Take a look at Capitol Hill as the crypto industry awaits a key markup on the clarity Act in a little over 48 hours from now.
Now Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong plans to meet with lawmakers over the bill tomorrow.
He's been front and center in the stable coin yield debate with banks, and along those lines, yields are a form of interest for users.
Crypto firms want to pay them to stable coin holders and also users also earned them as rewards for staking their tokens like Ethereum or salonna while joining me live here at the New York Stock Exchange this morning is Evgeny Gokhberg, founder and Managing Partner of Re7 Capital, which is a research driven digital asset investment firm.
So great.
Thank you.
Thank you.
So when it comes to defy yield, where does it actually come from today?
Defi is basically an ecosystem of fintech apps that exist in this blockchain world and because they are isolated from the traditional banks and traditional liquidity providers, that role is outsourced to the market to the individuals and professional firms who are doing this for a living.
So the yields come from lending, market making, and all the other traditional functions that traditional liquidity providers and financial institutions perform.
It's just that here it's done very differently.
And many of us talk about the maturity in the digital asset space, but give us your take on where we stand right now.
The industry went from 0 to hundreds of billions of dollars of assets currently sitting within those apps.
So what used to feel like a video game six years ago currently has billions of dollars sitting there in passive capital, as well as more than $1 trillion in trading volume over the last few years.
So this has grown to be a very valid and very strong fintech sector.
Yeah and speaking of which I do want to get your take on what you believe will be the primary catalyst catalysts and lots of growth and liquidity, especially at a time when we're keeping an eye on the clarity act and the progress in terms of the regulatory landscape.
What are your expectations?
I started as a fully isolated sandbox where.
Random people were playing with random coins trying to get some yield and trying to generate some capital gains.
Right now this world is converging with the world of traditional finance where the real banks and the real asset managers are deploying their assets on the blockchain.
They are tokenizing stocks and credit instruments on the blockchain, which means that DeFI is basically becoming the back end infrastructure for traditional finance.
And heading into 2026 institutional adoption as well as tokenization, the rise of real world assets, those were the themes that we're all paying attention to so when it comes to real world assets, what is your outlook?
It's growing exponentially and there is no sign of it stopping.
We've seen that as the Middle Eastern conflict progressed, there were traders actively trading oil on the weekend, which is a synthetic representation of that because you can't wait for the market to open on Monday.
We've seen exchanges announced that stocks will become 24/7 at some point in the future and blockchain will play a big role in that and credit instruments have grown like there is no tomorrow when it comes to.
Blockchain adoption and when we're talking about markets you and I are here at the New York Stock Exchange and traditionally we know that markets open at 9:30 and close at 4 p.m.
But when we're talking about the weekends, for example, I think the Middle East conflict really highlighted how active traders are 24/7.
So when it comes to this space, what is your outlook in terms of advancement.
And what will that look like not just for the institutional side but also the retail side.
I think 24/7 is inevitable.
It's very clear there is demand from people to trade beyond working hours.
There is demand for people to trade on the weekend and use new types of instruments, whether these are synthetic oil derivatives on the blockchain, even prediction markets to hedge some of the market scenarios.
That's clearly a trend.
So what does diversification look like in this space.
That's a great question.
Diversification is very hard to achieve within the digital asset space because coins are traditionally very, very correlated, but now blockchain is more than just volatile crypto coins.
It's traditional stocks, it's credit instruments, it's stablecoins that you can use for payments and other things, and over time the diversification and decorrelation is growing.
And I do want to get your perspective on Alt coins since we're also talking about not just the crypto majors which might be say Bitcoin ether.
So give us your perspective on Altcoins coins, I believe, are a very misunderstood phenomenon.
I believe that Bitcoin and every other coin in the world are very different.
Bitcoin tells you the story of digital gold whilst these Alcoins, they are.
Quasi equity instruments where you get a stake in someone's business by the virtue of holding their token, and we need to think of them as shares in a small cap startup that is quite young and is trading in a very volatile sector.
There are Altcoins that are linked to businesses that are growing phenomenally well, and they generate real free cash flow, and there are other coins that exist as a joke, and their coins trade accordingly.
So for the viewer out there who is watching right now, how would you tell them to look at the digital asset market, especially at a period where we're maturing?
I think the most important thing is to leave aside and ignore the crypto lingo and actually focus on fundamentals and what you're trying to achieve.
Trying to earn a yield on a stablecoin is very different from buying a picture of a monkey wrapped into a coin or buying bitcoin or buying tokenized shares or making investment into a blockchain company that is doing quite well.
We will have to leave it there since we are looking at the equity market about to open.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you for having me.
