Rebuilding the $12T Repo Market on Bitcoin | Bitcoin Dave

Bitcoin has won the store-of-value argument, but can it become the foundation of an entirely new credit system? David Seroy of Alpen Labs joins David Hoffman to explore why Bitcoin’s next era may be defined by digital credit, ZK rollups, fixed-duration lending, and an onchain repo market rather than payments alone. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast 📊BITGET | TOKENIZED STOCKS 2.0 https://bankless.cc/bitget-stocks 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless 👑BANKLESS PREMIUM | AD-FREE & BONUS EPISODES https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Hyperbitcoinization 3:51 Bitcoin’s Next Phase 9:57 The Talent Crisis 11:29 BitVM and ZK 16:26 Bitcoin L2s 19:06 Bitcoin Credit 28:28 Onchain Repo 34:09 The Yield Curve 38:21 Borrowing and Risk 43:24 Why L2s Failed 48:29 Saylor vs Onchain 54:51 Alpen and Strata 56:36 Ethereum’s Purpose --- RESOURCES Alpen Labs https://www.alpenlabs.io/ --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Bankless Nation, I'm here with David Se Roy, otherwise known as Bitcoin Dave. Bitcoin Dave, welcome back on to the podcast. It's been a while. How are you doing?

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks. You actually originally coined that name Bitcoin Dave. And, you know, I still think I'm Bitcoin Dave, but you are, you're no longer Ethereum Dave.

• 0:18Speaker 00

  I'm no longer Ethereum Dave. Yeah, I'm just Bankless David.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  Okay, Bitcoin Dave. Bitcoin has this manifest destiny to hyper Bitcoinize the world. I don't know if you believe that, but that's kind of like one of the original views of the path of Bitcoin as a monetary asset. To just blanket the world, denominate everything in BTC. Are we still on that path?

• 0:43Speaker 01

  I think so. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, the thesis of Bitcoin is pretty well established. It's one of the few things in our entire industry that like, almost everyone agrees has legitimacy. You know, Bitcoin as, you know, non-sovereign sound money. What is still up for debate is kind of like what's next and beyond after that. For me personally, I do think that Bitcoin needs programmability. Maybe not on the layer one, but you know, in these more expressive layer twos. And so I do think that there is huge unlocks that are enabled for Bitcoin as money. If you can add more trustless computation to Bitcoin. So that's kind of how I think about the future.

• 1:20Speaker 00

  When I, when I say the words manifest destiny of Bitcoin, that's, it comes from this idea of just like Bitcoiners have just memed Bitcoin to where it is today. And it's just been accepted. The world has just like absorbed Bitcoin into, you know, its vernacular, into its portfolios. And the brand of Bitcoin has just done phenomenally well. I think like much to the frustration of like the Ethereum crowd where the Ethereum crowd was like, we really need to build Ethereum. And it's going to be hard and there are challenges to overcome. And I think when Ethereum people look over the fence at the Bitcoin world and be like, man, they just had it so easy. All they had to do was meme Bitcoin into hyper Bitcoinization. Do you, do you agree with that kind of like lens?

• 2:05Speaker 01

  None of that. Like people have always said like money is a meme and like I, I get that, that there is like a somewhat social consensus around what is money. But there also are like actual properties that make money, good money. And Bitcoin does embody those properties and you cannot just meme them into existence. You know, like a lot of the properties of Bitcoin are actually what allowed the memes to, to, to take off. And if those properties did not exist, then the memes would not. So while I am somewhat sympathetic to the idea that like, things need to be built. There needs to be this kind of programmable ecosystem in some of the Ethereum arguments. At the end of the day, it's like, it's not just a meme. Bitcoin has the best properties of money.

• 2:43Speaker 00

  So do you think that Bitcoin is still on this like long arc of hyper Bitcoinization? Or I don't know what the word is, hyper Bitcoinization. I feel like I'm dating myself because that's like a pre 2020 word. But like, I don't know what word you guys use these days.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  I think at the very least, some form of Bitcoin is inevitable. Like I very much, I think the sovereign debt crisis is a major issue. I do think that, you know, eventually we will hit a kind of strong phase of monetary debasement. I'm not sure that AI is going to entirely bail us out of, of, of that crisis. And I do think Bitcoin is in prime position and arguably sole position to capitalize on that. Now, to what extent it capitalized, it could potentially be capped somewhat by, you know, Bitcoin's limitations. Like if we, if we just keep things as the status quo, it's like, great. It's, it's just, you know, it's a non-sovereign store of value. That is probably good enough to be a world-changing asset. But can you do better than that? And I think that's kind of really what we're pushing at the frontier of Bitcoin is kind of exploring, is there more?

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Is there more to be desired here?

• 3:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's something I want to talk about today. I still want to kind of like hash out this idea. And the reason, the reason why I ask with this framing is that every single cycle of sorts, cycle, the 2017 cycle to the 2021 cycle, to the 2024, five cycle, I guess. Is like, it's marked by like Bitcoin growing in like some sort of like STEM, step function way in like adoption and legitimacy and price. And, you know, when Bitcoin peaked in 2017, 2018, it was still a bunch of retail, but you got your first idea of like, you know, institutions and people building very large businesses around this. This is like when Mike, Mike Novogratz went from just like a speculator to like, he started to build Galaxy in 2017, 2018.

• 4:26Speaker 00

  And then in 2020 to 2021, you had Michael Saylor first start to do the whole Bitcoin treasury thing. And then now moving, now here we are in like sailors, once again, trying to like elevate Bitcoin from digital gold to digital capital. And every, every single cycle, like Bitcoin just grows in one step function values, like step up in terms of just like how adopted and legitimate and valuable it is as an asset. But I don't think every future step function is guaranteed. And so while previous eras of Bitcoiners have done a phenomenal job, not, not faking it, but like memeing the properties of Bitcoin into awareness.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  The very strong properties of Bitcoin that it has, as you said, the, the Bitcoiner, like community layer around Bitcoin have done a very good job elevating and pushing Bitcoin up the hill. The next step function increase in Bitcoin is not guaranteed, even though it seemingly has done very, very well previously. These are kind of like my thoughts. And so that's kind of why I wanted to get you on to see like, okay, what, what does the next step function look like? And how well is Bitcoin positioned to actually like achieve that?

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, Bitcoin's at an interesting point in time. Like obviously not saying anything groundbreaking here, just the larger it is, the harder it is to move the price. I also do think that institutions did come into Bitcoin, but not necessarily to buy Bitcoin, but more to tamper the volatility. And so institutions are here, but they are volatility suppression machines. And a lot of Bitcoins, the memetics that you kind of talked about, the price, it is a byproduct of the volatility, you know, craziness. And, and, and so I think some of that has been somewhat muted. They're also in Bitcoin land, like we're kind of in a phase change right now. I think a lot of the, you know, there's no leaders in Bitcoin, but like there were kind of high priests, so to speak. I think a lot of them are just tired and, you know, and they want to start families and they don't want to be involved anymore.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  And they kind of maybe occasionally want to, you know, post on, you know, IRC, but like they, they don't want to necessarily like steward the protocol anymore. And so there is kind of like Bitcoin is so big that there are now multiple competing priorities. There are people that care about privacy. There are people that care about money. There are people that, you know, are anti-data. Like it, it, it is kind of a big beast right now. And I think the core narrative that everyone aligns on is Bitcoin is money. But beyond that, there are a kind of a lot of people that are kind of vying for their vision of Bitcoin. And I don't know that Bitcoin has entirely sorted that out yet. So the future direction is still somewhat being decided and it frankly, it might go in multiple directions.

• 6:58Speaker 00

  How would you characterize the current state of Bitcoin and the Bitcoin community and Bitcoin development and overall, the whole entire ecosystem? How would you characterize it today as it, in comparison to like previous eras of Bitcoin? Like, what is it like to be in the trenches of like Bitcoin development and progress today?

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Well, for me, I feel like the stuff that I work on at Alpen Labs, like, you know, we kind of pioneered these concepts of ZK rollups into existence. And so for me, the vibes has never been better. It's like, holy shit, we're frigging doing it, man. Like we're no longer complaining on X. Like we're just building every day. We can do this without a soft fork. And like, I don't need to battle down in the X trenches, trying to, you know, you know, get like a certain soft fork in or anything like that. It's like, we're just building. So for me, fantastic. I think in general Bitcoin, I think the vibes are down, you know, probably in the same way that the general vibes are down for a lot of the industry. However, the true believers in Bitcoin, most of them just don't really care. They're very comfortable in a crab market and they're just like, I don't care, dude.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  And so the thing that is nice about Bitcoin is like, you always have those people that will kind of anchor the foundation and be comfortable just moving forward.

• 8:07Speaker 00

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• 8:55Speaker 02

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• 9:34Speaker 02

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• 9:43Speaker 00

  Do they, they don't care in the sense that like, we need a lot of people to care about crypto and like really be motivated in order to 10x these prices. And so, you know, Bitcoin is $60,000 right now. Like we need people to care to get it to $600,000. And I think one thing I'm kind of worried about is like a lot of the evangelists across the industry, Bitcoin included, but also everywhere else, like to some degree. A lot, a lot of people are just like changing, like they've been in it for a decade plus. They're trying to move on with their lives and, you know, Bitcoin or crypto or Ethereum has been like hammering in their brain ever since they got into it. It was their first career. It's been their only career. They, they want kids. And at this, so at the same time that that's happening, crypto is just not cool.

• 10:28Speaker 00

  And so all young talent is going into AI and we're not actually replacing some of the leadership and talent. Is that also happening in Bitcoin?

• 10:37Speaker 01

  I don't think it's happening as bad in Bitcoin as it is in crypto frankly. And like, I think, you know, some things are coming home to earth, so to speak, in crypto where it's like, look, a lot of these use cases suck, right? There's like no product market fit and people are like, why am I wasting time on this? Like, you know, like you just go after these token narratives and they drop 99%. Like AI is so much cooler. So like, I actually do think it's a bit of a crisis for like broader crypto. For Bitcoin, like people are pretty deeply convicted in that kind of, again, the monetary thesis and like, you know, the eventual debasement trade. So. I don't think it's as bad in Bitcoin land.

• 11:11Speaker 00

  So last I checked in with you and with Bitcoin technically on the technical roadmap to Bitcoin, not that there is a specific roadmap, but there are potential futures. It was all about the BitVM and ZK technology adding expressivity to Bitcoin. And that was like in 2024, 2023, 2024. Maybe you can update us on like what technological progress looks like in the Bitcoin world. Like what are people trying to do other than like all the censorship stuff? Which is like, I understand that to be Shelly's nan again, so we don't really need to talk about. So all the, what's the, what's the technical upgrade, update to the Bitcoin project?

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Sure. So I'll go back, 2020 was Bitcoin's last software, something called Taproot. We didn't know it at that time, but it allowed you to embed arbitrary data into the Bitcoin blockchain. Some people use that to post JPGs into Bitcoin layer one. But there were some researchers said, hey, you could build new types of layer twos like rollups. And so people wrote these kind of research papers that said, we could build a rollup on Bitcoin. And if we had a soft fork, we could actually build a ZK rollup on top of Bitcoin. About a year after those kind of core research papers came out, there was another paper that you kind of alluded to called BitVM from Robin Linus. And this said, we could bring some form, a kind of like weaker form of ZK verification to Bitcoin without any sort of software whatsoever.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  And so the core idea here is typically if you want to bridge Bitcoin, including into like a rollup, you would take Bitcoin from the layer one, you would lock it into some sort of multi-sig. But instead of that being a threshold where maybe six out of the 10 entities could move the funds, even if nine of those are malicious, as long as there's one single honest operator in that multi-sig, then the funds are cryptographically secure. And so that is the core promise of BitVM and then BitVM2 and BitVM3 and like this whole family of BitVM products. It's like a one of n trust assumption. So it's not necessarily permissionless, it's not trustless, but it's, it's very, very strong. And much of the research over the past couple of years, since I last came on here and chatted,

• 13:07Speaker 01

  has been pretty hardcore research, again, going from BitVM1 to like BitVM2, which has a difference out of trade offs, to BitVM3, to this kind of concept of what we call garbled circuits. And all of this is really just to get us to a more elegant and cleaner way to bring a form of ZK verification to Bitcoin. And that is kind of where the current state of things are. There is one live ZK rollup on Bitcoin, but it uses BitVM2, which I think has some pretty material trade offs. But now everybody's kind of shifting to this family that we call BitVM3, which is a concept known as garbled circuits.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  So is it, has it been possible to build a layer two product on top of Bitcoin with BitVM1, BitVM2? You just said that somebody did do it and now we're at BitVM3. It seems like Bitcoiners are kind of doing the Bitcoiner thing, which is like, let's just wait for technical perfection. And then we'll start building product. Is that about right?

• 13:58Speaker 01

  There is some truth to that. So in BitVM1, the long story short is, is that to perform the ZK verification, it took a lot of time, like, like it could take months of time to perform the verification. BitVM2 said, we can bring that down to two weeks. But the on-chain costs were very, very high. BitVM3 says, hey, we can, you know, perform this faster and we can move everything off-chain. But the trade off is you have to store larger bits of data off-chain. So it's kind of continually compressed, like squeezed the balloon to a better and better trade off. Until we've kind of finally got to a design where it's like, oh, like this is not gonna, you're not going to be required to spend $200,000 in a block to, you know, perform ZK verification.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  And you're not going to have to wait six months to bridge out your funds. That's, that, that, that's really why we've kind of pivoted.

• 14:48Speaker 00

  I'm reminded of that meme of like the SpaceX rockets, like the rocket one, rocket two, rocket three. And like one's just super fucking complicated. And then two looks a little lean and then like three looks like it's just super sleek. And there's not many moving parts and everything, everything's like really refined. It sounds like that.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's a good image.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  Are, are we done at BitVM3? Is that, BitVM3 is the one?

• 15:10Speaker 01

  No.

• 15:11Speaker 00

  Okay. So BitVM4?

• 15:13Speaker 01

  I, I would say BitVM3 was like a pretty significant, it, it's like, hey, like this is finally good enough, but you can do even better. And you can do better, it's just a matter of engineering. There is some like, I wasn't going to mention this, but there are some like kind of mythical forms of cryptography that are happening that I think can enable some really powerful stuff, like, like there's a team, the ALOC init team, like, like Misha's team, who released a paper called like Pipes V2. Long story short, it's like you could kind of bring a form of what's called a witness encryption, which is kind of in this category of like mythical forms of cryptography to Bitcoin without a soft fork. And if you could do that, then you could actually have like things like covenants and native ZK verification. So whether it's BitVM3, an iteration of that, or down the line, this very sexy cryptography, like,

• 15:57Speaker 01

  I'm quite confident that all of this is coming to Bitcoin.

• 15:59Speaker 00

  And so what does it actually, what actually is produced at this? So like on Ethereum, we have Ethereum layer twos, they're EVM layer twos. So they look like the Ethereum layer one, but they are just way more scaled. But that can't be also true for Bitcoin, because you don't cop, carbon copy the whole Bitcoin layer one and make it layer two. It's something different. So with the BitVM3 or whatever emerges out of these ZK rollups, what does the actual layer two look like? How to, how like understanding like the frame of mind of my listeners, which is going to be like what Ethereum layer two is. How, how should they think about what that layer two looks like and is versus?

• 16:35Speaker 01

  It's actually going to look very similar to rollups on Ethereum, something like Optimism or Arbitrum. So you have the layer one.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  So an EVM, it's an EVM chain.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  In our case, and I think other teams, it is an EVM. However, the way that we've actually architected this, and we haven't really kind of announced this because the focus is the EVM, but it will be able to support multiple, I guess what you can call execution domains. So you'd have the Bitcoin layer one, you kind of have almost like a middleware layer of just like the bridge. And that could go into an EVM, but it also is kind of like an open permissionless layer where anyone can tap in. And from that bridge, you could bridge it to Ethereum or Solana. You could deploy your own custom execution environment, you know, like Cairo or, you know, like a lighter perp stacks. Like that is kind of where it's going, is this multi-chain vision that can exist on a rollup.

• 17:27Speaker 00

  So it's like, it's like a modular middleware that connects the security of Bitcoin to BTC the asset. Like kind of like pipes it to anywhere it can go. And the reason why I can do that is because of ZK.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, so our design in particular was actually inspired, people may be familiar with this, something from Celestia called ZK accounts. Right? And so in Celestia, they have kind of like their layer one that has all the data availability. And then they almost have like a thin layer where it has no programmability to it. There's no programming language, but it can only just settle and interpret zero knowledge proofs. And so anyone that can create a chain, as long as it can be, create a zero knowledge proof can be created, which pretty much everything can, it can settle to one of these ZK accounts on Celestia's kind of like thin layer. And then you could have a different chain that settles there. And then these ZK proofs can either be aggregated or they can speak to each other.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  And, and so now you kind of break out of this vision where maybe the EVM becomes kind of the, the mothership. But nobody is obligated to use the EVM. Like if you want to create your own ecosystem, you can't. I think in reality, the EVM is probably going to be the dominant one.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  Going back to BTC's arc of hyper Bitcoinization and then like blanketing the world in a Bitcoin denominated world. What bottleneck are we trying to fix here with this? I know like we're trying to add expressivity and scalability to Bitcoin. But what do you think that really opens up and adds to the actual market cap of BTC the asset? Because I could equally see an argument where somebody says, well, if we really want Bitcoin to go to $600,000, I don't really care what you're doing, David, I want Michael Saylor just to buy more. And actually that's more worth my time and energy and attention. So like, what's the argument that this is the correct bottleneck for unlocking the most amount of market cap in Bitcoin?

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Well, we can use this if you want, but, but I really think you have to kind of rebuild the repo market, like the credit market on top of, of Bitcoin. You know, the repo market is really where pretty much all of the vast majority of wealth and dollars in the world exists. And whoever anchors repo, that, that is the true exorbitant privilege. And I think that you can rebuild a superior form of repo. On top of Bitcoin, and I'm not saying that because it's like, oh, Bitcoin's great and decentralized and it's this big market cap. I'm saying that like, I think people will see that, that the economics of what you can build on-chain with a Bitcoin-backed repo system is superior to what the economics are

• 20:01Speaker 01

  off-chain in TradFi. And when that happens, you will start amassing huge, sickening amounts of, of capital into Bitcoin, not because they care about Bitcoin or they're aligned with the values, but simply because the economics for the dollar system are superior.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  So your answer to like, why this is just the most effective thing we can do in order to increase the value of a Bitcoin is that we want to have a Bitcoin-backed repo market and you do that with a BitVM, BitVM number four or whatever, and to get that expressivity and security on to a new layer that can actually integrate with the repo market?

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Let me take a step back and explain how the current banking system works. There's the onshore dollar system, and then there's the offshore dollar system. The onshore dollar system has the Federal Reserve at the top, and then it has the commercial banks like Wells Fargo, Chase, you know, Bank of America, et cetera, underneath it. And the Federal Reserve can create these things called bank reserves, right? You can think of these in DeFi terms. These are like a permissioned stablecoin, where only the commercial banks can interact and send these amongst each other. So the Federal Reserve can print them out of thin air, but they're only transferable within the banks. The banks then, of course, they can create a separate form of money by lending dollars into existence. And this is the type of money that you and I interact with. We go in by coffee with, et cetera. And so when a bank creates a loan, maybe they lend you a million

• 21:21Speaker 01

  dollars, eventually you want to send that. Maybe you want to send that to me and we use different banks. When the banks settle amongst each other, they're not sending the liabilities or the credit IOUs they created, they're sending the bank reserves. So the bank reserves act as the trusted settlement layer between these different commercial banks. Now, we have to look at the offshore dollar system. And we say, there's tons of people offshore that use and want dollars, but they don't necessarily have access to the commercial banking system. And because they're not always as regulated, they can just create credit out of, out of thin air with really like no reserve requirements. Like they could, in theory, do zero reserve requirement fractional reserve lending. They can just boom, boom, David, I just created you a billion dollars. But what

• 22:03Speaker 01

  they are ultimately limited by is eventually that credit that's kind of created in this shadow banking system that nobody sees it just on private ledgers. Eventually, somebody says, well, I want to send that to a customer. I want to use it to fund a factory. And eventually, they actually have to settle that. The shadow bank has to go from these kind of shadowy IOUs that they created to a legitimate form of a dollar. And they don't have access to bank reserves because they're not part of the Federal Reserve stack. And so this is really the gap that, that repo bridges. Repo says, you can come up and you can post what we'll call pristine collateral. For now, it's, it's US treasuries. And then we will lend you dollars, and specifically a form

• 22:43Speaker 01

  of dollars that has access to the US settlement rails. And so there's, you imagine huge amounts of liabilities and credit that's created in the shadow banking system that has to squeeze through this tiny door of repo in order to, to, to settle. And so 20 plus years ago, the primary collateral that would have been used is something like, maybe not the primary, but a major one is mortgage-backed securities, right? People posted mortgage-backed securities as collateral, and then they borrowed dollars in repo. And so that is the exorbitant privilege that went to real estate. People said they're starving for collateral because they need more settlement for the, the, the, the shadow banking system. That pushes the price of mortgage-backed securities up, which pushes the interest rates down. That's why interest rates were so low going into the

• 23:26Speaker 01

  great financial crisis. And then even that is not enough. There's still not enough collateral. So people take the, the mortgage-backed securities and they rehypothecate it. They say, David, you can use this as collateral, and Alice can use it as collateral, and Bob can use it as collateral. And that's kind of what gave the exorbitant privilege to mortgages and real estate back in 2008. And then now it's transitioned to treasuries. And when treasuries are the primary form of collateral, that is what gives the US government exorbitant privilege. Because people need US treasuries as collateral to settle all these repo and shadow banking dollar claims. And, and that's what allows the US government to, to continually borrowing in perpetuity at low interest rates. So I want to make it very clear, the vast majority of financial

• 24:09Speaker 01

  activity in the world goes through this thing called repo. And because of that, an exorbitant privilege accrues to whichever is the pristine collateral in repo. And so now if we map that onto on-chain, on-chain will need to recreate a repo system. And so there's three different components here. There's the collateral component. There's the actual borrowing and lending engine of repo. This is like Abes, Morphos, Fluids, et cetera. And then there's the actual settlement asset, which is the kind of substitute for the bank reserves. Obviously, stablecoins backed by treasuries are the settlement asset. That's what people want. That's acceptable. There's kind of a battle for the actual repo market between all these different DeFi protocols. But the question is, what is going to be the pristine prime collateral within this on-chain repo market? And it's not going to be Bitcoin, because Bitcoin is volatile, right? It has to

• 24:54Speaker 01

  be a dollar-denominated asset. And so this is where something like Morpho Midnight, which I think actually got released like today, is very compelling, okay? Because in Morpho, Midnight in particular, you can create like a vault, right? And that vault, you can isolate, you can put dollars in, USDC goes in, and then with Morpho Midnight, you can lend it to all these different duration of Bitcoin-backed loans, okay? You can isolate and say, only Bitcoin, no other tokens whatsoever is collateral. And you can, some of those dollars, maybe 20% of those dollars get loaned into variable interest rate, 20% into one month, three months, six, nine, 12 months, et cetera. The LP, or the receipt token that you receive from that vault, is basically in TradFi, what we would call a CLO, or a collateralized loan obligation. It is now a Bitcoin collateralized

• 25:39Speaker 01

  loan obligation. It is like a dollar-denominated, it's a, it's a yield-bearing stablecoin backed by Bitcoin-backed loans. That instrument, that form of collateral, in my opinion, is the single best and most pristine collateral that can be created on-chain, period, bar none. And I do think that that will kind of come, become the basis of on-chain repo. Like, the biggest and the largest dollar allocators in the world, they don't want to take any risk whatsoever. It's like, why, why would you put your dollars into any other sort of money market fund, or any other sort of stablecoin, or RWA, or whatever, when you can just invest it into, into only Bitcoin-backed loans? And because you can now add duration with Morpho, you can start increasing the interest

• 26:22Speaker 01

  rate on these. So instead of just earning like 4% in Abay, you'll probably be earning 6, 7, 8, 9% on these Bitcoin collateralized loan obligations. And that is, that is the best risk-adjusted yield that's possible on-chain, in my opinion, with the deepest possible market. And that becomes the basis for now, this, this, this repo. So I could kind of keep going here, but I'll, I'll see if that lands.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. So just to be clear, what we are not doing is we are not tinkering with the existing repo market, and we're not like, we're building a parallel repo market with parallel structure. And the claim is that this side is going to grow very, very big. But we're not actually like integrating with like the current existing one, correct?

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's exactly correct. And so there's a couple of considerations here. One, you, you could argue maybe people are saying, well, why would you just not use tokenized treasuries, RWAs, and, and use those in something like, like Abay and recreate repo that way? Well, one, like, I'm, I'm a little bit of a skeptic there. I mean, one, you are, you have added trust assumptions, right? It's like, one lawsuit and these things get censored and, you know, you're screwed. I think it's also just quite hard to build deep markets for these tokenized assets. And they would just yield less than these Bitcoin CLOs would. So I just think it's kind of inevitable. Like, I challenge anybody to come up with a better form of collateral than,

• 27:48Speaker 01

  than kind of what I had just described. I think that will be, again, best risk-adjusted yield, and you'll be able to leverage it the highest. You'll be able to get the highest LTV, which allows like the highest amount of looping or just profitability.

• 28:02Speaker 00

  So it's a Bitcoin-backed loan, and there's different tiers. And so like, the reason why it is such high credit quality is, A, it's Bitcoin-backed, but then the yield is coming from like a natural market, naturally occurring market, not the Fed, like determining what the interest rates are. But like Morpho, and the market around Morpho structuring, structuring loans, but it's all, isn't it all constrained by how many people who hold Bitcoin want to get a loan on their Bitcoin? And how like, doesn't, how big is that market? Like, not, not that big?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  I think it's the biggest market on-chain. I mean, if you go and look at anything from back when, you know, BlockFi and Celsius existed, to the kind of major lending books like Morpho and Abay right now, or Maple, I mean, all of this stuff, Bitcoin is always the biggest consistently. So if anything is going to win, it has to be Bitcoin.

• 28:53Speaker 00

  But like, I think if you, if the, if the idea is like, we're going to restructure the repo market, like, then, then like, we don't have, you know, hold a candle to the size of the repo market.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  That's fair. And maybe I don't want to like, overpromise here that it's like, boom, we're going to replace repo.

• 29:09Speaker 00

  Right.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  But I'm saying like, if anybody is going to make a claim to being, replacing repo on-chain,

• 29:16Speaker 01

  how else can you make any other claim aside from, from, from Bitcoin, right? Because that same argument that you just applied where it's like, X, Y, Z thing you want to do on-chain, it pales in comparison to repo. It's like, that's fine. But, but if you want to try to bring this on-chain, In my opinion, this is the only path.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  Aren't you still constrained by the belief in Bitcoin first and foremost? Like first, you still need Bitcoin to have a very high value and to have a lot of holders. And then what you are describing here, what you are building on a layer two around Bitcoin with Morpho and Bitcoin back loans, and then you unlock that. But the tail doesn't wag the dog. It doesn't go the other way, not nearly as much as like first you've primarily still, we need to like meme Bitcoin into like a $1 million asset first.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I do think that there's a flywheel that that starts to potentially form here, but you are fundamentally correct that ultimately there have to be people that are willing to hold Bitcoin and want to borrow against it and be willing to pay an interest rate to borrow it. I think the indication is that's like one of the few, if not the only use cases that people in Bitcoin actually want.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  Is to borrow against their Bitcoin?

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Yes, for sure.

• 30:29Speaker 00

  Well, one other thing that we've noticed or potentially, potentially known is that Bitcoiners don't really, other than what you're saying, where like, you know, Celsius was very big, BlockFi was very big, like lending against your Bitcoin is very, very big. But like putting Bitcoin on a layer two or inside of a primitive DeFi structure that you could build on Bitcoin, or like really doing anything with your Bitcoin is actually not a very common activity with Bitcoiners broadly. What would you say to that?

• 30:57Speaker 01

  A couple of things. One, I think the Overton window is shifting. And even in private conversations that I have with teams that you would typically expect to never go on chain, are starting to kind of look over the fence and be like, damn, like you can get pretty legit interest rates in terms. And I think that we want to introduce this to our customers. On the security side, I think we're taking two approaches. One hardcore research cryptography side sexy, but then also getting like institutional level insurance on the bridge. And if you can have both of those, where you have the ZK roll up stuff and the BBM magic, and you can layer on like an institutional insurance, then I do think that you are very credibly competing,

• 31:39Speaker 01

  if not outcompeting the things like CBBTC and WBTC and, you know, qualified custodian BTC. And what will actually happen here is in this kind of Bitcoin back borrowing setup, right? Again, you have the vault, people put USDC inside of it. It lends to all these different durations Bitcoin back loans. You get the LP token, maybe that's yielding whatever, say 8%. People will take that LP token and they will put it in a money market fund again, like Morpho or Fluid or something. They will borrow against that at a variable interest rate and they will essentially run that, that, that, that loop. Okay. And so ultimately, the, the borrowing costs of these loans, the more that you can run that loop,

• 32:21Speaker 01

  which is kind of like a classic securitization loop and carry trade in what we call in TradFi, that will start to compress down the, the, the borrowing interest rates. Now, how effectively you're able to, to do that loop and how much you're able to compress down these interest rates and run that loop is a byproduct of the, the underlying risk of the asset, right? So if you have a very risky Bitcoin collateral, then this LP token, somebody is like, eh, maybe we're only going to lend 60% LTV on that, which means you can only get maybe one and a half X leverage loop. The interest rates are not going to compress as much. But if you have a more pristine version of Bitcoin, which is like a ZK roll up style Bitcoin, maybe possibly with insurance,

• 33:01Speaker 01

  then the LP or the receipt token, this kind of Bitcoin collateralized loan obligation has by far the best risk profile, which means that it will be able to, to, to, to get the best terms, kind of the highest LTV at the lowest rates. People will run this loop. And so you're, you're, you're going to start to create this really beautiful flywheel where it's very profitable to run this loop for the dollar lenders. And it's extremely low interest rates for the Bitcoin back borrowers.

• 33:25Speaker 00

  I mean, a lot of these words, I feel very familiar with like pristine collateral, security, capital efficiency. Like we've kind of had like a microcosm of this, not even a microcosm. We've had this ecosystem in Ethereum land with Ether as an asset as collateral. And I think you could also probably point towards base and Morpho on base and Coinbase CBBTC on base. And be like, okay, maybe I take your argument that none of these things are as, as sound as Bitcoin, because Bitcoin is super, is the most sound money of all time. But nonetheless, you would still expect to see some form of this manifest, both on Ethereum layer one DeFi and on, you know, CBBTC on Morpho on base. Have we seen anything close?

• 34:08Speaker 00

  Any indication that like we're on, we have an early stage like demo of what you're talking about?

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Well, not really, because this is not new. It's never been able to be created before. And it's primarily because of Morpho midnight, right? Virtually all of DeFi right now, it's variable interest rate loans, right? So I put in dollars, I earn the AVE rate of maybe 4%, okay? And if you want higher yield, you're lending against shittier collateral, okay? Riskier collateral. Once you have Morpho midnight and you can add duration, right? Now you're able to increase the interest rate, not by lending against shittier collateral, but by doing longer duration.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  So you're going to start to see these vaults in Morpho that are not just at the money market rate of AVE at 4% and its variable interest rate. You're going to be able to see higher yields without adding risk of crappier collateral. And that's really the core component, because if we think about it right now, the past five years, this idea that I'm talking about where you put dollars into DeFi, like AVE or something, and you get an LP token, you get the AUSDT, right? Well, that thing earns, you know, whatever 4% AVE rate, like what are you going to do with that? It's earning you 4%. Are you going to post it as collateral and borrow again at another 4%? Like there's, there's no carry trade to really kind of capture there.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  So, so the Morpho midnight, Morpho both V1, which allows you to isolate collateral only to something like Bitcoin or Ethereum, and then Morpho midnight, which allows you to add the duration. Those are two major unlocks.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  Okay. And the duration, when we talk about different durations in terms of loans, now it's starting to, now it feels like just rhymes with treasuries from treasury yields. And that's the kind of the same structure that we're trying to build here, right?

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Exactly. I mean, there will be kind of a yield curve that starts to form where it's like maybe 4% to borrow variable, maybe four and a half percent to borrow three months, et cetera, et cetera. And there will kind of be a vicious competition that is kind of already ensuing right now from vault curators. There's all these teams entering the vault curation space. And my intuition here is that there's going to be a vicious competition to create the best mix or combination of pristine collateral. Is it 60% in variable interest rate and, you know, some amount in this interest rate, or sorry, this duration? Or is it like, you know, how are you going to mix and match your vault to create again, this like idyllic? In DeFi, we call it the LP token. In TradFi, we call it the pristine collateral.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  It's like, what is the best vault combination to create the ultimate pristine collateral? Because if we go back to the repo market and the Eurodollar system, that is the exorbitant privilege. If your collateral is seen as the pristine collateral, then you win everything. All right.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  And you are a capital.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Yes, because everybody says, I don't give a shit, you know, like all of these shadow banks and stuff, they will start holding that pristine collateral or that LP token, not because they're like, I'm so aligned with Bitcoin or Ethereum, but they're like, this is just the best risk adjusted collateral. It allows me to leverage.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. So if I'm a Bitcoin holder, I get yield, correct?

• 37:22Speaker 01

  If you're a Bitcoin holder, you're primarily getting the best Bitcoin back borrowing rates and terms possible. So it primarily appeals first and foremost to the borrowers, the Bitcoin holders that want to borrow into Bitcoin. You could build Bitcoin yield products off of that, which I can describe if you'd like.

• 37:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So like, I would imagine that, well, because there's arbitrage here across the different term lengths, the way that you access that arbitrage is having Bitcoin as collateral. And then that unlocks the capital needed to do the arbitrage. That's kind of like my intuition here.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  Bingo. It's just a classic carry trade, borrow against Bitcoin at variable, relend it at a higher rate.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  Build a vault that's like somebody deposit that your Bitcoin in here, and then I will optimize the carry trade. And then your, the yield is not going to be too high. It's going to be a dollar denominated yield of like, I don't know, one to 3%, one to 4%?

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think.

• 38:16Speaker 00

  But like it's free.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Well, it's not, non-leveraged would probably be in that one to 3% range. But if you want to leverage it, right? Because you borrow dollars against your Bitcoin, you relend it into the higher duration vault. You get that LP token, you could borrow against that and loop it. So if you want to take leverage, you could. And I'm not advising this, but like, I would argue it's pretty safe.

• 38:38Speaker 00

  Somebody will.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  It's, yeah, it's actually pretty safe leverage, because in order for it to break, the LP token, right? Has to essentially break peg below $1, which would mean that the underlying Bitcoin back loans are essentially took on bad debt. They became under collateralized. The amount of times Bitcoin back loans have taken on bad debt in DeFi and the major protocols like AVE and Morpho, zero. So it's not risk free, but like, it's the best option we have.

• 39:04Speaker 00

  Okay. But once again, so if we have Morpho midnight, which is unlocked and available, aren't we going to see this happen with Ether first? Like, why wouldn't this also happen with Ether and the fact that it's also, it's also already available to only Ethereum layer one? Then why, why won't we see this happen with Ether first?

• 39:21Speaker 01

  A lot of this is right on the bleeding edge. So I, I do think some of this, you know, Morpho midnight is live on, on Ethereum. It's kind of doing like a, a phased rollout. And so I think you will see it on Ethereum network first. You're not going to see it with Ether, the asset first, because, you know, Morpho, Morpho crushes it with, with CBBTC, like.

• 39:42Speaker 00

  They do, they crush it with CBBTC on base, not necessarily on the Ethereum layer one. Ethereum layer one, Ether is still king.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  Okay, fair enough. Regardless, I think Morpho is first and foremost only going out with CBBTC on base. So I'll correct myself that it's not necessarily Ethereum, the network, which is kind of funny that you would call base, not the Ethereum network anyways.

• 40:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, these are all super chains.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes. Anyways, I do think, I do think this stuff you'll, you'll start to see. From our perspective, it's like, my personal background, I used to own a private money fund and I sold it back in 2021. So I'm very familiar with these ideas of how to lower borrowing costs while increasing profitability for lenders and increasing duration. Like this is my, this is my, my game. And, and so like, it's an idea that we are pursuing hard. Now, will other people like CBBTC, will they just be like, look, that's a good idea. But like, we're just going to focus on just like classic fixed maturity Bitcoin back loans with CBBTC first, before we get into these like securitization loops. It's possible. And if that's the case, like their loss, you know, if they want to come and take it from us.

• 40:48Speaker 00

  Okay, but you would want to see this emerge elsewhere because there's no reason why it can only, other than what you were talking about earlier with like having Morpho Midnight on a Bitcoin ZK layer two with the most pristine version of Bitcoin as collateral, you're going to unlock more capital efficiency and better risk terms, I understand that. But still, you would want to see this still being built elsewhere just to prove out the thesis that this is actually going to work.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's fair. I'm obviously biased by my own team and the project that we work on, but it would be incredible validation for me to kind of see this idea proliferate elsewhere with things like CBBTC. And yeah, I mean, I would love to see it elsewhere.

• 41:29Speaker 00

  Okay, so say this does start to emerge. What's the timeline for this newest innovation? Are you guys building this garbled circuits, which is BitVM4 or whatever?

• 41:39Speaker 01

  You know, for us at Alpen Labs, we'll probably be live on Maynet in fall or soon TM. And, you know, I think we typically haven't really been much of a hype team or an announcement team, but you know, behind the scenes, a lot of this stuff has kind of been getting built out. I do think that these, you know, I don't think, I know that these kinds of teams that I'm mentioning are keen to kind of be involved and take a bet on a Bitcoin ecosystem. And the reality is a lot of, there's a long list of graveyard of Bitcoin L2s that have failed. And I think some of that relates to the technology, like it just, it wasn't as good as this kind of garbled circuit tile approach. The trust assumptions weren't as good. And frankly, just none of the other Bitcoin L2s, they didn't close the big fish is really what it came down to.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  What does that mean?

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Meaning that, you know, if you try to build a layer two, like you have to go out and compete for, you know, the applications for the protocols, you know, teams like Circle and Tether and Morpho and Fluid and all of these kind of tier one DeFi teams, you can't just snap your fingers and they come on and deploy. It's kind of a brutal BD process.

• 42:47Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  And I think for us at Alpen, again, I'm kind of talking my own book, like very early on, we said, either we're able to attract the best and compete for the top, or we just have to wrap up shop and say, you know, we gave it, we gave it a good fight. And I still am kind of of that opinion. Like, if we want Bitcoin to win, we have to have the best teams. We have to have the best technology and we have to have the best teams. And we can't just rely on this narrative of, you know, we are Bitcoin, you know, come use us because it's a Bitcoin, whatever the hell that means.

• 43:19Speaker 00

  Who is your competition then? Where are the other Alpen Labs out there?

• 43:23Speaker 01

  A lot of them have been struggling or dying, you know, like, like a team that, that, you know, I liked our, you know, the Botanics guys, they just, you know, wound down shop. Granted, it was a centralized, kind of like a trusted multi-sig essentially, but like, they wound down. I think a lot of other people compare us with a team called Citrea, which is kind of live and they use like a BitVM2 style bridge. I think people can just look at the Block Explorer, like it's probably not getting much activity at all. I think our real competition honestly is, is Base and Arc and Tempo.

• 43:59Speaker 00

  Oh, really? The Bitcoin chains. Why are those chains?

• 44:02Speaker 01

  I mean, if they, if they have like a wrapped version of Bitcoin, you know, like Arc is coming out with, I think, am I leaking something here?

• 44:12Speaker 00

  Circle, Circle has tokenized Bitcoin that they just announced. Yeah, they're doing it on like Ethereum and Arc.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think we have, we have to break out of this kind of like competition for Bitcoin L2s. It's like, like no disrespect, like no, none of the other Bitcoin L2s are competing. And like I said, like, if you want to take a shot, you have to go for the top. And that top just does not have other Bitcoin L2s in it right now.

• 44:35Speaker 00

  Okay, so fall, Q3, Q4 this year is when the gates to the Alpen L2 open up tentatively, is that right?

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  And then you are trying to build this like Bitcoin interest rate curve as soon as possible.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  Who will that attract? What capital will that attract? So like, say, say you do it, you do it successfully, it starts, you know, it's primitive, but the curve starts to build, you know, the, the economy starts to grow. Who is like your first customer or first like entity to go knock on the door of? I mean, like, look, look what, look at the economy that we've produced. Don't you now want to like buy Bitcoin and take a part of it, take a part in it?

• 45:16Speaker 01

  I think if you look at the model that Morpho laid out with Coinbase, Coinbase was essentially a kingmaker for them. And I think we would take a similar approach of going after partners that have existing distribution and offering what we feel is the most competitive Bitcoin backed borrowing product and Bitcoin yield product, kind of using some of the carry trade that we talked about. Because if you look in Bitcoin land right now, Bitcoin back borrowing actually has tons of demand and there's lots of demand for people who want to pay these fixed maturity, kind of longer duration loans. And typically it's around like 10%. It's starting to compress down a little bit, but even that it's like,

• 45:57Speaker 01

  you know, it's, it's maybe 9.9% and there's like origination fees for it. So there's pretty substantial market and room there to come in and disrupt with a much better product. But it can't just be on the technical purity. That's just like a bonus point. It has to be on the actual economics. Like we have to come in and say, you know, we can offer lower interest rates, you know, and, you know, better borrowing terms and longer durations. And that gets back into the whole conversation I talked about where we started with repo into how this Bitcoin CLO idea will work. That's all kind of part of this vision.

• 46:33Speaker 03

  Hey, Bankless Nation, it's David. If you're hearing this, that's because you are listening to the free Bankless podcast feed. Did you know that there is a premium Bankless RSS feed? The premium feed has extra interviews that I do for my own personal research and just deeper questions that I want answered about the crypto industry, questions that I want to answer so I can be more informed as an investor, both at Bankless Ventures and also just in my own personal portfolio too. Also, there are no ads, which means if you listen to the premium feed instead of the free feed, you'll get about 20 hours of your life back every year because you choose to support Bankless directly. So if you're interested in getting extra content all while skipping the ads, or you just appreciate what we do here and want us to keep doing it, we'd appreciate it if you signed up for Bankless Premium. And there is a link in the show notes to get started. Cheers to a good 2026.

• 47:15Speaker 00

  Isn't Sailor kind of doing this in like a parallel hacky centralized corporate way? Like, isn't that what like Stretch is like, it's offering, it's a variable interest rate product and, you know, Bitcoin is the collateral in quotes. And then you get like, isn't Sailor kind of doing something is parallel in spirit to what you are trying to do in a very like cypherpunk purist way?

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah. I actually have a whiteboard video that I made where I compared what I call this Bitcoin CLO concept to STRC. But you're exactly right. People have dollars, they want fixed income. Maybe they care about Bitcoin, maybe they, they don't. And the proposition is you can either give your dollars to Sailor and you get this thing called the perpetual preferred stretch. He's going to use that to buy Bitcoin on his balance sheet. You are backed, not actually, but kind of by Sailor's balance sheet. Or you are a dollar holder and you say, I want to give my dollars into a vault that essentially is lending that on these over collateralized Bitcoin backed loans. So it's like, you either want to give your dollars to Sailor and you're quasi backed by his balance sheet, or do you want to give your dollars on chain and you are provably kind of backed by these,

• 48:24Speaker 01

  these Bitcoin collateralized loans. In Sailor's case, he issues, his instrument is STRC. In our case, our instrument is this Bitcoin CLO. Now, I also had a separate whiteboard video where I kind of explained why I think STRC would, would break peg. And it's exactly what happened, that people with these fixed income instruments like Stretch that maybe want to earn 10%, they're going to say, I'm going to put that on chain. I'm going to borrow against that at, at 4% and run that looping strategy. But when that trade needs to unwind, there becomes massive sell pressure on STRC and it starts to break peg, which is where it's now at at like, you know, 85 cents on the dollar. A Bitcoin CLO has way, way, way more resilience, in my opinion, to, to maintain stability there. And therefore

• 49:09Speaker 01

  you will be able to kind of, again, like run that, that loop or that securitization loop far more effectively. And so in my opinion, there is this battle for like what Sailor calls digital credit, or it could be Bitcoin backed credit. And I think there is a credible case to be made that on-chain is a far superior way to do this than perpetual preferreds.

• 49:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I definitely am curious about the perpetual preferreds, especially because it's not just Sailor, it's also Strive and Seda. And so the fact that there is like multiple entities doing this strategy kind of tells me that, hey, maybe there's a there there. And this isn't just like one, one man fueled by a dream to like build this like Bitcoin is digital credit thing. And so I'm like open to the idea that, you know, some, somehow BTC, the asset needs to elevate, can elevate, ascend itself from being digital gold, which I think is constraining on the cap of Bitcoin and can ascend to digital credit. And I really like the idea of Bitcoin as digital credit as like the next step function

• 50:15Speaker 00

  change for Bitcoin as an asset Bitcoin, the narrative. I look at Sailor, I look at like the centralized company model and be like, fuck, is it really a centralized company that does this? To some degree, he's doing it. Like despite STRC being in somewhat of predicament, nonetheless, like Bitcoin is way higher than when Sailor got started in the first place. But I do like Bitcoin as digital credit as the better meme for Bitcoin. And I see that, I see that being borne out here as well.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. I mean, you can hold two, multiple narratives in your head at once. Like Bitcoin can be this money and this currency and, you know, we are building, you know, things that will allow that. Maybe people want to have private payments with, with Bitcoin in a non-sovereign, you know, form of money. But you could also kind of build this parallel path of, you know, these kind of Bitcoin backed credit instruments or digital credit on-chain without like the counterparty risk of Sailor. And that is one very viable use case of Bitcoin as, as the lowest counterparty, you know, collateral out there. And if we go back again to like mortgage backed securities, like those were perceived as very low counterparty risk collateral. People are saying, I'm willing

• 51:25Speaker 01

  to lend my dollars into real estate because there's very low counterparty risk there, or it's pristine, it's, it's very strong collateral. And then people said, well, the US government is the ultimate, you know, form of like, like counterparty with the lowest risk. So we'll lend our dollars there to mint the treasuries. And I think this is really the role that, that Bitcoin can play. If it's not currency, it's the lowest counterparty risk out there, which is why people are willing to lend these dollars into it to create these forms of Bitcoin backed credit.

• 51:52Speaker 00

  So Morpho Midnight did launch today or sometime very recently or very soon. I'm looking at the, the launch document and a little Q and A. So like the race to build this Bitcoin backed repo market that you've been discussing starts, it has started, has started basically this week or today. And so like,

• 52:12Speaker 00

  Aren't you behind?

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Depends if we haven't been doing any like work to date.

• 52:17Speaker 00

  Okay, all right. What are you watching? What are you looking for? What are you watching right now in order to like see this market grow?

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Like, I'm very open sharing a lot of this because again, I'm just like, look, if somebody wants to try to do it better than us, like bring on like, like we are behind in terms of the network effect of like, kind of the Ethereum network and liquidity. But I do think that we have a very compelling case that that we have a superior form of Bitcoin, not just on the cryptographic side, but you know, again, maybe, maybe insurance is going to exist. And, and I do think that we can out compete there. In reality, Morpho just launched. It's going to be this phased launch rollout. Like, there's still so many aspects of this, like fixed maturity loans that like haven't even existed yet. And I think a lot of the vault curators are still kind of dipping their feet in. And they're just kind of being like, look, let's just make sure we still know how to like, bring dollars into the Morpho V2 vaults and then even lend them into fixed maturities.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Like, and the maturities are going to start off small, like, you know, a month or two is my intuition. And like, it's not just going to be this hit the ground running today and like, boom, we have 12 month Bitcoin back loans and oh my God, we have like a Bitcoin CLO. Like, I think, I think some of that is going to take time to build out. And I think there's very few people that have kind of thought, thought through it. Like, in my opinion, this is like pretty, pretty fresh stuff.

• 53:30Speaker 00

  What's the name for the L2, the Bitcoin L2 that you guys are building? Do you guys just call it the Alpen CK L2? What do you call it?

• 53:37Speaker 01

  Our EBM will be called just Alpen EBM. Underneath that, we haven't really announced this, but this layer that I kind of compared to Celestia's ZK accounts will be called Strata. And that's would be kind of more just like an open, you know, bridge standard where it's like, look, anybody else can kind of plug into this.

• 53:54Speaker 00

  Okay, so the Alpen, Alpen EBM.

• 53:58Speaker 00

  Are you guys are trying to like, open this up and have it be a open developer ecosystem, similar to Ethereum or Base or the layer twos? Or are you just like, no, we're actually very opinionated about what we want this to do. We wanted to do the Morpho Bitcoin back loans. We wanted to have fluid on there, but it's all as a means to an end of producing this Bitcoin repo market. And we don't really care about open, an open developer ecosystem. Where, between these two things, where do you lie?

• 54:23Speaker 01

  I think we're much more opinionated. I mean, like, the core ethos is it's open, it's permissionless. Like, hell, come on, do whatever the heck you want. But I think to some people's chagrin, it's like, we get hit up for grants and like hackathons. And it's like, no.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  I mean, it just, the, the, the, the truth is, it's like, where, where do we compete on that? Like, are we, are we going to be able to compete with like mega ETH for RWAs? Like, no, like, our competitive differentiator is Bitcoin. We kind of already see the use cases and the team that we want. And like, we voraciously pursued those in pursuit of our, our vision. And so if anybody wants to build the, the open developer ecosystem, like, that's great. But, you know, we're kind of in this to win it. And you need to be hyper focused on building the, the exact stack that you think is the best.

• 55:11Speaker 00

  I do kind of think that that's actually how Ethereum, as a side quest here, how Ethereum should actually brand its layer one.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  Like, no.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  The Ethereum layer one is an app chain for Ether the asset. It's the pristine collateral on the Ethereum layer one. All applications should serve Ether the asset. And I think that would actually behoove the value of Ether the asset far more than like, world computer, open developer ecosystem, come build anything you want on Ethereum.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  It's interesting, I don't know. I mean, I know why you say that because it kind of leads into some of the reasons why maybe you left Ether the asset and what you would like to see from the community and like, what's good for number go up. But I probably don't have super strong opinions on that. Like, I would agree with you if, if I cared significantly about the Ethereum ETH price. But in some ways, like ETH has branded itself as this kind of like, little bit of the experimental type thing. Like, I'm, I'm not sure if it can easily pivot to being like, here's our roadmap. We're going to be hyper opinionated about it.

• 56:12Speaker 00

  Right, yeah. I, I, I think it's less about being hyper opinionated and it's more about like, what is Ethereum for? Ethereum is for Ether, Ether the asset. And it's more of just like a meme and narrative and comms thing. But again, that's a side quest. David, if people are piqued about what you guys are building at Alpen, they want to learn more. Maybe they want to come and build on your open developer ecosystem. Where should they go to learn more about Alpen?

• 56:35Speaker 01

  In a couple of weeks, we'll kind of be putting out some new material. So maybe hold till then, but you can go to alpenlabs.io and you can check us out on Twitter. You can follow me, David underscore Seroi, S E R O Y. And yeah, keep an eye out.

• 56:49Speaker 00

  Thanks for coming on the show.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  All right, thanks for that.

• 56:51Speaker 00

  Paying the sanction, you guys know what to do. Crypto is risky, you can lose what you put in, but this is the frontier. We're headed west. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.