Macro Updates, Industry Narratives & Big Tech Coming For Crypto | Permissionless IV Recap

Transcript

Hey everyone, quick disclaimer before we get into today's episode. Nothing said on Bell Curve is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is forformational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Our guests and I may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed. Well, here we are. We're doing it live. Uh, welcome everyone. This is a bit of a a permissionless wrap. We we gathered the Block Works podcast Avengers to uh to riff a little bit, talk about the conference. Uh we should be doing this over beers, but unfortunately it's like noon, so not quite yet. But um yeah, I I guess I'll I'll introduce uh we have Felix of Forward Guidance fame, Rizzo of

Supply Shock fame, and then the research guys. Wow. Danny and Machio. Um, my rivals a little bit. Um, real. Yeah. I I mean, we've all been at various different panels running here and there. I've been drinking lots of the, uh, the free espresso drinks has kind of been my focus this week. But, uh, but we all have different vantage points. So, um, maybe I'll just throw it for some opening remarks. Toss it over to you, Felix. Like, leaving Permissionless 4, uh, how are you feeling? What What are the takes? what what stood out to you this week? Yeah, so I was up here just a couple hours ago doing a a piece on treasury companies and token acquisition

companies and yeah, that's where a lot of the momentum is right now. It's it's interesting to see, you know, it always feels like every crypto cycle is we uh we take one new thing and then suddenly you get a proliferation and you get 30 of them in quick order. And we always love to to test things to their logical extremes. So, you know, we're in that moment now. It's I think there's still a lot of runway. There's a lot of demand for this. You know, there's there's a there's a lot unlocking new, you know, asset classes in terms of being able to have access to these debt markets.

That's a whole different investor base than equities. So, it's it's really exciting. I I am cautiously excited about the meta. I think obviously, you know, Michael Sailor and Michael Strategy has just been exceptional in in leading and innovating this. It's it's truly fascinating as a as a huge finance nerd to see some of these these new debt issuance vehicles that they've had. Obviously, they they spearheaded the convertible debt idea and now there's just a whole bunch of other issuance as well. So, that's been really great. Um, yeah, you know, it's it's interesting.

Now, it feels like every other crypto token is going to have their own acquisition company. We had Joseph Lubal on other earlier about Asbet. So yeah, interested to see where it goes from here and yeah, still you know trying to present the risk associated with it as well. You know there's no such thing as a free lunch in finance. It may seem that way in the short term but you always got to be conscious of some of the risk associated with it. So cautiously optimistic. Rizzo, what what's your Yeah. Yeah, I'll dive in there. Uh first off uh great to see Bitcoin leading the discussion here on this panel and uh I think Bitcoin's been very well represented at this conference which I think is a contrast right to maybe even last year or the last couple years right I think uh

obviously everybody here knows Bitcoin. How many people here own Bitcoin? I want to get a sense of the crowd. Okay. How many people here don't own Bitcoin? How many people are proudly non Bitcoin owning? Okay. We got a couple hands. Okay. So it seems like Bitcoin is winning, right? I think that's great. I think you talked about the was it token acquisition companies call them Bitcoin treasuries uh you for the most part right but uh yeah it's been nice to see Bitcoin at the forefront of the discussion uh there was even a huge track on Bitcoin L2s and kind of porting a lot of the crypto technology over to Bitcoin which obviously I'm cautiously optimistic about as well but uh yeah nice to see Bitcoin represented in the discussion maybe in ways that in years past it has has not been so do you guys

think the um the token acquisition thing has peaked or no no this is going to get 100 times larger uh because in every one of these markets these capital markets there exists uh inefficiencies uh you know metaplanet I don't know if people are familiar with this but this is a company out of Japan that's executing the strategy Michael Sailor strategy uh why is MetPanet the best performing stock in Japan weak yen uh ETFs don't exist in Japan uh and the tax if you own Bitcoin and you sell it in self custody is something like 50% compared to 10% uh with the stock. So these are natural market asymmetries. And if the prize for closing one of these asymmetries is that

you end up owning 20,000 Bitcoin, you're going to you better bet that everybody in every capital market in the world is going to be racing. And and we say every capital market in the world, Africa capital markets, Europe capital markets, Indonesia capital markets, everywhere. If everywhere there was an opportunity for you to start a company and to own 5,000 Bitcoin, that's huge. Yeah. I I I think this dovetailes a little bit um with the take I was bringing, which is that I I think as as fellas in the content world, we're actually going to look back on this like these past six months as like a golden age. Um, a lot of times in crypto like something will work and then there's

like a hundred copycats of it until you're bored to death about talking about it, which is going to happen with, you know, treasury acquisition vehicles. Um, but it it actually feels like in recent months we've seen a lot of novelty. Um, to the extent you can call like crypto uh treasury vehicles novel, um, the the proliferation of them at least has been something new. Um, and I I I would agree with y'all's answer to my question that I think this thing hasn't peaked. You're going to see crazier versions of it, more unhinged kinds of uh ideas. Wait till you see these bundle as ETFs and they get wrapped into each other. We're just starting, man. It's early. We're we're now tokenizing the tokenizing the stocks

that buy the tokens. How deep can the rabbit hole go? Oh, it just keeps going. and and um you also I think another place to look for this is in sort of big tech crypto M&A. So Stripe acquiring bridge and now privy recently. I think a lot of uh traditional tech or finance firms are probably looking at that and saying hey you know what can we go buy there's probably not a lot of great stuff that you would want to buy but that doesn't mean that it's not going to happen. Um, and so I would I would expect a lot more like M&A like deals. Uh, following Circle's IPO, I'd expect more IPOs, maybe a return to some kind of like spa vehicles. Um, and that that might get tiresome, but like right now, you know, Felix told me in Slack, don't buy

Circle. You know, what whatever you do, it's it's overpriced and it's just it's just gone up. Thanks for throwing me under the bus. Uh, join the Telegram for the alpha. Yes, exactly. Um, but we're we're going to see like many more IPOs trying to recapture that circle magic. So, I think I think right now is kind of a point in time where there's actually a lot of novel interesting things to talk about. So, I've been uh appreciative as someone who kind of writes about crypto every day. Um, I don't know what's going on in the trenches over there. Yeah, I'm in the trench guys. I was going to actually agree uh the, you know, this this talk about we like to take things to the extreme. You know, one thing works and then we do it a thousand times. And I think like from my POV, I think we're

seeing that a little bit, right? you know, Poly Market, KHI, they just announced big raises. I'm seeing a lot of talk of smaller different experiments around prediction markets. You know, Pump Fund as well, they've got, you know, their rumored ICO coming up and public sale. Um, and we're seeing tons of like launchpad competitors coming into the space. And I feel hyperlid is another one. I'm sure Bukacha would love to talk about that one. But, you know, CLOBS, that's become a big, you know, narrative now, too, because of that. And I think it's, you know, we like to hinge on these these big successes and then, you know, hundred more people come in and they say, "Let me see if I can do that better or capture a little piece of that pie." Uh, and that's that's what the past few months have felt like to

me. I think the big the big themes and we've been running with them. Yeah, I agree with that. Um, on the other hand, if you talk to funds allocators, typically they're kind of bored. Like they're in Bitcoin hype soul. You think owning 5,000 Bitcoin is boring? That bores you? I think they're bored. No, but I legit mean it. Like you talk to these guys and they're they're talking about only a few assets as opposed to before where I felt like everybody was doing a lot sillier stuff. Um I think I'm talking less about the big guys and more about like small to mid funds. Um who is like the analyst etc.

I feel like I feel like I don't know if you've heard the same thing, but this is what I'm seeing on my with those funds if that makes sense. Do you uh how do you think that boredom ends? More tokens, more launch pads. Probably more tokens. We need more maybe not more launch pads, but more tokens. I think DeFi has become more serious. So, if that makes sense. Like people want a syrup. Maple. Yeah. Well, I you know, I don't I don't listen to your your podcast whenever I can help it, you know, but the the one time I did recently, you kind of made a good point, Picacio, I I have to admit, where you're basically like back in the day, you

could just wait till the new L1 came out and then buy like the top decks, buy the native token, stake it, whatever, and that would book a pretty good return for you. And um it seems like that meta has gone away and maybe people are trying to artificially recreate it with Hyperlid. Uh wow. Just just for the love of the game just to just to recapture that. What's the backstory here? I feel like I got enough. Hot take is Solana guy doesn't like Hyperlid. Huge. Sorry. Nothing. Continue. But but like h how does that uh where does that meta shift? like where's the free money going to going to be for these funds? I don't think there is free money anymore. I think a lot of long

only funds underperformed because they didn't buy Bitcoin. Um Rizzo, you were right all along. Sorry, what' you say? You were right. People needed to own Bitcoin. People need to buy Bitcoin. Yeah. In terms of the headline, free lunches. I think overall it's just the the altcoin the way the way they are created the structure of them is just you know there's no real claim on on equity and the only ones that do have any sort of at least close value to cash flows have done well but overall I think there's a there's a good fundamental reason why the equity world is where things are going off right now because we end up back in a world where it's like actual claim on equity well here's the thing is that the treasury companies are the new tokens right because they

give you everything that you get with a token you get a logo you get a symbol uh and you get some beta on Bitcoin. But here's the thing is you get access to the largest user distribution portals in the world, right? The NY NASDAQ uh they have hundreds of millions of users. So they don't need to go out and get users, right? So this is this is the hack here. I think you know you're looking at Bitcoin uh treasury companies are the new tokens and they're competing. Very good. I don't like the decision to have Rizzo in the middle of this panel. It feels like he's kind of just like, you know, spreading his Bitcoin. Uh oh, sorry. maximalism around to the to the edges here. I don't know. I think I would have the take that, you know, a lot of people maybe in 2021 they had the

idea that you mentioned free lunch like we thought that this free lunch would happen over and over with, you know, call them vaporware or shitcoins or whatever you want to call them, but just any old thing you buy it and it goes up 10x and you're a happy guy. But, uh, yeah, I mean, the reality is that just can't happen endlessly forever. Um, and we're seeing, you know, the more mature protocols, I mean, Bach mentioned a few, right? the a the syrups things that they have a a sub, you know, a business business that's kind of formed and they they earn revenues and they're giving some of that, you know, guaranteed to the token holders. Like we're seeing a slow maturation and it's natural that if if that business model and the kind of token model matures that, you know, you don't typically see equities go up 10x

in a few weeks uh unless something crazy is going on in the markets. So well I have a question for you guys and this is this is less of a maxi question but uh where does the value acrruel happen on the chain? So you guys are fighting because this application is on its own chain. Maybe he wants it on his chain in a world where stable coins are coming out right next year every bank is going to have their own stable coin. Every large company they're probably going to compete on the level of having their own rails. It seems kind of incomparable to me to think that if you're a large financial institution, they're not going to band together and run their own networks. So, I guess like where does V value acrruel in the token world uh happen if you're ultimately competing against networks that maybe are launched

a year from now that that are owned and operated by banks? Stable coins are really really tough because payments they don't generate a lot of fees. So, at Blockworks Research, we mainly focus on REB and fees. um simple sending money from X to Y doesn't you want complex interactions you want me you want people spending a lot of fees on buying and selling stuff um honestly I'm not sure it Daniel Smith would say we're going to have low transaction fees per transaction but we're going to have billions of transactions and that's where the value approval comes from. Um that is clearly a Salana thing. I don't think Ethereum could compete in that sense. Um, but I think it's I don't

think anybody really knows right now. Like on the one hand, we have what Felix said, which is we don't know where the token value comes from for apps. Um, for L1's, I think part of the reason why we've had this debate for a year and a half about REV is because nobody really knows how to value an L1 very, very well. Um, Ryan would yell at me and say it's cash flows. And that's what I agree with as well, but we're going to have to see cuz these are new startups as well. So, you can't just be like only revenue. Yeah. I um another theme that I've been thinking about a lot, I'm, you know, I'm the macro guy, do the macro things. So, I've been thinking a lot about stable coins and just the intersection of the big question at hand in macro these days

is is who's going to be buying the debt, right? you know, we're running a 7% of GDP fiscal deficit and there was a a short-term attempt to try to normalize that and you know, that was the theme of Doge and we quickly saw just how difficult it is to to change these these ingrain institutions and and so that failed. So now we're back in this world of huge fiscal deficits and if the big beautiful bill passes, we're going to actually accelerate further. We're going to go to an 8% of GDP fiscal deficit. So you have that dynamic happening and now you have the rest of the world too. they you know it's always so interesting people feel that you know every other country I'm I'm Canadian right and so like the the theme over there is when you go to the

other when when I come to the US it's oh you know the the the socialist Canadians they must be like printing even more money there must be even more debt but we've actually only been running like a 2% of uh GDP fiscal deficit over there for many years and the theme we're seeing you know just yesterday there was a NATO summit where they discussed increasing defense spending up to 5% to meet that level So, we're going into this world now where fiscal deficits are going to increase across the world. And the big question at hand is who is going to be the ones buying this debt? And there's a very logical reasoning behind why we're seeing such a push for the Genius Act right now because that is a huge unlock for US Treasury Tills coming forth. So, you can see that happening right now. So, there's a lot of this

discussion around who's going to buy the debt and so stable coins are going to be a huge unlock. You know, I I I hear many stories of people actually keeping their their money in something like Tether that are outside of the US system. And you know, if it's an interesting dynamic because you think about you talked about circling, he roasted me for it because I thought it was a bit richly priced, but it is it is overpriced. It is it is overpriced. You know, it's currently wrong, I will say. Exactly. You know, we'll wait a few months until the IPO lockup hits and and I'm sure it'll be a different story. But in the meantime, it's a fantastic business because if the Genius Act passes, they are going to restrict any sort of interest being passed on to the consumer. So you're in this like wild situation where you have,

you know, stable coins are basically money market funds. It's a new version of a money market fund where they own T bills and they pass on the yield. But what's unique is that all they don't pass on anything. They're not allowed to, especially if the Genus Act passes. So you have all of this this net they have 100% net interest margin. It's an absolutely absurd business model. So I think even though yes, most of the money, most of the revenue does flow to Coinbase, the fact is it's the only option right now. So you're seeing so much attention for it because it's just an absolutely absurdly profitable setup where they just don't have to pass on any interest to the consumer. But won't that acrue at the bank level because eventually they're going to launch their own services that compete and if you're a circle, it's like how do you compete

with the distribution that you know Bank of America comes out with their own Yeah. stable coin. Boom. Everybody here has it in their app. Like that's that's how quick the distribution is going to be. So how does a circle even compete in that environment? They need to access to end users which they can't really get right now. Yeah. It have to be out of the US which is why, you know, I think Tether's more set up for that out of the rest of the world because Yeah. Like nobody wants to invest in a a business of a money market fund. It's honestly not that profitable of a business. Banks make their money by lending on the short end and or sorry borrowing on the short end and lending on the long end, right?

And just earning that spread. But this is like very very short duration. It's just like this weird in between moment. So I think that's why it's done so well recently because it is that short term. But to your point there's every bank's going to be coming in. It's also the only way to trade the better right now. Yeah. Yeah. No other way to trade. If you think see stable coins in the news, there's no there's no one else to trade. Yeah. Can I uh can I drill down on like another macro question, Felix? Yeah. I I think there's a version of the past few years where what we were speaking about with token value acrruel and the the disappearance of the free lunch is not so much about the crypto market maturing as it is about a very idiosyncratic period of time where a lot of 20some

males were sent $1,000 by the government and didn't really know what to do with it and so they went and bought like curve or whatever. You guys had great parties though, you know. Yeah, exactly. Even in Bitcoin, we're jealous, you know, like these are great parties. And um I I think like what are the monetary considerations for you in the token market? Because I wonder if you know if we're facing down a the a ballooning deficit, but the government just keeps printing money. Is that actually bullish for for people's tokens? Um under I don't know. I know you've been having a lot of these like modern monetary theory people on the pod recently. Yeah. So they better acknowledge the economy that we're in

today versus traditional Keynesians or monetarists because we're in a really weird set of circumstances that we haven't really seen before. When you have debt to GDP levels as high as we have, that's a lot of debt out there. You have that at the same time that corporates and households have termed out their debt very significantly. So households, you know, they locked in a 2% mortgage and in the US it's a 30-year fixed. the Fed could jack rates to 30% and it won't affect them. Corporates have also turned out their debt. So they are they are fixed at those low levels. And then what happens when we have such high debt levels? Well, all these boomers are in money market funds and as rates go up, they earn more interest income. So this is going into money market funds. This is why you see charts

where it's just ret like money market fun flows are just like up and to the right. So that money goes into there and then they rebalance it because you know these are that income class. their their marginal propensity to consume is is is not that high when they get an additional dollar. They're just going to invest into other things. So they'll rebalance that rebalancing is not happening into onchain tokens. You know, these are these are boomers. It's it's rebalancing into stocks. So this is why equities just keep grinding up higher and higher and higher. And this is why I think valuations is just the wrong thing to anchor yourself to in this dynamic.

It's a flows thing. It's it's a lack of other options thing. And overall, just to circle back to your question is that there's just there's no mechanical move towards that into all coins. That's that's just this side capital and anything that can be close to that i.e. you know these treasury treasury companies, Bitcoin ETF, there's obviously still the Ethereum ETF which gets some of it, but that's where the marginal dollar does go when it goes out the further out the risk curve, but it just there's no linkage to altcoins to onchain.

Um, bearish. I just said bearish. Want to underscore how bearish that was. Danny and Bkachio, I want to ask you guys. I I think I feel cautiously certain that the the movement of big tech firms and like large legacy firms into crypto is real this time. for uh for for much of the time that I've been covering crypto, it was kind of this thing where you know JP Morgan would like settle a transaction on a blockchain and there was no reason that they should have done it and it lost everyone money, but like uh maybe some money tra you know changed hands between the blockchain foundation and JP Morgan and that was it was it was all basically

just marketing. Um now we have uh you know Robin Hood seemingly embracing crypto in a real way. um hearing like you're seeing Stripe embrace crypto in a real way and then I think there's lots of whispers around of other big legacy firms that want to do more and more in the crypto space especially as as legislation passes and that becomes less scary. So what do you guys make of like our big tech overlords? Is this is this a good thing? Is this a bad thing? Is it real? Or is it is it just more marketing?

I think it's real. I you know I think Robin Hood, Coinbase, I mean pick pick your favorite FinTech, Stripe, right? They they see that there is a market here regardless of whether you know all of the boomers with their their cash sitting on the side earning yield are are investing or not. Like there is a a real, you know, marketplace of people who are trading meme coins, you know, buying altcoins on chain, what have you. And there are very very profitable, you know, teams. You know, Pump Fund is annualizing at, you know, 500 million plus a year right now. Hyperlid is doing, you know, hundreds of millions to maybe upwards of a billion a year just from really a lot of trading activity.

And so, you know, when you have a business like Robin Hood where they're tapped into the same mindset, right, people trading stocks, options, it's it's a very similar type of type of idea to dive into this marketplace. um where the revenue potential is also great um given you know if that's spreads or or fees on trades. Um you can see this with you know trading bots the the consumers in you know this market are willing to pay one two 3% on top of a trade just to get it through just to slam the bid button. Uh and I think that's very attractive to these businesses and I think it would be silly for them to to leave that aside regardless of whether there's like some cyclicality there. I think you know they can tap into that certainly and and maybe they can even

get their existing customers to you know jump into those markets as well and and you know get some additional you know profitability per customer. Yeah, I think we're going to find out if a lot of applications did well because it was regulatory arbitrage or if they actually had good tech and they're useful, etc. Um Robin Hood is very scary. I think there's a Gore tweet that's like, "We built all of this open source tech. Now we're open. Just going to come in and eat our lunch." Um, yeah. I think if I'm a DeFi developer, I'm kind of nervous. I mean, they have it figured out. Like the UX, we can't compete right now at least.

Um, so I'd be nervous. And like Danny said, I mean, if you go up to anybody in Tradfine and you say, "We take 1% on volume." Like, they'll call you a liar because it's ridiculous. So, we're going to see. I think it legitimizes the space a lot. Um, and we've clearly seen a shift away from it used to be about decentralization, privacy, now it's more about settlement. Um, I'm curious where it's going to go going forward. I know Bennett was talking about how we're going to have a shift back to privacy. I don't know if I see that. Um, but we're going to see going forward.

Yeah. Interesting. Um, like so, so riffing more on that tweet, Picacio, which basically said like you all spent years building out open source tech just for Robin Hood to come in and, you know, use it to take all your business away. Um, is that is that like a real failure of crypto if that happens? like if if we end up with basically uh everything on crypto rails but no privacy and it's all controlled by by big legacy firms that crypto initially meant to unseat. Yeah, I think Rizzo, I think this is where you wanted me to go with the stable coin talk, how they get the value cap to. Um, it really depends on like where Robin Hood

launches their products, but I think definitely like I think there's all this tech. We don't have that many developers within crypto. There's a lot more developers in web 2 obviously. Um, I think it's going to be real. Like I think they're going to come in and build out. Well, and the nature of decentralized solutions always compete with centralized solutions. So your question is a bit you know obviously if the user experience is going to be better and the product is better people are going to use the centralized service right and that's the thing is that decentralization while it's a nice thing to aspire to it has to actually solve a real problem for the end product and if it doesn't solve a real problem for the end product it will get centralized right I think what's what's important to acknowledge and I think I think more

people in crypto that are that are building these applications need to go go look at history a bit more financial history a bit more I was on a panel yesterday with my friend Austin Campbell who does a lot of a lot of policy consulting. Um he's done a lot of great work and he always has this saying that I've never I've never seen anything in crypto that I've already seen a French quant blow up in TRA 5 before. Um it's it's the cycle of repeating the previous mistakes. So there's a there's a you know I think it's just exceptionally important to read financial history to read you know cycles of booms and busts and you know it's as well market structure you know as we develop these exchanges etc like there there's a really good reason to have you know

brokerage se separate from exchanges for example like this is there's these walls in traditional finance and they're there because we've gone through the motions in history of seeing what happens when it cross-pollinates. And in the same vein, I'll I I'll throw I already threw the dig at at that part, so I'll throw a little dig at Bitcoin, too. But um you know, just the idea of moving to, you know, there's there's these notions of like moving towards a deflationary economy or or basically a fixed money supply. And we've we've seen many right now we're inflationary. So we're we're inflation and there's some issues there too. But you know, on the other side of the vein, like there was some very terrible depressions when we were on a gold standard. Yeah. And so there's I just think overall the crypto industry

just needs to read some financial history a bit more. There's a lot of examples of us just recreating it in a digital format. Yeah. And I would ask like you know you you asked the question is it a failure? And and I would just say failure for who, right? if if it's Coinbase or if it's Robin Hood or if it's banks come out and they can create new products that are maybe a little bit more efficient or are convenient for customers because they can, you know, settle transactions 247 and there's no latency there. Uh, and it's better for users and maybe they're savings for the business, then it's clearly not a failure for them, but maybe it's a failure for, you know, some small protocol that launched on chain and, you know, didn't quite pan out. Uh I do think I think it hinges at that that

point that there's maybe an ethos that's getting lost of people thought for a long time like yes fully decentralized this is everything for everyone for every use case and I think a lot of people and and teams and developers are realizing that's not always the case. I'm seeing more, you know, CFID defi blended products. We're realizing that, you know, having some centralized components, but other cases where some trustlessness to the product provides a better experience to the customer. Um, but there's cases where you want a little bit of both. There are cases where, you know, maybe you do want it, you know, to be as decentralized as possible as maybe the Bitcoiners would say. Yeah. Um, okay. We're we're running short on time, but uh one thing I did want to ask all of us, you know, all

podcasters, we we say a lot of words in our in our day jobs. And um I just want to like ask if you guys have things you feel like you really missed on. Like not everything you say is is uh going to prove to be correct. Like if your co-orker asks you on Slack if if you should buy Circle and you say no, like sometimes you have to eat crow. But um I I yeah I'm just curious like reflect on some predictions, things that influenced your thinking on your podcasts the past 6 months, a year, like what or or there could be something you hit on like I don't want to make you guys uh you know um play play your your worst hits here.

I I'll say for myself I thought that AI agents were going to be something and they've turned out to really be nothing. Uh it seems like so far that that whole trend really just came and went very quickly. I felt like there was going to be a lot of funding, a lot of more interesting ideas to come out, but I that I I missed on that one big time. Uh yeah, I think I've I've been a bit over optimistic on the Bitcoin L2 movements and just kind of the movement of crypto apps over to Bitcoin. I think there's probably some reasons why uh the ecosystems kind of remain separate. I mean I still long term I think that you know uh anything that can and will be built in this industry will likely come back to Bitcoin at some point or otherwise be kind of co-opted by a

centralized service. Uh but yeah I think uh you know obviously there's some stuff that we're expecting to deploy this year that maybe changes that and maybe accelerates that again but um and uh yeah I think that I was I was probably a little overoptimistic on that. Yeah we uh Buck and I talked about it earlier in the week but we really missed as a podcast on prediction markets. you know, we thought the election was the forever top. You know, they still have some traction in a lot of the recent, you know, geopolitical events, elections, like sports, it's continued to grow. So, that was a big miss. Uh, I think for myself though, like looking back a year, everyone was saying meme coins are this ephemeral thing that are, you know, they're doomed to die forever. And Pump Fund still around. Yeah, they are certainly still around. Pump Fund is is

doing more more activity. It's it's worth more than it was a year ago. So, I think that was a win for us as well. Um yeah, I I guess I'll take the macro route here. And the one that's always difficult is if it feels like in the last four years we've every six months it's people screaming about imminent recession. I mean in in 2022 I think 100% of economists were their consensus was recession and and that did not happen. So I feel like my evolution in how I think about it and you know there's been a couple times where I've I it seems like everything's l I mean as as recently as April right you know it seemed like the writing was on the wall for a recession being and you know a lot of that reason was because so much of

the the tariff impact was reversed but I think it's just a big lesson for me is to just always look at the the first principal drivers which is those fiscal deficits that I talked about like in this regime that we're in Now growth is at like three and a half% real GDP. That is absurdly that is above trend. Um we can see a slowdown but I think it's just it's really important. This is something I harp on a lot on on my pod is just it's very tempting to get into the dumerism. I' I've fallen polite to it all the time. And so I think it's just really important to to not get too doomer or hold and to just always re-evaluate these these baselines and if they're present or not because yeah,

there's been a lot of false starts on the recession thing the last few years. Yeah, I I think on each of these pieces there there are very plausible reasons to to believe these things and and all of them could come true just on a longer time horizon. Uh but uh but but now that we've proved our humility, um I I'm I'm being yelled at by the by the red light here that we're we're over time. Um thank you guys for for doing this with me. Where's lunch? Yeah, you're supposed to Well, let me let me do like a little Sorry. I'm sorry. This this concludes actually our our main stage content here permissionless. So uh please give it up for my panelists. Give it up for all the panelists that have come up here. It's been a lot of fun.

It's been it's been it's been great. It's, you know, the first one we've uh the first permission list we've done in New York. It's been awesome. Thank you all so much for coming out. Um Felix, my good friend, asked me where lunch is. And I have good news for you. I I I know where lunch is. It's right out these doors. Do not go out the back. I I was told in very strong terms, don't go out the back. Go over here. It's in these and core room rooms. Very good. There will be lunch. Uh you can head over there and then we got more content for you in the afternoon. Thanks everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Jack. [Music]