The Great Digital Asset Regime Shift (...And What Comes Next)

**Robbie** (0:00)
And let's start with what happened this weekend as a star, right? So obviously, you know, there's this war going on in Iran, and unfortunately, we have a lot of oil production in that part of the world, and that is leading to oil prices flying. And so the price of oil went from about $65 a barrel, all the way up to about $110 a barrel over the last two weeks or so. And this weekend, we saw a massive, massive shift in this weekend and last weekend in price discovery for markets that are closed on the weekend.

**Andy** (0:40)
And like oil.

**Robbie** (0:41)
And if you think about it, there's a broader shift happening about how these markets are reacting due to the crazy nature of the kind of administration that we're currently in, right? So there's this consistent news barrage in the world today. I like to think of it as like a 24-hour amnesia where something happens in 24 hours that is like a mind-blowing event that would be a once per month five years ago. That happens every day now, it seems. And so this is leading to markets being far more volatile, to more wars, to more things, more headlines. Like everything has been compressed into a headline. And so what this has done is that it has created a lot of opportunity for markets on the weekend. And markets on the weekend are increasingly becoming something that the NYSE has pushed, that we've seen people from ICE push, obviously today with Kraken and NASDAQ. And so I think just to start off, this regime shift is a more volatile world, is leading to a much stronger desire to trade 24-7.

**Andy** (1:56)
Well, I think you're right that we're compressing a lot more substance, things that would normally take a lot of time are now taking much shorter time. This is attributable to several reasons. I think one is the internet, I think faster communications, faster transportation, and generally a more connected world than ever before. And there was previously this 12-day war, right? It was over in 12 days. 50, 100 years ago, these wars are drawn out. So now things are getting compressed in real time, and they're happening much, much more frequently. I think also, if we're looking at this relative to the markets, we're thinking about how price discovery happens. And I think that is part of the key, the cornerstone of this conversation, which is a thesis that actually Solana ran with for a long time of always trying to be approaching the speed of light, so that they were one of the fastest paths of information and lowest latency. Yeah. And what that allowed for is the quickest price discovery. And if you can get liquidity behind price discovery, liquidity begets more liquidity, and price discovery ultimately is pushing the needle. So what you're alluding to and what happened over the weekend is that, obviously, traditional markets were closed, and we're having developments, not in Europe, because Europe takes the weekends off, but here in America and over in the Middle East, we had developments happening over the weekend. The Strait of Hormuz, which is where a lot of the oil travels, I believe it's 20% of the entire world, travels through this very narrow strait. Iran is threatening, saying that they're going to torpedo any boats that cross through the strait. America and Trump is saying, hey, we'll give you protection, we'll give you an escort along the strait. Don't worry about Iran's threats, keep the oil flowing.
The insurance markets are starting to say, hey, if you travel through this strait right now, we're not going to insure you. That is causing, even with this police escort, and so that is causing a lot of these boats to effectively say, no, we're not going to travel. That slows down the supply and the production of oil, leading to obviously demand hasn't shifted. Everyone still needs oil, still needs gas. And so maintaining demand, short supply.

**Robbie** (4:16)
Price flies.

**Andy** (4:17)
Price flies. And so price appreciation flew over the weekend where all other markets were closed.

**Robbie** (4:23)
Exactly.

**Andy** (4:23)
The only market venue that was open, obviously in a more open competitive landscape, you're going to be pushing the edge on latency, getting closer to bare metal, these sorts of things. The legacy markets are making it extremely easy for hyperliquid because it was just the only liquid venue that was open trading these assets. And so yes, hyperliquid was the venue of choice for price discovery of oil over the weekend.

**Robbie** (4:52)
Yeah. And the platform itself has processed trillions of dollars in trading volume. It surpassed Coinbase in annual volume.