Alt Season, Decentralized AI’s Evolution, and Institutional Interest | Roundup

Transcript

I do think that there's going to be a new meta that forms and I think we're probably a couple months away from this this is probably a 2025 theme but the The mcoin Meta turns into the AI agent meta yeah and you're gonna have agents that maintain their own ecosystems maintain their own coins and they're going to launch their own things and like that is going to be wild and crazy because there's literally gonna be no one behind it except for this this agent and that what it does people will be following it like you turn it from this internet meme in into what will the internet actually do by itself with its own valtion and its own power and now its own money that will be a fantastic experiment hey everyone quick disclaimer before we get into today's episode nothing said on bell curve is a

recommendation to buy or sell Securities or tokens this podcast is for informational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions not Financial advice our guest and I may hold positions in the companies funds or projects discussed everyone welcome back to another Roundup edition of bell curve you got Michaels one and two Vance how you doing fellas doing well looking good it's looking good big week Nvidia didn't [ __ ] the bed so I think we we have at least another quarter yeah no I think I think we're looking pretty good um everything seems to be

rallying and um yeah I mean we've definitely seen some of the most interesting pitches over the past couple years in the past few months so I think that's the barometer of you know our bullishness if we're seeing just like you know the 18th decks again gets a little tiring um and yet we see other people fund these things and it just boggles the mind and and one thing we should probably talk about is like you know we do periodic updates on like exchange listings tokens obviously like meme coins are now um a thing and they're getting listed you know Peanut squirrel had a CU a tough uh 24 hours um I'm sure I'm sure that Community will rally back together

but um there's more tokens than ever and there's more Choice than ever for retail and it's a question of like how you stand out when there's a you know A Narrative of the morning and then the afternoon and then the Asian narrative and by the time you wake up some of these things have kind of Gone full circle so you know what else I find interesting is that for the first time it seems like Tik Tok is actually G to play a pretty big role here when it comes to meme coins have you guys seen this chill guy meme that is going around yeah I mean I feel like by the time this comes out that may be toast relevant what are you talking about I do think um you know Phantom number one in the App Store I guess I mean I guess that was yesterday um definely number

six I thought yeah number six oh no sorry not number one number six um but like you know we have seen even even the smaller wallets in our portfolio like you know 700 800% increase in transactions and users so it's happening across the board um but I I don't I've I've gone on Tik Tok looking for crypto Tik Tok it still kind of isn't a thing I would say honestly like crypto Instagram is probably more of a thing it's definitely more Millennial on Instagram yeah um and it's more about the asset on Instagram I would still say you know buy some Bitcoin buy some eth buy some soul

on on Tik Tok it does seem to be more about the wallet and I think that is going to be an interesting Harbinger for like the dispersion of like it seems like base meme coins are starting to catch a bid like even anom tweeted my base mem coins are going up which I think was probably hard for him to tweet but you know it's true and I think there's like you know I wouldn't be surprised to see barah you know mem coins pop off and you know I think if it's just like this wallet and one of the apps in our portfolio is called slingshot and they just do like complete chain abstraction it's just like usdc and buy whatever meme you want and whatever chain yeah it really is seamless and a lot of these user

experiences are getting to the point where it's basically intent based which is really really cool like just to hammer the point on slingshot and you they they launched uh a couple weeks ago but I think one of the major differences of this cycle versus last cycle is Mobile versus web yeah and being able to have a mobile experience slingshot is in the App Store you can trade across any exch any blockchain you want you don't even know that you're on salana or or base or you have to deposit onto one of them but then you can basically trade any asset uh that experience is frankly what we've been waiting for for the last four years uh and not having to go to your website you know whatever to decks to to trade um I think this is going to be a fundamental shift from retail

adoption just being able to have a mobile experience to trade these things well I'm interested the reason I think Tik Tok if it ends up being a big onboarding um channel for retail is is interesting is just because it's a very different I feel it's like a very different sort of vibe and interest and I've thought about this a lot from like putting my block Works hat on and in media and you know we we conceptualizes creating content and delivering insights mostly to crypto Twitter like that's who we view as our audience and for a long time people have been telling us hey the audience doesn't actually live on Twitter it lives on Instagram or it lives on Tik Tok or something like that and our response to that has always been in order to create content that's going to resonate with audiences on that

Medium you need to really drastically change the type of content that you're going to create right and so it's interesting to see the type of stuff that people want um on these different Med I'm just interested to see if this ends up being an enduring Trend or if it's not actually a thing and it's still just crypto Twitter is basically the taste maker for this cycle but it's interesting um and it's definitely a much younger much more Zoomer sort of active demographic on Tik Tok so if they came in I think it would actually have a pretty big impact on the market and meme coins and all that stuff but yeah I don't think it has to be a salana story at all I think it's definitely going to be a chain abstracted you know like wallet sort of story yep I mean I I think they will come in for the

memes and stay for the network for stay for the longer dated Investments cuz like um it's like it's kind of um maybe analogy is like daily fantasy sports or like sports betting you come in you churn you bet you love it you hate it you you leave then you probably still manage your fantasy team and that's kind of like your long-term relationship and like I Michael and I uh you know early eth early BTC um and then frankly like the first wave that we were really in was the Ico bubble where we were like really active on chain and those were in some sense as meme coins chain link was definitely a meme coin

but it had like this longer perspective of utility and like aligning over the long long term to this like ambitious Vision yeah um I think the question for each asset now is like what what differentiated bid are you bringing with you um because if you're the 10th decks on the fifth L2 that's tough um but if you're doing something that really stands out or is new or as novel I think you're going to win points for that um so it'll be interesting to see I don't I don't know if I'm a huge Bull on the on like any specific meme coin I do think they will be a feature um but what what retail is doing is they're kind of like not to overuse this but democratizing access to venture style returns yeah whereas that used to be the

purview of VCS it's now like you know people can hit 100x getting in on a market cap of you know 10K and it goes to 10 million which is like or or a ski group can pull together and nice trip to Breen Ridge the the new the new meta is low low or high float low FTV low liquidity high volume like yeah it makes no sense but it makes sense when you think about the wash trading Bots but like you know if you're if you're a little but hurt about people flexing huge meme coin pnls and I I like follow this account look on chain it's like this guy turns $64 into you know 85 million and it's like well

there's only 230,000 in the lp pool so like how is he going to turn that 85 million into money that that that still relies on exchangers listing and I I would assume kind of done for the moment like they had this big catchup wave of like Pepe dog with hat uh you know Peanut the squirrel who knows you know Nero but like what's the mechanism for these new meme coins to now you know get on these exchanges it's kind of like chicken in the egg problem because they need to be low valuation for binance or whatever to list them but like people are trying to you know get these things to go very very high on chain so there's kind of this weird Mexican standoff happening with

memes and exchange listings now well I also I think that part of that story as well is the people got sick of the high fdv low float more um you know cerebral type coins that were sort of down only after listing and I think exchanges actually are pretty sensitive to their customers losing money trading these things and so now there's the perception that Meme coins maybe actually from a reg I'm this is just way outside of my purview maybe they're less worried about them being there's a regulatory angle on Meme coins that they're less worried about maybe it's just a you know looking out for their customer standpoint but we we've been talking about it on the show forever I saw a statistic the other day 60,000 new assets launched on pump pump fun and look I hate to be the Boomer

just repeatedly saying this over and over what this reminds me of though is the nft kind of double bubble type thing where there were there was initially with nfts there was kind of like board apes and punks were the two and then there was this extremely wide dispersion of jpegs which did really well but then eventually it collapsed the market collapsed on top of it was a supply driven collapse and I don't know when that ends up happening for mcoins but doesn't it feel like the rotations are getting faster it was sentient AI memes like last week and now it's Tik Tok memes and the rotation that was so funny the AI thing the dude literally went through you know grinding founder hero to villain Arc in like eight hours I

kind of missed this shelled like 70% in like three in like three days or it it's just I feel like it's happening faster and faster the Ico bubble what was remarkable about the IC Ico bubble is that there were such few coins that the hit rate was basically astronomical like if you could produce a coin it would go up and that was the hard part pumped out fun is just like Click Boom and you know who knows where it goes and um I do think there will be you know Supply overwhelms demand I I also think like like the the rotation is also kind of like an asset class in some ways where you're just playing Hot Potato but you know Burns hot probably

you know Burns Out quick I mean the the the promise of the icos was that the only way that you were able to have something that would work you know in the way that you're describing Vance was if it had the promise or the potential of utility eventually and it was it was all sort of like okay who what's the white paper how legit is it who signed on to be an advisor like all all all kind of like vanity metrics in terms of real value and real utility but you still had to have the promise of real utility for it to do well eventually you know yeah like we're going to partner with Visa we're going to build a a vis of credit card that's powered by our blockchain and like buy this token I mean 99% of that stuff went to zero but

the the meme stuff doesn't even pretend to like have eventual utility like the eventual utility is like the meme persists and BEC something you know mudang level or uh you know Doge level I I don't know what the like Pinnacle of meme success is but there is no promise of utility like it's just a listing so these things naturally right it's pre-revenue it's a pure play Russ handman approved permanently pre-revenue yeah I mean but what's funny is like AI 16z launched the coin it was a meme they're aping a16z uh and then they tried to build utility you know we have a crater fund for AI developers we have all this stuff and then they basically just like you

know kind of just like tripped over their themselves and just knocked out their own front teeth and you know they're building it backwards they build the brand first then they build the utility and I think that's you know uh retardo which is another meme coin has its own Casino you know that doesn't have seemed to have helped the price at all it's like you know down a bunch um I do think that there's G to be a new meta that forms and I think we're probably a couple months away from this this is probably a 2025 theme but the The mcoin Meta turns into the AI agent meta yeah and you're going to have agents that maintain their own ecosystems maintain their own coins and they're going to launch their own own things and like that is going to be wild and crazy

because there's literally going to be no one behind it except for this this agent and that what it does people will be following it like you turn it from this internet meme into what will the internet actually do by itself with its own valtion and its own power and now its own money that will be a fantastic experiment I agree I do think that this early iterate one thing that I think humans have been pretty bad at is predicting how AI is going to be used in general I mean even just you look at how we fun forecast out technology on a long term we thought everyone was going to be driving around you know flying cars right with the jetss back in the day but instead it's just like you have a supercomputer in your pocket and everyone thought that the creators were going to be protected and you can't

replicate human Ingenuity and it looks like they might actually be the first to go who knows I I have no idea how AI is gonna ultimately end up being used I do think it's funny to watch these some of these AI agents tweet there was actually a funny meme or a twe tweet that I saw which is the old scam used to be Bots pretending to be people and now it's people pretending to be Bots which is that's pretty good which is pretty good uh and there's definitely some of that that's going on here but yeah I guess we'll have to see I yeah we'll have to see what ends up happening there the metas are moving faster they're also becoming much more retail oriented like Remember When The Meta was like data availability totally yeah a year ago a year ago yeah I mean like it's like I

can't even remember what the meta was two months ago um I honestly where we're spending most of our time is like what is the what is the meta in five years based on fundamentals so maybe we should talk a little bit about I mean we haven't even talked about Bitcoin it's been a pretty killer last couple of weeks for Bitcoin we also got options um that went live this week and there's been an enormous amount of trading activity that's happened specifically on ibit um you know the Black Rock ETF and I I saw an interesting thread around this that an enormous amount of the trading volume it was like something just under two billion um notional volume traded on the first day and a huge percentage of that was deep out of the money call options

so there's a very heavy skew towards call options as opposed to puts um so you've get this like kind of volatility smile that options Traders like to talk about and there were a lot of deep out of the money which suggests they're basically lottery tickets so it suggests retail retail buying for this stuff and you're also kind of starting to see that as well and the memec coin side of things with these Tik Tock nice guy or chill guy you know sort of mean so I don't know it's kind of made sense to me that retail would return at a convincing break of the previous all-time high and I know we technically broke the all-time high uh before but now at 97k or 98 or whatever bitcoin's currently trading at we're probably beginning to see the signs of retail entering back I mean

retail is coming back in basically all the mats that we just talked about whether it's meme toins whether it's App Store ranking whether it's you know call put spread uh I think the there seems to be General consensus on retail that there's a gravitational force pulling Bitcoin higher wherever that lands who knows but it's just kind of a question of time but I I do think that it's perfect timing frankly uh and historically some thanksgivings have been good some have been bad but you know we are exactly seven days away from Thanksgiving and there's a lot of people going home to talk about crypto in seven days and it's going to be interesting to see what happens after that Friday might be an

interesting day next week there there is um like I think basically what you're waiting for is like Bitcoin to be fully priced maybe that's 150k I also think like at 100K people are gonna be like I missed it what's what else is out there um and there's also like you know diminishing marginal returns to the Sailor bid and the Bitcoin ETF inflows and like you know he's buying three billion today and there's probably like a billion of ETF inflows today and the price is like up there um I just think there's a lot of people who are like I've been holding on to bitcoin since 3,000 and it's at 100,000 and now it's time to sell and that'll diminish eventually but like there are you know fewer there there's lower marginal returns to the bid um you

know Bitcoin still probably goes like 250k 300K but it'll take a while and it'll necessitate you know Central Bank buying and things like that but you know I I don't think alt season is too far uh beyond the corner and like you know you see dog with hat and you see Peanut and these are all great but like it's like a two and a half billion and 1.2 billion coin respectively um you know at this point in the last cycle we had you know five six seven protocols l1s that were you know between 15 100 billion so I think it's like longer Cycles higher for longer Bitcoin prices um and yeah I mean it's just a really

bullish setup and it's funny it's like you know people are people like a week ago were like you know we broke out of a seven Monon consolidation it's up only time and and now on my timeline it's like um you know the Cycles in its final Innings and you know there's all these top signals and like you know uh be be fearful when others are greedy um I think there's just a symptom of spending too much time on crypto Twitter which I'm also guilty of um but yeah you know you gotta like take a step back a little bit one of the other things that we've been spending some time on obviously post election is just like what happens next from and and who knows exactly the order of operations but some of the like

major Milestones that I would think about in terms of the next 12 months in terms of the government um obviously we're going to have uh Clarity eventually here and don't even know who every single day feels like there's new names being tossed around for SEC for cftc like don't have any perspective on that until it's finalized but it seems like uh consensus is marua will take over as the interim chair uh until there's an official appointment that official appointment probably won't happen until like March um if we're being realistic and may maybe February if they're moving fast but given that it is a red sweep the other sentiment is that there's going to be a lot of uh uh

lot of effort initially to focus on things that are not crypto and this will be you know immigration tax reform you know government spending you know the stuff that they they really have to get done initially um but also we want any sort of crypto reform to be something that is bipartisan and it has to be something that isn't pushed through in a Reconciliation bill it has to be something that's supported across both sides and the timeline for that is honestly probably a year from now which is actually a good thing but but what that means in the meantime is this regulation by enforcement policy goes away for the next year and we take our time to build the best possible bipartisan crypto Market structure bill that we possibly can stable coins gets a

future of that maybe there's defi element or maybe a defi car out who knows the nitty-gritty but we want this to happen and so if we're sitting you know September of next year having these initial conversations after they've done all the the leg work on you know the stuff that they wanted to get done in the first half of the year that's going to be a catalyst in of itself because it'll it'll officiate the the recognition of digital assets as a new asset class in the United States and that is a massive seminal moment the thing that we've been fighting for for the last eight years and and so I I I actually think you know one of the questions I got from uh two different Founders in the last week was like what do you think about the market cycle and

where are we but also like where does this end I I think that we might actually be looking at something that's fundamentally different based off of two factors the first is the ETFs and I think officially the Bitcoin ETFs have crossed a 100 billion in assets which is absolutely Bonkers and you know that's a liquidity black hole we haven't even turned on the wirehouses yet for raia money which is where the bulk of the assets actually are and number two would be a market structure bill that that denotes crypto up there with equities and fixed income and real estate and you know it's it's an asset class and you know now there's rumors of having a cryptar in the cabinet there's the uh Tim Scott is most likely I I think officially going to be

the chair of the Senate Banking Committee his first order of business he has said is to create a crypto subcommittee underneath Senate banking which is huge like the the stuff that uh the Catalyst that are up on the horizon you they're still six nine months away but these are fundamental catalysts that I think drop uh adoption even further because once you get clarity think about all the financial institutions that are waiting for that Clarity who haven't been able to touch Bitcoin or crypto or defi they're just waiting on the sidelines to be able to to interface with it I I think you know there is a strong chance that this is a fundamentally different Market cycle and to say that we're at the end of the cycle is is preposterous I I even think that we might even be

entering in the super cycle wow pack it up hack your knives and go I I I do think that's basically all true um super cycle I like it super cycle is intact I like ITF is in jail so so run you know Kyle Kyle who knows who the [ __ ] he is but um I do think it's going to take a bit longer mostly because Mitch McConnell has said no recess appointments which is absolutely hilarious Mitch McConnell is also the least popular politician on the planet like there's like all these favorability ratings least popular in

the Senate least popular you know known public figure and so I think the the actual confirmations are going to be like summer of next year like it's gonna take a while appointments but keep in so yeah confirmation I mean I think things like SEC cftc those will be a little bit more you know Middle Ground uh you know if there's no recess appointment we'll see what happens with Matt Gates but the did you what is the recess appointment thing sorry what what does that mean recess appointment is basically um asking the Senate to be on recess so that they don't have to go through an official vote to verify um these cabinet members it's like a Fly by Night method of getting people into these positions

um which is you can do it but is like not in the spirit of of democracy also Michael and I uh you know we talk politics a good amount and one of the contrarian opinions I shared earlier in the year is that Matt Gates is ascendant and I'm like very bullish Matt Gates he he is the most hated man in Washington similar to Trump and he's got he's basically like the trumpi version that is not Trump and so I think in 2032 the presidential matchup Matt Gates versus John fedman just gonna put that put that out there the working man's you know party the people fedman

versus you know Trump 3.0 I think populism is basically just one I mean that's the story of the Republican party it's not surprising to me that um Mitch McConnell is the least popular politician because he represents this old school of republicanism that is kind of dying and I think there's AOL yeah um let's talk about uh let's talk about uh sky on yeah yeah let's talk about sky so Sky well actually here I'll te it up but I would love to get your guys perspective here so this was something that at least I have been waiting for because when R teased his original end game he talked about you know launching um at the time it was maker chain now it be sky and going multi-chain um which I think was a big

surprise he talked at a rune uh spoke at breakpoint this year as well and so you know people have known about this move to salana for a little while but uh just this week usds which is the rebranded die uh went live on salana and I believe I was looking at numbers this morning but it looks like there's some 80 million worth of usds already um live and trading on on salana and it seems like it's been integrated across many of the existing D5 platforms the Jupiters the Caminos of the world Etc so yeah all All Pause there but yeah give us the give us the kind of inside scoop like how how should we interpret uh you know the prospect for usds on on Solana well one one thing I'll add and then I'll

Advance dive into usds specifically is just the comparison of let's let's just like compare the metrics on ethereum versus salana broadly and what you've got generally is you've got more volume is being traded on salana um and that volume is primarily from meme coins as we've been talking about and pump fun um being able to have me meme coins there you're trading these assets on salon and so the volume is much higher I think by a factor of three uh than volume traded of assets on ethereum on the flip side you've got number of or amount of stable coins on salana as like a 20x difference it's it's 20x lower um than what you have on

with stable coins on ethereum and so ethereum at least to date is the place where rwas exist it's where where stable coins exist it's where assets are are existing and what that suggests to me is that there's there sort of like this desire to have more novel interesting uh permissionless stable coins that are widely oped on salana and it it's it is you know a need that the salana ecosystem has because right now what you're trading with mcoins you're tra the trading pair is soul and so you're trading against Soul it's the exact same thing that ethereum went through you know three four years ago when when everybody was training nfts or or especially what was going on in in 2017 when people were trading Ico tokens it was all against the pair of eth and so

eth gets the bid because you need to have eth to be able to buy these things I I do kind of wonder what happens once you can dollarize a lot of these trading Pairs and have them be against something that is um you know based priced in a dollar priced in a stable coin um but it does feel like there's a need for more stable coins or or a desire to have more stable coins on salana in comparison to ethereum yeah I also think it's worth getting into a little bit so I'm a I'm a big fan of uh just sky in general and I think spark um is doing an exceptionally good job and I don't even it wasn't super clear to me actually what the business model is for U something like the relationship in between something like spark and sky but it's basically

just it's very similar to the kind of Central Bank and Commercial Banking relationship where Spark ends up getting basically preferential funding rates and they you know are much more specialized in terms of how to actually lend that out and generate yield and they make money on the spread which is a great business model um Vance I saw you I saw you in the uh the bell curve telegram which I actually Shell Shell to the bell curve telegram it's called left curvers we'll link it in the show notes if you're listening to the show join it yeah it's pretty lit actually um and Vance I saw you going back in forth because I believe uh someone um Eugene asked why would usds be different than py USD and you were getting into kind of the business model difference between

usds and the niche that you see that filling so can you just talk about that for a little bit as well I mean stable coins are actually pretty hard to understand especially algorithmic ones it probably took me a full n months a year to like fully get maker and that was after we bought maker and and we bought maker because we saw uh basically these two other large firm selling it and Rune buying it with his own money and that's the first time I've ever seen R any founder buy their own token especially at like $50 million size so like a little bit of like invest and then investigate but like we knew how it worked we just didn't really dig into it and the thing to understand about maker is that you know the path to stable coin adoption for for for most stable coins

is you use it as collateral then you use it as payments and and maker is a purpose-built collateral lending stable coin and what that means is say there's very high apy on uh Camino Finance on Soul basically what maker can do is just spit usds into that pool until that apy comes down you know you spit more Supply into the pool you know the cost to borrow is cheaper the apy goes down because people Loop it and you realize adoption and stable coin growth through that and it's not dissimilar to you know maker was one of the main collateral asset or die was the main collateral asset for a lot of people who are looping Luna yeah basically like what run said is like look you wanna you want

to like Luna is a Ponzi but you guys want to you know use our stable coin to get 20% apy like knock yourself out we're gonna have an Auto Liquidation at a certain dpeg price and we'll get all the collateral back but you know this is going to the stable coin Supply and so really what's happening on salana is people are starve for stable coins because there's not that many and when you think about maker being able to programmatically just spit usds into pools with high apy that's a lot different than something like a PayPal USD where it's like okay we need more PayPal USD on Shane all right well do you know anybody with PayPal USD no we don't know anybody with PayPal USD all right well can you get a hedge fund to

Mint some well we don't okay well I know one hedge fund okay they minted some all right can they put it into Cino Finance it's like well they're not comfortable putting it into lending markets and then it just like kind of the the growth stops that problem is not the same thing for for D because it has this allocation system that sits underneath the Central Bank of maker and it's just really bullish to see you know it's doing 140 150 million of earnings it's buying back its own token it'll be deflationary on an order of about 10% per year and people are like you know well it's it's not going to be the size of tether it's like well yeah no [ __ ] tether is like $200 billion dollars of stable coins on chain or 130 billion but if you can have you know five and a half billion of D

spitting out 150 million of earnings and you have a path to double that you know it's the number two app behind pumped out fund and earnings and um I think the other thing that people are kind of fading is you know we we came out as in support of maker endgame and specifically the sky Rebrand and you know people are fading unit unit denomination bias when the entire mecoin cycle has been powered by that like I'm pretty excited to see the migration of maker to Sky in the coming weeks the turning on of the endgame incentives and then the continuing growth of you know now it's on Soul it's going to be on base pretty soon and the more they can do that I think they're

going to just execute and win and I do think you know coming into 2025 a Fresh coat of paint a new brand a new name and frankly like transitioning that on coin Gecko and coin market cap that is probably going to be enough to Kickstart the flywheel so we're we're we're very bullish on maker um and we're excited about what they're building you know what you know what else this model makes a lot of sense to me is if you think about the Central Bank versus Commercial Banking relationship you trust the Commercial Bank to actually be able to manage their um you know their balance sheet and allocate to different uh you know yield generating opportunities you wouldn't really be super confident in the federal reserve's ability to do that so it makes sense to me that someone like spark should be able to find good you know better yield

generating opportunities and yeah I mean I think Vance what you're basically alluding to right with like supplying Cino with um you know additional liquidity that's like the d3m module so they've uh this has been deployed very successfully on a and markets like Lio Etc so yeah I think it just makes an enormous amount of sense here's one thing that I would be very curious to get your guys perspective on so let's just say that this year uh progresses and you do get something like a fit Bill and maybe a stable coin bill I would guess that the like the black rocks the JP Morgans of the world also look at stable coins and I would be curious you know when you see a bunch of banks like US Banks and large asset managers issue

their own stable coins whose market share does that eat into does that eat into the usdc and tethers of the world um I don't know I think some of these you know that's what I would sort of anticipate right like I feel like that is whose market share they're going to eat whereas the usds of the world just fit a very different Niche and actually might do slightly better in terms of holding on to their market share when these big regulated Blue Chip us stable coins launch I would be more nervous if I have a circle and there's stable coin Bill coming yeah tether I think will be one of the largest financial institutions on the planet and like tether and and money more broadly is like a pure Network effects business it's it's trusted because it's

been used because it's trusted and you know it just feeds on itself to some degree um I think one of the questions for like the JP Morgans of the world is like how comfortable are you with putting your money on binance yeah and that's kind of tether's Edge and tether is very specific about the chains that they want to Mint on there's only seven today um versus Circle who's kind of like you know dictating or relying on their growth strategy being the growth strategy of the underlying chains usdc is on Aptos now they're hoping Aptos grows they're hoping they kind of do the leg work but tether is more like exchange Centric is kind of how it seems um so I think usdc is at most risk um but all the lending stable

coins like you know it's not like you know JP Morgan's gonna be like oh there's some there's some high yield in pool two all your guy get him to spit out some some you know J Morgan bucks into pool two oh we dropped the yield pull back pull back which is like the point around my earlier comment of like you know usds doesn't need to get to even 20 billion to be massively profitable that's that's why these more Niche stable coin lending products work I I think um where you don't want to be is like a PayPal USD where you don't quite have the scale to take on usdc and you don't quite have the lending Market you know Savvy to to take on you know a usds there's like a

messy middle of the stable coin Market the the other angle here too just on the Black Rock side is I mean BlackRock has Biddle and and the ability to put you know assets on chain is probably what they will focus on first not not necessarily just dollarized assets but potentially T bills potentially other other types of fixed income and if you have that that is your collateral base to be able to Mint a stable coin against and so you know even further to the point on PayPal pay is not a financial institution in the same way that black rock can produce assets and put them on chain uh and be able to m a new stable coin against it or or you know partner with a usds or partner with a like bidd is going to be part of the I can't

remember the name of it but the black the the uh the maker program exactly um and if you've got the collateral base uh and they've got the ability to Mint like that's that's kind of a per perfect partnership yeah yeah yeah I mean the the other big win of um usds on salana to Michael's point is uh what the [ __ ] now I'm Geo blocked from even looking at these markets oh no now I'm not the things that are really interesting is this you know this is just mooning the supply you know it's going up it's going up and what do this exactly correlated with correlated with this like usds

powering jeto higher in terms of um Supply because people are looping because people are looping and then let's just see how gto's been growing I mean yeah this thing is ripping you know and you know I I think this the other catch-up trade that's gonna happen like I think eth starts a catch up to BTC I think jto starts to catch up to um soul to soul cuz like so much of the economics of solar and J now so story of what's beyond mean coins and like the first order primitive is like lending money money there's so many parallels to how

the ethereum ecosystem developed as well I mean there was you know in the beginning there actually was an enormous amount of demand to hold stable coins on ethereum in the beginning because there was so much that was going up and so many ways to make money right and then only once a whole bunch of wealth ended up up getting created in that ecosystem do you start to think well maybe I'd like to hold some of this in stable coins or something and maybe I want to just generate a yield here instead of you know having this YOLO into you know defi summer tokens and I I wonder if something similar happens on Solana and it ends up being an enormous Boon for yeah exactly goo or any stable coin which is able to generate yield for you like that be interesting the other thing

that happened this week as well is something that's kind of interesting to watch is uh or coinbase uh you can now earn you know what like the 4.7% or whatever apy just holding usdc on their wallet which I think is a pretty cool feature they have a so uh Circle and coinbase have this JV called Center and I think that is technically the issuer of usdc and there's some sort of rev split and I don't know the specifics of it but I know the Rev split is higher to coinbase when it's actually held on the coin based platform so you get this really nice like just under 5% uh yield if you hold usdc on the actual coinbase platform and that got extended to the coinbase wallet this week so they're doing a really good job of pushing

people on chain in general they're doing a good job of moving usdc onto base uh you can now earn the same yield that you would earn if you were custody your your assets on the platform it's a very interesting ecosystem to watch I know that's like the least original take of all time but yeah I just keep looking at base they're crushing it from my perspective I mean the so you put usdc in your coinbase wallet right has to be wallet yeah yeah in your coinbase wallet historically it was coin it was usdc stored on your coinbase account right if you have but I think it's also not for Prime users um yeah and so it's just your coinbase.com and if you have uh usdc on your

coinbase.com and it's just sitting there you are earning implicitly 4.7% whatever it is now now what they're doing is they're saying we're extending that to coinbase wallet and slowly moving people I mean the transition that coinbase has been running has been pretty phenomenal in that you know think about it just started with coinbase.com and you had GX which was you know the institutional Pro adoption now it's Prime primes on G and uh but the um the interesting part now is like their their entire push is to move things on chain andart incredibly smart I I think the people that lose

from this are kind of like the rwa providers right so why would we do it with you if we could just put it in coinbase I guess there's less composability you have to have it in your wallet exactly and it's not like you can have state usdc be earning 4% additional it has to be just pure usdc it it is an incentive for you to have things more on your coinbase wallet but I think what this move in and of itself is not the most important thing I think what it does signal is they they're just intense institutional desire to have everybody transact on chain which I think will be phenomenal um but this move itself rwa

loser rwa providers are definitely losers the other ones are just like net new stable coin issuers that are trying to win out on yield like there's there's now like not much reason why you wouldn't just have coinbase wallet where you can do all the defi things you can inter face with anything you want and any additional usdc that you're sitting on you just earn yield well people have you guys seen this fat wallet thesis that's been floating around I think this was from one of the I mean the reason we do this literally every three months with a different we call something fat and then it's like this is I know well I think people are just calling wallets brokerages the reason why everyone is excited about

wallets is the is the aspects of them that look brokerages right they're orderflow Originators and in theory that orderflow is very useful I I also think that probably the users of uh remember there was a lot there was a big push when there was online brokerages the amount that platforms were willing to spend on users was very high because people are really sticky they basically don't move and I wonder if that Dynamic is going to be similar in crypto I I was talking to a guy at Devcon from Unis swap actually who mentioned I I'll try to find the research report that he was referring referring to but in some of their research they actually found I think he was talking about their LP base but it's really sticky it's very very sticky and not very mobile there is a

just as you would expect there's kind of this hot ball of money very active farming contingent which actually does move from protocol to protocol and layer to layer but mostly once people go somewhere they just kind of stay and I would imagine coinbase has done some sort of analysis on that as well and they're just trying to move everyone to their layer which is base and even like that usdc yields probably there's some amount of marketing spend there like if you look at yeah it's not because I think that what they're paying out is higher than short-term rates so um but yeah I guess that is right yeah it's a pretty interesting move I don't know I think I think as you see more dispersions of assets across Chains It's going to become more wallet Centric and less

chain Centric like I I buy the people don't leave the wallet I don't buy the people don't leave the chain I agree totally um cuz like look like people want to buy assets that go up irrespective of what chain that is completely agree can we talk for a second on I would be curious to get your guys perspective on just because there's so many there's so many eyeballs on Bitcoin now and I'm at least on my feed starting to see this very familiar refrain of bitcoin's going to crush at this cycle there's not going to be an ALT season there's you know we're getting close to the death of you know eth BTC ratio and there was the death of eth type party and maybe to editorialize

my own perspective here is that this feels really similar to me like December 2020 time frame where Bitcoin dominance peaked everyone was saying the same thing it's only going to be Bitcoin this cycle you you even start to see I I'm seeing a lot of like oh now that there's options there's this gamma squeeze which is going to make Bitcoin an even higher Vault asset than it has been in the it's all these arguments I feel like I've heard these things recycled three times you and and in 2017 yeah you know it was Bitcoin Le it was all we were gonna do and then people were like what the [ __ ] are these icos and it was like oh God here we go well remember okay so so here here's the timeline in March of 2017 you had the Winkle Vibe put out their

Bitcoin ETF proposal and then as soon as that got shot down that was the Catalyst to having the first icos and it was the rotation at that point it was end of 2016 early 2017 Bitcoin you know rall and then it's a transition completely away from Bitcoin into ethereum because that becomes the the asset of choice for trading these uh and raising money uh for these seos and I think the first one the first one that really kind of like shock and OD everyone was Brave in May of 2017 um basic it did like $35 million in 28 seconds or something like that and you had to like build a program like I literally built a program to be able to

like put try to cram some eth into that address and so those are the days those are the days but uh every single time there's a new there's a new transition it doesn't happen just naturally I I think that's one of the things that we should also keep in mind I think last time Bitcoin peaked when uh Tesla started adding into the balance sheet uh Elon went on SNL um and Michael sailor was kind of like buying but nobody knew how high he could he could send it and and then it transitioned through the summer of 2021 eth kind of took over and eth was the asset that won leading into I think fall November of 2021 was the peak of

eth at 4,800 give or take um every single time it's the same cycle you have a run up in Bitcoin however High it goes kind of provides the the trajectory of what the next phase will be which is an ethereum run uh and and then after that alts run after that um and so I I think we're just in the same exact cycle um where bitcoin's G to get the bid first the higher it goes the better it is for everything else and so we want it to continue to go higher obviously but the the ceiling top I think is so once again Market structure being different what you would historically have is you would have Bitcoin first and then you'd have let's say ethereum and then you'd have alts but to move from one phase of the

cycle to the next you have to sell Bitcoin to buy the eth and so that's what creates this this like selling buying uh dichotomy whereas now we don't have the same effect because of these ETFs acting like liquidity black holes and so I think what we're going to see is just a fundamentally different phasing of how this stuff transitions from one one phase to the next um where you're not having to sell one asset to move into the other and and the amount of capital that we're talking about is like multiple orders of magnitude higher we're talking hundreds of billions at this point which is just a number that nobody would have expected in 2021 and definitely not 2017 but so the fact that we have all the capital we have the infrastructure we have um the the products now to buy I

think you markets are going to be fundamentally different do you think there's a you know I'm not a markets guy at all here so I'm just completely speculating but there's a round number effect around 100K I I could see psychological effect which is like hug huge huge effect I mean like the the basic math is in this double yeah 100K 200k is a big number big number can I mean people are just GNA be looking for things that can double based on un bias is my guess 100K if you've I mean the 100K is such a big Landmark we've spent the entirety of crypto

mostly between I would say 15,000 and 40,000 that would be probably like 70% of the time people are going to think they missed it and they're going to rotate to other assets and I think really um there's going to be a bunch of catch up trades but I think the ones that do really really well are the new L ones that's my guess Bara monad um look at Sweet yeah it went down congratulations suie I saw someone I think it was dudus that tweeted the Baton Pass from salana to sui now that look there's always a market for being early to things totally and if you can have some sort of

new take and novel take and culture and onchain activity especially I think you're going to do very very well in this environment um exchange listings I think those will kind of open up for those protocols um but those are kind of like you know one way to think about coins is like movies or TV shows there's some that are like the Avengers where it's like they get go live in theaters people leave their houses to go see them they pay they sit down you know they put their time and attention there there are others that are like Indie movies that straight to DVD straight to Netflix you know I'll catch up on it if I hear good things or if I have time whatever I think the the Avengers of the

cycle movies you know those are going to do well the Indie movies I don't know there's still things like scroll you know that just basically down only price action and maybe it comes back but um you know that that's the risk of kind of being in that Indie movie category um I think the one thing that's been missing I was talking to Yano about this and he made I think a good point that there hasn't been any real new category creation this cycle dpin is probably the closest thing that people are excited about but I mean the things that what like what's doing well right now Bitcoin is running um meme coins and honestly come on how how how much can

you really talk about meme coins you know I don't want to be the Boomer being like these things feel overheated but that's kind of been my read on on them they're fun yeah I own a good amount of them but how many how how can you really talk about it on podcast whereas in in the past there was so much to nerd snipe you on defi that was ha I mean it just felt like this totally brand new very interesting thing to talk about maybe D I can't believe I'm hearing myself but like Desai as a category is the first thing I've kind of looked at as a new category creation I don't I don't think we need anything new okay so just just to like run this back a little bit uh meem coins okay there's some analogies to like the nfts of last cycle it's kind

of interesting people are punting it around it drives retail adoption uh dpin too broad of a category to say like oh that's something that's new like it's there everything if you boil it down like Bitcoin is deep in right yeah yeah I agree and so I think you can't really say like deepin is is one thing I I actually think there's no reason why defi isn't still the new the new thing based off of what happened in the election and I think being able to onshore and bring back defi into the United States is really the promise here and what we're going to look towards 2025 to accomplish we now have the ability to have decentralized Financial applications that aren't going to get

regulated into Oblivion and at least have a Sandbox for for you know whatever it is that they want to do so I actually think defi comes back in a in a very material away so we didn't talk about this actually but I was in Devcon I was in Bangkok the last week and I had a couple of takeaways first most important takeaway is never eat oysters when you're in Bangkok because you you will die which I did for about four days so never do that most important takeaway the second most important takeaway was I mean the Devcon conference is extremely well organized I was blown away by how many develop like they got 10,000 people to actually be in this Hall like the main event was was excellent but the amount of people that I talk to that are

excited about New York next year in the US and they're either moving back to New York or opening up an office in the United States or whatever it is I think there's a I think the next six months it's you see it on Twitter it is a narrative I understand that but I think it's real that people are going to be moving back and that this Market is opening back up and I think that's the story of 2025 100% we I mean we have three portfolio Founders who who had the exact same perspective you know moved away for the last three years hey it's time to let's let's go back to San Francisco let's go back to New York game on it's coming home it's coming home baby the other the other thing uh um that just got announced is uh FTX distributions will be no later than

March 2025 if we're talking about catalysts that are coming up there's a lot of cash that's going to get deliver back to you know crypto creditors that don't have any crypto left and and is I I would imagine that it actually starts earlier in q1 but you're going to start to see a lot of money flowing back to people who want to buy assets also all the VCS are selling their assets right that's the other shuttle butt which you know if if you think about so let's explain what we mean so last VC funds uh for most of these firms were raised at the end of 2021 early 2022 um what that means is typically you have

a twoyear uh investment cycle where you're investing for two years at the tail end of that you start to raise your next fund so that you can you know not miss and have like a gap where you don't have any Capital to invest what most Venture firms did just given 2022 uh was they extended that investment period for a year some of them didn't most of them did and so what you're coming up on is uh most of the Venture funds are are tail end of their Capital base so they're being a lot more choosy in terms of what they would deploy Capital into because they don't have much left and a lot of the funds at least the ones that we talked to were thinking about sharting their fund raise in let's say

June July August maybe even September uniformally were met with don't even think about it until after the election responses from their LPS and are now looking at starting right now or starting in q1 their fund raise process which typically takes six to nine months if you're you know a multiple hundred million dollar fund and that means that a lot of these funds also I think were given feedback which is we don't care about your marks we don't we don't care about the assets that you think are going to perform well we need to see DPI which is distributions out of your previous funds to be able to continue on and raise another fund maybe some of those LPS are like you got to give Capital back so I

can put it back in but a lot of the lp are are also just like you need to show that this stuff you know you can perform on distributions um because also you know the traditional Venture industry has had zero if you were in a venture fund that started in 2018 or later and you have any distributions 100% of those distributions came from crypto you have no traditional Venture distributions in the last six years and and so the the lp landscape is show me the distributions and I'll I'll show you the commitment to your new fund and that that is what is going on right now um amongst all of you know a bunch of our Pier funds which towards the end

of Q4 which you've got uh 30 more day 40 more days um they're going to be selling everything so they can get the distribution marks by the end of Q4 to be able to go raise the X Fund in q1 can you guys comment a little bit on has do you from your perspective has the one thing we've talked about is the allocator market has still been pretty lukewarm about crypto in general especially pre election has that changed at all from your guys perspective or what do you think yeah I think it has a bit um I think it has a bit especially with Bitcoin at 100K you have to pay attention um and you're too late for Bitcoin too which is kind of the other Dynamic where LPS used to be like why

should I why should I pay you to hold Bitcoin and E when you know I can just do it myself and the answer is you didn't do it yourself and so you missed it and now you're playing catchup and so the question is is like you know what strategy do you want to allocate to and basically the only strategies that make sense are a venture fund structure hedge funds and liquid funds I would say are still not in Vogue I would say that's not just a crypto thing like the era of like long short hedge fund dominance is probably receded and it's gone to like this more like pod shop model and maybe they get their crypto exposure through that at some point in a liquid context um I do think the market is sorely missing like more value

oriented liquid fund managers but that's kind of a different topic back though yeah the the value oriented liquid buyers I think frankly Venture funds will probably have like crypto Venture funds quote unquote will will be the ones that have to step in and and do that type of investing you know you you invested at a $200 million valuation and it trades on binance but it's trading at a 100 and it's doing 50 million in in revenue and 20 million in earnings like th those types of venture scale outcomes are still possible in the public markets it's just that nobody knows other than people like ourselves nobody knows you know where to find them where to get them how to get access how to work with

the team Etc like those are the the liquid Venture opportunities that crypto presents in a unique way but the allocator landscape I mean look we a lot of traditional kind of like endowments pensions foundations like they don't care who's in office they they want to know that this industry is legit and it's going to survive and I think anybody who was paying attention knew that it didn't really matter who won the white house uh as to whether or not this industry was going to survive but the the catalysts uh were were definitely you know faster One Way versus another um and it's more the like family offices the smaller ticket sizes that are like o this is interesting let's let's put some more money into this because we think that there's you know it's going to be a

good fund cycle and so I think from like an allocator perspective it really depends on what your LP base is if it's more kind of always on Capital endowments pensions uh foundations it's business as usual um maybe some of them are a little bit faster quicker on the draw um but I think you know what what you definitely see is the smaller ticket sizes the faster Capital um Family offices moving moving in the direction of crypto I think there's a big opportunity for the more value oriented funds in the space it the I guess the challenge there is that you've got to look past the shiny objects and you know there's going to all always when there are these crazy bull markets there's always some face melting returns that I it would be challenging if you were a

little bit more disciplined to the but there there are funds out there I gotta shout out the um they do a really good job on this they feel very disciplined I think I'm not sure if he's actually structured more as a hedge fund or as a VC shop but um Arthur's um Arthur want to split capital with Zahir yeah yeah Zahir does really well so I think there's going to be an upcoming cohort of of managers that maybe start a little bit smaller and it takes them a long time and the alpha there is just disciplined to stick to what you know but I think there will be those sorts of opportunities like Moro I don't know if you guys just saw went live today I mean it's pretty reasonable valuation really Blue Chip project they're great they're great protocol that just ships and moves very quickly

so I think there will be these opportunities and I don't know I've been seeing you know Chris berinsky sort of espouse this opinion that Meme coins I feel like you guys have been talking about this too sorry I now can't remember whose opinion this was maybe Vance I saw you Tweeting about this but it's gonna make the actual projects like show me the money right like the mem coins are sucking up a lot of the hot uh ball of money speculative type flows so now projects it's actually Inc combing on them to deliver results and I think there will be a handful of projects that do that in Spades so should be big opportunities but also fascinating to see how different people think about crypto markets um because it's just so Venture heavy and at a certain point that's kind of like an Albatros because it's just like

everyone's incentivized to launch new coins yeah very true what about the ones that already exist yeah yeah um because there should be especially if more value ends up moving to the application layer that should be I don't know I I feel like maybe a smaller handful of winners but the the scale of those winners should be very very large there are definitely 100 or more X opportunities out there in liquid markets today it's just tough to figure out which ones those are look the alpha the most Alpha that we can provide is go look at the def5 1.0 and the ones that are working and the ones that are alive and the ones that are transitioning to something new

I I think there's there's a lot of activity that's going on in that ecosystem that still is very much underneath the surface completely agree all right fellas anything else on your guys you want to chat about do we miss anything this week um no no thanks guys appreciate it yeah appreciate you guys this was uh sorry I missed last week uh but we'll we'll be back again next week and yeah I'll sh our telegram group if you guys are listeners come join um good debate good hangs so seriously free Alpha come in see you guys Financial advice that's [Music]