$100k Bitcoin, Hyperliquid’s Airdrop, and Altcoin Cycles | Roundup

Transcript

maybe like piece of advice in terms of where we are in the cycle is we haven't really seen anything super differentiated that's hitting scale yet like meme coins no those aren't differentiated that's basically nfts but fungible and you know is it defi no we've seen that before multiple cycles and is it l1's like no we've seen this before and so until we start to see differentiation I I think we're still very much in the very very early Innings hey everyone this episode is brought to you by Unis swap Labs who's launching the largest bug Bounty program in the entire history of crypto it's a $15.5 million program this is aiming to be the most rigorously reviewed codebase ever deployed to ethereum so if you want more eligibility on the scope rewards payouts Etc just click the link in the bottom of

the show notes tell them that I sent you you'll be hearing all about Unis swap Labs later in the program hey everyone quick disclaimer before we get into today's episode nothing said on bell curve is a recommendation to buy or sell Securities or tokens this podcast is for informational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are our opinions not Financial advice our guest and I may hold positions in the companies funds or projects discussed all right everyone welcome back to another Roundup edition of bell curve you got Michaels one and two Vance B how was Thanksgiving yeah good lot to bek lots to be thankful for so much to be thankful for yeah thank you guys save my [Laughter]

bags uh did you guys get I I don't know do you guys spend it with family did they ask you is there a lot of crypto talk around your Thanksgiving Day tables always I just purposely cut the uh attendee list for Thanksgiving so that it's only people that I talk to on a regular basis so they know not to ask that's smart it's just me and my parents so they're just always asking me what I'm doing my life I tell them it's going well yeah like the CEO Bitcoin treats me well Mom yeah no we're we're moving in the right direction but yeah it was good I did a I did a so I did a family Thanksgiving down in North Carolina but I also did a big friendsgiving thing and I was a little surprised usually I thought

bitcoin's back up around 100K I thought a lot of people would be asking about it I honestly I got the sense the majority of people didn't even really know um but I've talked to our analysts a little bit who have friends that spend more of their time on Tik Tok and yeah those people everyone knows and everyone's asking about coins xrp is fully back it is the future of Finance again uh it's it's a fake business yeah yeah um so I know we talked about this I think the last Roundup that we did about the Tik Tok stuff I downloaded Tik Tok and I've been messing around and just searching crypto and it is a different you know what it reminds me of do you remember the like 2017 era YouTube coins like oh yeah those are still by the way I feel like that's what this is on steroids

basically I saw a guy talk about mortgaging his house to buy xrp I was like dude I saw I saw someone talk about how uh how how it's gone up uh 150,000% uh and he goes well because of that it can go up 150,000 x and here's the amount here's what here's what it would be if that was the case it's like oh my God we are in that phase of the cycle I mean Ripple is just the quintessential fake business coin it is Vance can you explain your fake business pivot from meme coin crime to fake business I I mean think about Brad G house in a suit talking about Ripple being the future of Finance

literally nothing has been built on Ripple in years at this at this point it's been over a decade it's been over a decade um Ripple lost but it keeps up the veneer of like these like institutional Partnerships and I think it's you know it's good and bad it's I think it's fine because uh all coins are going to go up and you know the fake business uh will rotate into the real business meta and I think that's what you've seen with a lot of these defi coins eth you know a lot of this stuff starting to pick up but you know I I think it's like so few people in crypto are willing to put on a suit and pretend at least to be institutional that people who are get a lot of credit and you know it's like sometimes the fake business

can turn into a real business and you know people have fake jobs they're fake models people are on fake diets I've done some of those it's like you know a lot of things are fake but I think this is this is a fake fake business look every every every startup also starts off as a fake business until it figures out what its real business true you could say open AI is a fake business you know it has built real technology but the business itself is fictional they lose you know 10 billion a year and they need to keep raising or else they'll run out of money and like the fake business can translate into a real business and that's not to say that I'm bearish on xrp or that I don't you know respect at least what they're trying to do like I get it you know real

recognize real they're they're trying to take something that's dead and revive it and I think you know based on the price they're doing somewhat well xrp Army is gonna they're going to be coming after you Vance um there do you see people are bridging onto trying to get us to buy like Ripple shitcoin it's like you idiots uh and it's I mean it's like you know people are now being like you're starting to see the what's what's I missed XR what's xrp beta okay Stellar lumens you know Stellar goes up you know and um people are saying that chain link is xrp beta um but I I think like the the mcoin crime versus fake business Paradox is

like memec coin crime is just like you're not doing anything you're just like trying to like HW Tua just launched it's already down from 500 to like 75 million it'll probably go up and I'll just be looking ridiculous but like the mcoin crime doesn't go anywhere fake business like you can generate a real business most startups are fake businesses so that's my take a pre-revenue pure play exactly would be proud so what what is driving your guys Minds The Dino coin Resurgence here I feel like I haven't gotten a really great explanation of why that is I find it very funny you know crypto has this great habit of surprising every Market participant and when's like oh retail is going to come in and buy our meme coins

and what did they buy the random shitcoin they had in their you know coinbase from 2018 or 2019 time frame which I find kind of hilarious but what what is actually driving this or is it just random I I think it's actually really simple in that what overarches this entire effect is price begets narrative begets price yeah and it all has to start with some Catalyst and I think the Catalyst and it was official I I believe earlier today or um Paul Atkins is officially named the the uh nominee for the SEC chair but everybody knew that and Gary danler said he was stepping down on January 20th like everybody knew that this stuff was

coming if it hadn't already officially happened yet and frankly just like that Catalyst in and of itself makes all the people who for the last three years have been talking about xrp is GNA go to $2 right at some point because it goes to$ two do and then it's like oh wait well if they're right about this then what else do they know and wait if they're right about that maybe like Swift is going to get replaced with xrp and it's like if you're right about one he may be right about everything and I I I think it it the Catalyst here was just I mean look at comp is up uh 50% today it was up higher earlier but like all of the things that have received Wells notices or have

lawsuits or whatever the the situation is uh I all of them are going to do well just because you remove the regulatory risk of a new regulator and that's the Catalyst that starts the flywheel starts the narrative churn again and and to Vance's point then it go oh you missed hrp well what's beta right you know everything that's in relation to that and maybe it's chain link maybe it's Stellar maybe it's other things but I I think the Catalyst here was just very obviously the The Changing of the Guard um that the election represented it's it's um I totally agree with all of that I would say it's like probably catch-up trade season in the sense that uh eat's catching up to big Bitcoin you know

Bitcoin rallied first J's catching up to Soul because people are like okay Soul at 250 that's kind of expensive is there anything that is a fundamental play you know that reats then there's like the def5 bid you know the apps catching up to the chains like all these things are like catchup trade season and I think catch-up trade season is basically in session until Bitcoin breaks 100K which probably happens this quarter um but people forget like it wasn't like crypto all rallied at the same time in 2021 it just like it went in it was like you know it's kind of like this you can think about like water sloshing around you know that's kind of how the liquidity works and like people have ragged on us so much for gaming as a

thesis for forever guess what's outperforming this week gaming tokens and gaming tokens are a very specific one because it's the largest and most real Mass adoption narrative it hasn't been proven right or wrong yet I would say were probably getting more to the side of right because like pixels has a million users they're monetizing there's a few games that are kind of like that um and like you know a lot of this cycle at least what I see on Twitter is people being like how do we front run retail do we buy memes also a lot of the meme coins that people created are not actually memes they're not memes anyone's heard of they're just like pictures on like what is dog with hat does anyone like be like you know does anyone talk about that in C no so like

the best way to look at retail if you're really trying to think about like that machion is like games are probably how they come in but like these things move in Cycles only other thing uh I would add is there there was a I can't remember who put this out I can try and find it but there was some analysis done on volume with BTC pairs versus volume with uh USD Pairs and for the first time we're starting to see volume with USD pairs actually surpass BTC pairs which I think is an a signal in a number of different ways um and we've talked about this before probably months ago at this point where I I think the market structure has fundamentally changed broadly in that you're not moving from

one asset to the other as you sell because we have stable coins now as a realistic you know opportunity like billion hundreds of billions of dollars on chain but also all the USD pairs are the ones that are outperforming in terms of volume relative to a Bitcoin or an eth pair and selling for dollars I think is going to be a lot easier for people to do um as dollars move in but you're also not going to see the same effect as much as you have in previous Cycles where you're selling your Bitcoin to buy something else and you're selling whatever that is to buy something else and I I think that it'll be really interesting to see but we're we're starting to see the volume uh overtake that narrative as well so on the I guess like closing note on the the

dino coin front here one thing that I think people don't necessarily see if you haven't interacted with any of these teams recently is you know Ripple Stellar lumens Etc one of the things that they did probably right was they raised a bunch of money in their initial Ico they sold a lot of that into eth or usdc they're really well funded and they're more Trad type teams like if you interact with them they feel more like web 2 very focused on BD and BD has been like a dirty word in crypto almost for a long time I I sat on in a cosmos spaces about a year ago saying should we do BD and overwhelmingly people said no and it's like what do you mean of course you have to do that that's these things don't sell this is there's no such thing

as build it and they will come you have to do marketing and BD and all that type of stuff and these these groups are poised to to do that so maybe I don't know maybe some of them are fake businesses today but I I think some of them might end up being real like you you might be really surprised about it um it's and it's like golf you know you swing the clubs you hit the range that's the fake business you actually play the game that's real business the fake business makes you better at the real business but it just matters if you can get there yeah do you guys see even nfts were catching a bid so my horrendous prediction going into this year might actually be wow with a month with a in the summer that call was looking terrible but oh yeah it is it is like

kind of this simple it's like gas fees are at like 50 on E you know we're like we're like probably close to 5 to 10 billion dollars of earnings per year people are feeling rich the price is going up they want to buy nfts let's create Mor fees you want to take out a loan against your nft that's Mor fees it's just like the reflective nature of crypto is probably the least understood thing that exists and it gets to Michael's point of like a lot of the pairs are now USD nominated sure but it's like imagine a stock market that for a while where if you made money on Tesla you couldn't sell to US Dollars you had to go buy you know Microsoft you had to go buy like Airbnb or something yeah right there's so much money in crypto and people ask us it's like who

buys tokens family offices hedge funds Venture capitalists a lot of it is the money that's already in crypto and as that becomes more valuable that's the wealth effect that drives the cycles of gaming to def5 dino coins so whatever it's wealth it's wealth effect seasonal season I got a question for you guys on there more of a market prognostication but you know we're it feels like we're the round number effect around 100 100,000 is real for something like Bitcoin and we're in maybe like a range here and I've just been tracking like the overall total crypto market cap has been going up where the price of Bitcoin has been ranging or going down for a little bit that feels to me again not a Trader here at all but like some

kind of unstable equilibrium like something has to change there either Bitcoin goes down and the market sells off or I guess it could just you know keep going from here but how do you guys feel about this ranging an alts running Dynamic I mean I think there's literally a cell wall at like 999k for Bitcoin that's that's what's held everything below 100 and we'll break through it at some point and what we do it'll probably jump to 125 in short order yeah and that'll have an effect on bitcoin Bitcoin dominance you know all those effects but I mean look there there's more money coming in there's money rotating within um and that is where you're starting to see the crypto total crypto market cap increase

in the way that you have relative to the bit bitcoin price not moving and it's the rotation it's the wealth effect like all all the things we're talking about are the the data that you just described is exactly describing the situation that we were just talking about where it's the rotation and the rotation is a constant part of being in a bull market where it's not you're one thing goes up and it goes up to the right over a short dur period of time and then it comes back down and it never happens again like yeah sure there are certain things that do that but in most cases it es and flows over the course of like months to quarters to years and and I think that's we're at the start of that if we're talking about like where we are kind of

in the cycle we we haven't really even kind of started the frenzy or the fervor or the craziness yet because there there is the one of the questions that we talk about is like who's the marginal buyer at 101,000 Bitcoin there's probably a ton of people who are like o it's over 100 I should buy it and then the question is like who the marginal buyer at 126,000 but these are the types of questions that you have to think about as to like who the marginal buyer will be at those different psychological price points and also we're talking about you know obviously dollarized prices here um in Canadian dollars in Australian dollars we're well above a hundred it's not it's not a question um

and so I think there's there's definitely going to be some breaking through probably the next few weeks and there's also going can be a lot more rot and we're going to see some new Sub sub narratives take off probably in q1 how you guys feeling about eth here I I saw that real Vision or um zeroedge was tweeting out uh Sim similar Dynamic I guess about this this cell wall for Bitcoin at 99.9 or whatever but very different like people are basically doubling and tripling down on shorting eth um around 3800 which it has since kind of broken through it would also just make a ton of sense to me at this point if eth BT PC just started to Rally from here and was up only for a good period of time because that's been this

thing that everyone has just TR you've seen all the bitcoiners tweeting the eth BTC chart for I don't know what's felt like at least a year at this point and so I I've got another chart for you if you search Benjamin Cohen all right yeah this guy this guy's pretty good the TA people can either be super hot or super cold this guy's definitely here he's great he's been on curve before he's um yeah I mean Ju Just Like You Know Bitcoin I think it's like kind of pinned below 100K I think there's a marginal buyer at like 120,000 but I think people are going to be like oh I don't I don't know 102 it's like maybe um eth I think has just been extremely

hated on for so long but now it's like I mean the framework for eth has always been the same for us when there's the fundamentals and when there's the flows this thing is going to rally and you have both fundamentals and the flows now turning on and it looks like there's going to be probably a year to maybe 18 months of like eth being the only other ETF and that is like you know if it if it keeps up with BTC or it rallies on E BTC like this thing is going to pop and if you look at just the monthly chart or the uh yeah the the E yeah this this is him um there's one chart I don't know if this scroll down a little bit um yeah I don't know if this is the right

chart but but basically the chart that I was thinking of is his multi-year perspective on eth BTC and effectively what it shows is eth BTC bottoms basically in November December of this year right now in the four-year cycle and it's some number of days post havening is when it bottoms and then it starts to rally and his this is where he gets to this expectation that in 2020 and through 2025 you probably see eth BTC rally up into the 06 07 range and I think we bottomed at like 0.312 or 035 one5 but in any case we're we're back

you know towards the longterm average of 0.4 uh and I think 0.5 is closer sorry 0.5 is long-term average we're below that um but his expectation is we we kind of like rally back to the 06 07 and look if if bitcoin's at 150k like the the math on eth is pretty strong there yeah and and I think um so it's like the fundamentals it's the flows and then I think it's like the narrative sentiment and it always goes from really really poor to really great but I think the framework to getting to Great sentiment is like what's the long-term plan for eth and I actually liked the beam chain um presentation and and I also like the

timeline because like if you're stewarding a billion dollar asset you can't come out guns blazing a Devcon and be like you know it looks like these meme coins are taking off and we need to like Jack the gas limit up and like you know scramble all the fighter jets you know like panic mode you can't do that you need to set a long-term ambitious Target for the community and then the other thing that's been happening this week especially is this thing called pump theeg gas.org which is a community Grassroots effort to up the gas limit so if you have a validator you signal that you want to go to 6 UH 60 million gas and uh I think last night there was 3 and a half% I think now it's closer to 10% and coinbase and

Victor buan have been tweeting out like if we wanted to change the gas limit on our validators which I think is probably 20 to 35% of the validators on eth you know what should we change the gas to and it like the number one option right now is 60 million and it's like if the Grassroots movement comes together raises the gas limit cheapen the fees that'll hit the earnings whatever um but it shows that like there's a plan I think that's a watershed moment for eth that kind of unifies the sentiment and so we're very Pro pump the gas um and we have a ton of validators that we're going to be signaling so where where do you guys fall in the whole you know John charbono wrote a long piece this week about ethereum's Northstar and getting away

from the Northstar stuff it's it seems like the the vision that he is arguing for here is a return to the world computer and moving some activity back to the L1 so it's just there's the gas limit there's also moving to you know signaling towards decreasing time to finality eventually you want single slot finality um and just kind of taking a more balanced approach to how much activity lives on l1's versus l2s where do you guys roughly fall on that debate it look like JN is smart and that's great but it's like let's raise the gas limit and uh through the period of ethereum's demise everyone's been just so cool about it I think John has actually tweeted out that soul is going to flip eth a few times and um yeah I

mean now people are just figuring out that like who do you want to long-term align your brand with which chain xrp flip Soul flip soul look like I I think with the meme coins and stuff and like yeah it's a great experience but like kind of risk turning your chain into like the 4chan chain is that a good thing I'm not so sure yeah I think John smart I I think they're there's no reason why we can't do these simultaneously um you know pushing more activity back to L1 and running the L2 road map the L2 road map is off and Off to the Races already I I

would imagine that we're going to see you know bases hitting all-time highs like virtuals is doing well like there there's so much activity happening on the l2s I also think um you know what we have enough portfolio companies that are moving from that like we are an app on eth or we are an app on optimism to we are our own L2 based in optimism and and I think the transition from um you know app to L2 is going to be more pronounced especially with things like conduit that make it super simple to to build your own L2 um and blobs are now burning and have been basically uh constantly since I think early November and multiple

months of blobs hitting above their limit and if we're able to add more activity to L1 you know get the gas fees down in incent more you know rwas or whatever activity may like it's going to be it's not like there's a single Silver Bullet that we should all be charging forward it it is a bunch of different opportunities where they will all yield different you know effects for ethereum at large this is also the time when people start to really over rotate super aggressively and give back whatever gains you you got and I I I just caution people against doing that too much because fomo is just so powerful and I can see it for you know it just takes losing a bunch of money on really dumb things and watching it go down 95 or 98%

being like what was I thinking to just not want to do that quite as much and I have these I don't know if you guys would it's an overs simplistic sort of bucket but to me it feels like there are three distinct periods around just crypto in general there's like bare markets when everyone leaves and even though it sucks in some ways to be going through bare markets it's very interesting right like you people actually try to solve really interesting problems people uh you know all the tourists kind of leave and it's it's an interesting period of time to be in crypto that's also where a lot of alpha is then there's like old early bull markets which like all right it's coming back and everything kind of goes up there's a lot of concentration so everyone kind of rides the same tide up and makes money together and it's just

great Vibes all around but then it feels like we're starting to get into the last per period where there's the wealth effect uh it's there's a lot of dispersion so not everyone's making money equally you get a lot of people that come in in a very fraudulent way and it it's like less Good Vibes you know it's like late stage bull markets resonate you can feel feel the greed I only thing that I would say is yes those are the cycles uh I agree with that I think that we are just barely touching scratching the the global wealth fact like yeah e eth is not even at all-time highs nor is salana anymore and I I think until we get well past

both of those you won't even have the ability to really rotate into a new narrative like if we're GNA put this in the parland of 2021 Bitcoin has to be at like 250 for us to for us to be in the equivalent realm of of positioning from 20 of the previous cycle to 69k the top of last time so I I I think we have a long way to go um and yes there will be some really wonky things internet computer definity was worth a hundred billion dollars like there are there were things that were just complete fake businesses that never turned into real anything uh except for anyone who sold the top um and so yeah I I think we've got a long way to go but

yes generally those are the cycles we're just like I don't even think we've really hit the wealth effect yet yeah and it and it's literally followed the um 2020 2021 road map to a t so so far like Bitcoin has stalled out basically to the day um and if it were to continue the pattern it's on right now um it would get you know December 16th would be it breaks 100K so that that's my personal prediction for when it happens but we'll we'll see I think the things that you said Mike about um just like that first phase of the bullmark whereever goes up like I remember when polygon went from like 30 cents to like

a buck 20 I think it's down to like 50 again but like you kind of have that first wave yeah you have the second wave where it's more kind of equal and um the difference this time is the ETFs and you know like let me can you pull up the Etha chart yeah that's the only chart these people see like there is no like oh went to 80 and like 20 you know 6 it was like you know went to 800 in 2021 it's like nope this is the only chart they see you've made 20% since August like this this thing is a chart that's just like going to a new all-time high if you've never seen this before and IIT looks most mostly the

same um but but obviously it's sold out around here for even like a week but like this is the context in which most of the world who's buying these coins are operating so I agree with you so that wealth effect I think is really important where where do you think we are in like I heard you say like in 2021 parlament you know we need Bitcoin at 250k I do you feel like that's a reasonable level to to get to this cycle or I mean I know this we're just speculating here good Financial advice Adam no no price predictions look I right I I think the the way to think about this is

and it's not the exact same thing but the way to think about this is the same context of what are called Elliot waves which is basically like how things move over time when you're in a bull market and I think that there if we were to it's like there's five Elliot waves until you hit the peak and we're in the like one maybe one and a half Elliot wave and these things move kind of like an e in flows and then you get like stalled out on bitcoin and then you catch up on everything else because I think a of the reason why it's not necessarily rotation out of Bitcoin it's people who are like okay I bought a bunch of Bitcoin it's stalled out like what's what's G to catch up like what's going to be the next thing they're buying eth they're buying defi they're

buying gaming tokens but yeah if you know we were to think about this in terms of from 2017 Peak which was 20,000 to 2021 Peak which was 69,000 the 69,000 peak of 2021 you know multiplied by about three and a half that that puts you you know pretty pretty well above 200k for Bitcoin all right everyone listen up like I said at the top of the episode Unis swap Labs is rolling out the red carpet and launching a $15.5 million bug Bounty this is the largest bug bounty in the entire history of crypto to anyone that can find a critical bug with the Unis swap B4 protocol this bug M aims to make it the most rigorously reviewed code base ever

deployed to ethereum now the Unis swap name is basically synonymous with security $2.4 trillion in cumulative volume has passed through Unis swap V2 and V3 without a single hack so Unis swap V4 is dedicated to bringing that same level of security and transparency to the V4 protocol so if you want more information or eligibility or scope or Rewards or payout or any of that good stuff there is a link in the bottom of the show notes I highly recommend that you stop listening right now go to the show notes click the link head over and tell them that I sent you start earing money today it'll be an interesting uh cycle here I you know we talked about this just the top of the episode I think Michael you mentioned but we have a new sec pick from Trump so this is Paul

Atkins so he was the SEC chair under Bush you know I was reading up a little bit on him today you know it seems like he's very staunch um libert I I don't think he was chair I think he was a commissioner okay commissioner commissioner under Bush um but he's been you know he's been seen as a he's got a Libertarian by background uh you know has been pretty vocally positive uh on on crypto in general he sits on one of the the Committees of the Chamber of digital Commerce he actually advises at least one crypto startup because that token rallied about 100% in the day before it got announced you know we don't need to name any names here but o it's [Laughter] crime all right so what does this guy

mean I mean how are you guys viewing this like is this positive for crypto what do we know about um about Paul and how positive is he going to be for the space do you think I only know what I've seen on Twitter from like the the sharpest legal minds of the crypto Twitter movement and they all approve so I think it's a positive and it sounds like I mean he's a lawyer so I don't think it's like you know no holds bar you know let's launch hawu a coin let's launch all this stuff I think he's going to be a a pragmatic regulator that also establishes like real rules I I don't think it's like crime cycle continued I think it's like okay adults are in the room there's going to be looser rules but there are

going to be rules well so one one part and this is just total conjecture my own personal opinions I haven't even really heard anyone talk about this um there I I think it's interesting to think about what are the what are the like Prime motivators of people like Gary Gensler or Paul Atkins and what we at least know now about the Gary gansler show was he was an he was an aspiring um politician you know there were rumors that he wanted to take over the open seat for the senate in Maryland there were rumors that he wanted to become treasury Secretary of Biden got reelected like all of these rumors like kept on popping up and they were pretty consistent and he had already been cfdc

commissioner you know SEC is kind of like the next step up and you would imagine like there's a there's a higher step that he could have potentially earned you know had political wind shifted in a different direction there was also a lot in the backdrop of him cing favor with Elizabeth Warren to do her bidding through the SEC and then she would kind of give him an opportunity to take a step up so like all this stuff was kind of going on in the background and what we at least know at least what has been talked about on on Twitter and I think this was reported on like Zero Hedge is that Paul Atkins was reluctant at least at first to take this job yeah and he didn't necessarily want it and I think was asked to take it as more of like a favor and he'd be a good person

he' helped Shepherd this this industry even in Trump's tweet he said we need to you know Foster innovation in the digital asset space and in in the tweet that he was naming Paul Atkins as the nominee so it's very clear that at least Trump is seeing him as someone that can help Foster Innovation within our within our industry but I think the biggest part here is just the fact that he's not trying to use this as a stepping stone to something else you know he he's a partner very successful lawyer at a at a large Law Firm I think maybe even his own or he in any case he he's successful in his own right and I don't think that he is using this you know as a as a Next Step um which ultimately is one of the best things that we could have because

anyone I think would have been better than Gary Gensler but it seems like someone like Paul could be you know a benefit to this industry you know it's it's interesting to think about it from the personal motivation standpoint people have talked about the issue of when it comes to the people that run these regulatory agencies are ambitious people and what are ambitious people want to do they want to grow their remit they want to scale teams they want to increase their status and importance and that's clearly not the Mandate that's coming from this Administration it's actually the opposite of that so it's interesting to put yourself in the shoes of someone who's going to take over one of these agencies and in theory you know I don't know anything but maybe make it smaller or you know decrease the remit just just like imagine all of the

uh what were those talks with Gary where he'd be those super CR just like no be careful and this it's just like he steak no not that type of steak I was like dude yeah trying too hard yeah way too hard I I think um yeah we'll see I think is the answer but I think it it looks really positive on on its face um I think one of the probably last ones is just Ty like a hyper liquid in that air drop oh yeah yeah so I can it up for you guys and I would love to get your both of your takes so hyper liquid is and I'm just going to put my hand up here I'm not a pers Trader I'm not very

familiar with the pers deck landscape I do think it seems like every six months there's a per deck which is going to completely change the game from you know roll bit to you know it wasn't pers but Lyra or whatever whatever the sort of new uh per decks is but uh hyper liquid launch it's a decentralized exchange although it seems like mostly what that actually means in practice today is I think there's a test net with with 40 validators but really it's for collocated validators which are run by the team um and so even though it's technically decentralized exchange uh that type of thing I think they're probably a good amount of trust assumptions but what they've been able to trade off there is they provide a really great ux so you have to go up to arbitrum but the bridging experience

from arbitrum to hyper liquid is Flawless and I talked to a bunch of our analysts about this and just asked what is so good about hyper liquid and a lot of these other per dexes are very wonky like weird ux things so one of the things that hyper liquid got right was you know it's oneclick trading as opposed to on other per Dees you have to do you know it's technically one click but that only allows you to trade a certain amount of eth within a certain period of time and so just feels like they got the the ux comparable to something like a binance and then the other thing is it seems like they've nailed the mechanics of the airdrop so they didn't raise any money and I think what that meant is that there weren't a bunch of people that were trying to dump

um as soon as possible and a bunch of these you know you could actually see on chain that a lot of even like large holders were buying more um which is very compelling they did a really large air drop I think it was about 1.9 billion or just under 30% of the overall Supply so that always gets everyone fired up and maybe it was just a pretty good macro time to do that because the coins are running at this point but it gathered an enormous amount of attention and so I'm curious what do you guys think about hyper liquid I I think the UI is great um I think a lot of people are also converging on a similar UI uh whether it be Lyra or infinex or whoever sythe like it does feel like and those coins have gotten a bump um as a result it's just

uh it's a good product and having it live before the token launch was definitely able to filter for people who actually add value um you know definitely Flawless airdrop um I don't I don't know if it matters if it's more centralized or not honestly I think you can make the same argument for some blockchains um but I mean we we'll see how it continues to do it seems like they're going to have spot trading there they're going to have um all this stuff like centralized exchange listings are next like bybit I think is putting it on its exchange so that'll be another interesting Milestone um I think it has probably more ramifications um than like you know what is hyper liquid how it doing like it seems like the new l1s that come out are going to do very very well just because

people now have like you know it's that Meme of like people sitting forward in the chair where it's like okay if if a if an L1 comes out at two like it's go time I think a lot of people are um now cognitive of that especially because hyper liquid launched on Thanksgiving night and was at 10 billion you know maybe even like 24 hours later so a lot of people feel like they missed it and it feels like they're going to try to compensate in other ways to kind of get that back for with new L1 launches even buying hype you know at these prices or you know hype beta or whatever whatever you want to call it yeah totally agree do you guys think okay so I have another question for you guys on just the now I've seen a lot of people saying hey

this is they got uh they nailed the timing on this but I'm not 100% sure that's really true there have been a lot of tokens that have launched in a pretty good environment have gone straight down so it doesn't really seem like with Hyper liquid to me any one thing is the Silver Bullet it does seem like this team executed really well across a number of different it seems like the mechanics of the airdrop were executed really well they also had this Insurance Fund which is denom that is actually there's a certain percentage of the token that goes into the insurance funds they basically teawap $40 million worth of token which always helps especially when it comes to just the Aesthetics of the of the price chart and it kind of and apparently it's a really good product as well so it doesn't seem like

there's any one specific thing it seems like they executed on a good amount of stuff I have a question for you guys in terms of I think one of the other things that excites people about hyper liquid is it's not just a per de pers de it's an L1 also and so in theory in the same way that uni chain is sort of general purpose you can build arbitrary smart contracts on top of it so it's not just an app chain the idea is to have other people build things on it what do you think about the prospect for hyper liquid as an L1 do you slot it more as a DEX or as an L1 how would you think about that question I I think this is kind of like core to what we were describing earlier where apps become layers themselves whether it's L1

L2 its own blockchain who knows if you get big enough you have the opportunity to become something like that just based on the fact that you need that from an infrastructure perspective a throughput perspective um but you also want that for for the additional control and they're probably the only if not maybe the only one I know uni is doing uni chain um but they're one of the only ones that is size enough to be able to have their own chain for their for their Suite of applications and the bual test for that will be are people willing and interested to move their applications over to this because there's liquidity there's activity there's Traders like that's where you start to build this

like hyper liquid cabal potential um yeah and I think we haven't necessarily seen that with uni yet it seems like every kind of version of Unis swap is pretty segregated and and segmented it hasn't really kind of like combined in a unique way um and so I does think it leaves a lot of opportunity for someone to do it well you know what I've I've sort of noticed here a little bit is like this kind of um convergence of apps and the layers that they're built on is you know we used have this pretty narrow definition of what it meant to be an app chain or a general purpose chain and now it seems like there are at least a couple of different layers competing for like a defi layer or like a you know High throughput defi layer and I kind of

look at hyper liquid is something that looks like that there's there's technically a deex at the base but you know you can build arbitrary apps on top of it as well un chain looks a little bit like that the l2s like Atlas um what the ellipses team is Building looks a little bit like that kind of squinting and seeing quite a bit of similarity there and maybe that's just an observation not more of a question but if you are a generalized L2 or L1 and you don't have something that's working that is something that you are known for there isn't really any reason for you to exist I think I think people take like some of the takes I heard was like this is great like why do we need monad it's like I'm not sure that's the exact right take um yeah monad is building for like

super high through throughput consumer applicate in my mind at least um but it's easier to build out from the from the purple air you build lending you build spot like there's a very clear road map there it's just a matter of if you can get to be that center of gravity um but I do think that the new l1s who have something differentiated about them um I think are good prospects because like at this point in the last cycle you know we still didn't have avac Luna really um that kind of all happened in q1 and then they all really ran during that Q4 Bitcoin Spike I would I would probably expect the same I I want to end on just getting

your guys advice on as we Michael to use your verbiage like in the very very beginning of that wealth effect late stage bull market sort of phase like any advice that you guys would have I I don't know if you guys have had any chance to look at this because it only came out a couple of hours ago but there was a new project that got launched today called double zero um which I thought was pretty cool it was and I saw Austin federa from the salana foundation is going to be like one of the founding members so congrats Austin on doing that but you know I just sort of skimm the white paper and what it looks like is it's a decentralized network which is designed to improve or um solve some of the uh bandwidth constraints that especially High transaction High TPS chains uh deal with um so I'm actually

reading from a chat gbt summary here just to be fair that's my version I'm skimming but uh basically what it does it creates a decentralized network that combines underutilized private fiber links to form a high bandwidth low latency resilient communication layer for distributed systems there's like a filtering and prioritization of traffic that actually happens at the at the fiber optic layer there are dedicated links anyone can participate so private businesses you can either contribute bandwidth or you know plug in and and consume the bandwidth um and they're actually smart contracts which do networking and routing so it almost seems like an entirely separate layer you know one step below almost the consensus layer of an L1 so it's definitely a super ambitious pro project he just feels like a huge swing and

something that's very differentiated so I I haven't had enough time to dig into it and develop strong opinions maybe we can talk about it next week but at least it seems cool you know seem seems cool I mean there's been a bunch of these so I wonder how this one will break out but I don't know much about it have there been a have there been a bunch of these before in the I didn't realize that we've seen a bunch yeah oh interesting all right well I I do think that a lot of this next narrative and talking about like where we are in the cycle I I think the things that you know will work are the things that will work first but the things that really Drive um the later stages of the cycle you know the the wave four wave five Elliot

wave analogy is things that are going to be different and things that we haven't seen yet right now it's happening with def5 first it's happening with the Bas layers we we know how this plays and the stuff you know that work really excited about which we announced a few weeks ago um for instance glow uh building solar as a service on chain a deepin protocol for that um totally new totally differentiated like that type of an opportunity I think is where the end stages of this cycle will start to realize that value and if you can build something that's totally different like there's the the size of opportunity the size of Market opportunity that you have is just like 10x bigger um and and so that's another signal maybe like P of

advice in terms of where we are in the cycle is we haven't really seen anything super differentiated that's hitting scale yet like meme coins no those aren't differentiated that's basically nfts but fungible and you know is it defi no we've seen that before multiple cycles and is it l1's like no we've seen this before and so until we start to see differentiation I I think we're still very much in the very very early Innings yep agreed yeah I don't have much to add to that I would also just say don't uh subscribe too much to fomo here because it's just so easy to give back any gains that you've made up till this point and look have price targets or time targets and stick to them yeah I agree it's so

tempting right so hard because I feel like the thing that everyone forgets too is that the people call Top Cycles because dumb people are saying ridiculous targets that's not top signals for me that are most meaningful it's actually when really smart people that have a lot of money or big fun managers or whatever those are the ones that are screaming you know bloody murder at the at the actual top and it's so much easier to listen to those people because they're supposed to have been there and done it before and those are the ones that get you so yeah I mean it's different this time is not something that we've heard that much yet the Sequoia s bankman freed post is one of the best examples of the first trillionaire right it's so easy to read

that and say this isn't some internet Degen this is sequa writing this wouldn't do it if they weren't sure case in point not to ragon seoa but it's just a good example easy too yeah fun one all right see you guys next week peace cheers