Discusssing the Coingecko Top 20 - with Su Zhu and Hasu

Transcript

hey guys so we have an episode today that's a little bit out of the usual because um we were actually meeting um someone to record an episode today on options trading and um this episode will be recorded later this week when we have uh our audio problems fixed up but um since Su and I were already here we thought why not use the time to record something it's very spontaneous um for you guys and something that we actually never have done before and uh the quickest idea that came to our mind was just to look at the top 20 coins on coin Gecko and um well just uh kind of freestyle about them just kind of talk

about uh what comes to mind and um yeah should we start off yeah let's do it okay um yeah so I have my my my coin geeko open um I think this could maybe be interesting for some of our less experienc listeners who are not as familiar like with all of the coins that that exist in kind of the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem top 20 is actually C die compound die so um I think this actually a pretty pretty interesting one because it uh highlights a pretty interesting uh property of defi so can you maybe explain what what Cai even is yeah sure

so defi being decentralized Finance uh CI is kind of a kind of a building block of that so it's basically there's a stable coin called die which exists when people collateralize their Assets in the maker protocol and then borrow the stable coin from that and that stable coin's name is d uh so they usually use ether or wbtc or usdc to collateralize and then when they have that die they can then do various things with it right they can trade it for ether they can trade it for other coins they can also

deposit it in various defi um protocols to earn a yield so C die happens to be when people deposit die into compound which is one of the two or three biggest um bar and lending platforms then this will generate CI uh so as you can see the market Capac CI is like 1.5 billion um one of the reasons it's so high is that um because the compound platform has a coin distribution of its native token comp based on how much you're supplying and borrowing from compound uh people are basically farming comp by depositing and uh borrowing die

and because the the governance of compound has been such that it's incentivized people to um use d as the double-sided asset because because the comp is paid out to people when they are borrowing and and uh depositing as much as possible uh D becomes the best asset to use because its yield uh settings are the tightest so you don't lose as much by borrowing it and then depositing it borrowing it and then depositing again so that that's why you end up with a lot of cedi uh as a market cap and as we saw like a few a few days ago um some of these

double-sided uh D Farmers actually got stopped out on compound because the Oracle price uh shot up way past 1.2 uh so in other words the die stable coin actually traded very high relative to $1 and these uh Farmers these yield farmers were a little bit uh caught off guard by that I had never looked at the market cap before and when we just looked at it I was like hm why could it be like 1.5 billion when the market cap of die is actually only uh 1 billion so yeah it's it's kind of leveraged in that sense right yes precisely if liquidations happen on compound then this kind of die would yeah it's kind of almost a synthetic in that sense right

it would disappear from circulation again so do you think maybe one last question for die for CI do you think like that a coin like Cai could become something that people use as money instead of die that's what people are kind of wondering right now because this coin kind of pays interest in real time right like you're earning interest on it in real time but there are some problems with that too because the ux or the user experience of a coin that's constantly uring value isn't you know it's not that great for conversion factors things like that so I I mean I tend to think it's going to be more likely that people will just deposit

um onto aggregators such as like Y wifi like the Y curve and then that will reaggregate into a into compound and then that asset could end up being used um but I but I don't think that the the tokenized balance of a specific Bend protocol is likely to get that Network effect where people use it as money just because it always will beg the question why don't you you know deposit it on like a instead right or on dydx instead you're just not going to be able to guarantee that you have that best rate and so as a result the money's going to keep moving back and forth you know so it's a tricky one though a lot of people

have different theories on it okay thank you so moving on to tezos I think tesos tezos is a pretty it's a a pretty interesting Coin West of fundamentals um it's it's yeah it's the first um kind of chain they call it like chain based proof of stake so it actually has a kind of sort of like longest chain rule similar to to bitcoin and that's how it uh how that consensus mechanism works it's it's pretty different from like the bft um Bas style proof of proof of stake that kind everyone else goes for they were

also the first ones to um yeah use kind of uh completely decentralized like onchain governance right where you kind of have where where you deploy kind of a new set of code and then like uh people vote on that that code and if the vote succeeds then the code is activated right that's we just talked about CI and compound kind of took that concept from tesos um of onchain governance and yeah they imported it into defi if you will right and and now the kind of compound governance module has emerged as the de facto I don't know if we can say like

the gold standard in defi yeah but um it's being copied by a lot of other protocols and I actually like it a lot that would be in contrast to something like like yfi where you have kind of informal governance where you have maybe people voting uh via snapshot for example on on what feature they'd like to see and then the governance or like the developers look at what people voted and they implemented maybe a few weeks or months later right so yeah yeah I think also like teso is being interesting and that it kind of it's kind of the first you know proof mistake but also kind of f first attempt to um experiment more with um onchain governance and I think it as a result

because it was in the backdrop of big Bitcoin scaling debate and so on I think it got a lot of interest from bitcoiners at that time as well uh not not just ethereum people uh who were kind of really interested in the idea of like like would this ultimately be a governance model that larger coins would use as well if it worked so I think now it's not as popular to talk about onchain governance for Bitcoin or ethereum but I think I think back then there were more there was more interest in that as a as a test case for those coins so tesas also took a different kind of approach and all the ethereum quote

unquote ethereum killers that you see today right who who are all evm compatible and um I'm pretty sure tasos is not right they have their own virtual machine yeah um and what do you think that about for their chances of kind of getting developer traction I think that's been their challenge right because it's O camel based which is a functional programming language it's a little bit difficult to get people onboarded into the framework and to sort of benefit from developer tooling that that's been kind of the big strength that ethereum has had right which is that it's relatively easy for anyone to just come in and do something within a couple weeks uh and find people who can support them as well so I think that

um yeah it's it's for sure I think some of these projects that were in the you know 2015 to 2017 phase of development they weren't exactly sure what their product Market fit was going to be they were just wanting to put these ideas into action and and put it on Main net so which tesos has done so so I think that that's I mean it's already impressive that they've done that at that time and and that they have this community that they do now um but yeah it's it's definitely a struggle to find the application fit and to find the use case fit um you know the advantages that ethereum has and some of the other newer coins have so what do you think is the what will happen to to to to chains

like like tasos who are kind of intellectually very interesting but uh kind of struggling to get traction what do you what do you think do you think we can have another bull run like we had in 2017 where people where projects like or Bas layer projects blow up purely on the possibility that they could get some kind of developer Direction years later or do you think that this run people will expect some kind of adoption already you know tasos is an interesting one because it probably has more moneyness about it than most other proof State coins I mean for one uh from the private sale or from the crowd sale people contributed BDC and

eth into it um and then since then they've kind of safeguarded their treasury relatively robustly uh in terms of investing so kind of has that treasury value that people do talk about when it comes to tesos um and then for two like they they do have uh very smart people who are committed to it and and kind of working on it every day so I think that it has a better chance of keeping up with the market than most coins do um but at the same time the application side is likely not going to be what pushes it through because it's ultimately because it doesn't have the uh Grassroots uh participation of smart contract

developers it's very difficult for them to really get get that adoption and so you just have to hope that it's the staking it's the staking game right where you know tesos went up a lot um a few months ago or around a year ago plus where you know people said coinbase has to buy it because that as more people buy tesos in stake the exchanges have to also buy it uh to be able to uh stake on behalf of their clients because of the way that the they call it baking in tesos but the way that that baking works so you know stuff like that it could happen again because it has Mone to it you know its price history is long so yeah I definitely wouldn't rule it out as a coin but I mean if you're if you're

buying it based on an adoption thesis it's definitely a tougher play uh speaking of adoption coin number 18 nem okay I have actually no idea what this is yeah NM the tricky one uh I'm going to I'm going to pull up the coin gecko I know it's very popular in Japan uh and that uh during the coin check this is this is the Hacked coin from coin check at that time so this is also a top 10 coin at one point I remember so it's it's definitely it's it's a very 2017 coin we'll put it that way I I don't I haven't seen much adoption I haven't seen much that they're doing um at this stage it sounds like an Asian Ripple like just from reading the kind

of uh description here right it's it's supposed to be used for payment and settlement and clearing in a kind of interbank uh environment yeah we leave it there I mean yeah it's it's definitely definitely not something you hear about a lot these days for sure yeah probably likely to fall out from the top 20 um if not this year then next year as I think there are now some very interesting coins that are not actually quite far away from the top 20 right all the kind of application layer on top of ethereum especially all the defi applications I think we'll see many of those break into the top 20 at the expense of those kind of dead ghost

layer one chains that would be my thesis for 2021 what about Tron though I mean it's um I'm not sure that I would call it a ghost chain I've actually definitely not a ghost chain yeah exactly I've used it for the first time this year when there was this kind of just dabbled around a little bit with the the sun uh Sun mining liquidity Mining and uh I mean you can say it's a rip off of ethereum it's a fog of ethereum and that's and that's true but I mean they are I thought that they are very smart about it in a way right so they basically have their own exact copy of metam mask and just the way that you use it feels

extremely familiar yeah and and fast and it's super easy to just super easy to use which you can't say about any of the other coins on here yeah I think you know just the fact that there's so much usdt on Tron is kind of interesting as well right because like a lot of that are probably just Tron whales as well but also some of it is the fact that when the fees get really high on the ethereum blockchain a lot of OTC will use Tron usdt instead a lot of exchanges will even try to push you to to to deposit and withdraw in Tron usdt so I think um for some reason or another Tron has managed to kind of get get that kind of um cheaper ethereum

use case uh somewhat and I think you saw that with some of the gambling daps too right that did okay uh during the the bare Market in 2018 2019 where people were using these to uh play a bunch of It kind of like you know precursor to defi type stuff right where you know you would have a governance staking token not really governance more mainly a staking token with revenues and then there would be people playing these dice games or these betting games and that was actually all happening on toron and EOS at that time so um it's unclear how much of it was real or not real but you know they definitely do have a community in China in the US and in a lot of these countries um I think that where they may struggle is as as newer

blockchains come out and do offer more technological innovation it's going to be more difficult to get mind share uh especially as people have now realized that they really are just copying everything right like there really is no there really is no sort of Novel thinking behind uh what they're trying to do I think you know bits Toren excited some people but then you know people realized that it wasn't really going to it really wasn't going to help Tron that much so so I think you know it it's already surprised Everyone by just not disappearing so you know credit to them on that yeah I mean I think the the best case thesis at this point is that it becomes something like Litecoin right

something that's used by some that has nothing Innovative about it at all um but it just kind of sticks around just based on its kind of network and Lindy effect yeah yeah um and is seen as something where maybe people don't like it but they kind of like grudgingly like tolerate it being there yeah sure so r r BTC I mean this is kind of like Bitcoin but I I'd be happy to talk about kind of the intricacies of of like wbtc and actually how it works because um like many people don't actually know right so yeah um rep BTC the soul custodian is bitgo right do you know

where they are um located like jurisdictionally I actually don't know jurisdiction it could actually be anything because I haven't myself read the legal docks for it but um yeah it's uh you know we're my firm three ARS is one of the bigger uh mentors of wbtc and I think one of the reasons why you know as you see the market cap 2.3 billion not nothing to scoff at uh mainly because of the Primacy that it's managed to achieve in key defi apps so maker being one you can you can draw die you can borrow die uh against wpdc and also compound and a you can do the same and

then obviously with Unis swap as well where it was one of the four incentivized pools so so I think all these things kind of got together and I and I kind of always believed this about BDC on ethereum which is that you're going to need a network effect for it to really take off and likely going to go toward a single one just because it's um easier so I think you've seen like wbdc and ren BTC do pretty well and then like everything else kind of just no one knows how exactly they're supposed to try to use it um so so definitely um definitely a custodial uh coin you're kind of depending on bitco to have those BTC and they do approve of reserves uh bya chain link I think but

um you know it's it's not it's not as bad as people think because USD usdc themselves are also custodial and we don't care anymore about those either so it's ultimately it kind of shows the power of defi in know way it shows that you know people are it's so useful to transact on chain uh with BTC like this that that people are willing to take that risk the market is willing to take that risk and So eventually when they have even more you know when they have more deenal size versions of it then you know that'll be just just even better I guess so I was going to ask you that next so I mean wbtc is kind of racing ahead it was like way easier to construct and to launch

early on when D was still very immature and um Solutions like tbtc um which is is already decentralized but it's it's kind of more expensive to use and it's the very like immature terms of network effect and something like Rand BTC which is currently completely centralized but I think their goal is to yeah also add these kind of security bonds um that that tbtc has so do you think that one of those costlier more decentralized solutions can eventually overtake wbtc or will it just kind of run away with its current Head Start Network effect I think it'll I think it'll run away because

liquidity is the most important part of the user experience you want to be able to get in and out of it quickly you want to be able to create and redeem it you know sometimes you know if you want to put in a th000 BDC into defi you know with the other approaches it's really difficult to do that but with rap BDC or with Ren BDC you can do it pretty fast so I actually think it's more likely that wbtc and rbtc ultimately find ways to decentralize then that the current the decentralized coins find mass adoption interesting interesting okay I don't know if it's like I I don't know if it's likely but I have a higher I see a higher chance of that happening than a decentralized coin a decentralized

Bitcoin launching now and rapidly gaining market share to the detriment of wbdc and ren BDC I think that's very unlikely kind of goes into the whole debate of how is regulation going to play out yeah right so so far it seems that regulation on on bitcoin has actually been pretty doish right um exactly like Regulators kind of like no one is actually thinking about banning Bitcoin anymore right that was kind of topic four or five years ago but nowadays and they may think you know it's the devil they know right if they if they go and ban wbtc maybe it pushes the market toward you know a direction they can't even

fathom so that that also must weigh in for Regulators when it comes to this kind of stuff I agree actually brings us to the next coin on the list which is Monero right um uh Monero that coin that's getting a lot more attention from um Financial Regulators than Bitcoin uh uh so Monero is a coin that that hides the transaction sender the recipient and the amount so and it's it's privacy by default right so so you can't opt out of yeah um using Monero in a private way because of the Ring signatures and um yeah I mean it's a coin that I um actually like a lot but

at the same time I must say I was very surprised about how well it performed this year because I thought there was a lot of like the thesis that you need a privacy coin rather than a privacy Solution on top of an existing coin was kind of falling out of favor yeah yeah definitely I think privacy coins were incredibly popular in 2017 just because they kind of seemed like they would be an investment class unto themselves right and then I think 2018 just bad for all all non BDC coins quite quite quite bad and I and I think 2019 you know

because these coins are proof of work it's you know it's very tough for them to go up because there's just this non-stop selling uh and and so it's hard for people to just imagine them going up when they're not in a bullish accumulation so I think Monero clearly has gotten some Traction in his original use case which is being private money uh in the past few months and kind of the beauty of Monera too is like you don't even know why it's going up you just you know someone somewhere likes it now so that's pretty cool I think and you know one of the bearish cases for privacy coins that people were making was that these coins because they would have a hard time getting listed on a coinbase or you know these kind of regulated

on-ramps that it wouldn't have the money effect uh and you know that's not wrong but I do think that to say that privacy is not a use case because you can just add some privacy onto ethereum or onto some of the other coins I think that you know I'd like to see it happen i' like to see it happen first because I I don't know if that will happen even uh for one and for two is I don't think it's I don't think it's something that is is pre-ordained right it could be that the Monera approach where you just create minimal viable privacy uh does have a lot of value because there's the idea that that

privacy will be protected right because the network exists to defend that privacy whereas even that's added as a feature on ethereum it can be taken out as a feature too it can be de anonymized one day right by a new hard Fork it could be you know there's no there's no stability on which that privacy sits in my opinion so so I so I think you know if you're someone that really does value privacy and you want that like it's pretty much only Monera at this point in terms of that that that kind of raw privacy set um yeah right it goes into like where privacy is actually part of the the key social contract of a particular coin and ultimately you don't just buy the

financial asset you buy into into a social contract and the social contract is kind of yeah important in the sense that the community is actually committed to defending these core values and Sh like making the uncomfortable decisions that that kind of are necessary when uh yeah when when when Bush comes to sha kind right yeah so what do you think about um this is a very old question I guess but what do you think about the kind of the mandatory privacy of of Monero versus the kind of op in privacy of zcash so it's I we supposed to kind of talk about Monero but I mean zcash is a coin that has performed like it's almost a meme at this point how poly it

has performed since it launched yeah so just a kind of do doing I don't want to call it like a postm but um just do you think that there was something wrong about their approach to privacy that kind of made it perform this way you know like it's a good question I I think that there's two schools of thought on zcash I think there there's one that would say that it's already a success because it's managed to to deliver opin privacy on a coin which no one else has and so it it has the exchange listings uh you know but it also has shielded uh accounts albeit not that many people use them but but they could

uh and there's you know you can now mine directly into a shielded account a shield shielded address so you know it it definitely works so it's success in that it actually works it does what it says um I think the I think the small privacy set or the fact that not that many people use the Privacy yet is just the fact that so much of crypto is people buying in anticipation of other people using right yeah so you know you got like zcash Investment Trust you've got zcash investors that are in you know highly regulated entities so I think that during 2017 that was part of the cash thesis for people which was that it was going to be a very good privacy coin but in the meantime you could invest in

it it wouldn't be like Monero where it would be very difficult to invest in in in a regulated entity so but I think there I think one of the things that was challenging for them is that they had the founders reward right which was a pretty big percentage um of the emissions and um I think that that kind of it it put a bit of a tinge on on some of their narrative and I think also just the just their emissions curve which was modeled after Bitcoin exactly I think people are starting to realize now that if you if you have an emissions curve that's modeled out for Bitcoin like you're GNA have just incredible amounts of minor dumping right because miners are just doing energy Arbitrage all day and that that process um definitely takes a toll

on holders on the other hand you know for people in the first Camp who think that this is all going according to plan they would say you know zcash has one of the the fairest distributions ever created in crypto because literally the earlier you heard about it the poorer you are right yeah if you hear about it now you're not disadvantaged for someone who heard about it four years ago where else can you say that and the chain actually works so you know it's it's kind of it's kind of like I mean it's it's I can kind of see some truth in that too right where you know anyone who owns e cash now you know that they paid a price for it that is not an unfair price versus what you have were that that you can pay for it and question is will it go up at any point but you know

even the market cap Now isn't that low so you know it it it could be achieving a goal while investors are not achieving a goal you see what I mean so and then maybe when the emissions are sufficiently low one day then you know the investors will get their chance too so it's that's kind of the way I view it yeah it's a coin that um uh yeah I don't know I I think it would it would stay around it has a good future but i' I'd probably rather buy it at like $100 than at $70 yeah like even though that may sound kind of intuitive but just this kind of I just want to see like some confirmation first yeah so yeah both Monero and zcash I think very very interesting coins uh Monero in the top 20

so moving on to EOS um yeah EOS is kind of the original ethereum killer right it's um when it launched in what was it 2018 right yeah M main net in May 2018 they had been doing an ongoing crowd sale for months before I think the coin started as an erc20 token that you could get by contributing ether and I think at some point 11% of all ether got contributed to it it's impossible to know how much yeah something something pretty high like that um so so definitely very very hyped at the time I think mhm I I think it kind

of was the it was kind of the AL ultimate delegated proof of stake play where people thought because ethereum had scaling issues you could do delegated proof of stake and you could kind of solve some of those scaling issues you could have uh lower fees you could have more throughput and you could also have some element of governance uh through this delegation uh process or or through this like block producer Pro basically they called block producers on EOS mhm and I think um know it it definitely got had a lot of adoption from developers they wanted to build stuff on it uh I follow I followed it relatively closely in 2018 uh but I think you know they they had a lot of economic

incentive issues with the way that resources were allocated uh across you know whether you're a user an application or a block producer I think that I think that all ation of resources is very tricky to handle and I think uh without getting into too many details I think EOS struggled with that I think it it struggled to figure out how that would ultimately work uh and I think because the of that Rising complexity too it it kind of got to the point where you know there were attack vectors that people didn't foresee in the beginning so there was a lot of things where you know they weren't sure what was Solid Ground and what was not uh for the protocol so I think that that's been one

of the reasons why it kind of you know it's it's $3 now it was hit over $20 in May 2018 um it's still got a strong Community the the existing block producers now are a lot of them are the big exchanges uh so so that also has raised some eyebrows in terms of just how how how that works exactly in terms of the decentralization um so yeah it's it's definitely um I mean it's still a two 2.8 billion dollar coin it's still got a pretty wide distribution and they're definitely still working hard on it uh but it's something that uh has generally not delivered as much as people hoped in 2018 yeah I mean uh it's interesting how

that goes with the um exchange exchanges becoming the large block producers in my opinion do you think that's kind of that's an issue that's kind of localized to EOS or not at all I think you think that's that's a risk for all POS Co a RIS it's a risk for all P coins right I mean with eth 2 you see that binance coinbase um Kraken these all have E2 staking a lot of these validators may end up getting run in exchanges because they are the ones that will provide liquidity from your eth two to eth one right so if you if you stake on an exchange you can get that money out for for for Real eth uh very quickly whereas if you s it on your own you can't so you

end up possibly with concentration uh from that aspect and so I think definitely all exchanges will have I mean all all proof of State coins will have to figure out how do you mitigate against that H how do you encourage people to stake on their own um so definitely I mean e has kind of showed the dangers of that I think it's also interesting in the sense that it was the largest Ico ever right I mean they they had a like an obscenely large kind of Treasury um yeah I actually thought they would be able to do more with that just because I mean the the the raw force that you can generate with that kind of money um I mean you you could you could you could pay every developer on

ethereum 100K a year in salary in theory you would have enough money for that yeah um and I believe their treasury is mainly BTC so I think they I think they have over 140,000 BDC which is I think the largest uh Foundation the largest Ico foundation in terms of Bitcoin notional and they also have a lot of dollars as well and and some other coins so definitely very formidable uh player in the space it could be that they're biting their time and trying to figure out where can we really achieve product Market fit I think they're definitely wouldn't count them out in terms of be able to deliver something uh but uh it could be that they don't they want to see better what

use cases are actually that they can actually go after with you know what their community and with what they've done um and they're kind of buying their time till then so rank number 13 USD coin usdc yeah um I think maybe the interesting angle to explore here is the kind of like regulated stable coin or like more strongly regulated stable coin um versus tether which is more lightly regulated it's still regulated still compliant us regulation um but it doesn't like the main difference i' say t doesn't offer kind of the kind of proofs of reserves

um that that usdc does and it it doesn't have the same kind of exchange support or it does have a lot of exchange support right it's it's kind of the trading pair on uh on binance mostly um but it's not actually supported by like a lot of other exchanges like coinbase yeah all the the US one so what do you think about the the kind of head-to-head race between tea and usdc definitely been a big rise in usdc and I think they have run away with it in some sense among the among the us-based stable coins so MH I remember when they first came out people were saying is it going to be p is it going to be usdc is it going to be gusd um and we've now seen packs go

toward a white label model mainly where you know when you use buusd which is binance USD or when you use um husd which is Hobby USD th those are actually Pax white labels they run on the Pax infrastructure and basically the brand is the exchange that is using those rails so I think usdc because of the strength of their brand the circle brand and then because of their tie in with uh coinbase having you know being one of the easiest ways to Mint usdc I think that that's that's been the main source of their strength actually

and and I think defi has really helped usdc right because you know in curve you have these pools where you have usdc uh die usdt and so people have to M more usdc to participate in defi it's it's a key on-ramp into Defi and then on top of that die maker because they wanted to create a lot of uh you know help the peg get closer to one and be more liquid now you can mint die through usdc so on very high leverage so so that creates another use case for usdc so so I would say usdc has been a huge beneficiary of of defi it's uh also increasingly commonly used in OTC trading now where you know rather than sending Bank cash we send usdc because

it's instantly convertible to Bank cash at silvergate bank with no fee so you know sometimes it's just easier to pay via stable coin than to pay via bank transfer because it's faster so usdc kind of becomes like the proxy bank transfer if you will um because of the ease of creating and redeeming it whereas for tether because there's slightly more fees when you want to create redeem it to Dollars in a bank account uh it's not able to serve that function so so I think that that that that kind of creates it but I also think it's symbiotic as well I think usdt is also benefited a lot from Defi and it's also benefited a lot from um from from from OTC as well so it's

it's very much not either or at this point I think of it more of like tether's more like Euro dollars where it's like more offshore dollars it's still regulated uh and it's still very legitimate but just uh slightly different client clientele and then usdc being more focused toward uh a separate clientele as well do you think usdc coin like do do you see any chance that USD coin could become the official uh like Central Bank digital currency of the us because we do see some we do see it used now to export US dollars right yeah that was really interesting to see that was really interesting to see I I think there's definitely non-zero chance because it

you know it already works it has a network effect so if you're a cbdc issuer you know you you could just do that but I guess I don't really I mean I don't really know how Regulators think I don't really know how government um bureaus think about this do they want to create their own from scratch to seem seem very you know smart or do they want to do public private Partnership if it's the latter then they'll definitely partner uh with usdc they'll definitely partner and I think this could lead to some interesting use cases for some the non- eath chains as well because you know if you want to give a Ubi to everyone you

defin not you're not you're definitely not going to congest the ethereum chain and give out 20 200 million 300 million transfers so so I think there could be some there could be some blue sky use cases for slightly more centralized blockchains that are that are kind of uh nonetheless the government thinks they work so yeah so that that's that would be my guess what a cbdc will ultimately look like I don't think it'll run on bitcoin or ethereum type chains just because it's it's fundamentally too expensive um so yeah then there's no need right there's no need you're you're paying for the censorship resistance

that you don't need right so exactly actually now very fun coin to talk about Bitcoin SV this is this is rank 12 yeah so uh it's still alive still alive you know it forked off forked off bch in late 2018 2018 yeah and there it actually flipp ined bch for for a couple moments and I think I mean you're probably more familiar with the technical debates they had but I recall it there were two different there were two key differences but mainly that they

wanted a much bigger block size whereas bch wanted an Adaptive block size and then two being that BV the people behind it kind of always wanted their own coin all along so this kind of gave them the reason to do it um not sure that's in line with what you know about PSV I mean they're obviously ever increasing kind of the the the block size and making it I mean for for no reasons really because no one uses it and they're putting and they're pushing through a lot of transactions and then saying that these transactions show that this is the real Bitcoin because it's got this massive throughput but these transactions are they don't need to be on a blockchain and they also are not economically meaningful at all so it's you know it's

kind of interesting to me though that they've actually pivoted toward a lot of what I consider actually like ethereum based Arguments for utility of blockchain like if you follow the rhetoric that bsv has has gone toward now it's much more about like well we're going to also do like um you know put everything on the Chain we're also going to uh like do like non-financial applications uh it it actually reminds me a lot of like early 2017 ethereum rhetoric uh the the kind of stuff that they think is going to ACR value to bsv but no one can explain you know how how those things are ultimately useful and and no one can explain you know if those are their goals why are they why are they doing

this on a proof of work uh Fork of a for right it's it's not it's not clear why they're doing that so my my view on it is that it's something that like you said it has an endgame which is ultimately very different than what they say it is and and that that that could be that that could be something which is very like I don't think people should go around shorting it because it's it's something that they don't think is a good idea because you don't know what the endgame is and the thing to keep in mind too is that when bch forked from BDC in August 2017 even up to now tons

of bch has never been claimed right because people don't bother claiming it because such a small percentage of the BDC value people don't bother to wake up their Cold Storage to uh claim and sell it and then you have bsv on top of bch so like the actual circulating supply of bsv is far less it's far less than what people think right I don't know exactly what it is but it could be 3 million coins 4 million coins 2 million coins I don't know what it is so what that actually means is that the the market cap is very overstated basically because a lot of that Supply is not even activating um they may not activate because of tax reasons too they may not activate because of uh you know they don't want to dox their account right

because if they send that fork into binance they've now doxed let's say maybe a very large 2015 2014 Bitcoin accumulation right yeah I mean it it also puts a kind of cap on where it could go right so let's say Bitcoin as we go like yeah if it goes to $5,000 here yeah if it goes to $5,000 people are going to pay tax and and claim their bsv yeah exactly yeah so there's a lot of selling pressure on a coin like this that applies to bch too but to a lesser degree and much more to to to bsv for sure um where once once it rises too much then a lot of Dom Supply will activate and then crush it back down and I wanted to go back to what you just s

said about like you wouldn't short it so I strongly agree the way I think about shorting um in general with these coins is you don't want to short something where like 95% of people think it's a terrible idea and 5% of people think it's a great idea like you if you if you short a coin you want to short a coin where like almost everyone is kind of indifferent about it right um not not ones that have this kind of rabit supporters um regarding the endg game for bsv I think that I saw a proposal quite quite recently actually where um I mean I don't think you can actually run the note anymore for for bsv like unless you're have like an industrial scale setup but um they are also now getting

rid of the peer-to-peer Network in general right so you they they don't actually broadcast uh the blocks anymore so I saw like the the most recent proposal was that just one just connect directly to to a Mining Node and I mean at that point um you can definitely get rid of the proof of work as well you yeah you fully fully at the server client model at this point that the all the rest of the internet is already built on so um Bitcoin SV has lost everything that made it different from the existing internet infrastructure at this point all right Stellar yeah um is a fork of uh Ripper

right yes pretty early Fork yeah not a distribution Fork yeah not not a coin distribution Fork like bsv but but uh I think Jed maleb he would have been at Ripple right he was one of the founders there and then he went and did stellar and so he actually has a lot of xrp as well as being the founder of stellar and correct me if I'm wrong but Stellar also is one of the few coins that is a little more interoperable with Bitcoin because of some yeah I learned this one uh a while back I don't know if it's still true but like it's lightning network uh it it's uh it's uh what's the word it it it can

in theory run on Lightning network uh I think also Stellar had a huge Bitcoin airdrop yes in early 2017 and that kind of got some Bitcoin to back Stellar because they thought that's it's like it's like a ripple Fork that bitcoiners hold more of in that sense yeah um so I mean I I know very little about their adoption path I I haven't been following too closely but uh the coins been doing well in recent days um I think I think with a lot of the C cbdc stuff coming out recently you know I wouldn't rule out one of these more payment micro payment Focus coins to to uh be able to deliver some of that stuff

I don't know if seller can do it I I don't know the technology well enough but um like we mentioned you know you don't really need you don't really need sensorship resistance in a cbdc you need some kind of a uh technology that you know the governments adopt I don't know how it's going to look but I do know that a lot of these kind of payment coins are going to be buying for that I wouldn't I wouldn't want to be buying for that I mean especially after we talked about usdc um I think actually usdc the existence of usdc and how popular it has become and the kind of public private Partnerships that it has already wrecked up at this pretty early early stage I

think it totally destroys the the kind of longtail investment thesis for something like Stella does ites if you ask me it does I I've I've never been more bearish on on Ripple and by by extension Stellar than than I have been today I think I think another point to add about Stellar too well we'll probably get into this talking about Ripple as well but a a ton of the supply is not active right so again it's the market capab is high but you don't actually know how many of those coins can be sold and you know they recently I think a few months ago they announced they're going to burn some of their you know they announced that they they're going to burn some of their escrow and then price went up for a while and then

it came down and then you know it it's it's something where the coin Supply is is not is not well defined right you ultimately don't it's it's centralized in that sense right where large amounts of the supply can be mo moving around can be doing interesting things that you don't know about that that historically has been the strength of the Ripple Sellar model which is that they can they can distribute large amounts of Supply to key Partners in in return for them backing publicly is supporting their project right so yeah you know now the question is how do they use this you know if they're burning it that could be you know that could be bullish or

bearish right it's bullish in the sense that they that the supply is decreasing uh so scarcity is increasing but it could be bearish in the sense that they're not they're not able to uh figure out any other use case for this coin other than burning it to try to get the price higher so so number 10 break into the top 10 binance coin um I think B binance has done pretty much OB seen amounts of volume trading volume right and I think that they hit a few days where they had like $30 billion of of volume uh in November so what do you think about the The Exchange token they've really been running away with um the offshore Market I think because you

had big issues with okx right you had the fact that you couldn't withdraw for over a month month that wasn't great and then hobby had the it still has the issue where I think three of the key people there are in prison yeah so it's also not a good look uh so I think for a lot of Traders they've just been saying okay why am I even on these exchanges why don't I just go to binance and trade where I at least know that it's got a less you know less of a chance that the guy is gonna be in jail so I think B has been a huge beneficiary of that I think like also like ever since they they started I mean I think I've always felt that binance is the most uh focused on trying to make

sure that their users are going to do well so even the way that they did their Launchpad the io phase right it was very clear that they were the only ones who actually knew how to do the io because they brought on reputable projects that are still active today and they made sure that they negotiated good terms for the launchpads so that the people who BNB and then get to buy these coins they get a good deal and they're able to make money in the long run so I think Biden kind of that that kind of very direct to client uh relationship I think it really helped them whereas the other exchanges they then came in and emulated this but before binance it wasn't really this

idea that you know the client comes first um and that the you know that the management is very um kind of reachable buy the client base right I think I think now with FTX and SPF he's kind of like trying to do that kind of CZ game as well where he's saying you know I'm very accessible you can tell me things about my platform and then I'll change them uh but yeah it's it's been it's been a huge success uh I think I think the the other thing that people underestimate about binance like since the beginning really is that they because they've had this exchange token and they were one of the first to have a good exchange token like a lot of their use their use Bates

are very loyal because they got B&B early and they made money from that and B&B gets a lot of value accured back to it through the Launchpad through B&B staking through bance smart chain a lot of these different ways but so it's something where people inherently trust it because the token of it has done really well right whereas for a lot of the other exchanges they also then came out with an exchange token but they didn't have a focus on how do you approve value to this thing they just kind of like let it be out there too as a second thought you know as an afterthought and and so those exchanges you know some of the users actually left because they were like you know disillusioned that you know they bought

this coin and then the exchange kind of didn't care about it anymore and yeah so maybe Leo good example uh possibly possibly but but you know like like even if you look at H token hasn't really done anything quite some time to the same price in 2018 so so I think it's you know to Buy's credit they really were able to pull out that Vision in a huge way right yeah I really like uh I mean exchanges are kind of the big Winners right yeah beside the originally the kind of layer one coins and now this year we can say okay some application layer coins also did really well but besides that the only really

big Winners so far in crypto world the exchanges and I think that the binance token was well a way for for people kind of to participate in that success for the first time right yeah uh in a very Democratic way and um I mean I like pretty much everything about this token I think it's it does actually I mean even though a lot of people kind of disagree with that I think it does kind of behave like binance Equity so far and um I mean I don't really mind I think what most people criticize B is the kind of buy and burn model yeah um for some reason I don't understand why people dislike it I think it's it's functionally equivalent to a dividend

but it's actually better um if you have to worry about taxes in your jurisdiction it's better taxwise but but people think like psychologically the aspect of forcing the user to sell it in order to realize some of their cash flows is is like a bad user experience uh which is not wrong so that's true that's true yeah I mean we see that kind of the if the number of your token like actually the the the number of tokens you have goes up you just prefer that over the value of the token going up and that is kind of the the psychological success story behind all the rebasing yeah that we saw in the last nine nine months yeah exactly yeah so that that could also

explain like why maker so unpopular yeah um um if they changed from I mean we could we could always come back to that topic but I mean objectively speaking like makers on track to burn over 6% of all mkr Supply this year which is a lot right that's kind of the most cash flow of any of any token in defi actually um and um if they change the the kind of model from from buy and burn to to paying like a dividend um maybe even in die or whatever I think that would be that would probably go a long way to

changing uh kind of the narrative around this coin possibly there's some other issues too yeah but yeah yeah yeah so uh okay I think that settles it for for binance um number nine polka dot um I think it's very interesting qu proba probably the the coin like after Bitcoin and ethereum that I'd be most inclined to own of all the coins in in the top 20 so far yeah we are definitely big fans of polka dot I think I think the approach the team are are are a bit unparalleled in the sense that uh the the team behind polka dot

which is parody uh Gavin wood they already have the experience of launching a ethereum of being of being key in launching ethereum and building that community and bootstrapping developer interest and adoption and I think that their motivations for creating polka dot were highly sound at that time as well which is to say that the architecture of ethereum uh May ultimately not be the way that you'd want to do it if you wanted let's say application specific uh projects to really do well and if you wanted sort of I think their other big uh gripe would have been onchain

governance versus ethereum based fuzzy governance right where I think ethereum with the Dow hack and then with the EIP one 999 issue which is that parody had gotten some of their eth funds locked in a multisig wallet and then they had asked for the next hard Fork to restore those funds right and then and then the ethereum community at that time rejected that I think that sort of the polka dot approach is to say that you know if you're an application you you secure the resources required to then have participation in a network a like a your sort of one chain within

like other chains and through this you can have full autonomy right you can deploy uh whatever it is you want whatever makes sense for your project and you can also and you can also make sure that you have sovereignty right like there cannot be another hard Fork that makes this not work anymore right whereas in ethereum where you saw that um I think in the Conant of NOA Fork like like Aragon guys were saying you know you you you've changed things in this which require my application to change like a bunch of lines of code because you've now done this thing in your hard fork and and that kind of stuff if you think about just like as it gets bigger and bigger you know how does that at work right how do we know what

the applications of these hard forks will be on live applications and and so that that that kind of messiness and that kind of like you know that that I think I think pokka do for me like I see it as like the highly engineered approach um to to uh smart contract applications uh I think it's its direct kind of analog would be Cosmos uh which has a slightly different approach approach uh but yeah I I do tend to see these kind of players as you know covering a odd number of bases and likely being synergistic with ethereum as well where applications can can be on both and they can access both and they

can ultimately decide where they live the best right I mean we already always he that poka is very um popular in Asia has a large Grassroots community so are there any projects on top of polka dot that you kind of track that you think would be worth checking out uh I think it's a little too early for me to promote like any specific projects but I think that um I think the next few weeks and months will be key I think a good way to learn is like kusama as well because so kusama was the canary Network for polka dot basically the Litecoin to bitcoin and kusama was super interesting in that so it had four times faster block speeds it had f

governance module it has like a lot of these kinds of things and that's had tremendous amount of uh Grassroots developer interest the gusama price has outperformed the polka dot price in large part because of that and you know there are even some people debating like well why do you even you know why can't I just exist on kusama forever why do I need The Prestige of being a polka dot par chain right and all these kind of debates so it's been it's been very interesting to see it like all I can say is like it's very fluid and it's uh uh definitely a lot of people interested in seeing if it makes sense for what they're building I I think you'll see a lot of defi applications uh sort of plant a plant a flag and Pok it out over the next few months I think compound

recently announced that they forked substrate to to explore that and I think there's G to be a lot more others in the works because I think the nice thing about polka do 2 is that it has a lot of evm compatible uh tools now so you know you can just decide if you want to try it out out if you want to see if it makes sense to deploy instead on polka dot I think that that approach is is ultimately good because of how much stuff has been done on like on ethereum and how much people already know how to write in that I think there was a big like e like ewom kind of a kind of a thesis as well for some time in the eth killers and I think like now I think the more practical of these are

kind of hedging their bets and saying well I also want people to just like be able to deploy evm solidity uh and just be able to map it and then you know not have to necessarily write it in Rust not necessarily have to do that uh so you know it's I see them as the most practical they just want adoption but yet it's also like the most engineered I guess yeah I agree and I think yeah mostly I think the case as we also said the case for polka dot is in its very strong um kind of community and kind of the the all the the time it has already existed right it has already some kind of Lindy effect that yeah the a network effect that the others might not have

social credibility behind it yeah a coin that has existed for as long as polka dot or maybe even longer I'm not sure it's in rank eight kadano and um this one is like a complete mystery to me I mean it's kind of here in the top 10 of all cryptocurrencies but I I know it's a proof of stake coin that's and that's pretty much the extent of it I I have no idea what what it actually does yeah I think Charles hoskinson founder also early in ethereum named as a co-founder I think they rais 50,000 BDC in Japan mainly but also in other countries uh which is quite a bit of BDC

to raise um and I think that I think that it's uh definitely done very well price-wise uh even despite being down I think still 85% versus alltime High um but yeah I I don't fully understand the road map at this stage for them uh in terms of adoption road map I think it's become you know it's one of the coins that's on bitmex when bitmex had alt BTC perss uh and not all BTC perss all BDC Futures so like it's been one of the coins that people like to trade a lot it's little bit like Tron right like a lot of the mech Traders they like to trade Tron and cardano because it has you know it's a nice shelling Point like

if people believe in an ALT season they like buying cardano because it's high market cap it's liquid but it also moves a ton so it's benefited from that I think that that kind of lindin uh where people buy it as a as a proxy right so yeah it's it's almost more like yeah it represents something the idea yeah it represents the idea of a coin which is a low which is a low price right it's a 15 cent coin so it is one of the lower price coins interesting interesting it is actually the it is the only coin below a dollar in the top 10 so it does have xrp xrp is xrp is also oh you're right yeah xrp is 60 cents right now

sorry kadano 15 cents yeah so it's cheap so it's cheap MH chain link in rank seven is pretty interesting I think it wasn't really Tak seriously for the longest time um but I mean chain link I mean you can't really debate a it has done extremely well price-wise it has a highly dedicated Community it has kind of besides Bitcoin has kind of the best memes um and they're actually actually doing like interesting engineering work work uh that I respect so they are poaching some some very uh prominent uh

uh well academics um kind of yeah they they are they doing just doing overall very interesting work I think yeah a lot of Partnerships like not the kind of Partnerships that we saw in like 2017 18 but like actual Integrations with defi yeah I think chain link definitely like one that we missed mainly uh and I think that nonetheless it's um it kind of is the kind of is the poster boy I think of application thesis right for defi because I think when chain link came out and you told people that chain link could become 10% of ethereum market cap or you know something like that people would

have thought that quite insane right whereas now you know is very comfortably so and I think that it kind of shows that we don't really know still how value will acrew in this ecosystem we don't know if the native token of the smart contract platform that wins or if there is one winner will ACR the value or will the Oracle layer that is you know queried uh will that ACR the value and is that win or take all or will it be the user facing applications that you know it's no one knows the answer to these questions uh so you know if the application thesis is correct then I think you'll see a lot of

defi coins enter the top 20 over the next uh few months because these are actually used by people and they have a way to acove Value uh if the thesis is wrong it may be wrong because applications somehow can't maintain value because of forks because of um you know a war to zero or something like that or governance being captured whatever it is but then you'll see like base layers will ultimately you know benefit from the economic activity kind of the City versus the you know the country side analogy that people use so I think chin link is very emblematic of of that I think it's definitely the best Oracle solution now and and uh it's got the credibility to so everyone is now

forced to use it or if they don't use it then they get harassed right so it kind of it it kind of has that Network effect um yeah I mean chain link there are still a lot of things that I don't understand about it like I haven't looked into it too deeply it might be interesting to eventually invite like some chain link person to just yeah learn about it a bit more yeah let's get some chain link experts on in a few weeks that be fun would be interesting yeah Bitcoin cash in number six um yeah I mean it's still there but it has lost uh a lot of value against BTC uh over the years and

um I mean it just makes kind of the whole idea that you can Fork Bitcoin and kind of destroy its scarcity um I think Bitcoin cash I'm very grateful that it exists because back in 2017 people were like extremely scared um of Bitcoin forking they they thought if Bitcoin can be fored it would invalidate the the scarcity of Bitcoin so there Unlimited Supply of it but the fact that Bitcoin cash lost so much value against BTC is actually I think there even like at the end of the day you could say that the fork actually generated value for Bitcoin even though it it looked like it

would destroy value at first I think so and I think people have started to realize that the it's kind of it's kind of anti- Lindy when you have a fork uh and the fork doesn't achieve what it says it will the longer it doesn't do so the more it'll kind of Decay against the original coin because the narrative for it is very difficult to resuscitate I think right because because the longer that it doesn't do what it does it it's harder to convince people that it can do it um so I think Bitcoin cash it'll actually always be around I think because it's got a lot of OG support uh from people that'll probably

never give up uh mainly because they also quite big you know they still have a lot of BTC and they also still quite active in the crypto markets as a whole uh but I think yeah you know it's also it's also been damaged not even more so from Bitcoin but also from ethereum right because I think the people who bought into the idea who buy into the idea of blockchain utility being the main driver of price and network effects you know a lot of them went to ethereum because that's where all the utility actually came about right where stable coins were getting created erc20 massive Network effect um so you know it it kind of lost the Bitcoin Network effect the you know

the brand and the and the in in the investor community and then it also lost the utility mantle to ethereum so I think like I like I always say like if Bitcoin cash had forked off in 2015 or 2016 it could be very different now right it could be that Bitcoin cash is worth a lot more um it could even be that like that model uh because where we would have been in let's say uh in sort of M's regression uh theorem where you know which money is the more useful one in the beginning it could have been that this is now the one we think of as

Bitcoin and we don't even know that it like you don't know which because because the one that wins is the one that we think think now is the real one right and we don't know which one the fork is course yeah so like ethereum is actually like a fork right it is clearly the fork of ethereum classic right or in the sense that in the sense that it is a it is a more aggressive act how do you to put it that way so yeah so so I mean yeah all blockchain forking is kind of has this kind of like ship of thesis yeah aspect to it right where I mean Bitcoin has has has forked and I mean has hard fored when there was a buck right and in theory someone could keep running the kind of original keep running the original exactly billions of

Bitcoins on it I mean this wouldn't be the the original Bitcoin right so I think that it is indeed like the kind of social contract like the yeah it's hard to say what determines what is bitcoin or what is ethereum like it's just you can talk endlessly it's whatever we decide it is right so yeah I think I think Bitcoin cash now the struggle is to you know I think struggle now is to figure out what is the road map what is the adoption road map um how do they H how do they create um a larger Community than just the ogs that forked off Bitcoin during the scaling debate those are all tough questions I think that um you know ethereum having the utility

that it is it really doesn't help Bitcoin cash at all uh yeah I think they I think bit cash they try to do you know simple simple Ledger protocol where that you know you can do transfers of tokens on bitcoin cash you can do Dividend payments kinds of things a lot of it is a little bit you know it's it's a little too little too late I think um you know where those ideas were kind of cool in 2016 but you know ethereum the Grassroots community and and just the power of that ecosystem is tremendous right I think in a single day ethereum Grassroots you know thinkers create more stuff than bitco cash creat in a year in my opinion yeah yeah so so that that that's tough I I think that's very tough on the Utility side it's always

interesting to do the kind of postmodem on what they could have done differently and I think for me the biggest thing that I that I see with Bitcoin cash is that didn't give like Bitcoin people any reason to own it really because it's not in my opinion it's like it's okay that you want to f off Bitcoin and that you want to do like follow the kind of payments utility Vision but they didn't really lean into it enough I mean that's kind I think they I think they spent too much time arguing and and not enough time delivering their road map right if they had you know if they had delivered the road map and earlier you know they could have gotten there but I think I think also their playbook was a little bit more focused toward um toward payments

and toward Merchants right toward the idea that uh Merchants would accept it and that would be the way that it gets uh adoption and and becomes used as money and I think again like stable coin definitely hurts that a lot because usdt got used instead uh in usdc and you know it's just it's just tough because because once you have that then how do you tell people well you're GNA people are going to use this volatile coin as a medium of exchange and it's you know it's it's ultimately you have to carve out that Niche for people to own it like you said and they haven't done that and proof of work itself is very challenging because you in the meantime you will have miners

selling it doing energy Arbitrage on it right who may not even believe in it but who will so if you try to move the price up they will move hash over to to sell it so you know it's it's very difficult I think yeah I mean Bitcoin really has no like Bitcoin its current form has no competition right it's it's basically the only real star of value uh that's recognized by everyone whereas and it's it's kind of like the pristine collateral like every every other blockchain wants to import it um to to be used in its applications and so on whereas with Bitcoin cash you have the competition like you have coins that are or blockchains that are more useful like

ethereum can deliver more utility you have stable coins that beat you on the payment side you have C more centralized blockchains that beat you on confirmation time that's that's like my big problem with Bitcoin cash there's nothing that it does really well and I think that's that is the best way to lose right in in a game that's all about kind of about Network effect yeah and winner take all I mean it's it really only matters in this space to be the very best at something and that's when how you C carard your Niche but it's not enough to just be there and be like do do do various things like a little bit yeah with that said like I I wouldn't be

that surprised to see Bitcoin cash price do relatively well over the next year just because you you had so many waves of flushing out now and with this recent bcha wave where um now from what I'm told there's more developers that can get more of a say because you've had sort of a calling um via that process and so they have a they have a better chance now and also I think the investors in bch a lot of the ones who got this illusion they have quit the supply is getting increasingly centralized also from that perspective so M you know it it's ultimately a question of can bch track BDC as it goes up because people buy it as a philosophical hedge against

let's say lightning Network against the Bitcoin Vision because if so then you know bch can move in a ratio versus BDC let's say like you know 0.01 to 0.1 uh for the rest of time because it'll always exist as this philosophical hedge right but people definitely do that much less now than they did let's say in 2018 where they said you know the blocks are full we buy bch or the you know the blocks are not full you know so so so this kind of it remains to be seen can they push that narrative so if BDC blocks get full will people buy bch if not if they if they just buy eth instead then it's it's not good and you know it's it's going to be tough for them because they decouple from that

there used to be a lot of triggers where people actually bought Bitcoin cash or where you saw kind of on social media the kind of narrative shift right go very high on on BTC and immediately you would see people press bch but that just doesn't happen anymore no it doesn't happen at all so so we originally wanted to record an episode episode on options right and I I really love what you said earlier where have a project Forks off another project and has this kind of vision that it wants to realize every day that it doesn't realize that Vision you have this kind of time Decay right that you have in options right where where Fox I think it makes a of sense actually to think of these Forks as options on realizing some kind of vision

and yeah then you have the time Decay where it gets worth a little bit less every day where it doesn't get closer to that and um I mean you do have this kind of counter counter Force which is the kind of Lindy effect right so you have on the one hand the time Decay and other hand the Lindy effect so it gets worth a little bit more yeah every day where where it's still around so yeah it really goes into I guess which of those forces prevails definitely a coin that actually is very similar to bch right in rank five Litecoin um it's is like why is it still in rank

five like how do we explain this I think Litecoin is actually it's definitely the second most lendy coin after Bitcoin because of actually how early it was created and also because it was I think because the gold silver meme is very strong in the traditional markets you kind of yeah I mean it's it's created it's kind of put itself into this Digital Silver concept and I think to their credit I think what they've done really well is they've kind of aligned themselves very closely with the Bitcoin Community like they never claim they're going to flip in Bitcoin they never claimed that they're going to go overtake it they're they're just like the kid brother right they're they so

but but as a result I think they've actually been able to capture a like a lot of retail interest because you know when Bitcoin is really high price people say okay well you know what I just buy Litecoin it's you know it's the the unit price is lower so I can own whole coins and um and kind of it I kind of see Lyon as the ultimate beneficiary of like unit bias on bitcoin more so even than xrp because I think xrp it still requires narrative you still need to believe some things to be true that that banks will use it right that that xrapid will that will happen uh so whereas like you don't need need to believe anything you just need to you just need to think that it's Digital Silver to digital gold and you

know if you look back in time you look at a long chart you can see wow it's been around almost as long as Bitcoin right and actually the more years that go by the more it'll look like it's been around almost the same time as Bitcoin right like if it goes around 50 years like is around 48 years it's basically the same right so so so actually like and and you kind of see that because it's also the one of the only coins that is definitely not a security right because it's like you know it was not pre-mined uh proof of work and it is dominant in its proof of work chain right it it shares an algorithm with Dogecoin but it's dominant on its chain so so I think that that's also good for it um

and it has all the payment it it has all the on-ramps as well right like it has the PayPal on-ramp it has the other on-ramps because it's not a security and because it's Lindy so I don't I mean I think it's it's it Litecoin definitely triggers people because it's a very it seems like a regressive bet because it's like not it's not betting on any technology right like it does work it does function as the test net for a lot of Bitcoin in Innovation right so it's a test net for seg it uh it's test net for some other things that I can't remember right now but um you know that the lightning Network the lightning Network lightning Network as well yeah so it it does it does serve that purpose and so it it has value because of that

as well because of that Prestige and there are a lot of like you know more more Hardline bitcoiners that will only trade between Litecoin and Bitcoin so if they think there's an ALT cycle they'll refuse to buy any all except Litecoin interesting right so that also gives it a kind of lend uh to it like I would say like like canonically right you know some of the like the most OG bitcoiners in in in certain countries like they only will touch BTC LTC and XMR because they think these are the only coins that are like you know clean right in that sense so so that that that's why it's number five I think despite the fact that no one knows like if there is a road map if there

needs to be a road map you know like all these things I mean I really I think Litecoin really tells an interesting story in the sense that you have a ton of I mean you really do have money crypto and Tech crypto right um these kind of two this is the pure money crypto exactly yeah yes exactly there's so many people in the space who who think that basically this this is like a technological Revolution yeah and we need to innovate in order to make the price go up but Litecoin is still the purest version I mean now there Bitcoin is is also getting more and more pure in that sense that it's it kind of O ofies unfortunately um but yeah Litecoin is really it doesn't change um it doesn't

innovate whatsoever it's uh there's nothing interesting about it technologically it's just a network of people who kind of respect its value and yeah I mean it's been around for a long time it's probably going to be around for a long time and yeah I mean the regular case as you say for it is is also extremely clear I think it it has it has more going for it than well people who are in the tech crypto Camp are willing to believe I think certainly number four is usdt so I think the the big story I mean for one has reached 20 billion market cap so really insane growth but I think the big the

even bigger story is in 19 um basically you could have asked almost anyone that would have said what what are the odds that tether goes B up the next 12 months and uh a lot of them would have said very likely but you're kind of seeing the opposite right I mean kind of the all the talk about tether going down and kind of the has completely disappeared right and Trust in it is uh basically at completely new levels so why is that I think people underestimated the network in fact it already had at that time right where if you're binance if you're hubby if you're okx you know you you need USD to work because if it doesn't

work then nobody can trade spot on your exchanges because you know to this day there is no spot USD on these exchanges you have to use a stable coin and you have to use a relatively neutral one too I think for a while you know bance and HBY thought that they could get get everyone else to use their own stable coin but that's a tough sell right because you know you're now trusting that exchange to run the custody of it what if they don't like the way that you're competing you know it makes sense for it to run to be run more independently right and I think like I think with usdt it's really benefited from the fact that uh when people when the markets go

up also people sell into stable coin and they'll naturally sell into usdt because this is the coin that they're most sure that they can buy back in uh in a liquid way right whereas there's no real usdc trading pairs like anywhere uh yeah on any exchange uh for BDC and for E so that that big you know I think I think usdc shows the big liquidity Network effect that the top stable coin will get because people want to own what everyone else owns owns so people want to own the stable coin that everyone else wants to own uh because they know that they can get in out of it with big size right without having to go and create and redeem it um whereas if you

hold usdc or any of these other coins you have to actually get someone to redeem it for you you have to actually do a Fiat on and off ramp to be able to get the value out so here you know it's become the deao dollar of crypto as a result and to their credit they sorted out their issues you know they sorted out their banking issues they moved to the right jurisdictions they moved they got the right partners and and so they really managed to grow from there yeah yeah and I mean tether is is like six times bigger than usdc but it's probably more than six times more liquid right much more because actually usdc is a lot of it is locked up in defi as it's sitting in these kind of like liquidity pools sitting in maker couple hundred

million of it exactly and I mean it's not it's really not serving a lot of usefulness there it's more used collateral than used as trading pair right so tether is tether is predominantly used as trading pair and not as collateral yeah all right xrp I think it's kind of a hybrid of different narratives I think it's it's very early right so it has some liness from that because everyone has heard about xrp and ripple and this kind of stuff and you know for a long time it appeals especially to tradition Finance people when they first learn about crypto because they think huh xrp

like you know it it doesn't have proof of work so it seems like you're getting something for free you're kind of getting consensus without having to work for it without having to expend energy so that appeals some people you know it's also got the uh the you know the unit bias going for it with the with the 100 billion Supply and I think mainly it's it's been able to do these Partnerships and then use the Partnerships to Parlay it into what looks like adoption and so and they get very motivated Partners to come on and and and sort of collaborate with them on that right but whether it's actually going to be able to deliver its road map uh which is that

people Banks use xrp uh to transact value uh to do remittances to do payments that's that's remains to be seen right and and I think that now that there's cbdcs like you said and other stable coins it's it's very difficult to sell that narrative and I think you know people like the markets do get smarter over time so I do see Tech thesis crypto as having a slightly lesser version of that same anti- liness where the longer you go on and talk about Bank adoption and the longer it takes for you to get it it

does hurt right because you know people say like you've been around [ __ ] seven years where's your adoption right like why why is no one using it yet so I tend to think that fresh narratives will in general do better uh this cycle um and I think that the less fresh narratives they almost have to Pivot into fresh ones right and so you're seeing that now with xrp because they're they're planning the uh flare Network Fork uh in in maybe three four days uh where basically what is it uh basically it's going to allow you so it it Forks out ripples uh xrp uh Ripple labs xrp and it and it takes the and it takes the

distribution and it and it gives the Ripple Labs uh equivalent coins of the supply of uh Spark It's called on the flare Network it it gives this to the users it it gives this to the uh company behind it so uh but the idea is that you can then use defi on Ripple because they it's e it's evm compatible uh the fork so the idea is that oh so the idea is that you're going to be able to use like xrp on ethereum uh so so you kind of see how that's like almost the capitulation right because it's like and and rple Labs is supporting this uh this for quite heavily so it's that's kind of why

it's gotten support now from coinbase gotten support from binance that uh that that that you you can claim your spark from your xrp that's sitting on those exchanges but you know like I I see this as actually very bearish because this is like you're you're now turning xrp into a full copycat of ethereum right you're you're basically saying that there's nothing compelling on the xrp road map you're literally GNA copy uh you're you're going to say we can also use this in ethereum defi right and that that to me seems like like even even retail will catch on to this I think yeah I don't really have a lot

trade about xrp I pretty much agree with all of that I think it's always like it's always a long shot to bet that any of those are going to disappear from the top 10 I think if you if you actually go back on coin market cap and look at like I like it that you can look at like the the top 100 list by year find it a really cool feature and um like in every year you have Bitcoin and you have xrp and you have Litecoin pretty much yeah in the top three and uh until ethereum came around and eventually ethereum broke into the top three yeah and Litecoin slowly fell out of it but yeah I mean it is really hard to see with kind of the cbdc narrative dying I think like it had

some it it had some some supporters right I mean xrp even in like the traditional Finance sector who were very skeptical about Bitcoin mainly because they thought that if Bitcoin gains popularity then it's going to be banned but at the same time there were like big believe us in digitization yeah um and those were the kind of people who thought that well xrp is maybe going to replace Swift or whatever right yeah um but I don't really see the case for that and it's increasingly going away I I agree that now like them burning Supply can be interpreted as as as a kind of cap capitulation and yeah I mean

I wouldn't sure surely wouldn't want to hold it all right last two yeah so the the big two big two Bitcoin ethereum I think it's super interesting should talk about ethereum because I mean our podcast with light it got so much attention and um we were actually we actually said some some bar stuff about e theum right that that got a lot of attention onp Twitter sparked a lot of responses so um where we should we could do like kind of recap of of what happened since then yeah I think I think that you know one of the reasons why ethereum price is a very uh is a very hot I guess hot-headed

topic is because it did so poorly right uh in 2018 and so a lot of the community they feel that like I I think it was best described in one of the tweets I think they described it as like PTSD right like so so I think that like now that it's doing well I think to like hear that people are not Ultra bullish on ethereum versus Bitcoin I think it I think it uh it does trigger some people but I mean with that said like I am bullish ether versus almost 95% of coins right like maybe 90% of coins like I think it it's the only it's the only smart contract change that can legitimately say it has adoption right people use it you can you can earn

a living on ethereum uh using the etherum chain you can't say that about anything else everything else is still a promise in a white paper uh to a large extent right especially outside of the top 20 uh and I think people have really underestimated erc20 Network effects people have really underestimated metam mass network effects people really underestimated um just the fact that ethereum even with its high fees or even with its sort of uh you know uh transaction ordering issues and things like that it it doesn't it doesn't matter because because it has so much of the other stuff right it has is has the composability it has the developer community and it has the users that that

that actually want to use the application so I think that that's important to remember like it it it is number two because it has all that I I think that also so um I I I can definitely see a world where we go more into Power law where where you know Bitcoin is 80% let's say and ethereum is 20% and you kind of have this like power law distribution it's getting quite popular in some of the chats I'm in where people think like this will be the way that crypto evolves like it'll all grow together and then you have this like you know this power law ratio I I could see that happening um I still don't really buy into the flipping narrative because I think it's

fundamentally flawed from the point of view of understanding why Bitcoin right now has value right if you think of it as a contra positive if you say you know ethereum already has higher fees than BDC it already has it has a has more onchain fees to miners it you know it already has more transaction value transacted it already has you know it's easier to use then why hasn't it already actually it actually still has substantially less transaction volume right I meant uh fees per day fees that's mucher yeah uh so so why doesn't it already flip in Bitcoin and you know I think for etherum people that they would say the reason is that they would say the reason is that people don't know

yet people are just kind of stale Longs in Bitcoin uh and and once they realize this utility then they'll switch over right and I think I think that I I think what what some of them are missing I think I think to to be honest most people like in ethereum they understand why people also own Bitcoin I think they get that to that to be the digital uh numer to to be the digital money it requires a high degree of trust minimization it requires a high degree of possibly OIC at at some point once it it works as intended right and there's a debate on whether it reached that point yet or if it's too dangerous that for it

to already aify I think that that can be a debate but I do think that it's it's very difficult for people to imagine a a digital money that is uh let's say hard forking quite often that is uh that the monetary policy no one can really Define it and especially given the fact that ethereum doesn't have onchain governance it's impossible to describe even the process with which the monetary policy is created right like that I think that that that reality uh makes it a relatively uh less appealing like as a money for a lot of

people who are coming into crypto buying due to the premise of digital scarcity um I think that I think that there is also unit bias element to ethereum right now that that may help it which is that uh you know Bitcoin is at all-time highs a lot of people missed it so they may see you know e at you know 40% uh of all-time highs it seems like a good value right I think that that that element is there but it is worth noting that even with the eth to deposit contracts hitting over 1 million eth even with all the defi coins breaking all-time highs even with all that you know fbtc ratio is still you know 0.031 right so so it does it does tell you something about like where the Fiat

inflows have been and that's been very Bitcoin USD driven I I personally think you know ethereum has already achieved so much though that it's almost it's almost not that useful for the average person to debate Bitcoin versus ethereum I think I think you know it's it's clearly if you own a basket of those two you're not going to go wrong in my opinion um if you're if you're if you're betting on flippening I think it's a little bit ambitious but you'll probably still make money in dollars I think and you'll probably still be quite okay I think that those are um those are valid approaches um that uh people can kind of take I think that the the

biggest uh thing that I would say that people who own mainly e should consider is the fact that defi applications um you know whether that's a sushi WiFi uh whatever it is these coins um they benefit a lot from ethereum network but they also want to acove value for their own token holders and deliver utility to their own users so I do think that there is this myth in in or not myth but there is this divide you know and and and I think Molly uh the founder of hedc kind of uh talked about

this very nicely where she said like you know I don't care about your eth this money by tell Bic she spelled it wrong on purpose this this vitalic Bic stuff like I'm I'm using ethereum because it's permissionless and I can deploy my app there yeah I think that's I think like a lot of the like the the strong ethereum supporters who get very angry like when we say something bearish about ethereum they they kind of misconstrue like criticism or like bar about like e the token with criticism of e the platform and I think it's very hard to to overate like how how bullish I am for like ethereum as a platform right um but it's it's there's no guarantee that that kind

of adoption of ethereum as a network will will transer one like it with the same degree that it would in something like Bitcoin right where there's only one investable token in the Bitcoin Universe um whereas in ethereum the app player can go 100 X from here and there's no rational link why that should make the ethereum Tok like ether as token more valuable you you can argue that like once we have proof of stake and once we have Erp 1559 that it will kind of increase the amount of fees that are generated on the network and it also makes e more useful as collateral in these networks but especially from the

collateral side um that that's where I see kind of e challenge the most right with more and more um Bitcoin coming on ethereum and I think it's it's quite likely actually that Bitcoin on ethereum will flip e on ethereum in 2021 um it's it's well maybe not in 2021 but I definitely the amount of stable Coins Plus BTC I think that's where what I that's where I'd commit to a bet that that will probably flip me in 2021 and then I mean you get so many other options for coins to use as collateral um in defi that yeah I mean I I would not want to own East but I also I'm still not nearly

as as bullish on it as I'm on bitcoin but I do like I don't know if you saw this tweet but I mean had had actually a great tweet and was kind of at the bottom of the of the E BTC ratio and what he tweeted is that it's all kind of like it's all kind of shortterm and people underestimate the kind of reflexivity that that you have in in in crypto where if for whatever reason e was to go to like 500 then the entire narrative would flip right because it's not actually that much based on fundamentals but then people would say I mean come on it generates that amount of fees like how can it not be worth like 500 or $600 right and I thought it was such a great like case study where actually a lot of people did change the

tun right once once uh once e recovered so it's actually the the price informs The Narrative and not the other way around yeah many of these cases definitely and I think eth is the kind of token where if it breaks alltime highs like when it breaks it's a very good buy through all-time highs because of the fact that it would mean that it took out all the you know all the natural selling Supply uh up to that point and like it would radically enter price Discovery right because of the fact that yeah uh something will have been validated in its token uh value cruel and something will have been validated in the idea of investing in ether uh so so I think that like ether is definitely the most reflexive asset

in the space uh you know when it's at 800 you know $80 $100 people are like this you know you don't even need eth to have any value for theem to work right like economic abstraction and then when eth is at like you know $800 or $1,000 people you know say this is going to flip in Bitcoin uh it's like a Bitcoin super set and all that kind of stuff right so it's like but but people don't realize too like a lot of those like big high and big lows like it only last there a few weeks because as soon as the as soon as it changes like like the hot money goes the other way and and so and so I like what worries me the most about it is that like it's still very hot money driven but over time it's gotten it's

gotten you you have more sort of long-term holders now you have more sort of long-term Believers uh that it's a good it's kind of become the Bitcoin cash of it's It's kind of inherited that Bitcoin cash mantle more so than I think a lot of people have realized which is that uh it's a hedge against BTC like if BDC truly aifi and it aifi too early and it like just doesn't work ether will become the money and it'll it'll kind of inherit that role I think that that like a lot of the existing and the the sort of more sustainable monetary premium that eth has will be from as a hedge to bitcoin uh I do think that that's the case um so that does give it a floor

that does give it a floor press that that the other tokens don't have right yeah I think it has sort of predictable amount of upside and downside against Bitcoin actually I don't think it can flip in Bitcoin but I'm also like 100% sure it's not going away like if I had to recommend two tokens to buy to to like people coming into this space actually I did that even when I owned like very little etherum never own no ethereum but for a time I own very little of it um even then like poker friends of mine were buying crypto for the first time and I told them like yeah hold them for at least a year and buy Bitcoin and ethereum buy them like sort of based on on kind of market cap weight

ratio because I like long term I'm definitely bullish on the existence at this the the continued existence of both of them yeah let's just talk were like okay so what is there to say about Bitcoin at this point right Bitcoin has almost I think breached past alltime highs and the thesis or like what a lot of people said is it's super quiet it has been super quiet around Bitcoin on the runup and what but once we breach like the alltime highest kind of the the media machine is going to turn on yeah a lot of people will get this kind of like for the for a lot of people the moment they actually end up buying Bitcoin is just kind of the second time that about it right because the first

time they think it's some stupid idea or it's a bubble or it's tulips right but the second time they hear it often like years later that's the moment when they realize oh it's it hasn't gone away right so something about my mental model has been wrong and Eric Wall has written phenomenal posts about this that they kind of verbalized this this concept very well which I would recommend everyone to read but I think that's why I I I am actually bought into this idea that once Bitcoin makes a new all-time high that's when you do get this ramp up in in attention and then a lot of people will get the second look on bitcoin and it's the second look that will turn them into

Believers yeah and I think also just seeing a lot of the people that they do respect in traditional finance and traditional you know figures coming out and saying that they see Merit in Bitcoin I I think that Barry Silver had a really good quote in 2018 where he said you know 2019 is where crypto gets more respectability and Bitcoin gets more respectability but 2020 is where like you really get like social proof from Bitcoin like it becomes prestigious in its own right and I think you're seeing that a lot this year and and definitely you'll see a lot more of that as it breaks alltime highs like like just even interacting with a lot of you know traditional Finance people in Singapore like the the the social Prestige of Bitcoin I don't think has ever been higher than it is now right

where yeah even you speak with like Bankers who like are against it they're like huh like that's like you know it's impressive now to be associated with Bitcoin so I think that that is a see change and I think that um that's also why you've been seeing a lot of high netw worth buying you've been seeing a lot of family office buying because for them it's not about it's not about uh outperforming it's about keeping up right it's about okay if this is going to be a numer if this is going to be digital scarcity then I need my own piece right if I own let's say X basis points of the total wealth in my city I need to own x per of Bitcoin just to get back to my original wealth distribution right so so that's the way a lot of

these guys are viewing it and I think that that that that kind of you know if you speak to the ODC death out there they they'll tell you the the on the the ODC by flow from highworth is 100% BDC right now uh and that and that's spread across whether Asia or Europe or us so I mean you you kind you kind of see that in the price as well but I think it just goes to show like they have been studying it for years some of them have dabbled in it earlier uh and they've seen it you know fend off the forks as you mentioned and they've also seen it kind of um get regulatory uh get more regulatory Clarity in some sense as well so I think that um all that has kind of come together uh in a backdrop of very

heavy monetary easing uh and uh money printing so I think I think that's no surprise that we're at all-time highs now and and I think that um I think that the the thesis for Bitcoin as a store value has never been stronger yeah yeah and I mean you used to have kind of career risk from owning Bitcoin yeah and I think we are approaching the point where you have career risk from not owning Bitcoin and I think people underestimate how fast this kind of can flip in like one like zero to one moment for sure for sure so yeah that was an unusual episode but I thought it was very fun to just I don't

know just catch up uh about like with you of course but also about the the different coins so some of these I haven't really thought about them in a long time definitely yeah it's been uh it's been unusual for sure but I hope people got something out of it and uh and uh you know anything we say it's just our opinions it's nothing more