Not only is Tarun Chitra the founder and CEO of Gauntlet, but at this hour live at the iconic New York Stock Exchange, as you can see for yourselves, he's also the best dressed man down here on the trading floor.
Thanks for being here.
Nice to have you.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for wearing such an awesome.
Here I am, I think I got to like dress up for the show and.
You're putting me to shame.
I appreciate it.
That's awesome.
Where do we stand on protecting stable coin yield?
A huge conversation for would-be investors, for the industry as a whole.
The work of you and your colleagues at Gauntlet, you, you play a pretty central role in how those conversations are unfolding.
Yeah, so I think the interesting thing right now is like everyone is focusing on congressional fighting between banks and crypto companies over where Yield goes, but there's a whole another form of yield in earn programs which are ways that neobanks and fintechs are offering yield directly to their users outside of the banking system.
And that yield has been growing dramatically over the last few years.
It went from sort of $0 around the time we started February 2024 to around a peak of around $14 billion last year and now it's sort of in the like 8 to $10 billion dollar range.
And a lot of people are predicting.
Predicting that it's going to grow a lot this year because a number of institutions, everyone from Apollo to Fidelity to um Bitwise, have said that they're going to be joining this endeavor and so that's where we see the future going.
I think a lot of asset managers who are afraid of crypto, uh, see the stablecoin yield as the future.
Sure, uh, what is, correct me if I'm wrong, Falcon X Vault?
Did I stylize it the right way?
Falcon 10, Falcon X.
What is Falcon X Vault and what does it show us about the state of real world assets right now?
Yeah, so a lot of lending and crypto, like where's the yield coming from?
It's from lending activity, right?
There's people who want to earn yield, they pull together their stablecoins.
There's people who want to borrow against some assets, and they want to borrow stablecoins and You know, compared to the normal world where lending is kind of has a lot of friction, you know, when you open a credit card, you have to fill out a form, you have to wait till they approve you, whatever, stablecoin lending is instant.
It's like I put up collateral, I get a loan immediately, and so that kind of UX has been really popular for people who understand how to use it.
But it hasn't really worked for a lot of people because their assets aren't crypto assets, right?
Like most people in this room probably own assets in stocks, in real estate, in other things, and for them to borrow against it, they have to go to their bank.
And what DeFi has kind of evolved to decentralized finances, it's been able to start taking real-world assets and lending stablecoins.
Against them, so you could imagine you get a home equity loan immediately.
You get a loan against your stock portfolio immediately, and it's much more seamless, and that's sort of the world, the direction that the world's trending in.
I've got less than a minute left.
In what ways, if at all, has crypto volatility scared off institutions ironically coming at the time when we talk so much about institutional adoption.
So I think the interesting thing is there's institutions who are trend followers and there's institutions who are looking for a deal, and I would say the institutions who are looking for a deal are really interested right now because they see the stable coin yield market growing despite the volatile crypto prices and sort of the, the traders and sort of more speculative trend followers, they're sort of out and I think it's, it's never like there's no institutions, it's just like there's a.
Changing of the guard and the changing of the guard right now is safe yield, yield for the yield for your grandmom, you know, yield that that anyone can feel comfortable with and less, you know, meme coin high volatility.
Yeah, the worst part about this interview is that I have to end it because we have blocks for a live TV show and I, I, I, I don't have any other time, but please come back any time.
Love the conversation.
Big fans of the work you do at Gauntlet.
Congrats and thanks for being on the show.
Yeah, of course, thanks so much.
