2026 Crypto Predictions with Haseeb Qureshi

Transcript

On the whole, I think the easiest out of the box solutions are all for EVM chains because they've just existed the longest. They just have the most tooling and the most kind of robust ecosystem. Minute differences in technical architecture have seemingly gone to the wayside in exchange of like, okay, who's actually making money or like who's using this or like >> So, you would say that this uh this technological uh indifference would extend also to EVM and SVM. It's not just L1 L2. Welcome back to the rollup. I'm Robbie. >> I'm Andy. Rob and I met at the University of Florida in 2017 where we first found out about digital assets.

>> We learned a lot along the way and we're bringing you face to face with the leaders of our industry. >> Sit back, relax, and enjoy today's episode. >> Happy holidays. Happy New Year, man. >> Merry Christmas. Always going to be celebrating Christmas on the 30th. Uh glad to be doing it with you boys. >> Did you have a nice holiday, Jim? >> I did. I did. It was very lovely. Um but uh yeah, I can see you guys are very in the Christmas cheer. I respect that. >> We are. doesn't doesn't want to let doesn't want to let go of holiday. I I I feel that. I feel that. >> We're going to run it all the way through to uh through the new year 2026. Um >> yeah, we should just go till like February. Just keep doing Christmas stuff.

>> We're gonna go we're going to be live all the way until uh till ETH Denver. Um >> nice. >> Um see, man, you came on. You gave us some great predictions last year. It feels like a natural place to start from a a reflection and start with how things went last year and uh what went right, what went wrong. >> Yeah. Well, um if you zoom out on 2025, I technically still still 2025, so we can still get our asses kicked in the last couple days, but I'd say overall um it's been a very mixed year. You know, we went into the year with enormous amounts of optimism. We had, you know, presidential election. we kind of got everything that we wanted in the wish

list of regulation. Um, and yet prices, you know, Bitcoin is like down slightly on the year. Uh, alt really got kicked pretty hard. Everything besides, you know, if you actually if you look at ETH, you look at XRP, they had pretty good years. Uh, BNB had a pretty good year, but almost everything else in the alt complex really just got kicked in the teeth. Um, so it's it's a mixed year. It depends on really what you owned. Uh, the more that you own the majors, the less you have to complain about. Uh but of course this year has been the year of like everything else rallying. You know, NASDAQ is up something like 2530%. AI stocks have done incredible. Gold has rallied like crazy. Um and yet crypto kind of seems to have been left behind. So that makes it a tough year from what everybody was

expecting going into the year. >> People were definitely market. >> Yeah, that's right. That's right. So at the end of 25 or sorry at the beginning of 25 I wrote uh a set of predictions last year that that got a lot of attention and um at the end of every year I try to do both going back and seeing what did I get right what did I get wrong about my previous year's predictions and then making predictions for the next year to try to keep myself honest and try to improve as an investor. uh because so much of investing is actually being able to separate out what's the narrative that everyone's telling, what's the hype that everyone's excited about and what part of it is real and what part of it is going to end up being transient. So if you remember like beginning of this

year, everybody was excited about AI agents. That was the meta, right? It was like virtual taking off, there was AI XPTt, there was all like that was what everybody was talking about. Uh, and we were still in the era of like Zerro and um what was the uh what was what was the word? Goat. Um and uh all all that stuff was going crazy. And so a actually most of my post and most of the stuff that I got engagement about was talking about how I think this stuff is going to flame out pretty quickly. Um now some of the specific predictions that I made turned out to be a little bit actually too generous to the AI meme coins. So, I claimed that I thought the the memecoins were going to lose market share to the

AI Asian coins. That really didn't happen. Um, AI agent coins kind of collapsed like I think like end of Q1. Basically, they they kind of just totally got destroyed. Um, I I thought that it was going to continue through most of 2025. That was wrong. But I did say that they were going to die off by the end of the year. That was true. I also said that these chat bots, these agents would become so ubiquitous that people would get annoyed by them. And that >> that one is certainly true. >> Twitter became true extremely quickly. Like it went from cute to I remember I had this analogy of it's like seeing an elephant paint that like the first time you see an elephant paint you're like oh my god that like that's amazing. You see that elephant just made that painting

and then the thousandth painting you see by elephant you're like this [ __ ] these paintings [ __ ] suck. Like I hate I don't want to see any more elephant art. Um, and that's kind of where we're at now is that like every nobody is amazed anymore at what LM can do. We all just hate them. Everybody hates them and they're all like people are now looking for signs that this was, you know, painted by an elephant when they see anything posted that has an M dash in it. Um, so I I a few other claims that I made. I thought that um this idea that everyone's going to have their own trading agent or miniature hedge fund from AI, that's not going to happen. That was correct. uh there's going to be a ton of scams that are going to be automated by all these

chatbots. That that uh was correct. Um and I I claimed that software engineering agents were going to be the most impactful uh of anything. And so far that seems to be true is that the you know software automation you see how much money anthropics making and uh claude code and all of this stuff that's where the most product market fit is for everything in AI. Um and uh and I said the memecoin stuff is going to be superseded by more serious decentralized AI players like you know Near Jensen uh prime intellect news research that seems to be happening. I don't know that it's like huge but that seems to be the case that most of the mind share and what people are talking about these days is is there.

>> Yeah. >> So other predictions I've made. Oh sorry go ahead. No, I was gonna say I think the the only positive development that we saw from the any of the uh kind of agent meta was just uh a realization that that wasn't actual agents and that whatever is going to h come next to get people interested has to be way better than whatever that was. So, so maybe that'll be a 2027 or or late 2026. Well, so what I what I suspect will happen is that any time that people see a new phase transition in abilities, right? So like that was really the first moment that you could have a fully autonomous agent interacting with people online.

And that was so exciting the first time that you saw that that crypto has a way that when it sees something that's genuinely new to just go all in and be like great, let's like make tokens around it and let's sell in a retail and let's like find a way to play a game around this thing. Um, so it's been a while since we've seen another phase transition, right? There's no, you know, people have talked about, oh, what about agents paying each other? What about, you know, some kind of agents becoming economic actors? That hasn't really happened yet. Um, I suspect that once that does happen that we'll see another speculative mania. Um, it might be smaller because people have already gotten burned by the chatbot stuff and they kind of know, okay, maybe that wasn't where it's going. But when they see agents actually being economic

actors, uh, that's when I think we'll see another little mini mania, um, doesn't necessarily mean that's where the long-term value is going to be. Uh, but we're not there yet. We're probably more than a year away from from getting to agents actually being economic actors. >> Trade on anything, economics, weather, sports, crypto, and more. All on couchy.com 24/7 for the world's biggest prediction market. Yet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are

missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a Treasure at treasure.io. Another one that was kind of interesting, I don't want to kind of steal your thunder here, but this EVM market share kind of dominance one was interesting because we had all this hype around SVM L2s and move L2s and L1s >> and I mean, >> you know, we don't need to throw anyone under the bus, but not many of them actually, you know, amounted to much, but but in this prediction. So, so, so you counted that as as definitely right.

Yeah. So, I mean, I think the reasons why I was right were not the reasons that I originally anticipated. So, I thought it's going to be this new generation of EVM chains, the monads, the megaes, uh the um uh of bar chain of course also launched this year. And I thought, okay, all these new EVM chains and Hyper EVM, all these new chains are going to increase the adoption for the EVM at large. Um that was not really the story. The story was more that like we were at in December of last year, that was the local top for Salana dominance, right? If you remember, it was right when the Trump memecoin launched that Salana hit all time highs >> of 300 something. I think it it it touched 300. Um, and where the Salana transaction volume was alltime high. I

think that was the day that Trump launched his meme was that we saw record-breaking volumes on Salana. And people thought like, okay, it's over. Salana is just going to eat everything. salon is just gonna be absolutely dominant and it's only a one-way ratchet from here and um actually that was the that was the top for SVM dominance. So if you look over time the market share of transaction volume market share of TVL market share of like uh uh rev fees me everything has declined from that point not not linearly but it's almost like mean reversion you know is that that was kind of a you know Salana had a hot hand salana is still good it's still very big it's still very important but it's no longer really seeming like salana is going to eat everything so um

you know maybe we see another resurgence but at least right now it's pretty EVM remains the dominant architecture for blockchains. Um, and so I think that was why that one ended up being wrong. I also thought that maybe LLMs are going to have something to do with it is that LM just know so much more about the EVM that maybe they're just going to make it so much easier to write uh programs and contracts than EVM. Uh, that turned out to not really be part of the story, but I think it may end up mattering more going forward. So, um, but I think one of the claims I made was that L1's and L2s are overcrowded. They're due for a shakeout and that people are going to stop caring about the distinction between L1's and L2s. And this felt like the year of that, you know, it felt like the year of

there's too many of these. Market is no longer giving credit for just having a L1 or N L2 that's lying in weight and doesn't have traction. Um, and this this whole idea that like yeah, users don't really care. Like Robin Hood was an L2, uh, Tempo was an L1, and maybe some CT people argued about it or some Ethereum maxis care about it, but most people don't care. Most people are like, "Oh, okay, fine. Corpo Chain is this, Corpo Chain is that, who really cares?" Um, and so I think that uh that that that that does feel like the year of these kind of tribal fights just mattering less and less as corporate interests start to matter a lot more than our kind of regional crypto battles, you know, like what um Freud called this the

narcissism of small differences is like the closer you are to each other, you know, like Ethereum has more in common with Salana than we have with the rest of finance. And so, but the the fights between Ethereum and Salana are like the most fierce fights when really it should be like us against them. U but that's the narcissism of small differences. Um so you would say that this uh this technological uh indifference would extend also to EVM and SVM. It's not just L1 L2, it's also like EVM, SVM. These are minute differences that we as crypto people care about within the industry, but broadly these are not things that differentiate six successful companies from unsuccessful.

>> Uh, yes and no. I think it it does matter in terms of a choice. Like the choice between L1 and L2, I think if you're a corporate, I don't think like you need to be explained why you should care about this, right? If I explain to you like, well, if you're an L2 as opposed to an L1, like, well, there's going to take longer for you to become progressively decentralized and you're using Ethereum security as you're not using it here. You don't have your own validator. It's like pretty it's like okay well I just wanted to put stable coins and get my c you know I don't know about any of that I don't I don't why are you talking to me? Um whereas if you tell them like okay if you use SVM you need to hire Rust engineers and you can't use these contracts you need to

write your own. Um they'll say oh okay well I'll use the other one. You know like that's that's that that is actually a business decision that I think a lot of these enterprises do care about. Um, and that's part of the reason why almost all the corporate chains are EVM. Like EVM is less performant than SVM, right? So these are not performance decisions that they're making. It's interrupt and ease of adoption questions that they're answering. >> So I do think that question matters from a business perspective. But L1, L2, and you know, like to to which chain or community do you swear allegiance?

>> I don't think these corporations really care. Um, unless they're being yelled at really really loudly. And the thing is like we're we're not as loud as we think we are. >> Yeah. And I also think the a broader shift, you know, I've got this whole return to fundamentals thing, the the argument about L1, L2 or whatever it is. And even like some of the revenue meta stuff that we just kind of like, you know, joked about permissionless it it's all causing such a I don't know, you know, for lack of better term, reality check in the space. And so these kind of minute differences in technical architecture have seemingly gone to the wayside in exchange of like okay who's actually making money or like who's using this or like you know who's who which institution is adopting your technology etc etc.

>> Yeah. No I I agree with that and and the other thing I I didn't touch on it in my predictions but this was also the year of the Ethereum revival right I mean at at the time you remember Ethereum was just down in the dumps. people were talking about L2s being parasitic to Ethereum. Um, and I think that in a way that like that is part of the revenue meta is this idea that L2s are pulling the life force away from Ethereum and Ethereum needs to like you know kind of pull these barnacles off of itself and like you know emerge from from the depths and it kind of did that right with the the whole Ethereum pivot which you know now uh we can talk about it without it being so politicized but at the time it was like very contentious to say is it a pivot is it not a pivot blah

blah blah. In retrospect it was totally a pivot and it was good. It was successful. They did the right thing by refocusing their marketing, their storytelling as well as the focus on scaling the L1 and supporting developers directly on top of the the uh the base chain. So that was probably one of the big stories of this year. >> Yeah, we we called this a bullish reversal. Uh and this was particularly by the by the EF uh where they they did change their story. they've refocused uh on core priorities, improve the UX, uh scale the L1 and improve blobs. Um and so I I think as we look forward like okay well Ethereum is still the home of stable coins, the most stable coins around Ethereum. Uh

the most DeFi all of these things that we're we're saying are going to be the key components uh for a successful project in 2026. Ethereum has most of those. Um, and as we're talking about what institutions and companies don't care about, they don't care about L1, L2. They don't really care about EVM, SVM for maybe, you know, some resource allocation decisions. Um, it it you know, you mentioned stable coins are one of the things that's like, okay, I just want to deploy my stable coins somewhere. What do you think the institutions, the companies that were previously on the outskirts looking at crypto, kind of testing the waters, dipping their toes in, and they hadn't previously gone in,

now they it seems like they're getting in. What are the things that stick out to them? It seems like Ethereum has checked all the right boxes. They just want to deploy their stable coins. What do you think is the what are the things that matter the most to those companies that are now coming in? I I think the the things that they care about are pretty straightforward, which is one, I want access to customers, right? Where are the people who hold stable coins? I want to get my stable coin into their hands. Second, I want it to be easy to launch, build, interop, you know, everything. I want everything to be easy. I don't want have to build a bunch of stuff myself because like that's not my expertise. That's you, you guys are good at that. I'm not good at that. Um, and then third, they want it to be

really easy to keep track of. So, they want easy indexing. They want easy accounting. they want to be able to like, you know, just have some ETL pipeline that they know exactly what's happening on the chain at any given time. So, um, you know, Salana for quite a while had a lot of indexing issues. Now, those have improved significantly this year. Um, and so it makes it a lot more viable place for for people to be launching stable coins. But on the whole, I think the easiest out of the box solutions are all for EVM chains because they've just existed the longest. They just have the most tooling and the most kind of robust ecosystem. And that's why most of these people are choosing EVM. It's not because they love Ethereum or because they want to, you know, be Ealigned or whatever. It's it's purely a pragmatic business decisions

that they see. That's where all the stable coins are. So, I should probably go there if I want to be the next big stable coin. >> Yep. Yep. Um hiba another interesting one that I think that we also thought would have accelerated more but maybe you know didn't in in the same way that we thought you marked it as a wash was uh more applications following hyperlquid and creating specialized chains. Um you know we thought kind of like this app chain this kind of modular thesis app chain thesis every apple launches it own chain we're hearing rumblings about poly market maybe doing so due to some congestion on polygon or just other kind of reasons. uh you probably have insight that is not able to be shared and then others like lighter edex um you know even pumpf fun

there was rumblings about you know are they gonna leave salana but none of these really materialized in the way that I think a lot of the kind of thought um but of course you know lighter hyperlid these are all on their yeah I mean I just thought that one I thought would progress more by now as well >> yeah yeah no it's it's a good point and I think part of that is the the reality that like a lot of these this infrastructure has scaled. So, you know, if you're on Salana and you're pump, you know, maybe maybe if if you're looking at January when Trump Bemecoin launched and like Salana basically fell over, you're like, [ __ ] we got to get off of here because, you know, I can't have the

single biggest day of crypto trading on this chain in history have my users be unable to use my platform, right? But, you know, after January, a bunch of people fixed a bunch of stuff. RPCs became more robust. Um, like, you know, there's just like a lot of improvements that happen when people see these scaling bottlenecks. Um, and then it's like, okay, look, is this the biggest priority? Is the biggest priority for us to create a whole new infra, create whole new indexing, create bridges, create, you know, all this stuff, like launching a new chain is hard. It's really difficult, especially if you're not doing it from day one. If you're migrating an existing application to a new chain that is brutally hard, right?

And if you look at the examples of people who tried to migrate almost entirely failures, right? So if you look at uni chain, if you remember unis swap launching uni chain, people were so excited. This is one of the things that you know I predicted on our own podcast that uni chain was going to underperform. Here we are uni chain is basically a nothing burger. You know there's absolutely nothing going on on uni chain. unis swap is still dominant on the primary chains where it trades, but yeah, trying to move the liquidity and move the demand and move move everything over into a new platform, it's just too hard and it's kind of not worth doing when the core business is working. So, I I suspect for a lot of these, you know, if you're pumped out fine, maybe even if you're if you're Poly Market, like launching your own

chain, it's like, yeah, maybe I'll get around to it when I get around to it. Uh, but I have so many other things that are more important to just improve the product experience, get more users in the door, you know, regulation, like all this other stuff that is existential and moving chains is just very seldom existential. >> Yep. Couple more on here. Um, airdrops move to a two-track world for project clear KPIs like DEXes and lending while L1's L2s move to crowd sales. You said you nailed it. I mean, I I I think we don't, you know, say less, right? Monad huge launch. Um, Legion blew up. Uh, Echko got acquired by Coinbase. Like, what a year for uh that. And then also,

if you guys remember in the end of our in the end of 24 when we did our 2025 predictions about a year ago, points was everything. Hyperl had just done their airdrop, the biggest airdrop in history. Points were like that like 2024 was the year of points. And that is also seemingly completely I mean not completely lighter lighter just dropped there. Yeah, exactly. So points for KPIs like dexes points still rule the roost but for everything else yeah points are points are done. >> And crowd sales I mean mega eth one of the largest uh ICO raises this year and the list just goes on and on and on. I mean, yield basis, uh, the Curve Curve

Curve Michaels project had 200 million, uh, subscribed for $5 million raise on Legion with Kraken. Um, and so you just had a lot of these big big launches. >> Yep, totally agreed. >> Another one I thought was cool was uh, more optimistic UIs, you know, onboarding in browser wallets. I mean, if if if people were around in 2020, 2021 using DeFi compared to now, it is like it is mindb blowing. It is mind-blowingly better and it's still got a long way to go. But that I think I think yeah I agree that one was definitely nailed. Uh stable coin bill passes 2025 market structure doesn't that's crazy call because we're so close. We're so close.

>> That's true. >> Oh so close. And just a couple other final ones before we get to 2026. Fortune Fortune 100 companies offer more crypto project products to consumers under Trump admin. Um totally right. I mean, altcoin ETFs, Salana ETFs, chain link, Dogecoin, all these bills. Um, and all these >> all the big all the big fintech companies and a bunch of banks now offering >> stable coins, Vanguard, all these things. >> Yeah. >> Um, yeah, man. I mean, close us out on 2025. I I think you were about you were over 50% for sure. I'll give you closer to 75% here. Accuracy. Maybe you could argue 80%. What do you think?

>> Yeah, it depends on how you count the washes. Um, so if you if you count the washes, 15 out of 24 is like, you know, slightly below 70%. Which I think is pretty good. I think it's pretty good. Uh, if you don't count the washes, then it's like 15 out of 18, which is even better. >> That's like my free throw percentage. So pretty good. >> It's like 80 something. Um, so uh I I think I I think I did pretty well. I think the ones I got wrong were giving a little bit too much credit to the AI agent stuff. Um, those are those are my main misses. But most everything else I I was able to get right. Um so I think it was a good year um for a lot of tech. It was a bad year for

prices. >> Yeah. >> And so I think like you know at the end of the day it's one of these years where the industry is forced to grow up. people are forced to look in the eye of what they're doing with respect to meme coins, respect to these, you know, agent slop coins and all this other stuff and be like, "Hey, what really has staying power here and what's just, you know, kind of a game of musical chairs that we're playing?" Uh, the music stopped this year. There's no more there's no more there's no more music playing for the game of musical chairs. Um, and so you got to actually do something productive. And I think that's the theme going into 2026 is like let's let's build some real [ __ ] >> I love it. Um the the musical chairs will come back. The music always comes

back on. It's crypto, you know. People uh people get bored when there's no music playing for too long. But um at least for right now, that seems to be the defining vibe. >> Well, you started us off with Bitcoin over 150K by year end. >> Yep. >> But Bitcoin dominance decreases in 2026. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, my my view here, I mean, look, it's going to be clearly a year of financial stimulus. Uh you've got rates coming down. You've also got a lot of the um a lot of the Trump policies actually kicking into gear next year that are going to be fiscally stimulative and I think he probably is going to end up doing even more to stimulate going into the midterms uh just to try to win some votes and you know kind of curry favor with voters. So uh I think all of that is going to end

up uh creating a good environment for digital assets. I think also there's just some mean reversion, you know, is that like Bitcoin dominance at a local high and if you just kind of chart Bitcoin dominance over a long enough time horizon, that thing is just a, you know, it's a sine wave. It goes up and it goes down and a lot of it is just sinosoidal around uh sentiment, reactions, um, you know, vibes. Uh, I don't think it's so much that like, well, you know, this was the year that we discovered that alts are worthless. Uh, I don't think that we discovered anything this year. I think it's more just, you know, macro kind of conspired, uh, and the fact that the AI bid was pulling away so much capital from retail out of the crypto markets. Um, but especially if there's an AI correction

and you start to see less and less frenzy around, okay, the idea that AI is this up only category. Um, then I think the crypto bit will come back. It's going to be rocky. It's going to be ups and downs. Um but I think you know and and there's also to some degree just a catch trade with with with gold right and uh one of the things I was thinking about is you know gold has had a massive rally this year right crazy performance for gold um and at the same time SpaceX is going to be going public soon and of course SpaceX one of the things that they have said is that part of their monetization strategy is to do asteroid mining and of course if they successfully do asteroid mining the big hall for asteroid mining is like an asteroid that has a bunch of gold on it.

And I I I I read somewhere that I believe uh all the world gold, all the gold in existence could fit in a 16 yard by 16 yard cube, that is how much gold there is in the world like that is currently been already been mined. Um, if you find one asteroid cache that has enough gold in it, now this is very unlikely, but you know, this is this is literally one of the bullcases for asteroid mining is that like asteroids have very rare minerals inside them. If you get like a crazy event with asteroid mining, or we even just discover asteroids that have like, oh, this one has a bunch of uh, you know, platinum in it. Interesting.

Uh, or a bunch of aluminum. Wow. Huh. I I bet there's probably asteroids with gold in them, too. And one indication that the like the world's supply of gold might double from one asteroid uh would send Bitcoin skyrocketing. >> Wow. >> That's incredible because obviously there would be a capital flight out of gold and into Bitcoin. People see it as a very similar asset class, but it with a fixed supply. You can't go mine asteroid for more Bitcoin. >> Yeah. So there's there's like weird asteroid risk to gold that people don't talk about a ton but like all of the all the the conditions are conspiring to make it happen which is that Bitcoin is becoming more and more ubiquitous and SpaceX is becoming you know one of the most val right now it's one of the most

valuable private companies in the world and going to be going public soon and u you know as they increase the space uh the the velocity of uh these kind of asteroid mining missions before you know it might be on people's radars. Wow, man. >> See, do you do you do anything like this on the dragonfly side or personal angel side going into uh you know investing in in space or any >> I do not I do not look my my my rule is very simple is that uh I leave it to the experts when I don't know what the [ __ ] I'm talking about. I know I know enough to be dangerous but uh not so much that I should be underwriting investments. So yeah um I I think in anything outside of crypto I am the dumb money. So,

>> I try to stay I try to keep it simple. >> Well, before we go too deep into into your predictions for 2026, I am curious about some of your your biggest wins and maybe your biggest losses in 2025 for Dragonfly, if you can speak to any of them. You know, where where you are the expert uh in your in your um you talked about your personal predictions 2025, what went right, what went wrong, but yeah, as far as far as Dragonfly's concerned, can you talk about anything that went exceptionally well or things that you know fell by the wayside? Yeah, I mean we've had we've had a number of projects that we invested in that have done very well. So we're you know we led the seed run of Athena, we did the SE led the CE of Monad. So we've done a bunch of stuff that's done really well,

but probably the standout for the year is Poly Market. So I mean last year was just like if you remember uh so the the 2024 election um people thought that Poly Market was basically done. It's like okay, you know, yeah, you got all this volume for the election, but obviously everything's going to fall off and like no one's going to be talking about poly market anymore. That was the story at the end of last year. The story was that flash in the pan. It's one and done. We're not going to talk about this again. You know, come see us in four years. And prediction markets have gone from that to becoming just this meteoric category. And we actually put more money into Poly Market. Um I think it was like February that we committed more money.

And this was against the course of people saying that like, hey, I think it's done. And I think, you know, there's no there's nowhere there there. Uh and that turned out to be hugely pressured. We first invested into Poly Market beginning of 24 before the big election runup. Um and so we're we're big we're big holders in Poly Market. Incredibly proud of what they've done because they basically created the category and kind of willed it into existence. Um so that one is probably the biggest win of the year. Um in terms of biggest loss, I mean it's venture, so you kind of lose stuff all the time.

The nature of venture is that wins and losses are um they're asymmetric in the sense that like you can only lose a 1x but you can win arbitrarily big. So in that sense like you know as as a VC we really don't spend that much time thinking about our losses because they just kind of don't matter. What really matter are the wins. U but if I had to say biggest loss I mean the one that's definitely recent is Axelar. So I'm sure everybody saw the story about Circle acquiring the Devco of Axelr and um you know Axelr we invested at um I think it was like beginning of 22 so it was you know near the top of the market and uh we invested at a billion dollar valuation they went out you know it kind of fluctuated around there but then since then you know all the bridging and

interoperability platforms have just gotten crushed um Axelar of course is one of them so down a lot in that investment um wasn't a huge loss it's unfortunate and obviously you know the team ended up getting acquired by Circle and that created a lot of drama around this tokens versus equity uh discussion that's been increasingly happening and now now is happening around a as well. Um but um that's probably the one that's most recent that that comes top of mind. >> Yeah. Yeah. Appreciate that. No, I mean yeah that was that was an interesting moment. People are now asking whether or not app tokens are even investable or not. We have to do a whole new episode on that or something. Um >> I mean I think a lot of that is overblown but I we can we can talk about that separately. Holiday is unified

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underdel while Ethereum and Salana will overd deliver. Best developers will continue to build on neutral infra chains. >> Yeah. So, this one, um, this might be one of the more controversial ones. Um, I'd say that I think people have a lot of magical thinking about tech companies launching products. Um, if you've ever actually worked at a big tech company or if you're a close watcher of big tech companies, you will know that they launch new products all the time and they flop all the time and nobody cares because it's just like, oh, you know, we got a team, we tried a thing, didn't work, who cares. Um, so like I don't know how many people remember Facebook

Pay still exists. You can pay people in Messenger. Uh, almost nobody does it. I don't think I I only have one person I know who like pays me in Messenger. Um, but like they have this feature. So does Google. Google also has a Google Pay uh that like you can play pay people peerto-peer using like their messaging ser. I don't know if people remember their messaging service. Google has like you know like all these companies launch products all the time and they don't go all in on them because like why would you go all in on like Google messaging? Like who cares? Let's try it. see if it works. If it doesn't work, whatever. Just kill it. Why not? Um, so I think if you look at these three products, uh, uh, Robin Hood chain, Tempo, and Arc, I have not seen from any of these three a

commitment that looks like they're going all in on these products. It doesn't look to me like Stripe is going all in on Tempo. It doesn't look to me like Robin Hood's going all in on Robin Hood chain and ARC. I mean, I think it'd be crazy if Circle were to try to go all in on ARC, meaning like they tried to move all USDC onto ARC and said, "If you want to use USDC, go here." Right? That's what it means to go all in. Um, there are times when companies do go all in on a play like this. Uh, and if they did, I would be a lot more like, "Oh [ __ ] maybe it's going to happen." Um, even Libra was more of a big commitment from Meta than any of these three chains are.

Um, but I don't think any of these three are are big commitments. I think they're basically flyer bets. I think if they work out, great. If they don't work out, uh, whatever, boohoo. You know, if you look at Stripe, Stripe is going to support payments on every chain. They are not going to say, "Oh, if you want, if as a merchant, you want to take stable coins, you have to use Tempo." They're going to say like, "Oh, you know, if you use Tempo, maybe you get like a little, you know, whatever reduced fee or something." But like, where are your customers? Where's retail? Where are the people actually buying stuff at the point of sale? Do they have stable coins on Tempo? No. Then, okay. Well, if if at the point of sale they're going to have to buy stable coins on Tempo to then send them to you,

why would you do that? Why would you just be like, oh, you know, settle with a credit card, you know, like that's obviously what what consumers would do. And so, I think for them, it's kind of a free option. They see this as a cheap way to like say like, yeah, maybe this crypto thing, maybe we have a blockchain and maybe it takes off, but if it doesn't, it's fine. We might as well launch it and see if it works. I think same thing with Robin Hood. Robin Hood, I don't even know what Robin Hood chain is supposed to be used for. um we heard about it, haven't heard anything since. We just know it's gonna exist. You know, it's like it's Adele 2 and then later they'll some something, you know, I don't know. So, all this stuff feels to me like these are flyer

bets. And I think crypto Twitter as well as crypto commentators generally, they they they I think their theory of mind is just totally wrong about how these companies view chains. We're excited because, oh, they're doing our thing and if they're doing our thing, they're so big and they have so much distribution, they're going to kill us. But their distribution, they're not trying to move their distribution into crypto. They're just trying to make money. And if crypto helps them make money, they'll use crypto. If they make money other ways, they'll do it other ways. They will all accept stables. They will all, you know, they'll all take crypto rails, but will they go all in on having their own crypto rails become dominant? I I don't believe it.

>> Yeah. I'm I'm going to lump two together here. A big tech company launches or acquires a crypto wallet in 2026 and many more Fortune 100s launch blockchains. Although increasingly concentrated among banking and fintech players, expect Avalanche expect my bags to be a standout here along OP Stack orbit and ZK stack. >> Yep. Um so on the first point uh which is uh sorry [ __ ] what was the first one? >> Uh it was a big tech company launches big company. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this is the unique window when a big tech company can actually get into the game. Uh if they wait a year, maybe even two years, it's probably too late and they will launch whatever they're going

to launch into an unfriendly administration potentially, right? It's a gamble. Um now is the critical window where you know I predict that uh clarity uh is going to go into law and that's going to give them some certainty that like hey we can actually do this and there's some there's some real regulatory safeguards around how this is supposed to work. Um I think you're going to also see a lot more aggressive uh um rulemaking and guidance given by the SEC and CFTC about how you can get into this game without running a foul of of of those rules and regulations. Um, and people are going to see the numbers on stable coin penetration growing like crazy. And all of these big tech companies want a piece of that because they just see this is an increasing part of the digital landscape that we do not

own. And as it's getting bigger, it's getting real and it's becoming legal. Well, [ __ ] I want a piece of that and I want to be able to connect it to everything else that I own. So, I think that you're going to see a big tech company come into this game. Um, I think Apple's probably unlikely. I would guess either Google or Facebook. Um, but you know, maybe Apple. I just think they're too riskaverse. Um, I think Google or Facebook are probably more likely players to enter into here. Um, and very good chance they go through acquisition rather than building. Uh, just because it's easier to just get something that kind of works off the shelf. Um, in terms of Fortune 100 blockchains, yeah, there I I think there are going to be more of those, especially among fintech and banking players because they just

all have the perception that if they do a blockchain, good things happen. Um and like there's this kind of sense that like hey you should have one have a digital strategy announce it to the world and in case that there is a big push in tokenization or uh more and more RWAs coming on chain uh you want to have your own wall garden with your own controls and uh compliance regimes and maybe even some privacy about how all that works. So I do think avalanche is the best positioned among the fintech and banking players because they have the most customizability around privacy controlling the validator set etc. Um but all these guys are making inroads with you know these kind of big uh financial players wanting to launch their own chains and get their own block space.

>> I got one one comment on the on the first point about a a big tech company acquiring a a wallet. I think if this happens it's going to have a a lot to do with AI agents as more of that technology where agents tend to pay one another. uh this is a AI is becoming more and more integrated into these big tech companies. I I think uh Google and are are probably two of the leaders in that category, but I could also see someone like an open AI acquiring a wallet provider to then help facilitate a lot of the agentto agent coordination.

So we'll we'll see how that plays out. It might take more than just one year, might not happen in 26, but as this prediction plays out, I I I could see that uh becoming a part of it. So, one of my predictions within AI was that there's not going to be any agent agent payments in 26. That basically agent agent payments are still too early and it's not going to happen this year. Um, that being said, open AI is a very interesting idea. Actually, I I feel like I could see that especially with Sam having a piece of WorldCoin and you know, having these kind of broader world ambitions with the free tier of Open AI.

Um, that would actually be very interesting. I had not considered that. Yeah, I think you saw the World Coin and Tinder uh news. I'm not sure if you did. So, Worldcoin is with Tinder. >> So, so you can verify that you're a human on Tinder dating app and uh no longer become catfished by an AI. >> Hold on. That but they only know that you're a human, right? They don't know that you're not catfishing. >> Right. Right. That that >> because they only see your iris, right? They all they know is that your eye is not catfished. Yeah. the rest of you could be, you know, an extra 200 pound.

>> The catfishing is just is up to the eye of the beholder on the first date. It's it's it's, you know, >> um all right, let's let let's move into into DeFi. Um perex market share consolidates to like big or sorry, three big venues. Allah, HBO, something like 40 30 20 uh followed by a long tale of smaller players who compete over the leftovers. Earlier on the show today, I said something more like 80% 10% 10%. You seem to be kind of a bit more of a distributed prediction here, as well as equity perks taking off and becoming 20% of total DeFi per volume by the end of the year. Um, and also significant growth in RFQS versus clubs. Um, and

some crazy insider trading scandal hits the mainstream. So quite the interesting DeFi predictions there. Yeah, I think um for those for you know people who have been trading for a while they might remember HBO. HBO was the acronym for Huabi, Binance, OKX. Uh and so those were the three big venues back in the day before you know Bybit kind of came with the big ones. Hobby fell out you know blah blah blah but so people used to call it HBO and the the market share at that time was roughly something like 40 3020. Um, and I think there's there's a there's a famous article I think by BCG, the consulting firm, um, that was written, it must have been written like in the 60s or something and it describes this equilibrium for markets is that

markets almost always end up with three big players and usually the distribution is something like 40 3020 or 40 2020 20. Um and the like there's something about unless there is a runaway network effect to a business you end up getting this kind of consolidation into a few players it's very seldom like five or six players right think of think like credit unions right uh or credit uh whatever you know like Experian and these guys like there's three you know there's very often three and there's something special about that number that all sorts of businesses end up evolving into having these three big players Um and even right now if you look at per right like we've got the three what's the

three it's hyperlquid aster and lighter if you just look at volumes even today after lighter airdrop um you see those are the those are the big three that are doing meaningful volumes so um now that being said lot of game left to be played and obviously incentives end up warping a lot of these numbers in the long term so we got to see it shake out once there's you know some steady state with respect to incentives um but I I think that's where we're going to land because at the end of the day exchanges are not a kind of dominance type business, right? Like if you look at Binance, Binance like they topped out at like 50% market share and and you think like, okay, well there's like network effects, you know, like the liquidity blah blah blah. Yeah, but it's not it's not a

network effects business. It's not one of these things where like one guy's dominant and just crushes everybody else. Um even with something like Binance and Pers, there's split market share. So I think we should expect that in DeFi. it. Once upon a time, Hyperlid was so much better than every other product that was out there. But give it time, right? Like there's never one of anything. There's always competitors. There's always people playing catch-up. There's always people learning from what your innovations and advantages were, copying the best things, innovating at the margins, and playing for for the market. Um, and so I don't think anyone's going to be able to say, "Yeah, the market's all mine. There's nobody else who can really compete."

>> Yeah. We thought poly market was a runaway train and then there comes caution. Now there's very clearly two in the market. Um and the principle of three is interesting to think about when it comes to prediction markets because it we we've you know first we said oh there's only one. Now it's like okay the two are so far ahead that there's no third that could come in but >> there is a third. There is a third and that third is Robin Hood >> right remember Robin Hood is going to be adding their own backend to clear outside of Kshi that they're doing in partnership with Saskuana >> which means that there will be three it'll be poly market Robin Hood and Kiy >> yeah and as you said it's lighter aster and hyperlquid right now or in in order it's hyperlquid by oi hyperlid aster lighter as of

current but that okay >> that'll change equity burps uh also set to to take off significant growth in RFQ uh compared to clubbs. But I think more most interestingly, I mean those are both, you know, very good takes. I think the insider trading scandal that is just out of a whim is is I ought to think that's got to be prediction market related, but it seems like it's not. I think um I think there will be something because of the growth of um equity pers that is likely to trigger much more kind of mainstream type news. Um like for prediction markets it's kind of like oh

somebody traded on a prediction market like okay yeah who first I got to explain to you what a prediction market is and I got you know like that that I think is is kind of a tougher punt for mainstream news to give a [ __ ] Um, and then you know, oh, somebody there's a Bitcoin whale and they knew that Trump was going to, you know, okay, that's kind of another complicated story. Like, is somebody going to read that and be like, "Yeah, clearly somebody insider traded Bitcoin." Yeah. Right. Um, but when somebody's like, "Oh, here's the NASDAQ index or oh, here's Tesla stock." And somebody traded right before an announcement, that is going to >> Yeah. like on the weekend or something, some some whale buys like $25 million of Tesla on Hyperlid and then Monday, you know, 9:00 am newswire drops and they've

just they've just found gold in an asteroid. >> Simple story and >> it's like holy [ __ ] how do they know? >> Very very straightforward story and that's something that somebody in Congress is going to care about. >> And so you so part of your like so equity per you're this has been tried and tried but it seems like it's it's it's it's the right time now and it's happening better now, >> right? If you look at trade XYZ, trade XYZ has been going up like crazy. Oium obviously has been doing this for a while. They but but trade XYZ seems to have really cracked it open with respect to open interest volume and just like the the attention that's building around it. And so I I think you're going to see more and more growth. um especially as RFQ combines with um equity equity

purpose because like if you look at OUIM today so AIM right now is the is the dominant one that's doing it RFQ style and when you do it RFQ style the problem with trade XYZ is that the funding rates are very volatile especially you go into a weekend where there's just not a lot of liquidity and you know the the funding rates are just moving around like crazy and so you want to hold a position for a long time you have no idea how much it's going to cost you right I mean you know, the NASDAQ goes up, you know, 10% a year on average, right? Something like that. And for an asset that's going up 10% a year on average, if you're eating 15% a year negative funding, then it's like, okay, well, you don't want to hold the NASDAQ for the year, right? No, you might have

positive funding, but who knows? Like, it's just volatile, right? And you have to really be monitoring it to have a position open for a long time. Uh whereas for uh if you have RFQ, then you don't have to balance the order book in order to get a funding rate, right? your funding rate gets quoted to you by your counterparty and they're getting their funding rate from just their cost of capital of filling the other leg of the trade on, you know, CME or whatever it is that they're that they're, you know, doing the trade. Um, and so they're kind of just a pass through, right? It's like it's like, you know, it's like an OTC desk basically. Um, and so I think that is going to be increasingly how especially for longtail stuff like you know RWA per I think that's where they're going to go. If you're trading

Bitcoin, ETH, you can do a collab, you can get the liquidity and it can be good enough liquidity to match Binance, right? Because that's the prim like you know the primary venue is Binance. You can get close enough to the primary venue in terms of the liquidity, but for longtail stuff, you cannot replicate the liquidity of Binance in Hyperlquid or Lighter or whatever. You're just never going to do it for, you know, 500 pairs, especially when you're talking about RWAS because then it's really long tail. It's kind of like um when you buy, you know, let's say 3x leverage gold junior minor token because you're bullish on gold and you hold it for two weeks and you don't understand how the instrument works and you're like, "Gold's up 25%.

This asset's up 35%." But I'm I'm somehow down 6% on my holding and you're like, "Oh, I didn't read the fine print about the decay of of the rate of this instrument." It's kind of similar here with with the CLAB model with the funding rates are so variable. You could be so right on something, but the platform that you chose to do it instrument was just so wrong. And so that that is just not gonna be that's not going to work for people who want to do these types of things. >> It depends like if you look, if you're a day trader and you're trading around funding rates, great, you know, have at it. But if you're imagining that people are going to be taking longdated exposure to an index or to some stocks, you know, I want to hold Apple stock for the year, but I want to hold it

synthetically because I'm not American. uh and I you know I have stable coins you know I I I if I get on hyperlquid and I go on on trade XYZ then okay I'm taking a lot of funding rate risk and I have no idea how that's going to shake out by the end of the year I've got to monitor it you know u but ideally if you can get to the right RFQ type setup basically somebody can lock in a funding rate and just say I guarantee you this funding rate for the course of the year >> love it stable coins stable coins supply expands by 60% in 2026 and USD D remains 99% plus USDT dominance declines moderately to 55% um and stable coin back cards grow a thousand% in 2026 insanely fast growth becomes a

dominant w stable coins land and expand in emerging markets rain is the biggest winner here we're calling this new kind of category neo finance neo banking um stable coins are set to grow by at least 60% I think that is um on the conservative side. >> Uh is that on the conservative side? I mean, stable coins I think grew by 50 something this year. Um so 60% is like a slight increase in the growth rate. In principle, it should be harder to grow the more you've already grown, right? In principle, the growth rate should be decreasing, but I think actually we're going to get a stimulus of growth because of the amount of companies that now see the Genius Act getting

implemented. So the Genius Act passed, but it's not actually in effect yet, right? There's like a grace period uh where you know everything gets into shape and like they kind of decide how to interpret the law into actual regulations and licenses and so on. Um and so I think once the Genius Act is implemented that's going to be a sort of positive impulse for the dollar. Uh the other thing of course that the dollar has declined this year. It's been a bad year for the dollar. Um and that should be a drag on demand for dollars globally. If next year we see the opposite and the dollar strengthening or you know mean reverting against some other currencies then that should potentially be a buoy for stable coin supply expanding. Um I think also just the expansion of like you said these sort of neo banks these these crypto neo

banks uh that should also be a further distribution channel for stable coins but I think especially for stable coin cards. So you know we're we're big investors in Rain. So again, talking my bags here, but Rain is the biggest stable coin card issuer in existence today. Um, and they are growing like crazy. >> We're investors in Ether. They're a bit smaller than Rain, but the the chart looks like just parabolic hockey stick in terms of spend new users. >> Etheri uses Rain on the back end. So Ether, so Rain is B2B TOC, right? So like they they work with companies like EtherFi that then issue their own card programs, but they're doing the customer acquisition, not Rain. Rain doesn't acquire customers, they acquire businesses. Um, so, uh, like there's so many companies like Etherfi that are

going out there building their neo bank offerings and they have cards that allow you to spend stable coins. And that last mile problem is like, okay, I get the stable coin. That's great. I wanted dollars, but what do I do with it? The answer is like, oh, you use just a normal card, you put it into, you know, e-commerce site. You go swipe it at a thing. You do your tap to pay thing, and you can pay with your stable coins now. And that simple change has changed stable coins from like yeah in theory I guess I should use these to like this is the easiest way like you know for many people they don't even know they have stable coins they just know they have dollars in a fintech app that they can spend with a card. The end >> reinforcing one of the most primitive

use cases of crypto which has been democratizing financial access. And it it starts with cash which is stable coins is tokenized cash and then it goes is what can I do with my stable coins? Well, if I just want to spend it, I use one of these NEO bank cards. But then there's this plethora of financial apps, DeFi, that I can go and I can deploy stable coins beyond just using it for payments. So th this is the stimulus for industry. >> That's right. That's right. So, and I think this is again like how stable coins continue to get into more people's hands, which is also ties into what we were just talking about with like RWAs.

When you hold stables, like right now, what can you buy with your stables if you want to invest your USD? The answer is almost all these neo banks they offer some kind of yield product which is you know okay maybe I put it in a or maybe I like buy some tokenized treasuries or something. Um so that's a really easy way I can integrate yield and then maybe I let you buy bitcoin right and that's like the investable universe that's available to you if you're some guy in Nigeria or you're in Argentina or whatever and you've got one of these neo banks and you're like great I've got two options either treasury yield or I can you know buy some Bitcoin. Um, and I think for a lot of those people, they're like, "Well, I kind of want, you know, like, can I buy an index, maybe? Can I

buy, you know, the S&P? Can I buy the Nikk? Can I, you know, can I buy something else, please?" And RWA perks are how that happens. And so, the distribution channel for these kind of long-term investors, these people are not day traders. They're not speculators. They're not here to speculate. They're here to grow their capital and then to spend it, you know, responsibly. Um so I think that is going to be again another way in which you see these things get distributed last mile to more and more customers who have a different profile than the current set of users in DeFi who are mostly trading.

Yeah, I mean globally as well, right? Not just in the, you know, like in the big trading hubs or the big finance hubs in the more emerging markets and that's just the very basic need of holding dollars um globally is is is now happening. Um moving to regulation, clarity logist signed into law in 2026 after some significant markups and in horse trading. A bit of buyers remorse from crypto insiders. Um let's start there. buyers remorse in which way? >> Yeah, I think um the Democrats know that they have a strong hand. They know that they're going to take the midterms very likely. And as a result, I don't think they feel a lot of pressure to have to

give into a deal that they don't like. So, I think there's going to there's there's going to be some pressure from the administration to pass clarity before the midterms. And if you want to pass clarity before the midterms, the Democrats are going to have their say. And I think there's going to be some concessions that are made that that u crypto industry doesn't like. Now that being said, better to have clarity, the Clarity Act, than not to have the Clarity Act because it does mean that look, even if you go into a much less friendly administration, you know, imagine the president AOC in 2028. Um, that's not going to be a very friendly administration to crypto. But if you have Clarity Act, it's kind of baked into the bread, right? You can't you can't uh undo it. But if you just have rulemaking and regulators and like you

know informal guidance that can very easily be reversed by a new administration. So there's a lot of pressure to pass something but in that pressure to pass something my guess is that there's going to be some buyers remorse. a time know people will not say like oh it was a total mistake but if you remember like back when SPF people remember their history back when SPF his first like the beginning of the end for SPF's like public profile was this big fight he had over regulation was that he wanted to pass um uh uh Fit 21 and was willing to trade in Fit 21 DeFi regulation and allow frontends to get regulated in DeFi and that like I remember there was this big fight between him Eric Vorhees and the

bankless guys where they were jumping down his throat saying like, "Oh, how could you sell us out like this? We thought you believed in crypto." Um, at that time it was unconscionable. I think we are in a very different place today as an industry. Um, and my guess is that we might see a similar set of trades on the table. >> Yikes. Yeah, that now I Yeah, that makes that example makes uh makes makes it feel much more real than just, oh, we didn't get exactly what we wanted out of this. just like, "Oh, no, no. We kind of we kind of shot ourselves in the foot here a little bit." Hopefully hopefully the Dems are um worried about consumer protection in in the ways that also uh embrace the crypto ideals.

>> Yeah, exactly. The civil liberties. I think this um this next one here, the final one of regulation about uh there's a parade of hearings about anything in crypto that tr touched a Trump memecoin or world liberty finance dems win the house. the underlying deals get sub subpoenaed and Trump insists he was never involved. Didn't know anything about it and thus these deals are not protected by executive privilege. Anyone who signed a stupid deal which I promise you guys these were signed gets publicly embarrassed. Something of of of the sort of like give us $10 million and you will get a logo on our types. Um >> that's right. Yeah, that's right.

>> Yeah, there were a bunch of those. There were a bunch of those. Um, and uh, I'm sure there are some that I don't know about for my portfolio companies that I'm going to be embarrassed to learn about. Um, but uh, yeah, there there was it's very clear that the right now the most animating issue for Democrats is corruption, right? There is this narrative about the corruption in the Trump administration. And once they have the House, that means that they can hold hearings. Now, these hearings are kind of toothless, right? They can't really do anything. they can just drag you in front of Congress and but they can subpoena you and they and that the subpoena has a force of law and so you have to tell them the truth because they will subpoena you to to testify under oath. Um so when you go in front of

Congress and you testify, you got to tell them what happened and the whole world gets to laugh at you. Now will the Justice Department do anything about it? Probably not, you know, because yeah, it's Trump's it's Trump's Justice Department. They're not going to do they're not going to do anything. But it does open the door for again 2028 if you know things turn over there could be some potential corruption probes that take place so long as they don't you know subscribe past the statute of limitations. So there's a there's a lot going on here but I would expect there to be a lot of stuff around cryptocr uh 2026 2027.

>> Yeah. I mean, especially around just the general like Trump's enriching himself to uh Trump is enriching himself off of crypto and this is why it's the biggest issue uh kind of in the in the Yeah, that's that's the issue. It's it's look at Trump's net worth before he got in office. Look at it now and look at how much of it is crypto. Also, if you've been in crypto for any, you know, time longer than a handful of years or even just a handful of years, you can look at World Liberty Fi and you can smell something something stinks over there. So, um, prediction markets, prediction markets grow like crazy. Big legal fights over sports betting regulations.

>> We got we got we got to speedrun the rest of us because I got I got to hop soon. >> Yep. Yep. Uh, big legal fights over sports betting regulation and federal preeemption, but nothing major gets resolved next year. Status quo through 2026. Poly market continues to steamroll culture. It starts winning more and more domestic market share from Robin Hood and other sports books. and the expo explosion of other platforms tacking on prediction markets, mostly flop. Kind of a similar thesis with regards to why Arc, Robin Hood, Chain, and Tempo may not do as well as as as many think. Um, B2B partnership driven distribution underperforms direct to consumer outperforms all of almost all of Mana 226 is sourced from Poly Market, Robin Hood, and Koshi frontends as well as

traditional sports books. Let's speedrun prediction markets, go through AI, and let's wrap it up. >> Yeah. So prediction markets um I think everybody sees the momentum now like it's really everyone feels it is that they're just winning. They're just steamrolling everything and I think that's going to continue going 2026. Um I think the biggest thing is that everybody kind of thinks that they now can do prediction markets is they're like oh wow now that there's so much energy around this like we're just going to build our own. We're going to launch it. We're going to see how it does. And I think what you will find, it's a little bit like, you know, when when when Coinbase really started taking off and people were like, "Wow, crypto is a really big thing." You had all these other applications that decided we're going to add crypto buys. And now you

can buy crypto on PayPal. You can buy crypto on Schwab. You can buy crypto on blah blah blah. And what you find is that actually most of these products are kind of nothing burgers. Now that doesn't mean that people don't want to buy crypto, but it means that like when they do want to buy crypto, they know where to go. They don't actually want to buy crypto on a whim in like some unrelated app. They want to buy crypto in the crypto buying app which is Coinbase, right? And so in the same way like when you think prediction marketers I just like oh you know I yeah I guess I want to bet on Taylor Swift you know getting married or you know whatever like you will be like oh I want to go on poly market and see what the predictions are and there I will do my betting but

I'm not just going to like on a whim be like yeah you know what I guess I do want to bet on this thing now that I saw it in like my you know whatever unrelated fantasy sports app you know um so so that that's my guess is that it's going to feel like crypto buy crypto buy and sell right the lesson that Coinbase learned from crypto buy and sell is that even if other people add this even if they have more distribution than us, right? Like Schwab and Fidelity have way more users than Coinbase, but Coinbase is the one that people associate with buying and selling crypto. So when you buy and sell crypto, you want to do it through Coinbase. Um people sort of they want to keep the apps separate in terms of the brands and what they use them for. And I think the same thing will be

true for prediction markets. >> Beautiful. maybe just speed on us through AI um and just kind of the high level here for your takes and then we can wrap this up. It's been absolutely awesome. >> Yeah, so AI um we alluded to a little bit earlier. I think that the main use case for AI is going to continue to be just software engineering. Um that's going to be the big uh you know it's continued to be a theme already with anthropic making tons and tons of money. Um I think it's going to continue uh this year. security is going to be the main thing that touches crypto is that this is the year that that um these agents are getting good enough at cyber security to be used for both attack and defense. I think we're going to see more hacks in 2026, but they're going to be

smaller hacks because more and more of these big hacks are going to get caught by people using defensive agents to scan their own code and scan their own software for potential vulnerabilities and white hats being able to use uh this kind of scanning at scale to be able to uh look for vulnerabilities as well. Um, so I think you're going to see a lot more of this uh integration into everything, but I think wallet automation is going to be minimal. Agents won't be paying each other. Like you're not going to I think most of these things will still remain prototypes. Uh it's going to take a lot longer for these models to get good at a lot more of a general swath of things.

Something we've just generally learned from AI is that actually they're getting really good but at narrower and narrower tasks, right? They're getting really really good at programming but they suck at Excel. They're getting really really good at, you know, uh, writing essays, but, you know, they're terrible at, um, you know, I don't know, like, uh, designing things, you know, I don't know, things like this. Man, thank you for joining us. Um, 2026 is set to be, as you said, a highly uh, liquidity friendly environment for the space. Although it feels very apathetic right now. I think the sentiment is not exactly representative of the accomplishments of 2025, but mostly based on the price action. Um, and I think the year, my take is that

like of all the predictions and of all the takes is just I think just it's going to I'm more optimistic than most about price action and just general growth for the industry next year than I think what the sentiment represents. Um, now that would be my 2026 prediction. So, I'm I'm with you on the 150k by the end of the year. There's probably a poly market for that. Um, and uh, see you on the other side, man. >> Always a pleasure. Good to see you guys. Merry Christmas. >> Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Him. >> Happy New Year. See you guys. >> See you. Cheers.