Crypto’s Casino Phase: The Future of Bitcoin, Ethereum & DeFi with Jordi Alexander

Transcript

The January inauguration top was predicted by a lot of people, not just me. You had this Trump memecoin launch, the millennia one. I was incredibly bearish when when that happened. And it's just like a very The only people that were bullish were like the young kids. So memes are dead, alts are dead. What's left? Before we started, you were talking about the stock market. Um you thought you thought stocks were also dead. So are we all going back to buying gold and bricks? is that um well unfortunately yeah people are not going to be feeling very like risk positive I think for uh for the next one two years is kind of what it feels [Music]

like everyone I'm really happy today to be talking with Jordi Alexander who's CEO at Seleni Capital capital and uh also host of the steady lads podcast which is like a really great podcast. I try to listen to it as much as I can. Um and today we're going to be talking about what's happening on what's going on in the markets right now and kind of taking a step back and uh looking at uh the sort of macro situation uh from a global macro perspective but also from sort of a macro crypto perspective. Um hey Dy, thanks for joining me. Yeah, no good to chat. That's uh we were just saying like how there's no quiet week in crypto or in the markets in general.

Yeah. I wanted to talk a little bit about your your background and um like a lot of folks who know you and who follow you and like listen to your podcast will know that you used to play poker. Um and uh you know in in my like 12 years in crypto, I've met a lot of it feels like I've met like a disproportional amount of ex- poker players. you know, is there something in crypto that you think like particularly attracts uh people who gamble or who, you know, think strategically like like poker players or is it just uh is it just a coincidence? In this stage of crypto, we're still in the casino phase where there's just like a bunch of people speculating and trying to outsmart each other. So, yeah, we saw what just happened with Bass today. you know, they're they're trying to tokenize

content, tokenize everything. And the like this is an environment that's still I would say um very conducive for people who can just like think from an EB perspective about expected value. How did you how did you transition into crypto and like when did you start becoming interested and uh and seeing that there was like something interesting here for you to like sink your teeth into? I mean, I had between poker and crypto, I had like a 10-y year Trafi stint. So, during that time, you know, learning about currencies and about rates and and uh commodities. I was a fake trader mainly and um I would say like, you know, hearing about Bitcoin in 2013, I was

like, ah, this is too small. This is not going to get any any kind of like network effect. But then in 2016 it came back and um you know bought bought first bitcoins then and um like 2020 um was the time that I just went 100% you know deep as you know first as a monetary system an alternative monetary system and um something that can be useful for just like human organization in general because everything once you think from first principles and break things down it all it only comes down to just society organizing itself and like people being able to create incentives and and do like good work and kind of put the

incentives in the right place. That's that's all anything is. So, um when you look at it from that perspective, there's some building blocks in crypto that are, you know, better than anything else. Yeah. I mean I think like a a lot of us who've been in the space for a while like look at blockchains as just massive coordination mechanisms with economics kind of built in and you know certainly buil bit Bitcoin is like the most you know the simplest example of that. It's like a very simple example of a global coordination mechanism that incentivizes people to coordinate and act like in the interest of of the thing and and that's been kind of stretched out and there's been lots of other experiments um since then of course like you know like all of DeFi is kind of

like based on this idea. Do you still look at all those things from a first principles perspective to just to decide or determine um whether or not they're like useful, investable, have long-term value? Yeah. I mean, I guess um my mental framework is there's, you know, there's the bed and and it has two pieces. It has like the base and then there the mattress. And the mattress is like the speculation. And it's sort of like the the hype and you know it's like maybe the out of mantra like mantra $6 maybe it's like the you know the big ch part on top and then you have some uh some base like the wood you know the harder part that and both of them

together determine the price because it's lan of the two and um uh you know as an investor longer term you have to think about the base like how how solid is that? how big is the is really like the fundamental aspect and then for short-term uh narrative you know memecoin trading or whatever it is you just just focus on the mattress and and that's fine. So the two things stack up uh in a in a few examples maybe like Ethereum Salana um and then in other ones it's like mostly one or the other that you're dealing with and just know like know what uh part of the of the bed you're dealing with. Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes the bed gets termites and uh

and oh yeah, even the legs get eaten up or like you know sometimes just someone throws a mattress on the floor and there's like absolutely no base and uh Yeah. Yeah. Or maybe just some uh some thick blanket. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people just sleep on the floor, you know, and just try to put some blankets up, but um if you wait long enough, at some point the the fluffy part starts to dissolve and it's just a matter of time. Yeah, you were talking before uh before we started recording how um you feel like things are playing out in reverse.

Uh I take it from that that you had like a pretty accurate prediction of like where things would go. Um can you elaborate on that? Like what was your sentiment say like 6 months ago or like a year ago? H how do you trace back from that how you feel the markets are now and like the ecosystem as a whole? I mean, broadly speaking, um I think we all went into the election and um kind of knew that one outcome was good for crypto, one was not because they were very clear about this. So, we got the good one and then we just ran up. It was a question of how far, how hard, how how will it go and um the the January inauguration top was predicted by a lot of people, not just

me. um and ended up being, you know, basically exactly spot on. You you had this Trump meme memecoin launch, the millennia one. I was incredibly bearish when when that happened. Yeah. And it's just like a very The only people that were bullish were like the young kids cuz they just haven't seen enough market forces, enough market cycles to understand that you're, you know, you're at the at the point where it's just it it's like the sugar sugar high and and it's going to come down. Um and the disappointing thing is like how far we've come down. uh where you know this um expectation that we would get institutions coming in full force and

like a lot of uh like new money some of it's come in it's gone to Bitcoin I think that's pretty obvious as like a you know geopolitical asset it might get even more I'm quite bullish on Bitcoin or very bullish in a medium-term sense but um I think there's still a crisis on the um you know smart contract side uh we've had like our AI cycle It has been surprising like how quickly that AI forgot about the AI cycle. It it it just it happens so quick, man. It was a blip. It was kind of shocking like some of these, you know, zerro type of charts where just you create a billion dollar asset that you know just completely flat just dies. Um things are coming more

efficient like market is like rewarding the the right decisions quicker than it used to. we don't have to wait, you know years. Um, but still optimistic on pockets of things for sure. And, um, yeah, I mean, the last thing, of course, like we're seeing that some of the unsustainable looking valuations where you have something trading at, you know, 10 billion and there's nothing there. There's like no product. um you know it's it's more of a token game and and like you know playing with floats and stuff like this and um yeah like at at some point like people get too greedy anyway it seems like yeah what what pockets of things are are

you interested in do you think like still you still have faith in I mean the two obvious ones uh one is still AI I think the AI and crypto combination just makes fundamental sense. It's not speculation. It's just a matter of time before the really strong, you know, traditional AI people and companies find more and more collaborations and things they can do with uh with crypto, whether it's like for agents to be able to transact. Um, you know, whether it's for the actual models themselves or for the privacy aspect. There's there's for the training aspect. There's a lot of elements that I think will get increasingly exciting more than what we had which was more of like a memecoin AI

agent launch pool launchpad thing uh which you know um has not turned out to be very sustainable. And then the other one of course is is is like the more traditional finance aspect where the traditional finance system gets more involved. So you have stable coins, you have things like uh they're talking about real world assets. Obviously we have treasuries already might get other things that that make sense. Uh banking just kind of like integrating the fiat world with uh the crypto world. And I actually think like you know CBDC's might make a comeback like we'll start seeing more digital cryptoness of the traditional financial uh ecosystem. So those are the two. Yeah, I think that overlaps with the way I see things as well. Like it I mean AI I think is still

a ways away from being you know codified as like a real use case with actual kind of like usage and value like a lot of AI I mean most most of AI is still captured by you know sort of traditional tech companies there's hope in me that like AI will move more towards the types of like decentralized technologies that ensure privacy data sovereignty etc things like messaging apps right where people just really don't care so much about privacy and they don't really care so much about like using Signal over WhatsApp, right? Um even though all of us sort of, you know, in the that are attuned to these things um feel that that's important and and like evangelized, but I think like the masses really just want like I don't

know AI generated cat videos and they don't really care if the data is being farmed or whatever. Um so I think that one is like harder to get to. True. I don't I don't I don't disagree on on the masses, but I think there's, you know, even if it's like 5 to 10% of the population that is willing to pay premium to have, you know, like a private digital twin that they can tell stuff to that they know is, you know, verifiably secure and they can express, you know, their, you know, private details like an AI and it's kept, you know, private and they really have like a strong representative of themselves. s uh like stuff like this. I think people will pay premium and it'll still be a

big business. Yeah. How how likely do you think that a new market entrant is the one who kind of breaks out with that sort of solution or a company like Apple for example adopting this technology in their own AI um products? I don't think it's going to be a company like Apple uh or Google directly, but I think those companies might collaborate with um I mean we're starting to see like some of the crypto startups that are uh taking direct investment. You know, I've invested personally and I've invested along with you know like some of the public ones you saw like Prime Intellect with Sandre Karpathy. There's other ones where some of the other obviously Sam Alman has involvement in crypto and um you know

some of the other you know anthropic some of the other Google these guys are also doing stuff. So yeah I don't think it has to be the big companies themselves but it'll just be like somebody who actually makes a product that um uses the technology in a way that makes sense. Yeah, I mean like that's the dream, right? Like the dream is that we all have our own digital twins that are private where we own the data where um there's you know the the kind of risks that um a lot of folks are fearful about AI um you know don't come to fruition. Um yeah I don't think we're far to be honest like if we talk next year there'll be there'll be a lot of movement. Yeah. Okay. Well let's uh we should we should already plan to talk

next year. if if this played out or not. Um, yeah. I mean, so like just coming back to the the the kind of like Trump uh top practically speaking, we've never had a more pro pro crypto US administration. Um, and fear in the market right now is like super high. Um, the markets, you know, the prices have come down significantly. Valuations have come come down significantly. Um there's just there's something about this situation that just feels unright. Like you have these very bullish signals on one side and like the market reacting in a totally different way. Is it just that this was all priced in before Trump came into office or are there other things at

play that are causing the markets to be so bearish right now? Definitely some of it got priced in pretty hard. Yeah, I mean the the way we ran up with no dips uh you know November, December was kind of crazy and especially like a lot of these alts that caught bids with a lot of dead projects like there was just like such inefficiency of capital moving around that had to deflate. um you know the teams woke up from their four-year slumber and suddenly you know like I won't mention uh I I don't need to poke specific you know large cap projects but you you know a lot of these debt projects kind of suddenly like 5xed and started selling their their treasuries back. So like that was not going to ever get anywhere. There's only like limited

dollars in the system regardless of anything else. the economy is is kind of in a we might see a recession that that could be like you know deeper than the COVID recession because it's uh it's less of like something you can point to as a single thing of like oh we just got shut down and as soon as we open up people will be optimistic again. Yeah. Um once you start getting pessimism seeping in and fear seeping in like the things you're talking about you don't get out easily. I mean it's it's you know it's a couple years of working through it and um the really bad part right now is for whatever reason like the strategy that they've taken is like very high in uncertainty like nobody knows if they should invest if they

should like how much do you hire what like what like do you open offices do you like who knows it doesn't know so everyone's pausing um and the more it's like a reinforcing cycle where we just deflate and then the other thing that I'm noticing especially you know I live in Asia I'm here in Singapore certainly um you know the role of the US dollar as like you know the the de facto baseline of everything is getting questioned more and more and um we're seeing gold just completely crush it. I mean I was I posted on Twitter yesterday I was like who is the market maker of this X aut token which is like the the tether gold it's just going up non-stop.

So that says something. I don't think we should ignore what gold is saying. It's a huge asset and the fact that it's moving like this. It just means people are um globally I I think diversifying out of dollars. So uh we're just in such a tricky um market to navigate um and it's it's probably causing people a lot of um a lot of fear. Plus they've taken a huge draw down. I mean, everyone in crypto probably has some Ethereum or, you know, Salana, uh, one of those two, right? Like, everyone has one of those two, I would say, at this point. Um, so we've all taken an L to a certain extent. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I wanted to talk about uh, ETH a little bit. Um, uh, so in 2022, you wrote this article um on on the on Bank list that argued that the ETH merge was overhyped. And you know certainly like we all remember the merge and how everyone was excited and it was going to like acrue more value to Ethereum and you know make it a deflationary asset and like you know um uh ultrasound money and like all this stuff if you were holding ETH a year ago you'd be down uh by about I don't know what's the price of ETH today like00 is bad. I mean, I I saw it like on a

uh like a 8year horizon. We're flat or something. So, it's not it's not great. Yeah. So, like what what's your what's your feeling about ETH right now? Are you still holding ETH? Um holding it. I mean, I might hold it to zero. It's fine. One of those things you uh you know, I've held it for so long that uh Yeah. Um, look, I mean, it's clearly going on going in the wrong direction. The things that I was mentioning in that article, everybody was like so bullish and it was the reality ended up being worse than even my contrarian bearish take. It was worse than that because L2s were even worse than I thought in terms of like maybe you can just recap the kind of

TLDDR of like what your position was in that article. Yeah, I mean, you know, historically, um, this ultrasound money thing didn't really sit it right with me. It didn't make a lot of sense that you can just, you know, decide uh you're going to make a sound money and ultrasound money like this kind of thing. Didn't really make it a macro asset. There was like this clear conflict I could see one on the revenue side where you're either having L2s do stuff or you're actually getting revenue. And if you're not getting revenue, then your only like use cases as money is kind of is like the network effect. Over the years, I've started calling it um community money because uh it's not base money or ultrasound money, but it's community money. And what that means is you have a lot of people and it's just like NFT collections like if

there's a lot of people and and like there's a strong community, then the value is very high. As soon as the community starts to um you know get splintered away and then like lose attention uh lose faith and uh the community money which is like the value of you know just the Pokemon go-karts or whatever whatever we're talking about the community money goes down and Ethereum unfortunately like has the the community that started a very high point and um felt you know that there was a pristineess to it. I think the Salana cycle showed what you said previously that uh for the masses they don't care about pristine asset. They just care about like you know what can I gamble

try to make money like they just want they just want their dopamine receptors to be you know uh hit pretty hard. Yeah. And um that's another first principle. Dopam people will search seek dopamine uh hits. Yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, that's that's um unfortunately our monkey side coming out. And when you look at what happened this cycle, it was clearly like the memecoin cycle. Like there's no other way to describe the cycle. Yeah. Um it was pretty obvious that the thing that is still driving uh most of the value is the speculation and like the ease of use and the quick quick the dopamine hits. not like sitting on MetaMask and clicking like you know

confirm yes this asset let me do like 20 ETH and this and it's just um people want to just gamble. Um that said look like the the only really bull cases for Ethereum are related to what we said before like one is the real world asset thing. I think having the most neutral smart contract platform um is by default the place that you know a very large potential tokenization would happen and um and that remains true. So that that thesis is kind of what's holding me as a as a believer. Yeah. What's surprised you the most since uh since you you know you wrote that article and um like in terms of how like the ETH price has has

gone or in terms of like how the ecosystem of rollups has um has built out or L2s rather I mean the L2's thing we all we all kind of thought from first principles back when we had just arbitum and optimism and then we started thinking okay what if there's like thousands of these like they're telling us like do we do we need thousands of them like I can't be in a thousand cities at the same time. Like we just want like a few good cities. Um yeah, I remember like Manta like some of these like L2s, you know, they would do this playbook where they just go to Binance, they do a launch pool, they do some points campaign and then um yeah, a lot of the stuff just didn't surprise me. I think the thing that surprised me was um

maybe like this base aspect where like now people are saying like bass is Ethereum and and basically like it's it's a strange there's strange bed fellows between Ethereum and and base right now. Um that that's definitely surprised me. I don't know if you expected anything like that to happen. I didn't expect for base to become so huge. I I think I expected Ethereum to like really remain um dominant in DeFi and like all these L2s would be more of more of the speculative ones and I I felt like the you know DeFi was the more um the use case that was more rooted in first principles and that people would like

more you know flock to first principles but uh but in reality like you know people want to speculate and they want to gamble and like I think I think I think like the leadership of Ethereum also just has been I would I would grade them as like a D minus for the last few years. It's uh if they understood the game at least they would be able to make some strategic decisions but they didn't really seem to get it or understand what the fight like what's happening. Uh, in my opinion, if they looked at like Ethereum as being the NBA commission and then you have all these different teams as L2s, that would have worked because you kind of you you you just showcase them, but you you kind of create like a structure where it all makes sense

because they're all, you know, part of this organization. Then instead, you just have um Yeah, I've called it like the European uh disease where you just have like this, you know, OG aspect. there's a lot of old wealth and just kind of gets lazy and socialism and that not like really like looking at the capitalistic uh case enough. Yeah. Like I don't have a really good sense of this because I'm I'm not like super plugged in with the I guess the Ethereum leadership team. But like looking back and if you look at you know the Ethereum leadership team and you know the Salana leadership team there's a real difference in terms of really capturing this capitalistic aspect and being like you know trying to build a business out

of this and building something that um it feels more like a business and less of a less like a public goods project and like if you look at Ethereum it's definitely the latter right like it's it definitely feels more beta uh than you know something like Salana where you know everyone is just like gung-ho and like highly capitalistic and efficient. Um where you know Ethereum you know like Ethereum has some of its roots I guess in in you know some of the idealistic I think um kind of place right where like Salana always wanted to be kind of like the biggest and the best and and and and

there is a little bit of you know um uh I guess maybe like US versus Europe personified here to some extent. Yeah, absolutely. But like even Salana, you know, like has um things to deal with because the token is still community money. It doesn't change. It's still community money. Sure. Community like is happy when things are going well and then there's like a big reflexivity when the community's just been getting wrecked on a bunch of like random coins. Um you know, there's like a huge unlock that just happened. Thankfully, it's behind us. Uh yeah, I was kind of warning on these like multi-billion unlocks on Salana and you know, it's obviously just had an impact. uh it's it's traded so heavily for for the last few months. Um yeah, let's see. I mean,

Ethereum does have like a strong mattress board underneath, I think, uh with a neutrality and like just you know, there's a lot of infrastructure that's been that's been built around it. Do you think this new leadership team um is is going to move the needle in any meaningful direction or does something else need to happen kind of structurally for to the token to the chain um and and the way it interacts with LPs? We need something pretty big. I think it'll happen potentially from like a Black Rockck that type of thing.

they'll just get involved and issue some stuff and say, "Okay, like this is where we're going to like a like a friendly takeover, you know, we're going to use this as our base for uh for like this big digital strategy, something like that." Um, I mean, that's what it's there for. Um, I think people were thinking maybe like the AI use case because of the neutrality there, but I actually think that most of the AI crypto activity will probably happen on like purpose-built chains or yeah, at least uh infrastructure. So, I think the RWA, Wall Street, uh, getting like a big black rock type of institution, that's kind of what it's going to take. When you say like purpose-built infrastructure, you're talking about app

app chains, basically kind of purpose-built chains. Well, AI like we've seen a lot of attempts already at building, you know, chains that are um you know, working well with some of these components that uh crypto AI uses like um these like secure enclaves or yeah, just like privacy aspects where you can uh be less transparent than you know on a public blockchain. Right. Yeah. Um yeah, definitely like if you're building anything that's that needs to use like tees and stuff like that, you want to use your you build your own chain. You know, ear earlier you were talking about stable coins and like kind of transforming the the traditional kind of existing banking

system. The way I think about that is I think stable coins really accelerate the these kinds of use cases, right? like stable coins will I think transform fintexs traditional finance or fintech products so we'll get like better online banks get better settlement quicker settlement faster and cheaper global settlement as well you know companies like transfer wise you know might you know suffer from um like new entrance coming in using stable coins for uh for international settlements I mean Revolute has you know always been a competitor to transfer wise and Yeah, they've grown massively and I think they're embracing crypto quite a lot. I think a company like Robin Hood is

incredibly crypto uh curious, progressive, not curious at this point. I mean they're they're they're all in in bed. So um yeah, there there's definitely like progress of fintech towards towards more crypto adoption. I think that's going to continue. At the same time also institutions have adopted Bitcoin um you know through ETFs and through holding Bitcoin and kind of seeing Bitcoin as this kind of pristine asset you like you were talking about earlier whereas the the you know DeFi the project of DeFi has been to build this new infrastructure for finance and to a large extent that that hasn't happened and I think alts like the the current

kind of dump on alts represents the rejection of institutions. So, institutions have adopted, you know, like stable coins, RBWA, Bitcoin, but they've rejected DeFi up until now. And and I I'm I'm like I'm wondering if you know is it a fundamental thing where institutions cannot adopt DeFi or it'll be very difficult for institutions to adopt DeFi in its current form because DeFi fundamentally um is a political project that aims to replace you know that that instit that institutional infrastructure like you know Ethereum comes from this very kind of cipher punky uh libertarian um place where the the initial the initial goal

was to build like the new kind of internet infrastructure for finance and institutions adopting that kind of goes against their own interests. You know, like institutions want to preserve their infrastructure. They want to preserve an issue because like they're all competing against each other and so if there's some something that Goldman Sachs can make money on in crypto that the others can't, they'll go for like the just competition that exists because it's a it's a very competitive market, right? uh even the legacy firms are not going to strategize together and be like, "Oh, none of us are going to go try to grab the grab the cherry." Like they'll they'll they'll go for it if it's there.

Um so I think it's more displaying that it's just there hasn't been enough meat on the bone yet. Uh we saw the Ethereum ETF, you know, not not not terrible, but not not a huge success either. They're saying, you know, look, if we can package it up with yield and then it's like a yield product, then maybe we can sell it. So I don't think it's that they rejected it. I think it's just maybe they need to get the right, you know, story and format for so they can sell it properly. Adopting the infrastructure I think will take a much longer time if if it happens at all. And I I think that here we're going to see a lot of consolidation. I feel like you know there will be a handful of winners if if institutions adopt you know this

infrastructure only a handful of winners will um will be a part of that. those that have like good institutional um relations that like actively work towards building infrastructure that um can fit within the institutional frameworks, regulatory frameworks etc. and the rest is are probably not going to amount to much and will continue in this sort of speculative bubble. Yeah, of course. I mean the good thing is we we have seen this cycle a couple coins like Hyperlid for example that are just making a ton of revenue. There's there's hope on the app layer, I would say. And um the infrastructure layer, like all these like L1's, L2s, you know, that the only way that they would ever

have value is if like a lot of talented people spend their time building stuff on top of them and kind of letting the underlying base acrew that value. But um you know the game theory kind of played out and the most talented you know app founders just want to capture the value themselves. They don't want to you know put it on someone else's base and and put it on their plate. So um we're definitely living in more of an app direction. That's for sure. Yeah. Uh I was talking to uh Josh from Astria the other day and he said something on here on the podcast and he said something which was I thought was really

interesting is you know fragmentation isn't uh a technical problem it's an economic problem and you know liquidity costs money and like if you're building an app and you brought that liquidity there and that liquidity has costed you money there's no reason why that liquidity should go anywhere else and you're going to continue to protect that liquidity and as we're going into this more kind of like appentric uh vision for the future um the kind of like Cosmos, you know, app chain um philosophy. I I wonder how that's going to play out from a liquidity perspective and how we're going to solve this this fragmentation problem. Um and I I think it happens through consolidation and just like a lot fewer actors that are able to actually have app chains. Yep. Like we've seen that in

Cosmos and sort of like you know the app chain world for the last two years where a lot of chains have gone to zero and only the the big ones remain and up until even just this week you know even the big ones are starting to fall. So um yeah any any thoughts on the mantra um on the mantra episode you know as a market maker? I mean, we never market market make it. We never invested, you know, didn't really do anything, never really interacted with it. So, I guess I can look from the outside and um you know, you have something that went up like 100x over couple years

without a functioning product. Um, and then was like a top 25 coin at least like iconically like you never really know what the real uh market cap is, but like theoretically based on what they reported it was like a top 25 coin. Yeah. Um I think everyone knew it was overvalued. The founder was saying it was overvalued. like everyone kind of understood that game, but it would there was just like a token game going on of like squeezing the shorts and um you know like trying to keep the momentum going. Um but even if the asset on paper uh is 13 billion, if you rip 100 million into the bid, like is there

anyone really going to absorb it? Um, and we've seen this time and time again, you know, like I I wrote about Olympus back in the day where it was similarly like trading at some uh kind of billion valuation and didn't mean that it could really sustain sell pressure um of like 1% of it or like you know maybe a few percent. So wasn't their token also token wasn't it also? Yeah, that one has a ticker. Yeah, similar. Yeah, they've stabilized it but it's stabilized at like $20, you know, instead of a,000 where it was this one. Um, there was just this air pocket below. And um, look, I think the exchanges are probably still unsophisticated when it comes to like

protecting users from this stuff. They don't really know or understand it well enough to I mean, they do their investigations and they try to look at the float and try to like understand what's happening, but uh, clearly um, not well enough. And I think they're still learning a lot. They have to learn a lot more. Um, I saw Star from OKX said that this is like a big scandal for the industry and certainly like, you know, we're going back to these like bad headlines and these Safe Moon kind of days. Um, yeah, we'll see. We'll see how it sort of plays out, but I I don't I don't think that we go back up to uh whatever 10 billion uh run this token. Do do you think that as an industry like you know

we need to start reporting we need to demand from projects that they're reporting their actual market cap and like removing you know like um lock tok so like tokens held by the foundation from the float um so that yeah coin gecko and coin market cap are reporting more accurate uh fds I mean we definitely do but like there's always people going to get around it. I mean, you you always see this like, oh, there's an airdrop. Oh, it's a 10% airdrop. But then 9.9 like belongs to the friends. So like it's not them, it's their friends. Okay. Like who is it not is it not float? Like it is. So you just kind of get around this stuff. I don't

think that's really the solution. Um regard like sorry regulation. Um I actually like I don't I don't know if regulation can do enough because it's it's not a national thing. It's an international product. I've always like thought that the exchanges like the big exchanges, Binance for example, we have seen Binance get more aggressive. They they've been just generally intervening when they see something uh obvious. I would say this one um was maybe a tricky one. Like these things are not old. Like if you look at why traditional markets have derivatives regulators separate from you know you have the CFTC you have the SEC

um you just need like someone who's like an expert at understanding derivatives for example like the the perpetual product I've talked about this a bunch is uh is not like a bulletproof product like it's fun it's like good it's good UX but the the underlying fundamental of the the perpetual is also um not solid and relies on a functioning spot market that is like a healthy spot market. Um, if you don't have a healthy spot market, then you get all kinds of crazy stuff going on. And um, I think that's part of what we saw here. So, memes are dead, alts are dead. What's left? You were talking or before we started, you were talking about the stock market. Uh, you thought

you thought stocks were also dead. So, are we all going back to buying gold and bricks? Is that um well unfortunately yeah like when you look at the organization of society aspect that we talked about whenever you have a huge kind of reorganization happening um there have to be big flows happening. Now I'm not saying like stocks are going to go zero. I just don't think they're going to like you know reach alltime highs anytime soon because you just have these like we're like late stage. like late stage in the cycle in the in the fourth turning, whatever you want to call it. But the Fed cannot just cut rates because there's a little bit of of a shake anymore because, you know, we already have too much debt. Inflation's

out of control. The basically like they can't spend money on interest rates and they can't save money. Like they can't really do much. They're just um trying to they're stuck and they're in they're they're going to be in like emergency mode where they're just trying to catch the falling plate like, "Okay guys, like unemployment's falling off a cliff. We got to we got to do something." Oh, the bond market got to do some QE. Okay, now inflation's too high. Let's try to They're just They're in a bit of impossible spot. And um yeah, unfortunately like risk assets people are not going to be feeling very like risk positive I think for uh for the next at least uh one two years is kind of what it feels like. So,

you know, things can change, but um and things like gold, Bitcoin, when you have so much international uncertainty and and uh clashing, these like neutral uh shelling points are the basis for the next reorganization of society. Like you need to kind of go back to the the fundamentals and then you kind of build from there. So yeah, unfortunately like we're we're back to back to the gold bricks. I don't know. Yeah. Uh and and what's your like I meanuh Coinbase just put out this thing where um saying that we we were we were in probably for a a crypto winter.

Do you do you think like the crypto cycle is over or um No, I I mean I I don't think the crypto cycle is over. Obviously like the the part of it that's just like extreme froth speculation is probably obviously over. I mean the memecoin cycle is Yeah. But just maybe they want just just step back here like I think a lot of people in you know I've talked to a lot of folks in the last like year and a lot of people I think up until just recently were thinking that like there was like the early 2024 pop right like the memecoin pop and then there was like kind of AI and like the Trump top and that we would have the mega top right where um total market cap reaches like

10 trillion, right? And and that kind of follows the u the cycle uh logarithmic curve and um and that that would happen, you know, in like end of this year, early next year. Uh I don't know if you subscribed to that idea up up until recently, but like a lot of people I think did. Um so you don't think that you never thought that would happen? No. No. I've tell been telling people it's like astrology and that they should have sold in January and uh I have a friend he was like uh like but it's altcoin it's the seasonality the altcoin seasonality and I I managed to convince him to like sell a quarter or something and of course now he's like you know I should have should more um no there's there's none of that

I I think like everyone's waiting for one last pump that's that's kind of like the the mantra right now is like one last pump one last pump. Um, people are like, "I've learned my lesson. Next time I'm getting out, just just give me that one last pump." U, look, I I think Bitcoin is going to do very well. Uh, so I don't think the cycle's over in that regard. And in so far as digital assets as as a whole do well, but there's always going to be some extra money that flows into, you know, like alternative uh, digital currencies and and assets. We haven't really seen like a good Bitcoin L2 thing happen yet. Uh like a big success there. So maybe at some point we get that. We we'll wait and see. I don't

I don't expect any any astrology uh logarithmic cycle thing to to come into play from this conversation. The takeaway is like start cycling into Bitcoin and maybe gold. Yeah. Cool. Um, anything else you want to share or any uh any parting thoughts before we wrap up? Yeah, I'm I'm not generally pessimistic. I think um once we get a lot more money in the digital world. Um, we will start, you know, having some of the other options and the other uh kind of ecosystem things start to uh play out well, but we're we're uh we're maybe a bit early. This feels like a reorganization phase.

Yeah, Jordy, thanks so much for coming on. It's been great chatting. Oh, good for the chat. Appreciate it. Cheers. Take care. [Music] [Music]