0xResearch | Friday, June 6th

Transcript

[Music] [Music] This music is supposed to stay.

[Music] No, it's uh this is a Streamyard special, I'm pretty [Music] sure. There he is. Didn't even want to show that. I like the beats. [Music] We're figuring it out here. I don't know why it's doing that.

Just [Music] [Applause] [Music] There's Ryan. All right, guys. Let's hop into it. I got to pause the music before it rips another round through. Welcome to another run of the Zerox live stream.

Joined today we've got Felix from Forward Guidance. Glad to have you on, sir. James Christopher from the Telegram. Uh known individual. Ryan Cash flows Connor and Westy from the data team. How we all doing today, guys? We're still alive and we're not crashing out. Yeah, we're here. We're doing a community outreach for uh for our brethren, you know, pulling in people like James from the Telegram and uh giving them some followers, giving them some clout. What's up, James? You're here for the second ox research pod now.

That's impressive. second time. It's very, very exciting. Happy to be here. First time pre-recorded, second time live. We love it. Um, Felix, glad to have you on. Uh, I don't we don't usually get to pull you in. you know, the macro and the DGEN and the deep research pieces don't often collide that frequently, but uh we the last time we had you on on on the pod, I know we we tried to get a little bit into your uh onchain enjoyments, if you want to call it that. Um would love to do that today as well, but we also want some of your macro takes and I think it's probably a great idea to start off on markets.

Actually, a ton of stuff happened yesterday. Um, I was just listening actually to the to the forward guidance app. You guys just dropped you and Tyler. Um, would love to just dive in, get your thoughts on the market and maybe some of the recent, you know, crash out news the other day and then let's just dive into it like how are people people feeling? Um, yeah. So yeah, Tyler and I talked about this in the roundup, but uh I think the fact that the fact that the government is just going to keep on spending and running high def the fiscal deficits can basically be the uh catalyst for breaking up the the previous bromance that was Elon and Trump. Just goes to show how ingrained

these dynamics are. Um, that was my biggest takeaway from this whole thing is just that you just cannot fight the beast that is Congress trying to be reelected and throwing money at their constituents. And the fact is, no matter, you know, how much you bang the drum about fiscal austerity and all these things, there's there's midterms that need to be won. There's uh taxes that need to be cut. And so, here we are. You know, it basically it basically broke them up. And I think that just goes to show how ingrained these dynamics are. And it it really really revitalizes my conviction in owning assets that can both be a tailwind and a hedge to that dynamic. So I've been

talking a lot about how important it is to focus on the fiscal side of things as opposed to the monetary, which is what we've been used to for the past two decades of just looking at, oh, what's pal going to say at whatever press conference? And I mean, you just look at the past 5 years, like we are, especially the past like 3 years or so. We're we're three years into having rates be quite a bit above the zero lower bound. And I feel like there's a lot of detractors that thought that that would cause a recession, that would cause, you know, speculative assets like Bitcoin to do badly. And it's just the complete opposite. And I think because that is so much driven by this fiscal side of things and that do I mean, you hear this idea of fiscal dominance and I don't think we're quite there for me.

The definition of that is when the fiscal side of things completely leads the charge and the Fed and the monetary policy side of things is there just to basically smoothen out that process and also to basically monetize any excess uh issuance that is required to lead fiscal policy. But we're getting closer and closer to that point. Um obviously, you know, Powell is still the head of the Fed, but that's going to end in 2026. And whoever replaces him is going to be somebody who's blessed by Trump. And I think that'll be some some meaningful catalyst further towards this idea of fiscal dominance. So yeah, when I just look through the noise, when I set aside all the tariff stuff, all of these different things to me, all the the core components are are still there and

accelerating that uh make me bullish on on monetary hedges. So still very excited about Bitcoin, still very excited about gold, still very excited about US equities. um bearish, anything that is a fixed rate asset like treasury bonds. Um I think we're just going to continue into this world of of cyclically and secularly higher inflation. So yeah, I don't know. It feels like there's just, you know, there's narratives that pull us in one way or the other every single week, but when you just look at the core buckets of of what's there and what's driving things, it's it's all the same thing. So there's there's no real reason for me to change my mind. Obviously, you know, we're heading into the summer here and we could talk a bit about that, I'm sure, in terms of just how choppy and illquid summers are typically for

crypto. And I think it's totally possible that we just mess around for a little while, drive people insane and um accelerates mental illness, but overall when I look at the big picture, it's just like it's the same old thing and it's and it's accelerating really. Um yeah, so that's where I'm at. Felix, do you think like h how do you quantify traditional markets and kind of like Trump exhaustion where the marginal headline and the marginal escalation on tariffs is having less and less of an effect? And do you think we get to a point where like we're we're just totally looking past that kind of stuff?

Um, yeah, it's it's so funny because like you just you track through the headlines basically since Liberation Day and it's just been every week some sort of marginal in in the right direction. At the same time that you know we saw we saw Trump come out and say oh we're going to potentially add 50% tariffs on Europe and that quickly got revised and the market didn't even really take it seriously that time. So obviously that's been the driving factor of this whole like taco thing which I don't know feels like we're probably now opening up the risk of that being taken uh waiting it too too heavily. This idea of just Trump always chickens out. Um so I don't know it's like with anything in markets you

know is that when you just when you see the same thing hit the tape every single time. Every single time it hits the tape it has a lower impact on it. And that can be Trump you know tariff headlines. It can be yeah earnings releases pretty much anything you know. Um, so I feel like it's just, yeah, the way markets anticipate and and price in for changes. And for some reason, it just feels like a lot of people get too stuck up in where things are in the present day and and this like static thinking I kind of complain about um that too many people have. And yeah, you just have to look at like what's likely next as opposed to where it stands today. But also balancing that with this like diminishing returns of pricing in those if that makes sense.

Shout out to Kristoff with the worst mic I've ever heard in my life. Oh my god. Is that bad? Send him a pod mic now. I told him it was okay beforehand. Are you using wired headphones from 2011? Like what's going on? Well, first I had AirPod Pros and then Danny told me they sucked. So now I'm on my computer. They were worse. Oh yeah, and you have the Lenovo. I'm on an Asus Vivo book now. Times are tough, man. Can't afford it.

That's fair. He need He really needs the markets to go up higher to afford new gear, I think. Um well, I guess maybe we start diving in into the more cryptocentric views as part of the recent market activity. I think really one of the big ones here is Circle the IPO um list listing at what like opening at 31. And could I jump in? I can we can we actually go back to macro for a moment there? Sure. Um I have a question for Felix. Um like I thought two interesting things from what you just said. One is you

didn't really talk about the Trump Elon breakup. Does that matter to macro at all in terms of like Trump's ability to get things done? Because he has a very tech- ccentric cabinet and there's like a potentially like I don't know maybe I'm reading too much in between the tea leaves but like he has a very Elon influenced cabinet and I think that there's potentially some risk of infighting there. And then two, from a macro perspective, I didn't hear a mention of AI um in terms of like what that does to the macro backdrop, like either near-term or long term. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts there. Um I'll before I answer both of those, I'll just say that I have no real good uh unique view on these, but I will

say just off the cuff, um I think it's a good flag on the first part. You know, I think it's it's really easy to look at these headlines of this uh you know, tech oligarchy breakup with the Trump administration and extrapolate it out into, you know, what does that mean for, you know, JD Vance sitting in the middle of of those two and trying to have to pick a side and, you know, the the Mark Andreas of the world, the the Chamas of the world, all these people that have sort of been been married between the two. Yeah, it's a it's a decent um it's a decent risk. I I don't know really how it trickles out to be honest with you.

Um you don't think the market cares like they're you don't think that they're thinking like I don't know. I'm just wondering if you think that people who are managing macro risk like are actually thinking about that thing. Yeah. I mean it's a decent one, but we've also seen like a complete reversal already of it. I mean, maybe part of that is the draws report today that was like decent compared to the the ADP was pretty weak and people got off off a off base there and a little too bearish on the economy and the labor market. So maybe it's part of that, but it also feels like a big reversal when people just stop for a second and think like what are the actual mechanical impacts and sure maybe it creates a few more headwinds around some of the more tech-centric policy decisions that they

make. But I think overall you have to weigh that against like the these these fiscal impulse dynamics that I mentioned that I just think are are so much more powerful. Like I've been thinking a lot about how what it means to be in this economic regime that we're in now where there's a lot of debt and now that debt is paying a pretty significant uh yield on it now. It's it's paying four and a half% and that's happening at the same time that people's mortgages are sitting at 2 and a half% in a 30-year fixed rate mortgage. That is, you know, you could jack rates to the Fed could jack rates to 10% and what would that actually do to mortgages? It wouldn't change anything and then they would actually get a higher interest payment on their yield. So I just feel like these dynamics just overwwayigh so many other

things and it's it's why you see you have this you have the passive flows constantly going into markets you have the buybacks of every equity company. So just it feels like every time we get one of these little shocks you just I think it's the reason why you see these V recoveries where you have you have the catalyst that brings it lower and then it's like a beach ball underwater because eventually those other flows I mentioned just have to take it up and come forth. So yeah, I think it's a decent risk, but I just don't feel like it it overpowers those more powerful flows. Anyway, um and on the second question about AI, it's I mean I feel like some some other people here probably have better takes on AI than I am. Um I'm definitely a tourist, but I feel like you know

there's the other day I was like working in in a spreadsheet and there were some charts I needed to make like 10 of them. And typically if I just did that manually it would have taken me a couple hours and instead there's like the Gemini integration into Google Sheets now and I just put in one prompt and it was done in 30 seconds and just that little tidbit in terms of extrapolating that across the world in terms of productivity. It's it's going to improve things a lot. Will it improve, you know, to the point where we see like the the big, you know, spicy takes of like the anthropics EU talking about unemployment doubling in the next few years. Yeah, maybe that's that's the case. But I just have no edge in in in forecasting that.

But I don't know. I've talked a lot. I'd love to hear what other people's takes are on the impact of of AI on the uh the economy in the world. Yeah. I my my personal belief, and this is someone who used to do macro, no longer does, and now just mostly focuses on AI and crypto, is that um you know in 2022, I think a lot of macro people just got everything wrong. uh 2002 22 into into 23. Um all like you know you used to see these lead lag models pretty popular on um at least like retail like in retail macro circles and you know they were they were popular in

professional macro circles as well and they all stopped working. So if you were at if you're going to have a model that predicted the change in unemployment which would also signal a recession because unemployment spikes in a recession. I think if you had 50 met metrics that would predict that on a league lead lag basis, 49 of them said that unemployment should have ripped in 20 in the back half of 23. It did not or pro or actually sorry probably the first half of 24 it did not. Um and like so what caused that? Um I think you have a very obvious inflection in the fourth quarter of 2023 which was AI capex spend and just like um you know the Keynesian animal spirits around this

technology. You saw it in construction spending in the US that went parabolic that was mostly dri driven by data centers and you have the largest components of the S&P 500 all who generate um either high tens of billions or low hundreds bill hundreds of billions in free cash flow per year. the most cash flowing uh generating entities in the history of capitalism all spending as much as they can on capex in the United States, right? And that filters into local economies and creates job growth. So you you you have this like weird um you actually have this weird trend now in U3 unemployment that it just

doesn't look like it does historically or it's taking longer to like kind of take off than it has. you have this weird trend in PMI that you know the chart hasn't looked that way for 15 or so years. Um, but like I'm willing as someone who just knows like the highle data, I'm willing to say that that's all the animal spirits coming from uh AI investment out of the largest companies in the United States that have to put cash to work there. Um, so I don't know. I I personally believe that like that that's the biggest um force in macro like you mentioned earlier um you know high rates happened everyone

thought the economy couldn't handle it I think that that was almost true until AI right like because like now you have ROI is potentially higher and that that hurdle rate of interest rate expense matters a lot less so I don't know I'm I'm of the opinion that like the cycle keeps going like I understand all the flow stuff and fiscal spending and stuff but I I even think that you could get a decline in fiscal spending and it wouldn't matter because um the the the mega caps are just going to just going to pick that up and all the startup and and venture funding is going to keep flowing into the economy to capture this AI opportunity which I believe all these biggest players view as existential right so they have to spend that cash yeah th those are great

points I feel like it's that's definely a huge chunk of it I would say it's that compared with just inaccurate analysis because you know you rewind back to 2021 and it's like the Fed can't you know there was I remember there's like you know Jamie Diamond is saying Fed funds might go to 2 and a half% and everybody was like no way that's ridiculous like the the economy can't handle that and I think a lot of it is for sure the AI cap expand and productivity gains but also I think just an incorrect analysis of what happens when you have corporates that have turned out their debt on the long end for for many many years and households doing that on their household balance sheets, in terms of mortgages, in terms of the fact that the the flow through of interest rate hikes does not affect the

economy like it used to. So, I feel like it's a combination of both. I think that's a really good point that I probably underweight that side of things. Um, but the two together I think just makes the entire economy less cyclical and and more just other secular exponential. For sure. I I remember looking at the 2-year rate in the back half of 21 and thinking to myself, this is never going to get off zero. Like I literally like said that to myself and that was my expectation. And then when it went to two and a half or maybe it was it was two um yeah I was certain that the economy couldn't handle it. I think everyone was and and look where we are.

So I think something that's interesting, Ben Eert had a really good tweet thread last week of to your point Ryan of like yeah the capex spend is totally real but I think people are extrapolating and kind of being a little too doomerism on productivity gains right like we have yet to hear on an earnings call like a CEO of a big corporate coming out and saying hey we're we're jamming five billion into buying productivity tools and we're going to fire you know 10% of our workforce as a result of this. And I'm not saying it's not going to happen, but I think it's probably a bit further off than people think. And it's going to be predominantly capex driven for the next couple of years before we start to see like mass layoffs um and like, you know, real implementation of this stuff.

I will say anecdotally, I have a lot of family members and their friends that are in the like graduating college like new to the workforce class and like I'm hearing a lot of stories of the job market for them being like horrible due to a mix of like just the way things are currently, but also like hearing that AI is the reason that they're hiring less for those like junior your entry level positions. And so I think yeah, anecdotally it's already being felt, but on the macro you're not really seeing it quite yet.

Did you guys see circle just hit an alltime high? Yeah. 108. Oh, 118. Oh, wow. I'm delayed, I guess. 100x long or short right now. What do you say, Felix? Oh my god. Um, I got my finger on the the green. It's like I don't know. I haven't looked at what the the float is of the circle IPO, but uh it's just that yeah, these things are crazy when they first launch. And you have that compared with just like the lack of lack of cash flowing companies in in crypto. Maybe Ryan Cashful Connors can elaborate a bit on it, but uh yeah, it just feels like it's just like the

valuation is not the concern right now just because of just the lack of options for crypto exposure sort of. So, it's like I have no idea where this thing can go. Yeah, Ryan, you shared some info on like a model the other day in an internal chat. But I guess I'm curious like if you have a deeper take there, but I that's the the feeling I get is what Felix said like there are very limited options and it's just like if you want to allocate to this that's like one of the very few public options to do so right now. Yeah. I I think that circle and IBIT are all market structure. I mean all I don't want to be um all all is strong but I I think that there are two forces here that are

somewhat contradictory but are both true is that one uh hedge fund managers and and RAAS they want crypto exposure so they're going toward the things that are most familiar which is why Bitcoin did well ETH did poorly and why circle is doing well because they're stable coin adjacent and adjacent and people understand stable coins and trify But I also think that like a huge part of their story is market structure. There are so few options that the you know if you want a pure play which every hedge fund manager RA wants a pure play like you don't want to buy JP Morgan to get stable coin exposure even though they're going to make money from stable coins one day. You want to buy circle because

it's easy to explain to a client. You can more easily like manage that direct exposure um rather than within a conglomerate uh exposure. Um, so yeah, I I think that there's a large market structure story here. Um, so like first to market on these products like matters, right? Like Salana getting an ETF therefore matters because market structure matters. Um, it's just like kind of the state that that that we're in right now. Um, you know, what would happen to Circle if Bitfinex were, you know, able to IPO?

Like I don't think we're ever going to know, but um yeah. Yeah, it's all market structure, I think. Yeah. What other way do you have to get exposure to stable coins directly? Like every other way is completely indirect. I guess Coinbase might be a decent proxy given, you know, their proximity to circle, but yeah, this is like the purest way to get exposure to stable coins. anyone who was at DAS, I mean I wasn't there, but it was all I heard from takeaways of the conference was every single person there was bullish on stable coins and their growth and potential. You have Shimoth every week on Allin mentioning stable coins in some

way, shape or form. It's very clearly hit the Trafi uh mainstream, if you will, where everyone I think has come to the conclusions that stable coins are good. They have product market fit. They're growing fast. And so, yeah, it's like, okay, how do you get exposure to that? It's it's literally just the circle IPO. There's no other pure way. It it begs the question, go ahead, James. No, no, please. Okay. I was going to say it begs the question of um like you mentioned both Ryan's here, the uh market structure question I think is interesting because it's, you know, let's say circle wasn't the only option.

I mean, if we look out a few years from now, I mean, how do we expect things to unfold? I mean, do we really do we think Circle is going to be a big winner here or are we looking at other things now and and forecasting, you know, these guys are eventually going to go public? This token is eventually going to come to market and that's where I would really want to like put my cards on the table. Yeah. The big question for me is about so it feels like this double-edged sword now where one side is going to have to be a loser. So the reason I say that has to do with where does the interest go for these stable coins. So if if the Genius Act goes like it's proposed right now and there won't be

interest allowed on these stable coins that means 100% net interest margin for these stable coin issuers that is very profitable for them. Like you think about money market funds you know they they will collect fees but overall most of that interest gets passed on to the owners of the money money market funds. Um so you have this situation where either you have something like you know obviously circle part of it is that if you own on Coinbase you get part of that yield but just in speaking in general terms it's either these stable coin issues issuers get 100% of the net interest margin and the consumers get zero yield in which case if you're if we're talking about that trady money that wants to be in like money market funds or you know the money market funds

2.0 know, which is how I see stable coins. Either they have to sacrifice not getting any yield as opposed to getting four and a half% in money market funds or on the other side of things is the stable coin issuers get to keep that 100% net interest margin and make a ton of money. And so I feel like the biggest question at hand is where does that end up? And yeah, I mean, if it gets passed in Congress and these these uh big stable coin issuers can't pass on the yield to consumers, that's going to be great for the companies, but it means that adoption from money market funds will probably not exist because why the hell would they own it if the owners of those stable coins can't get a yield?

It's uh it's a weird one. Um I don't really know where it goes. So that's kind of like exactly where I was going to go, Felix. Like if if you go down this route of massive trady, stable coin adoption and the issuers keeping the interest, I think it's very very unlikely that names like Croup, JP Morgan, BA are happy to dive deep into this business and support stable coin rails, but somehow allow this weird nichy little company called Circle to own everything. That That's the Circle.

No pun intended. That's a terrible joke that I can't square. Like I I just don't understand why you would want to bet on this standalone business to be totally honest. Like you you can price forward-looking NIM very very well. Um and if you look at Circle right now, I don't I don't know why you would buy it at the current valuation if you're bullish on stable coins and it's a cruel of NIM. I agree. It's it's certainly pricey right now. Also, non non-zero chance that a lot of retail capital is moving it, but I have no I have no inside baseball there, guys. I got to run. Um, but I'll be back in 30 minutes.

Peace y'all. See you, Ryan. I'll see you Ryan. Yeah. So, I don't know. It feels like somebody's going to win, somebody's going to lose. um it feels like it's more likely for the consumer base to lose assuming the Genius Act gets passed and you can't have interest on these stable coins in which case maybe the the runway for Circle is is more attractive but yeah if you start to get interest bearing stable coins these like you know we obviously we can't see the profitability of these other stable coin issuers like we can with Circle now that they're public um and overall what you can see in those is that yeah the gross margin is entirely just because of the fact that they don't have to pass on these uh well obviously they do through

Coinbase. Um but you can just extrapolate that and kind of set it aside and just be like okay well the only reason they're like somewhat profitable is because this weird situation where they have 100% net interest margin and the consumer base does not expect yields. But uh if if we go into the direction that like James is talking about where the JP Morgans and like the the Schwabs of the world come in with their like digital money market funds and start passing on yield, suddenly those margins get compressed and these valuations just just don't make sense. But again, you have to set that aside against the dynamic that is that it's one of the only options for exposure and people hit buy and market structure, you know, if that happens in a situation where the float is super

low, which I assume it is. Um, I haven't looked at the numbers, but you know, to see it just whipping around like this, I assume the float is very, very small. Yeah, I'll tell you right now. So, two, what is it? 202 million shares outstanding, 175 million float. Not terrible, actually. Yeah, that's decent. One of the things that's been interesting is I would have thought given the success of the circle IPO that stable coin protocol like governance tokens would perform really well and to be honest like there hasn't been much outperformance of like your your makers or Athenas. I've also been seeing a ton of people float uh Forax thesis recently

given their like ties to um like the Genius Act stuff like they're really trying to penetrate um like DC in a weird way and also funds are super underexposed which I thought was like a super interesting thesis but and that has been like outperforming recently but ever since the circle IPO just absolutely thing. Do you guys remember when Frack was going to get a Fed Master account? I do remember that. Yeah. I mean, it's it it brings up the debate of like these useless governance coins versus Yeah. actual cash flow occurring to stable coin issuers, right?

like Ethe I I love the project but the token itself is is is a tough one in terms of the you know value flow through into it and yeah maker seems like another one that's a little bit better um I don't know too much about the specifics maybe you guys can expand but yeah it just feels like the the endless issue of the tokconomic structures and the the governance coins that just that don't have anything that they can claim onto it versus like these actual equity ownership and stable coins. And it just feels like a continuation of that dynamic of like, huh, these governance coins like may not be the best framework for for creating uh, you know, exposure to crypto markets, right?

Like I think there's a good fundamental reason why we've seen a lot of people get really excited about like crypto stocks like Robin Hood as opposed to, you know, the the 10th iteration of a random governance coin, right? like this just it's just a way better form format. Yeah, we talked about this a lot on the pod. I want to say a few months back maybe when Kaio was a hot topic or when when that token dropped and just discussing, you know, there's the endless debate of of the token versus the labs entity or the equity or whatever. We have this kind of dual structure that's been very pervasive.

um not quite stable coin specific, but maybe this is worth discussing Morpho um in this recent announcement from them. But to that point, I I do agree with you to an extent, Felix. I think as long as we continue with this structure of there's some labs or other entity equity structure loosely associated with then this token to some basically you know if it's a successful protocol some cash flow generating business and then you're choosing to divvy up the revenue between multiple places it's like you just you end up with a much less attractive offering and a lot of uncertainty there in terms of you know am I always only

going to get 25 or 50% of the revenue. Am I going to get 75 or 100% in the future? Do I actually even have any right to that? Like, can they just yank that away at any point? Um, I think that's a big problem. I I'm curious. I'm just going to read a quick note here from Morpho, but they they mentioned that what they're going to be doing here is Morpho Labs will become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Morpho Association to eliminate perceived conflicts with equity value and ensure that token holders and the contributing entities share the same incentive. It sounds like a good step in the right direction to me. I'm curious your guys thoughts like should more protocols just be doing this like do away with the conflict with labs have it all under the token.

Yeah. I mean initial thoughts are this is fantastic and a step in the right direction. I think it became sort of the norm to have like a foundation labs arm like once one person did it uh and like no one discounted the token as a result of having that kind of structure. You just saw it pop up again and again. But there was one interesting talk from DBA's recent research day from Felipe at Thea talking about how uh liquid token markets right now are broken. And there's a bunch of different elements to that. One of them definitely being this like equity versus token uh mismatch um making it really really hard

to invest in actual tokens because you don't know whether like the cash flow will actually acrue to the token or not. Uh and you don't know whether things will change in the future versus now uh given that the foundations and labs have so much control over the supply and can just change things via governance at will. There's also other pieces of like you need to discount uh token liquidity versus equity in like a huge way. And so just off the bat, tokens need to be valued at less than equity. I I highly recommend people go uh listen to that talk. But yeah, I mean the only way you really solve this is through creating new norms and also the market starting

to price these things in that like the token should be valued at much less than the equity if there's no value going to that token. hands like we're also working on something uh that should help with this sort of uh transparency or rather like creating norms within the industry that these teams should follow and that the market should should price these things based on those uh sort of elements. So yeah, I think Morpho is doing a fantastic job sort of putting their foot down, putting things in the right direction and and setting an example for other teams going forward that you you don't have to do this like I feel like people felt in the past they had to do this kind of structure because

that's that's what teams do. That's what you do. So having a a path that's different I think is very very valuable. And the Morpho team is great and I'm not surprised that they they did this as well. So yeah, I'm happy about it. Yeah, that that data video video was really really good. I think the other thing too from this announcement that I really appreciate is lower in the article, they talk about how it's become the norm for when when we start to move towards this idea of fee switching for protocols. The the assumption is, oh well, let's like give these out to equity owners as a dividend. And you know, maybe James can riff on this too as we bring in the like crypto once again like it always falls pl to this idea of just like reinventing the mistakes that try has already worked

through. And so now we're in this situation where there's like this this owner base that is like well I want 100% dividend on retained earnings from this company. And when you like that is just if if you started to ask that against like early stage growth companies they'd be like what the hell are you talking about? like why would we give out a 100% like dividend payout ratio? That's absolutely ridiculous versus reinvesting in the company. So they also mentioned in there about how they want to do away with this notion of just spitting out cash flows to others because the idea there like when you when you think about capital structure and equity structure.

The idea is that we like when you go through the calculus of deciding your dividend pay ratio, you're you're making the calculus of is it more creative for us to give it to the equity owner or do we think we can get a higher internal rate of return on it internally investing it? And this this notion of the expectation of giving out all the fees to equity owners and not reinvesting it into the company is is just way too far to the other side of the extreme. But it's it's somewhat valid of a criticism because they've been so burned on the fact that they haven't gotten anything. They've just had governance tokens. So I think the combination of fixing equity structure along with this idea of let's rethink these as actual companies and actually be a bit more pragmatic about our

dividend payout ratios, i.e. throwing off these to equity owners is a is a really good thing. Um yeah, James, what's what's your take on that? I'm curious. I I think it's just like kind of obvious, right? Like I think people are people are done listening to protocols say, "Well, we're not we're not in control of this. The foundation is and the foundation saying, "Well, we're not in control of that. The labs is." And like I feel like people are totally totally exhausted of that over the last year or two. Um so yeah, I've got nothing but good things to say about it. I think it's very very obviously a good thing.

Yeah, I I think I'm I'm inclined to agree completely with you here, Felix. I feel like if you collapse this structure that is has been pervasive, you remove a lot of the I think you made the point so well that just like you know as maybe a token purchaser today of a lot of these weird structures that probably you're going to get a small fraction of revenues maybe redirected at the thing at at maybe not even now, maybe at some point in the future. And so it it makes sense that the thought is well if they're going to give me anything like you know buy back the token or just like give it all to me you know because we don't you know if if 75% is going to labs team like we don't even know if they're reinvesting it in the protocol are they paying themselves fat salaries

and just sitting around like you have no we have no insight there's very little transparency I think to a lot of these activities today and so it doesn't surprise me that a lot of the sentiment today around the flows that go to the token are very much just like pay it out. We want we want the money for the investment. Um and I think if you if you eliminate a lot of that stuff, you get more transparency around what the spending looks like, how we're allocating, how what growth strategies look like going forward. Um and it's all under this one common investment vehicle or token or asset or whatever you want to call it. Um it it can remove a lot of that friction, which is what I see it as today is it's this is an expression of all that friction. And Danny, I don't

want to jump the gun, but I think it kind of dovetales into this conversation. Like I think that's probably the number one reason that people are so pissed off about the pump ICO, right? Like this this split. Like this is like this is it, right? Third biggest ICO of all time. And it's unclear, right? Like even if it gets 25% of the revenue, it's still to me that's that's not enough, right? To to come out and raise a billion dollars. Yeah, I think it's a I think it's a fair point and I and I understand and I'd love your guys takes here. I understand why teams still operate this way. One, it it's good for them, right?

They get a kind of a double win here. They have some equity, they have some tokens, they can, you know, the the equity gets raised up, they drop the token, they can use the token to incentivize things. Maybe the incentivization of the thing then raises the value of the, you know, the perceived value of the equity. There's a lot of things going on there. Um, but also like the prior regulatory climate, like I'm sure there are still teams who would be scared or very cautious about saying, "Hey, we don't we're not even going to have equity." Like it's all just the token. You know, I think there's been a few, right? Kite Kaido was one where they're just like the token is the thing. You know, we're doing the token and like that represents like what we're building here. Um, but, you know, it doesn't surprise me that

that other teams would maybe still be hesitant. But in the new administration, it seems like maybe you can maybe you can step on the regulatory gray line a little bit more. Um, you know, the SEC is certainly leaning far more openly than they have, you know, in the prior sort of regime. Um, and it it seems like it's an opportunity to to push those boundaries and like, you know, if we need to go fully, you know, token operated businesses basically, um, now's the time to test that out. And I agree with you, right? The kind of current rumor is that 25% of revenues would go to the token, which is is far different than if all of the, you know, they're on they're on track for 500 million plus in annualized revenue this year. So, it's

it's a ton of money. Um, and to see 75% of that go to a team and be opaque and transparent like all the other projects of the past, yeah, it would be a big letown. Yeah. Yeah, I I think they would do themselves a service if they were like, you don't we don't need the full road map, but give us an idea of like what are you going to spend it on because like there's a very nonzero probability that they just special dividend out like half a billion dollars to VCs and like that's totally fine. I guess they can do it, but I think like some transparency. Are you guys going to buy streamers? Are you going to do contracts? like just give the community an idea of like what you think you're going to spend this money on before you raise it to to just to just take a

billion is is very tough to me. Yeah. It's it's like if they went through a traditional route to raise this kind of money, obviously the investors are going to ask that like what are you going to do with the money? So the fact like ICOs and and one of the downfalls and I'm I'm a big proponent of ICOs. One of the downfalls is just you don't really have to have that much transparency like the community will just like for the most part fund you especially if you get enough people like enough eyeballs on your ICO like you're probably going to get the money without having to actually disclose what you're going to do with it. And that was a lot of issues of the previous ICO era is people just threw money at anything and

you could just literally have a fake project and rug it. So yeah, I think they should have way more transparency over what they're doing with a billion dollars. Um I strongly agree and one of the things that I feel like every day frustrates me is that we we work in an industry that like one of the the number one values is transparency. the fact that we're working with blockchains and that everything is available to see um that like we still have such crazy opakqueness when it comes to you know teams launching tokens and what they're doing with the money like it's it's pretty absurd like we as an industry should be setting a standard way above

tradfi of like in real time tracking where money is going, how it's being spent, how much revenue is being driven and what are users doing? Like we should have this all in real time in a much faster pace than Trafy. And the fact we're not doing that like blows my mind and and frustrates me a lot. Yeah, 100%. I'm curious what you guys think about what that does for L1 tokens versus like the applications that sit on top of them that end up being the ones that end up having cash flows and profitability and and revenues and like it just I mean it it feels like every L1 is going through

this existential moment of like doing some weird trickery of not even trickery maybe that's too exaggerated but just like trying to jump through every sort of hoop to try to get any sort of value curl So it's like L1 token meanwhile these applications come in find product market fit start getting fees like crazy and then yeah you start to wonder okay pump token versus salana right like which one is the better hold if I don't know most of the activity is just like on pump fun and you know what if they just go off and and start their own blockchain right like that's where what does that do for the L1 token it just I don't know it feels like a huge headwind for James, look like you had thoughts. I

have a lot of thoughts on this topic. Yeah, I I think like first at a high level like I'm perpetually confused that people in crypto are still obsessed with valuing things on the near term on cash flows. Like it's it's to me like I think Rev is Rev is really cool in terms of showing momentum and directions. I think it tells you very very little if not nothing about the value of something. Um, but also like if you look at like early stage venture, which is kind of what I think we're all doing here, like no, no one would look at Open AI and say like, "Hey, let's slap a multiple on this thing. What do the cash flows look like in 10 years? What's the immediate term value acrruel?" I'm not really sure why or if anyone is really accurately

modeling this stuff for cash flows and kind of what the obsession is with that. Um, and you even see stuff that like every every single time there's a token in a cycle that occurs tons of cash flow, right? I'm thinking of like Sushi Swap in 2020, 2021, right? Everyone had all these amazing DCF models and God, I was going to print so much money and it just never works out. Um, so I don't know, Westy, what do you think? I'm glad you brought that up as well. So yeah, I like mostly agree that like in the short term like right now if you're looking at re of the major chains that doesn't really tell you much because we are like these are still early stage venture bets but at the same time when you look in the future you're optimizing

for growth now but at a certain point you want that growth to actually capture value and if you're a blockchain the way you capture value is people paying to be in the chain which is rev. So you're optimizing for future rev. Now there's obviously a debate on whether current rev is a good predictor of future rev which it's probably not especially when there's a bunch of memecoin trading. You don't know how long that'll last. Maybe that's here forever. Maybe it's just here uh for a short time. But you're still optimizing for rev. And so this gets to the questions of like L1 valuations. I think for the most part L1's and like really a lot of chains as a whole are pretty overvalued.

There's a like I think right now they're basically valued on like people dreaming about okay smart contracts are going to be really big. What's the probability chance that this takes a certain percentage of market share of that and so it gets priced at in the billions tens of billions of dollars. The problem is like that sort of worldview is is like very much future-looking and so there's no way to actually come back to reality of like okay in the future how much cash flow are these things going to generate and really what you should be looking for is again future rev and over time we're going to see the amount of margins that come from REV go down over time because right now a lot of it is like sandwich uh like arbitrage really like inefficient uh

price discovery It's like a lot of memecoin trading and and yeah, like people that have insensitive uh like buys and also like yeah just and also yeah people exploiting that via sandwiching etc. And so that's going to come down over time and as a result like L1's are very low margin business in the long run. Um, and when you like think terminally of like, okay, let's say we ramp up TPS and like the median fee is like less than a penny because we want as much activity as possible. These things don't make that much money uh when you like you actually calculate things out. And so yeah, I think L1's are like for the most part overvalued

unless they have an enshrined application uh and that application is generating revenue. Oh, speaking of tell us tell us about applications that fit that. No, no. Um, so there's this one called Hyperliquid. It is Boy, you wouldn't believe it. Um, Wesley, I have a question about this. Yeah. How, Cuz I didn't I was I wasn't listening. I'm sorry. I just Yeah, you just What's up? What's up? I was wondering um how long is this like L1 valuations are I guess L1 fees are going to go to zero like in what time frame do you say that it's is it like a fiveyear thing is

it like a three-year thing is it like a 15-year thing what are we talking about here I mean in terms of like like a per transaction basis it's probably like a fiveyear thing I think you just you see basically like the whole thing is you want median fees to go down, you want number of transactions to go way up. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So, like I think on the next five years, you see median fees go way down as there's just like more efficient me architecture more competition and like apps also like sequencing things and taking a lot of that me like margins would compress the median fee goes down. But the hope is

that you're the place that everyone congregates and there's value in having shared state which I think there is and that like you become a chain for a bunch of these things or again you have an enshrined application and that application can have high margins or its own form of revenue in the case of hyperlquid purping. Yeah. Do you see anything like if you look at it from a call like a value fundamental perspective that you'd be comfortable holding for like four or five years and just locking it away where like we're still in this momentum um market where where Yeah. It's just BTC is the only thing you're comfortable holding and everything else is just a

trade. Yeah. I mean that's how I view things. Yeah. Bitcoin is like the only thing that I can hold on a five plus year time horizon and feel comfortable. Everything else is a trade for the most part. And like even looking at that like let's say we're like right now forming the the future mag seven of crypto and that like you as a as an example maybe that eventually gets to trillions, right? But in the meantime it's going to go through waves of like up and down 80% like down 80% from tops. And so if you can trade it well, you can also compound that. So to me, it makes the most sense to trade everything that isn't Bitcoin. Yeah, I think you saw this this year as well

with Oh, Felix, he just disappeared, man. He said, "Fuck you. I want to Sorry, I'm still here. I got to jump in a minute, but I didn't want to interrupt the conversation, but I'm still sorting here." Yeah. I want to Let's cut in the middle here real quick. I think we'll we'll get back to this conversation because I think it's a good topic, but I want to say thanks Felix for coming on. Appreciated the macro takes. Love getting into the details. Uh if you have any last takeaways here on just this this valuation piece or if you're just excited to see it play out. Uh happy to hear it. But then also Ian, glad to have you on as well. Kyros research boy. Um we will pick up the conversation here.

Um any last last words, Felix? Otherwise, we will see you on the Forward Guidance podcast as per usual. Um, yeah, no major final thoughts. I think it's just like I think Jay brought up a decent point that this obsession with like near-term cash flows just feels like a natural reaction to just how shitty the situation has been the past few years for the token structures that we've had. So, I feel like it's a reasonable just reaction to the other side of things. But I feel like now, and this is what I really liked about that morpho piece was just this like understanding of okay, we need to have a bit more pragmatism around like basically like dividend payout ratio of fees like how much do we just reinvest in the firm versus give it to equity holders. So yeah, I I'm I'm excited

about the next iteration of things because obviously so much of this too has just been so hamstrung by the regulatory situation where it's just been so difficult to create these token structures. So I feel like my high level is just we're in this interesting transition stage where a lot of these useless governance coins that were created the last few years just because out of necessity. Well, you know, we're we're still seeing them go basically down only. And I think that's just a natural progression of markets. Meanwhile, you know, things like like Circle and then other projects like Hyperlid that show actual like product market fit and good tokconomic structures start to decouple from those.

And I'm really excited for the token structures that are going to be probably worked on right now by devs and coming out in like a year and a half. I think they're going to be really really great. So yeah, I feel like things are going in the right direction. We're just like in this weird transition stage out of like the terrible SEC regulatory situation we had and where we're headed from here and the token structures just don't really exist yet except for like a few exceptions. So yeah, I'm optimistic. Um, yeah, don't want to fall plate to financial nihilism and go punch coins all the time. Um, I think good things are coming overall.

Love it. Thanks for coming on and hopefully we'll have you on again sometime soon. Definitely love to do this. See you guys. Actually, this would have been relevant for Felix as well, but I wanted to ask you were too late. Sorry. what the blowup risk for these new um vehicles are. You know what I mean? Like meta planet. I don't understand what the like I understand that eventually there might be a cascading issue, but I I just don't understand why exactly it is, which is why which is what I wanted to ask him.

If there's any bank or anybody in like traditional finance on this call, that would also be beneficial. But we can see Yeah. If only we had someone like that who could, you know, just give us some some valuable insights. What do we want to talk about, Bach? I don't understand why like what's the Can you explain to me like you're speaking to a very stupid child? Yeah. What like the micro strategy bad scenario end game is, but like really dumb it down for me. Sure. So like think think of a very traditional company that wants to borrow money in capital markets, right? So Apple goes out there and they float unsecured general corporate debt, right?

So maybe they'll issue at like I don't know x percentage, they'll repay it in seven years and they make regular coupon payments. Super super vanilla. Now think of a convertible bond as an unsecured debt instrument that pays a very very low coupon basically effectively zero. But the difference is convertible bond like its name can be converted into equity right so at a certain conversion price and a conversion ratio and these are all different for each type of convert it's convertible into common equity so you basically have piece of straight debt with a call option embedded in it right so you can you can price this with like black shaws and

tons of traditional models um so that's that's kind of like super high level how a convert works right so micro strategies obvious obviously found a ton of buyers for that debt mostly within the convertible arbitrage community. Um, and just to keep it super super basic, the way that those types of trades work, a convert arb fund will long the debt and then short the common equity and they'll delta hedge that on a regular basis, right? So, so there's a there's a natural buyer for the paper there. Um, in terms of like the blowup risk for for Micro Strategy, I agree with most people that there's not really like a blowup risk where he sells all of his Bitcoin, right? Like that's that's not really a

thing. So, you have you have two situations with a convertible debt instrument. One, either the equity trades really really well and it converts to equity, right? And then the paper's retired and Micro Strategy doesn't need to to pay anything back. Or you have the other scenario where the converts busted and the equity, this is kind of the more interesting piece, right? Where the equity is trading very poorly. You assume the MNAV of Micro Strategy is also trading pretty poorly. So you get to an end scenario and I don't know, I can I can pull it up on a computer in a second like what the Micro Strategy debt distribution is. Like I'm pretty sure the first um convert doesn't come due until like 2028, something like

that. Let me see. Uh, it's loading. Whatever. It doesn't matter. 2028 or 2029. So, assume the convert's busted and you can't repay it. What the seller do to repay that? So, one, he could sell Bitcoin to do it, but more likely he's probably just going to try to issue more debt or more preferred equity or something um to do that, right? So, I don't think there's like a blowup risk in that. You're not going to wake up one day and get like the whale alert that Michael Sailor is selling, you know, 10,000 Bitcoin to repay something. Um, but I think more on like a micro structure basis and what's more interesting to me is not asking the question when Michael Seller is going to sell Bitcoin, but more what's a situation that causes him to buy less

Bitcoin and that effect on markets like that that buying pressure like you don't need to sell something for the market to collapse. You can also just buy less, right? And that's something that I think is is is worth thinking about. Yeah. Yeah. To me, it's less about like these strategy and strategy clones blowing up and needing to sell, like being forced sellers. It's that these are the biggest idiosyncratic buyers of of Bitcoin and also like some of the largest tokens in the market. And if all of a sudden there's a reason why they're buying less, then that has a cascading effect on prices.

Yeah, I think people underestimate how much he's bought. Um, I should probably pull this up. There's this website called Sailor Tracker. I'm sure everybody's familiar with it, but I think he bought 20 bill in the second half of Yeah, they they own about they own about half as much um as all the the BTC ETFs combined last I checked like two days ago. Yeah. I mean, it's ridiculous. Um but what about this is not related to this as much but what do we think about um the entire like all of the now copycat vehicles popping up and if that

is kind of a toppy signal. I don't like saying this is a top signal, but to me that feels a bit like a bit much. You know, I like one of the questions. I mean, yes, c it's certainly different. It's certainly I think accompanied by a lot of additional froth in the market from other things that we're seeing. Um, and I think it's just because there's so much excitement. Uh, like we finally have like the the tailwinds in the industry. But one of the things I'm wondering is like um and James, you might know this, but like how do all of these new treasury companies that are popping up, how do they actually like uh pay their employees? Like how do they make any money at all? like their whole business is predicated on just being

able to like issue debt and then buy tokens and like to my understand like it's like at least with Micro Strategy they had like this you know bit of a dinosaur analytics business that kind of like lived for a while and now like it's still there like it has they have like a bit of AR there but like all these new companies like they have no actual business um for the most part. So curious if anyone knows how like they're making any money. Like that's the entire goal as well of that these companies.

It's like how how are they paying these people? And also like uh did any of you guys listen to the light speeded pod that Jack did with um the DeFi development corp investor relations guy I believe. Um yeah it was a good pod. I think people should go and listen to that. Um but yeah, I mean just first question I guess first uh around like how do these people make money? How do these companies make money outside of purely this business? James, do you know? I mean you don't have to, right? Is the simple answer. Like you can in the same in the same way that Tether can run their company with 25 people. Like you can spin up an SPV tomorrow. You can raise like 10 million bucks of equity

that's going to pay your overhead and your health insurance for for like forever. And that's also one thing like like Micro Strategy's business doesn't make money anymore like it like that like they're they're done, right? Like their their business whatever residual um income is there. So like like the last 12 months their pre-tax income has been negative6 billion, right? So like they're they're not they're not an operating company that's selling SAS to people anymore. Like that notion is kind of gone. Um, so yeah, like you can you can perpetually raise equity and pay two or three employees to, you know, manage that business. You don't need an operating business to do that.

So, it's really just more reflective of like this appetite from whoever these private investors are handing out, you know, 50 million, 100 million, 500 million, billion dollar checks to pick your favorite company who's going to go and bid BTC with it. Yeah. And I think one of the most interesting things that came from the light speeded podcast is like there eventually will be a normalization of these SPVS trading at like different NAV premiums, right? Like if you have, let's say two years from now, five Salana, you know, buy and hold treasury companies and one's trading at

like a 10 mnav and one's trading at like a four. Um, I think those kind of things are obviously going to get very hairy for people. Um, and there's eventually, you know, I've long thought there's going to be activist investors um that that are going to come into these companies and try to break these things, right? And and force like an orderly liquidation for them. Um, this is like this is like an activist's um dream type of transaction, right? On a maybe maybe Micro Strategy is too big at this point. Um, but if you have a company with a few billion BTC on its balance sheet and you can get it to a hold position in there, um, and take them take them to court or get a get a proxy war going on. Um, I think you can force them to to liquidate if through a big enough nav premium.

So like in the longer term, do you eventually just kind of see consolidation amongst these types of companies? And also if any sort of like levered uh style ETF product like you know 3x leveraged BTC ETF or anything like that for any other token like hits the market. Do you think the demand for these types of vehicles is also like greatly diminished? Yeah. And there's like there's there's a whole hedge fund strategy of it's called closedend fund activism, right? So so closedend funds can trade at a discount or a premium um to NAV. And I'd argue like Micro Strategy is just a closed end fund that's that's trading at a huge premium.

Um, and you know, hedge funds can get together and and build a position and short short BTC on the side as a hedge and and you know, force shareholder votes and get these companies to liquidate themselves if the premium gets too out of whack. One thing I also want to say is James, you mentioned that the amount of Bitcoin in the ETFs has doubled that of these treasury companies. I think the important piece is that since Q4 of last year, um the treasury companies have been heavily outpacing ETF buyers, especially Q1, there was basically like no ETF flows and treasury companies bought a ton of Bitcoin.

Um we had a chart of that on our analyst hour call yesterday. Actually, I sent it to Danny. I don't know. It's a grainy screenshot. Maybe I'll send it in the Zerox research chat, but that might be too much alpha. It's um I think they had outflows yesterday and they also had significant outflows last week from the B BTC ETFs. It was like 350 mil last week at on one day. I can't remember what day and then yesterday it was 280 mil outflows. So not great. Um it is in a weird spot where there's clearly a lot of adoption accoins into the Uber app. Um but also on the other end you you have like

random companies spinning up to do treasury strategies which is always like a little scary as if the price isn't going up as well makes you a little nervous and I I I think with a lot of this stuff like I really don't like to overthink it right like a lot of times people are convinced that like these treasury companies have con have like created some new kind of like financial alchemy. Um, and I hate I really hate to use the grayscale analogy because like it's just to me it feels a little bit lazy. Um, but like there were people in 2020 like whose names will remain anonymous that were spinning up their own trust vehicles to do the own to do the same

Grayscale trade, right? Like like we actually have just seen this before, right? I mean, it's obviously very different. It's a very different flavor. Um, but I remember back then all of the lenders saying, "Hey, this is like this very exotic way to to juice returns and create revenue." Um, I don't know. I'm not going to say at the top or anything like that because I think that's a fool's game. But yeah, I don't I don't know. At the end of this, I don't see Michael Sailor winning and him being, you know, the richest person on the planet and just continues to issue converts. But who knows? Maybe I'm wrong.

Here's that graphic West Wesy was asking about and you can see the uptick in the public companies flows relative to the ETFs um and that flipping that happened between Q324 and then Q424 and then Q1 of this year where like Wesy mentioned ETFs very little and a ton from these treasury companies and the ETFs picked back up Q2 but um you know these companies have been chugging It's also important to know that these Bitcoin flows, the ETF ones, a lot of them are delta neutral and they're shorting somewhere else. So, it's like

not really net overall, whereas the treasury companies are net. So when it comes to like again like they're the largest idiosyncratic buyers of Bitcoin and if that starts to drop off in a meaningful way that's not it's no bueno the Bitcoin price. Do you guys have that graphic? I'm going to try to find it. It was I think it came out two days ago. I think the Bloomberg guy retweeted it. Um it was like the breakout of ETF holders by um like investor type and it was actually pretty good. I think it was like I think the largest holder was actually um RAAS which is really good to see there. There was obviously a ton of like RV hedge funds there but there there was a decent

amount of um RAAS there which is good. I don't I don't have it off hand but yeah let me pull that up. Eric Belchunis shared this info. I think you're making a great point here. Yeah they uh he said he mentioned previously that they were nowhere near Holy canoli. they were nowhere near the top of this list and then just recently like have kind of jumped up the ranks. Um so it is an interesting point to make that like yeah adviser has surged up the list now number one by a mile. They make up 20% of total assets but he said likely to rise another 354% as more adoption comes. I don't know. Do we have we have broader thoughts there? Like I mean, is the trend just continuing to trend?

Could it really be that simple? I mean, are they just going to keep getting dumber and dumber with treasury companies? like are we just gonna continue going out the risk curve and we're well I mean I think if you to spoke to like um you know people with the Bitcoin vision would say like okay now it's in the ETFs and like now investment advisors are telling their clients to buy it and you know now funds are going to start making it part of their you know sample typical port you know options for like 401ks and other different you know investment vehicles that people are typically you know investing through and maybe they're not even managing their own money like is this really just a part of that process.

Like we're just it it's it's achieved this like past the transition point of becoming a large enough and like meaningful enough macro asset and then now that you know as it is at this point of the adoption curve where you just you see these numbers that that Belchunis brings out and you know is it there's sort of some unstoppable thing here. It's not quite the same as like when gold kind of had its its big move. um you know maybe a decade or so or two ago um around like ETF you know inflows and people buying that. But I don't know I just wonder if there's like this this broader trend that's just like kind of primed to play out now that the vehicles are out there

and people are thinking this is a great place to park money. I mean, for the for the most part, yeah, like this is this is a a ginormous macro trend and like over a long enough time horizon, Bitcoin is going up. Like, I don't know what else to say other than that. Um, yeah, that's all I got. I like the I like the Jeff Park take of the 6040 portfolio is dead and he's like, you have to add Bitcoin into it.

You have to buy their ETFs. You have to buy their ETFs. That's his whole point. Makes a lot of sense coming from his angle. It does make a lot of sense. You have to admit. Yeah. I think he's got no bias at all. Well, to be like who's buying bonds? Can I I'm like real question. Do you guys anyone here own bonds in a meaningful allocation? Well, so like largest capital alligators on planet earth are buying bonds. There's a very bigass there's a very big difference between buying like when people are talking about the death of bonds like there's a very different thing between being exposed to 30-year duration risk in US government bonds and then buying like fiveyear corporate paper or like

short-term private credit. Like those are those are very different things, right? like corporate credit is not down 50% because of duration risk. Um, so I just think that that's like a very technical but an important point to think about. Like yeah, as a as a 70-year-old pensioner, like having a decent percent of your portfolio in like fiveyear paper, I think is still very very useful and very very smart. Yeah. But if you bought Bitcoin with that money instead, you could retire your entire lineage. It's very very Yeah. But the the point of the point of buying bonds is like duration matching, right? So you have some liability and you need to earn yield over the period at very low risk. So like they serve a portfolio. Like that's why like I kind

of I'm I'm kind of a hater on all like the death of bonds story. It's like it it really lacks nuance. Um they're very useful um financial instruments. Uh perhaps, you know, they're not they're less useful for retail or perhaps some of certain durations or risk characteristics are less useful for um a certain subset of retirees or whatever, but they're still like they're not going anywhere, you know. That's fair. Yeah. I mean, I think as an industry and and probably also as a group here, we I mean, we've got a younger bias here as well. So the, you know, allocation to bonds is probably

not the most important thing maybe at this stage of life, but I mean, James, you make great points. Ryan, you make great points. There's nuance there. And I think a lot of that gets, it gets skipped a lot because we like to get to the, you know, just allocate 50% to Bitcoin, you'll never lose type of, you know, the stuff that's all over the timeline. And and also like no one wants to own bonds when they're going down, of course. And like they like from an annualized return perspective like the Barclay Zag has not done well in this over the last you know whatever seven or 10 years due to the recent draw down but like the next time we have a banking crisis you're going to want to own 30-year bonds because the yield is going to plummet and you're going to get a lot

of nice convexity there and it's going to protect your portfolio and we just haven't had that environment in a long time. Yeah. Or I mean you could just take ETH for the 2% as well instead of the bond. Yeah. Yeah. Bonds are bonds are too risky. So I think we're going to opt instead for the sixmonth PT tokens of USDS. That's what I'm saying. Um Danny, what did you guys cover before I was introduced? Yeah, we talked um talked a little bit of macro with Felix. We talked a little bit about the Elon Trump crash out. I missed it. Circle. Of course, we can talk Elon Trump crash out. I think you

covered the celus bit or no? No, we did not. We just covered one crash out. We can cover other crash outs if you'd like. There were more crash outs that occurred. Crash outs. Um, circle came up. Morpho and and and token structures. Pump fund to an extent. Did we do pump fun already? Because I feel like Ryan Connor, not quite. I'd be happy to discuss it in more detail. On it. I I did it already. He said, "Oh, I already did it on another pod, so we don't have to talk about it here."

What do we think? Four bill 25%. So, they're raising one bill at four bill. Is that a yes or is that a no? Like, you can put a meaningful percent of your portfolio in it. Would you do it or not? I mean, if if it were trading at four times cash, you would I think, you know, you would put a sizable percentage of your net worth into that thing that's extraordinarily cheap. I think the reality, the reason the valuation is so low is because the token's not getting all of the economics. That's like clear. I think but but the problem is that the market doesn't like only the only the people who participated or saw the deal know that. I don't think the broader market

knows the details yet. So I think it's much more likely that the you know the token gets a small portion of the economics something that looks like I don't know like Ato that would make the valuation much more reasonable and fair. Yeah. For on um actually I think this was posted on Zer chat by Daniel Smith. The the rumor is that it's going to get 25% of revenue which at that point would you say yeah this is decent or no? I think it's fair. Yeah, I'm with I'm with Ryan. It seems fair. I think you could look at the just the memecoin launchpad portion of it and call it pretty fair and look at the growth potential and the kind of dominance there and the live streaming

whatever community social app growth is like probably basically valued at zero today. Um, so you kind of get like a an opportunity to long that. But I agree with Ryan that like, you know, if there was just the token and there was no equity, then I think that would be a type of scenario where I mean, I would certainly be very interested in in allocating, but it's it's far different if only a portion of the revenue flows to the token and Yeah. And and they might not raise the billion, right? That's still TBD.

Yeah, that's a it's a lot of money. I mean that's like you know that's like crypto megaphone size. I think I think this is going to be a good test to see how much like idle liquid capital there is. It doesn't even seem that crazy in the context of circle and bitcoin treasury companies soul treasury companies like I think if they ask for a billion they will 100% get a billion. You think they know they're 100% sure? I imagine they would know. They wouldn't just go out and say yeah we might get a billion. I would be shocked if if they if they formally set an ICO for for a billion. I would be stunned if they didn't fully fill it.

Yeah. I I I said before like gun to my head, I guess I would think that they raise it because I think that the appetite from funds is already way higher than I expected. Um, you know, we've seen we've definitely seen funds over time warm to the meme the memecoin market and pump as a business. Uh, but it was only a handful. It was an impressive to even get to a handful, but like clearly there's how much VC capital did they get? Like between 100 300 million. Like it's more than I would have guessed. Yeah. And think of like think of how many think pieces came out within like two days on launchcoin and

pasternac and all that kind of stuff like that is if that's emblematic of how much liquid funds want to deploy. I think like yeah they'll they'll they'll ship it into pump fund with with no second um thoughts. Wes, you are unusually quiet. I feel well I was gonna I was I have something to say. So, I'm curious what your guys' thoughts are on Pump Fund, like the quality of their cash flows and Pump Fund dominance as well within the sort of like memecoin trenches market. I personally think that their dominance has like basically peaked or or I don't think there's a lot of growth. The problem with like their business model

and their sector being in this like deep in the trenches of like crypto trading, the problem with being there is that the meta always changes. The thing that people are trading always changes uh and the place that people are trading always changes. And so while it has been pumped on historically, I just I have a hard time seeing that like always being the case that this sort of form factor continues to to pull poliferate and you won't see new like launchpads come up with better incentive structures that eat away market share. Uh as well as just like different types of trading like we're trading completely different stuff because the form factor always shifts.

Um, so yeah, I'm curious your guys' thoughts on that. I I was gonna say I think this is like mitigated if the token is not locked when you buy it like on the public because I agree with you. I think we could see like a shift away from it. But if the four bill public sale is just um like at TGE you're not locked for a few years or like a year or whatever, I think it's it's a risk that you can probably take. But if they're doing a two-year lock, threeear lock, whatever, even on like the public sale, then I agree with you. I don't think it's like even it might be worth considering. But it's it's a risk that you have to take um with a team who will have already had

made a lot of money to continue to dominate when we've seen that they're not um like there's actually bey competitors out now. Um I don't think launch the Believe is one of them. I do think that Meteora and the Jupiter side might um end up taking some more market share. I do think I'll agree to an extent. I think they're more than ever before there's higher likelihood of them being you know having their market share competed out away from them. Um whereas in the past I don't think people took them seriously enough for whatever reason. like it was all the this is all

ephemeral, this is all this that or the other thing, it's going to go away. Like Pump Fund's gone in 6 months and so there didn't seem to be like even a desire to compete really outside of like the few, you know, for me on BNB is hanging out and having a great time over there. CZ's, you know, pumping them. That's great for them. Um, nobody else has really been keen to go after pump until just recently, like in the past few months. Um, so I'll say that like I think it's that's a higher risk now than it ever has been, but like I do think that they do still have a very meaningful network effect. Like we've seen a lot of these teams try to come in, you know, Radium kind of punching back after Pump Swap comes out and they drop their launch lab. They do, you

know, they have the partnership with Bonk and do Bonk fun. Not really much happening there. Um, same with Believe. Like James mentioned it, people were very excited. um it did a ton of volume really quick like within a few weeks um and sort of had a very strong like blowoff there and I'd agree that there's an opportunity here to like pick on these like little subsectors that pump isn't really they've not catered to anything specific right they've remained like this kind of neutral any token any meme any whatever you want like you can launch here it's just one standard thing like the formula is always the same um but I do think at some point Leaving that completely

vanilla does open this playing field a little bit more for something like a believe. You know, maybe maybe they can still execute on it. There's, you know, there's time. It's only been a few weeks. It's not like it's over forever. But, um, if you can pick out these these subniches that maybe tokens of that type are not served so meaningfully on pump and like draw eyes and volume to your platform instead. I do think that is a risk for them. Um, though obviously they're leaning into the live streaming thing. Like maybe they don't really care that much about ICM and they really want to like bet on the kind of social app and like network effect that that that would come with it if let's say your platform is one sort of like a a Twitch

or a Twitter type thing that also has the casino baked in. I mean, I think that would just be a very powerful business that would be hard to kind of like to compete with in the future if if if X or Twitter or whoever or YouTube was also the casino. I mean, that would be a very very strong business and I think it would be incredibly hard to compete with them as like an incumb or as a new entrant coming into the space because they've got all the users there and then they've got the really like highly revenue generating and like eyeball popping stuff that the people are interested in doing.

Yeah, I think those are all really good takes. I think when I'm thinking about Pump Fun, I think the entire business is like premised on attention, right? Like you need to have people constantly launching these new new tokens and it's not entirely clear that's like people launching these tokens. Like I would imagine there's like a lot of bots that are like scraping the web and finding relevant news articles or like whatever cuz like no matter what like there's always new tokens for whatever new meme and I think like being first to launch the new culturally relevant event token is like pretty probably um profitable.

So I imagine like that's a big part of their ecosystem that is kind of more in the shadows. Um I do think like all these streaming stuff is also important but um on in terms of market share I would hope that they use whatever new capital they raise to cement their market share and then continue to grow that as well. Um so it's like if you were to think about what is like pump funds mo I think it really is pronounced on like attention and network effects of that. Um but those are kind of the two main things that I think about there.

Uh, I have a question. Um, well, I guess first to answer uh Wesley's question, I think it's all about whoever owns the front end. I think pump's going to get dis intermediated if they don't. Um, but question for the data team. Uh I believe so in preface our data is always right and if it's wrong we very quickly fix it because all the biggest liquid token funds rely on our data. Um but the time series has changed uh for for uh trading volume that comes from external platforms for pump fun. I was looking at it like a few weeks ago and it was at 27%.

now like the time series has shifted and it's closer to 54%. And we haven't been at 207% for a while. So like I don't know Westy did do you know who the data analyst responsible for the pump fund dashes and you know what they found because like they found a new contract that's um a new front-end contract that's driving volume to pump. It's almost like there's this app called Axiom that does a ton of volume. Well, this included Axiom before, so it's not like it was I I think they perhaps found a new smart contract or something.

Yeah, this is Jacob. Do you have a screenshot of the original? And you're talking about bonding curve volume, right? I probably have a screenshot of the original in my net new asset report. Yeah, bonding curve volume. Yeah, 7% makes sense of like total AMM volume of pup fund coins. We do Ryan have two queries now by the way. One is bonding curve specific and the other is this pump swap. And pump swap it's like 29%. And bonding curve is listed at 51 and it I don't though, right?

We've not always had the two. We've not always. Do you know when we got the second one? I don't. But that would could be a good sharp question. Pretty closely after the AMM launch. Yes, we've had for a while for a while. I was I'm going to agree with you as well though, Ryan. I think that's the other big piece here is they really need to own the front end. they need to own their users. Like if Axiom can if if this like assuming this data is very

correct, you know, if Axiom and Photon and these other apps can can grow and grow and grow and they're doing 99% of the volume that flows to Pump Fun, then it's like a very different picture to Pump Fun having, you know, 50 or 60 or 70% of its volume originated directly on the platform. or even if that's by bots that just directly interact versus, you know, some other app has the direct connection to all these users. Yeah. So, confirm that it has changed. Um, I do have a screenshot of the historical. I'm I'm sending them along now to the group.

James, any thoughts? Mr. No, you lost me. You lost me a data front end. This is not my forte. I'm going to share something as well that is also a bit of a change up um that maybe folks aren't expecting and maybe we'll need to, you know, double check and confirm with triples as well, but uh he's got some new charts cooking on the deck side of things showcasing market share and uh for me on BNB is like really a player in this space if I'm being honest. Pump Fund has been the dominant uh memecoin or just general like sort of launchpad and recently this like run uh that B&B is having is really

rocketing for memes dominance which is interesting. Now, I don't know that there's a lot of like user or customer crossover between for meme and like pump fun today or even like between B&B and Salana, but maybe that changes if uh all of the hottest tokens start launching over there. Do we um can we go can we look at the absolute number? Yeah, I I think I I I do you guys know how much I love the market share charts, but I do believe that in like very low um as the cost to participating in these things gets like really really low, I feel like the

absolute numbers for like launching tokens, launching individual tokens like matters more. Oh, so sorry. This is a this is a volume number. Yes. Gotcha. Okay. They're doing several hundred million as well. They're, you know, not, you know, they weren't really even in the picture, but they they had a prior sort of move back in in March. There was, you know, sort of a previous memecoin boom when CZ was talking about his dog and all that stuff, and that actually was like a massive amount of volume for them. Um, and then recently again, and I think some of this, you know, I there's been a lot of talk like what's happening on B&B, what's happening with Pancake Swap.

Um, our friend of the show, friend of the of Xerox Research and Blockworks, Tumilelet, shared some details in the Telegram the other day as well. There's some trading campaigns going on with certain tokens on on BNB chain. Um, and that's spurring a lot of activity basically select assets have, you know, volume related incentives associated with them right now. So people are trading those then they get you know brought over to Binance Alpha and then Binance Alpha is kind of like a a site line of sight to getting listed on the exchange. So it's it's driving a lot of user activity. Maybe this is reflective of that. You know people are just they're hoping to hit, you know, the new hottest meme that does a thousandx because CZ talks about it. But

um there's no reason that train has to stop if they want to keep promoting tokens in the ecosystem. Well, it seems like it's pretty inorganic right? Or no, counter. I don't know how to make it. Wait, guys. I want to do kind of a segue into the protocol. One sec. Clarifying on the data. Uh, the reason why it was different is because we tagged more Axiom wallets that other sources had not found. And that's probably I don't know if you saw some charts circulating uh X yesterday of like supposedly a huge drop off of Axiom volume, but it's likely because these accounts didn't fully tag

the the amount of Axium wallets that exist. So that's why there's a change. Just want to clarify for the audience, but go ahead, Boach. Thanks, Weston. Um, I wanted to bring up I wanted to bring up the protocol. No he left. I wanted to bring up the protocol um that Ethereum released and their like treasury thing. Did you guys look into it? I know Danny and Ryan Connor are immediately going to say, "I didn't look into it. They're dead in the water." But Westy, I'm hoping that you may have looked into the protocol thing and might be able to actually speak on it a little

bit. Looked into what? What are you talking about? The blog post from like three days ago. Oh, like they're firing the research and development team, bringing everybody under Dankrad. In fact, we didn't talk about this, right, ever? I don't think so. We don't know like too much of the details other than what they've publicly announced which is basically they're hunkering down. They're like changing around having specific teams focus on their specific outcomes of choice of scaling the L1 scaling blobs uh and UX improvements and they're putting people in place in each of those categories to lead the charge and then Dankad is overseeing all of those teams. That was

the key piece that I read. honestly skimmed over the rest. Uh, but that was a key piece for me of like, okay, they're they're they're having, again, it's at this point it's still all talk, but the talk is way better than it was six months ago, and everything they're saying is the right thing, and they're approaching things in the right way. and Dankrad leading the charge. I love uh because I've always loved, you know, his contributions to Ethereum research and also, you know, his opinions and how he views things, his work ethic. Um, so I'm yeah, I'm a big Dankrad fan. So happy to see him leading the charge. Do you agree that all you you you specifically said that

everything they're doing and from a con comm's perspective right now is correct? Do you actually believe that? Well, no. like from a from a process standpoint. Um, so my assumption also with this is that they're like firing people, restructuring, and this is how they're restructuring. Uh, like I wouldn't say it's like like if I were to give it a grade, it's definitely like an A minus. It's not perfect. Like it's great. Yeah. Do you think they're going to be less opinionated on use cases in the future? Like do you think they're going to ever be as agnostic as Solana for example or like on what level how close to that will they be?

I don't think they'll be fully agnostic. I do think Vitalic in the past being like weird about DeFi. Like I don't think that's going to be a thing. I think they're going to very much prioritize DeFi on the L1. Uh, and they're, yeah, I think they're going to be somewhat opinionated of like these are the type of use cases we want on the L1 and it's going to be mostly DeFi focused, but yeah, I mean, I feel like you have to be somewhat opinionated, although for the most part agnostic.

Like, you don't want to be the chain that's known for like uh, tornado cash and like North Korea coming to your chain, right? like there's some amount of curation you want to do, but for the most part, you should be pretty open to like whatever people want to build. My thing here is that I feel like every four months, Ethereum does one good like comms thing and then everyone's like, "Holy Ethereum's back. Soul is dying." Still all talk, right? It's like they haven't done anything different really. Did you see that arrow that says next year it's going to be a global reserve currency? from the Banklist podcast.

I I think just like I have the same view that I did three months ago, four months ago, five months ago when these talks started where it's like, yeah, we put together a new group of people. We we put a new person in. We got a new person in. These are the new missions. Like just ship a product update a little faster than you have in the past. Scale the thing a little faster than you have before like you say you're going to and then like I'll be more positive about it. But until like until the announcement is like, okay, we scaled blobs by X instead of, you know, half of X like we were originally going to, then it's just like, all right, we're waiting until they ship a hard fork in a shorter amount of time than they plan. Like it's still all talk. Like they need to ship.

It's a bit weird, too, that like no one who is building an application that is used on the chain seems highly opinionated about the chain's future. like any like who who's the most opinionated DeFi builder in your guys opinion? Have you seen someone who like continuously speaks out on what the direction of Ethereum? That's like the main thing that's used. Mark Zeller. Does he speak out on the chain itself though or just like a No, he just says use a Yeah. And like that's great, but like you know like I think there's a there's a really compelling DeFi use case happening on Ethereum. Like actual DeFi usage outside of like trading is you know much much larger on Ethereum than it is on Salon or anywhere

for that matter. And you have no opinionated devs showing up in Discourse around the chain's future which is just kind of crazy because it's like they're using your product. It's like it's just bizarre. It's just so so strange. I feel like this is uh something that has come as a result of in the past Ethereum Foundation never talked to application developers. Like your your biggest DeFi founders are like, "Yeah, I never talked to the EF until like many years after I founded this thing and it had billions in TVL." I think that's just a result of them not like the Ethereum Foundation and App Builders not being close at all and feeling like there's no mode of communication. Hopefully that changes

recently and I feel like there are some uh bigger D5 founders like Kane I feel like has been pretty vocal about here are Ethereum's problems and was also like took a leap of faith building on Salana with Infinex and being like this is an okay approach to scaling where like most ees would like never even speak of Salana and you also have like Leshner I'd say has like thrown some criticisms here and there not anything too harsh, but I'd say like app founders for the most part are making themselves known. Um, but it's yeah, few and far between. I think a result of the past relationship between app developers and EF. Yeah, we got a couple months and

then Christine Lagarde and everyone the ECB will be will be adopting ETH. So, it looks like we're on track. I think soon. Um, one thing about ETH that I always feel like is kind of relevant is most teams and protocols, um, they create a foundation and they don't really rely on the foundation that much. It's just there. Versus Eve, I feel like really works with the foundation all the time. Almost like they didn't realize that it should not be making all of the decisions. Is this correct or am I being like I feel like in most teams it's like the labs that's like actually making the decisions versus ETH is like the foundation right I so when the the you know when the media push for ETH the ETH

the the so-called ETH pivot started um I dove back into ETH media and listened to a bunch of hours worth and all any any EF person who was doing official comms on a pod like I I listened. Um the interesting takeaway is that their framing of decision-m over time um like differs from what the market thought it was. You know, I think the narrative was that ETH decision-making for a long time was too decentralized and disorganized, right? Like our decentralization was too good and we got in our own way. But um I think it was um Tamas and perhaps Donrod or other

important people in that ETH core. They specifically said that decision-m would happen from Vitalic with two or three other people in a telegram group and now they're going to be now they're going to get more opinions before they move on things. So they actually had a very highly centralized decision-making process that did not go well for the community. um from you know end of 21 to present and now they're they're actually telling you that they're going to get more decentralized and consider more opinions in their decision-making. So it's actually the opposite the opposite of what the market thought was going on and they're telling you it's they're actually telling you that's going to get worse.

It's pretty crazy. Yeah. Yeah, when you put it that way cuz like definitely there can be a lot of benefits from highly opinionated people making decisions when it's like you're not really taking any other ideas in consideration. But maybe they just like weren't super opinionated or I have no idea what was causing them to, you know, stall like they were before. But, you know, thanks for doing your DD there, Ryan. I'm sure there's a lot of mental trauma that you're now, you know, having to deal with. And so I mean just really put yourself through it for for the community there, man. I I think No, I I think that ETH podcasting is like fantastic. They've been doing it for the longest amount of time. Like they're super high quality conversations. Like Yeah. Sorry, Bach. Like it's just it's

fantastic over there. The water's warm. Like they're very very good. Very good. And it's entertaining. And if like if you if you are really into just like philosophical musings, like no one does it better. It's really entertaining. I could do it all day. Yeah. Yeah, but what's the point of all that? No offense. Like at the end of the day, like it becomes a bit like not boring, but like show me, right? Like it's been it's been 10 years. Like I feel like just sitting here and having philosophical conversations is fine, but it's not if it's not productive, then there's no real point. You know what I mean? And that's what the market's telling them, right? It's like it's not productive. And even this time, they're not believing it. Um, it's easy to be academic and pontificate

when you're when you basically have a monopoly and there's very little competition. But as soon as you have competition up your legs, that's where you do what they're doing now, which is, oh, oh And like hunker down, restructure, wartime. At least I mean that's what they should be doing. And it sounds like that's what they're doing. Do do you think they never realized that it was valid competition until now? Justin Drake on a bankless podcast when Salana had more rev than ETH being like, "Oh, it's over. East one." Like he literally said that verbatim. Yeah. I think they never viewed other smart

contract platforms as their competitor and only viewed Bitcoin as their competitor. I don't think they were looking backward at all. I think they were looking forward and like like to your point they were the incumbent so I think that makes sense but I think it's definitely a mistake um for them to have like picked Bitcoin as the only competition and I do think it only really started to kind of actually you know gain a lot more momentum across the crowd when you saw other metrics pop up that Salana was doing much better on uh versus Ethereum. So, I totally agree.

And I just don't think like you can't you can't be that opinionated and win, right? Like I think trading meme coins and like gambling is like pretty dumb. I do it a lot of it. I think it's stupid. But like that is the market. Like if you want to sit there and and yell at the market and say it's wrong for six years in a row and you should be focusing on more serious endeavors, like back to the philosophical point, yeah, you can do that. But like that's not what people want. So like too bad. Like the market tells you what it wants, build it. You can be opinionated and win. You just need to be right. Like otherwise you need to let the markets do it do its thing. Yeah. Interesting. I I think there are a lot of problems with the

recent comms. one um and I guess that um Darren from our team pointed out that someone in uh in one of like the ETH um monthly meetings or something like recently brought up fees, but in all those hours of ETH official media comms that I listen to, they did not once mention the word revenue, which is a problem and is the fundamental reason why the ETH token is lower is because its revenue has fallen 95% from peak. So, it's not a surprise to me that the token's like whatever 50% from peak. Um so they still fundamentally don't understand the the value driver for the token. Um I think the other issue is that you know just a few days ago Vitalic was at a conference and said Devx is more important than UX and I

don't know that was clickbait. I'll clarify it was a clickbait clip. They were asking about a very niche specific thing of like in this specific ZK type of design system he thinks that right now today the devx is more important because it's so early stage I got baited too don't worry gotcha okay so I stand corrected but like if you were to I mean what's okay so yes I am wrong got click baited what would the evidence tell you though like that they think because I don't know I I think that the evidence suggests that UX is still of little fundamental importance. Yeah. I mean, they they hate the users, Ryan. It's

like you always say, I agree with you. It it just it's been a worse experience for a long time. I think like the the e Ethereum wallet experience, like the transaction signing experience, like a lot of pieces and like it's gotten much better than it was in the past. You know, there are better wallets today than there were a few years ago. Uh Rabbi's quite good for an ETH wallet. I'm sure there's others. Um, and there's other kind of obviously there's lots of other parts to the to the stack and what the user experience is, but uh, it really has not iterated as fast as I think that they should have been. I don't know why that was like not so much of a care for these teams. I guess launching like the 50th L2 was more important. Well, like also think about our I mean, this is interesting. Think

about our pump fund conversation where we're constantly saying like, hey, they have to they have to own the front end. ETH has totally given up the front end. uh the centralized exchanges favor their own native chain. Uh the wallets are no longer solely ETH wallets and don't and in in many cases don't default to ETH. Um you know ETH is not the you know um it's not the favorite chain on Phantom. It's not the favorite chain on Coinbase Wallet. It's not the favorite chain of Coinbase. So ETH is very much fallen further away from the user and um so maybe UX doesn't matter.

I I will say UX is distinctively one of the the core pillars of their future visions. You have scale on scale blobs and UX improvements. So that is like one of the things they're working on. Is it too late? I think is an important question like yeah there's so many UX issues like too many to name really with Ethereum the EVM etc. So, like obviously they haven't prioritized in the past, but it sounds like they're going to. Again, all talk. We'll see. On your revenue piece, Ryan, have you read the cyber funds ETH thesis? I think that's like the most grounded Ethereum thesis I've probably

read yet of anything. Definitely. What is their significance though? Um well the the um the founders of Cyber Fund were like Lido OGs like Ethereum OGs like very much involved in like governance and uh etc. of Ethereum. Yeah. I mean I think that the fact that they that their priority of scaling the blob market which is in a way um contradictory to scaling the L1 right because the two are competitive with one another. you're supporting L2s, but then you're also saying that we want execution on the L1. Um they still fundamentally I don't think they know it's it's not a clear

um they're not prioritizing in fact execution fees on the L1 if you're scaling blobs, right? You're helping out the L2s which are effectively your competitors for execution fees. You can do both at the same time like there's no reason. I mean, maybe with like capacity constraints and how quickly you scale, but in theory, you should be able to like add more blob capacity while also increasing the gas limit. Yeah, you could you could do both, but if you were um if you were focused on maximizing revenue, you would help your you would you would solely focus on that thing, right? Because scaling blobs is going to help L2s get market share faster than you. Yeah. And I I think part of that p

like their piece was scaling the L1 will bring revenue back. I think that like the other piece that they really focused on was solving interrop um and like yeah revenue generated from that is sort of a bigger question mark but that's like I think that's like scaling blobs and having more people post DA because DA is super valuable because you get some interop standards from it and then they can charge a higher price for that DA because of those properties. I'm not saying I completely buy the thesis. I I just I understand like where they're coming from and at least in the piece they talked a ton like they used a ton of block works data and did talk about like revenues and like ultimately at the end

of the day how much value is ETH acrewing whereas like you never hear that really on other ETH podcasts or ETH media. Yeah, it'd be nice if you if it'd be nice if you heard um whoever's in charge of the EF mention revenue. They actually brought like I was listening it was like John Charb I think on on Bank list with one of the guys from the EF and they all brought it up and all laughed about it and they all chatted about it like very quickly the Rev debate and Tomas didn't wouldn't didn't say anything. He's like I think he specifically wanted to stay away from it because of how the community might react. That's just me reading the tea leaves. Kind of a weird thing to do. Um guys, should we also shed on Solana a

bit or focus on the rest? Let's Let's open it up. What What do we want to talk about? What What's interesting right now? Hyperl is a big one. What other like tokens, narratives, trends are we looking at? Maybe this is a little bit of a trench talk on Friday. What are we interested in chat? I think I think to go bear mode. I think he wants to that is not I'm not going bear mode. Want to say he's got something to get off his chest. I don't have anything to get off my chest. I am happy in the tokens that I own and that's it. I I did sell my Solana just FYI to people. Um that's the third time we've heard that

this year. I just I just have to say it out. Never buys back in but always fully sells. I fully sold I fully sold not fully I sold it. I'm unhappy with with its performance. I've instead opted to buy other tokens that only go up as opposed to go down. Yeah. And what tokens like selling into weakness? Is that part of the strategy? Uh yes. In fact, anytime I get slightly emotional, I don't look at numbers, revenue, anything. I just look at as holy this might go down. I got to sell it.

What's the quote? It was going down precipitously. I don't know who wouldn't sell. Exactly. Exactly what I do. Um I get really nervous about it and then I just holy I need to get the out of this. Sometimes I do TA James Kristoff really helps me out. He has this VWAP strategy that is unreal. He needs to explain it out. Um, but yeah, I mean that's I wanted to talk about Solana's weakness, but I guess we can't do that because Danny wants Did you sell just because price was down more than No, I s we can talk about Soul. I just want to talk about, you know, we talked about ETH. Let's talk about I'm just trying to dive in of like okay soul why? Because it was going I just don't

think that it's I think there are other L1s. I'm not going to show them. I think there are other L1s that might do better in the medium to long term and that have been doing better in the medium to long term. Um, and I think that the soul's returns may not be I don't I'm not bearish on it as an asset. I just think there might be better things to buy. Um, is my is my take. I'm very happy to be wrong. Um, because that would mean that you guys are winning, which is more important than me winning. You're so selfless. I am. I'm very very nice guy. But I I largely agree actually. I think Soul will likely underperform

um newer chains. Um I think I mean I already said I think I have some question marks on Pump Fund's dominance and I just think like people want a new game to play and the Salon game to me feels like it it happened. it's super saturated and so like I think the likelihood that we see a new game elsewhere is like the highest it's been yet. So it's kind of a general thesis and no it's not like I'm looking at specific data and making that. It just feels like like if there were a new game that it would pop up somewhere else.

I mean, isn't that So, okay. What do you think about this push back where um I I I just think that that's kind of like backward-looking like what's happening in crypto is very different from what's happened historically where like in crypto like you could argue like it was like a fixed capital environment. You had the same players moving assets around and chasing the same returns and trying to do that new game whereas now you have a new a new source of capital coming into these markets. um now that crypto is legal legal in the US and you have um regulatory clarity in both the US uh and Europe. So like like why we said earlier that you know a new game is always played. Um but

I'm I'm particularly bullish on incumbents because these are network effects businesses and capital is going to go to where there's liquidity um especially professional capital. So to me there's like two different pools of capital. There's the professional capital and there's the DGEN capital. And to me, Pump Fund and a lot of like the Salana volume is the DGEN capital. And to me, yeah, like most of the new money entering the space is this like professional capital, which is that's what's bidding like the circle IPO. Um, and like the DJ capital to me is always looking to be early to the new thing and like is mixed in with like CT and K's of like sort of creating self-fulfilling prophecy of what the new

thing is. And so to me, it's like are you really early to this Salana pump fun game? Is there really active liquidity because people know what the game is? To me, it's like the DJ Capital feels like it's going to go elsewhere. Yeah, I guess you could argue that like 70% of Salana activity is that yeah 50 to 70%. The counterargument here is that Solana is I think the user base that Solana's in attracting is actually very different to what we've had historically and it's like 18 to 19 year olds with a Phantom wallet and some Salana. It's always been, huh? Were you trading in 2021? That was literally the same thing.

It was like 23 year olds who are buying these like third grade DeFi protocols on like your fifth L1. It's the same thing. It's a different game. Yeah, fair enough. Good point. That's just like something that's always in my mind is is there an extra group of people that I'm not indexing for that I'm not thinking about? I feel like that's the one that I'm not. Yeah. I think it's natural that like I mean the fun the silly fun games that's indexes lower on the age group. Like it's not surprising that a lot of the consumer experiences appeal to the 20-year-olds and the Gen Z's and the millennials and then like the idea of like you know just earning some yield on

dollars is maybe you know maybe that percolates up the the age demographics a little more easily than like gambling on a random token ticker. But I I I think I agree with your point to an extent here, Westy, of like in my head, I do like the idea of trying to find a bet on if if the next maybe the next game is Pump One live streaming. Who knows? like it could be or if it's something else tang tangentially related to like the stuff that already you know we had meme coins and NFTts and just dexes and then now launchpads and like if there is like a slightly modified app that has a token and I can bet on that and like with Salana's market share and pump's market

share and hyperlquid's market share where it is today like sure you can bet on growth but I mean I think you do have a point here it's like you know you can apply some some growth number to that and and look for those returns But there this space I what I think for me has always attracted me and what's always interesting is that there are just like constantly these like 0 to 100 opportunities where nobody's using something and then all of a sudden it's the hottest app and it's making $500 million a year and if you have the opportunity to get in on that thing um you know that's what I find exciting and so yeah I mean I wouldn't be surprised if if something else pops up that's not pump fun and is you know you see the headlines in a year or two years that

are like this new app got to 100 mil ARR in three days and it's a crypto app. If you guys liken memecoin trading to like sports gambling as kind of like a crude analogy, how much bigger do you think the opportunity is to expand memecoin trading compared to like if I just very crit like the market caps of the of the top publicly traded um sports gambling and like you know online blackjack companies like how much larger is the TAM for for memecoin trading and like are we actually already saturated there? And one thing like I did mention this that I think is interesting, Wesy, I talked to you about this and put it in the um block works research subscriber chat like asking for a dashboard that

looks at the median call it like peak market cap for an onchain call it runner for lack of better words and how that changes over time. And like obviously I think everyone would agree right now the market feels like super weak where something might run to five million bucks and then completely die whereas five months ago it could you know that could have ran to 100 million bucks on chain. Just curious what you guys think about that. Uh I think that there's a solid chance that the TAM for memecoin gambling is larger on an annual basis. It already does more volume than traditional gambling in the aggregate. Um, the only difference is the profitability of pun is of pump is

lower than that of DraftKings. Uh, I don't exactly understand why, but I have to look into that. I guess the spread's larger on DraftKings. Um, I think that um the risk there is that the memecoin game is too opaque. So, the nice thing about sports gambling is that it's you you very clearly understand when you win or lose. You can bet on the game. You can bet on the overunder, you can bet on the next pitch, you can bet on individual points scored, rebounds, whatever. But on meme, a lot of on meme coins, it's the um it's a little harder to understand how you win. And perhaps that is a bare case for the TAM being larger. But I think just

very simp simplistically um I think that meme coins increase fun and minimize the um barriers to multiples on capital like like sports gambling like I don't think comes close. So that would be my reasoning for why I think the TAM's bigger. Yeah. To to your point of like the opakeness of of memecoin trading and the difference of sports gambling like I I liken it to Right. I think we're probably at peak saturation for sports gambling in the United States, right? I don't think it's going to expand as a percentage of people that participated in it that much. Um, and yeah, you of course do have professional bers and sharps that are in the market. I think the difference between a sharp and

sports gambling and just your average college kid who's betting on sports is very, very different than if we 10x the TAM of memecoin trading on Salana. you're going to have extremely extremely sophisticated participants, even more so than are in the market today that are going to come in. And I think convers like it's an inverse relationship. You're actually going to get a worse user experience for your average person who's punting on chain because they're going to get ripped off by actual, you know, guys at Jane Street that are now trading on Pump Fun because the TAM is 10 times larger. Like, I think your experience is actually going to get worse the bigger it gets.

Yeah, I mean you have sports gambling is pretty professionalized too, right? Um I have talks on the board and he used to do it professionally dayto-day. I don't know. No, but but your your your win rate as a sharp is very different than your win rate professionally bundling coins on pump fun. That that's that's the point. Very very different. Yeah. And think about like who your counterparty is and how you win like a certain scenario. Like if you're gambling, your counterparty is these like the books basically, unless you're doing some like prediction market. Like you're gambling against these other people that are running statistical models. And so the idea is to like bake out like a small amount of edge that

compounds over time. And the your counterparty with memes are like you're like dumb retail trader. And the way you win is you're just early. And so what that means is the game gets saturated when people realize you make the most money spitting out tokens and like causing them to go viral. And at the end of the day, like no one wants to be the exit liquidity for these like token farms. And so like the game itself is set up for people to lose way more like your average person. I I think that's fair, but I I I still think there's an opportunity for like, you know, Ryan did his net new assets right up. And I think like there is an opportunity for more of these like categories to unfold here where I mean, we've kind of seen bits

and pieces there where like just the core launching memes, which a lot of it is either news type content or it's like who can come up with just the funniest thing in the moment based on a reaction to something. Um, and then maybe fight fight fight against the other 16 launches that are trying to do the exact same joke. Um, but you know, if you can the live streams is is one question mark, right? Can you tie a token to to content creators? Are people interested enough are like audiences interested enough to like bet on the mind share or like the growth or like the virality potential of a creator that they like?

You know, internet capital markets is another one. like I is getting web two startup tokens onchain like something interesting enough and durable enough that that people want to like bid those up consistently. I think there's other opportunities for like these different sort of plays on the same idea where the game is can be different from how it is in the past where you know in in ICM there's not there can't be 10 tokens for the one business right because there's the one business and the one business launches the token and the same goes for you know the content creator right so you don't you get rid of some of those issues um and there's so there's different ways to kind of maybe play some of these categories categories that could unfold which might lead to you know some of that additional TAM

expansion. But these are all I mean they're relatively unproven still, right? Like Believe had kind of a little bit of a blowoff moment. The streams they're they're not doing much today, but they're they're definitely leaning into it. They want to incentivize it. Um we'll see if other categories can like draw that attention. Get a haircut. I did. I did, but he kind of up the front. I look like 1010. If you guys know who that is. Like a kid.

Do you guys think the uh I mean the trenches feel back to me like it's getting it's getting easier to make money. Why aren't you sharing these opportunities with me, Ryan? Yeah, I I don't know if I agree. I thought it felt good like a month or two ago. feels a little different today. There's there's always pockets where things Yeah. are fun and it feels like the the time windows have shrunk of these pockets. What do you think the catalyst for like the the trenches doing well is?

Because I feel like it's always just like a runup in like soul the native asset or like some I don't know. Yeah, I'll leave it open. What do you guys think? I think it's days like yesterday where a viral social media moment happened and you can look at the numbers. You got a big spike in um memecoin launches and trading volume yesterday. Just looks kind of off the charts. Um which is why I think yesterday was so good. Everyone just wanted to find the next thing. Yeah, but even yesterday there were like tokens that I feel like before if this happened we would have like 15 to 20 runners in a week. Um, yeah,

like we didn't even talk there was no Celkus token, no Peter Chef token, you know, there was just like one or two. There was a Crash Out token that didn't go up a lot. It's it was just a weird like it's not how it used to be if that makes sense where it was like there would be like 25 of them and then like the and also like before it would be like everything would hit 15 to this is just like very normal though know like it's it's overindustrialized now and it's be becoming more and more like there's a billion tokens out instead of a million tokens out which means that things don't go up as much and when things don't go up as much people are like they're wary they don't really want to buy it's the attention doesn't go up as much as it used too, which I think is

fine because there pump fund still makes money. So for pump fund, it doesn't really matter because there's a billion tokens that are doing 10,000 volume each instead of a million tokens that are doing whatever the math is in that case volume each. So to them, it doesn't matter. But overall, something we can something news that we can on. Um Gemini filed for an IPO. So can we can we um discuss how low valuation they're going to get? I want to talk about box thing. So, first of all, it's actually not in Palm's best interest. Sorry, Chris. And the same. We'll get back to the Gemini.

James, we're gonna get back to you. Westy is gonna on me and then we're gonna on Gemini and then we're going to end it. I'm sorry, James. Yeah. Yeah. Like that's just going to be like we're just Yeah, that's whatever. Um, yeah. It's like a casino, right? like people like casinos love when when people win big and promote that big win because then it it really draws people in and they win on the totality of like in the long run they're going to take their cut and so more the more people betting the better. It's the same for pump fun. It's like if there aren't runners that are going to crazy valuations then you have less people trading the tokens which means less people launching the tokens and it's like a whole reflexive loop. So I don't agree with that piece. Uh and like in

terms of the original question to me it's like a a function of both liquidity and like exciting events or things happening. So yesterday was like the exciting things and events happening but there's not much liquidity to me in the trenches right now compared to like November December of last year. Like that to me was like all like the trenches were were booming then whereas like yesterday like box said it's like you had maybe a couple runners and they like they detracted so fast. So to me the trenches are not really that back. I I think that there's a curation problem very obviously like I think there needs to be some automate some automated mechanisms to just like filter out for

like bad bubble maps. Um because now like like the axiom feeds pretty dog I think I think it's full of things that you know you might not want to like you need a you need you need you need an aggre an aggregator to curate the experience to um uh make discovery a more pleasant experience. Yeah, I I think I agree with this point, Ryan, and I and right today the model or the design is like you go to Axiom or Photon meme scope or wherever and it's like all the filters are available, right? You you could filter out all of the things that you want to filter out, right? Like anything that's got more than, you know, 20% supply held by one

address or how much is bundled et you know, etc. You can you can ignore all that stuff, but the fact that you know it's it still plays into the same dynamics, right? Like if not everyone is doing that and there's still people buying those other tokens like it doesn't really like directly address the problem that you know you're still going to get all those bundled launch tokens that you know suck a little bit of the flow that would have maybe gone elsewhere if there was a little bit more of a curated experience. Um and it seemed like it at least in the short term was exciting enough for Believe. I don't know what the best way for Pump Fund to do that is though. Like at least with live streams, there's, you know, it's curated in the sense that like if Aiden Ross or Anom or whoever Gainzy has

a stream token, it's like there's just that one token, right? It's if they show the live stream on the platform, there's the one token associated with it, right? Like that's straight up curation from like how many views their stream gets or what have you. And there's nothing else really to do there. But yeah, with the with the news type content, it's I mean that's it's harder. Can we talk about believe like super specifically just for like five minutes? Westy, is that okay? Yeah. He doesn't want to talk about Gemini now. I want to talk about Believe. Is that signed off? Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. So, do you do you would you guys agree or disagree that it's done at this point? Like he missed his window of opportunity and like the entire thing is cooked.

I said, "Sorry, Ryan. I don't agree." I don't agree either. I don't agree. Boach, did you agree? I I think he'll pastor Knack mode is very much a thing, but I think for the time being it's like he needs to come out with a V2 product and that needs to be good. My only thing is that in crypto if a chart it's it's more difficult to come back because your kind your product is kind of reliant on your chart he could come back but I think it might make more sense for a competitor to launch that is a V2 that is much better like I said this on the pod and Ryan called me an

idiot because he was like that's very obvious but the V2 is always better than the V1 like the shift is so dramatic and I feel the V2 era of um god forbid. He did this crazy take that the next gen of products are always better than the previous gen. Update two is better than update. Right? Like I feel like that's a decent take. It's like a good head. Have you seen the chart? No. Is the chart good? It doesn't look that bad. That's fine. But but I just think his like his window of opportunity, he just refused to realize like it's crypto. You need to ship stuff

within like two days. There's no like, hey, we're going back to the drawing boards and we'll be back in two and a half weeks with an update. Like he had some like serious serious momentum, right? Like when when Launchcoin was big for that first like five days or so, like that mind share was crazy, right? Like that's all I was thinking about. I know a lot of you guys were super in like super involved in looking at those coins too. And like he just lost that within like two days by being way too slow. And to your point, Boach, of like V2, yeah, V2 is better than V1. He could have just launched like a shittier version of V2 and like it would have been fine. But like if he just did something like even if it was an incremental game, it would have been

something versus him just like randomly replying to tweets and being like, "Yeah, we're going to think about this and take it into consideration." Like he just wasn't playing to his audience. Yeah, I agree. You do have to ship. I mean, you have to ship really really fast when you have the attention on you. That's I I would definitely agree with that take, but I don't think he's done forever here. Like the interesting part of what Believe was trying to be is still interesting. Um, but maybe that takes more time and he needs to go back to the lab and, you know, have a better like consistent onboarding flow of like startups who are willing to launch tokens on this thing. Um, because I think that's if you if you can achieve the unlock, then I'd say there's a chance, right? like if the next Uber

launched a token like rather than doing like an equity raise or something on chain then like that's very interesting and people are going to want to buy that. I think it's interesting because he has um a opinionated go to market on the supply side of specific token issuers um that are um it's just like it's just a really interesting niche. Um, I also think given that go to market, it doesn't really matter that he's not capitalizing on momentum today. Like I think most crypto apps like they need to own the moment or else they die.

And because the supply side is so unique, I don't know how much it matters because if you win an interesting token issue where all of a sudden your app is rele your your app is relevant. Again, the downside is there's people have seen this, you know, it's twice now, right? ICM moment one earlier in the year, ICM moment two, and um you know, will there be more competition for ICM moment three? I think that's the question. Wait, did we already have moment two? Believe is moment two. Moment one was like January, February when we had Jelly Jellycoin or what have you. God, that was the dark. That was the original. That was the first popup there. This one's so much more serious

though, I think, because of what Believe is doing. Like the first one was inherently scammy. It was just like, hey, buy like buying coin to support like the Vine like whatever the Vine team did historically, which like makes no sense. But this kind of like we're kind of like nearing Phantom equity and integration um of the token within the product. Um there's like a very sophisticated effort around helping founders understand how to manage these communities with like I think it's called like the belief playbook. Um, it's just much more professionalized uh than the first go around.

Yeah, as the great philosopher once said, V2 is better than V1. It's a hot pick, but I think it's correct, but V3 will be will be better, Ryan. And maybe it's not past V3 is going to be even better than V2. That's the thing. That's what you think. Not necessarily. I'll dive into it on our late next spot, but it's not necessarily true. So just keep that in mind. So he's already making improvements to the model like understanding getting feedback. Okay, this isn't working like with the snipers and stuff. He's trying and incorporating stuff to stop snipers.

He's again trying to figure out the curation thing. he's going to iterate over time and as long as there isn't some competitor that's figured it out and hits the market, they're really the only one focused on ICM token launches and all it takes is one or two like really really solid projects to to launch their token on believe and this thing uh like rips uh because then you get the reflexive cycle of you know web two builders see the successful builders launching on believe raising a bunch of money they then launch their tokens and it starts like a really cool reflexive cycle.

All right, I love it. Let's uh let's crash out on Gemini then. James, you wanted to talk about it. IPL for Gemini. Yeah, I mean I it's probably the worst run exchange and like one of the worst run crypto companies that I've ever ever had the mispleasure of of experiencing and working with. Um yeah, it's shocking to me that they're still around. Uh, does anyone have anything good to say about Gemini? Did they do something to you? No, it's just terrible. It's just a horrible experience. It's just it's just like they're just a company that will not go away and they're just it's just terrible. It's terrible.

Do you know, James, you're muted. The do they have a bit license? Uh, that I have no idea. No, but in all seriousness, I I really I got like a a really a sour taste in my mouth after um Genesis and their whole program is just it was it just it just stunk and it was just a very bad they didn't resolve it well with customers. Um and they've just been super slow and everything and they've just never bothered to really expand, right? Like their institutional offering doesn't exist unless you guys know differently than me. Um and I I don't know. I don't know why anyone would buy their IPO. Where would Gemini rank?

Like, so if you're gonna make a list? Yeah. Do you mean like volume-wise or just like um you know the James Kristoff version? Yeah. Yeah. Met metrics wise. Sorry. Not like because they murdered his dog. So yeahise book. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. I was just going to say they do 10% of Coinbase's volume. the majority of their volume is both in like you know the BTC and ETH pairs and then their alt liquidity and their alt alt coin volume is like pretty dismal and I imagine that's where you make a lot of your money given a lot of these exchanges have like you know uh tiered fees and a lot of these people who are probably trading these two majors are probably

just arbing across multiple venues. Yeah, like their 24 their 24-hour volume on BTC is not even hundred million dollars. What? That seems ridiculous. Surely that's fake. You're lying to me, James. I'm on the I'm on exchange. 24hour 24-hour volume is 97.6 million bucks on BTC. I was going to say we have a nice centralized exchange dashboard now, but we did not include Gemini. I'm guessing maybe because they were not large enough. So maybe maybe soon. I mean, yeah, it sucks that they were caught up in that uh the Genesis thing. Like maybe things would have been different.

Um it's been hard in the exchange space. I think Coinbase was a early first mover and they really benefited from regulatory arbitrage and I think it was hard to compete. Um and perhaps the the Wlvoss twins are um already rich. I know that they are a large Bitco Bitcoin holder so perhaps it's not a huge priority. I feel the same way about Coinbase, James. So, we can talk about that as well. I hate Coinbase. And I was right. And multiple people were wrong. Everybody thought that Coinbase was going to do really really well because they have legal um whatever regulation on their side in the US and consistently I've been proven

that they're just dog and are not doing well. Have you ever um been wrong on anything in the matter of cryptocurrency, Buck, or is it just like No, this is just I don't like their energy. Ryan, they they hurt Ryan once and I really I'm one of those employees that like really has to stick up for their superiors. And I think that's what really got me going. Ryan, do you want to talk about how Brian personally wronged you? No. Okay. Then what I Bo bo you were right, you know, as coin went from like $30 to to like $300. And that's why it I knew there was going to be a vindicated.

I knew there was going to be a dip back down to whatever it is at now. That's why I didn't buy the move. I was right. You're right. What What if it were Kraken IPOing? I actually really like Kraken. I think Kraken's a really good experience. So, I've had I've had really good customer service experiences with Kraken. Like I actually once sent like some this is years ago like some stupid Osmos Osmosis token to the wrong chain and within like 24 hours their customer service actually sent it back to me. Like they're they're actually quite good. Um I I I really enjoy them. I I can't say good enough things about them. Sponsored post. I mean they're definitely next.

Yeah, absolutely. I think just judging from things I've seen on Arkham, a lot of the older wallets also prefer to use Kraken, it seems, over Coinbase, which is a bit interesting. And volume-wise, they do about half of Coinbase's 24-hour volume. That's not bad. And the the it's Ian, the point that you make on old wallets is interesting. Um, I've heard that the Kraken team is like more crypto OG than the Coinbase team. They're like more aligned with the ethos. Um, but they're also acting more flexible today like around the Salana stuff I think is pretty interesting.

There seems to be like some pragmatism coming out of there which which is always good to see. Yeah, I think you feel it in the product experience like as a user there seems to be a lot of flexibility around you know how many different addresses you can generate and like where you can withdraw to or what you can do with certain types of assets. Um, their stance on self-custody and different things like that. I think they've really they've I think they've kind of had that maybe captured that OG user for some of those reasons being you know maybe more crypto ethos align to some extent at least in their product choices. Um I agree with you as well Ryan like there being uh some maybe somewhat early to the uh trading

equities on chain idea. We we'll see when that launches. I think it's interesting like I would have expected somebody like Coinbase to be running down that avenue more quickly. So it's interesting to see Kraken maybe iterating iterating a little more quickly than than Coinbase is. Yeah, I like Kraken. Think they're good. You can always trust them. Well, now they're going to go under because they said that. But I trust it. Few months where you weren't supposed to talk about centralized exchanges at all and anytime anybody brought up like a sex, people were like, "Holy it's going on there. That's why people brought it up." Not your keys, not your cryptobach. Yeah, they might explode

next week. That's true. Knock on wood. Um, Danny, do you want to wrap it up? Ryan's clearly gotten bored and left. Yeah, we're not uh intellectually interesting enough for Ryan Connor to continue. No, this has been good. I think the Ethereum the Ethereum stream over on Bank list. If he if he was camera off listening to Banklist, I think I might end it all right now. You'd have to ship me a rope. Um all right, let's call it there. We've been going for a while. I think it was good two and a half hours today. Thanks for coming on today. Let's before we close out, actually, we did this last time, too. Buck, real quick. Permission list is coming up I think in two and a half weeks. I want to say June 24th through the 26th. You guys know the code

at 0x10 for 10% off tickets to permissionless 4 in Brooklyn, New York. I'm only laughing because James, how much do they cost now? James is a loyal fan and he paid a lot when we first began and then we did a flash 50 and then James sent me 15 messages in a row calling me an idiot. like I make the decisions for the for the tickets. We don't get to choose the ticket prices, but we do have 0x10 the code for 10% off if you want to come out to promotion list. We are going to have a dunk tank.

A bunch of folks on this stream will be getting in the dunk tank. For all you Lions out there, Ryan Connor, Ryan Connor will get in the dunk tank. We will will it into existence. He doesn't think so. All right. Awesome. Thanks for coming on today, guys. James, Ian, and all the Block Works folks, Boach, Ryan, Westy. Appreciate you guys coming on for the second live stream. ZeroX Research live stream. We will be back again next week, of course. And the normal pods will roll as per usual. Until next time, we will see you then.

Thanks, Danny. I don't know why it's showing that. Great work, Picachio. We're still live, bud. Yeah. No, I wanted people [Music] [Music] [Music]