The Next Phase of the Bull Market | Weekly Roundup

Transcript

You ask 100 people in the world, not your 10 crypto deents and natives, and you tell them what is the how do you express a DeFi trade like crypto taking over payments? What are they going to say? A or Ripple? Maker or Ripple? Ethereum or Ripple? What's a payment chain? Yeah, Ripple. Honestly, I've learned a lot about investing about like in crypto like you can can you distill and I ask this question a lot of founders like what is a oneliner for your project? If you don't have one liner for a project, it's going to be really hard to capture attention. This episode is brought to you by Scale, the next evolution in layer 1 blockchains. Explore the gas-free ecosystem at scale.space/ecosystem and follow their

journey on Xcale network. Thanks to Scale for making today's episode possible. Hey guys, Jason here. Just to let you know, we have Permissionless 4 coming up in June from the 24th to the 26th at Industry City in Brooklyn. This is a conference for the developers and builders where we'll be focusing on the DeFi Renaissance, applications, token design, and much more. Click the link in the show notes to grab your ticket today and use code Empire 10 for 10% off. What up everybody? Happy Friday, happy Saturday. Happy Sunday if you're slow. Happy Monday if you I don't I don't think people are listening to the roundup by Monday. Santi, how you doing?

Who knows? Doing great. you know, lot lot lot to talk about. I mean, it's it's amazing. I mean, we're heading into the summer. You know, who doesn't like summer, I guess, if you're northern hemisphere? But, uh, no, lot lot going on in crypto. Uh, I think I mean, last round up, we just went bang bang bang like news article. I think we'll have another I think we got another bang bang bang roundup. Totally. So, let's just jump right into it. Right in big news of the week. I got a haircut. Looking like a child, but at least my chin bruise is gone. So, you know, you one step two step forward, one step back, you know.

Yeah. I was hoping you'd finally come through with our bet, which is you still have to shave your head, but hey, what was that bet? What it Oh, it was a Twitter follower bet. Yeah, I don't remember making that. Actually, I don't don't remember. I thought we got Man, by the way, there there's one guy there's a couple of folks in the Empire channel that like always DM me. It's like, when is Yano? Someone tweeted about it the other day. is like sh we got to block just I just start blocking people. Uh that's good man. Yeah. Um let's talk markets first. So and then Okay. So here here's what I want to cover today. I want to talk about uh two interesting acquisitions. The Robin Hood acquisition and then Anchorage actually made an

interesting acquisition of Mountain Protocol which we had on the pod with uh yeah we had so his founder's name is Martin. We had him and Nick Carter on the podcast. um they were like the first regulated yieldbearing stable coin I think if I remember correctly. So we'll talk about that. I want to talk about Coinbase added to the S&P but also they had this hacker this breach. Um public treasury companies uh e Toro IPO memecoins are coming back with with believe. Um but maybe first we can just talk about the markets. Um so we just recorded this ETH podcast. ETH has had this like you know god tier candle in the last week. Uh, you know, it's up from kind of $1,500 range, $16,700 to up what's ETH trading at right now? 2500

bucks roughly. Yeah, 2565. Um, what is your did that what's your sense of ETH right now? And did that podcast make you more bullish, less bullish? I just curious your sense on ETH right now, ETH and the whole I'd call like the ETH ecosystem. ETH or ETH or Ethereum? Because there's two different things when we talk about like what am I bullish on? I am I've never been sort of super bearish on Ethereum as an ecosystem. There's uh many reasons to be excited about the developer community. The research it goes on the thriving ecosystem.

Companies continue to come to Ethereum. It has like it's an important piece of the crypto ecosystem. So I I've I've been very constructive there especially now. I think the the Ethereum community sort of like has a renewed sense of urgency that uh I think you you're starting to see now and we covered it a lot in the pod. I asked in the podcast like putting that aside like um you know a lot of people talk about oh there's been a lot of negative criticism of Ethereum like like can we just still agree that Ethereum is the second largest crypto asset. It is still a $300 billion asset. So, like how do we get to that valuation is a question that I'm going to continue to press every team, every founder that

comes into this podcast, it's like why is it worth 300 billion, not just Ethereum, every other crypto project? And what do you need to believe for this to be 300 billion? And I think that is the ultimately the question that I don't have a good answer to. So, I have I have a good answer to that. I think the only reason any of these things are valued at what they're valued at is the same reason Open AAI is valued at $80 billion um or what whatever their last valuation was which is OpenAI is not an $80 billion company today. that if you close your eyes and you can kind of squint and if they get everything right over the next decade that is all you know all all information will flow through chat GBT and boom you've got a trillion dollar company and I hear you

I hear you but you know again it's like when you run a fundamental analysis discounted cash flow go talk listen to the podcast I recorded with Jeff Dorman about Coinbase funny enough Coinbase now got ahead of S&P 500 and we'll talk about it in this actually I'm going to be honest I didn't listen to that episode what what Jeff's take on Coinbase. Was he bullish or bearish? He was he was like look bearish. Have I say the the the product suite is not very integrated? Uh you know it's going to be facing competitive threats from uh traditional financial institutions and you know across different line items you know it the moat is not there there. So anyways that was Jeff's take you know Coinbase was at like 140 150 bucks then it's now 250 got out of S&P every manager now is buying it because they

have to right. Yeah, they can't afford not to have Coinbase in order to perform the index. Nonetheless, when you like I agree like ultimately you have to do a discounted cash flow 10 years. What does this look like and then terminal value to get to some semblance of a valuation? That's not how you that's not how you'd value a startup. Like you invested in block works. Did you build a discounted cash flow for us? Yes. Like like did I model it out? Like I looked at the different pieces of your business and I say okay you have a lot of dependency on the event space. Do you believe that you can move away from that? And since I've invested, you've like executed on a number of other line items that move away from um one-time uh cyclical revenue source to a subscriber

type. And ultimately that was the bet that I made back then. I think you guys have executed on that. And so yeah, like you you know are you going to model it to the nth decimal? But at least you have to have a reasonable understanding of like how many users are using chat GBT, what is the average revenue per user? And then how does that flow through the P&L and what's the margin of profile of the business? I continue to struggle with the Ethereum value like the ETH value acrruel and we don't have to spend too much time on that but and a lot of what we talked about is like the L1 L2 dynamic and rent and how does that acrue we talk a lot about security being like a very valuable piece here and like you know rent and whatnot. So anyways it

was a helpful episode. I still am not fully convinced on ETH being a $300 billion asset. Like I just I'm cautious. I'd rather I see more opportunities in other parts of the ecosystem. Okay, let me ask you this. So the market is starting to develop where um did you see this Believe app? It used it was called Clout and then now it's called Believe. Um 100 million in revenue. Yeah. So um to me this is like just a different kind of spin on meme coins obvious. So okay. So basically we had Pump Fun which was like meme meme coins. We all called them memecoins and stuff like that. And then we had Zora come out on base and and ETH uh and Zora chain and they called them creator coins, but really they're just meme coins as well. And then we have Believe come out and they're actually

calling I don't know if you've seen this, but what what believe is is the it gives you the ability. They're marketing it as like, hey founders, don't go raise from VCs. They've kind of made the VC the enemy. And they're saying the way the way to fund your company is actually go launch a token. Um, and this is just this is just a different marketing spin on Pumped. Fun and Zora. So, Pump Pump calls them memecoins, Zora calls them creator coins, believe calls them founder coins. It's all it's all the same thing. Um, but it's got me asking the question of like, so the original cycle, right, in 2021 was Bitcoin, then we rolled in, then you roll gains into ETH, and then it goes into altcoins, and then it went into NFTts. So I think a

lot of people went into the cycle and they said it's going to be the same thing Bitcoin then into ETH and soul then into the alts and then into NFTTS or whatever. Um what actually happened is there were so many people who have been in the industry through 2021 that they just skipped all the middle steps and they went straight into NFTs which this version of NFTs were memecoins obviously. So we went straight from Bitcoin gains from the Bitcoin ETF in January of last year directly into the memecoins. Um, so many people got hosed on that trade now and have lost so much money on memecoins. They they made a lot and now they've lost a lot because people didn't sell the top. Um, that I think actually this resurgence in the market, Bitcoin's going up, ETH is going up, soul's going up. I actually think

this is when we could start to see a classic cycle which is Bitcoin. You roll those gains into things like real revenue generating token. What whatever whatever the alts like I'll broadly call it alts or something like that and then maybe later on we get memes. Um curious what curious what you think of that or or the because the other side of that would be look go look at a chart of meme coins. Boom. We've got it on Blockworks Research. memes are coming right back up and everyone's just going to skip the alts again and go right into memes. Uh, how do you think I mean let's I always look at when the market rebounds like what are what rebounds the fastest and hardest. Okay.

So so like that's always to me a strong signal of what the market wants to bid. Okay. And so like se seven days like I'm looking at coin gecko has pretty good categorization. So you have like smart contracting platforms. Uh you have proof of work chains, proof of stake chains, um you know, world liberty portfolio chain, you know, so they they bucket these things. Uh I'm looking at like, you know, memes for instance. Uh that bucket is up 34% over the last seven days outperforming uh right here. So we've got do, we've got whiff, pi, pepe, e obviously they've rebound quite hard. Again, it's a simplistically it's a flows game. Like it doesn't like how much flows are

required to move the price of an asset by 1%. For a very mature asset like Bitcoin and Ethereum, it is obviously harder. I'm saying obvious things, but it's just like it's important to contextualize like it doesn't take that much capital to, you know, that flows into particular lower cap market coins to double, right? Yeah. Yeah, but if we're being intellectually honest with that take, we've got whiff obviously is at the top. It's up 60% on the week. Um, and Pepe is up 40%. But then, so then you've got all the ETHs, right? Like West and Ste and we wrapped ETH and Kelp RS E and all all these ETHs. So then you have to scroll down a little bit. Then you've got then you've got Athena and

Radium which are I would call like fundamentally driven tokens. Um, I don't know if you'd agree with that. Then you've got the L2s which is like optimism arbitum and then you've got like OG defi with a then you've got hyperlquid which I'd bucket in the same radium Athena category. So it's actually not as clear to me what this is what I don't get clear signal from this but how what maybe you're seeing something I'm not okay. Uh look uh remember that time we talked about like what are the top 20 coins? Top 20 coins uh in crypto continue to be like legacy coins. they just have brand recognition and power, right? When when when investors I don't pretend to understand all the pockets of flows in

the crypto ecosystem. It's like really hard I think it for me to like visualize but like for instance Ripple like no one was expecting that and and you know Ripple is now like a top four asset right up from Salana and B&B. Where's that money coming from? Who who's bidding this asset? like Ripple is, you know, a lot of the Cardano, Dogecoins of the world, like there's like there's one like try to piece together like fundamentals, do they matter? Like we can have a whole intellectual discussion on that and I would argue no, not so much. Uh but of course like for hyperl liquid you know you have like a reasonably and maker and a like defi protocols like you have a buy and burn mechanism that you had guys have put together a great research piece recently about like looking at buy and

burn tokens and how the market has like rewarded them like maples of the world right so so it's that whole category the other simplistic arguments like what are the main assets that people how can people express views and if you look at like what are the assets that are offered to people at the wallet at aggregator level, an exchange level, it matters, right? Uh so so so naturally like all the all the meme coins, you know, are readily easily like understood by the market and a lot of the retail participants. And so, you know, when people feel that they want to put risk back on the menu, are you going to buy Salana or are you going to buy levered exposure to Salana, which is perhaps whiff or bonk? Yeah. Or are you going to buy Bitcoin or you going to buy

Dogecoin? Um, and and so I I think like that's sort of how the market views it when when risk is back on the on on the menu and on the table. People like to express levered bets whether it's through a per or options, but memes kind of do that. I'm not here to tell you that memes are dead. They're definitely not dead. They're they're ne they've been a core component of the crypto ecosystem since day one. Bitcoin is the ultimate meme. So why don't So are you buying memes right now cuz we're going back down. I would I don't have time. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Help me answer this. I would have I would have put on a trade of me like WIF for open up the chart wave. I think it went all the way down to 25 cents.

When I looked I'm like yeah this is Yeah. Yeah. Like like Yeah. All the way down to 25 cents. Yeah. Liberation day, right? It was like I think the low there was like Yeah. So it rebound really hard, right? Again, it's a billion dollar asset now. It traded all the way to 200 million which which is you know or or we can look at the better memecoin which is yeah hot air rises kind of thing right. This episode is brought to you by scale the next evolution in layer 1 blockchains with a gas-free invisible user experience instant finality and robust security. Scale allows for limitless scalability and has already saved its 50 million users over 11 billion in gas fees. scale's high

throughput, zero transaction costs, and powerful web 3 infrastructure make it the ideal platform for gaming, AI, and other high throughput apps. To explore the gas-free ecosystem, visit scale.space/ecosystem and follow their journey on X at scale network. That's scale spelled with a K. Thanks to Scale for making today's episode possible. I wanted to take a moment to tell you about Marinade, the platform connecting Salana holders with the best staking rates on Salana. Marinade unlocks a high-performance staking delegation platform that brings billions in liquidity and security to the Salana market with solutions for both individual traders and global

institutions from both DeFi and traditional finance. Use Marinade to earn rewards on your Salana treasuries and holdings. Optimize your Salana staking with Marinade's bestin-market features, including user downside protection through protected staking rewards and optimize delegation via Marinad's automated auction marketplace. To learn more about Marinade, visit marinade.inance or click the link in the show notes. So, help me answer this question. I got a question from uh from a friend.

He said, "Look, I'm finalizing the sale of one of my houses. I'm going to dump that cash into the market." Uh go here's what he said. He said I'm going I'm going heavy into or he said going to go heavy soul memes and then some real revenue generating projects like Radium Jupit and Athena. Anything else you love right now? Um how do you how do you answer a question like that? And and I'm curious what you think of that actual basket. But well a what's his time horizon? Does he need that money? And what's his return profile? like what is he expecting to get out of that? Can he hold this uh for 10 years, five years, or three months or one week? Yeah. Um let's say he's very risk on, very

comfortable with risk um and has a multi-year time horizon. I think Bitcoin deserves a important part in that portfolio. And I've come around to that actually as of late. That's funny. That's what I said. I I responded to him. I said can never go wrong with with a bit of BTC. Like you you can look at Bitcoin dominance and maybe that comes down. But as a whole, I mean, I think like there's a great chart going around around like M2 and Bitcoin uh Ro Paul and a few other folks like uh Eric V, not Eric, but uh I think the Bitwise guys, a couple of them tweeted about it, which is it is really, and we've talked about it here, it's it's sort of look at M2 and the correlation between M2 and the price of Bitcoin is actually quite strong. uh if you look at

just um and so yeah like Bitcoin's great as an asset because you can do so much with it. You can borrow against it. The V is you know less than your altcoins and so you know it just it it it allows you to just build a little bit dampen a little bit of V and still capture I mean Bitcoin could be at 150,000 heck could be at 200,000 by the end of the year. it wouldn't surprise me. And and that's a great outcome, I think. Um I I I would argue like you put put some in Bitcoin, some in gold.

Um and then of those assets, I don't dislike I would be curious how he would express the meme trade. Is he buying a basket of like the top memes? And what I what I've seen other really smart investors like, okay, pick your favorite meme in a particular ecosystem you feel excited about. Salana, Ethereum, Bitcoin, you know, Pepe, Whiff, Bonk, um, and Fartcoin, whatever it is, right? I'm not here to like these are all hypotheticals, right? None of this is advice or whatnot, but I think that's how normally a lot of people think, right? That I what I like to think about is say you have a hundred people in a room, they all describe the scenario that you just described, which

is they come across some liquidity and they want to put on risk. I think it's the it's not so much like what do you believe? It's it's the family feud style of investing is how I would describe it. You know Family Feud, this game in America, right? For for listeners that don't live in America or have been living under a rock, Family Feud, go watch it because the the game is sort of like survey says and they survey a hundred or x amount of people. And so it's like what and they ask a bunch of questions, right? Like uh whatever um what do people do on a first date, right? What are the top seven questions?

And so, how do you play this game to win? Not to be right. It's to win. Again, you're playing a game to win, not to be right. This is a classic CMS out there probably listening. Uh, do you want to be right or do you want to make money? Um, and so that's what you need to anticipate is what is the what is it's not the it's not it's not the objectively right answer. It's like the social consensus. Yeah. What's what does the crowd think? And so that's the exercise I think for crypto which is in the episode again with Jeff Dorman. It's like we came both to the agreement that a lot of value in these networks is the social currency.

And because it is a social phenomena then you just sort of like invert and you say yeah okay so how do people like you could be sitting there all day saying Ripple has no value. It's a ghost chain or Cardano. like yeah but you know that's how the masses like somehow Brad and team have like really developed this brand that Ripple is synonymous with DeFi. You ask 100 people in the world not your 10 crypto deents and natives and you tell them what is the how do you express a DeFi trait like crypto taking over payments. What are they going to say? A or Ripple? Maker or Ripple?

Ethereum or Ripple? What's a payment chain? Yeah, Ripple. Honestly, I've learned a lot about investing about like in crypto like you can can you distill and I ask this question a lot of founders like what is a oneliner for your project? If you don't have a oneliner for a project, it's gonna be really hard to capture attention. Yeah. Um let me ask one more markets question then we can move into the news because because there's a lot of it. Um, I tweeted this out. Um, got just attacked by the the Bitcoin army here. Um, I said, "Bitcoin dominance calling the top at 65%." Um, we're currently s So, we've been on a multi-year since actually the end of 2022. Uh, basically

since like FTX blew up, we've just been on a multi-year uh, uptrend for Bitcoin dominance. And we just hit 65%. I said that's the top. 65% call in the top. Bitcoin dominance. Uh it's today it's at 63%. Uh I don't know if you have thoughts on this one again. Yeah, I think uh I sort of agree with your take. Um normally what it happens is so you saw like a pretty pretty big rally here of Bitcoin dominance and Bitcoin. Usually when there's a relief rally, a rebound, Bitcoin leads and then everything else follows. in so far as Bitcoin is stabilized. So, if Bitcoin holds, it typically goes and you'll hear a lot of these traders say like if Bitcoin holds this level of like 100K,

then it it's breathing room for other things to to to rip and so naturally dominance comes down. Yeah. Yeah. Um that that's historically how the pattern has sort of behaved. But yeah, cool. I at the end of the day like I would characterize FOMO has always been everpresent in crypto because you hear stories about people making life-changing money with Fartcoin or whatever and so it's always the this is already ripped so I missed Ethereum train because it's a $300 billion asset then oh uh Solana is at 90 billion oh wait um this avalanche is at 10 oh wait uh this project in these ecosystem is at one oh Wait, there's another ecosystem

at 100 million. Oh, wait, there's another 10. There's another one. And then you keep going down that path. Yeah. And then you sort of like say, okay, how many people are going to allocate to these things? and and uh of course there's some truth into like the the narratives of AI and you know um you know memes and particular sectors within memes like so it's just uh it's it's I will say it's hard to objectively speaking like it's very hard to outperform Bitcoin Ethereum the majors over a multiple cycle like period some of the best investors some of the best funds that are actively doing this 24/7 have teams doing this struggle to outperform for me. Yep.

Yeah. Um all right, let's get into the news. A lot of news. Um uh first first piece of news uh is uh two acquisitions. We had Robin Hood acquired Wonderfy. We had um uh Anchorage is acquiring uh is acquiring Mountain Protocol. So Mountain Protocol we've had on the podcast. We mentioned earlier Martin uh we did that episode. Nick Carter um I think Multicoin and they'd raised an $8 million series A Multicoin. um uh Castle Island Ventures obviously uh they were innovators in the sense that they wanted to their their idea was that you could actually have a stable coin with native yield baked into it which as we're seeing more and more and more that's that's already happening. Um this is a pretty interesting acquisition because so

they're actually I don't know if you saw I don't know if you followed this acquisition at all but um so US so Mountain has USDM is their stable coin. it got to like 150 million market cap and then now it's was trading down at like 50 million or something like that. Uh USDM is actually being wound down as part of the integration. So I originally tweeted out, oh this is interesting. We've got this nationally or federally chartered bank with uh with Anchorage and now they're going to have a stable coin. That's very interesting. I was wrong about that. Uh USDM is actually going to be wound down as part of the integration because they need to comply with the Genius and Stablecoin acts. So it's not this isn't Anchorage getting a stablecoin. What this is is Anchorage is now the first OC crypto bank that can

help other institutions issue stables. So as Anchorage now tries to go headto-head with the State Streets and BNY Melons of the world as this big custodian, they need to layer being a custodian is actually a pretty crappy business model. You need to layer other services on top. So, the service that this acquisition gives them is the ability to help institutions issue stables. And you'll see it in this line um uh ba uh or or maybe it was in their tweet. Basically, every everybody's going to have a stable coin in their mind or or at least a stable coin strategy. So, yeah, I thought this was a pretty smart uh pretty smart acquisition.

What does their business model, I guess, look like over the next year or two with this acquisition? I think they basically just start layering. So the the first thing that a custodian needs to do right is so they they all start with being a custodian and then everybody whether it's BitGo or Coinbase custody or you know Gemini's custody business or um who uh Zapo or Copper whoever it is they all started as custodians then they started layering trading services on top of that. So they all started launching the ability to trade on top of the the crypto that you had custodied with them. Then they offered the ability to borrow and lend against it. So I think Anchorage today has one of the biggest uh lending desks in the industry. Um and now as you as that becomes a product that other people that becomes really

competitive, you need to offer more and more and more services. So um and you know stable coins are obviously at the the heart of the ind industry today. So I think it's a pretty good service. I like it. I thought this was a good acquisition. Yeah. Um all right. The other one that's that's interesting is Robin Hood acquiring WonderFi. this one. There's probably a little more meat on the bones to talk about. I thought this was a brilliant acquisition um for for five reasons. One is um regulatory fastlane. Uh Robin Hood just bought the only crypto platform in Canada with full CRO approval and CIPF insurance.

Basically, uh, for those not familiar with the Canadian licensing space, which I assume is most listeners, they just skipped this like multi-year regulatory nightmare. Uh, they bought a compliance engine uh that other people can't replicate and they they basically skipped this like regulatory nightmare trying to get the licenses. And um, so that's number one, regulatory fast lane. Number two, um, and and by the way, I'm got a lot of this from uh Simon uh Simon Taylor. So just big big shout out to Simon um who's at yeah just very good fintech guy. Uh second is instant Canadian footprint. So Wonderfy has 1.7 million KYCed Canadian users. Um they've got a couple billion in trading volume,

one and a half billion uh in custody. So they've got the staff to run a big uh you know Robin Hood Canada basically, let's call it. So they've got they get they get almost two million KYC Canadian users. That's big. Three is um uh Canada actually has clearer crypto regulations than the US right now in some aspects. So this actually gives Robin Hood the ability to like if you think about you know we were talking about this with with uh talking about Darabit this actually gives Robin Hood this interesting sandbox to kind of uh test like derivatives tradings and trading and per staking products and crossber trading solutions. Um, and it it right now if they didn't do this

acquisition, they would have had to wait for the SEC to give them approval to do all this. Now they can go do this in Canada. By the way, I'm not a lawyer, so I don't actually fully know what I'm talking about, but this is my guess. Um, uh, number four is, uh, they can now layer on all of the existing Robin Hood things on top of their Canadian products like, um, their X1 credit card and zero commission trading and all the classic stuff. And then number five is um yeah as Simon said this is a competitive chess move right so they are basically paying they paid a 40% premium to keep wonderfy away from you know there's five big Canadian banks there are other US crypto exchanges that were you know looking north probably like Coinbase and

folks like that uh Wealth Simple is the Canadian equivalent of Robin Hood so by doing this you're basically saying look all all the competitors can't have this business Um, so I love it. I think I think it was great. I I thought it was smart. I don't know if you have any thoughts on this acquisition, but No, I just love to see the M&A activity in crypto pick up so much. I mean, I think we're pretty early in our predictions. I think not this year, but last year. We talked about the we even speculated that Coinbase might be acquired by by Big Bang. Uh, and you know, at the time Coinbase stock was trading at 25 bucks. Now it's 10x that. So, someone missed an opportunity to buy Coinbase. Um, so yeah, I mean it's it's it's pretty impressive. The question is what gets bought next? Like who who do you think

is up? like who I guess who do you think is the major so the number one M&A that's happening right now are are actually it's a little boring but the number one thing that's happening is uh exchange license acquisitions so there are a million I mean basically what happened for the last five or for 2017 let's call it 2016 to 20 23 let's call it where you could actually it wasn't that hard to go get a license this could be anywhere from in Singapore to Malaysia to Indonesia to Mexico to Argentina like all think of all these global think of all these countries around the world you could go get a license around two years ago after everything blew up all these countries

stopped giving licenses so you have a lot of countries around the world whether it's Canada to Brazil to the Netherlands where there's like one or two exchanges that have become dominant and they've got the licenses so now if someone like Coinbase wants to push push into that area or Robin Hood wants to push into that area, you're going to have to go through like a two or three or four year regulatory hurdle to just break in and start trading crypto, all those companies are going to get gobbled up because they own the it's really an it's it's really a licensing acquisition play is what it comes down to. So, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Um, what do you think? Any anything that's kind of a boring play though because like exchange acquiring exchange any other more interesting things that you think

will happen? inversion acquiring something. No, no. Listen, I heard you. I can't talk about immersion too much in this pod. Like, I hear you. Uh, no. Uh, Circle is probably one where might be acquired. I I don't know if it actually gets acquired or not, but I I could see them potentially be acquired. Yeah. Um, oh, the obvious one is data companies. Um, okay. So I mean this is just the world that we play in. So I've got kind of a unique insight into it which is there's all these data businesses. Uh so there's kind of the big player. So there's there's like the data companies that most people know. Then there's this

basically like 50 data companies in the industry that um let's say they raised either they didn't raise any money or they raised somewhere between like 20 to $60 million and they they actually have amazing data in like one little area. like they've got the best derivatives data or the best staking data or the best um hyperlquid data or something like that or the best APOS data. Um and they've got like two engineers and a product person and and a founder or something like that. Uh, and they've been able, a lot of them are maybe have 500 million of ARR or excuse me, 500,000 of ARR. Mhm. A million of AR, 2 million of AR, but they're more like a feature, less like a company, right? Um, and basically all of them are selling right

now. Do you think there's any protocol to protocol M&A happening or could be happening? Not good. There's not good protocol to protocol. Um, I think when's the last time we saw that? I mean there was uh well there's there's a synthetics was looking Yeah. Yeah. That's what I was thinking about synthetics and the trading LRA which was LRA. It used to be called Yeah. Yeah. Whatever it's um this one. Um so this was yesterday. Synthetics proposes $27 million token swap to acquire options protocol derive. Um synthetics acquiring derive formerly LRA vx for DRV token swap. Um, yeah. So there, yeah, there's deals like that,

but like those are less interesting. I think what ends up being really interesting is look, some of these companies are or some of these foundations and protocols are sitting on billions of dollars, literally billions of dollars and they're not doing anything with that money. They're literally they're they're staking it and they're getting a little y. This episode is brought to you by Scale, the next evolution in layer 1 blockchains. With a gas-free, invisible user experience, instant finality, and robust security, Scale allows for limitless scalability, and has already saved its $50 million users over 11 billion in gas fees. Scale's high throughput, zero transaction costs, and powerful web 3 infrastructure make it

the ideal platform for gaming, AI, and other high- throughput apps. To explore the gas-free ecosystem, visit scale.space/ecosystem and follow their journey on X at scale network. That's scale spelled with a K. Thanks to Scale for making today's episode possible. I wanted to take a moment to tell you about Marinade, the platform connecting Salana holders with the best staking rates on Salana. Marinade unlocks a high-performance staking delegation platform that brings billions in liquidity and security to the Salana market with solutions for both individual traders and global institutions from both DeFi and traditional finance. Use Marinade to earn rewards on your Salana treasuries

and holdings. Optimize your Salana staking with Marinade's bestin-market features, including user downside protection through protected staking rewards and optimized delegation via Marinad's automated auction marketplace. To learn more about Marinade, visit marinade.inance or click the link in the show notes. So, I heard this week I had a meeting with uh someone's really involved in the rootstock community. They have like 2,000 Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. in cold storage, ladies and gentle $2 billion sitting in cold storage not earning 5% on treasury. It's like you know talking about it's like what what are you going to do? What are you doing with that capital? Now I think like there if I were here's what I would buy. Where do

you think most of the value acrru um I don't know go just I don't know user aggregators go buy a wallet. Argent ladies and gentlemen. Yeah. Yeah. What's Argent doing? They built some really cool tech. It's not going public. Probably has, you know, at this point 10 years of investors sitting there. Probably some of them want liquidity, you know. Yeah. If you're a protocol, you want users. Well, there's a lot of users people using Argent. Yeah. If you're a protocol, I mean, that to me feels like a pretty interesting acquisition. Yeah. We spend a lot of time looking at like fintex, like traditional fintexs that just have gone nowhere in places. So, that's what I

think will start to happen is like like um what's a fintech? I don't know. Acorns. Like what happened to Acorns? Yeah, Betterman. Acorns. There's a myriad of fintex in Latin America that we have in our in our in our short list of companies that we're looking at and poking around. Um I just read uh Coinbase. Uh sorry, JP Morgan just put together a um I just got their um just note on Coinbase. I uh this is like the analyst there. Uh Kenneth Worthington uh and they just had Worthington. Hell of a name. born to work on Wall Street. Yeah. Yeah. So, so he uh you know, Coinb they're neutral in coin. Anyways, like they're like TMC conference takeaways and they hosted Coinbase president Emil Choy and the CFO. They had some really

interesting like topics, four main topics. One legislation which you know clearing up um the derivatives and payments obviously der acquisition they talk about uh the competitive landscape to listen to this competitive landscape presents opportunity to white label. I'm like white label? What do you mean white label coin? They're like coin is uniquely positioned to withstand most competition as legacy crypto participants have been honing, broadening, diversifying its products. Their whole point is Coinbase currently provides 200 partners technical support and infrastructure to engage with the crypto ecosystem, you know, and so I think they think and this is the first time I hear this term crypto as a service Cass offering is notable and they think of like Coinbase acting as quotequote acting as a principle. JP

Morgan wants to go launch crypto, they'll just be like, "Hey, Coinbase, you got everything. You got the licenses." Yeah, it is the first but not the last time. And I powerful terminology like this could, you know, really spark some interest. Um, so crypto as a service. Obviously, the internet had software as a service. Kevin Worthington, let's go, buddy. Coming on. Yeah, like kudos to them for this is the first time hearing it, so I'll give them credit for it. I'm going to start using this. I've been using crypto enabled businesses. Do you want to hear a great marketing line? One of our d one of our data or one of our research analysts posted on Twitter. He said, "Access to Blockwork's research dashboard gives gives me data privilege." He's like he's like, "You didn't know that Soulfi was gaining DEX market share on Salana or that Radium's

Launchpad hit record volumes or that Ethereum reclaimed DA market share or that app revenue on Appto just reached an all-time high. Sorry, I thought this was common knowledge. I've got data privilege." Whoa, that's uh that's powerful right there. Stud line. you one more note on this line about the protocols having so much money. I thought there was a I thought this there's a post by Dean uh uh Dean Igenman um that I thought was spoton which is he said if there was proper activist investor in the space companies like Gollum project Gollum network TBT right wouldn't be sitting on a h 100,000 ETH that's not $100,000 worth of ETH that's a hundred,000 ETH while having a $270 million FTV wouldn't

been a no-brainer target before the pump. So 100,000 ETH mental math I think 250 million 250 million and their FTV is 270 million FTV. Uh yeah. Well, so this is something that I want to talk about, right? Cuz because you have we're going to have an episode with Parfy uh and a few other folks talk about like these the the strategy of the day is taking a public company and and and like injecting one crypto asset. Yeah. Exactly. So everyone's now doing this. You know, you have the soul strategies of the world and a few other plenty of these things launching right now. Plenty of this now, which they're trying to basically do what micro strategies done, which you take a holding company, you see it with 10 to 20 million, you reverse merge it into a public shell

company and the market and the market's giving you you're going to trade at two, three, maybe four times any right right for now. Uh I would be cautious for now. You know, it's like at some point that the the classic Charlie Mongers of the world come say, "Hey, yeah, this this goes away." Uh, for everyone that remembers the widow trade, which is, you know, the the the GBTC grayscale trade, you know, where you you're doing effectively this. Um, which is interesting, right? Because you have in the public markets, you have this dynamic where these these holding companies are trading at a premium, pretty substantial one. On the other hand, you have golems of the world that are trading at one NAV, right? Golem has 250 million of ETH in their balance

sheet and they are trading at right now. Let's see just to make sure that yeah 278. So it's basically one one. So you're assuming there's no value to Golem and what they've done. Basically it's like a you know holding company of sorts. Um why is it not trading at a premium? Because again they're not probably doing anything without Ethereum right? They're not, you know, recursive. They're not Kevin Ow said they are building Octant app and my response would be you need $250 million to go build an app, please. Like I mean, yeah, that's something that I've like paid attention. You'd get sued by investors

if like if if Blockworks raised $250 million and we were just building a little app and I mean we probably get sued. I mean like listen Berkshire Hathaway has like $300 billion in cash or something like that. So the question is like are you a steward of capital like what is the purpose of Golem? Uh you know and so they I mean the incentives are kind of not there right if if you're the golem team you're kind of like probably putting some of that ETH and buying treasuries and you're clipping 5% on 250 million. Well you know that's pretty substantial amount if you ask me. Yeah. So, so like they're basically, you know, a dormant hedge fund of sorts that is clipping a 5%

management fee, but doing things correctly now. They're earning like anywhere between at most 12.5 million by putting this on treasuries. Yeah. And by the way, where did they get that 100k ETH from? Uh the ICO investors gave it to them. Yeah, exactly. Investors. Yeah. Okay. Savs are saps are nice receipts of thank you for your money. here's a receipt that you gave us this money. There's like very few investor rights attached to that. Yeah, true. Of course, you could you could corner buy Golem and like and that's a SA not let let alone uh you know going on Ether wallet in 2017 and just signing up for an ICO.

Yeah. To to be fair like if you're sitting on 250 million of ETH uh you can't put all that in treasuries. You could like borrow against it and put some like maybe at best they're clocking five six%. you know, you know, half of that you could, you know, diversify or, you know, allocate correctly. But yeah, there's a, by the way, it's not just go like so many other companies. I know. Can we talk a little more about this pipe strategy or basically these like public treasuries that are happening and just your thoughts on them? So, there was one that was um so David Bailey uh and Bitcoin native. Oh, they merged. Oh, that's interesting.

Um Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. This is the pipe. This is the exact same thing I'm talking about. So David Bailey and Bitcoin native holding company Nakamoto announced merger with Kindly MD to establish Bitcoin treasury. So this is the exact thing that I'm talking about. You get a holding company and then you reverse merge the thing into a shell company. Uh so they so raises $510 million pipe, 200 million in convertible notes, making this the largest capital raise to launch a Bitcoin treasury, the largest pipe for any public crypto-related transaction. Um and so really what they're doing is they're just buying Bitcoin. They're just they're just creating another Bitcoin uh micro strategy. Same thing happened here. This was um Spettz announces strategic partnership with Sonic Labs ahead of closing their current financing

round. So Spettz is pleased to announce a strategic collaboration with Sonic Labs, the core development team behind the Sonic blockchain. As part of this collaboration, Sonic Labs will be making a direct investment into Spettz, the parent company of Sonic Strategy. All this is saying is you've got a holding company that's going to be a publicly listed company now that where their only thing that they're doing is buy the token, market the token. Um, and you you you put in place very key to the strategies, you hire a mini market, a mini Michael Sailor and you market the hell out of that token. Um, how does this end?

[Music] I don't No, I mean like am I just mid-curving this and I'm just like oh risky risky risky and you know left curve right curve or like just just buy the token be okay with it. I again like I don't think that the premium is sustainable. Um it's a function of I think of a couple of things as I try to understand it being there are some parallels I think between the grayscale premium for a refresher there was a time where the only kind of way to express a long crypto view was to either buy and you know store crypto and many institutions didn't want to do that the only alternative in the market was go and buy

GBTC products and they had some tax advantages and you could put it in your 401k and so there's like a lot of benefits to that it had a convenience factor therefore it traded at a big premium and the premium like kind of moved around quite a bit that eventually go went away right um like it's sort of like financial engineering now the question is like it's not perfectly comparable but like why why does micro strategy trade at a premium and I think we discussed this in certain episodes with um Bitwise folks uh what is it what's his name um I forget but Jack Matt or Jeff. Jeff, I think it was Jeff. Oh. Oh, yeah. From Bitwise. Yeah, Jeff from Bitwise. And we

had another guy in the pod and we talked about this. So, but their whole point was like Micro Strategy is basically borrowing against it Bitcoin in a very friendly way. And like the way to go levered long an asset like Bitcoin is best expressed via Micro Strategy because they have muscle and they have negotiated really interesting terms with creditors and whatnot. And like fine, I've actually been impressed like that they're what's the premium now of Micro Strategy? I forget. But I was bit worried when options um of course the Bitcoin ETF launched and the premium was still there. And so like okay, what's going on? And then all right, if you want to go lever on Bitcoin through traditional markets, you could go op you could use options and a

whole suite of products that are not as fully robust out there. Um but I think like over time like uh basically there's a lever long vehicles right if you want to express a levered long view on a particular asset what they'll do and my understanding of soul strategy is they'll take soul and then they'll stake it and then they earn that and then you know that's a you know investors get excited about that versus holding um you know an ETH ETF for instance or whatever. So, um I I I I honestly don't understand and maybe I'm a left curve here. Um um or middle curving it, sorry.

But I would I I don't know. I I don't want to play I guess the worst what is the worst case that can happen for these companies. It goes back to like trading one to one NAV, right? Yeah. Maybe there's some of creative way to like hedge that. Um, like you sell puts or something like that. Yeah. I don't know. I I I personally feel more comfortable holding an asset that I like and just being plain vanilla. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it'll Well, it'll be So, there's like 20 of these things coming out for all these different tokens, which you can probably imagine what the tokens are, and it'll be interesting to see what happens with them and if they're able to successfully do it. Is there one for Ethereum, by the way? And if there isn't, why not? Um, I don't know. Maybe because the Ethereum ETF exists. So, it's like why is why is Soul Strategies valuable? It's like, oh, it gives institutional capital access to Salana before the Salana ETF. Yeah, but the what is interesting though is that you have these vehicles for Bitcoin. No, I know. I I actually don't I don't You have for Ethere for Salana, but I haven't correct me if I'm wrong. I haven't seen one for Ethereum. Maybe Ethereal. I should get on it.

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Carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before investing. Um, all right. La last thing I want to touch on is um, E Toro. The E Toro IPO happened. They got out and it was successful. They're trading at like $6 billion. So, first off, um I do want to give a massive congrats to Yonyi, uh just the founder of it Toro because he has been running that business for almost 20 years. They founded it Toro in 20 2006 or 2007. Uh so for anyone who's built a business and has done it for more than a couple of years, it is a grind. And yeah, so big shout out to Yoni for for building it Toro for uh yeah going on going on 20 years. I think

it's 18 18 or 19 years here. So yeah, big shout out to Yonyi. Um, it also more uh more publicly traded companies that are related to crypto is amazing for the industry. First off, it gives these uh crypto companies or cryptoreated I would call it eoro crypto adjacent the same bucket as Robin Hood uh gives them access to the capital markets which is only going to further accel accelerate M&A which accelerates venture which it it's just very healthy for the for the whole industry. Um and then it also gives more pricing, right? So if you actually talk to latestage investors or bankers who price IPOs, nobody knows how to price something like a Fireblocks or something like a chain analysis or

something like an anchorage. So very tough or or even something like a Kraken by the way um because they only have one company to comp it against which is Coinbase. So the more cryptoreated companies that go public, the more we get to price these companies. And so it's very very very helpful and it'll actually have it'll it'll just help the IPO markets and the latest stage venture markets which have been incredibly dry as of late. So uh it Toro did roughly I think it's 900 million in revenue 800 or 900 million in revenue last year. Um adjusted IBIDA was about 300 million. So they're trading at like six times revenue uh 20 times IBITDA. Um I think I got

that right. crypto trading accounts for like almost 50% of the revenue now. So, um yeah, just more more pricing is very helpful. So, uh congrats to E Toro. That's what I said. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. No, no, really good. I definitely agree with you on the point around like you could start seeing a crypto basket, right? Uh and and it helps pricing for future companies. It also paves the way for more IPOs. Um this is going to be really interesting how Coinbase trades what multiple what premium relative to other things that are to your point crypto adjacent or in the space like Robin Hoods of the world. new banks of the world, stuff like that. PayPal maybe.

One interesting thing is uh we haven't talked about here. I I referenced earlier, but Coinbase obviously one of the more probably impactful things that happened was Coinbase got added to the S&P 500. I thought you were going to say Coinbase got hacked. Well, uh well that too. Uh or their employees got bribed. There's an interesting element. But Coinbase got added to the S&P. First crypto company added to the S&P. It's it's it's massive. It's massive. It it truly is. I mean the stock kind of like went from uh it's just gained roughly what is it like it's now 247 it was like sub% it's 40%. People asking like why why is this so important because now every if you're a large institution a like you need to rebalance your portfolio because the name of the

game in institutional management is can you outperform the index. So you cannot afford to to hold stuff that you know you want to like outer if you want to outperform the index you best that most of manager just scramble to buy stuff that gets added to the index right and so you have new flows coming in um and you know still Coinbase is still trading you know 40% off its high of 340ish 345 which happened like end of last year um but still I mean it's a it's a pretty important milestone stone and of course everyone comes out and says that Coinbase is definitely not I mean it's just more to your point there's just more awareness more coverage of Coinbase now that it is in the S&P 500 right there's just more eyes on it more

visibility more managers have to get exposure to it all these 401ks have exposure to it so point super super important for the industry my prediction or question to you is and there should be a pie market for this is like when do we have a second cryptonative company added to the S&P 500 how how many more how much more time does it year. I think a few years. I mean because I mean usually contender for when's the next Let's start here. When's the next crypto native company that's going to IPO? Is it right? Kraken.

Uh probably Kraken Circle but TBD BitGo Anchorage like you know. So first we got to get a crypto native company to IPO and then and then we can talk about that. So I think I think it'll be a couple years actually. So this is yeah it's huge. The other metric that I'd be really curious in a perfect world you guys are data guys but like of the S&P 500 which businesses derive revenue from crypto in some way shape or form maybe like in a version where Stripe and their business becomes far more crypto n stablecoin like direct. Have you seen the S&P? Have you seen what's have you looked recently at what's in the S&P?

Uh yes. My computer's like I completely knowing it's like the max seven are like what 40% of the S&P. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But like I mean let me read these to you. Tell me if you've heard of any of these. Eolab. This this isn't even number 400. This is 150. Eolab Autozone. Well, no. Auto Roper Air Products and Chemicals. Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. CSX Corporation. The Travelers Company. Carrier Global. Freeport, Mc Mormon, New Pneumont Corporation, Copart, Norfick, Southern Corporation, Truistportation, Wano NXP Semiconductors Kinder Morgan, Insurance. Yeah. So, oil and commodities, oil and gas, uh, yeah, a

lot of tech like go to the top 100 lot. Yeah. Then, then there's I mean, you obviously know these Microsoft, pharma, pharma, tech, and pharma and tech and financial services basically some healthare. Yeah. soon to be crypto data. It would be interesting. Maybe maybe you don't have like a pure cryptonative company join the S&P in near term, but I would argue a lot of these businesses are going to start using stable coins. Um whether they I agree like it, you know what I mean? And so like as a it would be really interesting if in a perfect world you have like the revenue or profitability of the top of the S&P 500, how what percentage of that gets starts being derived because of like crypto line? Here's a different way to think about it. When does the Coin 50, which is Coinbase's index product, which

I think is just going to end up taking over, when does the Coin 50 become as important of an index product as the S&P 500? Fair enough. Yeah, I think that takes a while, sir. As much as bullish as I want to be. Um, I got I got two more things. One is um there's a Bloomberg article, Morgan Stanley digital assets head quits to start new DeFi fund. Um, I've become pretty close with Andrew Peele, um, who's, uh, he's the guy, he's the head of digital assets at Morgan Stanley. He just left his fund to invest in and issue digital assets and tokenized assets. That's not just the story, though. Um, the story is that there's a lot of these folks leaving traditional

capital markets to get into crypto, right? So, you had Andrew just left Morgan Stanley. You had Tony Mclofflin. Um Tony Tony basically created city's regulated liability network. Um he just left to start uh it's it's like Ubix I think it is UBYX and they're building clearing infrastructure for stable coins. Uh you had Caroline Butler who was running crypto at BNY Melon for a while she left. Um uh you had Jay Bianc Carmano who was the head of crypto at State Street. He left he's at Platonic now. Um so you've got all these heads of someone a Goldman may

have left to join um some startup someone called Inver. Yeah great great first hire. Um so she's actually on guard but we haven't been public about it but yeah it's happening soon. Yeah. Is it public talking about? No, not not public yet. Yeah, but uh it will be soon. Uh I want to talk about something else. Okay, Maple Story. Pretty interesting. Uh is this the Avalanche? Is this the thing that just Avalanche? I also wanted to talk about this. This is um soing at like three and a half billion.

Yeah. Trading. But the more interesting thing to me, like putting putting price aside, it's like they've been around for more than 20 years. It's like a pretty cool game. They have 100 million registered users. The company is like three billion in revenue and they launch an Avalanche. Um I I think like uh talk about like resurgence of narratives. Like Game Five was like all the rage when like Axi happened, but again it was like was it a fun game? And I think like Maple Story is one of those like to me it's like a huge it's a reminder of like you're going to see more like I think the gaming narrative is not dead. I think we're starting to see like Godzillaas of the world and Maple Stories which is pretty like you should be paying attention to this narrative is all I'm saying. These are actually look

at this tweet. Wow. Maple Story with a huge launch day on Avalanche. What a flashback. Used to play this game as a kid. So this is I did too. This is a real Yeah, this is a real bit. This is a real game. Real business. real. It's a real business. It has a ton of music. What a concept. We're going to have these guys on the pod. Yeah. Yeah. I just added you to the group like cuz I asked Luigi, "Hey, like uh can we get these guys on the pod?" Cuz I want to hear what did they see as the benefit of launching a chain, right? Cuz I think like um this is like it's not a crypto game. It's just a fun game with crypto elements. Yeah. Here's this Luigi tweet tweet. Maple Story is a freetoplay game which has been around for more than 20

years. Overund 80 million registered users, three billion in gross revenue. Um, yeah, it's trading it 3.4 3.1 billion. Yeah. So, we're going to have these guys on to talk about like what was their thinking of launching a chain like what what is it actually the benefit for the gamer and and I think it's like we're starting we're going to see more and more of that, you know, real businesses coming to the conclusion that like they can layer in some crypto elements to like enhance their value prop to users. I think that's that's really powerful. It's not like never lead with crypto. Lead with a good product and then like have crypto kind of like embedded in there. But it's really exciting. Um all right, sir.

Let's wrap. What are what are we consuming? What's the content content of the week? Well, I've been reading a lot. Uh shout out to this person I hired actually from Goldman. She recommended this book, The Surrender Experiment. Have you Have you read it? Story Mickey Singer. Really awesome. Honestly, like one of those books that just of like what's it called? The surren I think the surrender experiment. Yeah, the surrender experiment by my journey into life's perfection. And I thought it was going to be one of those like guru like uh deep act chop bra kind of books but it's it's actually like just a who's it by? Really refreshing Michael Singer. Mickey Singer. Huh. I don't know who that is. Yeah. No, honestly I mean it's but it's it's a

pretty I really enjoyed it. Um and just go read it. Have you surrendered? I will be lying if I didn't tell you that throughout the day I now repeat this word surrender. And and and most of the time you come to the conclusion it's like surrender has like can have a negative connotation which is like you give up. You you you like throw in the towel. But it's the way that he comes at it is like surrender to what life brings at you. And I've like for me it's like often times um so I'll tell you for me like um I usually don't like to ask for help. That's just like just not what I do. Like I rarely ask people to for

favors. I like to help others but I don't but I do come across a lot of people inbounds that like hey we want to help you in X or Y or Z and and I'm like you know what I'm going to start paying more attention to that. Like you know because there there is something good that comes out of that. Look at how many times have I deprived myself of that happening. And I think there's a lot of magic that can happen when you just surrender to that that someone comes across your life and all I'm saying is after reading this book, I've started to pay more attention to these people that come into my life. And you know, a lot of times it's it's there's a lot of noise in there, but every once in a while to your point, like some of your

best hires came around at inbound on on a DM on Twitter. That's what he talks about surrendering, like actually paying attention to those people that come into your life. And for me obviously it's important because I'm in a new journey and a lot of people reached out and I've just started to pay more attention to that whereas before it would have been like listen I just got to like heads down build. But I think I've become a bit more aware to these travelers that come into your life and giving it a shot of like hey like I'm going to pay attention to this. Maybe something good comes out of that. You know you just never know. Perhaps often times because there's a lot of noise we tend or I've tended to discount a lot certain random strangers that come in. It's like as opposed to being

skeptical or having your guard up. I think there is value in just opening up to people. Interesting. All right. That was very fun. Philosophical. I I have something that's way less philosophical than that. You're like, "Yeah, why low was good?" I actually didn't like No, not that good. Um, no I listen to so there's a podcast actually called My First Million hosted by one of my friends, this guy Sam Parr and then another guy Sean Pur. Um, I'm sure there's some crossover with Empire. I'm sure some Empire listeners will know it. There's um there's actually two really good episodes for founders on it. So I got kind of burnt out of the Founders Podcast just because I can't stand David Senra say telling me why you should be listening to the Founders podcast for

like the thousandth time. It's like this is why we listen to the Founders. I'm like I get it. You already got me. I'm listening. So, I stopped listening to the show. Like, why do you have ads on Empire? Yeah. Um, but there's two good episodes. That one is with Blake Schol who started um a the supersonic jet company called Boom. Oh, I'm an investor. You're an Oh, so that was an epic episode. Um with Blake Schul. And then there's another one with the founder of NFX, the venture firm. Yeah. Um, and that was called uh from sell from making this the clickbait title from making $6 a week

selling worms to making 110 million. So, ignore the clickbay title, but it was a really good episode about like almost I mean here's the philosophical part to maybe tie this into what you were saying is like he talks about um he's like look I run in the circle of like Elon and uh you know he's like I was on a you know friendly basis with Steve Jobs and all this kind of stuff and he's like what game do you want to be playing? Like do you want to be playing the game of like buying boring businesses and cash flowing? Do you want to be like world domination game and be on Elon's level? And he's like you got to kind of understand the game that you're trying to play. though.

Um, and but then he talks about for 90 minutes just about the it's the power of network effects and how network effects go beyond just your business and they tie into your life and network eth like his mental model for the world is network effects are at the center of everything. So, I thought those two episodes were good. That was great. Um, one one point on that as as you were saying that there's a really good tweet by Mark Andre that I I really like and and it goes I'll quote, "The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would have think you would have thought.

That is a play on a Steve Jobs quote. That is not a Mark Anderson quote. So Steve Jobs said life can be so much broader once you discover one simple fact which is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people who are no smarter than you and you can change it. you can influence it and you can build your own things that other people can use and I think that Mark so Mark was good I think it's a play on that Steve thing anyways and Steve was a play on someone else's you know probably Socrates or or not allowed to steal anything in life or Marcus Aurelius or something you know we're all standing on the shoulders of giants I did watch Gladiator 2 on a flight that was my that was my fun content play of the week I

didn't I didn't like it as much it was good for an airplane movie you know but Gladiator one is the OG Anyways folks good roundup hope you guys enjoyed Always good hanging with you guys. We have the ETH bull podcast podcast coming out on Monday podcast. And then the week after on Monday, we've got a really really really good episode about um uh treasuries, this whole like token treasury public company strategy um with someone who's actually in the middle of it all. Uh plus someone who's looked at a ton of those deals. So yeah, two really good episodes of Empire coming. Rock and roll. Well, have a good weekend everyone. Thanks for listening. Yo, good haircut. Maybe shave your head next time.

Cheers folks. [Music]