Aave Makes Millions—Does AAVE Capture the Value? | Daily Crypto IQ

And of course, we're starting with a because its product has already passed the test. Most crypto pro projects never actually pass, which is does it have a product that works and actually produces value? Right. What's up, Struggle Heart? Thanks for letting me know you're still here. So, here is why a deserves a serious investigation. Right. At the time of the time that I checked the data, which was earlier today, right? Uh, DeFi Llama reported approximately 8.4 billion locked in a 12.7 billion in active loans. Over the preceding 30 days, users generated approximately $34 million in fees. Not too bad, but approximately 4.7 million of that was actually classified as protocol revenue. So, what's going on there? That difference is the first lesson that we're doing tonight. Why someone says a made $34 million, we need to ask who actually

received any of that money. Much of the interest paid by the borrowers belongs to the people supplying the capital, not the actual token. It's economic activity inside A, but it's not all income belonging to the DAO or a holders. Right? So again to reiterate here, 34 million was made by a but almost all of that is going to go to the people who supplied the money that was then being borrowed and then paid back on interest, not necessarily fees from the protocol revenue, right? Like fees for transactions and stuff like that. It's very different. So their own website advertises more than 3.4 trillion in lifetime deposits and 1 trillion in lifetime borrowing. Those numbers establish scale and endurance. They still do not answer our token question and that is honestly the most important thing. Blues Guy on stream, welcome

in. Welcome in. Shout out to you, Blues Guy. Thanks for being here. So, the mistake that we're really trying to avoid is treating every impressive protocol number as evidence for the token. And again, you hear me talk constantly about some tokens were never designed to be this amazing value capture. Some of them are literally governance tokens like we discovered with Onondo. But who told us or who made us believe that they were all supposed to be these amazing value capture tokens for an ecosystem? It seems like, and I hate to say it, it seems like the majority of us just kind of got the wrong idea or made that up because nobody really promised you that. Ono didn't promise you that the Onondo token was going to be some amazing value capture aka money goes into the market cap

through their ecosystem if you don't understand what I'm saying. So where did we get this idea from? And how come we assume every project that looks good and has a real product token is going to do extremely well without knowing how the value gets from the ecosystem the revenue fees and things like you know revenue protocol fees. How is that getting into the market cap of the token? A lot of these tokens are completely disconnected from the ecosystem. Anyways, total value locked is not revenue. Okay, revenue is not profit. DAO income is not automatically token holder income. A buyback is not automatically a burn or a dividend. A has more connecting these pieces than most crypto projects do. But the connection remains indirect and controlled through governance and we're going to continue to dig into that tonight. That is

our mission. So the real investigation is not whether a works, right? That's not the big part of what we're trying to go through here. It's it's established enough that we know that it works. It's whether the path from a successful lending market to a ownership the token is strong, durable, and difficult to interrupt. We are just scratching the surface and we are just now getting into it. How's everybody doing tonight? Yeah, Struggle Heart's here every day. I can tell that he's committed to raising his crypto IQ. I hope you guys as well would like to raise your crypto IQ. and let's get into it with no delay. So, the problem, what is the problem? Crypto discussions regularly use total value locked, deposit, loans, and fees interchangeably. They like to just take a number and throw it in a headline,

throw it in your face. Say total value locked is something like a billion dollars or something crazy for some protocol and they just keep hitting you with a billion dollars. We got a billion dollars. A billion. There's a billion. And nobody really has a high enough crypto IQ to say, whose billion dollars is this? If I hold the token, is any of that money going to go in? Because there's been many projects that I've held the token as I've gone through the process of learning this stuff myself. And I'm like, I keep seeing them doing deals for billions of dollars and the market cap of the coin is still sitting at like 300 million. It's like, where is that money? I didn't understand in those days that they're completely different stuff. They're not interchangeable. And I feel like that

is the biggest value I can bring to everybody watching this show. So these measurements, we're talking about the problem here because that's what we always start off with, right? These measurements describe different parts of a business. The token can be associated with an active product without receiving the product's cash flow. Someone buying a the token does not acquire legal equity in a labs or automatically contractual claims to the DAO revenue. Basically, holding the token doesn't mean you have any right to the company itself or any of its affiliated companies like a lab or a DAO. What has changed? So, a introduced a DAO funded buyback program in April 2025. Heating up. That's heating up. It's getting bullish. Any kind of buyback programs are good. But remember, as we discussed before, a burn is telling you that we are burning

supply and there will be less supply because we burned it. A buyback simply says we are buying it off of the open market. They could use it for rewards somewhere. Basically, just cuz they're buying it back regardless of what they do with it, unless they burn it, you're not changing the supply. Therefore, you're not increasing uh you know deflation or you know any of that kind of stuff. So it doesn't necessar a buyback is good. It's a great start but it doesn't necessarily mean you are going to create more scarcity for the token itself. How's everybody doing out there? Let me know that you're live. Let me know that you like this show by of course smashing the like button and subscribing to the channel. And uh tell your friends, tell all your friends, tell all of your friends

about this channel. Even if they don't like crypto, they can come here and say mean things in the chat. It's great for business. All right, it's great for the channel. I don't know why I said business. Anyways, let's not get distracted cuz I can go on a tangent. You know, I can tangent like nobody else. So, by February 2026, the Dow reported allocating approximately 42 million to acquire more than 205,000 a 1.2% 2% of the max supply, which is a decent chunk just for a buyback, right? GH created an additional source of DAO revenue because interest paid by GHO borrowers goes to the Treasury. All right, again, we're heating up and I'm I'm learning with you guys, okay? I haven't I've mowled over quite a bit of this because I'm got to put it put together a stream that

has value for you guys, but I don't know every little tiny detail. So, I am always learning with you guys. And of course, repetition is the father of learning. I keep saying this. Um, just cuz I read through this stuff a couple of times doesn't mean I'm going to retain it like I'm going to retain it when we go over it together. So, we learn as a community and I feel that that is highly important. What's up, crypto family? Thanks for being here. And if you're watching this later on, feel free to still drop a comment. So, GHO created more Dowo revenue. That's great. And we know that interest paid by GHO borrowers still goes to the Treasury. That's bullish. So, A volume 4 introduced a new hub and spoke architecture, and I'm not going to take the time

to explain what that means, but we're going to get into it a little later. So, that architecture intended to unify liquidity while supporting differently configured lending markets. Of course, having liquidity not able to come together and it's isolated in different places is a problem in DeFi across the board. The A ecosystem has also expanded through consumer institutional and infrastructure products and hopefully we will learn more about that. So why it matters? Why does any of this matter? Well, a gives us one of the strongest available tests of whether a governance token can evolve into an economically aligned asset, which is really what we want. If a protocol this large cannot consistently connect revenue to its token, weaker protocols deserve even greater skepticism, right? So, if a protocol this large, as big as a cannot consistently connect revenue to its

token, then who can? That is what we're saying. If a day can make that connection durable, it becomes the model other Dows may attempt to copy. Set in the way, set in the trend, right? So, who benefits from all of this? Well, suppliers of course receive most ordinary borrowing interest. You supply money, you get paid interest. Makes perfect sense. Borrowers obtain liquidity without immediately selling their collateral. That's good for the borrower, right? It serves a purpose. The DAO receives reserve factor revenue and selected fees and GHO interest. Service providers receive DAO approved funding for development, risk management, and operation. Sounds like they have a pretty tight-knit system put together. A holders control governance and can benefit indirectly from the token purchases, reduced emission, and ecosystem growth. Ave stakers may receive rewards but also accept smart contract liquidity and backs

stop related responsibilities. So you're staking obviously there's rewards but there is some risk as a staker of course there's impermanent loss and other things we won't go into right now. So the question is after suppliers operating costs, security programs and growth spending are paid, how much durable economic value remains connect to a right, we just talked about how three 34 billion or million and there was only like four or something million that was considered actual revenue for the protocol. So, that's a big difference. And you could tout that 34 million all day long, but it doesn't necessarily mean anything. What's up everybody in the chat? Again, thank you for being here. So, just to kind of stay on top of a couple current rel uh relative events, we do the signal verse noise, right? But we're going to tie

it into what the point of the stream is. and to give you a slight break on the a a in your face, right? So, revised clarity act heads towards the procedural vote. Now, revised in my mind means what did they slip in there last minute and what good stuff did they talk about talk about and then they got rid of last minute? So, what actually is the Clarity Act anymore? Don't know. So, what happened is Senate Republicans released another version, a revised version of the crypto market structure legislation ahead of a critical procedural vote expected Tuesday. The new draft incorporates additional ethics and enforcement provisions, but passage remains uncertain. Why this matters? Well, this could shape which crypto assets and intermediaries fall under securities or commodities. That's a big deal. oversight and how decentralized protocols are distinguished from other

entities operating interface or services. And like I said before, the Senate went into a recess, a vacation that they have planned for like a month cuz who gets that constantly throughout the year and super well paid? But I digress. They started taking these victory laps like they killed the Clarity Act. And you believe what you want to believe, but it was pretty much only Democrats doing this. A couple Republicans, okay? And I'm not making this a Democrat or Republican thing. I'm just saying that's who I predominantly said saw going on social media, Twitter, and uh literally drinking a beer and filming a video patting themselves on the back about how they had killed the Clarity Act because they knew people wouldn't hear anything about it for a little over a month and a couple of weeks because they were

going on a planned vacation. It was not a surprise unless you're just a normal person who doesn't follow the Senate, you know, recess schedules or whatever vacations. And I told you it's not going to matter. And they're dumb because they know that you, and by you, I just mean people, have a really, really small attention span. And when a month and a half goes by, you'll forget all about the video where they took the victory lap over absolutely nothing that they made up. And then the Clarity Act will come back and it'll get passed. That's my emo. That's my thought here is that it's going to get passed. and have thought that the entire time because to not pass the Clarity Act means to let the entire world get ahead of us. Not going to happen. So my point

is here we are later. Clarity Act back on the table like it never went anywhere because it didn't go anywhere and it's most likely going to get passed even if they have to revise it and give you know the the other team a little bit of something. So who benefits or loses here? Well, clearer rules could benefit established protocol capable of absorbing compliance costs. Smaller or partially decentralized projects may face greater uncertainty if the new law separates protocol software from the organizations and interfaces surrounding it. We're going to call it signal cuz it's highly important, but it's unresolved and we don't even know what's going to be in it by the time it's all said and done. But what do we need to watch for? Well, whether the proposal receives the necessary votes and how the final language treats

DeFi front end, right? Developers and governance organizations. So, basically what's in it by the time they passed it, I have the utmost certainty that they are going to pass something called the Clarity Act. But remember, the Clarity Act very much becomes like a title. It's just a title of a thing that they're passing and they can kind of pull in and out what's in it. So, it's like if you had a box and the box I was going to give it to you as a gift and what's inside the box I like constantly was like uh put a diamond ring in and like nah nah you're not really you're not really worth that kind of good present. So, I pulled the diamond ring out and I put like a cheap plastic ring in it from one of those 2550

cent things you turn comes out with the little bubble egg and I'm like yeah that's that's more like it. That's more like it. The box is the clarity act and what's in it god knows until it's actually finalized. So, we'll see. So, symbiosis Bitcoin bridge exploit. Look at that. Another bridge exploit. It's almost like I've been sitting here saying for the longest time, bridges are where all of the money is exploited or lost or stolen or whatever. Bridges are probably the single most faulty point of attack or exploit in crypto, period. Now, what happened? Symbiosis reported recovering approximately 15 bitcoin following an exploit involving its Bitcoin bridge. Has anybody even heard about this uh symbiosis bridge exploit? Anybody? Anybody even heard of this? So the affected native Bitcoin route remained isolated while third party routes resumed. Right? So it

was just a Bitcoin part of the bridge or the Bitcoin bridge, right? But they bridge other assets besides Bitcoin. Why it matters is because the attackers reportedly created an enormous quantity of unbacked synthetic Bitcoin, but the amount that could actually be extracted was much smaller. That illustrates the difference between a theoretical accounting failure and an executable liquidity. Very important. So, who benefits or loses here? Well, liquidity providers bear the immediate risk. protocol teams and user benefit. Users benefit when affected components can be isolated rather than allowing the failure to spread. We're going to call this a security signal, meaning it matters but only for security. And it's not evidence that every DeFi protocol is broken. But it is evidence that composability can import risk from one component to another. And again, the biggest thing here is bridges are probably

the most risky thing. So, whatever you do in DeFi, using a bridge is one thing, but a lot of people provide collateral to bridges and stuff for good return. Well, if it gets exploited, you could you could have nothing nothing at all. Arc mainet approaches well a considers deployment. So, we talked a lot about arcnet right for quite some time and uh now it's finally going to go public. So ARK's public mainet is scheduled for September 16th which is in 2 days. ARC describes itself as a financial market focused network using USDC for fees and permissioned funding validator set. A governance is actively discussing deploying a volume 4 on ARC. Why does that matter? Well, this represents another attempt to connect permissionless finance applications with infrastructure designed for institutions and regulated assets. Who would benefit or lose here? A

could gain another source of deposits, which is a plus, borrowing and protocol revenue. The trade-off is additional deployment complexity and dependency on a network whose real public demand remains completely unproven because they're just now going into mainet. It's an early signal, but it's not established adoption. So, what do we watch for? Mainet reliability. When the mainet goes live, is it reliable? Does it go down a bunch? How is it received? How many people are using it? Actual deposits, borrowing demand, and whether an a deployment progresses from governance discussions to a live usage. All right. So, let's get a snapshot going here of our numbers for tonight. These are pulled from today. So, measurement total value locked 18.4 billion. What that demonstrate is the scale of deposited assets, revenue and profitability is what it proves. Active loans 12.7 billion. sustainable

borrowing demand and that every loan is organic economic activity. That's what it proves. And if the numbers really just go over your head, don't worry about them. All right? We have plenty of other great information. Uh don't strain yourself trying to figure out what each all of these numbers are. 30-day fees, 34.4 million. What does that demonstrate here? is that cost paid through protocol activity and it proves that income retained by the DAO a decentralized autonomous organization. So 30-day protocol revenue 4.7 million in a month amount classified as protocol income direct token holder income. That's a positive and what we're really looking for the whole point of a token autopsy. So, a 30-day tracked holder revenue zero. No holder revenue recorded that A never conducted buybacks. So, that's interesting. We're going to get more into that. So, let's let's

move along from all the numbers because we're going to go through a lot of that anyways. And I think that most people don't want to hear a bunch of numbers anyways. I hate when it tries to tell me what to do. Anyways, so let's talk about a money funnel, right? So these are fees generated, protocol revenue retained, and directly tracked holder revenue. Total fees way high 34 million. But the protocol revenue 4.7. All this chart is really here is so that you can see that there was 34 million in total fees interest I'm sure is included in that but only 4.7 of that is actually protocol revenue which we already went over pretty much all of this is going to the people who supplied the liquidity for you to borrow right for you to borrow and pay interest on

well they need to get their And so that's that's where pretty much all of it goes. Hilarious. I'm doing great after a day. Is anyone here besides myself and Eugi? Yeah, there's some people here I can see. But maybe they're watching while they're driving and stuff like that. I know a lot of people have told me, "Hey, I I watch it a lot of times while I'm driving, so I can't really comment." And that's fine. Keep your hands on the wheel. 10 and two. 10 and two. All right. So, what does that really tell us? Again, 34 million was collected in fees. 4.7 actual protocol revenue. Borrowers paying interest creates the largest number of fees in the network, which makes sense because it's basically a lending protocol. So, that tracks liquidity suppliers receive much of that interest. The DAO

retains a smaller protocol share. A holders do not automatically receive the DAO's retained revenue. and token value capture begins only after governance decide what to do with the treasury income. So now we really start getting into the nittygritty. A what does it actually do? Well, a is over collateralized lending system that is the product. A normal transaction works like this. Suppliers deposit an asset into a lending pool. The supplier receives an interestbearing representation of that deposit. A borrower deposits collateral worth more than the amount being borrowed. The borrower takes liquidity from the pool. Then interest accumulates on the borrower's debt. Most interest supports the supplier's return. A reserve factor sends a portion towards a DAO. If collateral becomes sufficient, liquidators can pay debt and claim collateral under the protocol's rules. Why a borrower would use it? It's really not

that different from any other type of lending in any other place, even in the traditional world. Cam in the house. Welcome in. Welcome in Camsta. So, why a borrower would use a well obtain liquidity without immediately selling appreciated crypto, right? They don't have to sell their assets and they can borrow against it to do other things. They just better not lose their money. Leverage or hedge positions. Borrow stable coin against volatile collateral. Construct yield and looping strategies. Access liquidity programmatically through smart contracts. Why suppliers use it? Earn variable interest for supplying money basically or assets. Same thing. maintain exposure to the supplied assets, use interestbearing positions throughout DeFi, and access deep established pools instead of finding individual borrowers, right? It's all put together. Deep deep liquidity. What a does not eliminate, right? collateral price risk, liquidation risk, oracle risk,

that's data feed, smart contract risk, stable coin DPEG risk, or risk imported from collateral assets and connected pools. So, there's plenty of risk to go around here. So, the most important accounting distinctions, fees are not revenue. I'll say it again for the guy in the back, fees are not revenue. When a borrower pays interest, the complete payment does not belong to a probably one of the most important lines here. Most standard borrowing interest supports the yield earned by suppliers. The protocol receives a portion determined through its reserve factor and other fee mechanisms. Therefore, fees equal total economic cost generated through activity. Protocol revenue equals the portion retained by the protocol or DAO. And token holder revenue at the very end of it all is the portion that demonstratively benefits token holders through defined mechanisms. The three measurements should never

be used interchangeably. And let's go through the path of the money. So being a lending protocol, borrowers pay interest and fees. Suppliers receive most ordinary borrow interest, right? Suppliers receive most ordinary borrow interest. A DAO. So those are two places and that one pretty much stops there. The fees that go to the DAO reserve factor and select fee revenue, they get split up between the operational security and liquidity and growth and then the governance approved a purchases. So the final arrow is the most important. It exists, but it is governed. Not guaranteed like a contractual dividend or like a smart contract protocol that does something like a buyback or a burn. What the A token does is governance, right? AB holders can participate in decisions involving protocol upgrades, risk parameters, asset onboarding, new market deployments, treasury spending, incentive programs,

buyback budgets and service provider funding. So a token has a huge role in [music] a DAO governance. Governance is real utility, right? But we don't want to put down governance especially when governed treasury and protocols are economic economically significant. And another thing I want to point out here is that a DAO is not the same everywhere you go. What they vote on, what it matters. Like you could have a DAO that things are put up and they're directly voted on by the people that hold the token. You can have a Dow where you have that mechanism and then whatever is approved goes to a round table of people recommendation you know then you have other Dows where people take their voting right and they delegate it to different representatives and then they vote on the stuff right so it's

all over the place and who's to say what is better on first glance for a DAO you would think or governance you would think oh everybody individually should vote their opinion and that should be what defines what happens. Well, the problem is most people don't involve. They don't keep up with it. They don't vote. So, that makes a very select majority of people who are voting have all the power. Where at the same time, if you delegate, okay, now you're delegating your votes to different representatives who who really represent what you want or you think they do. very much like the political system in America. But now they can decide whatever they want and even though they're your picked representative, they might not pick what you want. So which one's really better here? Uh you really need participation in

governance. And that's the one thing we don't get and in my opinion a big part, you know, of the problem where I live in America and around the world is that a lot of people are not involved. And then you have the other factor of if if there's manipulation and things. So then does it even matter? It's a whole argument. But anyways, let's get away from that. Let's talk about staking and security with a do I own a I don't actually own any a but who knows at the end of this I might. And I don't mean I might own a I might consider owning a which is the whole point of the token autopsy. Right? Again, the reason why I'm able to do this six days a week or almost every day, we used to do seven days

a week is that I love this information because it helps me speculate in the market and raise my crypto IQ. I've learned so much from doing this show. It's crazy. and I don't really know if I'm going to like a token anymore until I do a complete token autopsy on it. That's why we got to get a lot of these tokens under our belt. So, let's talk about it. Staking and security. Well, a has historically been staked through safety related systems in exchange for rewards. Typical staking type stuff. What do we got going on? Camsta, you need to buy $1 million of a right now to show the chart you mean business. I like the way you think. I I really do. Can I borrow that million dollars from you, Camsta? Uh, and I'll pay it back at some

point. I mean, it's a lending protocol. Could you be Could you be my lending my lending protocol? All right. That arrangement should not describe as free yield. The reward compensates participants for locking up capital, smart contract exposure, liquidity restrictions, and potential backs stop or slashing responsibilities depending on the active module. Remember, there's a 1 2 3 4. I don't know how many of them are still, and those are volumes, but I don't know which ones are still operating. But just like unis swap, there's still like you could still use and set up a contract on unis swap like volume two even though they're on to like volume 4. They just do different things. So a shifting towards umbrella, a more asset specific protection system funded through protocol related yield and DAO allowance buybacks. Well, a DAO reported that its

program for buybacks began in April 9th, 2025. not that long ago allocated approximately 42 million during the first 10 months acquired more than 205,000 a purchased more than 1.2% 2% of the max supply. But the real question is what are they going to do with that? And that is genuinely economic activity involving the token. But a buyback does not automatically equal a burn, cash distribution, legal enforcement to holders return, guaranteed appreciation, or a program that can never be paused or resized. Right? So, we got to know what the heck they're going to do with those tokens. Purchase tokens may fund security, contributors, liquidity, and future initiatives. But that benefit depends on what happens after they purchase. So, they buy a bunch of tokens. Well, that's not we don't really know. That's not the end of the story. We need

to know the end of the story. Do they burn them? Do they give them away as rewards? they can buy all the tokens they want. But if those tokens do not create scarcity for the actual token, then it doesn't really matter, right? [music] It's kind of the same as if anybody else bought them other than maybe they'll give them away as rewards and you could benefit from that. Uh Cam says, "I need to find a bigger fish who wants to lend me a million at 10% interest monthly." By the way, UG, I'm giving you a generous interest rate of 25% monthly. Wow. 20 25% monthly, not even yearly. I don't even I don't even think that's legal, man. I think they put uh they put caps on that stuff, right, to protect consumers. Maybe not in Canada. In Canada,

there's probably no cap on what they can charge you in interest. So the current gap well Defi Llama presently records approximately 42.9 million in cumulative holder revenue from a purchases but zero during the last 30-day window that does not erase the historical program. It reveals that there is a connection between protocol revenue and current token purchase is not as continuous or automatic as casual a buybacks. It's not in like a smart contract that does it all the time. They kind of approve them as they go and maybe they do it and maybe they don't. [music] But I clearly said it was generous. Now you're understanding how this works. [clears throat] We both said it, so it must be true. Yeah, exactly. The war is over soon. It'll be over when it's over, I guess. I don't know. We shall

see how that goes. A supply. So, let's talk about our supply, our tokconomics, right? Well, let's just get right to the diagram because it makes more sense. Come on. So, we have circulating 96. This is all we really need to know here. 96% is circulating and 3.6% 6% remains to be the maximum supply. So the coin is almost 100% vested or out in the supply. There's very little coin to dilute your actual uh value, right? So or bring inflation. So that's a positive. I mean when you get to a point where all the token is out in the supply, then what? It's hard to inflate it after that. Unless of course they just decide that they're going to just make more tokens, which I guess they can vote on in some instances, right? Even Bitcoin, from what I've understood

about Bitcoin, there's 21 million tokens, but like if they can get enough people together and vote to make more tokens, well then they could inflate the value. I don't think you'll ever get that to happen. But how far off in the future are we talking here? Maybe in a 100 years from now they could convince everybody to vote on that because even Bitcoin has governance, right? So maximum supply 16 million. A approximately 15.4 million is already circulating. Circulating market cap and fully diluted valuations are therefore very close. A does not carry an enormous hidden supply gap found in many newer tokens mostly because it's not a newer token. Remaining emissions and treasury distribution still matter, but they are likely to multiply the supply several times over. Important qualifications here. A hard maximum supply doesn't automatically create value, but it's

a good start. Demand must still exist. Otherwise, it doesn't matter how many tokens there are if nobody wants them. A token can have perfect scarcity and weak economics. In A's case, scarcity receives credit because it exists alongside a functioning protocol. Governance, authority, and demonstrated token purchase. This really reminds me when we talk about that when it comes to tokconomics, that Lumina coin that I talk about in the tokconomics are amazing, but it's a game and what is the demand for the token? it's only going to be as good as that Lumina game actually produces, keeps developing, keeps building, keeps marketing, keeps doing stuff, then it could really matter. But just cuz it has amazing tokconomics, if that g that game kind of fades into the background, nobody cares, then it doesn't really matter. People will still sell it and

there will be no money in it. So, GH, let's talk about that. A more direct revenue source is the GH token. So GH is A's overcolateralized dollar denominated asset. When you borrow GH, GH is created against approved collateral. The borrower pays the interest. Repayment burns the repay GH. Interest paid by the borrower goes to A DAO Treasury. Right? Pretty nice technique they got there. So DeFi Llama, it's good place to get data by the way, currently reports approximately 699 million GH in circulation. This is another token, right, that's associated with the ecosystem of A. A Labs reported in February 2026 that GH has produced more than 22 million in DAO revenue since it launched. So why GH matters to A? Well, GHO does not automatically pay a holders necessarily. It matters because it creates DAO owned revenue. So that's

money in the DAO. It's like step one, get the money into the DAO and then we can vote on giving it to ourselves in the token. Is that the idea? Well, it expands a beyond taking a fraction of ordinary lending interest. The Dow can direct surplus resources towards security growth liquidity or a purchases. So if the DAO can direct surplus to something like growth, they could pay developers to make things that are highly more useful and then that could help increase A token's value or speculation in the market that could bring A's price up. So greater DHO adoption may strengthen the DAO's financial independence. [music] But the unanswered question here is will GHO's expanding economics consistently benefit A the token or primarily fund the growing A ecosystem. Both outcomes may benefit the protocol, but they are not identical for

the token holder. One of them can benefit the ecosystem, which is great, maybe long-term if you're going to really hold it for like 10 years, [music] but the token itself kind of needs that GH, you know, expanding economics to actually benefit the token and not just the ecosystem. What we're really trying to say here, so a volume 4 launched on Ethereum with a hub and spoke architecture, right? So, let's get into that. A volume 4. The basic idea is this. Liquidity hubs hold and coordinate supplied capital. Spokes create differently configured lending environments and multiple spokes can access shared liquidity. Each spoke can have different collateral risk and liquidation rules. Specialized markets do not necessarily need to rebuild liquidity from zero. Potential advantages here of course is better capital efficiency, more specialized lending markets, shared liquidity across different use cases,

greater flexibility for institutional and new revenue opportunities, better separation of certain risks without completely fragmenting liquidity. And of course, those are your potential advantages, but we have to talk about risk. More architectural complexity means more things to break. More governance or to be exploited. More governance and risk parameters. More dependency on specialist service providers. Potential uh contagion if hub level assumptions fail. Right. An early production history compared with V3. A reports that volume 4 underwent approximately 345 cumulative days of security review involving four audit firms, independent research, and six week public contest with more than 900 verified participants. So, it looks like they went through quite a bit of testing to make sure this volume 4 was all buttoned up. So that is strong preparation but it's not proof that every production failure has already been discovered. Next competitive

mode. So how does a stack up against its competitors and who is A's competitors? Right? These are crucial highlevel crypto IQ questions that we really need to answer. What protects A? Right? What is their mo? What is their advantage? Well, deep liquidity is a big one. There's a lot of money over there. A long operating history. That's good for trust, right? And reputation. A recognizable brand. All right. Large collateral integration, multi-et network deployment, established risk management contributors, and significant DAO treasury. of course the GHO token as well developers and institutional integration and high switching costs for large positions and in integrations right so one of the most important things is the fact that they have really deep liquidity and for most people that never really matters much but when you have a lot of money or people with a

lot of money you want to move around $100 million there's very limited places that you can do that you want to trade with $100 million. Well, you can't do it in uh Marscoin. There it just doesn't work. So, you need things like Bitcoin or I guess Ethereum and there's a handful of other large things like XRP and Salana and B&B, but as you get out of the top 20, maybe top 50 or top 100, it's really not a lot of coins you can move $und00 million in and out of. And that is why big big money has taken a long time to come over into the crypto assets [music] cuz they don't want to get stuck holding something for millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. It's a big deal. And they're also smart enough that they know their risk

before they take it. So who can challenge this, right? Who are the competitors for a Yeah, I saw that. the CLLD AAI. Nice. Where can you buy it? You can buy it in your dreams. That's where you can definitely buy a whole lot of uh CLD AAI token. So, who can challenge a obviously Morpho and permissionless lending infrastructure? Spark and vertical integrated stable coin ecosystems, [music] Compound, Euler, chain specific lending programs, centralized exchanges offering simpler borrowing, uh, Flare and all of their stuff, tokenized treasury and stable coin products competing for passive capital. The real competitive threat here is a does not need to lose every user to lose pricing power. Because suppliers chase yield and borrowers seek cheaper rates, competing markets can force low reserve factors, higher incentives, reduced margins, more aggressive collateral listing, and additional operating spending. And

just to reiterate here, a supplier is chasing yield. The yield is how much the borrower is paying for borrowing the money. But the borrower is seeking cheaper rates, meaning the borrower is seeking to pay less for what they borrowed. So you have this eb and flow, this give and take of course the supplier wants more yield, but of course the borrower wants cheaper rates. So where do we find a happy medium? And that [music] is a big deal, right? So the moat is substantial, but the capital is still mobile security and decentralization. Hilarious. If Cam said it, it must be true. I like that. I'm going with that. So security and decentralization, right? Supporting evidence. Multiple protocol generations have operated through severe crypto market stress, aka bare markets, and bad times. and they haven't seemed to have too much

trouble except for that trouble that they had recently. We'll get to that in a minute. Volume 4 received extensive auditing, formal verification, and public review. Off to a good start. Risk parameters are publicly governed. A uses specialized risk and technical service providers. Protocol contracts and governance activity are publicly inseparable. Inspectable. Sorry, not inseparable but inspectable. Umbrella and other backstock systems address shortfall risk. So they have a backstock backs stop system. Not everything does. Limiting evidence though is that DeFi Lama records a March 2026 oracle misconfiguration incident involving approximately $862,000 that was later returned. Right. But I'm sure it scared the crap out of some people. A depends on external collateral price oracles and connected infrastructure. So there's always somewhere where there's somebody else involved, right? Uh Hex Downunder says, "Morning brother. Win Clarity Act." Well, Clarity Act is looking

like uh what do we say? I'm going off top of the dome here. in two days. It's supposed they they the Republicans revised the Clarity Act, sent it back out, and they're going to argue about it in two days. Now, what's still in it, what has been taken out of it, we don't really know. Just to recap there. Um, but it it it's headed for further arguing. Basically, they say discussion, but it's just, you know, give me a little of this, I'll give you a little bit of that. So, a depends on external collateral, right? Price oracles and connected infrastructure. Price oracles can be a problem. I don't know if anybody even still remembers what happened to Bitcoin like October 10th of what last year. That was a pain, but that was all I'm pretty sure data being fed

through oracles and other matters. And it was seemed like a coordinated thing to me but the market took a huge hit. Right. So the relationship between a labs the DAO the brand interfaces and intellectual property has required explicit governant governance debates. Right? So all of this stuff has to [music] do with what the governance decides and of course they have to debate it. Volume 4 adds new code and architectural complexities. And yes, we're really focusing on volume 4 because that's what is predominant or newest going on in a so decentralization has layers to it. It's not necessarily just decentralized or not decentralized. Right? A governance can control protocol perimeters without necessarily owning every surrounding asset. The governance for a forum has debated questions involving brand ownership. Uh domains and communication channels, intellectual property, a lab's role in everything, Dowfunded

development, conflicts of interest, and voting concentration. Concentration concentration. I guess we could go with that, too. But that's not what it actually says. Clarity Act for crypto. The next major step is tomorrow. Yep. And uh I think it's going to pass. Now, will it pass tomorrow or whatever? I don't think so, but it could be as soon as in the next couple of days. So, this does not prove A is secretly centralized. It proves that decentralizing contracts, governance, and brands, operating organizations are separate problems for A and their governance. So, let's go into like what is proven, probable and unproven. I really like this section here. A solves a real lending problem. That's proven. Billions in deposits and active loans across multiple market cycles. No argument there. A generates protocol revenue. Any amount proves that they generate some revenue.

Could be $10. Treasury revenue is measurable on chain. So we can see it. It is transparent. A has low remaining dilution. Well, that's proven because we know that it has approximately 15 million out of 15.4. So closer to like 15 and a half out of 16 million. It's only like a little over half a million coins to come into circulating out of 15 or out of 16 altogether. Pretty good if you get what I'm saying. Ave buybacks have occurred, but the Dow reported more than 205,000 in a acquired. That is proven. What is not proven? Well, buybacks permanently reduce supply. That's not proven cuz buybacks just mean purchases. They don't mean burns, right? [music] Every A product benefits a that's not proven at all. Product, DAO, and corporate economics require separate tracing. And in our token autopsy, we're really

only concerned about the token itself. V4 will expand A's market share. Probable, but it's not exactly a guarantee. Strong architecture and distribution, but adoption must actually be measured as it actually happens. Are they holders own protocol revenue like shareholders? False. Um this is this is this kind of thing is more for your trady people right but tradfi people might be looking at a bigger coin like a they're not looking at you know uh she inu so a does not provide a conventional equity claim or dividend that should just be automatically known but I like to keep it in the token autopsy because somebody may be new coming from the trady world who considers themselves well-versed in finances is but may not necessarily know that about crypto right a's moat their ability to win over against their competitors is completely

unproven capital is mobile and competitive is and competition is advancing right so there's more people getting into the lending borrowing space think about how many tokens we've gone over that have like a finance in it finance or something like that a lot of those are lending protocols and collectively they can really take a big share air away from a big company like a uh Hex Down Under says, "Cheers for the update." Absolutely, man. Cheers for being here. I appreciate you. Double check that you hit that like button for me. So, valuation reality check here. At the time that was checked, AB market capitalization was approximately 1.9 billion. Defi Llama trailing annualized protocol revenue estimated was approximately a hundred million and dividing those figures produced through rough market cap to protocol revenue ratio near 19 to 20 times. I know

that means nothing to most of you. Don't worry about it if you don't get it. And this is not a stock style price right to sale ratio. Why not? A holders do not automatically have claim on the revenue. Dow expenses can be considered. Revenue charges, rates, collateral prices, demand, and liquidations. The DAO decides how retained resources are deployed and the buyback is done through the Dow. So, we're all at the mercy of the Dow. Let's get to drum roll. I wish I had a drum roll. Uh, one day I'll get one of those mach machines where I hit the button and we have all these cool sounds. Today is not the day. Tomorrow doesn't look real good either. Anyways, let's talk about how a actually scores because this is what we really care about all together at the end.

So, real utility and adoption a 19 out of 20. Token value capture a 14 out of 20. a decent score, but there's still some to be desired there. We're six points down. But look how the real utility stacked up, right? It stacked up one point short of a perfect score. Tokconomics and supply, got to admit, pretty good. 14 out of 15. I mean, it's almost completely max supplied. So that that is good because then we don't have to worry about dilution. Competitive mode, 13 out of 15. solid security and decentralization, a seven out of 10. Uh catalyst and execution, a nine out of 10 and a risk and unanswered questions, a 6 out of 10. Right? There's always going to be some an unansweredness about a project, its ecosystem, what we're going to be doing moving forward. But altogether,

that gives an 82 out of 100. That is a pretty good score. Um [music] yes, Landa, we already answered you. We have information about uh the CLD AAI token pre-sale that you keep spamming in the chat. If you will just lay down in a comfy place and drift off into some rest, into some sleep, a dream will come to you. And in that dream, you will be able to purchase astronomical amounts of CD uh CLLD AAI token. And then you can be very happy and stop spamming in my chat. Got to love the bots, right? I know it's a bot. I'm just trying to make make some fun here. All right, this chart not useful to us. And then I have like an a detailed thing about why it scored what it scored in each ones. I don't particularly

think that you want to uh go over all of that because it's a lot of reiteration. It's a lot of reiterating what we have already talked about, but I will be posting it on Twitter and they will all be nicely organized in the um the discord which is linked down in the chat free discord. This all stuff will all get organized in there. I just haven't got to that yet. Have uh have some grace with me. Got a lot going on. I should have uh you know another human being living in my house. My son should be born probably in [music] the next week, week and a half down to that last moment. and I still have a business to run every day. Anyways, I'm not I'm not really asking for any sympathy. I'm just saying I'm a little

bit behind on a couple of things that I always still think about, which is getting all of this stuff up into our Discord because I think it'll be highly valuable, but it's coming. I haven't forgot. So, let's talk about the strongest argument of our score, right? So, I think to be the most balanced, right, we we do a full token autopsy report and then we turn around and give you how or what you might want to look for that would kind of invalidate our reasoning here on this token autopsy. And I feel like that's the best way to get both sides, right? So an 82 out of 100 may give a too much credit for achievements belonging to the A product. Specifically, A the token is not stock in a labs. It does not provide a guaranteed dividend or

legal claim on protocol revenue. The DAO can spread revenue on developers, incentives, security, liquidity, expansion instead of token purchases if it so chooses to do so. Even when tokens are purchased, they may be retained or redistributed rather than actually burned. We need them burned pretty much always in everything, we need tokens being burned. So, Devi Llama currently records no holder revenue during the last 30 days. That's not real great, but we had some things go on. Maybe that's a product of what happened with a from before. They had paused a lot of stuff. If the token's economic connection can disappear whenever governance prioritizes other things, that's a problem. And critics can reasonably argue that a remains a scarce governance token [music] surrounding a successful lending business, not ownership of that business, something somebody out of TRDFI would be highly

concerned about. So that criticism is why the token value capture received a 14 out of 20 instead of a near-perfect score. But a still possesses more than narrative, right? A governance. It governs a cash generating DAO. So there is revenue there has demonstrated buyback in buyback history in the buyback program they started last like was it April something of 2025? So it wasn't that long ago and it's already starting to to to stall. So that's that's worrisome. Controls a scarce token supply and sits inside an ecosystem with proven demand and significant treasury resources. The product case is strong and stronger than the token case, right? The product on fire and is amazing. The token value capture is wishy-washy, but is somewhat there, but you're at the mercy of the DAO or the governance arm of everything, which means it's

not like a buyback that's put in a smart contract that just executes all the time that you can count on. But the token case is still materially stronger than most of the market. So our final verdict here is a pass. A passes the token autopsy because it combines genuine adoption, substantial protocol revenue, and strong supply characteristics, an established competitive mo, and demonstrates history of purchasing a from the market. I feel like I'm going to lose my voice, but this is conditional product versus token conclusion. So, the point here, not to give you guys a whole bunch more words, is that it passes the [music] token autopsy. That was a little bit to unpack. Hopefully, you guys are still with me. I see there's a few more people here. Uh L is not responding to me about her CLLD AI

token. I I already told you where you can find the pre-sale. Uh no credit. I hope you hit the like button. So max supply 16 million. We already went over that. 15.4 circulating supply. So very little to come out. Uh categories is of course finance, right? Yield farming, lending and borrowing, stable coin issuer, governance, base native. That's good. I love to see things native to the base ecosystem. And it's got a ton of interoperability as any good lending protocol should be highly interoperable because it needs to move all over the place as a lending protocol and have a lot of different assets if they want a lot of people to use it. [clears throat] And that pretty much concludes our token autopsy of A. I will tell you uh to smash that like button and make sure you're subscribed.

There's a free Discord down in the chat where you can find us when we're not streaming. Uh, I've been saying it a lot this last week, but I kind of have to. I gave up the to uh the ad revenue. I'm so used to saying token revenue. The ad revenue for the channel as far as playing ads while you're watching this show for your viewer enjoyment. As many people said, they couldn't stand the ads. Okay, that's fine. I appreciate that your feedback. So, I'm going to go ahead and move on it, but if you could do me a favor and consider a membership, they start at $3. All right? If I'm not worth $3 to you, then I I guess I'm providing zero value. Enough of that. But if you would consider a membership or throw in a super

chat every once in a while, would greatly appreciate that. That would offset the the money. It wasn't a lot of money, but it was not zero money either. Beauty in the eye of the beholder, right? So, I would appreciate it if you would subscribe to the channel and maybe consider a membership, but feel free to hop in that Discord. You get access to the our our crypto family and our main people in our ecosystem, right? But at the same time, you also get access to me if there's anything you want to talk to me about. Don't ask me to balance your portfolio or tell you where to what to buy or this that and the other. We do research here. This is not financial advice. Hello Zo, what's up? Thank you and welcome into the channel says great info.

I and I said welcome into the channel. I'm pretty sure you've been here. Great info. I think I'll add some a spot. Yeah, absolutely. [music] And uh what else can I really say about AB? [snorts] I had a I was gonna show something a minute ago and I forgot what it is, but it kind of lines up with what you were saying. If you're going to add some Oh, okay. I remember what it was. The So, the market cap's almost $2 billion, right? But when when crypto goes parabolic, right? or it just goes euphoric, which I don't really think will happen for a couple of years, but you're not going to probably be able you're not going to be able to buy a at $128 two years from now when things start going parabolic. It'll probably be at least

at least double by then. But a lot of money is going to flow through lending. There's going to be a lot of people who rather are geniuses or think that they're geniuses who are going to be borrowing against what they what they have, right? They're going to put it in as collateral and they're going to borrow against it so they don't have to sell what they have. And then they're going to try to double or triple, quadruple their money off of the money that they borrowed. A lot of them are just going to lose their money and a is going to make a ton of money by keeping their collateral because they can't pay their debt and that could help a lot. My point that I'm trying to say here is that I do think from now to the

top of a bull market, you could have a lot of money flow into the market cap. And then something that I always say that I want to reiterate here is when you look at a meme coin, right, and it's a meme coin with zero product and zero value and it's at like a hundred million or even a billion dollars, right? Which is pretty good for a memecoin. Certainly, you have to think, what are the odds that this memecoin is going to go another billion dollars? Like, that's just a lot to ask. That's a lot to ask. And in that type of situation, you'd hear me say something like, "Hey, this memecoin's already at $200 million. What are the odds it's going to get another $200 million?" And if it did, you would only double your money, which sounds great

if you have a ton of money, but if you got like a $100 and it it's peanuts. There's probably better opportunity somewhere. But for a big project, a top 30, top 50 projects. They will attract much larger capital, much larger institutional interest. and an institution could put $2 billion in something like like you buy a cheeseburger at your favorite fast food place. So, with that being said, I wouldn't be scared of the fact that the market cap's almost 2 billion and like where will they ever get another $2 billion from all the people who want to put money up so that they can earn interest and yield off of it. That's who for sure. Well, with that being said, I appreciate everybody. love to see l always. I know a lot of times I think you say you watch

on your TV. So I appreciate you coming and actually dropping a comment. I think that's all I got for you guys. Struggle heart with the popcorn. There again is no gaming stream tonight if I haven't said that yet. Uh I basically I just didn't get to set up a a gaming stream tonight because I ran around all day. I don't know if I should tell you all of what I got going on or what I've been up to, but why not, right? You know me, I'm pretty transparent. I uh still having a wonderful time doing these streams. I'm still learning a ton. I'm still raising my crypto IQ and I'm going to be here regardless doing that as we go through the market. I hope that a lot of the things I said have resonated with you and you've

considered building some spot bags at the bottom of the market, potentially the bottom of the market, right? I'll feel a lot better once we start holding higher than 85K for a week or two. I think we're done. We're done with those lows, but we're still got to see about, you know, that October 5th date bottom of the market historically. Have a good night everybody. Why is it that when I'm wrapping up the stream like just people come piling in? How's everybody doing? We just did a whole uh token autopsy on A. Highly encourage you to go back and watch it. It was a good one. A got a great score, but you'll have to go back and watch it for that. Other than that, I am going to go ahead and jump off. You guys have a great night,

and I will be back tomorrow with another token autopsy. Yes, sir. Blues Cry, great to see you. All right, everybody. Stay underground, stay crypto, think long term, and I will catch you tomorrow night, 8:30 p.m. New York time with another token autopsy. Remember, we don't just do a random four token autopsy. We give it we connect it. We're talking about DeFi protocol business models. We'll we'll do four of those token autopsies. We'll have a D5 Friday and then we'll do a Saturday where we wrap everything up and go back over it just to cement it into your brain to make sure you really understood what I'm putting down here. Later Blues Guy, later Melissa, later Zo later strugg night everyone. It was a lot of fun. Catch you in the next one. Underground Crypto out.