Trump's memecoin launch and what it means for crypto: VanEck's Pranav Kanade

Transcript

GM good morning welcome to the milk Road Show to Da the crypto show we try to make sense of a president launching a meme coin days before his inauguration what the heck is going on I'm your host Jay Hamilton Bitcoin is above 105k soul is ripping up to 255 as of the time of the recording the markets are green if you thought that it was all over a week ago when everything was red that was that was only a week ago everybody last Monday everything was red everyone thought we were over and now we're back and not only were we back shit's going crazy like I If you missed this weekend you might have missed one of the biggest weekend in crypto we're going to talk about a lot we're Trump launches a memec coin it reaches 15 billion in market cap pretty much overnight top 20 token in

all of crypto Eric Trump everyone at first thinks it's fake everyone's like this is fake there's no way this is real Eric Trump comes out he confirms the validity in a bit of a ridiculous statement a lot of us is any of this legal like this this meme coin has 80% of its supply has been held back it's fully diluted value is like $50 billion dollars at this point we're gonna get into all of this what is going on here then as if that wasn't crazy enough then Melena Trump she drops her own mem coin and it skyrockets Trump mcoin drops in half we all get to make a joke about divorcing your ex and how that the best way to take 50% is to drop your own meme coin Google search volume Skyrocket crypto is being searched all over the

world salana was the biggest winner deck's trading volume hits an all-time high $27 billion Dex trading volume on salana salana whole ecosystem ripping salana actually has some congestion issues as a result of this like there is just so much that happened this weekend today to join us to break it all down we have Prav Kad portfolio manager at Vex digital assets Alpha strategy division now Prav comes from a trafi background he's got over a decade in experience in managing Financial assets and understanding how markets move so no better person to join us today now before we jump in we're going to be covering Trump all week this week the inauguration is happening right now as we're recording but you can bet there's going to be news coming out every day so

we've got Scott milker tomorrow we've got James safer from Bloomberg and the bitwise boys Ryan and Matthew joining us later on this week to talk about Trump and the Trump effect and what you guys can affect so make sure you hit the Subscribe button on YouTube or wherever you're listening so that you are up to date every day this week on The Wacky wild world that is no doubt going to be before we jump in we should take a moment hear from our sponsors who make the show possible meet odos the defi aggregator that makes your token swap smarter faster and a whole lot easier tired of trading like it's 2019 odos finds the best prices for your swaps across 900 liquidity sources and 14 blockchains so you always get more bang for your crypto Buck whether you're

swapping setting a limit order or just avoiding gas fees like the plague OS has you covered it's like having a genius Trader in your pocket minus the coffeee addic join 3 million wallets already using odos to power over 6 billion in monthly trades start making smarter swaps today at milroad docomo RAV welcome to the milroad show thanks for having me yeah what a day to have you my man holy gez you and I are talking on Friday planning this episode I'm thinking we're going to be talking about you know Trump's inauguration maybe there's no news that comes out I think I literally said we will talk about any news that comes out if there is anything and here we are we wake up

on Monday and holy [ __ ] uh what is going on um so let I mean we got to jump right into to trumpcoin it you know Trump drops this this meme coin on Friday it's officially Trump's meme coin let's just I don't even know where to start there's so so much to break down on this let's just start with your what are your initial thoughts I've seen like the mix of responses from the crypto world right obviously in my opinion price is the best signal and the price tells you that in aggregate people find this somewhat interesting and and then want to like speculate on it which I think is kind of Point number one but but my kind of reaction the day after on Saturday was the following which is people shouldn't get too hung up on the fact that this is

a mem coin uh I think maybe I had two takeaways one is that this is symbolic of a regime a regime change right until you know very recently the people who are experimenting in the crypto world were largely folks that you know were were sort of Trailblazers or one you know big Risk Takers so like the the general world you know the Fortune 500 companies or you know even people that could theoretically raise money from luch Chip VCS to build whatever AI project in in in the world were choosing not to touch crypto because the perceived regulatory risk and obviously we all know that the candidate Trump was very favorable favorable towards sassa class and that once he became president

there was a set of scenarios whether was through Congress or through the regulatory bodies that enforcement on the S class would come down but you know the big question we always had was how quickly right because things take time so how quickly were all the all the changes going to happen and how quickly were people going to then adopt the underlying technology I think what president Trump did on Friday and now obviously the Milani point on Sunday to me is like almost a little bit of like a green light for the rest of the world just go ahead and experiment right which is like look sitting president is experimenting with a mein and salana the market seems to appreciate in many ways so you know I think it takes risk away from companies that would have

historically said let's see what happens through Congress or let's see what the SEC does in terms of rul making so I think it t it takes away sort of this intermediate period of time where there could have been some stalling you know people can now go ahead and experiment that's kind of takeaway number one takeaway number two was really around the fact that you could launch a massive multi-billion dollar asset right on a blockchain without you know investment Banks and intermediaries or anything like that uh you can form capital and then you know essentially Capital moved from zero to tens of billions and then you can do that pretty seamlessly and things didn't necessarily break and so again I think if I'm a Creator out there in the world I I know Mr Beast came out and said I'm not looking to do mcoin but

I think there's tons of creators out there that are that are looking for exit vehicles and those types of things um launching a token for themselves or their project on a blockchain becomes somewhat feasible in the in the future so that's just kind of like Pi number two for me yeah it's I mean I I think definitely there's no doubt that the uh the change in regulation is coming when you have Trump launching his own mcoin like there's no there's no bigger signal to every developer out there that America is going to be open to this type of innovation and experimentation uh and and I think I think you're right like there's there's

Capital there's a new way to raise Capital that we've never seen before that exists as a result of crypto markets and here it is at play Let's just chat did you buy Trump token yourself I gotta ask I did not so I didn't either I didn't NE yeah look I mean we can't we don't mess around with mean points in our strategy and you know I so so so it was one of those things but I you know was an OB Observer I was observing how essentially Solana was performing through the entire process I was generally seeing the flows of capital so how people are getting access to it I received several calls from people that are not in the industry saying how do I buy this thing so I was trying to help them think about that um so so anyways yeah yeah yeah certainly

it has brought a lot of attention and I expected I expected the attention to happen today right with the inauguration and you know we're actually going to check a couple of stats you know around Will Will trump say Bitcoin in his speech will he say strategic Reserve what's going to be his executive orders you said yourself you know there might be 100 200 executive orders coming these These are the type of things I thought we were going to talk about but what what's going to capture media attention even more is a meme coin like this meme coin is going to get so much attention uh let's chat about Solana though quickly like that was definitely H the big winner here right like this Trump's coin is on salana melena's coin is also

on salana we saw highest Dex volume in history over the weekend uh I think it was uh the stats I can never get the exact stats def said 25 billion Artemis said 27 billion so but previous all-time high was 10 billion that's on salana alone that's that's huge what do you think the impact is here for Solana yeah so so I've said this to a lot of people for the longest time because you know I come from Triad fight so have a lot of tried five friends colleagues from from that world and and I live in crypto and and and people generally get hung up by the fact that a vast majority of Solana's fees um in the last 18 months have been coming from pump fund and then mcoin trading right I think over uh

two-thirds of sana's fees on certain days is really come coming from that speculative activity and people look at that and kind of dismiss the entire asset class or even Salon of the blockchain and and what I've always said I think this hold true even after this Trump meano launch is is I personally believe that the end State for the use case or the end state for most public blockchains is going to be tokenized equities companies will no longer go public with their Equity sitting in a dtcc ledger it's going to be on a blockchain because a tokenized version of XYZ stock can still be a stock but then have other properties so it can be used for a variety of different things within um company sort of business model so to me that's the end State and I

think every until we get there is just a beta test of what's ready for that right and so to me the entire 18 months of sort of mcoin trading and Sal kind of culminating with this one is is is kind of tells you how how far you can push this system without breaking it and and even when things break right I think if you remember last spring when there was a ton of mcoin training activity um people were having trouble Landing their transactions on salana and and then you know the the salana Foundation people as well as toy and team got together and engineered a pretty novel solution that didn't increase the complexity of the overall user experience but just made it better and and so so I think the world

is watching that right if I'm if I'm a private company today and I'm asking should I launch a token as my ultimate exit vehicle the question is like where do I launch it well there's been one system that's been battle tested now for 18 months so anyways I think it's all just a beta test for what's coming in the future and so you know don't necessarily get hung up on like the fact that these are mean points that people are trading yeah it's a great point like I think that um there's there's going to be a big debate about is this a good or a bad thing right there already is a raging debate on crypto Twitter if this is a good or a bad thing uh I think it's it's really both at the same time right it is in the good category it's a stress

test for salana right incredible incredible volume in transactions over the weekend is salana ready for that uh if we want to get to where we want to get to in the next decade we need these type of stress tests that's great coinbase huge volumes that's awesome to see like that's a big step forward we're getting more attention Google search on crypto growing that's great good for onboarding like definitely as you said yourself I'm getting the same thing a lot of people coming out and saying like Hey how do I buy this I've never maybe and maybe there's people who haven't bought crypto before right so I mean one one thing that stood out to me was uh the number of holders so Trump token has 850,000 holders whiff only has 200,000 Bon has 880,000 but that was done

through an airdrop you know that's that's a big deal to have 850,000 holders of a token so you know some good on the bad side definitely some bad here big opportunity for some bad things to happen at a very public level here right like we are now in the Limelight and who knows what happens next and where this goes uh not really great that like one one token can drain liquidity from the entire system like a lot of people I think are the number one question in our Discord server was hey uh are we all worried that like 15 billion just got pulled out of the rest of our system here and into one token like that's

that's a little bit concerning uh and then also I think the other thing is like where does this lead with um the the fact that this meme coin was launched with 80% of its token Supply held back held by Trump like Trump or Trump uh Affiliates or organizations that he controls and the token unlock happens in the next 36 months which during which time he will still be president most likely uh so you know is he going to did he just rug us all basically like was his whole plan I I you know I don't think so but you know was his whole plan to launch a token right before he's inaugurated and then put in the rules to make sure that he safe from any sort of you know legal

action on it like anyway so just unpack some of the the bad quote unquote bads right number one I don't think any of us sit around and say hey Vegas is bad or hey you know sports betting is bad right we just kind of assume it is what it is people want to do this and and you know the markets have spoken so po we to judge whether something is bad or good it's just observing and so I kind of put mean coin trade in the same category of you know people like speculate and and they're choosing to speculate here then go to like you know MGM or whatever to bet on red or bet on black um that's number one number two the liquidity component is interesting because it did happen on a Friday night banks are

closed it's not easy to on-ramp Fiat into the crypto world right so the first reaction function for people who want to get exposure here is going to come from selling something else when that's the case so you'll have to see sort of what the net effect is once the banks are open next week and so people can bring money in from the outside world into the crypto world but what is it going to do with the 80% Supply that's the big question right uh which is now there's all this theoretical value and and people that find the asset valuable so The Optimist in me doesn't like to think that that's going to be used poorly um there's a lot of interesting things you can do like some that could be like very charitable right if some of those proceeds are used for you know victims

of the wildfires of California whatever I'm just making it up like there's bad things happening in the world so if that Supply can be used for good then I think it could set a very interesting precedent um in the world right I think the market is just assuming the worst like oh this is gonna get Dum me you actually think are you actually you actually think that's possible though I mean I hate to say it but like I don't like Trump's a capitalist like I don't think he's out there trying to you know to just donate this money to somebody else I maybe I'm wrong right like I mean I saw this funny tweet that how hilarious would it be that if some of the pro seeds from the the 80% is is used by Greenland right sure like it's not that's not charitable but like I

justess like you know the the cynical people on crypto Twitter are kind of assuming the worst and I don't think it's it's as helpful to do that right because maybe it's because we've been so used to many people in crypto being you know scam artists and we were kind of been scarred by the last cycle of of grifters that that blew up the cycle so I think that's we're all kind of like wired to things about it that way but we don't have to yeah yeah and the other thing that's interesting is and and then we will we will move on to other topics here because there's so much else to discuss today um but is in the past there there there's multiple Trump tokens there's there's a bunch of trump meme coins right not not

associated with with Trump or his team or his family at all even though there was speculation that many of them were at different points um and you knew that they were going to that something was going to pump heading into Inauguration Day what are mem coins in the in the end they're attention coins right Whoever has the most attention that's the meme coin that's going to go off as you said before we don't think Sports gambling is bad what is sports gambling that's just betting on attention that we're all looking at at that moment so I think you know what would have typically happened is the the meme coins that were launched by others not associated with Trump would be the ones that would do well today now all of a sudden you have Trump himself and his own team behind this

they're the ones creating this attention like in many ways maybe they deserve that and as you said there is creators looking for ways to monetize they should be able to take advantage of the attention that they're creating and so I don't I can I agree with you in that sense that like it's all experimentation and experimentation is good we don't necessarily need to judge it as good or bad but um certainly something to keep an eye on I did not invest in Trump and would would not touch it myself uh I Can Only Imagine the volatility that this thing is going to go through like dayto day like Trump tweets one thing it's going to go crazy one day and he's going to Tweet another thing it's going to go to zero the next day like it's just gonna be a total it's gonna be an up and

down ladder it's non-stop uh okay let's go to uh to the inauguration quickly um that's happening right now as we're recording um Trump has not spoken yet I don't believe uh but two questions I have for you um one is the biggest question is the Strategic Reserve uh let me let me bring up poly Market as of right now I I actually am amazed at what the number is right now as of right now poly Market is saying 48% chance that Trump creates a strategic Reserve in the first 100 days get your take on whether you think he'll make in the first 100 days but better question than that is is it priced in I think is the better question and and if it's not priced in

do you kind of have to buy Bitcoin at least some of it do you have to hold enough of it at this point because of the chance of an SBR happening is just too big that you might be missing out yeah so so I think there's two variants of of this whole SBR concept right there's the senator llas Bill that um I believe requires the government to purchase a certain amount of Bitcoin over several years and then and I think again I think the probability of getting that bill through Congress and ultimately to president Trump is relatively low because there's so many other priority items now and then there's the executive order element which I believe just essentially says don't sell the Bitcoin that we currently have and then maybe move that to

treasury um and then the treasury through the the ESF can maybe add a little more sell it to whatever they got to do with it right uh so the question is like whether something that that happens so again I'll take the poly Market odds on it no clue right now if it were to happen I personally think it's not priced in uh and here's a simple reason why so if you kind of look at Bitcoin Market structure um the last 60 days the reason you know things stalled out generally you know again observing this on chain a lot of long-term holders had been moving their coins to exchanges and you can assume that Co those coins are getting sold so you have Supply and at the same time the inflows into the ETFs had generally

slowed down and get a couple of days of outflows even in the beginning of January so so essentially have Supply and lack of Demand right because prices ran up so quickly you kind of have a lack of people finding the asset interesting at least momentarily to buy I think having Bitcoin sit within treasury or having something symbolic like this happening could catalyze a new cohort of people to kind of revisit this um again similar to Trump launching a memec coin and us saying it sort of der risks it for everybody else to experiment with crypto having this SBR thing happen kind of could der risk it as a potential investment or an allocation for many folios so that could create a new cohort

of buying but yeah that's kind of my Takeaway on it so it's it's always as it comes to bitcoin a lot of things you think are priced in are never priced in yeah I think to me nobody knows if or when an SBR will happen uh it's clearly not priced in right now I think that is clear um I think the the question is will Bitcoin dominance continue like that is really the question on everybody's mind is when we Bitcoin has had such an incredible last year right 2024 was the year of Bitcoin starting off with the

ETF typically in a bull run we would see an allcoin season right we haven't really salana had an amazing year last year so you could consider that but salana was also down bad because of FTX so it was kind of in a lot of ways just getting back to it's its normal rate so will will we see an altcoin season is I mean I'll bring up Bitcoin dominance right now Bitcoin dominance sits at uh 54 and a half% but even got up got up as high as 57% yesterday um you know I think we were we were all thinking that Bitcoin dominance would be trending down by this point in the bull run but it's

actually been trending up the past few days what are your thoughts yeah so so it's hard to say look I mean where Bitcoin dominance goes from here but I I'll generally make some observations right so P last cycle which is kind of end of you know end of 2021 uh the altcoin market which I Define as essentially crypto Market X Bitcoin x ethereum and x stable coins kind of peaked at like 930 940 billion approximately and then we kind of went down to like 200 300 billion through the bare market now we're back up to like essentially that same kind of 900 is billion dollar market so essentially we haven't added any market cap to altcoins what you've had what you've observed is just sort of

money moving around between the different coins you've had a handful of coins Drive massive out performance you know Soul being one uh s being one there are a couple of things in the AI category um maybe hyper liquid right you have a couple of these individual coins that have really dominated performance but I think they've essentially taken away market cap from other places I think you've also seen the mcoin category kind of rise and take market cap and it's taking away let's just say share from your average D5 project right so essentially you've seen a reshuffling of this Market um and the way of view um you know the market excluding Bitcoin and ethereum which is essentially the altcoin market is kind of has two pipes in pipe number one is retail right opens

up a coinbase or whatever count moves Fiat in and then does something or pipe number number two is through conduits like us like institutions like us I would say generally speaking um flows into institutions like us has generally been steady hasn't accelerated or anything like that uh even after the election things haven't necessarily accelerated so so one pipe coming into the AL code world has not really taken off anything the retail pipe has potentially accelerated post elction but it's really allocated into a very specific set of coins it's gone into Bitcoin I think because it seems like a longing for bet for retail then it's gone into a whole bunch of mem coins because people just want have fun I think people generally find trading meme coins fun so that's where retail money has gone so anyways I think I think

whether you get an big alt season or not is really a function of institutional Capital coming in to the altcoin space through conduits like us because there's not other ways for it to come in right like most large institutions aren't going to open up their own coinbase account and start buying different alts because they don't they don't have the expertise to do that uh and at the same time there's not ETF for like all these alts so there's no real pipe in so so so in our opinion we operate with the assumption that Capital will come in when it comes in but in that intermediate period of time while the M Market is somewhat static there's a very specific set of alts that will win so you won't get full-blown alt season you'll get sort of similar things like what you saw with salana last 18 months

where a very specific type of alt will alt will perform now Capital starts to come in then you'll see a real alt season okay I want to talk about which alts will perform but before we do I I just want to understand this like institutional pipe a little bit more um because I think that that's something that a lot of our listeners are very interested in but maybe don't follow and don't understand because we're not professional Traders working at a professional firm like you are so why like what why isn't that institutional pipeline growing right now and when might it grow like any predictions or expectations of is is Trump regulation the key thing that they're all waiting

for and like that's what's going to make this pipeline go yeah so so if I think about the traditional pools of capital to allocate all assets right so endowments foundations pensions Sovereign wealth funds yeah those are probably like the largest pools and then there's family offices and then there's the RAS which are essentially the wealth management channels they all kind of move in different sort of they all move at a different pace and they all have different mandates right so if you look at a pension fund their mandate is they have liability ities which is pensions that got to pay off for people and then they have assets most of the time it's you know stocks and bonds and they need to generate a certain return with that and and and the argument always is like hey even having a small allocation to crypto in that asset pile can really

accelerate those returns and help you meet the the liability hurdles and so on so for every sort of pool of capital there's a different reason why they should look at crypto I think um if you think about the folks that work at these organizations you know they've historically been there for a long time they have obviously they're kind of individual bias but more importantly a lot of them are are sort of you know rewarded for not doing crazy things they they they don't want to lose their jobs right like so what would get them to lose their job well they take pension or money and then they allocated something and it ends up being like the next FTX right so so like there's like sort of that you know job risk element to it so so after the blowups of the last cycle and then all the regulatory

uh lawsuits and sort of litigation stuff that's happened to this industry all the schools of capital have just said this is too hairy for me I'm not going to touch it the family office world is a little different U you know because if you're a billionaire and you know someone's managing your money and you're a billionaire who likes this sasset class then then you will sort of experiment with it so that's really been where like Capital inflows have been coming from but everything else which is a vast majority of institutional Capital stayed away so it's it's it's our view that having regulatory Clarity AKA sort of having let's just say the US say this is okay we'll give a lot of these people these organizations cover to then allocate to the sassa class because you know we we talk to a lot of these people and the individuals

responsible for allocating to crypto these places get it they understand it they like it uh they might even be dabbling in the stuff in their pa right in their personal accounts so so they they all like it but again they don't want to take job risk touching the stuff so so I think our view was you know Trump comes in you have a new SEC chair you have a new cftc chair even if you can't get something done through Congress if you can at least get like a safe harbor rule done through the SEC it gives a lot of these folks some cover to deploy capital in what Trump did launching a meme coin might be actually an accelerant to all of this right is I could always yeah there like it's like you know if I'm one of the hardcore crypto lovers at one of these large

institutions who's been patting the table for the last couple years to his team to allocate to crypto now I have something to say which is hey look like the president of the United States and the first lady just did this so why shouldn't we have exposure to it right because what in order for us to get the regulatory Clarity that you're talking about and there's a few different levels of this we've got like the legislative regulatory Clarity which would take a while uh I'm not a legislative expert but like that's that's we're talking in years not months now then we've got more SEC cftc perhaps making an a statement that you know like Safe Harbor like this type of thing it's

not legislative but it's a statement and then and then we've just got Trump doing stuff basically as like it's not really regulatory Clarity but it's a signal so so because I think the thing that everybody wants to understand is like okay when is this going to happen I think everybody gets that like yeah the institutions aren't really here yet the big money isn't really here yet but then when like is it and and I know you don't have Crystal Ball but is it is it is it this year is it still years away so it's just funny so I had a a couple of my colleagues uh go to DC on Friday for the crypto ball thing and know other the people that were there as well I there was a lot of optimism that you could get

legislation done this year at the very least you could get some stable coin legislation done so we'll see right I have finger like fingers crossed you know something happens in DC I think two things need to happen a you need to have real adoption of the underlying technology for kind of productive things they can't just be pump fun right and I think stable coins are ready for that so so to the extent you know traditional businesses are giv the green light to experiment Stables to kind of just improve their own underlying business models and unity economics and that creates like true adoption that's a story that will resonate with the allocator community institutional allocator community so that that's when that money will also come in so those things are coinciding you know it's like give me some clarity so that people can adopt this thing and leverage the

technology for all the good things it can do then that also gives the capital sort of um reasons to allocate so so so let's let's say that who knows legislation will happen or not there's reasons to be optimistic um I think so so I don't know if if youve ever read um commissioner Hester P's Safe Harbor proposals she's I think got two variations of it there was one that she put out maybe 18 months ago but essentially um what that Safe Harbor rule from the SEC does if implemented is is it kind of establishes is that tokens can have light touch regulation you know sort of as long as they meet a certain set of criteria and then they have like a path towards let's just say

decentralizing or if they're not going to decentralize they have to have certain reporting requirements every periodic sort of on a periodic basis so it kind of sets a set of rules for tokens to exist and for retail to participate in tokens and um and then then have sort of you know transparency around them and then and as long as projects meet those rules they can get listings and exchanges and kind of exist and things are safe you're not going to get sued right obviously that was not implemented in the last SEC regime but you know I'm cautiously optimistic that it could happen in the next several months here quickly yeah yeah I think um I'll throw I'll get the link to the safe harbor uh note that she wrote or proposal that she wrote and we

will clude in the show notes because that's very interesting but I think people don't really and and you you can't understand this unless you worked for the Biden Administration or for the SEC for the past four years the change that is coming is like it's the biggest 180 of all time like it's you can't even comprehend how different things are going to be now okay when this regulation comes what are these institutions going to buy are they only going to buy the Bitcoin and the eth ETF because that's all they can buy or are they going to buy other things as well so I think if potential world of where where all this kind of ends up in 18 24 months is

something that looks like the coin 50 index have you have you come across this thing so um you know coinbase kind of put together like essentially essentially it's like 50 coins kind of like market cap weighted set of rules it looks like the S&P 500 equivalent for for crypto right some version of that or some something like that should be an ETF one day uh assuming obviously the regulatory environment allows and and because like I don't think it personally I don't think it makes sense to like go through like the top 50 coins and have an ETF for each coin right um and so you I think I think that's where you might end up and that might be the easy access vehicle for a lot of um a lot of large institutions very interesting and uh

it's great we're getting James saart from Bloomberg on the show later this week we will ask him uh what he thinks the ETFs they're going to come out this this year will be because he'll have a really good idea on that let's talk about going back to what you mentioned before which was okay we're gonna see an altcoin season that is likely what will it be the same as last Cycles maybe not where every altcoin pumps that seems also likely and something that you're suggesting so what tokens or categories do you think will perform well in this bull run

yeah so I think the market has generally told us what it likes uh when you put kind of meme coins aside it's told us that it likes good products that are different and useful coupled with a Founder that's trustworthy uh people generally want to see someone leading a team and kind of continue to ship and make the product better and then coupled with a lack of Supply overhang I.E people would say Market wants Fair launches and don't want VCS that's not it's not as simple as that it's not like oh like VCS are the problem it's how tokens are launched and and sort of the vesting schedules and the overhang it creates Supply being the real problem right so to the extent you can get a price Discovery happened early in the life cycle of a token such that you know

you don't have a supply overhang and you have a fair price in the market the the FTV isn't too high you know there's not a big Delta between market cap and FTV and then that way you know folks know that they can buy it and then assume that you know they're not going to like have this thing go down 90% on them because they're Conant getting dumped on um that's a good token structure so so I think that's the combination which is good product clean token structure paired with trustworthy founder um and so you know I think a lot of those will be found more on the application side um not on the infrastructure side so not another kind of layer one or you know scaling solution or da or whatever uh those are all just kind of to me infrastructure that leads to Nowhere at

the end of the day um so so I think those are the properties we're looking for as C you know when we looking which what alts might perform and when you when you look at categories like the category that stands out to me is is defi because like we and we can talk about look um I'm not I'm not putting down meme coins or AI agents which really are just meme coins right now too uh but like there's there's narrative based categories and I think yes those categories will do well if we have this Raging Bull Run that everybody thinks could come in 2025 then yeah sure but that's all narrative based that

means which means they're probably all going to drop 90 99% at the end of the cycle um the fundamental-based category that interests me the most is defi because as you said trafi and institutions are coming regulation is going to become more clear when trfy institutions look at this my bet is that they're going to say okay what do we understand well we understand Finance so therefore probably understand defi easier than we can understand AI right well defi has incredible products that have great fundamentals have great revenue streams have proven product Market fit all they have great Founders

all the things that you're saying do you think that defi has a a big year in 2025 that category actually I'm actually going to challenge you and disagree with you I think AI agents will be a huge category that I do think as a byproduct that certain defi projects will do really well but it's always been my belief that um if you're kind of like looking at crypto as like a new construction um you know defi is like the scaffolding you still need a building right because like like like people so far have only used defi to like just kind of farm different things like ultimately it's like I'm going to Loop some you know some trade and like Farm some air drop and whatever so like you haven't had like productive assets you can use this defi around so you need that again eventually I think

it'll be tokenized equities but AI agent tokens Can ultimately be tokenized equities as well and let me let me kind of expand on that right so everyone agrees whether you're in crypto or not in crypto that agents will be a big thing right I want to be able to have a nice like travel agent token not token travel agent that will help me book my travel like discover places to go all this stuff it work for me um I'm sure there's like tens of teams competing to build the best travel agent and and and so on you can kind of go to like I want a really good like you know shopping agent or I want a really good Agent that will help me pick out my outfit whatever like there going to be a lot of different types of agents and different teams competing for that uh ultimately I

don't like it's hard to imagine uh well two things I think teams that are building agents are likely going to be small teams and they likely won't need a ton of funding and they likely can never be public companies either right so if you build like a really good travel agent you know you might be making revenues in the 10 of millions of dollars and and not billions of dollars and as a result you're just a small business and so if you're that team of three or four guys that built a really useful agent that's on you know built on you know U Chad GPT 401 or whatever whatever model underneath and you're looking for an exit a token might ultimately be the right instrument for that a token that captures the value

economic value of the agent itself it's not what the category is today people are still experimenting with all this stuff but I think that's where we might end up you might have a really good Agent that everyone uses and that and that team says you know what I should have a token that's attach to this agent capture the value the value cre and when that happens and now you have a set of productive assets that defi can be used for and leveraged with so you think do you think AI agents currently sitting actually haven't looked today but uh it was 17 billion market cap the last time I looked let me pull it up quickly uh 14 14 billion now man the the volatility of AI agents is just wild but probably most of that is just because

it's been moved over to trumpcoin you think you think AI agents has as a category is one of the biggest categories in this cycle yes like I've been in a space I've been in a space space since 2017 and um they've been there have been two times where I've been kind of genuinely excited by what is possible um one is during the Ico Mania just observing that Founders around the world could raise Capital without any intermediaries that was interesting obviously everyone broke Securities laws by doing that but like I think there was like an interesting unlock there in what's possible and the other time around was actually like defi summer because that truly showed you that um you can

democratize the use of financial products and and you could again get rid of a whole set of intermediaries uh like the nft stuff was kind of interesting and then people Tred to like do things with gaming and nfts and then there was all game f all the stuff are like kind of like variance of like what was available previously so they they're all great uh deepen has been interesting although you haven't had like a killer deepen app take off like it's still conceptually interesting but um I think deepen ultimately will be huge but it will take time for things to get massive there I think this agent category is like very net new uh in what's possible and I think people will eventually get the business model right and and and I think those things can have a very quck go to market you don't have like you

don't have to wait three years to see if these things will take off or not yeah yeah I'm also very excited about AI agents in this cycle and also think it's going to be huge PR of this has been an absolute pleasure uh I've been scrolling Trump's inauguration to see if anything has happened so far apparently all we've missed is melena Trump is wearing a big brim hat so Donald couldn't kiss her on the cheek uh and uh uh people talking about how it's just a bunch of tech billionaires on stage with him which uh there you go that's what we got it's time for the tech acceleration uh Administration that's for sure um been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show PR of we'll have to get you on again in the future appreciate your time today

absolutely anytime thanks for listening in everybody we'll see you every day this week with more and more information keep you up to date on Trump have a wicked awesome day as always if you liked today's episode please hit subscribe and make sure you follow us if you don't miss miss out on the next one there's also a link in the description to our free 5 minute daily newsletter where we simplify crypto for you while making you laugh and if you're willing to step up your crypto investing game we're going to also leave a link for milk Road Pro you get access to our portfolio where you can see exactly what we are buying this is your number one resource to help you invest successfully in crypto one final note this show is

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