Maker's buyback, Virtuals and Berachain, per Milk Road PRO

Transcript

GM good morning welcome to the milroad show The Daily crypto show where we break down crypto like you break down after checking your portfolio it's Saturday March 1st I'm your host Jay Hamilton and because it's Saturday it means we're back with the milro pro research team that's right I'm talking about Kyle Martin and Adrien these boys are some of the best in the game because all they do every day is look at the crypto markets in dive deep to make sure you guys win that's what we're all about now today's episode was recorded and released to milro Pro members on Tuesday February 25th but we wanted to make sure we gave you guys

some of this Alpha as well in today's episode we discuss everything is down bad except except maker is up 60% in the last 14 days what is going on what's causing this there was a big buyback that happened their bu back program just going to announce we're going to explain that and give you guys some Edge and Alpha on maker and what might be coming straight up this might be the token that milro team is most bullish on virtuals was making over 500,000 a day back a few months ago and now they're making a couple Grand a day is virtuals cooked does the revenue really matter we're going to talk all about virtuals plus

our thoughts on bar chain and more now before we jump in I've got really exciting news for you guys the milk Road team has been cooking with some other awesome Partners in the space I'm talking about cow swap protocol and radium we've been working with both of them to make the milk Road swap so you guys can now swap your tokens on milk Road go to swap. milroad dcom or hit the link in the show notes because you're going to want to swap here a not only can you do any ethereum chain or salana chain all in one place awesome but also you can trade with some of the lowest fees in the space I'm talking we're only 15 basis point fees on milk Road swap

because the Milkman ain't want to take your money he wants you to make more money so check it out today's episode is brought to you by crypto.com cards one of my favorite cards in the space check it out if you haven't already Link in the show notes without further Ado say what's up to the milro pro research team gentlemen back for another Pro research meting markets have been a little bit uh in the gutters the last little bit so it's a tough go but that's okay we're still here we're still a researcher and we still learning uh the key to success in the space actually is just don't leave during these times just keep learning keep digging deep and sometimes during these moments you start to see where the hidden gems are right the first thing we're going to talk about is actually maker which is not Hidden Gem

we've talked about it for forever however probably the best performing asset in all of crypto maybe in all markets during this uh dry down because even you know the traditional stocks are are getting wrecked uh over the last week or so uh so we will touch on that and then um we want to touch on virtuals and just the AI agent ecosystem uh we'll hit up some bear chain stuff because they've had a big launch and a lot going on there and then Martin's got some nerds on payroll stuff as Chevy calls it uh talking about the endgame for blockchain so I think we'll we'll discuss some of that too uh and who knows what what else we'll come up with um but let's start things off just looking at maker there's been some big news going on and some great market performance let me share a screen here

what what bare Market or what down only Market sky or maker does not show that at all if you can see the screen right now it's currently sitting as we're recording this is on Tuesday at you know almost $1,500 uh which is close to its high for the last few months um this just been kind of up and up and holding super strong while bitcoin's tanking eth is tanking Soul's down I don't know 60% or something at this point uh and make it remain strong which is wild now there's a few reason and we'll talk a little bit about them but the big one that we have talked about on the show so many times and this is Martin's big sort of like theory of of why he invests in certain tokens which is who's going to be the next buyer of your token we think it's

going to be protocols that generate good Revenue uh and maker just announced yesterday or a couple days ago actually run here the founder of of maker Sky said that they've turned on the skymart burn engine and they are beginning to buy Sky tokens and burn them at at a rate of get this a million do per day now let's just put that into context a million dollars per day that's $365 million of buying and burning maker in a year if it was annualized now to be fair this isn't something that they're going to do for the entire year they won't have that much Capital uh they're not sure how much it'll be but they're doing kind of an initial stimulus and we don't know how long it'll be maybe a few months kind of thing um but if they did $365 million of BuyBacks and burns in a

year that equals I think the market cap of sky or maker is around 1.2 billion that is one quarter of the entire market cap of this token that the protocol is going to buy over the next year now if you look at what happened over the last week where markets are red what was going on there that's people panic selling I can tell you right now the sky protocol does not panic sell right it just buys it doesn't care if markets are green if markets are red it just keeps buying and it keeps burning and I can't think of a better place to put my Capital than a protocol that's buying back its own token and doesn't give a about the market so to me this is wild we said this was coming I didn't

think it was going to come this fast maybe you knew more than I did Martin um but to me this is massive and then just to be clear it's not always going to be a million eventually after this sort of like initial stimulus they'll set like a a rate depending on their profitability uh and then it'll just kind of fluctuate from then on but um if this is something that continues at this amount then maker at 1.2 billion makes zero sense and this thing needs to be repriced and I think that's kind of what's happening right now like the fact that we're sitting in the green on maker during a time when everything else is red and just plummeting Bitcoin now at 86,000 and Maker's up 4% uh it's absolutely insane so Martin I'm GNA toss over to you to start the heck's going on here says

maker just figured it out or what I think there is no one else like with maker bags who hasn't ha yet like no more selling pressure and now we are only getting like now all the maker holders are pretty much people who understands what's going on and those are not willing to sell especially when fundamentals are on your side and everything seems like maker is finally starting to getting like more adoption for their stable coin and now they just need to make few more updates to make sure that there is sustainable profitability for for the protocol and yeah I now I I hope that more Market

participants will start to pay attention to maker because it's eventually what this whole industry is about that you you want to find some strong protocols who are able to sell the product and have product Market fit and then at some point you will just like evaluate them on a cash flow basis and those are just early signs of of uh of that it's happening and you don't really need to rely on someone else buying your bags like the protocols will do it for you and like you know as you said they are not going to sustain this BuyBacks worth 1 million per day for the whole year obviously but that's not the point and like at some

point I don't necessarily need to do BuyBacks at all like if there are some other ways how maker should invest their money into something else which will just help them to strengthen the network effects or something else I would like vote for that rather than just BuyBacks so it's not like people need to be aware that this is like different story than most projects are experiencing these days they are just like okay how much how much R Runway do we have like are we able to cover I don't know 12 months or two years without generating any profits and like maker story is it's a complete different story now they are making a ton of money and finally there are some

good good shifts in the governance and like more Community people are getting back to paying attention to to community calls and like asking questions on Discord and creating more pressure on run to be more transparent and everything so I think I believe we are on the right path and and to be honest like it's not just maker like if you look look at Jupiter Jupiter just also started their own BuyBacks worth of almost 2 million per day you have hyper liquid and you have like many more projects who are just making money and they are already started or they are gonna start pretty soon to do the BuyBacks so it feels like you know it's

not just the theory that like fundamentals matter because you don't need to bother who is the next buyer but it it's really kind of happening and it's much realizing the that promise that this whole thesis is based about so yeah happy to see that how long can they sustain these BuyBacks are they using their treasury yes sort of they are going to do those BuyBacks for two months I believe yeah 50 days at current numbers it's around 50 days they'll do a million a day and then I'm not sure what it goes down to he said likely the rate will be lowered before then ensure the burn can keep going and definitely at a sustainable rate after this initial burst so we'll see long it goes for maybe for it it comes with the marketing

boost now yeah well and you know their estimated annual net revenue currently sits at 140 million and that's just skyrocketing right now as we mentioned I don't know a few weeks ago there were some issues with their expenses they're also working towards one of their goals of 2025 uh is to lower their expenses their core expenses to Zero by the end of this year basically offloading all expenses to their like stars or their subd Dows whatever you want to call it so the level of which sky or maker is is starting to execute and kind of like what they're able to do when you have such a strong business already I mean they've been around literally for 10 years they've been around like as long as ethereum's been around right this thing is an OG and so the world they're working in is way different than

basically any other protocol that exists I think on chain right now um they're actually legit business driving real revenues and bare markets don't hurt them like look at uh not bare Market but whatever we're in right now um other than obviously there was a bit of a scare with the uh the buy bit hack so some people had to remove some liquidity like Athena and stuff um you know it's still just gone from you know five billion in end of December all the way up to close to nine billion now we're sitting at eight billion at a time when markets have done nothing but go down right uh it's and then at the same time its collateral has gone up uh and so the way that it generates Revenue has also gone up during that time and so like this thing is just it's product is

getting better as prices go down and when we get to virtuals in a second we're going to see virtuals and even you mentioned Jupiter ETA like all most other Protocols are very dependent on prices uh but because sky is in the stable coin World um it's actually not so uh it just continues to to grow regardless of what prices do um so that's that's quite interesting are there others like do you think this is going to be a thing you mentioned Jupiter and Hyper liquid are already doing this you think this is going to be a trend here in 2025 or like are other protocols just not profitable enough yet to to start to have meaningful BuyBacks what do you think I think there are already multiple who who are doing BuyBacks or who are in the position that they could just start BuyBacks it's just

hard to understand all of them in depth enough to understand all the Dynamics and nuances in there but like you know there is radium there is atina there is AA like many mors who are like just one one one proposal from doing BuyBacks it has to be substantial because B&B chain for example they are doing buyback forever and it was just such a low amount it never had a big impact yeah like I don't consider binance chain as a serious thing so um it needs to worth 100 bill yeah I know know but that's a different thing for like layer ones we still don't know if

you know it's worth 100 bill but is it maybe over valued and people are not really buying it because there is no real reason to buy it it's my on the Asian market it's just also something we don't get here I think do you know what is the coolest thing about what maker and sky are doing right now I'm just going to start calling it Sky I think I can't seem to get away from the maker thing but so like token BuyBacks is not a new thing we have we have stock Buybacks in in the traditional world as well however you only get an update every quarter on its metrics and its BuyBacks and what it's doing and just when something's on chain I can just every day or whenever you want you can go and look at how's their business doing what's their revenue doing what's

their BuyBacks that they're doing like you can just track it in real time and that's just it's just insane to me it's super super cool and I think as more businesses do this um it's just going to be wild it's that transparency you just don't get that right you got to wait every quarter for these guys to like create this like slideshow for you and then go on the stupid call and tell you about their numbers like it's so ridiculous whereas you can just watch this all live it's it's pretty cool um and also like growing so uh with this stable coin growth which is quite substantial it should not be the end of the bull market I think because typically we don't see sta growing that much yeah I was just to say that if you are like really listening or like investing in stocks then you might not

have enough data to provide this kind of analysis because you might need some propriatary data or some something you are not you cannot really find on the internet but here everything is on the blockchain so you can find everything anytime you want it's a huge difference cool all right let's um yeah we just wanted to make sure everyone update to know what the heck is going on I know a lot of people were wondering how the heck is maker so strong in this environment and it's it's literally there's just no sellers left uh look maker went down a lot over the last little while so you know it it went down a lot but there's just no Sellers and then they launched BuyBacks and their revenu is growing and it's like the one time we're seeing fundamentals actually kick in because it it's not even just

like people are speculating on the fundamentals being good it's just there's actually something by buying back this token non-stop now uh with no se with no selling the the price just has no choice but to go up doesn't matter what else is going on in the market so pretty cool to see that um and uh I mean congrats to run and the team over there they're they're really crushing it I'm excited to see where this thing continues to go all right let's talk about the next one which is maybe on the opposite end of the spectrum here of uh of what Maker's doing and that is um AI agents and virtuals let me just pop up a chart of virtuals first just to give context to the uh to all of us here and the listeners virtuals if we look at the last little while

here has had a hell of a right uh I mean what's crazy though like in October so what is that like six months ago not even this thing was worth 10 cents not even five cents let's keep going five cents October 1st so six months ago not even six months ago right uh and it went all the way up to $5 okay close to five bucks and then now it is down uh to a dollar so it has had a journey in the last six months I would say AI agents were the The Narrative for a bit there everyone was calling that it's going to be the big narrative it's going to take over meme coins uh and I

think it it it sort of did that for a while and then obviously the the wind kind of took out was was taken out of its sales and the whole Market meme coins AI agents everything kind of imploded at the time that AI agents were so big virtuals was the thing there's virtuals and there was a6z were the big thing right everyone wanted a piece of it and the reason I'm bringing up virtuals is my question is is virtuals cooked is it the next friend tech let's call itth for those that were around that was the the social fi thing that we had that had its moment had its narrative uh it was generating all this Revenue everyone thought it was going to be the next big thing and then now there's like four users or something um and when we look at virtuals here's the

reason why asked this question like obviously its Revenue has been cooked but it was never valued off its Revenue anyway so it doesn't really matter it's currently making yesterday it made $2500 us uh in a day milk Road makes more money than that okay and this thing's valued for example uh for Contex it's valued at a billion dollars okay milk's not valued at a billion dollars so like e even if the narrative comes back um does this make any sense right like that it was at one point making $575,000 a day that was just a month and a half ago imagine the virtuals team they're like holy we made half a million dollars in a day and a month and a half later you're making 2500 bucks like uh

that's wild to me that this stuff even happens um but what worries me even more is it's less about the revenue in my opinion it's more about the whole idea virtuals is it needs teams launching AI agents and launching the AI agent tokens obviously so he's just using it product it's okay if the revenue's gone down but people still using the product yesterday it had 10 tokens launched on it uh here let me make this big for everyone it makes it better to see it had 10 tokens launched the day before it had nine earlier in January it was at like 200 to 250 back in December it was like 500 to 1,000 to 1500 so obviously that's kind of fizzling out the chart really does look like friend Tech um you know do

people really need good prices to launch tokens like I understand for the going to go up you probably need better market conditions but like if we're trying to build technology here and useful AI agents which to me is what would make this thing actually valuable um you know the fact that no one's launching it now is a bit weird I know there are some incentives around you got to launch around a certain time with good prices so that your tokens get listed on certain things so it's a weird it's a weird setup but like ultimately for me when I look at will this narrative come back um look I think AI agent narrative is not going anywhere but will it come back to virtuals is is my question and I don't know the main thing I saw with virtuals was there was a lot of PE uh AI

agents you know tweeting and when I I've unfollowed them all now because I think that they tweet just absolute nonsense they're hallucinating all the time their replies are complete garbage their tweets make no sense um but they tweet so much that every once in a while they get one right and people highlight it uh and so I'm kind of like I am bullish on AI agents I'm not sure I'm bullish I'm definitely not bullish on the AI agents that exist today and then I'm just wondering like is virtuals going to be the thing that leads this narrative forward or will we move on to something else you know well they just like as the AI narrative comes back because obviously like AI continues to improve day over day like grank is unreal and that just came out what like last week um and so

like these things will improve I just um is there a remote to virtuals will that Capital come back to this thing even though it's imploded so much I'd love to get your guys' opinions on virtuals and let's kind of just have a discussion here of what's going to happen with overall with AI agents in that narrative and then and then we can kind of bring it back into specifically with virtuals so yeah what do you guys think I mean first of all why is no one launching a token in the current market because prices are down so much and allcoins are not in demand and especially for virtuals you have a mechanism similar to pump. fund so you have a bonding curve and you need to survive it uh for your agent to get from the Prototype stage uh to the actual stage where can also tweet

for example and you need some capital for that so you don't want to launch your agent right now where there is no demand for agents uh but they could uh certainly come back because uh AI agents will profit a lot from all of the web 2 Innovations from everything that open Ai and deep seek and maybe also Gro in the future do and these agents are already on Twitter so why shouldn't they be able to use Gro in the future it could be another re Rue stream for X basically so the first phase is definitely over we had this huge bubble which bursted a lot but rless was one of the top gainers in 2024 they made about 231 X so that's

actually quite impressive and for those investing into narratives you have to sell these you can't just hold them like your Bitcoin or eth or Solana you can't expect you're playing with fire but you can't burn yourself that's it's not happening so this is what happened but uh the next leg up AI has still a lot of Mind share it's still the narrative with the most M share it's always about 30% uh Defi and fundamentals basically they are getting more M share right now which is uh an important and a good step but it's not dying completely and we are seeing actually some interesting Innovations since virtuals is launching

on Solana now ask Billy bets is a new sports prediction agent which got shilled by a basketball player um so there are some news new ideas with all of this Sports gambling and betting stuff and they are trying this and this could actually catch a bit so I'm trying to monitor this uh they are trying new stuff and that's the important thing but right now the narrative is not in demand so prices are down I know that we compare virtuals to let's say say pumped up fun right my only thing as I look at that comparison is you said people won't launch a agent tokens right now because they don't have like good price actions so you don't

want to do it in like a it's not a bare Market R in but in when you're having you know a down Market but then when I look at pump. fund hasn't really been impacted people still launch pump. fund tokens all day every day they don't give a right now do they perform well of course not but they can still just launch them and this is one of the things about virtuals is like as much as people are kind of pinning virtuals as the next pump. fund but better meme tokens I the problem is there is utility in AI agents right pump. fun you just launch tokens and it doesn't matter there is zero utility the moment you add utility it means you actually have to create good utility you have to create value and you don't have these like grifters these whoever just launching a

gajillion tokens you need actual teams you need developers you need people with ideas to launch and then iterate and keep building and keep improving and so like you can't just rely on a narrative you actually have to have teams build something of substance otherwise I don't see why the chart would ever stay like this I don't see why the chart will ever go up again do you know what I mean like you need something of substance because this isn't a mcoin it's an AI agent you absolutely need something of substance but it's what every team is doing they are waiting with air drops for better Market sentiment bar chain was waiting for quite some time so uh this is what they do because they hoping they are getting into the next leg up doesn't work out basically what you're saying is

grifters can't launch AI agents and so therefore AI virtuals is cooked because it's too it's too hard to launch an AI agent where it's very easy to launch a meme coin no my so the way that virtuals makes revenue is very similar to Pumped up fund it needs volume right it needs a lot of tokens it needs a lot of trading and so like that makes sense for Pumped up fund and I think that never goes away no matter what happens because people can launch them for free and you don't need to be a Dev you just need to be an idiot with a computer and you can launch whatever you want right and people just do that they just automate it but that's the problem with virtuals is it doesn't have the same business model well it has the same Revenue model but it doesn't

have the same product right you can't just any idiot with a computer can launch a token there uh and so like for virtuals to basically you can because it's a no code uh launch pad you can very easily do this right I guess sure you can because it is no code so I guess any OT could launch it but just to me there's a difference between an AI agent token and a meme coin right a mem coin is like okay I just need to hope that this thing is gonna get attention at some point and a bunch people want to buy a cat thing because it's funny there's an agent you're like I need to hope that people want to use this thing you know uh and which means it needs some sort of utility which means some idiot's probably not going to build some

AI agent with utility and so I just just um I struggle to see it getting the same volumes as pumped up fund which means I don't know how virtuals gets the same revenues as pumped up fun which was kind of the reason everyone was buying it it's like oh it's the AI agent version of pump. fun and now that I'm looking at it and seeing what's happened here in the last few weeks it's like well maybe it's actually not you know like maybe it can't be the Pumped Up fund H because there's a limit to it almost like ftech it's like ftech could have gone on for forever but it had this this like what was that called the um the uh where you had to buy the tokens but you needed more and more capital or more and more people to keep buying them the curve

what do you call that um anyway it doesn't matter but it had a limit and it feels like maybe there's a limit here to virtuals as well and so should it be worth a billion dollars I'm unsure if they wouldn't be building and expanding to another chain uh I would probably think uh in a similar way but uh they are trying to innovate they are trying to get into new markets so um I wouldn't be so NE about it here's the other bear take H you go Martin first I hear your point but you basically saying that it's uh no let me put it another way like if you should evaluate the business perspective from something that's launching a mcoin versus AI agent

like in a let's say in a couple years you would probably be more bullish on AI agents because that's building something sustainable right yes yes it it it like the the the whole promis is that they are going to bring something new something useful unlike mem coins yes well I'm hopefully maybe overly critic to mcoins but maybe there is something too but yeah so like now you are comparing mem coins which are around for couple years already everyone knows them it's part of the gamble game Everyone likes it and Etc and now a agents are here like two three months so it's not really fair to

compare them like okay you know people are still launching meme coins but they are not launching AI agents but in the long term people are still probably gonna launch meme coins because people love to gamble I agree that with AI engines it's a different story maybe it's not that much about gamble it's maybe more about like trying to really crack it down and build something useful and like think of it as a as a startups launching like okay I want to solve this problem so instead of like I don't know building traditional startup in a traditional way I will just launch my AI agent trying to figure out this thing

but be the best one at it and it's it's the model that it's going to work in the future that is my you make a great Point that's also my bare case for this because here's the difference pump up so pump. fun virtuals they're both launch pads they both need lots of lots of things launching lots of volume okay to to to be successful otherwise there's no point in it and it's not required pumped up fund has no competition from the traditional World it doesn't exist anywhere else and it can't exist anywhere else there's just pumped up fun right but virtuals like you said these AI agents need to create something of value right whereas mcoins didn't and it won't succeed unless their AI agents and

a bunch of them create a bunch of value right and actually create some utility here the problem is virtuals has competition from the traditional world it's competing with open AI it's competing with Microsoft and grock and and Facebook etc etc whereas pumpt up fun had no competition and so that to me makes it even worse the fact that they need to succeed in creating a company and they're already worth a billion dollars like to me it's like I get it AI agents are going to be big and I would invest in AI agent startups when I inv in AI start up at a billion dollars especially when there's competition of the biggest companies in the world to me that seems a bit crazy and especially with the business model virtuals you're

not really investing in an AI agent succeeding you're investing in thousands of ai ai agents succeeding and continuously succeeding otherwise virtuals doesn't really have a a business model here because it's a Launchpad now maybe it can iterate and become more than a Launchpad which I think it's trying to do with with more features um I know it's like created the the I for it was called business Commerce something U but like coinbase just launched that same thing and so now I'm like okay now it's also competing with coinbase like uh it to me it's it's in a tough position I think veress is not really competing with open Ai and other web 2 companies because none of them is uh building an agent that can use any uh onchain uh transaction for

example or that can manage your portfolio or that yeah can have a wallet and uh trade crypto basically so you have this and you can also not invest into any web2 AI startups at least the good ones if you're not an accredited investor right but so there are many people including coinbase who's building the creating the ability right now for AI agents to use wallets whether they're virtuals or open AI like that's not going to be a hard thing for people to create everyone is like there's a lot of teams building that so like we don't have a moe because virtuals allows to launch a token or allows you to have a wallet that's going to exist for all AI agents regardless of where they come

from it might be aote today but that's definitely coming and it's coming very fast um I think coinbase already has this I'm pretty sure coinbase enabled this with um who was the first big was it zbo or whoever Brian AR agent kit yeah or something like that yeah yeah so like I I think that's already gonna exist um now you are right you can't I mean you can invest in open AI technically through Microsoft but it's not a direct investment but like who's to say like why can't I go and create an AI agent using open AI which probably has better tools and then just launch a token and I could launch it on pump. fun if I wanted to represent that you know what I mean like I don't think I need a Launchpad to do it it's to and it doesn't have native

integrated web 3 functionality but don't you think that that's going to be built like coinbase is going to build that or people are already starting to build that coinbase okay but it's also web 3 company it's not Microsoft I'm just saying there's a lot of competition I think the the a good question here so like when you compare it to friendtech it's it's it's it's taking it in the context of a an early experiment in a new tech right yeah frek was an early experiment in Social fi no social fi has worked out yet every single one of them up crash up crash right yeah AI agent incubators new experiment I think we would all agree that there is going to be a business

that wins that I think I think that it makes a lot of sense to have an AI agent incubator because a lot of people are going to want to launch AI agents for very micro small things right like I'm gonna have a problem I'm going to want to build an AI agent for it to solve my problem right and then I might realize oh this solves a thousand other people's problem but I'm not you know open AI is never going to launch something on this scale and oh I want I want to raise some capital in order to build it further great launching it through an incubator is a great way to raise some capital and to to get it on chain and maybe it becomes an even bigger business right so I can see the incubator model for AI agents I whether it's virtuals or

something else I agree with the fact that like it doesn't feel there is no clear moat for virtuals right now there could easily be another incubator that wins quick break from Today's Show Ladies and Gentlemen to tell you guys about crypto.com debit cards now these cards are one of my favorite way to spend your onchain dollars in the real world on coffee on flights whatever you're buying on a day-to-day basis here's why I love it they got great perks Netflix subscription Spotify subscription and a whole bunch more access to travel lounges if you're a traveler like myself and you get rewards in crypto onchain you're building your

onchain dollars just every time you spend check out the link in the show notes and get your crypto.com card today now back to the episode with the milk R Pro research team I'll show you something cool if you um bring up my screen these are the popular open source Frameworks in web 3 what you're seeing here in the core section you have these different categories one is very good at reasoning memory uh embeddings personality multi-agent Liza for example is very good at most most of them but if you want something specialized if you are uh absolutely needing embeddings here or M multi-agents you would most likely use Rick The Arc framework and not the Eliza uh framework so depending

on what you need you might use a different framework and from there you will have some winners of course but specialized AI tours will always be better than generalized ones Wess is not here because it's not open source of course but it's more going into the no code it's more going into the gaming Direction maybe NPCs in games so there's a lot to be done but uh yeah that's how I see it and that's also why you might have not only one winner but you might have several winners so I don't doubt that there will be successful AI agents that come out of the crypto World okay I I think for sure that'll happen because grock and open AI they're not going to build ai ai agents

that do things that are native to crypto right they'll do more General things that can write and do whatever they do but if you go to use any of those today on anything to do with crypto trading or crypto advice like they're they're actually useless so like there's our Edge in the crypto world to create AI agents that can you know we already have some that talk about and and share Alpha uh and then there's some that will like do things on chain like we'll have the edge there and we'll be ahead of of all that my issue goes back to virtuals needs tens of thousands of AI agents to launch all the time daily for it to succe Ed like pump. fund and to generate revenue and I just I see no world where that happens zero world even if some of these a agents do succeed there will

just be a few of them that succeed right once I launch an AI agent that can trade for me or whatever does everyone Now launch an a agent does that or they just use mine they probably just use mine because mine actually works and it's good and so there's no it's not like memecoins where there's like once you get one you don't need a bunch more right like mcoins you can just have infinite it doesn't doesn't matter but AI agents you won't get that because you need a team to actually build it and create something good and then once it's good everyone's going to want to use that because it's the best one right once you have a a terminal that is the best at giving you crypto advice everyone's just going to go use that why would they try to then compete with that

maybe a few teams will compete but not thousands whereas like if you launch a memec coin I go I'll launch a mem coin and then Martin's like I'll launch a memec coin I'll launch and so the the model works as a Launchpad for pump up for Pumped up fun I don't know how that works for AI agents because you actually need teams to build something of absence it doesn't matter we only need couple useful AI agents and they will bring the whole narrative back again and it doesn't matter if this a specific AI agent is launched on that thing or that thing so it will like okay the people will okay I need exposure to AI what are the best things out there so they will probably learn about um Eliza virtuals this Rick and stuff like that and they

will buy the the pick and shovels they might not be buying the the I agents itself and we think that the narrative is still coming back and it doesn't matter if it's going to be from agent who is launched elsewhere the the point is the AI agent meta is coming back at some point and it it should drive back the valuations like don't think if it's overvalued undervalued it's like you can do these things for a narrative plays but that's that's the idea here yeah okay you make you guys actually anyone else have any other thoughts here so so so we all we all seem to agree that the narrative is coming back Martin I I think the narrative is coming back everyone narrative right I agree with that too to me it's a question of time now how long is it g to take until the

narrative comes back and none of us know right now right like if it takes a month or two I feel good about virtuals capturing it still like there's no one else yet there's not they still their MO will last a short amount of time if this is like 6 months or eight months months like then I don't know if it's virtuals because in that time period I could see something else being launched something else coming out and then I have less confidence in it being virtuals that gets it I'm gonna go out on a limb here and if anyone wants to take the other side of this bet I'm down to bet whatever you want in this year virtuals does not go back to alltime highs so it never reaches $5 again or

four whatever it hit 450 475 anyone want to take that the other side of that bet it's year this cycle let's say this cycle not even this year this cycle virtuals does not go back to alltime highs and by the way for the listeners I don't like the odds I don't like the odds on that bet I don't like the odds on that bet I I I like the odds on your end better than the odds on the other end interesting okay anyone else what's what's in Adrian's getting ready he's like all right Teddy let's go for the listeners I don't have like strong conviction here so don't like go and sell everything you have or like make a don't make a financial decision based on this I'm more just like trying to have some fun but although I do think that that's I I don't think it's going

all time wise again I'm bearish all right we'll leave it there you guys don't have to say anything uh let's go speaking of bears we'll go to Bear chain uh bear chain has had some hype as of late Adrian's been digging in uh why don't you get us up to speed what's your what's going on over on bear chain there Adrian sure yeah bring up the screen share bar chain tvl is actually at 3.26 billion and it became the sixth biggest Chain by tvl which is quite an accomplishment so they are bigger tvl buys than base which nobody nobody really expected they just launched three weeks ago that's the that's the fastest TV

growth ever for any blockchain right like I'm pretty sure nothing has gone that fast before right right yeah and they had a special strategy for that they have more than 1.2 billion in Stables right now on chain trading volume was also not that bad in the last 24 hours 95 million so there is traction actually on the chain and why this huge tvl because of their Royo or Boo as they call it initiative they had uh about 2.7 billion in predeposit before the chain uh was even launched so this is an interesting go-to Market strategy to uh don't have the Cod start

problem already have some tvl uh that supports trading activity on chain and yeah this is basically all what bar chain is about with the proof of liquidity um mechanism uh where they don't have only a proof of stake but liquidity providers actually have voting rights and uh also have a say in where the incentives and where the yield goes to and did this boo um initiative they had different uh opportunity you could uh Supply something like BTC uh but also uh liquidity pairs but also stable coins uh at 14% apy so that's why a lot of

people did this and the uh good API opportun opportunities they actually filled up extremely fast so most of them were closed after a few hours or after a few days so that's uh quite the uh interesting initiative what they did there and and why are people still going to Bar chain because it's not only the predeposit but of course also what we are seeing here um in the last seven days uh plus 8.5% which is substantial with 3.2 billion tvl um they have huge yields basically with their ponics um disclaimer this is very very dangerous and the Barra chain token is very inflationary but what you

can get on for example is here with um their stable coins by USD and honey uh 16.83% apy which is really good compared to other yield opportunities and if you like the risk if you like to go the risk curve a little bit up um you can also do something like a Barr chain and the Honey token and then you can get something like 109% apy you then take this Li liquidity token and restake it on infrared and there you can get additional 121% so for one liquidity pair pair you can get about 2 30 to 250% apy in BTT

tokens back actually which is the governance token on bar chain and you have to burn this bgt to get barah and then you can sell it so there will be a lot of sell pressure there will be a lot of inflation on the Chain but for everybody who interested in Defi and gambling a little bit it's actually something interesting to check out I got to say the one thing that bear chain has done really well that our industry really sucks at is marketing and it's go to market strategy like for them to get over three billion in three weeks is absolutely nuts uh and I mean they've built a pretty big Community for not even being live they've done that

through like I don't know events at conferences just doing a bunch of different things they've done a really good job on that I wonder how much money they've spent on all these events in marketing I think it's a heck of a lot uh and so they got 200 million from VCS right right yeah yeah they're heavily yeah capitalized it's um the one thing I would say if we look at the token price uh like obviously it tanked once bear launched um which makes sense I mean I know there's a big Community but their Community is a bunch of opportunistic people that are there to try to make quick buck and then also their whole strategy was let's get people in we'll give them barer tokens through aird drops also through all this yield you're talking about and so like

what are people going to do with those winnings and those awards they're obviously going to sell them so it was like to me it was very obvious that token was GNA go down though it seems like now I'm sitting at what three three billion market cap or three and a half billion market cap three billion FTV three billion FTV which is wild because it's tvl is is over three billion right um and so it to me it's like can they the hardest thing about a blockchain is can it get a bunch of users fast and then can it get a bunch of liquidity fast it's not hard to get users because you can get like people from all around the world that'll bring a dollar over and do whatever to get an airdrop um but if you can bring meaningful amounts of liquidity which they did at three

billion that's a great way to bootstrap now the question is is like what can they do from here you know and how much of that liquidity that was predeposited will actually stay on chain it's locked for one to three months so we will see how much stays on chain then I just think about blast and like blast got what two pull pulling up the chart right here so let me uh let me screen share uh pla blast got up to 2.2 billion tvl and then people sending money to some multii with unknown keys to it fre yield fre yield that's the that's fre yeld it was all I mean Sim similar to

Bar chain right like but they never in yield but they never build a community I think you can't compare blast and bar chain but this thing really you don't think so they had the everyone Wasing everyone felt like they were a community and they were like's just yeah that's I forgot about blast I mean I didn't forget about blast but in this context I forgot this this does feel very much like blast what's blast worth these days probably not much huh but you didn't have any Innovations on blast um you have some Innovation on bar chain with the proof of liquidity consensus mechanism with new protocols coming which are trying something new to be fair blast had native yield before

and actually still no one really has this but they have native yield on their eth and Stables so you just like every eth and every stable that you hold there just automatically gets yield that was pretty wild and still is pretty wild like I actually am surprised that more chains have not done that and I think think it's because there is a big Tech overhaul to do it blast did a good job on that um I thought and then blast also is trying to build the the full front end for it too right with their app and their wallet Etc so like I I was actually always fairly I wasn't bullish on blast token but bullish on blast team and like the thing that they're building um but it does seem they did bring I would bet a lot of the people that were on blast that got that air drop and

we're we're farming over there are the people that are now over on Bara right I don't think bar has NE brought new people into the industry I think they've just they've just gotten a lot of the the D gen yield Seekers to come over there um and I think as we've seen in Blast they they don't stay very long right to me to me the question is like okay so I agree Bara has better maybe has better Tech right like um do they the question is is there is there an app or a protocol that is actually using that Tech that is going to launch that is going to capture the attention and the mind because we have seen with blast and with other chains that airdrop farming and apy incentives like bear is

doing right now do not last forever so that will dry up eventually so the question is like do they have can they have a a hyper liquid like app that everybody uses and that's why hype is done so well right because it's being able to maintain usage Beyond just the speculation it's all about yield as well you have to be kind of a yield farmer and try to get this passive income somehow and like that and Adrian from what I gather you're not necessarily saying be is a good investment you're saying if you want some really high yields there is some opportunity right now on Bara is I think what you're

pitching here right exactly yeah okay are you bullish or bearish on Bara the token at the current price I'm not bearish on the token I'd say longterm because of the inflation I'm is right now the token is valued quite fairly you know it's starting to feel like so we used I mean there's always been a lot of l1s that come out but like not a ton right like you get a few in a year back in the day and then there was l2s that came out and there was like hundreds of l2s that launched all the tokens got cooked because like you know where are you going to put it if you want to invest in l2s there was you know 500 different tokens you could buy so they all got kind of diluted out it feels like that's what's Happening Here with

l1s now like how many l1s have we had launched in the last three weeks you know or or whatever month or two months it's like bear chain and monad and U Mega eth and I don't even know the list goes on and on and on it's starting to feel like we're getting just too many and it's going to be very hard for any L1 tokens to go up in price that don't have meaningful adoption right I I I think the idea of it's an L1 it's got to be worth you know 10 billion or whatever I think that's kind of going away because there's just there's too many them it seems exactly like what happened with l2s back in was it 2023 I think is when all those tokens launched or 2022 to 2023 uh and all those kind of just got diluted feels like maybe the same

thing here yeah General l1s won't work anymore they need a special use case exactly like l2s yeah what about what about guys like everyone's bullish on eth how is called the Mega E Yeah Mega E like what they are bringing you to ecosyst system like they are just saying like okay it's going to be like super fast you know Layer Two and like okay but now we have hyper liquid who is also able to do like 100k transactions per second now we might have monad or someone else like what what is like what are those guys bringing new like you either need to have some user base or you need to have some working product

like hyper liquid and like all these new people coming in launching their own chains without nothing like good luck guys I think that that's this this narrative is over or or you have to I I will say I will buy into or you have to be incredibly well funded like be chain and be really good at marketing and building Community because that could lead to one of those get the users and you could you can attract the builders who might go build the app that keeps people but that was blast well funded incredible markers he understood incentives more than anyone and it didn't work I actually don't think that like a lot of money in marketing dollars

make sense in crypto because it's actually such a small industry there's not a lot of users especially for chains that they just do yield or they just do defi stuff you're talking like a million people Max that actually will do this and not a lot of them are like bringing a load of capital and so like you actually have a very very small market and like in any business if you're going to spend marketing dollars on an industry that's only like a million people you can't really spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in marketing because like you're maxing out your marketing dollars right you spend millions of dollars marketing when your Tam is hundreds of millions of people right and so I don't know that $200 million is needed to Market um I understand you can get a bunch of people over real quick to like get some

incentives but is that even profitable marketing like I don't think so like probably the amount of be tokens these guys are giving away is is just like I don't think it's actually profitable and you're not keeping them either so I just just um I don't think that that works either I don't think it's about being capitalized or or a marketing budget um you you were sorry go ahead I was gonna say I think you got to create something that keep people around and yield isn't that because yield isn't sustainable uh except for maker that's because they actually have sustainable yield yeah like you started this discussion talking about tvl and tvl is the metric you can fake pretty easily so all incentives like if they're going to

um 50% of new bar tokens is going to be distributed this year so it's like if it's three bill right now so 1.5 billion over the next year so that's what probably drives the whole TBL and liquidity in flows so it's like are they really good in marketing and creating Community or is it just like paying ecomics yeah leave it to crypto % from market cap inflation so it's less because 1.5 billion additional Supply would be crushing the token so so what percent of the three whatever billion in tvl is actually just be a token is it a lot of it because l2s also did this

trick right their tvl looked big or their assets on chain and end up like arbitrum for example was just billions of dollars of of ARB token you know um I I I don't know if bear chain is doing this but it it appear I mean three billion seems like a lot of freaking money to get in three weeks it just doesn't make sense I don't know if there's a Metro or somewhere that shows you that data point but uh either way I think um someone I heard say that trade is over the L1 trade is over can you just quickly We're not gonna get into the full1 stuff like you were talking before but like what did you mean by that was it Martin you said that yeah well you mean like the whole idea about layer ones and no we don't need get to that I just mean you said the L1

trade is over is that because you think there's just too many now or was there something more to that yeah there are too many and like you they can't really bring anything new that's not existing today so like think of blockchains as infra and we have good enough infra to build whatever people want now we really need to like double down on real products that have like real users yeah I kind of agree okay let's let's finish off with this we're not going to get to the other part of the l1's because that's a whole another conversation we don't really have the time if the L1 trade is done the a AI trade we haven't we don't know I think we all agree that narrative is coming back what is the trade for the rest of

the cycle what is here what is the opportunity or we I'm biased so you start anyone have onei 3.0 fundamental oh new defi not wait is that defi like OG defi or is this some sort of new defi that's coming out when you say defi 3.0 it's basically the OG defi coming back I I agree to me that's that's the trade right now I think it's defi Renaissance I know people have been saying this one for for years it really does feel like I mean again I said this I don't know how long ago but like stable coins is really the only good Innovation we've got here and then decentralized Finance like taking out loans borrowing uh and and having a

stable dollar onchain I mean it's the fastest growing thing on chain we've got5 billion dollar worth of like coming on chain every week um and uh and then the adding yield bearing to it ETA like defi stuff to me seems like the one thing that has true product Market fit they're still pretty undervalued I mean like a lot of these OG defi projects like sky for example are valued the same as virtuals which just making $2500 a day right so like um even a lot of these OG def5 products are making more Revenue than most of these Z1S that are launching and they're valued at way lower premium than these l1s so I just um yeah I don't see a better trade right now than Defi and I and I really don't I actually don't really see another trade

other than like obviously holding Bitcoin and ethereum and salana I think are great coinbase Robin Hood these things the the sort of front ends other than that in terms of apps l1s Etc I I don't see much um maybe there's I haven't like obviously over the last few weeks everything has gotten just wiped out and I haven't scanned looks through everything so like I'm sure there's some some gems out there that are way undervalued but I think broadly to me it's it's Defi and majors and I don't see much else anyone else because because that's because that's also because there's no narrative right now right like this is a timing thing if we come back and we have this conversation in a month and there's a narrative

because whenever markets are pumping there is a narrative that is catching that liquidity you know things will change I agree right now when you sit back and you look like you're going to go back to basics and fundamentals because it's blood in the water we always talk about on the show we always talk about who's the next buyer and we've said a bunch of times we think it's the the next big amount of capital coming is probably not retail although some of it is but it's it's institutions because of Regulation coming in and then the other next buyer is protocols buying back their tokens when I look at that two forms of capital where is that Capital going the only companies in crypto that can have token BuyBacks is Defi and then I also don't see any other tokens that institutions are going to

buy other than the major l1s because there's ETFs coinbase and Robin Hood because they exist in the traditional world to buy so those they can already do and then it's like probably defi tokens you know because they have product Market fit they have revenues they have ETA so like all the capital I think that's coming in in the next while here I just don't see them going to like they're not buying virtuals at a billion dollars that's I think they're still I think they're still buying out ones I think that they all still that that trade for them is not over like so many of the institutions missed on that TR they're buying private they're investing private they're not buying the liquid tokens because they know the stamps of all these l1s launching and just dumping every but they but they have when they buy those privately they have long token

lockups so I I I think the to the L1 trade still has time I I agree that we can't have all these l1s we need more we need focused specific l1s not general purpose but I still think the L1 trade has time in this cycle I also think we just had um the uh commerci was Chief commercial officer from KY Rock which is like a leading uh Market maker and liquidity provider and he talked about how institutions are buying meme coins and he's like not not like it's like the the major thing that they're buying he's like 70% of Institutions that we talked to are buying Bitcoin so like let me be clear here and they're also interested in Ethan salon on the majors but he's

like they are buying meme coins so that's the that's the the crypto native hedge funds like Joe mccan that's not the institutions I'm talking about that are not already here right that's the ones that were already here they never cared about the regulation they were going to buy the anyway they figured that's theu out that's not the capital of Institutions that are coming in because regulation has allowed them to these if they were not buying crypto because they were told they can't do it or they weren't even sure if they were allowed to do it they're not coming in and then buying a meme coin that's for sure right these guys are very very risk I don't know I think they I think Blue Chip meme coins I think they will buy I think they will yeah J trenches no because Blue Chip mem coins aren't trenches right like these

are meme coins that have been around for years they've got strong do you mean like Doge or like dog with hat yeah like Doge dog with hat Bon like the Pepe those those type I think I think those type when when this cycle picks up again when the ball goes again yeah maybe but then you don't have a good sleep overnight if it's going down what do you do well that's why you you take 1% you know like I'm not saying your whole portfolio which I'm sure there's a lot of people listening this right now that are not sleeping well over this last two weeks whoever if you're not sleeping well I sleep great I'm all 90% because I don't give a I don't buy any of

this trash and I mean and let's just talk about that for a second like I think if you're not sleeping well then like move into Cash and chill and move Majors don't move into cash or move into Majors right but like readjust your portfolio so that you can sleep well let me put that even if even if you are down bad right like there is nothing wrong with taking a step back and waiting markets will go up again they might go down more from here it's difficult to know yeah or just readjusting it's okay to sell at a loss yes exactly things have changed I also think like you ask what's the trate of the cycle I think people tend to look back and make their judgments based on the

the P right but they are not looking like forward so like maybe I'm saying something is true and like people don't pay attention to what I'm saying until it's becoming a consensus so like yeah think about it's year 2028 let's say and you will look back into 20 this year and you'll say oh there were such an obvious signals that this thing is going to just go nuts and okay but like what is it and it's defi like what else do you want to see to make you believe in that thesis it's like it's product Market fit most

tokens out there in circulation people use them generating revenues like valuation around to Bill like best teams what else do you want yeah let's got it all all right we're going to wrap up there next week we will touch on a bit of an L1 thesis that Martin's got going on to um finish up our talk here that we just did on l1's but boys that was a good conversation uh thanks for joining in that was fun I wantan to I want to know our community everybody listening in if you guys are interested in what Adrian talked about with providing liquidity on be chain or on new chains are you guys interested in that because

like that is we don't talk a ton about how to do that where to do that there is a lot of opportunities to do that if you're in the trenches and you want to experiment and try that type of investing or opportunities to get yield so let us know in the comments if you guys want more information on how to do that because uh as Adrien showed he's he's doing that and knows how to do that so happy to provide you guys more on that yeah good point all right guys thanks so much that was a blast we see you next week as always if you liked today's episode please hit subscribe and make sure you follow us so you don't miss out on the next one there's also a link in the description to our free 5 minute daily newsletter where we

simplify crypto for you while making you laugh and if you're willing to step up your crypto investing game we're going to also leave a link for milk Road Pro you get access to our portfolio where you can see exactly what we you're buying this is your number one resource to help you invest successfully in crypto one final note this show is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice investing in crypto or any asset is risky and you should never invest more than you can afford to lose thanks so much for listening in my friends have a wicked awesome day