Jordi Alexander, AI Supercycle EP 15, Tristan from Bullet, Vance & Michael from Framework

Transcript

[music] I'm about the [music] [music] >> [music] >> I'm above the [music] >> [music]

[music] >> JP Morgan, Black Rock, DTCC, Fidelity, the entire thing was just institutions. [music] It's just it's next level. This industry is going to the next level. And guys, I I don't know what else to say. [music] You said it. You finally said it. So boys, boys, I'm bullish. We're boys. [music] [music] [music]

[music] >> [music] >> How about the [music] [ __ ] [music] above the [music] B. [music] [music]

>> [music] [music] >> How the [ __ ] [music] [music] is heading to the top? [music] If we're not already at the top, we're going to the top. We're on fourth floor today. We're going to be on floor one and then we're headed straight to the moon, boys.

>> Yes, sir. Happy Aloha Friday. In Hawaii, we call it Aloha Fridays. 8:54 a.m. Firing. Firing. Happy birthday, Rob. >> What's got you What's got you so excited? >> Hope the birthday was great, man. >> It was It was a good time. What's got you so excited? Aloha Friday. >> It's Friday, man. It's aloha Friday. I got my electrolytes going. I had double espresso this morning. I'm firing. >> Cheers to that, brother. >> Yeah, I just took my zinc, my ashwagandha, uh my electrolytes, and uh probably going to take my men's daily multivitamin. I'm firing, dude. >> Day in paradise.

>> I've heard things about ashwagandha. What What What does that one do? >> Chinese peptide. >> No, it's just helps for sleep, stress, endurance. Took some magnesium. Just kind of like a I don't know. It's a stack. I'm just I'm just stacking things and just trying stuff out. See how the body reacts over here. >> It's just supplement stacking. >> Another new alltime high in the stocks today. Meanwhile, Brypto is in a bare market, guys. This bare market is uh is really hitting hard right now, isn't it? I mean, look at look at NASDAQ, S&P. Oh, boy. We got a banger lineup though today. We got Jordy, we got Nick, Tristan, Vance, Michael. Going to be a fun one. Um yeah, good be kind of taking us back to the long stream vibe. So, Yaman, aloha Friday. Aloha Friday

indeed. Yeah, the uh the stocks are doing well. Um I anticipate that will continue. Crypto, they're removing regulation. They're trying to do everything that they can. We'll see if it's enough. Uh, believe it or not, it's 2026 now and there's crypto companies in the stock market. >> Did you know that, Andy? >> Of course. But they're not pumping. Of course, they of course they wouldn't be pumping because why would they pump? >> What are some of the top uh stock crypto companies that we have out there? Obviously, Coinbase, >> the DATs, >> the DATs, of course, >> Galaxy that Joseph Shalom video is ripping on YouTube.

>> Love to see that. Wisdom loves it. >> Tree is a publicly traded company. >> Yeah. >> Um, dude, I think we have some news to cover. >> Okay. >> Uh, before Jordy comes on with good vibes today. Happy Friday. >> Why don't you lead the show today, Andy? >> What do you mean lead the show? What do you >> Let's take a look. You're >> You're not feeling too hot, are you, over there, bud? >> Take it away, brother. I'm here for the ride. >> Here for the ride. What have we got? What have we got on the docket?

>> Well, we got Jordy coming on in a couple minutes. Um, but to start, Sky has hit 10 billion dollars of total stable coin supply, making them the number three, third biggest stable coin in all of crypto. Um, coming absolutely for the number three spot, pretty much locking it in. Uh, I think the battle of Sky versus Athena is very, very clearly being won by Sky right now. I really don't know if Athena is going to be able to turn this thing around. Uh I I I actually think that they have some things up their sleeve that will get them to grow this year. But uh yeah, Sky has hit 10 10 bill. I mean, I think these stable coins are going to hit trillions. Wouldn't be surprised to see

Sky at closer to 100 bill in the next couple years. Um, similarly to Tether and Circle, which I expect to both be in the trillions. So, yeah, man. Pretty excited for Sky. >> I think we're going to see a lot of growth in the top stable coins. I think the long tail of stable coins may not do so hot. >> Um, for the same reason that >> uh I think you're going to continue to see this outperformance of the cycle leaders and the category leaders. >> Yeah. uh MAG7 is going to continue to win the stock market. Uh that's where the S&P gains are one. So you might as well just buy the MAG 7. Uh similarly, I expect majors to do pretty well. A lot of the crypto companies that have been around for a long long time have had

tokens around for a long time. Uh I think those will do well. There's going to be this I think this trough of disillusionment for a lot of companies that launch their tickers, excuse me, launch their tokens too early. Y >> and now they're fighting uh to find business and find a way in which they can acrue value from that business back to their token. Buybacks aren't working. We're going to be talking more about that with Jordy. >> And >> or are they? >> Or are they? >> Or are they?

>> Yeah. Um so that's Sky, guys. I mean, look, pretty bullish for Sky here. I think um market's going to probably repric them. Uh, Syrup has actually been doing extremely well from the DeFi perspective. I think from a token perspective, it's probably one of the better looking DeFi applications. Sky hasn't really I mean, it's done well the last couple months, but it's kind of like slowed down a bit over the last several um, you know, for I don't know, just since the end of the year. So, nothing crazy there, guys. But that's Sky. Um, let's move on to one last thing before Jordy uh pops in. And um and I think we have one other thing to to kind of cover today. Yeah. This of course I mean this is kind of a bit out of our lane but holy crap 15 billion with 1.77

billion for American or sorry 1.17 billion for American dynamism [snorts] 1.7 for app 700 mil for bio 1.7 for infra 6.75 for growth and three billion for other venture strategies so pretty insane saw a branding comment here that said uh pretty ironic that in this very Americanoriented announcement of this fund. >> Yeah. >> They chose to use a uh a picture of Mount Everest, which is obviously in the Himalayas in Asia, not anywhere close to America. >> Yeah, they did, didn't they? Why do they do that? Eh, >> of a faux paw.

>> I'm bullish. >> Faux. >> Yeah, faux paw. It's like a slip up. Ah. >> Um I mean insane. I mean, this is like gonna power the next AI. This is gonna power the AI bubble, right? Like, you know what I mean? >> Yes. Um, like this is like going to continue to run that trade hot. >> Yeah. I think a lot of VCs are getting kind of crashing out. uh A16 obviously not but like the same thing that you know Vance tweeted about uh the you know VC dollars going into crypto in particular uh is is collapsing so we're not going to get all these T-Mu versions of different protocols >> I think um we're gonna and the way in

which crypto evolves >> because it's funny we we have like this undying belief in this industry even in in the face of adversity when it seems like you know things are bleak I think the way in which this industry does evolve and kind of proves some people right but it depends how you look at it is you have these companies like yes yesterday we had re right >> on the face of it plain old insurance company really nothing special >> but in when it comes to the financing they're able to democratize access to capital >> democratize access to these markets and to higher yields and so I'd imagine that is where we're going to see the next wave of companies come from, they're going to have to have real business

models. They're going to be real businesses. They're not going to be narrative driven research uh cabal research fetish type of narrative uh companies. That is how they get all their value. There's gonna have they're basically the way to think about building a company I think in crypto is get out of crypto build a real company and then when it comes time to allocate capital to grow the business you go back into crypto and you say hey I have a real business it's generating this much money I can pay seven 8 n 10 11% in yield >> come deposit use the money from the deposits to scale the business Yeah, it was pretty insane to uh hear the that RE

guy say that he thinks his business is the most scalable and durable business in all of crypto. I was like, okay, well, >> whether he's right or not, I I I think the nature of the business is a lot more scalable than a lot of other companies in crypto >> because a lot of other companies in crypto have found narrative market fit, but have no idea of the semblance of products. Even if they're selling infrastructure >> they're selling they're make they're announcing partnerships there's no there's no products >> even even the infrastructure products are not product market fit >> I mean look I just think that uh $15 billion raise not a single mention of crypto >> n they have a crypto uh they have a

crypto arm which I think A16Z uses pretty insane though um like this this bull run in equities and in VC is just like not stopping. It's just insanity. Like it's just not stopping. >> So >> I I think um it'll be interesting to see whether or not the crypto companies in the equities markets continue to lag because they are right now. But I'd anticipate that those would be some of the first companies to end up kind of reversing the trend, bullish reversal.

If there's companies that do well in crypto, I think the ones that are publicly, not not DATs, but I'm talking like Galaxy Digital, Wisdom Tree, these neo finance companies that we've been talking about for a long time, >> these are the companies that I think are probably going to have that first wave of resurgence. Yeah, we'll see. All right, guys. We've got Jordy, the founder of Seleni Capital. He's ready to go. Um, Jordy put out a banger piece about token buybacks. It's been health maxing. I have not seen his 2026 predictions yet. Maybe we'll do a little bit of that. Uh, talk talk about the the market outlook, what's going on over there at Selena. I think it's been maybe six months since we had Jordy on the show, like last year in New York City. Um, so yeah, let's get Jordy up. Um, and let's get cracking. It's uh Oh, I think it's 11:00 p.m. over there

in Singapore. So, Jordy, what's up? >> No, it is 3:00 a.m. So, I wish it was 11 p.m. [laughter] >> Are uh are 3:00 a.m. nights are they conducive to the health? Is this like a polyphasic sleep schedule that we're on or what what's what's up there? >> I'm I'm traveling to Switzerland like this weekend, so I'm kind of okay to try to adjust pre-adjust for jet lag >> to the Europe hours. >> Yeah. Yeah, Jordy, happy new year, man. How was your uh how was your Q4? >> I mean, you know, like I I was happy that things were pretty quiet. I didn't get many telegram messages over the holidays. So, it was the first time that I actually disconnected and it was just very nice and chill. Um I went to Saudi

Arabia, which is not a normal destination for uh holidays, but I think it will be in in the next few years. like they're they're building some pretty nice resorts. And >> what uh what brought you out there? >> I just chat GBT, you know, where is where is warm and nice [laughter] and what are the best places and it seems it gave me a couple good options uh in Saudi Arabia apparently like you know they're spending a lot of money trying to >> make like a Dubai B2 like a second Dubai and >> I think they'll get there in a few years. Yeah, man. I know you're going out to uh St. Moritz for CFC. Should be a fun week with the uh lizard people there in Davos uh who who control the world with their strings and their and

the way that they pull things and and clearly Trump is not playing by the rules. So, we'll see what how Davos goes. It'll be an interesting interesting one this year. There's a lot of economic activity changing globally. Um we'll get into that. We'll get into some of your token buybacks, 2026 outlook, but let's just recap 2025, man. How was it for Seleni? How was your performance? What did you learn? Um, and like what are some of your biggest takeaways from the market in 2025? >> Uh, overall, you know, I'm happy that we we did better than 2024, which um, you know, was not easy. I mean most most firms and you know mo most things did not do better than 24. So um it kind of

speaks that we've really you know gotten a ton of talent in and we were able to navigate even even like these choppy situations. Um you know obviously like some categories did better than others. I would say like venture wasn't like having the best year in history. Um, you know, we made like a pretty big bet on WorldCoin that didn't go amazingly well with all alts. You know, basically they didn't under overperform just like, you know, alts alts didn't do well. >> Um, our systematic trading side, it was a mixed bag. I would say like we lost a little bit of competitiveness to like the jump kind of, you know, HFD side, which we're trying to really like aggressively prioritize now. So, um, you know, number one priority is like just

get get like latency and and and networking and execution really tight. Um, but we did really well with some of these um, you know, venues like lighter, you know, I think we were maybe like the the largest volume on on that exchange and did pretty well in the airrop. So, it was a nice kind of end to the year there. And, you know, we survived 1010 which a lot of people were like, "Oh, [snorts] Wintermute's out of business." And then I'm like, oh, they're like, oh, there's >> the rumor mill was hot. The rumor mill was hot for sure. [laughter] >> Yeah. I mean, we, you know, we we we did lose like, you know, a few weeks of P&L. Um, but, you know, these things, these things are as long as you survive and you don't give back too much, it's

fine. >> Yeah. >> Um, and, uh, you know, some things did really well for us. Um we're doing more and more um stuff on the liquid side, you know, long short obviously like the shorts have have, you know, really gone down. So, you know, when we track things like unlocks and kind of, you know, things that look overvalued, like obviously all of that stuff just kind of went to zero. So, um yeah, overall overall was good. >> Good. Yeah, I think uh 1010 scared the boots of a lot of the per farmers. um it's kind of like made that trade more difficult than it was before that. Um and if you look at the numbers, it's kind of gone down. We'll talk about per. So, all right, let's talk about token

buybacks. Um this was like a big thread, a big kind of part of what you were uh kind of pining on recently. I want to talk about that. I want talk about health maxing just like kind of like general 2026 plan. So, you put out this post in in the midst of kind of this token equity dilemma. Maybe we start here and go into the buybacks as a result of this. So, uh, the natural order of thinking in 2026 is going to be like unifying these structures. So, it's actually quite funny. Robbie and I have kind of came up with this pro- centralization idea as of recent. Maybe it's not the exact way to put it, but you think about how we had all this kind of fugazi decentralization for for the sake of regulatory arbitrage and then obviously

with this new administration and regime change in the states specifically uh a lot of that kind of is unnecessary now you could say and so coming to this one of the realities is well there's a lot of realities that are hitting the market as a result of this but I think one of them is that the way that these foundation and labs corps have been structured uh you know have been kind of mis aligned for incentives for investors uh for uh stakeholders for participants retail etc. So we've got this kind of token equity dilemma and on top of that you've got these app layer projects being purchased uh by larger companies and then selling out kind of leaving token holders with you know not claim on that sale etc. And so you've got this dynamic here that is is happening and then on top of that you've got this

token buyback structure. Jord, what's your take on the token equity uh situation happening right now? How do you see this unification happening in 2026? Um, we've gathered opinions from tons of different folks and there's all these different kind of ideas. There's yet to be a really consensus way, I would say. What's your take here? Yeah, look like the the main problem for the industry is that every chart is just down only. And at some point, you know, what's happened is like retail has stopped bidding because, you know, they're just not getting enough wins.

And um there's a few structural reasons for that that have kind of caused like every single chart to always just go down. Um not least of which, you know, is not related to buybacks. It's more related to like unlocks. And the other thing I've been posting about is, you know, you kind of force investors with these like one-year cliffs. And I think, you know, the centralized exchanges love that because, you know, they they get to launch things where the only tokens or the marketing tokens that the exchanges are getting. So they they're the only ones that have tokens. So they're they're very happy. You know, the exchanges do do best. Um and then you get these like artificially high prices. I was looking at back at some of these

Binance launchpads from like a year or two ago and it's just every single like project regardless of quality was launching there at like you know two to three billion. I mean I don't want to like name specific names but you can just go back and look at them and clearly like these are trading at like 99% down now. Um so a lot of it was like this like structural reason of like there's not enough tokens. The founders are drinking way too much [ __ ] Kool-Aid. I'd be talking about this like it's 5% of founders that I've talked to that like will say that their token is like overvalued. Like to give him credit like someone like you know Mike from Etherfy like you know they launched at like 8 billion and he like you know we're an investor I talked to him like

that week and he's like yeah like this is like dumb like what what the [ __ ] like what are people doing? Like come on. Like you know I love my project but like we're not it's not a billion right now. Um most of them they just drink the Kool-Aid. It's like oh yeah 20 billion. Yeah. Um and then you know this this concept of like having revenue is good. Um you know it's a maturity of the space and you have revenue to do buybacks. Not many projects have revenue do buybacks but you do have some projects that you know have managed to get there and then and there's a few problems. one is the what you mentioned of like are token holders getting it versus like is it this equity structure and I think um you have to be very clear on it and and like unfortunately like even in the last 48

hours I've had two conversations with projects where I thought that like it was going to be like an equity thing and then you know they're planning to just prioritize equity holders um and it's like yeah you know all these people that bought the token like what's going to Yeah. >> Um, so that's this ongoing thing where I I always prefer if there's just like a you know the token should be the equity and then you know you get some regulatory concerns or tax concerns or stuff like this come comes back to you. Um I think you know like the US is obviously like right now in a bit more of a tolerant place where you can do you know better things. Um I think an interesting one so soon there's going to be a launch of um something called Fu

Fuse Energy which is a company that has raised at 5 billion on the equity side and has separately raised like on the token side at like 333 million. I think multicoin led that round is a Salana token and that's quite an interesting one because it's going to launch as an SPL while you know there's like this whole other part of the business that's just making like web two money and it's just like a cash cow. I mean they have like 440 million AR like huge but then they're launching a token that's not going to be getting that revenue but then they're going to try to give it utility. So like you can try to like thread that needle and you have different investors on both sides. It's even more it's worse than having like a safe and a saf investor like different investors >> different investors. Yeah. >> I think like you know if you do really

well everywhere everyone's happy that's fine. Like know that's a good case scenario. You just like token doing well everybody's everything's doing well. Um but you know the these things are expert kind of like difficulty nightmare difficulty you know things to navigate. Um and then my last point like uh on on the buyback specifically like the projects that we've seen in crypto the few really like successful ones that have uh buybacks like you know uh you know look at Jupiter u hyper liquid right now. >> Yeah. Athena like I guess they don't have buybacks directly but the dad has done a ton of buybacks like through the money that they they they raised through token sales there.

>> Pump yeah for sure. I mean I don't know why it's not pumping more but [laughter] >> well this is kind of your point isn't it right is like is there a more systematic way to approach buybacks than just programmatically buying daily? Right. >> Right. I mean um I think that targeting you know price ranges through some you know ratio either PE ratios or some other kind of like you know ways to find that like what is cheap you know the simplest way to do it is just like look at the EMA like if you're under the average price of the last like 60 days versus over the last price of the last 60 days and you know like things are trending down you want to buy more

things are going up you don't you don't necessarily need to chase it and just kind of keep pushing opinion. Um, you can get more tokens out of the market this way. Um, so I think like, you know, for the few successful projects that can do it, there's ways to do it. I took a bit of offense when like, you know, people say that like they don't work. Like, oh, look down doesn't work. I mean, >> they [ __ ] work, right? They work clearly. >> We know this from like hundreds of years of like, you know, stocks existing. Like, they work. It's just like, you know, other parameters that >> Well, I mean, with the Jupiter case that that the post that you were referring to, I saw some comments on there and it was like there was about a billion dollars of unlocks over the same period

that that did like a $70 million of buybacks, right? And it's just you're just kind of like, well, you know, so the math is not mathing here, right? And so from your perspective, right, there's like a more, you know, you're talking about doing this in a very calculated price to earnings ratio-based way where you can try to achieve a consistent buyback methodology that is not just purely programmatic based on the revenue of that day or of that week. Um, maybe you can like walk us through that from your perspective, right? because you have kind of more of a fund manager style perspective and less of like a I'm a founder managing my token, you know, perspective, I think, which I think that probably founders want to start to think more in the way that you are rather than

in just kind of like doing what the market is screaming them screaming at them to do. >> Well, I'm I'm happy with like, you know, both approaches whether it's systematic or not systematic. I mean, you look at like traditional equities, they just like buy back whenever like the, you know, the board decides that that's it's a cheap price and they just buy back their shares. And it's like a very standard thing. Obviously, you know, when you're dealing with traditional equities, you know, if they're public companies, you have disclosures, you have windows, blackout windows, these kind of, you know, like there's all these kind of structural considerations so that things don't get too incitery and too front. um you know if we've decided that these are things are commodities then it's it's

sort of like you know what what makes sense but uh I mean we're looking at some projects like I would say like lighter and meteora that do have substantial revenues that are taking this approach of um you know they're not just like doing systematic buybacks but they're like yeah like you know there's prices we're going to buy back our our cheap tokens and um that should give some confidence to the market that you know the revenue is is going to be utilized um for token holders in some way. I I think that's the key thing.

It's just like at some point you know you have to either give dividends or give buybacks. I think dividends are totally fine obviously like they're very normal things to do and we do have some projects where you stake and you get you know revenue. I think uh you know the curve kind of crew does things like that. Um you know even like their new token yield basis kind of has this kind of structure. You know you stake it if you lock it up for longer you get you just get more dividends. Um I think uh you know sometimes those things go into Ponzenomics. Obviously, you have the full Ponzi nomics which is Olympus down and you have like the semi stuff like aerod drrome where it's like oh you're getting you're locking up and you're

getting some other tokens and they're paying your token like it's like this this kind of hybrid structure. Um, yeah. I mean, if you're going to do systematic, I think like the one thing is just don't have something that will just keep buying top lasting because when the market's good, your revenue is good and you're just like pushing prices way too high, which is not good for anyone because when things revert, you just have people that are down way too much and you've also not absorbed enough tokens. Um, so you know, did did it look like Jupiter was worth $20 billion at the height of like, you know, the volumes that were happening during the Trump token release? You know, maybe. But like um I I would say like what we've seen in crypto time and time again is that the

you shouldn't put like a a growth stock P ratio of like 30 plus on on these things because the the space changes so quickly that like you know there's a new perex every like year and so like you know DYDX shouldn't be valued at like 50 XP if they have to defend from like you know the new generation of whatever it is. Is there right because Santiago and Hib from Dragonfly, they had this whole debacle where you know Hib was arguing more like this is this should be valued almost more like a city or a state and they have this network model and then you know Santiago was taking more of this price to sales price to earnings ratio. Where do you fall? And this is less about the velocity of price and you know directionally getting it pushed

higher or lower but more in terms of the static valuations that maybe something should be valued at and you know the efficient market would you know take it there swiftly. But where do you fall on this as sort of the value heristic? What is your what is your mental model when it comes to this this dynamic? Should we kind of fall on one side of the aisle or the other? Yeah, I I have like a pretty clear mental model that I've arrived to after like you know whatever 10 years dealing with these kind of tokens. Now my my mental model is this like you you have revenue as like one source and like future revenue kind of like a traditional equity you know DCF type of model. You have that and then you have this other thing which I'll

call like um it's like this premium for being a good game to gamble on. Like you know you go to the casino and it like if they have a fun game and people will just go like throw money at it. they just want to bet like you know we saw this with pre-markets where like you know these things got just got popular because people were just able to you know speculate on something new that was exciting for them and um you know some some of these like things were very successful as just like a a novel thing that people wanted to just bet with each other on and we've seen like now like even poly market has these like oh you know what will this thing launch at over 4B over 6B like all this kind of stuff I think, you know, there is a value to just being like the

the thing that people will bet on. Like you'll absorb speculative premium for whatever reason. You know, people uh will make bets that they know like are zero or like negative sum for somebody. They're just like, "Oh, I'm going to win." So, doesn't matter if like, you know, overall we're going to lose 10% because I'm going to be the winner. They're going to they're going to be the one paying the rake because I'm I'm going to be winning. Um and so like tokens that have a lot of mind share and that have a lot of like you know uh distribution for places to bet on you know they have a lot of exchanges betting on it. There's a lot of liquidity. There's a lot of like people talking about it. They'll they'll during that period just have this extra premium and that's what it is talking about cities and states and whatever

like it's literally like you know are a lot of people wanting to speculate on what is this thing is going to go up or down and for how long is that going to be the case I mean usually like TG tokens start really high because there's just like a lot of people betting on you know what the next week is going to look like and then there's a new one and then as soon as there's a new one the old one goes down because there's just like less people giving it that premium and that's why you see the that premium disappear. Right. >> Yeah. I mean coming to that for 2026 then Jordy um is there particularly sectors that you're going to be bullish on more so than others from a token performance perspective and sectors that you're particularly bearish on from you know either personal or Selen's perspective like applying this framework

right of speculative premium you know L1 L1 premium or not uh chain app premium revenue generating tokens is it like where are you kind of looking at for bullish sectors and maybe not so bullish sectors for 2026. >> So obviously there's some uh amount of like excitement about taking traditional companies and like cryptofying them and you know giving them stable coin rails and like potentially giving them a token especially if that token is actually like you know collecting the value of of what's happening in some good way. Um I'm I'm you know very open to that idea. I think the

quality of the assets that we have in the space is kind of [ __ ] Like you know you look at like the number one like the number 10 token. You know it's supposed to be good. Like it's like the 10th best token in all of crypto. It's the 10th best digital asset 15th one. like you look at some of the stuff and like some of it's just like this we have >> having better options than this like this or like Doge or you know whatever you just have like a bunch of stuff right um I think that you know equities are winning out because like they're more quality assets and eventually people have realized that you know you kind of you want something that has longer term sustainability.

um we will hopefully get some good businesses issuing tokens that represent those businesses and have higher quality assets and ideally that you know there's one in discussion that's making me like >> incredibly bullish but I can't talk about it's like very early it's not it's not even I don't know what's happening but if you get like a brand that is like like globally recognizable ible and even has like new moability and it has revenue >> and you and you bring that uh that that's like the sweet spot. So >> really trying to focus on a few opportunities that that can hit all those sweet spots that >> um

>> you know like you like imagine like a global brand that that will actually like do this like you know you can acquire this company for a lot of money but then like you know you kind of bring those rails. So very excited for that kind of stuff. Maybe we lost him. Take a quick breather here. We'll be right back, guys. Um yeah, we we we got Jordan back. We'll just set up. But Rob, I think um >> I want to take a guess on like what what this could be.

>> It kind of gives me like Pudgy Penguins vibes to be honest. Um >> yeah, >> like not not obviously quite a bit that punch is quite a bit smaller. Um >> Um Um It actually I you're right because it is like globally recognized, but I I kind of get the vibe of like a like a GameStop like a brickandmortar something that has some memeability. Nike fans. >> Okay, I think we got Jordy back. Let's get him up. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think uh I mean I was talking about this with the Van uh portfolio manager in New York last year as well, like like these onchain IPOs. Um yeah, Jordy, you we'll get you right back up here. I

think you're good now. We're just re refreshing you. Yeah, it does seem like there's going to be this pull away from cryptonative stuff, if you will, businesses to like these like like what would you want to own, right? Would you want to own a um an altcoin or would you want to own the tokenized share of a business, right? That's actually And so I think this is like kind of like the trend that's um happening. >> I think we're also seeing like the stockification of a lot of these companies. And so if you look at, you know, Jordy said the number 10, but if you look at the number 11, it's uh >> Yeah. What is it?

>> Figure Heliloc, which is that >> like coin market cap. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's number 11 in the market in market cap. And so >> so weird. >> Obviously, this is it's this RWA thing. They're tokenizing these home equity loans. And again, this would be if crypto didn't exist, they would find a way to do this business and it would probably go public or, you know, it would, you know, be private and then it would go public. >> Yep. >> And then you could find, you know, this business on a public stock exchange and you could trade it. >> Yep.

>> But crypto is eating the back end of a lot of these money stacks within a lot of these companies. And so they're tokenizing the they're tokenizing these companies from the inside out. And I think what we're seeing is like the first thing that we're seeing is we're seeing these these products from these companies get tokenized in the sense that like first we're going to see companies before they tokenize their stock or their equity. They're going to token, they're going to launch a stable coin and like before figure goes public or launches its own governance token or network token, it's going to launch this figure heliloc token which if you look basically just a stable coin, just tokenized loans. >> That I think is the first step. And so

you'll end up where more and more of the companies in you know the NASDAQ or Dow Jones or S&P more and more of those companies will have tokenized parts of their business call could be a stable coin and then eventually we'll get to a point where those companies themselves will tokenize their equity. But I think first and foremost we're gonna have more parts of those business get tokenized. Yeah. And it'll just look like like the top 10 or 15 tokens could just be stable coins or like yield coins. And then eventually I think we'll we'll expand the the surface area of the tokenization.

We'll expand it from the inside out going from just a product a stable coin product that they launched to tokenizing more and more of the business. Yeah. >> The equity, the stable coin and more parts from there. >> Yep. I totally agree. All right, Jord's back. We got you. Check. Check. Um, Jordan, so kind of hopping onto a different tangent off of the onchain businesses that you're excited about, which I I think again it's like Hyperlid caused an entire restructuring of how the space is thinking about profitable businesses on chain. Obviously, the new administration came in now. Now we're having token buyback, token equity conversations that's happening. I think what you're saying is going to re restructure the way that a lot of

investors think about which tokens to allocate to in the space because if you've got these massive brands as you're saying with business models with revenue and they have a token well that puts them in the top five like very clearly or top seven right and so you know that game is going to change. when we were in New York, um you uh respectfully told me that my infrada thesis was just not going to live up to anything. And I was kind of like still a a a believer in our venture bags. Come six months later, I'm absolutely cooked. So, you were right on that one. Props to you for that one. Um cooked me there straight. Looked me in the eye. I was like, "You're wrong, buddy. Get your [ __ ] together." So, thanks for that. Uh but we we were also talking about micro

strategy. We're also talking about the this was like pre-dat kind of DAT mania but micro strategy was on and you had kind of formulated a a take around where you see kind of this space going and then obviously we had the entire DAT craze. Um where are we at from your perspective with this part of the market? Um is this is Tom Lee going to get you know absolutely BTFOed liquidated? Is he going to make it? Like where are we at with DATs? you know, take us from like micro strategy all the way to like long tail story protocol DAT like where are we at in the spectrum from your perspective?

Yeah, I mean the DATs were another one that I was very skeptical about and I just knew like these things would trade under MNAV because you just have a worse version of owning the token because you have an illquid like way you can't actually sell the token and in some cases you know the founders blocking you in some cases you just have too much of a a token like Bitcoin ETH maybe you can sell you know you can sell like a billion dollars if you have but like nothing else so um thankfully avoided did most of these dats, you know, we did we did a few for commercial reasons but um didn't do many and um the the part of the cycle I mean look I I did like have a concern that like one we would get this massive like run up to 200k and this crazy mania and

that would be the cause of it because we would just way overheat and then we would collapse. We didn't heat up that much. I mean, we did go to like, you know, 130 and ETH went to 5K, whatever, whatever. But, um, we it didn't get like too ridiculous. And so, even though the the bubble burst, it wasn't like a ridiculous bubble. So, we've kind of like gone through it. It's the same thing where I was saying I was warning like around the the DOS event in in London that um I had that debate with Hib about uh synthetic dollars and I was warning that like you know this this thing people are going to keep like yeah you have Athena but then you have like you know people just adding risk to get more yield because it's not getting enough yield and this

is going to like blow up and people are pres presenting these things are stable coins. They're like presenting them as dollars. They're pegging them to dollars. I mean, sure enough, like two weeks later, you just get like this collapse of stream finance. And, you know, that hundred million dollar loss just permeated like through the entire like, you know, vault ecosystem of of every single exposure of like Elixir had some of this thing which had that, some of that thing, and then it's just like this like everyone was was like, you know, indirectly being touched on it. Um but thankfully like you know what I warned happened but it happened at like a size before things got like way too big. You know it got it happened at a hundred million of a loss instead of

like a 10 billion loss like you know like Luna did. So um you know bottom line like we've gone through where are we on the cycle? like we've we've had a few of these bad things that I predicted happen have happened like the dats kind of splintered and like this but it's not catastrophic and I don't think that you're going to see Micro Strategy or you know Tomly blow up in essence like these things like still have they still have a bid um they still have cash they still have participation the tokens that they're buying are actually like worth something uh in both cases like ETH and BTC so um you are they going to be able to buy as much as they used to, you know, a few months ago? Like no. Uh and that that bids like reduced, but it

could come back and and I think like, you know, for those two big ones that you mentioned, um the game's not over and you know, the assets that they're buying are good assets and so that that game will continue. But when it comes to the altcoin dads, uh, yeah, I mean, it's it's it's just the graveyard out there. >> Yeah, it is. Um, and so do you think that these DATs putting their like so Tom Lee has staked, you know, billions into ETH now and then Sharplink has also just recently put a bunch of their ETH into like IE layer and Lineia and um, Etherfi and whatnot. Is this something that is at all interesting or is just kind of like the because like you know

like the trend is okay they can't just be holding companies these DATs need to turn into more productive companies. I guess deploying their assets onchain is one way to do it, but is this is it enough? Is it interesting? Is it compelling? Or is it just is it just meh? >> I mean, look, if if there's there are some that are trying to be like proper operating companies and get like actual real revenues and like, you know, build like do stuff that that's fine. And like, >> you know, um like it's like the Aether one trying to do some stuff with compute. Like there's there's a few trying to be an operating company and then that's fine. The ones that are just like oh we're going to stake this or put it into IE layer like those yields are obviously going to get

compressed and you can't do it on size and you know it's not tremendously profitable or interesting to just like do that and then you can make it more interesting if you take more risk but then you're just like a hedge fund um and maybe you make a mistake and and you like lose money because you're taking too much risk. So um look they have to try stuff. I mean so many people even like the big names of the industry even like the Sanmanis and the Hives who like were initially like very anti-dat they end up doing they end up doing that themselves. So you got the AVAC one you got the like Solano one you know like there these guys are on the boards. I mean everyone's kind of like committed to trying to make the best of the situation

but it was definitely a fever dream. I think now it's pretty clear. >> And then on on one of your points in there about, you know, the yields aren't enough. You take more risk and then you try to get more yield and you're kind of selling these as stable coins. Like I I there's kind of this new cohort. One of one of them that comes to mind here is like USD AI where it's selling itself as a stable coin but it's going out and it's you know trying to do things in a different industry and then bring those yields back to crypto bring them back to the stable coin holders. Are you paying attention at all to this this new cohort we're calling it like Neo DeFi or Neo finance and we're you know these guys are going into like energy or we were talking to a protocol

yesterday uh they're doing reinsurance right so they're you know going out they're selling insurance to insurance providers and they're getting their capital base from crypto and then the products that they sell obviously get revenue they get yield they're just passing the yield back to the stable coin holders. How how much do you see that overlap? Do you think that is sustainable or do you see this as again just you know the yield's never enough? You're going to have to go get more risk uh and the yield that you promise to your stakeholders is going to fall through.

>> Uh I think it's sustainable. I mean obviously you need to know what risks you're taking and there's no free rate above the risk-free rate with no risks. So there are some risks. Um but you know there's a place for people to take some risk and you know whether it's private credit whether it's reinsurance whether it's like you know financing compute which will then hopefully have a return like these things are super interesting I think um you know going back to like the quality of like the assets that we have like th those those can eventually end up you know once they're cleaned up and you know like they go through the extreme cases and they kind of survive like there there can be some some decent yielding assets pets. Um, totally fine. I mean, uh, you know, like there's stuff like Wildcat, which gives private credit for any company that wants to just show

up and say like, "Hey, you know, we have our reputation. We're Seleni. We're Wintermute. We're, you know, uh, Bodie Ventures and this is Kane speaking and whatever." and and here's my yield and and you know um obviously they they did have one um one company I can't remember which one but they they they did have like a first default but that's kind of normal. I mean that's part of the game like you you're going to have some defaults that's why you're getting paid above their risk-free rate. Um so like the these these instruments are interesting for sure and um you know the RWA side has been trying to do it for for for a long time. You know we've heard about like real estate yields and different stuff. Um but there's there's some interesting things I'm hearing like

people trying to do like data center real estate um you know uh tokenization obviously canon which you know we've invested in u on the digital asset side is trying to do a lot of just bringing a lot of people on chain and tokenize assets and and do it natively in a way that is like you know representing the real assets not just a receipt. So, it's definitely a space that um I think a lot of people are are very interested in and including us. >> Yeah. I mean, we're calling it NEO finance. That's kind of our that's that's our focus for this year is like this this category of combination of tokenization, stables, neo banks, kind of the the institutional crowd. I'm going to New York again. We have a sick

office space in the Empire State Building. We're locking it down. We're doing all these different things. It's very very focused on this. It's kind of like it's aligned with what you're saying about big brands coming on chain and launching tokens, but it's in a different way. It's more just like very institutional. Um, and it does seem like that's like the ongoing meta. Um, there's a there's a lot of apathy right now amongst like cryptonative participants, but there's also uh simultaneously like a lot of bullishness and excitement from these like higher level institutional participants like the Cantons and the teams that they're working with. Um, so that kind of brings me to your portfolio positioning 2026 big game theory guy. What is the game theoretical approach to the market right now from the investor perspective?

Right. So Trump, Venezuela, QE, Jerome Powell, um, uh, midterms, uh, four-year cycle where, what is the game theoretical approach to the crypto market right now? How like what is your current mental model for uh allocating in the space? How is Seleni positioned? How are you thinking about like like the risk on versus risk off period here? Your buddy Tiki just closed his uh ETH shorts for a loss. He thinks that they're going to go lower. He had a fun short spree there. Um other people are are getting bowled up on going to all-time highs off of a 5% pump to Bitcoin. Feels very PVP right now.

What's the game theoretical approach to the market? What's your mental model right now given the large set of variables in front of us? >> Um, I'm expecting this year to be as choppy as last year. So, there will be, you know, some big movements up and then like we'll have some crashes. Uh, so that's not going to change. It's going to still be tricky. So my mental model is like you find these spots that are worth accumulating during and I think you know this recent in the 80s it just looked very nice. I think we already came you know quite a bit off the top. We super lagging traditional markets including things like silver and like you know palladium whatever all platinum all this kind of random stuff people people are

like shooting out to the moon. Um, and it it's just like a situation where you can easily see like a bit of a catch-up uh trade. That said, you know, like I said, alts are kind of broken for the most part. You just like have unlocks coming, you know, for for most of them. Um, the major L1 tokens, I think, never really managed to explain why the token should be worth anything apart from just the fact that it has that speculative premium of like people want to bet on it that I mentioned. Um, so like even like the, you know, the large L1's I think are not necessarily like super clear long-term holds. So, we don't actually hold much

ETH or soul. You know, we hold a little bit. you know, we participate in in like the the trading, but we hold a lot more BTC um as a macro asset that I think is very relevant for today's world. We're definitely tracking the the quantum thing. And when I say the quantum thing, I don't really mean like the actual quantum as much as like people's perception of what could be a quantum thing. Like are people, you know, I watch I watch like uh these like clips on like CNBC or MSNBC, whatever. like I I want to see like what the normies are talking about. And they mentioned it like they mentioned you got the guy random dude coming talking and then they mentioned quantum for Bitcoin and they're like you're a little bit scared like they're just kind of like looking

at it. [laughter] Um >> that's so good, man. >> I think it's I think it's a good thing that they're kind of climbing that wall of worry because, you know, once things calm down and nothing happens, we'll we'll be able to kind of have people come back in. So um you think about you know positioning when when you see that and I think positioning might be might be low and people might need to position more um and um you know the main risk like you said is that we just get like a collapse in like uh equities other assets and then um that would obviously like hurt hurt uh hurt crypto prices. So, you know, midterms, um, I am expecting Trump is going to aggressively try to juice things either by doing some

kind of, uh, you know, airdrop check 2K, uh, to people or, um, some, you know, getting Steven Moran in in place of POW or some he's going to try to do something. So, um I do expect we'll get a liquidity surge around, you know, the mid year and and that's going to be like another buying opportunity. So, TLDDR like you know long right now mainly Bitcoin some select alts that have just like sold off way too much especially the ones with revenue. So, um you know we we do have some of the ones that I mentioned like all all the ones that have revenue. We have like a basket of of of all of those things now that they're kind of at reasonable prices.

>> Yeah. I remember you were telling me like, you know, Hyperlquid at 40 or 50 here, like is it that interesting? Or you you were kind of like me. I was like, ah, dude, it's going to go to the moon and it went to 60 and then now we're back at 20 and it's like, okay, now it's kind of interesting again. And lighter. And then you got like the like sky, Maple, even a after some of the drama, Jupiter, these types. That's kind of like where our focus is. What's that? >> Meteora as well. Meteora. Meteora is very cheap on on a like a revenue basis. So, um yeah, we just have a basket of these things. I like I like layer zero as kind of like another one that is like a dark horse, you know. I think I think like they're really starting to get some stuff uh together and they've

undoubtedly won the war when it comes to like, you know, some of these categories, you know, like the OFTs and like some of these things. So, um >> what about privacy, Jordan? Are you excited about Zcash as much as Arthur Hayes and Merch or not so much? No, I'm not. I mean, I'm excited about Canton, which has privacy and I think the things that that might enable. >> Um, less less kind of like, you know, forms of money like Zcash that are trying to like meme themselves, >> you know. I was also like c like I felt the same way about Bitcoin in 2012 when I first heard about it. I'm like, are they really going to meme something like into money? Like, I don't know. And then they did. So, like I could be wrong again.

I know it's getting late over there, but just curious because we've heard it come up and I think they will come on the show, but why are you bullish on Canton? What what's your Canton thesis? >> Uh, you know, I I it's the same with lighter. Like I like um the combination of like um a founder that is able to go to these like trady institutions, these big guys, and like sell them to co collaborate and bring them on. And you know, um, I think Uval has that ability to just, you know, go to a citadel, go to these guys, get get the banks on, get these guys on, okay, like we're doing some interesting stuff. you got privacy, we have the credibility, we

have, you know, the other names and then just kind of you just kind of get a a a bit of a group going and then before you know it, like other people want to come in because of because the other people are in and and and that that's a good that's a good way to uh do things in the world, you know, that's it's very different than the hyperlquid thing. I like, you know, what Jeff is doing this like neutrality thing of like we're just like gonna put the infrastructure and it's just code and anybody can deploy and that's also cool but like I think you want to be barbell. You either just do like pure infra like neutral or you go like okay we're really good at like showing up and doing partnerships with all these guys and building you know building this stuff. So, um,

they've been building this thing for a long time and, um, you know, I think at this point there's like so many investors that are in, they've thought about the privacy aspect, they thought about like issuing actual native securities and like the legal side a lot. Obviously, like when it comes to, you know, things that we're used to on the crypto side like, you know, MetaMask or EVM or some of these things are different. So like there that that's probably like the main thing that they need to um overcome and and kind of think about how to make like the the you know the UX let's say like um kind of more friendly. >> What do you think about chain link? They they they've done all the things that Canton is has done. Sergey is you know

one of the best founders in the space. token just can't seem to get a bid sustainably over time even though they are probably the most important kind of like DeFi trady connector right now like do do you see these types of fundamental companies like ascending into the higher ranks of of um you know like top 20 top 10 I mean chain link's already obviously up there uh like over the five to 10 year period or like do do these companies have to work on like like does chain link need to work on its token more than what it's currently done basically is what I'm getting at. Or is just the fundamental work that they're doing and business that they have enough to kind of allow them to basically outlast everyone? Because I think it's really a game of outlasting more than

ever now. How do you view like a company like Chain Link or those that are kind of similar in in in the space where the token value is still, you know, in that kind of utilityesque realm? They've kind of got some buybacks going with the link reserve, but not nothing like programmatic or like massive uh like like massive uh programmatically like something like or hyperlquid. >> I mean, look, like I'm not a I'm not a a chain link expert. Um, one of the reasons is like it it just never was interesting for me for like looking at it from either a long or a short because from the long side it was just always so expensive. like I could never like really justify why this thing's trading at like you know many billions and then from a short side it's like you know there's much less real like there's like more vacuous [ __ ] to short than like

something that at least is is like is okay so I didn't look at it from a short side or a long side I just haven't like dug into into it too much but I will say that like you know some of the categories that they try to compete on like the bridging and some of these things you know they're not necessarily winning in all of them and And so um I guess like you know there's oracles but now there's like you know people are not really like using them for for most of these like financial oracles now they're using like pith or they're using you know something else and um so I'm not exactly sure like I had I'm not the expert on chain link I'll say >> all right guys uh quick rapid fire and then we'll close out here. Jordy, uh, Bitcoin above or below 150K and end of

the year. >> Uh, you know, given where we are, like I I would say like close to but probably like a bit below. >> Yeah. Soul above or below alltime highs around 280. >> Oh, it's definitely below. I mean, like >> not going to get close. >> Best uh best quarter of the year, Q1, Q2, but >> for crypto in general. Yeah. >> Yeah. the best best performing quarter? >> I think um I think Q2 >> Q2 um biggest sleeper like narrative or sector that people aren't talking about right now that that will be hot, you know, it was privacy in Q4. It was it was hype liquid and per back in 2024,

end of that year was the AI agent meta. What is it th this year? Um, I I like I said, I think like getting some like real businesses as a tokenized asset, whether it's, you know, they're fully tokenizing the whole business or if it's just like equity per becoming really hot. Um, I just think that people are going to want to bet on things that have like a real business. >> Yep. Yep. Jordy, thanks for your time, man. Get some rest. Uh, I look forward to to hearing about what comes out of CFC, uh, and seeing you in the city as well soon, man. >> Oh, wait, hold on, hold on, hold on.

Before we finish, can we just have a quick couple minutes? What is the health maxing journey? Can you just give us like the like the 90 second TLDDR? Like, what have you been up to? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I mean, obviously, like I've been, you know, anyone that's dealt with me over the last years is just like, dude, like how are you [ __ ] online 247? Like, you don't sleep. you're always like and I've just been pushing like very hard for years and at some point I think it just you know uh I hit I hit 40 you know the anxiety of like trying to run this big business and everybody it just it just started to creep up in in health ways that I didn't you know realized until it like really hit me so I just started prioritizing and you know I think like uh the approach is you just need to like layer habits and why habits

because like habits become automatic so you don't have to like think about them they don't take your brain face. So if you just have like a healthy habit, you can move on to the next one. Then you just like stack them and and and so like I started with uh something that was very easy for me which is diet just because I've always kind of you know been diet conscious. Uh and then you know exercise obviously like you know is something that we lazy people like or busy people like me like sometimes you lose you lose the slot that you're supposed to have. Prioritize that. And then um I would say like the latest one I've been successful on is sleep. Uh I'm quite happy. It's like the first time in years that I'm having like you know seven hours a night so I feel good. Um

and then um you know there's a bunch of other stuff like you know just um stress. You know if something is just like very stressful I don't even tolerate it. I I sort of just cut it out. And then the last thing of course is um you know things like supplements and uh I've gone very deep in that rabbit hole. I'm a bit of a nerd when it comes to you know this stuff because I like to take um information from like a lot of experts. Like what I've always done well in my life is like you know there's a lot of economic projections from different people, different experts and I just I just take it all and I just distill it into like here here's like here's the most likely correct vector out of all of this like noise. And so you know I've been doing that for a long

time with you know people you should take take you should you should take the the goat weed thing. it's gonna, you know, increase your sexual endurance or the other. You just hear a bunch of random [ __ ] right? So, I I I've I've been doing a lot of um trying to like clean up clear up the noise and u sometimes you have to take stuff that um you know, like peptides are, you know, they're not FDA approved yet. You got you got to like figure out what makes sense and and I think I'm pretty good at that. So, um, I've gone down that path. And at some point, I think I I'll try to give people, you know, like the not the TLDDR, but like the long form, uh, like write up of of what I found. >> Awesome. Yeah, I'm I I took some

ashwagandha to sleep recently, and it's been super great for sleeping, for endurance, um, all of that. Yeah, man. Good. Good. I'm I'm glad. I think, uh, you'll perform better in the markets, in life in general, feel better, be happier, right? And uh as you said the the big four zero for us I mean we're 15 years behind you or so 14 years behind you. And so uh for us it's more just like don't have 20 beers have like 10 and then get seven hours you know it's like you know don't do the whole concoction like do like a a very small bit of fun and sleep and then work out and get some sun right and but as you as you progress it becomes more and more you know you have to be more specific with it. Yeah, the only the only good I mean

obviously like your body's less forgiving but the good thing is like you you start becoming uh I would say like more disciplined and you have more more like you know data points more knowledge so in some ways becomes easier as well in some ways harder some ways actually becomes easier as as you age. >> Yeah Jordy Alexander thanks for your time it's been absolute pleasure guys we'll take a quick break be right back with our next guest Nick for AI supercycle our weekly AI show and we'll be right back guys. Thanks Jordy. >> Thanks Jordy. >> Cheers. Thank you guys. [music] Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto.

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coins. [music] Get a Treasure at treasure.io. >> [music] >> Welcome back to AI Supercycle, [music] our premier AI show airing every single week presented by Near. We cover the ins and outs of decentralized AI, privacy, and the future of this massive technology.

>> Near is the blockchain for AI and the execution of AI native apps. You can check out Near's latest AI product at near.ai. Now sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. Welcome back to AI Supercycle, our premier AI show airing every single week, presented by Near. We cover the ins and outs of decentralized AI, privacy, and the future of this [music] massive technology. Near is the blockchain for AI and the execution of AI native apps. You can check out Near's latest AI product at near.ai. Sit back, relax, and enjoy. All right. All right. All right. Welcome back to AI Supercycle episode number 15, the first one of 2026, our weekly AI show powered by our friends at Near.

They've just launched Near.AI, AI, one of the only private AI LLM chat products on the market, if not the only. Powered by Tees, Intense, and of course, our lovely ZK technology that we have here in crypto. Chat like a therapist, like a doctor, chat like it's your ex-wife, whatever you want to do. No one's going to watch you. It's all on near. We We got Nick. Nick is a friend of the show. Uh also a portfolio company of our fund, Good Idea Ventures, which is getting ready to be stealth launched after many months of uh putting that off, which was silly. And we're going to have a fun conversation about Claude Code 2026 AI outlook and more. Um so we're going to get Nick up as soon as we are ready to go. And >> Andy, have you uh have you messed around

with uh cloud code much as of late? >> Dude, I've got it set up right on my terminal already. I'm good to go, man. I'm cloud coding. What do you what do you >> haven't like vibe coded anything quite yet other than like trying to figure out Frank DGOs's subscription tool. Um but but yeah, let's get Nick up and and let's get uh fire and talk about the hype coding and cloud code and AI and more. What's up, Nick? How are you, >> Nick? What's happening, guys? Good. Good. How are you? >> Good, man. Welcome. Welcome back. >> Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Happy New Year. Yeah, it's going to be a big year, I think. >> Yeah, it definitely is. Um guys, I must say Claude Code has been all over my timeline. And uh before this happened, I

felt like Open AI was so light years ahead of everyone else in terms of competition when it was just like if you like look at like general AI. I was like, "Okay, Sam Alman and Open AI, they're just dominating." And it feels like the tides are just turning hard right now with cloud code, browserbased agent workflows, with MCP, the ability for any dumb normie like me to just download a terminal, click a couple buttons, vibe code an app. It feels like the era of browser agents is here. Nick, from your perspective, what does this mean? How is this sentiment flip happening? Like kind of give us your give us your uh POV here. >> Yeah, I I I mean I agree. I think Cloud Coat's incredible. I think what Enthropic has done on sort of like the agentic coding side is really powerful obviously. Um it's sort of surprising

that it just kind of popped up out of nowhere because I like I know I personally a lot of the company a lot of people I know have have kind of been kind of like deeper on on the cloud code stuff for a while. So, I I think maybe it has to do with like the new year and and it being like this time of trends kind of like disseminating outside of their little bubbles sometimes, which I think is like a like a trend of of like how different metas uh uh like permeate different pockets of society. Um I don't know if you've spent much time looking at the Ralph Wigum stuff. I feel like the Ralph Wigum stuff has has uh >> Ralph Wigum's pretty big. Ralph is uh it's it's taken like the Claude code like ecosystem by storm. I think in a lot of ways over the past few weeks it's

it's basically this this tool or paradigm for just like setting cloud code off on its own allowing it to just like work through its own sort of like autonomously generated loops to an end product where I'm sure like like since you're using cloud code like you have to jump in a lot. You have to give it approvals to run certain commands. You have to kind of correct it. You have to manage context in a useful way. Ralph solves all of it. You know, Ralph is just this like truly autonomous age and you just set it off with say like a product spec if you're building something or even just like non-engineering things theoretically. Uh and and it'll just work through to completion. And so I think that that these types of developments I think like we can talk more about like context graphs I think have have really like

entered the mainstream in the past couple of weeks which are this big development in in just like uh LLM context setting. So I think a bunch of stuff is just kind of coming to a head at once and 2026 is going to be this year that we see a lot of the stuff that's being predict been predicted over the past couple years of of like agentic tooling really becoming this fundamental like uh force in our labor market and how we just all individually work dayto-day stuff like that. >> Was it context maps that you mentioned that >> context graphs? context graphs because obviously I'm I'm I'm somewhat familiar with like context windows and and it's gotten a lot better. I remember before maybe a month or two ago I would you know say something and it you know chatbt started to build a profile around

me and started to build the context that it had on my life and you know we have an organizational AI account and so it started to kind of combine these different context windows together. So >> what what's the extrapolation from context window context graph just yeah what what's the significance? >> Yeah there's sort of like three layers here. There's the the context window itself which is like basically like the context that the the LLM generates throughout your your individual session with it. So like if you're in a a single session in a single chat, it's building context. It understands what you said previously in the chat. Um it can recall that use it to inform its responses.

That's why it's it's nice to like stay in a single chat for as long as you can. Sometimes when you have these like fairly finite or time box things you're trying to do with an LLM. The problem with context windows alone is that obviously like as the context grows in a single session in a single window, the AI's quality drops off significantly. It really falls off a cliff as more context fills that window. And AI does need context. AI needs memory. it needs to pull from potentially vast data sources like at a company level if you have a a huge amount of data that it needs to be pulling from if you're working in like a specific domain things like that. And so, um, you you like what's been a part of of these kind of AI systems or these fully fledged AI systems for for a while

now is is this concept of like rag memory or or just like expanding the context window by creating these like vector databases of information that when the AI is when you're conversing with the LLM, it can go pull the relevant information. It can try to find the relevant information, incorporate it into its logic and it providing a response and then have a more informed response. The problem with like non-graphbased systems here is it is it loses this kind of like relational importance in data. It's just kind of like it's an oversimplification, but it's kind of doing like a text search or a semantic search over like the relevant data as you're asking things. And that's not how data is oriented. That's not like the optimal way to traverse data.

Like you know this building a company like there's a bunch of different things. Maybe you say something on Slack here and you use some some CMS or some like product management project management tool over here. You have two different accounts. You need to connect those accounts. You need some relational dependence between them. You need to build uh a relation in in some sort of graph-based system between some Slack conversation to some set of of to-do list items over in your project management system, whatever it is. And like context graphs have been a thing again for a little bit, but I think they're just kind of entering the mainstream from like a narrative perspective in they they expand on this like extended memory or rag context uh or concept in introducing this like relational uh importance amongst pieces of information which like really does supercharge the ability for AI to

understand domain specific problems. It makes it meaningfully more effective especially as you start integrating AI into say like your company in terms of headcount things like that like companies sort of knowledge bases are are massive and they grow quite quickly and they have an immense amount of relational importance in that data and context graphs enable you to kind of give this like interconnected brain or interconnected data source uh to to an LLM or to an AI to to make it again meaningfully more effective, meaningfully more performant in in the the types of things you're with it. So, I think like that that's really sort of entered the mainstream in the past few weeks and and added to this like resurgence of of conversation going on around >> LMS, aic tooling, all that stuff.

>> Yeah. So, so could just like very practically and tangibly for for for those in our audience who are listening and want to you know they're using these LLM on a daily basis or weekly basis like what what is a like how do you take advantage of um this context graphing from a a basic LM user perspective? Right. So you go on chat GBT, you've got like so I for my use I've got like my I have like main chat like I have like a main thing that I always [clears throat] go back to and it's built a lot of context >> but but but then yeah like it you know it it it'll say like this chat has ran out and you got to kind of go to the the other you got to make a new one and and the new one doesn't have context to the to the other one. Yeah.

>> So like what is the how can we practically take advantage of the improvements here in the context graph from just like a user perspective? I'm sure there's some element of this going on in some of like the memory integration or the memory features that have come to like chat GPT in the UI. Uh Claude has this now. I think Gemini probably has this at this point as well. Like there's probably some aspect of of like context graphing on the back end, not just simple rag to inform that that memory. Like you're having a bunch of different chats with chat GPT and it it'll remember something from a chat maybe you had six months ago. It's a different chat session, etc., but it's pulling that in. There's probably some aspect of that going on. Um, I'm not super aware of like the commercial tools that exist. I'm sure there are a number

of like MCP servers now for example that allow you to establish your own sort of like uh data store that is managed in this kind of like graph-based architecture that you can simply just integrate into say like chat GPT or claude or claude code any of these things that over time it'll build this this kind of memory and this data store that that embeds this kind of relational importance across data um I don't know again I don't know the specific ones we've built some custom stuff internally that we use to to kind of do this stuff, but I'm sure there are a number of MCPs or or like similar like structures of tools that do this now that people can integrate into like their LLM flows.

>> Yeah, man. So, Claude Code coming back here is is making it, you know, what Pump Fund did to altcoins, Claude Code is doing to like iPhone apps, right? And or like applications software companies. Um, what do you think are the knock-on effects of the ability to make deploying an application, deploying a website with like really somewhat complex code and functionality so easy? Like what is the what is the commoditization effect? Um, you know, in in in comp in competitive uh business there's this idea of like commoditize uh the compliment, right? So there's like uh you you commoditize what makes a someone else's business uh extremely valuable. Thus you basically

make their business uh you know less valuable by commoditizing the compliment. And so uh it's a bit more you know clear than that. I don't know if that's the best explanation, but what is like the commoditization outlook of whether it's programming or software development or application building like what is the second and third order consequences of making this so easy to launch applications? I think the really obvious one and and like like a very material one is like SAS as an industry is in question. Like SAS has built an industry around like building software as a service obviously like giving people these tools that that like help bring efficiency into their day-to-day workflows. When when software creation is is commoditized anyone can do it at scale like the SAS industry itself is is like facing this kind of

existential threat in my opinion. Like I think SAS's life lifetime was 98 to to 25. You know, it's like that that like I I think when anyone can build software tools for whatever they'd like trivially just by interacting with something like cloud code, like what is the point of SAS anymore? Um so I think that's one thing. I think like it it poses this like more systemic risk and risk used lightly here because I think there's a lot of benefits that come through this but it it like brings this really systemic change to um just like software companies in general or soft software businesses like anyone building software today for the most part 90 plus percent of of like any software driven business now is a castle without a moat anyone can can build a competitive business

there is no real defensibility to software where kind of like innovations alone and so network effects are going to move to and like defensibility is going to move to other sectors whether that's user distribution whether that that's like capital accumulation if it's a capital kind of uh relatable business those types of things I think like we she we will see this like meaningful shift both in terms of the businesses that proliferate and that has downstream effects in terms of like the funding markets as well like like it it no longer is like a really profitable venture to invest solely in some like new innovation in software because all software more or less is now just like a non-defensible business. Um, and so I think it has a lot of big impacts there.

I I think like the one people the one thing people talk about a lot and there's there's like obvious like truth to it but I don't think to the degree people talk about it is like the labor market impact this has um around like software engineering or software engineering related jobs like like cloud code can replace a lot of software engineers in theory. I think it takes more I guess like craftsmanship or um like directive setting still in in making these tools like truly autonomous for it to to have some like super major super sort of ubiquitous impact on labor markets. That will come. I just don't think that's that's here yet like like labor markets are going to face this really like like paradigm shifting like quasi existential risk as well. And like you get into stuff like UBI and other things to try to remedy this. Maybe you

you theorize around like what labor markets look like in the future in the face of this. Um but I I I think it like really does just flip a lot of these fund what we accepted as fundamental truths in society today on its head u across all of these these kind of core functions. So we'll see a lot of a lot of changing and I think 20 26 and and beyond like this stuff is is only going to keep accelerating at this exponential or super exponential rate basically. >> Yeah, I definitely agree there. Like there are so many rabbit holes to get into as far as what are the potential outcomes, knock-on effects as far as like the out the the consequences of this technology. I I'm curious like how someone can can kind of take their destiny into their own hands. What makes

someone what turns someone from a good vibe coder into a great vibe coder? Like are there certain elements that you found certain light bulb moments where you've said, "Oh, this is like a nature of how I prompt a particular agent or or LLM that really gets it to do what I'm trying to do." >> Yeah. Let me just chime in here. Uh ox designer put out this tweet. The formula for getting the most out of cloud code. I want parenthesis goal/outcome plus in quotes interview me thoroughly to extract ideas and intent plus ultraink plus in parenthesis plan mode on >> yeah like what >> all of those are great tips honestly >> yeah I mean like it is true like you literally just type the word ultrathink

into like your prompt in cloud code and it like expends more resources reasoning and and like leads to better results as a function of that like like building this like Q&A pattern with with uh with the AI is another good tool. I I I think all of those are right. I think we're seeing like like even in like the early days of this stuff a like a material dynamic range between like like the quality of of output that's generated just based on how you use these tools. I think there's a lot of prompting stuff like you're talking about like there's a lot of like smaller prompting things you can do. I I like I come back to the context thing because I I think that is like a really meaningful piece of this.

I think like intelligence is is only so powerful. Intelligence in the form of like these these massive models is only so powerful on its own without like a robust memory or context system. I think there's a lot you can do to like really ramp up the quality of of output that you're getting from these systems with robust memory or context systems alongside them like context graphs, things like that. Just making sure it has um like all of like access to everything um that that it needs. What I do a lot is is I do a lot of like uh like parallel stuff. So I'll spin up like 24 plus instances of clog code alongside each other and I'll and I'll have like like I like and I I've seen this like pattern followed by others uh online. So that's sort of where the

inspiration came from. But like you have you have like uh one or a couple instances just identify like areas for improvement, bugs, feature ideas, etc. It enumerate those. it produce context and then you spin up a bunch of other instances of cloud code to then like tackle each of these things and then a mirroring or a parallel set of instances to then review those and create this kind of like pair programming um or a a programmer plus reviewer paradigm in in like how you're approaching uh like cloud coding sessions stuff like that u I think that goes a long way I I I think people like there's still I think people are doing this now a lot more but I think there's a lot of opportunity to use like sub agents as you're working uh in cloud code sessions because of the context window issue. Like if you're just talking to a single cloud code

instance uh or within a single for example cloud code session and you're just having it do everything it runs out of context quickly. probably see this a lot where it's like 5% to autoco compact or things like this and then it compacts the context and that means it basically just creates like a summary of of your your work in that session to to then loses a bunch of quality losses a bunch of fidelity and then it creates a new session with that summary as the beginning. Whereas you can just trivially spin up tell cloud code spit do all of this break down your tasks tackle each one that can be done in parallel in a separate sub agent that it spins up which is essentially a different cloud session. um and then work through those. So your master claude session is is using like a a a fraction of the context than it is if it

was doing all of the work all of the sub agents were doing themselves. Um so there's a lot of stuff like that. I I think like MCPs are like the other big big unlocking in these types of workflows. Like you can you can get an MCP for basically anything now and just make it this like seamlessly integrated tool that these tools are that these agentic tools like cloud cut are using. uh as they're working through problems, stuff like that. And so I I think there's there's a discovery problem there just because of how many of them exist and people kind of trying to understand what they what different types of of like MCP tools they need for example. Um but if you stack your your like agentic tool of choice like cloud code in this instance with like it's it sort of like inventory of MCPs the the level of of output you're going to get

is meaningfully higher obviously is just having access to this big tool set. And so this MCP question, MCP uh discovery kind of question with regards to using these tools. This is the technology that powers the Chrome browser agentic workflows, right? Those go hand in hand in some >> maybe I actually I I haven't played a lot with the the Chrome like browser agentic workflow. But you saw like Frank DG God's whole viral post, right? About like the cancel your subscriptions. >> Like you drop the CSVs and then like it Claude goes into the browser for you and like you know uh asks you questions about it and then we'll go and actually cancel them on your behalf.

>> Yeah, I think what he's doing I could be wrong. I think he's using a specific MCP to do a lot of that and like like a browser use MCP which basically gives like your LLM access to just go use your browser like you would um like sometimes like a headless version of the browser but yeah it's it's that same concept >> and that's happening now right this browser like because like right the whole thing was are we going to be able to book a flight with my agent you know what I mean am I going to be able to like tell claw code like I need a flight you know I need to cancel this flight or I need to you know move this because you know a lot of um entrepreneurs have EAS right and and they and they have these EAS or PAs they do all these things for them and it's like sometimes they're

sleeping sometimes that you know whatever whatever and so it's just >> that concept seems like it's real now that like this whole give a give a task to an agent have it do something in the browser for you uh book a reservation book a flight >> change a meeting etc >> yeah that's right I I think like the internet is being rapidly reconfigured to be like agent first. I I think like right now it's browser use like these there there's tools for these agents to go use the browser similarly to how like we use them but increasingly like more and more of these tools are just being like rebuilt or or like repackaged to be agent first to begin with like are like the big thing here. So let's like kind of loop in the blockchain crypto angle to this micro payments is going to be something that in an agent first

internet would be is likely something to get like pretty excited about like you know this idea of aentic microp payments for you know tipping for posts for uh getting behind pay walls for all these different things just even if it's just like in the agentic first economy with some sort of crypto rails the the the economy of micro payments is going to skyrocket h how do you see this kind of X42 slash this general agentic first internet developing with regards to microp payments is is there any use cases that you're uh excited about anything that you've seen in your work with Allora kind like what is the future of the microp payment uh based internet if we're thinking about things not from a human first perspective but yeah kind of from this agent first perspective

>> yeah I I think like what it does because like AI is is so much more like capable and expressive than than humans. What it does from like a pricing perspective is it makes microp payments like meaningfully more viable in my opinion. I think the reason we have such like simple pricing models for any good or service today is is just like a cognitive bandwidth issue in humans. Like we we pay subscription costs, we pay these we like we preund accounts etc because it would impose too much like cognitive bandwidth or cognitive overhead on the the users up to now which is us. Um, when you have such a like a capable technology that can process so much more information so much more effectively in such a smaller amount of time, you can impose much more

like granular or or nuanced pricing models onto things. So, I think like what we'll see a lot of companies move to is is just more like a per unit uh pricing model. We're not going to wrap things in these like subscription costs as much anymore. it's going to move towards this much more efficient economy uh around exchange um because AI is just more capable and and blockchains, online payment systems, things like this, they enable AI to participate in like the the actual like financial aspects of the economy and the financial aspects of society um as a as a kind of like first class citizen as opposed to just being this this tool that lives on the side that helps us kind of make sense of things. Um so yeah like like blockchain will be just the tool that all AI uses to coordinate financially which is basically coordination and it like in

general um in the future and and going forward I think and I think it has a lot of stuff to do like we can talk about like prediction markets stuff like that I I think like society just becomes much more speculative in nature as well like there's real-time prices driven by speculation when AI is the de facto user and not humans things like this like like I think it it produces this much more efficient economy in a bunch of different ways. >> I was going to mention that, you know, uh I'd imagine that AI itself would be one of the first ones to flip this subscription model into a perunit basis because there's already a very core unit to these AI LLMs, which is a token.

>> And so you could just have it, you know, the LLM would charge your payment method, fund your payment method, and charge it on a per token basis. uh rather than you know whatever you know chatgbt I think it's 20 bucks a month there's premium models etc >> but but so as far as you know what you're getting at in the latter part of your point Nick is that the the world becomes more speculative in nature it's not humans maybe humans do as a as a knockout effect but it you're saying bots and AI is doing the speculating is that right >> yeah exactly yeah yeah like a like we we have a speculative economy me to begin with and in that like if the price of of an apple goes up or down tomorrow more or less people are going to buy apples

like there is there is like in fact just like an auction going on daily in our lives in those decisions AI is just so much more efficient that it will be able to do this in real time continuously we don't need these this like lumpy or discreet sort of like pricing update to like find the the like optimal intersection of the supply and demand curve as we do today, you know. >> Um, I feel like before we get like too philosophical, I feel like we're putting together almost like this like ultimate guide to using clawed code. We went through prompting. We went through some of the knock on effects. Is there anything else that you think is extremely important or significant for someone who is breaking into vibe coding or trying to improve their skills? What

are misconceptions or anything that is flying under the radar? anything that is, you know, particularly significant for someone to keep in mind? >> Yeah, I think that's a good question. I think there's a lot of small tools like um what one thing that I think is is like underused today and I I think maybe it's it's a function of like a lot of like the new people now getting into coding through vibe coding just like weren't engineers traditionally and so they like didn't have this sort of lexicon of tools that that have been being used in engineering for a while and it's very simple things like like using GitHub as or git as this uh like coordination layer amongst your like cloud code in your cloud coding setup like like git is built to coordinate amongst software engineers. It's built to like itemize different things uh that

you're working on create like a sensible set of of like version controls about the different features or bugs or whatever you're you're kind of tackling. And so I I think it's it's like a good exercise for people to like practice bringing git workflows into their agentic coding setups. um spinning up like like uh different like work trees and things like this to to like break cloud code sessions or whatever coding tool they use. I think cloud code is the best though like break different like cloud code sessions into these these like different sort of siloed instances uh that they can work on in parallel and then just like fix conflicts at times of of merging things like that. Um so I think that's a powerful thing people can do. Um I think it is useful to um like

approach even vibe coding in this kind of multimodel setup. Like I think some models are useful for uh like constructing initial like product specs that you're trying for a product you're trying to build. Some models are better at like aentic tooling itself obviously like like claude opus 45 at the like right now I think is is the best at at coding. Like I do think pulling in multiple models like Gemini has has like a really recent cutoff window and so you can pull like like more informed uh like real-time information to inform like like tooling use and like what are the optimal like tools or or frameworks or software libraries to use pull in chat CPT for like some deeper research stuff.

Like I I do think approaching vibe coding as this more holistic multimodel problem or exercise is just a generally useful way to uh approach it as a as opposed to just like typing cloud in your terminal and and start like just just jumping into coding right away. Like I I do think planning is a material like element of of how you produce something great from a vibe coding kind of session versus not. Um so yeah, I think planning is important. Like I said, I think context is super important. Um I I think like if if not using git then establishing like uh at least just like a simple like file system within any sort of like repo you're using or cloud session you're using to uh like for for cloud code to like track what it's been doing and to

to stay up to date across different sessions to to devise a robust plan and and to update it in real time as as it hits snags or as it comes up with different ideas or as you come up with different ideas is a simple way to spin up like a task MD file and a spec.md file and include that alongside your cloud.MD file and and like tackle your session that way and have it manage things there as it's going through its its its workflow. Um yeah, there's there's a bunch of of I I think little things like that that go along the way. think using like plugins uh in clog code is is really useful if if like you have like if you're going through a nor like a a regular uh uh and commands like if you're going through like a regular flow of like fixing a bug

or or having it find bugs spin up like a find bugs uh uh command spin up a a bug fix command that just has a like a prompt and sort of a setup already established so that it can just tackle that in a much more like codified way. Um I think a lot of this stuff is stuff that people are starting to use more and more in these like agenting uh like coding setups but uh it's it it does have a meaningful impact on on the type of performance you can get from these things. >> Yeah man, I appreciate that. I think anyone who's looking for a primer on on you know just getting the intermediate level of cloud coding will will be able to use a lot of these things. I think the 24 sessions that you mentioned is is insane. um was kind of zooming out of

cloud code and getting to just like the use cases of AI holistically. It it seems like um programming is like the the big use case like and I I know there's obviously the chat and the there's a ton of other things but it seems like like Claude like we started this kind of I was saying the sh this sentiment shift where like you know Claude was advertising on like NBA stadiums and like advertising on TV but people kind of all knew it wasn't as good as open AI and it was kind of like nah of course is better 5.0's 5.1's better. Now it's like, oh wait, was is is this this programming part of the equation so much more valuable? So I guess to both of you guys, Nick, we'll start with you and Rob curious to your perspective as well. Like is programming

like the the big thing for AI to to to like figure out like is that the 100x for AI companies or or is there like obviously all these other kind of like verticals that are important, but like is programming the 100x here? And like if so, you know, it it seems like Claude's winning. >> I Yeah, I I I think it's like a it's kind of like a heavy somewhat philosophical question to tackle. Like like I I do think it it like reshapes all of society. Like AI is just like this this kind of new paradigm of compute that will replace most of like the the like predecessor forms of compute that society runs on today. I think when you think about like what has the the like most leverage in terms of of input to output coding is is like has

one of the the like largest like leverage factors for lack of a better term in that like if you write some some like post or some manifesto online the level of impact it can have is maybe maybe a like a couple orders of magnitude maybe it's 5 10x whatever it is when you like build a piece of software it has the the potential to like affect hundred thousands x of of value, you know, like we've seen this in in the software industry over the past 20 years in general, right? Like like when someone builds a piece of code, it's very little capital, very little resources that go in and massive amounts of capital that's created as a function of it. You know, massive amounts of value that's that's created as a function of it. So I think just like practically speaking, AI being pointed at this problem of software engineering

is this super high lever vertical to focus on. And yeah, in that regard, I think for in a lot of ways, Claude is is winning in that. I think they made the right strategic decision to to like focus in more on that um as opposed to being ultra general and and kind of like maneuvering the idea maze more slowly um as maybe some of the other companies did. And and I I I think as a function of that, their lead does have some like merit to it and some defensibility to it, I guess, rather. Um so yeah. Yeah, Nick, I uh I really like the idea of leverage factors as far as like where to allocate time, resources, compute, you know, where where can we target and aim AI at? And then, you know, what

which ones of those areas are going to have the most impact on society and most value created because it's probably not words. Um, and we've already seen, you know, AI slop on social media and whatnot. Um and so uh I I think you know coding and software creation has an incredibly high leverage factor. I also think that um like like deep math and scientific discoveries is going to be a little bit later to get off the ground. But just the sheer amount of research that these things can do and analysis that they can do by going back and probably and they can survey data. they can look through academic papers and they're already starting to make discoveries in some of the, you know,

toughest math problems that have gone undiscovered. Uh they're starting to crack these things and I do think it takes longer for those to reach the market, but there are significant uh multiplying effects as far as what source of value those those discoveries can lead to. Um, and I I do think it's pri primarily theoretical uh in terms of math, science, uh these different uh areas of focus, but I would put those areas up there with coding in terms of leverage factors as far as what kind of value can be created for society after those discoveries are made. Just takes longer to come to market.

>> Yeah, I agree with that for sure. >> Nick Emmens, have a great 2026, man. Hope to see you in New York. Uh, thanks for coming on today. Uh, absolutely fun session. AI super cycle. It's cloud coding year. Apparently it's it's vibe coding year. It's it's the year of vibe coding. >> Nick, before you take off, give us like just a quick update on Allora. Like where are you guys at and how are things going? >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean like we're like the network's live now. Uh we have models coming onto the network. Laura for context is is like this kind of model aggregation layer to like pull together a bunch of different models enable them to like learn off of one another and and like collectively solve AI problems in this kind of like multimodel format. Um, and we're seeing a lot of integration

and a lot of stuff starting to go live in in this Q1 in the like AIXD sector and especially like we're seeing a lot of stuff in prediction markets. Like there's a number of of like quite successful agents that are for example trading on poly market leveraging like collective price predictions from a bunch of different models on Allora to to trade these like 15 minute 1-hour long binary options markets that like there there's work being done around sports betting markets that'll come live later in Q1 um start to expand into other types of markets. There's a lot of stuff being done around like AI powered strategies or agents on perexes these money markets in DeFi. a lot of stuff like that because I I think like the impact AI can have in the immediate term most effectively within like the crypto sector is in like leveling up the

quality of market participant that's interacting with a lot of these these like DeFi systems and and these kind of new types of markets that are being spun up. So like Q1 and Q2 I think is is going to be all about like these these this like nextgen of AI powered DeFi infrastructure and and AI defi agents basically. >> Incredible. Yeah. Nick. Yeah. >> Uh, let's have a great 2026. Thanks so much for coming on, man. And, uh, >> yeah, we'll, uh, we'll see you again real soon. >> Yeah. Thanks for having me, guys. >> Cheers, buddy. Cheers to you soon. >> See you. >> Boom. That is AI Super Cycle number 15.

First one of the year. Our weekly premiere AI show powered byum near. All right, guys. Quick break and we've got Tristan from Bullet, their upcoming mainnet, Pers, Landscape Update, Lighter Launch, Hyperlquid, Pers, all the perpetual pulse.xyz teams. We're going to talk about it. We're going to talk about bullet. We're going to talk about scaling pers on Solano. See you guys in just a second. Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto.

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Open, stable, borderless. Frack is building the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit fra.com to learn more today. Yeet is built for big moments, the most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. >> Ladies and gentlemen, we've got Tristan, co-founder of Bullet, talking state of perex market. Tristan, GM, sir. Hello. Hello, >> GM. Good to be back on the podcast. Really appreciate you having me on.

>> Yeah, man. Big big quarter for Bullet uh with Maynet imminent and other other interesting um you know, primitives coming. We've had quite the quite the year or quite the last six months in the per market post 1010. We've seen OIS across the board really get ruptured. Hyperl is about 1516 bill as of today on perpetual pulse.xyz guys my favorite perpetuals tracking website. Uh Hyper was at 9 bill Aster at 2.5 lighter 1.3 and then the kind of list goes down there. So OI has not yet really recovered post1010 across the board when you look at the the entire landscape. Volume however has has you know gone down but but been bit less of a dramatic impact than OI has over the last six

months or so. Um I you know I think 1010 really shook the market a bit that with that context Tristan what's this talk to us about the state of perpex where where we at in the perex market. Obviously, we've gone through the, you know, the big points farming, the airdrop craze. There's all these farmers. I think it's pretty saturated. I don't know where your head's at. What What's your take on where we're at? What's the state of PERPS? >> Yeah, that's a really good question. I would agree with you. Like, it's been a very hot narrative for the last six months at least. Uh, I think it will continue to be that way. Obviously, given that per I think has a lot of staying power as one of these like real utilities of crypto. Sometimes we go through all these cycles and try and figure out what boils down to what do

people really love to do dayto-day. Uh and I think trading and per it's such a cryptonative product that make a lot of sense. Uh and it's been good to see a lot of these new platforms coming to light and actually I think start to take over a little bit of that centralized exchange market share. We continue to see that dominance actually grow. I think it's nearing almost 20% at this point going to Dexes which is a far cry from what we saw multiple years ago. Um, obviously the history of that is Hyperlid came in and kind of uh set a lot of the rules there or set a lot of the precedent. Uh, it's been really good to see. I think a lot of people had questions around lighter and how that launch would work and whether that hyperlid playbook could be replicated.

Um, and I'd like to say that I think they've done quite a good job. I think they had a fairly successful launch. And I think that airdrop went off pretty well. And I think so far the feedback for for their platform at least has has been quite good. And at least I'm quite happy to see that because they've also been going down this layer 2 roadmap essentially for perpetuals trading also doing a ZK rollup. So it's good to see that validated in a way and see more people kind of building uh down this road map and now I think people are looking to the future like what are the new platforms like who are the new players in the space. Uh there's a bunch that kind of come to mind that are all tackling it in different ways and obviously we're trying to uh carve out

our own niche uh within that space as well. Can can you give us a sense of how sticky or mercenary the liquidity in the per space is right now? Right? Because there's one on on one side of things, you know, you see obviously OI, you know, crashed after 1010, but on on, you know, and another reason that OI has slipped is because there this playbook is, you know, farm the points, get the airdrop, move to the next platform, farm the points, get the airdrop, move to the next platform. And it's very mercenary in that way. Do we see sticky liquidity in pockets in the per space or is this the trend? It's just it's just rinse and repeat. How do you how do you see this dynamic? >> It's a great question. I mean, I think the reality of it is there is a finite amount of liquidity out there and not

every platform can have an infinite amount of liquidity. So, it will kind of concentrate to I think the main players who can deliver a really strong product that traders want to use at the end of the day. Um, I think the counterpoint to that is people said this about platforms like Hyperlid. essentially they did their airdrop and I think if anything they had more success post airdrop uh and they managed to build up this really sticky cohort of users. I think the liquidity there is is really robust and really solid and better than what we've seen in a lot of D5 platforms you know in the kind of years of late. Uh with uh lighter I think they obviously had a little bit of a drop off but I think they've still managed to retain quite a healthy level of liquidity that I would consider quite good. Uh so I think it really depends. It will kind of

concentrate to the major players. Uh like I've said as well, a lot of uh good faith was lost in centralized exchanges off the back of 1010. And I think for the most part, decentralized exchanges did fare a little bit better with that. So having your your kind of custody of your own keys, having a lot of these systems that kind of run in a more decentralized manner, I think does really help uh when you care about the trust aspect of things. And I think that is the kind of emergent trend over time that you're going to see more liquidity, more open interest start to pull to these dexes over time. Obviously, there will be some transient ones where people are kind of moving between and some level of mercenary capital, but the goal there is to really find those long-term traders and double down on them. >> All right, man. Talk to us about about

Bullet strategy here. Obviously, building out the as as you said a ZK roll up on top of Salana to basically scale Salana's per strategy. As we know, per require an insane amount of throughput as well as um just general uh like just force to make this thing work. I mean, we're talking 10, 20, 30ks here across some of these exchanges. What's the technical strategy? How have you seen this play out so far? And just like generally give us a product update. >> Yeah, for sure. So I think the kind of lay of the land there is essentially a lot of per exchanges have moved towards uh kind of app chain design. If you look at basically the top 10 by volume and open interest, I think you'll largely

see that as the defining feature of a lot of them. That was basically the thought in our mind a year and a half when we basically moved in the direction of bullet to build essentially our own uh kind of network extension on top of Salana. We wanted to be able to control the execution, get that kind of TPS number like you mentioned, you know, north of of 10,000 TPS as well as bring the latency down, which is very important for for PEPS trading and and that was really challenging to to do entirely on the L1. This is something that we had tried for for multiple years and and had difficulty scaling. Um, and so with Bullet, I'm re really glad to see that like in our test net and especially the mainet uh kind of private beta that we launched, we're able to get kind of north of I would say 5,000 uh transactions per second, which is like a

really good starting point. Uh, and we're also able to get the latencies down to something that basically we've never seen before on a DEX. So if we're measuring the end to-end latency once uh transactions actually hit the sequencer, we're able to do about 500 microsconds now to place a trade essentially, which is uh pretty much on par if not faster than centralized exchanges, which I'm quite excited about. And to be able to do that at 5,000 TPS, I think, and north of that, that really gets us to the level where we're competing with centralized exchanges. And that's always been the thing for me. I don't want DeFi to be this little play thing that people don't take seriously and and and kind of just trade on, you know, for example, for points or just because they feel like it. I want this to be a viable and serious competitor to centralized

exchanges and to bring liquidity and price discovery on chain. Uh and so that was a big reason why we built what we built. Uh and we're also trying to fill this void in Salana essentially where you you've probably noticed the narrative of the last year is there hasn't been a very strong purpose competitor on Salana. uh which is quite surprising given that spot volumes, you know, meme coins, all these other things are very strong uh and robust on Salana at the moment, but per volume has definitely been kind of lacking compared to the rest of the market. So given we're very close to going live and I think have been pushing very hard and and shipping very quickly over the last uh year or so, I think uh we're we're probably in that pole position essentially to capture that opportunity. And so I'm very excited obviously in Q1

to get this out there and get that in the hands of traders and bring as many of these Salana traders over to to start trading purps as we can. It's an exciting position to be in. I I'm curious more technical question is like how for a long time it was thought to be the case that decentralized exchanges would never surpass the throughput of centralized by the nature of that structure. Um but I take it that maybe the secret sauce is in the ZK. Could you just describe what has been the the technical unlock that has allowed you to achieve these levels of scale this level of TPS and you know where are do you think it is achievable to ultimately take a DEX even though it's decentralized and make it more scalable and have more throughput than a

centralized exchange? Yeah, this is a fantastic question and to be honest, I always ask myself, you know, when I I'm kind of like sleeping at night, why didn't I build what I built, you know, let's say even like two years earlier? And the really simple answer to that question is the technology just wasn't there. Uh that's what's really changed, I would say, in the last year. Uh and what was kind of the watershed moment for us was we kind of partnered up with the sovereign SDK team, uh and the Celestia team to essentially brainstorm how we could build this kind of high throughput chain for for PES. And so one of the unlocks was obviously the kind of rollup technology I think has matured over the last couple of years from firstg rollups I would say with you know optimism and arbitum uh and now we're getting

essentially these kind of second generation of much more appsp specific uh customuilt roll-ups like like we have at the moment the entire stack the sequencer the full node everything is written from the ground up in Rust everything is basically like thought about from a performance perspective uh and we've kind of engineered a lot of things just to get maximal throughput through there as much bring as much latency down as we can. So there's kind of like a whole redesign of that paradigm building things from the ground up again. In terms of actual kind of uh throughput of the DA layer, that's where Celestia comes into the picture. Since we're pushing 5 to 10,000 uh TPS, we need multiple megabytes a second of bandwidth. And that's thankfully something that Celestia is starting to hit on their product roadmap and their scalability roadmap. That's been very cool. And then the last point which you

mentioned is ZTE ZK technology um which comes into the essential like scalability properties and the security properties there that's something that has been too immature I guess uh in previous years too in feasible in terms of uh cost prohibitiveness uh and now ZK is just becoming much and much more proliferated costs are coming down you know by a factor of 10x I would say every six months to a year if if not faster than that so this tech is uh has been in kind of research mode for many years and now is becoming production ready and that's what's really enabling this uh second generation of ZK rollups such as bullet such as lighter and many others. Yeah man definitely and it's happening quickly and it's important for the entire space whether it's Zcash whether it's per whether it's uh the combination of all the likes it it's

coming and it it has a very important part for uh Ethereum as well talking about ZK EVM the L1 so we're definitely excited about that front when it comes to mainet what is left on the road map to ship bullet mainet for people to be able to use it uh in full production where you guys at on the tech roadmap product roadmap. What's what's your timeline here? I know it's tough. Um, but you know, what what can we look forward to leading to to mainet? When's it coming? Um, you know, I'm sure you're super busy. >> Yeah, we have been super busy. Obviously, even over this uh Christmas break, there's been a lot of stuff to ship. So, currently where things are at is we're roughly feature complete, I would say. Uh, we have PERS, we have spot trading, and we have portfolio margin. Um I I would just kind of call

out that yeah for example these things have been you know starting to be built I guess on some other platforms like a lot of these other per exchanges are just per lighter still didn't have spot I think until very recently with their kind of token launch hyperlquid is kind of only just kind of starting to get their proof of concept of portfolio margin out so we've kind of shipped all these things and are basically spent the last year building a lot of them out they're all ready um like I said we kind of had a soft roll soft roll out uh of a private beta of our mainet going out in December and we got our first 100 traders on essentially using the platform. Everything has been really smooth and that kind of gradual roll out has been really nice. We're looking to go out progressively to bigger and bigger audiences and and bring on

referrals and you know some of their friends of friends and and kind of grow that group in a sustainable way. So um I think the call to action there is if people are big per traders, they want to use the platform, definitely get in touch with us uh on our Twitter and we can kind of whitelist you essentially for access. We're focusing on big traders, liquidity providers, market makers essentially uh to get live. >> Uh in terms of product roadmap, like I said, pretty much most of the stuff is there. Um we're just polishing off the Celestia integration and starting to get those blobs onto mainet. As you would have seen, there was like a bunch of uh test net activity where we were getting like a lot of uh throughput there, which is really cool. So, some load testing.

Uh and then otherwise, yeah, I would think things are in a pretty good place. The big thing that we're focusing is less on the core engineering stuff now because it's done, but more on liquidity. So, working with these market makers, making sure that markets will be quite liquid when things go live, working on APIs and integrations and and hopefully soon builder codes and stuff like that. So, external frontends and other people can start integrating. So, if there are traders out there, now is a good time to start talking to us and start looking to integrate. if you're a front end, a trading terminal, some other kind of trading app that wants to build on top of us, that's going to be on the the kind of uh short uh or the kind of medium-term road map as well.

So, it's a good time to be chatting to us and kind of starting to get around our APIs. Um, and then if you're a regular guy, I would say also points should be going live quite soon. The earlier that people get in, obviously the opportunity is better because things are a bit less competitive and a bit more exclusive. So >> that's why I kind of urge people that like the earlier they get involved uh you know the the more exciting the opportunity and the better it is for us to get that feedback from really good traders uh early on in the process as well. >> Beautiful. Um what is the what is the user experience going to be like for a Salana user? So like right I I have a Phantom wallet. I have um you know my Salana wallet obviously I'm used to SPL tokens. used to interacting in the way

like you know there's it's a whole different it's a whole different experience than using EVM for example but because you're kind of like this network extension does that change my flow am I do I have to bridge to bullet uh through like a bridge app and can I just connect my Salana wallet what's like the user friction like >> that's a great question that's like the one trade-off obviously of using a layer 2 we get all this great performance uh but some of the kind of composability at least the atomic composability is is traded Uh so there is kind of a deposit flow and a bridging flow there. Essentially we do try and use all the same cryptography and should basically have the same integrations with a lot of the Salana wallets. So we've been testing you know for example uh Phantom and Backpack and Soulflare and a bunch

of other ones. Also like a lot of our flow runs through Privy. So a lot of the time you just use pass keys and you don't even need to worry about these wallets whatsoever. Um, and so yeah, we're trying to make that process as frictionless as possible and make it really seamless for Salana users when they deposit. We do have this kind of integrated bridge flow in the background. So it will take about 15 seconds to bridge in, but we think that's quite acceptable at the moment. Uh, given that people who are used to doing it on the optimism or arbitrum side might take 15 minutes. Uh, this should be much faster. We're also working with a bunch of bridge providers uh, who do these kind of intense based bridges. So we think once we integrate one of those we can get basically you know maybe like subsecond essentially

like deposits as well but that will be coming in the next month or two. Yeah that that goes to say that I think it should be relatively frictionless to wait 10 15 seconds to get your money in there and then get basically like submillisecond trading I think is a worthwhile trade-off. >> Beautiful. Well, Tristan, man, I wish you the best in the next couple of days into weeks and I know it's going to be a crazy crazy push here to mainet from the dev side, from marketing side, product as as well. It's just it's a journey. Um, so enjoy it and I know it'll be good for you. Thanks for joining us today. Enjoy the time in SF. Um, and yeah, man, it's always a pleasure.

>> Yeah, thanks a lot for having me on. Really appreciate the support and uh looking forward to going live and uh showing you what kind of product we can build. >> Beautiful. >> Absolutely. Let's go bow it. Let's go >> to the moon. All right, Tristan. >> Thanks, Tristan. >> Have a good weekend. Happy New Year, man. >> See you guys. Yeah, you too, guys. All the best. See y'all. >> All right, guys. Um, up next, we've got the lovely fellows from Framework, Vance and Michael. Um, about 45 minutes with the with with the boys and then it's it's the weekend, guys. So, how are we feeling, Rob? Feeling any better over there? Not.

>> Oh yeah, we're moving and grooving, brother. Let's go. I'm gonna ask uh Michael and Vance how long till they're speaking English in Venezuela. >> So until we're buying water oceanfront property in Venezuela. >> Yeah. If they've bought any uh >> and importing the Latinas >> any [laughter] any real estate purchases out there. Well, uh we should get the guys in very shortly. Neo Finance is uh all over the timeline. >> Yeah, the insurance company yesterday was uh uh super super cool. Um they were that they were quite quite bullish on their on their own product, which which you like to see that, you know what I mean?

>> I mean, >> if you're not bullish on your own product, what are you going to be bullish on? >> Yeah, I don't I'm not exactly sure if if I'm being honest with you. >> Um I'm bullish on Neo Finance and uh >> let's start there with these guys. Let's just let's just straight Neo finance pillum and see where we end up. >> Sure, let's do it. I think neo finance is a great place to start because it's really where it's where all all roads lead to neo finance. >> Yes, all roads do lead to neo finance and it's where the space is going, man. It's so obvious. >> It's what we're it's not only what we're building, but it's also it's what the entire industry is building. And it's almost like whether they know it or not, they're building Neo Finance. Um you know we were on a call with a partner earlier today and this team was talking

about you know the teams that are straddling between web two and web three and you know people I think have chosen to build in this domain but this is a conversions point and I think if you haven't already started to build in this uh conver this cross-section of web two and web 3 uh you're going to be forced to do so >> um and obviously we're calling this neo finance we have you a strong reason as to why we believe this is uh this is the cross-section of the next the next >> it's just like the intersection right it's like the intersection of legacy finance DeFi it's happening >> it's not just the intersection it's the evolution right because I I think what's important to understand is that there's this old guard and there's an old guard

not just in finance but it's also in crypto this crypton native infrastructure L1 slop >> like Neo finance I think is an evolution of both. And you're right, it is an intersection because it's it is both, but I think it's also an evolution of both. >> Oh, let's see if we can uh Neo Finance pill these guys. They're already quite quite pilled, but I think I I I think they're going to like what they hear. So, let's bring them up. We got Vance and Michael ready to go. Um stoked to end off the week with the lads. It's been maybe a month since. So, um lots going on. Lots lots to talk about. Gentlemen, >> good to [clears throat] see you. Just take a seat.

>> Happy New Year, Vince. Good to see you. >> Welcome back, guys. >> 11 am here in Hawaii. So, >> yeah, I'm on [laughter] to my off. You on island time >> a bit. Yeah. I mean, I've been on like a mental, physical, spiritual uh growth phase. Less on the business, less on the markets. So, it's been healthy. >> Wow. What What have you learned? Uh, I've been reading this book, Book of Zen, and um, I've learned that fullness and emptiness are the same. And the difference between a man and a Buddha is that one realizes that there is no difference. [laughter] It's >> deep, man. It's deep. This is This is sober. This is sober, too. This is not like >> I was about to say, how many? [laughter] >> Well, boys, happy new year. Um, Rob and I started off kind of talking about uh this neo finance category. We want to

bring it to you guys, get your take. Obviously, you guys have probably invested upwards of, you know, 10, 20, 30, $40 million into this sector and have some of your largest positions in the sector. Upwards of 500 million. >> I mean, I think you have nine figures exposed to NEO finance. >> Figures. Nine figures. 10. What are you talking about? >> Wow. Your size is not size. All right. So, >> um, so Galaxy Digital. >> Yeah. Yeah. We we are the ones we didn't create the term, but I'd say we're the ones that we popularize the the term DeFi. I think it's also fair to say that it's probably time to shut that one down. I think it's, you know, been a good moniker for everything that's going on. The reason why when you floated this to us, and we've been trying to think of

different names for describing what we do, we're at the convergence of fintech. Yeah. >> And decentralized finance. DeFi doesn't hold that meaning anymore. And so NEO I I think is being, you know, something new, but it's it's a new description for what we're talking about, which is the convergence of financial technology, financial institutions, and decentralized technology. >> So I I like it. Um yeah, it's it's a good term. >> So Vance, you you put out this tweet here, right? uh persistent buybacks, maximum financial discipline by protocol, stable coins, RWAs, lending, capital markets, doing less, doing better, walking the the regulated path. Mike, as you're saying, it's this convergence between um the entire financial system, legacy finance, not

trady. We don't call it trady, it's legacy finance and DeFi or fintech and DeFi. the um you know the Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novagrats pushed that there's this kind of shift happening to businessdriven tokens away from narrative driven tokens measurable value and profits uh wallets and exchanges evolving into these neoank like platforms you know we we have you know uh it's kind of like this new supererset of fintech with consumer frontends DeFi backends business driven tokens we expect an institutional bid on these D5 blue chips that you know have this sensible value acrruel Um, so just kind of like throwing things your your way. >> Andrew, one more one more thing I think is important to mention here and and it goes back to what Michael said about how DeFi is no longer the moniker that applies to a lot of the emerging

technology and apps that we think are going to do extremely well because it's not it's no longer decentralized for decentralized sake, which is what I think a lot of teams raised on when they got into crypto. And that is no longer going to get them the dollars that they're that that they're looking to raise. So I think what Neo finance is doing is it's it's taking a more pragmatic approach. It's saying def decentralization works when you use it the right way. But really what consumers want they want a forgot password button. They may never get sold on self-custody. And so DeFi is is kind of this kind of this old term and and it's time to grow up and it's time to realize that if we want mass adoption with all the handwavy things that entails, there's a new way of building and there's a new way of thinking about crypto in this modern

era. >> Can can I propose something >> please? >> I think instead of uh calling it [clears throat] uh neo finance is is the full term just like decentralized finance is I I think you got to call it newi. >> Neither. >> That's really what it is. Neoi. >> Neoi I think is a little wordy. Yeah. Nui in terms of the shorthand I think is a much better description. And you could even write it out as nefi. >> Um but I think having it described as newfi is is really probably the best description. Robbie going back to what you're talking about which is it's not decentralization for decentralization sake.

>> Users don't want to users I think don't want to self-custody in in a lot of ways. They want to entrust in in security and a third party to manage it. They just don't want the the people who they're entrusting to do bad things with it or do things that they don't know that's happening. And there I I think you know describing this as newi is kind of like calling you know web one to web two web two to web 3. Like it is an innovation. It's an improvement on what we're doing. And and I [clears throat] it's like a step two for for finance. And I think that that's really kind of what decentralized technology applied to financial technology will be will bring, which is a step change in terms of, you know, all the different applications and what you're able to do with it.

>> Yeah. >> I I also think people have co-opted the DeFi term for bad purposes. Like a always saying like DeFi will win, dude. Like they delist the third largest stable coin. they have this committee to list you and if you tweet badly about them, they won't, you know, up your supply caps. Like there's things that are DeFi and there's things that are not DeFi. And just like this, these bad actors have kind of blurred that line. And um I think the whole term is kind of cooked and we either need to refound it and kind of actually call things decentralized that are decentralized.

Otherwise, it's just going to be co-opted as a a lame marketing term. So I'm not even sure what to call what we're currently doing. But when Sky has $10 billion of of money, we should probably figure it out in terms of like what we're actually going to call this category. And you can call these things like capital market stable coin or decentralized stable coins or or whatever you want. But I think the the really powerful thing about maybe like open finance, maybe new finance is that there are massive returns to scale. And that's probably the key point that a lot of people don't understand is that um you see these things, they kind of look like rinky dink toys at this current scale, but what happens when Sky has 50, what happens when Sky has a 100red billion of actual assets under management? Um the massive returns to

scale and the democratization of being able to govern that is truly what I think the quote unquote DeFi opportunity is or was. But a lot of people in crypto and DeFi and decentralization theater just got too high on their own supply and built things that either people didn't want to use or didn't have the massive returns to scale that characterize why crypto is powerful. So um I'm with Michael in terms of you know we got to figure out something else to call this but neo finance new finance open finance all good candidates. I'm personally hopeful that we can resurrect DeFi and have it actually be something that means something. >> Yeah. So kind of then moving away from the specific nomenclature here thinking about like the thesis at large I think obviously you guys have spent a long long time thinking about this and then

obviously allocating towards it so like what is the what is the thesis in a nutshell for this category right you guys are obviously bulls on sky on syrup and on the on the likes there's this category that is bridging institutions on chain they've got a very clear uh product market fit they they have tons of capital um and they're doing things in a different way than just DeFi. Michael Vance, what is the what is the NEOI thesis here? What is the new finance thesis um in a nutshell away from just kind of like the terminology here? >> What I what I would say is that um it has very little to do with decentralization. Um I think decentralization is a means to an end. You can think about it this way. Money transmitter laws are a hugely influential and and hugely uh

consequential piece of legislation within the US and it basically you know adjudicates who and who cannot move money around and Vitalic comes around builds a decentralized blockchain with smart contract functionality and it just makes that concept irrelevant and so I think there's some of that in terms of what we're trying to do with DeFi here. Um, and really if you think about like a decentralized stable coin, it's not a uh decentralization theater in terms of like the cipher punk vision. It's decentralization in terms of risk management, in terms of transparency, in terms of people being under able to understand what yield they will get on what cadence and in what format. And I think that's probably the best of of DeFi. But when you think about what we are specifically bullish on in this category is that you know stable coins

and asset management you know Sky and Seir respectively and and I would also say Spark have this very narrow path but a path to connect to Tradfi and the language that Tradfi speaks is inflows and aumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumum and ROI and that exa is exactly what syrup and spark both offer this landscape and so I that's why I like newi or neoi but really if you combine the massive returns to scale of a decentralized system with the ability to connect to tradi that is the opportunity here and that doesn't really cut across to things like derivatives um because that's like so heavily regulated on one side and trady and completely unregulated on the other um and even kind of spot trading as well. So I think the actual opportunity is specific to stable coins asset management and

lending and that's really what we're bullish on massive returns to scale being able to connect to Wall Street to accelerate that flywheel. >> [clears throat] >> And maybe just to add a little bit and using the same analogy, um, we actually were asked kind of this question at a at a at a panel that we were on a couple days ago. Um, using the money transmitter example, I'd say that's movement of money payments is is kind of like what that category is. And you used to have money transmitter laws for two reasons. one because you had to entrust customer funds in a centralized blackbox entity like I'm gonna give this payment processor all of my money and hope that they like tell they move it but when I tell them to move it. Um there was also people who ran off with that money which is why the laws exist. But the other

element is KYC. You have to know that you're sending the money to [clears throat] someone who isn't a sanctioned you know terrorist. And when we think about what it what an Ethereum, you know, network enabled, it enabled you to not need the money transmitter laws for for one reason, which is you don't have to put trust in a centralized entity to move money around. And if you look at and that being said, you you still have to have rules. There's still rules around you can't send money to North Korea because that's against the law in the United States. But what if you use stable coins as an example here, you look at stable coin volume transactions and it's gone from basically zero five years ago to Visa today. And that scale is unprecedented in basically any other financial market in any other growth uh sector for

finance or financial financial technology. Like that is that is a zero to her movement in in record time at venture scale outcome similar to what we're seeing you know in AI this day these days like it is that level of unprecedented growth. [clears throat] Now that's Ethereum and that's stable coins. If you were to apply that same process and logic to every single other category of financial institution, whether it's, as Van said, lending, trading, banking, insurance, all of those categories will experience similar trajectories of growth if you bring about decentralized technology because it will provide a global scale and finance truly moving at the speed of software that we haven't seen before where we got things I would

misaligned or or out of whack was the expectation that we have to be fully decentralized to do it. And it's actually not the case. You still need laws. You still need institutions just like you still need KYC for payments and stable coins. But [clears throat] if you have one element that allows for the speed and basically the the government regulators to to agree with you and see the value in this, they're going to come about, you know, recognizing this as a huge boon for the financial services industry. Just in [clears throat] the same way that they passed Genius and that we're excited about stable coins, you got the Treasury Department saying we're going to 10x in five years. Like that is I think the best analogy here for what the potential is. And so we're just at the start. We've done payments and we've done stable coins. What about

every other category of finance? >> Yeah, we're and we're seeing it happen. And I think this is the reason why we're seeing a lot of the the institutions that are starting to take, you know, at first it was they they put their toe in the water and now they're ready to dive deep. uh and they're doing so with tokenization because that is that feels like the unlock that brings a lot of their services onchain and ultimately allows them to then process their financial stack at at the type of software scale. Michael that you mentioned I'm I'm you know and we this is something we've thought a lot about over the last few weeks as we started to recognize more and more and we saw the juxtaposition that was happening in the institutional world the legacy financial world and and their break point into this space. So, I've been I've been

trying to think about like what are the potential holes in this thesis and one of the ones I keep coming back to is the 2020 20212 like CDFI like offshoot where we had the Celsius BlockFi liquidity contagions and we had centralized frontends and decentralized backends and they were serving DeFi yields to regular consumers and it feels similar to what we're talking about but I think there's a fundamental difference and it it's essentially that the yields are sustainable. So I'm just curious if you guys have also thought about this.

What makes this different from that past regime and and why do you think this is a more sturdy and bulletproof thesis now than it was a few years ago? >> Well, well, first and foremost, uh, every single founder of those companies that you just mentioned are in jail right now. >> That's right. One, uh, like let's call a spade a spade. Fraud was going on during that period of time. And I think broadly what we now have is and what we're excited about, you know, Spark, Sky, Syrup, they're they're all doing amazing things on chain. the the stuff that we've invested and announced recently, you know, whether it's the Day product where you're doing energy and basically a decentralized utility that generates yield on chain from solar and storage in on residences throughout the United States or you're talking about

USDA which is enabling, you know, GPUbacked lending as a new business model that brings on like that yield isn't like indogenous to the crypto industry. It's not we're just trading back and forth with each other or we're, you know, giving you these these tokens that have an asmtote to zero over time. We're we're talking about bringing real business models, real business activity that's happening offchain onchain and that's where the yield comes from. Like that's a fundamentally different perspective. >> Um, we had re protocol on yesterday talking about the reinsurance market. Another really good neo finance example there.

another framework portfolio company. >> They just keep coming on the show. What the hell, man? Um, so, so that is actually so this idea of and and Rob gave me this thesis like, dude, I'm actually pro- centralization. And I sat on this for like two weeks and I was like, dude, we cannot come out and be publicly saying that we're pro- centralization when we're running a a crypto podcast. And then now that we think about it more and more, the regime that we're in is actually enabling that, right? And so this is kind of a good segue into this market structure bill voting next week and into like the midterms and and all of this where you know we built a lot of these systems based on regulatory arbitrage for the previous regimes that we were in.

Obviously this new one is much more friendly towards crypto regulation innovation as a whole. We've got this market structure markup bill vote happening next week. Also midterms at the end of the year. How do you guys see the evolution of just like this general category and and the space at large as it pertains to the market structure bill? You know, what are like the pros and cons of that and genius as it relates to NEO finance? And then coming into midterms and even thinking like further out to the next election cycle, how do you guys kind of pause it around this centralized front ends, decentralized backends or this kind of general shift towards um this newer approach? How do you see it changing? How do you see it uh evolving here?

I I think there's going to be numerous regulatory pathways for people to be nonsecurities and also deal in new financial products like tokenized stocks or or tokenized uh bonds. Uh be it clarity, be it the SEC innovation hub, be it other avenues. So I think there's going to be a variety of avenues. Um, I think the cost of compliance is going to be meaningful or the frankly like the ability of a space to get into like an SEC innovation hub or or other kind of sandbox type environment. So, it won't be for everyone. Um there's also going to be a difference between people who have already launched a token or a product and and you know probably are thinking about it as we're establishing like a US branch kind of like a USAT versus people who are more you know just

like evergreen entrepreneurs and starting out and wanting to do things at small scale. Um I think there's going to be a question as to at the end of the day what does being a non-security get you on top of all the hurdles to get there. Um, and if you are uh, you know, deemed a security, what happens? And I'm assuming that, you know, a lot of the current tokens on Coinbase will probably be deemed securities at one point or the other. Um, and I think what their strategy is, frankly, is to kind of have a broker deal license and be able to trade uh, those things, you know, right next to coins. But it's a shitty outcome because you know if you are a uh you know public security but you're listed on not NIC or not NASDAQ but like the Coinbase alternative broker dealer

that's like a pretty tough position from a liquidity perspective. So, um I think there's going to be some tough times for some tokens, but for the other tokens, they will generally be held to a very high standard of decentralization and and uh education as to what they do, and they will either graduate from the SEC program or they will kind of be nonsecurities on day one of Clarity Act. For everyone in that in the middle, there's going to be a lot of work to do. Um and for a lot of our entrepreneurs, I think they're going to see the path of just being a normal private company may actually be for them. once everything is laid out in front of them, it's going to be easy to tell versus today where it's kind of like this nebulous journey which seem to be very valuable because you can

launch a token, but there's really no uh actual regulatory hurdle. So, uh you know, point being is that there's going to be winners and losers because it's going to be pretty winding path and it won't all happen overnight, but it will be good for the space. The worst thing that can happen is that we're still stuck in this no man's land of like nobody can buy what we're selling because nobody knows what it is. for those products that you know they're going out um they're going outside of crypto so they're avoiding that indogenous risk that the CDFI world was susceptible to a few years ago and they're bringing like real business and revenue into crypto and they're serving it as yield maybe in a yield bearing stable coin a yield coin are you suggesting that the best path for them is to start getting ahead of the

eightball going and exploring securities laws and probably launch as a security >> well it really depends I would say in terms of what you're talking about in terms of what is the security. So there there's there's like a couple of elements here. There's like do you have a product that is a yield coin and is that yield coin in and of itself a security? the you could take one belief that it is and you know for instance yeah like I think that there's yield coins out there right now that limit US persons from uh you know minting or redeeming them basically interacting with them directly and there's a KYC element for for the same reason that is fundamentally different from let's say the governance token that is you know maybe you know collecting or or like

governing the entire protocol um that I I'd say is probably not the aspect that the security is and that would be something that is covered more in the clarity act or whatever it ends up becoming called. But the products themselves can be viewed as securities just in the fact that they are accepting you know subscription and redemptions um effectively and we have rules around this which is like a red D offering which basically means over a period of time you can use an exemption to not have to go through the full securities offering securities listing process. If you wanted to do that, then that's something that you could you could go through the process of. We just don't have any, you know, redd exemptions for crypto. So, you kind of have an option to like do the regggd offering, limit the number of participants. Like,

they're built for a securities landscape that doesn't factor in this concept. Um, that's where things like the innovation hub with the SEC, I think, are are extremely valuable because it's not just a one-way street. It's not like a you're in the hub, you get a you you basically get like a all clear for the next three or four years. It's more like they're trying to work with the industry to figure out what the next type of, you know, innovation hub uh or or what what the next type of exception could be based off of feedback they're getting from innovation hub participants. Like that's why I think, you know, we've put a lot of stake in this clarity act or this market structure bill passing. I think that there's elements of it that are going to be really important and we need to have and we need to have at least as Vance said clarity on what this

what these assets are and a path to decentralization. But the nuts and bolts of what really matters when it comes to like newfi if that's what we're calling it is really going to be about participation and conversation with the SEC via the innovation hub. That's where the nuance and the real rule making that's more important you know than what is decentralized, what is not. That's where that's going to take place. anything to add Vince? >> I I think that's broadly right. Um, a lot of these programs will also require you to rep that you are a non-security and that is like a uh that's and I think that's being set probably by the Democrats with the sense that like if you're going to go for this, you actually have to replicate legally that you are not a security and so you can't be doing like some fugazi

decentralization for no reason. Um, it ups the stakes for protocols for sure, >> but once but once again it's like what is you and what is repping? Like you is not the you is not like the product that you're building, the yield coin that you're building. It it could be but you could use the exemption for that and that says that you are a security but your securities offering doesn't have to go through the exemption process, >> right? >> It it probably doesn't mean like the governance token that one is the one that you're repping and saying, "Hey, that's not a security." >> Yeah. Well, that kind of brings us to another good point. We we had uh Jordy Alexander on earlier and he's talking about, you know, the the whole model of buybacks and how he's he's more of a fan of actually doing buybacks in a way that

is uh let's just say more game theoretically apt rather than just aping every day programmatically hyperlquid style which uh forces you know retail to be buying in at highs where you know because there's always this buyback and yada yada. he has a very fund manager approach to to this and we got into kind of like the token equity dilemma which we're kind of orbiting around here right now and so I guess the the point and the question is is this new kind of like NEO finance category tokens are they going to be able to create a more unified approach to uh what your claims on on on ownership are what really you are owning like how do you guys see the evolution of the token infra infrastructure

standards evolving this year in this category. I think these teams will probably be leading this because they have real flows because they have revenues. Um, how do you guys see this token equity dynamic evolving as it relates to kind of what we're talking about here? >> I I think the equity side has to be done. There's there's really no workable path for a dual structure. Um, there's this good line about like, you know, democracy can't be two wolves and a sheep arguing about what they have for dinner. Uh, because it's going to be, you know, just diluting the token. It's going to be raiding the treasury. It's going to be all the easy things that you can do. And I'm not very sympathetic to founders that are saying like, uh, you know, we need like this equity structure because we need to grow the protocol.

And that just reeks of me as to you know, they didn't get enough exit liquidity on the token. now they need to layer another useless part of opex on top of the protocol in order to continue to get paid. Um the idea of these protocols is that they're done at a certain point and there should be a robust ecosystem of you know folks like consensus for ETH who are able to grow it without being you know directly tied to it or having governance over it especially not owning the brand and the rights and the IP over it. So I don't think those structures are workable at all. Um, I do think the optimal structure is a foundation, a permanent capital vehicle that can permanently align, that does not have a profit incentive, rights over IP or brand. That that does seem to me, you know, after five years of doing this. We've never

seen the equity token thing work. One plus one does not equal 15. There's no, you know, like that doesn't make any sense. I I will say, you know, like we're we're talking about multiple things here, which is um you know, there's the equity tokens, which is like tokenizing existing equities and bring them on chain. That's just to be clear, not what we're talking about. What we're talking about is like the equity of the labs company, let's say, you know, persisting on, continuing on. Um look, I I think consensus in Ethereum is probably the best-in-class example of this. It, you know, consensus is a centralized entity. It has a business model. like there were rumors that it was going to go public at some point and it owns MetaMask. It's making a ton of money from all the different business lines that it has,

but it is aligned with Ethereum because I'm sure it has a ton of Ethereum on its balance sheet, too. If not from the ICO, from purchases after or quickly after or or maybe funded by Joe Luben himself. I I don't know exactly. But the point is you want to have an aligned entity that can go off and make business transactions and sign contracts because there are actually limitations as to what foundations are able to do. You like you can't hold equity in a foundation. Like there there's just like structural limitations. You want you want a centralized company to be able to do that. Um but also employ a bunch of people and scale up, raise venture capital. Like all of that stuff is valuable. Um and a foundation isn't able to do that. they're able to sell tokens and hold a balance sheet of cash and tokens basically. Um, but I do think

that when you're talking about a token that probably is the ideological split which is the IP, the brand, the technology and the token are governed by the token itself. And so whatever business activity is being generated by the protocol that determines the value of the foundation which is basically the a proxy for the valuation of the network and the and the token itself. the IP uh that's generated offchain and in the company like all of that stuff acrru to the value of the equity and like we can have two different layers. It's just that they're going to have completely different mandates. Trying to squash them together is like to Vance's point it just doesn't work. Yeah.

>> Uh and we've seen hundreds of these at this point. Like none of them have worked out well. Look at Uniswap and Uniswap Labs at this point as a as a great example. Um you know it just is hard to do round page square hole. >> Yeah. So, so consolidation into the token and and into a foundation. But then, okay, so then let's say we get there, right? And let's say some of these products do this, whether it's retroactively or, you know, proactively. How do I as an investor then know what I'm buying? Because like I think that's still a problem here is like what like what am I buying when I buy XYZ token?

Like I don't really know. So like what what's the step from there to like understand what I'm actually owning? >> Yeah. Sorry. So you know to add to this I I think what you are buying so what you're buying with equity with shares is obviously the future stream of of value whether you know revenue profits whatever you want to call it the IP of the company itself and the brand and sort of like what's called goodwill like that's all on the balance sheet of an equity and then you have your proportional share based off of your ownership of equities. Now, there's tons there's like decades, centuries of case law that like backs all of this up basically. And that's why we have robust financial markets around equities in the United States and elsewhere around the world is because we have property rights for those. What we don't have currently

is property rights for tokens. What we probably need is property rights for tokens. And I think that >> sounds like a framework article. The first step in getting there is identifying what a decentralized network token is relative to the equity. Like, but just to like pull the curtain back a little bit, when you're a company that's building a protocol, what happens is you start off as just a company and you raise venture capital for it. It's into a labs company, the investors who raise the money are getting, you know, equity in the company, but they're also getting a warrant for future tokens if you are to build the protocol. It's like the structural way to to fund you know new new networks. At a certain point the company basically splits. It's like the you know as life begin you know as life starts it's like the the cells split and

like one of them continues off as a foundation and one of them continues on as a company just like it was set up to do. There's an IP transfer that happens. So any of the IP that's related to the network, the token, the protocol that transfers to the foundation. Whatever's not stays within the company. There may be residual value in the company. There's a lot of people who will continue to work for the company developing open source software for the foundation. Maybe they're getting paid in tokens that the foundation is giving them. Like that that's structurally kind of like how everything works. But I hear you in that we don't have rules and regulations around, you know, I own this token, I get a proportional right to whatever is in this. That's why equities are outperforming like stocks are outperforming crypto right now because

everyone's like, "Well, I'm just going to go buy something that I know is going to stick around longer and has a has like I'm actually buying something that I know what I'm getting or something." Right. >> First step in us being able to do property rights for tokens is defining what a token is with market structure built. >> It all comes full circle. Vance, anything to add? You know, I I think uh it it has come full circle and there's going to be a lot of tokens that just have no purpose. But like this whole idea of there's a ton of breadth in crypto and a ton of projects to invest in, I think is just patently false. Like the industry needs to focus on the five to 10 that are really working. And I think some exchanges are somewhat incentivized against this. Like Coinbase specifically offering every coin under the sun,

including creator coins. It's just a travesty. I I think really this at some level also needs to be policed by the exchanges in terms of what they give access to users um or what users get access to to trade. >> Totally. >> So, you know, assuming that that that this market structure bill passes before the midterms, that would be the ideal for us, I think, as an industry. um we should get this like this should be the 2026 should very much be the year of kind of like defining what it is that we're building here uh in the industry from a token perspective what is the I mean like the logical consequence here second and third order is okay a lot of these tokens are going to be deemed as as you say Vance kind of like useless or worthless but then there should be a bit of like a a value concentration power

law happening this year and I put out this tweet um yesterday saying that I think 2026 is the will really get the you know further definition of like the mag seven of crypto that will be very investable tokens for like the next half decade. But then last night I was having uh beers with the with the circle head of research actually up here in Hawaii brought him to the place showed him the view was total total schmoo off and um you know he's like man it took you know 15 years for the mag seven of the actual equity market to be created. How do you guys think about like so the ramifications of what we're talking about here? Will we then see like this pocket of investable assets in crypto basically, you know, come by the end of the end of this year into next year? How

do you guys view that process of like basically consolidation happening? I I assume you feel you're already positioned for it in your portfolio. Other investors may not be. How do you kind of think about this? What's what's the mental model for this investable future of like smaller number of quality assets going forward? >> I mean, we may not be 15 years in, but we're at least five years in and we may not have a mag seven, but I think we've probably got like a mag three or four. >> Y there are investable assets. And the reason why you you call them a match seven is because they're the ones that have outperformed, but they've outperformed based off of their business being so strong and and growth being so robust, they just like drag the rest of the ind indices up and kicking and streaming in some cases. And you know,

[clears throat] we're at all-time highs. I think you know, the Dow Jones is like it either passed or or is about to pass 49,000, which would be an all-time high. Like but if you look at the representation of that there actually are a number of assets that have done well but like the max 7 is what's driving it and that's the whole point. If you look at any of and it's just it's unfortunate that this is the case but after 1010 we were at such a high point. If you look at any of the alts like they've just gotten absolutely crushed decimated like it is it is tough out there. But there are certain assets that are up you know on the year up since 1010 and have extreme growth forecast for what they're going to enable in 2026 like we are starting to separate what we

also need I think is understanding of how is something valuable in crypto and I think basically we've got three camps and it's like very very broad but the the three are bitcoin as one of them smart contract platforms that have you know um monetary premium. I would put Ethereum and Salana and that's it in that. And honestly and unfortunately, I would also maybe put XRP in that just based off of all the attention that they have. I I look it pains me to say, but that's true. >> That is brutal. >> The third the third camp is businesses with fundamentals that are on chain.

That's it. Those are the three categories. Just real quick from framework perspective is the allocation like you know a lot of bitcoin some of the some of camp 2 some of camp 3 or is it like just >> no I mean look it's hard to build a venture case or a venture fund around bitcoin >> of course >> now if you're an asset manager or an ETF manager doing a different strategy like if you if you can charge two and 20 to own bitcoin then that's great but I I I think that that's just not our our strategy that's not our forte um you know we did invest in Ethereum when we started the fund and that that was a huge you know value driver in our first fund as well as a number of other DeFi assets and and um a lot of them we've

talked about today. Yeah. >> Um but I think going forward it's who is building a strong business and has value cruel to a network asset with the expectation that over the lifetime of that investment property rights will define you know and structure around ownership of that asset. Within that last category, is there also a carveout for things that might not even launch a token, but they do have onchain services like maybe they have a like a Stripe that has a stable coin? >> Yeah. And and equity has been I mean, you probably saw the rain cards big that they raised today, but you know, it's never been better for equity investors. And >> I don't know if CT has figured this out yet or or maybe they have and they're and their butt hurt about it, but like that involves no community allocation.

Um, so that's kind of a tough one and um, you know, we've had big wins on the equity side and we're starting to see IPOs and M&A and things like that and that may be one of the animating forces behind crypto going forward is just this equity outcome uh, that is not available to the community. And uh, that means there's no wealth effect and that means there's all these other, you know, probably not as great uh, secondary knock-on effects. But I think what we've seen with um with tokens has been um we do have probably the mag three or four the incumbents are incredibly hard to displace especially now because there's no venture dollars which can fuel a real shot at them. Um and that all impacts frankly people's ability to get upside in these things and so I would say the

general retail participation landscape has to change pretty dramatically going forward. um there's not going to be a ton more airdrops like and frankly like as we think about tokens like it used to be we do you know uh one to two token or equity to token ratio I think that's kind of going away because there's no need to give half to the community anymore. Um, so we're we're closing the chapter on crypto, uh, the first era of real kind of venture-driven crypto with these tokens. And I think what we're going to be left with is kind of these one of one Monae paintings in terms of they're very unique. They're very uh singular. Um, but there's probably three or four tokens that are really worth buying and very very interesting as businesses. But that's it. And that's kind of our contribution to this world so far. And it won't stop there. But uh

generally tokens need to be treated better and part of that is regulation, part of that is you know giving less to the community, part of that is just having better business fundamentals, but probably not what people want to hear in terms of, you know, airdrop hunters or or whatever you want to call them. >> And just as additional color, you know, like at framework, we're probably 5050 tokens equity. So like we're talking tokens here and I think that's probably the most interesting you know generally right now um for this audience but equity I'd say is not only increasing in interest but it it it's been a mainstay of our strategy since day one.

>> There's an increasing breath of assets that have onchain products and services that don't have tokens and have equities. >> Yeah. >> Uh guys closing out. Um how are we feeling? Are are we still bowled up full on? Uh I'm I'm a little scared out here. [laughter] >> You've been scared for months though. I look >> Exactly. >> I think I think what I would say is that uh people should really read the documentation around both BMR and Micro Strategy. Those are the main driving factors of this market. And the MSCI decision, you know, they they actually kept Micro Strategy. Um, and then the Tom Lee pay package is on the 15th and there will be all sorts of knock-on effects to that

coupled with very strong ETF flows over the past week. Yesterday was outflows, but the first two days, you know, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday were nine figure days for both ETH and then high figure nine figure days for BTC. Like those two things, that's the one-two punch that makes the assets go up. Not the vibes, not the CT, you know, commentary, but those two things are what is the driving force. So, if you're bullish on crypto, it's because you understand those two things. Um, or you just have a view that these things are inevitable. But I would say Bitcoin and ETH are kind of singular and then the DeFi names are singular and then everything else, you know, is kind of out of our purview and and we don't really have a view. Um, there's things that haven't worked in the past, but I would say the vast majority of our

thought process is staying long uh and waiting for the inevitable push to new all-time highs for the majors. what Vance is um uh dancing around is a bit of a uh perspective that we have you know read about but also kind of discovered um and no no proprietary information here this is all in disclosures and and you know everything that's been uh put out from BMR in particular but it looks like um Tom Lee has been building an extremely large uh in the money call position on ETH um which as well as stacking ing um at least a billion in unencumbered cash right now, but that's been a billion for the last month plus while also hitting massive ATM numbers. Where is that cash

going? Our belief is that it's going into a very large call position, which you actually started to see earlier this week on the the dealers delta hedging um ETH, which is why it went from 2,700 to like 31, 32, 33 kind of out of nowhere and with no information whatsoever. Tom Lee has his shareholder vote next week. That shareholder vote decides his pay package. I our expectation is he's basically been building this position for the last month or two. Also, the expectation is that he's been selling a ton of puts in December when everybody thought it was going to a,000 or 1500. He's he was basically like nope. So like I think rotating the premiums from that raising the cash from the ATM and

building this massive call position um our our you know guess and a lot of people's guess seems to be in the high uh six figures potentially seven figures of ETH notional um and you know executing on that is um massive um so I would expect that there's potentially fireworks in the next few weeks for for in particular Ethereum I think the MCI I um announcement I agree is actually extremely bullish um sailor for the for at least another 12 months until he can rightsize the the ATM and fundraising process which I think he absolutely will. Um and yeah, I think you know we in talking about market structure here definitely have put a lot of you know uh chips on the on the table in terms of

market structure passing. I actually think that that it is important and it would be great if it passes like next week or gets through committee next week. I don't think it actually matters that much if it's before after the midterms because what will matter a lot more uh is what the innovation hub actually does and and the idea is like you join the innovation hub and the SEC wants people to join and they're like things that we have talked about you know on on channel today are are definitely you know looking at this very strongly um and the idea is that you get a a multi-year kind of sandbox um multi-year like effectively like a no action um for for three, four, five years. I'm not sure exactly how long it is, but the idea is like you get a long time to basically figure out everything. And in

doing so, you work with the SEC to as we're talking about like define some of these rules. So like extremely bullish that um just yeah, like that that's happening way sooner than any of the market structure bill would happen in the first place. So like >> that's that's way more bullish than market structure. And look, the the things that really matter as well are uh the DATs and the ETFs being in good shape plus a narrative drive and and we have all the ingredients for that with relatively light positioning. So that's kind of how we think about it. And I think at a very very high level, you know, in a world of AI and like how fat the tails are getting on with AI like you know

Skylink or Star Starlink or Sky Skynet, you know, robots taking over like there's going to be a need for a world computer. There's going to be a need for a digital store of value that is not gold. Um I I think there's a lot to be optimistic on with regards to just crypto's inevitability within a world uh filled with AI. Yeah, gave us the uh asteroid mining is getting extremely uh sophisticated. So, gold is going to be, you know, watch out for all your gold. >> The SpaceX IPO part of the SpaceX plan is >> I think I just 100x long to ETH. Thanks for coming on.

>> Again, is that a thousandx now? >> Thank you. >> I would just encourage you guys and anybody else who's curious to go dig through some BMR stuff because you pull on the thread, it gets it's long. Yeah, we stayed up I forget which night that was, but >> Tuesday night I found this article and Michael goes to bed much earlier than I do. Um, and I was just spamming Michael, [laughter] hey, like I found this like look at this and like I saw him the next morning very clear that he did not sleep at all. [laughter] >> Sounds very familiar. Sounds very familiar.

>> Michael is uh I'm more of the night owl. Michael is uh early early to bed early riser. >> All right, J. Happy New Year. Have a good weekend. Thanks for coming on. >> Cheers, guys. >> See you soon. >> Bye. >> Cheers. >> All righty, guys. Happy Friday. Aloha Friday, my boy. I'm out of here. >> Aloha Friday. >> I gotta pee like a racehorse. I am sweating. I'm hungry. I'm tired. What a week. What a fun stream as well. >> It's a good way to end off the week. >> Good way to cap off. Yeah, man. You guys are great. They they really help cut through the noise. Always bring us a uh a pretty unique perspective. >> They're just bullish on Neo Finance.

Everyone's bullish on Neo Finance, man. You got to love it. You got to absolutely love it. So, ladies and gentlemen of the Rollup TV community, see you fresh and early Monday. Speak soon. Mahalo. Chow. Chiao. Feel better, Rob. Bye. [music]