Is Ethereum the next Amazon?

Transcript

The right thing to understand is what is the profit of Ethereum relative to the profit of Amazon. And the one thing I pointed out is that Amazon literally made no profit. No profit until basically about 20 years in as a business. What's up everybody? It's LG here and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that stays on the sidelines of the major bottles but hands out the popcorn when things get real spicy. Today is December 9th, 2025. We're recording this late on December 8th and Hib is here. He was one of the main contestants in the big battle on crypto Twitter that's been raging for the last 10 days about L1's and their value. He's also the managing partner partner at Dragonfly and we're going to dig into what he's seeing in the industry, what they are seeing in the

industry and really honestly what we all want to talk about is what is the learning long-term value of our top favorite chains and all the other chains that are still launching after them. So, we have a lot to dig into. He puts out tons of content. So, we're going to try and zip through this one as quickly as we can. Before we start, shout out to our sponsors. Reserve DTFS. Get exposure to the entire crypto market in a single token. Chain link. Break the interoperability barrier and power the future of tokenized finance and bridge power your business with instance stable cocoin payments. No friction, no banks, just global finance made simple. A dude, welcome back to the show, man. It's good to have you at this point in time especially.

>> Happy to be here again, man. Okay, so we need to recap because not everybody uh shockingly it may surprise many people, but we don't all spend all our time on crypto Twitter. Uh some people like to listen to podcasts when they're driving in the car and not read all the tweets. Can you please recap for us and don't spare details what the hell happened last week between you and Santiago that that merited a fullon brawl on the Thread Guy show? What what what was what started this and what was it all about? Okay, so a couple weeks ago, um, I wrote a post called in defense of exponentials. And this is a post basically describing the spiritual capitulation that I've been seeing from a lot of people about whether or not layer 1's are overvalued, whether

they're ever going to be able to capture value. And this idea that, hey, this is an exponential technology. This technology has been getting bigger and bigger over time. It's gobbling up the entire world of finance from where it started. These very, very small, humble beginnings. It's more or less been this unabated story of growth. Obviously with fits and starts along the way, but if you look at exponential technologies like e-commerce, like the internet, they all took the shape. None of them started printing a bunch of profit immediately in the first five or even 10 years. Um, and so what basically what I was advocating for was patience and not getting too despondent over, oh hey, what happened over the last three months or six months uh over the span of a technology adoption that's just not a long period of time. you have to zoom

out and see the big picture and that's and that's largely what I was advocating for in my piece. So enter Santi. So Santi important background two things to know about Santi. One uh Santi is I think one of the top three most active angel investors in crypto history. If you go to like the angel investor portfolios he is he is I think he's got the bronze medal. He is enormous. Okay. So very very active investor in the space. Uh invested in almost everything. Second, he is starting his own project called Inversion which we actually led the seed round of. Okay, so that's another important thing to understand is that we are investors into inversion. So um I have a lot of respect for Santi.

I've known him for a very long time. He's also been a crypto VC previously at Parafi uh before he went solo and then eventually started building this project. And so he um you know his whole idea is that he's trying to bring real GDP on chain by taking over these companies and you know cryptoizing them basically. So taking like, you know, a a traditional fintech or or going out and buying like a like a telco and then incorporating crypto payments and USDC transfers and all this other stuff in order to supercharge these businesses. That's the whole idea. So he's spending all day looking at traditional businesses and figuring out how to bring them on chain. And so he started writing in response to my post which went pretty viral. He started writing like, "Hey, look, this is all great talk. Yeah, okay. It's nice to be bullish on

Ethereum or Salana or whatever, but come on. Let's be serious. Let's look at these P multiples. Let's look at these revenue numbers. These are embarrassing. These are nowhere near what you see for traditional companies even at this stage. You know, Amazon, yeah, okay, maybe it wasn't profitable in any meaningful scale, but it was printing tons and tons of revenue, even if it was losing money, right? All these early companies were making tons and tons of revenue even if they weren't making a lot of profit. Compare that to Ethereum. Ethereum is trading at, you know, he said something like 300 plus price of sales, which is just an insanely large number. These valuations are way ahead of their skis and people are being enumerate. We can no longer justify this kind of, you know, polyianaish approach to valuation. And I Okay, so he he

posted this. It got some it got some play. I came in the responses. I was like, "No, you're you're you're you're not being sufficiently fair. Blockchains don't have revenue. They have profit." because blockchains don't have expenses. So, the comparison is not between revenue and revenue. The comparison is between profit and profit. And if you look at the profit of Ethereum, actually, it's pretty comparable because Ethereum could be charging higher fees. They're choosing not to. And the reason why they're choosing not to is because they want to grow. And so, we just we just kept going back and forth. And he was like, "Hey, what do you say we do a debate?" I said, "Fuck yeah, let's go. I mean, I'm I'll debate anyone anytime."

And so, we decided we were going to debate each other respectfully as friends. Uh, and we're going to find a neutral venue. So bunch of people came out and said, "Hey, we'd love to host your debate." But each of them had a bag, you know, so like, "Oh, Mer wanted to." So maybe Andy, who literally Andy coined the revenue meta, I think is his term. So we were like, "Okay, who who's somebody who doesn't have a dog in the fight?" Thread guy popped in. We said, "Great, we'll do it with Thread Guy." So we did this debate about an hour and a half debate of us going back and forth barbing one way or another. Um, and this this debate kind of went super viral. So I think um thread guy later showed me the numbers that it's got over a million uh views across all the different clips

and the and the debate itself and all this stuff. I mean it was a slow week. So there was we had we had a lot of uh um a lot of time for people to dig into this debate and it really got people talking about what is the right way to understand what these L1s are worth because historically you know what have L1's traded on how have they been valued historically the answer is mostly either combination of vibes/perception and or TVL those are kind of the only two things that most L1's trade on there was a moment when Salana tried to say Oh, no wait. We have our own metric that we've invented called REV, which stands for real economic value, which is kind of a measure of MEV and also fees and some other stuff. Um, but then REV fell

off a cliff after the memecoin mania in like, you know, December, January kind of died down. Uh, and now REV is super low and now Salana no longer talks about REV. So, the reality is we don't really have good metrics to talk about layer 1's besides TVL. TVL is kind of the first metric we ever came up with and ironically it seems to be the most stable and predictive of whi what chains manage to hold on to their valuations and and which ones bleed out. Um so that's the backdrop that was where this all this big conversation came from. And of course I've been on the side of being bullish there ones and believing that the future is going to be much bigger than the past and these things are going to continue to grow and they're priced for growth. They're not priced for how

much profit are they extracting today. Um, and if you believe the future is going to be much bigger than the past, that's rational. Whereas Santi, he's like, "Look, there's a lot of stuff in this world that's growing. I don't think these things should be priced on growth. They should be priced on revenue, and they don't show revenue today." So, it sounds like Santi is taking more like the opportunity cost approach, right? That it's he's just saying that it's like you you could be waiting this game of finding out which of these L1s are going to eventually grow and become the Amazon. Can't be all of them. Or you could look at other investments kind of like he's doing, although he does as the third biggest investor. Clearly, he sprays investments all over the place.

So, he does take a similar approach, but maybe with with a different way for crypto to try and bring actual businesses with actual revenue and bring them on chain. Is that about correct? That's kind of what he's saying. >> That's correct. Although, one of the lines in the debate, which I think got a lot of play, was that he said at one point uh I think he said, "I'd rather own Western Union than own ETH." Uh because Western Union is trading at four times PE. And uh I told him, "Okay, why don't you buy Western Union?" He's like, "I I already did. I'm I'm super long Western Union. Um and so that ended up getting played over and over and over again. So >> Oh, that's amazing.

>> Yeah. So he look he's got his money where his mouth is. Again, I think he's wrong, but you know, in the short term, crypto is super volatile and obviously everybody sees the crazy volatility we've seen in these asset class >> from the debate. Is there anything that you added to your perspective? Cuz I think sometimes talking this out, especially with a a worthy debater like Santiago, somebody you know, right? Maybe that changes a little bit of your per perception. Maybe 10% maybe 20% gives you a bit of a different point of view. Has anything changed for you since this blew up? >> If anything, I have become more confident in my view. Um I think the like look the argument of hey the revenue of these companies or the revenue of these protocols is very low compared to a traditional company. Um that is kind of a devastating argument

on its face, right? If that's the only thing you know about a layer one, you're going be like, "Wow, these things sound super overvalued." Um, and so there's always competing frames with which to look at and understand these things. But the more that I really had to wrestle with these arguments and the more that I had to do my research. Um, so he was insisting in the debate that the right way to look at these things is price of sales. So if you look at price sales for Ethereum, it's something like 380. If you look at Amazon, I think Amazon topped out at price of sales of 42. Uh, and this was during the bubble. And I I insisted that like no, no, this is not the right way to look at it. The right way to look at it is as like there's no

sales for a blockchain, right? The sales in some sense is like the GDP of the blockchain which we're not measuring. There's no way to directly measure that. Um I mean you could if you wanted to go and say what are all the transaction fees being paid on every single chain on every single application but that you know I don't know it's not easy to find that number and it's kind of not a useful thing to to worry to spend time trying to disentangle. Uh the right thing to understand for a chain is because I mean that's like kind of the equivalent of GMV, right? The right thing to understand for a chain is the profit because when chains charge fees, that's profit. There's no expenses for a chain. Chains don't pay expenses, right?

There's no AWS hosting cost for Ethereum. So the the right thing to understand is what is the profit of Ethereum relative to the profit of Amazon. And the one thing I pointed out is that Amazon literally made no profit, no profit until basically about 20 years in as a business. And e in the in the year I think it was uh I quoted in the in the debate uh 2013 uh Amazon had a PE ratio price to earnings which is profit that's what we care about that's what almost every company trades on the PE ratio of Amazon was over 600 whereas today the PE ratio of of Ethereum of course is something like 380 so the problem is that you can say both price to sales and PE of Ethereum are the same because Ethereum has no

expenses so the question is what's the right comparison is it PE or is it Yes, I argue that it's PE given that it's very difficult to come up with a good analogy of what revenue would be for a layer 1. >> What has been the main takeaway from this argument publicly? Like what is the sentiment like after this show that you've done and it's blown up and everything? What what is what would you say is currently the narrative, right? Like how do people currently feel about this? Have they become have they joined your side and become more optimistic or are they like santy and they're like holy [ __ ] Western Union fill me up buddy?

>> I don't think you've seen a lot of demand for Western Union stocks since the debate. So I'd say probably not that. Look, you know it's hard to put too much. Um I I'd say the sentiment that I have seen on crypto Twitter is that most people think I got the better side of the argument. Uh there was one post-debate poll that Thread Guy ran where I think I got something like 62% uh believed that I won. So, not a blowout. Like, it's not that everybody thinks Santi is wrong, but um I think you can also see to some degree people voting with their wallets that you know it's not like these L1 just drop like a stone because people suddenly realize something they didn't know before. um which which I think would be if this was truly an emperor has no clothes moment that hey turns out there are no good

arguments as to why you should continue to believe in things like Ethereum and Salana then that might have been the outcome is that like wow all of a sudden a generation of investors was just uh hit in the head with the realization that they were investing in a bunch of nonsense and I don't think that's the takeaway and and I don't think that's true >> ETFs provide investors with a structured disciplined and diversified approach to crypto which is cool but The world is moving on chain. We need a crypto native equivalent. That's exactly what Reserve's decentralized token folios bring to the table. Reserve ETFs are rule-based baskets of crypto assets packaged into a single token like Coin Market CMC 20, crypto's version of the S&P 500. Go to milkroad.com/reserve to find out what's on offer. Sure,

tokenized financial products are the future, but there is a big sticking point. They all need to speak to each other. This is a tough problem to solve, but chain link does exactly that. It's the universal language for financial markets, linking Wall Street to web3, banks to blockchain, and so much more. See how chain link is linking the world by going to milkroad.com/chain link. So you it feels like your general argument kind of having read all your posts and and tuned into this debate is that you are largely arguing against cynicism in the space that you're like, listen, people are just too pessimistic about what's going on, right? And that they just can't see the forest from the trees in terms of and even the Amazon analogy of just like, listen, it took 20 years for them to make money. Ethereum's already ahead of that, right? What

drives that cynicism? Why? Why? Because all these people show up every day to be here and yet they seem to hate it. >> Yeah, that's right. I mean, look, it obviously there's a cognitive dissonance that people feel this year particularly because this was supposed to be our year. You know, we got your guy is in the White House. Uh he is passing every possible regulation to make it easy for you. All of your enemies have been defeated. You know, the Gary Gendzler is out. Everybody who is railroading you from the the banking side to finan to whatever they're all cowtowing, right? All the big corporations are coming in. Stripe is launching their own blockchain. Robin Hood is in the game.

You've got, you know, every major fintech company. Every single bank now contemplating a stable coin. This is supposed to be the year that that you were vindicated that everything is supposed to go up for you. And yet we got chop. You know, like you said, prices are kind of up and down. You know, Bitcoin is down on the year. Uh, we now have Bitcoin down since or sorry, most alts are down since the election. Uh, it sucks, right? You see your friends out there punting, you know, AI AI stocks and, you know, quantum stocks and all this other random crap and they're all making money. Your gold bugs are making money and yet the crypto guys have not made money this year. And that sucks. It hurts. It feels like why wasn't I rewarded for my faith? And I think that can that can result in some

real um acrimony towards hey, who are the guys who kept telling me that the stuff is supposed to be valuable? where's the value? I don't see the money going up. Now, that being said, there's obviously macro forces that superintend on everything in crypto and there's just animal spirits and retail is flighty and finicky and this is a very retail driven market. Um I I think beyond that like there's so I I I posted something last night that also got a lot of um or sorry it was maybe night before last that also got a lot of attention and it was in response to a post that's gone viral recently um by this guy Ken who posted that he realized that he'd wasted the last eight years of his life building in crypto and all that he sees that has

come of it is a bunch of casinos and he felt very disillusioned which I think is again a sentiment that a lot of people felt and I posted in response to that like look crypto has always had casinos there's never been a time that crypto didn't have casinos right so if you look at you know the first viral application in crypto was Satoshi dice uh the first viral smart contract on Ethereum was king of the ether hill which was basically uh king of the hill ponzi game on Ethereum there's always been gambling there's always been random you know the first viral application on Tron was not stable coin transfers it was Tronb so there have always been things like this.

The industry's always had, you know, whether it's, you know, food coins in DeFi or whether it's ICOs or whether it's um, you know, memecoins or NFTTS, there's always been something that represented the casino. But if you only focus on the casino, then you are missing the forest for the trees because the big story has also been happening. It's not as volatile. It's not, you know, people are not making their riches overnight in building stable coins or building financial substrates or building, you know, the DeFi rails that all this stuff is built upon. But it's all real. It's all there. It's all happening. And so, um, the last point that I make in response to this guy, and again, I think this is very much, um, endemic in the industry right now, is that there's always going to be people who work on the wrong things or work on

things that don't have longevity. And those people are going to be disillusioned and they're going to leave the industry. And I think that's healthy. It sucks to see, but it is healthy because at the end of the day, I I sort of analogize it to a forest is that forests actually need to burn every once in a while. Uh to eliminate the deadwood because that deadwood eventually it rots and it spreads disease and it metastasizes to the floor of the forest. The forest has to burn in order to stay healthy. And it sucks to see it happen because, you know, these are people who really invested their time and resources into the space. But either those people need to like straighten out and focus on the future or they need to leave because there's a lot more work to do in this industry. We are nowhere near done and the industry

needs the people who are here to be fully dedicated and locked in to actually building it out. >> Does the casino aspect hold it back? >> I think that's a it's it's it's kind of a false dichotomy, right? Like you sort of can't have permissionless money without having people building casinos in the same way. It's like, you know, did did did porn hold back the internet? Like maybe the internet would have been adopted more readily or maybe it wouldn't have had so much puritanical push back in the early days or or take illegal file sharing. Did illegal file sharing hold back the internet? It's like well on some level it brought a lot of people in who would never have used the internet before but because they wanted to download MP3s. Uh at the same time it also created a very bad reputation for the internet. Uh created

a lot of laws that restricted the internet that might not otherwise have been created had those things not existed. But the reality is you cannot have an internet without file sharing because that's what the internet does. The internet makes it instantaneous to be able to send any information. That includes information that's copyrighted. Um in the same way crypto gives you the ability to do anything with money. And if you can do anything with money, you can gamble and people will find a way. It's human nature. So um I don't think it's possible to have a world of crypto without gambling. But so I I don't think it's really useful to look at the people who are building casinos and say, "Why are you doing that? you're holding us back. What's more important is for the people who are building things that are not gambling to build things better,

faster, stronger, more effect, more effectively, and to get distribution for it. That's the real imperative, not to make these other people stop doing what they're doing. >> When you say distribution, what do you mean? Because I think it's a common story in industry that it's like, well, why are you guys all focused on this scammer and his repetitive scams or whatever it is, and you're not focused on this person who's the builder who's actually built all these great applications, right? And that's that's normal in any industry, right? Is the kind of shitty celebrities get more attention than the actual people that are super talented. How do we fix that in crypto? Is it is it fixable?

>> I mean, look, I I'm I'm not a very good social planner. I don't really have good solutions at a cultural level or at a kind of society level about how we invest more attention and goodwill into good things and less into bad things. Um in general I think like again the the the fact that I mean when you say that we pay a lot of attention to scammers um we pay a lot of good attention as well as a lot of bad attention to scammers right so the community spends a lot of time um you know following people who maybe don't have the best ethics or the best track records and following them into doing stuff at the same time they also spend a lot of time calling them out and you know kind of publicly crucifying them and that's important actually that that

is actually a very important social function which is that there needs to be community policing and there needs to be, you know, because it can't be the SEC coming out and doing all this stuff. It's just not scalable enough. Like the community has to be good at doing it itself. So on some level, I think that's okay and actually it should be it should be encouraged of this self-p policing at an industry level. Um at the same time, like yeah, it's not again the builders, it's their job. It's their job to break through the noise. It's their job to inspire people. It's their job to get other people to care and to create enough utility for them. And not everything is valuable to everyone, right? Right? So, look, if you're if you're American and you're upper middle class, you probably don't need stable coins. So, like you're fine using Visa

and PayPal and Venmo and whatever. And it's like, okay, maybe I could use a stable coin to like do an international transfer, but I'm not doing that many of those. So, and obviously use a stable coin to use a crypto product, but you know, like it's I don't really need it to take over my financial life. Um, so it's not that every product is supposed to be compelling to everyone. I think that's also okay. >> Which builder does that best in the space then? who who builder is able to find to weave that line between building great products and actually advertising it a little bit because that's a big part of the industry is you really have to self- advocate for the attention you want. It's that's a ne necessary part.

You can't just build secretly and hope that people will care. >> Not all not I'm almost >> yeah I'd say the first one that comes to mind is Hayden. uh the founder of Uniswap has just been an incredible advocate for not just unis swap but also the industry defi and just the longevity that he's had in the space as a dedicated focused builder. Um and he's done so much for the industry in just terms of you know they had they were locked in a very important battle with the SEC that they ended up prevailing in and were not for him standing up I think a lot of DeFi would be in a very different position than it is today. So that's somebody who I look at. Um, you know, we're not investors in unis swap, but I have an enormous amount of respect for Hayden and what he's done for the

industry. Um, there's a lot more. Obviously, there's a lot of builders who've been fighting the good fight for many, many years, but Hayden is just such a he's almost like a Vitalic-like figure in terms of his just relentless focus and selflessness in wanting to make the space be better. >> Good answer. I like that. Okay, I got to circle back to something you said um because we do we do always want to talk about like market conditions at this time, right? And I circle back to to you were saying about cynicism >> and you said that crypto is not obviously not doing well. Your date Bitcoin's down and meanwhile gold AI random AI stocks those are booming.

>> Is the is is our is is the depression around crypto driven by comparison right now? I mean, if everything else was down as much as crypto, I think people would be complaining less, right? There wouldn't be as much sort of opportunity cost feeling of like, man, why didn't I just, you know, yolo into Nvidia or something? Um, so that that being said, uh, if you look outside of AI, I I saw the stat recently that, uh, in the S&P 500, uh, I think if you take everything outside of 41 stocks that are basically AI stocks, uh, the S&P 500 is down since last year. So, uh, it's not just crypto that is having this kind of K-shaped, uh, experience where it's like, okay, Bitcoin's doing okay, everything else is

kind of in the toilet. Um, you see the same thing happening in the stock market. So, we're in a weird economy right now. Um, the so much of the marginal demand for crypto comes from retail and retail is hurting. Retail is kind of in the gutter right now. Uh, there's not there's not a lot of capital to go around and so to the extent that there is still an institutional bid in the space, that institutional bid is mostly concentrated around Bitcoin. It's why Bitcoin has been relatively resilient, whereas everything else in the space has just really gotten shafted from from the election till today. >> I don't think people want to compare their cryptos have their cryptos compared to all the other stuff in the S&P. I think people think I think people want their crypto to be one of those four companies or six companies or seven

compan like holding up the S&P. I think that's what we think. Uh but clearly that hasn't been the case. >> What's what what is like what's happening with retail right now? has retail like arrived because that was such a big story last time, right? Like, oh, NFTTS, they came in and then a lot of them stayed and they wanted to keep spending, but clearly now you're saying that that's the retail bid's not there. Are people poor? Are they waiting for these $2,000 Trump checks? What's going on? >> So, we do know that there's a lot of sign that retail is hurting. Um, >> what does that mean? What does that mean? Retail is hurting. Like, what is what is hurting? So, if you look at uh consumer debt defaults in the US, they're they're increasing pretty rapidly right now. Um you look at wage growth, it's been pretty weak. Um

there's a lot of signs that the consumer is not doing super well. Uh now that being said, the US is historically a very very strong consumer-driven economy and that means that US continues to spend and continues to accumulate debt at a time when many other countries just slow down their spending. So this is something just part of the psychology of the of the US consumer. If you compare that to China, China for example doing very poorly. You see youth unemployment very very high. You see the same thing in Europe like Europe is slowing down a lot. youth unemployment with given that young people are a lot of the marginal buyers for crypto um is again another signal of that. I was just looking at the stat that shows that um I think we're at kind of an all-time high for MBAs who are graduating and not able to

find jobs. So we're starting to see the signs that like hey things are things are things are changing uh things are changing in the economy and um I I think it's likely that the Trump administration is going to try to do something about it. you know, whether it's lowering rates more aggressively and, you know, obviously Trump has been angling to try to get his man to get into the next uh seat of the Fed as well as potentially appoint Fed chair come u you know, end of Q1 next year. And then beyond that, very likely they'll do some kind of fiscal stimulus before the midterms. Um and even the big beautiful bill, a lot of the things in there that are stimulative don't happen this year.

They happen next year. So, and and the Fed's still doing QT. So, QT has not stopped yet. And so if if Fed shifts gears or even goes into QE, um you should see liquidity conditions change quite a bit. All of that stuff is part of this overall macro picture, right? The thing about AI stocks is that yeah, AI stocks have gone up. It's kind of the only thing that's gone up. Uh AI stocks and gold basically. And um to the extent the AI stocks have gone up, a lot of that is because again AI stocks are not driven by retail, they're driven by institutions. It's institutions who are kind of yoloing into AI. Um, but I think the when retail is actually able to reload, that's when you're going to see the ability for alts to get repriced.

Right now, alts are overwhelmingly retail driven. Um, institutions aren't buying anything except Bitcoin. Maybe some ETH, but even ETH, most of the ETH ETF is held by retail. Actually, not held by institutions. >> Say that back to me again because you're saying that when retail reloads, they're going to go buy alts, but institutions aren't even buying alts. So, is there a world where institutions come come for the alts? >> Not for a long time. Not for a long time. >> Why? Why? What's holding that back? >> It's just like structurally, so a few things. One, structurally, they're incapable of holding alts. There are no ETFs on alts. So, there's no there's no traditional vehicle you can use to buy some of these alts, right? DATs as well, institutions are not buying DATs. I mean, maybe if DATs stabilize and they show that they're actually trading at 1x

MNAV, but as long as DATs are, you know, flying up and down in terms of MNAV uh expansion and contraction, it's not what an institution wants to own. Institution wants to own a simple asset they can underwrite. Um, and so they they prefer an ETF over a debt. Um, then on top of that, then there's the underwriting. So most of these institutions, this is single name, right? If you look at something like Salana, Salana is worth 80 billion, right? That seems like, oh wow, that's so big. Institutions must really love something that big. 80 billion. There's a lot of $80 billion companies. Most institutions are not spending their time researching a single$80 billion company. They own indices, right? They own bonds. They own like huge capital assets. They don't they don't obsess over individual names.

So, um that that that's why I say uh it's just not the Salana breaks through that barrier, but most things that are like 5 billion, 10 billion, it's like yeah, no institution is underwriting a single 5 billion, 10 billion name. That's more hedge fund stuff. Stable coins are the biggest use case in crypto right now. But let's be real, using them on chain is still way too complex. That's exactly the problem Bridge is solving. Recently acquired by Stripe. Yep, that's Stripe, Bridge helps businesses send, store, accept, and launch stable coins instantly. Explore the future of global financial infrastructure at milkroad.com/bridge.

>> See, where where are you putting your money right now? And I mean like if you were starting from scratch, like you walk into the industry today and I'm like here's 100 grand uh invested for me. What what would that be? >> So >> not financial advice. Not financial advice everybody. >> I have to let down this question some because I work for a registered investment adviser which gives you very strict rules on what say uh you almost close. It was close. Um, look what what I would say to give you a very high level answer is that I don't know that I would change my portfolio very much based on what I would be holding at the beginning of the year or even the middle of the year. Um, I mean depends on what you were holding obviously. If you were holding a bunch of crap or a bunch of

speculative, you know, I don't know, crypto AI mumbo jumbo, then okay, maybe you want to rebalance away from that. But holding the core stuff in crypto, like the stuff that's working, keep holding it. It's not that complicated, right? Like if if you looked at the early internet, if if if I'm right that this stuff is a big longdated macro trend that we're all investing into together, then if you looked at the early internet and you looked at the mid internet and you looked at the late internet, it wasn't like, oh man, 3 months of volatility, you should change your portfolio. Um I'm sure there's stuff that you can momentum trade and I'm sure there's things that go up and down. It's not my business. I don't do that. Um, I'm sure you have other guests who are who are uh more built from that kind of, you know, cut from that cloth.

That's not me. Uh, I'm a long-term investor. And my long-term investment thesis, basically nothing has changed in the last 3 months. And so, I don't think fundamentals have have, uh, warranted any kind of real repositioning. The way that I think about it in crypto is that fundamentals are like this nail that's drawn into the wall. and momentum, sentiment, animal spirits, macro is like this big long string uh of a pendulum and it flies around as the you know ground is shaking and the price is that thing on the end of the pendulum and it's moving around. It's going up and down. It's flying everywhere and you're like, "Oh my god, what should I be doing? The price is moving here. It's going there." For me, I'm like, "Look, just look at the nail. Has the nail moved?" If the nail hasn't moved, it's

fine. Not that much has changed. What exactly has changed in the last 2 months between, you know, ETH going to like 4,800 and ETH being at uh 3,000? The answer is basically nothing. I have not seen a single thing change about this industry in the last couple months that would warrant some kind of big repositioning. So to the extent that's an answer, that's my answer. >> What would warrant a big repositioning? >> Something being invalidated. So if you see, for example, that a quantum computer breaks crypto. If you see for example that um you know stable coin supply on Ethereum is plummeting. If you see for example that uh Tether decides that you know all sorts of things that you could look at this and say wow that really changes the fundamentals of what's happening in this industry. Um has anything like that happened?

Obviously not >> right okay great answer uh very very responsible answer uh considering the way I worded it. Uh I want to get to a question from our community uh because we always ask our community for some great questions. We've got a really fantastic in-depth one here from Bat Chave. So, he said, "My portfolio is heavily concentrated in Bitcoin and ETH across uh various investments here in Canada like TFSAs and RSPs uh with DATs further amplifying the skew. The thesis has been that ETH could undergo price discovery and reach new all-time highs of 7500 or 10,000 in 2026 implying a 2 to 3x return. But given a new point that there's a nonzero chance ETH may not outperform Coinbase, does this undermine the case for holding ETH directly? spot or ETS as the core allocation scenarios

I'm weighing and this is still this is still part of the question e price discovery succeeds it's a long question our man >> question or an essay like >> bat bat is detailed all right shout out to bat we get some detailed responses it's almost done hold there's the scenarios I'm weighing ETH price discovery succeed ETH hits 75 10,000 outsiz returns thesis validated ETH stalls versus Coinbase ETH underperforms coin despite constructive macro concentration risk exposed or balance diversification, reduce my ETH and soul allocations, add to coin or cash flow assets for a smoother riskreward profile. Man, Bat Bat, dude, I feel like I feel like Bat should be doing the show and I should be learning from them.

>> Yeah, clearly. Okay. Well, so Bat, you are correct. Those are the potential outcomes. Either this one does better, that one does better, or they both do okay. Yeah, I I I I almost don't have anything to add to your analysis there. Like, yeah, look, I I don't know. The answer is obviously I don't know. Um I think Coinbase is a very different asset at this point than ETH. Um you can see that is that the two have not you know obviously there's correlation between the two because from crypto beta but the two behave very very differently. Coinbase is a bet that Coinbase will continue to be dominant in the US market. It's a bet that their margins will continue to be able to hold strong for retail um and that they'll be able to scale the institutional side of their business. That continues to drive a lot

of the you know I think marginal excitement about about Coinbase. They make most their money like in terms of margin, in terms of profits from retail, but they have an enormous amount of uh growth and enormous amount of revenue that they're making from their institutional business. So, it's a very different game. Uh betting on Ethereum, totally different story, has very little to do with whether or not Coinbase can hold on to their margins and so on or whether they scale their institutional business. Ethereum is more the bet that Ethereum after the pivot that they've made this year continues to hold on to the TVL, the activity, the the kind of lindiness of Ethereum. Uh that they able to they're able to hold some of the barbarians at the gate with respect to all 1s, respect to Salana, with respect to BMBB chain. Uh and that they'll

maintain their dominant position with respect to the financial flows that are running through Ethereum. Um and then lastly, that they're going to continue scaling V1. There's been a lot of criticism of Ethereum in years past that they were not really focused on scaling and they were delegating everything to the layer twos and that caused a lot of value leakage to the layer 2 ecosystem. I think Ethereum has woken up to that this year with the pivot in the uh Ethereum Foundation now moving to leadership under Tamas and Tia Wang. Uh that puts them in a position to be able to say no no no no we are scaling the L1 Ethereum is here to stay. This is where you should build. I think it was just uh earlier this week that Vitalic tweeted, "You should come build on Ethereum layer 1. Fees are low. Come build." Um they

just increased the gas limit. I think basically 2xed it uh compared to where what it was just a year ago. So all that I think bodess well for Ethereum, but you know, will it outperform Coinbase? Who knows? >> Excellent answer. Well, we'll wrap up there. Thank you, man, for coming back on the show. I'm sure we'll have you back in the new year. Hopefully no fundamentals or uh thesis change between now and then, but maybe maybe the price action will a little bit to the upside. >> Thanks for having me. Thank you everybody. >> Want insights on what's moving crypto markets and how we're trading each event? Subscribe to our channel and join the Milkro Daily and Pro Newsletters and start investing like the top 1%. This show is for educational purposes only.

Nothing we say is financial advice. Investing is risky. Never invest more than you can afford to lose.