Ethereum isn’t just “crypto”, it’s becoming the foundation of a new financial system.
In this in-depth interview, Chris Perkins (President of CoinFund) speaks with Vivek Raman (President & CEO of Etherealize) about why Ethereum is poised to transform how the world trades, settles, and owns assets.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
- Why Ethereum is “digital oil” powering stablecoins, tokenization & DeFi
- The investment case for ETH vs. Bitcoin
- How layer 2 networks enable banks & institutions to build their own blockchains
- What institutional adoption means for Wall Street & global markets
- ETH tokenomics: deflationary supply, staking yield & value accrual
- How treasury companies & ETFs are opening new on-ramps for ETH
- The future of wallets, user experience, and mainstream adoption
- Why regulatory clarity is the biggest unlock for blockchain growth
This is a must-watch if you want to understand Ethereum beyond speculation, as an infrastructure for the next era of finance.
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Vivek Raman 0:00
Ethereum is the next Internet where financial assets will live. And it’s that simple. Even retail people know that assets will be digitized and tokenized, and Ethereum is a platform that wins. You have Bitcoin as digital gold and eth as digital oil, which is growth of the entire posh hand ecosystem. And they then they belong together.
Christopher Perkins 0:24
welcome back, everyone. My name is Chris Perkins. I’m the president of coin fund, and today we are going to take a deep, deep journey into Ethereum land. And I couldn’t think of a better conversation than one with Vivek Rahman, my friend who is president of etherealize. Vivek, welcome, sir.
Vivek Raman 0:47
Great to see you, Chris. And this is one of my favorite topics, and thanks for having
Christopher Perkins 0:52
me. Yeah, we’re going to talk a little bit about Ethereum today. I’m just guessing. And it would be really helpful if you started by just giving us a little bit of background of how your story What brought you here? And then I’d love to learn a little bit about etherealize.
Vivek Raman 1:04
Sure thing, my story is actually not being crypto or Ethereum native. I spent the first 11 years of my career on Wall Street, in the engine rooms, on the trading floors. I was at Morgan Stanley UBS Deutsche Bank, nomira, and I traded the more esoteric, complex products within credit so those include high yield bonds, those include distress bonds, credit default swaps, loans. And I jumped around several banks and developed a pretty good network across the buy side and sell side and Wall Street was one of the most wonderful places to work, and had some of the most high octane, impressive people. But the one thing it lacked was any sort of technological evolution, specifically in credit trading, and after 10 years of never seeing any evolution in back offices and trading systems, I had, I had to do a career shift and pivot. I wanted to be a little bit more tech forward. I ejected out of New York, moved to Austin, very serendipitously. Met the team very I mean, it was complete serendipity, but met the team working on the merge for Ethereum, and they were working under this guy, Danny Ryan, who is now actually a co founder of ethereal eyes, which is amazing how it comes full circle. But they taught me everything there is about Ethereum, from what proof of stake is to what the stake yield is to what you can actually do with this platform and create applications. And I didn’t. I used my first decentralized finance app, and thought this is the future of how finance will trade. And that was how I got into Ethereum.
Christopher Perkins 2:40
Awesome. So it really, when you talk to a lot of people in crypto, it’s really Bitcoin that drew them in. For me, it was Ethereum, and for you, was Ethereum too. So we’re going to talk about that, but before we do, can you just talk about etherealize? It’s a new company. You’re the co founder. What’s your mission and what do you
Vivek Raman 2:57
do? So etherealize is, it’s a relatively new company, but it’s something that I’ve been working on for the last four or five years. I’ve always thought that blockchains are complementary to Wall Street infrastructure and from credit trading. I always thought that Ethereum would be the backbone at which all different assets trade and settle. To me, that’s that’s the internet moment for Wall Street that I was craving for the first 11 years of working there, I’ve been working on institutional adoption, which means just going around to my network, the banks, the buy side, and saying, Hey, do you guys want to integrate Ethereum in some sense? Should we tokenize assets? Should we trade? Should we use decentralized finance apps? And honestly, I got rejected for the first four years because the US wasn’t ready to integrate blockchains into the capital markets. So for four years, banks knew what blockchains were. They’ve all experimented with them, but didn’t want to use public blockchains like Ethereum. Last year, when all of that started to change, Blackrock started tokenizing their money market mutual fund, the ETFs got approved, and the regulatory landscape started to shift. That’s when we formalized these efforts and said, Okay, you know what? Now is the time to accelerate. Now is when we’re gonna have the adoption moment for Ethereum. And we formalized it with etherealize Awesome. The etherealize mission is to connect institutions to the Ethereum ecosystem and to help them onboard, to teach them everything there is about it, and to help them build products and solutions to actually use this amazing technology.
Christopher Perkins 4:24
Was it a barbecue this weekend with some Normie friends, and they kind of get bitcoin. They’re like, okay, I get it digital gold. People believe that it’s a store of value, and it seems to be working. We’re hitting all time highs. How do you describe Ethereum to normal folks. What is it exactly?
Vivek Raman 4:44
Ethereum is the next Internet where financial assets will live. And it’s that simple we have we can always analogize it to.com when the the old Internet came and rewired everything. Now we have a new internet for financial assets where you can take any asset you’ve been Toke. Tokenize it. I think tokenization was, before, a difficult concept to grasp. Now, every single bank and asset manager and even even retail people knew, know that assets will be digitized and tokenized, and Ethereum is a platform that wins from all of that
Christopher Perkins 5:16
got it. And I think, you know, being on Wall Street a long time ago, and people used to say, Oh, I get blockchain. A blockchain is a ledger. It’s you can have public ones, and you can kind of check who owns what, but like back in the day, it was blockchain, not Bitcoin, but here you have this token, which is, I’ll let you describe its value, its value set. But then you have the ledger itself. How do those two come together? I
Vivek Raman 5:43
think that’s what makes Aetherium, not too much more complicated, but a little bit more difficult to comprehend. Which is why? Which is why? Bitcoins gone first. Bitcoin has reached a threshold where it’s considered a store of value asset. It’s a macro asset. It’s digital gold. Ethereum has two things. One, it has this financial internet, this platform where you can take every asset in the world, represent it, digitally, program it, trade it, settle it, own it. I mean, the possibilities are absolutely endless, but every crypto blockchain system has to have an asset powering it. Eth is the asset that powers every transaction in the Ethereum ecosystem. So every time there’s a stablecoin transfer, eth benefits. Every time a new assets tokenized, eth benefits. Every time we create a new application and use decentralized finance or decentralized social media or put a game on Ethereum, eth benefits. So eth is that asset that accrues value from activity in this economy. Eth is the store of value for the Ethereum economy. So it’s a little bit more complex by necessity than Bitcoin is, but the potential, I think, is far greater and it’s a way more exciting vision.
Maggie Lake 6:53
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Christopher Perkins 7:12
Yeah. So the way I think about it is that the Ethereum blockchain is like a sediment layer. It It tracks who owns what and what you need the token for is to pay for the movement of those assets from from party a to party B onto the ledger. It essentially enshrines those transactions on the ledger. And we also have these things called smart contracts. And smart contracts are amazing, because anyone with an act with access to the internet can enter into a smart contract, and if A equals B, then C. So it allows things like, we’ll talk a little bit about the apps, but borrow and lend and all different types of things that can be built on this ledger. So here’s the easiest one of them all. What’s the investment case for this asset class? Right? You know that you can go out and buy not in financial advice or anything, but bitcoin is digital gold. What’s the investment case like? Why do
Vivek Raman 8:09
you want to buy eth? Eth is upside in the growth of a digital economy. If we think that all assets are going to go digital, eth benefits, if we think that the whole world is going to be tokenized, each benefits. If we think stable coins are going to be the way that people pay for things, because you have a digital dollar that can be transmitted across the world, and now there’s a stable coin bill that, knock on wood, is going to pass and become law very, very soon. Eth is a chain for stable coins. If we think the blockchains are going to grow and become universal, eth is a way to is to benefit from that. So we actually do come full circle back to the blockchain, not Bitcoin. If we think we want a digital asset store of value, bitcoins established itself as digital gold, as one of those stores of value. We think that blockchain is the innovation. Eth is the way to benefit from that. But the part that I also like to close the loop on, is eth is a very, very interesting store of value. It’s a very, very interesting strategic reserve asset. I think eth complements Bitcoin as part of a portfolio. Eth has a staking yield. Bitcoin does not have a yield. Eth has utility. It’s used as collateral. We’ll talk about applications like you said later, but has collateral applications and layer two stockpile it. It’s almost like oil in a sense that it’s so strategic to the functioning of the digital economy that e has its own place as its own standalone store of value. And I firmly believe that if we think that blockchains are going to be as big of an innovation as AI and other game changing technologies, there won’t just be one store of value. So the investment cases, you have Bitcoin as digital gold and eth as digital oil, which is growth of the entire plus hand ecosystem. And then they belong together.
Christopher Perkins 9:51
I think it’s a solid analogy, and it’s hard to I mean, this is such a unique asset that is very difficult to say this is but from a. Mental model perspective, I see it is a commodity, right? It’s like any other commodities. Is it valuable? I don’t know, you just talked about $3 trillion of of potential. I mean, when I say $3 trillion that’s what our own Department of the Treasury is saying. The number of stable coins that are coming on chain, I think Ethereum probably benefits from that, because, you know, I think the other blockchains are going to benefit as well. They hold stable coins. But Ethereum is, it’s 10 years old, and like when I was in tradfi, we would want 10 years of history. This is an asset that hasn’t been down in 10 years. It’s not It’s stayed up. It’s been viable for 10 years. There’s a million validators. It’s very diverse, and it’s very, very resilient. And so if you’re going to be putting trillions of dollars in dollars onto a blockchain, I think the commodity that powers them is probably pretty strategic. Do you agree? I
Vivek Raman 10:55
could not agree more. I mean, that’s the thing. It’s, it’s if we think, we have to think way bigger than what blockchain has achieved in the last four years. So we weren’t allowed to do anything with Blockchain the last four years. There was no regulatory framework. Now, every single bank, every FinTech, are all rushing to launch their own stable coins. The majority of all stable coins are on Ethereum, across the Ethereum network, layer one and layer twos, we just chat about the layer two design too, because it lets every company have their own blockchain that goes to the next thing. If we think that the future is every company will have their own blockchain and run their own system, those can plug into Ethereum. If there are layer twos, eth benefits from that too. And if you have assets that are programmable and tokenized, I mean, the sky’s the limit on on the amount of assets you can put onto the system. Yeah, it’s going to be pretty valuable if it’s powering all
Christopher Perkins 11:46
of that. So can we talk through some of the utility you talked about? We talked about stable coins and tokenization. What’s, what’s the point? Like, why do you people want to bring dollars? Why are stable coins important? Why is tokenized securities important? Can you walk us through that? Let’s
Vivek Raman 12:02
start with the clearest product market fit is stable coins, and that’s because people want dollars, and dollars are not that easy to access. It takes days to send wires. It costs egregious fees. Honestly, if you want to send wires internationally, wires have gotten this is sending dollars abroad, it can take weeks or more for approvals dollar dollars should move at the speed of the Internet, and the only way to do that is to digitize them and put them on a public blockchain, which is open, which is owned by nobody. It’s not a closed system, so it’s not it’s not owned by a bank. It’s actually as open as the internet, which means it’s as secure as the internet, which means it’s as trackable as the internet. That’s a very, very powerful use case. And the world wants access to dollars, and they’re doing that with Blockchain. So we’ve without without regulation and clear rules of the road, stable coins have already thrived. There’s already over $200 billion of stable coins, and again, most of them are on E now with regulation, with a stable coin bill that’s hopefully going to be enshrined into law. That number, like you said, our own Secretary of the Treasury is saying it’s gonna be 3 trillion. So that will increase access to dollars globally. It gets even cooler when you when you graduate from stable coins and go to tokenize assets, should stocks only trade nine to four, arguably, no should more people have access to the complex financial products that Wall Street creates, probably increasing access and increasing distribution and opening up the ability for anyone in the world to own and trade something is only going to increase commerce is the most positive sum outcome ever, and blockchains enable that. So that’s why more open markets, more open access, 24/7 settlement and and just leveling the playing field.
Christopher Perkins 13:52
Awesome. Can we go back to what we call tokenomics, right? Tokenomics are the properties that underpin a token, and some tokens are very inflationary, right? Where you know you’re buying into this inflation. Can you talk through, like, the dynamics of the token, how yield works and how it’s inflationary? So people are thinking about, hey, I kind of like this asset. How do the tokenomics work, and how do they behave over time?
Vivek Raman 14:23
It’s very, very important for the token underlying a blockchain system to be attractive as a store of value, to be something that people hold, because the token is used for security. The token is used as a proxy for for the whole entire ecosystem, and eats tokenomics are really, really interesting, and they haven’t been expressed clearly enough. Everyone knows that Bitcoin has a 20 million supply cap. Everyone knows that Bitcoin halves every four years. It’s a very simple, understandable set of tokenomics. And so people have accepted this is digital gold. Eth actually. As Bitcoin has a supply cap of 21 million eth has an issuance cap. The protocol will never be able to issue more than 1.5% new ether every single year, and usually that’s much lower. So let’s talk about why it’s much lower. One of the things that brought me into the ecosystem, made me absolutely love eth, is that eth is linked to activity in the ecosystem. So the more activity that happens on Ethereum, the more stable coins that transfer, the more applications there are, the more users there are using the system, the more eth actually becomes deflationary, because activity creates a burn mechanism, just like if you use oil, oil burns. So there is a scarcity mechanism built in that actually makes each tokenomics Very cool, is that more usage lowers the inflation to the point where sometimes eth is deflationary. So now you have an asset that has a max, capped issuance can sometimes be deflationary, and it is usually much, much lower even than bitcoins issuance and it has a staking yield. So the stake yields where things get really interesting, because I’m biased. I come from from credit trading and Wall Street, I think yield is the ultimate application. Most of the world wants yield. Most of the world is a risk averse they don’t need to play price appreciation. They want fixed income instruments. Eth has a native yield of about 3% and that’s very, very powerful. So you have this store value with low issuance to maybe deflationary issuance, with the staking yield that that people hold in stockpile, I think that sounds like a pretty attractive store
Christopher Perkins 16:35
of value. Yeah. Full disclosure, we have worked together on each yield before. We are the producers of something called Caesar, which is the compass ether staking rate, which is kind of like the risk free rate of Ethereum. But I mean, I got once I realized that with that, wow, there’s actually a yield here. We’re like, wow, we need to standardize this thing, and that’s why we put forth that yield. And we’re seeing incredible innovation from insurance to structured products. That’s for people with an institutional mind, makes a ton of sense. And, you know, I think retail is getting much more sophisticated, and they’re going to be absolutely taking advantage of yield products. And then you layer on top of that, AI agents who really understand how to optimize yield, it’s going to get crazy, but very good for individuals. Vivek, you talked a little bit about layer twos, if you could just break down what they are, who they are, how they work, and then how they how they come together with this ecosystem called Ethereum. Be very, very helpful. Definitely.
Vivek Raman 17:31
I think layer twos were a design choice by the Ethereum ecosystem very early on, and we are now seeing the fruition of that design choice, and the choice was this, you can put all of global finance onto one blockchain, or you can say that different asset classes have different regulatory requirements, different banks and institutions will have different sets of rules they need on blockchains. So there could also be a world where every bank has their own chain, or there are different chains by region, by regulatory requirements, and certain assets that are super high frequency trading might require different types of blockchain environments and something that’s very, very slow, what Ethereum said is, let’s scale by allowing customizable blockchains to be built On top of Ethereum. And those customizable blockchains are called layer twos. And what the beautiful part about a customizable layer two blockchain is that institutions that want to build their own chain don’t actually need to build all the infrastructure that eth already has. They can just leverage on top of it. They can just sit on top of Ethereum, inherit the security, which is the best, the most secure blockchain in the world, from Ethereum, and then build their own environment and ecosystem. For a long time, people criticized Ethereum for scaling and allowing for many different layer twos to form, rather than putting it all into one place. That is now starting to shift, when we start to see real institutional adoption. Very recently, Robinhood chose to deploy their first instance of tokenized stocks, which is one of the most brilliant and I think one of the most bullish and inspiring cases we’ve seen in Ethereum. They did it as a layer too, and the reason is because they wanted their own customization. They didn’t want to use someone else’s ecosystem. They want to define their own. Every bank is going to say that, and that’s how the layer two ecosystem flourishes. What connects all the layer twos, they’re all rooted into Ethereum. All these layer twos can talk to each other. They can bridge to each other. The assets can can travel seamlessly to each other, especially, as you said, Chris with AI agents that can navigate all the complexities. So you get in this ecosystem where you have the security of Ethereum, but you have the custom customizability that each institution or player may want. That’s a winning combo, yeah,
Christopher Perkins 19:48
so I like to think of it as very modular, right? So we’re going to talk about apps now. So if you’re constructing an app, you can dial up your your back end to accommodate. For whatever you’re trying to achieve, if it’s we call high TPS or transactions per second, low fees, etc, and it introduces this modularity for specific apps. One of the things crypto has been criticized for, for ever, is that, okay, here’s the solution. What’s the problem like? Where are your applications like? What’s the utility? Right? With all this wonderful background, right now, can you talk through the application layer, like, what applications are you seeing? What utility do they do, they deliver? And how does, how does the application come together with layer twos and layer ones and all this other stuff,
Vivek Raman 20:37
the application layer is, is by far the most important part. And at the end of the day, if we don’t have great applications just infrastructure, then we’ve scratched the surface of what blocks what’s possible on blockchains. The most straightforward application is the ability to trade assets. You have assets like stable coins. You have assets like tokenized securities, tokenized real estate, tokenized money market funds, being able to trade between one of the other 24/7 using a program instead of using a intermediary. That’s how the financial system should work. And so trading is one of the first and most currently use cases for for Ethereum and other blockchains. The examples of trading apps are uniswap and curve, and these applications let anyone in the world plug in their assets, plug in their wallets, which they can own and swap to other assets. That’s it was brilliant. Actually, my my aha moment for Ethereum. And the reason I’m here and can never go back, is when I use, when I use uniswap for the first time, and traded, traded an asset without the frictions, without three days of settlement. I immediately thought, this is the future of all finance was when I first used uniswap. But it gets better once you have assets on a blockchain, not only can you trade them, but you can lend against them. You can borrow against them. If we look at every wealthy person, no one ever sells their assets, they borrow against their assets. People. People want to accumulate and own assets and unlock financial access to those by borrowing against them. People take mortgage mortgages against their houses. People take margin loans against their stock portfolios. Well, with lending protocols on Ethereum, like Ave, like Morpho, you can deposit your assets that you think are very high value, assets like eth, if you think eth is a store of value, instead of selling your eth, you can deposit it and you can borrow dollars against it and pay an interest rate. That’s all done programmatically. There are no loan docs. There’s no intermediaries. It’s all done instantaneously. You can repay your loan whenever, and if the loan goes underwater, the protocol, the the application itself, will liquidate it, and that way there’s no bad debt. So you don’t, you don’t get in this issue where there’s potential financial crises, because you have people in the middle that can’t keep up with liquidations. It’s all done with code and programs. It’s a very ironic thing that we noticed during the last crypto bear market is there were a lot of firms that went under during the previous bear market and like a block file, like a Celsius. The an ironic part is those were all run by people. The things that didn’t break during the last crypto crisis were these protocols, these lending protocols, like Ave, like makerdao. So code is really a better arbiter for financial applications than people are, and lending is the next application. I don’t just want to talk about financial applications, though, because there’s so much more crypto lets you own your own assets. And assets don’t just have to be financial. You can own your own identity. You can own your own social media graph, you can own your own assets in a game. All of that can be done via using the blockchain as ownership record and then building things like games, things like prediction markets, things like social media, where you actually own your own graph, like forecaster the potential for consumer based applications that are that are non financial is so huge, and just because I’m personally focused initially on Wall Street as Product Market Fit undersells the real potential of Ethereum, which really is the next Internet where all assets can live. That’s
Christopher Perkins 24:27
pretty amazing. Great. Summary, I agree that there’s, continues to be a proliferation of apps, and sometimes those apps have tokens of their own. And so there’s opportunities. And the thing about them is they’re all customizable, right? But anytime there’s a transaction that’s done on the eth layer, one the value, then there is a form of value that will accrue to Ethereum in one way, shape or form, depending. What are the risks like? I mean, you’re outlining an incredibly bullish case for Ethereum. What could derail. This we, I mean, we didn’t even talk about the clarity Act or the genius act that I’m going to heading down to DC tomorrow. So much regulatory momentum. What are the risks? What could derail us, like, what could, you know, what could stop us or slow us down? What keeps you awake at night, anything?
Vivek Raman 25:17
A lot. And I’ve after four years of running into walls and seeing what all the pain points are, I feel the most bullish that I’ve ever been. It’s because people have said no for so many reasons for so long, and all of those no’s are starting to become tailwinds. Regulatory was always the biggest risk, because you’re not going to have a bank, a traditional finance institution, any established player, take any sort of regulatory risk if they don’t need to. The fact of the matter is, the US financial system is the best financial system in the world. It needs the least upgrading. So unless we are really delivering new value, regulated value, without any real risk for these institutions, they’re not going to adopt public going to adopt public blockchains. That is now a tailwind. Now their bills in Congress to enshrine stablecoin legislation allow stablecoins to flourish, that hopefully it was pretty likely to pass, so I don’t see that as a huge risk. There are other bills, like the market structure bill, the clarity Act, which had the fortune you helped me a lot with this of forget to testify in front of Congress and talk about the clarity bill. From the industry’s perspective, it was pretty surreal to represent Ethereum there, but the risk is that we get too overly politicized and important legislation that can set the future of the blockchain industry doesn’t pass, then it’ll be an unfortunate outcome, because ultimately, institutions know that politicians go in cycles, political regimes go in cycles. We want lasting rules that will transcend any political regime. And so putting things into law is very, very important. And so that’s the risk. The risk is that we undo this, this Cambrian explosion, explosion of innovation now by not having things be enshrined the law. But I feel very good about the stablecoin bill, and that itself will unlock so much with the
Christopher Perkins 27:10
blockchain. I think so too, because one of the things that people don’t realize with the stablecoin bill is that it suppresses yield to the holder. And you know, you and I can agree or disagree that this is an awful thing, like, why can’t you give yield to the holder? But because it suppresses yield, I think it’s actually going to be very, very good for defi. Because if you’re sitting there in the developing world and you’re like, hey, wait a second, I’m desperate for dollars because I don’t trust the Zimbabwean government, so give me the dollars, but dollars are depreciating without yield, and so you can go into defi, where that you can borrow, lend, you can do all these different things, or even buy into alts to generate incremental value or generate yields. Of course, there’s risk associated with it, but I think that that’s probably going to happen as a next step. And then my thesis has always been, and you know, we have companies now that do this where you look at AI agents, and you say, hey, agent, go find me the best yield, optimize it for me. And agents are amazing and optimizing, and then off they go. And to me, that’s the future, and I think it’s going to be pretty amazing. Do you agree with that view?
Vivek Raman 28:18
It’s the most inspiring future. I mean, people talk about how there’s some sci fi future where AI is and blockchain intersect. I don’t think it’s science fiction at all. Clearly, like you already have companies you work with to do it, but, but to me, blockchains and AI are the perfect marriage, because though the we used to have robo advisors, but robo advisors still have to navigate the traditional financial system with its frictions, and there’s very little there’s very limited things you could do. AI will never be able to have a bank account. AI will never be able to go through stripes API or something without without a lot of permissioning. AI agents can use permissionless blockchains, and they can use the the myriad of applications. They can even create their own applications. They can go see what all the different yields and opportunities are, and they can deploy capital on behalf of its users. So AI is kind of the perfect it’s not only the perfect marriage with blockchains, but I actually think AI agents will be the biggest users of public blockchains like Ethereum. And I’ve done this exercise where I’ve actually asked every single AI model where they would feel most comfortable transacting and storing value and and they feel like they would have the most reliability and global accessibility. And every single one of them, from chatgpt to grok to Claude, say it’s the Ethereum ecosystem due to its uptime, due to its reliability, due to security, and this decentralization. So it’s a really funny way to user test and say that if we think AI agents are going to be the primary users of blockchains, Ethereum benefits the most from that.
Christopher Perkins 29:52
Sounds good. Let’s talk a little bit about etherealize. If you’re okay with it, what are you guys focusing on? What’s your how’s it going there? I know it’s a. Relatively new company, officially, what’s the mission, what’s the goal, and what are the conversations been like? But it’s
Vivek Raman 30:07
so much has changed since even when we started not too long ago, nine months ago, but the genesis of ethereal is was we’re going to get this window of opportunity where blockchains are going to be adopted institutionally. There are a lot of different blockchains out there. There’s a lot of competition out there, as there should be in a new technology. Um, Ethereum was not as represented as other chains in the US, in the financial markets, and that’s because Ethereum is a big decentralized network. The Ethereum Foundation does not have that much influence, if any. Um, the network is, is global. It’s the validator set is very distributed, and Ethereum is not political. It’s just this neutral infrastructure that being said, there’s a time to be aggressive and there’s a time to be defensive. And blockchains have been playing especially Ethereum has been playing defense. The SEC was not very favorable towards Ethereum in general. Blockchain networks in the previous administration that started to shift. And so there was an opportunity to say, let’s accelerate. Let’s try and get responsible adoption. Let’s try and pick systems that will last decades and decades the financial system will upgrade onto. And we think that’s Ethereum. So we got the blessing of Vitalik and the EF to start etherealize, which is an independent entity meant to go around to Wall Street and to the buy side, to the sell side of family offices, to capital allocators, and teach them about Ethereum and teach them about the opportunities you asked me before, what are some of the things that could go wrong and keep me up at night, If for whatever reason, the financial system moves on to a brittle blockchain ecosystem, or a centralized blockchain ecosystem, or something that’s run by a company that’s not the optimal outcome. You want a really neutral playing field. And I would argue Ethereum is one of the most, if not the most, neutral playing field for finance to for high value finance to go on to. And so with that we started taking that message around institutions, and it went really, really well. There was so much appetite for people to connect to Ethereum, whether that means guide them through tokenization projects, whether it means teaching about their layer two opportunities where banks and asset managers and players can create their layer twos to explore what the application space looks like. What is defi to basically speedrun how I learned about Ethereum by using uniswap and by buying EP asset. That’s what etherealized mission is. And it’s absolutely inspiring to see how many big name institutions really care and want to learn when this window is open. So that’s what I’ve been sprinting I’ve had hundreds and hundreds of meetings, a lot of them you you’ve been tremendously helpful in getting us into into policy and in institutional players. And really, it’s a positive sum game. The more adoption we see, the more opportunity we’re going to create in this in this Ethereum economy. And yeah, again, I like playing positive some games, and working on Ethereum, to me, is the highest calling,
Christopher Perkins 33:05
awesome, man. You know, I get asked all the time, Chris, like, where’s the book? Like, how do I learn about this thing? You know, is there a book? What’s the best reference? I think I know what you’re going to say. But if someone wants to learn more about Ethereum and the Ethereum ecosystem and familiarize themselves, you know, with all with with the apps, the layer twos and everything else. What’s the best way to do the
Vivek Raman 33:27
part of part of it there realizes mission is education. And so we saw a gap where there are not that many books, there aren’t that many sources, where, again, the audience for teaching about Ethereum isn’t crypto people, because they already know about Ethereum. It’s everyone else, and there hasn’t been much, to be honest. So what we’ve been we can either put out a lot of research and reports, which we have, we wrote, we wrote a report on eth called the Digital oil calm. And that’s, that’s open for the I mean, all of this is open for the whole world to read and learn. But the inspiring thing we’re starting to see is, what’s a higher leverage point? Why don’t we educate institutions about eat and Ethereum, and then institutions have much more distribution. They go to their their their client bases, is across, is global and across the US. So what we’re starting to see is banks and asset managers are starting to write institutional grade reports about Ethereum and the potential. And so that’s what I would point to. Fidelity. Just put out a brilliant report about Ethereum and how you should look at Ethereum as an economy. We’re seeing a lot more literature. Bank of America, I think, today, put out a piece saying Ethereum is the next internet. So we’re actually seeing this permeate to audiences from institutions themselves, and that’s what’s been inspiring. That’s when you see the critical mass and the narrative started to take hold. We can also talk about the Treasury vehicles, because those are those. Those are another really good way to learn about Ethereum and. Its potential, and those are going to be amazing amplifiers for for Ethereum, just like Microsoft was.
Christopher Perkins 35:06
Let’s talk about that. So you know, if someone is interested in acquiring that asset, they can buy the asset from, like a exchange. They can buy an ETF now, now there’s these Treasury companies. Can you explain the difference between the three, how they work,
Vivek Raman 35:21
definitely. So the the crypto Native people, which, again, will be the minority. Our goal is to onboard the world. Our goal, our goal is not, we’re not trying to push some fringe technology, not we want, we want open access to everyone. But the crypto native players will say, I want to own the actual tokens themselves. I want to own the actual assets themselves. I tend to believe that I like holding Eth and then staking it myself, because you have your own property rights. You get to own your own assets. It feels like owning a home or it’s like owning a digital version of an asset. That being said, there’s downsides to that, there’s risks to that. You need to have private keys. You need to be worried about safety, and you worried about hacking risk, and it’s higher when, just like, if I had a lot of cash under my bed, that’s riskier than keeping it in a bank. So similarly, there are ways to still have access to eat the asset with the equivalent of putting in a bank. One is an ETF. So you can buy an ETF of eth. BlackRock and the other ETF issuers saw their highest ETF inflows ever over the last week. So clearly, the demand there is rising sharply. But then you can own a stock that underlined that represents the price of eth, and then the ETF assure will hold the eth for you. That’s great. That’s a that’s a very, very clean way. And honestly, that means that you can go into retirement accounts. It’s way more accessible. It can go through brokerage accounts. That that’s amazing. However, eth is a productive asset. Eth is a really the potential for eth is very, very high. We talked about the staking yield right now, you cannot access the staking yield for eth through the ETFs, which should change pretty soon. So so that that’s gonna be very good, and it’s gonna open up even more benefits for the eighth ETFs. But there’s this new wave of companies, public companies. They’re saying, why don’t we become holding companies for for assets. Michael Saylor and big started this off with Bitcoin, and he made MicroStrategy, and MicroStrategy is the largest public holder of Bitcoin out there, and it’s a way for retail to get access to Bitcoin. And he also, as a result, has taken bitcoins brand, almost single handedly, and made it pretty universal. It’s pretty impressive what he’s been able to do there. Eth is also an excellent Treasury asset. Eth has what Bitcoin has, plus yield, plus ability to put it into defi, plus ability to use as collateral, plus the ability to borrow stable coins against it. So now we’re seeing a wave of eth Treasury companies, which are public vehicles like MicroStrategy, pop up and start to buy Eth and start to do things with the eth that generate additional yield. And that is going to really showcase the potential of the Ethereum economy. Because now you basically have Ethereum can have quarterly reports now all these companies that are public are going to talk about what they’re doing in Ethereum. Analysts are gonna look at and say, Oh, wow, there’s a lot of potential here. And it might be one of the best on ramps for everyone to learn about the potential of eth. And I’m excited to see him. There’s, there’s at least there’s five big ones now, and there’ll be a lot more coming, and the more the merry because eth is a is a very, very unique and differentiate about differentiated asset. And all these Treasury companies can help amplify
Christopher Perkins 38:45
that. And so like, literally, people can do their own research, underwrite their investment, and then just buy them on their own, like brokerage account, simple as that, right?
Vivek Raman 38:53
Simple as that. And they don’t even they don’t have to do the complexity if they don’t want to, if they don’t want to do the complexities of navigating through defy or staking or worrying about custody, then the public companies can do that. I will say at some point in the future, everyone should want to, because it’s cool. It’s like, it’s like using AI, or it’s like using the internet or using an iPhone. It’s cool when you can take your own asset and have your own ownership and lend and borrow against it. But this is a really, really good stepping stone
Christopher Perkins 39:18
to get in there, right? And you also, if you have that Native Asset, you can use it to pay for what we call gas right, to power those applications natively, which I think will be important for some people as they start learning and navigating this ecosystem, unless they just tell their agent to do it, which is probably going to be the future
Vivek Raman 39:36
anyway. That is going to be the future and the we’ve scratched the service on AI using Blockchain rails. But yeah, you’re gonna have your personal AI agent do all your financial transactions, find you all your opportunities, even transact and do commerce for you. So that’s gonna be cool to
Christopher Perkins 39:51
see. Yeah, so we talked about this as we kind of come to the end of this, the way to access equities makes sense. Is, what do you need to acquire native ease. How do you? How do you get into defi? Like, do you? How do wallets work? Can you just walk through some of that journey to get into defi?
Vivek Raman 40:11
It’s getting easier. So, so I think crypto has always had this reputation. It’s been difficult to access, which is why, that’s why these public stocks that own eth trade higher than actual eth. That’s why the ETFs are such good on ramp. But ultimately, it’s getting simpler and simpler. Anyone can download a wallet. A wallet is an example of wallet is Metamask. Another example of all is Coinbase. Is wallet. And with a wallet comes responsibility. You get a seed phrase. The seed phrase is effectively your password, and if you lose the password, the assets are gone. That’s That’s one reason why people like to just hold things in an ETF form or stock form. However, all of that’s getting better. Ethereum had a big facelift, had a big UX upgrade, so now I can actually access my wallet through face ID or through a thumbprint or fingerprints. So the user interface moment is here for crypto. But that being said, once I have a wallet and I have my face ID to log into it, then I can transfer dollars there using stable coins that can happen from Coinbase, that can happen through any exchange. And once you have dollars, or you can transfer eth there. Once you have assets, dollars, eth, in a wallet, then you can plug into any application, any financial application that anyone’s made. And there’s no login, there’s no password, there’s just you connect your wallet to me. That’s the coolest that’s the coolest thing ever. You don’t have to go through multiple intermediaries. You have your wallet, you can access anything you want to, and then you can transact. You can connect to uniswap, and you can trade into another asset, connect to Ave, which is a lending protocol, and you can lend out your dollars, or you can borrow against your eat. And you can start playing games, and you can pay for every transaction of those games using the Ethiopian Wallet. So there’s the wallet. Is your home. The wallet is going to be the universal way to access crypto. More and more companies going to have consumer facing wallets. Robin it has wallet. Coinbase has a wallet. I’d imagine every bank will have a wallet. Zelle should look like a wallet, so we’re at the tip of the iceberg there. But when, when the consumer moment will really happen, when wallets become user friendly and accessible? And that’s
Christopher Perkins 42:20
happening, got it? And my final question, you talked about an upgrade, right? This is a living, breathing ecosystem that changes in time. Can you walk through some of the changes that have happened in the past, and what do we expect in the future?
Vivek Raman 42:32
So let’s start with Bitcoin. Bitcoin does one thing, and it stores value, and so it doesn’t need to upgrade. It doesn’t need to change. Ethereum is a technology, and technology needs to evolve and get better and become safer, and there’s gonna be quantum risks in the future. So you do need to upgrade technologies. What Ethereum has done is it used it started off like Bitcoin with mining. So you had GPU mining rigs, just like with Bitcoin, you had ASIC mining rigs, Ethereum decided very early on that there’s a better way to secure the network, and that way actually gives you yield on the asset, instead of having to use electricity and rely on external hardware, and that’s called Proof of stake. So Ethereum biggest upgrade ever was the move from proof of work using GPUs to proof of stake, where it’s much you could reduce issuance a lot. It had a staking yield. It’s way more secure, way more globally distributed. That was the biggest upgrade ever, ever. Since then, Ethereum has been getting faster on layer one. It’s been getting faster on layer twos. All that is to get ready for the World to Come on chain, and it’s been improving its user interface for that exact use case. I said, instead of having 24 word seed phrases, you can start using safe ID. You can start programming your wallets. You can start programming access. So it’s becoming faster to use, cheaper to use, and easier to use. And that’s going to be the direction of every Ethereum upgrade going forward, while importantly maintaining a decentralized network. Like what is decentralization at the end of the day? It’s security, it’s resilience, and it’s not having counterparty risk. And so if you start to centralize parts of the network, then it becomes more brittle and fragile. Ethereum wants to stay maximally decentralized, so it’s always up and and it has the best uptime and institutional properties that are going to let it be used.
Christopher Perkins 44:27
Love it. Love it. Love it. Vivek, how do people connect with you?
Vivek Raman 44:31
I think, I think we have to go back to Twitter. I guess that’s, that’s, that’s the, that’s the mode of communication. It was Bloomberg for tradfi world, it’s Twitter now, so I’m Vivek ventures on Twitter, and ethereal lives is just getting started, and we’re really, really excited to do our part and help help this wave of adoption.
Christopher Perkins 44:51
I really appreciate your time today, and thank you for teaching us about the Ethereum ecosystem. Pretty exciting road ahead, hopefully the the. This week is crypto week in Congress. A lot of momentum coming out of that, and look forward to seeing all the amazing things that you built. Thanks again for coming on,
Vivek Raman 45:08
sir. Enjoy your time in DC. Thanks for having me. Cheers, buddy.
Maggie Lake 45:12
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