# True Markets raises $20 million from PayPal Ventures, Solana Foundation, RRE and Accomplice Stableminded, a Stabledash show. Jul 23, 2026. Vishal Gupta. https://live.stabledash.com/shows/stableminded/episodes/usdc-coinbase-goldman-sachs-building-a-non-custodial-FQFDY04gh0s Vishal Gupta, who grew USDC at Circle and ran exchanges at Coinbase, is building a lean non-custodial exchange that he says should not hold customer assets. True Markets, a non-custodial crypto exchange, has raised $20 million from investors including PayPal Ventures, the Solana Foundation, RRE Ventures and Accomplice. Co-founder and CEO Vishal Gupta says the company trades Bitcoin and 150 other assets with 13 people, charging 100 basis points for Bitcoin, which he puts at a third of what the top US exchanges charge. ## Exchanges that hold nothing Vishal Gupta says his general thesis is that exchanges probably should not be holding assets. True Markets settles to qualified custodians, with assets such as Bitcoin held in bankruptcy-remote accounts in the customer's name, so that if either the custodian or the exchange blows up, customers are fine. Behind the scenes it uses Turnkey for technical wallets. Settlement is meant to be stablecoin agnostic: True Markets can speak any GENIUS Act-compliant stablecoin, including PYUSD, Gupta says. It currently supports Solana, Base and Hyper EVM, and aims to be chain agnostic and eventually custodian agnostic. ## Built for APIs, not apps Vishal Gupta argues buyers should not have to pay 300 basis points for Bitcoin, and that the industry assumes 5,000 people are needed to run an exchange. About 10 of True Markets's 13 staff are engineers, and he says one and a half people, helped by AI, are building the matching engine, work that once took dozens. The first customers are systematic traders. True Markets is giving away $1 million of equity through a liquidity program and offers an API, True Markets Gateway, for building front ends on 150 assets plus Bitcoin. Gupta says agents will pick venues on fees and liquidity: "I don't think we'll have the best app, but we'll have the best APIs." ## From Goldman to USDC Vishal Gupta joined Goldman Sachs's electronic trading desk in 2002 and stayed about 10 years, at one point routing about 10% of options volume through his team's technology. He met co-founder Patrick there. At Circle, as head of USDC, he grew the stablecoin from zero to half a billion in market cap, though it sat at 200 million for a long time. He says DeFi did not work well until USDC showed up, and that it was the first stablecoin FTX integrated as collateral for perps. ## Lessons from Coinbase As head of exchange at Coinbase, Vishal Gupta ran three exchanges and took spot listings from 20 assets to 235. Merging the USD and USDC order books took about two years, he says. He describes Coinbase and Circle as splitting leftover interest revenue effectively 50-50. Vishal Gupta wants True Markets to offer markets and liquidity as a service the way AWS offers compute, eventually adding securities and derivatives. His message is that markets will innovate, and that old and new markets each have lessons for the other. ## Key takeaways 1. True Markets raised $20 million from investors including PayPal Ventures, the Solana Foundation, RRE Ventures and Accomplice. 2. Vishal Gupta says True Markets trades Bitcoin at 100 basis points, about a third of what top US exchanges charge, with a team of 13. 3. The exchange separates execution from custody and aims to settle to any GENIUS Act-compliant stablecoin across multiple chains. ## Chapters - 0:00 Preview: stablecoins, non-custodial exchanges and markets as infrastructure - 1:14 A decade at Goldman built electronic options trading expertise - 8:03 Settlement belongs on chain; exchanges should not custody assets - 12:22 At Coinbase he ran three exchanges and grew listings to 235 - 14:18 USDC grew slowly through OTC desks before reaching half a billion - 22:18 Tokenization works when utility clearly outweighs risk, as with dollars - 26:31 Exchanges must treat stablecoins as dollars and capture interest economics - 32:07 USDC's multi-issuer consortium never materialized after Coinbase partnership - 35:25 True Markets starts with systematic traders and a Gateway API - 40:07 Blending old market rules with new technology defines True Markets - 45:00 Agents choose venues on APIs and fees, not apps - 48:35 Strong co-founders complement each other across five or six jobs - 53:22 Goal: become the AWS of markets and liquidity ## Transcript **Vishal Gupta** (0:01) I think there's like a superpower to stablecoins. A lot of people are like, it's just a dollar. My general thesis is that exchanges probably shouldn't be holding assets. I tell people DeFi didn't work well until USDC showed up. Like we became the front door for DeFi. The most beautiful things that we're building at True Markets is we can speak any genius compliance stablecoin. You can come and leave with whatever stablecoin you want. It's not an accident that I'm building a markets-based business. I was writing market ecosystem docs at Coinbase. This is my time to bring that ecosystem vision to the forefront. I want to see markets and liquidity as a service the same way you see AWS. And I think everything does become markets over time. This is my fifth crypto exchange. We're just early and I love building in a bear market and that's what we're doing. **Drew Rogers** (0:46) Hey, it's Drew. Quick thank you to Altitude for making this episode possible. Altitude is rebuilding business banking for teams on the frontier. They offer the full stack for the modern CFO and founder, a beautifully designed platform for payouts, bill pay, corporate cards, enterprise controls, and so much more. Move money with speed, yield, and total control, all from your stablecoin balance. Operate at Altitude. If your business is on the frontier, your finances should be too. You can learn more at altitude.xyz. Vishal, thanks for hanging out this morning. Excited for this conversation. Okay, I was thinking about where we want to begin and thinking about the listener base that we have and the people that follow this show. I think a lot of the, obviously stablecoins are very core to this, but your role and your point of view in stablecoins within markets, but also how markets have evolved over time. Why don't we start with, I just love for that to be the thread of our conversation, is how markets have evolved. Give us your intro. Totally. Go back to the beginning. Happy to give a little bit of background. You know, **Vishal Gupta** (1:47) background, computer engineer, graduating the dot-com boss. So I did a small stint in Silicon Valley as a hardware engineer at Cisco Systems back in the day, which kind of like formed my opinions around technology and, you know, building in general. Just kind of seeing that like vigor, but also like the volatility of that market was very interesting to see as a young man. As I graduated into the dot-com bust, you know, as a computer engineer, everybody's telling me that all the computer engineering jobs are now being outsourced. And I'm like, okay, great. This is great for my career. It's actually, it feels a lot like AI right now and how new grads feel with like a big seismic change. And this happens to be like, obviously on the downturn, but like the AI upturn is also really confusing, I think, for new grads. But I graduated, found my way through the startup space, ended up actually taking my first full-time job at Goldman Sachs at the time on what was then the newly formed electronic trading desk. This is back in 2002. I know you probably have listeners that are younger than that now. electronic trading is what it was called it was it was it was called it was the old spear leads in catalog which was a company that was bought out by goldman sachs and that was there was like very first inklings of algorithmic trading and things like that that were offering execution services for like hedge funds and brokers these are like very simple algorithms at that point so equities options futures fx and i was like literally just like a grunt on the desk day one You know, straight out of college. I kind of worked my way up, ended up running their options business over time. I was there for about 10 years. I met my co-founder there 17 years ago. I pulled him right out of college. He was like the right flavor of like autism that you want for like a co-founder, like co-founding CTO. You know, we've just kind of been building since. So this is our fifth gig together. You know, I'll go through some of the background, but like, you know, we did a lot of amazing things at Goldman. You know, we were part of the teams that were building some of the first ATSs and really kind of like invigorated the options business was a very small business for them. And we were able to like innovate in that space, build algorithms that people wanted. You know, I was a young guy effectively running like a small desk that, you know, was routing at some point about 10% of the options volume through our technology. So that was really interesting. Learned a lot there, kind of pivoted out of like banking or like being at a bank and worked for a vol market maker. So me and my co-founder went to a firm and helped kind of build a similar business to what we had at Goldman at a smaller firm. And we were able to, I think our first big client was like, we were able to steal Fidelity from Goldman Sachs. And that was like, That was like pretty big and it was like just two guys in Seven World Trade Center in like a room much smaller than this just kind of like working together and you know we're in our early 30s at that point or I was in my early 30s he's probably still in his 20s and two guys like you know just making business happen. **Drew Rogers** (4:33) So just to let's pause on the one this this the moment of Goldman Sachs for you there's this 10-year period was such a I'd imagine a very formative time for you in terms of learning about how those markets function yeah and also The prelude to maybe some of those inefficiencies or opportunities that True Markets is now solving. But I want to take this time also for me is like, I think a lot of people will hear Goldman, they'll hear these terms, options, they'll, you know, we're familiar with these types of terms, but I'd love for you to break down, if you were to like, imagine you had like a whiteboard in your head of those kind of core parts of, you know, you have options and you have all these other pieces, like what actually makes up a trading desk and how these things work, like break that down. Yeah, so **Vishal Gupta** (5:15) I mean, we were building what we'll call execution services. So these are like effectively trading software algorithms. So like, well, we had like support desks, we had sales desks, but largely this is all electronic. So we were sitting on a trading floor, but you know, you're taking phone calls, but for the most part, you're servicing like large scale hedge funds that are trading like size. And so in terms of the different product classes, equities was like the big volume maker, but options end up being like, there's a lot of revenue back there and there's like things like payment forward flow. And it's actually a very like advanced market structure options. I think there's like 15 or so options exchanges and they all have slightly different market structure. So it's very different than crypto. Crypto is a very simple market structure. It's like maker taker only, right? For the most part. And what I learned there is that there's like this natural evolution of markets that we still haven't seen at some, you know, effectively like a very immature market, which is crypto. Like the amount of things that we know and we can apply to markets, we still haven't really applied to spot markets or perpetual futures or anything. Even like prediction markets are very simple market structures that we love to like invigorate. So yeah, I mean, there's complexities here that we could talk about. Yeah **Drew Rogers** (6:22) so you but you joined at a time where a lot of these trades were happening maybe more manually with phone calls and like OTC orders and things like that? **Vishal Gupta** (6:29) I was just at the very like I joined at the very cusp of like electron trading going like okay so kind of harkening back to my my previous role like working in Cisco systems as a hardware engineer like There was this idea of we're going to build the internet and then everybody will come right and then there was a moment of like dark fiber where like they lay a bunch of fiber down and nobody was like streaming video nobody was doing these things back in 0102 and that's where the dot-com bust kind of like happened so when it ended up happening and it wasn't like it looks like i like willingly like kind of like found the right niche for myself and i did love markets i was you know i was attuned to markets But the banks, brokers, hedge funds all found that there was all this like latent fiber around. So they were able to take these markets electronic. So I kind of joined at a time where things were going electronic. I wasn't taking like paper trades or anything like that. These weren't, these are listed trades. Like I started in the equity space and then, okay, now we'll figure out internalization, Reg ATS, all these other things started happening. This is 2007. You know going from 02 to 07 there's a little bit of evolution and then we saw that their options world like there was like a lot to do and it was still pretty pretty early I mean it is pretty small scale still and we saw the ability to grow that market so yeah the evolutions markets the electronic markets I wasn't there day one I was there like day two **Drew Rogers** (7:47) What are the similarities that you see between maybe what traditional electronic markets were at that time and maybe the traditional options business? How similar effectively are these things to bringing these things on chain? Are they operating in a very similar way? Are there new things that are possible? **Vishal Gupta** (8:03) You know, the thing that I'm excited about for like True Markets is that we are a team that have seen both the traditional markets, the very like, you know, these are the New York Stock Chains and NASDAQs of the world have been around 100 plus years and you see like the new stuff that's literally being launched real time where it's like on-chain markets, you've got prediction markets, go to all these other things. So it's like the mixture of the old and new and nobody's really kind of splitting the gap and saying, hey, we know a bunch of like stuff from the old and we know where the new stuff's going and we can see like an opportunity to kind of like do both well, right? What's stopping us from taking equities 24-7, really? It's not really tokenization, it's infrastructure, it's DTCC, it's legislation, it's a bunch of other stuff, right? I think crypto in general, and we are a crypto-based business, but we're markets-focused, not crypto-focused, is what I would say. I think there's a lot of opportunities. You see this in prediction markets, like half of them are We'll talk more about your markets, but we love the hybridization of some of these markets. We see reasons for certain things to be on-chain. We see certain reasons for things to be off-chain. But evolution of markets is what gets us excited. Are **Drew Rogers** (9:11) there other things specifically that you feel like should or should not be on-chain that are, or maybe things that people are trying to put on-chain that don't deserve to be or don't need to be? **Vishal Gupta** (9:20) You know, if you look at the evolution of DEXs, right, and I've been in the market long enough. And again, I think it's probably helpful for the podcast to know that after Goldman, I went through traditional finance. I was done with TradFi after 2015, pivoted towards fintech and crypto, was an early guy at Circle, so I was head of business development, but more importantly, head of USDC. So I was in charge of launch and growth of USDC. Really, I tell people DeFi didn't work well until USDC showed up. We became the front door for DeFi, right? Everything was ETH denominated before that. Tether hadn't really taken on a real hold on the DeFi markets yet. So we had seen the opportunity in the DeFi markets to kind of be the front door. The Aave's and the Compounds of the world were really kind of ETH denominated before USDC showed up. So that gave us an opportunity to Innovate in the DeFi markets. Then looking at DEXs right like we you know the the first like DEXs and you know I'll throw out like you know we I was trying to make markets on like radar relay and I'm like all right you can't do that well and effectively because whenever you place an order or cancel an order you're paying gas fees and as a market maker you're never going to want to do that it's just too too heavy and it doesn't really work well. So then you see AMMs come up and AMMs make a lot of sense, but they're not like order book driven. They're obviously a little bit like different and there's a place for them as well. But I think what you see with like hyperliquid is that they build their own chains, highly focused on the idea that this is built for like, this is literally like tailored to building markets, right? And The idea of placing an order and cancelling order and not paying a gas fee makes a lot of sense for it being on-chain. So it's less about whether it should be on-chain or off-chain. It's just how effectively can you allow a market to happen. And markets are more than just order books. They're more than just RFQs. There's a bunch of different ways to do these things. And what should and shouldn't be on-chain is a good question. My general thesis is that exchanges probably shouldn't be holding assets. So we want to be non-custodial, which is where True Markets is. We want the ability to settle to like a qualified custodian as a QC like for things like Bitcoin and let them sit in bankruptcy remote accounts or so these assets are sitting in your name so if either the QC or we blow up you're gonna be fine assets are sitting there for you or they're sitting in technical wallets so we use turnkey behind the scenes so I think that like for us settlement is very like very much at home on chain whether or not the order books have to be on chain whether or not orders and executions and things like that have to be on chain Can be debated. I just think that at least the idea of self-custody or non-custodial exchange like resonates with me. Again, I don't think we're crypto obsessed. We're markets obsessed and we're just trying to make the bill the best mousetrap. **Drew Rogers** (11:55) Yeah. So we can go back to, we'll be talking for a while, we can go back to the circle and I want to spend some time on that. But since we're kind of now talking about how True Markets is built. Let's just define this so you the qualified custodian like just let's break this down a little bit so yeah the qualified custodian is where assets get parked but you actually believe that the exchange layer shouldn't hold assets i think that's a **Vishal Gupta** (12:18) yeah let me let me define two markets for the for the audience a little **Drew Rogers** (12:22) bit how is this structured **Vishal Gupta** (12:23) yeah so true markets and again like sorry a little bit more on the background so after circle i left to join coinbase as head of exchange you know i had helped run poloniacs a little bit at circle as well building liquidity programs and things like this so that was my first like Real crypto exchange and then i was running coinbase spot exchange and at that time like the exchange was running about 20 assets and you know the exchange infrastructure was a little bit brittle so we took one of my my co-founder was one of my first hires patrick and we were able to take the exchange from 20 assets to 235 launch two derivative exchanges really kind of like bolster the exchange business over there and you know we we learned a lot so like you know i i ended up running three exchanges at coinbase it was like the spot exchange and the two derivative exchanges And now True Markets is just like the natural evolution of where we think that markets should go. The one feedback we would hear over and over again from like people are like, yeah, I get you. FTX happened. A bunch of things are happening. I don't feel comfortable with my exchange holding the assets. And there's I think Coinbase is a trustworthy team and they're the best of the best of the best out there. But I think technically speaking, you want your execution and custody to be separate. And one of the things that I think crypto grew organically, you were a broker, you're a custodian, you're an exchange all in one clump. And in like traditional finance, it's like the custodian is here, the exchange is over here and the broker is here, right? And they're very separate and there's like systems of checks and balances. And I think that again, we're an API for markets. Our focus is like to be markets and You know in many ways like we don't want the markets to be on the back end we want to be in the front that's where we're markets the custodianship whoever the broker is like that's that's up to you know we'd love to like white label our services and give it to every FinTech out there and let them trade Bitcoin and the 150 other assets we have events we will do other markets like securities derivatives prediction markets everything else we just want to be the API for that stuff so I think there's a real opportunity to do it way and no one's really thinking about markets that way **Drew Rogers** (14:18) Yeah, so man, okay, so when was the first time you heard about Circle? Like when did that first hit your radar and bring us into the USDC story? **Vishal Gupta** (14:27) Sure, sure. So I was in a fintech firm by the name of Moneyline, ex Citadel, ex Goldman guys, building an online lender. And I was like very much crypto obsessed. I have a good friend of mine, we're sitting around my kitchen table and I'm like, I like fintech, but I don't feel that thing. **Drew Rogers** (14:42) Moneyline, you said? **Vishal Gupta** (14:43) Moneyline, yeah. **Drew Rogers** (14:44) Moneyline was very influential in 2015-ish. There's a Moneyline mafia that's **Vishal Gupta** (14:50) incredible. I think **Drew Rogers** (14:52) half our team **Vishal Gupta** (14:52) are Moneyline guys, so they're quite great. **Drew Rogers** (14:55) Yeah, and that very influential kind of neobank. **Vishal Gupta** (14:58) Yeah, Gritty, Fintech. Yeah, yep. And they're great. Big fan of the team out there. And I would say, no, I mean, with that in mind, I mean, we built, man. We just built with that team. It was **Drew Rogers** (15:09) MoneyLion. You weren't using Stabledash. So **Vishal Gupta** (15:12) I became crypto obsessed. I was doing it personally. I was like playing around with some things and I wanted to build out a crypto prime broker back in like 16, 17. And at the time Bitcoin was trading, you know, way low and nobody saw an opportunity. Nobody saw a reason to have a smart routing for like for crypto. And I'm not entirely sure that that was the best idea either, but like prime brokerage was like, Not an idea at that point. And I was trying to raise capital around that. Couldn't raise the capital I wanted. Nobody wanted to talk about crypto back then. And I ended up talking to a couple of teams. I talked to the Coinbase team. I think I talked to the Coinbase team twice before I even took like the third time I finally joined Coinbase. But I was talking to I think there was only like three firms you could look at in crypto that had like the pieces. And I looked at Circle. They had the best OTC trade desk in crypto at the time. They had just bought Poloniak, so they had an exchange. They were still trying to figure out what to do with that. And when I was brought under the umbrella of what was going on behind the scenes, there was this white paper for this new stablecoin called USDC. The idea was, hey, there's a consortium model center, there's going to be multiple issuers, there's going to be... You know it's gonna be 24 7 issuance and it's gonna be fee-free from you know mint and burn and there's all these other ideas that were happening and like some of them came true some were not but like it sounded really interesting and i was joining as head of business development and i started asking questions about like okay who's the market maker that we're going to be working with to get it out in the markets who are we like which markets are we talking to again i'm a markets focused person so i was asking all the right questions i think And at some point, I think Jeremy was just like, all right, you're going to answer these questions by just owning it. And they gave me a little bit of runway to like figure it out. So from zero to half a billion in the market cap, I was at Circle kind of leading the charge in the market. So getting USDC out in the market, I spent a lot of my time in Asia, a lot of time in the US just trying to get USDC up and into the market. And then, you know, obviously Coinbase joins a couple of months after we launch it and everything kind of set off. It was the easiest thing to sell. It's a great product. **Drew Rogers** (17:12) Yeah, what was the approach? So you come in, you have this awesome role, you're building the first major regulated stablecoin. What **Vishal Gupta** (17:18) was the strategy? Who did you go to? How did you grow it? Yeah, so there's a lot of things here. There was a couple waves of stablecoins. There was obviously Tether before us, and then there's this wave of stablecoins which include TrueUSD, GUSD, Paxos Dollar, and then the last to launch was USDC. And there was a couple Drew Rogers, Stabledash Global, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, **Vishal Gupta** (17:56) And even if I did, you could just go to Coinbase, right? And there's another, effectively another issuer. So it created a little bit more of an easy way out. And again, this is 1819, where, you know, minting and burning wasn't as easy as it is now. We were the first to like integrate with Silvergate Send, so we had like 24-7 mint burn. I think we were just the first to a couple things and we like looked a little bit different than Tether in the United States. We were like what I'll consider like one of the first like real good US domiciled, US denominated stablecoin and that like gave us a leg up and all you need is a slight leg up and it wasn't like it was never was it super obvious that we were winning we were just like okay we're just climbing out of okay it's 50 million dollar market cap okay cool sweet we got there and like kind of like work with the trade desk work with Poloniex like okay how do we get this thing to like the next level okay 200 we sat at 200 for a long time 200 million market cap was supremely long to the point where we didn't know if we could get out of that hole. **Drew Rogers** (18:50) Who was driving the volume at that time? What kind of companies? Yeah, so we're **Vishal Gupta** (18:54) talking about OTC trade desks for trade settlement on the OTC trade side, lending. It wasn't really the exchanges at that point because nobody really integrated it. Still, people aren't integrating stablecoins correctly and we can talk about that more. The first use cases were trade, trading settlement, lending settlement, OTC focus. So a lot of the mint burns were coming from large scale OTC market makers and traders that you would know. Like, you know, a lot of time I spent in Asia just like shaking hands of like the big, you know, mint and burners of USDC. **Drew Rogers** (19:23) Okay, so you get this thing off the ground. It has momentum. **Vishal Gupta** (19:27) True. **Drew Rogers** (19:28) You said, bring us into the relationship with Coinbase, how you met that team. You said you were in touch with them before, but... **Vishal Gupta** (19:34) So that was almost entirely Jeremy. I would say like then Jeremy and the exec team like you know obviously I think at that point USDC went from like being like a small project to like hey like we've got some big things to do here and they were able to capture as the first like issuer like the issuer and I use quotes because there's only really one issuer. They were able to capture kind of the attention of the Coinbase team. And so at that point, very much an exact conversation with their exact team. But, you know, I'm working with my counterpart at Coinbase, who I'm obviously very close to all my counterparts at Coinbase at that point. So it's their business development teams. It's like, you know, it's the guys like Jim Miguel, Cyril All these guys were working hand in hand, just trying to get that thing up and to the right. And then again, then we're like, it's okay. Partnerships happening now. What do we do? And it still wasn't like a success. Like never, I don't think we were ever like, Hey, this thing's super successful now. It wasn't like that. It was like, what are the metrics that we have to pay attention to? And there were a lot of ghost metrics, right? There are a lot of metrics were like, okay, should we be paying attention to like liquidity on order books? Should we be paying attention to number of wallets? Like what should we be paying attention to? And I think no one had successfully launched a stablecoin outside of Tether and it just looked very different. A lot **Drew Rogers** (20:43) of people just focus on total supply. What are the metrics that matter in your view? I **Vishal Gupta** (20:50) think number of wallets is actually a supremely interesting one. So whenever you want to look at one of these stablecoins, you're like, well, how many wallets are holding how much? So if it's like there's 10 wallets holding 90% of the stablecoin, that doesn't sound like a win to me. Now if you have a bunch of wallets holding a couple hundred bucks that's like retail that's like a bunch of other things like that's getting out there in the ecosystem so you know average dollars in wallet and number of wallets is a very interesting one i think the centralized exchanges like largely just like don't understand how to land like leverage the stable coins like they're just like maybe you could on-ramp with them but the order books are largely You know, driven by, you know, they're like US dollar and they're like doing something behind the scenes. So, I mean, we can talk about that too, but I think one of the key things that FTX did well, actually the first wedge that FTX had was using stablecoins for collateral for perpetual futures. So I remember, I don't know if Arthur would remember this, but we were at Circle, one of our offices, and I remember saying to him, You know, your per product is amazing, BitMEX, but what about using like a stablecoin for collateral? And he's like, for many reasons, he didn't want to touch like a US dollar denominated stablecoin. And I'm like, if you don't, someone will, right? And so FTX's first like wedge was using dollar denominated stablecoins for collateral for perps and like FTX's futures trading exchange, right? That they were perps only at that point. They only really took on stablecoins and paid out in stablecoins. So the wedge that FTX had was effectively stablecoins as collateral and the first stablecoin that they integrated was USDC. So that was the work that we had done. **Drew Rogers** (22:18) Yeah, you've seen so many things behind the scenes. What do you think that the, you know, we can go into what exchanges or other players are doing correctly or incorrectly with things like stablecoins. I think you understand the role that these things play within markets. What do you think right now is under, maybe missed or undervalued or things that people might think of stablecoins that I think there's like a superpower **Vishal Gupta** (22:42) to stablecoins that people like a lot of people are like it's just a dollar why do I need a stablecoin like why does that matter and like you know I had a conversation with Sony about probably a year ago and and you know they were looking at stablecoins and I think they they had asked me a question like why do we need a stablecoin And I'm like, well, okay, you've got your Sony, you've got four or five businesses. Each one of these businesses has a CFO, has like a pile of money that they have to manage. That money is being invested in short duration bonds and long duration bonds. And they're always going to kind of like plan for the worst case scenario, right? So the percentage of short duration versus long duration is always going to be bigger than it probably should be if you had pooled the money together, right? And so imagine a world where all those CFOs are pooling that money together and they're bringing it in as a stable coin. And then their percentage of short duration versus long duration bonds changes where you can have more interest because you're willing to take on a little bit more risk because the stablecoin allows you to pull those monies together. Now, imagine taking that stablecoin and then expanding it to your PlayStation network and your externally to like retail customers and all of a sudden like you're pulling a lot more dollars together. You can be a lot more effective and also like the transmission of these things become like All of the ease of use and utility of a stablecoin is much higher than the risk associated with minting and burning. So all of a sudden it's like, it's very interesting. And that's, I think that's one of the superhero powers that people don't understand. Now on the counter side, the people always ask me like, real world assets, tokenizing assets, tokenizing everything, let's tokenize the world. And I always like pause for a second and I say, it's always... A measure of utility versus risk, right? So tokenizing a dollar makes a lot of sense. There's a lot of utility. Like if I give you one USDC or one paper dollar, you're probably going to take the USDC because you're going to say, Hey, I can use this for collateral. You can air draw me interest. I can do a hundred things with this thing, right? Now the risk associated now was a dollar. Is there a dollar back there? Do I trust the issuer? What's the time for a mint? What's the time for a burn? Like those are the risks associated. So if you look at that and you say utility versus risk, there's like a good deal of utility and like minimal risk. Now, if you start to like tokenize, like, let's say a Reg and MS security, there'll be a question of like, what's the additional utility? Like, why am I doing this? Can I use it for collateral? You're still in Reg T margin world. You're still kind of like inviting the SEC in. So the utility is like kind of minimal, like the tokenization. And again, I used to help run the securities business at Coinbase, right? So the utility is relatively small. The risks associated are relatively high. It's like, oh, do I trust the broker? Am I getting my voting rights? There's a ton of things there. I'm not saying that this equation won't change, but right now the utilities are much higher than the risks associated. So that's why tokenizing a dollar makes a lot of sense. And then on the other side, tokenizing everything may not. **Drew Rogers** (25:25) Yeah, what parts of tokenization in our RBAs do you think are, you know, because there's a spectrum here, which one, like you think about what Superstate is doing and some companies like that, what parts of the market do you think are actually doing meaningful, will get meaningful traction versus maybe others? **Vishal Gupta** (25:41) I mean, I think it's a projection of where things like regulation and risks will lie. So again, it's going to be always a question of, well, what's the additional utility? So it's going to be a question of, do I need this thing to be tokenized? Is it adding utility? And if the answer is no, then you probably shouldn't do it. And if the answer is there is utility, but the risks associated are too high, then you've got to ask, Well, what's going to lower the risk? Maybe it's regulation, maybe it's rule setting, maybe it's a bunch of other things. It's technology. So it's always that like utility versus risk. And the market will tell you what's working or not. Stablecoins, dollars are working, right? Everything else is meandering a little bit, right? Like until they find that utility versus risk metric that makes sense for the market. If you're in the market and I'm talking about like market makers, systematic traders, they're like not going to just willingly mint, like tokenize something and add risk. That is going to be worth less, right? So they won't do that. **Drew Rogers** (26:31) So you've spent a ton of time in the context of exchanges and the relationship that exchanges have to things like USDC or stablecoins more broadly. What role have you seen stablecoins play within the context of an exchange? You mentioned the CX use case of what was really innovative about that. What do people need to know there? **Vishal Gupta** (26:50) Yeah so I would say this like current state most of the centralized exchanges kind of like just like take them in or they can like you can trade one for one for another yeah but there's not like I mean there's many reasons but there's not you know they're not like just like okay so bringing me into our **Drew Rogers** (27:04) last night the chat we had around USDG a little bit like how exchanges and leaders at exchanges need to be thinking about stablecoins? **Vishal Gupta** (27:10) So let's talk about like the first thing I wanted to do at Coinbase when I joined. So again, I was running USDC at Circle. My next job is head of exchange at Coinbase. And I, at the, you know, my prior job is trying to like, at the exchange, you need to do these things. Like you can't have separate order books for USDC and USD. You need to combine these things. You need to allow USD and USDC to be one thing. And that took about two years, but we ended up combining them. So like, that was like the first thing we had to do. Like USD and USDC needed to **Drew Rogers** (27:39) feel like the same thing. When did that join? When did that happen? The joining? **Vishal Gupta** (27:43) I joined Coinbase in 2020 and I think it happened like 2022. So like, that's like the one, right? Like, so now we speak USD and we speak USDC and it's one and the same. We're an issuer. It kind of is the same thing. Now the question is, and some of the most beautiful things that we're building at True Markets is we can speak any Genius Compliance stablecoin. We can settle to any Genius Compliance stablecoin. We have our, like our, our execution engine is built in a way that like we can Settle to PYUSD. You can bring PYUSD. You can bring USDC in. You can come and leave with whatever stablecoin you want. And I think that that's the natural evolution. No one's done it like that, right? So again, it's super hard, but like we know how to do it well. So if like a bank broker or anybody else or fintech says, hey, I'm going to launch my own stablecoin. I want to use your rails to like buy and sell Bitcoin and some other like volatile assets and CFI and DeFi. And I want to settle to my own stablecoin. We can do that at True Markets. That's like the natural evolution. I don't think anybody's doing that. So again, we have a very different view on markets. We're just trying to be infrastructure. We're trying to power the next wave. We want the fintechs and banks and brokers to say, I don't need to buy my own exchange. I can just leverage an API and settle to my own stablecoin. So those are things. That's the natural evolution. It's just supremely hard. So our goal is to be stablecoin agnostic, chain agnostic, and eventually custodian agnostic as well. **Drew Rogers** (29:01) Do you think exchanges will start seeing that stablecoin itself as like right now, you know, Coinbase was in a really unique position when you were there because of the relationship to USDC. A lot of these exchanges are now in the position where they're like, well, we want to participate in the economics around that thing. How have you seen like maybe the model and maybe we define, I think it's important we define What the relationship? I think so many people don't appreciate the relationship Coinbase had to Circle and USDC and now how other exchanges are trying to position themselves in that way. Yeah, so I'll say this like **Vishal Gupta** (29:32) first the Coinbase and Circle relationship effectively like they share the interest revenues and you know effectively 50-50 in whatever is left over from their pool of interest. They do pay out some I mean there's some deals that they make obviously with some exchanges and other players out there to hold USDC. I don't think they're ever giving away more than that you know. 100% of the interest, they're giving them a portion of the interest. But given that Coinbase and Circle are effectively like partners in this, they have an incentive to settle their trades in something like USDC. So something like, we want some perpetual futures exchange, there's a big question like, oh, can we make enough money for this to be worthwhile? And I'm like, in the interest alone on the stablecoins that are used as collateral, obviously USDC, that will pay all the bills. They'll keep the lights all on. So don't even worry about the transaction revenue. Just looking at only the stablecoin interest revenue will be fine. And so that's a very unique position to be in where you not only own the exchange, but you also own interest revenues around the stablecoin that you're using for collateral. Now, not every exchange has that ability, right? And we were talking about exchanges, but it could be any app, it could be anything. Like, what am I settling dollars to? And, you know, there's two schools of minds here. It's like, I'm gonna create a walled garden stablecoin, I'm gonna create MetaMask USD, or whatever it is, that's gonna be hyper-focused on my own ecosystem, and it's gonna work really well, and I'm gonna get 100% of the interest, and it's gonna be sitting in my walled garden, and that's gonna work beautifully. And then there's like the idea of a network-based stablecoin. USDC is a version of it. I think there's gonna be more and more versions of these things that make more sense. But those are the two different ideas. Now, **Drew Rogers** (31:06) if I'm cracking and launching my own stablecoin, **Vishal Gupta** (31:09) I don't know. I have some ideas there, but, you know, we're building. So, you know, I'm not gonna show too much of what we're building. Why are you **Drew Rogers** (31:14) smiling right now? Yeah, I have ideas. **Vishal Gupta** (31:16) Listen, I **Drew Rogers** (31:17) ran **Vishal Gupta** (31:18) USDC. True Markets is my co-founder and I's dream. We're building all the things we want to build. We'll capitalize. We're just small. We're a small team. **Drew Rogers** (31:27) Yeah, can't get too much off it too early. **Vishal Gupta** (31:29) I like building. You guys will see things. We just started trading Bitcoin recently. So you're trading Bitcoin for 100 basis points, which is like a third of what the top exchanges are in the United States. They're sitting in bankruptcy remote accounts. If you're going to buy Bitcoin in size, True Markets is the best way in the United States to do it. We're just small. Nobody knows us and that's fine. I love coming in from behind because we're a small scale team. We're 13 people. We're trading Bitcoin and 150 other assets. That's a great place to be. You're seeing a bunch of layoffs. You're seeing a bunch of things happen like inefficiencies in the markets. You need 5,000 people to run a crypto exchange. Well, we're trading 150 assets with 13 people in the United States. So, you know, there's a way to **Drew Rogers** (32:07) do it. It's awesome. All right. I want to go back to the network, the network versus the kind of the walled garden. Do you think that either of those, like, I just want to pick those apart, like maybe even like thinking about Money Lion and like that use case over there versus the exchange use case. Do you see like one being more maybe effective or successful or it just matters on the use case? **Vishal Gupta** (32:27) So let's like because you have on the spectrum you have like like a metamask follower or something that's like sitting way over here in like kind of a walled garden which is like great and that's that's good for them and I'm sure that works for them. And then you have like a player like Sony that has like an ecosystem for sure. Like they definitely have like dollars coming in and out of their ecosystem and it is a wall garden but it's a huge wall garden and it's not just like one thing it's not one application it's like many things and there's many reasons for them to have their own stable coin and do it well and sit in their own world and like if disney did the same thing like what would happen yeah like that that seems also very interesting **Drew Rogers** (32:59) The last conversation we had was with Nas from Bastion and a Sony bank, I believe, put capital into Bastion in their last round. I think that's really where they're now focused. It's like those use cases of like super complex ecosystems **Vishal Gupta** (33:12) where they can kind of bring all this tech to a Sony. Exactly. So I think like in the spectrum, like if you're a global ecosystem where you have many touchpoints with many, you know, there's different FX rates, there's different things happening. There's dollars behind the scenes. Like what if you create a stablecoin for that ecosystem? That's really interesting. And then you've got players that are like, well, I can't build a Sony, but I am like a, I'm a small scale exchange. I'm a trading desk. I'm an OTC. Like, how do I get involved in a network? And the reality is, I think that that's still an unsolved problem. Like USDC was meant to be a consortium. It never really was. Say more on that with, with **Drew Rogers** (33:45) Center. **Vishal Gupta** (33:46) Yeah, I mean, it's just, I think after Circle and Coinbase kind of found their footing with USDC, there wasn't a lot of impetus to, like, grow that network, right? So they effectively part-centered or, like, made it go defunct and, you know, they renegotiated the split. So it is not multi-issuer. It's always been kind of Circle behind the scenes and Coinbase takes inventory and they can manage it effectively. I mean, one of the key reasons why that works, though, is that Coinbase does a really good job with ACH and debit risk and all the other things that need it. So they're effectively the retail dollar rail for USDC. Was **Drew Rogers** (34:15) USDC's original vision to be multi-issuer? **Vishal Gupta** (34:18) Yeah. So sitting around the consortium, the center consortium, and then like, you know, the Facebook dollar, you know, DM was coming up and that was like really scary for us at one point. We're like, oh no. And like, you know, we were small, like Circle was a very small like group at that point. Like there was like, I think there was like 300 people on like 280 of them or 90 of them were focused on like Poloniex. So, you know, it wasn't like there was a huge amount of us like working on USDC and you know, you've got a behemoth like Facebook saying, hey, we're going to effectively create a consortium model that is going to blow your consortium model out of the water. And we've only got Coinbase, so it didn't make, you know, it was scary, like, as a startup. What would that have, if that went through, what would that have meant, do you think? What were you scared of? It's funny, I think Zuck is probably, like, kicking himself a little bit for pulling the plug on that one, and I think he's, like, rethinking his ideas there, but, like, I think that would have been scary for USDC. And while we parked the consortium model, we still had the strength of a multi-issuer format because it is Circle or Coinbase and you're never really worried that you're just gonna be holding the dollar. So I think that worked for the market. Again, I don't think anybody's tried the consortium model well enough yet. I think Paxos was trying with USDG, but I think there's gonna be, there's opportunities there, I think. **Drew Rogers** (35:25) Sure, sure. How have you thought about just the way that you are building monetization like they're all these things that we we now live in these like modern markets where economics are flowing in different places and you called out just like some of these layoffs and feels like we're going through a pretty interesting transition where like modern markets are finally arriving where do you see we've talked about stablecoin economics and like the perp use case where do you see most of the economics going and maybe some of these new channels that you're thinking about **Vishal Gupta** (35:56) Yeah, I think that exchanges don't have to be huge moneymakers all the time. There's meant to be a little bit of friction in the execution, but you don't have to take down 300 basis points to buy Bitcoin. That shouldn't always be the case on an execution venue. The broker can take whatever he wants, but that's a different question. **Drew Rogers** (36:16) Why is it typically so expensive? It sounds like you guys have really prided yourselves right now in being, like you said, the best in the U.S. Yeah, I mean, like, again, we're small. Are most of it just expenses and costs from... **Vishal Gupta** (36:29) Yeah, I mean, we're a small team. We're able to do things, like, pretty effectively. We're not holding... So we obviously, like, are not holding the assets or held at a qualified custodian that does this really well. We pay them. For the customer our rates can be really low we're just our ideal is to be cheaper faster safer right and you know i think exchanges so it's it's again traditional finance you have you have a custodian you have broker you have an exchange right and our goal is to power all the brokers out there and give them proper crypto rails whether you're a big big name bank or a new fintech or you want to be the next robin hood competitor and you don't want to buy your own crypto exchange We want to be markets and liquidity as a service. And that will start with crypto. And there's so many other interesting markets we'd love to get into. And we're just trying to kind of climb our way into that market. **Drew Rogers** (37:13) Yeah. Markets and liquidity as a service. Who right now do you, who are you trying to start with in that? Like where are you embedding this type of market? **Vishal Gupta** (37:22) So our first layer is really kind of like systematic traders and like in this market where things are getting obviously more and more automated and like crypto is largely like systematic trading. We have a liquidity program we're actually launching now. We're giving away a million dollars of equity for systematic traders to show up and like provide and take liquidity and it's a really interesting program. Can **Drew Rogers** (37:42) you define systematic trading? What does that **Vishal Gupta** (37:44) mean? Pretty much anybody that's coming in via APIs, I would consider systematic and that comes in via FIX, REST, even our CLI and providing and taking liquidity, offering, you know, again, these are like, this can be anybody from like a large scale market maker that, you know, names that you know, to, you know, two guys in a garage or one guy in a garage that's just trying to figure out how to systematically trade, maybe building robots. And it's every, you know, every month it's getting easier and easier to build something, right? So like systematic trading will be really important. So like if anybody asked me in TLDR on like what, Drew Rogers, Stabledash Global, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, **Vishal Gupta** (38:35) So we have a product called True Markets Gateway. It's an API. You can build your front ends and you can say, okay, I want to offer 150 assets plus Bitcoin. And we give you all the tools. It's an API and you can get right there. It's actually a lot easier than like trading equity, right? Like equity, you have to become like, there's a bunch of things you have to do. Obviously, like this one's a little bit easier. So if you want to start there, you can start there with us. And eventually we'll be doing securities, derivatives, everything else. So just You come in with a pipe and we just offer you like the best execution, give you best pricing and we just, it's all fair, right? These **Drew Rogers** (39:06) are all digital assets, **Vishal Gupta** (39:07) crypto? Currently, yeah, it's spot markets. Yeah, currently. So it's 150 spot markets. Yeah. **Drew Rogers** (39:13) How do you see the other asset classes fitting into that with things like tokenized equities and stuff like that? Are you focused on that right now or? Good **Vishal Gupta** (39:21) question. So our rails will be used for any of these tokenized RWAs to any degree. So we currently speak Solana, BASE, Hyper EVM, and we'll be chain agnostic and wherever the volume is, we'll go. And so like, yeah, if there's a real world asset that needs to settle in a tokenized manner, we'll do it. But we're also like not hyper crypto obsessed. Like if you look at prediction markets, like I think, you know, you see Kallsheim and Poly and like You know, Kalshi is obviously off-chain and Poly is obviously on-chain. And, you know, I think they, in the eyes of a consumer, they look very similar. And like, so we're not so obsessed with the underpinnings. We have crypto underpinnings, but we also, we also do on-chain, we do off-chain matching. We do like things that, you know, we can do things on or off-chain. **Drew Rogers** (40:03) Yeah. Yeah. Really interesting. We have our own **Vishal Gupta** (40:05) matching engines. We have our own settlement engines. Yeah. **Drew Rogers** (40:07) If you weren't building True Markets at this layer and you were forced to, and maybe you could consider this even, it's not a this or that, but if you were to give the business to Patrick for a year and go build something on **Vishal Gupta** (40:19) top of it, what would you go build? Well, it's funny, it would stay in the markets. We're building as we go. We had a hackathon. The only rule of the hackathon, we split the team into A team, B team, was you can't work on something we're currently building. And the two things that came out of that are gonna go to production in the next six months. These are coming from the founders, this is what we wanna try, let's see how far we can go. Again, using our core infra, using our core technology, Staying in the world of, you know, our company is called True Markets. Like, there's no accident. We're a markets-based business. What I saw at places like Coinbase is that the markets was like sitting in the back end and some database in the back that people don't think about much. Like, True Markets is markets first. And to be a markets first business, like, allows us to kind of speak the truth of what we're doing. **Drew Rogers** (41:04) And speak about the name. Where did the name come from? Yeah, **Vishal Gupta** (41:05) yeah. True Markets came to me in many different ways, and we had a bunch of code names in my mind, I think, before we really named it. But years ago, you know, I really was like, well, if I leave Coinbase, what do I want to do in my life? Like, you know, that's going to be, you know, I run the largest crypto exchange in the US, and I've always been in markets, like, since 02, right? So, like, True Markets was always my thinking. I want to build markets and liquidity as a service is what I would call it in my mind. You know, the name True Markets came in many different ways, but I remember one specific way that I was like, okay, that really locked in for me. And I think we already named the company, but like I was at Network State in like Singapore at one point and I heard like Naval speak and he said something along the lines of a group of people that think the same and come to consensus as a mob and a group of people that Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, Stabledash Global, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, **Vishal Gupta** (42:09) You know, there's a bid, there's an offer, there's a quote, there's like all these other things, but then you walk in a room and be like, well, what's a true market? You know, that's like more along the lines of like, what's the truth? What's it going to print at? Like, and that resonated with me. You know, we actually had to go through a pretty litigious like trademark battle because someone tried to park our name. And I'm like, no, man, we've owned those trademarks for a long time, baby. We've been thinking about this for a long time. It's not an accident that I'm building a market space. I was writing market ecosystem docs at Coinbase that hopefully execs were reading, but this is my time to bring that ecosystem vision to the forefront. **Drew Rogers** (42:43) What do you consider to be a true market? I think we're in a really interesting point of history where there are more different, from my vantage point, it seems like we're entering all these different types of markets that now can't exist. You've mentioned polymarket, calci, like with prediction markets, it seems like anything can be a market. How do you think about the state of markets right now? And what is true? How you're thinking about the pie growing? It seems like everything is becoming a market. **Vishal Gupta** (43:09) Yeah **Drew Rogers** (43:09) again **Vishal Gupta** (43:10) like I think these are it's what we see is that there's this bifurcation of like old school markets the New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaqs of the world that have been around for 100 plus years and they haven't like fully why are we not at 24-7 equities yet it's not because we technically can't do it obviously it's because of like I'll say like a little bit of complacency right like we're just kind of been sitting in that world for a long time and it's like whether it's like regulation or technology we're just not doing it for many reasons and I've been in this market for so long and we still can't do 24-7 like Tesla Trading? That's crazy. Why aren't options markets 24-7? But there's a lot of things you can learn from those markets. Why do the options market and equities, why do they work? They're a quote-driven market. You get a good bid offer everywhere. Market makers are incentivized to provide a good bid offer. There's 15 plus exchanges or whatever it is to offer fungible options quotes. There's a reason why those markets work really well. You know, they've figured out wash trading, they figured out like, you know, self trading rules, they figured out like circuit breakers, they've done a good amount of work to figure out some of those things. And then you get the new school that's like, obviously, like, kind of like in the fuck around and find out mode where it's like, let's just launch these things, let's do some cool shit. And like, these teams are super innovative, they're trying to figure it out. But they're also like, I think they're missing some of the key pieces that they could have gotten from like traditional markets. And like, that's what happens when you're a startup, like we're not. I won't pretend like we built all the things we want to build yet. So I think that there's a real opportunity to kind of like split the gap and like build with tradition in mind but like with new age technology and like matching engines. I mean like our matching engine at Coinbase and the one that's still being used for the swap market is effectively the same tech that we started in 2014. But it's 50 or 100x better because we've been replacing it and you know replacing parts over time. But I think that sometimes when you do a refresh or a brand new from ground up, first principles, your technology is going to be better. I've got one and a half guys on the matching engine. I don't know how many I had at Coinbase. **Drew Rogers** (45:00) I think about the reality of programmatic trading or systemic trading with something like True Markets now being available. And you go back to this side of the spectrum where someone has some sort of personal conviction, they make a phone call, someone on the other end is picking up that phone call, and then they're making that trade on behalf of someone manually. Some people still do that, but we've evolved so much from that type of trading experience. I now start wondering, I'd love your thoughts on this, with the rise of research agents, inputs rising in terms of how you can build insights, how you can have agentic trading start happening, having that as a top of the funnel and then pairing something like an agent with True Markets under the hood, how are you seeing those worlds come together? **Vishal Gupta** (45:43) Totally like an agent doesn't care about your brand marketing or anything else what they care about is like what are your fees what is my access to liquidity what am I access to like assets what am I like they care that's what agents will start to look for right so you know it doesn't care how your app looks it doesn't care about it worries about the api so your api for markets so true **Drew Rogers** (46:01) markets is the best place to buy bitcoin in the us like you will get all of the flow **Vishal Gupta** (46:05) The agents will figure it out. And again, we're going to charge a little bit less, it's going to be a little bit safer sitting at a QC, sitting in bankruptcy remote accounts, and then trust in your name. These are things that you just... So we're building for that next version. I don't think we'll have the best app, but we'll have the best APIs. That's a good example of that. We build on our own APIs all day. If you ever go to our website, download our app, every two weeks you'll see a new version that's drastically different because we're just constantly iterating. And again, we're sitting in this agentic world where We're 13 of us. I think 10 of us are engineers. And we have a couple operations, design, a couple other people. But everybody's building. It's the best time to be building as an entrepreneur. I've been blessed with a great career, but I've also always been a builder. And I want to be building. And I want to be building in markets. And the idea that you can have a bunch of... 90% of my team used to work for me at one point or another. Just teams that you know really well and we're in office and we're grinding and we're hacking away and like, you know, the fact that we can just like come up with an idea, spin up a V1 very quickly is amazing. Now, I don't think all of it goes to AI. Like we, okay, could you build a matching engine with AI? You could. It's just not going to be as effective as someone kind of building it from the ground up but like no one's building it from the ground up anymore you're building pieces with AI and all of a sudden now I've got one and a half guys built you know my CTO is a coding CTO him plus half of him and another guy are building the matching engine or built have built the matching engine it's trading right now again like it would take dozens of people in the prior world and so they are using AI to build like some of the pieces and they're building lego blocks together so this is like **Drew Rogers** (47:38) the most amazing **Vishal Gupta** (47:39) time to be **Drew Rogers** (47:39) building So the news from Coinbase yesterday, this will come out in a couple of weeks, but what would you say to the person who's maybe unexpectedly hit by that news? Who's very, I think probably many, many talented builders right now. What's your, what's your message to them? **Vishal Gupta** (47:52) Yeah, I mean, I've been part of a bunch of rifts, like, you know, having to drive them at Circle and Coinbase and up and down turn, you know, turns. And honestly, like crypto is the most volatile, like market out there. So like, you're going to have good days and bad days. And like, obviously, like, I think that the execs at places like Coinbase and Circle are like, know what they're doing. They're gonna cut to the bone and try to find where the core of the team is and that's what their job is. Now for everybody that's out there, it's a great time to like, I think they give great packages, a great time to be learning, a great time to be building. You know, this is a good time for you to, you know, grab a friend or two and start building. And I do think that like, I do think as an entrepreneur it's great to build with someone else too, like you have up days and down days, so I don't think you should be building by yourself if possible. But grab some friends, ideate, and **Drew Rogers** (48:35) build. What do you look for when you build something meaningful with someone? You've known Patrick for, you said, 17 years? **Vishal Gupta** (48:41) Yeah, so the founder makeup, the founder Venn diagram. So I think it was Marc Andreessen said something, or actually Ben Horace said something around that two good founders probably make up five or six jobs, right? And it's a Venn diagram where they can speak the same language. I am, at times, a designer. I'm, at times, an engineer. I'm, at times, a product person. I'm, at times, a salesperson. I'm, at times, a podcast person. I'm doing all these things now. Patrick is consistently a builder, but he also understands regulation really well. He's the best technologist I know, by far. He understands like leverage and risk and like he can be a risk officer to some degree so like you need someone you need to be able to look at the two of you and be able to say can you do five or six jobs really well and like and then you'll start seeing where the pain points are and they'll start hiring for the pain points and so when I would look when I talk to young entrepreneurs and I say the worst thing to do is to partner with someone that looks exactly like you You know, you don't want someone that's going to say, because you're going to fight as well. You're literally like the same person, just duplicative. Find the counterbalance to you. And that's going to help you cover those five or six jobs and be really effective. **Drew Rogers** (49:48) Yeah. What are the, what are the specific things that you think you personally bring to the table that's kind of your, throughout your career has been your like defining force? **Vishal Gupta** (49:57) Yeah. I mean, I'm, first of all, energy. I think that like, you can't be like, you can't, you have to bring the energy. I'm, you know, I'm 46 years old. Where do you get that **Drew Rogers** (50:04) energy? You've always been that way? **Vishal Gupta** (50:06) Yeah, I think that there's like an enthusiasm and you have to keep a little bit of a chip on your shoulder. If you're an entrepreneur, you have something to prove and I definitely have something to prove. But no, I mean, you need that energy, you need that consistency, you need that focus. I think, you know, I jokingly like when I left Coinbase in my car, I went to Chatubti at the time and it was like an early version of it. And I was like, what are the things like a VC founder should be doing? Like, what are the... And then three, there's really three things. It's like set the vision, right? Raise capital for the vision. So be able to tell that story and be able to raise the capital if you can, right? And then build a team around that vision, you know? And that's like been consistently in those things. But like, again, I'm in pixels. Like I have patents on trading UIs from back in the day. Like I love like being a designer. Like I minored in design. I was a computer engineer, but I minored in design. So I love that. I was a sales guy at Goldman at one point, but not because I want to be a sales guy. It's because nobody else could trade, nobody else could speak that, you know, I was running a derivatives desk. Volatility was like an interesting product that nobody really fully could sell. So I'm like, all right, you know, I'm in, I'll do it. So you have to put on the sales hat. And honestly, as an engineer by background, Pull on the sales thread is hard, but I like it and you have to be able to cover those things. I am supremely a product person. I am a trader. I like to trade. I know when the trading UI sucks or when it's great and I can tell you which ones are great and which ones are sucks because I trade in the morning. I'm selling premium on options. I do that. **Drew Rogers** (51:30) Where should people learn about this stuff? Like if there's like a beginner, I feel like there's a huge education gap between people who actually like you understand this. What is the best way for someone who's either personally or professionally for their firm wanting to go take more of a sophisticated approach with this? Like what's the best way to get started? **Vishal Gupta** (51:47) Yeah, I mean, I think what you're doing is really interesting. Like, obviously, people are, you're getting, you know, people can then follow us on, like, Twitter or something like that, and we'll write some thought pieces around the markets. And, like, I think trading in general, you gotta trade. Like, you gotta, like... Just start. Yeah, and I think you have to be careful. Like, I think that, you know, my TLDR on trading would be, like, first, like, if you want to, if you have cash, like, put it in something like the S&P 500. Keep it simple. Once you have an opinion on something and you want to put your money to your opinion, then you start taking out the S&P 500 and you buy something else. Okay, is Tesla undervalued? Is Apple undervalued or overvalued? You're taking small trades and you're starting to think, okay, now I'm going to go along with something I believe in. Okay, well now how do I use an option to either go longer or sell a premium on it? These are questions you have to go step by step and you can't expect to be an excellent options trader day one. You just have to step into this and I'm guessing, you know, a lot of people like listening are like 20, 30 years old and like they first save, then invest, then start to learn the next phases and you have to keep learning. I know a lot of really smart people. They're like, oh, I don't really touch my money. It's not something I do myself. And I'm like, it's probably one of the most important things in your life. It's like not paying attention to your health. It's like, well, if you're not paying attention, no one is, you know? So I would say it's something people should just keep reading, watch a couple of podcasts, follow people that are in the know. You can DM people. I mean, I get great DMs. It's wild, **Drew Rogers** (53:04) isn't it? Everyone's accessible. **Vishal Gupta** (53:06) Yeah, you can just DM me and ask me a question about options I might answer, or stablecoins. I don't trade crypto markets for the reason I run crypto exchanges, and I don't think that exchange operators should be trading crypto specifically. You know, I knew what asset we were going to list next on Coinbase, so I never really traded it. **Drew Rogers** (53:22) So as we kind of wrap this, so True Markets, looking at your career, where you've been, where you've gone, it seems like such a beautiful, we were kind of talking earlier, like it seems like a culmination of all these pieces that you've picked up along the way. What is a successful True Markets look like? It seems like this has the potential to be just a career defining, just something you do for the rest of your career. What does that look like? What does a successful True Markets look like? **Vishal Gupta** (53:49) Yeah, I think our goal is really to be the back end for a lot of like the markets that people trade. I'm not super obsessed with being like a retail focused business because I think it's supremely hard to launch retail businesses, but I want to be the back end. I want to see markets and liquidity as a service the same way you see AWS. That should be our AWS moments. Every prediction market, every Uber, eBay are markets. And what I want to do is be infrastructure for that. I want to be markets and maybe get you access to liquidity. I want to be able to build those for you as quickly as possible. And I think everything does become markets over time. And I don't think it's just going to be one or two venues. I think these are multi-venue markets and that's what they're meant to be. I'd like to be infra behind the scenes, but I'd also, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to find out in the retail space as well. I think there's a lot of innovation left in places like prediction markets and equity markets and options markets. And there's a lot of things you can and cannot do when you work at a big company. It's not your vision, it's the founder's vision. And you have to fit your vision within their vision. And I think this one's for us. This one's for Patrick and myself. And this is, again, we see traditional markets being really old school and not really budging and they're like, oh, you know, they're a little fuddy-duddy and they do know things, but they're not innovating fast enough. And then you see on the other side where these brand new markets are just going really fast and breaking things, which is cool too, but imagine a world where you can kind of do both. **Drew Rogers** (55:05) It'd be interesting if you guys, I mean, just given the tools you have almost, you did this internal hackathon. It would be really cool to see almost opening that up to like other people that come build. Like, have you thought about that? **Vishal Gupta** (55:16) Yeah. So we have open APIs and they can code up. If you go to TrueMarkets.co, you'll see our APIs. We'll be having trading competitions and other things that like hackathons that we're going to be doing so people can build on top of our systems. And that's going to be a great way to like go to market for retail API traders, which I think have been largely underserved. Like if you think about retail API traders, they used to go to like Coinbase Pro, and that's largely been deprecated to Coinbase Advanced Trading, and their APIs are different. And then they used to go to FTX, they used to go to Binance US, and the reality is it's too expensive to trade as a systematic trader in the United States as a retail trader. Your trading costs 40 basis points or something to provide liquidity on some of these exchanges. We're going to do a fraction of that, a tenth of that. So if you want to cut your teeth on systematic trading, come do it with us. We're going to charge you less. **Drew Rogers** (56:01) Will this be virtual or in person, do you imagine? **Vishal Gupta** (56:03) Probably virtual. We might do some in-persons. We've done in-persons in New York. We did one with NYU. That was great. We got four interns out of that, so it was fantastic. NYU, Columbia, Cornell, big names are coming in big on our internship program. That could be fun. **Drew Rogers** (56:18) It'd be fun if you hosted one of those. We **Vishal Gupta** (56:22) got a beautiful office in NoHo that's ready for a hackathon. **Drew Rogers** (56:25) What's your final message to markets? What do you want to tell the markets about what you're building and what's the invitation? **Vishal Gupta** (56:31) Yeah, I think the battle cry here is that markets will innovate. There's a lot to learn from the old markets. There's a lot that the new markets can learn from the old markets and vice versa. We're going to be the team that's just going to drive markets forward. We want to be that team. That's our focus. This is not an accident. We've been in markets since 2002. This is my fifth crypto exchange. We're just early and I love building in a bear market and that's what we're doing. If you want to trade with us, API-driven traders, we're giving away a million dollars equity for systematic traders. It's on our website, truemarkets.co, tm.co. There's going to be a bunch of trading competitions we're going to be launching for API traders. So we're really trying to cater to API traders. Awesome. **Drew Rogers** (57:08) Vishal, thanks for the time. This was **Vishal Gupta** (57:09) fun. Thank you. Cool, man.