Fund, and I'll be your moderator for today. I'm joined on today's webinar by James Heckman, Roundtable Chief Executive Officer, Bill Sorensen, Roundtable Chief Operating Officer, and myself as Chief Financial Officer. James will first review an investor presentation. Following that, we will open the webinar up to a moderated set of questions and answer session. If you have questions, you can submit them in the Q&A box located at the bottom of the section of your Zoom screen. With that, I am happy to introduce James Heckman, Chief Executive Officer of Roundtable, who will begin the review of the presentation. Take it away, James.
Thank you.
Thanks, Ali.
I'm very proud to have Aly on board for the company. Some of you may have seen our recent announcement. You know Aly's pristine financial mind, but more so in the blockchain investor community with over 200 investments, equity investments in world-changing platform initiatives. After this being his biggest investment, he's actually taking a sabbatical from leading that investment firm to come over to be our CFO. We are very excited about this visionary joining us. We will talk a little bit about the rest of the very senior leadership and technical team that's leading this initiative. Starting off, just a slide of my background. Really, this isn't about a resume in any way. I think, to put it simply, I've really done one thing with a world-class team, which has grown through the years, and nothing else since 1991.
Originally from Seattle, and we've accumulated engineers from Amazon and Microsoft and Google and top technical companies through these decades doing one thing. That one thing is the technical sales, distribution, and operational infrastructure for major media brands. The way to think about it is there's a world of social and search, which took over the classified advertising and direct mail, basically transactional advertising. Those are different ad agencies, a whole different world. That's now a multi-trillion dollar industry with Meta and Google and Amazon. We don't play in that world. There's a $200 billion advertising industry that has been my focus since working with the NFL and as a president at age 25, running all of their platforms for publishing that we've been working on for 35 years or so.
What that involves is when you're on a website, if you're watching a video, and you are doing so on a premium media company, there's $200 billion spent to reach you in that very pristine environment. That's called branded advertising. That branded advertising world is where you differentiate yourself from a Honda or Mercedes or a Timex to a Rolex or drinking Pepsi or Coke versus fruit juice out of your refrigerator. Basically, the delta between utility value and a retail price is determined by people's thoughts about a certain product. Over the years, starting with the NFL, building digital infrastructure and designing the first ad network, moving on as one of SoftBank's original CEOs back when Mark Cuban and I were original CEOs at SoftBank, we built the largest sports network in the world, sold that to Yahoo for $100 million.
We built an infrastructure that allows premium publishers to publish, to distribute. We do ad operations, yield management, streaming, data storage, audience storage, really everything that a major media company sitting in New York or LA would never dream of doing. That is our expertise. On with me is Bill Sorensen. He's been with me since 1999. He was the lead product manager for MSN and helped build Exchange, built Hotmail into MSN, and one of the top product managers in the world. We built 12 networks together over these years. We went on to build, 20 years before Substack, the first subscription platform for hundreds and hundreds of journalists and media companies around the world.
I then went on to be Chief Strategy Officer for Rupert Murdoch, where I oversaw MySpace, designed the first ad platform for social, then put together the business model for Hulu, which is, again, infrastructure for major media. I went on to build the largest ad network, premium ad network with AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Disney, and every major media company. Again, an ad infrastructure. Our team went on to build at Maven, a New York Stock Exchange company, for Sports Illustrated, History Channel, Biography, The Street.
The headline here, if you look at those pretty logos on the far right, is that 100% of my team's career and my career has been doing all the stuff that nobody wants to do technically for major media so that they can be recognized on Google and MSN and Yahoo, show up first in the search results, get the highest cost for their advertising, build in huge scale, multi-billion dollar partnerships with advertisers, reach hundreds of millions and eventually billions of users. What's happened recently is blockchain technology. Blockchain technology is going to change the media industry, I would say, three generations ahead of any platform in the world. If you go ahead to the co-founder, Il Hertzog, I was able to partner about three years ago with Il. Il is the inventor of decentralized finance protocol.
Before Il's invention, people had to go on Reddit and trade tokens. He invented the idea of a digital liquidity pool, automated market making, and smart contracts to trade finance. This invention changed the world. It's now a $3 trillion industry. What I wanted to do is basically cut out this huge space, sometimes up to 120 days, of the media companies actually generating the traffic and paying for that great content and videos. By the time they get paid from ad agencies, it takes 90-120 days. They don't really know how much they're making. They can't get real-time feedback and what's working and what's not working.
Through the blockchain, we can now give them real-time payments, and they can have possession of their own data, possession of their own audience, essentially humanless contact with all the revenue that they're producing, that they're booking from a GAAP standpoint, but not getting paid. Il invented something then called dWeb, decentralized web. Binance, a lot of you guys are familiar with, funded him for $10.5 million. I bought his company about two years ago. We merged our Web1, Web2 platform and our engineers with his engineers in Tel Aviv. Over the last two years, we built the most remarkable, for sure, three generations ahead of any of our competitors' system, all on chain. Since then, we partnered with major media, which I'll show you in a bit. David Bailey is the voice of Bitcoin.
He really has led the world in terms of understanding what Bitcoin is, what blockchain is. He brought blockchain to the White House. Famous guy. He's my co-founder and bringing just an army of investors. Walton Comer, Chairman of the Board, is operationally heavily involved with our business. He just sold his company for over $4 billion to Coinbase. The first money in partnered in terms of architecture is 15 years. Stephen Cohen, Commodities Quant, who then sold his data company for $1 billion. Deribit is certainly the largest M&A in the history of crypto. He's helping advise us on our liquidity pool that allows media companies to get paid instantly. A little bit more about our founders to find out the type of, if you go on to the next founder slide, top people in the industry are backing this initiative.
Mike Alexander, CEO of Jefferies Asia, did the largest ICO in history, over $4 billion for Block One. He was just intimate in recent IPOs for a bullish multi-billion dollar company, Figure, multi-billion dollar company. Again, those two companies exactly mirroring what we're doing, which is blockchain-based, SaaS platform, consumer-facing. Graham Russan, biggest name in hockey. Our first client is the largest hockey network. We just landed the International Hockey Federation. We will show you later, we're running the top website for every NHL team, plus Junior, plus the Olympic Hockey. That was our first client and growing that business. Bill, very senior product manager at Microsoft and our partner in building 12 networks over the last 20 to 30 years. Ali, our new CFO, talked to him about recently.
Brock Pierce, many of you know, he's the founder of Tether, which is one of the largest companies in the world. It was his brainchild. I think we have just an unbelievable elite team. I think we have the best blockchain engineering team in the world under Il. I think from a financial leadership standpoint, Mike is really the person who kicked in the door and brought kind of the crypto world into major media. There is no product manager with more experience building platforms for major media in Bill Sorensen. I think there is nobody who has more investments, equity investments in infrastructure for digital, and obviously one of the early voices in Brock Pierce. I think I'd like to explain a little bit about what we do in case there's any confusion.
If you kind of go to the product, the product compare, you were just there. No, the product compare slide. Yes, there you go. As an investor, I think one of the most difficult things that you have to worry about, but you do not have to worry about with us, even in a little way, not even 1%, is to think, hey, will these guys be able to go to market and get consumers to participate on their product? That really has nothing to do with what we do. We are a technical backend, technical backend for an already existing $200 billion industry. We do not have to go to consumers and say, hey, come to Roundtable or anything like that. What we need to do is what we have done for the last 30 years with a 12 and 0 record.
I think I'm the only Silicon Valley CEO who's never had a product that isn't still in business today and profitable. For example, going to The Hockey News, 50-year-old Brandon saying, hey, we can provide you way better service if you look at this than any other company in the world. We invented the digital media platform when SoftBank and Intel backed me. We've done it for Disney. We've done it for MSN, AOL, Yahoo, Discovery, The Street, Sports Illustrated. Every major media company I've designed backend platform for. Not a single media company that I haven't done major work starting with the NFL. The question that you'd ask as an investor is, does your platform work for major media better than the alternative? That's literally it, right? Because when we signed up The Hockey News, we didn't buy The Hockey News. We're not trying to do hockey content.
We're just the backend. Overnight, overnight, millions of users were using our platform. We take in the money. We put it onto the blockchain. That allows the hockey news to get paid by the nanosecond instead of having to wait 90-120 days. What you can see is all these incredible components that they don't have to pay for. They don't have to go out and have a team of 50 figure out ad optimization, yield management. They don't have to go sign up syndication relationships. I'll go into that a little bit so that their content can be seen on Google or Apple, Apple News, Apple Plus, MSN. It's something that takes decades to build those relationships. When you work with us, it happens automatically. A little bit like Hulu, we immediately had syndication across every major media company.
It went to a multi-billion dollar company overnight. When I built the biggest premium ad network in the world, I already had AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Disney. Overnight, advertisers reached hundreds of millions of people. The question from an investor is, now that our 12th network is built, does the product work? It was already up and live and reaching millions of people. It not only works, it works better than any other product in the world. For those of you who understand technology, there is something called full stack. We are not talking about one feature like WordPress doing content management. We are not talking about an ad network. We are not talking about YouTube, which is a one trick pony, which is video. We are not about Substack, which sells subscriptions. All those are one or two trick ponies. We literally do everything. How is that possible?
Thirty-five years of being the best in the industry, building backends with incredible PhD-level talent and decades of experience with major media plugging in syndication. When we started working with The Street, overnight, they're syndicated on Apple and Apple News and Apple Plus and MSN and Yahoo Finance. They reached 900 million. We're able to do that for them. Overnight, we've got advertising. It's like, hey, do they know how to sell advertising? I mean, I ran global strategy for Yahoo. I had a $5 billion ad budget. At Fox, we brought in incredible amounts of advertising. At Rivals and Scout, of which I was a founder, millions of subscriptions. These are things that took decades for us to do. I think our only viable competitor is Vox. Because of financial constraints, they quit generating SaaS clients.
They essentially merged themselves into being a media company. My last company, Arena, would have been a competitor. Once my team left and all of our engineers, they could not service third parties. They effectively are a media company now. We think we stand alone and no company is operating entirely on a blockchain, which completely alleviates their having to bill and do reporting for clients. I think we are in a position a little bit like AWS was when they were the only cloud-based web services or DoubleClick when they were the only viable ad-serving company. If I was an investor who kind of sits back and wanted to analyze us, what would be the risk? The first risk is, do they have enough money? We have no debt. We have $30 million sitting in the bank.
We have almost no expenses because we're essentially a software business. I think in terms of, do we have the lasting power? We have enough money to last for years. There's no going concern issue. Hey, can I get liquid? Can I get public? If you look at our press releases, hopefully, Alliance is providing that for you. We landed a Nasdaq-listed company for only 6% dilution, basically a non-event. When I filed my S-1 with Goldman Sachs, they sold so much stock to mezzanine-level companies that the dilution was just stunning. We're essentially going public, have no dilution. Okay? Hey, could they be delisted? If you look at one of our public filings, I invested, we invested significant money. We bought the preferred. We essentially control the public company. They can't get out of the merger.
If they do their breach, our preferred becomes common, and we take over the company. We can force the merger. Is there a risk that the merger is going to happen? Is there a risk of delisting? We put enough money in the company. With a reverse split that we've announced, the items that would have put us in danger are gone. We got and filed and let public know that Nasdaq reached us and said we are no longer in danger of that delisting from shareholder equity. I think the risk factors would come down to execution. We're 12 and 0. The company's operating. I think it's just time. How fast can we take a meaningful portion as a SaaS business of the $200 billion in premium media? We've never not taken a meaningful percentage.
Now it's like, what does that mean as an investor? Why don't we go to the comps? No, comps. Okay. Okay. What are you? What is this company? We're not a media company. We're not a DAT. We're not a treasury company. We're not anything like that. We are a full stack. You guys saw what full stack meant. Consumer-facing. In other words, we actually take in the revenue. We touch the consumer from an infrastructure, from a technical standpoint. SaaS platform. Just like Coinbase, they aren't Ethereum. They aren't Bitcoin. They're not Polkadot. They touch the consumer. The consumer logs on to Coinbase, right? They generate the transaction for Ethereum. They take in the money for Ethereum. They give back the money to Ethereum. They're the exchange. They're the marketplace.
They're the hub of a consumer-facing platform that their SaaS clients, tokens in this case, use the platform as an exchange. My partner invented that entire thing, decentralized finance. We're essentially Coinbase for media, right? The media companies are producing content, producing videos. The advertisers are putting money into our liquidity pool. Consumers are consuming. Basically, there's a clearance and money goes to the content producers. ESPN, if we had that account, would be like Ethereum. The consumers are the people who are consuming or buying a token. We basically have a liquidity pool and a platform all on-chain. Okay. What does that mean from a standpoint of value? Value is the stock. Okay. A SaaS platform, Web1, Web2, like Netflix, like Spotify, like AWS, they're not on-chain. There's a lag time on getting paid.
They have to generate the content over the month, send bills out to advertisers, send bills to consumers, bring the money in, and then eventually pay. The data can be hacked. The audience is not on-chain. The database is not on-chain. That Web1 and Web2, on average, if you were to chat GBT media SaaS companies and go look what they are, but I'll just tell you some of them, Hulu, Spotify, Netflix, Rivals.com, Scout.com, 24/7, these are companies that are single platform, touching consumers, but operating as a SaaS platform for media companies. On average, it's $7. Seven is average. Look at Spotify, $6.6 revenue. Let's just stop for a second as an investor. Media companies are, in my view, a horrific, horrible investment. There's no scale. It's not software. On average, 4-6 times EBITDA.
SaaS platforms in the media industry is anywhere from 7 to 10. I've sold multiple SaaS platforms for media companies. I've never been paid less than 7. I had one that was Infinity in 2008 that I sold to Yahoo. No revenue, but rolled up clients and moved it to Yahoo. It eventually became a platform for every major media company. Now we talk about Web3. Web3 has the remarkable component because my partner, his invention of decentralized finance, gets immediate payment and total encrypted control of data and audience. IP protection, audience data protection, absolute instant payment to the media companies because of this liquidity pool invention. If you look at Figure, Kraken, Coinbase, I'm not sure why Bullish got disappeared from here, but it should go on there. These are SaaS platforms, consumer-facing, single database, full stack.
The SaaS client, all of the technology is taken care of. That is what we are, just profoundly more complex than Coinbase, profoundly more complex than Kraken or Figure because we have so many components, which we showed you. What that means is the final thing for an investor is, okay, I get the market size is $200 billion. We are going to take a meaningful component part of that, as happened at Hulu, as happened with our big ad network. Okay. Believable. Does the technology work? It is up. It is running. I will show you here in a little bit. Okay. Is there a leadership team that knows how to do it, been doing it for 35 years? Is the market size big enough? It is $200 billion. What is the final piece? Is it working? It is working. It is working right now. That is really describing the company.
I think I'll just show you because some people want to see the hole in the side that this actually is working for major companies. Why don't we just go through a little bit and show some of these major media companies that are working and interoperating with us? You know, Al. The top Dallas Cowboy site, I don't know, could you go back there? Okay. Maybe scroll. What's the number one cowboy site in the country? You can kind of see some of the beautiful stuff. Maybe click on one of the stories real quick, Al. This guy is, he's got the number one podcast. He's got the number one radio show in Dallas. He made millions of dollars as a Sports Illustrated cowboy reporter. He moved his entire business over to Roundtable. Got 180 teams. Go all the way down to community.
The big thing that Web2 companies lack, if you scroll all the way down, is integrated communities. You can see people can ask them questions and build profiles. All of this is now live and reaching millions of people. Maybe go over to Hockey News. That is a network of about 50 hockey sites. We just landed the International Hockey Federation. I do not know which one this is, but it is fully integrated with Yahoo, fully integrated with Apple, Apple Plus. During the World Series a couple of weeks ago, we were showing up first on the search results. We have the top reporter for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Why do you not show that Dodger site here? Just stay with where I am guiding you out. This is a top Dodger supporter or reporter press credentials and fully syndicated now.
If you could start scrolling with Yahoo Sports, which syndicates to over 100 million people. Roundtable was showing up first in the search results during the World Series. Got a good Dodger community. This is just an example. Maybe go over to our finance site if you go to roundtable.io. I mean, I'm not going to go through the couple hundred destinations, but it gives you an idea of the kind of top platform partners that we have. If you can maybe go over to Apple or Yahoo to show our syndication that we bring our clients. Syndicating here to Yahoo Finance. Maybe go over to Apple, show our content showing up on Apple. Here's MSN, which reaches hundreds of millions of people. I think the only reason I wanted to show you this and maybe then go back to the comps now.
I don't want to spend time going through all of our content here. But the platform is built by the people who invented the industry. The blockchain basis is built by the person who invented decentralized finance. The leadership team are the biggest names in the industry. Biggest M&A, over $4 billion in wealth in Comer. Maybe go over to those founders right now. The inventor of Tether, the voice of Bitcoin. Maybe go over to the, yeah, yeah, that sounds, that's fine. Guy who built the biggest website in the world back when it was all being invented and built, Sorensen. The number one investment banker in the space, the person who has invested more blockchain equity investments than anyone in the world than Aly. I think the top engineering team in the world for blockchain out of Israel.
You're really talking about people who know what they're doing and have scaled it to the billions over and over and over again. I think that you're down to execution risk. In life, I think it comes down to the people. We're already up and running and reaching millions of people and generating millions of dollars today. The final piece, and I'll spend only 20 seconds more, is that we have, in what my opinion is, fait accompli on Nasdaq. We now are going to bring this to millions of investors, and we already have access to distribution. Every major investor can see our content and what we're doing on Yahoo Finance, Apple News, Google Finance, Google News, and MSN. That's it. Aly, this is your biggest investment. You just made a decision to come over as our CFO.
I'm sure you're looking at it as an investor. I'm looking at it as an operator. I'm sure that when you did your diligence on our company, there's a reason we're your biggest investment and that you've decided to help us go public. Love to turn it over to you.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I keep getting that question, right? Why did we make this the biggest investment in the fund, that Blockchain Founders Fund? I think there's a couple of key reasons, right? In the Web3 space, we've been talking about how are we going to go bring over millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people into the Web3 space without them knowing it? How do you do it seamlessly? I think what Roundtable is doing here is it's actually able to do that, right?
We're talking about bringing over sports fans, as you showed, finance, fashion. It's really about flattening that ad stack, distribution stack, reporting stack. There are a number of other things you went through there and really putting those all on chain. I think that's what's so exciting here. What that really means is, for example, reporters or writers now are getting paid, for example, instantaneously instead of 90 days or 120 days. That makes a real difference. These things, I think, have a major, major impact. I think one of the other things that sort of came up in our diligence when we looked at this deeply is your last company with Bill. James and Bill previously started a company called Maven or Arena Group on the New York Stock Exchange.
Essentially, it's a very similar company with what I'd say is essentially not Web3 tech, so much worse tech that doesn't do some of those things that we just talked about. On that company that the two of you founded, you grew it from 0 to $189 million in revenue in under four years. I think that's an annualized revenue. I think that's very impressive. If there's two sort of key metrics that I want everyone to be aware of, and this was something that was big in our diligence, there's sort of two key metrics that are important here. One is MUU, which is monthly unique users, right? The other part is how much do you make per MUU or how much do you make per monthly unique user?
On your last company, and everyone can find this on public audited records, was $1.26 per user, so per MUU. What's exciting here, and you may have all seen the press releases, in the last few months, James and Bill have gone and signed about 150 or so or 100-plus commercial contracts. You can sort of quickly start figuring out the math that this is tens of millions of users, as we just showed with the Dallas Cowboy site or the Yankee site or the Dodger sites. These are some of the top sites. You can start to figure out, if they made $1.26 per user on their last company in terms of revenue, what does that look like here? We're talking about gross margins in the range of 50%.
This is very exciting, I think, as an opportunity of what we're seeing here. Those were some of the reasons why we decided to make this our largest investment at Blockchain Founders Fund.
Ali, I really appreciate that. I'm very proud that Ali has joined us as CFO. I think if you look at his credentials, they're like the most ridiculous financial credentials I've ever seen. A genius in the space, in the crypto space, but also just in traditional finance. We're very lucky to have him. I do want to point out that although it was four years to get us to a couple hundred million dollars, the first two years we were just coding. We actually weren't in market. I'd say from a standpoint of where we are now, we are in market.
Il Hertzog spent six years building this platform. Bill and I have spent the last two adding all the enterprise components. We are now in market and generating millions already. We have a very good head start in getting going. I think the other thing to think about is, okay, can you get to $100 million fast? We are going to get to $100 million fast. If you look at what all the comps are, SaaS, consumer-facing, $10-$14 times revenue. I think I had a couple of questions in here. Somebody said, "Hey, when are you going to get to the point, which is Ryvyl, RVYL?" If you look at RVYL right now on Nasdaq, that is the company we captured, and we have completely captured it.
We own preferred shares that cause what I consider a fade, a complete on the merger with only 6% dilution. That merger, in my view, is going to happen. If they do not, they are in breach. Everything converts to common, and we control the majority of the shares and will force a merger. We believe we have that locked down. Ryvyl is the, if you want to buy stock indirectly in our company at this very second, you can go to RVYL and buy that stock. We believe if you look at the public-facing filings, look at our investment in them, we believe we have full control. If they do not merge, they are in breach and it ends up converting into common, and we do have control. I think that is one way to get in, I think, at a price before merger.
I think you guys understand, although there's nothing that is not public information that we gave you, I think putting that puzzle together gives you, I think, an opportunity to go out and buy this liquid asset right now. Trying to think of, see what the other question here. Ryvyl is what the entity is going to be on Nasdaq. We are close to filing our S4. There was a government shutdown, but we feel like we're getting to the finish line there. I think it will take 90 days is kind of the standard thing. What's different than what you see a lot of these crypto investments, and again, I don't put us in that category at all, this is a major media SaaS platform that's using blockchain to revolutionize the media industry. This is not a crypto investment. It's just blockchain technology.
I think the key to understand here is that that puts us in the bigger Bullish, Coinbase, Kraken, so blockchain infrastructure category. Okay? If there are any other questions, I would love to open it up.
Perfect. You can submit questions at the bottom in the Q&A box if you have not already. We do have a question from Jensen Sunny. Do you think investors would be in a better situation to buy right now or after the reverse merger?
Yeah, listen, I think it is inappropriate for me to give you investment advice, but what I can talk about is the difference. In my opinion, there are millions of investors who did not get the detail. They were not on this call. They are not reading through all the filings.
They don't understand what you guys may understand by reading the public filings, which is a lot of these investments, there's risk of delisting. Okay? I'm not saying there's no risk. I'm saying we did get a letter from the Nasdaq that says, "Hey, you now have relieved yourself of the reason why you're at risk of delisting, which is shareholder equity. I invested enough into that company that now the shareholder equity is in there." The other is, "Hey, your stock price." We have announced a shareholder meeting that is, I don't know if it's a 30-to-1 split, but a split. We are well, well, well above that dollar. A lot of people will say, "Well, I'm going to wait until make sure that their Nasdaq listing doesn't come through." You guys have the information if you do your homework. Hey, that's not in the way.
I think another thing that would be a risk factor would be, "Hey, they're merging with a public shell." Sometimes maybe it's a medical device company or not. We're actually doing a true merger with a blockchain-based infrastructure company that is live and generating revenue. We're not reversing into a shell, which sometimes the SEC doesn't like. These are two blockchain companies that are merging. There was a lawsuit a long time ago. That's been settled. We think we've removed all the hair and all the, I would say, hurdles in the way to the merger. In life, it's risk versus reward. If you guys want to ask me about any of the risk factors, I would say you have an opportunity to invest while people think there's standard risk in an RTO. We think we've removed them.
I can't think of any other risks anymore. I mean, the SEC does have to approve it. We are going as an actual merger. We have control of making the merger happen. If people were to vote against it, we would just basically convert our shares to common, and we would just vote for the merger. I think the risk factors are low. I do believe, though, once the merger happens, all the people who are not, I would say, savvy investors are going to learn what you would learn if you looked into the detail and say, "Oh, the merger happened," right? Now these millions of dollars are happening and the growth of a blockchain SaaS business and all of the multiples will start kicking in. We'll come out with our financials. Right now, that's behind the wall.
Let us get to what the financial opportunity is. Good job, Al. Okay? Right now, you can buy on the open market, and you can make a decision based on publicly filed information that I just went over of what you think the opportunity that this merger is going to happen. I cannot think of a material blocker, but it gives you an opportunity to get in way ahead of what we believe, but cannot guarantee, is a fade a complete merger. We went through and just took care of what I think is everything. Number two, you could say, "Well, I will go over the wall for a pipe, have my money put in escrow," and that is totally fine.
We're inviting you to come over the wall, send us a message, send Alliance a message, and then we'll give you inside information and let you into the data room, let you see further financials, let you see the larger deck, kind of take away that risk. You can put money into escrow and just wait for it to happen. It's obviously not going to be liquid for a while as we grow. That's an option. What most people are doing is they're buying in the open market right now at this low price, getting as much liquid shares as possible. You can see in the last few weeks, over 600 million shares have traded when they found out our team has come in and taken over Ryvyl. I think we're averaging 10 million per day. That's very uncommon for an RTO.
I think there's a lot of interest in what we're doing. Again, you can do both. You can grab liquid shares today. Again, I'm not telling you to do it. I'm saying it's an option, right? You can look at what the possible blockers of merger would be. Measure your own risk, talk to your own financial advisor. Look at our public filings. You decide whether it's a fait accompli, whether this merger is going to happen, right? You buy liquid shares. I think you should contact Aly or somebody at Alliance. You can come over the wall after you bought liquid shares, and you can put money in escrow, and you can be involved in what could be an upcoming PIPE.
Both is what most people have decided to do over the last bit, which is why you're probably seeing so much activity in the stock. Again, we are not guaranteeing anything in any way, but we have filed public documents that we think have cleared the way, and we are already up and running, generating millions of dollars. The biggest clients in the world, MSN, Apple, Yahoo, etc. It's up and running. It's working. We have no debt. We have almost no burn. We have over $30 million in the bank and seem to be very comfortable. Any other questions out there? Oh, jump from 4 to 12. What's the expected time? Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.
Yeah. There's quite a few questions right now on the expected timing of the merger close.
Aly, why don't you talk about that? Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, what we typically see right now is something around 90 days. Of course, we've got to file the S4, and then we've got to get approvals. It's been pretty smooth from everything we've seen under the Trump administration right now for approvals of these types of things. We're not expecting any hiccups. That doesn't mean there can't be any, but I think it should be reasonably smooth.
Hey, t here's a question here. Maybe we could just kind of alternate. Ryvyl, the company that we are merging with, has asked about the payment processing solution to be maintained. Look, I think that they're a little bit, for those of you who know Google Search, they have 85% or 90% of market share. Then there's these boutique companies who generate hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. Same thing for payment processing.
I think easy processing, buying a hamburger, you might use Block. I think, but complicated transactions Ryvyl has done, and I think those are higher fees. I think it's pretty attractive. We love being a blockchain-based infrastructure company with SaaS clients. I'm becoming very interested in payment solutions and payment processing. We will get into the subscription business. Bill and I have been doing that for decades. I think processing our own payments is something we may want to consider. The question is, would it be shut down? I don't see it being shut down. I think it's $8 million-$10 million of revenue right now. I do like that business. I think being an infrastructure, blockchain infrastructure with revenue running through is pretty good.
I think the next one, in terms of which blockchain will Roundtable rely on for its payment processing, we're in the middle of a bake-off right now. I'm not going to give any information on that right now. How are you balancing workload between Aly and George? That's a real interesting question, but I'd love to kind of, we've got this dual-headed monster. Aly, could you talk about maybe your focus and George's and kind of how the background gives us an amazing two-headed monster here? Not that you're a monster.
Absolutely. I mean, you're all well aware of George. I think he's got an incredible pedigree, very, very strong on the accounting side. He's essentially a Chief Accounting Officer, and he's got an entire team already that's public company ready to run the entire finance operations.
A big part of my role is to come in and help build out street coverage effectively and help drive a lot of the crypto aspects here at Roundtable. That also includes making sure that we can go drive this raise. We have a lot of Web3 investors in the company right now, many others that I am sure will be joining as well soon. A lot of my part is working with James around those aspects. We are a pretty good tag team, I think, between myself and George.
I think the incredible thing about Aly, we worked very hard to recruit him. He has 200 blockchain-based equity investments, about the same number of LPs at Blockchain Founders Fund, and over 600 investment partners. I do not know an investor who is not in at least one deal with Aly.
He's a world-renowned speaker and analyst. I think what we're able to do, which a lot of companies can't do, is bridge blockchain investors with TradFi investors. A lot took $33 million over the summer from pure blockchain investors. That's just sitting in the bank right now, the confidence. Not in escrow, but in the bank for our usage. Ali is doing a great job introducing our traditional business, which is blockchain is an underlying foundation for it. I think we're going to be able to bridge two ecosystems with Ali. I think that's remarkable. Very few companies are going to be able to do that. Maybe the mortgage industry with Figure is an example. Look on $50 million-plus in earnings for Figure, if you look at a comp.
These guys have, I think, a set, I don't know what it is right now, but definitely over $7 billion market cap on under $60 million in earnings. It gives you an idea when you add blockchain and it's transformative, taking existing ecosystem and moving it on-chain and being the clear leader like we are, I think the reward can be very positive. There is a question here in that vein, what's the expected market cap? Obviously, I don't want to get set up for a shot in the head from the SEC and say what I think our market cap is, Eli.
However, I would say that you should look at that comp list that we gave you, and you can see people who are taking existing ecosystem, adding an underlying component of blockchain, being the first mover, generating millions of revenue and getting out there, that the comps are over 10 times revenue. Okay? I think what Aly did, and there's no guarantee of future success for past performance, I'm sure this is being recorded. My last company, we got a couple hundred million of revenue super quick. This is way better technology. We had a lot more momentum, a lot bigger backing. I would say we have a goal of very quickly getting into nine figure, and I think that the market comps are over 10 times revenue. What does that compare to today at Ryvyl?
We have filed an 8K showing how many shares are fully diluted today. So definition of fully diluted are the registered shares and the shares that are being contractually obligated, right? If you add up the shares, today our market cap is $200 million. Today our market cap is $200 million fully diluted, not just registered trading right now, but fully diluted. That is why you can see the market cap sustained with 600 million shares traded because they saw, "Hey, this is what's coming to the table," and you could look at what is the current number of shares. That is how we get a market cap of around $200 million.
I think you can do the math if you believe that this team can once again build a nine-figure to ten-figure business and go look at what all the market comps are in this industry. Even SaaS Web2, it's usually 7-10. This isn't a meme coin or a quick flip, but if you believe in this team and believe in the technology and believe in our track record, we do believe we can become a nine-figure to ten-figure business. That is our mission. That's our goal. We don't think there's anything in the way. You can kind of do the math and figure out what your horizon is on your investment. Somebody asked, "What's Roundtable's headcount and what does the company's cap structure look like?" Hey, Bill, I'd like you to ask one question.
With our blockchain technology, could you talk a little bit about the dramatic reduction in headcount that we need to be able to serve people because of blockchain? And about what is our burn today and speaking to our efficiency?
Yeah, I need to keep it a little bit general. We're certainly a lean company. We have on the order Roundtable right now on the order of 14-16 people. But we rely on an amazing engineering team, mostly based in Israel. I'll just give you a little anecdote on how the world has changed. It's a company whose assets we acquired, and they had built out a platform that was pretty advanced. We spent the last year refining it for the benefit of the large media companies that James has talked about that are now or will soon be running on the platform.
They estimate they are doing the same work today with a group of people that it took four times as many people to do a year ago. They have seen a 75%, or, if you will, a 4 to 1 improvement in efficiency by using AI tools. Software development is not dead. It has just become really, really efficient. We embrace that multiplier.
Our past companies have had as many as 200 people. Right. Our last company. This is an almost scary, efficient company. People look at it and say, "How can you do all this with so few people?" Let me just kind of describe it. We have over 200 clients. We had 150 people with 200 clients and 200 people with 250 clients.
What that means is that with AI, only the best engineers in Tel Aviv are using AI tools for their architecture. Bill and I had a team of like 60 engineers for a company that does, yeah, that does one-tenth the work. Our architecture, which they built over six years with $10.5 million of Binance money, that's built. Now we're only doing edge incremental changes. We actually were able to reduce the engineering team, which I think is remarkable. We may bring it up because we have so many clients right now. The second component that we used to have at our last company generating a couple hundred million dollars of revenue is we needed a layer of reporting. Literally, people adding up how much money each one of our clients made, doing reports, sending out bills, sending out money.
That's all done automated on the blockchain now. I think I'm not saying we may not get to 50 or maybe 100 in the next couple of years as we increase maybe our business development team to reach thousands of media companies. We definitely will build out our sales team, but we're burning hardly anything. That's because 35 years of software development, we really have an incredible machine. We got over $30 million in the bank that we don't even have to touch. It's just sitting there as a liquidity pool for media companies. I think this will be one of the most efficient companies in the world. Really, pedal to the metal just means sales to go out to media clients to open accounts. It's one of the most remarkably efficient companies I've ever sat in.
I've worked for a dozen companies worldwide over the last 30 years.
Perfect. Let's see what else. All right. We are getting short on time, but we do have some interesting questions that I don't want to skip over. From Eli Winter, how scalable is the architecture? Can it support 50 million plus monthly users like Yahoo traffic? What KPI should shareholders track to measure the success of the new Roundtable platform?
I can take that.
Please do. Sure.
What I always say, and James is tired of hearing it, but I've done a lot of very large platforms, including at Microsoft, that scaled up to approaching a billion users. What I always say is scale is IQ times time. No platform ever scales to 500 million users on day one.
What you need to do is get incredibly smart, experienced people who have scaled before. That's what we've done. We're already supporting millions of users today. The architecture will continue to build out and continue to scale. It's an incremental process. We scale both for any geeks in the room. We scale linearly through more compute power. We also scale what I call vertically by increasing the efficiency of the code, really getting it down to fundamentals and focusing on speed and efficiency. It's a continuous process, but we're very confident because we've done it before. You should know our design point is actually 500,000,000 users. We're very comfortable. I think the other thing that has changed the world is operations. Back when Bill and I started building networks, we had thousands of clients. We actually had to have our own servers.
Everybody knows, I don't know if everybody knows on the call, but AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Cloud, and Oracle now handle operations. We're coding to that end. Obviously, operational scale is easier, but concurrent users against our database, something that Bill has been doing with us for 35 years. He built the largest .NET platform in the world when he was head of infrastructure at MSN. Il, our CTO, obviously built a system that became decentralized finance, which has obviously a billion people using it. He also invented MetaCafe, which was the first large video social network with 60 million users. If you just go right now to thehockeynews.com, it's the fastest website in the world. There's nothing close, nothing close. Our engineers in Israel, when we started moving people over on-chain last January, there's a dashboard with Google.
In order to show up at top of the search results, they actually have red, yellow, green. Every part of our UX is measured. These incredible engineers worked months making sure that we're green. Compare us to any website in the world. We are the fastest in the world. We can scale to a billion. We know how to do it. Our engineers have done it for the biggest media companies in the world. We love our engineering team. We're talking about world-class coders. I would challenge any company in the world to match their talent and experience. What else do we got here, Ali?
Fantastic. What percentage, and this might be your last question, but what percentage dilution should Ryvyl shareholders expect after the $33 million capital raise?
I mean, the dilution is already, if you look at our 8K on the definitive agreement, okay, so investors were already priced in. The money has already been taken. It's already been ingested into the Roundtable cap table. If you go to the 8K on the definitive agreement, there is a roughly 6-35 ratio. That's already been priced in with 600 million shares traded. Because the 33 million convert that auto converts into shares, that already is defined and the math has already been done a couple of months ago. This is no new information. This is not kind of over-the-wall type stuff. All the analysts and all the people who have been investing already know what the dilution is.
You should just, I would rather than me do that math, do what all the other investors have already done. I would go to the definitive agreement, 8K. I cannot remember what date that is, but there is no new news in terms of dilution.
Fantastic. That concludes today's webinar. Thank you, everyone, for joining us. Thank you, Bill, James, Alp, the entire Alliance team for helping to put this together. We will see you soon. You may disconnect from the webcast. Thank you.
Thank you.