Building a Crypto Portfolio for 2025 | Dan Matuszewski & Roshun Patel

Transcript

yeah Dino coins are great I'm like making so much money it's there don't like you didn't catch every single one of these Dino coins some random 12-year-old on Tik Tok put out a video and ripped it up in general if I put a gun to my head I'd say like the basket of like Investments we make on top of the L1 will underperform the L1 itself but you just like sort of own both in conjunction you can't it's like doesn't work if you're not willing to do both components of it scale is the blockchain that is Simply Built different other L1 networks have costly transaction fees clunky user experiences and lack true adoption in Ai and onchain gaming explore the gas-free ecosystem at scale.

space ecosystem and follow their Journey on X at scale Network that is scale with a K hit the link in the show notes to get started hey everyone Jason here wanted to talk about something that's been on my mind a lot recently if we should not be just recreating the trfi industry that's why I'm excited to share with you that today's sponsor magic Eden is getting into token trading and their vision is to become onchain binance and then much more as the entire world moves onchain stay up to date with magic Eden's journey by giving them a follow on X at Magic Eden are you a project founder that wants your team to be paid and Stables or even just give your team token grants both of these things can

become complete nightmares toku simplifies every part of global token compensation all in 100 countries on one platform reach out to their incredible team at tok.com or by hitting the link in the description of today's episode hey everyone Jason here our friends over at Ledger are running some great holiday deals upgrade to their latest product The Ledger Flex while earning $70 in Bitcoin offers valid until December 23rd or while supplies last so be sure to hit the link in the description of today's episode so you don't miss out on this really good deal what's up everyone welcome back to Empire quick disclaimer the views shared here are the guests and only the guests

all such views are for informational purposes only they do not constitute and should not be construed or relied upon as legal business investment or tax advice row how' we do excellent that was perfect thanks couldn't have done better myself great um we have two sworn enemies back on the show row going head-to-head versus Dan what's up fellas wait what yeah it's good oh God how we doing good good yeah stuff is up um I am seeing I gotta pull both you guys into the better view here so Dan we got a Pepe painting here and row I think I see a Tungsten tungsten cube in the bottom left are we that that point in the cycle uh we never

left the cubes you know um the cubes were last I assume that was bought in a much lower cost basis uh yeah I was actually looking at Midwest tungsten's website they've uh really jacked up the prices on some of these these bundles and cubes I think uh the demand went a little wild because they know the Bitcoin boys are back yeah yeah I feel like they look at the price they're like 100k and they just add a zero to the cubes they definitely do their like targeted marketing when like the price moves up I definitely start getting the emails 100% Dan what is what is your size Cube that we're working with these days I think I bought all the ones they'll ship there's like a six a seven and an eight I think it's 8 inches the biggest one the heaviest one is 250

lbs won't ship it over that or at least they won't ship to me over that so that ways i' I've exhausted the list for for the new for the Empire newcomers uh what's the story of the Tung and cubes guys how did this what's the lore I remember Naraj was talking about on Twitter with I think Nick Carter I think that's like where I first saw it and then I was like oh we got to get one then I just bought it and then I was like well how much bigger can they get and then that just sort of went down the r hole Yeah I can't remember I felt like it was like came from like telegram or group chat or something and then it kind of made its way to Twitter but yeah it sort of blew up and there was and then

Nick Carter and then Dan I think you just yeah plopped it remember there's like that photo in the Wall Street Journal narage in that like ridiculous kitchen and he like he's just looking at the cube yeah that's iconic that was like almost to the week the 2021 it like November 10th or something it was like breakpoint yeah yeah the tungsten cubes are back what dam what's the story of the uh the Pepe painting let's see this thing here office so he D It just fits look at it like hits against the ceiling it's like it's beautiful it's actually leaning a little bit but yeah it's gorgeous yeah I had prate to like a framer in town who like thinks I'm a lunatic now but we had we just need some stuff for the office not wrong nice um all

right Fells well a whole bunch of stuff to talk about I I'd love to I mean I think there's a bunch of folks who are just unsure of what is happening in the markets today so I wanted to yeah I mean I think people know both of your guys' backgrounds but maybe we could start with um there's kind of two views it feels like of this cycle and so one one of the views is like uh Trump is uh we we've never had a we've never had seen crypto with this like bull president it's the you know biggest government in the world with the with a bull market president and like this cycle is just like is is going to be a last cycle wasn't the super cycle this is the super cycle maybe we'll see 30 or 40 or 50% draw downs but you know

this cycle is going to be different than all other Cycles that's that's one view the other view is like hey maybe we top like somewhere between May to October so because I've seen some Cycles I'm G to be quote smart money around this and start selling early and this cycle looks no different than other Cycles uh just curious how you guys shape out on that yeah danan you want to rip it first sure um I don't think it feels much different yet except there's a little bit of a constant bid in Bitcoin in particular uh maybe a little bit Neath but not really um like just because there is like a conduit into more sort of traditional flows um I can ETF in particular and then like I would say micro strategy sort of putting floor in it but there's sort of a set of risk

different that come along with that but either way I think your the old coins will have sort of the same Market cycle I think you'll just see more nuted responses on the way down in Bitcoin Eve I I will say I thought that last time and that just ended up not being the case so there's a world that that's wrong I do like to think they're hitting a little bit of like a Al like valuation where their volatility will start to come down a bit but I think the rest of the Market's going to do the crazy swings right like your mem coin to your AI chatbot to your sort of alll one like those are GNA have just as much Market Cycles going forward yeah for sure I I I tend to agree largely with that like I think the rotations are still in play I

really I mean I think you know given where we are now it's logical to maybe ask this question but I I really don't think we've toed yet in at least the majors maybe in some other stuff like closer to it but uh personally I'm expecting like pretty strong uh Jan inflows into etf's funds like Dan I don't know if you remember well you definitely remember won yeah remember that where like January was just like all everyone got their check yeah yeah and like these Boomer ic's are so like they're talking now and they've been talking since Thanksgiving about what do we do in January when we're back from Aspen or whatever and uh I think um yeah you should see some pretty strong inflows I think it's a little little silly to kind of try to step in front of that or try to be too cute but yeah you

know December seasonality exists a little bit March and may for sure summer for sure so you know I think as you go into March or may you can maybe think a little bit more about portfolio rebalancing but for now it's like it feels pretty healthy also like if you caught us at a good time right where a week ago I was probably a little bit more like if per funding was at like 150% and pre-wash out like straight through 100K uh you know you'd have to be a little more careful on this podcast but you know we saw the flush the flush happened things got you know kind of washed out and uh yeah now today is a really supportive day like you know we rallied and and funding is still pretty is really flat like it's really off of where it was so yeah I think signs are

looking pretty solid yeah I think the idea though that like cryto Traders aren't going to over leverage themselves is like yeah it's silly like we're gonna continue every time and the Cycle's never really truly different you know it just you know just your trading changes that's but maybe the only thing that's different is that there's so many people who have seen this is now their third or their fourth cycle so everybody is it does feel like something in the air right now is like everyone's looking for the top whereas I don't think that was the case last cycle last cycle it was like we could go to 400k bitcoin and like this thing's going to change the world and now the conversation is like is this a top signal is this a top signal is this a top signal yeah but to be fair like on the way up like people

were doing the like like it's always that way right like people start fading it all the way up and they start looking for Tops and then at the top they're like it's going to go higher like I don't know that just tends to be the the way heuristically you talk to people about it it goes yeah I feel like like that's why really like the last leg of any real cycle is like probably the most parabolic because of this exact sentiment where you have people who have you know trimmed a bit or a little under less exposed than they were before um I don't think that that part necessarily changes I do think the PTSD from you know multiple cycles and knowing that crypto tends to go up a bunch and down a bunch sets in but I don't think it's necessarily unwarranted so like yeah

people are you know looking at signs seeing journals uh or seeing like the Wall Street Journal article headlines or whatever about everyone's getting rich off vcoins and whatnot uh you know there there are little things here and there but overall I think you know the last leg is always the most parabolic and we I don't think we've seen it yet yeah do you Ro do you still believe it's a sell and may go away type of type of well I know we were talking about that the other day well you know I don't want to be like like look like if if you're this thing for the long term like you know never who cares about it like whatever May November but my my thinking is that if you know if November of next year is truly like let's say the top and it's not like March or you know it's later

it's after q1 of next year I do think like generally you'll always kind of have a good buying opportunity in the summer so I think if you're trading more tactically or have like a a liquid book or something um yeah Dr risking in you know late q1 early Q2 and then just looking to buy the summer blood has historically worked really well in crypto though and I don't see why it necessarily doesn't continue to work maybe I'm wrong but you know it feels pretty solid Dan do you think like that or you just wait for some blowoff top to happen uh I mean I don't try to like pick seasonality as much I'd say I mean the ends up working out that way a lot of times um I think you just like you want to look for like the froth in the market right like you want to look on

like funding is massively extended people are like lever to the tits like I mean you're getting degrees of this for sure right like there was pretty good leverage which is what Unwound over the last couple days um I knew got blown out and like people just like reaching for risk everywhere um I think that's just like the biggest thing is you haven't like it's been pretty still contained to the crypto Universe though it's like gotten a little bit out like when Ripple started flying and everyone was talking on Tik Tok about Ripple like that's like where you see it breaking out sort of into the main stream at some point there's no more marginal buyer right like if everyone's already like in it like then everybody's in it so it's like have to start thinking being like well like this doesn't sort of like work like

there's no like pool of like passive Capital that's like sort of like coming through it um and like I said that changes a little bit now that you have like traditional pools that potentially are moving into this thing um via the ETF product um or even micro strategy right like that's like another conduit into it so that it changes things a little bit on the Bitcoin specific side but either way like you you see you big what is everywhere like people are trading memes and levered up then like you know like there's you're pretty extended into this thing yeah yeah go ahead r no no I I agree with that Al I would also say like relative to the previous um you know I think the fact that the last cycle like the last bare Market came with such a brutal um like just cataclysmic implosion of credit and

then also like the macro side of things like that was definitely a catalyst for for downside and I think in this like right now at least looming on the horizon there's not too much that's super obvious that could like be like you know Luna level or like you know Mass uh overthe counter lending kind of implosion looming so like I think like that kind of catalyst doesn't hasn't yet may not ever like materialize I mean maybe you could point to certain things but really there's nothing is obvious so that helps a bit you maybe smooth out this one and U but it also still affects the minds of like people that experienced that 2022 year which was obviously awful 2022 was different right like 2022 was a bare market and like a credit contraction exactly it's like

it's missed it was a lot different than other cycles and this is so many people didn't make it out the other side right it wasn't just like you lost a lot of money it's like you lost more money than you had and you like actually got out of it which would like hadn't it obviously people blown themselves up with like perss and leverage and stuff but people really got like all sides like larger institutions people like we lost some old Soldiers sort of to speak in that one oh yeah rip that was much different than previous like their markets and to be fair like from my advantage point like we were pretty active in the credit markets back then like we have not seen that come back in any real size um like there's bits and pieces of it you see people trying to like spin it back up

and credit will get looser as like people start just leaving that this will go up forever but as of right now like there's not the same like access to like borrow and especially terms that were sort of back then so that's a big difference I think at this point in the cycle last year so what like uh you know Christmas 2020 credit was flowing right Genesis had genesis's book was massive already right yeah I mean credit got like a mini reset during the March 12th 2020 move where you know L the the the co crash right that kind of like reshuffled it a bit but then I think it It ultimately bleeds down to like a little bit of you know canelon effect in the sense of once the spigot opened at the top which is really the fed and like QE Infinity postco I think it it really

just bled into all lending markets and and the crypto lenders were kind of maybe at the tail end of it like you know it starts with the banks then it goes down then but you see it right it's like the hedge funds are getting more exposure and leverage they want more demand for it or they have more demand for it and it kind of bed bleeds down so yeah that at that time credit was flowing I I don't know if we're necessarily in you know December of 2020 if it's a Perfect Analogy but at least from a credit perspective yeah it's much different for sure what's funny is like people were insolvent during like the covid crash they just got saved like a lot of people were probably they were just like I hope it goes up it just pouned back so [ __ ] sharp that like

everybody's like all right like maybe we weren't like too super solvent at this period but like we're okay now so I think like got papered over a lot of like a potential credit event that could have happened there is that like I mean you don't know but like what you hear is that there was definitely some entities that were like very close to if not like underwater for a short period of time there no doubt no doubt Lord knows the [ __ ] FTX was at that time like probably was under water to like doesn't like you don't really sort of know because you get saved if the market like rallies yeah but is there is there a question then that where it's like okay that is happening this cycle you just don't know because every number is going up like FTX blockfi Celsius Luna like that's the

thing you can't even get it if you want it yeah yeah you're just talking you're talking about credit I mean but there were other like I mean Luna wasn't Luna was just some like weird ponzu FTX was a fraud blockfi and Celsius were just credit I mean or like you know borrowing from retail like there are these different flavors of it right so in this cycle you could say like I don't know is micro strategy a risk is something like you know other people's words not mine is something like Athena a risk like restating a risk these are all things that are risk yeah yeah for sure yeah these are all risks I mean to to the three that you spoke about I think um micro strategy is probably the most interesting one it reminds me you know

not not exactly but a little bit similar to um the gbtc premium nav discount like basically the way I think that this could potentially play out um or the risk at least like you know it wouldn't be ideal but basically if micro strategy if there's an exodus of capital from crypto for whatever reason right people who are in micr strategy stock will sell it right and that'll drive the stock back closer to its net asset value but if they still want out it might even it could potentially drive it to below its net asset value at that point there is a decent Arbitrage flow that could come in it's sort of like fundamental Arbitrage it's not true where it's like hey I can buy micro strategy at a discount to the Bitcoin Holdings on its balance sheet right which is what you could do at gbtc

in the bare Market it was a 50% discount to spot however at a certain point if there's not enough demand to support that Arbitrage flow then there's an ABS solute bottomless pit on the on the equity price that is I think the tail rist there that that that that may come out but it's a lot of series of events would have to happen to get there but yeah like basically the reflexivity on the way up for micro strategy with the premium and this Recycling and kind of the yield pitch of it can work uh equally both ways I don't know if you agree with that Dan I was thinking about I think I mean I think there's just like this there's definitely a line of reasoning that people put out there being like oh like they don't have to sell the Bitcoin so it doesn't matter

and like I don't think that's right because if it starts to trade it a discount to the nav people will they're going to be pressured to right like people will buy that and sell Bitcoin or like people were just like well I could buy some ETF or I can just buy discounted Bitcoin in the strategy like people just use it as a substitute good and they're just buy that so like it does have an effect on the overall price in the same way it affects it on the way up like it's like you're not in a vacuum yeah like to put it simply I think there's a certain amount of notional dollars that are willing to buy micro strategy at a discount to nav either just outright or or against a short ETF or short Bitcoin spot position as more of like a basis ARB trade but that is a

limited amount of capital and if that ever runs dry relative to outflow demand um you know then the then then it could be a pretty pretty negative downward spiral do folks not on the on the market back to the leverage for a second do folks what's why is uh leverage not building up in the system like is it that there's no supply of Leverage like the block F and csuses and the Genesis don't exist anymore or is that just the demand hasn't gotten that crazy yet so there still leverage right like Perpetual like financing like still show you like there's like still like the oi and crypto is still gigantic and it's like I don't know if it's at the highs but I bet it's pretty damn close to it um but there's no uncat borrow like P2P like there was like that's like not

really a thing you can't like go borrow from somebody against like a basket of assets or like you have to like do it with the exchanges and exchanges like are a different past because they can just blow you out of it really quickly like they can also just ADL like there's like mechanisms they have for controlling that risk a little bit differently like you can't you can't go negative on yourself right now like it's hard to put yourself in a position that's let say you can lose more than you like put in yeah yeah exactly like the pers yeah I think you know the the the the pers is kind of it's it's it's impressive that they can still blow out so much on annualized funding even when this basis traded the perve trade has become so popularized like it's not a new trade it's it's it's relatively old and I

think that's an exemplification of the fact that people aren't aren't getting enough dollars into crypto so like the interest rate gets bit up in the derivatives markets relative to like you know it happens over the counter and then people can actually keep the basis relatively in line so there's still leverage just it's not there's no hidden lending I guess going on or like offscreen as much will that come back it hasn't I I'm skeptical like there's just not for it yet yeah like eventually it come I don't know I just feel like human nature with at some point people go back to the whole like oh this yield is worth it like these will it will it be on chain though that might be the big difference is it is it really different it's just like how you settling it yeah

right like the by definition unsecured credit is like yeah sure you could make the unsecured loan on chane incend it for my wallet to Dan wall he go yeah rips like zero GTE calls I don't know I I don't know it never looks the same it'll it'll come back at some point I just don't I in general like the crypto industry is still like pretty starved for like Risk Capital right like you still can't borrow like money from traditional venues in any capacity right like that's kind of crazy like I can't go to a bank and be like hey I want to borrow and I own X right like you can't do that yeah yeah yeah I mean the whole the whole debt markets are shut off to crypto companies too like not just funds

and individuals but if you're a company and I mean unless you're someone like a coinbase like you you're forced into a series a then a b then a c then a d like there's no there's no debt markets available too yeah market right I mean like would not have been like great like a lot of your counterparties would have fallen over yeah yeah the the crypto Market makes it I think just a little difficult to do truly unsecured or like illiquid AB kind of stuff because it just moves so fast like you know like these companies that are used to making loans to like you know they're like real they're like normal companies with stable flows and they like they kind of just acrew over time like a trading firm in crypto's net asset value can move quite massively like relatively quickly and unless you have like a real realtime

sense of it like you're not really going to be comfortable with any degree of unsecured or illiquid Al kind of stuff so I think that got like exposed and um it's a structural problem right like unless the volatility in crypto gets completely sucked out um I don't know like it's it's gonna be hard to overcome that particular hurdle yeah Dan what's your sense of what takes down this market like are there any Market you it sounds like me buying a watch when I buy a watch I'll tell you guys just s like blow this thing up yeah this is just be porn here um all right we can let's let's talk again it's the same thing it always is it's just like it's apathy right it's like people get disinterested in and they move

somewhere else like I don't know trunk comes in and he's like everybody who's ever tried to do an IPO for the last two years go for it right and then suddenly you got like 500 new companies that push through everybody wants to start trading then my crypto is not as interesting yeah all right pivot let's talk about uh two charts eth BTC and soul eth um eth BTC is starting if you zoom in enough on the screen we're making a little we're making hold on there we go that's what we're that's what we're looking at here is a little ebtc coming up um Dana row what what are your thoughts on how this chart plays out this the rest of this year or excuse me the rest of the cycle um yeah man talking about the ebtc chart is just like an absolute Widowmaker it's like every time you

think uh it can't get much worse it continues to get worse this year but look I I'll say this like now that bitcoin's br 100K the the the more Bitcoin goes and like some of this other stuff like the I feel like the the more relatively cheap eth kind of looks right so you know the thing about crypto is like everything is always kind of mean reverting like whether you bought Ripple in 2017 or you know slata in 2019 you may have performed the same as of one week ago so I don't know I tend to believe that things that get exaggerated one way kind of come back so yeah like eth probably goes up you know it's uh it's fine I I would I don't want to call a bottom on E BTC because it's like a cursed thing to say but um yeah looks

good I'll give a little bit of nuance answer I bet I bet it trades a lot of beta right so I would imagine that so e continues to outperform like e BTC or even just like Bitcoin on the way up but on the way down I think'll just have the exact inverse right like I think these things will like revert back to their historic median if we get like a bit of a bare Market see now I'm the bear on the you just think continues as it is like I think the trend probably continues though epc's been kind of flat now for a bit yeah so you just think soul is higher beta than eth and in eth is higher beta than Bitcoin and then I mean same thing obviously on the way down yeah yeah I mean like look like how much of the just net sort of interest in

what's going on like in crypto is related to sort of this mecoin phenomenon like if that were a sudden return on a dime like Soul would be the biggest like loser of that and it would sort of like and and you could see that happening in a detracted like bare Market yeah it oh I was just going to say ebtc kind of was up for a bit like during that 2022 Bear right like it didn't exhibit that downside beta um it did have the mer it's true the merge right and now we have the Splurge so yeah I think thing btc's got going for it is if any of this like L2 stuff like plays out the way they think it has I guess like really coinbase is the one doing all the heavy lifting there

yeah yeah the S is so bad though it is just it is you just want to earn some quick Twitter points just go like make some like each jokes and like people just pile on yeah yeah yeah it's quite it's quite funny yeah if you if you post something like bullet sheep like the amount of Engagement you get relative to something like salano or AI related it's night and day it's wild or God forbid you make like a bearish post that you're over like no one will like it not a [Laughter] do you uh you guys think do you guys think the L1 trade is still on yeah of course I think it's gonna be huge like have you not seen my monad bags no all right ostic of it I mean

like look at what hyperledger just did Hy R sorry hyperledger is John Co say I just that's hyper Lan hyper dude there's to the R3 blockchain thing right right there's also hyper Drive there's all sorts there's too many of these anyway I should know this Eric will kill me um yeah no uh like right that's like a great example of sort of one of these things getting out there and just like reating super higher I mean you got Barra probably next though that's like really confusing when that is actually gonna hit um it sounds like January I don't know I've been like it's been a month away for like six months so I'm just trying to like pick it I I have no inside baseball there but anyway I

think these things are going to trade huge yeah I mean it seems like what so movement came out of the gates traded at like what seven or eight or nine well I don't know what hyper liquid's at roow I know you've you probably tracked that thing pretty closely magic Eden tra like yeah magic eeden I thought opened at like 12 or something ridiculous I don't know yeah but it was only there for like a second yeah it l it was like it looked a little like the Haw Tu can can you guys explain that to me when something trades it like opens it why why does magic Eden open at 12 billion what is the what's going on in the background that makes that happen uh I mean do want like if like the crazy timla hat theory on it or do you want just like the probably like

more likely than not it's just like people have like bad bids like in a level or like there's some chunk of liquidity that they that's not that's not interesting for the podcast purposly like paint the tape to like make it look high but I don't generally no no I don't think it's I don't I mean that's the that's very nefarious if that were the case but I think it's more like hey look the air drop is live the token's live there's Maybe small amount of liquidity seated or not but it's like there's two types of people there's people that want to be like oh Magic un's Al I'll buy a little token and then there's people that actually claim the air drop and sell into it and those opening hours both of those sides are relatively thin that the thing can just go everywhere it's completely untethered from any

price like it's just there's no there's not a lot of training there yeah exactly it's just like a little bit of thin volume and then it finds its true value relatively soon it's not like you know if you got a huge air drop you would have necessarily able to sell it all up there right yeah why did nobody why were there no for hyper liquid row yeah that's a that's um that's an interesting one I mean I think the hyper liquid Community it's a little different than like the people that you know maybe like Farm something for an airdrop and then once they're done with the air drop they withdraw and they're done like the the the people that hold the thing are genuinely people that like I feel like use the platform pretty much every day and it's relatively sticky so they have this loyalty that's like actually like

you know kind of Raw to the platform and they want to be bullish the thing that they like and they use so much and then obviously the hype like hyper liquid I think made a smart move going with this like kind of hype chain uh maneuver rather than trying to just be a pure Dex so you know they're inviting Builders to come and like yeah do things on the chain and build like daps that support the exchange so like it's getting this little bit of a premium like hey hyper liquid relative to maybe a normal perex token it might seem like very wildly pric but relative to like an L1 it's actually pretty reasonable if not you know cheap so I think the the the holders are are are putting those two things since their calculus which is you know they they love the platform and

they think it's a it's a layer play not a DEX token play so yeah going back to the L1 trade there's um I mean it seems like there's a bunch coming out in q1 right you've got Mega oh one one thing one thing I'll add on the hyper liquid though to not be super like you know moon boy on it is I do think just given the amount of liquid wealth it created if this Market ever is in a position where it wants cash liquidity I would be interested to see like kind of how how deep it goes there because and that would might might be an interesting opportunity but in any case uh yeah like it created a massive amount of liquid wealth so like you know this the things I'm saying where do that where does that flow to I think it's just flowing it's just

there it's like people just don't sell it selling it right it's it hasn't flowed anywhere yeah where where where will it flow like the like Sal people who made a lot of money in salana they didn't move that money into optimism and arbitrum they didn't start buying eth nfts they just moved it to you know start buying jeta and they're buying Jupe and they're messing around with I mean it's the meme coins like they're messing around with the meme coins like it all stayed in salana yeah I mean hype has some stuff on its exchange and there might be there will be some daps on it with their own tokens I don't know maybe you could see that but yeah as far as I can tell it's kind of idle I don't know Dan yeah about guess I'd be Sana Jason more than it is

ether Bitcoin yeah Fair sorry I interrupted you you were gonna say something no I just going to go back to the L1 trade because it feels like q1 probably even actually January specifically is like I I mean monad mega eth bar chain like uh abstract chain which seems like people are are liking right now what I mean just what is your sense of how this all plays out like they all just catch a bid and it all rips or one does much better than the other one uh better than the other one's going to be relative to way they open I think um because like some of these are probably going to open pretty high um so like you may not just get a crack at it liquid like where you sort of would be as interested I think like what's very

interesting about hyper Li you kind of got a window there to buy it but like it was very hard um but like there was like a 48 hour period where you could take a crack at it um some of these might just might not like because they're going to like be a little more like organized with a market maker across like a bunch of centralized venues and they'll probably have some like level that they open at um so anyway like in terms of like performance I I mean your your bigger games are going to be in the ones that are like a little more the underdog and like turn around a little bit as are the ones that are like sort of like priced in for Perfection which like may also like trade up but like be a little more the typical sort of like structure

you see is like something like grows higher right to one billion valuation and like you hit a home run and it's like looks like you're G to be even overtaking some other like L1 like you're going to like appreciate much faster than something that's like baked in is like already like a core L1 when it goes out to Market so it's all just about expectations yeah I agree some of these things have huge expectations on them coming out of the gate yeah they do they do and mon they all like they're they're priced very well like they're not really price check because they're not out there but my gut is they're going to price to like a very an FTB that's already like a lot of success baked into it which isn't a bad thing it's just GNA be you got to grow into that a little yeah I think the ones

if they could somehow figure out or I don't know if there's a way to launch at a cheaper Val I do think it's just better like I think that actually it reduces so much downside risk in the future get builds like at least gives people like the opportunity to to get into it liquid like something that hyper um liquid I think did decently well I mean obviously you had to be quick and you were like you had to be there but um I don't know cautiously changed the narrative I think that like I hopefully that happened with enough time before any of these other projects that right coming out in 21 can like pivot a little bit and find a way to like match it it's hard because you run into a lot of regulatory problems right like supress like how do you keep a price suppressed

like okay you have to introduce Supply boom regular right or like and then you can't like well it's like all right well what if I sell it to like 20,000 people but then like can you explain that I didn't get that well like what would keep the price of a thing low at open if there's like an innate massive amount of demand and people want um exposure to it like something like that's very hyped up and and and expected to be worth a lot in the future yeah you need you need to introduce Supply right but then it's like selling something especially in the united like in a lot of jurisdictions and I'm not a lawyer so nla not legal advice but yeah like within a year like at the day of something going live like selling something like there's all sorts of complications that can come into that

so you I feel like that's avoided right like back in the day you just Ico like a big slug of it and then like that would be how you get distribution like you can't there's not a great model for that yet yeah exactly how did how did hype do this well hype did is by airdropping so much of it yeah I see yeah s gu is the other way you can do it it's a little but then like you gotta figure out how do I air drop this how do I void SI like all that jazz like there's like other set of problems that go with it um that is like I think a good thing to be doing I think project should be giving out more of it um but like it's just it's a it is a tough it's also specifically hard with

like l1s where like you need it to launch with a native token out of the gate and it's like well how do I then like airdrop it to people that are using it like that that can be like a little bit of a challenge right through the crowd sale that like you can't take that pass yeah Dan as a um as a big monad investor do you from an Investor's point of view want them to launch at as high of evaluation as possible because you're like great my bags or is it like look my long-term bags I want them to actually launch low because I think that's better for them what would be from i' would rather than go into evaluation I mean like if as I would say figure out a way that you can get a bunch of this in people's hands at

a cost basis that's low enough like that would be like my and I do think they're thinking along those lines it's just it is a regulatory and like legal problem more than it is like a marking and like what are people like it's not like this like not this inherent I think idea that people who have like bought these things on like lower cost basis just like want it to be like up a ton because like that doesn't like work for anybody like longer term like you want to figure out a way to get distribution it's just been very hard to do that compliant and a lot of the attempts at doing that in the past have like not worked out great right like air drops a little bit of a checker history of like sort of how they work yeah wholeheartedly agree what's the M I do think this is

what this is what KOB trying to fit right like this is like part of what he's trying to yeah yeah and like coinless has a similar product they they're compliant there's always going to be a world that like people who don't want to do I know Kobe's checklist I don't know when you guys signed up for Echo but like the checklist when you go through onboarding it's like you know 80 questions long of like are you aware these things will lose money like I'm like oh this is this is going to some regulator yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly it and I mean coinless has had a similar product for a while um which has been I mean a lot of people got into the salana one that way that was like great yeah so there are there are some solutions they're just not they're not massively

adopted yet um I mean like I don't know how many people Echo has but I guess it's under I don't know the counter is uh I was with the founder last night he put something up on Echo it's sold he raised 500k in two minutes that yeah so you gota keep the limits low and you gota like try to like get bro on it too yeah there's like a couple of them now Forge yeah whatever it is that one's like that that one's a little on the like not compliance but like yeah it's an option okay yeah I don't know anything they don't kyc so you just do it got it got it interesting I mean there was something quite elegant and Democratic about like a 24hour 48 hour shot clock with an Ico you just rip it and then you get the tokens like when

everyone else does then it's on binance or something it was nice so bad at the end of the yeah yeah it went too far like all good things it goes too far you know it got so toxic it always goes like that you know I guess pump fun is kind of I don't know like has like Ico DNA in it maybe I don't know I mean yeah it's Democratic in that sense it's just I don't know it's just thing there's not there's no like it's not like you need to raise capital for something scale is the blockchain that is Simply Built different let's face it other L1 networks have costly transaction fees that increas as the network gets busier scale has has solved

this problem with a gas-free scalable infrastructure where users never pay gas fees scale was awarded the most active gaming chain in 2023 by coin Gecko and host five of the top 25 games on dap radar you should definitely check out scale I was using it the other day it really is incredible to use that's scale spelled with a K hit the link in the show notes or head on over to scale dospace ecosystem to get started today hey everyone Jason here I wanted to take a second to break down why magic Eden is getting into token trading their team is extremely concerned that crypto is still Consolidated in the hands of a few centralized exchanges who act as Gatekeepers ultimately recreating the

trafi space they believe that crypto is still missing an onchain binance and their aim is to move trading completely onchain fully decentralized they've done $6 billion in nft volume in the last 3 years and have had more than 1.4 million users visit their platform in the past year making them the number one nft platform in the market today they are the ones that can do it stay up to date with magic Eden's journey by giving them a follow on X at Magic Eden are you a project founder struggling to pay your team in Stables or even just giving them token grants I've seen this issue firsthand throughout the space traditional payroll or E providers don't support crypto even

if you wanted to do it yourself it's really complicated to figure out all the tax withholdings report to the IRS or any government and manage local filings toku simplifies every part of global token compensation everything from paying full-time employees in stable coins issuing token grants to your team and investors all in 100 countries on one platform you can plug toku into your existing payroll setup or even choose a fully managed service no guesswork no missed deadlines no complexity reach out to their incredible team at tok.com or by hitting the link in the description of today's episode earlier in today's episode I mentioned Ledger latest products the stacks and flex and I wanted to take a

few seconds to tell you more about them these wallets feature the world's first secure touchscreens which don't just simplify your digital transactions but also keep them extremely safe these wallets are virtually impenetrable to online attacks because they store your private key in a secure offline chip you can manage more than 5,500 tokens and install up to 100 apps choose the most trusted name in Hardware wallets and take control of your digital Security today at ledger.com or hit the link in the description of today's episode to check out their latest wallets all right let me all right let me extend this conversation then into I tweeted this yesterday and got a bunch

of [ __ ] in my DMs mainly from VCS who did not like this take I said uh combo of meme coins the return of icos success of non-vc products like hyper liquid and bad performance from the big funds feels bearish for crypto Venture and obviously crypto Venture firms did not like this take um Ro no one from hack reached out so you guys you're good you're good but uh yeah what I mean what do you guys think of this I mean the Market's ripping and like random names or flying huge amounts like Venture crypto Venture funds are going to have a great time going out and raising money in the near future so I'm like skeptical of like the like the macro sort of nature of that of like it being bearish for c benture i I do think

that it's giving I think it's forcing the conversation of like how do we actually get this thing to have some Ico like properties and get distribution better like the FTV meme like needs to die and what's funny is like we used to get so much [ __ ] for this in 2021 it was like definitely even like a meme that got passed around with our logo on it about and like we we surprisingly had little control over those terms that like teams were going out with but I do think that it's putting some pressure to get like the distribution better yeah yeah exactly I think you know I think there's going to be a balance here that's ultimately struck like you can argue in 2017 um the the the icos were just a little too out of control and like you know Venture was still good but it was

relatively small then it kind of went all the other way right there's like no Public Access Venture is the only way you can get exposure to this stuff and then all you know all the Insiders have the tokens and then retail has to buy it at whatever they kind of get I feel like the ultimate state of this like with stuff like hyper liquid kind of showing it is like let's figure out distribution and like get it so that and I think a lot of you know Venture rounds are kind of doing this where like investors will take less allocation and be like hey look get like 120k checks in and uh that's going to be quite beneficial so you know there there's going to be some Reckoning in terms of like balancing out distribution and not having it be like just in investors then public investors

kind of get whatever price they they can rip on a liquid market so I don't think it's necessarily bearish for crypto Venture I think it's a forcing function for evolution of how cryto Venture is architected maybe you know if you were raising right now would you go to Echo would you just do like would you kind of copy the hyper liquid Playbook would you just go raise from like the traditional crypto Venture firms I just text Dan I um I think it'd be depending a lot on what I was building uh I think if I was building something that sat on top of an L1 I would probably approach the L1 for funds and I would then be like L my plan is to like give half this thing away via airdrop and then figure out a good way

to do that obviously there's a lot of nuance in like what you're building and like what your plan is and like what the purpose of the token is um if I raising an L1 I would try and go and raise like a massive round via like an echo coin list fund style and just get as many participants as I can yeah I do think you could legitimately probably raise like $10 million that way if you like had a more yeah I agree with that for sure for sure um Dan why um so I see you in all these monad like ecosystem deals like the apps building on monad what is the um what is the return uh what is the math of that like do you are you trying to make money on these obviously you're trying to make money are you do you think the return will be high on these

on these applications or is it more like look I own so much monad that I need there to be an ecosystem on monad like yeah did the same thing with sonana like back in the day and like we weren't around for eat but sort of the same process is like you own a big slug of the L1 you just like build you're going to need like the functionality on top of it so you're like subsidized sort of like financing a bunch of that stuff not that we don't think it'll be performant like some of it may like overoll but like in general if I put a gun to my head I'd say like the basket of like Investments we make on top of the L1 will underperform the L1 itself but you just like sort of own both in conjunction you can't it's like doesn't

work if you're not willing to do both components of it yeah yeah they tend to be cheaper too and it's like nowadays I feel like you have seen a slight subtle maybe Renaissance of like apps like okay sure hyper liquid is maybe more of an L1 app but it is kind of an app token too but some of the stuff on salana even L1 mainnet things that have launched recently like they're they're command commanding like valuations that maybe l1's would have early in like back in 2021 so and especially if you can get them at like you know eight or 10x cheaper price relative to an L1 seed or magic Eden magic Eden is an app it's not right right there you go yeah right say is I don't know you gota let's say back 25 and like magic e one yours and you like average that return profile against

like salana itself like it probably underformed by a little be my guess at least historically that's how we' seen it yeah it's hard because it's it it it's a scenario where like your the application built on top of it will do really well if the underlying L1 explodes in popularity which will also cause like price appreciation yeah it's is like don't bother those Venture stuff just buy like the underlying right like that's like which is possible but if everybody does that then nothing gets done yeah how do you when you hit a winner how do you I was talking to ro about this the other day um and I we didn't finish the conversation the conversation so I'm curious to get both of your views

how do you or is is there even a way to lock in a price like to hedge a winner on a liquid uh liquid investment all right let me use an example movement just went live let's say you let's say you invested 100K into movement you're sitting on probably 25 million of locked move right now nice it's nice but it's locked and maybe you think the bull maybe you think the bull Mark maybe your first your vesting Cliff you got foure vest one year cliff and you think the first Cliff is going to hit end of the end of next year or something like that I'm making these numbers up um how do you yeah how do you lock in so you're like oh man I I'd love to you know maybe lock in 10 million of this move instead

of sitting on 25 million of loock the move hypothetically how do you get like how do you lock in that price do you just go to some someone like second lane and you're like let me hey is there a market and I'll sell it to you for 50% discount you is there something you can do with perss that I'm just not smart enough to do like how do you think about that yeah so yeah you can always try to just sell the position that's kind of hard I don't find a lot of there's no buy actually selling the stff you mean yeah yeah so like there's two worlds right it's where those support a Saft reassignment which where like you can sell something and like the foundation that ultimately like keeps the record is like AR like we can like move this from here to here um they don't like to do

that for like reason and like that just is very and like they're also like you're making work for me so like we just like don't want to like be involved in this so more often than not like that's not an option the other option then is you can face each other and like do you can do the risk transfer where it's just like all right I'm willing to buy this at X price on like a forward basis like I'll pay you your moving staff's worth $10 million today if you were to like take the fully diluted on it like I'll give you two for it and you can either more likely than not like you're just doing a risk transfer so like you're locking in the econ on that but you don't get paid until the tokens like actually transfer it's it's much more unlikely that you can get them to

front you the credit and like give you the money for that position but like in in a world you could do that you could be like all right like I'll sub this you on a forward basis you give me cash now like that's a legal heavy one you're gonna need to like paper that pretty well um just because now you're taking like credit exposure to each other uh well one person saying it to the other but and then the other way you can do it is you can hedge it via derives but you need a lot of collateral right because if like you want to sell this thing you're going to have to post a hefty amount of like collateral to be able to like sell it down and you're going to pay financing on it right like there's going to be a cost to hedge that um like

in a bull market you might just get paid to be short it because like the the financing may actually be positive but I would guess over the lifetime of that like position like that's going to become a negative cost right like you're going to have to like pay financing to be able to hold that hedge on and you also are on the hook for the collateral ride and so if it doubles you're gonna have to find a ton more collateral to post up against that so that's like the other issue run it's like the position runs against you have to post additional collateral you can also go to the some of the Brokers like the OTC guys like winter mute I know or Bellos does this too um you can be like listen I have this position I want to buy a hedge you can either buy an option or you can like

sell them forward and like you may need a post collateral or just like outright buy the like put if you want to do it so this ways too hedg it they're expensive um and also like they're not always clear like from a credit standpoint like riskless yep yep I agree with that the only thing I'd add to that is like you know it's a lot easier as like for the for the movement example you kind of gave like you know I think the TG happened like two days ago something it's a lot easier as you get into like a specific unlock and like not selling the whole position like let's say that specific one within like let's say six months four months because then the bid side starts to formulate where like trading firms will basically price like hey what would I buy this at and then

I'm going to short the per I'm gonna try to collect the funding and then price out the variable rate that I can get for that relative to the discount I need for spot with the added um sort of calculation of how much collateral do I really need if this thing goes bananas so like that's easier like Day Zero of something like this I get it like something like J where it's been live for like a year and like most firms or maybe like a quarter of it has unlocked or something like that yeah there's a deep spot Market just unlocked like last month a couple days ago I think yeah now yeah yeah but yeah obviously as you get closer to the event like there's less unknown it's much easier to price so what do firms what do most firms do there like the are they are they just

holding and they're just like all right like I'll take the risk of just sitting in spot until I unlock or they is there is there these back room things that are happening where they're hedging out and like what what actually happens I think a lot more than not it's just people are saying on the risk yeah more way more often than not like I think there's this like C process this like all this stuff's getting hedged out and it's like very I think it's very infrequent that it happens yeah it's very frequ it's very thin relative to the underlying like actual ftvs and that like the values of the tokens for sure is that different like Ro you have you sit in two different uh camps right you you've got your like your hack hat and then you've got your like personal Ang Investments do you do the same thing

with both well that's just to be clear like I mostly you know kind ofest everything out of hack personal Angel Investments or stuff that hack passes on or things that I have done prior to hack which is actually quite significant from previous days but I guess these are from the mo mostly from the last cycle too yeah yeah the last cycle yeah the you know I would say it definitely have have dabbled in you know a little bit of kind of hedging flow but generally it's a lot easier easier to kind of ride it out and just see where it goes from a complication perspective also like from a not going bankrupt if something 10x is into an unlock if you have collateral like as an individual you're generally just have less credit risk access compared to like

a big firm so from an angel perspective I would say like yeah if you have to post liquid collateral for OTC forward or something like that you have to be uh quite careful because like yes something might be like very Val very currently valued but like there's no real limit as to where it can go so my general philosophy is kind of like crypto is fine you know it's it's a good asset class like having exposure is is okay and then you can kind of just deal with things as they sort of become liquid and come to fruition yeah there was uh we had Rey what was Ray's last name l1d um oh uh Hindi Hindi yeah r ray and Ray and tar on the podcast a couple months ago talking about liquid funds and how it's

been like you know maybe 98% of the capital's been uh Venture funds in crypto and now you're going to see more liquid funds coming in there was this tweet um that he posted I don't know a couple weeks ago that was like uh you got Venture and then you got tge you know at the early stage tge then you got liquid Venture and then you've got long short and then the gross trade stage and then trading trading an ARB and he said liquid funds are making a comeback November is estimated to be the strongest month for liquid funds this cycle uh the fourth fourth best month since l1d started allocating in November 2028 uh the monthly print will likely attract significant institutional flows uh here's a look at why and how Founders are increasingly engaging with liquid funds how do you think this Dynamic

evolves yeah I am still skeptical on liquid mostly because like people just can't stomach the mark to Market I think I've wrote about this and talked about a couple times is like the V is so damn High people just like puke it and the Venture Smooths over it so much that they're like willing to like hold it um I just don't know if people are like okay taking like intram month you're saying you're saying the LPS in these funds yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah and you know for the liquid funds you there's definitely a couple good ones but when you look at like the overall landscape especially this year where like dominance on bitcoin has been relatively high and it's generally been like a magnet for Capital especially from the trafi perspective it's kind of hard to outperform bitcoin right like if you're trading other things and like in

and out and doing other it it's been I I'd be curious to see like what percentage of liquid funds have actually you know meaningfully outperformed Bitcoin I imagine it is a small sliver yeah I mean we're an invest in a handful of them I'd say like its average return is like under Bitcoin some do beat it but like some Just Get Smoked by it too so it's like yeah Dan do you guys have do you guys have LPS no what what was the thought process behind that I'm sure people have asked you that before but yeah I mean I'd say it's mostly luck um so we started in uh we started in October 2019 and we were going to get a year

track where record and then see if we wanted to go raise and then covid hit and it was like all right well clearly like everything I up really quick and then we basically like made a fortune on like the following sort of six months of it and then we just like deferred ever trying to raise so we got like just like lucky with the pad dependency and like we hit that big bull market and then we just sort of haven't looked back but like in theory we were going to go out and like potentially raise in the beginning wow I didn't even know that about the beginning you never never you said that you were you running circles OTC desk is that right yeah with was Ben was Ben Floyd over there Ben Floyd was there yeah yeah with Ben yeah interesting there's some I feel like

there's some like uh that early Circle crew there's some good good folks who have gone on to do good things yeah there's been a lot of people now too it's kind of wild like I don't I don't even really know anybody anymore which is like the sort of crazy part yeah interesting yeah wild but yeah like it just sort of was a a timing and then it just like the mat didn't make sense to like bother so we just kind of went with it yeah let's let's talk Circle um what do you guys uh you think Circle ends up iping in 25 25 I don't know probably 25% chance I think like in their current Trump B in they'll probably be able to get it out yeah yeah Kraken and circle are probably ones to look out for if I had to guess um I

think it also it'll come with a broader IPO like kind of trend I think it wouldn't just be like endogenous to crypto um but yeah optimistic there I think go get out though yeah you see you see coin check just I did it stting trading it's today right oh yeah so this spack has been they've been working on this spack for like three and a half years and it's just got hung up in regulation and I think this is actually this this story like I'm not really seeing it talked about at all but I think it's really bullish news for the indust because it means these IPOs and spaxs can start going through again so coin coin is a big uh what Japanese exchange I think um yeah second exchange to go public on NASDAQ so it's live it started trading

wow nice yeah it's it's $13 I don't know what that is in market cap interesting so anyways I think that's pretty bull what do you think happens in the crypto IPO markets outside of all the miners and micro strategy I think you're going to finally see some of these names that have been like hung up that are like at pretty big valuations like push out finally like there's like I don't know there's probably like 15 crypto companies that are like well north of a billion dollars that just like haven't been able to get public yeah yeah but are they ready to go like um all right let's run through the list it's like what Circle Kraken chainalysis but then there's you know block fire blocks block D you think these guys are in a position to go

public in the next like two years if we stay at these levels probably yeah yeah that would be bullish that would be good that' be great yeah yeah block Works obviously why not it's also a two-way street like they have to want to go public too right where it's like I think some of these like their early investors are just like can you please Finly like I mean they're getting pushed like if I if I'm blockchain capital and I'm I've been sitting in Kraken for freaking 11 years I'm like guys you gotta you got to do something fair enough yeah yeah it' be good bring some permanent capital m&a Market heats up that trickles back to series D trickles series C yeah yeah it is wild that it's only really been coinbase outside of micro

strategy and the miners it's crazy there's no that was three years ago like that cpto IPOs remember markets give you this permanent Capital that you can then do things with right you can buy companies and it flows back to late stage cap late stage Venture so yeah get access to I mean like it it would also just be there's so many of these early Venture folk that like have just been sitting on these marked up books for so long so they can finally Like nichel Son of that that'll be great um Dan why did you tweet this thing about coinbase the other day what I tweet I don't even remember um oh no never mind it was about Andre

you said Andre was one of the largest benefactors of true yeah all right yeah let's do this so listen man when I I worked at Kraken in 2013 so when I was there nobody had a bank account so like kren couldn't get an OBS account they couldn't get uh bank account to like basically even just like pay bills so the only person who had a bank account at that time was uh coinbase who a16z had backed and who basically leaned on SBB and said you have to bank these guys or I'm going to like whatever yank all my other business from you and that was enough that coinbase had a bank and nobody else had a bank so part of coinbase's like fact that it's so

dominant today and like owns basically the entire US market is that they got to operate for years probably like two years they were the only people that had a bank account in the US right so they were the only people that were able to like on board us retail and get them to like be able to buy and sell crypto so they had like a monopoly for a couple years and it was mostly because they were the only ones with like that banking relationship that was in it so they were a benefit factor of the fact that nobody else could get banged and then they were obviously look I'm not like not taking away everything coinbase did but it was a massive leap that they got forward and I remember just being infuriated by it at Kraken because we couldn't get anywhere with any banks we

ended up with just only having this Fedor Bank in Europe which is like why it was a euro exchange that's why K so big I didn't I didn't know that Kraken couldn't get any us presence so they had Fedor which would give them a Euro bank account so they were just like all right I guess we trade Euro Bitcoin like this what we're going to do then for year I've always wondered why Kraken was so big in Europe because it could get us banking it's the only reason you open up your Kraken account it's like Euro BTC I'm like I don't want to trade Euro BTC it's because that's all they had for a long time yeah it's because coinbase and coin just dominated the us because of that interesting so all and just like it's so funny to be like ah they're daggy everybody and it's

like yeah I mean like all right but let's be honest like you also massively had a windfall from this like yeah and that was the start I I think it kept like even with the bit license right I think to this day I don't know if Kraken actually ended up getting one I'm not I'm unsure if Kraken serves New York customers still but like coinbase went and did the thing whereas Kraken was like fundamentally philosophically opposed to the bit license to the point of not supporting them you know and then it's like your friends in New York are like hey I bought crypto on this app they know the one that works so there's other things too but I think it's a fair you know weird yeah there are these weird things it's like uh who's got a bit license right cash app coinbase Gemini Rob and then Robin Hood has it

because they bought bit stamp and there's just this dude Ben Losi who like you know stamp approval complete sham it's a joke doesn't Loi run a a consulting firm helping people get bit license now did right what' you say is he on gble bored still yeah in any case maybe during the Trump ad that is one optimistic thing to tear that thing up once and for all um it's been just an absolute night for for particularly New York which obviously sits close to home yeah that was quomo Cuomo created that I don't think Cuomo was like yeah this bit license is good like you know he probably signed a little thing like they wanted they it actually came out of a good place I think they wanted

they it was bullish crypto at the beginning when the bit license got created they wanted crypto to be like in the hub they wanted New York to become the Hub of crypto so they needed regulation so they created this thing and they were starting to give this bit the bit license out to different people and then it just got squashed and they stopped giving it out to people that's yeah just I was there at time and then like they basically shut the door they're like all right well it does exist we gave one out and then they just stopped it's like it's like Anchorage getting the um the national Charter or something and then a day later they what what what does Anchorage have the national I think they have a a bank Charter right a National Bank Charter they have a National Bank Charter and

then like the next day I think it was Biden's like we're not giving any more of these out Anchorage is like oh we got that in all right oh right the North Dakota one I think or I don't know maybe yeah yeah was like OC pay yeah it was funny like FTX was actually trying to get that like I don't know the exact details I don't want to butcher it the hottest thing the hottest thing in m&a right now in crypto is uh are these Regional exchanges that have licenses in like you know Philippines and Thailand and all these place like those are the that's where the m&a is happening right now because you know people used to give out licenses now they stop giving out licenses but some folks random people just have them so that's where the m&a is still

happening that filters into so many things for sure like just having the license goes to like cannabis whatever Dan where else is like weird stuff stuff happening in crypto that people are unaware of I like these stories oh like in the past I don't know I a Vue question I mean I dude it's like so there's just so much going on now it's like very impossible to like keep on top I I find this whole AI agent thing mind numbing but like that seems where like a lot of weird stuff's happening and most of it seems to just be like people masquerading is pretending to be AI which is like the funniest part to me and they're just like out there met found doing this real money I met a Founder who's got who's got an automated bot an AI agent on

Twitter and he's just ripping out tweets it's like he go to chat type something so it's like oh it's it's an AG like I don't I don't understand it but there's like mu money moving through it right now dude it's kind of it's w I've never seen more of a ju the position between like when you hear someone talk about something like oh I'm super bullish this thing oh this thing's down 40% got it buy more whatever and then you go you click and you go to the Twitter and you just like scroll down a bit and you're like dude like what is this this is you know it's like you have to kind of like inhale some glue before sitting down for the AI coins I feel you know you got to get in there and be like you know I'm just not going to think about this thing

and like wow that's really funny and like look at how Innovative and exciting this this guy chatting on but you gotta apply it so that your friends aren't more wealthy than you for sure yeah exactly hop hot ball of money Dan I would say is still very much alive it's been the last month in particular it's been really roaring its head yeah I mean like look like there was weird stuff over the last week like archaic stuff flying around Dino coin season real like let's talk let's talk do you think these dinos run the rest of the cycle oh that's a good question um I think they'll continue to like have moments where they're like hot and they like double over like a period of like four or five days but like they'll end

lower than they start yeah yeah I think like they'll just be instruments that get like wound up and like the closer they are to leverage like the more moves they'll have I mean yeah hadera is up 430 per in a month somehow harar has infiltrated the American mind of like retail like matter regular you have to go on if you have not opened up Tik Tok go to Tik Tok and type in crypto and you will see Ripple and hadera just everywhere yeah yeah Ripple and cardano were the staple and like somehow H bar got snuck in there I don't know how it happened but it did yeah yeah good for them it's the

dino coin narrative it's like I would say most people in crypto native like yeah maybe they lar and they're like yeah Dino coins are great I'm like making so much money it's there don't like you didn't catch every single one of these Dino coins some random 12 yearold on Tik Tok put out you caught it because you bought him in 2017 then you never had the balls at you're like oh my coinbase account that's why that's why you own like that's why you own Ripple you know I mean we do we do a lot of like all right look at the top 50 names like what hasn't moved all right like we'll just buy that like it's kind of how it plays out yeah yeah and it's not even like the it's like a little bit of the anchoring bias like look at where the chart was in

2017 and look at where it is now like look there's like this huge gap right you just like pull up but it's like the capital that's driving it up is not even they don't even care about that it's like unit bias stuff whatever um yeah it's I think a lot of those things are maybe closer they have less upside relative to some of the I don't know it's hard to say the majors like for example like Ripple traded 280 like how much higher does it go this cycle right I've seen Tik Tok in hundreds $100 rle goes to 100 40 bips of global I got I got a text saying Ripple could hit a thousand from a friend who had just bought RIP just bought crypto for the first time ever like two months ago yeah Dad's it's

possible I mean if no one sells right like hear me out if everyone three threes theoretically it could just go just buy a whole country yeah like yeah just mut you think Ripple Ripple Labs IPOs I think they're going to try it I don't that one will be a little bit harder I think to get out but it's possible they'll try I will definitely try yeah yeah there's a lesson which is just really never underestimate Ripple whether it's the equity the token the people the Army just you know do not use it as your short beta hedge going back to that long short part of that liquid fun yeah it felt like someone got carried out on that I somebody probably had it on someone yeah so always like

when Ripple rallies I'm always like Gotta Buy Stellar just CU like just like right it's like right next to and it doubles Mo it's like so silly so now that the hot ball of money is just back in the system I mean like Pudgies are ripping Pudgies Pudgies went from like eight to 25 in a month it's great yeah well they got the chain yeah they got the chain they're getting some air drop you got the abstract airdrop you got the pangu airdrop like you know you got all that um nfts are kind of back yeah nfts are back Dino coins AI like B basically hot B hot ball of money is floating around the system do you um for the next several months do you think it's a good idea to be chasing these hot the hot

ball like are you gonna make more money if you chase the hot ball or if you just sit in like Bitcoin eth and soul if you're a regular person sit in Bitcoin eth and soul but if you're like going to be active in this stuff you want to be like allocating to where it's going not where it is all right so where is it going whatever hasn't moved yet like I really do think that's like generally like the brained way of trading this yeah for most so what hasn't moved yet like OG defi like okay here here hasn't move yet like none of that a ran a ran but other things haven't run so therefore other things should run yeah but it's like I know it sounds stupid but like that that could be all there is to it maybe some Stu in like Cosmos

ecosystem like oh yeah big thing this week yeah yeah cos problem with the cosmo stuff is even if it could run no one knows how to get their Capital there like when you go on osmosis I'm kidding you got a little Kepler wallet yeah yeah it's a little all right let's end with uh let's end with the conversation of how much money is enough to retire it's crazy because inflation now I don't know maybe you need like $12 million so the context is we had Buffett out and saying $110 million is not enough to retire with yes fact Dan how much is it needed to retire $12 million

no this all started because my comment because I said to somebody you can't retire with $10 million and I'm gonna stand by my comment because my comment was if you're like 22 years old and you made like a bag on crypto like that money isn't going to last you as long as you think it is and like people really discount how long they're going to live and how much money they're going to spend over the course of that that was my point not necessarily like the exact amount and then people are like yeah you can go live in the desert and like live on $5,000 and it's like that's not like what I'm trying not like it's not a hard number I'm like you just should prepare a little bit more for this like don't be ridiculous Sor my number's $2 million now post or pre-

talkx post talkx like 12 liquid stra we never it never even came up which is hilarious because it's like a factor of two it's a huge difference like we're arguing like without even discussing that aspect of it yeah yeah I feel like in a major you know American Metropolitan Center or something like 12 is probably there to like feel comfortable and never have to really look at things it's crazy like you know inflation and price level are two very different things and like that price level price levels are never they're never coming back for across the board right like they just don't right so you want the same things um you know yeah you want the cubes you if you need a $50,000 a month Cube budget you're going to need a work but also if

you go to Bali spend on cubes last cycle oh that's want me look it up let me see if I can pull this up real quick I it's definitely nor out of 50 because like the 4 Cube that we bought was like 40 I think itself my point is too much I weder it was probably what is the what is the what is the most expensive purchase you made last cycle the we there money we spent at the auction for the dinosaur I ulous like besides like things you buy in your like it's like a frivolous purchase like that would be it what you on we wired 250o which I don't know what is in like

dollars back then so maybe a little bit more 3 300K or something yeah something like that so that's what we spent on like Rand this was the Big John dinosaur yeah we didn't get the big we didn't get the dinosaur obviously um we got like other stuff yeah at least you bought something physical I bought the Pico top of a nfts so there you go we bought we bought a we bought an herbic Galaxy that was a bad purchase well I don't know I I was looking at a yeah that one is heric Galaxy's you're with the open which is invaluable you know like trade is kind of the problem like I don't even know where we mark it but we paid real money for that we had uh we had Curtis we had Curtis yarin on the Pod like oh nice oh

you got mold you got the man himself we had Curtis on like five months ago and it was a ridiculous episode he was he was one of the earliest on bitcoin going back to that blog post yeah Savage yeah like buy $10 of it now it was like a dollar I don't know I have I have a actually related to the1 million doll question um you guys have both stay you didn't move to Monaco or Puerto Rico or some tax Haven like I don't know if you you guys stayed in these like in these cities with high taxes like what is the rationale for that I mean the point of making the money is you can live where you want right right like I don't I think that's like ultimately like you want to I mean like look you argue where you sort of want to be but like to move

just for a tax reason is like ridiculous in my mind like you should you the whole point of like making a good living or like making some money is that you can like live the way you want to live not so that you can like go somewhere else and like live in some siloed structure that's you can have like more like I don't know I think that's silly and I've been here the whole time right so I've like paid the taxes along the way not like I came back yeah the philosophy is really I would say just you know you could make more money and that that does the same thing right but yeah I don't want to come off as too detached by saying like hey like you know you need 10 or 12 million bucks to like live comfortably like to most people that's like this is

a bit of a joke it is a bit of a joke right just to be very clear and there are other countries right that have very solid quality of life that are much cheaper that might be perfect for you and it really it's a personal thing right like depends where you're family is what you want to do like you know if you want to go live in Bali on a in a villa for nothing and spend $3 is on breakfast lunch and dinner combined like you can go do that and it's like a very chill life and you might like it like yeah maybe your Amazon doesn't arrive the next day or whatever but you know it's fine yeah I don't know you kind also like if you're gonna eventually like come back to reality and like have a family like you're probably gonna want

to be near your family like that's like like if you want to just be a digital Nomad and like be single your whole life like fine yeah yeah and when you think about other places like you know I America has it pretty solid you got the water it's pretty [ __ ] great ites you got like a big buffer to the rest of the world you got a lot of resources not not I mean we're gonna our impending fight with Canada you know or I think join us I don't think I think it's gonna abortion you're just be okay with it wait has anybody like pushed like trouble on the idea that like this would also massively throw off his like current like Sway in the electorate like like Canada's like very like it would

just like make the country more democratic no he would be like they're like Guam they can vote symbolically yeah actually State like the whole out a whack for him like indefinitely they can vote on the Rockefeller Center Tree color but that's about it yeah you're seeing like think tanks put out pieces like the merger of the century dude I know people that are super deep on this like they've thought it out like Maps kind of High I'm thinking about it like we don't even really protect that border anyway yeah it's fine just you know like trade between Canada and Michigan is like just as important is trade between Michigan and China because of like the rotating automative part and

labor Supply and and material so it's like Canada's super intertwined to the US yeah isn't like 80% of the country live within like 20 miles of the Border isn't something like that yeah there's all sorts of things and then like the the lake I don't know there some interesting YouTube videos on like you can judge the particularly like particular States versus Canada versus their trade with like someone like China and it's like significantly more important I mean this used to actually be a big issue in the in the early us like the American Revolution Civil War war of 1812 we used to always it was like a hot button issue should we should we invade Canada should we take Canada should have died earlier but yeah and now and then it just stopped for some reason yeah could have like Louisiana purchased it probably at

some point exactly we did Hawaii and Alaska and then it's like all right we're good but we shouldn't have yeah um anything else we we should have discussed that we have not covered yet I think you got it I think we got it you leaving Boston to speak at any of our three events this year Noe nice bro bro you're Dan plays hard to get maybe we'll see it's it's busy right now you know didn't end up going Dubai or whatnot but you're six games of pel a week you seem real real busy yeah they're at seven in the morning why I don't have an in nobody can call me out cool well appreciate you guys' time always a fun pod and uh yeah enjoy the rest of the

week hey everyone thanks for watching today's episode just wanted to quickly thank today's title sponsor scale scale really is one of the best chain experiences out there today and I've used so many different chains there's a reason they are gaining so much adoption in both gaming and AI use cases hit the link in the show notes to explore the scale ecosystem [Music] n [Music]