Colin Butler - From Bitcoin to Stablecoins: The Next Chapter in DAT - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

My name is Colin Butler. I am co-founder of Mega Matrix. And the title of the the speech today is around digital asset treasuries that are moving from the original theme which is Bitcoin to more productive assets and in this case stable coins. So I'm going to introduce a novel topic today. We are actually representing the firstofits-kind basket of stable coin tokens in a digital asset treasury and that's just being announced uh today here at the conference.

So appreciate everyone hearing it and I'm looking forward I'm super excited to talk about it. So Megatrix is focused on being the number one stablecoin focused digital asset treasury company in the world. We're going to start with a $2 billion initiative to develop digital asset treasury strategies on stablecoin and governance token pairs. And here's where it starts to get fun. So the initial basket will be governance tokens of stable coins starting with Athena, Sky, STBL, Hyperlid, and Aster.

The market for stable coins is projected to grow to $2 trillion by the end of 2028. Now that's not something I made up. That was actually suggested by Treasury Secretary Scott Bent in the United States and it's also aligned with the number given by Standard Chartered. So what does that mean to everybody in this room? A number of two trillion.

How does that apply to us as individuals or us as investors? Some numbers around stable coins. Right now, the market for stable coins is $287 billion. They do $3.2 trillion in monthly transfer volume.

They have 26 million monthly active users and 193 million holders. But if we're focused on what a growth opportunity looks like for stable coins, we take that number of 287 billion and we look at a number of two trillion by the end of 2028. And what we get is a growth of 7x from where we are today in as short a time as 2 to 3 years. And so what I believe this represents is not only the best growth story in crypto, but potentially the best growth story in the entire stock market. We believe at Mega Matrix that the growth in stable coins can go from 1% of US M2 penetration to a 10% number and something similar with FX penetration 1% also to 10%.

Now I encourage everyone to do their own work. Please check our numbers. Come up a come up to us afterward to speak about our assumptions. But internally, we see the potential for a10 trillion dollar number in as short a time as five to 10 years. And so what I think you're getting is quite frankly the most incredible secular growth story likely since the internet.

Certainly I think the best secular growth story on the market right now. And the challenge that I think investors face is that currently in public equities, there's only one way to express an investment opinion on stable coins and that is Circle. And so we're here to represent the second path to expressing an investment opinion and that is a stablecoin focused basket of stablecoin tokens. Really the first of its kind. So this is a new generation digital asset treasury strategy.

When we think about a digital asset treasury strategy based on Bitcoin, it's really a buy and hold strategy. There's some capital markets engineering, but those strategies are no longer novel even after as short a time as 3 months when a lot of them have started coming online. What you need in the future is a strategy based on productive assets. While you're waiting, you need to be able to maximize yield by staking and putting it into DeFi in such a way that you grow a business model around capital markets activities. So, what we have is a dual engine for stability and growth.

And I'm going to start with Athena. And I'm going to spend a little bit of time on this one because I want to be very specific about how people can take advantage of this opportunity. Within an overall exponential growth story of stable coins from $280 billion to 7 trillion in the next couple years, we believe there's a couple tokens that will be market share growers and market share leaders within the second within the secular story and Athena is one of those. Athena currently has a market cap of around 4 billion. It's got total supply of 14.

3 billion in USDE and 1.8 billion in USDTB. But that's not the real story. I don't think the numbers tell it. What I want to do is project a picture, a vision for potential growth in Athena specifically as it compares to Circle, which is again the only public pure play on stable coins at the moment.

And again, this will be the second. So if you take a supply of 14 billion, let's just call it 15 billion for back of the napkin math, and you say through a basis trade mechanism or delta hedging mechanism, Athena generates around 10%. And the yield varies. Last year on average, it generated around 19%. Currently, it's right around 6%.

But just for the sake of the back of the napkin assumption sort of based math, let's just say it's 10%. What that means is if there's 15 billion in total supply of USD and it's a 10% return for the Delta hedging strategy, we're talking about $1.5 billion that flow through to the Athena ecosystem under an assumption of a fee switch, which we believe is a catalyst for the story and it's likely happening in the not too distant future. And under an assumption of a 10% fee switch, again this is just for very simple math to allow people to directionally understand where all this is headed, you get a number of 150 million in cash generation. And why that number is so important is because that's about the number that Circle did last year in cash generation.

They did 155 million. And so if you take a comp like that to the public equity markets from where it is now in purely in crypto and you apply the same multiple that Circle is getting to Athena, what you get to get to Circle's $30 billion valuation on the same number for cash generation is a 7x from where Athena currently sits today. And so what we're talking about not only is a secular growth story in stable coins, which we're projecting at a 7x over the next two to three years, but you're also getting a specific growth story within that segment, specifically with Athena, which is another 7x. And so all of a sudden, you're doing math that looks more like an exponential growth story. It's a 7x 7x getting to a 49x.

Now, these are big numbers and you're probably going to say, Colin, I don't know if I'd buy that. But what I want to do today is illustrate a directional narrative as to why people should really start doing the work if you haven't done it already. My view is that this story for some people in this audience will change careers and it will change lives. Just understanding the direction that this is going and how rapidly adoption is taking place. This is not a 10 or 20% growth story.

which is what I think portfolio managers in the traditional stock markets right now in the equity markets are shooting for. This is an exponential growth story and we want to bring that story to public investors for really the first time. So some numbers around Athena. Athena has the third and 10th largest stable coin behind Tether and Circle on the market today. And so by accumulating the governance token of Athena, you actually have a call on the revenue of the protocol.

This is a really important point for digital asset treasuries because if we're talking about the next generation of DATs, people are going to ask what happens when the market goes down. And the short answer to that is that you have to have an operating model on whatever it is underlying your digital asset treasury. So for instance, Bitcoin has no yield currently. What happens during a downturn? What happens when your capital strategies are no longer effective and you can no longer use the volatility in capital markets to add value per share?

And so one of the answers to that for the modern next generation DAT is to create a yield and to actually create an operating model around what you're doing. And that's exactly what we're going to do at Mega for the benefit of public equity investors. Now I really wanted to spend a lot of time on Athena because I think it illustrates well the strategy. But there are other tokens that we will also be accumulating. We will be accumulating Sky.

Maker is one of the OGs in the space, one of the original D5 protocols. It's also one of multiple synthetic dollars that represent something that falls right outside the framework of Genius Comp, but something for which we believe could also see exponential growth. And I'm going to kind of go through skip through the slides a little bit, but this will be posted online so everyone again can do their own work. But I think this provides a highle overview of where we're going with this strategy, what kind of numbers we think we can achieve, including exponential growth. Hyperl is another great example.

Hyperl did a a billion dollars in revenue last year versus NASDAQ, one of the largest companies in the world. It's been around for a long time at 8 billion. Hyperl did it in a hyperscaling, incredibly short period of time. And our view of Megatrix is that it could achieve NASDAQ's level of revenue also in a historically short time. And so by buying these governance tokens on stable coins, we believe we're taking advantage of one of the top narratives in the entire world right now.

Aster is another token that we we think people should be looking at. This is a competitor sponsored by Binance to Hyperlquid which we believe will also benefit from the exponential growth that I think we're seeing in the space. And so what we want to posit is that there are is a variety of ways to play the 7x growth in the broader stable coin market. And within that growth benefit from specific names that are growers, market share growers within the larger secular story to create an explosion of value for investors. And really why we're so happy to bring this to market is that this is the first time that I think investors can get exposed to a story like this in a market that's starved for growth that likely only grows 10 to 20% in a good year.

We can really offer something far beyond that for investors that are really able to do the research and underwrite the narratives and participate in something that I think is the best story likely since the internet was invented. The final stable coin in our basket is something that's actually near and dear to my heart. It's STBL which separates principle from interest and it is a very novel way to play stable coins. And just to illustrate how quickly this is growing, they went from essentially 0 to5 billion in the course of seven days. And so I think to the extent that investors want exposure to explosive growth stories like this with not only a massive secular trend, but growth stories in and of themselves for each additional each each token, we want to provide that in order for them to express again a novel investment opinion on assets like these.

Thank you very much for having me. Thanks again to the token 2049 team. Appreciate everybody's time.