Strato Unfiltered: Real Gold, On-Chain

There we go, we are live. There we go. We worked through our technical difficulties. So, James Pelton here. Thank you guys all for joining on this Wednesday afternoon. I'm very excited here to talk with Kieran and Victor about what they are doing. Again, Crypto Jimbo is always looking for crypto projects that are actually doing something. So, I've been very tired of meme coins and Ponzi schemes and things like that. So, excited to talk with Kieran and Victor about what they are up to. So, if you guys are in the audience, please hit like, that's helpful. And if you have any questions as we're going, as you hear my dog in the background does not like live streams. But if you have any questions as we're going, just let me know in the comments. I'll pull those up and we'll get those answered the advantage of doing it live. So, let's go ahead and start with introductions. So, Kieran and Victor, maybe just one by one, you can tell us just a little bit about yourself, how you got to this point. Not too long, but just a little bit about yourself. Sure. Kieran, CEO at Block Apps, which is the lab co that birthed Strato. Strato is the protocol. I've been saying spiritual leader at Strato. Strato is a fearless leader. I don't know if I agree with this. But, you know, for technical, still run a little bit of code, especially with the AI, with the long lull. We've been working for the better part of a decade, maybe more, on crypto related things, including the Ethereum mainnet client, the Haskell Flavor. That's where we started. But anyway, I'll hand it to Victor. Yeah, and like Kieran just said, I'm Victor Wong. I'm co-founder along with Kieran. I serve as chief product officer to the project. And yeah, we were part of the launch of original Ethereum. We brought the first big partnership to Ethereum through Microsoft and blockchain as a service. And we did the first RWAs on Ethereum along the way. And we're still here building with our newest project, Strato. Okay, awesome. Great to have you guys. Can you dive just a little bit more into, I really wanted to highlight what you guys have done, especially with Ethereum. Just because, again, in this space, we were talking about this before we got on air, but there's so many scans. It's so hard to trust people. So tell us a little bit more just about your experience in crypto and kind of what you've worked on up to this point. Sure, yeah. So again, we built, I think there were five or six original mainnet clients, three from the Ethereum Foundation, two or three external. So we built one of those, the Haskell Flavor. And really early on, we actually intended to be like the API interface to mainnet Ethereum. And that's a market that came, but a little bit later. But we actually found that big corporations were all experimenting with Ethereum, even before the mainnet launch, actually. And we partnered, to Victor's point, with Microsoft early on and helped serve that market. It started a lot of internal enterprise use cases, going into consortia where it was like a big company and its broader supply chain, some financial services trading use cases, et cetera. And so that was like the first few years of the company was really like a SaaS business that took the Ethereum tech, made it accessible to the corporate audience. And the last few years, we've returned to our kind of mainnet roots. The corporate experience taught us how to make reality match the blockchain, if you will, which I guess we call tokenization now. That is what we do today. Awesome. Nova, thank you very much. Very helpful. So let's start. I always like to do kind of an elevator pitch, just so we can get kind of a thousand foot view of what exactly is going on here. So maybe, can you tell us a little bit, what is Strato doing? What is it set out to do? And tell us just a little bit about that. So I guess we've kind of been calling it hard-fi. Basically, we're trying to make traditional assets, in particular, gold and silver, behave like assets do in DeFi. So this means if you have precious metals, you can drop them off in kind. So 100 ounces of gold, you put it in the vault. Our partner checks it out. If it's all good, you get 100 tokens back, and you can easily trade those in smaller portions or borrow against them to get productivity out of an otherwise unproductive asset. So same works for other assets. Gold is so huge, we can really kind of stay focused there. 30 trillion of above ground gold. We think it'll follow the pattern that stable coins did, where it started with a trickle, but US dollar stable coins are about 1% of the dollars in circulation, depending on how you measure. And probably rising from here, you'll see something similar with gold as it gets the benefits of meeting DeFi style technology. So that is what we do. It all happens on its own chain, although we're tightly linked with Ethereum. And the token we're launching, which we'll talk about later, is the native token of that chain. Okay, awesome. So I have a lot of crypto audience. I have a lot of non-crypto audience too. So maybe can you talk through what's the value of tokenization? Why not just buy gold yourself? What's the advantage of doing it through the blockchain like this? Yeah, so about half the world uses gold as a savings asset. The biggest class of holders are like Indian households. It is often like a wedding gift. I think it's like 8%, 10%. Lot in China, privately held sort of mattress gold. Obviously, the United States government has plenty of gold. It has actually overtaken treasuries as the largest central bank reserve asset around the world. So we're seeing like an interesting rotation as geopolitics shift. So a lot of the world heavy in gold for savings. The US actually not so much, right? There are more Bitcoin holders than gold holders. Here, it's a bit of a boomer asset, if you will. But I think we're seeing resurging interest in it. And this even reflects in on-chain volumes, which are still quite small, but are starting to come up. And we saw with the silver run-up in particular, gold too, everything is something of a, it's one big market out there. Everything, TradFi, DeFi, et cetera, everything can be a meme asset too. But really, so gold has stood the test of time. It's usually the case you can get a home in the United States for about 280 ounces of gold true over the last century, down to 100 right now, actually. So the S&P 500, all-time high in dollars, not really that close to all-time high in gold terms. All-time high was actually 2000s kind of dot-com bubble, et cetera. So it fluctuates a bit, but it's not a thing that people expect to have huge venture returns. It's not a thing that anyone ever expects to go this way. So you can think of like our gold token, again, it's like the US dollar in 1970 before we went off the gold standard, just a perennial store value asset, relatively low volatility compared to crypto. And one thing we have to think about as crypto industry is like, we're kind of in a fight for a mind share, wallet share, et cetera. And outside of crypto blue chips, Bitcoin, et cetera, Tradify has sort of had a monopoly on the good assets, if you will, for a long time. So to be competitive, we sort of simply must tokenize. And that means getting the assets sort of ownable in a crypto native fashion as possible. So that's kind of what we're doing today. So you can compare also physical holdings. Yeah, that's great. People maybe don't know you have it if you're into that sort of thing, store value, use case. Physical is the problem where if you try to sell it, especially in a pinch, you may pay a big haircut to spot, like in the silver run up, people were doing 10% off spot, or even 20 if you got to melt it down, et cetera, where the more financialized flavors actually tend to be more liquid in that way. So the other comparisons against ETFs, ETFs I think are a little bit under a trillion of gold or around a trillion. So of the 30 trillion above ground, call it a couple percent are in ETFs. They're great, but they don't have quite the flexibility that you see from tokenized gold flavor. So don't have the DeFi access. You can borrow against it sometimes through portfolio margin, tends to be more expensive than DeFi. And it's just not as much of a barrier. You can't really go in and redeem the shares. If you're a bank, you can, but as an individual, you can't really turn in your ETF shares and get the gold back. So tokenization is more of a direct ownership interest that more convenient than holding yourselves more liquid, but a stronger claim than the ETF type. I was just going to add to what you said. I think the big thing is that gold is, as Karen said, the most widely held asset in the world. And people feel the need in uncertain times to buy gold, right? Like you feel this need like, oh, I don't know what's going to happen in the world. It's the ultimate safe haven asset, as Karen also said. No one is ever saying gold is going to go to zero, right? Like that's the thing. But the question that always comes up next is, well, I have this gold now, what do I do with it? And the answer for most people is it just sits there. Like they put it in a vault, they put it in a shelf, and it just kind of sits there never doing anything. So we want to give a better answer than that. We want to, by tokenizing it, you can borrow against it and you can take those dollars without selling your gold, but you can also start to do other things. Like there's a trade that a person did on our system doing this process. And again, part of this is, I think everyone in cryptos likes to say HODL, but the Ethereum people took it a step further with projects like MakerDAO, et cetera, where you had ETH, but you could literally mince dollars against the ETH so you can hold onto the ETH and then make purchases in the real world, et cetera. That's actually happened in this case. We had a partner deposit a few million of gold into gold tokens, borrow our stable dollars against those, swap into ETH, entered at something like 1,800. This was a little bit, I wouldn't call it last cycle now, but you know- There's always another cycle. The 1,800, he exited at 4,000 and it was like a seven figure profit. So think of it as like tokenized for collateral productivity. You can get something out of the asset where it's otherwise just like kind of sitting there, holding its value, you know, typically, but not doing much. Okay, great. No, that's awesome. And one more question before we get into the kind of the financial side of things, but can you maybe explain, how does the tokenization actually work? Like what happens when you buy a token? Are you buying a piece of gold? Like, can you just maybe explain for people who might not be as familiar with that process? Yeah, so there's two ways. You can actually physically drop off metals in kind and you can buy the token. So there, we actually have a couple of vaults, but let's say for our given sake, there's one vault and we have a partner that does the intake. So you can mail it, you can drop it off in person. They kind of check it out, do a chemical assay if required and so on and say, all right, like this looks like, you know, a hundred ounces of gold. This is a hundred ounces of silver, et cetera. So once that's done, they give the thumbs up and use the software to mince the corresponding number of tokens. So locked in the, you know, before you had a hundred ounces of gold and no tokens after a hundred ounces of gold locked in the vault and a hundred tokens. And so you can earn those tokens to redeem for the physical. Also in some cases, people exit through the secondary market and just want cash instead. At small denominations, it can be more inconvenient than trying to pick up physical, but you can still do that. So this is basically just a one-to-one backing of, you know, ounces in the vault to ounces on chain. Yeah, and we do monthly audits with a, you know, certified accountant to make sure that what we have represented on chain, we always have more gold in the vault than what is represented on chain. Okay, okay, very good. We got a whole bunch of questions from the audience. So we'll start bringing those up here soon. Yeah, RWA is the next big thing. Yeah, I'm really excited about RWA because again, we've kind of went through, I've been through a lot of meme tokens and just a lot of stuff in crypto that was not doing anything. And so I love real world, bringing blockchain and real world together where there's actually something tangible. So yeah, totally, totally with you there. So for people who are wanting to get involved, like what's the best way to get involved with Strato? Is it buying the token or tell us a little bit about best ways to get started? Yeah, there are a couple options. So we've got Discord and Telegram communities if you're like, you know, kind of want to see what's going on, but aren't really ready to part with any funds. You can check the website out at strato.nexus. There's more information there, developer docs, if you're that kind. There is a link with more details about the auction, but we are currently, you know, this is the first available native Strato token. So going back to our Ethereum roots, so we've been running a chain with sort of in a way without a native token. There's gas and the gas has been paid to date in our native stable coin, but to really enable staking, you know, an unpermissioned validator set, et cetera, you need native token. And that's what we're just starting to release over this last week and onward here. So the token's called Strato, ticker Strato. And if you go to Uniswap, you can go explore auctions, or you can just click through on our webpage to find the auction. There are about maybe what? 18 hours left. And that will be the best opportunity to get a hold of the token at this time. And so, yes, if you're, you know, that interested, we encourage you to go over there and do so. Okay, awesome. Yeah, and that's why we wanted to get this video. I scheduled it kind of urgently was because we wanted to- We're almost at the time. So we'll tell people about something months ahead, weeks ahead, et cetera. They're like, oh, sounds cool, sounds cool. You know, and it's always like at the last moment when they're like, wait, how do I do this? Yeah. Oh, you're so right. You're so right. That's smart. I'm going to remember this lesson for future lives. Let's see. So can I, I can still get in? Yes. What wallet to use? Will MetaMask work? So it's on Uniswap, right? MetaMask is the best tested. It should be any browser wallet, but we, most of us are MetaMask users. We also, we're integrated there. You can actually use the MetaMask card on Strato too. We can bridge stables from Strato to Base or Linea and then spend them at the point of sale. So we've been working on that MetaMask partnership for some time. But yes, you can certainly bid on Uniswap there. I assume the Uniswap wallet works well because it's Uniswap. But yeah, MetaMask is the most common. And you will need ETH. The auction is in ETH. So you will need ETH on MetaMask or the, you know, any EOA wallet to participate in the auction. And yeah, it's pretty straightforward. It's a continuous clearing auction. So there will be supply right up until the end of the auction. Okay, very good. Yeah, and there's a lot of questions just about, yeah, where is it launching? So we already talked through that. Gold is a good asset. Yes, you're right. It is the asset. Gold and real estate. I mean, those are the assets. So very good. Can you tell us a little bit, so the Strato token, does it capture more than just the spot price of gold? Do you want to tell us a little bit about how the token actually works? Yeah, so it's actually, we actually have some other tokens already. So gold ST is the gold token. Silver ST, silver token. Have a US dollar stable, USPST. Those have been around for some time. So certainly, you know, you can get involved with those too on our system. But Strato token is a little bit different. Again, think of it as our ETH. You know, it's like you need something native on a chain to pay gas in for staking a native money too. Like, well, as we get ready, we'll start to have pairs between Strato and other assets on the system, just as you see on Ethereum, et cetera. But really the way to think about it is we expect lots of golds to be tokenized in the world. A good chunk of it, hopefully landing on Strato, right? And that tokenization generates economic activity. People want to borrow against it. People want to trade it. And that just all generates fee burn, which burns Strato. So 100 million fixed supply of Strato. And then, you know, hopefully we get lots of activity and, you know, it'll be taken out of circulation over time. Okay, very good. And then do you want to talk a little bit about the CCA part of it? I thought that that's kind of interesting. Good education for people. Do you want to talk a little bit about why you went that direction rather than just a normal token sale? Yeah, yeah, certainly. And I don't know if you were set up to like show what it looks like. It might be helpful for people, but I'll just start the answer in any case. So, okay, CCA stands for Continuous Clearing Auctions developed by Uniswap. Obviously they've been, you know, just an excellent player for a long time. Probably the biggest DEX still, depending on how you count. And just reputable folks for a while. And so Uniswap is typically for secondary market trading. So tokens already exist and then you trade them on Uniswap. But they've realized that they could get more activity on the system if they could help tokens reach the point where they're liquid enough to trade well on Uniswap. So that's kind of what the CCA does. Again, it stands for Continuous Clearing Auctions. So before the token is trading secondarily, like on exchanges, DEXs, even like the stock exchange typically secondaries, it can go through like a primary sale. And that's what the auction is doing where it sort of allows for price discovery around the token and seeds the liquidity for it to trade against. The way it does this is folks submit bids so that token starts at a certain floor price. And then bidders say, hey, I'm willing to buy up to a certain amount in ETH or USDC but ours is in ETH at a certain price. So let's say you're kind of more on the whale side and it's 10 ETH. That's the amount of budget you're willing to commit. And then you also have to specify what's the maximum token price or FDV that I'm willing to pay. And once that bid goes in, it actually starts filling right away. That's the continuous part. So the purchases get spread over the remaining time in the auction. So you start getting the token in the first block, actually, after your bid. And then you'll continue to get it all the way up to the end. The last block has like 30% of the supply. So and that's meant to control the price effect of like a flood at the end. But the thing that's really good about it is if you look at token sales, we lived through the Ethereum sale. Remarkably, I think it was, I keep saying, I remember it being 42 days, which like in modern times is hard to even conceive of a token sale running for that long, right? Like that's a crazy amount of time because so many of them, like if you have a really hyped token, it's not uncommon for it to sell out in like one block, especially with the fixed price format. So say you say, all right, the token FDB is $100 million and we're making 5 million of them available. Like, then it's a race. Who can get in that block when the first, if there's enough demand, there's either too little demand or too much. And people are- By the way, Karen was doing customer support for Ethereum. Oh man, bless you. When you picked up the phone and got a call, Karen picked up the phone, so he felt it. But yeah, so like fixed price, you tend to have too much demand or too little. Auctions are better because you figure out a clearing price, but even still, it can be the same problem where like Wales bid the whole supply in one block and there's a gas war. And we've seen sniping wars for token bootstraps, et cetera. Kind of the genius of the CCA is to move back to that Ethereum model and slow things down a little bit where I think the shortest ones have been a couple of days, even up to a couple of weeks. And because you're getting tokens along the way, you're kind of guaranteed to at least like get some as long as you bid in range, you'll have some access, maybe not as many as you wanted, but it just ends up being a more fair mechanism where the timing is not a factor and allows the market to find a real clearing price. So that's what I did. It's been pretty successful so far across 500 bids, maybe an hour ago, over 750 ETH committed, which in our interesting down market, I think is pretty good. Yeah, and one thing that I had to work here inside is that our community is not just native crypto DJs, right? We have people who invest in gold and do kind of stuff. So they couldn't stare at a trading screen. You know, a lot of people, the minute you hear about a token sale, even if you hear about it, click it, it's already gone, right? So we want to make sure that, you know, if you had a job, you can come in and get some tokens regardless of it. And one of the huge advantages I think of this structure is that everyone who is participating in a block gets the same price. It doesn't matter if you bid 100 ETH or 0.1 ETH, everyone's getting the same price. And the only limit is really your budget and the maximum value you're going to pay with the token. But if you're willing to put in anything at any time, even right at the end, you'll get some tokens. We thought that was really important for our community. It's pretty gaming resistant. No, I really appreciate that. Especially like a lot of my viewers are people who are interested in crypto, but they're newer. And so it makes them nervous if they got to get on there and like, oh, I have to... Yeah, it's like, don't worry, just take out the bond, you know, and then the bot will put your bid. It's like, it's absurd. Like I've had calls from people who are like, oh, you know, like I can't get my ETH of my exchange for like an hour. What am I missing? And I was like, don't worry about it. Like whenever you get it in there, you'll get it. So, you know, that's one of the big advantages. Awesome, love this. It's a strange thing to just not know where they come from. Like maybe it's, you know, friends of the project, people we've contacted, maybe it's your viewers, you know. It's been kind of fun. They just, we wake up, they're like, whoa, okay. Yeah, where'd that come from? No, that's awesome. I'll leave a link to this, guys. So if you're watching and you want to get involved, you can hop in here and get going. Let's see, I think we did have some questions. One question, how can someone physically redeem gold ST thanks in advance? So this is getting off of this topic a little bit. You have to get in touch. So there is an intake procedure. And they're actually in our app. There is a contact link. But basically you got to have the tokens at the ready. And then you'll sort of redeem them back to the team. And the tokens will be taken out of circulation and the gold will come back. Those have to be scheduled, et cetera. And the pickup location's not like the vault exactly. We got to move some things around for security's sake. But yeah, that's how it works. Pick up in New York, typically. We have, we've received a good amount mailed in. We actually have not physically delivered much out. Theoretically could for an additional charge depending on where you are. Okay, very good. And then it looks like you two have some fans. Yes. And I will say, when I have guests on the channel, my dog really does not like, I think he doesn't like the neon lights there. But a lot of times in crypto, especially you really want to look at the team behind what's being built. Like what have they done before? If this is their first thing, there's been a lot of projects where people just start up. They come out of nowhere and they raise $100 million or something. And it's like, oh, how did they lose all of our money? And it's like, well, they've never done anything. They've never done anything. So I really appreciate you two being here, sharing your background. And I think that that garners a lot of trust with my audience. So let's see. Phil Omathiat says, redeeming or vaulting requires KYC, I imagine. Certainly to physically deposit and to redeem, yes, there is KYC. Secondary market purchases, it's like USDC, USDT. Secondary market purchases do not require KYC. And yeah, so in the app, there is an email where you can start the intake process, et cetera. So yeah, so certainly, we've got a need to know who's coming to the vault, for sure. Yep. And how much you're bringing, right? We don't want someone just showing up with some giant truck of gold. I mean, we want it, but we will be ready for it. Yes, right, right. CCA looks kind of cool. Yeah, it is. It is a cool format. So I'm glad to see that through this. This is good because I'm really into gold. Yes, that's a great inflation hedge. When the world is in chaos, gold's a great place to be. So I totally agree. James is bringing us a good project once again. Yeah, thank you guys so much for watching. And please do go check them out. At least, if nothing else, go hop in their Discord, join their community and get to know, ask questions if you have, if you're skeptical about something. Well, let's ask this. So a lot of my audience has been burned before by things. Anyone who's been in crypto has been burned by multiple, multiple things. So what do you tell someone who they think this looks really interesting and they're like, oh, yeah, this looks good. I'm into real world assets, but I've just been burned so much in crypto. What do you kind of tell someone to help instill some confidence in them? Yeah, good question. I mean, obviously, like size it appropriately. Like, you know, I think to your point, I mean, the crypto dream is, you know, the project just takes off and runs on its own. And, you know, you don't have to do, like, you know, I see the downsides of being a main character, but, you know, it's better for us to see us, you know, and just like, only eighth in up to your comfort level. So that, you know, even in the worst case scenario, it's not so bad, right? But yeah, we've done our best to be really above board with how the tokenization works, the mechanics, the terminal tokenomics, you know, software is open source, and so you can kind of check it all out, do your own research, but also just like, you know, put an amount of your net worth in that you're not going to be really angry at us over if something goes wrong, which we hope it doesn't. Yeah, I mean, like, you know, I think one of the things you said before is really important, right? Like, you gotta look at the team. Like, if you can't, you know, happy, you guys welcome to look at our backgrounds. We do have LinkedIn pages, believe it or not. Like, you know, you can see we have a 12-year history in crypto, and it's pretty much all public. Like, we've not only been at the launch of Ethereum, we helped launch the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. We brought the first partnerships to Ethereum. We built some of the biggest blockchain consortium for governments in the world. You know, so we're not, we didn't come here just to, we didn't come here with the intent to launch a new token. We really waited as long as we could to launch the token for the real need that we needed, and that was to decentralize the network, right? So, but, you know, another good way is to look who's backing us. Like, we have, as some of our investors, some of the companies that helped back Ethereum, ConsenSys, Fimbushi, Galaxy. You know, we were just on a little welcome call with some of these investors, and these investors have been backing us for, some of them, close to 10 years. You know, so they like what we're building, and I think it's important to kind of weigh those factors when you kind of look at any project. Yep, and I say in every video, not financial advice. We're not telling you to do anything. We're not saying to do anything, okay? We're just showing you, here's what it is, here's what is presented, and then don't risk more than you can afford to lose, okay? Don't take your food stamp money and start putting it into crypto, okay? That's just not a wise move. That's a real world asset there. Like, food, they're almost dollars, but they're not quite, you know? It is, it's almost the same thing. Almost the same thing. I'm just kidding. Yep, highlights, good to see you. Glad you could make it today. RWA plus DeFi, best combination. Yes, I'm a big fan. Yeah, I mean, that's an important point, and it's something I think that we had to come to, right? Like, if you think about, you know, I have been on record as sort of a hater of the RWA term just because it's too broad. Like, we've tried a lot of these things, and as Karen often says, there's a reason why stable coins came first, because they're the easiest to get yield out of, right? Like, if you take dollars and you go buy, if you take crypto and you go buy treasuries, the yield is kind of automatic built into the treasuries itself. With something like gold or silver or what we know as what we call hard assets, the yields are not automatic. And so we had to build that whole, the DeFi rails in order to make any kind of yield come out of those. So all those financial kind of services that we had to build around them, it was really hard. So we think that's sort of the next wave. But yeah, we think ultimately there'll be a lot more waves of tokenization like stocks and real estate. Everything is coming down the pike. Yeah, that's actually, that's a good question too, is yeah, what tokenization do you think is next? What's the next big one? Yeah, yeah, okay. So in terms of unlock, we see obviously gold, silver as being maybe the biggest just because it's like, it was the money and then it wasn't. It's hard to use, you know. But stocks make a lot of sense because they've, you know, at least like the broad market indexes have been almost up only. And there's a lot of native, like a dollar, they're pretty much digital and they're pretty liquid, right? Depends on market hours, of course. So like the tokenized stocks, we actually do support some of them on our system. You can get really good price quotes during market hours and outside of market hours, sometimes no liquidity or sometimes really bad, but you don't really want to trade up. But that's a problem that'll be solved over time. And so in stock market capitalization, I think it's bigger than gold, but yeah, it's really large. And so lots of people are tackling that, you know, we'll have some interest in it, of course. But it's a funny thing where, you know, you're starting to see, I like to say like TradFight a little bit had something right with trading hours because you could sleep and, you know, hang out with your family and all that. But the cat's out of the bag, like everything's going to go 24-7. And so you'll start to see kind of, I mean, these markets are merging a little bit. Like it's been very strange to watch like Hyperliquid become the weekend trading venue for oil, you know, like especially in these, you know, kind of crazy times with lots of price dislocations due to the war, et cetera. Once there is a trading venue for oil on the weekend, right? Like speculation venue, TradFight kind of has to respond too. So I think you're seeing them, you know, an interesting, funny merger going on. And so stocks in particular make a tremendous amount of sense just because they're very liquid and digitized already. I say stocks, but I also mean like there's a lot of fixed income on chain too, you know, US treasuries are among the most popular tokenized assets. Also, it's all coming, I think, but it's sort of like the ease of execution has been the driver to some extent. Again, US dollar stable is you could just wire folks the dollars and get the stable and be off to the races. So that was first, then the rest is coming. Yeah, I mean, I think we kind of believe that every asset class ultimate will be tokenized, but the percentage of that asset class really will change, right? So, you know, we think that probably, you know, stable coins are at what Karen said, like 1% of money supply right now, probably we'll get to like 5% or 10%. We think gold, silver, like hard assets will kind of reach similar points and then everything else will come along. Now it might not get that high with everything else, but, you know, we think all of that will ultimately be part of the whole pool of tokenized assets that are coming. Awesome. Yeah, no, I don't even want to think about all the regulatory work that has to go into getting stocks onto the blockchain. I don't even want to think about that. That sounds like... Somehow we have a super friendly SEC at the moment. We'll see if that changes, but I think they're encouraging it. It feels like there've been some native issuances too. I know Galaxy put some of their stock very directly on China. I forget exactly how they did it. There's paperwork to be done, licenses to be held, and all that sort of thing. But actually, yeah, there's no reason why stocks can't be born on a blockchain as opposed to born in the legacy and then minted on the blockchain. I think that's quite a small chunk right now, but could be a lot of it in the future. Okay, very good. Got a couple last questions here then we'll let you guys go. We're going to combine a couple of these because you're kind of asking the same thing, but people are kind of asking how does Strato different than there's a few companies that are going this way of like, you know, digitalizing gold in particular is going to be a popular one. So how would you say that you differentiate from some of the other gold tokenization projects? Yeah, so I have positive feelings about most of the other gold projects, big ones being PaxG and XAUT are both in the couple billion kind of range. Both have like a little bit of a, you know, higher access barrier where it's like you need 400 ounces to mint and redeem, which is like $1.6 million at the moment. And there's a good reason for that. Those are the delivery standard denominations in the sort of TradFi metals world. But it's like the access barrier can be a little bit high. They used to have transfer fees for some time. I think they got rid of them. So the projects are sort of starting to work in DeFi, but certainly we're not DeFi first. I think Tether in particular, its gold holdings are much larger than what's tokenized. It's sort of more like a reserve asset for them than like a primary vertical per se. And yeah, they didn't build a system, I think, with like DeFi in mind at the beginning, like the instant credit aspect. There's some, you can get some liquidity out of it. They're hitting ceilings some of the time. But, you know, I think, you know, I don't really have anything negative to say about these folks, but I think it's sort of imagining everything from first principles, like what would a, you know, what would a gold token like the old US dollar or a gold backed dollar that's as decentralized as you can make it look like? That's the problem we're solving. Yeah, and I would say, I think one part is outlook, right? Like I know we've talked a lot about gold tokenization, but really, you know, we're longtime crypto guys and our goal is to bring the rest of the world into the crypto ecosystem. And gold is our way of doing it, right? Gold and silver are our way of doing it. And we want to make sure though that those people that we're bringing in participate in the rest of the ecosystem. Right now, you know, I know a lot of crypto holders and they've never used DeFi products because they're just too hard to use. So when we kind of built this rebel system, we want to make sure that, you know, a normal gold holder can come in and start, you know, borrowing against you, borrowing and yield against you. We're doing these kinds of things that you can do in DeFi, but can be quite complicated. It is a good point. If you go around a conference, like most people use Uniswap at some point, maybe everybody's got a Coinbase, if you ever used Aave, if you ever used Maker, it starts to get thin, you know? And so we're kind of exposing those, you know, let's call it DeFi 300 level style capabilities back to the user in a pretty consumable format. And again, it's a new, we're bringing people into crypto who weren't in crypto also. So, you know, making that intake pretty easy is an important thing. And, you know, we need, everyone needs to expand this market a little bit, find that next new crypto holder. Totally, totally. And it's a big pie. It's not like there's a limit with this really small market, you know, and- 30 trillion with 5, 6 billion tokenized, like it's, you know, there'll be a couple. Yeah. And I've told a lot of crypto projects that you're not really competing against these other crypto projects. You really want to go out and get more of the non-crypto people. The crypto people is, that's a pretty small market compared to what else is out there. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and that's really like, even from the beginning, when we were doing our enterprise projects, we always saw this as a way to kind of bring, you know, the wider world into the crypto sphere. Like when we brought that first partnership to Ethereum with Microsoft, it was, you know, for a lot of people, that was the first time they could use blockchain, you know, it was called blockchain as a service. They could go into Azure, and spin up a blockchain and use it for the first time. So we kind of always had that idea of trying to reach out and kind of bringing in more of the world into, you know, this crypto ecosystem that we believe in. Okay, love it. All right, one last question, and then we'll close out here. Can I send you my gold bars and tokenize it? You actually can definitely get in. The email's in the app. Do you know what email it goes to offhand? I don't have it. Can we grab Jeff? But yeah, like, if you go to app.strato.nexus, I'll sign in, and you will see it in the app. And, you know, we'll, we're happy to, someone will contact you and walk you through the whole process. Okay, very good. So you said, ha ha, wise a hoof, but you can't, it's actually can't be done. There's some questions, like we need, you know, denominations and all that. There's like a, there's an intake form. It's not like, don't just like mail it to us. We got, you know, probably I'll have a phone call with the human being. Yeah, you just get my wife's earrings. We have to help you guide you to a certain vote. And the vote usually has questions depending on where you want to vote. But short answer, yes. We want the deposits. Yeah. Okay, awesome. And last question. So again, I'm just going to encourage everybody to go check out the auction page. But so I just bid and go to sleep and the CCA will just take care. This is almost true. Are you able to go to the Uniswap site I just want to show a little bit about the mechanics. Yes. Give me one second here. The main thing is it is almost set. I didn't forget it, but only if you scroll up, if you scroll up on this page, you'll see a place bid button, a green button. That'll bring you to Uniswap. That will bring you to Uniswap. Place bid on Uniswap. There we go. Yeah. Click that button there. Yeah. All right. We're loading. Okay. So as you can see, it's the graph will load in a second, but it's up 100% over the floor price. There we go. So on the right, there is a place to place a bid with the two parameters. So that's the amount of ETH at maximum that you're willing to risk and the max FTB. So if you want to sleep, you actually want that max. You don't want to pick the default for max FTB. You want to move it over a little bit to a point. You don't necessarily. But maybe a little bit more than that, you know, somewhere in the middle, just move it over a little bit because the, and the gray line is not showing. No, if you go all the way. So if you go back, slide it all the way to the left again. Yeah. Get all the way to the left. Oh no. Put a number in the top field. Yeah. Just put any number. You see that line? Yeah. So that line is the price in effect at which you're bidding. And if you just slide the slider just a little to the right. So basically the line is telling you visually, like how much buffer you have. So if you do it right over the market price, it may be the case that bids will come in and it'll go past your bid level and you won't feel as much as you might've liked. Now it depends. If you have a hard price in mind, just stick to it. But if you're like, okay, I think I'm kind of bullish on this project. Then you want to give it a little bit of buffer. Maybe in cents, it's what? Like 45 right now, maybe you're at, you know, 60 cents or something, or just enough so that it isn't really easy to get out of range. Because if you get out of range, you can cancel, get the e-stack and rebid. But if you're sleeping, you won't be able to. So like we've tried both and remember that you always get the same price as everyone else with every block. So if you set it at a higher range, we call that the set it and forget it method, right? If you set it at the lower range, you always got to come back and check. Oh, is the current price exceeded that? And then you have to refund and re-bid it again. So that's your two options, basically. Gotcha. And you're not bidding at this price. That's just the max that you would go if it gets up. Yeah. So it will fill until the market hits that price. If it goes above that, then you'll cease to fill, at which point you still could cancel, but you might've slept through the conclusion of the auction in this case. Again, not financial advice, advise a little bit of buffer if you're trying to fill. Yeah. Okay. Awesome. Well, those links will all be in the description. They're here in the comments as well, but we'll go ahead and wrap up there, I think. So thank you. First off, thank you to the audience. You guys are amazing. The only reason I can even do things like this is because you guys come and watch. So thank you guys. Please go and check out what they're doing because again, I've been burned a lot in crypto, but I think real world assets are where crypto has a real place. And I think getting DeFi with real world assets, like you said, is just, that's amazing that we can do that. It's really cool technology. It opens up a lot of doors that weren't there. And so let's use the technology, how it's meant to be used. And let's stop with the meme tokens. I mean, nothing against meme tokens, but let's get us some real world asset, DeFi going. I love that. And then Kieran and Victor, thank you for coming on. Thank you for building something and coming, showing your face on the channel. Appreciate that. And for talking through the project with us. Thank you very much for having us. Thanks everybody. God bless you guys. And have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you later.