Coinbase’s Listing Frenzy, Massive ETF Flows, and Bull Market Phases | Roundup

Transcript

if you do it correctly the market then says wait a minute you took a company that had 20% evop margin and within a year you took it to 40% we've never seen that it's like the Houdini effect without like doing Financial engineering which doesn't work anymore in a normalized rate environment and like if you do that then people really finally start getting it of like yeah bitcoin's super important and whatnot but there's this other component of crypto what people haven't really truly appreciated and that's the Insight that's the secret and I think you've done ly like that's a case study and I think once you do that very well for one or two then it's off to the race then people are like oh okay so this is what crypto's all about scale is the blockchain that is Simply Built

different other L1 networks have costly transaction fees clunky user experiences and lack true adoption in Ai and onchain gaming explore the gas-free ecosystem at scale. spacecosmos that is scale with a K hit the link in the show notes to get started hey everyone Jason here there's a reason why Ledger is trusted to secure more than 20% of the world's crypto assets today check out their newest devices The Ledger stacks and The Ledger Flex featuring the world's first secure touch screens take your security seriously hit the link in the show notes of today's episode to check out their latest

devices trust me you won't regret it hey everyone excited to share with you that Kronos ZK evm has launched its Pioneer program offering early adopters a chance to earn not only loyalty points but also potentially win part of a $330,000 ZK cro giveaway if you're interested in being an early adopter visit zk. kronos.com not going to unlock the next generation of applications super containers offers dedicated customizable app spaces

running on supra's 500 ktps layer one blockchain giving you complete control over gas tokens and fees get notified when super containers are ready for Builders at super.com containers this episode is brought to you by toku if you are planning to launch a token already have a live token are granting employees their contractors vesting token Awards or just trying to figure out how to take care of taxable token events for your team from easy to use token Grant award templates through tracking vesting to managing tax withholdings make it simple today with toku what's up guys what a week what a week what's up Sanji yeah it's it's only

Thursday I guess but yeah uh it's exciting see see you on Yahoo finance you're going on Fox you're you're doing the rounds you're doing the circles people want people want to hear about crypto now I'm going so I'm going on Fox Fox Business in like an hour and a half I'm talking about the Bitcoin strategic reserve and the possibility of a $500,000 Bitcoin like oh the bull market is back I I love how we go from like about 100 200 straight straight straight shot into 500 like we're just going catap there saw a picture of uh novag grats he went on Bloomberg talking about 500k Bitcoin and he's looking you know he always wears like a jacket or like a

Bund done he was looking like freaking Steve Jobs in these like new rimmed glasses and a turtleneck and I was like oh the bull market is so here definitely people it's how quickly how markets people regain their confidence and yeah give me a give me a quick State of the Union on inversion cap just because I know you're in New York I know you're fundraising I saw you guys launched a Twitter account I you got oh my God looking Dapper looking Dapper uh you guys got office space um so yeah give me this we're undisclosed location in we're in undisclosed location in uh Lower Manhattan um very good uh I haven't really started

fundraising um but uh I've identified yeah it's really exciting look most of my energy is spent on identifying targets uh I've pulled together a really solid team operating team uh um I don't know how much I can actually talk about this but from a execution standpoint I'm super excited the more I look under the hood of a lot of these businesses it's just incredible how uh the the type of value release and transformation that can be had um and like that's pretty amazing obviously the the the opportunity the challenge is staying focused right because there's so many businesses you can apply this to um but you're working within certain Contra constraints resource constraints time number one to Capital but yeah it's

really encouraging um again as I said I think that uh the reason why I'm so excited about this is that I want this to be a case study and I was watching like Barbarians at the gate uh over the weekend it's like a fantastic book and movie you actually find it for free on YouTube uh because I could only get the DVD version it's basically a story about one of the earliest buyouts or one of the largest buyouts in the 1980s by KR of rgr abisco um I think I I I get so excited because I think we're going to this is it I think for private Equity as an a new chapter where um I want to be the first and I want to be the best at transforming businesses with crypto and I think you've done correctly like this could be

a case study of like you know I mean like the version and the success here is you take a business you transform it you do all the a all the other stuff that's level Stakes but if you do it correctly the market then says wait a minute you took a company that had 20% EV margin and within a year you took it to 40% we've never seen that it's like the Houdini effect without like doing Financial engineering which doesn't work anymore in a normalized rate environment and like if you do that then people really finally start getting it of like yeah bitcoin's super important and whatnot but there's this other component of crypto would people haven't really truly appreciated and that's the Insight that's the secret and I think You' done correctly like that's a case sety and I think once you do that very

well for one or two then it's off to the race then people are like oh okay so this what crypto's all about I'm like yes we've been telling you for 10 years but you have to do it you know you have to show it and there's no better way of showing it than just doing it with a very substantial business people know so I'm excited that's where I'm spending most of my energy I have two sectors and three companies that I'm like doing a lot of work under the hood so yeah exciting how are the fundraising back to my private Equity news yeah I haven't really started but but uh I can't talk about that but a lot of inbound interest I guess um I'm I'm really just prioritizing really strategic people at this point um nice and so yeah it's good nice um what do the really big when I know

you're not fundraising but what do the really big Trad five folks think of this I hav um well they appreciate private Equity um they appreciate that this is not Financial engineering and this is a way for them to express a view on crypto in uh in a way they understand yeah right because his torically if if you're like a crypto fund you're pitching to them hey these are the you have to get them over the hump of certain ideas like first the is it a hedge fund these like liquid Venture asset class is tricky for them and second it's like the token component but this is just like I'm not underwriting a token I'm not underwriting uh investing in that it's

purely like I'm using crypto infrastructure and it's almost a bit like this is blockchain not crypto crowd but of course my conversations with him it has and we all transitioned talking about this in this pod the tune has really changed after the election and all this to say people have been studying this ASA class for a decade they've been either pitched or have are seeing it on TV and they're at a point where they were just side on the sidelines waiting for clarity I I knew that in my days of Pary I knew that you know over the last couple years you just get a sense that so many people are on the sidelines you just Black Rock like come out and support a bunch of these assets that

were deemed Securities by the SEC you have Brian Armstrong using um different language and you know as it relates to like the poly Market uh you know Shan being rated by the FBI like that that's a very big change in tune and so yeah let's talk about the let's talk about the week then huh yeah let's talk about the week yeah but anyways super EXC yeah there's too much going on but going well you I'm busy you know I responded to all your messages and everything it's because I'm inundated I'm just really focused on on on on the Acquisitions good well I'm excited for Barbarians at the gate is at the gate I'm a

friendly you know on this point by the way I just want to make a comment private equities had a bad rep of going in there slashing the business stripping it Levering it up and and like firing a bunch of people what I get so excited about crypto is that the Transformations that you make are removing what I call systemic friction so when you lower payment processing from 5% to less than 1% and when you eliminate chargebacks when you fix settlement times to t plus 20 down to zero you have all these working Capital Improvements that's like a material transformation of the business that none of that requires you firing your Workforce you know what I mean like and and for me that's like also really

important which is doing good and these Transformations no one's ever done before and so um I I actually get really excited about that because it allows you to actually expand into new markets employ more people and so I think that's um you know ultimately I think I'm a Believer you have to do good and crypto is that type of technology that allows you to be more efficient serve new markets it doesn't involve you know slashing and burning kind of Barbarians of the gay type of strategy but yeah I love that this is barbarians of the gay 2.0 s's at the gay baby all right so let's uh dude what a freaking week um marketing team told me I have to give a plug we have New York is back I did see you're getting an office in New York Kane's getting an office in New York

Irene is getting a freak I I'm in the office right now this is your office nice nice I mean like well this isos brick Oh how New York it's like one of the most historic buildings in New York um all right well anyways reminder to folks we are hosting two events in New York next year D is in March permissionless is in June we just announced um actually this is kind of wild Muhammad alaran he was the CEO of Pimco during the uh financial crisis he is now Chief I think economic adviser of alons which owns Pimco uh they're the largest insurance insurance company in Germany yeah and he is I mean he's speaking at Das so to see someone like that come to a crypto event is uh is

pretty wild so there's that and then also telegram is booming we have like 600 people go join that um okay dude what a freaking week Bitcoin passed silver Alliance Bernstein is emailing their clients to get into crypto we will keep it as simple as that get into crypto ETFs had I mean some of the one of the craziest weeks for ETFs in the history of ETFs uh defi folks like blur were talking about turning on their protoc uh their fee switch uh Black Rock expanded Biddle to a bunch of different chains coinbase launched bank accounts and meme coins in the same week um eth did their eth 3.0 road map uh there's some m&a what is it like a 2050 road map something like that yeah well

we'll talk about that we'll talk about that so where where do you here here's here's where I would love to start if I had I was thinking about I mean you know usually leading into these roundups I take notes and I'll send them to you like hey here's what I think we should talk about there's usually what three to five topics I think there were 17 on the list this time so I was trying to think about a theme for this episode and the theme in my mind is crypto companies do not care about the SEC anymore the reign of terror is over and the the shackles have basically been torn off of both the investors the financial institutions and the founders and when I look at things like we can you know we can talk about all these news stories one by one if we

want but you know blur there's a blur proposal to turn on the fees switch for blur um black Rock's Biddle fund um which is tokenized by SEC prze is expanding from just ethereum to Aptos arbitrum Avalanche optimism and polygon coinbase launched meme coins Brian is saying [ __ ] on Twitter right coinbase also launched bank accounts these are all one big theme of the shackles and the kind of tie rate of the SEC has come to an end so I don't you know there's a bunch of other news things this week but it was just a very I listen to this podcast with Ben Horowitz and Mark Andre yeah talking

about the impact of trump and Mark used this he's like look it felt like there was like a foot on my neck for the last couple years it's funny because you know Mark andrewson seems like he's got this great life but like I think if you talk to a lot of the founders in the industry my my friends and your your friends too like it that is what it's felt like for so long is like there's this there's you know people it's really frustrating because people say look what is the use case of crypto you're like I can't give you a D use case because you're pinning down my arms and my legs so this week was really cool because it was all these things I'm like yes these are the these are the freaking use cases we just haven't been able to do them for

the last four years so um yeah that that was my theme of the week for the Roundup yeah absolutely couldna agree more like one you have to really update your thesis very quickly um because it is materially different environment and the second component is yeah let's definitely now talk about the amount of use cases that we know are there and we just haven't been able to explore because of this this hostility and people may ask well what about other places in the world that have been more Pro I'm like no you sort of fail to appreciate that the US will always lead and if the US changes its tune the rest of the world follows it's always been like that that is that is unequivocally true um there have been some jurisdictions that have been trying to like take advantage of that but it just

doesn't move it as much and so when you think about the timing of things it there hasn't been a better setup in this industry ever yeah Trump administra the prior Trump Administration was not pro crypto the Obama Administration was not pro crypto uh the degree of hostility has gone up as this industry has grown um but absolutely like you have to update your thesis and you've been in this space for a while you may have grown cynical which is the worst and I had a tweet around this idea of um you have to always be skeptical that that what makes you I think a good investor but you always have to be willing to update your priors and with new information and and

I think that's the difference between being cynical and being skeptical um you know and ultimately yeah if if you've been in this industry and you haven't really updated your thesis um or your targets then you probably should do that because it's a vastly different vastly different environment when I think about what I'm doing now it's like yeah the timing is right to then start exploring all these things right and you know how many like let's just talk about like the crypto business model like I'm actually be super excited now you have the one there's increasing m&a activity that we should talk about how many more companies can go public now also interesting to observe Kraken and a few you know bitwise and a few others

the amount of m&a is going to increase but also the amount of coverage from Wall Street will increase and so I'm actually excited to see someone start comparing Unis swap with coinbase or some other Crypton native business with a traditional business and saying wait a minute these are vastly more profitable businesses you know what I mean so anyways you pulled up The Bernstein memo maybe I just pulled up this Bernstein so Alliance Bernstein is one of the largest financial advisers in the world they are there's a there's there's a big survey every year of who are the most trusted financial institutions in the world and it's usually like um uh like no it's like Vanguard and then Fidelity anyways there's a list Alliance always top five Alliance burn I

guess they took the alliance off of Alliance Bernstein now it's just Bernstein they're always third fourth or fifth usually behind Fidelity and Vanguard um let me read people if they missed it this is the uh from their Global digital assets team on November 11th November 11th so people remember Bitcoin went on this big run over the weekend and then you know Wall Street can't really get access to bitcoin over the weekend so everyone's waiting for what happens on Monday morning and Monday morning Bernstein sends out this list to the clients the digital assets memo welcome to the crypto bll Market buy everything you can quote Bitcoin is at 80k we will keep it simple don't fight this add crypto exposure ASAP call us if you need help I mean that was a

crazy crazy crazy thing to wake up to Monday morning and um yeah actually it was interesting to look at their uh their what they said they said institutional people this one didn't get as much High uh coverage on Twitter because like the the headline was obviously the most interesting thing but if you actually scroll down this you know it's like a 20page report institutional investors have a few choices Bitcoin and ethereum ETF Bitcoin miners AI Focus miners Bitcoin corporate treasuries crypto exchanges and brokerages so as Bernstein puts it there's only like five or six different ways to get exposure to this industry which again just reminds us how early we are there's Bitcoin there's Pure Play Bitcoin miners there's AI Focus miners

there's micro strategy there's Robin Hood and then a digital asset set basket which includes what they said was Bitcoin or eth or you could go the nine High beta assets salana arbitrum optimism madic Lio Unis swap a chain link and Ronin um and so I just thought this was a really interesting thing to see how the large Financial uh institutions are talking directly to their clients about this yeah by the way um really interesting on this point uh on Hood there's a great uh interview by Vlad the CEO of hood Robin him that is and he and he talks about people go listen to it um and he talks about how vastly he says we operate two businesses traditional like

brokerage firm and then we have the crypto side of the house he says operating the crypto side of the house is an order of magnitude cheaper than the traditional one uh I mean I hear that and he's like you're pitching my fond right now and it's so true like how many more businesses do you think are like listening to them and saying wait a minute uh what and looking at that I thought I found that to be really interesting that he sort of commented on that like we know all these efficiency games but to hear BL talk about that is very interesting they they relisted salana they delisted it when it was 17 they relisted it when it was 20 20 so um I have some I have some like very retail friends who just got four S there four sellers of salon at 17 and now they're

like it's like the FDX estate you know mentally I can't buy back in I was like I you know honestly I understand that we should talk about the mental paralysis like of like seeing an asset do that and and buying back in but before we go there the other interview that I want to highlight people's attention to is salana posted this in November 12 and it's that clip that you're referencing Mark uh I think Ben Horwitz talks about um you know just basically how different this is and people should go listen to that I retweeted it well we'll link it we'll link it it's a new Ben and mark the Ben and Mark show on sptify this one is just soana retweeted it it's a clip and it's been talking about he's like the the the case of why crypto is so important he loves music and he says

artists creators have been really uh in a in a tight spot in the current Paradigm of these monopolies to get five 10 20 at best percent of Revenue share and with crypto it's like 98 and if you're not if you don't appreciate where this is going like all you need to do is understand that economics like that drives everything and so now that the regulatory there we go that one maybe you can play I mean it's a minute clip but I think it's worth people listening to it yeah let me let me play it hold on I think um you know Ben is and Mark both have a are incredibly good at um lending their perspective just given I mean at least the

internet so every crypto project uh that's out there has kind of gone up in value but I think much more importantly than that um in talking to Founders there are the number of things that people have wanted to build um and some of them you know so important particularly you know we have a lot of friends uh in the creative businesses in Hollywood and art in music and they have been you know kind of waiting for a technological platform that gets them past uh what they've been dealing with in these distribution monopolies and you know kind of very you know difficult uh take rates um from the people who are kind of in charge of Distributing the

music around the world and now here we have this technology that lets the creatives basically instead of getting 2% or 10% you know depending what platform you're on or 20% of the money get you know 98% of the money and we saw that early on you know before the Crackdown uh you know my friend Nas put out a an nft of a song that you know had been out the the album won the Grammy and the song nft you know made more money than the album uh even though it came out late and so that you know that kind of thing was so exciting for so many people and all those projects shut down um and now they're already starting to come back

just in the last two days so I think that's uh tremendously exciting yeah exactly it's like I mean these these things were just crushed you couldn't actually build what you wanted to build so all right let me let me go over to a there's so many new stories I want to make sure we we hit on couple of these the other another interesting one from two different angles was the Black Rock Biddle thing so um this is uh the first off this is the chart of tokenized um tokenized treasuries right now so you can just see this this is going up and to the right rwa doxy Z does a good job um Black Rock has now overtaken Franklin Templeton and Ando for onchain with with Biddle right they have 544 million of tokenized treasuries if you click into

this um you can start to look at it so they used to just be on ethereum they're now on the big news that they had is uh they now are on optimism Avalanche polygon arbitrum and Aptos so a few things I want to talk to you about is uh so one you can see optimism is the only one that's gotten real capital in here they all have about a million optimism has has 26 million already in their in their uh uh in their token supply of of bidd so optimism seems to be up to a hot start here here why do you think that um base and salana were left off here so ba both base and salana were both left off why do you think that

is question yeah no no no I mean I was with the U with the optos guys this morning um they were obviously super excited about it um I can think of why they chose app TOS I mean obviously they they sort of benefit from they've been very institutional fcus since you know spinning out of Facebook you you think about the Libra Consortium then became abos seems to be winning a lot of these I mean look look I work very closely with them and I'm an investor um um and so I think movement as a programming language my thesis has been and I've said it here before is is very well suited for it's a more secure environment that's not to say that like salana is not a secure environment I just think like movement as a as a talk it's like uh it's I could appreciate why

it would be more interesting or easier for an Enterprise to like appreciate and get um I I actually don't know why salon and base are off this list I don't know if you have theories but it seems like like in what version of this world would you pick arbitrum and optimism and not bass Bas is a like an implementation of optimism using the op stack um Solon is a more interesting head scratcher one I I don't know there are are always people like I tweeted some of the effect of like Solana is 30% of ethereum's market cap I see no compelling reason why that shouldn't be at least 100% and there were some folks in the in the

comments saying well Larry is not going to deploy in Sal so people were sort of intimating of that I don't know if they had some sort of insight knowledge or not but I I don't really know do you have theories you're made it thank you uh no I have no theories um I mean there there are a few names that keep showing up in these institutional deals it's apos um Avalanche and polygon those three just keep winning these Institution deals um base I would have thought would be in here because I think Black Rock and coinbase are so joined at the hip on a lot of these deals um and because I mean coinbase has the custody for them right so so I I yeah exactly so I only I spoke with two folks about this um they take on why salana was left out

and I have zero CL I have no idea if this is right or not is the meme coin stuff is actually hurting salana with some of the institutional players they're like look that that's that's kind of that's like we we can't really touch that chain right now um so you know the counters like salana has won a lot of institutional deals too but the meme stuff might actually be hurting salana when it comes to the institutional deals I have no clue Ben Ben would probably know or OA or Austin or something like that but I'm catching up with them later this week so I'll ask yeah get the take get the take well who who else like this mem coin stuff how would we be able to quantify like that like have you heard it from actual institutions many institutions do you think it's actually it was the yeah it

was the head of blockchain at one of the big at one of the big banks with a with a with a decent sized blockchain team so um yeah that was well and maybe we can bring someone maybe we that person would come on the on the podcast we could talk about that um the other interesting thing I thought was uh so first off securitize is crushing these deals securitizes on all of these uh seems like an interesting battle between like securitized and Ando maybe um I'm not sure if they do the exact same thing but uh the other interesting thing is bny melon is actually the custodian for bidle uh so it's not Anchorage or fire blocks or bitgo it's actually bny melon and one of the things that is going to happen in a trump admin is these banks are actually going to be able to unlock

the custodianship of a lot of these digital assets so it's cool to see bny melt I mean is it good is it bad I don't know but it was I think I think it is a big unlock for the industry seeing B melon is the custodian there um and then the last thing that I thought was interesting is this uh some of these chains and tokens are under pretty heavy SEC scrutiny right they've been mentioned several times in you know uh in in different SEC filings and for to now the Black Rock stamp of approval has basically been extended and they're like sure sure polygon has been mentioned in SEC or sure you know a lot of these other ones have been mentioned and now Black Rock has it's just another sign

that this SEC R of Terror is ending so as well like coin listed this week Pepe with a bunch of the meme coins that they haven't historically yeah let talk Kraken did as well like it's just yeah you have the chief legal officer of quein Bas uh tweeting exactly this which is we're gonna list yeah it was Paul I think was tweeting that like about the Pepe listing just a big uh big F you I guess yeah I mean two big I'd love to talk about two big coin based things this week so one is they started they listed what Pepe and and whff um and I thought this guy pickle crypto had a good good take uh which is significant

for two reasons one coinbase and Robin Hood don't care about the SEC anymore this is the Trump effect uh going into play and two if coinbase I think he said lost but it's I think he meant to say list if coinbase now lists popcat it becomes a serious player to rival binance dominance in the meme liquidity uh this forces binance to start listing legit onchain stuff without charging fees slash a cut of the Native token the context there that he didn't say is you know if you're if you're if you're a token uh you oftentimes have to actually give binance like between five to 15% of your token Supply which is an egregious amount right let's say you have a billion dollar fdv 10% of that is a hundred million so binance is just

printing on these listing fees um and so what this this is actually a really interesting second order impact that I hadn't really thought about which is coinbase starts to get the meme liquidity forces binance to start to list other stuff outside of just memes really net good for the industry so yeah hats off to coinbase for for doing this I mean also if you listen to our meme episode from two weeks ago those four memes not doing too shabby not Financial advice but my God if you listen to us yeah just we didn't talk about peanut uh look me yeah we'll see whff is doing okay whff is doing all right um the the other interesting on the

complete other side of the spectrum so this is Zach from bridge um I think a lot of people missed this because it's not really a numberg go up technology type of thing but this was in my mind even bigger than them listing meme coins uh so coinbase coinbase actually launched free US bank accounts so users can open a bank account which is automatically linked to their non-custodial wallets uh this is back the founder of bridge saying another big launch consumers across the the world can now use bridge to create a virtual US bank account all payments land in coinbase's wallet as usdc on base so it's really hard in the world to get a bank account and it's really hard to

move to connect the crypto world to actually the US banking world and this is a really big step forward I would say to do this um and so just yeah big yeah big shout out to to coinbase for and and big shout out to bridge obviously for launching this yeah um anything else on these meme coins well peut was ridiculous runup I mean my God it went from basically zero to 1.7 billion obviously pet was very tied to you had Elon Musk you know talking about it it was important in the election it'll be interesting how it performs like over the next subsequent

weeks uh just been a lot of profit taking from people that basically this guy punted like 17 bucks profited 3 million like crazy right um I think it's just sort of so so that was obviously uh the the the latest flavor of meme coins that you probably missed um and you have the marad sort of coins haven't been doing as well um I find that to be interesting uh of course it's all uh I think animal coins are like now back in the menu like I think it's just something about like Doge like Department of government efficiency you had like Doge just is capturing and sucking all of the air of meme coins in many ways um and I sort of think that

that's going to be the case for the next couple of weeks I mean there's incredible way incredible scenario here where Doge flips salana and then flips like ethereum like I I I'm taking that probability higher like doge is now sitting at 56 billion six largest Mark uh crypto asset by market cap uh 2x from here it flips B&B and Solana scale is the blockchain that is Simply Built different let's face it other L1 networks have costly transaction fees that increase as the network gets busier scale has solved this problem with a gas-free scalable infrastructure where users never pay gas fees scale was awarded the most active G

gaming chain in 2023 by coin Gecko and host five of the top 25 games on dap radar you should definitely check out scale I was using it the other day it really is incredible to use that's scale spelled with a K hit the link in the show notes or head on over to scale dospace SL ecosystem to get started today earlier in today's episode I mentioned Ledger latest products the stacks and flex and I wanted to take a few seconds to tell you more about them these wallets feature the world's first secure touch screens which don't just simplify your digital transactions but also keep them extremely safe these wallets are virtually impenetrable to online attacks because they store your private key in a secure offline chip you

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leading teams across the space protocol Labs dydx Foundation Mina Foundation hadera no safe getcoin and a lot more reach out to toku at tok.com Empire or click the link in the description hey everyone Jason here I wanted to quickly talk about Kronos ZK evm a Next Generation zero knowledge layer 2 blockchain Network focused on scalability security and Innovation secured by ethereum it further expands the Kronos ecosystem using ZK sync Tech Kronos ZK evm has launched its Pioneer program offering early users loyalty points for engaging with Kronos ZK evm and its daps join the first Quest by depositing cro in the

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and it's like nine out of 10 I think on my side that you meet and they tell you oh I saw this super early on and then I just saw that candle that is vertical and I and I didn't I didn't buy that in there I just couldn't get my head around buying an asset that went vertical uh this chart you could have looked at Bitcoin in 2012 and said the exact same thing it's like my God Bitcoin was at like less than a dollar and it's now like 80 bucks I missed the train I'm an idiot ethereum no different uh salana no different every asset in crypto and most people that come into the space the brain is not programmed to think and in nonlinear exponential terms it's just not and and it hurts when you

see something and you don't buy it we've said it before in these in time time again and none of this financial advice but I do prescribe to this idea of stand riller which is buy first analyze later if you have an inkling if you want to pay attention to something size it appropriately buy a small amount so that psychologically you insulate yourself from this paralysis that is so often when you don't buy something you you you're like it eats at you in a way that it paralyzes you and you can't re underwrite the thesis so let's talk about Doge here okay it's sitting the do has gone up over the last seven days 100% right it's sitting at 56 billion the question is not so much why

like oh it's gone up 100 I missed the move it's like no can this do another five or 10x Because by the way if you're in crypto that's that's like your return profile it's still down 47% off the high which was 73 cents over three years ago at the peak of last cycle so the question is can it reclaim that level if so why and so you zoom out and you say okay let's think about what we just said at the beginning of the episode it is a very different environment I don't think there's a better setup for crypto ever you have ETFs and you have what has been a choke point for this industry has gone away and is going away you have a president incoming president that launch an nft collection and you have institutions that are now more willing to allocate to

the space because you have more accessibility and the infrastructure has come a long way you combine all that and you say are we going higher than last cycle yes or no yes okay you make up your own mind about that sure sure and then the question is then from an asset selection standpoint whether you want to do top down bottoms up what will outperform what is the best way to play this industry and then and then you ask the question is it going to be means do you believe means yes or no do you think they're going to perform Bitcoin yes or no and from there you kind of you kind of do this like peeling of the onion right and you say Ken Doge I know it's sitting at 56 billion what do you need to believe for it to go to 100 billion or down to 20 like just just

make up these scenarios right and describe probabilities to them um I I think it has lasting power people appreciate it like Moon shot which is this um wallet The Exchange and makes it super easy for people to UNR and and buy a lot of these meme coins and just crypto athet in general has had record inflows so have exchanges coinbase was down yesterday so I don't want to instill fomo but I do think it is just important like when you see a chart like this yeah I know there's like mean reversion and people take profit but you have to ask yourself and it's difficult to do this analysis in a weak time like who knows where those is going to be in a week but I think it

becomes easier to understand where's those going to be in six months or a year yeah so and if you have a if you have a longer time Horizon I think it's easier to make up and then you just sort of position yourself that way and say okay maybe I'm G to cost average in to asset a because I think it can do a 10x or a 5x or a 2X and this is a risk profile and this is how I'm gonna measure it and weight it in my portfolio that was going to be my next question is around entry point so okay let me let me actually tell you about a text conver I'd like to hear how you would have responded to this text conversation I get a text from a friend she owns Z she owns no crypto she goes Jason what is a what is a good

meme coin or is there a Reddit Forum I can read I say they all just got listed to to down coinbase bit late she goes way to be a downer so is crypto over should we be selling I said I said look we I own I own three meme coins but I don't know if I'd be buying those because look the you're you know you're not like I don't want you I don't want it to go down and you lose you lose money she said what's the crazy new thing to do and I said I would just buy some Bitcoin in salana small small amounts and she goes isn't isn't Bitcoin and salano really high and I think that's the mentality of a lot of people

is it's exactly what you were saying which I said I said that's not the right way to think about that people have been saying an asset is high for since Bitcoin and I mean a not even crypto Amazon Apple you know you could have looked at a chart of Apple five years ago so isn't Apple High um so here's how you would recommend someone like that if they're like I want one mainstream asset like salana Bitcoin eth something like that one meme coin do you tell them hey just go buy Doge right now and like this thing could fall 50% but like just hold it for a year and close your eyes you could say that but why do that when you can have an invest in a number of assets like like the like it's not like you're buying birkshire stock there's like 100k plus like you can buy

a basket of these things the question is are you going to pay attention like keep your normal if you have a normal job you have cash flow coming in that's the best position to be in because you can allocate to the sassic class and like you I mean like not have to stress day in and day out it's not you're not doing it for a living it's all upside I guess because you're going to pay attention you're gonna listen and if you lose all of it then I guess it doesn't hurt you as much or you survive right yeah you can be aggressive at Things fall like yes I would be prepared to see a lot of these assets fall at least 50% so however you want to think about like allocation then like there's no winning formula here ultimately investing is

just such a psychological sport what you don't want to be doing is overtrading and what you want to be doing is not having a be a force seller just position yourself so you can be aggressive on others or not I mean I know I'm saying like obvious stuff but honestly I've seen time and time again people in every cycle just over lever or it's always like the oh God I want to find the next peanut because 17 bucks can turn it to 3 million I'm like yeah guys but like like no like just I appreciate that maybe you want to buy a basket of like sub 100 million sub like 20 million mean coins and punt all of that does that outperform Doge I don't know maybe if you catch one of them one in a million uh but it

carries 10 times more risk units so it's always like this trade-off between how many more risk units are you taking versus the return profile I know people want to hear specific asset selection I'll tell you my asset selection how appro space has changed dramatically yes the size Matters I can't buy Sub $10 million sub 50 or sub hundred million dollar coins as easily like in size no but um historically Doge has been and has survived many cycles it is it is it has Brand Power I mean it' be it'd be dumb not to mention that Elon is you know it's he's going to continue to use Doge because it's now you know embedded in the sort of like the

government agency and so I mean we've got an actual government Department called the department of government efficiency there's a new account on Twitter called let's see Department of I mean this thing is no no it's the handle is doge look at freaking look at the logo a it's Doge no I I'm not sure it's is it that I thought it was just Doge no no no that's not it go to Doge no it's literally just this no this account is verified because it's an official government organization this is oh I see I thought it was not affiliated oh Doge yeah okay not affiliated with with Doge but Department of government efficiency oh

wait Community yeah go to oh oh oh no go go to Doge just Doge Doge that Doge yeah that yes I thought it was that one oh oh yeah that's like zero followers one that you're right I'm following that one yeah that one okay yeah anyways um listen I think listen yeah there's a lot listen I'm not here to tell how you conu construct your portfolio um just bear in

mind that you're not a genius the market goes up keep that in mind have with a block Works employee who just uh made some life-changing money on on one of the meme coins and discussed quit some good heart to heart before the episode you make life-changing money change your life but also appreciate that I've seen so many people think that they've made it and want to retire and it's just like taking a vacation fine after two weeks you want to go home and you want to get back on it and sometimes it's hard to get back on it just do the I heard it from Jeff B the best thing about money is that you can position yourself so that you can take time to do whatever it

is that you want you own your time and that is the ultimate definition of wealth and Financial Freedom in my mind and then it allows you to just play the game that you love in the way that you want it to play it not how other people are telling you to play it and that's so liberating so lean in that um and if you're not there well you know I'm not here to tell you what ex to buy but I am Telling You categorically there hasn't been a better setup in this industry ever and I've been here for a while yeah speaking of that ETFs with a monster freaking week let's get away from the me mcoins the uh I love this term by Eric balunis the Bitcoin Industrial complex it's a [ __ ] I got

to stop swearing we get we got we get demoted in Spotify Al learned if I if we swear um the I'm not Shing anymore no I'm honestly I'm just taking after our Lord and savior Brian Armstrong uh who swore on Twitter for the first time ever then he deleted his oh did he if only you uh shaved your head but you know here we are years next the Bitcoin industrial complex ETFs micro strategy and coin it's it's an amazing combo saw 38 billion in trading volume this was November 11th which was Monday lifetime records being set all over the place including ibit which did four and a half billion robust week of inflows just an

insane day it really deserves a name allaha volmageddon uh Eric balunas he's nailing Twitter these days good good job Eric look at that look at that chart just a monster freaking inflow for the for the big bit coin industrial complex so Bitcoin that's a Bitcoin ETF not the ethereum ETF yeah but the ethereum ETF is also also had decent influen is doing all right too let's let's talk e let's talk eth so oh my God I got absolutely destroyed in my DMs people were very upset with me um I'll pull this up why were they upset oh by the way nft bull market 2025 what do we what do we come back we'll come back to that

um I tweeted hold on too many damn tweets these days I tweeted I said okay so basically um uh what's uh Justin Drake Justin Drake shared this thing at uh at Devcon and the the context to te up this presentation was he's like this is the most ambitious thing I've ever worked on like this is GNA fix ethereum etc etc so everyone's really excited so he shares this thing and this is the this is the timeline and I look at the Timeline I said I tweeted this out I said I'm sorry but does this actually say ethereum 3.0 ships in 2029 nothing ships on time so realistically it'll be 2031 that is seven years from today and that is and

by the way this the proposal is just to improve the consensus layer not the da layer nor the execution layer nor nor the evm I said that is actual Insanity go ship a damn product and I got you know H basically I have 50 DM saying LOL this is the best tweet I've ever seen and 50 DM saying you're a clown what is a podcast person know about launching products etc etc um what I'm curious if you have takes on this or I can just give my takes right out of the gate please do um I think that I uh okay I think I have a couple takes one is I do think I was

being a little harsh like a little harsh because this is actually really tough like you know D David did act David Hoffman Brother David Hoffman did have a good response which is which is fair and Saar who's building um uh I forget the L2 abstract L2 also had a good response which basically says look this ignores the fact that this product must be built five separate times one for each ethereum consensus clent I I acknowledge that I acknowledge this really hard shipping shipping like up updating the ethereum consensus client is much different than you know we shipped better notifications at block works and a better data dashboard this week very

very very different things I I I totally get that however what I David said David asked this thing he said the process is much slower e decentralization client diversity just saying ship the damn product is a asking ethereum to look and feel like a single client centralized organization of which it's not this is what decentralized looks like it has its cost I agree with all that and then he says what do you value what I value as a startup let's remember ethereum is still a startup I value not dying over every other thing I value not dying and ethereum what is not dying I think ethereum is facing this existential is facing into Fading Into irrelevance

or guess the path here of dying would be cutting Corners having a catastrophic bug because you're moving too fast or fading into irrelevance two versions of dying in my mind uh market share in my mind so if you fast forward 10 years from now if eth has 1% of the market share and all these other chains make up 99% but eth has never had a bug that's that's dying eth eth died um so look should it take one year should you just max centralization ship this thing in a year definitely not absolutely not but should it take seven years to go ship this thing absolutely not as well absolutely

like you know you've got a year and a half for pilling a year and a half for specking two years for building two two years for testing like give me a break you you gotta ship something faster I do not care like yet keep the decentralization all that stuff just figure out a way faster well that that that's I think the response that Justin say it's like you want to be truly this has always been the line of defense it's like you want to keep the centralization ethereum is to a point where the product level is decentralized because there's multiple clients there's multiple organizations and so is it the chain is the layer one is really decentralized AC

I guess you could argue um how that how you measure that but just just call it it's decentralized the product is as well and it just becomes incredibly difficult versus other projects that might by the way still have the same or similar level of sufficient decentralization notice I said sufficient decentralization but have a centralized product organization or one client or maybe two like Solana's going to two clients now maybe more how does that how does salana look in two three years time is it gonna face the same level of challenges I'd argue probably not because um but but then you have to wonder like at what point do you harden I think the the issue with ethereum yeah

at what point do you harden yeah but but but the key here is like if balic were to re and the initial creators of ethereum were to re architect the pro the protocol today it would look closer to a monad or salana maybe monad because of the hardware requirements and whatnot but I I think like if you were to ask theal okay if you were to rebuild it from scratch he would do it quite differently knowing what he knows now about other implementations and other projects and that's the issue with a theorem that I that I have which is just the backward compatibility issues of no matter how much you want to change it's it's like very fragmented

and um I think this is both the Beauty and the curse of Open Source right by being first there are there are less I think first mover advantages um Bitcoin certainly yes because it's pretending to do one very focused thing um which is being non-sovereign store value but ethereum is an expressive General open source Contracting platform and I know that's a jorgan but there's other competing platforms around that um I just think that you I mean like can can we can we agree that if you ask vitalic to do it again he would do vastly different parallelization a few components that just can't be implemented and the question becomes like how much can you

actually innovate with a current set of constraints um um and limitations around convincing people right and backwards compatibility and all this stuff there there's only so much you can innovate and whereas if you look at something like salana or maybe some of these new other chains abos or monad then you wonder like is this going to matter and for everyone out there that says well ethereum's really Harden it has no bug it has had bug by the way um and and pretty big ones at that in the early days it's just sort of hardened yes it has the most amount of developers yes it has the most amount of users

but you know I sort of think it's sort of like a mute point when you think about where's where's the slope of the curve and where the next 100 million 200 million users going to come and I just think it's to your point you wonder like are they prioritizing the right thing so here and no matter how much you want to build and even if you can figure out convincing everyone in the community and all the different clients and whatnot is it gonna be a marginal piece of innovation and how is it going to compare against some of the other chains um and are you GNA be at a just a technological disadvantage yeah and and I don't I don't have good confidence in

in that their ability to pull that off I admire and respect the effort but I am just seeing a clear line of path in other chains yeah I so Saar had the best response to this um maybe you know I really actually do want to do like a bull case for ethereum episode is this uh xmaker this is Z ex Saar I I don't know I've or Cyrus anyways go ahead he's building no not cus building abstract but he he had the best response and we're sharing it if you're watching on YouTube and maybe we can actually have him on I want to do like a bull case for ethereum thing maybe we can have like Hayden and cigar because you know Hayden kind of sub tweeted me and said L at

people dunking on ethereum thinking five years in advance it's like this industry is allergic to long-term thinking also this is a vision subject to change and input um and my my quick response to that would just be this is not a vision this is a tech road map so like when we build something block works like we will lay out a vision we want to become the best onchain data providers by the end of data uh 2025 that'd be that'd be a vision right and then we sit down with our CTO and we figure out how we're getting there and we make tradeoffs and you know that that is the that's the tech road map that's the product road map the vision here like a vision is very different than a tech road map and Justin laid out a research driven Tech road map that is going to ship in seven

years when this industry will look orders of magnitude different than today so I would love to see ethereum have a Clear Vision I agree with Hayden but what I saw at Devcon is not a vision it's a tech road map again um I would like to have more sophisticated knowledgeable people here because I think It ultimately comes down to do you believe that like put aside the tvl and the users I know it's important but I just don't think that's like the mo I think the more fundamental question should be can ethereum maintain or E compete uh not in the super long term in the in the near term as you have um as you have uh

These Chains like salana and you know some others that are launching or live like appas um and I think we're gonna as I've said before we've all been beta testers for the last decade in this industry it it's like sort of like a speck of dust in terms of TV on users yeah but you when you think about where most of the activity recent activity most of the recent project launches have happened I appreciate there's some good good ones in ethereum but the vast majority of them have not been on ethereum you Bas is encouraging of course it has a lot of distribution from coinbase um I'm not here to discredit I'm an investor in many of these projects but I'm just objectively and if people disagree and think that I'm not

being objective please call me out on it but I'm just observing most of the best projects being interested in Solano yeah or some other chains and and it's a slope of the it's a slope of the curve that I'm interested in and can you build a thesis around like where the next 100 million developers and users and billion users can exist and live but then the counter argument of all this is like look black Ro made a clear signal you know and maybe that's you know that's going to matter too yep yeah um okay let's uh um let's let's move on from eth we should have I'm going to text I'm going to message haar and like maybe Hayden we could do a or we could do like more of a like Vance

and like bull case for eth or something but yeah I think I think Kan Kane had really good takes here on as well by the way um he's Kane should probably be part of that discussion because he's more balanced and he's come over to quote unquote when I met him in Australia like a year ago like he was like you know I really need to get up to speed on saana this thing's really just been interesting and now what he's doing with infinex I think is that right philosophy which is make you sort of very friendly for users and he's taken a very practical approach yeah cool um by way practical doesn't mean cutting corners or not Val decentralization or security yeah Kane said in my uh IMO the reason for the reaction to the 2030 timeline is we already have a long-term

road map for ethereum if we're going to propose radical Alternatives they should probably optimize for Speed and deployment speed of deployment also any proposed timeline in crypto gets blown out by like two to 3x minimum so most people are most people are internally adjusting this to be like mid-century L all right moving on from this um interesting news of other thing uh two Acquisitions and a merger all in one day this was on Wednesday there were three uh deals that were done obviously these deals are not done on this day they all just announced on this day but uh really interesting to see uh m&a speeding up in the industry um and I I I tweeted I'm thinking that we'll actually this will actually be the cycle we get substantial m&a for context I'm sure you've heard this even longer than I have as long as

we've been in the industry people say this is the cycle we get m&a this is the cycle we don't get m&a that we get m&a and the reason we got no m&a last cycle was because there were blowouts in the valuations so if you had a really good tech company that was for sale your valuation expectation was so egregiously high because maybe you raised at 100 times Revenue that the buyer says there's no way I'm buying this for for your valuation expectation and the seller says well my valuation is way higher than you want to give me there was this massive mismatch that was driven by zerp which caused excess funding in the Venture ecosystem which actually really drives down uh m&a because of valuation um mismanagement

and Mis expect and uh differences and expectations so this cycle I think is going to look a little different so there are three Deals I want to briefly touch on all of them so the first one was um coinbase AAL hired the Utopia labs deal and just for full discl I don't know if you're an investor in Utopia or no Okay cool so um the best take I saw was actually by the products lead at avara this guy Jeremy black he said uh coinbase buys Utopia Labs because they need to get rid of bridge anyone serious about stable coins needs to own the entire stack from issuance to liquidity it's the only way to architect for scale and give customers a good ux the stablecoin team is an internal platform team and uh someone said Utopia

use Bridge elv and Jeremy says not surprised the hurdle for on andof ramps in the US has always been about finding adequate Bank sponsorships this is why nearly all of the stable coin payment infrastructure players that started in 2022 got stuck doing only off- ramping for the first year or two coinbase solves this for Utopia by bringing them Bank sponsorship while Utopia accelerates coinbase's roadmap to seamless stable coin payments in for a really good take really interesting analysis of the acquisition seems like a good deal for for all parties yeah who's next next we have uh next we have like next m&a like who who who do you think is kind of and you remember

who's next on the M listen when Co was trying to get 40 bucks I mean that should have been that should have been acquired then and there like it was my prediction was that JP Morgan would try to buy coinbase and we had that both as a prediction uh to now now we got freaking coinbase is gonna buy JP Morgan come on yeah like maybe we should talk about maybe we should talk about like that because Co is launching some really interesting products um it nothing really stops it from being a full-fledged financial institution yeah next up uh bitwise bought ether staking ether staking service attest um bitwise will manage 10 billion in assets after the

deal I don't know how much it was uh for but Hong the co-founder and CTO of bitwise put out a good thread so bitwise is acquiring aant I don't know why I can't pronounce that a non-custodial institutional ethereum staking provider with four billion in staked eth they're eth staking experts open source contributors engaged community members etc etc they're rebranding attested I got to stop saying that to bitwise onchain Solutions um yeah really in uh basically the the second the I would guess the reason behind this is that uh bitwise is bitwise believes that the um that the Trump Administration will

unlock a new thing for ETFs which is the ability to stake uh from from ETFs I think staking be huge by the way yeah I think ethereum ETF staking is now on the table which would obviously improve the eth ETF products um and so I would guess that bitwise is preparing for that world right y yeah last deal um I would love your take on this one this is uh ARCA and block tower are merging so Jeff Dorman's F ARCA Ari Paul um who's been very quiet recently but you know was definitely one of the bigger characters in The 2017 Market um yeah block tower and ARCA are are merging uh first time I've seen

something like this would love your your take obviously block tower had that big hack um ARA never really got as big as I you know they had all the they have very contrarian ideas like activist investing in Dows and they were really early to like fundamentals investing probably a little too early uh just very very curious to get your take on Ara block tower merging is it just them combining forches like full Equity yeah full Equity deal just merging yeah yeah um yeah I mean I don't know what they're yeah good for them I guess um no hot takes no no no hot takes I mean it's just I I don't see synergies I just think that you know maybe it's a combination of

resources and yeah both of them to your point haven't in my mind like they're good organizations they're just not tier one uh and maybe they just want to combine assets and there's something to be said around like block block to has credit strategies and also directionally long token strategy and so ARA does most more like just mostly just like a traditional fun like long only uh but some activ but long only and no no credit strategy so yeah I mean um good you know Jeff and um wishing Jeff and uh Ari continued success what a weirdly polite response I don't know I don't know what to say like

I don't have any insight as to why they merge or why they didn't merge I'm like the I wish every manager in this space uh success and not blowing up or doing Dum [ __ ] for their LPS you know I mean we don't we don't need more chaos mean we don't need more chaos or blowups it's like people who write all their emails like hi Santiago I hope this email finds you well all all of the best wishing you a a a a happy and nice uh productive it's like the holiday card well you know you know like the I've s like the meme of like I hope this email finds you well like it's the meme of like the guy just burning up and like does not find me well this is this is how the [ __ ] email found me

sorry there we go I cursed my bad s jar five bucks all right let's let's zoom out talking about all these um the the very last thing is um actually blur th I'm less interested in the actual blur proposal but I think this is going to be a thing that you're going to start seeing over and over and over again so uh there was a proposal to turn on the fee switch by blur it was proposed by split Capital um basically if you uh kind of run this one by the Numbers uh they doing what three like really low volumes like 3 million in Daily volumes I think the fee was like half a percent or full percent that's like roughly six million in fees um at at at their numbers today blur trades at like 900

million FTV so that would be sub 1% of the yearly fee Revenue um it if it was shared with the whole Supply 1% of fees on like no revenue is is is obviously not super compelling um so you know the token didn't like blur didn't really do much on the news I think it shot up like I don't know 5 10% on the news but now it's pulled back already you are an the most interesting there's two interesting takes that I have here uh or takeaways one of them is I think this is just going to be a theme like I think you're GNA see all of these defi apps start turning on the Fe switch like one after another after another after another um and I think that's a really good thing

the second thing is I hadn't gone to blurs I hadn't looked at blur's FTV in a while it's sitting like 800 or 900 million uh that is only $100 million less I gotta repoll this up let me make sure I get these numbers right because this doesn't seem right blur coin Geto all right so blur is trading at oh all right 700 million FTV blast is trading at 850 million all right so blur is only $200 million fdv lower than blast right the the L2 both built by Pac-Man I know

you're an investor in both of these um just it's kind of like a narrative violation seeing this an app almost flipping the L2 I don't know if you have any thoughts on that but um yeah it's you know Comics I'm an investor but yeah P blur is at what similar valuation you mean blur is at 650 blast is 50 and mind you that's where really come down quite a bit um so we'll see I mean it's so I would categorize blast L2 trading in similar territory as a few other l2s um like scroll is at say 700 six 700 bucks

um yeah 600 oh my Lord that's and you have and then you have a few others that are trading in that territory um yeah we'll see I mean obviously it's it's a very competitive L2 um environment and um I maybe let me let me let me pivot the question do you think that we see nfts start to come back you know I was seeing on my timeline it's like you know dudus is tweeting about buying nfts people about punks you know Bobby the founder of Quin gecko's like my penguins are going to rip I had a little tweet talking about Pudgies but everyone's got you got to remember everyone's got bag bias right I've got a bunch of Pudgies

that I want see up you know go up obviously um would you sell them if you if if I don't know if you're down on them or not but what you sell I am I'm up pretty big on the Pudgies still because they you know they're doing quite well they're still sitting at like yeah they're they're one of the collections that held of the most value yeah so if you look at nft price.com they are so punks are sitting at 33 eth um board apes are sitting at 11 and a half eth Pudgies are at 9 by the way punks the top was 105 for the floor so and I bought probably the top for one you bought right right that that was me ladies and gentlemen right there the punks that I have like in

public uh the bandana Punk that was 105 ladies and gentlemen that was half a million bucks T and and you know what like I have it walking in in the corner of my house like have it straight I have like a couple of my PLS I have that one front and center you know why to remind me you're not that smart of of an investor you know by the way I collect I don't invest I don't I've always said it nfts everyone that's everyone who's down that's the coping I'm like I'm I'm a I'm a curator collector not you know I mean there's to be fair there was always a price if someone came in and say buy your bandana Punk that you bought for half a million for like 10 million yeah you you know I'll have it go have it um there's more productive

capital I wouldn't get rid of my hody punk to be fair but um where are your punks where can we see what what punks you on uh there's two of them that I display the band the one that I have in my pfp and the bandanna one I I haven't seen the band one that's cool yeah yeah but here's You' probably underperformed on eth terms maybe not but like or salana like if you the eth yeah no let's go let's not USD let's go on eth terms on E I don't know how much eth you put into it yeah yeah are you are you have you outperformed the underlying meaning e

well yeah yeah because I didn't buy yeah you bought 2023 bought I know exactly when I bought because I bought right after we did that episode Luca Nets Empire podcast we I don't know I don't know when we did this yeah July of 23 I bought probably three two to three weeks after this because I went back and relistened to this episode and I was like oh my God this guy's actually gonna this guy's actually going to do it so that was July yeah I think I bought for like four three or four eth yeah so you know I've you know I'm up I'm up 3x but anyways

not not talk about my Pudgies what what do you think happens with nfts do you think these come back or is that just cope and it's all just floods still floods into me coins it's cope look I I I think uh I mean yeah are they going to come back yeah that's a wealth effect as soon as people start making money they want to buy watches cars Che Zillow nfts is part of that behavior um there are there's some um there's some some scar tissue that you have to overcome from people that are way under on their nft bag so you're going to have to clear that to then maybe break new ground but mcoins are you know easier mcoins are better versions of nfts right they have they have more liquidity they have they don't have the the the unit bias right

um and they they're they're just are they on the spectrum of like what do you value liquidity and then emotional cach a like you feel really you still feel part of a really good Community if you're in peanut in Doge and whiff um but you the the the sense of ownership is I'm not going to pretend like it's as much as you own one rare piece like your Pudgies um but there's a whole subset of people that are just you know still are there for the entertainment value in the community and you get that from memes and so I think uh I don't think I think nfds have probably bottomed here but I would probably I I would argue that most of them will not outperform memes as a

basket yeah at least not this part of the cycle nfts maybe towards a late late or late last real late cycle real late and that's the issue right that's the issue with nfts that you have is that you don't have the liquidity of a mean coin and so you always have to think about you're never going to be perfectly timing these things but if you're going farther out in the risk Spectrum you're buy you're trading more risk units for more potential return You always have to think about you're not going to be able to time it but can you get out and what's the size of the door and the way out for nfts it's this size for memes Wide Open Door and so like you have some of these asss memes have way more liquidity than

like the majors it's it's incred incredible yeah now you you haircut that by 50 60% it's still a ton of liquidity to get out nfts yeah no you it's just structurally very difficult to get out yeah um all right we can wrap with um there's like two or three things there's um Bitcoin strategic Reserve is uh I just want to call it out it is trading at 32% right now in poly Market that is the United States buying a you know creating a Bitcoin strategic Reserve there's a news that just broke while we were on this which is that um the state of Pennsylvania uh this Pennsylvania House of Representatives just introduced a

bill would enable the state to hold Bitcoin as a reserve asset um I would just say this is the currently the most interesting Market on poly Market is now Will trump create a Bitcoin strategic Reserve that is the that is the the market people should be watching uh the other thing that happened was uh shout out to Shane the founder of poly Market um the feds broke into his apartment at 6: a.m. uh and kind of raided his apartment and looked at his phone and just yeah shout out to Shane he he posted a legendary tweet that I think will will go down as one of the greats um he he tweeted out new phone hudis right after the you know at four o'clock

in the afternoon but then he said a more serious thing he said it's discouraging that the current Administration would seek a lasage effort to go after companies they deemed to be associated with political opponents um etc etc I'm also proud to say that the future of America and in particular American entrepreneurship has never been brighter in the face of adversity we buil so yeah the the feds broke into Shane's apartment in New York and uh yeah went through his phone and took his phone and stuff like that and um J Jesse from Kraken who also was subject to a raid had a pretty damn just retweet about it you which I I twe I quote twe I said having gone through I said it's insane that some of the best founders of our time are accustomed to FBI raids uh Jesse said having gone through this number one council's

probably going to advise to stay quiet Shane's already broken that obviously two search warrant would have been provided with some crime statute cited with some crime statute cited three they claim evidence of any crime could exist on any electronic device this is the crazy one so they take every electronic advice they can hold them for up to five years without charges obviously this is insanely abusive in an era where everything is digital four we won't know what they told the court affid davit to get the search warrant approved until much later if ever and five we won't know if they have other Secret fisa warrants to monitor his online accounts and people around him so just a just a you know I think the reason they did this is because they are accusing him of

letting us users use poly market and that's a big crime you know if so but what I what I would say to that is why are you going after this you know 27y old founder who's decided to he could have moved to Dubai he could have moved to the UAE he could have moved to Singapore he has decided to still build his company in you know out of Soho in New York which is the the literal worst place to build a crypto company in the world right now because of not only the us but because of the bit license which is still ongoing by the way um which no one talks about the bit license anymore but it's also criminal and um yeah he's decided to stay in New York City you could go after the the Myriad of shady Asian exchanges that let us users walk

into them and build accounts and you've decided to go after poly market like it's a it's a shame that these great founders are having the FBI raid their homes what's the harm done I don't understand what what was the harm done I think I always go back to like the interpretation of law it should always be again when you're restricting users from claiming an airdrop accessing poly Market what is what is the actual harm that you've done to users and that should always be the guiding principle as we think about an Administration where we can probably get some more rule making in place yeah that that should be that that should be I think the Northstar for any policymaking but what do I know about politics

nonetheless um um yeah it be it'd be interesting I I um on this point just alone um I think uh like maybe I'll reserve for another time we can cut this part off last but not least do we want to talk I tweeted this big thing about the stages you tweeted we're in the everything cycle um let me pull up your Tweet so I I sent out this big tweet that I will spare people the uh the pain of going through this long thread live on a on a podcast but um you should it's

just it's my pin tweet if you want to go look at it I said there's four phases of bull market we just entered the most fun phase welcome to stage three I won't read this whole thread the thing that I just want to drill into is um I'd say we've got about six months here what I'd call stage three and it is a really really really fun time um because people are it's really just the industry is making money it's not like all the outsiders haven't really come in yet and you're not getting a bunch of grifters and Shady people and celebrities and like non-serious actors and by the way this this I there's plenty of grifting still there's always been grifting there always been but like it just um it's a really fun time in the industry and I would just you know take

remind people to take a second to you know at the end of the day go for a walk or make sure you go to the gym and just reflect on like how crazy it is to be working in this industry at this point in time um because at some point this industry is going to get so insane in 2025 that it'll get not fun and you'll say who are all these Outsiders making all the like doing like this is clear grifting and it's just gonna it's just going to get not fun and I I I just promise you that and that's what I would categorize as stage four and so stage three in my opinion is is the most fun time in the industry it's when all the people who you just like slog through the bare Market of the last I mean the price has topped out three years ago um

people think back to two years ago FTX but price has topped out three years ago and we've been slogging it for three years and you know all your all your crypto homies are are making money and everyone's winning right now like it's just a good feeling so just take a second to reflect on it um and yeah we we can we can link the the thread so but you you had a good you had a good post which was um we're entering the anything is impossible phase of the cycle it can be easy to lose sight of the most important things and i' do you want to maybe walk through some of these take on this yeah it's the anything possible phase um it goes back to what we were saying earlier Juan believe believe what is possible in a new regime um you got to I would

characterize it as shake off the cynicism cuses but not the skepticism scars um again very two different concepts here always be skeptical but not cynical of this technology of what crypto can really do remind yourself of what Drew you into the space and go back and revisit some of the core principles and for me it's been Illuminating to go through now looking at traditional businesses looking at systems and understanding just how much friction exists and to me it's it's just a very good reminder I'm excited as ever because you truly see how crypto will transform these businesses and in the industry r large and that's incredibly exciting so go back and remind yourself of that but be skeptical um I think in

this time you have to kind of maniacally process new information the election if you didn't process that ask yourself why and then you re underwrite your thesis very often with new information because information always is changing but like don't lose sight of that um and if things are working update the target like I remember investing in a like a sub 10 million and then they got TBL and it kept growing and growing and growing during def5 summer and you're like again the brain's not programmed to think in exponential terms but you have to re underwrite the thesis then and there def is working so you're re under right right and how big didn't this get it's not 100 million right that was a target for me initially it's like oh can it get the compound's valuation the private Market it's 100 million that's a 10x or

more than the 10x well no it's could be a billion dollar asset or maybe more so re underwrite like how big can this get if memes work how how big can they get if Bitcoin how big can is it what Bernstein is saying at 500k is it million is it 150 is it back to 50 like think about those probabilities update your targets and I think you gota I think in this stage of the bull market and just ever like you want to be back in the fastest Force so don't be afraid to jump uh that doesn't necessar mean to something you said earlier you don't have to make necessarily drastic changes in your portfolio like be mindful and wary of overtrading it has tax implications depending on the jurisdiction you're in but also it has like a cognitive load of anytime you add a new asset in your portfolio that's

less resources you're going to dedicate to your your children so to speak so you have to have like that bandwidth of you know be mindful that sometimes it's just backing doubling down in the fastest hor that you already own in your book but there's there's this natural tendency and preference in Venture as it is in hedge funds to add a new position because people are making money on other things there's millions of things in this industry people are gonna make money on so many other things or and lose money you don't have to chase them all and I think the path towards under performance is trying to catch them all stay in your lane focus on your process and and again the thing that I'll caution the most is people do really dumb [ __ ] when other people are making money and they think that they're not

making as much it's always a relative it's always my neighbors making more money than I am and it just is the path to financial ruin Envy is a very dangerous sports uh be mindful cherish the success of others it's a win-win right this industry is going to grow right if if this industry goes from two three trillion to 10 plus in this cycle possible you best believe that no matter what asset you have if it's something of quality you're gonna you're gonna be okay yeah so just just focus on that don't do dumb [ __ ] don't over lever don't overtrade Focus time is the most valuable resource own your time and if you can change your life change your

life honestly and do good I've never regretted taking profits I've never regretted spending the people that I love and and doing some cool experien and I'm still very very long and very exposed to this industry that's a good point I I I sold I sold uh some crypto last cycle to do two things one is help pay for pay for my wedding and two was um yeah and two is to buy a house and I have you know bitcoin's at 90k I'll be up what 3x or four 2X or whatever I don't even know I don't even remember the price I don't even think about that and so just uh just a good reminder too um yeah yeah by the way ask yourself like yeah maybe you're at a number right

now and then you 10x that are you going to really change your life what's it going to change like what gives you meaning I guarantee you it's not gonna be having another million or 10 or 100 it won't margin thing that yeah my dad said which is he's like what would you do if you you know had you know this this was at the when the last was starting I was like I'd probably get like I don't know massage every month or something or maybe I'd get like a personal trainer he's like he's like he's like hey idiot you can do those things right now do that today exactly he's like a personal trainer is 120 bucks a week for to have him come once a week I was like you do that I know but it's the thing that like you know you do

if you have he's like hey idiot that is that if that's the thing that you're telling me go do that right now it's yeah it's always your parents that drop these truth Bonds on you but it's all right you can probably change your life today you just don't know it and the thing for me like that I just woke up one day and and I have candidly been feeling this desire to do something more and more meaningful yes we do the podcast gives me a tremendous amount of meaning and fulfillment when I talk to people and especially now that we have the telegram group it's so nice it honestly is the thing that it's not to say that a doing a great investment in a 10x or 100x on the Venture side is amazing feels good to be right in the validation but I get more I the thing

that I remember the most is specific people coming to me and saying hey I listen to your episode two years ago I've been listening to Empire for so long thank you and I love that that's what I remember the most and honestly that's you know and of course people might say oh because you're in the privileged position so nice to be where you are you know you already made it I'm like yeah like I won't lie to you get to that [ __ ] number as quickly as possible but just be mindful that it's very marginal at that point and you know I just woke up one day said I would I would not be able to live with myself if I didn't start something new which is I'm building now and I'm working harder than never I mean I'm just look at my schedule I got to drop now because I

have 10 calls back to back so I'm working awesome man well hope these calls go well today I just realized I also I've uh I'm talking about this Bitcoin strategic reserve on Fox Business so I need to figure out what I actually you gotta put makeup you gotta put makeup on or yeah I'm looking a little shiny here yeah all right so well good luck make us proud okay thanks everyone for listening join the telegram group um we might be doing some events coming up in the greatest city in the world so go Jo thanks for listening hey everyone thanks for watching today's episode just wanted to quickly thank today's title sponsor scale scale really is one of the best chain experiences out there today and I've used so many different chains

there's a reason they are gaining so much adoption in both gaming and AI use cases hit the link in the show notes to explore the scale ecosystem [Music]