Key Predictions For 2025 | Analyst Round Table

Transcript

a lot of people are greenlit for 2025 those space is as de-risked as ever that means a lot of capital is coming and um there's going to be plenty of times to get shaken out along the way like most recently but like I don't know the price action matters so much less than the fundamental drivers um in the space today it's it's a really exciting time this episode is sponsored by scale scale has differentiated itself from other layer ones by offering users a network of gas-free interoperable evml ones where the users experience comes first explore the gas free ecosystem at scale.

Spacey and follow their Journey on X at scale Network to learn more about the gas free architecture and growth of the scale ecosystem visit the scale research Hub at scale. space resarch chaos Labs the leading onchain risk management firm recently launched its new flagship oracal product Edge Edge delivers integrated High Precision risk and price data for any application with the market follow and reach out to chaos Labs on X to learn more nothing said on zerox Research is a recommendation to buy or sell Securities or tokens this podcast is for informational purposes only and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions not Financial advice pachio Ryan and our guests May hold positions in the company's funds or

projects discussed hey welcome back to another episode of ox research today I'm joined by a lineup of analysts from the research team we've got Luke Ryan and Carlos today um how you guys doing I know the the market situation might look a little red and Bleak today or yesterday um any general thoughts or takeaways at the moment from you guys yeah I like lower prices lower prices or better prices temporarily lower prices but they're generally better yeah we've seen a vertical move since the election uh 7 or so green weeks without much consolidation so I'm ultimately just looking for a higher low and an uptrend

maybe sideways for two to four weeks um but optimistic for Price action in 20125 you saw that like I'm not a technical analysis guy but if you throw threw a Binger ban on bitcoin like it was way outside of the two standard deviation line for a while there done some Quant stuff in the past where like I think in trafi like NASDAQ never spent five days outside of that band and I think Bitcoin was a few days out of and just like looking back on the historical chart um strength measured from that perspective was quite High even given the crazy stuff that Bitcoin has done in the past so like it's got to happen um enjoy it it's what we signed up for love it I think um

gonna g to agree here as well remain generally optimistic bullish and excited about in oncoming Administration that is very Pro crypto from what we're seeing um across the board in all and all appointments um and all activities even you know World f um being built out so uh gonna jump on from the we're not going to talk too much about the market today instead I think um you know coming up on the end of the year we want to look ahead to 20125 um 2024 has been a great year actually for crypto I think lots of metrics for a lot of top protocols chains um different categories have kind of spawned and exploded um so want to

look ahead and kind of go down the line and and get from everyone like some top ideas and thesis going into 2025 um whether they're contrarian whether they're you know we think what the next big thing is coming um want the want the listeners to know kind of what we're thinking going into the new year Ryan if you want to start us out yeah so yeah we're gonna write a piece um every block Works analyst is kind of like putting pen to paper on like one or two ideas that they think are like most top of mine for next year some contrarian um some not not everything needs to be contrarian just like what trends matter right um and I think that you know one of the I I have two that

are top of mind uh I guess we'll start like with the one from that's a little bit more familiar on the defi side uh I think 2025 is the year that uh multiproduct defi really like wipes the floor with single product defi I think single product defi is a thing of the past um now that we have the green light on meaningful Capital coming into the space on the US or maybe like the yellow light but more or less the green light coming uh to that capital I think that capital is going to flow to things that are kind of like backwards compatible with what people are used to and I think that you know multiproduct defi has a number of

characteristics that that really um just like naturally makes sense and that will just like naturally give it market share um the first is that like I think def defi protocols and defi users naturally benefit from increasing wallet share on the protocol side you get to cross sell it just makes sense and then on the and on the on the user side like they're being they're used to being cross sell too right so if you like think of your banking relationship like you don't have a checking account one place and like a savings account another place and investment account somewhere else like you typically do it all one spot you do your private wealth you do your banking you get a mortgage whatever like it it's

it's there are synergies between those products they should all happen in one place more or less um and then just like these things enable Capital efficiency like you have this weird def landscape where if you want to margin something on like hyper liquid you can only do it within with your your assets that are in hyper liquid and that's incredibly capital and efficient like we should start bundling these protocols together to give users Capital efficiency and frankly institutional customers are going to start demanding that so you're already starting to see it I think that's starting to take place like a is moving into stable coins drift has a bunch of products um that it's bundling together and doing cross margin on so like that

kind of like the writing's on the wall and I think that that I think that that accelerates in 2025 I think I would agree with that um we've seen especially in the lending vertical that I can think about like in Solana you can see Camino they built a lot of products on top of like their money market uh they released like the long short product for spot leverage uh they have their multiply bols like for uh leveraging up and looping like lsts and now now they release like their amm and like you've seen that in other systems as well like I recently wrote a flash note on Swedeland and I think it's very interesting like they start with one

product like the money market but then they released products that are tightly integrated with that money market to create a growth fly whe so like suland for example released like the uh spring sui standard for lsds with instant on staking and they release their own LSD so that LSD by suland like as it grows like it is deposited into the money market and creates like a flywheel for both products and now they'll release an amm that will also like go back to the money market and create like this uh virtuous cycle that creates like growth and as you say Ryan like it's not just one product that that is isolated from

the rest but like people can have all of their assets like in one specific platform which is more Capital efficient and has better like ux yeah I'm going to give a thumbs up here as well on a on a related category like in lending I think we're seeing as well um a lot of teams have been going after this new design like Moro Oiler Camino new versions are going after like this sort of Vault aggregated product design where really the intention is to enable like potentially if it's risk experts or other protocols to just ad hoc create these like products Vault products that they can incorporate directly into their own protocols protocols um we're this with moon moonwell leveraging Moro um I know sky and the sparkk um as well and I

would expect to like just see that generally grow as we've seen this category kind of they're sort of starting to adopt and and Trend in this direction um I would expect to see more protocols kind of latch onto that and build out products on top of these things do you think that any one ecosystem is doing more of this than another seems to it seems like salana ecosystem teams are pretty focused on this like they have a lot of teams that are doing it uh where like I know likeu might be a little too early to say but SW land's a good example uh I feel like the eth folks are a little slow to move in that direction or have been historically yeah I would say that does like the sort of historical Giants in eth do seem to have like captured their

kind of dominant position and for a long time sort of remain at that spot um without going after this approach but I would generally agree that like you know we've seen Jupiter and um Camino and others like in in goo you I think you can really list off basically any of the top projects at this point that are looking at you know multiple products multiple vertical um I think just something that maybe they realized early from looking back at kind of the history of eth and where we're at today um that this is sort of a Natural Evolution for things yeah I think within the evm landscape you're seeing more applications basically extend Integrations or composability to products offered by other applications

such as like listing a Pendle principal token Market to be able to Loop that um we don't really see money markets trying to offer that product themselves but as you called out Ryan um looking at the salana defi suite and as Carlos highlighted as well like Camino certainly seems to be doing um a number of different all-in-one offerings like they offer the liquidity product for automated rebalancing on a concentrated LP position then you can borrow against that on the money market you can take the um Jupiter LP position for their Perpetual Futures protocol and borrow against that on the money market or

multiply it through um the multiply product and I think uh I think those offerings kind of allinone on on Camino definitely kind of extend the uh the total addressable Market that that they can offer their products to I think kind of like writing's on the wall here I wouldn't say this is too contrary and maybe um the degree to which I think it it's going to happen perhaps is contrarian um I think you're seeing these AI agent like meme coins or Creator let's call them Creator coins um like zerro and Ai 16z and you know um I don't want to say

others because they're too small cat but like there's a bunch of really interesting stuff out there um these things are like create these teams are creating music creating art creating videos and like parlaying that attention with a token which I think is really powerful and I think is going to kind of catapult perhaps a few of these names into like mainstream consciousness if you look at Instagram today there are multiple influencers that are completely AI generated with hundreds of thousands of followers that are generating uh real revenue for the teams that are behind them and it will not surprise me if a handful of these

influencers with armed with tokens to get that extra attention from folks are catapulted to like top influencer positions in 2025 and start to make other influencers think about like how they're approaching the market like to me these influencers are just much more scalable than a human right uh they can work when others aren't working they don't get tired um they're higher margin inherently um and they can better adapt towards sh to shifting Trends in attention so if you think of like Facebook's ads algorithms right like they look more like that than a human does they can very quickly adapt to

what's top of mind and stay relevant so armed with a token which we're realizing with things like far coin um can really catapult something into the mainstream um it won't be a surprise to me if like you see some top creators in 2025 coming directly from the crypto space yeah I second that um this is definitely something I expect to continue to grow notably in 2025 and I kind of see AI agents basically accelerating their Capital formation through the utilization of onchain rails uh the the truth terminal Salon account has received over $40

million in tokens of course the account wasn't purchasing these on chain but rather they were sent to the account from the public uh zbro as well north of 10 million um in tokens and countless other examples of um agents becoming capitalized in aggregate north of a billion dollars um I don't know yet what vertical whether it's content creation or perhaps onchain algorithmic trading um might be the most lucrative Endeavor for the agents um at large it's clear that these agents

can raise a tremendous amount of capital incredibly quickly and I think this will ultimately look like the most productive agents being able to generate some return on that Capital through some some action whether that's uh content creation um or you name it so I think like the rails clearly eliminate uh much of the frictions and latencies associated with the Legacy Capital formation process and as a lot of these tokens have blown up um it's it's going to be increasingly evident to AI development Talent what the incentives

are for building in the onchain space and um as more of these sophisticated agents get shipped um I think the most productive ones will be able to generate return on a large amount of capital and I think that can be highly disruptive one thing that I do think is interesting to point out is that we're basically having like a bit of an Ico moment again where like these AI teams essentially you know developers have kind of they sort of co-opted the mcoin you know pump fund Launchpad rails into you know a means to raise capital and then you know build out products and develop these things um which I think is just it's interesting and like you're

saying Luke it it removes all of that complexity of like you let's say you're going to do an AI startup and and raise money the traditional route like there's a lot more that needs to go on there to sort of get to that point raise funding you know hire some people kind of build out the the actual product um we've dramatically reduced that time period here to where somebody you know if it's a prominent you know AI agentic researcher Etc um they can get their idea out there raise some capital and just go after it very quickly um and in terms of like where we see these things going what I do think is interesting is if we look at you know sort of like AI generated slop content that gets spat out on like Facebook and other platforms for I would say probably the older

Generations who maybe can't or don't really are are not really quite as in tune with the the tech and the culture today as maybe younger Generations would be they're maybe not differentiating that stuff from just like other memes that might get posted um I think as these models and like as the tech more mature like we we might see that that sort of age um decline in terms of who is if you want to call it being fooled or like just enjoys the content that these things are creating as it gets more and more sophisticated obviously like people are rallying behind some of these personalities today right like you know truth terminal zerro they've they've dropped albums on Spotify and you know this like cult Community is interested in that but like probably the

expectation more broadly is that as the the models and the technology you know get more inter like more capable and also more integrated with different if it's apps or platforms um we can see that sort of like General audience appeal grow um and go from you know obvious like crappy generated art to like wow this is actually this is a really cool like video I just watched and it was entirely AI generated and the user has no idea can we take a I I wanted to ask a question on something that Luke said earlier of all the capital these tokens are raising or like like a16 Z and zro are like how are they doing that are

they asking for it or people are just sending them tokens and they've effectively like made these AI agents like millionaires it's uh it's the lad you can check the um truth terminal uh account activity on Soul scan and see that these tokens were sent to the address from the public and um the the account isn't transacting on on chain to initiate the launch or purchase the tokens um so that's probably coming next then it's I'll say there's a parallel here that I think is interesting is that it reminds me it's like reminiscent of 2021

when you know shib and other coins would send a billion tokens to vitalic like a prominent figure now we're having the same thing but it's like sending Your Meme coin to the AI agent personality and seeing what happens one thing that I find interesting is that in contrast to like static memes like sh wh or whatever like these AI agents have a ton of execution risk like you look at cereo you look at truth terminal now there's an expectation that they deliver content and that every time they get better and better and if they don't meet these expectations like there's it's clear like execution risk like for the project

and it may not vote well for the token whereas you look at things like fcoin where there's literally no execution risk it's just like a meme and it has done a lot better like recently and I think that's that's part of it right like you don't have as many expectations from the token like it just is like it's it's just a meme right whereas with AI agents like you you you have certain expectations that that you need to fulfill yeah there's totally execution risk but I I feel like there's like it's your you're I feel like the market is bigger for the AI agent coins than pure meme coins

like I I think the amson like framework um like obviously like he's he's had done a great job of at everything this cycle I have to say that first and foremost but I think like in hindsight like thinking like betting on whiff to be the thing that people buy when they on board like it is a silly concept that you're just buying a coin that does nothing um espe and especially it's like why am I buying the dog with the hat where I could buy a portion of this cool new AI agent thing and I can potential like it looks more like a stock right which I think is familiar to people they feel like they're participating in the economic upside side and you know perhaps that Tam is bigger than the I

want to buy the funny picture because other people are buying the funny picture I'm I I probably agreed with anom going into this but now seeing seeing what these AI agent coins can do like I I think the Met is kind of Shifting I I would agree with that the only thing I would say is like the game becomes a lot more it's a lot harder right because you need to Peak some like you need to bet on the team basically and you need to know that they are able to execute it's not just it's not as simple as like the dog has a hat anymore right you need to have a thesis of what that AI agent will do in the future that will basically gather more attention and and and make the token like do well

basically yeah it also makes me bearish on the Launchpad idea um just that they um it's so you need you need a team with AI expertise and like a strategy you need the like you need a go to market I think the dynamic agent instruments do carry more execution risk but concurrently carry more potential upside as well through the ability to generate a return on whatever Capital they're they're able to raise um like looking at zerbo I've now scrolling through Instagram have seen accounts with absolutely no relation to crypto or artificial intelligence like fill in a

re with audio of a zerro track and like to the extent the content can escape The Silo of like just the AI or crypto industry um like there's a lot of upside for um it's like Mass market products or content that um Can ultimately like to the most productive AI be able to generate a return back to whatever token so I will say there is an interesting maybe Point here to be made that like if we're talking about these AI agent teams that are specifically going the content route um while there may not be

execution risk to like a dog whff hat and there is to the agent they do both fundamentally rely on like this growth of attention fun right if the goal of the agent is to produce like meaningful content that people want to watch and then earn revenues on the basis of like you know song plays or you know watches on YouTube in adrev um you are coming down to the same fundamental thing of needing to drive attention to this thing um obviously that can be it's it might be a bit different right if you're continuously able to put out new and evolving and interactive content that's a bit different than like one static image like it's been mentioned but um kind of fundamentally there is this similar theme that they're both going after attention kind of in the in the

whether it's the short term or in the longer term hey everyone we'd like to give a special shout out to the sponsors of today's episode scale scale is built different unlike other layer ones scale is offering users a network of gas-free interoperable evml ones where user experience comes first scale operates like the AWS infrastructure model where developers pay for space in the network in skl tokens to validators essentially scale has chain fees and not gas fees this allows for free transactions on scale and has saved 46 million users over 9 billion in gas fees explore the gas free ecosystem at scale.

Spacey and follow their Journey on X at scale Network visit the scale research Hub to learn more about the gas-free architecture and growth of the ecosystem that's scale. space research chaos Labs the leading onchain risk management firm recently launched its new flagship Oracle product Edge Edge delivers integrated High Precision risk and price data for any application with the market after 2 months of securing Jupiter Edge has already secured 30 billion in volume and more than 60% of all Salon of perss volume edges comprised of three components High Precision price data with an integrated risk engine automated delivery of real-time parameter adjustments on chain and secure delivery of custom data points via zero knowledge proofs follow and reach out to chaos Labs on X to learn more thanks again to

chaos labs for sponsoring today's episode Carlos do you want to jump in with your key thesis for 25 sure um so my thesis is basically it's not contrarian I will say it's more momentum thesis and I think Athena continues to do very well in 2025 like assuming the bull market continues historically funding rates and open interest have been high during these periods and I think like USD is just meant and Bill for this type of conditions uh since October like the supply of USD has more than doubled uh I believe in that it's now like at six

billion and I think atha has a chance like at eating marketer from tar and circle in the coming year and I think that has second order effects on the ecosystem particularly in the money markets you've seen things like Pendle and a a like grow in in the posit by quite a lot and stable utilization rates rise a lot and that rises uh interest rates basically and I think that votes well for other protocols that people are not seeing and I'm thinking about uh Moro in particular in the landing landscape uh the thing with a is that as utilization rates drive up I think that

uh because it has like just a multi-asset lending pool uh like rates will be very high for spot leverage positions whereas Moro has more like a modular approach where they have a separate markets for separate like Risk profiles so like you can have very high Landing rates on the Athena pool let just say but then you can have lower rates for like just opening Along on ethereum and so I think like Moro will keep eating market share from a maybe like obviously not flip it but I think like in the past year it has grown like over 200x in TBL and I think like it will continue to do very well and get some Market sh from Abby I don't know

what you guys think yeah I I would agree with that Outlook um the growth in moro's kpis against a are are definitely a compelling momentum Trend that I'd expect to continue um just the capital efficiency you can get with the mod modular Market lending architecture is improved and watching this industry long enough like it's clear every single incumbent can ultimately get disrupted through a better product with better Tech and better Innovation um Su ssde has been an incredible product um offering pretty attractive apy of course

a lot of that is Downstream of current market conditions and the elevated demand for leverage um we've seen higher funding rates we've seen higher open interest during a bull market um so I think there's still upside there for the usde Supply um then if we think of the downstream effects for defi like as you called out Pendle has been huge beneficiary of uh the growth in usde uh PT and YT products are very compelling instruments to get long or short exposure to the underlying on ssde then think of Downstream of Pendle

um Integrations with money markets like a um or Moro Moro beat a to the punch for listing uh s usde pts and that has been you know particularly good market for them um a has a proposal to list that market um but Moro beat them to it so yeah I would agree with Carlos's Outlook how much do you think that listings matter to the lenders a good amount um if I we think of like this ssde strategy on money markets um for a they added about a billion in ssde in

just under a month um so there's huge interest for suppliers to deposit that collateral type that's carrying call it 27% apy and borrow Stables against it at 10 to 15 and perhaps Loop that strategy um then if we think of like The Edge that um using an ssde principal token from Pendle can offer is you're basically going to get a fixed yield to maturity for borrowing against that instrument and looping it whereas on the a market right now your your collateral asset side is going to be paying paying you a a variable apy so you have both

legs of your looping strategy U basically pay ping a variable rate if you can take one side of uh one leg of that strategy and have it be paying a fixed rate I think it can uh basically drisk utilization of of that instrument maybe a related question um I would I would Ponder like do we see a point here is a going to be forced to tip their hand and adopt a similar design and go after this modular like lending Vault um system as well because I think having just looked at Moro myself and um put out a report recently it's their deposit growth has just been like straight line up only over the past year um clearly

like it's it's a great design and like Risk risk curators and experts and you know risk advisory firms have jumped on to like I mean that's that's um it's a great opportunity for them to like build their businesses and um earn performance fees for building out vaults like I think there will like adopt a similar approach what I would say say is like it's harder for them to do so because they are so mature now and so they have like 20 plus billion in tvl and they have that deployed across multiple ecosystems it's not like just one deployment like on ethereum Manet they are in multiple chains so I like I think like technically it's a lot harder from for them to do so and there's a lot higher like higher risk because they

have a lot more TV at stake yeah there's more I guess technical debt in 's current implementation that's kind of going to be a barrier to ship the same functionality that Moro can offer right now that being said like a is working in this modular direction through something like uh the Lio Prime instance but then also the sort of markets they're going to ship with uh the V4 upgrade um but given the current implementation and both both like the size of the project the number of Downstream dependencies and just the nature of Dow governance and development

um they may not be able to move at the velocity they need to to remain competitive against um moro's current offering so I mean a a has an incredible moat in terms of the absolute value of deposits and borrows within the ecosystem um but ultimately like Capital efficiency matters and right now that's that's moro's Edge so um I'm unsure if you know Moro can or will flip a but it is a contender over what time frame if you if you think that Moro could flip a

could it be this cycle I would say no um given both just like the current lead um and also how long I think like the cycle is is going to last um do I think it happens within a year which is kind of my my outlook for the rest of the cycle that might be too much too quick but um on a long enough time Horizon like two to five years I definitely think it matters during the bare Market of 2022 there was a time where maker Dow was the largest lender through the die Supply compared to a um what we've seen since the start of the bull is A's

supply of deposits and total borrows um has outpaced H makers kpis on those on those metrics um by hundreds of percent so it can happen you heard it here first Moro flips a Luke's calling it in the next bare Market um all right I like it Luke do you want to jump into what are your what are your other big calls for 2025 yeah so this one is um similar to Carlos's idea about uh the usde supply but I think we have an incredibly positive context right now for uh continued growth in the aggregate stable

coin Supply um which is just recently eclipsed 200 billion um but across the board there are so many onchain venues and products for stable coins whether it's secured lending uh looping ssde that these these positions are paying very elevated yields whether it's you know 10 to 40% on a stable coin position that is you know secured lending on an nonchain money market or or something like that and that's a really compelling risk premium on you know Delta's equivalent

to a dollar position that's you know well in excess of the 4 and a half% federal funds rate that could drop further from here so so long as there's this huge spread to that risk-free rate I think there's a very compelling incentive for a lot of money that that is currently in trafi to become interested in these onchain products given the risk premium and as that money flows in the aggregate stable coin Supply can grow notably from here um I've seen some figures thrown out that we hit 500 billion on the aggregate stable coin Supply I may not be that

bullish for 2025 I think uh 300 billion is definitely in play um particularly given the current context of elevated yields but then on a much longer time Horizon thinking 5 to 10 years um I would expect trillions in the aggregate stable coin Supply and there's there's no better backdrop to move in that direction than the fact that you're getting paid handsomely on those deposits um and for bringing that money on chain so that's my outlook for for stable coins for 2025 what do you think are like the downstream impacts like what apps benefit from that um if you were to make

some longer tail Investments um to take advantage of that meaningful increase in onchain Stables yeah so so Circle and therefore like coin bases I think 50% stake and in circle is uh one example of that but of course like circle is is clipping a large margin right now that is then many other uh projects opportunity to eat into so as Carlos highlighted like Athena's Sude with a much better yield can certainly eat into that market share

then also as you see if if you were to see the aggregate stable coin Supply grow um that could be more deposits into onchain ecosystem and money markets a Camino and andoro I would highlight in particular so as deposits and borrows borrows in particular grow on those money markets uh the money markets get to uh clip a take rate on a growing borrow base that is now currently paying elevated apy and um both a and Camino put in their highest revenue generating month um this past month in November and

yeah I think they certainly stand to benefit how do you guys think about like beneficiaries in terms of chains because historically like ethereum has had the majority of stable coins in circulation like if you think that stable coins grow to trillions of dollars in value do you think that stays that way like ethereum mayet keeping the majority of liquidity let's just say or do you think like Solana with Camino has a chance like to finally scale in terms of like stable coins in circulation uh because historically it's been it's been really hard for like Solana to have a lot of a lot of Staples like I think arbitr base have more stable coins than Solana which like to

me is kind of baffling I don't know how you think about that that that sort of growth in terms of like chains or or what what needs to be done like to get there I definitely have a um a fast chain bias that I think a lot of fast chains with high throughput low latency low transaction fees will continue to gain market share against the ethereum layer one um how it relates to like stable coins in particular I think is more important for like a a high volume use case whether that's going to be payments or Dex activity that's denominated in

stable coins but as it relates to money markets I think that differentiator is less important when you might just have one transaction that's either a deposit or a borrow and then you then hold that position for a high time frame weeks or months in that case that the latency throughput block time median transaction fee is much less important yeah I also I think I want to caveat like when you adjust base uh when you adjust bases stable coin balance for what they simply hold on the exchange so if you go to like base scan and you look at the top

holders of usdc there are like 20 accounts with 101 million um usdc in it and it's all just like sitting there it's just like a coinbase inventory so when you adjust for that and when you adjust arbitrum for hyper liquid usdc I think that um I think salana might be second and stable coins to BNB and eth um so I I don't think the picture is and Tron of course yeah um I don't I don't think it's as it's actually it's somewhat surprising that um salana stable coin activity is or sorry balance the the balance of stable coins on the chain is as low as it is but I think when you make those critical adjustments

it looks much better on a relative basis and I think also in terms of like stable coin transfer volume like you see it on the series on emis there was a huge like salana had the lead in stable coin transfer volume that was actually due to that Exchange Phoenix and market makers cancelling then posting Market orders again I think they've adjusted for that and I think it's only second to eth on the chains that they track and I don't know if they I don't know know if they track um Tron so I don't think it's as Bleak but um I I do think like there's there's a lot of progress to be made on salana yeah I guess what I would reflect is that I I would expect to see outsize

growth in the ecosystems where the opportunities are so you know if activity I mean Salon of stable coins have grown quite a bit I think over the prior you know year and a half probably I think maybe 3x from the lows of um 22 23 um which is fairly significant you know if you look at ethereum it's maybe up from 60 billion to the hundred some billion range um so the growth has been there but it's just the you know the relative total size is just starting from a much much lower point but I think if the you know if the activity continues to happen um in these particular ecosystems if it's you know lots of activity on salana lots of activity on base um that drives up rates for supplying Stables because of you

know demand for leverage or demand for um The Stables themselves like I do think there's some natural tendency that those will grow um it's you know looking out five 10 years it's it's going to be really hard to bet on which um specific chains those are going to be um we could see so many things disrupted in that time but um despite what Ryan says about you know if you discount some of the base Stables um I it would not be surprising to see some of these platforms like Kraken as well has just launched their L2 Inc um I wouldn't be surprised to see other exchanges like at some point perhaps we see a Robin Hood um L2 or chain um affiliation um and maybe others um and to basically direct their users

on chain through their you know either their Affiliated chain or like their preferred kind of destination um I would expect to see stable coins grow you know on a relative basis much much quicker in these locations versus you know if people really aren't you know performing activities on eth outside of the the capital that's just sort of been there since since last cycle yeah I think I think Stables on eth is just a result of path dependency and just like exchanges having a bunch of them right like there's just like volume that gets cleared on E because there's a lot of eth tokens and the have billion dollar valuations and they trade a bunch um that changes over time it's it's not one of my favorite indicators to be honest stable coins like I understand that it's important um I

understand it could be a signal of like it could be a signal of mass adoption I don't think it is today because I don't think anyone's really doing payments I think it's just like Risk Managers who want to hold like Risk who want to like bring risk to zero on chain um and I don't I don't expect a lot of these chains to have large stable coin balances because I feel like once you like you park your cash balance like not onchain functionally as an asset manager like you don't want to to have Smart contract risk um you could probably like with your Brokers just like flip into a money market and not have to own the stable um so I I think it'll be a function of

onchain Risk Managers more than more so than payments and um you know I just that really hasn't happened in size like talking to funds you like even the more quantitative ones you think like oh they're on chain all the time like they're not um or at least I've been I've been surprised with how much I thought they were on chain compared to like the reality of it so 2025 that probably changes 26 that probably changes yeah I I agree with that framing that like if you're a professional money manager Fiat in a bank account is a very different exposure than some onchain stable coin position um but like if you're that onchain if you're that money manager if you're going to get paid

enough to hold those stable coins on chain and you're your profit maximizing um I think that that's the reason to move move that Fiat onchain and grow the stable coin Supply um if if we were seeing uh A's a USD Supply rate at 4% Athena at at seven um and there's no compelling risk premium I would be not bullish the um the growth in aggregate stable coin Supply but to the extent people are going to get get paid on those positions um I think there's enough incentive that it Trends up into the right yeah the the risk reward is

compelling especially during these times when when rates really Skyrocket um due to the other onchain activity it's it's a pretty strong point um now that uh I think we we kind of mentioned or maybe Luke I think you mentioned you know fast chain good sort of idea there um my I think my key takeaway for next year is um sentiment has has been a bit interesting I think in regards to maybe some of these upcoming fast chain good deployments um hyper liquid has been the Talk of the Town lately um people have been very excited you know the they love the product they love the token launch um I think it has somewhat distorted maybe expectations of like all future

chains and token launches to come at least for a period um I think we tend to see the cyclical nature of when the best air drop ever drops um you know people get really excited and then when a when a poor one follows um they they get really dis disinterested but um I think we've got multiple chains coming up um that are more than just like vanilla evm implementations um you know the monads the Mega eths um and even the bear chains um and related coming in 2025 where you know it seems that the community is maybe discounting some of these a bit um either because they've taken too long to come to Market you know they're sitting around wondering like where's the token I want to bid it up while Bitcoin is above 100K um and maybe some are thinking now like oh you

were too late you missed it like the bare Market's coming um I don't think so but regardless of that the I think going along this line of you know dropping you know meaningful improvements to the sort of the tech stack the product stack and bringing like interesting new app deployments to these chains um I'm really interested in like Monet specifically um you know there are teams going after like some interesting like app types um trading on you know whether that's like Leverage sports betting um or going after like interesting ideas in terms of like attention markets like trading social media activity so you know making uh you know a bet on whether um a a particular

influencer or video might gain or lose an attention um overc coming weeks um just having these like faster evm sort of implementations similar to what bass is trying to do growing the the throughput and scale of the chain um to enable you know Mega eth calls it closer to realtime um blockchain I don't know if we'll get to like what is theoretically a real-time blockchain but regardless of that opening up like higher scale applications for if it's social apps um which people have talked about for you know years now FR Tech flopped and you know we've been kind of hoping for the next one pump fun has maybe filled that void for the time being um they're going to open up opportunities for exciting new apps um

and their some of interest and then the other one is even if the tokens themselves do not pull off a hype level performance you know post launch um opportunities for incentiv incentivization if it's um you know farming new native protocol tokens um you know just incentivized liquidity rewards I think Luke you know you had a recent report onu um and after deep books you know deep token launched there were incredibly high like multi hundred% um pools to farm with you know deep inui or deep in stable coins Etc um they open up just interesting strategies for Capital to come on chain and you know whether it's arbit out or just Farm you know delta neutral and um you know capture some free income for the time

being um either way I I think that these will inevitably draw um attention and take some mind share and you know the the hot ball of money will at the very least give it a rotation if not you know be excited um by new apps and opportunities yeah I think there's demand in the market for on the dev side spoke mostly about the consumer side but on the dev side I think there is a I think there's pent up demand in the market for a highly scalable integrated evm I think to the interesting thing about barah and man that is not going to be or that wasn't true about apos andu is that I think they're going to have a

bunch of things to do on on day one and I think that um I'm I'm not an expert on how they're dropping tokens to the communities but they do have like large pre-established communities like going to Singapore like I met at not bar chain events a bunch of people building and very like part of that Community the be chain community so like they have a bunch of people ready to go which I think we haven't seen historically so be interesting to see what happens um in the it's a long game but I think these guys will be a little faster out the gate than chains have been historically I do think if yeah if I had to call out of risk to these ecosystems it's the kind of time to deploy um apps

you know following main net launch um I would agree that like the feeling that I get today is there's sort of an expectation that there will be a you know wide range of applications available on mainnet day one um if not Day Zero and if that's true it is like fundamentally different from what we've seen historically like even Bas was you know a bridge you could get eth onto the chain and people you know quickly spun up you know bald meme coins and got rugged on them um but there wasn't really anything to do it took a few months to really get things going to get to get apps deployed and for stuff to do so um this might be one of the first times where we see a chain potentially

with um you know an ecosystem of apps to use day one um and if and if that's not the case then that would be like a serious execution risk um because you can't sit around for months um with with nothing nothing to do when I think like maybe Luke mentioned people are thinking that the bull market is kind of drawing near to its end potentially yeah I think every new ecosystem will have its new projects that particularly a hyper performant evm will be able to have deployed at Genesis um better than something like sdos would have at Genesis so I think a lot of

these projects will have tokens and they'll have Juiced farming opportunities and in my opinion airdrop farming is my favorite game in crypto and I think uh I think there's going to be a lot of lot of interested money that will be uh wanting to play that game on these new ecosystems totally agree um well I think we've been all around the horn here anyone have any big final thoughts or takeaways before we I think before this episode closes out the year I think um just tough to make macro predictions but I think 2025 you know a lot of people are greenlet for

2025 the space is as drisk as ever um that means a lot of capital's coming and um there's going to be plenty of times to get shaken out along the way like most recently but like I don't know the price action matters so much less than the fundamental drivers um in the space today it's it's a really exciting time so see you in 25 love it we'll call it there thanks uh for coming on guys and we will see you all next time in the new thanks again to scale for sponsoring today's episode if you weren't already planning to make sure to go check out scale's ecosystem explore the gas free

ecosystem at scale. and follow their Journey on X at scale Network and visit the scale research Hub to learn more about the gas-free architecture and growth of the ecosystem that's scale. space resarch [Music]