Where Are We In The Cycle? | Weekly Roundup

Transcript

first off thanks for the motivational speech I appreciate it I need I needed the motivational wow I'm here for you man this is what this is what the block does you know yeah [Music] yeah exactly hey I I avoid doing things that'll get clipped on Twitter and make me look like a fool I appreciate that you those are rookie numbers you got to pump them up Pump them up today's episode is brought to you by geod net discover how the Network's native token GE EOD is powering the next wave of the robotics Revolution by hitting the link in the description of today's episode what's up everyone welcome back

to the Roundup we got Santi he's calling in from New York Santi what's happening man listen I just want to let the record show sticker is still on oh look at that piece of merch you know when you're supposed to like the 50 cap that you take the sticker off yeah this sweater might be worth at some point might be Relic I just may have lost a lot of value by doing that but it more importantly would take the tag off because I don't intend to sell this we still on four years ladies and gentlemen four years of sitting on this chair and I finally have earned my salt look let's go look at that nice nice hoodie nice great hoodie by the way great quality you know I can do an entire segment of just you know it fits

well it's good I'm going to wear it today it's snowing so it's perfect day you are a sweater con s so true yeah I I needed to up my sweater game I think I was wearing the same sweater like for two episodes and one guy in the YouTube comments shout out to everyone that goes to YouTube says dude is this guy like broke like get him another sweater people stopped commenting on my looks a long time ago I just rolled out of bed so also I'm getting they got the team got me this influencer light it is just blasting me I gotta figure out how to turn this thing down the funniest comment I've seen in a while I was like can you tell janana to stop recording in his bathroom can't get the record I can't get the light right I'm like yeah you're too but

I people might have remembered that uh I think there's a great and we should do an episode with you and Mike about kind of like a Founders segment of block Works uh there's a great article that came out by the way uh about like your journey and stuff and media and think goes really good we can link it in the show notes uh but it was something to the effect of like we were like we were using stack boxes as like standing desks in the very beginning OG origins of block works I think Shane from poly mark also was like I started ply market like for my bathroom kind of thing and I was let me see if I can pull up that picture yeah we had a nice uh nice article come out about us this week it actually I mean you can't really ask for

a better headline from the than this from a from a media company let me see if I can find it when you get good press which doesn't always happen you you like to shill it you know you got pump this thing it was um what do they say blockworks results best ever as competitors appear to struggle I mean you gotta love that one it's not bad I mean we were talking about that you had it as a prediction when some of these acquisition started to happen and so anyways yeah um what's happening so you're in New York how's the trip very good very productive uh I'm um meeting with um yeah a bunch of people um so it was very good um there was an Ando conference yesterday I believe I didn't

go to that one but the lineup looked pretty stacked like a lot of traditional institutions so it was it was great to see that I didn't go but uh I don't know if you're there we can report on that but no I I I thought about going but I skipped this week is I think been the busiest work week I've had in months quarters I don't know like interesting yeah in terms of like basic I mean basically for us like you know one of the ways we make we we make money is like marketing dollars flow into blockworks like sponsorships and ads and um just every single founder has you know the first thing that gets cut a bare Market is actually marketing so and you know so we had like two years of that where just marketing budgets got

slashed and they've been I'd call it like slowly coming back um and then now it's like every single person is just like okay now like let's make hay while the sun is shining and um marketing budgets are like drastically getting ramped up and it's actually I think a good tell of where we're at in the cycle I remember feeling this exact same feeling as we like went into 2021 because you know our Revenue was was like 2018 2019 2020 was good and then 2021 was just insane like exceeded all of our expectations and it because these marketing budgets just came back in spades and you're starting to see the exact same thing happening for context these are Crypton native companies not traditional companies trying to tap into the crypto audience it's crypto native

but also it's like I mean for D this year we have let me pull up the sponsorship lineup real quick because I should know this off the top of my head but it's you know like vanc KPMG Perkins Koy um bny melon oh um actually we haven't put up some of the new logos but I think like I think there's some other big traditional names that are about to come in too these are all sponsors like Flagship sponsors yeah sponsors and we're talking to like some of the biggest um like Cloud providers actually who are who actually a lot of crypto is built on top of these guys

um so I mean there's not many so I guess you can guess but you know about doing something huge in you know this year so like they're really making a push in that's great uh very good to see so what's going on this week I mean there's there's uh there's you maybe we could just talk about the market for a second because um so so Trump on Saturday issued um so well so Trump had originally promised these tariffs right he promised T like in his campaign he he had promised tariffs and um on uh who was it Mexico Canada and China and he talked about that a lot in the campaign but I think everyone thought that was kind of a negotiating tool um and then he actually I think it was on Saturday he actually said that he was

putting these things in into effect right so the markets actually well the markets can't move as we talked about last time when we you know last round up we were talking about Nvidia this time we're talking about this the markets can't move on the weekend so everyone's looking at crypto so crypto gets sent into a tail spin everyone was kind of trying to position themselves for this like incoming trade war and um yeah future is plunged um there was two two billion in liquidations which is the uh so Ben so Ben so two billion so exchanges changed how they report their liquidations um actually someone in the Empire Channel hold on I can pull this up but uh they've changed how they report their liquidations and so it's actually a real understate saying it's two billion is actually I think a

understatement Ben who's the CEO of bybit said he thinks it's more like8 to 10 billion which I felt like it was more it felt like more to me too I think that'd be the largest liquidation day in history yeah um not by like percentage but by just total size obviously yeah it was uh it was substantial I remember I mean Bitcoin the interesting thing Bitcoin held up reasonably well it was down I think it dipped a 97k no it hit like it hit like 90 or 9 there was there was a wick right when ethereum hit like 2100 um a lot of alts were down like 25 like Doge was down 20 more than 25% it was like down like 30 there was like that final Wick uh and then it rebound fairly quickly over the ensuing like 24

hours but yeah it felt felt messy 100% it's good thing you got into got into some cash I I hope you I hope you spent some of that cash I I did buy some I did buy back some positions yes not not some I didn't get filled on on on some of my orders but like 20 25% of the order got filled which was nice yeah it happened it it was the worst correction for Ethan Soul since August of 2024 um eth fell 34% right from is down from 3200 to 2100 is like wait is that math right yeah I think it's like 33 or 34% so um so you know what's annoying I my

bank so I had sent a bunch of wires uh and all of my wires cleared except for my wire to coinbase oh they're calling me they're like this seems like fraud this is like the you know we can't process your wire I was like are you [ __ ] kidding me this was this was Friday yeah yeah you know it's interesting because uh people may forget now but if when the send Network existed you could this was a far easier process to move money from your silvergate account to coinbase Prime like you could do that fairly quickly and you know you could take advantage of these opportunities and yeah I mean it's that's gone the bank was like why are you sending money

here I was like I was like don't you like this is my life like this is yeah I I mean come on guys I mean as a as a it's kind of uh when most people start discovering like money markets and defi you're like the the question that I like to ask the most is do you know what happens when you deposit money in a bank and most people Pro probably tell you that money is sitting in a vault and you are you my friend are very wrong that money is re hypothecated and therefore if you wanted to get all your money back uh and everyone else in the bank that depositors wanted to get their money

back their money back they would uh not be able to process those withdrawals because you know they lend out there's long duration asset liability mismatch and whatnot so um yeah anyways it's uh it's a bit of a you know interesting Journey when you ask people like that but oh that well that uh I guess sucked you're wiring clear till Monday yeah so which then the market had already rebounded and it's like whatever um actually the mark yeah the market hadn't even gone down I don't think by Friday hey everyone just wanted to give a quick thanks to today's title sponsor geod net by setting up a base station you can get involved with this groundbreaking web 3 ecosystem learn more by heading over to geod net.com or

just by hitting the link in the description of today's episode today's episode is brought to you by unich Chain an upcoming layer 2 that's purpose built for the next generation of dii applications with up to 95% lower fees than ethereum and 250 millisecond block times coming soon after launch uni chain is designing the future of cross-chain liquidity stay ahead of the launch by visiting unich chain. org and giving un chain a follow on X anyways let me let me pull up some of these numbers so um if I mean everything just is down basically it feels like and I I want to actually talk just about the markets and like kind of just how you're thinking

about things right now I know we have been talking about this a lot lately but it's still top of mind for me so you know if you look I I got a new computer and my security won't let me share my screen for some reason but I'll just talk about it right now which is you know if you look at the memes from the alltime highs whiff is down 84% Bon is down 70% doge is down 64% Pepe is down 65% pangu is down 82% Trump is down 75 Melania is down 90 fcoin down 75% layer twos arbitrum is down 80% optimism's down 80% IMX is down 80% Maddox down 90% uh blast is down 85% if you look at defi Athena's down 60% from thetime high which happened uh let's six uh nine

months ago yeah I I actually don't yeah I trust your call there but you know AER drum 60% a 60% compound 95% curve 97% uh Unis swap 80% jup Jupiter 50% this is a little misleading because this is down from the alltime highs which you know if you had bought a year ago you'd be up on some of these things but actually still not even up know even the AI agents right which had just been like they were just it was just the thing to to buy goat down 90% AI 16c 85 0% go go back to jup Jupiter yeah if you go to Jupiter and you look at market cap um how does that chart look because oftentimes the the price may go down but

on a on a on a circulating like market cap basis that may increase because mind you a lot of these tokens a lot of these projects are emitting tokens and have some pretty big unlocks and so okay actually so we'll do a little Empire uh Community corner here I always ask people what they want to what they want us to talk about in the telegram and one of the questions was how do you think about market cap vers fdv vers price so can you just expand on like yeah how you think about that a little bit Yeah so so typically most most people would say you look at the price say that uh you know ethereum went down from or a project was trading at $100 and then the token is down to 50 so okay

you might just look at that and say wow it's down quite a bit from the all-time high but say that that token had 10% of the supply in circulation um so um in on that basis it would have been a th000 fdv sorry a thousand circulating market cap like if you go on coin gecko you look they typically most of the time report on a circulating basis so you take the 10 token Supply that is circulating and unlocked freely traded times the price of 100 so that prod you could have said oh it's a th000 and then it's down 50 you could have said okay that's you know 500 right um am I doing that math right by the way yeah I mean the the market

cap is just the price times the circulation price times the circulating Supply yeah now that is okay one metric you're like certainly psychologically the market is looking at that and it's it's important but say that during that time where it went down from 100 to 50 it unlocked you know 50% of the supply and say that the total Supply is 100 units so you went from 10 units that were circulating you know it it it launched whatever it's been around for a bit and so the total Supply is 100 so that you know that project when it was trading at 100 right you have just for round round numbers it was $100 price times 100 total units of

tokens that was uh um what is it 10 10,000 there's a rule man we don't do mental math on the podcast yeah Mental Math 10,000 that's fully diluted was 10,000 right then on a fully diluted basis it's 5,000 because the token went down to 50 uh on a circulating basis it was 10 units times 100 that was a th so it's only 10% right makes sense right there's only 10% of tokens um and then it went down to 500 but actually when you do the math and we said it unlocked 50% of the total Supply so now there's 50 total tokens and it's trading at 50 so it's

2,500 uh relative to the total um market cap so anyways putting ma um Mental Math aside it is important because in some of these projects if you go to coin gecko there's a tab that allows you to see like the chart on a market cap basis circulating and I think it's just interesting because some Pro like arbitrum for instance when it did the first unlock oh here I can share now yeah there you go exactly okay people be really so go to market exactly click market cap go to jup yeah so go to like Max um so in this case like it's look at look at how different these charts look exactly yeah why is that the case it's the case from projects where you have a

lot of tokens unlocking and I think that's a important metric like the the market cap chart is instructive because in some instances you might look at the price going down but Market Cap's actually going up and that's to me is actually quite bullish because Market is absorbing those tokens unlocking um now this may look quite different for other projects I don't want to read too much into this but my assumption is when I look at a chart where the market gap's going up and price is going down is like okay someone there is bidding this pretty aggressively probably as an institution go to a which has most of the supply unlocked at this point yeah so this is the metric to look so circulating Supply just to do that again in 20 seconds if anyone's watching on YouTube this is circulating

Supply this is total Supply total Supply is the total number of tokens that have like been issued to anyone in the world so a lot of a lot of these projects raise a lot of venture money so let's say you know you issue you know panta and Pary an electric do a big round or something in Jupiter they have a bunch of tokens but they're locked up that would be in the total Supply here but it's not yet in the circulating Supply because it can't be sold and then as soon as there's unlocks this total Supply moves into the circulating Supply and you can just do the math here so market cap of 2294 is 8723 which is the Jupe price times the circulating Supply should get this number yeah okay youna go to a yeah go to a Jupiter is a project that is

unlocking right so a is a project already vested most of the tokens have not like like the vast majority of the Tok see how tight see this number number 15 over 16 is going to get you 90 something per whereas Jupiter was 2.6 over 7 yeah so go to now go to if you go to Avi the price chart and the market cap chart look almost the same actually yeah yeah yeah yeah they do exactly and so it's just important right um because again you want to understand if Mar there could be a phenomenon where I pay attention to when price goes down but market cap goes up for projects that

have launched that tells me that there is a bidder out there that is really interested in absorbing that unlock uh maybe go to Ando for instance now that we've talking about Ando earlier on another project it launched it has you know again a fairly what is that you know you have circulating Supply at three billion total supply of 10 billion so what what caused the so if you're looking at the Mark so the price price went up quite a bit price went Uno's up Uno's up like 7% last two weeks it's so the market cap ripped overnight from two to four can you explain can you explain that there

probably big unlock this a big exactly exactly that's a big unlock because if you go to the price chart because I want to make sure the price didn't Spike yeah I mean it kind of did right no no no this is it it over this is Jan 17th it went from two to two to four then Jan 17th nothing yeah the price didn't move much that's ladies and gentlemen what we call a bullish unlock that's it go to there's a website that tracks like all the unlocks maybe you guys track it but um yeah Tia okay let's look at Tia because Tia's another interesting um so you know it's a different picture right you have Tia has been unlocking quite a bit

there's a big unlock earlier or last year I should say circulating Supply they should have you know what if I were coin gecko Bobby if you're listening it would be nice to have a chart that looks at like Supply unlocks like it's the growth of Supply there you go this is a we should really add token unlocks into our platform actually yeah I think so just give me the ability to like overlay like a chart of price and token unlocks or like like that' be kind of nice but look at uh Tia for instance Tia Tia all right I think Tia is quite Tia had a big unlock we can't look at it oh I don't pay for

it well well [ __ ] well [ __ ] oh [ __ ] we're too poor to pay for token oh [ __ ] wait what is this is this the exact same platform tokon oh wait these the exact same platform it shows for a few projects actually but nonetheless you know it's just I think you understand the point this is all right this is what I was talking about before it's like these are these are the things down from their all-time highs like AI agents down 90 90% modular stuff Tia and dynamic and what Saga down 90% gaming all these things are down 95% the l1s except for Bitcoin are down 60 70% what do you make of this well um just I mean it's it's a

there's a weird where in a bull market we're obviously in a bull market but these things are down like 80% off their highs there's a lot of return disp like like I I wouldn't have expected the beta between Bitcoin and some and alts to be this High meaning you look at bitcoin's down 9% from the high and you have ethereum down 44% I would be I don't think there's been a moment I'm gonna go on a Lim here I don't think there's been a moment in crypto where that is that that beta has been that high like that it's a 5x beta yeah that's soul is down 30% you know again the soul the eth soul having less beta than eth on the

downside is actually interesting um you know so behaving more like B&B down 29% um but yeah it's pretty again I mean it goes back to the point where we've been making the PO it's like it's just a a Have and Have Nots market and the Divide is quite big you had to be in certain very specific names to to have you know performed decently well if you're a crypto fund or an investor and you didn't and you didn't have your money in Bitcoin B&B soul and uh a few other like Ripple here where's Ripple because Ripple's done very well right it's I don't know if it's on here but go back to coin Market coin

gecko sorry like xrp is doing quite well well it's come down a bit right since it hit it's down 20% that's a ridiculous chart yeah but look at look at like the 14-day chart below it's down 20% if you go down to go down a bit uh historical price down below what do you want going to look at here uh down below the there we go it's down 25% from the alltime high which happen 7 years ago but it hit it it it hit uh three bucks and 40 I think just it almost touched that yeah yeah yeah it was very close out but yeah R again anyway I have

a I have a theory for you actually um so look look at this so everything's down a ridiculous amount except for Bitcoin why is why is Bitcoin down only 10% off the highs why or but actually why is Bitcoin having an amazing cycle and everything else is struggling um you're asking me theories flow wise you have an ETF you have sailor bidding um and it's a different type of investor we talked about it um in our predictions um Trump got elected in November uh executive orders have been coming in they're quite positive if you talked a lot of funds in the space flows are not coming in yet into into their

into their funds it takes time right takes a couple quarters for allocators to invest in funds that are going to bid alts because it's that's where the money really comes from um I would only preface that by saying like how do you explain then Ripple Ripple I think has been this Tik Tok phenomenon where a lot of I would want to see data to validate this so my my theory is that a lot of flows have come from like Tik Tok now you would have expected a um you know Ripple has been an interesting outlier because you could say well what about memes right because a lot of money like you know Trump and a lot of these memes should have you know are also getting some of those flows um but I I I think the retention is

really poor for memes like the half life of most memes is really low I think Nikita tweeted something about this Rob from dragonfly had really interesting data on the retention of trump a lot of the a lot of the new if you go to Rob's profile I I retweeted that because I I thought it's just very instructive so I'm going to read it so Rob looked into this and said a lot of people took yesterday's chain analysis report to suggest the Trump token was a mass on boarding event primarily because 50% of trump milania token holder wallets were net new to S altcoins but that that continues to make the same wallet user fallacies and misses the distinction between interest and Trump versus onchain users that are value additive and contribute Capital to the broader ecosystem in the last 30 days other than moonshot other than large other large

access points to the Token have had their abser rank go down not up meaning moon was likely the access point for most uh new users um and if you can continue to go down uh yeah it's just um it was just interesting to see this data um and because if you look at the headline like moonshot like great you on board all these users but clearly like a lot of these users you know may have bought Trump at 20 30 40 70 bucks and they just had a pretty traumatic experience of seeing Trump go from the high of 70 down to 18 bucks like that that user is not sticking around is not putting in more money in a crypto you know what I mean

so here's a theory for you uh oh crap where did this go micro strategy here let me go to our site all right I originally thought we were kind of mid to late stage cycle here going into the year I was like all right maybe we top in the summer fall or may or something like that but all these prices are acting very funky I would say this is the single reason bit coin is up so much and everything else is down is micro strategy micro strategy bought what 40 billion of Bitcoin 20 billion of that Bitcoin was bought in Q4 20 so they bought 20 billion Bitcoin in the last three months so that's that

is propping up the price of Bitcoin so Bitcoin should actually be lower than it is today mhm which to me tells me that we're actually earlier in the cycle than people want to say yeah I mean again I oh and then I was I was confirmed you were confirmed I was confirmed by Dan CMS had a good tweet yeah there this is what you need to know um so so Dan's take if you guys didn't read uh Dan from cms's take he said um um what what was the main takeaway from this the main the main takeaway is

that there's basically still this kind of large overhang of 2021 liquid still doesn't exist they really are like Venture is not flowing into the space yet there haven't been the new raises yet there's not really any flows it's very PVP you know you know AI agents goes up but that's at the detriment of meme coins meme Co coins go up but that's at the detriment of defi like it's all just you need more flows you need more flows coming in they haven't coming in if they're coming in it's very selective there's there's been a rotation from salana to Avalanche there's a particular meme coin in avalanche is just ripping yeah and so like it is very PVP still in my conversations with a lot of funds that are raising they still

haven't received all the flows maybe that's on the come you know with all this positive like new regulatory 180 David Sachs uh was put out um there's a couple interesting from a policy standpoint perspective I think David saxs went on the record this week saying we will have have greater regulatory Clarity uh we will be more Pro crypto like everything that you want to hear right if you're an institution that has been talking to a lot of funds that has been on this on the on the kind of ledge um hearing that I think pushes you forward to make a commitment to a fund that is Raising right a lot of crypto funds are raising right now there are in Market that process takes time as much as you have

executive orders that are very bullish and a new regime it takes time so I I would agree with this where we are in the cycle the the hope is that um you know um if you have flows you know funds crypto funds are not going to invest in Bitcoin they're going to invest in alts some of that will be in liquid other that another component will be in Venture um at the moment for the last better part of the last 16 months it's been pumped out fun and a lot of the capital you know moving around from mcoin to mem coin yeah you know you you if you look at there was there was a stat out there that I looked at which is like what two3

of salones come from pump. fun um Mt I think had really good takes there um you know pushing back a bit but a lot of people were like pump. fun is extremely you know value extractive it look at all the you know soul that it's deposited into exchanges I mean it's it's printing right uh and that's just a that's just a this is state of state of things right um yeah let me um all right La last topic on this and then there's some other stuff I want to get your take on so Ryan Connor who's um uh leads leads research at block Works had an interesting tweet he said for selling and um soul out soul with cash flows reasonable valuation outperforming e I'll skip that one Cino

and hype holding up benefit from Liquidation is growing honey and geode have barely moved revenues are uncorrelated to crypto AI coins with massive evaluations leading the way down who here still believes fundamentals do not matter I thought this was an interesting MH take which is a lot of the a lot of the things with I'm kind of putting like the fundamental ORS but like the fundamentals like didn't go down that much actually in this in this crash and Camino rebounded substantially actually yeah um and you know full disclosure I'm an investor there I'm an investor in geonet I'm you know might as well just say all the disclosures here but I'm an investor in Soul as well but yeah I think um Y how did how did the makers like

what's maker up to I was I like to look at maker every once in a while to see like if it's still a stable coin or sky or whatever it's called now Geet is a firstof its kind dpin protocol that's revolutionizing satellite navigation Services they're actively generating onchain Revenue that's growing 500% year-over-year by providing Precision location service that are 100 times more accurate than standard GPS on Empire we always talk about finding how crypto can power completely new business models and they're a perfect example of this they're already trusted by over 30 Enterprise customers across Industries including Automotive agriculture

construction and even robotics the network is powered by its native token G EOD and easily mined with their satellite Miner by setting up a base station you can get involved with this groundbreaking web 3 ecosystem learn more by heading over to geod net.com or just by hitting the link in the description of today's episode today's episode is brought to you by unich Chain an upcoming layer 2 Solution that's changing defi forever it's built with a vision to be the home for cross-chain liquidity and defi Innovation as part of the optimism super chain uni chain brings you up to 95% cheaper transactions than ethereum's base layer as well as near instant finality with

250 millisecond block times coming shortly after main net launch to make things even better seamless cross-chain transactions if you're a developer this means you can build defi applications that truly push the envelope of what's possible onchain visit unich chain. org or follow unchain onx to stay updated on the launch upcoming features and getting started on building your dream applications going back to the CMS we like to always point to that chart where we're on the cycle it's like the M everyone loves to ask that question and and bull post but um do in what version are we much later in the cycle and what would derail CMS

is and your standing assumption that we're early I mean what would derail it is probably like I mean you saw David saaks came out and was like Trump asked us to look into a strategic Bitcoin Reserve he didn't tell us to go do it so the market fell 5% on that because he just you know asked them to go look into it the market probably I mean we're probably late if like I don't know Trump and if they see kind of as a dick to the industry still and if Trump uh and if the banks don't end up actually doing anything even though Sab 121 got rolled back and if Trump ends up just being doesn't follow through on any of his promises yeah this I had a tweet around this and I'll close close out my

comments around this is um when this happens it's a constant reminder for me to just we there are things we can't control and there are things that we can't control as an industry I've always felt that I look at Uber and the resistance that they faced when they went to Market it had so much push back anywhere they went taxi lobbies wanted to kill them it just delivered such a great consumer experience that it was almost impossible for politicians and cons like to to deny their license and I think that that is the most important thing for us like can we control we can't control a lot of the

certainly not the price action if you're talking to founder you can't control you know new institutions coming in the thing that this is a constant reminder at least for me that it's actually quite invigorating because it's it's like it just reenters the focus which should always be our Focus which is we we need to really just focus on on the fundamental use cases Beyond just pure speculation we have a broken funnel in crypto we always have had a broken funnel if people come to this industry just thinking I want to punt Trump or the next flavor mem coin they're will be trauma in that in that in that journey and they might come back and it and it's like you know but there are new

mechanisms like prior relative to Prior Cycles we have stuff today that can fix that and so I think it's just a reminder like we have to I keep talking about non-speculative use cases I know I'm obviously going to bring it back to what I'm doing but I I get very excited because it just further validates the thing that as an industry we need to be there is a sense of urgency that I don't think people have in my journey I've talked to most of the foundations and I talked to them at a point where prices were hitting alltime High over the last six months and when that is happening they're like Kumai you know they're they kind of take their their eye off the ball which is we need to really focus on H fixing this broken

funnel and F and looking closely at the retention of these users and the experience that they have and the best we can is servicing them real use cases like geonets of the world deep ends of the world like stable coins I know it's happening like companies like newbank very encouraging I was looking at newbank data and remittance flows like you know remittance operators are feeling the pain newbank uptake of stable coins has been very important like most of the users now that that are onboarded to new bank their first meme their first crypto asset is a stable coin we just need more of that uh and less of just pure specul I'm not being dismissive of stable of uh meme coins and speculation I just think that it's a

broken funnel and if we if we are not focusing on improving and adding more funnels to this industry than just purely coming through an exchange we're going to continue to have this problem it's as simple as that and and I I don't think we have 12 years I don't think we have that much more time and and I just don't feel that the industry really feels that sense of urgency it's like oh yeah black Rock's going to come and rwa it is there's there's a lot of really good people doing very good work uh to try to fix this funnel um but it just needs to be a priority much more so than it has been historically and when prices go up we kind of drop the ball because you know it's like yeah you

know everyone's going to come and uh but you know let this be a good like you know kind of reentering event of yeah we we just got to get we got to fix that yeah all right let's talk about um I wanted to get your take on this tweet this was from Tom D Tom Dunley who is a partner at MV Global and sparked a good conversation so he said no project in crypto needs to raise over 10 million stop I frankly think a lot of these projects bear chain monad abstract infinex movement Etc get their valuations strictly because of the need for big capital allocations from large VCS when big VCS raise 300 there's functionally no way to deploy it unless you write some $20 million checks even

if you do $5 million allocations you have to invest in 60 projects and DD thousands um there's no way they need this much money monad 250 million be chain 100 million movement 140 what protocols actually need Omega 20 what protocols actually need 20 million Capital with in a business with marginal fixed costs that are extremely lower and just getting lower with AI we're effectively funding these startups for five plus years of Runway when they also get additional runway on token launch this creates terrible incentives motivation incentives for the team the valuations associated with big Capital intakes set the bar so high that the price for Perfection for what their user and revenue metrics will be 10 years in the future um if you admit the industry

isn't ready for these kind of rounds you have to return capital and not charge management fees these project valuations are directly a transfer from VPS into marketing and yield Farmers for these projects because you have no need to spend the money on anything else no more raises over 10 million no more fbvs over 100 million retail wins price Discovery wins product Market fit wins yeah it's not the first time we hear this type of narrative right I mean it's it's quite popular when you know I'm not disagreeing with a lot of these things I've actually from my standpoint I was just talking to the mega eth team yesterday um you know I I don't I don't see the need to raise uh but that much Capital but you know the the counterargument to

all of this is it is a competitive game out there to acquire talent and acquire you know teams and a lot of Grants are being doled out and so it's like if someone raises a war chest then if you don't have that war chest does it put you in a competitive disadvantage on the margin right you could argue and I've always told teams this it's like don't necessarily go deploy in a chain because they offered you the most amount of incentives and threw the most amount of money at you go deploy there because you actually believe that this is where you can live for the next 10 years and you will actually you know but it's it's challenging right um it's kind of like a bit of wishful thinking I don't think it's going to necessarily

change because the Crypt is funky liquid Venture asset class and this is well I don't think it changes because the the opportunity set you're going after there's no way to Value what an L1 or an L2 is worth so it's like it's either going to be worth hundreds of billions one day or zero and that's why these things are getting funded like this it's like yeah the liquidity is shorter there's a comp set out there everything trades on a ra devaluation so yeah of course right yeah I I do I do think I mean I think there's some I think he's right and wrong basically I think he's right I think he's right that you don't need okay I think he's 10 million is way too low because at most 50 yeah I think you

should raise like 30 to 50 if you're building an L1 um how how however eventually you do need more money and uh it raising it's so much money actually does give you a higher valuation just funnily because it works like that um not by Logic but because you can tell a story and get a high valuation and raise a bunch of money and stuff like that um and so actually raising a bunch of money actually sets your token your token price I think higher upon list and people want that it also means you only have to raise once or maybe twice right like like movement didn't go raise 140 in one slingshot round they raised four I think three

rounds three then four after right yeah yeah uh a a and then a b and then after TG they kind of did a another a round then and there yeah I would also say I mean people people underestimate the cost that actually go into some of this stuff it's like I was talking to one of the Oracle uh one of the protocol Founders who's paying three million a year to one of the Oracle sbri providers that's three so let's say you only raised 10 million that's 30% of what you know of your of your costs are of of the money that you raise is out the door right there so there's also pretty high stable coin integration fees I've heard some of the stable coin providers like usdc it's

not cheap to have them come into your chain if you're if you're an L1 or an L2 I think Tom has a point but I think 10 million is way too low um all right I I got a question for you um what I so I went to a hockey game this week with h Yan uh vanc um we went toland we went to an Islanders game by the way hockey might be one of my favorite sports to go watch we went to an island game it it was great shout out Yan it was it was awesome um had a great time but we were he asked me this question and it kind of just it got me a little disappointed because um he said what are you really excited about in crypto right

now and I think for the first time maybe being since I've been in crypto I didn't really have a good articulate answer usually I feel like I've got like six seven eight things I'm like this they're they're doing this and they're doing this and this is happening here and I was just like I I was like I I don't know like stable coins are pretty cool and he was like yeah is that like the coolest thing in crypto right now so I can't tell if I'm just this like if I'm too out of the weeds or if just nothing interesting is happening or if I just this is a classic third cycler move like I don't know what what do you think about that I'm here to tell you sir most of the time a lot of people the longer you are in crypto the the the more this

could happen I don't think you become cynical I think you're skeptical rightfully so but there's a difference between being cynical and skeptical I think cynical is just your your skew pessimist skeptical is a healthy dose of skepticism is very useful but it doesn't doesn't preclude you from being Optimist I love technology I'm a Perpetual Optimist but I am skeptical of because I've seen just stuff but I am constantly reminded that um just because something didn't work in the past doesn't mean that it can't work because technology moves very quickly in the space it has four years ago the tech was not is very different you know um you know what you saw with Trump and how salana managed that it was it was impressive like Cloud Fair would

have gone down like salana like was able to absorb that and volume was really high I look at that I'm incredibly excited because then you you've heard toally say since the Inception of salana nowas like on the blockchain and all of a sudden you have an event over the weekend that was able to absorb and process 100 billion of of trading volume fairly Flawless and I I look at that I'm like I'll say it again like there's just something very real about that that just I've never seen it um Nick shouldn't be uh Jean should not be I mean Nick is his son is building Agora I spoke with Nick this week because it's just really interesting what he's building now um

people might say that how's that sexy it might not feel sexy to you but I'm here to tell you stable coins are the sexiest thing of this industry and deepen but stable coins like are an amazing category and if we just stopped innovating there there's enough reasons to be excited and there's enough reasons to like take a longterm view in this industry and say if we just stop there and kind of innovate it on stable coins that is enough to justify the existence of this industry by a country mile and we are not even scratching the surface of what is possible with stable coins and everything that happens on that like you are radically fundamentally going to change consumer behavior and how people think about Finance because Finance has never caught

up to the digital world that's just the nature of the game yeah so that that was actually Yan's I was like yeah stable coins but like I mean I guess I don't know how exciting that really is and he said look you get once every 50 years you can upend the financial system and maybe yeah once every couple of generations I mean you I will I will pinch myself constantly and I'll say I consider myself extremely lucky because we're just at that moment where you are seeing a total transformation in how the financial system and those rails are going to are are being built in real time in an open source manner like building in the open sometimes it's messy right because you you see open works when you walk in the city it's not

great right think about how building is being built like sometimes they covered but if they're not you're going to see the pipe you're going to see the the messy stuff you're going to see the trucks coming in out might be dust all over but man when they unveil that World Trade Center and you're like holy [ __ ] that's Monumental and it will be Monumental it already I think is Monumental you're already seeing data points that suggest that and it fits so well with like other other Mega trends that are happening in the world like AI agents I still think like a lot of stuff will be automated the more the more I've in in this journey of building inversion i' I've just constantly looked at bank statements and consumer Behavior I'll just like offer one tipit which is you had high interest rates where

people could have bought treasuries and made 5% on their money in a relatively risk as free manner yet there were so many deposits a staggering amount of deposits sitting on checking accounts that are not earning 5% for the simple reason that people were either unaware uneducated or just didn't go through the process of depositing that money in their checking account to a money market account and Banks like profited from that and didn't share the interest Revenue that they were clipping now you talk to Nick vanc who's building a Gora or usdc who is now sharing some of that and they're doing that work for you that that fundamentally transforms the the consumer experience

and the savings rate and the ability for that consumer if they're earning 5% you know you need to automate Finance people don't like the contrary to what a def5 Founder may think no one wants to check their bank account daily no one does no one logs into them once you deposit in a Bank of America account you're set for life most people don't ever leave betterment and all these Robo advisers learned this the hard way building distribution and finance is very hard but with stable coins you're breaking that you're just making it abstracting away all the complexity for the user that most people don't learn about this in school you never get taught how to save you never get taught how to invest or how money works or the counterparty risk of depositing in a bank account or what that money does or doesn't do or

that you need to deposit it bu treasuries you most people don't know this it's very complicated it seems easy because we talk about it here all the time but it's really not when you look at the financial like when you look at the earnings for these Banks they're making staggering amounts of money they're not sharing that they're not sharing that treasury yield back to the user yeah but it's but you know that's the most powerful thing about this and I was talking to someone this week and it's like so what does success look like for you in this industry I said I still every I'll I'll the exercise listeners should go do is walk around and this weekend go go around you're at a restaurant you're at a coffee shop I still think you you you go to that you you You observe and you say what

percentage of these people at this point most of them have heard of crypto heard of Bitcoin heard of you know it's everywhere right but what percentage of them are using it what percentage of them are using stable coins the reality is it's like less like one out of 10 in the room at at best maybe uh and before it was like we need to convince him to use it now I'm like you have the stripes of the world um new banks of the world paypals of the world that are just going to offer it to the user and the user is not going to be even aware that that's happening and that is the endstate of this technology and I think I think that's what gets me most excited because now you have the the aggregators that are going to

evangelize this without even telling their users and that's really powerful the the the second order effects of stable coins really working are like I don't even want to go there because that that just opens up that's like the the smartphone moment stable coins are like that smartphone moment which is no one really predicted that Uber was going to be possible that you would have been able to stream Netflix like you do everything with your smartphone now no one really predicted that no kid didn't predict that Steve Balmer microsof didn't predict that companies just really missed the boat on that and I think um I think that's why I get so excited about stable coins because they truly transform Finance yeah um so I don't know it's a boring unsexy

answer I was talking to B A parfi this week too and we were like man we just go back to the simple pitch that you know I'll give you this so when we were fundraising for instance uh back in the day they're like what is defi is this thing you know I'm like guys listen and the pitch to LP was very simple it's like hey okay go and try the stable coin go buy usdc at coinbase and then use it or tether or whatever and then come back to me and tell me if you want to do a wire transfer again go do it and the flow was like actually much broken back then uh you know you didn't have easy stuff like you didn't have Phantoms of the world you have to make it super easy but the majority of people that went

through that flow came back to us and invested in the fund back then mind you that was 2020 first off thanks for the motivational speech I appreciate it I I need I needed the motivational spe wow here for you man this is what this is what the block does you know yeah [Music] [Laughter] yeahh exactly I I avoid doing things that'll get clipped on Twitter and make me look like a fool I appreciate that you those are rookie numbers you got to pump them up Pump them up by the way we always give movie recommendations go watch W for Wall Street yeah yeah I need a little bit of that in my life right now

um so two two things that I think I had that I thought were coming but like kind of was like ah how long will it actually take um tech companies I think my prediction one of my predictions of the year is about to come true massively very soon finex tech companies Banks launching their own coins I think the banks are actually going to be much slower than people think but there's some huge tech companies in fexs that I think are about to launch their own stable coins that is just going to surprise the whole world so that's gonna be really cool um and then the other thing Point can you just explain what the biggest motivation for them is oh yeah easily it's I won't I won't explain I'll just I'll just show you this

it's right here where is this where is this new computer te it's te doing you gotta return that computer there yeah there that's all you need tether hits 13 billion in profits in 2024 that's not top line revenue folks that's 13 billion in profits that's like more profitable than most banks and most tech companies and revenue per employee probably all highest it's been for any it's got to be the best I actually met the um I met the C the old CEO of only f over the weekend and we're um comparing notes of if they were more profitable per employee or was tether more profitable per employee I think tether I

think tether still got them beat I think so so but anyway this is why so everyone's looking at this being like Oh my God we are leaking so much value to the to the to the old school l1s of the world the banks right Payment Processing fees the charge back fees the all so I think they're all so that's the first thing that's going to happen the second thing that is um that I was also underestimating the timeline is I think onchain equities is about to get turned on in really big way and um I think some of the biggest fexs like Robin Hood like some of those kind of folks are gonna are gonna are gonna basically launch stable coins figure out

their own how to do their own chains and figure out onchain equities and I think you'll see a lot of some combo of their own chain their own stable coin and bring on chain equities I don't know if this is Robin Hood's or the coin bases or the or the fintex of the world or the tdes of the world but those folks are those are the two things to look out for and it's gonna be it's gonna be a huge Paradigm Shift actually yeah so I had a maybe we can wrap up with this because I had a poll which said like uh Elon was tweeting something the fact that in order to increase transparency for Doge we should put the treasury on chain like the budget to have more accountability of where the funds are going and whatnot and and I I just did a a poll

which said hey where would this happen which chain uh you ethereum call it L1 or L2 I I said ethereum L2 Avalanche L1 Solana other um why didn't you put ethereum main chain here I don't know I just felt it I actually think of all the chains it's ethereum ethereum one is the most likely to do here yeah yeah yeah well I was going to ask you that but you just answered the question so well [ __ ] well [ __ ] well [ __ ] I I guess that's the end of it folks have a great weekend no well D I just killed I just killed the conversation yeah there's a there's a great um so is it aval avalan for folks we I didn't let

you complete that sentence Avalanche L1 got 56% yeah of the vote ethereum L2 got 22% salana got 133% yeah so there there's a and then I read there's a great post by Morgan um at Avalanche and she makes the case whether you believe that it's Avalanche or not go read that blog post um and she makes a very compelling argument of like some of the some of the features that are interesting um you know the Privacy um fee customization like EV like a lot of particularly I think permissioning and privacy were

interesting privacy I think is really one of those categories that is quite interesting and relevant for this type of use case and so yeah it was it was a great blog post go read it maybe have uh reasons why like yeah but um be maybe this is something that in the Empire thread on telegram people can comment because it's inspiring to say the least just a spark discussion yeah um I'm actually not going to close with that I'm going to actually call out something I thought was interesting this week because I want to get back into calling out out some cool things and it's um uni uni V4 so and and I actually wanted I don't know if you looked into it and if you've been like following Unis Swap and uni V4 and stuff

but they so they announced this like two years ago right that they're gonna work that they're working on these like Hooks and univ V4 and they finally actually rolled it out they rolled it out over 12 chains um over the past weekend and it's a really big deal I think one is I think it could could spark it could be kind of Be the Anchor that we defi needs for defi 2.0 like defi summer yeah and I think it's a really interesting Innovation um and the reason for that is these things called hooks that I'm sure people a lot of people know about but hooks are basically these separate smart contracts that are kind of um like hooked on to or like attached to Unis swap liquidity pools and they enable developers and like any Builder to

implement custom Dex logic that triggers based on certain behaviors so what that actually means is intents limit orders uh where you want to provision liquidity in the curve all these things right yeah so like univ V3 pools are pre have these predefined featers and predefined features essentially V4 deployers can essentially customize their pool logic with any sort of Fe curve uh adjust all the VAR variables adjust the volatility you can punish LPS with a fee when you withdraw liquidity um you can introduce a fee switch right without waiting for the Unis swap protocol to do it so they essentially let uh liquidity pool developers and

deployers act as their own decks and build their own decks and so I I saw one called flaun it's it's a meme coin Launchpad on base and when tokens pre-launch on flunch they can be bought at a fixed price for 30 minutes and then after 30 minutes all remaining tokens are sold the meme coins launched on the open market so I don't know if flunch is going to make it or not but like I just think it's cool basically any we just essentially commoditize dexes anyone can go launch a decks like blockworks could go launch a decks tomorrow I think um and it's just really cool and I think you're gonna see a lot of innovation coming with this yeah it's kind of bearish for existing dexes I think because the idea of building a deck I think just got got commoditized yeah um

there was an interesting experiment recently which was like a creative way to fund raise like I think someone launched a coin that programmatically gave all of the fees to someone and it was like a Creator an artist or someone that needed fundraising for like medical research or something it wasn't the guy that had like unfortunately a sick child but it was something to that effect where like someone launched a token on uh for someone else and was like all of the fees are going to be diverted to this particular wallet address I think that's what like these the the this functionality enables right these hooks yeah I mean it allows you to create a custom essentially a custom Dex um custom Dex logic so there's this site

that uh Donovan who writes the our research newsletter found it's uh uni V4 projects. notion. site we can uh we can link it in the show notes but it's just a directory of everyone using these hooks Doppler A51 flunch bunny I guess Andre cron cron is building a new thing on here um he said something it's can you go to his profile really quickly I noticed like he tweeted something like something about Fair launches and then yeah maybe it's what his he tweeted he tweeted you you liked me when I launch did Fair launches you're going to like me when I do unfair launches yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I'm

really curious I don't know what it's all about but um I I it did caught my eye last time I gave you all the fair launch time to show you the unfair launch anyways uh anything else sir oh I was supposed to do this at the top of the app uh so shout out Joseph sorry Joseph love you Joseph's uh Joseph is no longer the producer for Empire and just want to give Joseph a big shout out for producing so many great shows um we are hiring a new producer and uh hold on I've got the job description here but I I won't even read the job description it's on our website but we're hiring a senior producer if you want work with Santi and me um our new head of podcasts

you want to work with all of our podcasts is a really cool role we have a bunch of open roles like Cross Research and engineering and sales but the senior producer one one is very cool um we had track record good track record G is now it's squads gett was Garrett was Empire's first producer Garrett went on to then host the light speeed podcast and then now he's head of BD at squads which is killing it then we got Joseph was second second yeah and Joseph's now tired off of his meme coins so Joseph you know this like you come to Google and then you eventually become a goog good success story so what can you do as the third producer here the bar is high we looking for someone exceptional we we

to be fair like I I I I really like that role um I think it's great exposure because you get to get the Insight look into all the guests we have um you know I a lot of my rambling here is when I don't read the excellent notes that our producers put together but i' be lying if I didn't tell you it make me look Smart Way smarter than what I am um they get to do a lot of research and then we just you know it's it's a really good role I think so yeah we are excited whoever you get to meet some of the biggest people in the industry like when we are having people guess on like the producer is the one interfacing with them and it's just a really cool you get to like just embed your I mean you're full-time at blockworks you get to embed

yourself at block Works what we need is someone who's really Crypton native like really really really crypto native if you don't know what that means then the role is not right for you we need someone who really understands growth like understands like how to just get this show to rip on Twitter um we want to make this the number one EP podcast in finance we need someone who's really good at making the trains run on time there's a bunch of stuff that happens after Santi and I click end recording and we need someone who's really organized and get the trains running on time and we need someone who loves podcasts so if that's you go to the website and go to just type in blockworks careers on Google and you'll hopefully find our site and maybe you get to uh you most likely get this

beautiful sweater we will send you a sweatshirt it'll take four years to get it won't take four years it took me more than four years by the way but you know you know so cool all right folks well have a great weekend thanks for listening um and we'll be back next week all right any good guest any good episodes launching um yeah I just recorded with Avery the new about Avery the co-founder of Aptos he's the historically the CTO he just moved into the CEO role so the episode coming out on Monday is just about like the new Aptos like I think everyone's a lot of people are familiar with the old Aptos he kind of lays out his vision for the new Aptos so right enjoy that all right see you folks enjoy the Friday enjoy the weekend yeah have a

good weekend man hey everyone just wanted to give a quick thanks to today's title sponsor geod net by setting up a base station you can get involved with this groundbreaking web3 ecosystem learn more by heading over to geod net.com or just by hitting the link in the description of today's episode [Music]