Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: Last year, Atlas Merching Capital sponsored an eight hundred and
Speaker 2: eighty eight billion dollar, I should say million dollar merger
Speaker 2: involving Sonnet Therapeutics to create hyper liquid strategies, a digital
Speaker 2: asset treasury company centered on the hype token. For more
Speaker 2: on this, we're joined by Bob Diamond. Bob is the
Speaker 2: current CEO of Atlas Merchant Capital. He is the former
Speaker 2: CEO of Barclays. Bob, thanks so much for coming in
Speaker 2: on our one hour launch of bloomber Crypto. I want
Speaker 2: to start big picture before we get into hyper liquid.
Speaker 2: How would you characterize the current environment for risk given
Speaker 2: how much sentiment and momentum on crypto has really shifted
Speaker 2: since last October.
Speaker 3: Well, I think over the last week or two we've
Speaker 3: certainly seen de leveraging and probably a little bit of
Speaker 3: a risk off trade, you know. I think it's one
Speaker 3: of the reasons why we're so excited about hyper liquid,
Speaker 3: which I always try and simplify things a little bit scarlet,
Speaker 3: But if you think about bitcoin and the volatility of bitcoin,
Speaker 3: it's really a store of value and the price is
Speaker 3: really much more about supply and demand. It can be
Speaker 3: quite volatile, where hyper liquid is a layer one blockchain.
Speaker 3: It's a blockchain that was built for exchanges to be
Speaker 3: on top of it and execute on top of it.
Speaker 3: And I think of hype the native token, as more
Speaker 3: similar to equity in a company, so it's much more
Speaker 3: valued based on the price, earnings based on the volumes.
Speaker 3: And as we see Hype be traded on hyper liquid,
Speaker 3: but now trade xyz, which is a platform a part
Speaker 3: of unit. Through Hip three, they're able to go in
Speaker 3: on hyper liquid and build an exchange and they're trading
Speaker 3: the Nasdaq, they're trading SpaceX, they're trading Tesla, and just
Speaker 3: recently they've been trading silver and gold metals. So we're
Speaker 3: seeing for the first time real application of real world
Speaker 3: assets coming on to an exchange, and I think this
Speaker 3: is a sea change. But the volatility we've seen in
Speaker 3: things that are supply and demand driven stores of value
Speaker 3: is very, very different than hyper liquid, which is really
Speaker 3: a business.
Speaker 1: We've heard a lot in recent years about the idea
Speaker 1: of real world, real world assets being tokenized in trading,
Speaker 1: but I think there's still a lot of people out
Speaker 1: there who are unconvinced that this is a problem that
Speaker 1: needs solving. Convince them right now.
Speaker 3: Well, silver has been trading on hyper liquid for about
Speaker 3: two or three weeks. Last Friday was the single largest
Speaker 3: day for volume of silver trading. I think as far
Speaker 3: back as you can go in history and trade x
Speaker 3: y Z on hyper liquid was two percent of the volume.
Speaker 3: I think if nothing can say we actually have real
Speaker 3: world assi that's on this exchange, hyper liquid is doing
Speaker 3: it now. Over the last seven days, bitcoins down about
Speaker 3: twelve percent, Ethereum's down about twenty percent, and Hype the
Speaker 3: native token is up forty percent. Think about those numbers.
Speaker 3: Down twelve percent, down twenty percent of forty percent. It's
Speaker 3: because the volumes have been growing, Revenue has been growing.
Speaker 3: Last year revenue is just under a billion dollars. There's
Speaker 3: eleven employees. This is a real business and for the
Speaker 3: first time we're seeing real world assets come on chain.
Speaker 2: What kind of adoption do you see from TRAT five,
Speaker 2: from traditional Wall Street onto the hyper liquid platform right now?
Speaker 2: Because they have a lot of concerns around know your
Speaker 2: customer and anti money laundering, and these are things that
Speaker 2: don't get solved quickly.
Speaker 3: I can't even say TRADFI very well. I say traditional finance.
Speaker 3: I'm so traditional finance of trad FI. I'm trying to
Speaker 3: work on it, Scarlett. You know, I think is some
Speaker 3: of the people were saying when you did those clips,
Speaker 3: the institution adoption is real. We were an early investor.
Speaker 3: You had Jeremielaira on there. We're an early investor in Circle.
Speaker 3: That's infrastructure, that's stable coins, that's blockchain. These are things
Speaker 3: that real bankers or traditional bankers can really understand. And
Speaker 3: I think today all major banks JP, Morgan, Bank of America,
Speaker 3: Bank of New York, State Street, Barclays, they're all investing
Speaker 3: in blockchain. They all have use cases for blockchain. So
Speaker 3: one thing we're seeing for sure is the infrastructure is
Speaker 3: very much adopting blockchains. As in my own view, over
Speaker 3: the next five to ten years we'll see blockchain emerge.
Speaker 3: Is probably the most prevalent infrastructure really in finance at large.
Speaker 1: We just spoke to Mic Novograds over at Galaxy Digital
Speaker 1: and he regrets not getting into the prediction markets game
Speaker 1: sooner with investments in the big players, the upgrade to
Speaker 1: hyper liquid will allow support for prediction markets. How do
Speaker 1: you compete with the call she's and the polymarkets out there.
Speaker 1: What gives you the edge?
Speaker 3: So, first of all, thank you for asking that Hip three,
Speaker 3: we've been bringing equities on metals. On Hip four, we're
Speaker 3: doing some more changes in the technology so we can
Speaker 3: bring prediction markets on. Literally in the next couple of weeks,
Speaker 3: they'll be on hyper liquid, and I think what we've
Speaker 3: seen is that hyper liquid is fast, hyper liquid has
Speaker 3: deep deep deep liquidity, and hyper liquid is on chain,
Speaker 3: and those things mean that it's going to compete, just
Speaker 3: as we've seen, you know, three weeks of having silver
Speaker 3: on trade x y Z, it's already competing.
Speaker 1: I want to just end on one more digital asset
Speaker 1: treasury type of question here. It's the ticker per that's
Speaker 1: the ticker for your firm. It's been trading below net
Speaker 1: asset value, So what's driving that and under what circumstances
Speaker 1: would you actually consider selling hype?
Speaker 3: So I don't think it's under set value. We have
Speaker 3: earnings next week, so we'll go through so that we
Speaker 3: can be more public on what the net asset value
Speaker 3: is so people can trade it back and forth. But yeah,
Speaker 3: I don't think your calculations right.
Speaker 1: Okay, well have to go back and look at that.
Speaker 1: Just one more on that is part.
Speaker 3: Of the listening, and to be fair, I didn't really
Speaker 3: answer your question. I think we announced publicly a few
Speaker 3: weeks ago that when it was below net asset value,
Speaker 3: early on, we had approval from the board to buy
Speaker 3: up to thirty million of shares. I don't think we've
Speaker 3: reported back on that to the market. But next Tuesday
Speaker 3: is our first earnings, so we'll be talking about that.
Speaker 1: Then we'll wait to hear on that. Very briefly. Is
Speaker 1: the value proposition for per to give access to a
Speaker 1: wider audience and a wider user base.
Speaker 3: So I think there's two value propositions. Value proposition one,
Speaker 3: and this is really really critical, tim, is this is
Speaker 3: a business creating revenues. The volumes are exploding, and they're
Speaker 3: exploding in a very substantive way. We're going into new markets.
Speaker 3: We're actually getting real world assets through Hip three, through
Speaker 3: unit and trade xyz on chain. We now have a
Speaker 3: native token which is USDH. So there's a lot of
Speaker 3: things that are building this business and increasing revenue. And
Speaker 3: so the first valuation of Hype is it has all
Speaker 3: the characteristics of a share buyback because ninety seven percent
Speaker 3: of the income that's produced within hyper Liquid is used
Speaker 3: to buy back those tokens. So think of that as
Speaker 3: very very similar to a share buyback. That's number one
Speaker 3: and number two, now number three, what we're doing with
Speaker 3: our data, and I think it is different. Everyone says
Speaker 3: it's different, But we're giving access to a lot of
Speaker 3: US investors who are not yet approved for perpetual futures
Speaker 3: to get access to hype into hyper liquid, and I
Speaker 3: think that's the third your.
Speaker 2: Proposition, Bob, thank you so much. Bob Diamond is Atlas
Speaker 2: Merchant Capital CEO, but you may also remember him as
Speaker 2: a former CEO of Barclays