The Evolution of Alt Seasons | Tolks & zkMike

Transcript

I think the bubble on alts has kind of burst this cycle to an extent I think a lot of people and and intuitively like just think about it everyone kind of knows that a lot of these tokens are just griffs there's no underlying value to any of these things like they don't actually have underlying business models they don't have anything substantial hey guys D the digital asset Summit is coming back this year it'll be in New York City next month um there'll be a ton of great speakers and guests there uh some of our friends on the research team I know Mark Arjun Ryan cashs Conor they'll be there in the flesh um so you'll you can have a chance to to meet and chat with them and some key folks from around the industry and hear what they're thinking about crypto um for all

for all our listeners out there use code 0x10 at the link in the description um you can get 10% off tickets and we really hope to see you there nothing said on zerox Research is a recommendation to buy or sell Securities or tokens this podcast is for informational purposes only and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions not Financial advice bacho Ryan and our guests May hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed what's up guys welcome back to another episode of zerx research today I'm joined by tols and ZK Mike um to talk about what's happening in the markets and probably spend a good bit of time talking about grass but before we get into that um Mike do you want to give a short

introduction of yourself what you do when you got in the market ETA yeah sure yeah so quick background myself uh on crypto 2017 doing icos um made a lot of money and lost it all basically around trip and then uh Bally stuck around I was on the research side of things when I got back into working in the market around like 2021 I was doing that for two years um was at a research firm for about two years first and then I was at new orow doing uh helping with like incubation and all that good stuff and then since then basically just been uh full-time trading and then I recently joined the gun off one team working with uh basically do

like mix of a lot of things like product development and um like business spe and stuff like that so yeah very good gun. used to be Shogun right I'm not mistaken yeah I mean same thing it's just the ad is good enough on but yeah it's Shogun and can you do you want to give a short intro on what that is and then we can get into markets yeah sure so gun off or shogun's a t based defi platform so right now the main focus is trading uh we're working on we have like a trading bot and a web app up it's kind of bare bones right now but yeah we're working on that um and then with intents you can basically do any sort of thing you can think about on chain and defi

with intense so later on I mean there's a lot of I mean basically anything you can kind of think of right and I think I think later on we're going to try to do a lot of interesting things such as like let's say you have like 10K on soul and you want to do like a leverage loop on a on eth for example you could do you could like abstract like all the processes in between that so yeah I mean there's a lot of different creative [ __ ] you could do with that basically but yeah right now it's just um a trading telegram bot and a web app for cross chain transactions very cool um talks we we kind of talked about this a bit earlier while we're waiting for Mike

but do you want to give a you want to give some high level Market FS um before I start crying are you in the mood to cry a little bit um yeah I mean it's been a uh it's been a hell of a 24 hours and it seems like you can say that at least once a week nowadays um obviously yesterday we got the we got the couple tweets from uh true social the first one about um The Reserve including xrp soul and cardano and then the clarification statement about 45 minutes later that of course uh Ethan and BTC would be included as well um so obviously on that news Market just

absolutely raped yesterday and running into uh kind of the bottom of the range that that we spent a good three months in or so um kind of rejecting off that right now um but yeah I mean to me the the bigger story is unfortunately just the the macro stuff and I know we all hate caring about macro but um you know us equities um specifically Max s and kind of the policies that the Trump admin is admin pushing forward is kind of weighing heavy on on markets right now and I mean we can have ideally as many bullish crypto catalysts as possible um but the unfortunate reality is these things don't exist in a vacuum and so we're kind of tied to to macro right now

and that's that's been weighing heavy on us and what caused a lot of the the selloff the the past two weeks too um so to me we're kind of just in a in a waiting stage right here kind of see what the event on the 7th Friday is the crypto Summit we'll see what they have there and whether that ends up being kind of a sell the news thing like we saw with the last uh crypto Summit that that they had um but yeah right now just kind of a lot of I don't know a lot of organized chaos I guess I'd say a lot of people I think um I think you can make compelling statements in each Direction right now and it's kind of just going to depend on what the follow through from from the admin is so yeah kind of just a

wait and see right now that makes Mike any thoughts just on the market yeah uh yeah I think um what do you guys think about this little pump we got from the uh Trump stuff what was your guys opinion on that I um I thought it was the thing is it's it's it's kind of disheartening if the the president tweets out the tickers and you sell off 24 hours after um doesn't make you feel great I also my general thoughts around spr or like any talk of Reserve stock files whatever you want to

call it is that it is just like a massive tease and not something that's necessarily going done amount to anything at least in the near future so any times it's brought anytime it's brought up um I feel like you have to kind of sell into it unfortunately just because I'm not like a huge huge politics person but as far as I understand these things take a a lot of time um B it requires on like external approval so I I wouldn't like hold my breath on anybody saying this is going to go through um which is why I feel like you have to kind of drisk on all of those especially since in the short term um in the long

term it's fantastic that you have the sitting president saying we're gonna we're going to do like Bitcoin reserves I don't know about xrp reserves I don't know how useful that is but um like objectively it is it's pretty great news for the industry yeah did you see uh you see I Suite I think I sent you it uh I did not oh here I'll send you it uh he basically thinks that I I thought it was interesting I didn't see anyone else talk about it but he basically said he thinks that this is kind of like negotiation chips because he just puts out something super absurd like having xrp or a into it and then it's like he's like okay well if you don't give me what

I want which is a Bitcoin Reserve then you know we're going to make it pretty I don't know I guess he pushes for those things but yeah I generally agree with you like this pump is uh I think a little bit exuberant and I mean nothing's really changed in terms of a macro backdrop like there's still a lot of uncertainty like Risk assets are not there's not really a reason to be allocating the huge amount of risk right now until the macro stuff figure kind of figures itself out from my understanding a lot of that has to do with the bouncy right now um I'm not some macro genius or anything but just from what I've heard um yeah I mean I

don't think it's necessary I don't think the top is in by any means it's just a time to kind be patient you know it's like we got the move on bitcoin down to 77 so like if we get a Underside retest here and go down to like 70s or something or 74 I think that's a generational opportunity at least for like a trade you know yeah I think I mean waking up uh when was it was it Saturday morning or Friday morning we were under 80 um but yeah I mean I kind of I tweeted about it but I you know kind of just have to Blind by there and that seems fine I mean especially how much we're off from the top um but yeah I mean like the the pump yesterday and stuff like I mean I don't know everybody wants continuation on that but like you know these assets

are up you know 25 to you know adaa went up like 65% at one point like it's going to you know there's going to be some consolidation and just kind of uh you know flattening out and I mean the market as we saw like you know when BTC was still up at you know like 105 we had endless good news and you remember people talking about just kind of why isn't stuff going up and it's because like it's almost like that the market wasn't going to settle for anything less than S spr like that's kind of what was priced in since the election and then when that didn't come along with you know the um MA 7 and and q's going down for um three weeks now like yeah just kind of an excuse to set until there's there's another Catalyst and I think

we're we'll see on again on Friday what what comes of that crypto Summit but um until then I think um you know kind of needed more Market Just Waxing and waning between you know reasons reasons to sell and reasons to buy and trying to find that that equilibrium there but yeah like Mike said you know anything kind of under 80k is just kind of a blind Buy to me um while we let the the macro work itself out yeah I don't know if you do you listen do you guys listen to agar at all or any of that stuff or I know I don't think you do but do you look at like orderflow at all tokes uh not too much no it was interesting I stayed up all night well I fell asleep on my desk actually and I missed the actual bottom

I was listening I listen to tape pretty much all day I was listening to it I was like oh like it's starting to sound you can actually start to hear like differences and you can kind of start to see it on um L time frames like people actually interested versus just you know D gen Leverage is trying to hit every bottom right so yeah it's like okay well if we have a buildup down there right and you actually can if you're if you're if you're on an assumption that there actually is longer term interest let's say I don't know like 80 8.8 down to like 78.4 it's like okay we have this leverage build up now if that gets rinsed and you just hit a bunch of

people stops it's like okay well it kind of sets up perfectly for just hit more areas that you start to see longer term interest right I don't think all of the people who bought like 78 like 80 are like short-term oriented maybe not correct but if you're under that assumption you can probably assume that if it goes under that there's you're just going to start hitting more and more um interest and then also it's kind of interesting if you look at like uh if you just like pull up like a volume profile and pull it from like just like like the entire price history like we kind of just Wick through like the big gap there and then if you get anywhere under this Wick like down to like 77 down to like 74s when you or even down

to like 69ers is where you start to hit uh it kind of start to hit like that thicker part of the range so it would would expect that to be near the bottom and a lot of people start thinking about that too it's like okay well if that's probably going to be where the bottom is it's like you start to see people front running and start so yeah no definitely and I mean there was yeah I mean there was a ton of you know I think there was a lot of uh kind of short and and and bearish build up in in the weeks you know prior weeks leading to to Sunday and of course a lot of that culminates towards you know the bottom is obviously I mean that Catalyst yesterday too like I mean stuff like that is just you know you can't you can't meaningfully like

press that in in in any way um in advance but yeah I mean like you're talking about like the the short-term orientation like I said I woke up you see BTC like sub 80 like I'm fine just buying there and not even trading that like you know just send it to cold wall like that's that's a fine price for me like if I lose on that or losing that we go back under again like like I'll buy some more and um you know just remain patient and see there but yeah I mean overall like I think I don't know I don't think it's out of the realm a possibility that we just you know spend another you know a couple months just kind of chopping around here while um like I said the the macro and um tariffs kind of the Trump policies like they

kind of and the US Treasury secretary besset like they've kind of made it pretty clear that they kind of want markets down in in the short term so kind of fighting against that a little bit in a way but um the good thing about that is like it doesn't seem necessarily like there's not like idiosyncratic risk in my mind like you'll kind of know when to like flip back on to like super bullish which I think is awesome compared to the alternative of like in the Summer where it was just you know kind of endless headline after headline and just a slow like methodical grind down like at least at this point like it's almost coming top down so once that pivot comes like it should be pretty clear when when risk is is really entering the market

again I will say one thing I liked about the summertime was that it didn't feel like we had topped now since we hit 110 you could reasonably make the argument that we did top and like the chop down is just us actually going down versus in the summer I assume you're talking about about that range like 65 to 70 range I guess like back then I was not stressed out at all because I was like that's not the top we can wait a bit more um but I do think I I position very differently to both of you where I just bought and then never really thought about some core stuff for a very long time versus now I have to actively think about it

all the time which I don't like I think that's a good point I mean I'm with you like the summer like you know that it was kind of uh it was really like be grinder PA that was just you know it was tiresome after a long time but there wasn't really ever a doubt in my mind that like I don't know that it was that was topped I mean you had the election too like who knows what would have happened if if it went you know the opposite way like you know that's all it's all meaningless to to kind of talk about now um but yeah there was never really like an overall concern that um we topped I mean I still don't I don't necessarily feel strongly one way or the other I lean a little bit more towards I don't know maybe like

6040 that maybe it's top at Le but I don't know like I said I'm more just you know three months plus or so around there of like you know just kind of chop and hang out and then and then we'll see but I mean when they do pivot from the top down like it should be it just depends on if it comes with you know a lot of pain in in the interum or not yeah totally the Cy is weird man so weird it's so weird yeah I've been trying to kind of place it in my mind and I I can't um think of what we're doing anymore like it's there's no like past historical thing that I can be

like oh this is exactly like when this happened um I've heard some arguments for it's just the same as the range that we had in the summer which is I feel like the common thought um another one is like we're doing the 2021 pullback after the first stop um to head into a double top I don't know it's kind of difficult and I think the the best way to probably think about it is BTC is a completely different um asset to everything else and then the ALS will just have small cycles for themselves yeah I think that's fair and I mean with like how much we're ented with trafi now like I don't know pontificating on you know like tops and

cycles and like all seasons and like comparing it like all that stuff to me is I mean it still matters some and there's historical context you have to pay attention to but like the asset is driven by like outside factors now that weren't really you know since the ETF launch like those didn't necessarily matter but now we're so tied to you know macro and like you can nobody I mean there's very few people in the world that like can accurately predict the direction of macro so in that sense like I don't know you just kind of I don't know pontificating about it all like as the asset and the class like grows just becomes a little bit more sillier to me which is both a good and a bad thing

like you know the dispersion and diversification of returns like we've seen this cycle like I think that'll continue and into the future and that's because again of where that asset is and like what it's tied to like you can't just you know play seasonality and like 3 months from the heaving so XYZ happens and you know all season happens in this period of time like those things aren't necessarily as meaningful as they once were and I mean it takes some adjustment to get used to that but overall like I think it's a good thing for the the asset class at large yeah I think you can kind of break it down into three different things one you mentioned B show is that Bitcoin is somewhat of a different asset class now

which is I think fair to say looking at how closely correlated it is to S&P and how uh there was a before that big liquidation event a couple weeks ago on the weekend like everything was getting sold off in crypto so being a 247 Market you know you kind of get a sense of what's going to happen or it was before uh the Deep seek thing I think it was like the DC yeah y yeah like people can use crypto as an outlet now to express these various views especially on the weekend and then I think the second point would be um I mean I I don't think people like when people go talk about alt season I don't know how you guys feel about this but I

I think we've had tons of alt seasons and tons of alt opportunities probably more than not more than the Cycles but I think it's just difficult it's more difficult and the opportunities are all on Shan like dude the amount of [ __ ] on Shain that went from know sub like let's say reasonably if you weren't doing pump fun is not a lot of people you can get in around like sub 10 amount of opportuni stuff that went to like 10 to like you know 100 200 plus 253 yeah that was kind of the top for a lot of stuff yeah but like that's yeah I'm with you I'm with you 100% it's more Kindle that that side of it was more similar to icos the Ico cycle in my opinion and then you

just see sex coins underperform but but even but dude like even we've had tons of periods where like per and alts on on centralized exchanges have gone crazy like over when we ran up during the summer prummer dude like every single meme major is going up 20% every single day like how can people say we haven't had an all season yeah no I'm with you like it it's it just looks different than what it was in the past but like the amount and like that goes back to you know kind of the dispersion and like returns I was talking about like yeah is that S Class like matures like things get a little more difficult like that's just the nature of how anything in in life works you know like the

efficiencies the longer it's around like they get stripped out the inefficiencies and it becomes more efficient um but yeah I mean I'm with you even like you know like suie went insane like SE had an insane R like you know so went you know 20 to 300 like yeah it didn't necessarily look like the old season have passed in a way and look at all the you know like LTC and xrp and all these coins like I don't know they went up a [ __ ] ton and then on chain like you know you had months at a time where there was you know three four five Runners from like you said sub 10 even like 20 mil up to you know a couple hundred mil like yeah maybe that's not like the altseason definition that you would have read and in a book if you

were preparing for crypto like two and a half years ago but I don't really know what else to call that yeah you you kind of nailed it that was my third point that it basically was um I forg what you what I was going to say uh oh yeah yeah the the maturation of the market like it's just I don't know to me it was always silly like just to operate under the assumption that you're going to have an allseason where no matter what coin you kind of really allocate into like yeah I'm just expecting this to go up five to 10x like because of this is what has happened previously like that just becomes silly and especially as you know pump started taking off and the whole onchain like it was pretty easy to reason that

there is like orders of magnitude more coins the cycle so like things are going to play out a little different like could have realized that I don't know a year and a half ago you know like things are just different yeah I mean we've been talking about this for months now so yeah I I I completely agree with both of you even if we're saying like all season has changed the way that it looks I would say we had what looks like a stereotypical um all season in March 2024 like that March 2024 pump was that was what it was like well not maybe not to like the 2021 extent but it was still like very much retail driven everything went up every single like

token went up um and it wasn't like dispersion it was just everything went up so I feel like you can even just say we already had like a pretty decent one yeah it's just pulse as a risk right it's changing now because people are smarter they I mean dude like if you ever you ever go on Tik Tok or anything or like just non crypto Twitter [ __ ] all these guys actually talk about oh like sell the news events you don't want to be exit like this FTV is too high you should buy this other coin it's like you know as as as much as the insulated isolated bubble of crypto likes to think that normes and Retail aren't here aren't smart you know the new dude like

the the information isn't half bad like dude when I was training [ __ ] in 2017 the information that you could get was awful like it nowadays you go on a Tik Tok and the algorithm just feeds you stuff where it's like okay like that's actually like good information like before it was like okay here's like Justin Sun talking about Tron being the future of everything and eolina showing some spreadsheet [ __ ] like you ever um Mike did you ever end up doing some like analysis on the YouTube and Tik Tok stuff I never did actual analysis on it uh I I kind of just I don't really I used to go on Tik Tok a lot and kind of had just a curated list of people I'd

fall and check in on but I've been kind of lazy about that um the YouTube stuff no I I should I need to play I should mess around with it now that um after playing out all the AI stuff it's like okay this should be relatively easy to do now I I I checked out on the um YouTube videos and tried to see if like increased posting about a token um implies like some form of attention top and it doesn't like I think content creators have managed to make it so efficient that like from what I saw and I didn't have a huge like sample set it it didn't really like maybe you can figure out a better way to do it than I

did but I couldn't find like any Edge in it at all um it didn't it didn't like give me any signal unfortunately yeah YouTube I'm not sure about t Tik Tok I back tested a lot of stuff this was months ago but I back tested a bunch of stuff and just kind of looked at the price action versus other other things that didn't have Tik Tok shs on it and it is pretty noticeable when there is an uptick Capital flowing from those it's just like I think the hard thing in the signal would be trying to figure out when you're actually meeting full money coming from these Outlets like for example uh there there was some B&B token I looked at called some onchain thing it's called AI

Tech or something sounds bullish dog [ __ ] token but if you look at the chart was you can just look at you're like oh that's a retail driven price action it was getting shilled heavy on Tik talk and it ran up to uh let's see it got up to they got up to like almost like 500 mil or something crazy yeah no I mean like what you're talking about was just monitoring and it just goes back to what we're talking about with dispersion and like harder kind of harder Cycles like you know you had people like after um the Trump launch and then I think when when poroi was on chain just being an absolute Menace uh like you had people monitoring

the moonshot like volumes and just there's just so many more outlets and more ways to onboard kind of what you're talking about Mike about like figuring out like when that strong flow of money like is coming in like it becomes more difficult as there's you know like growing onramps there's you know people are kind of already tapped in and and just waiting for various things like it used to be just going back to like allseason like you used to kind of know like once star stuff started ripping like it was kind of I don't know it was going to it was going to rip for a little while but now like I don't know things are just so much more efficient yeah I feel like if you were it's the worst type of market for people who

believe in the tokens it's you're anymore what's up guys um welcome back to zerox research today I'm joined by Antonio from dydx thanks for coming on Antonio hey thanks so much for having me um we've talked about this a bit um improving product experience you mentioned simplifying it um to maybe on board a new generation of perpetuals Traders is there anything else that you guys are specifically focused on and to add on to this what is the ideal product experience in your mind for dydx yeah absolutely so just to be clear what we'll always be focused on sophisticated in prot Traders as well but as an addition we're really excited about potentially onboarding a new class of retail type Traders with a simpler ux

as well um so am excited about that I I still am pretty hot on this thesis long term that I title trade anything um and I think if you look at the evolution of pretty much everything that's gotten hot in crypto for years at this point it's really determined by how many markets can you trade at a given point in crypto on a given exchange and if you look at the evolution all the way back to 2017 when defi started in 2020 when defi got hot in 2017 we had icos and we had maybe hundreds of things that you could buy into 2020 okay you have now thousands of things you can trade with a Unis swap um fast forward to 2024 now you have pump.

fund and you can trade hundreds of thousands of things and the interesting part of this is every time this happens the fundamental form factor of the app looks different like an Ico looks different from Unis swop looks different from pump fund um but you see this fundamental thing just continuing to increase by orders of magnitude and I think there's a lot of reason to believe that that's going to be the case on derivatives as well and derivatives right now are really big in terms of trading volume crypto but not that big in terms of actual number of users in crypto it's a lot of trading firms a lot of more sophisticated individual Traders and that's great and there is a big business opportunity there but I'm really excited about increasing this to many more use cases and what could you

do with derivatives on tens of thousands of things on a million things what does the app look like in that case that's really what we're looking at long term and there's a lot of problems that we have to go out and solve there like how can you build a chain that's performant enough to handle that manyy markets could you have new types of liquidity models like an amm or potentially even a bonding curve for you know a nence type of derivative that could allow you to have orders of magnitudes more things with liquidity and those are the types of things were were really excited about tackling over the next few years what is that going to look like exactly I honestly don't know yet um but that's the direction that we're moving in Mike you brought up the AI stuff and I want to talk

about um first of all toist lers I bought um chat gbt Plus or Pro just because Mike sent me like five reports about it and said this [ __ ] fantastic um Mike I think you're the only person that I know that is act actively like spending a lot of time building out processes through this I want to talk to you a bit about that has it worked out has it been efficient and do you want to give a little bit of a introduction on what you've been doing with deep um what the hell is it called Deep research deep research yeah yeah sure um so we we are going to talk about okay I didn't know if you wanted to take that risk okay all right uh yeah so with deep re so deep research uh I guess a little tldr for

people listening they don't know what it is it's the new chat GPT open AI uh agent what is it I'm not sure I think it's called an agent right um You have to pay I think it's like this Pro so is I think $200 a month uh yeah deep thing you can basically I mean it's the craziest it was the craziest thing I've ever used in Tech ever I think it's and especially the search feature they roll out with it is you can just search realtime internet with it which I think is like if you've ever used chat gbt it like couldn't just search Real Time stuff up to date as much like it still could to some extent but not like oh

like this event just happened let me ask it to pull me all the news articles or research analysts takes on this macro event for example this is kind of interesting because uh like if you think about anything you do on the internet a lot of it is um especially in crypto like you want to know like stuff that's happening recently this can pull and give you like these crazy reports and insights on it within like five 10 minutes whatever like I've asked it uh I've had to do things like research reports down to um like doing like background checks on companies and their employees for me like and giving me all the legal cases that a specific nonprofit has uh faced

its Inception and it's super detailed and um gives you citations and all that stuff so yeah deep research is sick for anything crypto related um and then I think when you use these things versus the other old models you start to it's it kind of kicks off like this creativity Loop creativity Loop of thinking okay like what's possible with this thing like for example um you mentioned what I've been doing with some other projects like one thing I have been work I've just been building out for fun is a uh like a basically just training this project to be like my Fashion Stylist so

anytime I buy something like a clothing piece or something I'll tell I'll send it the sizings and then um it basically learn and I'll give it feedback once I try it on and let it know like okay like this the sleeves are too long the links is too short and it just constantly learns these things and then when I feed it new when I ask it for new recommendations it'll be like okay like well these things this is it just learns basically everything um like your sizings basically and that stuff I mean then you can stem off of that like hey like what colors go work well with this and all that different stuff but yeah and with creativity super cool uh would recommend it I um I think like you said that the older models it's typically very

difficult to work with crypto with them because I feel like their knowledge is outdated I mean I was a big like Claude guy for a really really long time and Claude doesn't have any new information I think cut off right now is October 2024 um deep research is fantastic I I had to do some research on Solana um inflation and like validator stuff staking and I don't have a fantastic background on that and then I just asked it and it gave me everything and you can even like work with it and say only use like salana foundation and specifically like GitHub and also like let's say like marinade or jito's website and it will

only use those um and it'll give you like explanations of what people are thinking and what I really really like is that I feel like usually when you talk to when you expect like some write up from AI it's like kind of like slop um you know what I mean it's yeah you can tell it's Ai and you have to spend a lot of time just making sure it's not doesn't look like it's written by AI yeah yeah but apart from that it's also like the slop side of it it's it it always falls for marketing I feel like that's like my big issue is it it'll read like a blog post on I don't know like page one and it'll say wow uh page one according to the page one website is the best research um and newsletter thing in crypto and like it

can't discern that but I felt like deep research was smart enough to be like okay if this protocol is making this claim it might have a reason to do so so it actually makes like your research a little bit better um it helped me write a report very very well I will say like it cut down my time a lot and that's the reason why um I don't know it was this was like my first Mo I feel like I didn't really have that huge thing with AI when it first came out I wasn't like wow this is [ __ ] lifechanging um but I I've been using it very very heavily like AI in general over the past however long but

this was insane I highly recommend like anybody to just try it out for one month it's genuinely incredible yeah it's fantastic I mean grock's pretty good uh nowadays on Twitter just for crypto stuff because like the real time like that data lag aspect you were talking about like granted you kind of have to you know parse through the information because again it's just you know tweets and it's harder to find like you know the verified source of data but like just using that as like a little side analyst on certain things or to catch up on you know whatever token you want is becoming like extremely useful to me oh yeah I mean they're all getting really good dude you know what the cool the coolest part is too about gpts that you can mean me it's an AS so you can treat it like a

you can use it as a scraper too like uh I was I was helping my friend who was thinking about getting it and he needed to pull like 100 apis or something from different documentations and we just FedEd some parameters of what we were looking for and within 10 minutes it pulled literally everything and that would have taken you know like how long would it take to go through and find the correct API documentations and then actually pull the correct things that you need as a developer it's like whole day problema yeah no doubt dude have you guys Tri operator no one it's a little clunky right but it kind of gives you a peak in it's kind of like trying the iPhone the first iPhone

makes you it kind of gives you a peak in like what's possible and once they kind of get faster uh like dude for with operator I had it I had it uh log into my substack account to crossb Capital and copy paste every single article he's posted since he made the substack which with all the images and [ __ ] into a Google doc I don't know that probably would have taken me like oh yeah three two three hours yeah yeah and then uh I need to actually need to do this next part but I'm gonna feed it into uh either I don't even know if I need to use D resarch for this but I'm going to upload all the TXS into a project and then have it make me like a macro study

guide in like fundamentals order like top or bottom down or bottom to top in like a pyramid so I can learn all the principles he's talked about since he's uh been posting and had his paid sub and just like go through and learn all that [ __ ] like that's that's what I mean by that's what I was trying to say with like the creativity like you can do all these yeah things that you know probably would have taken you like 10 hours to start up if not longer yeah no I mean it's crazy the only thing I think we need is we need uh we need more tokens attached to these things so I can speculate on them there's one is that lead in there's one and we're gonna talk about it and there's a lot of people

upset with us because there was some I don't know how true this is but there was some news that there's some wallet movements on the grass The Bu bit side um I don't know we'll see and also Rodeo's upset that I didn't have him on but I had you on Mike to talk about grass but should we talk a bit about grass I feel like no one has a great feus on grass they're just like this is a good token and it should go up um Mike they're saying that you actually have a good thesis on it do you want to share it with the class uh my thesis on grass yeah yeah uh yeah I think it's the only the one liner I think is it's the only liquid token

right now that you can reasonably bet will go up that's not a complete scam that I think that's it's as simple as that uh like that's a good one ligher what I mean seriously what else are you g what else are you gonna bet oness bullishness on crypto AI or just crypto in general I mean you could bet on defi um but a lot of these have back holders bro and that that's a real issue like I mean grass kind of has back but not really it's a new token um I mean I think a big thing that people had ISS with was grass was their transparency and especially with their data like you saw like how it was

underperforming for a little bit or getting sold off and then their dashboard the D the data script was just like flat and then the minute it started up ticking people were like oh [ __ ] and then you saw um a bunch of funds just coming in and start like vwap accumulating it and if you look from like the date February 3D when we had that first liquidation event it's the top performing coin in the entire Market and it's one of like sub i' say sub six things on their Bitcoin pairs that are actually showing like real deviation from like outperformance it's like grass Kito ass maker ate it off that pump the other

which kind a Celestia which is like whatever and then things bar up against their Bitcoin pairs so um yeah good token good team um need a token yeah yeah I mean yeah it's a yeah no I'm with you everything you said um and I mean just like it seems like a a good it's like one of those classic like bell curve tokens for me too like you can make the extreme like you know right curve take like what kind of what what Mike did like you know you can dig into what they're doing and like what you know the T of that is and kind of like in the broader like AI cycle we're in and then the left curve

is just like you know AI token good like and it's just kind of one of those things where kind of every everyone on the bell curve there is is kind of lined and um I mean the scale at which you know the amount of data that that they have is just you know it it's Bonkers and um I think you know the team and and the foundation and there's some Grassroots movement and the community too um shout out Rodeo but just you know get more transparency on on the day data and you know the people that companies that that are paying for it because all that stuff has been alluded to in you know amas and and tweets here and there um but the scale at which you know they're operating you know we get uh more information on that like you know

the valuation of it makes makes it very appealing yeah I'm going to give a short background on grass as well I feel like okay for our listeners who don't know anything about grass I have an episode that I recorded with back in the day um I think the reason that we've been bringing up the analytics thing and I think why the analytics page is important is because the team has stated that they don't scrape data just to scrape data um they've historically been very very quiet like you said Mike which I honestly don't know why they have been so quiet I assume it's because they have some ndas with people that they sell the data to um but they've been like very

very everything under the table um I don't know if that's the right way to say that they've just been very secretive about the way that they do their operations um until they mention that they sell most of the data that they scrape and they don't scrape data for no reason which is why people love to pull up this chart that shows daily data scraped in terabytes going up and to the right um and they say wow this is fantastic there's more demand for progress than ever um I don't know how true that is to be honest with you I don't know how like relevant that is but I will say and not Financial advice I have exposure to Grass um but I like their feces of data is very important with AI

because we kind of talked about this as well is there's a reason that I want to use chat GPT like the recent one because it has data live data and that's what matters to me like I don't care about incredible reasoning um if the data cut off is like mid 2024 because doesn't have the most relevant stuff that I need like it can't tell me about simd 228 because it doesn't know about it the data is already cut off um grass is supposed to change this um by scraping data and they also have live context retrieval which is I think like a perplexity like product that can um scrape data every second um so yeah I think like that fit and

like you said Mike I really I don't I think you can bet on some defi um I don't know any other like very clearcut AI tokens that you can bet on with the confidence of grass um I feel like there isn't that much like great quality in terms of AI tokens out there right now I know like people like to do fetch AI I think the name's different now just to get like AI beta but apart from that there isn't much to buy versus grass which is I think quite relevant and probably will be going forward Yeah you mentioned a lot of good things I think kind of we touched on a little bit earlier but I I think one thing that I've thought I think the bubble on alts has kind of burst this

cycle to an extent I think a lot of people and and intuitively like just think about it everyone kind of knows that a lot of these tokens are just griffs there's no underlying value to any of these things except for maybe a few of the defi things but majority of the VC stuff that's launched is just what it's a new chain it's a new whatever like they don't actually have underlying business models they don't have anything substantial grass has well I mean their data scraping business obviously successful but they also have this no network there it seems like they have a very good plan on using effectively not just to do scraping but they can and they've talked about this kind they mentioned it not super

extensively but I mean they can verticalized business and whether they can execute on that I think is more question on if you want to bet on their team which I think they have a great team in terms of actual development but um yeah that's just something I been thinking about they're doing the Because if you see on the website they're doing um they're about to launch data labing as well is like a massive sector outside of crypto like absolutely huge terms of if you want to talk about like Val comps if they're actually putting up similar numbers to some of the businesses in

there it's like you know 2.5 bill fdv seems kind of cheap yeah I think that's been the general thought um and I I agree like I think if they can get into more and more on the um data side because not just scraping there's a lot more to it I wonder if they're ever going to launch like a front end product to highlight some of the data sets that they have um maybe Implement like some sort of Life searching through it I'm not sure if that's something that they're interested in at all or if it's relevant um I thought it would have been cool at some point but I think at some point I was just seeking for them to do more publicity and recently we I don't even think they needed it I think the price

was just low so I was like oh the team's not talking about it enough and now I don't think they've actually changed anything but I'm like wow the grass team is doing fantastically in terms of funny how that works huh well we can say objectively that they probably could have done a better job marketing if they wanted it didn't even have it didn't have to be even be like shady Griff marketing they could have just had better education on specific things right it's like we had that whole AI asan meta and like if you look at grass versus like the virtual like all these different pairs it was like there's clearly people taking a short grass long like virtual or AI 16z or something else type of trade

and yeah I mean I mean they just could have done a better job educating like even companies like chain link are trying to tie into like specific narratives now like with their social media and marketing stuff so um yeah yeah it's their choice it's just they're thinking on a they have like a real business it's one of those things that's like it's like kind of annoying and you don't necessarily want the matter but like you know it kind of I don't know everything you know in today's economy is you know like the attention economy and like that stuff unfortunately like kind of matters um it's just you know the way that it is like even with eth now like the foundation everything like you see the changes that they're making

there it's just like I don't know comms and and communication like BD like all that stuff is it's unfortunately kind of important yeah there's there's tasteful way to do that to do it that doesn't lump yourself into the Shady stuff that other teams that a lot of teams do yeah exactly exactly there's there's a line A Line in the Sand there yeah but you you have to do it like you can't not do it you can't not do it because you're like this is cringe you're I don't need to do this I have a great product um this is not just that the grass team as well I think they I agree with you like like being objective they could have done a better job um but I think a lot of cool teams just tend to not do it a lot

because they think it's a bit cringe you remember uh famously the Adam Founders going on a podcast I think it was like 2020 and they said they they didn't Market Adam or have like a foundation that like reached out to talk about the tech and stuff because they thought it would like it was so good it just would talk to itself talk for itself yeah and you can you can obviously you know chart Adam against anything but I mean they were kind of right like even like you know there's still a ton of chains that like are launching that are using like you know kind of the cosmos Tech underneath like they were kind of right it's just like you can't just ignore the aspect of being like yeah we need people to to buy the token too

yeah yeah um do we want to cover anything else I think we're good right I don't know Mike are you excited about anything else right now gu or what else uh you kind of watching working on trading anything um no I'm just kind of waiting bro uh I think it's just time to be patient it's like there's no issue waiting um bro you could always just buy stuff a little bit higher it's like look how look how bad stuff got wrecked just on this tiny little move down after we pumped it's like bro like if you had F over the top it's like I

don't know just like there's no especially if you like took a lot off the table and sold reasonbly close to the Top This is how people give it back like like I over traded the summer very much so and like you just have to like learn from these experiences you know and just yeah learn to be Pati like grass is like lucky because it's outperformed Bitcoin like I I think it's like very interesting how much this is actually outperformed against Bitcoin especially even though not dump when it dumped when Bitcoin actually was like Max capitulating last week how much it like didn't move um yeah and so like that like I'm like I was like okay thank

God like that would have sucked but uh yeah for everything else it's just like yo like liquidity is so bad especially after those types of moves people don't have enough money it's like um you know just chill for a little bit do some other stuff in ter and then that's your other part uh other things looking at there was the what's that what's that AI thing that r been talking about a lot uh they just raised from Founders fund I need to look in that prime prime int yeah that looks really cool yeah that's on that's on my list too Bach have you dug into that at all no I have not I I need to I need to dug dig into that and actually one of the blog re research guys just wrote about

news new new I don't know how you pronounce it new research yeah I need to I need to read a bit on that as well I'm uh I've become increasingly AI filled um Mike I think I that's kind of like to your point of why would people buy Defi and stuff when AI is here um and I do agree with that I need to like do more research we don't have any good AI coins that's the thing like we try to force a towel long every three months and I [ __ ] hate it yeah no I mean that's what makes me I mean excited about the grass and Prime intellect I'm pretty sure noose um when they announced uh gosh what the they announced something like three uh maybe

like two months ago something they were doing on soul but I'm almost I'd have to double check but I'm pretty certain there was a reference to eventual token um but yeah I mean stuff like that like I don't know it's what makes me and that's why you know the AI on Jane stuff like that's why that stuff went just absolutely like vertical like I think we'll have a round two of that eventually when the conditions are right just because I don't know the inter of like crypto and AI like yeah a lot of it is you know vapor and like scam but like there's clear I don't know there's going to be some massive winners in that category so spending a lot of time there like in the downtimes like you know being as tapped into that as you possibly can is good um but yeah I saw

million million's launching this month too now they announced this morning so that should be interesting yeah I should check that out um Mike did you go to E Denver talks you didn't go right no I didn't go uh I I'm here but uh I didn't really I ended up having to stay in just like I didn't really do too much and that with a couple people but that's about it okay what were from what you heard what were the Vibes like I heard that it was pretty good but also heard that it was pretty bad uh seems like I mean I've seen some stuff on Twitter about people talking about it being pretty bad but some of my friends have known for quite some time

so that they didn't really they thought the sentiment wasn't as great as normal um makes sense uh but yeah I think [Music] um like there's this tweet from Ari Paul I thought was really good that just like kind of had in the back of my mind since he put it out I something to you guys um but basically his his theory a couple months ago I mean it could have changed I any mean but his theory was like this everything we're seeing in crypto is like positive right now but we actually need like the actual like things being built here and fundamentals are not catching up to like the actual adoption

of like crypto and all that stuff so I think that I I agree with this a lot you said that there's a credible brand recognition reflects a growing gap between maturity and brand adoption versus real adoption underlying fundamentals I totally agree with there's just not enough legit [ __ ] being built here um there's definitely a lot of cool stuff that people are working on ID on ID ating on right now but I mean those are like years out and that's what we we we need more people like that and there's just been an incentive Miss alignments like why if you're like a good founder right it's like you get these rare people like Jeff from hyper liquid who actually will like go and launch something that's like a good product and execute on it but like

for a lot of teams and Founders coming in crypto it's like what's the incentive to go try to build something super legit when incentives point you to not doing that and just making a quick exit you know it's like yeah it's kind of a tough thing for a lot of people to do and once we figure that out I think we'll catch up in the next couple years yeah I think I think yeah I mean that's a good point and the just the framework and Foundation of like what you're talking about the next couple years like I was kind of telling before we hopped on here just about just the dichotomy between like mid to long-term sentiment verse you know short-term sentiment like you have the

SEC settling with youis Swap and and coinbase and Kraken and and Robin Hood and you know Hester Pierce like lead in the test force and like actively like going out of way to like Lobby like feedback on what they should be doing and um all that stuff like that stuff just takes time you know you stable coin and Mark Market infrastructure bills get done later this year like I don't know the the like us-based view of crypto has really never been better and you know it's just the unfortunate reality that even going back to like how we started the conversation about spr spr like even if that is announced like maybe it's you know local top because that takes you know the timeline to implement it and to have like the impact like you know this stuff just you know it takes some time

and people don't like to hear that especially in crypto because you know you're on Twitter and in group chats and it seems like somebody's always doing something but I think you mentioned a little bit ago Mike like you just I don't know there's times just to to kind of relax and obviously stay tapped in and pay attention to things but you don't need to always be you know trading or buying and selling things like there's times just to kind of let things play out and I think that's that's where we're at right now but um there's still you know a ton of exciting things later on this year that's a I think that's a good point to end it out thanks guys um Michael thanks for coming on Mike zero knowledge Michael yeah why why is your name your name's wrong right now why do it know your name

where's the ZK oh [ __ ] I forgot to put it on no he's a fake he's a fake ZK Guy R he just he hopped out he's got he's got to readjust it you actually doing this I think so no he's GNA pop back on with it on ZK bashio dog I messed up the whole thing how do you mess it up bro this is my day job as well there we go zik bachio all right um Michael thanks for coming on I appreciate this oh thanks for having me on appreciate it that was fun y it's always good to Yap you know we finally got around to it even though Bach was

putting off for months yep my fault nobody else's fault [Music]