Bitcoin’s Institutional Bid, Solana’s Memecoin Fallout, and HyperEVM | Analyst Round Table

Transcript

so maybe Bitcoin isn't is kind of in like a super cycle adoption thing but that doesn't mean that all coins are are going to go with it and I think uh training your mind and kind of reestablishing that this new reality I think um that's that's going to be the best way to survive moving forward nothing said on zerox Research is a recommendation to buy or sell Securities or tokens this podcast is for informational purposes only and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions not Financial advice pachio Ryan and our guests May hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed hey guys welcome back to another episode of zerox research um before we jump into the show today I do

want to do a quick shout out for das uh the digital asset Summit is coming back um to New York next month um a lot of exciting things are going to be happening we are going to have some some uh live podcast the Thousand X guys the light speed guys um they'll be live at the event and a bunch of exciting um speakers and and guests from around the industry um I kind of want to do let's do a quick like around the room Mark I know that you're going to be there at Das anything you want to highlight or what are you going to be involved with when when you're there yeah I mean I'm just looking forward to going this is gonna be my first crypto conference in the US um and it's in New York the Big Apple so looking forward to that I'm

moderating a panel on lending and I have a couple other maybe one other moderation so hopefully I can squeeze in some time because I know I know Kathy Wood's going to be there never seen her live I know Richard Tang is going to be there CEO of um bance I think this I don't know for sure but I think this might be the first time he's speaking in like a conference since he became CEO so I hope I get to catch out those two conferences while I'm there depending on how the workload goes but yeah excited Bach uh Danel Shiro any thoughts from you guys stuff that uh either speakers you think are exciting or you know talks that uh you're interested to hear yeah I I'm um I want to see a lot of stable coin

talk I want to hear about plasma and the new te the new tether chain the new te Al one um I want to see Mark speak that's really it one one guest I'm one speaker I'm I'm excited to be there is Eric Peters of uh one River um he puts out a great Weekly News newsletter and also just one of the earliest uh traide guys to to the crypto Trend um Kyle sonani will be there um always love his contrarian insights and then kind of on the more like rwa and uh crypto um Bridge stuff Sergey nazarro will be

there um so yeah really really great diverse range of speakers awesome yeah it's going to be jam-packed ton of people from either around the industry or you know maybe interested in coming into the industry from like the trafi side of things so definitely check it out and for all the listeners out there use code 0x10 Link at the description you can get 10% off tickets um if you're interested in heading off to das uh maybe you'll get to see Mark and some of the other research guys that'll be there I know Ryan cash flows Connor as well I think he will be there it's not really our thing huh Danny they're not sending us over H it's not our thing I wish they would send us over but I feel like it'd be a little goofy they sent the two

consumer and gaming guys to yeah I I think that's a good point it's it's a bit more institutionalized focused right so I don't know if the um yeah I mean you you said it right the gaming and the the Deep onchain D gen guys I don't know if that's who they need at the at the conference but you know maybe they'll they'll shoot us in for the next one yeah I'll um I'll do one final very small show I think you covered everything but I will say one thing I think a lot of um I would say like our type of analyst Danny they they think that this kind of conference isn't really worth going um like they would rather go to permission list um e Denver token 2049 etc etc I

think these institutional conferences are a pretty good place to kind of hear VCS talk to other VCS and like how funds think about the space going forward um so I think like if you are in New York or in the US or anywhere else and you're like this isn't exact exactly my crowd I think you should still kind of take a chance use code ZX10 take a chance and just go to the conference check it out because I do I I think it's pretty clear that the institution is going to face some pretty significant shifts going forward and it would be it would kind of suck to it doesn't have to be about D like any institutional conference you should take a shot and go

at it and just see what's happening 100% I think that's a great point for the sort of like onchain Crypton native folks out there like this is definitely an opportunity to either get perspectives insights like hear opinions from people that you otherwise maybe have zero exposure to or limited exposure to right and how they're thinking and how they're kind of you know stepping into or or thinking about stepping into uh you know doing more crypto related things so 100% I think great Point great call out um again one more time ZX10 that's the code get 10% off tickets and hopefully we'll see you there next month um but yeah we can jump into the show uh um we we ran around the room a little bit already but joined again we got bacho back on the Pod we've got Daniel Shapiro and Mark um a full

research crew today um happy to see it love to see that I think there's been a lot of a lot of craziness within the market um on the timelines while things are happening we're calling it crime season we're calling it do whatever you want on the blockchain season um don't actually do that that's not advice um but that's how it appears to be based on what people people are seeing on socials today um I mean I think the big the big one as of late we don't really have to dive into the details but the Libra token the sort of like Malay Argentina controversy and the kind of keler Ventures Fallout um that's you know you see a lot of people who are a bit jaded and maybe connections to just you know some some silliness that people were doing um on chain and around these

tokens but maybe some bigger news that's like kind of getting ignored or missed out on is there were a lot of filings just recently um around either new Holdings or added Holdings um around BTC ETFs for example the state of Wisconsin um announced that they're holding over 300 million the Abu Dhabi Sovereign wealth fund bought over 400 million of btfs in q1 um we're seeing like some early discussion of you know like City Bank and other like trafy institutions talking about sort of signaling their desire to want to launch like Bitcoin crypto custody obviously that's going to depend on regulations but um a lot of these things I think are they're getting

ignored and people are highlighting on the on the negative things how are we feeling generally guys right now like is it as bad as everyone says are we doomed I think Mark can probably give a bit more color on the institutional side of things I'm gonna kind of talk a bit about sentiment um I think this is just the I don't want to say I don't think it's Peak worse sentiment but I think what's happened over the past two months and I'm putting um prior to Trump coin and then also like Trump Co ETA um has been pretty drastic um I think there's clearly a

sentiment shift on Twitter um from what I understand now the way to approach this I think is like kind of twofold I'm going to mainly be speaking about Solana the value is still I think okay not like the tokens value but I think like the value prop of Solana which is cheap um scalable L1 um on the other hand I think Trump was clearly like now in hindsight we can all say yeah that was probably like Peak sentiment for Solana for some time um on that end I do think that the value prop is still there if you look at it today like I know

people get upset by this sometimes the term rev but what it is really is like fees and priority fees and how much people are willing to use the chain it's still 40% of like the l1s that we track at block Works which I would say are the most relevant ones um so it still makes up 40% of that so I think and this is something that Ryan kind of brought to my attention is this idea of what you see on Twitter isn't necessarily the reality like I'm sure that funds are still looking at Solana and saying wow this is you know 40% of the market share for fees like people are still paying good money to use salana and it's making money um even though it's down dude I think it's down

93% from the trump top with r which is kind of crazy um but still it's 40% so everything else has also gone down in terms of fees um I do think we got a bit too silly on that end and by silly I mean like very very serious crimes so I think there's going to be some backlash over this I also think both can be kind of true like Solana still has the value prop but on the other hand um if you hit somebody 15 times when they're when every time they walk through a door the 16th time they might just not walk through like people respond to feedback loops and if all you are getting on Solana is like Max Mass

extraction events and you're losing a lot of money and I know people like to say like oh some people are making a lot of money you know some are but a lot of people are losing a lot of money I think eventually that attention might shift elsewhere and I think it's kind of lining up with some other chains um I don't know if you if we're going to talk about hyper evm today I'm not going to talk about it too much now but like hyper evm monad Mega e um base is still a great alternative we might see some of those get some market share but I mean Solana is still kind of the dominant play we'll have to see how that looks like we need you I think fees are kind of a lagging indicator at that end but it can also help you understand like how

the activity is Shifting so I think it's probably just good to keep track of like ignoring Twitter sentiment and everybody saying H Solana's dead now I think it's probably best to just keep a track of how activities evolving on Solana because at the end of the day they did end up building out pretty good ecosystem like know is fantastic margin f um Jupiter even though they've had some issues lately I guess with the crime side um jeto is incredible so they have the base for it and I think it's semi Lindy now they got the wallet everybody to download the wallet um they have very strong distribution everybody knows how to use Solana everybody knows what to do on Solana so like the only I

guess the main takeaway is I would just like keep track of what's happening I could see a sentiment shift happen towards like n other new l1's and l2s gain market share from Solana but I also don't know if it's right to say Solana's completely dead um it's probably like a in between of the two maybe Solana never does as well as it has done in the past because it was dominating for a very long time but I also think it's probably best to just keep a track on it because they they still have the tools to do okay reasonable response I know you were worried I was going to come on here in crash out yeah I'm just going to Echo that I mean you pretty sum it up pretty nicely there I think we did reach some kind of

P Foria with Trump and maybe it was obvious in hindsight um you know when the institutions are coming and by that I mean government institutions as well we didn't think they were going to come to rug us right so that wasn't wasn't necessarily on the cards but you know more on more on the ETF side and the background things that are possibly happening like you know bit you know ethereum ethereum this month what are we the 18th it's had $400 million in net flows month to date that's just February alone you know and the 13e filings came out and you know we see things like Bitcoin um tudo investment which is um you know Paul tudo Jones you know billion dollar hedge fund like their 13e filing showed that Bitcoin was their

largest stock ETF position in the entire portfolio of 3,000 names so one of the largest hedge funds in the world they're one of their their largest position is Bitcoin through these um IID ETFs right so I think I think and I also think this is why there's been a lot of dispersion happening too because um because the ETFs have kind of I think the ETFs have kind of changed um bitcoin's market dynamics just in terms of you know steady passive flows every month eating up the mining seller pressure and as well as just as well as just more more more institutions buying it like like if you just do surveys you see more

institutions are are admitting that they're having have more in their portfolio even if you use 13e filings as a benchmark it's gone up quarter over quarter over quarter since the um since the Bitcoin ETFs launched last year January so I think I think these things are happening in the back end and maybe they become more normalized so we're aren talking about them as much but that's kind of a good thing the fact that they're being normalized and you know I just expect to see you know more of this consistent flows to follow um yeah I'm I'm trying to remember your original question here but just to kind of uh tail on um give General thoughts um I I think we're in a completely new market now um I think we're going to

continue seeing uh dispersion um right like clearly there's like Bitcoin is a product it's effectively selling itself as digital gold and there's buyers for that right and with the ETF there is a mechanism for large amounts of capital is to purchase that um that product um you know all these l1s like salana was selling um this beam coin game and that drives you know the vast majority of its RV um and I think you know there the only other sizable portion of its RV comes from sole USD trading but you could you know Inuit it that a lot of people are buying soul to then go um you

know buy meme coin so you know I think that that product um that game you know like it's it's a net negative EV game and I think the average person um loses money when they do that um and the whole Libra thing showed that like yeah like this it's just all insiders um are pretty much the only ones that can consistently make money doing that and like what box said like yeah how many more times are going to people go how many more times are people going to walk back in into the casino um so that was probably a local Peak there so at this point um pending [Music] some some event which either triggers um an increase in in liquidity and and

lowering of interest rates I don't know if that's down before up or I don't know if um if if it just comes because I don't know maybe China fires off the liquidity bazooka first like I'm I'm not a I'm not a macro expert here no one can predict things these things pending that coming um I think it's just going to be it's going to be continued uh dispersion um I mean already like bitcoin's holding up Al are getting um altered are down a lot uh from kind of the the December January highs and I think at this point um looking forward and I know we're going to talk a little bit about this more um in the later stages of this pod but it's it's going to come down to uh I think

fundamentals from here um and we'll see uh maybe maybe the Cycle's still on and we're kind of rolling through the top right now but I don't know I kind of have a feeling that you know Bitcoin is is starting to get these new flows and it's going to keep going um so maybe Bitcoin isn't is kind of in like a super cycle adoption thing but that doesn't mean that all coins are are going to go with it and I think uh training your mind and kind of reestablishing that this new reality I think um that's that's going to be the best way to survive moving forward this episode is brought to you by Ledger the global leader in digital asset security celebrating 10 years of innovation Ledger Remains the most secure Hardware

wallet for your crypto and logins trusted by 7 million users and securing 20% of the world's digital assets follow the link in today's show notes to grab your Ledger now I think good points all around I want to Let's Circle all the way back around to box takes on some of the salon RV stuff I think it's good to highlight we got the data up here um we've basically like in the beginning of febr have trended back to the levels prior to the Trump token launch and like yeah Looking Back Now you see that massive Spike you know maybe that what should have been some kind of indication but you know obviously that's always that's always hindsight as 2020 in all of these scenarios um but then if we look even more recently like maybe we are trending down to like even the pre-election levels of activity um which are still

incredibly meaningful like if we zoom out on the weekly basis like this is still massively massively more meaningful um in terms of value to the network than we saw a year year and a half ago um so if we need to you know if people decide that they don't want to trade as many you know Insider commemorative coins like and we go back to Prior levels it's not the end of the world for soul like you said um and I think just highlighting the other point here as well around the sort of L1 comparison or the or the chain comparison um you know soul is still incredibly dominant here I mean just the recent day we're looking at maybe 38% of like total Network RV across kind of the stack of things but again if we zoom

out like the trend has been very very strong for the past you know what nearly two years at this point um I think we'll we'll need to see some some other um other other meaningful Catalyst to to massively change this um and the one point there that I think you had is either a like you know if it's additional chains come on board and they can you know effectively you know figure out some distribution to get users on and maybe that convinces people to move over that might be one option um and then maybe we line this right into the the topic around fundamentals I think you're totally right um Daniel that like there's been a lot of talk about this as

well um which is funny but what's important to highlight like I think you talked both sides of this for example um in your in your points that you made but um there's been a lot of talk of fundamentals some some things getting brought up like salana dex's for example um yet a lot of the like dex's and trading applications depend on you know these spikes and high levels of of trading activity around memes today um to sustain like their current valuations or where they priced looking forward um if you think that that activity is going to Trail off in the coming 6 12 months then that changes your outlook um I guess do we have strong thoughts on like fundamentals today are there like we

need to be thinking about or looking at going into the next you know year ahead um that that people aren't really thinking about it seems like right now it's very much like oh memes were crazy and like now they're dying and therefore like everyone's going to buy fundamental things but that's it feels like a bit of a naive take like does anyone have a deeper insight there they want to share I do think that that's a bit of a naive take I I know like a lot of people actually this was kind of fun at the start of the cycle a lot of people were like we're going to do apps like we're going to be betting apps and then I think if you look you'll see that l1's probably did the best risk adjusted returns um there's a few apps that did

really really well radium um as Mark knows because he wrote that piece way way early um Camino across did well I'm just like there's a bunch of apps that did well but still people I guess generally where like the L1 premium is done um and then we kind of saw that not be true um I would expect that to continue I don't think that memes die I I do think that we do tend to overcorrect quite a bit like I I know a lot of people view this meme cycle as some form of financial nihilism um thing and then a bunch of other people are like oh it's just like

gambling and we're going back to Our Roots I like to view it as kind of an overcorrection on what we were facing and I think this whole idea of like crime is legal is actually what it was like we did overcorrect from a very oppressive regulatory regime towards something that's I think too loose um but there were like I guess like meme coins have always kind of been extractive but there's kind of a method to the madness and I wonder if like if we do go back to memes which is very likely like you said I think saying fundamentals matters kind of naive in an industry where fundamentals have historically not mattered a lot and I don't see that changing um apps will definitely be interesting L1 premium I think continues

and people probably still build l1s I do see meme coins coming back um probably not our memes in the sense that like the ones that we already hold um I kind of like the like wholesome memes like you can show your girlfriend Bon and she'll be like yeah this is funny you know it's like a dog getting it in the head and I know like these also have like big operations behind them uh same as Whi same as Pepe um but it's it's better than like like it's harder to explain I think melee which is a lot more of an extractive operation what I'm basically trying to say is like if we do go back to memes I am assuming that we'll do more like wholesome memes um I

know people like to blame pump fun um I think we might see kind of a decrease in that although I'm not betting on that um but that's like I I think we still see it and I think probably the best bet to do here is Bid stuff that is kind of fundamental but also has meme coin exposure and I think the big one has been radium um I'm sure there's a bunch of other like like if you just go down maybe like defi llama for 15 minutes you can figure out like what might benefit and then work for that um that's it that's my like that's what I see happening once again I'm going to 100% agree with Bach um I do think meme coins come back I mean look look at the casino

industry look at the online casino industry you know no matter how many times you lose money it's a growing industry globally no matter where and yes you know with the US legalization of online gambling they're experiencing that um firsthand themselves um I do think in terms of the the mean reversion to that bck mentioned like if you if you just took the entire crypto market cap you got rid of Bitcoin you got rid of um stable coins and maybe even e if you wanted uh like since post election since Trump won it was up like three 3x right in a few months and everybody was like this is a new norm and so I think it's kind of normal for something that's

up like a lot of coins up 300% in a few months I think it's very normal for them to retrace 50% or more um you know I think the sentiments right now even on bitcoin Bitcoin has a 0% funding rate on many of the major um platforms right so I think sentiments might be very low even if you look at RSI um indicators across many of the majors they're all very low um but what has even though sentiment is low and there's that this this retracement retracement and mean reversion things with fundamentals have actually outperformed like things with cash flows have not seen as much downside volatility as the things that people maybe don't have as much

conviction holding or people always knew this was a musical chair or you know for whatever reason that fundamentals matter they seem to me they seem to have mattered a lot more this this past downt and I think that's why they're getting a lot more attention now while while we're talking about it and probably the only people still optimistic on the timeline or those looking at fundamentals anyway so maybe that's a little bit of bias but yeah I think I think that kind of like you know zoom out a little bit and you could get a little bit of a more holistic picture of where we are yeah I agreed I'm gonna completely agree with you Mark I'm gonna say two things number one is I think we as blockworks were I would say like relatively early to the salon Trend

and we've been very very bullish and a lot of that has come from activity on it so I want to say like two things number one is that I think we get a lot of um criticism regarding like like rev um and meme coins so first of all R is just fees uh plus priority fees and some of that is from me um and the second thing is that I don't think anyone on the team is bullish this crime cycle and I I saw this a few of these tweets so I just like I feel like we don't really explain ourselves very very well on the Pod and this is our like very big public appearance so I just want to like clarify because I just said I don't think memes going to die Mark

you also said like the casino never stops and I think like there's a difference between saying something is good for radium and for salana um because that's just the reality of the world and then there's a difference between like moral which I'm not even going to get into like I don't want to ask Mark about the morality of gambling and meme coins because I don't care like he gives objective ideas on how it affects radium and so on and that's all that matters so I just want to clarify that um and in terms of memes I also don't think think memes die I if but I I I could see it slow down significantly and I wouldn't be surprised I could also see it just continue the way that it is but like my I think my heart kind of wants it to slow down a bit and like relax a

bit because it's a bit much but um we'll see the first bit is more important the second bit is not as important that's just my opinion Ledger is the global leader in digital asset security trusted by 7 million users and securing 20% of the world's digital Assets in recent years Ledger has built a comprehensive ecosystem of products and services making digital ownership more secure and accessible for everyone Ledger's newest devices Ledger stacks and Ledger Flex introduce the world's first secure touch screens making it easier and safer to manage your transactions and assets alongside Ledger stacks and Ledger Flex they have also launched The Ledger security key app offering a safer alternative to traditional passwords and enhancing your digital security follow the link into Today's Show notes to get

started with Ledger today yeah maybe I'll just add some thoughts generally is like when we think of similar examples of this type of activity like you know people buying lottery tickets on the weekly or sports betting like the rules and like the general game as it's played has is generally the same for those things like day in day out like you know the Mega Millions lottery in the US for example it's always the same right like you can buy a ticket or 10 tickets or whatever and you have like a one in 300 million chance or whatever like some insane low number but then the prize is is a massive amount and so like that that never really gets shaken up the only thing that really changes is like is the prize pool higher or lower this time and then therefore like do I want

to buy more or less tickets if I'm someone who wants to like you know gamble on this opportunity um the big thing with the memes like and I think you highlighted this is just like it's decentralized anybody can make them like the platforms make that pretty easy and so like when you have this you know opportunity for like teams and insiders and like large individuals with massive followings or like influence in the real world um to like use their image to like promote these things you know the the whatever the game is is constantly changing so it's not like it would be hard to expect like you know even if you thought that mcoin trading in this trend is going to continue like up into the future um it's it wouldn't be

unsurprising to see that like EB and flow as the game kind of evolves um because it's not always like the exact same system or game that that people are playing when you have an event like this this this Libra coin like I think it people kind of like they have to digest that a little bit maybe they didn't like that and they want to like wait for the next game or you know if the behavior changes like you know a bit of it is just social sentiment it's like social consensus around like you know we didn't like that type of game like let's design a new game we'll play that one later um but for now we're gonna we're going to chill out for a bit and I think that's what we're seeing and you know it's essentially I think what we saw from like on a cycle to cycle basis like you

know there were a lot of like ponz anomic tokens and and protocol design that weren't they weren't you know necessarily building like super real things like if you look at a lot of like forks and 33 designs and lots of things with like buy and sell token taxes that were essentially just like raw Ponzi schemes on chain um that was just kind of like a game at the time that was happening and eventually people got upset and tried to play a different one um and I think that's you know that's kind of what we're seeing now yeah I I will also add on to this I think I hope Conor doesn't listen to this pod and you as well I guess you have to listen you're hear me now but we had the OM Forks Etc whatever pwn

synomics we had and then we kind of shifted into more reasonable like we did get eventually people saying okay let's take a step back and build out other stuff I know that the meme coin Trend especially with celebrities is horrible ma like Mass extractive but I do think that it could lead to some new form like we've tried out social fight quite a bit I'm still not convinced why we need it but there's clearly interest in it from VCS and from regular people who are like somewhat interested in betting on influencers betting on creators and giving them money for some reason um we might get a re Revival of that which I feel like

would be a natural shift away from celebrity coins and we could look back in like a year and a half two years and say oh you know what it actually did match up so that's my positive take on $300 million lost over one weekend uh I'm actually optim cautiously optimistic on the future the next cycle of meme coins if and when that happens and primarily because of unisoft V4 um there's this there's this Launchpad called flunch Fair launch you get it and the way it works is that okay you know they're building off of these unisoft V4

hooks but you can you know you launch a coin the first 30 minutes is the same price for everybody there's a sliding scale where you can allocate between zero and 100% of the fees to either the creator of the coin or for BuyBacks of the coin itself like the fees from the trading volume on the Launchpad are used to buy back the same meme coin that was launched um you know it has some M protection and some minor stuff like that but you know this is just one example of a type of meme decks meme Launchpad that can be used to create a more fair system and you know like minimize the downside risk for these you know other retail participants who are coming into this meme game and you know if you're if you're looking at Daily

BuyBacks programmatic daily BuyBacks from the Launchpad like you know maybe that's some fundamentals in the mcoin there kind of reflexive but don't necessarily to say that but you know this might not be the optimal design but if the fact is is that this was like V1 it it might be the the optim it might be the go-to design because it's you know it might have Lindy by then but there's going to be more iterations of this and I think that I think that participants just like just like pump. fund made them secure through their bonding curve and through the graduation to to radium I think other market dynamics like mechanics within a Launchpad can help retail feel just as safe if not safer on on another kind of platform built off of these hooks or maybe another

decks yeah I think I think something like that is what um would be required for like celebrity coins to take off or right like some type of coin that is um theoretically like tracking um right whether it's some figure some entity some group you know a music artist athlete whatever um those would assuredly have to launch with some type of fair fair launch Dynamics right um and then I think you could do some you could do some pretty cool things um to to answer the initial question about the fundamental stuff like yeah I I agree with um everyone's takes here like speculation um is going to persist right

if it's in the form of meme coins as as it was last cycle I'm not sure um do I think salana has a good chance of kind of being the the hub for onchain um speculation experiments um kind of Cutting Edge um kind of new new things whether it's defi um you know these type of fair launch launch pads stuff like that I I think Salon has a has a pretty good chance um I do think that on the institutional side of things um my bias has always been I I do think that right like whoever I think the the power of a chain um and the dominance of chain comes from

right like what what can you sell right Solana sold all the assets that people wanted to buy this cycle and so it went up the most and it captured the most RV like I think that asset managers are are going to try to create their own chains to sell their own assets to benefit um you know to to capture all those fees themselves right and then likely connect um connect with each other with some you know interop solution or whatever um but in terms of the onchain side of things like I I I I think salana has has proven uh that it's it's likely the leader there for you know this kind of Frontier level onchain Innovation so I do think it's going to come back um you know salana

has a full-fledged defi ecosystem like it's it's it's caught up to ethereum and it's significantly further ahead than all the other high frequency um you know or high throughput chains right so I I do think there'll there'll need to be some time for it to cool down uh here um I that's Danny's favorite expression um but it it's going to come back um I think what I'm excited about though in the in the short term and this was a take I had on this podcast um maybe like a month or two ago like when um when the whole Trump coin launched and everything like my take was I actually thought that this was more

interesting for like fundamental like trafi Jason like RW way stuff than it was for like meme coins and speculative things because in a in a weird way like making all that legal like like now like the real stuff is legal like the people with trillions and tens of trillions of dollars that you know trade quadrillion dollar derivative derivatives markets and stuff like those guys can now start getting in start tokenizing things and start getting into crypto and like there's so many there's so many efficiency gains that that will be made and there's so much incentive for them to to um to tokenize and and to move on on chain um you know whether that's at first like more of like a close sbox

environment or like public onchain like I think that's coming now um there's going to be a lag it's not Trump's priority but um I think yeah the next ensuing you know months quarters whatever it is I think it's it's figuring out like what's that trade look like yeah no I I definitely agree in the sense that salanta definitely has some you know fundamental like institutions behind it you know um Frankl Templeton is onboarding Ral assets um I also think that ethereum is doing the same um and I might be cheating when I say ethereum um when I I I mean ethereum and potentially some of the l2s um yeah there's this great chart that I saw on Twitter um

showing of all the non crypto companies that's building up on on ethereum and the l2s and in my opinion this might be a little bit um OV exaggerated like is Google Google building onchain is more like okay maybe you can like get onchain data or something but like I think this is you know kind of what you're saying like the institutions are coming here whether it's sandboxes or Pilot programs this is this stuff has is exists now or existed in the past and now that this essentially more of a let's just call it a green light from the current Administration in the US which also kind of sets the stage for the rest of the world as well I think that this chart is probably going to expand probably by

tenfold across all chains in the next year and I say the next year because you know for these institutions that's how long some of the stuff is going to take you know just to even get the understanding around it the cost the benefit analysis like it it's going to take some time and you know and just like how there was a ramp up from even on the investor side of things like to purchase Bitcoin ETFs ethereum ETFs and whatnot I think it's going to take some time on like the product Market side of things as well from CMOS and cpos to actually begin to open up integrating these products into their Suite you know and I you know the lowest hanging fruit from this is obviously financial institutions and that's why probably here we're seeing majority of it being

like the Visas and the sandas and the black rocks but you know there's you know there's sonum have their own has their own L2 there's you know Shopify for payments there's you know there's you you know there there's other ones that I don't think are going to work um you know maybe things like I don't know what you know like Nike shoes I've I I tried to sign up of those I looked at that I wasn't really a fan it was like lame nfts but the more the bigger point is that they're trying they're trying more onchain stuff they're trying to reach out to to a different market and trying to expand the existing line so yeah definitely agree with your take yeah I think there's a good point here as well in that like if we link it back to some of the discussion around like

even Bach mentioned pump fun I you know we're seeing even like Alon the one of the pump fun creators talking about like you know they need to maybe look at implementing more guard rails around the application like do they need to filter out tokens on the on the front end interface because they are like seemingly scams based on you know the trading activity or the initial bundle transactions right if somebody bundles 99% of the supply like do you really want to put that on your front end and sell it and like let people buy it um um and I think like when we think about larger institutions and companies like doing things on chain um if they're aware of some of these things happening right like they see Trump token they see Libra token like I think it's it's

obvious that they're going to want to be careful about how they approach this space you wouldn't expect that like Nike or Adidas would want to like launch some token with 90% bundled Supply and like ruin their you know brand image potentially to Their audience or their Community because then they like you know onchain scammers or something um so I think it's natural to expect that like you know based on just the social sentiment the consensus around like what we think is like okay or not okay in terms of like how to approach tokens and like how we sell some of these things to to Consumers um that will shift and you know if these brands or like larger institutions are coming they're going to be very careful and methodical about how they do that this isn't related to the brand talk but I want to bring something

up um in terms of censorship and this is a conversation that got brought up quite a bit is people are expecting toy to do something people are expecting Raj to do something people are even expecting Matt to do something and he's clearly not even like on the salana side um they can't obviously um it's censorship it's trustless permissionless I think pump fun side should probably go with a strict non-strict type of play where they kind of look at some form of bubble Maps but those probably won't won't even work because people are very sophisticated now um I think honestly one of the things

that I love about crypto is we kind of self-regulate um or at least we start self-regulating when everyone's like been hurt and then we're like you know what guys this we should we should fix this up a bit um I think that's probably what will end up happening like we'll just end up self-regulating I don't think you can expect anything from pom fun because at the end of the day pom fun is like okay it's majority used for meme coins but what it really is is it's like it allows you to Fair launch a token that's it now is it being sniped yes are there like sophisticated actors at play yes but that's not something that the pump fun team or the Solana team can control um what needs to be done is on the buyer side um they need

to self-regulate like we need to self-regulate and say I'm just not going to like instead of buying 100 tokens I'm just going to buy one token that I know is good and that's it like instead of betting on random stuff um and probably get a bit more sophisticated because if you stop then it's not worth it for sophisticated actors anymore I think that's something that we forget a lot is like they are interested in money and if you stop giving them money inadvertently which I think will happen if you get burned too much then the scam slow down a bit Yeah I me I think you make a good point um I mean just tying back to some of alon's thoughts on this topic as well like there are aspects of that that they

can tune into right like if it's surfacing more data to the front end you know there's tool you can go look up the tools right like this token had 95% bundled Supply in the first transaction whatever you know as a if you're a more sophisticated user you can like go and dig and find that information but you know the the thing that made pump fun a meaningful app um kind of in the last year and a half is that they like simplified the user experience right before you had to be really you know more advanced to create a contract launch a token um and do all of those things and they made that really easy and so now we're realizing that the harder parts are like you know bundles snipers insiders Etc so if there are additional information that can be

surfaced to the users of these like front ends these interfaces or like additional Educational Tools um that give insight into whether like you know X type of tokens versus Y type type of tokens are you know you know potentially more or less risky whatever it you know whatever it may be um I think that just plays into the like self- policing aspect of if you don't know anything like if you don't have any of the data it's like you can't really make a decision other than just like how you feel but if you have the data and you know how you feel then um that makes it e even easier for the users to be like well I'm just like I'm not going to buy these tokens when the team you know buys 95% of the supply and dumps it on my head a day later because that is just

minus EV every time um so I you know I just think the the natural expectation is we'll just we'll see these you know we'll see these platforms evolve they'll Implement more tools they'll make them more meaningful for users the the experience will be um a little bit better you'll be able to it if it means censoring out some tokens maybe they will we've seen Dex screener do that with certain types of things based on like kind of social backlash in the past um and people were generally like okay with that um and maybe the you know maybe these trading apps will do the same thing like we'll see have you been getting silon chain this year Farm on 10 plus wallets across different different ecosystems well cryptex calculator is here to help cryptex calculator has 3,000 plus Integrations to support all of your wallets Exchange accounts and

onchain activity and a custom pricing Oracle to handle even the most chaotic portfolios get started today and make tax season easy you can use our exclusive discount code BW 2025 to enjoy 30% off all paid CTC plans until April 15th of this year follow the link in the show notes below to get started maybe one other point to get into is um people talk about actually no you know what bu since you mentioned it let's talk about it um hyper evm we also had moned testnet was confirmed for the 19th which is going to be technically yesterday when this pod comes out um mega eth like you know they did their

initial nft thing we're kind of like seeing some projects that are building there the mega Mafia things are going on um I think I think there's you know there's things to be excited about and I think it it lends back to the question of like is the activity going to continue to remain on salana they're like best position to like keep capturing like this onchain trading speculative activity but I think we are seeing potentially some contenders who could step in like hyper liquid has captured the pers Market you know can the hyper evm like get some apps some trading apps and some meme apps Etc um on boarded and get users in there and like compete with salana on the same front there's a potential for about what are your thoughts or I guess are there any early apps like or teams that we're that we're seeing that um I'll talk a

bit about yeah I'll do some hyper liquid talk um but like actually I guess like broader thoughts is kind of already mentioned this you're I think your job or like our job I guess over the next however many months mid to long term short to midterm to long term at all on all time frames is to basically assess like there are clearly four new chains that are going to launch that will Garner some form of attention hyperium already launched there's monad Mega E I'm missing one anyway let's do three chains that have launched and are launching re relatively soon and we had bar chain and Abstract launch on top of that you have base

which is an existing L2 you have ethereum mainnet which we're deciding on if we're going to scale it or not you also have other l2s so like there's this entire pi and on on top of that there's the old head the Old Guard Avalanche Phantom now Sonic and bmbb so you're like whole role as an analyst our role as an analyst is to say is Solana going to because the the majority of the pi is with Solana everybody else is fighting for like at some point they were fighting over 30% now they're fighting over 60% um you have to decide if Solana is going to if Solana's popularity is going to go down and if it's going to go down to 20% it'll still be like one of the majority ones but will it go down or if it'll be if they're going to fight

amongst each other now there's going to be a lot I think happening over the next few months um think to start it off I would imagine that the majority of the chains don't do very well in the first few months like that's I think been pretty clear is chains need time to get running like we've optimized it as much as we can we've decided on launching protocols day one 50 to 60 of them at some point at the end of the day use users don't go day one they need opportunities they need to have like oh did you see token X pumped on chain y I need to bridge over there like that's how majority of people go

um so I think like we'll have to wait a few months so then it'll be clear afterwards if what ends up happening is Solana loses market share or if um they just fight amongst each other now on the other hand I guess like talking more specifically I've looked at monad ecosystem hyper liquid ecos and mega Eve um I would say like relatively in depth now just like for my own personal reasons um I think hyper liquid doesn't need much like that's my honest take I think hyper liquid really needs a money market liquid staking um maybe some trading front ends that's it I think because the the core product is already good and I think that

is competing against and this is like why I tend to be more bullish hyper liquid than other people I think I think hyper people who look at hyper liquid are like this is an L1 it is competing with Salon it is competing with eum it is competing with l2s to me it makes more sense hyper liquid is an per stex L1 the L1 will be a side car but what it's really competing against is Sexes like I think it's competing against Sexes and per Sexes that's what that's why I view the Tam as that's why view competition as so I think for the hyper evm to be uccessful it really just needs to like play into the hyper liquid clob which means money markets you get

collateral bridging um liquid staking so that you can borrow on your liquid stake type that's really it that's all I can think of monad and mega Eve more difficult because those are going to actively comp compete against other l2s and other l1s and they need nfts they need gaming they need also on top of that per texes they need amm they need lending and money market like they need everything everything that hyper liquid needs and everything that Solon already has but like built from the ground up so those I imagine are going to take some time I also imagine that the hyper evm is going to take some time to evolve and grow and build up so I don't think that there's really any competition with Solana apart from base in the very very short

term um maybe be chain over the next few months but I think that's on the same timeline as everything else on that and a few things that I've seen that are interesting is I'm going to actually interview these guys on ZX we were supposed to do it last week but we didn't Mega E is GTE which is a club an amm and pump off fun style Launchpad combined all into one um that's on Mega Eve uh Valhalla perss which is by this guy named Pablo who is like used to be at free Sigma um they're building out a Pur platform on Mega Eve I think that's cool for Mega E I think you can just go through the mega Mafia

and make your own decisions like anything there is cool noise is another one where like you get to bet on sentiment um so I could have gone short um well I guess I could have gone short Solana sentiment but also long Solana's mind share if I wanted to over the past few days like if I thought that Solana sentiments was going to go to um we're seeing a lot of those I think like kaito is also kind of in that vein um I think that kind of stuff is actually quite interesting it is kind of like CT focused but we'll see how it works out I think it's at least interesting on the monad end you would know better Danny I um I'm probably going to try and avoid

the clobs to be honest with you um I'll I'll see if they have any cool um gaming NF these consumer style stuff I know like we we chatted with one of their ecosystem guys a while back four or five months ago yeah I'll highlight one interesting thing like this trend now that you mentioned some of the stuff on Mega eth is that and I think it lends itself to what these chains are trying to build right they're they're trying to build these like hyper High throughput scaled evm chains um but this like idea of like clobs on chain with like a with like a back stop amm or like an

additionally having an amm um either on the side or additive to that um I'm seeing several teams exploring that on Monet as well so I think it's interesting that you bring that up um for you know like the meth side of things I think you know it's just it plays into this like kind of I think thesis or idea that we've had as well around like multiproduct defi um where I think you know teams are realizing that like you know building like a great experience but then like incorporating other products or like if it's incorporating multiple products to make like that individual experience better for the user um fundamentally it's like where we're seeing a lot of teams move like you see this especially on the

salana side as like jup has scaled out as like Camino has added more and more things um it this has just become like a more prominent Trend and so I think it's interesting to see um like I know Drake exchange is one that just popping out of my mind on for manad um I guess we'll see testnet is going to drop tomorrow for us so we'll see like who has actually who has something like available live for testnet if um if anything um but yeah I I'm seeing more like combination of like yeah we're a per deck we're you know some kind of like order book on chain we're we also have an AM we also have a token launch pad like teams are going after this very early on which is interesting it's it's like a trend I feel like and on the like

Trend trading side um not to be like too puny about it but narrative is one that's on mod I'd say that's probably like the equivalent of noise for Mega eth where it's like building a platform around Trends and like basically going long or short um those you know basically types of the narratives and or trends that are like kind of percolating um which is it's like a could be a potential like next step or like morph of the meme coin trading game where you know people just love the speculation they want to get upside on like the things that are happening and if you know know if the new interesting way to do that is to be like you know I'm bullish AI I'm just going to like go along the AI Trend um you know that could be a fun way to go about it but

we'll see we'll see if that gets traction over like individual token trading I think it's unclear but it's at least interesting well yeah one thing I will say is I think um not tied into what you're gonna what you just said dannyel I'm sorry this gonna be rude but what I want to say is I think if sentiment continues to get worse we're going to get a lot of Kobe tweeted about this and it's like at this point these projects some of these projects are down so so bad and people are just keep on VC um VC tokens I think if sentiment continues to get worse what might end up happening is you see like pretty deep discounts on things um specifically

these like new l1s and l2s just because I think a lot of people expect these l1s and l2s to go day to get out day one blazing and that's just not something that happens like it doesn't make sense logically for a chain to have all of its end users all of its like end apps day one it it wasn't the case with Solana it took Solana a cycle to do it it hasn't been the case with sui and apos yet and it won't be the case with these new protocol these new chains as well so I think if sentiment continues to get bad and we constantly have this pared Narrative of like VC coins bad meme coins good um I think there are some things that have shown that this is good hyper liquid but I think a lot of these things are

getting into like existing projects are getting into deep deep discount territory where like they're lower than their latest raises um I'm sure there'll be an argument that there's an argument that can be made that like if they're still overvalued and I'm not going to argue like for all projects that that's not true but um if sentiment keeps getting worse there will be like very very good opportunities for these new chains as people continue to on them and try to sound smart by saying oh like why did we need a new chain like the L1 trade wasn't dead last year I bet it won't be dead next year or the year after that like I think people always

like to be early and I think at some point we might see these trade down quite a bit to the point that people who expected it to like do well day one might be Sil LED sidelined that's my general thought on this are you sidelined um yeah I mean I I have to agree with you there I think like this space so many times like the best opportunities are presented in the periods when like the sentiment is like it's so over territory like you know we're doomed this industry actually is screwed like we're never going to see

real adoption like I don't know people I think people always love to say like retail is never coming back like whatever you want your phase to be but it's like I think you know I don't know if that's the prices today or if that's you know in six months or what have you like you know maybe we need as uh Shapiro said before he he rolled off is maybe we need to cool off a little bit but like fundamentally I think I agree with you that just like this um these are the types of periods where like if you have sustained like negative sentiment around different things like you know that's where you can dig in a little deeper see like what's getting traction like where are users going um where where is activity actually happening um and you know what

what has kind of like a positive outlook for the future regardless of like what the the active sentiment is those are where the opportunities kind of present themselves that's like that's where the alpha is a lot of times in this space where we just tend to swing so heavily between like like literally we're it's so over to it so back where like the future of everything is blockchain like send Bitcoin to 500,000 within the month like and then you know when we go the exact opposite direction of like yep my target like we got to bounce to 15K before up only again like that's this space time and time again like presents those things and that's when you know you dig in and take a look at what's actually happening like what are people actually looking at what are they using where is where is traction growing um

and yeah those are the opportunities Danny is there anything else that we want to talk about on the what are we done I think we can cut it there um any any last big takeaways Mark I want to I'm curious if you have any any clear takeaways next six months next two years whatever you want it to be if you want big picture small picture how are you feeling how should the how should the audience be feeling um it funny I was talking to a fun last week and they listened to the podcast we did and kind of took it as like a macro signal the bearish sentiment from the podcast as a macro signal so I'm hoping this one was a little bit more of a balance take um in

the sense that I hope I hope you know the viewers can go and look at the fundamental data look at RV look at app Revenue data because I think last month app Revenue data and and Rie were the closest they might have ever been um and so I mean and that's what you want if you want you know more developers to come into this space you want them to be able to have the incentive to you know make a living earn money create profits right so I think just zoom out a little bit um touch some grass and you know like we I think there's like lwh hanging fundamental drivers that have now catalyzed and are just going to be playing in the background for the next couple years it's going to take some time but you know I think there's only reasons to be optimistic in the longer

ter I love it Bach if you have any snide remarks you want to make before the end of the Pod go for it otherwise we'll we'll cut it there I don't have any SN REM marks man I think overall it might be a bit of a tough quarter but I'm like I'm always kind of perpetually optimistic about Bitcoin and crypto like I love crypto I love Bitcoin and I think it's it's like really just hitting its St um maybe short-term chop pain but I don't know generally like my Outlook is good I think life is good I think if you're really stressing out you should have taken some off the

table Yeah I think that's definitely good advice um if if you're ripping your hair out right now maybe do a review of the last few months figure out where you went wrong take that as some learnings going into the next years of your life and uh you know just reflect on that in general and go from there you know you you you learn and you live that's that's really all there is to it the key takeaway you should have sold um well we'll see Pico top and uh then you wouldn't be sad so yeah I think yeah I don't know we'll see I think it'll be fine I think people we'll

call it there I think uh that was a good chat good advice all around good good takes for anyone interested D is next month remember 0x10 um if you're interested 10% off tickets in the Link in the description hopefully some of our guys will see you there all righty thanks everyone for tuning in byebye [Music]