Mike Dudas on Uptober and the Continued Bull Market

3 Oct 2025 · 1:10:22

Crypto investor Mike Dudas joins Empire to make the case that this bull cycle is still just getting started. He covers his investment thesis, his biggest winners this cycle, Flying Tulip's new model for raising capital, and where he sees opportunity across stablecoins and NFTs.

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I like DeFi because it's composable and I'd rather invest in that than in like stable coin orchestration even though it's super valuable to the world and I'm much more excited about like what new business model doesn't exist today um that's you know going to be worth billions in 5 years. This episode is brought to you by BlockDamon. You'll hear more about them later in today's episode. The digital asset summit, our premier institutional conference, is right around the corner. In London from the 13th to the 15th, we'll be at the old Billingsgate with some of the largest banks, funds, and allocators as they explore how to gain exposure to crypto. We'll have a ton of great speakers, including Dan Moorehead, Joe Luben, Guy Young, and a bunch of amazing

side events, so you can meet some of the largest names in the industry. So follow the link in the show notes to find out more and use code Empire 200 for £200 off your ticket. Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is forformational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Block Works team may hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed.

All right, everybody. We have replaced Rob with the far more handsome, more experienced, better investor. I'm just kidding, Rob. We love you. But we've got Mike Dudis from Sixman Ventures joining the show. We got Santi back on. What's happening, Mike? Hey. Hey. I appreciate it. Excited to be here guys. Yeah, of course. Um, maybe we can start. Dudis, you're on a historic run. Actually, you got brought up at a dinner I was at the other day saying, uh, they said, "Dudus is on a historic run. Six man's killing it." So, you got plasma, you got pump fun. How we feeling these days?

Yeah. So, we're we're feeling good. So, what's really exciting is the things that we're investing in now uh feel like truly like long-term sustainable products that I think in 5 years mainstream folks will be using. Uh they're going to start using now and are using them now, but I think we can grow and we're moving away at sort of the app layer. So in 2017 18 we had this like ICO phase where the things that were offered were like these grand you know layer one tokens and things like Dentcoin and just ideas they were just pure financialism right the the next cycle um was like extremely

uh speculative in terms of you know what assets were being offered you know we had kind of like NFTTS and um we had basically everything just focused around trading specul population, but it was kind of like wrapped in these big terms and ideas like web 3, but the underlying products just never existed and everything was sort of funded and bought and speculated on before anything existed. Uh what is exciting about this cycle is that you finally have products that are actually generating revenue um and then frankly using that revenue uh to benefit token holders economically. And so that is like the default like the top

apps like hyperlquid like pump um you know they're different things one is pers and one is sort of like meme coins and creator economy and attention economy um but there's real revenue real attention and economics driving the performance of the token. So we finally have like tokens that um do something. Mike I guess a question look full disclosure I'm an investor in your fund. So for people that weren't aware of it, like if you were to go back and see the initial pitch deck of what Sixman Ventures was going to do and invest in, would that check out to what you guys have been doing or is it more of look, you've just had phenomenal success in in picking the right projects and and you've morphed the thesis because the ch you know the times change and you see that opportunity.

Yeah. So it's funny because now I'm saying it like it was obvious and everything in the last but I actually think like in our deck for the last fund which we raised in 2022 was like something about web 3. What we really meant though was crypto application layer. So I actually think our website which we haven't updated in like 18 or 24 months still says like web 3 on it. I mean it's embarrassing if you brought it up. Um it's like purple and it has a crypto punk on it. I don't know. It's kind of cool and it's like our personality, but ultimately what it boils down to is we weren't entirely certain what applications would exist in crypto. Just as kind of like when the mobile phone finally like took off and had critical mass, it was sort of

unclear how the app store would be used and what apps would would burgeon and explode. But it was just clear that this is what people were using. You know, it went from like 100% desktop to like 40% desktop usage in just a few years. you know, everybody had a phone and uh an internet connection. You got Uber, Airbnb, and all these other amazing things. You know, Amazon became just even more magical. That is now starting to happen in crypto as these L1's and L2s become performant. So, we knew we were going to invest in the app layer. That was right. The apps we start investing.

Yeah. It was the worst year of this uh fund or of our four years investing as a firm though because basically we were looking at we were thinking of the apps as those kind of like speculative NFT projects and things like that. Unfortunately um after the reset post FTX you saw um kind of from the bottom the really really like missiondriven uh people wanted to create real products uh stick around and those are the folks who built the cool stuff we're seeing now. If if I were to characterize the success that you've had is because you actually use this stuff. I mean you do link style which you know you were very involved in the NFT stuff and it just pays to be close to the metal and understanding what's going on like you were I think you were the one of the creators or very involved in the

core team of Bonk which was um you know essential for the resurgence of the Salana community post FDX and so I think that's look I totally get it like you have to be sufficiently general in crypto to pay attention where the buck is going because we're so early with this technology like circa a you know early first smartphone iPhone moment and you're like the internet's not that great yet but you know there's cool apps being built and so yeah that's exactly right so I tend to know that if it's something I'm using um you know if it gets to the level where like I get excited about it my instincts like over seven eight years have been pretty good about what crypto applications people are going to use so like you know

to your point I'm actually stunned by the way how many investors like literally don't have money on chain and I have it you know all over the place right on Salana on L2s you know hyperlquid and you know figuring it out and just start investing actually in punk strategy um again none of this is financial advice but I'm experimenting and it's just having a lot of fun again which is partially you know we decided to chat today because I'm so bullish that we're not near the top and it's because I'm finding new and interesting things to do on chain right now and loving it across a bunch of different areas before we go there. I want to get your thoughts on something because look, being early, too early is indistinguishable from being wrong. Now you've been very right this cycle um and

you and I made investments like step-in for instance is an example that I want to go to because as much as pump is working extremely well right now and look it's had its ups and downs but you know it's executing hyperlquid executing um some other consumer projects executing but like the evolution of stein was I was running the New York marathon one year and everyone had like you could see it in the expo like step in step because the rewards were super high and then of the supply were not there there and so the project in its own right I think has been successful it's just um how do we how do we transition this conversation into how do we to what degree of conviction do you have that it's not

going to do that same evolution where everything in crypto's just been tied to the market cycle and prices and like how do how do we break that self-reerential dynamic or are we going to see a huge draw down of these tokens and then we're going to say the technology ology sucks again. Yeah, good question. So, look, actually somebody tweeted yesterday about like narratives in crypto move so fast and you know, be careful. Make sure you get in and out of uh thing in and out of things really quickly and like yeah, that's like true for the majority of things in crypto, but like there's a little Jeff Bezos quote like, "Hey, what's going to be the same in 10 years?" like those are the areas where I want to invest and you know basically

we look for things now because I was an investor in Stephen I love it I love it I was an investor in Stein uh along with you and it it you know when we invested the idea seemed like something that would be durable and actually I think you're also an investor in moonwalk fitness which I think has a much more sustainable model uh we're investors in sleep aagotchi which is basically again health and wellness related and tracks and gamifies it. Um, so anyway, we're looking for folks who are building uh into areas and segments that we think will, you know, still exist in five, seven, 10 years and they want to stick around. So to get back to pump, you know, basically the me the token memecoin launchpad was basically the

wedge to a much much, you know, broader long-term vision, which is, you know, look, we all kind of agree that more and more things are going to get tokenized over time. You're seeing it with everything from real world assets and um you know to crypto assets to stocks you name it right I worked at Paxos for almost a year and we believe equities commas you name it it's going to get tokenized well the folks at pump um and they're super native of this generation right they're you know in their very early 20s you believe that there's this notion of you that the creator economy and that attention and that like fandom and interacting with personalities um is going to be you represented you through a token and through value. And so the

reason I think pump has a chance and a pretty good chance to be sustainable is again they just didn't view it as like hey it's a token launchpad and it's always going to be memecoins. These guys have now innovated um to streaming and I believe will continue to move into bigger and bigger areas of uh attention uh in terms of you know basically tokenizing that attention and allowing people to participate and it's current form by the way it's extremely limited right somebody streams you I can buy the token and the creator eats on the fees and volatility like if it just stays like that you I don't think that's super sustainable but you can be confident it's not you'll get things like token gated conversations. Um you're going to get things like advertising coming

advertisers coming in my guess my guess would be and you know airdropping products or things to folks who you know hold the token or watch the streams and you just kind of go from there and it gets bigger and broader. So I think it is the first sort of sustainable big social product um in crypto. But honestly I'm not like like I'm I'm an investor. I'm not the founder for a reason. Like I don't have the very clear vision of what the next Yeah, big innovative product and unlock will be on pump or on most of our portfolio companies. I'm just confident that these folks who we talked to um have been talking with a lot of people about uh how many of these nent product uh projects are you know doing DATs. Well,

the pump guys like are getting begged by people dozens of groups to do a DAT and they're like no like we're not in here to make a you know 1 to2 billion shortterm in the public equity markets. It's like we want to be here in 10 or 20 years building out a generational, you know, social media attention company and we're in the very very early stages of that year and a half in. So, look, we've all heard the bull case for for crypto as it relates to consumer, which is everything's an attention game if you pay back. Tokens can serve as better mechanisms to to align contributors with the platform and and and in a more equitable way. So, like if you're a creator, why would you go on Twitch and live stream when you can go on Pump and earn a more reasonable um share of what your

contribution is to these networks? Hasn't happened. We've had some flare-ups. I would say Pump is far along and I think it has a team to execute. But it begs the question for someone out there hearing this saying these things have worked before. Like why would you reinvent the wheel? Like YouTube has distribution and and all these platforms have distribution. It's so hard to display social networks and change habits. Like do you think that price actually can work in you know to the detriment of these platforms where creators just get super disillusioned with the price of their token because the reality is very few tokens actually break away.

Yeah. So, it's a great question and I don't think that the um I don't think that sort of call it the motion or the sort of playbook for sustainable creator token value appreciation has been cracked yet. And I think that's partially because the nature of the trader on pump today is still very very short-term oriented. that's primarily sharps and we haven't crossed the Rubicon to kind of like true fans feeling comfortable with tokens in the bull case where this works. The reason it's better than YouTube is because I as the fan or I as the person who's excited about that personality or could be many personalities, it could be a brand can participate in the upside. I can't do

that on you know Tik Tok or YouTube. I can't really speculate on it. Um, but again, the the sort of normal market participant and medium fan isn't there yet. What you're seeing, the ones that are really succeeding. Um, Laura Shin just started, you know, streaming Unchained, which I thought was really cool. We're starting to move the Overton window on sort of what's acceptable and who can launch a token. I have an MDUS token. Again, no financial advice, but I just launched it. Um, frankly, it's like having a domain domain name. Like, I have my token, I have a domain name, you know, miked dudis.com. Like, I just want to make sure those are mine. Uh, but what Laura's doing is dabbling, right?

So simal casting and she still can basically stream in all her other main channels and so this is fairly lowrisk and additive makes no promises to her audience and you know if folks want to go in and sort of speculate they can and I think it will age well uh but I think it's really early there's going to be a lot of volatility so the people who are doing it now you have to have a pretty high tolerance for kind of like FUD and and people talking about and getting in your DMs and saying when are you streaming and when are you doing this so we need to move forward so I think things will develop. I think what's going to happen is for I'll just give you one example. Um there's a lot of individual token volatility today. I wouldn't be surprised if you start to

see like tokenized ETFs of you know certain creator segments, things like that to perhaps reduce the volatility of individual creator tokens. So I think it's like there will be ETFs of these things um is my macro point and we need to reduce volatility for this stuff to work. Mike, maybe um taking us zooming out from that a little bit. What do you think? I mean, for a fund to really hit it in a cycle, you need like one big winner, but you guys have had I I think two big winners this cycle, which is Pump and um I think were were you guys early investors in Plasma? I Yes. Yeah. So, so invested in their How do you think about like like a how did you find these two and how did you get the conviction? And then b like you know Paul and then like Noah and the

team and Alain like these are all like pretty young founders. um how did you like what similarities do you see between them? Like what what what's made plasma and pump do so well would you say? Yeah, good question. So what's interesting is they were sourced very differently. So uh Pump So basically everything is sourced almost all of our best investments are sourced by folks coming to me. We're not one of those like mega firms like Sequoia that goes out and has scouts and has a bunch of people and scour the earth and literally talks to every you know startup on earth. We just don't have that infrastructure and then kind of like pulls back in and you know tries to select down and pick the top couple.

Um what what we try to do is put our personalities, our thoughts and how we support the founders and companies and protocols we invest in out into the world. And then we have we hope that you know basically either directly or via our networks that kind of brings back uh folks who are building applications in the area that it's clear that we invest in. So that's what happened with both of these but very different ways. So there's the direct route. Uh Noah from pump you know basically had seen me tweeting about bonk and about memecoins. I was one of the few VCs who have embraced them like helped launch Bonk many years ago uh at the Salana bottom.

So he was impressed with that. He cold DM'd a lot of VCs, but I was one of the few who like responded. We groed it really quickly. Um, all of our partners used it. He didn't have a deck. He didn't have anything. We just launched each one of us like launched a token and we were like, "Oh my god, like people are buying this." I'm sure on the back end like Allan was like, you know, "Hey guys, like buy this token. Like, you know, make the VC excited." But honestly, it worked. It was just sort of magical. Okay. With So, so they didn't they didn't have a deck or anything. They were just like, "Here's the vision." Exactly. That's exactly right. And I asked for one. So, and I'll get to you asked like what's the common theme? The common theme, by the way, with all these

founders is they're they're extremely kind of like certain and confident in their perspective of what the world should look like in the future. And they tend to be doing things that you're just like shocked that uh I like if I was in their shoes at the given age, 20, 21, 24, like I just would not have the aura, presence, confidence um and clarity to do those things. And you know, crypto is out there on the edge where there's frankly in most areas there's just no expert hasn't been around long enough. So you're literally creating the the knowledge base and expertise as you go.

And I think both of these projects again plasma's much earlier in terms of being it just went publicly live. Um but with Paul as I mentioned so we were fortunate enough that um a guy named Mario Bennett at Heritage introduced the deal to us. he's a friend and an LP in our fund and you know we had actually introduced him to to pump. So you know basically we've created this good um network of of sharing interesting opportunities uh and you know he knew that we were interested in stable coins. So the good thing is as uh Santi was saying earlier one it's one thing to use the chain but you know we've actually founded companies our partners and we've worked in the industry. So, you know, I'd worked at Paxos, my partner Carl had, we know a

lot about stable coins, regulated stable coins uh in the landscape. Um, so anyway, we were introduced to Paul and uh, you know, we basically begged, scratched, and and Claude to, you know, pers persuade him to take a little bit of our money. Uh, and he was kind enough to do so. And then, you know, the key here is um the the similarities, as I said, it's it's just fascinating. and we're going to use these two founders. Uh they kind of like ask they don't ask us virtually anything on like product or product direction. They're just doing things and then we'll just selectively say hey can you help me with this or I

you know need this or you know what's a quick what's your quick take on this? We've we've got our perspective but you know and then when I give them an idea they reject it four out of five times. Like that's what you honestly it's a pretty good signal. Um, so that's one commonality I see. Um, as it relates to like maybe some of the investments that haven't really worked out. Um, and look, you've been around the space for such a long time on the operator investor seat. What are some of the things that that that you've passed on or made investments on said, "Yeah, like that was a big mess for us." And and is there like a general archetype framework that you now have adapted based on those learnings?

Yeah. So I would say the the there's one like big one which is just you know people who talk more about names and you you know like credibilities and like labels and things like that than about like a passion for the product like that they're working on like a deep deep deep one. So you want somebody who's so deep in the thing that they do. So we're invested in something called football.f fun. And the founder, you know, was a so rare whale. He loves the the sport of soccer.

Uh and you know, just that's all he could care about and talked about, you know, on the call and just clearly lived, breathed. Um and then the a second one is putting people around you, not being afraid to put people around you who are better than you at specific things. So I think a lot of founders get bad advice where it's like the founder needs to do everything and you need to be like you need to figure out like every single thing. Crypto is just not possible. There's like too many things that you need to be good at for any one individual. So the founders that um that we've seen be unsuccessful tend to like stay in the like really muck details of everything too long versus like putting really talented folks around them. is

somebody to focus on token economics, somebody to focus on um you know social and community. Uh and then you know the third is just like failure to ship like you have to be default shipping. Uh we've noticed a correlation between sort of complaints about a product FUD number of support tickets and like positive likelihood to succeed. Okay. Um and by the way that's true not only of the consumerf facing stuff but also on B2B. Uh it's been really exciting. We have you know portfolio company Dakota which is effectively you know stablecoin enabled business banking and uh so one Ryan the CEO you know he came from Coinbase custody. He's very um like he's

very serious person like the other two founders I mentioned earlier. uh he will listen to our ideas but he has a very clear vision of what he believes should exist in the market will exist in the market executes against it relentlessly uh and then you know basically is not afraid to kind of like really sell features that maybe are you four to six weeks out I don't mean like publicly market them but just to tell a customer I'm going to take you on and we're going to be uncomfortable for a bit a little period of time and then we're going to wow you and that keeps happening over and over again and you you sort of lack that are up over multiple quarters or years. That's very different than folks who are like, I need to wait until this thing's absolutely perfect to ship. We

have a few of those. And honestly, you just you miss cycles, you run out of money, the winds change. Uh crypto moves too fast for that. Yeah. Ship, ship fast, iterate faster. Yeah. And you don't get dinged uh very much in this industry as long as you're continuously improving. Uh yeah, people just want you to stick around. They want to hear from you. They want to see the blood, sweat, and tears. There's the innovation, the creativity, and that you're you're aligned with them across 30 plus networks and 180 endpoints. Block Damon Earnstack unites staking and DeFi into a single institutional toolkit for crypto rewards with multi-layered security, full asset control, and 247 support. Block Damon Earnstack is built for scale and

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The machine economy computer. Head to peak.xyz, that's peaq.xyz to find out how you can benefit from the age of automation or click the link in the show notes to find out more. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk terms and conditions apply. Yeah, I mean I can think of countless of successful now top 10 projects that started off very differently and pivoted multiple times and and they're there, you know, and so I guess like let's transition a little bit uh to what everyone wants to talk about, which is you made a pretty bold statement on Twitter. It says, "Hey, listen, we're nowhere near the top." Um, and we got a lot of more room to grow in this cycle.

um give us give us your insight like what led you to think that and let's go into that. So basically I think that was over last weekend and you know hey we're off to a nice start in in Q4 in the in the week or five days since um you know Bitcoin up 10,000 salon up like 15% since then. But bottom line is uh I was super confused about why I was hearing such disillusionment from uh so many folks you know in the cryptosphere in my private groups sort of in public on Twitter you maybe exhaustion from the conference cycle. I think part of it is that you know people have just doing been doing like perpetual motion for 18

months on like not important stuff. A lot of people have like trading, like farming, like doing the next meta, but actually like missing the the real sort of like quote unquote insiders and public speak, you know, speakers just actually missing how, you know, some of these builders that we've been talking about, how much progress they've been making. Uh it's like that iceberg thing, you know, under the water. Okay. Um, so you know, you've seen an entirely new uh stable coin mechanism in Athena, for example, be introduced and grow across multiple ecosystems to I think something like 15 to 17 billion in TVL. Um, and it feels like the sky is the limit there, right? So you see that in stable coins.

You see, you know, Stripe building out a really momentous stable coin business. You can see Tether and Circle and other stable coin issuance increasing dramatically. We're closing, I think, on 300 billion now. you see uh onchain D5 vaults growing at like record pace. Our portfolio company Midas just you know I think it's closing in a billion5 in TVL and it was below 100 you know six nine months ago. Um you see the DATs you know taking in more and more capital you know on the Bitcoin Ethereum Salana front. I think as you get down the the asset list, I get a little more nervous, but you know, positive flows and the regulatory environment is, you know, getting significantly better. You know,

we have the Genius Act that was passed and they're working on a market structure bill. The president himself has like, you know, God knows how many crypto businesses at this point and is talking about it. Anyway, point is there was a massive disconnect between the sort of like exhausted um sort of burnt out commentator and the actual like pretty clear empirical market realities. Also, the stock market has been moving up and people are getting a little, you know, too short term like why isn't crypto moving alongside it? Uh but again all of the things I'm talking about like fundamentals across multiple chains amount of value onchain uh use cases that we've been talking about for a long

time like you know onchain yield and defy vault stable coins uh we talked about pump and social you know base has a really cool emerging uh social ecosystem you know hyperlquid maybe building out like the first true you know massive you know onchain sex-like performance uh ecosystem where you have all the financial products of a centralized exchange. Uh it's just been really exciting to see. It's I just can't imagine you feeling bearish. Like the only reason, the only way that you could feel bearish in that environment is to simply say that the price of crypto assets will simply forever be

tethered to, you know, sentiment and um, you know, traders, you know, a select small group of traders sentiment and feelings. And I just don't think that's true. I think we have a number of liquid funds. As I said, we have a lot of inflow to the bigger assets from, you know, longer term uh institutional allocators. And it's just pretty clear that the flows we're getting have a longer term horizon than that core trader who's moved and you know, basically created the crypto markets for the last decade.

Mike, do you think that we will still see cycles and you're just saying we're not at the top of the cycle yet or you're like, look, this is just going to be 2004 of the internet on. You didn't really have cycles anymore. You just had like slowly upward growth for 20 years in a row. Yeah. So I just by virtue of how crypto is, it's going to my guess is we're going to look back at some point in time, you know, whether it's the second half of 2026, whether it's 2027, and we're and and you know, people who say we're we don't have cycles anymore, you know, the other folks will say, "Haha, like you were wrong. Look at it." Um but meaning at some point we'll probably

have a pretty big draw down from a pretty high peak and so but we're moving so much more money now is what I would say. So meaning like we're at a $4 trillion plus you total um asset class value. Like I do think we're going to spike up pretty hard here like over the next three to six months. So, when do you think about taking some profits if this is the personally or as a fund? Um, I guess both. You know, it's it's interesting. Maybe I should just explain the dynamics here.

Um, because I think it's important for folks to understand fund or VC obligations. So, effectively, you know, I'm a venture capitalist. as a firm, you know, people give us money and then we go invest it into companies, protocols, um, equity and tokens. And so to some extent, we do have an obligation to or we do have an obligation to return capital to the folks who invest in our fund. They're called our LPs or limited partners. Um, so we will typically and most VC firms will typically, you know, sell at kind of like regular intervals and prices um over a period of years.

Uh, and it's different than sort of trying to time the the top of a cycle. I mean, obviously, you want higher asset prices that you sell at versus lower. Um, but you're you're generally looking to return capital uh to your LPs. It's something that they value. So looking ahead, let's just say we were going to, you know, 2x in aggregate from here on the total size of the crypto asset class. Um, we wouldn't be looking to, you know, basically top tick that 2x from here. We would be looking on on positions that are liquid to sort of like exit in intervals. Um, you know, as we move from here towards that top.

That's kind of how I'm approaching. Yeah. Because I'm basically saying, how do you balance two two truths in your head? One is that you love Pump and you're very long Pump and the other is that you have LPs who are like, "Hey, Mike, you're up like a 100x on this thing. Can we can we get a little money back?" Yeah. So, it's a great question. You have to have a conversation with the F. You So, one, you have to understand your LP base. I just kind of explained what they want to see liquidity, but two, you have to understand, you have to talk with the founders and understand what they're optimizing for. and uh too many and I think there's been a movement towards investors who do communicate wi with the founders they invest in about you know their plans on you know kind of

like distributing some of the assets if it's tokens uh versus you know raising from like historically like funds that would dump like the minute every unlock occurred. So we're not that type of fund and haven't been for more than four years. We hold from our first fund, you know, the vast majority of the tokens that we invested in in 2021 and many of them are liquid. Okay. Um we've done distributions. The the but the reality is uh to your point, if you're up, you know, 200 50x on something like are you up 250x on pump?

Um so maybe. So the the the point is that the you're going to get sued if you know those tokens were liquid and like you don't try like and they're not. Okay. So it's like this is a hype. This is a total theoretical but like you know it'd be pretty hard to justify to somebody that you don't realize some value on that at some point. But again, we believe long term and like I would imagine the pump guys who are really smart would say anytime you sell, you're going sort of you're net short us because you're not as exposed as you were. And it's just a balance of explaining our business.

Mike, let me make it easy for you because I think like I I face this issue too like you have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize returns for your investors in the same way that and so and that's it like you just need to be have a very honest conversation. Um like it is unrealistic to assume you're going to hold this thing forever. you are not a perpetual like permanent capital vehicle, right? You have a life to your fund. And and I think um thinking out loud here though, I mean like look, if if you have like a couple of funds, say you're raising a new fund, private equity and venture, they get into trouble sometimes because they are now fli like contributing a portfolio company in one fund that is hasn't DPI and is, you know, 10 years in and hasn't

returned capital and so they contribute that to the next fund. So you're basically selling a portfolio company from fund one to fund two and it's not it's not looked upon nicely. Is there a version of this world with tokens being liquid where you could say hey listen we're going to sell into the open market or OTC this in a graceful way exit as gracefully as possible and we'll do that and then look we have fun too that's maybe liquid and has a discretion to buy liquid tokens so we might buy that. Like is that something that computes? Is it possible? or is there a conflict of interest? Like just kind of curious if that's something you guys have thought through.

Yeah, so we we don't specialize in that. There are funds that do a version of that where they have venture funds and hedge funds. Uh and I so I candidly I think an easier way um to do to so there's a middle road which is actually distributing in kind. So distributing the token asset to your LPs as opposed to distributing, you know, selling and distributing cash. And so some of the best investors in crypto who have really outsized positions relative to their fund size have historically distributed in kind. And so basically you crystallize the value, you send the tokens to your LPs and then they can make an individual decision on whether

to sell themselves and incur tax. Yeah. And by the way, fairly common in venture too. I think like for some funds like Benchmark like they distributed Uber stock which is a huge huge win for them. It's like guys do what you will with that and I think Yeah, that makes sense. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Mike, is there um so what what are the areas right now that you guys are still deploying into? Um because you've got and maybe one area that I'd be curious about and how you guys have played it or invested in is prediction markets. Um because it seems like you guys kind of have pers covered and memecoins covered and stable coins covered and but like I don't really know how you guys have thought about the prediction market space.

Yep. So um we have made one prediction markets investment this year. Uh and what's interesting so if you just look so we're we're we do believe like many other people do that prediction markets will be a you know very large sector over time. Uh it's, you know, look, calling them prediction markets is somewhat of a nice way of just expanding on what they really are, which is like they're not that different from effectively betting, right? And we're just now like betting on more more things. Um, you know, maybe we're betting on events versus betting on, you know, sports. But that clearly is a business model that works. And you know because of crypto and maybe regulatory

arbitrage uh you can do things in offshore structures to now create new and interesting markets. So the so we think that's interesting and going to become very large. Uh the existing market is pretty dominated by Kashi and Poly market. I think Robin Hood's now getting in the market. There's be big players here. So, our general belief is that you're going to have to go sort of out on the risk spectrum somewhat uh if you're investing in new businesses today in the quote unquote prediction market space. So, you know, we've invested Len around into one and we haven't announced yet, but um they're doing two things.

One is uh basically is AI or PE you know individual like I can create a market. Okay. Uh, and there are a few public entities doing this now, ones that are already out there like myriad markets where like you can create your own markets. Uh, and then they're adding in leverage as well, which is really complex. Um, really hard to make work, but if it does, uh, you go from kind of like that binary outcome where, you know, it's hard to to really get like really significant multiples and reasonable things to if I believe in something, I can sort of add and leverage. So that's one area. Um we're looking at what other prediction markets deal right now. So yes, like

we're doing uh we're investing there. We think it's interesting. Uh the one we're looking at now is very focused on like shortdated financial markets, right? So like zero day options and shorter and so bullish uh and you know we recently did a investment into bulk which is launching in November bulk.trade. Uh it's a burp dex and salana. We just I just fundamentally responds to hyperlquid. Yeah, there's a bunch of like I mean Drift exists and and Bullet, but like it just makes sense that Salana like I'm as bullish as I've ever been on it and it's going to grow and there's a bunch of great applications and there's more every day and it's the most used blockchain. Like if there's a really good perex there, people are going to

use it. Uh they just haven't had a really highly performant one with thick liquidity, great performance, etc. that should, I believe, happen over the next six months. And it's much better to have, you know, all of your different activities in one place versus having to bridge to, you know, four different chains to do this to do this. So, can we double click on that investment because I want to we talked about this in the last pod, but um what did Salana get wrong or didn't do and and Hyperlid stepped in? Because look, Hyperlid has been all the talk this cycle. Why haven't and maybe you can pick on specific projects or reasons why at the infrastructure layer or at the individual project layer like someone

like Drift just hasn't really taken off because it makes all the sense in the world in a venue like Salana. I'm just kind of curious what has Salana not gotten and what is uniquely enabled by this new project that you've invested in. Yeah. So first of all I think culturally you know Salana was still Salana DeFi has had I believe like a hangover from you know Sam coins and and FTX and you know was the Macalino brothers who had like nine projects. It just there was a lot of short- termism in Salana DeFi in that 202122 era that made it so that I don't even think Salana had a chance in 2023 24 when Jeff was building hyperlquid like

even if like even if an entrepreneur of that caliber had built something similar in Salana it probably would have been difficult to bring in the traders many of whom had just gotten wrecked on FTX and had like their you know what I it just had that association. So culturally it wasn't the right time. Uh and so I wouldn't say like Salana got it wrong but but and then you know the existing products were trying to do a lot like right on the L1. And I'm not a big perpetrator so I'm not the perfect person. My partner Carl knows the market and our liquid investor Bobby know the liquid uh know the market and the products significantly better than I do and led that led that deal. But what I

will say is everything I've heard from folks is that the existing per products on Salana historically were pretty bad and and not necessarily all of their own valition. They were trying to do things on the L1 that you simply like couldn't do in a clean way. And so people would get like tons of slippage um on their positions. They'd get liquidated um when they maybe didn't think they should. Like you would just do wonky things when you tried to enter and exit positions. Uh and so bulk is you taking a new architecture where a lot of sort of like the matching and a lot of things are happening uh not directly on the L1 but the assets always remain there. Okay. the value

always remain there and the a lot of the matching and logic happens uh not on an L2 or an extension or anything like that but they actually have an environment uh basically that is tied to Salana validators um so it is distributed and decentralized uh that allows them to achieve higher performance on some of the really really complex things that they need to do um but again the assets always sit in the L1 you don't need to bridge them like you do in other architectures and they're not constrained by the latency of the L1. Yeah, if you have my partner Carl on, he can explain a little better. But the point is, I think culturally it's the right time. Um, there's significant activity on chain and people are now exploring architectures that it would have been

difficult to get through 18 months ago. And so, uh, it's pretty clear like there are per traded on numerous venues that are centralized. It's pretty clear now there are multiple onchain venues with lighter and aster uh there's there's just gonna be one that's going to be large on salana at least one. So um it's a but it's still a venture bet right like there's a lot of companies going after um protocols going after the prize here. Yeah I know we want to go to something else but before we go there um what is the just double clicking on the Salana DeFi ecosystem. you just said that you you've been as bullish as ever on on Salana. Um I think the bullishness in the timeline has subsided a bit and I

think price action has sort of been muted and you kind of see this and it's normal. Um curious is there still an overhang? Um are you seeing more and more teams like there's the alliance DAO report there's the electric capital report talks about developer ecosystems and interests of teams from your vantage point are you observing something different? uh are teams still very excited to go build on Salana or are there other ecosystems that you think have just gained more market share um you know as of late? Yeah, so this gets to my point of you know the timeline not really being representative of what's kind of hap um you know under the water like the iceberg under the water part. So the prediction market protocol we invested

in is building on Salana. Bulk's building on Salana. We've looked at a lot of other exciting teams. Um, so there's plenty of of interesting stuff like stable coin issuance in Salana is increasing dramatically just a couple billion in the last month or two. Um, Camino is like breaking out. There are a bunch of other protocols. Drift drift is you know seeing significantly higher open interest. Um, so there's definitely there are things happening in DeFi onchain. Jupiter has a bunch of exciting products that are growing rapidly. So there's a lot happening even while memecoin you know volume and trading volume is down. There's other things.

The share of non-mecoin uh volume on Salana has increased significantly over the last couple of months. Uh but it's just not the biggest story right now, right? The biggest stories are, you know, CZ fighting Hyperlid and that's per that's fine because it's not stopping other like the actual folks building from their road maps. And what you're going to see is again Salana the tokens doing well because like there are so many interesting folks building to improve from the base layer, you know, all the way up to the application layer.

So, uh but it's not going to be the only ecosystem. So we've gotten we're never the first by the way into a new ecosystem. We weren't the first into Salana. We weren't seed investors. We came in when the app layer started to develop. You know Hyperlid we've started to invest now like you know we bought some hype and you know we're looking at private companies on that like is Hyperlid the second most active ecosystem from the app layer that you want to invest in right now? Uh I would say yes. It's up there with bass is also you know in the conversation. Yeah. So those are kind of the three that we're looking at the most. Salana Hyper Lipin across 30 plus networks and 180 endpoints. Block Damon Earnstack unite staking and DeFi into a single

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Tokenized robots are generating revenue for token holders. The first machine economy free zone is live in the Emirates and it's all happening on peak. The machine economy computer. Head to peak.xyz, that's paqq.xyz to find out how you can benefit from the age of automation or click the link in the show notes to find out more. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk terms and conditions apply. Maybe we can shift gears a little bit. Mike, you had this tweet. you said uh it seems we may be moving into more of a quote unquote company meta in crypto where TGES look more like IPOs instead of a 25 to 50% team and investor allocation uh i.e. insiders uh plus a 50

to 75% network allocation. You're seeing 80% plus to insiders with a small new investor float just like IPOs. Can you talk through that in a little more detail? Yeah, so I've noticed um and people have commented on this, not just me. Uh so I won't talk about any specific project but there have been a couple really high-profile uh token launches recently where uh you know I remember when like Trumpcoin launched and that was a meme coin and people joked about like 90% to the team right um but it was always kind of like it was always sort of the de facto structure that if you launched like a real coin and I I'm using that with air quotes if you launch a real

coin well Hey, there's no reason to launch a coin unless like you're giving some to the community and there's going to be like participation and governance and ownership and things of that nature. And you do that through a mixture of airdrops or you know long-term incentives and community allocations. So you would you would so we were seeing that with most token launches until I would say like maybe midpoint of this year. And the biggest shift that I've seen in the last couple months is an increase in the number of launches where um you know there's basically no community bucket, no uh you airdrop and where or the airdrop is on a percentage

basis pretty low. it seems big because there's a lot of shenanigans going on around ensuring that like the launch FTV of the network is really really high. Uh and so we've seen you know a decent number of those but what what it's starting to look like is more a creep up in tokens being allocated to insiders. So you know team through uh you know various different buckets and then you know investors but candidly I haven't even seen the investor bucket tick up that much. It's kind of held constant.

So it just seems like teams are finding more creative ways and is is this a good is this a commentary on the market or is it a commentary that this is a good good or bad development? It's uh we'll see. I think that you know the reason I was like I like to pump sold tokens in the market right sold like 30% of the supply to people right I thought like so that there's actual distribution of that token amongst people who want it versus just insiders uh I don't think it's a positive development in balance my guess is it does not end well in the future the the interesting thing is it makes things look more like securities

okay so it's like it's just It's not a decentralized network if you know only 10% or 5% of the float is going to be in like external people um participating in the network and if there's just not like a really clear way to give them substantial ownership of the network and I think you you've started to see folks getting like no action letters from the SEC before they launch your tokens. You don't need to do that unless you have some fear that your token's a security. So I don't I think it's something I'm going to keep a really close eye on. Did Did you guys follow Flying Tulip Andre's thing?

We did. We did. We took one pitch call. I think it's really interesting. It's outside of our mandate just from a valuation perspective. But it it it is interesting. It helps to align, you know, folks who are putting in capital with everybody else in the network. Yeah. Maybe I'll shed a little bit of context on this for people who saw um Andre who started both Phantom and Sonic, I think. Um, and and urine, by the way. Oh, and urine. And obviously urine. Yeah, of course. And and wineure and uh he like nine projects so far. Like nine projects. Yeah.

Yeah. Um so anyways, there's a there's a big announcement. Flying tulip is Andre's new thing. And he raised a quote unquote $200 million seed round. And the reason I put quotes on that is um I think people maybe didn't read the fine the fine text or maybe maybe people just didn't understand what this raise actually was. So basically what uh the way that they raised this I thought was pretty interesting um where investors contribute stable coins or I think stable coins are ETH and the capital goes into a protocol treasury and there's no no lockups no team allocation nothing like that. Every token that's issued uh to an investor is actually fully backed by the collateral that the investor contributes. Um, but the twist is that every flying tulip token, and it's funny to just the name is a funny

name, so good on Andre. But every every token comes with a perpetual put. So, what this means is you can actually if you're an investor, and dude, just correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think you can return your tokens and get your original capital back at any point in time, right? No expiration, nothing like that. And if you exercise the put, your tokens actually get burned, which means the supply shrinks and no no one else has to do anything. You can just you can do this at any point in time if you're an investor. Um uh the catch is that if you're an investor, you're actually giving up what you're giving up as an investor is the ability to is the basically the opportunity cost of that capital. It's the ability to if Mike if Dudis put in a million dollars into Flying Tulip, he's

not earning anything on that on that million dollars, right? It's it's treated kind of like an investment. Whereas if he was farming that in DeFi, maybe he could get 15%. So really the investment is uh the opportunity cost of your capital. It's not the principle. So it makes it it's not really a $200 million fund raise. It's 200 million got contributed into the protocol treasury of Flying Tulip and then they are going to the team doesn't actually get to touch those tokens is the way I understand it. their upside to run the business only comes as a share of the protocol revenue which are the fees that the 200 million is spitting off. Um so I don't know a Mike hopefully I did that

justice but but b I'm just curious what you think of this like this is very interesting fundraising mechanism. Yeah so I we we took a quick meeting I I've only sort of read the headlines. Um yeah, but that to me is a more sort of honest and open way to raise capital um than many of the things, you know, that I've seen uh in the like I like that you have to put that the investors have to sort of put money in at a full value into a protocol they believe in um and then you know kind of leave that capital at risk in the protocol earning yield to then encourage people to come and build and you build financial products on top of

this to make it successful. Um, it's different. It's it's very different than putting a dimminimous amount of capital in by insiders, like a very dimminimous amount and then, you know, kind of market making to really high FDV, right? And then kind of trying to have retail come in and and buy and sort of fund your exit in that way. This is different when you when you think about the dynamic of like you see a kind of a hybrid here where plasma kind of uh encouraged people to and and in fairness like Blast kind of did this as well which is like you encourage you open up a vault uh where you get TVL and that in plasma's case was a ticket to have an allocation and

um is that is that an interesting mechanism to you guys? Would you actually think that more projects are going to explore the Andre route or or is the way Plasma has done it maybe more of a good in between because of course raised from traditional investors and then they opened up they did the echo raise which was you know very like ground level for community um Kobe kind of led that one and those people are been you know you know getting exposure from the from the early days. What would be like what are you advising teams to do like is it subject to the type of project that they are or is there a preferred mechanism where you think it's actually going to be the def the default going forward?

Yeah. So it's so situation specific I think but look I think the the most common raise path that you'll see will be the something closer to what plasma did in the future and and frankly what pump did. So, a mixture of private investment from VCs, uh, angels and others, but not overraising because it's becoming clear now that if you're successful, you don't need that much capital right out of the gate to, you know, to proof validate, followed by these these public raises, whether it's like Echolion, uh, or direct in the case of what Pump did you or on Exchange. Um, and then I think what's more important than how the

money's raised is what the purpose of the token is. You know what I mean? Like the so with pump, you know, and with hype, like extremely different paths to get live. Hype hyperlid never raised any money, but the most important thing is like what does the token do and how does it crew value once it gets out into the market. And that's where I think you're going to see standardization around value acrruel and you have revenue generation to the token. Again, whether it's eventually, you know, you're able to distribute revenue in the form of like fees directly to token holders, which would look, you know, that would be like a security today. Today, you kind of get around that by doing buybacks, so making

the token deflationary. Um, but again, the only thing I'm certain of, these mechanisms are going to shift and we'll see and I'm not 100% sure what's going to work, but you better have a token that um has value in your protocol moving forward. Uh, and you see that like the reason Salana's like outperformed since the bottom is because there's been so much re, you know, revenue on like rev on the network and so much usage. So, you know, just outperformed as an L1. Um, and the thing that I would be confident of, you know, you're going to have the old school, you know, meme coins Litecoin Cardano etc. like Ripple, you know, who knows what's going to happen with those, but I don't think

you're going to have successful meme coins from like the 2022 era on. So, meaning, you know, if if chains like Aptas and and SU and Story and others don't actually get usage, I don't think in five years they're going to be valued where they are today. They will go down. Totally. Mike, um, elephant in the room. Uh, beyond pump, the most successful theme has been prediction markets on the consumer side. Those two projects do not have a token. Maybe they won't ever have a token. That doesn't mean you can't distribute and uh earnings and or allow active participants to participate in the upside of the protocol. there are different other mechanisms like uh would

you push back to that like do we need tokens for every project because that's been the flavor to draw since the early days right since the ICO it's like let's just have a token eventually we'll have a token unis swap kind of got forced its hand by sushi swap with a vampire attack maybe there was a version of this world where they wouldn't have ever launched a token um and and there's potentially investors that resisted that different environment different regulatory environment what do you is there do Do you think that there's a version here where like Koshi Poly Market don't ever have a token and and look they've been successful in their own right or or do you think look everything will have a token at some point and it's just how you structure it?

Almost everything will have a token is my general guess because there's you just generally have an incentive to issue one at some point. Um, and again, I think it's becoming less and lease is issuing a token after sort of for a while seeming like they wouldn't and they didn't need it. Um, but it's it's effectively it's just it the market is is rewarding tokens even on top of equity value. It it's just so far it's been additive. You're not sort of getting dinged. Um, so I would expect there to So there's definitely going to be things on chain that don't have tokens like many like sort of stable coin products. You'll probably have a

lot of DeFi products in the future that maybe it's just a pure borrow. Like there's no need for a token, but um and there's just pure fees on chain that go to investors. Um, so I do think that that type of thing will happen, but most cryptonative projects that are truly on chain will have tokens. Um, they're useful in so many ways and they're they're just so much more flexible than pure call it equity ownership um, in terms of who they can include in terms of how value can be distributed to stakeholders.

Wouldn't be a Dudas podcast if we didn't cover NFTs. Uh, any updated views there? Uh, do you actually think that they'll recover? Judas is over here pumping. Yeah. So, Moonbirds announced their their token. It's coming today. Why do you Why do you love Moonbird so much? So, NFTTS are emotional. They're not rational. Um, so basically like every human like we have I I like I enjoy I have I like joy. Like I like to have fun. You know what I mean? Like do you not Sir, you're not supposed to. I'm sorry.

Yeah. So, I'm not like get cancelled by that. Exactly. And fun for me means expressing, you know, things and like allegiances and being I do like to be parts of like fun tribes. So anyway, um so NFTs are what got me excited about doing things on chain other than just pure money, you know, like NBA Top Shot was what got me into. So point is Moonbirds, it was almost symbolic for me. Uh it was the it was the NFT project that I got most wrecked on um in 2022. I think I bought one for 43 ETH and I later sold it for like one ETH. um you know for tax write off. The project founder uh Kevin Rose like basically abandoned the project by you know rescue selling it to Yuga. Um and

you know just a lot of like he walked away with a ton of money and a lot of sort of like broken promises in the road map and it was just awesome. It was very similar to how Pudgy Penguins was sort of rescued by Luca in 2022. uh in 2024, I believe, maybe early 25, um Spencer sort of rescued Moonbirds and I and I kind of I was watching it and observing it. 1KX had invested in Pudgy, they invested in Moonbirds, said, "Heck, like let's let's run it back." Like, this is a I like the art then, I like it now. It's silly. Spencer's cool. Um um so yeah, one day I just bought like I don't know, don't don't overthink it, right?

Spencer's cool. 1KX investment. Let's go. And so, Exactly. often the best investments are the simplest and and I'm having fun now. So like it's good group. I've got no sense for a little bit and you know he is cool. I'm not you know like I'm like a boomer. He's like you know building out all kinds of cool merch and IP and he's traveling all over the world all over Asia is spreading the gospel and I just I'm having fun observing it paying attention. I don't know like what's coming next in the road map. He's created the TCG game for Pangu for Penguins. Maybe he'll do it forward. It's like I don't know. But um but it's fun and uh it it pairs nicely and gives some personality to my onchain behavior, you know, next to the DeFi stuff and holding

Bitcoin and Salana and the other big assets hype. Well, now last question for me and and um and we're up in the hour. Distribution in my opinion is the name of the game. being a consumer. Um I know putting aside like your role in and sex that you're investing in your mandate. What about companies that have in the traditional world um you haven't invested as much in stable coin issuers. I believe like I feel like that's a very tough segment of the market like you are just going to be squeezed on both ends rates cuts and just traditional financial institutions sl you know launching their own like like uh bridge uh just just enable that and like probably killed three businesses with one one whoop.

How do you think about like companies like Robin Hoods of the world, more of those companies entering the space using this technology and just crushing kind of like like startups that are trying to like do the web two uh analog for crypto? Uh is that something that you've started to think more about like just um hey maybe we shouldn't be investing in something that like JP Morgan can come in and crush you? And I guess the joke might be how many startups in web two and software it's always like what if Google gets into the space and and you know they never do like there's companies that just build around that and are successful but yeah so we tend to as a firm now there are you know even cryptonative investment you know VCs who

invest primarily in equity and you know companies that look more like you know onchain fintex for the most part uh it's not an area that we do a lot of investment in. Okay. So, you meaning we like, you know, protocols that have tokens. Uh we like things that you should be on chain. We specialize and really can help a lot around um you know, token design, dynamics, marketing, getting folks excited, how it works in your protocol, etc. Um so generally um we've not done a lot of investments that look like more like fintech than crypto. And we have fintech backgrounds

on our team like I worked at Google Wallet, you Google Pay, Brainree, Venmo, PayPal, Paxos, you know, my partners worked at Paxos, PayPal. So Google W. We had a lot of experience. It's just honestly I don't find it as fun and it's more of like let's run a very predictable spreadsheet on what uh is going to you know improve the legacy thing by 2x and I'm much more excited about like what new business model doesn't exist today um that's you know going to be worth billions in five years. So, we're looking for more of those. Uh, examples that may not seem

sexy, but I think are exciting like that are like onchain DeFi that's composable where you can use all different kinds of, you know, asset classes as collateral onchain stocks and, you know, stable coins that are yield bearing and, you know, your soul tokens and this that and the other thing and you can cross margin them to borrow uh to to to do you know, invest in per you can borrow against them. I like DeFi because it's composable and I'd rather invest in that than in like stable coin orchestration even though it's super valuable to the world and I think you can make money in it. But the edge there is going to is is decreasing really rapidly to your point as legacy companies come in. Um Stripe moves in.

I'm surprised Audian hasn't uh and as the big you know fintech VCs invest and squeeze out cryptonative VCs. Mike this has been a great conversation. I think we're going to have to have you on to discuss more of these new primitives that you know you're unlocking friction in in financial services and flows and that's going to unlock so much like exponential consumer behavior in in maybe not so much in the US but in other parts. So there's just so much that we can continue the conversation exus opportunities and whatnot. So this has been a real treat man. I don't know if there's anything else you want to cover. Yeah. Content of the week baby. Mike we always do content of the week. We will not put you on the spot. We'll let Santi and I can go first. Um Santi content of the week. Oh, no. You're going first.

All right. Uh, Bill Aman conversation at the Citadel. The Citadel is a military college. Um, Aman went and spoke and it was actually a um pretty good conversation on just like failure and his investment philosophy, why they just took a massive long on her rental car, which I thought was interesting hearing his logic. Um, and yeah, just I don't know. Uh, sometimes I feel that Bill Aman when he talks is just like fully shilling his own bags and sometimes I actually find that he's both shilling his bags and has a nice philosophical take on life and investing and this was the latter. So So I really like Bill's an LP in sixman ventures. So Oh nice.

His bags are our bags. Let's do it. His bags are our bags. Yeah. Well, he didn't give sixman the shill, but maybe next time. Yeah. What you got? Yeah. Content for me. You know how much I love founders podcast. There's one most recently came out with the founder of Spotify, Daniel Ek. He's got a new show. It's not found he's got a new show where he's actually I've got that saved. Yeah, I heard it's an amazing conversation. An hour almost two-hour long conversation. Daniel says something that's incredibly um resonates with me. He says he optimizes for impact, not happiness. And I think happiness is a derivative of impact. And it's very much in line with with I think everything that So great great conversation. And I'm really excited to see where David uh takes that format because I think it's you know this one was his first one was very very

good. Yeah. So I'll just give one uh quickly. Uh so I listened to invest with the best um and Dylan Patel was on this week talking about the trillion dollar AI buildout. Just a fantastic listen for somebody like me who's you know not deep in reading. I'm not even an engineer but I'm not reading like scientific AI papers. really good overview that can catch you up uh to speed. I thought I thought Dylan had great overviews on if you're like if you want almost a hot take on like meta, Google, XAI, anthropic, open AI, it's a good it's a very good listen.

Yeah. And then you follow it and I had Yeah. I'm like on chat GBT searching 15 things he talked about. What does this mean? Yeah. All right. I'm going to have to cheat. Uh dude, as you mentioned in best like the best there is um Colossus, which is I think is his kind of magazine. Dude, amazing. Amazing. Uh, two articles that I read over the weekend. One was this story of the founder of Interactive Brokers. If you love DeFi, go read that. It is a phenomenal fellow Hungarian. Let's go. Yeah. Fellow Hungarian. And then there's another one. Jerry Newman is retired VC. He has a take on on value acrruel for AI. It's so top of mind. Both of them will inspire. If you like crypto, these are topics that Where's the Jerry Newman one? Was it in Colossus too?

It was in Colossus. Yeah. He he I I subscribe to his uh blog. Colossus is so good. Colossus is like a good example of just put out worldclass content and it just it'll it'll come it'll bubble to the top. They don't ship to X US UK, but I want to subscribe because I want to get the magazine like it's it's there in print. So yeah, uh pretty amazing stuff. So those two articles were amazing. Really thoughtprovoking. Dudes, thanks for coming on, man. Good to see you. Congrats on just a hell of a last year or two of investing and uh good to see you're you're still having fun.

Awesome. Appreciate it, guys. Thanks so much. Thanks dude.