AI Memes on the Rise, Stripe’s Major Acquisition, and Kraken’s New L2 | Roundup

Transcript

I think one of the real interesting Parts is when you apply this to crypto it's going to turn into an agent based kind of conversation and it's not going to be like oh answer this question for me like hit point shoot give me the answer it's gonna be like go do this stuff for me constantly and you know I've got agents running who are helping me with my itinerary helping me with my calendar helping me with my like signing up for flights onp like all of that is going to be kind of the new narrative and you know giving it capital to be able to go off and do these things may decisions on your behalf giving it you know whatever mandate it needs to have um I think that's going to be what this next kind of iteration of AI is going to be all right everyone this is a message

for my dgen listeners out there if you are getting scalped paying expensive fees to perex is I highly recommend that you check out index co-op's new leverage sweep now whenever it comes to leverage do your own research this is not Financial advice don't bet more than you can lose all that good stuff but if you are going to lever up you might as well not pay an arm and a leg for it you can get leverage on BTC and E with built-in liquidation Perfection uh now available on Bas mainnet and arbitrum so click the link in the bottom of the show notes and head over and check them out today and you'll hear more from them later in the program hey everyone this episode is brought to you by Supra the vertically integrated L1 for super daps uh they have a very cool new product coming out

called Supra container so head over to supra.com that's s.com containers so if you're building on an L1 and it feels a little bit crowded or the complexity of L2 and l3s are getting you down just head over to Supra they'll get you sorted Thank Me Later hey everyone this episode is brought to you by Fuel Labs who's launching fuel ignition a new high performance ethereum L2 powered by the fuel VM now you're going to be hearing all about ignition later in the program but for now what you need to know is they are launching phase two of their points program so click the link at the bottom of the show notes and head over start experimenting messing around on fuel today thank me later all right everyone welcome back to another episode of bell curve before we jump in quick disclaimer the views expressed by my

co-host today are their personal views and they do not represent the views of any organization with which the co-hosts are associated with uh nothing in the episode is construed or relied upon as Financial technical tax legal or other advice you know the deal now let's jump into the episode all right everyone welcome back to another Roundup edition of belur if you got Michael's wanted to advance how you Fell's doing doing well this just Advanced mic episode so this one out um yeah doing well um trying to think of what uh is going on

uh I mean framework will have probably a couple announcements you know next next year that we're looking forward to making and um I think we're think sooner than next year as well yeah I know it'll probably be um out by the time I guess probably a little after people hear this podcast but um yeah I mean it feels like we're we're finding pretty interesting stuff at the intersection of um things like energy and things like daylight uh with crypto and yeah I mean we were we were actually at a a hacker house in Russian Hill uh which is related to kind of the announcement that'll come out um but

it's interesting with San Franc go like you know back in the day there was all this like people living communally and like you know biohackers and you know like soilent Bros and you know Krypto Castle in like Castle right I mean like and it's funny kto castle that was who there were like J Jer that's what I Wasing you know you had like auger started there and like all that stuff and that kind of went away for three or four years um but like you know we went to this Hacker House uh I think a few days ago and it's like you know a bunch of uh you know grungy devs living in like a you know 15 million dollar house in Russian Hill and it's like everyone's like super dedicated and

knows exactly what they're building and is you know there's some idealism to it which is like you kind of need that but the vibe of that house has kind of like I think it's a it's a defining factor in terms of San Francisco coming back and a lot of the sharpest devs in the world building things often times for the second time in crypto where now it's like they're like I had my first rodeo I built some infrastructure that probably didn't take off get a ton of adoption but now it's like I've got a use case I've got a new market and I've got a real reason for to use crypto um so I think that was uh we spent like a bunch of hours there a few days ago and it was just you know that that's what you play for in crypto it's just like it

reinvigorates you in terms of okay this is this is why we do it that's awesome did I speaking of castles did I tell you guys I was staying in a castle in this last week I was going to ask how the trip went dude it was great it was awesome we went with some of the I know you guys are fans of the chefs the uh steakhous crew um we had a mly we had some folks from Moro uh spark it was a great it was a great crew um formed a dow called Excellence Dow huh Scotland yeah why uh I don't know yeah it was it was a golf golf weekend um so I got to play like yeah dude yeah it was kind of it was it was spontaneous decision to do this but it was uh it was a lot of fun

um we'll run it back maybe around e Denver something like that uh but it's good crew we have to get you guys on the next next trip newest memers of a excellent style my my golf game is tenuous I can either hit it really well or like you need to escort me off the course because like I can't even make contact I I don't know what separates one from the other but i' I've seen I've seen Vance play better golf without shoes on than with shoes on yeah what was the what was the background to the no shoes golf feels like there's a story just playing nine hole Friday afternoon rule is no shoes or flip-flop that's all you get that's awesome Woods out there and then I get in a golf simulator I can't

even hit the ball it's just like yeah I've got a golf simulator in my garage and we had some sessions just I was like I'm done with this [ __ ] it what about would it change your mind if it was a skiing offsite instead of a golf I can rip it up on the slop so I'm always get to that but winter is coming pretty soon here and uh so is the election 11 days 11 days yeah in two uh two roundups we're GNA be through this thing um we we've actually got that's Wishful D much I'm measuring time in roundups here yeah but what do you guys think uh we were actually just talking a little bit before we got on some of the newest polls that came out Michael you were kind of giving us the

what what what's the latest in terms of what the polls are saying here I mean the the quick and dirty is uh some of the last polls so the way it works is you've got the major Publications you know CNN Forbes uh Wall Street Journal that they all have their kind of like polling uh Cadence and around this time is usually when they come out with their last poll of the session um maybe another week sometime next week we'll get the final polls from everybody else um others like Ras M do kind of a daily trend and so you're going to see a lot of polls kind of coming through but the big ones like the cnns and the Wall Street journals are the um the these are the final ones that they do and at least Wall Street Journal um came out last night and that was plus plus two or plus

three for Trump on a national basis um and then you've also got CNN that came through this morning uh head-to-head it was even 4848 but with the full field it was uh plus one to Trump um and I mean just as a comparison um you know CNN the final poll that they had before the election in 2020 was plus 12 uh for Biden and ultimately Biden won the popular vote by four and a half percent um so you know you assume a six or seven perc you know margin of error uh expected error from that type of a poll um and um yeah so if you take the data on the face and compare it to the last two election Cycles it's it's pretty

clear the direction um I think the campaign has made a huge shift in that direction in the last month um and that's what you kind of want to see is momentum going in um is usually the defining characteristic and um yeah the other thing that I think you know if you really are following this there's a lot of there's a couple of axios articles about you know fear amongst the ranks of the Harris campaign there's sort of infighting and and you know blame game um but then you also have uh you know the Publications like the LA Times And The Washington Post post uh both came out in the last couple of days Washington Post today said that they are not endorsing a candidate for president I think the The Narrative here is is um

I think a lot of the Publications are recognizing kind of the direction of where things are going to go with this election and for them to be able to save face is ultimately the thing that only thing at this point that can save their businesses because the if you if if you kind of like premortem the election results as we're talking about and you say okay well what what's the defining characteristic Why did Why was it so wrong uh it's the gaslighting of the mainstream media um that is just so transparent and obvious for anyone who's paying attention and people don't like it people don't want it um and I think they're going to have to really uh look internal and and kind of figure things out I think we talked about it maybe a

couple episodes ago but you know CBS is really Under Fire because they haven't released a transcript of the 60 Minutes interview with kamla Harris they had the you know we're not going to fact check in the last debate but then they fact checked anyways and then they lost the fast there's just been you know mistake after mistake um and bias is is really shining through um and so I I think people are stop or people are losing trust in mainstream media even Jason calacanis posted something on Twitter where he's like the trust that people have in mainstream media is at an all-time low over the last 40 years um which goes to show you know the evisceration of of their business model um alongside it so it's going to be interesting um I think some of these are

um some of these Publications are sort of um hedging and just not picking aside you know as like a last ditch hey we're gonna stay out of this like don't kill us uh and uh even Nate silver with his you know and I I follow his blog he's kind of couching things as well because I think for anyone to regain any sort of trust with their readership or viewership or whatever it is um you you can't be headstrong in One Direction and and bullheaded thinking that she's going to crush Trump uh and then have the opposite happen you you just you can't I pay 15 bucks a month for him to tell me it's a toss-up race so it's really valuable stuff Haven you you've seen that chart that just like it's the intersecting lines it's like

this chart has told me nothing like I mean I'm sure that will be one of my many substack subscriptions that I forget about and end up paying for for the next I was going to say how long are you going to keep doing that yeah dude there's there there's substacks on those that I haven't read in legitimately years but I I think our perspective is 2025 is going to be very bullish you're gonna have um Trump win you probably have that nerich reaction where just like things start to Moon um you know kind of across all asset classes but especially the the ones that are identified as the Trump trades um you know you rally through Thanksgiving you rally through Christmas you know it's kind of one of those years where it's like you're talking to your family about how great crypto is versus the opposite

um and then in q1 I think it's kind of like all right he gets inaugurated on January 20th 20th and that's when it all starts to happen starts cutting rates starts putting regulations into place the Senate and the house come back and start to actually legislate so I think 2025 is going to be very broadly bullish um but especially for crypto like there there is no industry that needs this more than than than crypto at the moment um and it's good that seems to be going his way but um yeah I mean just bullish you know the the gaslighting stuff really resonates with me I you know who else does this in a in a way which I really don't appreciate is like the Liz Warren uh

stuff about corporate greed it's so offensive to your intellect it's just so it's so offensive here there's a I don't know if you guys saw this this mik honkasalo put out a great tweet on this here I don't know if you guys can see this but it's like you know the postwar greed spikes and the good old days when companies were generous and when companies got greedy in the 70s or the long generosity of the 80s and 90s like obviously it's not the companies getting greedy like something companies are always greedy something just changed in the environment which allowed them you know to raise prices in this way that's really negative for society it's just I don't know I I I I interpret it the same way I just think that there is a really willful misin interpretation of on the

ground facts in a way that is losing people because I would count myself in the group of people where I don't want to be one of these like Fringe people being like you can't trust the media you know but and it's like you know you got to believe what your eyes are telling you at a certain point that I'm not being said you know best yeah truthful information B they're not your friend they're not um let's uh let's talk crypto let's talk maker first all right let's talk uh I was say there's some right curve stuff on crypto this week and then there's some hardcore left curve stuff too so what what's I guess we're starting with the right curve with maker people who don't know um maker rebranded to Sky uh or attempted to we'll get to the point of this but um

you know part of this is launching the subd Dows that they have which are kind of like the suborganizations with their own tokens part of this is launching L2 and salana support like it it's kind of just like this overall growth Initiative for um maker to keep growing their Di Supply and you know they transitioned to Sky and effectively Sky just didn't take um you know exchanges you know which increasingly hold the keys to the kingdom you know didn't list Sky except for a few um people didn't migrate their maker either um but as part of this what what did happen is that you know die Supply and usds which is kind of their usdc competitor that maker has started to grow and Di is about like six billion right now which is like a two-year High

um and continuing to drift upwards because because of these rewards but um effectively didn't take and it kind of reminded me of this moment at Netflix where I used to work where they tried to separate the DVD business and the streaming business into two separate businesses what what was that called uh quickster quickster I remember that too and Reed is like super um just call it like bullheaded not unlike not unlike run um but I think in the right context and and you know he was basically like I'm not going back I'm not apologizing I'm not doing anything and then this one coms lady who wrote the Netflix HR manual was like you have to apologize you have to reset this and there's this

famous video of Reed in a fishing shirt which is like so strange that he chose to wear that uh on YouTube saying look I [ __ ] up I messed up you know the service is growing fundamentals are positive but on the day that he announced quickster the stock dropped you know 32% 33% and so I think this is kind of that moment for maker where it's like look the fundamentals of the business are growing things are looking pretty good uh there's a path to higher die Supply and and more revenue and more BuyBacks but we just confuse the [ __ ] out of people with this maker and Sky Rebrand and so we had a bunch of discussions this week with the maker team and maker Community it seems like the feedback has been taken they're pushing through a proposal to keep the brand is maker uh

they will still red denominate it 24,000 to1 so maker will be like a buck but I think the Miss here was like misunderstanding the brand Equity of maker itself um and you know the good parts are that it's growing in usds seems to be attracting a differentiated uh user of die in usds but like you know it was I think audacious plan one that parts of it are working but you know listening to the community and dialing things back I don't think is is a bad idea after all and you know token price is what it is but like what we're playing for at the end of the day is just like the fundamentals getting better and just to like double click into this I I think that there were six maybe seven kind of fundamental changes

that were going on simultaneously and I think five or six of them have worked really really well one of them has not which was the shift from maker to Sky um and trying to do many things at once is never an easy thing to do it's it especially when it's in crypto and there's a lot of noise um but there's just you know constraints and people are you know used to maker they like maker changing both D and maker brand simultaneously uh you know software upgrade moving into the star and Sky ecosystem concept of you know the subow in the Paran of endgame um like there's a lot of just things that are changing

in your mental model of how this stuff works what is this Sky thing um and so I I think that you know hats off for trying it but I think also hats off for recognizing that it wasn't heading in the right direction and there's a new path forward and this is this is why decentralization is powerful because you can see things in real time you can react to the community response uh you can hop on a Twitter spaces or Community call and like get feedback and then there's a vote and this can happen all in the all in the span of like weeks not like years um and so yeah it was pretty cool to see that in action but I think you know calling it out is like doing too much is never a good thing uh but doing you know not enough is also not

the right thing it's hard to know what the right call is beforehand but you know being able to accept um you know things not working and move back uh or or change pace is good it's also kind of like you know you look at the valuation of maker relative to its peers it's trading at like onethird Athena and it has like I think two or three x as much revenue and earnings Ando it's like 17th and it has like you know 100x more earnings a it's like I think half and it has like 4X more earnings um it kind of gets back to the point about like why the Trump uh presidency is valuable there's just like you need the Wall Street institutions of the world to be able to interact and underwrite you know based on a PE multiple and I think maker trading at like you know eight or nine

XP at the moment um like if there's real institutions here and they're allowed to interact with these things that's an easy buy but when all when everything is just kind of like retail PVP like those people are more interested in probably meme coins than underwriting things on a fundamental basis like that obviously can't last forever but it can last for you know a while and I think uh things change quickly you know maker was like one of the top performing coins until like a month ago yeah so I think it'll kind of you know fix itself but it's just a reminder of why it's important and how kind of fragile just like the understanding of brand equity and the importance of not confusing people are um I have a couple logistical questions if this were to go through how

do you do the token migration from Sky back to maker like how would that work there was always going to be a two-way bridge I mean this is another reason why it was complicated because there was gonna be a two-way bridge and the idea is you you didn't maker is used in defi it's obviously used in governance you don't want to brick a bunch of tokens that are maybe being used as collateral for certain thing like so you have to have the ability to switch from maker to Sky and Sky to maker and so that that was one of the confusing points uh but yeah and it wasn't so it wasn't a one-way thing and not much moved over ported over um and so you had like maker this multi-billion dollar asset and like sky with an fdv of like 75 million because that's how much had transitioned

over um just kind of a Miss there but you can move your Sky back to maker and then maker will red denominate with a software upgrade if all this goes through I mean and and broadly as well just to like talk on the the D5 1.0s maybe um I I think that's one of the most bullish categories uh you know postelection um like this stuff is working it's scaling it's becoming Financial infrastructure like we talked about in 2020 um and you're start you're going to see a more friendly regulatory environment to give these things a chance to go through the process of whatever they need to maker also is going through the Mah MAA uh process in

in Europe um and I'm I'm sure you know there's going to be a lot of things that they need to do to get there but that regulatory friendly environment I think most benefits def5 1.0 tokens agreed is the sky. money app still GNA be live and a thing like I guess I'm wondering yeah it is so the rest of the you can think of it as like summer. f okay or AA it's just kind of like a front end for maker um but like it was a good it was a good swing like look like you know people want to try things that are bold and audacious like go do it um I think a lot of projects are saying like even for for a maker it's like we can probably get to 10 billion of die Supply but like how do

we get to 100 billion and that was the goal behind endgame and still is um and I think you do need to make changes to how the ecosystem interacts and you know the subd Dows and the stars and and the different tokens you can earn and usds um so like hats off for for taking the swing and I think there's valuable learnings but I think the community is going to feel a lot better when it's just maker yeah I think so too Maker's a great name and I yeah it's it was a huge swing but also you got to respect people for taking big swings right like where there are very few I would actually say every uh organization in crypto is still at the point where it has to be comfortable doing that from time to time and not 100% of those are going to land and yeah

that's fine yeah um what do you think about uh actually I think it'll be interesting as well to watch like the star I think it's now Stars right is the term for the subd Dows um I was talking a little bit with uh Sam from spark and I I didn't really understand where the yield was coming from is the preferential funding that you get from maker and then the spread that you can get lending it out it's a really cool model um it kind of feels like a slightly improved model of what a lot of like shared security implementations have tried to do in the past which is like hey we get shitcoin yield emissions but they actually get more fundamental um like there's a real business that backs the value acral for the token so real simple to think for that is as the central bank and then all

stars or subow as commercial Banks who interface with the customers and you know can charge a higher rate but they're able to to borrow from the central bank at a slightly lower rate and that's their that's their business model yeah super cool so yeah I'm uh do you guys know when the um is the proposal live yet for this like or it'll I think their plan is like look we're just gonna ship and drown out the haters in the in the you know peanut gallery and like them shipping die to Sal I think will be very like there's like no stable coins on salana like they AR legitimately need more stable coins so that'll be big the l2s are supporting the other subd Dows are coming out and I think that'll be kind of the focal point and then you will have a proposal where

it's like look we're going back to maker yeah and you know we will vote on that as a yes cool um all right I got one more speaking of uh stable coins actually there was a pretty big acquisition uh in the form of bridge uh which was kind of the first I think people got pretty excited about it because it was a big headline number $1.1 billion do bridge going a stripe so you can think of bridge as mostly really a fintech play where they enable different types of businesses to accept transact uh Etc with stable coins um and so they've got a bunch of crypto customers but they've also got customers like SpaceX outside of which with I I learned through this process that SpaceX actually pays their International contractors in stable

coins which is I thought that was kind of cool um and so you know they've gone through this process with stripe the what I've heard which is unsubstantiated but I think this was a um a pretty structured deal um I I would guess like high Equity consideration as opposed to cash but I think it's still really significant because they're just haven't been that many large scale Equity exits in crypto there's been one IPO right and then there just haven't been a ton of like large scale exits and so it chokes Capital at the later like the growth Equity stage of Investments so I what do you guys kind of think about this whole the acquisition so two two kind of angles of perspective here the first is

on the payment side and the second is on like the acquisition m&a side yeah um I I think what this shows is that payments businesses done at scale are extremely successful because in their you know stripe is like a I think net net revenue probably in the like 1% less than that when they're when they're you know fully you know baked in and working with uh the acquiring bank I mean there's a lot of kind of like nerdy payment stuff that we can get into but um generally like it's a super low margin based off of the gmv of the of the ecosystem but they just the the gmv is in the like hundreds of billions um and so I think that's you know kind of the the take here is like

payments businesses are are very very successful um bridge I think had lot of Marquee customers they kind of have a lot of infrastructure I think the other thing about payments is it's a highly regulated business so probably have a bunch of money transmitter licenses you know kind of like status with banks and that's also definitely part of the acquisition value as well um and yeah I mean I I think broadly from a strategic perspective stripe has always been kind of at the Forefront of this um and being able to have something that just plugged in plays as a new business model for them um with stable coins whether it's usdc usds whatever uh I think that's going to be you know the way that they kind of make Bridge work um and this is

maybe like too early to tell but maybe one perspective on this is um you know the Facebook acquisition of Instagram it's kind of like well did Facebook make Instagram Instagram or was it in was Instagram gonna be Instagram no matter what I I think we'll probably look back and say that like stripe kind of helped Bridge become Bridge um and it'll just be stripe whatever at that point but the point is I think this is a really symbiotic relationship because stripe will be able to help plug in to all of their customers you know International whatever um and not have to deal with the international payments ecosystem and and kind of use stable coins as that substrate um but I don't know if Bridge would have been able to get there on their own um but stripe will definitely

hypercharge that so that that's on one end on the second end um I've had so many people like three or four people hit me up and be like oh well now that we have like Acquisitions back on the menu like do you think do you think about m&a differently it's like we have large exits all the time it's just in the form of tokens tokens yeah yeah and like it's like guys what are we talking about here we you know we talked about this with our LPS it's like you know what's the exit strategy it's you we invest in companies where there's probably never going to be a token and and definitely have a number of them in our portfolio that are doing extreme all of them doing extreme well but it's just a different liquidity environment when there is no m&a um and the IPO Market I

I saw 2024 is on Pace to be the lowest lower than 2008 and the lowest year since 2008 uh in terms of IPO um Market liquidity and that's not even adjusting for inflation so like crazy uh there is no liquidity in the open in the open public markets IPO Market um and and so I I I think people are getting excited about this just because it's like o this feels like traditional Venture but in reality crypto Venture is you know you're ding liquidity elsewhere um with most most other opportunities so it's great for everybody who is involved um but I I think you know the balls kind of moved in a different direction for

for crypto Adventure I would I am a little like did Bridge have a lot of customers or like what were what was the internals of of that business I'm not 100% sure to be honest yeah I'd always heard great things about them but I don't know what the they had a lot of customers or some IP like their Tech stack was really good or whatever I'm not sure I mean this is this going back to the payments business side you don't need a lot of customers if one of them is doing you know a billion dollars of transactions per year yeah like that's a that's a you know $10 million AR customer you know what it kind of reminds me of as an acquisition was when coinbase bought toomi it felt a little bit like that it kind of helped pave the

way for their institutional like Asset Management Prime business maybe similar deal um but I Michael your Point's really well taken on there there are big exits they just happened in the form of crypto I I'm putting my like blockwork selfish hat on here a little bit and what hasn't happened in the course of the last couple years is large scale injections of venture capital and that like that used to find its way towards like the fire blocks of the world and the the the kind of the custodian you know more traditional Venture plays and I think if either one of two things happened I think the IPO Market is going to be the much bigger driver here um if that opens back up but if you get IPOs or you know several high-profile Acquisitions then you get those several

hundred million dollars of injections in capital and then it's just like oxygen for the startup system who if if those people are your customers basically so that's just been tough for you know this is maybe more selfish blockwork stance but yeah from a venture standpoint I totally get the the that those big exits happen I mean those growth rounds have died basically in every industry you know growth was the one that got hit the hardest um not just in crypto uh even things like you know bolt you know people doing that at 10 billion get a billion to Capital just instantly incinerated um so there's a lot of I think sorting out that still needs to happen with that ecos system but um it

feels like the cotos of the world are starting to kind of like reemerge and and underwrite things in a way that is close to what they used to do but you know the multiples of SAS need to go up before really that happens in Earnest I mean one one bullish year of you know all the things that are waiting in the wing you've got um you know starlink allegedly going public you've got stripe wanting to go public you've got there are a lot of businesses that are kind of like waiting chomping at the bit to go um and I you know it's supposed to be like 86 billion of IPO liquidity this year which is the lowest it's been um I I would imagine we in I think I can't remember exactly but it was like 650 billion of IPO liquidity in 2021 so like

that's the the general drop um but I would imagine there's going to be a couple hundred billion um in a year where you know interest rates are coming down the IPO markets new SEC chair IPO markets open again all of that just kind of opens things up and then it's like okay well we're back by the way speaking of SpaceX and starlike Elon is just firing on all cylinders at the oh my God po Bill like yesterday big day for him he's got to be the best entrepreneur of all time right like who else him or Jensen yeah but Jensen's doing one thing though the thing about Elon that's so nuts is years yeah hey everyone this episode is brought to you by by index

Co-op and their new product The Leverage Suite which I highly recommend that you check out click the link in the bottom of the show notes now disclaimer whenever it comes to leverage do your own research this is not Financial advice all that good stuff don't bet more than you can lose but if you are going to lever up you might as well not pay an arm and a leg and save a ton of money and use index cops leverage sweep so the way that they actually achieve these savings is pretty cool they Leverage The Power of money Legos defi uh in this case Unis Swap and a so the cost of carry for this trade is actually based on the funding rate of a as opposed to per Dees which tend to be much more variable and higher overall additionally pex's will also charge you

usually based on the entire uh open interest so the leverage exposure that you have as opposed to just the amount of money that you put in which is what index Co-op is doing here and the result of what you get is just an erc20 which gives you something like 2x e so you want to lever up and you want to save money doing it I highly recommend that you go check out the index Co-op Leverage sweet very very cool thank you very much index Co-op for making this episode possible hey everyone this episode is brought to you by Supra the new blazing fast vertically integrated L1 which helps you scale your D if you are a builder you're probably dealing with some combination of cost complexity and fragmentation of existing Solutions so if you're building over an eel 2 land everything's feeling a little bit

fragmented at the moment and if you're building in salana everything is fast and on one layer but maybe you're limited in terms of what you can do with your ab space so Supra is rolling up a new product called Supra containers you can head over to Supras s.com containers um to learn more they offer dedicated customizable app spaces running on Supra 500,000 TPS layer 1 blockchain that gives you complete control over gas tokens and fees so some cool things you can do you get the freedom to you can use your own token create local fee markets or even go gas lless whatever you want so this product isn't live yet but because you're a faithful listener of Vel curve you get notified first so head over to supra.com containers Thank Me Later hey everyone this episode is brought to you by Fuel Labs who's

unveiling their new high performance ethereum L2 fuel ignition many of you know fuel as the launcher of the first optimistic stage two rollup on ethereum with fuel V1 and now they're launching ignition to address some of the creeping centralization concerns around some uh L2 architectures today and if you like nering out about the tech there's a lot of reasons to get excited about ignition including how they solve State sustainability and perform and execution they have this EXO asset Centric architecture that's very very cool but there's a lot of other reasons to love it super easy to use you can either use a fuet wallet or your existing ethereum or salana based wallet like Phantom or metamask or whatever it is there are cool apps that you can experiment with

and again like I said at the top of the program they're launching phase two of their points program so click the link at the bottom of the show notes head over start having fun on fuel ignition today just tell them that I sent you let's let's talk about jeto yeah jto uh all right so jeto is there's a there's a proposal live um where jeto uh is talking about taking a rake on some of the tips that passed through their platform which would go to the Dow so you know jeto obviously they've got a couple of different businesses they started an me and then they branched out into liquid staking but you know part of what they part of what they started is these sort of discreet um auctions that get run in

salana so Sal's continuous block building they kind of slow down time to 200 milliseconds run an auction and there are these tips that end up flowing through and historically they haven't tried to monetize that at all or take a rake or extract any value and they're thinking about changing that and if you pay attention to the the me activity um that's happening on salana or rev this kind of combination of transaction fees plus Meb it is exploding and jto is like the amount of tips that are flowing through their platform is is pretty N I can pull it up um yeah um I think uh it's great to see more of these businesses in crypto

maturing to the point where they take a rake I think for jeto at least in the shortterm medium term they will put that money back into the business either incentivizing more uh you know liquid staking derivatives or more people to build on their reaking platform to come online so I don't think it's like you know they're just cing the cash out through the back door uh but but I mean like you just see these like kind of natural monopolies form in crypto whether it be with stable coins or whether it be with kind of Meb and block building and liquid staking or whether it be like I don't I don't even know what you call pumped out fun but like yeah it's crazy like look has as manyas does fees more more I mean this is on a daily basis but uh yeah in

recent the tips versus priority fees for salana the chain have been yeah there's bit of flipping here I mean the last two days there was 6 billion worth of tips 6.1 billion versus uh or sorry 6.1 million tips and 4.7 in priority fees yeah it's I mean it's just crazy that they you know chewed glass long enough for this to really play out and um I think what's next for for jeto is just like monetization and continued growth and if they can get to you know a billion of fees a year that they're putting back in the platform and I think it's like kind of like a 10x of fees away and then like you know they need to probably increase their take rate to

really get there like they should either be buying back a ton of their own token or there should be institutions that you know if there's a trump win are comfortable looking at J and saying like all right this is like levered soul that that's kind of the thesis that we have at the moment the other thing that's pretty crazy about jeto is that there are 14 of them I don't know how like H how are they executing on all this well and this is this is like from our presentation deck that we give to LPS it's like this is the power of a protocol versus a company it's like the coinbase Unis swap example you know back in the day it was like unisoft is doing more volume than coinbase from a transaction perspective

yet they have one 100th the number of people uh I mean now it's probably like they have I don't know 10% the number of people um but this is this is the power of when you build something on a protocol and you have an application you don't have to have the whole thing you know as a company and Tides have shifted where companies used to be like we need to get all all the people that we possibly can and and I think Mark Zuckerberg was kind of the at the Forefront of this where it was like we don't need all of these random PMS working on the color of a button somewhere like let's cut it down Elon really also was was he was always on this trend but I think Zuck was the first one to do in the software space and um but yeah I think people are

starting to realize the the absolute power uh and leverage that you can get per person uh in these protocols it's a yeah it's uh what are your guys thoughts in General on that there's starting to be you I've started to see Mason nrom uh from panta he's kind of putting out these charts about like applications versus protocols in general how do you guys weigh pros and cons in terms of like Market size or like Market opportunity versus decision- making ability in a protocol versus a company like how would you kind of weigh those two you see them converging over time or are they just meaningfully separate for you guys into the future I think the first thing is probably probably Market size at least

for me um and there's some entrepreneurs that and I think jto is an example of this where they're like you know the market size for salana like two years ago was basically zero especially for of and they just like were good enough where they built out and I think they probably enabled a lot of this flow to happen like without jetto I don't know what that would look like on salana like they did create that market I think if you look through the other D5 Primitives you're like these are large markets within crypto how much bigger can they get with an infusion of trafi capital with more stable coins with more users and I think like our philosophy on defi is that it kind of scales at roughly the price appreciation of the majors because those are the collateral assets um and then within gaming it's just like it's a

it's a pure Market size experiment at the moment how many users can they get how quickly and then we'll figure out monetization down the road um and then with AI it's all growth again you know betting on Market size and with energy you're kind of betting on a blend of like the founders need to know what they're doing when they're doing doing energy but the markets are so large and they monetize so well that you kind of don't need to underwrite anything beyond the founder um so it's different for each category but I think in the in the case of jto it was just like they had a vision and they kind of created the market and that is probably the most bullish of all of them at the end of the day when it's like we created this

Market that didn't exist before and we're a natural monopoly as a result you know the other cool thing about jeto as well is that so the the actual numbers here for it's 3% of tips that flow through the platform are going to go to the Dow but they're ALS Al going to get routed to goto's reaking platform they right um shoot I'm blanking on the name uh but they've got a new name for it U node consensus Network yep and and actually I believe I hope I'm not speaking out of turn here so uh you know Lucas if this is wrong I'll correct it but I think they they were kind of initially looking at reaking because they wanted to find a way to distribute their tips in a more decentralized way

and reaking actually offered a really interesting way of doing that so the interesting thing to me about goo also is that they're they have multiple different components to their their platform right there's the liquid staking element there's that Mev element and there's the the reaking element and they're extremely synergistic actually and they're kind of starting to dog food their own product which is just cool man I uh yeah beautiful thing it's a beautiful thing I should have said I'm a small but proud bag holder of jeto but uh but yeah they're you know we're large but proud bag holder of we do are small proud yeah but how could you not appreciate what they're doing right now they're just shipping like look you love when things work out it's totally totally acceptable um should we talk

about AI meme coins goat yes this is the left this is the left velker story that I wanted to wasn't it wasn't it some guy pretending to be a robot or something so all right so there's controversy to this so I actually watched the whole Mark andrees Saga here of how this ended up getting started so I give you guys the rundown I don't know how how digly deep dug into this but there is a there is an a basically an AI chatbot that got trained on the internet uh like memes and fortun and Twitter Etc it was developed by this guy Andy ad or something I'm not gonna be able to get his last name but he created this spot uh terminal of truths and it's basically just been going tweeting and you know I

guess Mark andreon found it and he donated $50,000 worth of bitcoin to the bot and what the bot did was immediately turn around and begin to negotiate with its creator for more abilities so it only had the ability to write and read text and then it was like Hey for a thousand of this Bitcoin I want you to build me the ability to actually do image based generation as well and then it somehow got on this idea of like goatsy as a meme so I don't know are you guys familiar with goatsy at all as a as a meme oh boy this was such a huge thing my high school all right so this is I didn't actually connect it for a while but goatsy is the well it's not a it's not safe for work meme uh but it is a

very lwd image um of a man doing an unspeakable act on the internet and uh this this chatbot really liked it glad that on my work computer yeah dude yeah don't Google it don't Google it uh and so he start this chatbot tweet started tweeting about the gospel of goatsy some enterprising meme coin developer launched a meme coin called goat cus Max Smith which is an objectively hilarious name and donated some portion of it to the to the bot's wallet and then people started donating people realized that this was going to be the meta and they started donating like fart coin and stuff like that and I think gosi or gosi Maximus ran up to like $800 million um of value in about a week um this bot now

has is it Deca millionaire where is it at now couple hundred okay um and yeah people are just donating and it's just exciting everyone about the this like the AI memec coin meta here I think is the the so man lots of thoughts uh 50,000 from Mark to an 11 million do wallet is pretty incredible first and foremost but look I I think the meta point is um and we were actually having this conversation earlier this week with a Founder uh The Meta Point here is like AI 1.0 was

all based around llms and basically the Google uh replacement of like hey what should I do here answer this question for me how do I you know even to the point of like build me an itinerary for a trip to Scotland and you got all of that going on um I think AI 2.0 and we're starting to see this open AI just announced that they're going to have their next model out sometime in December but one is already out you're starting to see the the chain of chains um and I think one of the real interesting Parts is when you apply this to crypto it's GNA turn into an agent based kind of conversation and it's not going to be like oh answer this question for me like hit point

shoot give me the answer it's GNA be like go do this stuff for me constantly and you know I've got agents running who are helping me with my itinerary helping me with my calendar helping me with my like signing up for flights onp like all of that is going to be kind of the new narrative and you know giving it capital to be able to go off and do these things make decisions on your behalf giving it you know whatever mandate it needs to have um I think that's going to be what this next kind of iteration of AI is going to be um and so yeah I think we've you know we have come into our first agent uh of with popular demand um in the form of you know truth terminal it's funny that like all the web two startups were like

yeah like you the agents are going to be pop to like negotiate with like you know Hotel clerks and you it's like kind of but it's still just a chatbot we have those um but I think within the context of crypto what's interesting is like I think bit tensor is kind of acknowledged as like the first AI coin and it's very focused on llms and llm offerings and kind of being like this open source employment opportunity for llm developers um and I think this is like a totally orthogonal vertical where it's like the thing you built does rely on an llm but it's just kind of sentient and watching it do its thing and govern itself and make decisions is kind of like more of where the party is at um

and the portfolio we're talking to Aur is is kind of like this specific based agent platform um there's probably a lot more rotations and like sub themes within AI Than People realize where it's not just like we launched one coin and it's all encompassing and this is how it works um but it's definitely interesting I mean is it still like I feel like some of these metas like I can like blink and like miss them and like it kind of comes and goes but I I think gosi is probably you know 200 million 300 million whatever FTV one of the funnier tweets I saw was like the first job that the AI took was marads um because I saw that I know it's like recommending coins and it's you know like you know um it's interesting like there's just so many meme coins now

that like I I I think mem coins are actually good for the space be kind of because it kind of segregates like the daily fantasy sports side of crypto and like the 10-way parlay side of crypto from the like Tech and money and finance metas and I think like what that forces VCS to do is just basically only fun things that are amazing um because like the midtail longtail is just not going to get that listing not going to get that that bid anymore and I think that's great um and they've kind of outsourced all of that to people trying to turn you know 500,000 coin into a $100 million coin or you know $15 million coin and like it's kind of nice to have that separation of concerns and people are now pretty crystal clear that like if you don't build something that's net new

that has adoption that's novel um that bid is not going to come so I think it just forces everyone to step up their game and with I think VCS have generally reloaded um on their funds and I think a lot more will come to Market there's going to be less strip powder than there has been but there's still be more than recent history but that Capital will just frankly go into things that are a lot better purpose than like this like mellan spray and prey you know I buy a percent of this I buy a percent of that I get the low float High fdv I get to sell I think that meta has kind of come to a close in some ways I think it'll persist and others but um the meme coins of the world have definitely upset the balance of power and even in the

exchanges we talk to they're like yeah like how do we how do we take advantage of this mcoin Market how do we like is there away and you know one way is listing these meme coins once they get big enough but then you're kind of taking the same risk that you have been on the on the more Tech you know Finance uh infrastructure coins so it's just an interesting time you know the game if we want things to stay the same in terms of you know things are going up and doing well and it's interesting like it also has to change um and I think it's healthy that it has been uh and I think part of it is just because of these meme coins no not not saying I agree with this perspective but I do think that memec coins have taken advantage of a

void with everything else that's kind of been waiting for the last like six to nine months you know all all the defi assets even you know Bitcoin eth like everything's been kind of stalled in ranging basically for the last six months at this point and I think meme points have kind of like taking that attention away just because it's like fun and engaging and and like Fast um I I can see that shifting as soon as attention kind of moves back to to other major assets that you know like defi protocols games working like some of the major categories coming back online it'll be interesting to see how that uh um traverses into mem coin activity yeah I um I I can't remember which of the two of you said this on an

episode of BCR two or three months ago but you said that Meme coins remind you of those early internet videos that still that's probably my favorite explanation that I've heard so far about these things it you kind of squinted it and it's stupid but it it has some staying power in a way that I don't really know how it's going to work yet in the end state but it's probably going to be here for a while if I say Star Wars guy I think we all know who I'm talking about yeah exactly yeah I mean it's just a question of uh if the graduation rates are so low and the turn is so high what how does it manifest um but there is always a market for being new and being funny and being irreverent and interesting and I think that will persist

um I do wonder when they run out of people to kind of churn um yeah and and it seems like it can subsist on a relatively small population like we we track the Pumped out fund user numbers and I think it's 30 40,000 people um and it's it's a pretty high turn rate and refresh rate as well but like most of the coins are produced by like a a smaller Universe of folks um so it seems like it's able to subsist you know on that but I mean it just it does remind me of like the Open Seas of the world where it was just like it was the future until it wasn't totally the other thing too that be is pointing out is that I think the

fair launch meme coin meta is changing a little bit and we're entering the K meme coin era where you know that is that's going to be tough because there were a lot of people that got up on their soap box and said hey this is so much morally Superior to these lowf flat High FV games that that evil VC's play and it's that's clear not the no now we're the same as you yeah right so from inside the house yeah so I I guess one other just one other note in this Saga it actually sold off quite a bit when there was a typo in the in the Tweet they misspelled groups they spell like group poost or something

like that and it led this this whole War of the llms make spelling mistakes I actually asked chat gbt if it made spelling mistakes it basically said no but sometimes when you merge tokens I guess it's it's possible I've never seen it I I really don't think it happens I'm robot I'm a little robot dude yeah I'm not gonna do that do you guys know there's a story you know what it reminded me of a little bit is there was a story of a supposedly this really young girl like a four or five-year-old girl who's a Phenom artist and they had all these videos of her like making these um like drip paintings and it she kind of caught on and they started selling for a lot of money and then it was debunked because in the background her parents were like directing the entire thing and like overnight it just

all of her stuff became worthless and I wonder if I wonder in this situation if we found out that it was just a the AI is just uh you know some guy in India making these tweets I'm not really sure if it would hit the same you know oh yeah I mean I saw people on Twitter like there's no way it's not a robot it's like dude you have no idea um like again like you can kind of like compare the agents themselves to like the meme coins like what's the marginal cost to spin up a hundred new AI agents zero yeah you know will there be a canonical AI agent how can you tell what would differentiate it what would be its defining F its wallet size who gives

them the most coins like pure Network effects of like you have more money you make more money you get more notoriety I don't know yeah you know you know what I will say about these if if this ai ai agent is real we've been kind of bad so far at predicting the AI use cases right everyone said oh the creators are going to be safe and it's like nope actually uh not so much ones get shot first ones yeah first ones right off all produce macaroni noodle art when we don't have jobs seriously like finger painting so I don't know I just keep an open mind about it I it's really cool I don't know how much you guys use Claude or chat gbt on a daily basis I use it it's not 100% replace Googling for me but I would now

say marginally I use it more um so I don't know I guess we'll see how it evolves I mean the I mean the bots of yesterday are the AI agents of the future you know it's totally how you brand it um and like I mean there I don't know if you've noticed your Twitter post or my Twitter post like there's clearly some AI replies in there totally totally you know it's kind of like getting this weird mix of like huh maybe we only have a few months left before the site is like mostly Bots um or like AI agents or that that was that was Ian elon's whole thing he was like he came in and got rid of 80% of the Bots guess what we killed all of our active

users they're back um you guys heard dead internet Theory you know what that is it's yeah your stuck culture yeah it's B it's basically that actually for a long time some huge percentage of internet traffic has been Bots and it's not nearly as active as everyone thinks it is so yeah I I think that there's some truth to that um it's it could go either way but like I do think you know what are the other use cases for AI agents I would say that that like a like a truth terminal was actually fairly predictable AI manages capital on chain I think people have been calling for that for for a long long time maybe there's an iteration of it where it's like the AIS are working

in teams you know maybe there's an iteration where the AI are working in teams and they are puppeting like human meat sticks to go like you know do things in the physical meat space world you know like you can kind of you can kind of keep going um I I I think what will change as soon as there's kind of like logic and reasoning and and kind of like depth to these agents as opposed to bots which are you know they're set to do one thing one thing fast and do it better than humans can um like historically in games Bots have always been kind of like a attacks on the gameplay on the user flow and there there's a lot of kind of recognition especially in crypto when you have

things of value in web 3 daming where maybe Bots are not that bad and you actually want them to be in the economy who are producing things in the economy that then could be sold in the economy and you should actually take the approach of let's invite Bots because as long as they're participants from an economic perspective there's nothing bad with that yeah and even I mean you have to put guard rails in where it's like you can't have a bot like completely just win every single thing and this is where the economic design and the game design are are super important but Bots I think should be embraced not kind of and Bots as AI agents of the future um should be embraced not kind of you know playing the wacka all game of trying to get rid of them completely you gotta

exract value from them if they have money take it use it yeah I've I've got another farther off one for you guys which is I don't know how much you guys have dug into ZK TLS which is kind of this relatively far yeah it's basically just you know you can take data from any arbitrary API and kind of generate a proof and put it on chain and you know I think if you extrapolate some there are some pretty interesting real world use cases like okay why could you not use a bot like an AI agent like an llm to book you a doctor's appointment or something like that it's because they have to get on the phone and there's so much bureaucracy that you need to penetrate but could you imagine if your medical records in this like like very privacy

protected way just existed on chain and instead of having to talk to a doctor you're just like moving this private data into that square like suddenly the bot classic example and the reason I know ZK TLS is frankly chain link um and they have their own version of it called Deco um implementation of same similar Concepts but the classic example that they give is why do you want to hand over your ID when you go to a bar to verify that you're 21 it has your name it has your address it has everything about you your driver's license number don't you just have a system that says is this person over 21 yes or no doesn't give out your age doesn't give out any additional information that's the only question that needs to be asked like let's let's think about information as how it's used and answering the right

questions not just like giving away all in additional information to answer that question like there there are so many practical use cases of this it is kind of difficult to imagine like how do you get an ID on chain and like how do you bridge the analog in the digital world and all of that abound yes I agree in the case doctor's appointments and like I I have one medical here in San Francisco and it's great you know for fast whatever but it's like every single time it's like Hippa this Hippa that and like oh can no no can't do that can't do this and it it it is all controlled because of pii um but this this if widely adopted could be a technology that helps with that even the chain link example of the of the bar what it does

is it transforms the answer to a I have like a I have to know all the numbers over 21 to just a yes no of is this person over 21 and it makes it way more easier for Bots something like an AI to interface with so I don't know it'll be interesting the ZK stuff it's always next year right but if if you actually were to you know it's always next year but if you were to pipe a bunch of that data on chain and then these Bots could manipulate it in interesting ways maybe there's something there right I I'm not sure but all right last story uh we can just end on this one Inc uh so we got a kraken L2 here and actually Michael you and I covered this uh when we talked to permission list but we got uni chain launch of uni chain which flash Bots um

is supporting with rollup build very fast blocks kind of a defi gen purpose chain um and so now all these different l2s are on the op stack you've got base there you've got uni chain and then you've got uh Inc which is Kraken L2 pretty powerful I pretty scant details about Kraken chain like Inc is basically they said they want it to be defi specific I'm not sure how it's we don't have any details about how it may or may not be purpose built for D5 whatever it is but I think the story kind of here is that actually the op stack is kind of running away with it I mean those are three huge BD gets pretty cool props to them did a good job I was told the L2 road map was not working no more l2s I mean like this is

all bullish for eth uh because they're going to need to pull assets onto that chain there's not enough stable coins for that to Really Happen needs to be e um I think you're going to see a lot more of these I think some of the l2s struggle with activity and you know blobs were burning briefly I think like a few days ago but kind of have turned back on to free mode um but like these things are what takes it back there sustainably so in in my mind it's kind of proed positive that it's starting to work and there's obviously things that need to change um and scaling the L1 is one of them but this stuff gives us more confidence that ether's on the right path and I mean look Kraken is going to run the Playbook that coinbase did it's it's a great Playbook um Inc is also I

think a great name especially for Kraken um but yeah if they can get any sort of activity similar to Bass and start to have that ecosystem where and I think ultimately Bas and Inc are going to be this like kind of hybrid model of you're a user on Kraken you're verified on Kraken and or or coinbase and you can then get access to all the different Services you know verified uh services that are on Bas or Inc and yeah exactly and But ultimately it's going to be a huge strategic play for them and you know talk about IPO Market I think they're they're lining up for something in the next year or two it'll be interesting to see how all these IPOs take

shape because I I think like even for coinbase like one of the things they sell on their quarterly earnings calls is like their base ecosystem and like we tell this to LPS but like the most powerful thing about crypto is that you're not building a company and if you can have this like other thing that lives inside your company that can give you crypto likee exposure to the underlying market like that's a very positive story and um I don't know where kraken's business is at right now but like my sense is that this could be a meaningful part of what's going on there I mean Bas has been absolutely murdering it from I feel like they are one of the big success stories in L2 land over the course of the last year there are some really cool things you can do even from a ux standpoint you can

use funds that you've got in coinbase on base in a really seamless way and they've got a ton of distribution so and Jesse is a great leader over there and he's been selling the gospel and doing a great work job of uh managing the corporate background and Vibe versus the onchain backr it's very few people that could do that so yeah I I'm I'm with you guys I think there's going to be a bunch more l2s I I do think that the air I'm not sure how much like performance is going to be a competitive Vector that's going to work too much anymore I think roughly these these all these chains are going to be relatively cheap I think you got to innovate on distribution now which is why I actually think that these exchange l2s are super interesting

because they've got a huge they've got huge huge huge user bases attached to them so well and this is what I mean they've got huge user bases but they also have product differentiation in that they're gonna they're going to be able to build an ecosystem where you as a financial institution let's say you know black rock or any of these that are building things on chain say great I want to have Biddle on chain but I only can transact or you know borrow against or lend against or you know do whatever transactions against verified users the only ecos that you'll be able to do that are base and and ink yeah all right Fells I think those were basically our big stories um all right two more roundups and then this election is going to be

done this assumes that we're gonna know on like the eth or the ninth we'll know well what is the I remember there was some distinction in don't aren't there more M mailin ballots from uh blue States right and there there was some Nuance to how vrats vote early um if you look at any of the Swing States right now it's like blowing people away that Republicans are actually ahead that's why I think we'll know that night like usually you know it's it's not close I mean 2020 was was closer but you know we knew basically that night that Biden had probably won even though I mean there

was the whole thing about Georgia and that like it what what comes down to it is in certain States if it's too close they'll have uh they'll have like a recount like a forced recount or they'll have a um some in in the case of Georgia in the case of the senate race no one won 50% so they had to do a January election remember that yep and so I I think that there will be kind of nuances to each of these different states I think Pennsylvania has this Georgia has this um Georgia looks like it's pretty solid red um so maybe that doesn't trigger but Pennsylvania is the one that you know could go either way if it's within half a percent I think it it might be a Trader recount damn well it'll come down to it

I guess I mean we'll see how it goes but uh yeah 2025 will be I'm very positive on 2025 I think it's going to be a good year I think uh there's a lot of stuff to get excited about and it's been a little bit of tough sledding I guess depending on what your seat is in crypto in the last year or two but I think there's a lot of reasons to be positive going into this next year so remain excited hugely bullish hugely bullish stay bullish see you next time all right see you Fells bye