The State of Macro And AI with Digital Assets Billionaire Arthur Hayes & Murad Mahmudov

Transcript

because the memec coin communities they are producing better memes than the memes that are produced by the tech Alin Community they probably made like 10 billion 12 billion and none of it is g to the Token holders that it's in these projects best interest not to pay revenue and myself and the broader Community is curious like how do you think about exiting what's going on guys welcome back to the rollup today we have a special episode following the Trump win and red wave in the USA election with Arthur Hayes who is the co-founder at 100x group and chief investment officer of maelstorm also probably you guys know him from the bitmex days um used to work at City Group in in deuts Bank uh certified dgen but also has a

lot of great macro takes pretty good combination here with mad uh the mem coin super cycler uh currently with a social trading platform stfx which we've heard of before and has been around for some time and youed also be a chief investment officer at adaptive Capital so guys looking forward to this one and kind of get a combination of different perspectives on on the election on the broader macro takes meme coins and everything in between so thanks guys and welcome on thanks for having me thanks for having us epic well guys let's Jump Right In I mean yesterday or sorry two days ago now we had uh the Trump win we had an insane

kind of pump across all the markets um and just really like this sentiment has shifted towards uh broader macro bullishness business bullishness Innovation and obviously crypto and so just like broadly I'm curious how are you guys feeling today from the results of the last 48 hours and what are your Reflections on the implications of trump winning as well as a huge crypto win in the House and Senate from the US um even more specifically like aside from def5 what other sectors do you guys think might kind of benefit the most from Trump and Regulatory Clarity Arthur if you want to take a stab at it and we can go around yeah I mean I think Trump winning all three uh

legislative branches means that he gets to pursue his policy of printing money without any obstacles not that I thought it actually mattered who won the election anyways but I was surprised that you know he kicked her ass as bit as well as he did and so the question really is how quickly is he going to print the money he's been very vocal that he wants to weaken the dollar and he wants to bring back businesses to America that can only happen with printed money and bank credit and so I think crypto recognizes this gold will recognize it shortly and then you know industrial St type stocks are going to rip uh as it becomes very clear about what his legislative priorities are I think the crypto specific stuff I'm a bit more sanguin on what that actually means it's very one it's one thing that

say you're going to have coherent crypto regulation it's another thing to actually you know have a bill get through all these different chambers obviously there's a lot of crypto vested interests who'd rather have just a bunch of regulations that nobody can follow except them and versus you know Crypt Bros who thought that you know Trump meant freedom for them to hold their coins and you know do defa and all that so I think there's a wide spectrum of what regulation means whether like you're like coin baser or black rock or you guess random Deen who's on Phantom wallet and metamask and what that actually means and we're going to see what regulation that comes out of it um on my side I would say I'm bullish crypto in the medium to long term uh regardless who would have won the

presidency my overarching thesis uh aligns with ar Arthur in the s in the sense that um I think people over index um specific news even specific election cycles and I think that there are long-term secular structure Cal forces at play in the world that are pushing crypto higher um that are occurring irrespective of whether Democrats or Republicans are in power in America and obviously it it it there's many things uh at play but I would agree with Arthur that money printing is ultimately the biggest beneficiary to uh crypto asset prices now Arthur um kind of gave his

view on macro on the micro level I would say after Trump's Victory you now have a lot of people on um Twitter aining that um his presidency is going to be bullish defi it's going to be bullish kind of like onchain equities onchain projects that kind of return Revenue to the stakeholders but my view for a long time has been that you know the vast majority of altcoins don't really produce any revenues and the 1% of them that do fr frankly in my opinion A lot of people have been arguing that uh Trump Victory is going to kind of bring about this defi Renaissance this onchain Revenue

Renaissance or whatever but I remain skeptical uh because you know if you look at a lot of D5 protocols and even if you look at the ones that are legit and are producing a decent amount of Revenue um it's not in their interest to distribute revenues to stakeholders why because if you essentially turn it into an onchain stock then uh trafy people who've been doing discounted cash flow valuations for their whole career they're going to come in and see that these things are effectively massively overvalued on that

basis right which means that up until now for the past decade these defi tokens um 70 to 80% of their valuation was memetic in nature already you know based on narrative based on community based on ponics based on speculation Etc right and I think you know a lot of people have been saying up until today that it's been regulations why we don't really have cash flow distributions on Shane but you know in my opinion it's not in the interests of teams to do so it's not in the interest of VCS to do so etc etc now longer term my belief is that um this space is actually purifying

this cycle uh mem coins are acting as a purification mechanism they're acting as a a sort of a a checks and balances system to a lot of the altcoin grip that has been going on and I think in the future slowly over a couple of Cycles you're going to see this separation in the industry Into Cash cash flow coins and meme coins right and I think gradually uh cash flow coin are going to be more serious more legitimate more Revenue oriented for the suits Etc and then meme coins they're gradually going to absorb more of the community premium djm premium speculative premium Etc and I think this cycle is where that shift

is like slowly unfolding I'd say that just on the revenue thing side of things I think that projects actually do get punished for not paying out revenues if you take a look at the take Unis swap right the most successful def I app and all of crypto makes what a few few billion dollars in fees every year right I was taking a look at the chart today it traded up to what a 40 billion fdv at its high right and now it's down at like I don't know 10 eight whatever it is and the revenues have kept pace right they're probably even grown from 2021 until today but they continue to be obstinate about not paying out any of that Revenue to the Token holders and the token has gotten punished as it

should because you know if they're making you know they probably made like 10 billion 12 billion dollars and none of it has G to the Token holder so I think you get one chance you get the one pump where it's m Medic in nature and it's all that and then it's like okay well you're successful you survived and yet I'm not getting paid as a token holder well [ __ ] you I don't want to own this token and then your Unis Swap and your dydx and your all these successful projects where the tokens is trash because they waited too long to start paying out Revenue so I think there is punishment for not paying out revenue and you know if for whatever reason the regulations changed in particular jurisdiction and allow these projects to pay out Revenue I think that's great but yeah I you do get punished over time it

might not be the first cycle though yeah we've seen we've seen almost all of these applications in addition to the ethereum itself kind of go through this this identity crisis where you know there's almost a divide the ultrasound Money crew in ethereum versus like the defi Revenue producing people and so there's this concept of of of monetary premium that I think mirat is pointing to with these these meme coins and if there's a successful monetary premium or or mimetic premium that can be derived it's almost a the value that these altcoin these mem coins have is almost amorphous and you can't really put your finger on it you can't really deduce what the value should be from a discounted cash flow model and so you

have this wild speculative uh surge that can take place and so would you guys suggest that it's in these Project's best interest not to pay revenue and to actually just focus on building community and trying to build the most speculative mimetic value possible well no I think take a look at Unis swap right it's the five billion market cap coin it probably generates I call two billion dollars a year in in fees it's a 40% return what other asset in the world pays you 40% dividend rate that's an amazing asset I want to own that asset right and I want to own it from 40% all the way down to 5% so they're [ __ ] the token should be ripping because they're making so much money and they're paying out dividends right so I don't

think it's it's um it's a good thing you know the mtic thing is like you use the memes to get you to a point where you have users who then will pay you money for them for a service I think that's the goal unless you're you know purely gets a mem coin which will never have any sort of Revenue but the medic is just a you know a bridge to revenue and if you never pay the revenue then like then the meme dies right because no mem lasts forever and then you're left with nothing yeah so I agree with Arthur in the context of Unis swap uh but I would also point out that for every Unis swap which is kind of like the Holy Grail example of Revenue Generation Um there are 999 projects whose current valuations don't quite justify uh their

revenues right so uh to answer your question Robbie I would say you would need to look at each sort of tech altcoin Revenue producing altcoin in isolation on a case-by casee basis to determine which of the two routes you suggest that they should pursue uh I agree that in the case of uniswap uh paying out Revenue to uh token holders would be amazing and it would be a step towards sort of the maturation of the space um but other other altcoins I'm not so sure right because the reason I say this is because there are dozens of alts that are trading at multi-billion Dollar valuations while only making like 10K per day you know what I mean so it depend deps on the it depends on the

protocol right and you should not own those right because what's the point if and yeah 99% of them are garbage but we knew that we knew that when we got in the game it's just trying to find the it's trying to find the one that goes a THX until you take the zeros and everything else soed your your mem coin thesis has not been uh kind of swayed At All by the regulatory or the perceived regulatory Clarity from a trump Victory and that this kind of defi Renaissance in your opinion is like a short a shorter term uh like narrative but probably won't be sustainable enough to outperform what you're viewing as kind of like this cult coin and movement coin

thesis yeah so um let's say let's assume that the Trump Administration provides regulatory Clarity makes it easier for uh revenues or profits to be distributed on chain Etc right my my issue is that nobody whose net worth is under $100 million comes to crypto to buy equity-like instruments right and especially especially in the current context where we are at this juncture which is kind of year three going year four of of a typical fouryear cycle um you know people come to crypto in hopes and dreams of catching one of those parabolas one of those parabas that

usually happens every four or five years right and uh that's why people want to buy something with momentum something that is fresh something that's already been doing decently well up until now and you know if you look at past Cycles the best performers weren't the ones that are like paying people out money and I and I don't think that I don't think that we're already at a mature enough stage where this is going to be the case next year um overall generally if you study kind of altcoin Cycles in crypto uh the themes and narratives and categories that do very well in quote unquote year three they are the ones

that continue to do well in year four and I expect this to be the case again uh next year so given the fact that uh 16 out of the top 20 best performers this year are memes I expect this to continue to be the case next year got it okay so one last thing on this kind of like Trump win and then we'll move to kind of some other topics uh Arthur I'm curious if your perception being kind of you know based in Asia for the most part and really just growing your presence there from a different all different lenses like I saw you on that Asian news show the other day and um you know you've you've really kind of established maelstorm and your kind of

crypto Empire per se in Asia I'm curious if the last 48 hours has shaped your perceptions of kind of where the Epic of crypto activity is going to be for the next few years and like where should Founders position themselves geographically and and culturally like is America back is it the home of crypto again or again is this kind of like a shorter term like narrative and emotion thing but um still kind of Uncertain I think this is mostly emotion I think this is hopium I don't I don't think a lot of people understand how politics is done in the United States and Trump said a lot of nice things he got you know he won their election people voted for him based on these nice things but now it comes down to making

rules right and it's not as straightforward as oh there's not going to be any capital gains tax on your crypto right that if that was the bill the bill would be 5,000 pages long because it'd be all these different lobbers trying to put on all these different things to get their piece their slice of the pie and it's not going to be a straight forward it's going to be complicated um the whatever rules they come out with are not going to be that clear because at the end of the day you have companies I'm sorry to pick on them like coinbase and black rock who are going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars and make sure that whatever comes out is going to be B most beneficial to them because they're going to regulatorily capture the the legislators just like the banks do and

the insurance companies and every other industry in the United States that's how things were done so yeah the overarching sentiment from Trump is we want to have regulatory Clarity and then when it comes down to making the rules the staffers are going to have this monstrosity of a bill that's going to be incomprehensible to anyone who's not a lawyer or has a law firm to spend $2,000 an hour to figure it out so I think people are going to be a bit disillusion of like what actually comes out of that and then the remainder is hey all the clients are in Asia it's 75% of the world's population lives in the arasan land mass right so it's just numbers so if you want to grow you know you know the next billion years of crypto they're in Asia uh and so that's where you need

to be that's the type of product you need to list list the number one trading market for cryptos in Korea you know so like per capita trades more than any other place in the world so [ __ ] English you should be you know having your [ __ ] in Korea I tell us to our projects all the time like why do you come to me with some project I want any more users well why is your [ __ ] only in English Chinese Korean Japanese Russian like Vietnamese Turkish this where this where all the users are how do you think CZ makes all this [ __ ] money it's not in America right so I think people just to understand just having like looked at the sheer amount of people that are here the amount of Bank banking back Wess that is here and the the hunger for

opportunity for something new for a much younger population in general in most of these countries right United States I know 38 40 is probably the median age versus like you know in your mid 20s and a lot of these fast growing Asian economies do you want you know Boomers and you know people my age or do you want somebody younger who's more digitally native is Will willing to try something new I think people are making a big mistake if they saying oh because Trump said nice things got reelected all of a sudden I need to Pivot my business to only focus on 4% of the world's population even though they're very wealthy America New York's trying to be the home of crypto but um as you said I mean I think that there's we have to see

what comes from these regulations and I one thing that I think is particularly interesting is that people are really excited about crypto regulations uh in your Clarity per se uh one of the one of the biggest use cases of crypto today uh blatantly is regulatory Arbitrage and the fact of the the lack of regulatory Clarity in the market today actually enables more uh Innovation per se than than kind of like a strict okay every user on every dap on chain has to kyc or every user has to go through this this step process and these things so I think that's also one thing where people are excited about regulatory Clarity but I'm not sure that we fully understand the implications of what that actually brings to the real users on chain but

it's only regulatory Clarity for 4% of the world's population which fine the regulation would be whatever it is good or bad or indifferent it doesn't matter 9 95% of the world has a different regime maybe it's similar maybe it's not I don't know but if that's if that's your goal as a founder of I need I was waiting for Trump's legislators to you know give me the rule book and now I can go and build I'm sorry you're probably gonna still fail because you just can't do math so despite this this the relatively small population of the US in terms of people it the capital base of the US is is quite large and you're talking about kind of the liquidity infusion that could come from a trump presidency so H how how do you reconcile the that well I

reconcile that you know regulatory Clarity specific to crypto is like what kind of crypto app can I use how do I onboard a customer what are the products I can offer them versus I am Trump and probably Scott Basset the treasury secretary new treasury secretary saying I'm going to probably print tens of trillions of dollars of bank credit to resure businesses in America ramp up inflation ramp up the amount of dollars in the world and those dollars will find themselves into crypto into gold into stocks right that's a global phenomena when liquidity is created in any fiat currency it flows to the best source of preserving value which has been Bitcoin since 2009 whether was China or from Japan or from the Europe or from the US we don't care Fiat liquidity always

makes it way into our backyard and so even if you know the regulations got even worse under Trump than they were under Biden if Trump's going to print 10 trillion dollars and hand it out to people people are going to buy crypto globally and so that's that's what that's how I reconcile the difference between the two I think it's more important what he does versus his industrial policy and how he's going to hand out credit to businesses than the minua regulations that come out of the rulemaking process all right let's get into some some more of the djen stuff there was definitely some some good takes there that I think that uh crypto Twitter has been a little bit all over the place for the last 24 48 Hours engagement farming pretty hard as usual but um when we when

we first uh wanted to do this podcast with with Mirad Robbie and I had watched several of these uh kind of uh episodes that you had done in at token 2049 and on a couple other podcasts so you know we're we're pretty familiar with the meme coin thesis and I think that uh you know all of our listeners can can go watch the presentation pinned on your on your Twitter if they want to get the full rundown I don't want to go through the whole thing again but the thing that I am just burning as far as a question goes is basically the following so these meme coins these cult coins these culture coins movement coins as you've described in this kind of hierarchy of you know people's needs from a personal and kind of uh just a a community level

as well as the broader makeup of the crypto markets you're describing these as having this this very strong speculative premium uh whereas as altcoins uh they have this a smaller spec speculative premium and they're a bit more complex from from like a valuation perspective but the thing is crypto markets always move in these cyclical natures and so the question is are these investments in these meme coins on your list are they entirely speculative do they hold lasting value amidst some of these Broad crypto Cycles all of these things have always ended in a parabolic trend as you said into year three to year four which kind of has an end date um so I think myself and the broader Community is curious like how do

you think about exiting like specifically these ones on your list SPX Giga Apu MOG USA ticker Bitcoin and others I know Arthur loves smoking chicken fish like how do you think about exiting this and the broader scope of this trend from kind of like where we are now in into this into 2025 and 2026 yeah so great question um my genuine belief and kind of Baseline thesis as of right now is that three or four coins from the current crop from the current cycle will end up being multicycle right I think doge is the best piece of evidence we have that multicycle memes are possible uh I believe FL key has made a new High um

which also proves that m cycle mean coins are possible ship might make a new cycle High next uh next year we'll see but ultimately is definitely within the Realms of possibility um my current view like I said top three four coins with the strongest communities by far with the strongest Mission with the strongest concept um they are likely to make it uh Beyond just one cycle uh I would agree with you that the vast majority of these 99.99999% will probably be a single cycle phenomena but I think the best of the best stand a chance of being multicycle and so those that that list that you have those are your picks for

multicycle coins and it's because they're these movement tokens or these culture tokens they're they bring a deeper Community to the market but then you got a guy like like like Arthur who comes around and sees this throws in a you know 100 Mil into memes and then just dumps on everybody after a couple X and and then all all the retail is kind of left like what's going on I thought this was a culture coin the community is all excited when everything's going up but what happens you know do you think that this is going to really be able to last in a in a deep bar market like like these these communities are that strong yeah so um in a deep bar Market everything is going to go down regardless of whether it's memes altcoins everything right um generally I

would say I believe that quote unquote utility it is um bearish in Bull markets and it is bullish in bare markets if that makes sense right this is why you had a bunch of successful meme coins from last cycle uh try to add a lot of utility to their projects during the recent bear in 2022 right uh you saw flocky launch a Launchpad you saw ship uh build some kind of like tools etc etc right um given the fact that I still believe we are in the middle of a bull cycle um the best is just to not have any kind of utility at all uh but to answer your question yes I do believe that a handful

of these Will Survive even a bare market now uh you should be mentally prepared for them to do a negative 85% or more uh from the absolute peak of the parabola after 2025 but that's been the case for every uh crypto cycle thus far and that's nothing new got it yeah and I think you mentioned that that there'd be like two more parabas is your prediction right so there's like one more impending one probably I don't know in in the next quarter or two and then kind of one final Harrah is that still your your your core core thesis yeah I think we're either going to have that or just kind of steady steady rise up over the next 12 months

uh one or the other Arthur do you agree with those timelines as far as like the next stages I'm not uh I don't like to Wed myself to this cycle has to be this long because every Cycle's different there's always different things that Propel the cycle and different things that break the cycle and so I don't have a it must be four years or four year we're in year three so we only have a year left I am completely dependent on what is happening and so if Trump for example prints1 trillion doll between now and 2028 there ain't going to be no four years cycle will be you know ripping and Rowing all you know all throughout those those four years so but if all of a

sudden you know everyone in the world decides that we want to balance our books and you know cut down all on all this debt then you know crypto could crash 85% tomorrow right so it's completely situationally dependent when I'm trading memec coins and obviously I'm not as much of a long-term holder as Marat or some of these other I guess more seasoned Traders I kind of go by the rule of something makes an all-time high once it's going to decline and then it's going to try again for that high and if it doesn't make it on on good volume I'm probably gonna exit that coin and I'll come back later at another time when I feel like the the mood is right or the macro is fitting up with trading um and that's kind of the thing but I'm

not I'm not gonna sit here and tell you I've made a THX on the meme coin right this just I get in late I leave early I but I try to keep my cap I try to preserve my Capital more than have capital appreciation but I'm coming from a different you know starting notional value than most of other Traders so mad I just want to further reinforce like the key point of the question is like um have you thought about your exit plan because I'm super curious to kind of understand like your Arc as a as a main character here because you know we've seen this time and time again and I got a question for Arthur about kind of what kind of parallels he sees with you to some of the other characters of the of the past but like what's your what's your exit

plan yeah so first of all I would like to agree with Arthur that making any kind of predictions especially um that have to do with like multi-month multi-year time related predictions it is ultimately a Fool's errand and um anything can happen we could have a longer cycle than usual we could have a much shorter cycle than usual right um and ultimately over the long term I do agree that at some point the four-year sort of cycle pattern will probably break or stop or evolve or change right um but for the sake of Simplicity uh I am operating under the assumption that we still have somewhere between eight to

14 months of bullishness left if this cycle is anywhere even remotely similar to past one right um now to answer your question um I am on record saying that I'll take profit on 60 to % of my positions uh sometime between Q4 of 2025 and q1 of 2026 so I um stand to do my best to kind of follow up to these words and Arthur you kind of talked about how dependent this is on like kind of the macro liquidity landscape what rather than thinking in terms of time when it comes to these Cycles what are some other things that we can point to that are consequential in kind of the

the Peaks and the troughs in these Cycles is are there macro liquidity indicators and you've you've spoken about them in your in your blogs quite a bit but kind of what are the metrics that you're you're pointing to now to kind of keep track of where we are in this liquidity landscape yeah so I think the longer that crypto exists the less that it becomes about the tech and it more that it becomes about it's a fin an asset that is inflated in Fiat terms right in the beginning it was about does this Tech work does the blockchain work oh there is something that happened you know this coin's down 95% because there was an issue you know blocks can you know produce or whatever right and so as certain coins have existed for a long enough time it's not about tech the tech aifi it get slow because people want to

protect what they've built it becomes about okay it's a finance supply of very low inflation versus Fiat which is what we're basing all these values on and so I you know if we think about 2021 you know what really popped the market well the FED started communicating in you know November of 2021 that it will be raising rates in in March and sure enough the top of the market was November and after the FED raised rates for you know nine you know six months it only took six months we had Tera Luna three Ros and then by the Fall we had um FTX right very standard credit driven implosion um people took a lot of Leverage when the price of money

went up they all got bankrupted like textbook style and so I think that we're more focused on the global supply of Fiat money and I basically track Japan China European union and America more so than anything else and so yeah if all the all the major blocks are printing money in you know 18 months time stuff's still going to go up just by mathematically right there's more Fiat and there's only so many mcoins so many Bitcoins so many East so many Soul right it's it's just math and so that's what I'm looking at Global M2 is probably not the right measure but it's there's all sorts of different liquidity measures

depending on your your philosophy but they all kind of say the same thing it's the rate of change of the addition or subtraction of of supply of Fiat in the market it's kind of what I look for and if I see like oh this is I'm bullish on crypto but then the market seems to be turning over in terms of the amount of credit that's going to be supplied maybe I should reevaluate my my convictions and te uh pair down some positions to kind of double click on like this and this might be more of a political question than an economic one but I think if you were to ask some Democrats like why does inflation rise when Republicans and you know Trump gets into office the like very like liberal answer would be because Trump's trying to

enrich his personal friends which I think is definitely shortsighted but maybe you could kind of explain like what a more reasonable argument is for why Republicans and Trump have kind of pointed to their like what is their rationale for increasing the liqu in into the market and and ultimately raising inflation increasing the the money supply in the world very simple right so from 2008 2020 I'm going to write an essay about this she drop next week uh I call it uh QE for rich people so that means the Federal Reserve and the Central Bank printed money it bought bonds and it handed Capital to rich people and what did rich people do they didn't need the money because their financial assets went up they made a Fiat profit they

bought a new house they bought a new watch they bought some squiggly lines on a canvas but that generates absolutely no economic value and the debt to GDP ratio of all advanced economies grew in the QE period of the last you know 15 years and in the US something happened in 2020 covid obviously and Trump did what you know probably the first president since FDR and he handed out money to everybody he said okay you know economy is [ __ ] I'm going to lock in your homes because of the flu and and here is a bunch of money and I'm not going to means test it if you have a job you get it if you don't have a job you get it if you're rich you get it if you're poor you get it and so what happened everybody in the US they went

out and they spent money right they spent so much money that all these companies they're like oh where did our customers go oh [ __ ] they're ordering washing machines they're ordering cars they they're going out to dinner and I need to I need to ramp up production I need to go hire more people I need to go to the bank and get a loan to build more stuff to satisfy this demand so the quantitative easing pair with handouts to the people who would spend it generated more activity than the debt that was issued and so the debt to GDP of the US government actually fell from 2020 to 2023 now obviously there was a backlash Bond hols are what the [ __ ] you know Safeguard the value of the dollar inflation blah blah blah J Paul came and started raising rates um he had to do a

little bit of QE because you know Janet Yellen came in and just started printing money again but at the end of the day it wasn't handing out money to people like Trump and Biden did with the stimulus checks they did the same old Q for rich people rich people assets went up stock price went up NASDAQ went up and they again what happened no economic growth people got pissed off and then they reelected Trump and what has Trump said I'm gonna print money I'm gonna print money in handed out to businesses so that they hired people I'm going to tell the banks that you need to lend to American businesses to bring back business to America to hire Americans who going to spend money in America and they're going to tax the [ __ ] out of them so the government's debt to GDP ratio declines and actually in a

healthier position so the inflation is necessary because it drives a high nominal GDP growth which the government taxes and reduces their leverage and so that's why that's his program that's what he's going to do um and you benefit if you're an ordinary worker who you know wants a better job if you have money in a bank account or if you own a Government Bond you get [ __ ] because I'm gonna admit so much of this stuff to reshore all this production and the sucker is you owning these bonds and so that's why gold and Bitcoin and certain stocks will do very very well and the average American who now has a job working in a factory probably making $150 $200,000 a year who didn't have a job before is going to be very happy about the situation even if inflation is

at 10% you know what the the parallels even from my perspective I'm 25 hearing and looking at the the stock market charts and the real estate charts of assets in in the in the states and worldwide before I was able to even really work or make any money and kind kind of like thinking about this like damn I really am way behind from basically Boomers and Millennials because like I'm [ __ ] like I need to figure out a way to get ahead because what am I gonna do am I gonna buy the S&P that that the chart looks like absolute [ __ ] banana or am I gonna go buy like do like Real Estate Mogul stuff or am I gonna do stock trade like it crypto comes at a really interesting time in history where

there's like this generation of young people who were in the system that you describe Arthur uh from the ma from the macro lens that are that are kind of like well well how else do I catch up and andad I think like on a micro level this applies directly to kind of your thesis on on the on the meme coins right like it's like this is my this is my way out you know yeah yeah I I would love to add to what you just said this is actually my overarching thesis for crypto as a whole uh for Bitcoin but specifically for the strongest meme coins this cycle right um if you look at the current situation in the western world but honestly arguably all around the world um it's like you said right

Boomers have pretty much [ __ ] Zoomers um partially is their fault partially it's just kind of emergent properties of the system right um in the 1960s your grandpa uh could get a wife could get three kids while having a minimum wage job somehow ended up with the house goes without saying that today this is a pipe dream for most people right and um whatever whatever I don't know 5,000 50,000 that aumer may have or a young Millennial may have um they know or they can intuitively sense that real estate returns over the next 30 40 years are not going to be as good as his grandpa enjoyed right S&P 500 returns unless

they invent AGI five years from now probably not going to be as good um in purchasing in power terms um in the next 30 40 years compared to what his grandpa enjoyed and so on and so forth so my actual thesis for meme coins is the following right Zoomers they don't have as much money as the older Generations they don't have as as much status they don't have as much Cloud they don't have as much political power they don't have as much testosterone frankly they don't have as much of pretty much anything comp compared to the older people but what is the one thing they're good at

the one thing that Zoomers are good at is social media right and I think the rise of meme coins today a lot of people think it's like an anti- VC thing and I increasingly think that's a small part of it the bigger part of it is the fact that uh Zoomers are emergently inventing a new asset class that is hyper optimized to thrive in the attention economy in the attention economy uh because the social media is the only domain where young people dominate culture attention and social media so this is I think the biggest reason why mem coins are dominating right now um I think also uh precisely because of the

massive amount of global printing of money that is happening non-stop over the past few decades and that's particularly accelerating in the last few years you're kind of having the following situation right so um in the 1950s 1960s um you had this kind of Industrial Age with the stocks dividends producing revenues Etc right then you had uh kind of the NASDAQ the tech World VCS Silicon Valley software became very powerful because it could grow so much faster than factories right you don't have physical objects you don't have Logistics um all you need is users and downloads right that can grow very very quickly and I think mcoins they take

that to another level even more from Tech altcoins which are kind of an in between Zone mcoins take it to another level which I kind of semi jokingly call Post software era now we have kind of similar Dynamics we don't even have the software we don't even have the metrics uh people inside of crypto also are realizing that the token was the product it wasn't the software right so now we're kind of stripping all the [ __ ] away and now we are essentially building assets that are pure Community pure speculation pure belief and that are optimized in the for the social media age because the mem coin communities they are producing better memes than the

memes that are produced by the tech altcoin communities right so uh this is these are these are the core dynamics that are happening right now anything to add there Arthur no I mean I I 100% agree like the reason why meme cords are fun to trade is because they AB there's nothing to understand does the meme slap is it funny is it viral okay I'll buy it because I know I know someone else will like I don't have understand cash flows [ __ ] Tech just you know all I need to new is how to how do I get on you know pump. fun and radium and open a phantom wallet and so I think memec coins are the best thing that ever happened to Sana even though you know I'm an eth not an eth maxi but I'm almost there

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on 50 plus chains trusted by over 100 clients and over 6 billion in total value secured visit redstone. Finance to find out more can we get your eth maximalist uh thesis uh so it's it's more based on if you think about okay number of developers the biggest thing right eth has the biggest developer Community um obviously soul is probably number two but again biggest developer Community I think some of the most most of the most successful Primitives in terms of dii or something that's happened in sort of the decentralized Computing space the products and the services started on eth and they're copied on another change and

they might be more optimized on another chain they might run faster whatever but the origal idea came from some very smart teams developing uh an ethereum first and then it's propagated later so that's why at a macro level I like eth over say salana or some of these uh other coins that's not to say that they're not good trading vehicles I love trading salana it's very fun it's fast it's high baed Bitcoin is what I like to call it but that's sort of where my eth maximalism comes from that's not to say that salana can have more developers and you start seeing projects doing new things first on salana versus ethereum but I do think that at right now the lead that ethereum has in that specific space um is you know miles better than

in the other the other chain which is why you know Salon is successful NE is what I don't know 400 billion and saa's 8090 whatever it is right so it's still four to 5x yeah and it it is the birthplace of a lot of these ideas uh and then end up coming to fruition and then and then kind of expand outwards and so circling back to a previous point that was made like you know would if you were to suggest to like the the the eth powers that be whether EF or otherwise like would you suggest this this ultrasound money monetary premium path or would you go down this you know based ecosystem da like blob shart like more of the revenu producing discounted cash flow path I

been un record many times eth is not money eth is compute power and so uh I think money is bit coin it'll in inel provement otherwise it will only be Bitcoin everything else is a specific use case which isn't a bad thing it's just that eth is a commodity token with an endogenous yield and theoretically if eth was worth a trillion dollars that would not be a good thing because then you wouldn't be able to afford the gas so I think people lose sight of that uh and I think eth made the right decision back in 2016 during the Dow hack to not be money and be a computer uh that was a very clear decision by the community because there wasn't anything wrong with ethereum the wasn't like there was a you know Bitcoin had an inflation bug right

and they rolled it back to fix it whatever but that was intrin to what Bitcoin was they had to fix it this was an external third-party app that got really successful and [ __ ] it up and ethereum compromised their mutability as a blockchain to save a third party application I think it's completely different I think they said okay we want to be a computer we need to get people their money back and let them continue building uh and so I don't believe E's money think they should go after the Mone I think they should continue to be the cheapest way to execute on chain and let that build more useful uh applications that happen um I can I can also answer this as well so I am of a different opinion to Arthur here I think that um the

biggest mistake that the ethereum leadership has done in the last two or three years um is to go towards this sort of second path that you outline Robbie which is focused on kind of like DCF Revenue blobs da Etc instead of being money I think High market caps for ethereum the coin and salana the coin are only possible if they acquire some kind of monetary medium of exchange unit of account store value properties otherwise they shouldn't be worth much at all right so I think it focusing purely on the technology would be really

really bad uh because every four or five years there's going to be faster blockchains there's going to be some kind of innovation there's always going to be something shinier something faster and something that's going to completely disrupt you it's very dangerous game um my view is the only hope for ethereum to go to 20,000 30,000 in like long-term future is if the world uh starts to see it as kind of uh currency number two like the silver to bitcoin's gold if that's not going to happen then that is very very bad for the eth price um now personally I am a hardcore Bitcoin Maxi when it comes to like the store of value

coins um but if uh either ethereum or salana are just purely going to be a computer then uh they're going to get hyper commoditized to shred um that that their value uh the the core of their value like if you actually study ethereum's history and salonus history um the reason why ethereum reached a high price in the first place is because it was effectively uh the Monopoly currency in its own Grand Casino you needed to have some e in your wallet in order to uh participate in the icos of 2017 and that story kind of continued with uh Defi nfts and pwn

anomic stuff yield farming in 2020 2021 right this is how ethereum kind of got quasi monetized a very similar Dynamic is happening on salana right now uh in order to hyper gamble on the fast-paced meme coins on the new Launches on the pump funds you need to have soul in your wallet right so effectively uh Soul not only becomes the medium of unit account in that kind of mcoin economy but you know what like automatically a lot of phantom wallets get a lot of uh Soul uh whether it's leftover or or whether that's people using it as their choice of currency to cycle essentially that's

how soul is getting monetized right now but you can sense that it's essentially becoming like an ecosystem it's like a borderless country with its own currency if you purely treat ethereum and salana as Tech then and in a perfect world in a mature industry their market cap should Collapse by uh 80% right and equilibrate somewhere very very low because then they just become a commodity as Bridges become better as OTC deaths become automated etc etc people will just go uh okay tether gas back to tether or BTC gas back to BTC but the reason something goes up in all of crypto regardless of the nature of the crypto asset is you

have have di hard holders who are not only buying and holding but they continue to DCA their paychecks into this you have trafi inflows you have retail inflows and that strong belief that strong multi-year inflows that they are needed but they're only possible if people believe this is like one of the big currencies of the future right so this is why now I personally prefer Bitcoin but if I was like a strategy adviser to the ethereum foundation I would tell them you guys are insane uh this you guys need to make the you guys need to succeed with the ultrasound money plan otherwise this thing is going to be completely

worthless Arthur I mean I would say that if that were the case in the commodity markets in general would be you know worthless e is a commodity a digital commodity in my in my view yes It suffers from those things you say it's just it's used right which makes it harder to be money at the end because it actually has a use case which in some respects is a good thing and a bad thing I think it actually preserves its value if they need to be used more and what you say is true right if they can't find uh you know a use case I don't know if it's going to be the next mem coin iteration or whatever it is they need successful applications that need to spend gas right that's how that's why ethereum has value and then obviously there's an a dodg a shield for

people who who stick it that's your reason to hold those right I can mind the thing that's that used to you know buy the compute power that I want to use versus oil which I can't really mine oil as a individual person right I can't store it it's hard to store whereas here I guess you know go to some validator and now I am you know I'm a commodity producer and and a user of it so I think we'll see I think it's gonna be an open question um but I do understand where people are coming from the sale it needs to be money because you know being commodity kind of sucks but if you're if you are the most used commodity and you have usefulness then it's a very good position to be but again usefulness is hard as we know like most of these

things that we've built in crypto are not actually that useful yeah so here's the thing in my opinion right uh Arthur if we stretch your argument to its absolute logical extreme just as a thought experiment and we assume that all of the future um onchain agents real world agents Etc they're going to be like super high IQ super fast-paced and perfectly game theoretically optimal kind of Agents then um in that kind of theory framework that you're suggesting they would just buy the bare minimum eth uh just one microsc before the transaction that you need to do eth for and immediately after out the other

end whether it's another similar recipient or whatever they would just grab it and or whether it's a minor whether that's the another guy or whoever they would just go back to like BTC or Fiat right and that kind of collapses the de like that monetary premium that they currently have and my argument is if you get rid of the monetary premium and you only leave that uh kind like you say the commodity the usefulness the fuel stuff then that is going to be very very that's going to like deflate that's going to deflate the valuation you know well the the valuation deflates because you're betting that there will be more people using as commodity in the future than there are today right then there's a massive price of earnings ratio on that

like I don't know what it's like two or 300 times it's massive right as you say right because we expect that the usage of ethereum in salana and aptose and all these things is going to go parabolic because of X different reasons and that's why you should hold this consumable commodity is because you know in the future it's going to be more value because there's be more people spending it that's why you hold these things and so yeah again if you're not able to generate usefulness if there's not more people using the thing in the future then of course you don't want to hold it that long but if you believe that oh there are these new emerging properties coming from this system and new applications coming in the future they I'm going my time Horizon maybe now it was a minute now it's 10 minutes now

it's an hour now it's a day or whatever it is I'll will to pay a premium because I believe that whatever is coming down the pipe it's gonna be more users using this thing and therefore what I hold today is gonna be worth more in the future it's like why you would hold any commodity right you believe if you I bought an oil ETF today because I believe there's gonna be more oil consumed in the future than than today for a particular reason but do I intrinsically want to have any oil no yeah I mean it the the comparison here is like ethereum is the greatest meme coin versus like ethereum is oil um almost very very simplified um and so kind of pulling us out of this one into the this this agent conversation mad I think

the community is very curious about your takes on these AI agent meme coins specifically like some of these goat and fart coin things they want to know like are you going to be participating in these are you going to be adding any of these AI coins to your list and do you think that these have any staying power is it just complete trash yeah so it's similar to some of the other responses I've already given here so far um the problem the slight problem so first of all when you're buying meme coins you're not actually buying memes you're buying the community like you're investing into the people so ultimately I believe the con the word mcoin is a misnomer and what these really are they are tokenized communities they're essentially groups

of people with their own token right um so ultimately the thing about goat and AI coins is it is undeniable that AI capabilities are going to be uh improving rapidly in the coming years which means that if kind of like the value proposition or like The Innovation or like the new shiny aspect of Your Meme coin is these kind of like AI Tech related stuff then every six weeks you're going to have something that's like better fancier faster Etc right and this is a very big part of why I am uh a big believer in BTC and I'm a big believer

in some of these cult meme coins it's because neither one of these rely on technology so much uh and the core value proposition are uh faith belief Community people liquidity and most of these things they are not technology related they are uh biological human and Faith related right and my argument is actually the following um and this is kind of like one of my newer theories I actually believe that the emergence of AI and the rapidly improving AI capabilities over the next 5 to 10 years I think it's pretty much bearish for

absolutely everything uh in crypto not not bearish but I I think it's like it's going to be a persistent bearish headwind for everything in crypto that is technological why uh because I think the cost uh to the cost and skill to produce uh a codebase especially if it's going to end up having to be open source that is going to be collapsing very rapidly we're already seeing that today which means that um even the legit altcoins of today that are producing Revenue um I think that revenue is going to gradually collapse to zero why because the initial vision for the blockchain was to build a world with no

middlemen and my belief is that open- Source software should be absolutely free 100% or at cost or essentially almost free and I think what AI agents or AI powered software Engineers they're going to be effectively whipping up um tons of like they're going to be aggressively forking battle testing hyper optimizing a lot of these protocols now yes maybe a handful of them like a and Unis swap or whatever are going to be able to maintain aote uh based on kind of like Lindy effect security trust whatever um and and mo mostly like liquidity and stuff but ultimately I think as time drags by

anything Tech related uh anything code related is going to get commoditized to zero which is now you have to ask yourself in a world where AI is kind of like running everything and Hyper optimizing everything super rapidly every hour what are the things that actually still are valuable and this is where kind of this idea of human Faith human people human Community comes in and this is essentially why I like BTC more than Ethan Soul when it comes to money and this is the same exact reason why I like cult meme coins more than any other uh technology related Al um I I feel like I understand your perspective but I I'm struggling to be

anything other than a techno Optimist in today's world because the other side as you said that applies to a lot of other areas in life and in society and as you keep going down like the butterfly effect of those outcomes things can can be somewhat Bleak yeah but you know techno optimism is all about making things cheaper right and which means that if things become cheaper uh that means less uh profit margins for uh kind of stakeholders for token holders of cash flow coins for the governance participants in like legitimate altcoins Etc right I'm not even mentioning the altcoin scams I'm even talking about the legit altcoins right so ultimately I think uh the more the the stronger you believe in techno

optimism the more you have to be bullish on things that don't rely on technology Arthur what what is what do you think is the the what do you think about Ai and the emergence of it on chain well I mean I think in terms of the specific allcoin stuff like the meme coin the reason why I like goat is it's the first one and it might not even been created by tooth terminal I don't [ __ ] care people think it is and that's all that matters every other one you know just like marad mentioned is going to be judged in all these different metrics because it's like what how much is it like goat what did they change is it good or better I guess want to own goat because the what's the one that that the Wall Street journals going to talk about and Bloomberg and this all

these idiots are trading these um AI meme coins look at this thing called goat it's I want to own that because those are they're talking about it um they're not going to talk about all the other 15,000 other ones that are coming up every other day now because go started the the the train just like how many pfp collections are zeros but everybody still knows what Crypt punks is it still think everyone still thinks it's ugly or whatever but Cel be is sing Crypt punks and not the other ones right so you want to own the number one maybe the number two because you number two did something better and it still you know gets that hype but yeah that that's where I am on sort of the the you know AI coins and I think AI in general yeah if costs are reduced to zero and

everything is about you how many people you have in your network and then like how engaged are they again yeah of course that's only going to benefit a few projects but that's the goal of this whole you know journey of investing is we know that 99.99% of all this stuff for very other not just AI for all sorts of different reasons will never succeed are we able to use you know our predictive abilities and luck to pick the Unis swaps and the AES the athenas of of the world of of the Cycles um and everything else I agree will'll we'll Trend to zero as Tech is free and all you have is your network and your community I must say Mirad your Your Meme coin thesis in addition to this AI

from from Arthur I mean previously just like a few months ago I mean it really turned me around on on the High FTV low float VC token is the product stuff now bringing into this AI are likely going to be in a similar boat as as Robbie and I from from the angel side where uh for the last couple years these token launches you know you've been able to get in and invest at you know 30 mil 50 mil less than 100 Mil and these things have been launching in the billions right and H you know VCS are able to exit OTC dump their saffs over time even if the token goes down 90 % from entry H you know you know the VCS are still up kind of like 10x and I I'm not here to

paint the VCS in the in the bad light what I'm more so looking to do is understand from your from both your perspectives how you guys see the capital formation process in crypto changing over the coming years um there's a lot of there's a lot of hype around public sale platforms like Legion and Echo Mett I know that you're pretty excited about Legion um yeah just like generally thoughts on where the capital formation processing crypto changes the uh shift away from these kind of low float High fdv launches and kind of what this is gonna look like for new tokens in 2025 uh Arthur you want to take that first yeah so I mean I think we're already starting to see a shift right there's a blame game between oh I didn't

charge a listing fee no you charge a listing fee like you know with H versus you know Brian ARS so we already know the game is up when you when when these guys are starting to blame each other like you know oh you technically said this and I know you charge list over there the game's up right we're going back to 2017 and to the Ico days which I thought was the purest and we should go back there anyways right you put a website up you created a community you launched a token you either did it or you didn't um and a lot of people got smoked but whatever right at least you're were able to get in and you know it was fun I think that Founders are seeing the results right not only you know I published an essay about this you know you were underperforming the market

by 50 to 60% because you were you know had to have the1 billion doll number and then your metrics were dog [ __ ] and the retail saw and they dumped it immediately and then it just went to Flatline to to nothing right and so I think project funds are starting to starting to get it they still think that they need to have the binance listing or that you know this tier one exchange like what do I need to do Arthur to like get on these exchanges can you help us out I'm like [ __ ] the exchange [ __ ] your token tell me when you have a million Dau and I'll tell you how to get every single [ __ ] exchange like who cares about your token price and who cares about what exchange you're on like tell me where your users are I think that's

start starting to hit slowly as people are seeing these projects just die when they launch because there's you know they're not the reason why we're all in crypto is to get rich and so if I'm using your product and I'm not getting rich but this [ __ ] over in like you know California is well [ __ ] you I'm not going to talk about your thing anymore on crypto Twitter I'm not going to ever support you in your community why did I get the tokens you know back at 10 or $5 million valuation even if you gave me just a little bit it doesn't really [ __ ] matter right that's how Ripple and cardano and some of these dog [ __ ] projects have the most dedicated communities because they're rich because they got in early because the project gave them stuff and incentivized them

and so I think people are starting to learn that again it's a cycle it'll take a bit of time but I think you know we've jumped the shark when the CEOs of the largest exchanges are like trying to out each other on Twitter saying you didn't charge listing fees game's over it's just a question of how long it takes yeah um so I'm in total agreement here uh I would say it's very simple um I would love the world to return to the 2017 Ico model I think it perfectly aligns with the libertarian and the kind of crypto Anarchist ethos of crypto um obviously you know in 2017 you could buy link and binance token I believe for 25 million or something along those lines

and you could buy ethereum in 2015 at 33 million I think and right now on the other hand you have some absolute dog [ __ ] with zero users and zero Revenue launching on day one on binance at 25 billion right so obviously you know here's here's my thesis right I've said this a thousand times already um all of these things have been meme coins all along period And I I think young people smart retail they're finally understanding this what VC founder centralized Exchange Market maker supply chain altcoin grip complex has been

engaging in for the past eight years I referred to as the global IQ Arbitrage unfortunately a lot of retail around the world they mistakenly kind of think of tokens as equity which they obviously are not most of these tokens is just some separate Loosely aligned thing that may or may not be one day somehow connected to the software right and you know it's all been per just performance art all along uh these games that these like kind of like day one valuation games that um a lot of tech Founders are playing I think it is borderline evil I think it's immoral I

think it's unethical um and Arthur is 100% correct the reason why xrp cardano and Link are referred to as Cults today and why they have dieh hard communities is because they made poor people Rich that's how you build a cult uh you build a very strong Community by making poor people middle class by making middle class people rich and so on and when that happens and when that happens on kind of a like a long sustainable emotional Journey uh these people they're going to quit their jobs they're going to make that coin their whole personality and we've seen that

with even the best tech Gos in the past right uh even to which I would argue is like the one good example this cycle um they started kind of letting people mine their coins in 2022 it was at like a fraction of a cent or something and right now it's trading at $14 billion so that's how you build a DI hard community and this is the exact reason why meme coins are completely taking over everything right now mcoins are essentially a icos 2.0 they are recreating that thing where um it's much more organic priz Discovery since day one priz Discovery literally starts at $1 uh it's completely bottom up it's

much more sort of aligned with that crypto Anarchist 2017 Ico um kind of vibe and the young people are realizing that all these tokens every single one of them they are just tables at the casino so why should we be bidding a $25 billion coin on day one in binance where where the VCS are already up 500x where we can just create stuff of our own and like I said earlier stuff that's funnier more inspiring uh with a lower kind of uh with with a less steep learning curve you don't need to learn about any liquid reaking [ __ ] or anything like that and um you we can essentially be the

overlords in a small pond rather than being uh kind of servants in an ocean right and so this is why meme coins are taking over right now pure and simple yeah I mean I think like it I've I've grown to find this balance specifically over the last couple months as being like I'm I'm very excited about the technological developments in crypto like uh new new Innovations on scaling on execution environments on different types of D5 Primitives on on breaking barriers for decentralization on you know all these things are extremely extremely exciting the tech token product is unfortunately plagued by this kind of system that you talk about where

I again I'm still very excited about the technology but that the the Tok the tech token product suffers from this kind of fate and um I think for the better the cryp those Capital formation processes changing there will be more opportunities for people um you know on platforms like Legion or Echo there'll be better there'll be better uh opportunities to buy on the liquid markets and I think that the sentiment might shift back into the direction of these Tech tokens if they can kind of follow the more Ico meme coin playbooks with their early communities so guys I want to say thank you for for for being here I just have one last question um for for you Arthur you've been in the

trenches for you know years bitm 2016 mads kind of came on the scene hot I mean you hear his takes today they piss people off um he's got his onchain wallet docks people are people are he's blowing up he's going main character Arc and I don't know if you remember in 2020 there was a guy who made a Google spreadsheet of every single Dogecoin derivative he had like a 100 Doge coin dog coins on ethereum and he ended up getting entries on all of them like sub one million sub five million market cap and just absolutely printed and blew up off of these memes um so that's just being one example but the question for you is what parallels with other main characters in the past or uh other

people in crypto do you see in mad's recent ascent and is there anything from this old from the old days that feels relatable to this that we could study to gleam Insight on how this will all kind of play out in the end I mean everyone has their time with the sun it's fun have a good time and take profit at the end of the day right you don't want to be the old dude trying to in the club and you know just trying to get things done right it's just you know trying to work too hard so enjoy it thank you guys it's been an absolute pleasure right absolutely thank you