The Return of ETH as Digital Money and Betting on Prediction Markets | Roundup

Transcript

there's a lot of other ecosystems that are going to have their moment in the Sun and for a while last year it felt like the game that everyone was going to play was like salana was going to catch eth I think now the game that people are playing at least like you know what I'm thinking from a venture perspective is like [ __ ] Sal's worth you know $50 billion like maybe finding some of the other alt l1s or alt l2s like they can they can catch salana and so I think it's like okay cool like all the cake and punch and Pie has been handed out and now it's just like time to really build apps um and prove that the monolithic thesis works but yeah you know they've got like a great community of Builders so I don't think it's impossible he everyone this episode is

brought to you by swell a team leading the reaking future with their liquid reaking token R sweep now I've talked about liquid reaking on this program before I think it is going to be a massive tectonic shift for ethereum and I am super super excited about it and I like the swell team a lot goes without saying do your own research this is not Financial advice you guys all know the drill again I like this team and if you stick around I'm going to describe how you can restake your eth in swell earn pearls I layer points and a whole bunch of future rewards so thank you very much for swell for making this episode possible hey everyone wanted to give a quick shout out to this episode sponsor flood protocol the optimal decks aggregator now if you are a listener of bell curve you know that me is a massive

problem which is why we are so pumped to partner up with flood on this season flood is the only gasless and meev free aggregator that not only gets you the best execution but also gives you back all the extra Surplus that you create every single time you swap now this is relevant for both swappers and developers but you're going to be hearing all about them later in the program so for now thank you flood and back to the show hey everyone wanted to give a quick shout out to the Wormhole Foundation if you're a bell curve listener you know that transferring across chains can be a massive pain I certainly do I complain about it on this program all the time that's why we are super pumped to have partnered with Wormhole Foundation the stewards of the Wormhole protocol the Wormhole protocol connects over 30 blockchains and six

different run times including salana soie ethereum layer twos and more and the coolest part about this particular partnership is that they have made custom bell curve nfts which you can get and mint for free you can claim that by just going down into the show notes and clicking on the link all right guys on with the show all right everyone welcome back to another episode of bell curve before we jump in quick disclaimer the views expressed by my co-host today are their personal views and they do not represent the views of any organization with which the co-hosts are associated with nothing in the episode is construed or relied upon as Financial technical tax legal or other advice you know the deal now let's jump into the episode all right everyone welcome back

to another Bell cre Roundup you got me and Vance today holding down the fort what's up buddy chillan just uh just woke up what about you yeah you've got that fresh out of bed uh quaffed qua look going on with the hair for folks who not following along great video yeah my hair is getting bigger and bigger I'm gonna have to make a decision here at some point whether to going it's going up I mean most bull runs I have really long hair so you know let's see nice that could be the new indicator we can just check how long bance's hair is uh tell where we are the cycle um all right let's slight fire right into the uh ETF so I'll I'll pull up the latest figures here but we summarize where I kind of think we are and then you tell

me whether or not you agree I think uh obviously with the benefit of hindsight in the short run it turned out that the ETF was a little bit of a sell the news event uh the day of the the listing Bitcoin ran up to 49k or something like that and sold off back to 39 and I think there was a lot of emphasis there first just on a lot of the way the market was positioned leading in either from CME futures or whatever people were positioned very bullishly but also people got very myopically focused I would say on the gbtc outflows and for the first uh five or six days gbtc was seeing pretty steady outflows of you know between 450 to sort of 600 million call it but now you know where we are today is that those outflows starting to

slow down so I think the last days outflows on record was like 221 million and we're back to the rest of the ETF complex saw a net inflows of 247 million and you're actually starting to see ibit I think catch up to gbtc in terms of trading volume so Vance where do you what do you sort of think about the um the state of the ETFs at the current moment so just you know doing a little math so let's say that you know we had yesterday 247 million of net inflows um including gbtc and like you can make the argument that the gbtc outflows are going to kind of taper off

but let's just let's just stick with 247 million of net net inflows and you know like I think there's an argument that maybe it's like lower than than that on like a go forward normalized basis but I also think like as the price goes up these things become self- marketing and a lot of the marketing and sales have not even really started yet at these big Distributors Black Rock You Know Arc uh bitwise all those guys so 247 million annualize that that's 59 billion net flows over the rest of 2024 that's like hugely bullish I mean just to give you an example of of what that is in in BTC terms that's like every three days um yeah this is great every every three days or so you know they're putting

about you know 10K BTC into these ETFs and if you look at like you know how much Bitcoin kind of Trades and it is not either lost or or just being huddled by you know the True Believers there's about 1.8 million Bitcoin um that are like available for sale roughly you know you're looking at like within the next one to three years like all of that Bitcoin kind of being bought up so like this is like hugely bullish in my mind um and one of the guys that I've been watching um is Fred Krueger I don't know if you've seen this guy um but like this dude is like this old trafi guy who's now kind of like

found religion on bitcoin and I know most most Knights he'll like put on like a you know an expensive Italian jacket rip a cigar and he has his dog there and he just basic wax is poetic about how bitcoin's going to a million like the Trad the trafi moon boys are here and um it seems like they really like crypto uh and so like you know I think you've had all of the calling cards of like you know Jim Kramer said bitcoin's going to 30k you know you had other people saying it's going to like 25k and Jim biano saying it's like you know potentially Dead Forever I just don't think there's anything further from the truth than that yeah I completely agree with you I also would just even add to that

analysis of flows you know keep in mind that we've got the having coming in April which I'm pretty sure I saw Matt Hogan tweet out that's roughly equivalent to7 billion dollar worth of Supply getting wiped out so I feel like the supply d uh the supply and demand Dynamics for Bitcoin have basically never looked better and you're start you've already started to see the outflows from gbtc getting neutralized and I mean where do you think Vance just if you had to put a number it like where do you think these outflows ultimately get to in terms of gbtc I think they started with somewhere around 25 billion in a which is a pretty unprecedented Head Start for an ETF especially with nine other ones launching they've had we're looking at the flows here so total

over 14 days they've had 5.6 flow out so far where do you think that ultimately winds up yeah so I I think you know um I would my my personal Theory at least is like you can there's different types of uh you know gbtc outflows like the initial few first few days where the outflows were very like chunky like those are just like net sales that's the FTX estate getting to cash to distribute that's grayscale selling gbtc to kind of recaller eyesee their balance sheet and you know pay off whoever they need to pay off like in terms of Gemini or any of the stuff that was going on there I think the outflows of gbtc right now are more kind of like neutral to price uh

just because a lot of them in my understanding are arbs like CME is still trading at a premium and so there is a ARB there that where you know you're you're you're buying the Futures and and you're selling the spot um and that's kind of like unwinding that is more neutral to the price than just straight up sales and so um I think you're going to see that pace tapering off it's like kind of like 180 million to 200 200 million about flows per day and I think you'll see that taper off pretty dramatically um but but like you know I expect Black Rock to be the biggest ETF for Bitcoin in the world and so you know if you think there's going to be 50 billion of net flows into these things in the next you know 12 to 18 months I think it's a pretty reasonable

assumption that gbtc is probably like a distant number two maybe has like 20 or 30% the AUM of something like ibit which is the Black Rock um Bitcoin trust yeah I uh my thought I was just looking at it obviously completely unscientific but I was sort of budgeting it about 30% of their AUM would just exit from gbtc so I was always kind of looking for like seven and a half billion or something like that to flow out we'll see if that ends up being accurate or not one one question that I had for you I was trying to think this through myself and maybe this can lead into the discussion of the eth ETF as well but I sort of do wonder you know the the ETFs what they

should have is a VA dampening effect uh right for a couple of different reasons because one if we make the assumption that now the dominant way that um Bitcoin and eventually eth are going to attract flows through these ETFs then that changes the dynamic of kind of this very Pro cyclical retail driven um these very procyclical retail driven flows to one which is much more institutional and one much more passive and you know all the the vehicle for buying it is just much more efficient than it's been in the past and i' I'm kind of just wondering like what the longer term implications of that are um I because all of the even like altcoins are

heavily correlated to the price of Bitcoin and eth and if bitcoin's buyers and the source of their flows has changed this structurally and it ends up being less volatile then I wonder if this is kind of not the beginning of the end but this ultimately has a much has a pretty significant impact on um the cyclicality of crypto in general what are your what are your what are your thoughts on that um look I I I just don't think there's enough supply of coins like I don't think there's enough coins for it to become muted from a volatility perspective and if you think like I have a lot of friends who work at some of the bigger hedge funds in New York um in the

world and a lot of their strategies are I mean it's not just this but one strategy is you know they love things where the float is relatively kind of cornered and the other one is momentum based so like if something's working they allocate more and more Capital to that uh and I you know it seems silly but like think of like you know all of the uh the meme stocks and and and the funds kind of getting in on that I think you know crypto is is obviously not a meme but it has some of the same properties of like it's a highly retail oriented Market um there is not a lot of float and these things are highly susceptible to momentum and as I think about like the bull run and you know

where the market's at and all that stuff like the Euphoria and like the like the float being really dramatically reduced doesn't really kick in until New all-time highs these things are again like self-marketing and so I think you're going to see a lot of Trad five participation in the upside that it's going to drive a lot of volatility I also think like when the cycle is over and you know who knows I think there's a lot of time between now and then and you know we're going to drive interest rates to zero and then you know at some point you know maybe we'll drive them back up and maybe that's in like four or five years and the Cycle's over like you're going to see Trad shorting this um on the way down and so I I think there's going to be more volatility not less

um but like you know if there's 250 million of buying pressure every day like I think the the main price action is just going to be drifting upwards I that's what I was sort of wondering I I think there were strong I agree with everything you said and I also do think this is a prediction that keeps getting proven wrong every cycle you know someone comes out and says we have a much more that's what people said in 2021 they were like we have derivatives now there's much more institutional money these crazy cycles that we've been through in the past are not going to manifest again and obviously that was just dead wrong so yeah that that in that in the like you know ever since I got into crypto I've been hearing that the markets are going

to get less volid and like there's also a price that Bitcoin will get to where it'll just be stable I don't think crypto works like that where it's like you know we drive Bitcoin to a million and then it just stays there forever like may maybe um so I I just don't really believe that yeah I I I'm with you too I I think where where my head was at was it's kind of like in past Cycles the next incremental dollar that was coming in was from some retail person which makes crypto much more susceptible to momentum Style Trading whereas now the next incremental dollar at least for the majors is looking like it's going to be passive and you know there are when you

when when you have macro and much more traditional investors in the driving driver seat then they're less likely to like buy breakout Trends they'll like short they're kind of like mean reverters and no that's the opposite of what they do really most of them like most of the big pod shops are momentum H like like to the extent that when you know PMS uh like uh I can't name names or sectors but like um you know say you're you're long something and it goes up 2x as a PM you're like time to cut you know my bonus is in Jeopardy you know it's looking good for this year and in the reality they're like you know because the pods allocate you Capital

like a like a millennium or a balazy or a citadel they're like no you're putting more on and you're not going to cut and and like you know look at look at gold you know was a retail oriented Market was waiting for a spot ETF forever you know the ETF hits and the price skyrockets um yeah like we we're pretty good analogies here as to what's going to happen also for listeners who might not be familiar with this pod model that you're talking about is kind of like this has become popular in recent years for hedge funds but it's basically like find some young portfolio manager the value prop position is instead of going to open up your own shop where you have to set up all of this infrastructure it's like we're going to basically provide you this infrastructure that you

can just plug into we're going to have more granularity about like how much money gets allocated to you and stuff like that but that's right when you describe the Pod model that's basically what you're talking about yeah exactly and you know the things that are in your control are what stocks you're selecting um but what's not in your control is like they will allocate you more capital and they will kind of you have to put it to work on the existing portfolio that you have um so it it'll be really interesting um I just don't like you know the the sell the news crowd I just think is very wrong and like you know all things considered was it a sell the news event yeah I guess but like we're 10% off where we were gbtc has been

completely cleared out Celsius has been completely cleared out um the FTX estate has been completely cleared out like I don't know like what what are we what are we doing here I'm with you um all right let's talk a little bit about the E ETF so we had Standard Chartered actually came out and talked a little bit about this in a pretty bullish way Standard Chartered is one of the larger sorry investment Banks that's based out of Europe and they came out this week and said that they think it's pretty likely that we're going to get an eth ETF by on May 23rd um so yeah I I would love fans if you could just kind of sum up for listeners who might not be as familiar with the some of the maybe specific

challenges to an E ETF like How likely it is and what do you think about Standard Chartered coming out and talking about this yeah so I I think the people who know this best are a Eric balchunis and James Cipher who've been like the ETF Sherpas for the whole industry for um you know the the entire Bitcoin ETF and they have it at about 6040 for for May and may is the date where kind of most of these filings are due to be ruled on by SEC um and if they do not rule on them you know assume that they will be sued and taken to court in the same way that gbtc was or or yeah grayscale was um or or actually sued the SEC um and so whether it's may or may plus like two or three months uh it

seems like at least I'm pretty high confidence that the ETF is going to come probably this year you know maybe in the second half but I would say like I'm more confident in the first half like I I think the Standard Chartered uh analysis is right like you like Scott Johnson who's another guy on crypto Twitter who's like ETF pilled and and super into it um he said that analysis is pretty service level and there's like other things that like potentially could mean that they need to go to court versus like an outright approval but like you know this ETF is coming um and you know if you think $250 million a day for Bitcoin is a lot like it it kind of boggles the mind what happen if an e ETF

gets approved um you know especially in the heat of a bull run I think beyond that you know you need a Futures ETF product um in order to have a spot ETF product and that's probably going to be another like it it it would require an Administration change in our view to have other ETFs and um I think that's going to be a big demarcation between Bitcoin and ETF and the rest of the field like if you don't have um an ETF like sure a rising tide lifts all boats but like the liquidity you're going to get on these things is pretty incredible and it's going to invite trafi in um and so I'm I'm pretty high conviction that we have one this year uh but you know

like the other side of the coin is like JP Morgan doesn't think we're going to get one and that is basically I thought like even more surface level analysis of just like Gensler doesn't like eth um I don't think that ultimately holds much water in the face of what we've seen the courts do to the SEC Vance what do you think about the possibility of like is this e ETF if we get it is it going to be yield bearing or No like is it GNA include staking yield no and I think that's actually if you think about it um all of the people who are not staking are subsidize those who are in terms of like the additional yield that they get um and so that's like kind of marginally bullish like Lio and like you know the Crypt native

staking providers um because I think it's going to be a while until the gets comfortable with like we're locking the Assets in this trust in a smart contract that could be slashed yeah I think it I had never really thought about it until just this moment but the an eth ETF which Can Only Hold spot eth is sort of a nice counterbalance to what's going on in the ecosystem right now which is this idea that hey like I could either hold eth or I could hold yield bearing eth in the form of Ste um and I think there's been a little bit of concern about that like pretty pretty understandable concern and if there was an ETF which was basically a massive buying Source just for the spot ETF that could actually like oddly solve some some issues in the current

moment so that'd be kind of interesting I mean yeah I don't it's uh I I think it solves a lot of problems for eth um well not a lot of problems like it it just helps subsidize the yield and it gives just a different Persona of you you know eth which is really kind of what you want you don't want it all staked ideally or if you do like weird things could happen to the price like if we get to like 70 or 80% staking rate like Cosmos and eth um there's just not going to be a lot of coins yeah and I think also from the perspective of eth the protocol it's like you want to preserve the moneyness

of eth the asset itself and you know Ste is actually you know it's a it's ENT like a receipt from the staking pool operator which is Lio and uh you know you're taking on certain assurances it's a little bit centralizing to the protocol potentially and you're taking on the trust assurances of Lio as opposed to eth directly I I'm in the camp that like most eth is going to end up getting wrapped eventually anyway but uh and I'm a huge fan of Lio I like I get why that some people in the ethereum community are concerned I'd also put myself like hardcore in the Pro Lio camp like I really like Lio so I don't know I just think think a little bit of incremental demand for like pure spot eth would almost be like a nice Boon to the state of the ecosystem right now so

just an interesting Dynamic I hav thought of before hey everyone this episode is brought to you by swell a liquid reaking protocol in the issuer of the r liquid raking token now if you're a listener of bellur you know that I am just so fascinated by reaking and liquid reaking I think it is going to be one of the most important Trends in ethereum and I am really excited for the benefit that it unlocks both users and also theum the protocol itself now disclaimer whenever there's yield involved in a product do your own research this is not Financial advice you guys know the drill but swell is a great team they have a non-custodial product and they are mission driven on giving you the best liquid staking experience if you take one benefit away from using liquid reaking make it be Capital efficiency

now you can earn passive yield from ethereum you can earn yield from multiple actively validated services that stack on top of that and then you can still use our S as collateral in D5 and because I know y'all are a bunch of Deens there's a points angle here as well but in swell we call them pearls so pearls equal points and if you stake your e with swell you can earn pearls and future IG layer rewards when there's a token generation event you can swap your pearls for swell tokens head over click the link at the bottom of this episode again just pause what you're doing right now go click the link at the bottom of this episode check out swell than to you later fans I want to get your thoughts on some uh some of the new Innovations that's happening kind of consumer use cases for crypto so we had

uh there's been a lot of talk on poly market and I want to get your a thought on predictions markets uh in a second here but thought one thing that I have actually been pretty interested in this week was foraster frames I'm not sure if you saw that um but yeah could you could you for uh for listeners just give an overview of what is what are foraster frames in general and why are people kind of excited about them can you do it I'm I'm probably not the best person I've been I've devoted my time on playing around on poly Market past couple weeks yeah I let me start with the let me start with the problem statement for for for blockworks for like media companies I this has been the first time that I've looked at something like kind

of someone messing around with crypto stuff and been like I can not only squint at this but look at this and see that this solves the problem that blockworks has as an organization so one of the problems with more traditional like media companies right now is that they lost access to distribution so like web 2 you know social platforms they have they have the audience right now and they're becoming they have leverage over you know media companies Publishers that actually produce content and they're squeezing margin out of them and they're just making it like a less hospitable place to um acquire users in traffic like blockworks acquires uh traffic through Twitter and Google and

you can see Elon Musk is is like not making a you know he's being very direct about it he's like I don't want uh basically he's making Twitter less and less of a hospitable place for blockworks which actually is a massive problem for us because our whole audience is on Twitter like that that kind of su how so I'm I'm curious that was what was behind remember when he changed um when you used to be able to show like when you linked a news thing it said New York Times title of the article and he like ripped all that off and it's literally just to make it less likely that people are going to click and because the the business model of Twitter is like he doesn't want you going to the New York Times Elon Musk wants you staying on Twitter right like that's his objective there and so

there's this there's this in incentive mismatch and what farcaster frames allows you to do is on their platform they're basically saying they're they're making it super easy for you either as a media publisher or an nft platform or whatever to just embed this action on foraster but unlike Twitter which is like trying to get you to not go somewhere else you can just immediately like mint an nft directly from farcaster you can subscribe to a newsletter directly from farcaster and right there that makes that a super attractive value proposition from the perspective of blockworks because right now to acquire like a user on X a x is making it less attractive from you know just displaying

an article you know when you click through it doesn't take you to the actual site takes you to this [ __ ] am thing which is a really shitty user experience for the reader like they're actively trying to do that because they're trying to keep you on the platform and foraster has kind of gone the other way and said we want to be super modular and if you were like a publisher on our site and they have a very broad definition of what a publisher could be it could be content you could be writing your own newsletter you could be publishing an nft we want to make it super easy for you to do that and that to me I was just like wow that is such a powerful idea it's so powerful I literally looking at this being like blockwork should be leaning into

forecaster right now so props to Dan Romero and the team over there I think it's super cool I haven't had the chance to play around with it yet as much as I will but I thought it was really Innovative very cool idea I mean it also feels formative to the eth narrative as well where it's like we've got our own Community now um and it's easier to coordinate it's less noisy all of that stuff um but yeah I mean I I've played less with for with around less with farcaster um and it all the points you made make sense I I do think if you take a step back and you think about like all of the crypto narratives that are happening right now it's pretty wild like you've got Bitcoin and eth you know

ETF soon or or you know already in place you've got social starting to take off and like not just crypto people are on foraster like it's it's like 15,000 Dau but like it's growing pretty rapidly you've got games launching you know immutable launch there Z ZK AVM you've got defi scaling um like I can kind of like see the headlines now in like a year's time when we break alltime highs and like you know there's like this diaspora of different narratives and use cases and things that have been built over the bare Market um it's really impressive and it's really positive for crypto it's so cool I right now there's obviously a lot it's I know I know anyway shout out to Dan Romero and the

team at foraster I'm definitely going to check it out more and social f is one of those interesting things where and I want you to talk about poly Market but feel like crypto should be highly disruptive to social media in a sense because the whole Pro the reason it's difficult to compete with social media is they have Network effects but that's what crypto's really good at solving cold start problems with tokens and breaking Network effects so always kind of looked at Social fi as like okay it feels like very primitive you're literally competing with some of the largest most well-run companies in the world that have extremely entrenched Network effects but I feel like crypto could be a really novel solution for how to compete and I'm just rooting for farcaster I think frames are really cool

so yeah people should check him out me too I'm I'm rooting for everyone you know yeah me too man me too um talk to us a little bit about poly Market I've seen that's been getting quite a bit of traction recently I've just gotten interested in like prediction markets and political betting and it's never really been liquid enough to really do anything interesting so all right so so these are the political betting odds for this year like this is just to give you an idea of like what these markets look like and and you know um for predict it which is historically you know one of the most cited like you know you look at the you go on you listen to the news and they site

predicted odds what's interesting about predicted is that you can only bet $150 or $850 per person per market and so like you get this like really weird skewed thing that doesn't really make a lot of sense that people's site is like a source of Truth and and that doesn't make much sense and then you look at the other ones of these bet us bada bwin sporting bet you know basically if you call them up and you try to bet um on any Market they will screen you based on what you do for a living you know if you if you work at a fund or you you know you're not like just purely retail they're going to skew the odds and they'll only give you tiny size um and so it's

like you know for something that everyone cites and everyone believes in like these markets are like a not functional and B just like not representative of of really any sort of real betting interest and like you still see political candidates like tweet out these odds and tweet out you know how they're doing on the betting markets like it's extremely weird so so that's that's one screen now I'm going to pull up poly Market um po Market there's $35 million or $3 34.4 million bet and if you look at like you know like you buy yes or no on on Trump odds or you know Biden odds or even Michelle Obama odds like look at

the midpoint here on a spread of 1 cent there are you know what 600 million of of liquidity on on the buy side and you know 800 million on on the sell side like right at the midpoint of the market it's extremely impressive and there's no incentives with this it's grown 3x um from about 10 million to 30 you know 3 million whatever it is today in the past three weeks like this Market's only been live since the first of January um and you have Donald Trump tweeting out his odds you know how he thinks he's doing and the polym market odds and all this stuff and you know it's like pretty

interesting and I think the problem with prediction markets is like every four years yes like we want to bet on presidential markets that's okay um but what are the other things that you could do that could make this more interesting in the future like the things that I think of are like you know they have like markets on the Middle East will Hamas remain in power will the houthis um you know hit another US ship with rockets um you know like you could build kind of like an interesting like this is just spitballing but like news betting site out of this like that's pretty interesting to me um and most people when they think of like you know what do you buy or sell if the houthis you know ramp up their aggressive campaign in the Middle East they're going to like you

know buy oil or buy some derivative of that event happening like there is an argument to be made that like if you can bet on the event directly it's just like more interesting and more accurate um the other things are like political outcomes in the Senate the house you know all these different bills that are going to be passed like I'm hoping that this is the cycle that we can break out a just beyond presidential markets um even though those are kind of like far larger than they ever have been like I I do think the presidential Market on poly Market will go to a billion in liquidity at some point this year um it's 30 million it's the first of Feb and the elections in November but like my hope is that that can be the starting point for this branching outwards and I think

there's other problems with prediction markets like how loyal is liquidity how proprietary is the site to people but like poly Market has just been slowly grinding and it's just cool to see them them really do well yeah I would agree with you I think one of the other cool ways that I've seen it used and I think it would be useful even for blockworks I found myself thinking about this when you were describing it as almost like if you could embed you know poly Market odds on an article or something like that where if you were covering the presidency it's like hey look at this is what betting it's just another data point and visualization that you can use and yeah I think it's super cool I think there you know just to point out there are some of the issues that people have raised around prediction markets in the

past is like assassination markets I think this actually ended up popping up on what was that like the first prediction markets that rolled out I can't I I know you're saying but like yeah come on yeah I I know well I also you know what the other thing that you could think about prediction markets doing is uh you know if they became deep and liquid enough is it actually lowers the friction for doing things like hedging like you could say like I bet that it's going to rain like if you're you know a farmer in Argentina or something like that you could have a prediction market for like I think it's going to rain however many times this year and that and that's a way to hedge essentially your your crops whereas right now that's not that's not an issue if you like a large agricultural

conglomerate or you know sort of industrial Farmer in the US you can go to a bank and there are special banks that do that but you don't have that option if you're you know in another part of the world or something like that so you can't you can actually look at prediction markets and see that they'd be really useful for like edging or lowering the frictions for creating super useful products like Futures and stuff like that so I think they're like like like you know having like this is just spitballing but like if you merge like Community notes with like a prediction Market yeah you know saying like you know uh how much do you want to bet that this is right or wrong like that's probably a better economic

incentive than just like let's see what the peanut gallery thinks of of this claim um there's obviously problems of like resolving these markets and poly Market is built on the Uma Oracle and you know that's like one kind of thing in the poly Market community that like divides people some people think it's bad some people think it's good but like there's no incentives going on in this market and there's a ton of volume and there's a ton of liquidity um and I think it is a good omen for for what's going to happen with these markets the future but like add it to the list of like expanding crypto narratives that are working yeah I completely agree with that um and I'm very curious to see what so what are the what is poly market pricing in in terms of trump is he he's

like he's like 52 cents right now like slightly better than you know 50% odds but like another another Market is the eth ETF market and it's at like slightly less than 50% odds that it gets approved uh I think in late may but like you know if you're bullish eth and you think that ETF is going to approve get approved like you double your money if it does like it's arguably more efficient than betting on the underlying which is which is cool yeah that point that you made too about sometimes maybe it's just better that you could bet on the thing itself as opposed to a derivative of that it's kind of like in you know what I would imagine you know to ver be really reductive about what it's like to be a hedge fund manager it's like okay do I think this thing is going to happen

if this thing happens then how do I express that trade and those are you know you can actually sometimes get the thing right or but Express the trade incorrectly and get screwed so maybe this just obviates part of that makes it a little easier to bet on the thing that you're actually trying to bet on which is an interesting concept so just want to underscore that that that's that's a great Point like the two parts of you know trading are what is your idea and and how are you structuring it um like a good example of this is like you know I've been I've been uh doing some some personal Research into like uranium and and I think it's interesting and like there's a whole thesis behind like nuclear and um whatever right now there's this there's this there's this

bill in the house that would ban Russian uranium and a lot of the uranium Community is like this is like going to be turbo bullish uranium and it's going to go up a lot and blah blah blah it's like if you have a view on the bill like and I like I'm more I'm more negative on the bill passing just because like I think our government is a [ __ ] show and like nothing's going to happen this year at all I'd probably rather bet on the bill than like hold a bunch of like spot physical uranium trusts it's just like a different way it removes the last part of like how do I structure this to your point which is cool which is half of the game yeah yeah do you think that eventually people will be able to take out leverage on prediction markets bets

it's like that oh I think it'll happen you know we have a way of making these things happen there's a will there's a way I know yeah I with you on that for better wor all right I what but I think in general and actually maybe to tease a little bit about some of the stuff that permission list is gonna focus on this year I just think consumer use cases are something that this industry needs to see and I do think if you take a second to look around there are things that are working and are cool so yeah I think it's always just worth highlighting um all right next next topic here is uh nfts so nfts as an asset class are seeing a little bit of a surge in interest so um we've got here via coindex uh Jesus coindesk uh indexes

that track the price of nfts have risen almost 10% this month and they're actually outpacing eth um so I guess you know we've talked a little bit about nfts nfts were a big prediction of Buy for this year so I feel like you know disclaimer I've been pretty bullish on them but what are your sort of thoughts on how do you view nfts as an investment in general like do you think that is there real Innovation going on in the model like are are pfp you know 10,000 collection pfps kind of dead moving forward um and yeah how would you just kind of slot them as an opportunity for investors out there listening all right so this is the the alltime price chart then this goes back to a 2021 um and like the thing you have to

remember about nfts is that their Bull Run was incredibly gnarly in terms of how much price appreciation happened it was also incredibly short so you know the the floor for crypto punks in August 6 2021 was 32 and then it quadrupled uh by October 2021 uh to almost 115 um and then we had this huge draw down you know I'm drawing in the chart and we bottomed at 40 uh in July 6 2023 that that was like when the eth identity crisis was in full swing as like Sal was ramping um and now we're you know 50 plus percent higher than that 61 and so like cryptopunks are

unique in the sense that they're like at least for me a levered beta on eth um and they kind of represent like the coolness or confidence of the ecosystem um I think everything else other than that has done pretty poorly other than like pudgy Penguins uh madlads on salana um and maybe a few other kind of Blue Chip collections but I don't see that there's new demand for 10K pfp Collections and you know back in the day these were really hard to make but now that we have generative AI it's like you can crank out 10K pfbs pretty easily um and so I think like the market is solidifying in terms of there's probably 10 nft Blue Chip assets that are going to be levered beta on the ecosystem that they're in uh or if they're creating

their own ecosystem just kind of their own thing but my sense is that gaming nfts are kind of like right around the corner and like pixels um who's a portfolio company of ours has You Know 200k da active wallets may maybe like you know a third of those are Bots and it's on Ronin um but you know they're generating selling Distributing nfts and they're pretty lowcost nfts they're like you know five to 10 bucks but like it feels like that's more of where the market is heading um versus like these super expensive nfts that that people kind of associate with different ecosystems yeah me too I I think also there's a lot of room to play around with the business model of nfts and I

think you're starting to see like talked about it a lot on the show but uh what Luca is doing with pudgy penguins and basically slotting nfts as sort of a a value sync or a value cruel part of a very traditional sort of Ip business I feel like is really interesting and that makes a lot much a lot more more sense to me than like the decentralized Disney thing that you you used to hear you know last cycle you also see like madlads with what Armani and Tristan are doing over with backpack as kind of using an nft collection as like a revenue generation mechanism and Community Building thing um as almost like top of funnel for a product uh torans have done that as well with torians the collection and tensor The Exchange I feel like they've Su

successfully experimented with that and I do think there's even room to experiment frankly with just gaming nfts I think are also super interesting and I also think there's room to experiment just with like does it need to be 10,000 like how like I me can we do more or less or cheaper like like even um the drip experiment that's going on uh on Sal is super interesting so I feel like there's a ton of room for Innovation and there's always going to be a market out there for people that want cool art like ultimately I just see this as kind of like a mix of kind of like a mix of trading and art and yeah it's kind of a left curve thesis but I just think they're cool and I think people are going to keep buying them is my is my take on them no I look I'm glad that

we've gotten the nft community off the mat they're they're pretty destitute for a while um but they bring a lot of energy and you know creativity and and Good Vibes to the space so I'm I'm happy to see all these nfts do well I agree I also do think there is a cultural affiliation with nfts like just imagine for a second punks moving off eth like how crazy that would be and I think there were some nft collections like no judgment but there were some nft collections that moved ecosystems potentially for the wrong reasons and I think those are going to struggle to gain traction again because again nfts are really just an exercise in building community and if you like switch Community it's kind of like a

sports team moving cities or something like that it just it takes away from the D I don't know I think it's I'm with you they're going to struggle hey everyone wanted to give a quick shout out to the the Wormhole Foundation if you're a bell curve listener you know that transferring across chains can be a massive pain I certainly do I complain about it on this program all the time that's why we are super pumped to have partnered with the Wormhole Foundation the stewards of the Wormhole protocol the Wormhole protocol connects over 30 blockchains and six different run times including salana SOI ethereum layer 2os and more and the coolest part about this particular partnership is that they have made custom bell curve nfts which you can get and mint for free you can claim that by just going down into the show

notes and clicking on the link all right guys on with the show one thing that I wanted to actually call out here as well uh or another story for you is we had the launch of sta today so that comes from stride protocol and I just want to call that out because I think liquid staking you know as you know I know you guys are investors in jeto um I also am but also just like a fan of the protocol but I'm I'm fascinated by Frankl Lio jeto and when I look out at the at the world of new ecosystems where a liquid staking token makes a lot of sense I think Celestia is kind of the obvious play there there's kind of this idea of modular money and I think Celestia like you can look at it and think it probably

has a pretty similar design to ethereum where you know you've got a base layer which is minimally performant um actually you know Celestia is like much more Bare Bones even than ethereum it can't support smart contracts but what it's trying to do is attract a whole bunch of rollups to build on it and to use uh Tia the token for gas or as a form of money so you can kind of think about Celestia's trying to export its dollars uh or its its token up to the the the rollups that are going to use it and the just because the construction of Celestia today it's like super minimal they don't even have interchain accounts or anything like that it's kind of tough to actually like what is the bridge that you're going to do that and you can't

support export Celestia itself it has to be a rra version of it so St is probably the best way of of actually doing that so stride is rolling this out uh I want to tease this did a long interview with Aiden of stride and at John charbono actually that's gonna be airing on Monday which was a really fun episode but uh yeah just I'm very interested to see the the penetration of liquid staking in the Celestia Market I think it could be a pretty large market and yeah pretty pump for stride overall but what what do you think bance in in general about Celestia as kind of an attractive market for liquid staking and what do you think about this idea of modular money um I I I think I mean modular

money just seems like a meme to me honestly um like like I say this is like we did the seed of of Celestia as well so like we we do have some bags there um look I I think it's like you know any asset can be staked and if the inflation rate is high enough um you're going to have people you know be interested in it I think this the staking rate for Celestia is 25% at the moment so it's like if you're not staking you're getting diluted so there's like a heavy incentive to do so um I think at the end of the day you kind of do need to build real fees for liquid staking to really take off in a way that is Meaningful uh or else everyone's just going to get diluted to

to zero um and I think if you think about how ethereum is constructed like the fees are on L1 that bootstraps the you know whatever 35 million of or maybe it's less than that 30 million of eth stake today everyone gets those fees the supply decreases everyone uses it as money everyone denominates in it on the lending markets on maker on a like that to me is more of a path um to you know basically becoming money than just like liquid staking and here some inflation like you need to get people to actually like denominated it you can't get people like the I think like Celestia has a to get there um but like more of it is re revolving around you know is it paired with main Assets

in liquidity pools when meme coins launch is it used as a lending Market piece of collateral when you're borrowing money like are you confident enough in the price to borrow you know half the value against it um and so I think like these are good first steps for celesy to be taking I think um you know inflation is vicious it can like really eat away at your principle and it can cause all these weird externalities in the secondary Market um having liquid staking is amazing I think the path to money for any asset Soul Tia you know avalan whatever you want to call it is like you need to get people to denominate in it it's not just about like o I have I had Tia now I have like s Tia that's like maybe the first inning of of getting there well here's

something to think about I be I'd love to get your opinion on this if you really think about it bridges are kind of a myth in the sense that the native asset is never leaving the core protocol but you're exporting different R versions of it through various Vehicles like some of which have much better security assurances versus another like the ethereum that you have on arbitrum or optimism is locked in a contract on main chain and then there is like the kind of synthetic version that lives on optimism or arbitrum but there's an extremely credible Bridge um there's like a canonical bridge where which exports the East so you're like very safe but it's still like you have to

think about it in terms of phys like the eth itself is still on main chain and so any asset that wants to be a money you need to export you know you need to export some kind of wrapped version of that and probably the best way to do that is through canonical like rollup bridges on eth um probably the worst way to do it would be like a lot of the old uh mintt lock Bridges like kind of third party Bridge designs that you saw and so then the question is like okay if most of of the money that is in existence is going to be wrapped it's going to be wrapped anyway then why wouldn't you just have the yield bearing version of that that's wrapped and then I think the other and then I think the other thing that is is just an interesting I don't

really know how Protocols are going to compete on this but how does like if you were just imagine Vance you were like unilaterally ethereum or unilaterally Celestia and you were like all right my asset can't leave my protocol but I want to incentivize these rollups to use my asset like what is the playbook for doing that because I think historically people had thought about that like I'm just going to create a bunch of really useful stuff on my protocol people are going to come on my protocol use the stuff and it's gated in my asset but as soon as you're like okay I actually want people on other protocols to use my asset you don't have that same lock in so I'm just I'm like a little bit unclear on what the overall Playbook is going to be in order to how do you convince people on other rollups where

you don't have that lock into to want to use and hold your thing I mean that's like one argument for the L2 approach versus the monolithic approach right where it's like in in my mind um you know you can have a bajillion TPS you can drive fees to zero um let's just say I'm like a monolithic protocol whatever you want to call it um at the end of the day when I have an app that gets big enough they're going to be like I want my own app chain or I want my own X or I want my own y like keeping uh value in your ecosystem is not a technical problem it's an incentive alignment problem and every single chain and every single it doesn't

matter how it's constructed or what the virtual machine is like every single chain will experience this a game blows up on your ecosystem how do you how do you get them to stay when selling block space is arguably another you know one a of Revenue to them and you know or at least like how do you capture value from that as an ecosystem and I think one way is like you can extract fees from them and try to just like keep them on your chain like I I don't think that's going to work long term I think the other way is like you establish your asset as money and as the money that people want to use in this game or in this market or in this app or whatever and so like I see all this eth being bridged to like even places like SE Oru or you know Salo

or the l2s and it's like sure that those eth um you know they will fees for the main chain whenever people meant or withdraw from that L2 or that other chain but the value that you gain from the monetary premium of that asset getting exported in my mind like more than makes up for any of the loss fees of that eth not being on the main chain anymore like whatever um and like a lot of this philosophy stems from I think money is the most interesting and biggest market for like the large scale crypto assets um and bootstrapping and monetary premium is extraordinarily hard and that's just like one way that you can do it and so like at the end of the day I think fees are a means to an end

for me like high fees on eel one bootstrap its denomination is money eventually the fees get so high that people want to deploy l2s or like the incentives are just there like we've seen like a thousand Roll-Ups raising like you know people just want to go launch their own thing and and have their own token that's cool all of them are running points programs trying to get eth onto their blockchain like that monetary premium isn't my mind like the most important thing um because like you know the fees on a salon or the fees on a polygon or the fees on you know whatever like you cannot justify the valuation of a lot of these things if they are not money I I agree with that I think my my broad perspective on this like at a

10,000 foot view has been we're going to see The Return of commodity like money I think there are going to be multiple commodity like monies that compete but I think the playbook for competing is kind of if your mental model is is kind of like an operating system uh that generates profits that's very different from competing as a money actually and I do think ethereum has a really good Advantage there and actually one one thing I've been thinking about it's really bullish rollups is if you think about the eth ro road map as it stands there's all of this tbll on L1 and all of this activity still but I think you correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure the objective is to push most of that up to rollups so you know like the tvl of rollups is just going to I mean

it's theoretically going to grow by what maybe they won't be totally successful and get all of the TBL off e that's probably not desirable there's probably a lot of people that really like the security assurances of just keeping their stuff on L1 but you know however you slice it there's probably 10 to 20 billion dollars worth of TBL you know before there's any asset price appreciation that's just going to migrate up to the l2s I think one of the things I've been curious about is who's going to get the line share of that I feel like it's very bullish arbit Tren off citizen actually um I mean yeah I mean we're we're holders of optimism so again we have bags but it's like it's been more bullish arbitrum than optimism like this is crazy I mean this this number is probably a little dated but I

think arbitrum has one and a half million eth in its Bridge that's so much that's crazy like it's real we're talking about real money we are well the the other difference though between arbitrum and optimism has been the incentives that optimism has paid out versus how much arbitrum has paid out and you know as a lover of arbitrum I do look at they did something called the step short-term incentive program you know the hundreds of millions of dollars that they're paying out that are probably go that are going to daps on the on arbitrum chain and then probably just getting dumped and now there's like uh L tip you know long-term incentive program which implies to me that this is going to be a constant thing I this was an old stat but I think hosu a little while ago we

talked about on the show tweeted out the amount of incentives that various uh you know dydx had paid out arbit from optimism out Lio big chains it was like I think I don't want to misspeak here but optimism was in the neighborhood of like 200 million and arbit was like 1.4 billion so there's a massive difference in terms of issuance policy I did not I did not realize that yeah um yeah but like there there is this thing where again like we see all these L2 pitches where it's like we're going to launch an L2 all right what's what's step two well we're going to do this points program or giveaway tokens to get TBL on the chain it's like okay which which ecosystem are you going to Target to bring TBL over and you know frankly like eth is the only asset that is big enough to move

the needle for any of these l2s that are launching like as much as a lot of them may want to go out like salana is like kind of the next obvious candidate but it is like an order of magnitude smaller in terms of like the capital that's willing to move across chains because like a lot of the whole thing with salana too is like the capital stays on salana it's one chain one team one dream you know that the assets don't move so it's like I don't know if I if I think about it like there's just a lot of sources for yield for eth because it's like you could go to this L2 and earn points you could go restake it in I layer and and earn you know tokens or points or whatever um but that is the asset that people are targeting and and I think

that is kind of glossed over and I I think ecosystems will be known for different things like you know Bitcoin is digital gold obviously eth I think is just like money you know I think like I think like things like IMX or Ronin you know they have a [ __ ] ton of users um but they don't generate like a ton of economic value not yet I think the long term is like you know you have a lot of users that generate a lot of economic net value right now it's just like there's a lot of users there's like not that much economic value so each of these things will have a part to play but like I do think the assets that are money are going to just be they're they're obviously going to be used differently but I think they'll be valued differently as

well yeah I agree with that and I I I think that is a challenge that Sal is going to have to face ultimately and maybe we can use this as a a jumping off point to talk a little bit about Jupiter so Jupiter had a pretty massive airdrop I I would say this week is something to the tune of uh 700 million you know we can uh in terms of that they're actually spreading out the airdrop quite a bit so over a period of like three years or something like that they're they're going to essentially do multiple successive air drops and um you know Jupiter for those of you who are aren't are less familiar it's they're an aggregator so aggregators have been much more successful in salana in general again I don't this is my opinion but it's because it's because of fees you

know like one inch and uh sh there's another aor but like it the reason why it's more difficult on ethereum is because if you're one inch you know you ultimately have to make multiple different Hops and the gas costs of doing that are just kind of punitive so it makes more sense to trade where all the the liquidity is on Unis swap anyway whereas in salana gas fees are much more cheap so there is actually a lot of value to routing across multiple different dexes um I'd be curious fans in general like what you thought of the air drop I I do think it's you know as a criticism of salana here maybe a constructive criticism know there definitely are I think the strains um are starting to show a little bit there are a bunch of transactions that ultimately are kind of starting to fail

and and I think the the primary reason there is that they don't have a very robust fee Market there are a lot of changes that need to that need to be made and you know ultimately the ux isn't really it doesn't really impact the ux that much because transactions happen so fast and they're so cheap but like you could have like two or three failed transactions in a row which kind of sucks but yeah what what did you think overall about the the Jupiter air drop yeah I mean like every no blockchain is solved eth has not solved this Pro like you know the uh the fee issue you know salana has some you know transaction failing issues like all the twos have issues like nobody's really figured this out and I think to say otherwise is just kind of being

dishonest so like I I don't think it's like a huge knock on salana but there's obviously just like work to do uh that's okay um and there were a lot of failed transactions just because there was so much interest which is great for salana um deflow was the only aggregator that was still up and in processing transactions because they had an orderflow model which is kind of interesting um I mean I I think it's uh now salana I I think has had um most of the major air drops that are going to happen um and like deflow has not but like most of the major air drops have happened that were going to happen um and now it's kind of like a what next moment and I think what what is next is like increasing liquid staking

participation to try to drive some of that monetary premium and like the goto Soul chart is nuts in terms of the supply just like up only it's a new all-time high basically every day so I think that's like a really good augur for what's going to go on um you obviously have all the D5 Primitives being built out as well with margin fi and and and all that stuff um like I have less to say on the Jupiter a drop like I did think that you know I don't even know they rais like 300 million or something there is a lot yeah I mean I'm I'm kind of with you it was I mean look Jupiter is a great protocol um I think they have super ambitious plans for what they want to do from a product Suite standpoint I I come kind of with you it was great I'm rooting for

the team I I always blank on how to pronounce the the founders name we meow or whatever but I'm really happy for the team and I thought they executed it well salana held up reason reasonably well as a network uh I think it's trading at like a five and a half billion dollar fdv right now um I saw some people kind of extrapolating what I'd be Cur like Vance what do you think about this sometimes when people be like oh you know this this newly launched token is trading at this value like this is how the market is valuing it and I'm just like is anyone really valuing this or is this just trading off of like pure sentiment and momentum like I I don't know I I would push back a little bit the obvious one is it's the same valuation as Unis Swap and maybe that

maybe that was engineered or or maybe it was an accident but like I I guess there is an argument to make there um the the only problem I have with it is like look raising $300 million is like a lot of money and then you know the other 60 million that they paid to use the launch pad like I do think there are some Salon projects who've done the air drops correctly again biased but like goo just giving it away to the most loyal to the most the people who use it the most I do think there is a knock on some Salon ecosystem projects from the last cycle of like you know some people just like went for the cash grab and not saying Jupiter was that but like when you raise $360 million it's like you know are you in it for the community are

you in it for the tech like like what what happens next where does that money get used um it's just weird I've never seen that before other than like the big icos of 2017 yeah I think that the one airdrop that I would still be looking out for is uh tensor as well there might be a couple others I'm sort of forgetting tensor I'm I'm I'm sure the other ones are going to be valuable as well but you know like after D5 summer it's like okay cool time to go build all this [ __ ] and like scale the ecosystem up another 10x and I I think the um you know like there's a lot of other ecosystems that

are going to have their moment in the Sun and for a while last year it felt like the game that everyone was going to play was like salana was going to catch eth I think now the game that people are playing at least like you know what I'm thinking from a venture perspective is like [ __ ] sala's worth you know $50 billion like maybe funding some of the other alt l1s or alt l2s like they can they can catch Lana and so I think it's like okay cool like all the cake and punch and Pie has been handed out and now it's just like time to really build apps and prove that the monolithic thesis works but yeah you know they've got like a great community of Builder so I don't think it's impossible I've I've I was never a proponent of the idea that salana could

catch eth I definitely thought it was really undervalued at a certain point but I've just it's just going to be hard to make the call on what would make that happen because I've never seen that happened before you know people have been calling for the eth flipping of Bitcoin forever has it really happened the lead is starting to get narrowed a little bit by Bitcoin generally any flipping calls are extremely bearish for that asset and I've done this too before where I'm like eth is flipping Bitcoin in six months and then it's like okay now eth BDC is down 20% um I think it's just like you know some of the best advice that I've ever gotten is just be very careful with your Victory laps yep I think that's a really good point and if people are looking at like there is there's so much exciting stuff going on

in in these ecosystems I would say like suie I think has been a relatively slept on uh new L1 which I find super interesting obviously we've been talking about Celestia uh even some of the stuff with near I'm interviewing uh Ilia Pushkin and they they have a lot of stuff going on so I think one of their challenges is going to be creating a cohesive narrative around it but they have this thing called the blockchain operating system which is you know a lot of especially l1s are very focused on what I would call like the back end like what we're describing like base layer you know very safe decentralized secure money like properties as its asset but they've created essentially a framework for hosting decentralized front ends and like oh that actually makes a lot of

sense and they have these things called multi-chain accounts where it's kind of like how icas work where you you can custody your assets with near you can essentially use a near validator as an MPC signer and they can you know sort of remotely broadcast transactions that will get executed on bitcoin or ether whatever anyway I I have I have no like strong opinion on how any of this stuff plays out but there's a lot of cool stuff happening there a lot of cool experiments being run and I don't know I think one of the other things that'll be different about this cycle is we actually have cheap block space that's useful people have always said oh there's all this cheap block space all over the place but was on shitty L ones that no one wanted to do anything on it now you've got rollups you got salana

you got Sovereign Roll-Ups on Celestia wherever I and I think it'll just be I think people are going to do some very cool stuff from a product standpoint that people are sleeping on um yeah I mean like I was this conference I think two weekends ago and I sitting with these people and they're like you know eth is in a very precarious position and like you know salana is going to flip it and like look this is not like you know to trigger a salon of people but it's like okay well eth has one guy chasing it and there's like a 200 billion dollar market cap Gap salana has like a hundred people chasing it like there's just like to your point there's a lot of cheap block space there's a lot of ecosystems with different approaches ultimately I think how this shakes out is like who has the

best app strategy for their chain and the ability to PE keep people on a chain and like if one of these gaming chains has you know 10 million monthly active users it's like okay well I guess that gets to be a top you know 10 chain whatever um but like there there's just going to be a lot of jockeying it feels like for probably third place like it feels like that just just my perspective like it's like that's where the money is going to be made yeah you who gets to be the next50 billion protocol that goes from you know a billion today to 50 tomorrow um like you know and it's not going to be liquid in the same way that an ether or Bitcoin is and like you can't pull like a billion dollars out of

that maybe you could but like that that that like is where my sense of like where the money is going to be made yeah and just a last note on the salana Fe thing didn't mean that as a knock on salana but I do think as a again one of my predictions for this year is that they're going to do their own 1559 there's a great U resource for those of you who are interested called umber research which I believe is a mashup between Ellipsis so they're the lab team behind Phoenix and jeto so Lucas has written a couple pieces on there Eugene has written a couple pieces on there and there was a piece that just came out by uh Eugene at alpus and Theo dandes uh who's done a lot of really great work on fee markets he works at

bank Capital um and then so the title of piece is toward multi-dimensional Salon of Fe so we can link it in the show notes if there are any me or fee Market nerds I actually almost did the whole next season of Velcro on fee markets I thought it's a super interesting topic so I'll be curious to see what Salon ends up doing with that hey everyone want to give a quick shout out to this episode sponsor flood protocol the optimal decks aggregator now flood is the perfect partner for this episode on the multi-chain future because flood is solving so many of the issues that we're going to be talking about this season and this is relevant for both Traders and devs so if you are a Trader you should definitely head head over to flood Swap and start trading because they solve three massive problems one

gasless trading no more pesky trading fees two you don't have to worry about getting front run me free and then three they have excellent order routing so that you know that you are getting the best price so head over to flood Swap and click the link in the bottom of the show notes we're going to send you right there for the devs out there you can leverage floods flexible hooks allowing you to make swapping a first class primitive by adding custom order types like T wops or if you're a wallet Builder or something like that you can actually build your own order flow auction in and start recapturing a bunch of that me if you want to reach out to them go to devs flood. bid or just jump right in the Discord all right guys thanks very much appreciate you flood maybe to close just as like more of a

fun riffy sort of topic you know balic wrote a piece he actually wrote two pieces I haven't WR I haven't read the second one on the end of his childhood I wonder if that's an Arthur C Clark I did he just turn 30 I actually should have I think yeah he just turned 30 so happy birthday yeah yeah I just turned 30 too so basically basically same guy basically the same guy yeah um but he he also wrote a really interesting piece I thought on AI and crypto and I'd be curious to get your take on this he he put AI in four categories and I I don't really want to go through each one because that's just going to end up being a list but basically he went through all of these different models of

how Ai and crypto could overlap and you know they ranged from on the spectrum of AI is kind of a a judge or a rule Setter uh in terms of decentralized crypto systems if it's uh like a way like crypto is a way to build better AI models all the way on the other side or if crypto is a participant you know alongside humans within the context of crypto and you know I think he showed that he was excited about it but I I ultimately got like a pretty cautious Vibe on the combination of AI and and crypto so I would just be curious gay or take I was like reading what he has to say I I think my like my take is probably the most practical um where

like for something like a maker that's a revenue generating business that like needs little human intervention like what if we turn that over to AI governance and just said like look goal seek for profit um you know within these risk parameters Ready set go like it feels like that's an evolution of Dow tools that could really be helpful for a lot of projects that are like more mature like think about Unis swap with the fee switch you know turn it on and and give it to the AI and say like what fees should be set on each of these markets and you know like try to remove the meat space you know interaction from humans um I think there's a lot of AI stuff that that's beyond that that's like a little bit more like you need to squint to see it like I saw some people saying

that you know you could you know prove whether AI or you know whether Taylor Swift's nudes are real or fake on a blockchain it's like I don't know how the blockchain would tell you know better than a server there's also kind of like you know you can put the proofs of models that run and making sure that Chachi BT 4.5 actually ran your qu your query instead of Chachi bt4 I think that is potential um but like we'll see it's like very speculative I I I think like it's going to be more of a narrative than a use case for a while but you know people like you know games especially have potentially more use case of this like AI Arena um is building a game where you know you train an AI and then

the AI actually plays for you and you kind of ACR value by building up this everchanging AI model which you can then you know earn rewards sell you know do different things with onchain like that that's like another one but you know we'll see I I think it's like people want the narrative to happen I think there's a couple use cases where it could but I don't think we need to be worried about like a Terminator scenario at any point in the next you know few years yeah I have I feel like I've got no unique perspective on AI and how much you should be worried about it but yeah I I am I am interested to see like at the very least you know this is the collective thought of our analyst but I agree I do feel like there is the potential for a massive narrative

combination of you could you can imagine a world where like crypto and AI take off together and it's like oh my God you know I mean the world is changing yep yeah yeah so who knows there is there was a I'm going to blank on the name but there's a guy named Anish uh who agot Tre who came on here during the me season um really bright guy he anyway I think he went over to this company called ritual um which is another like one of the early polychain guys and yeah when when they launched that I was like that's worth looking at because you know Anish has been a very senior like G to crypto when he was 11 years old and he like worked at Poly chain and the super impressive Place dude's genius straight up yeah straight up um so I was like

okay there's definitely something here and I know multi Chain's pretty bullish on it so so something to work something to watch I would say something to watch yeah if he says something it's generally you know probably worth watching SL correct I I just like I'm not in the weeds enough to know what what AI is gonna do how Vance how much out of curiosity would you say like crypto's become so much more diverse like how do you structure knowledge even within framework like how much would you say you personally you're like I'm In The Weeds on this and I grock it versus how much are you relying on analysts at this point it's just so hard to keep up with every little Nuance of this ecosystem anymore I

mean I I find it pretty easy but like you know I know what Bitcoin and eth are I know what the ETF chatter is right I have a very instinctual understanding of defi because I've been doing it literally forever gaming is like more of a moving Target where I like have less of an idea what I'm doing but I have a strong thesis on the space that I built up over time and then like you know the AI stuff and and um you know kind of more the speculative like infrastructure plays like I just try to you know put analyst on it and and cover it from that perspective because like once it becomes investable I want to be there but um at this point the fund is of a size that like we can't make $41 million to set of

a $400 million fund so you know you're you're also constrained by what your size and strategy is but like there's a bunch of like I think potentially promising smaller funds that are like we're just doing parallel block parallelized blockchains we're just doing Ai and crypto it's like you know if it if it hits they're going to be huge um but like if it doesn't you know it's going to go to zero so like that that's kind of the risky run with being more concentrated and and focused on emerging areas but we can play a little bit later than that which is fortunate for us yeah all right buddy this was a really fun one um I think we can probably end it here and or is there anything else you wanted to chat about

that's it this is a good one cool all right partner later buddy good one peace see hey everyone Mike here if you're a bell curve listener you know that transferring assets across chains can be a massive pain I certainly do I complain about it on this program all the time that is why we are incredibly excited to have teamed up with the Wormhole Foundation the stewards of the Wormhole protocol and the coolest part about this particular partnership is that they have made custom bell curve nfts which you can get and mint for free click the link at the bottom of this episode take you get your free [Music] nft