Running an On-Chain RWA Business with Sidney Powell (Maple Finance)

Hey all! This episode wis with Sid from Maple Finance. I was relatively bearish on RWAs before recording this episode but through this episode I acquired a new perspective on what RWAs are in the first place and why they’ve been poorly executed in certain domains. If you’re even remotely curious about them (or bearish), I highly recommend you taking a listen to this episode.

00:00:00

Speaker #0

Yeah, cool. So what have you learned about running, I guess, like a real world asset on chain business. And this is my description. Uh It may or may not be that. But uh yeah, what have you learned so far over the past few years?

00:00:14

Speaker #1

Um The running a running a business focused on real world assets is a little bit different uh to running regular crypto asset lending business or, or protocol. I would say that the, the two, the two are similar. Uh but you, you deal with more complexity because of the off chain element. So uh legal um up risk uh how you handle security um like, you know, security collateral, that type of thing starts to become really important.

Um But the things that the thing that the two have in common is actually the biggest blocker is access to lending capital. And that’s, that’s ubiquitous for everyone who’s in the space at the moment in D I.

And so what we try and do and how we try and solve that is by finding uh real world asset solutions.

So areas that they could lend to that meet uh the, you know, kind of meet the needs or the job to be done for on chain capital at the moment.

So what I’m looking at is what short duration, really good collateral and is reasonably high yield as well because that’s like that’s the opportunity that you have to compete with.

And so I think that’s why certain real world asset categories are challenged, you know, real estate is typically long duration, but things like trade finance, I think are are pretty attractive.

And so once we start to get more transaction, once we start to get more transactions there, I think that section of uh of reward assets will take off.

00:02:00

Speaker #0

Sure. So is the limitation more on the supply side of all the opportunity lies in the supply side of the lending. But the problem re relies on how do you get the demand side of borrowers like connected with those like lenders hungry for yield? Is that kind of like how you think of the meta problem or?

00:02:22

Speaker #1

That’s the right. Yeah, that’s the right way to uh that’s the right way to describe it. So you have, if you, if you have a workflow, you have, I’ve got to get capital in into the protocol and then we’ve got to choose where to allocate that capital, which is, you know, any of the real world asset lending categories, whether it’s trade finance, real estate, something else and the block, the blocker is not where to put it.

We get a lot of inbound interest from firms who want to, you know, want to borrow. The blocker is sourcing the capital.

It’s, I would love if I would love if our problem was that we had somebody who came in and said I have $50 million which reward assets can I put it into. Instead, it’s often the opposite.

It’s, I want, you know, II, I want to borrow $50 million and, you know, everyone wants Real World assets and I can offer it to them. Um How can Maple help me find $50 million? And so that’s, that, that kind of illustrates the uh the issue, which is that people because of 2022 are very shell shocked as to where they park their capital and the handicap that they’re applying to lending decisions is much, much higher than it was last year.

Maybe it’s even tilted towards being, you know, uh let’s just say over um over cautious in a way, but it’s totally understandable given the events of last year.

But it just means that um what you’re seeing at the moment is that the biggest, uh the biggest level of adoption in real world assets is things like t bills on chain uh because it’s perceived to be the lowest risk, highest liquidity and um you know, the best collateral for any type of lending or, or capital formation on chain.

00:04:13

Speaker #0

Yeah, I’m keen to talk a bit about that. Like what was the mindset like of the space say last year in like 21 around like what lenders care about when it came to risk controls and how’s that changed now effectively? Because it sounds like everyone has learned a lot of things and you guys are kind of like experiencing that first hand. So, yeah, I would love to kind of hear what was, what did the scene look like before? What was like a lender’s mindset of what they’re looking for? And what does that criteria now increase to?

00:04:45

Speaker #1

Yeah, the it’s it’s been interesting to watch the watch the evolution of lender appetite since 2021. So in 2021 and 22 early 2022 it was firmly focused on yield maximization. And so that’s pretty much just price. So every, every potential source of yield or interest was treated as commoditized. And therefore it just the the real question is, is the number 20% or 18% that I’m getting from a given opportunity and, and the decision, the decision framework will just go with the higher number.

So 20 rather than 18. But the question a more sober person would ask is, am I being, is that 18 being adequately like, is it, is it a risk adjusted 18 or is it or is it if I actually risk adjust it? Is it more like a two? Because maybe there’s a pretty good chance that all that capital could get lost, you know, from either a default or a smart contract hack or something else.

And so that’s, um that’s uh difficult to quantify, but let’s call that the risk adjustment, that was the risk adjustment or the handicap that was being applied to the yield.

And over the course of 2022 that risk adjustment uh went from being really, really thin to really, really large.

And so people are considering liquidity, counter party risk, smart contract risk, um quality of the underlying assets or collateral, you know, are you doing a loan that’s collateralized against, you know, token number 500 on coin gecko or are you doing a loan that’s collateralized by Bitcoin? Um With miners, were you doing a loan that was collateralized by the Bitcoin of the miners or was it being collateralized with a six that were, you know, significantly overpriced because you were near the top of the cycle? Um And so anyway, the lender mindset has evolved and adjusted and so what they’re looking for now is short duration exposure so they can get out of them quickly if they want to.

Um And that’s also because people perceive that we’re near the bottom of a crypto asset price cycle. And so they’re at the stage where they’re gonna want to be, they’re not gonna want to tie up capital for 12 months in stable coins.

They want to be able to, to transition and rotate out of stable coins into assets that would have capital appreciation. So they expect that assets may increase in price in the next 12 months. And so they can’t keep them tied up in a 12 month loan.

So uh short duration high yield because if t bills are paying you, let’s just say if one month t bills pay you 5% then to take the extra risk of a counter party or a smart contract protocol, they want to be getting paid, you know, 89 10 11% but they need a premium over what T bills can pay.

And uh that was totally absent. That T bill factor is, has been a confounding thing that emerged in the second half of last year because going back 12 months or 18 months, T bills were, were yielding nothing.

And so if you were getting paid 10% for lending to a market maker, that was your, that was your uh crypto risk premier was 10% that you were getting paid. And so that was, that was pretty good.

Now, if a market maker only wants to borrow at eight or 9% and T bills pay you 5% now, you’re only getting paid three or 4%. So the, the crypto risk premium has significantly contracted.

And so that also makes people pretty, um uh you know, pretty unexcited about lending at the moment. And uh and so again, all of that has sort of added up to this overwhelming uh dominance in the reward asset space of T bills on chain.

And that’s just, you know, the market, the market, you know, the market needs to provide solutions uh that people want to pay for and that’s what they’re willing to pay for at the moment. Um I think it will evolve again.

Uh But yeah, that’s just kind of where, that’s just kind of where we’ve arrived at in the uh in the, in the lender psyche.

00:09:04

Speaker #0

Yeah, it sounds like people actually uh started applying a brain such being monkeys chasing high numbers on screens, which is great because in that environment, it’s really hard when you’re providing a high quality good product that doesn’t have the highest yield, but you have something really dumb and everyone’s chasing that. So I think it’s a very healthy adjustment.

00:09:24

Speaker #1

I’ll, I’ll just point out but you can be as dumb a monkey running the other way if you’re, if you’re kind of irrationally running from everything. And so probably we went from monkeys running towards, uh towards, you know, improperly handicapped yields to now kind of running away from everything. And um then they’ll adjust back a little bit the other way towards, you know, peop people will graduate.

What, what that does is it just creates a, a price incentive, which means that debt is kind of under funded, so to speak.

And so interest rates will be a little bit um a little bit higher than what they should be and that will induce smarter money to go in there first and, and then you’ll have, um, you know, late adopters again.

And that’s just the way the cycle is kind of always repeated since, you know, since, since uh the beginning of beginning of money

00:10:18

Speaker #0

completely. So where do you see? Like, I, I definitely do agree with your assessment of, like, we’re at the bottom of the cycle right now. Like people are rewriting from crypto to A I like volatility in majors has been like nothing and crypto markets say nothing more than the low volatility. It’s very if you took it to go down, then go and up, then do nothing. Like do nothing is the worst.

So they’re kind of at this like historical low. Um don’t know, on a multi month time period, multi week, but on a macro level. So where do you see? How do you think the market structure is going to change in the next? I would say like 12 to 18 months by 2024 like, like interest rates probably won’t be hiking, they’ll be constant at worse and probably starting to reduce gradually um at best.

So like given that, how do you think that macro landscape is not gonna impact because all these like changes we’re seeing in part is due to the risk aversion from FTX and blow up that happened in that year.

And then on top of that, the macro interest rate regime kind of like changing. So as people forget about FTX and capital becomes cheaper again, what do you think? Uh it’s gonna look like in that time frame in the future?

00:11:29

Speaker #1

Uh It’s a good, it’s a good question and I’m definitely by no means a macro expert. Uh So if, if we point it to kind of two different regimes and just put kind of put our, our probability hats on. So if uh if rights, if rates get cut and uh that, that kind of pushes animal spirits a little bit more into the market, and, you know, let’s say asset prices rewrite upwards again, then you would expect to see maybe some more volatility on um in crypto asset prices and some more trading activity on centralized exchanges, which is kind of good for, for our line of business.

Um because then people want to borrow assets. So interest rates go up, lending opportunities go up and um the value of collateral that can be used to borrow against also goes up.

Um But it’s not necessarily, you know, it’s, it’s not necessarily guarantee that there is a catalyst for that kind of rerate or that, you know, return to a, to a bull cycle.

Um So if we just said, if things kind of remain the same as they are, I would expect to see the market structure shift and that you’ll have consolidation among different trading firms because um they’re just, there’s not gonna be enough food to, to feed them all um in terms of uh in terms of trading activity.

And so I think you’d see consolidation, I think what that does is um that is why Real World assets are really important because if you have uh if you have an environment where crypto asset prices and crypto trading activity, kind of doesn’t pick up, then what you wanna do is you want to increase the value of assets, um assets that are kind of recognized or used as collateral for unchain lending.

Like that’s that, that is one of the exogenous factors that can help the uh the on chain lending space grow is that we get access to more collateral and that collateral could be real world stuff.

So we’ve, we’ve tried to hedge bets with Maple by having a cash management product, which is one of the real world asset lending products we offer and then uh tax credit uh financing.

So the accrual so that, you know, that that is also um positively positioned there and then also, but then we also have the lending to, you know, to market makers and trading firms, which is kind of a hedge where if uh you know, if we return to a bull cycle, we, we have that.

And so I would say that is one thing that’s kind of a little bit different uh for us than from the other lending platforms is that most of them are kind of positioned in one vertical.

So they’re kind of, they represent a bet on either a current or future state of affairs um rather than kind of this portfolio approach of products.

00:14:18

Speaker #0

Yeah, I know. It’s a great point. It’s like kind of, we have a great circular economy in crypto, but when prices go down or say flat, like you’re only limited by the size of the largest, it’s like the macro of crypto, right? You can’t grow beyond that.

00:14:32

Speaker #1

Correct. The um and, and that’s why the real world asset stuff helps because you, you kind of bring in a larger market cap of collateral. But one of the things that’s hurt crypto lately has been the lack of, you know, the the porousness of crypto touching the real world has been uh shrunk by things like choke 0.2 0.0 which is, you know, which is very real, which, you know, for the audience listening at home was, you know, a pretty concerted effort to reduce access to banking rails.

So if you, if you get can get your money on to a centralized exchange like a coin base or, or a Binance, but you can’t actually then send it to a bank to spend it in the real world, then, you know, then, then you have issues and so what we saw is and, and that, you know, that hurts us, like if we want to lend to a business in the real world, but they can’t off ramp the stable coins, we lend them and uh turn them into dollars to spend.

Then our product is less useful for them. And uh so some of the exogenous factors, like if we had everything remain the same for the next 12 months in terms of crypto asset prices and interest rates.

But you had many more banks open the doors to serving crypto customers because it’s no longer perceived as, you know, illegal. And we get some regulatory clarity then uh then other things like other things equal.

I think you could see a boom in, in on chain lending again because we can serve more customers who are outside crypto and uh you just get more stable coins in circulation like other things equal.

I think most people who have used stable coins once or twice would then prefer to use them for the, the bulk of their transactions wherever someone would accept them.

Like I keep most of my finances in, you know, like most of my dollar finances that aren’t in crypto assets. I keep them in, in stable coins uh because it’s a lower cost way to manage your uh your, your banking and your finances.

And so if um if more banks allow people to, to on ramp into crypto, then uh the crypto economy grows larger and dollar balance and larger in the number of transactions. And even in even in an interest rate environment that is kind of the same.

If we just have more crypto dollars, like stable coins in circulation, then we can have a more vibrant economy and that economy will need credit. You know, even if you don’t have leverage against, you know, Bitcoin or Ethereum, everyday stores still need credit to function. Right.

Like they receive a shipment of goods, they pay for it 30 days later. That’s credit. That’s trade finance. And, um, what we wanna do is offer um finance to businesses and to innovative companies.

And that’s, you know, one of the things I, I, I saw an article yesterday, it was super interesting because it was pointing out how um the traditional banking sector is becoming really ossified now where all its assets are just real estate loans.

And so, you know, unchain lending in one sense is just the markets and the market and technology’s answer to um how do we support businesses and business lending again?

00:18:01

Speaker #0

That’s really cool. I, I never thought of it that way and it’s like we kind of see this with like kind of like regional banks which did a lot of that lending and taking those like not huge like real estate loans, but they’re kind of like getting wrecked effectively and you have consolidation into big banks.

So it’s almost like kind of like that middle layer of like regional banks kind of like unchain markets represent that new middle layer, which is, yeah, like I think a really cool thesis. Um, one thing I’ve always wondered, right.

Like, I’ve personally been bearish on real world assets because my definition of it was limited to, like, how do we get real estate and put it on chain, how do we get car loans and put chain and, like, that stuff just has failed, like fractional real estate, um, se like, securitized, like all of these things, they’re like the very classic real world assets.

But then I realized, well, actually us DC is a real world asset, like regulated sa coins are real world assets. So I was like, oh, ok, my definition of it was probably a bit skewed to like this thing that doesn’t work.

So I think like we should, maybe we should even start. But like, what do you see is like a real world as set? Um And why do you think? I guess like it’s different to like maybe most people’s perception of like real world assets on chain being defined as real estate and these really clunky contraptions.

00:19:20

Speaker #1

Yeah, my my definition is different to what other people might use for reward assets on chain because I, I look at it through the lens of debt and so you can have the way I see it is the uh reward assets on chain is a claim on those assets and that claim can either be debt or it can be equity. And so to contrast the two solutions or the two ways of looking at it, let’s say, let’s say Carman I lend to you. So I, you know, I effectively provide you with a home loan or a mortgage.

I take out a mortgage like a first lean on your house. Um So my loan sits on chain but your house does not sit on chain. There’s not a representation of your house on chain.

I I still class that because I come at it from a debt lens as real world asset lending because I’ve given money to you as a loan and it’s for the purpose of um financing this real world asset, which is you owning a house.

This is just a hypothetical example of not offering your own loan. Um The other example would be you uh put the equity in your house on chain and the way that people have been doing that is what you do is you create an LLC or for anyone in Australia, you create a AAA private Limited company and um you sell the house into that company.

So the house is then owned by the LLC or by the ptyltd company and then you create a uh tokenized representation of the equity in that LLC and then that, that is an NFT and that trades on chain.

So you can then sell me the equity in your house by me buying your NFT and the claim of the equity of the house references that NFT. So it might be like hashed in.

So that’s, that’s the way that people have been doing real estate on chain and kind of the common legal framework that’s evolved for that. But the two are different.

So the second one I mentioned where we have an nft of your house, that’s equity and that’s a tokenized asset. The other one we had before is a tokenized loan against a real world asset.

And I don’t, I don’t need your house to be a token that trades on chain to be able to lend against it because the only time that I actually need to worry about selling that token is if you default and I need to foreclose and sell the house.

So that’s the only time I care about the house really being on chain. And so that’s kind of where the, the that’s the two divergent views and my view is it’s less costly for me to just lend to you and have AAA an enforceable loan document that says that I have security over your house and I can trade your loan, trade the loan against your house on chain.

I think that’s, I think that’s more important because that’s the, that’s the market of credit. I don’t think it’s as important to have your house tokenized on chain because your house is not something you need to sell really, really frequently.

And so I don’t think you need that extra liquidity of having it on chain.

00:22:35

Speaker #0

Yeah, that’s a really cool way of looking at it. Why do you think the space is geared towards like the representing equity on chain rather than like debt claims so far?

00:22:47

Speaker #1

Uh Well, I think it’s because I think, I think it’s because there are a lot of, there were a lot of startups that were found on the idea of kind of like fractional ownership of things and to be clear, II I think it’s really, it is important because if you, what a another way to think of um fractional ownership is like res so real estate investment trust represents fractional ownership of a portfolio of houses because the only way to do it before they existed was to, to actually own a bunch of different pieces of uh of real estate, which is obviously prices are out of the reach of most investors. You can’t get a diversified portfolio of real estate if you have to go and own 10 different houses. Um And sores were really useful, the concept of like fractionalization of real estate into an er C 20.

So let’s say you buy a house and you turn it into an er C 20 then you issue a million tokens, let’s say the house is a million dollars and then you issue a million $1 tokens.

Um That’s really useful because then um people could effectively get diversification at a much lower cost because they just buy a little piece of your house and and 10 different other houses on there. So I think that’s useful and I think that will happen eventually.

Um But uh yeah, II I think that aspect of tokenization of real world assets is going to happen. It’s an inevitable trend, right? Because you know, one of the things we kind of observed over the 20th century was just the financial organization of everything, everything became a future or a derivative.

And so I think other things being equal, there’s gonna be this pressure, particularly as property becomes a more expensive asset class, there will be pressure to sell it to people in smaller chunks because you’ll also be able to realize more appreciation of a property.

If your marginal buyer is people who only have 10-K in savings because they can buy a fractional piece of property. Um I’m getting a little bit off topic but each is useful.

I’m just, I just look at it from the perspective of um of uh debt and lending and think, you know, I can kind of shortcut my way to doing a lot of tokenized uh real world asset lending without having to like spend, you know, 50 or 100 K, putting a house into uh putting a house into an LLC and then tokens that LLC and spending a bunch on what lawyers fees, I can, I can have a relatively low cost uh loan document that gives me security over a house.

And then I just tokenize the, the loan against the house?

00:25:29

Speaker #0

Sure. So why has the fractionalization of real estate not work? Is it because of the inefficiencies and the costs of the process? But even if you take that in, like, I don’t like, if you look at the products on chain, none of them have really been attractive enough for me to like, care about. I think most crypto natives that I know, like, think of the same way.

So why do you think they haven’t taken off even though you say they will eventually

00:25:52

Speaker #1

uh because of the embedded slowness and cost of the real world transfer of property. So you have to pay a conveyance, you have all these parties who um are barely even digitized. Um And then you’re trying to impose a solution on them, which is at the very cutting edge of kind of what financial technology can do at the moment.

So you’re taking people who are not, you know, they’re not five years behind the curve on tech, they’re 2030 years behind the curve on tech.

And then you’re trying to tell them, um you know, you’re trying to, you’re trying to sell them a new solution that doesn’t benefit them in any way. Like it’s pretty un if anything.

Um the digitization and fractionalization or, or tokenization of a bunch of houses on chain hurts the conveyance’s business because the owner of that property will then be an LLC and instead of the property changing hands, what will change hands will be the owner, the equity and the LLC.

And so they get none of that action. So your entire existing, um, set of participants in that market have a vested interest in not letting that happen. So that’s why, that’s why I don’t think it, that’s why I don’t think it’s taken off as much.

But, um, it is happening though, like I’ve spoken to probably a dozen different firms doing tokenized property on chain where it seems to be happening successfully is uh things like prop are quite interesting. Uh, roofs stock is also very interesting.

But what they’re doing is they, they decided to roll up a bunch of transfer agents and, and conveyances. So, you know how I mentioned, there’s that party that has the vested interest.

Well, they just started buying up that party and saying we’re going to tokenize all of their real estate and tokenize the land registration, which I think is, is a really novel way of approaching it and is, is one that’s probably likely to succeed because instead of instead of pitching the, you know, pitching that party on a solution, they just said we, we’ll just buy them and then direct them to, to behave as we want.

Um, but I think, uh I think, I think the, the, the OTC loan market is kind of more interesting because it’s one that uh effectively the market for syndicated loans kind of entirely trades. OTC.

And so you have these huge bit ask spreads and uh you have sophisticated participants, it’s kind of more institutional by nature.

And so I see a huge opportunity to kind of tokenize that and kind of collect all the fees that, uh you know, syndications desks and um banks have been collecting all this time.

Um And, uh and so I, I guess that’s why we’ve kind of focused on the, the tokenization of loans um because high, you know, high spreads and margins, um very opaque market, small number of participants.

And um there’s a lot of people who, who want that product, like there’s a lot of funds who would buy tokenized loans if they could. It’s just very hard for, there’s, there’s no real market in it because it’s all held by a few banks.

00:29:04

Speaker #0

Sure. So I kind of view in my mind is like you have real world assets kind of is like this top level, I guess uh word, right? And then the two subcostal level down in the tree is equity and then debt and then within equity, you have real estate and all these other asset classes and then within real estate on the third layer of the tree, you then have these different approaches and firms trying to like tackle that.

And traditionally the real world asset equity real estate fractional pathway has been the pathway that’s been attempted the most because it’s one that’s been closest to the real world. It’s like, how do we put a token on chain? Let’s like, create a security token thing.

It’s the result of sloppy and unsophisticated thinking at its core where you say what exists in the real world. How do we like put that on chain? Oh Like uh real estate trust. Cool. That’s fractionalization tokens are fractionalization poppy pace.

Like that’s kind of like the mental model that’s been applied at like a high level. But really no one’s kind of like zoomed out looked at the entire picture and said, wait, what are we actually trying to do? The objective is to get real world assets on chain.

There’s actually a whole divergent pathway at like a few layers upstream that you can pursue.

That is a completely different way of looking at the problem but like not many people do because it requires that hard thinking of understanding like why and understanding the market structure and the market participants like that kind of feels like what’s happened.

And when people think real world assets, there’s so many people that have attempted that very narrow pathway that anything outside of that narrow pathway is like this is not gonna work because it’s pattern

00:30:41

Speaker #1

match. Well, also also also remember though that real real estate is a really tough one because most of the real estate financing comes from banks, right? So why banks would uh it’s it’s uh it’s hard to see if a bank would even recognize the legal title of buying a property by purchasing an on chain token. And it’s, they’re pretty much their interest is pretty much diametrically opposed to that. And they’re hugely conservative.

So why would a bank endorse a form of transacting that, uh goes against the way that they do things, um, and stands to kind of undercut their revenues um on their most profitable line of business, which is home loans because home loans have the lowest capital requirement.

And so generally a bank will make its highest, like in Australia, banks will make 20% return on equity on home loans, home loans. We we struggled to achieve that kind of pricing or that return on equity and institutional banking when I was in the sector.

And uh since banks give the approval to buy your home and for your home loan, they, you know, they, they are not gonna be early adopters to uh to, to doing tokenized real estate.

So that’s probably one of the other reasons why tokenization of real estate has not worked as well, even though it’s a huge asset cost because ultimately even the non bank lenders have to get their finance from banks.

They get their finance from, from a mix of um banks and debt investors which will include in Australia’s superannuation funds, insurance funds, other um asset managers. But uh but the the wholesale facilities that they get um before that all come from banks.

So that’s, that’s why I think like the the sector is just very challenged and it’s just because of entrenched interests. Whereas if, if you look at a different token, something else that banks don’t touch as much, uh you’ll probably see it move faster.

00:32:42

Speaker #0

Sure. So you’re telling me the entire concept of real world assets which people commonly ascribe to is based on this notion of putting real estate on chain, which is quite literally the absolute worst asset cost to put on chain. Given the financing is from someone who already makes a ton of money off the stuff, literally hates the entire sector and everyone involved in the industry from the conveyors and everyone else in the middle gets disrupted in the worst way by supporting this technology.

And there’s very high transaction costs at every stage of the process. It’s like that is what we have all collectively thought is real world assets. And then we’re like, oh real world assets aren’t gonna work out.

It’s like, well, of course, if we’re playing thinking in this very narrow definition of it, but actually the definition is different. It’s just the approach for that definition has been the most popularized. One is that like a fair summary of kind of like the problems.

00:33:41

Speaker #1

Yeah, sort of sort of it’s um and to, to be clear, I think uh doing tokenize real estate on chain offers a way, a way for the average family to save a lot of costs. It’s just that, that average family is not a frequent transactor and um the participants in the transaction with them have a vested interest in doing things the same way that they have done for a really long time.

So um the the weakest participant in that transaction is the the home buyer because they have to borrow the money from the bank, the bank, you know, um for the reasons I mentioned before is not super interested in tokenization of real estate.

But I do think it would start, it would save people a significant amount of money to just be able to buy a token that represents a house rather than pay, you know, 15 grand for somebody to uh to, to do a conveyance of property or, or that type of thing.

00:34:41

Speaker #0

Agree. No, I agree. Everything will happen eventually. But the real challenge is what is the next logical path? But that’s

00:34:49

Speaker #1

why it’s generally better in, you know, Clayton Christensen’s innovative dilemma, right? Start with a smaller niche, um you know, smaller niche market segment and then kind of expand from there. So, you know, find a specific type of asset that you could tokenize and bring on chain and um find people who are willing to pay for that and then just expand that technology, expand the application of that technology out to concentrically broader categories.

And then eventually you get to a really large asset class like houses

00:35:23

Speaker #0

completely. Yeah, it’s I, I think there’s so many like business principles that you can apply in crypto, but you really have to think from first principles, like as you said, um but just in this very crazy environment and I think the problem is a, people don’t properly understand the market structure that they’re operating in or they don’t properly apply the principles.

So, uh when you have the two, I think you get something like what you guys are doing, which is really cool.

Um And even though we’ve known each other for a while, like it’s only now that like this is really like kind of clicking to me because we’ve kind of like gone into this level of nuance.

So, yeah, like I feel like I’ve learned far more uh than I expected to and I, like, definitely everyone else did as well.

Um Is there anything else you’d love to kind of like, I guess, like add on or tell the audience before we kind of like wrap things up?

00:36:12

Speaker #1

Uh No, I think, uh I think we covered most things, I guess a small plug for the cash management product that uh maple released a couple of weeks ago. This is in, in my view, this is a real example of the in, in crypto because we saw banking rails were getting shut off. Crypto firms were getting denied bank accounts and banking services. So what did the space do it? Um, you know, innovators in the space have created a solution or a place for people who, you know, whether it’s a, a crypto startup or a dow or a high net worth individual to park their cash and get, you know, a decent yield.

But the yield is collateralized by T bills and, and treasuries and, and pretty low risk, uh pretty low risk stuff and it’s really liquid.

But that’s, that’s the example of what should be happening in, in capitalism and creative destruction where, you know, a a need, the market surfaces, a need and then people find a solution and offer.

And so what I’m really encouraged by is the resilience of the space where that came around so quickly, you know, it’s like the number of people offering that service in the last six months has um has increased dramatically.

And uh anyway, obviously, I hope people use the uh the Maple solution, but it is uh it is encouraging to see how quickly the space can adapt.

00:37:31

Speaker #0

Indeed. Um Yeah, it’s, we’re at the forefront of like financial technology and when people realize like the definition, you can be a lot more creative with how you apply that. I think we get really cool things like what you guys are doing. So, um yeah, thank you so much for your time and I’m really excited for people to kind of listen to this and hopefully change their definition on how they viewed real world assets. Um You’ve converted me uh at least.

00:37:58

Speaker #1

No, no, no, it was a pleasure. Thanks for having me, dude. And for anyone who wants to reach out, I’m at syrup on Twitter. And uh you know, you can also find us at Maple dot finance and uh or our telegram group. I’m at Sid Maple on telegram. Perfect.