Understanding the Rise of AI and Crypto as TradFi Plays Catch-up | Roundup

Transcript

I don't know if you looked at the Reddit uh S1 and as they prepare for their s uh for IPO oh almost 10% oh we got Vance here look at this that's such a nice surprise Vance what's up buddy sorry guys just got off Bloomberg you know doing Gods had somewhere more important to be than you know your humble that little little local TV station called Bloomberg not sure if you've heard of it hey everyone wanted to give a quick shout out to the Wormhole Foundation if you are a bell curve listener you know that transferring across chains can be a massive pain I certainly do I complain about it on this program all the time that's why we are super pumped to have partnered with Wormhole Foundation the stewards of the Wormhole protocol the Wormhole protocol connects over 30

blockchains and six different run times including salana soie ethereum layer 2s and more and the coolest part about this particular partnership is that they have made custom bell curve nfts which you can get and Min for free you can claim that by just going down into the show notes and clicking on the link all right guys I'm with the show he everyone everyone this episode is brought to you by swell a team leading the reaking future with their liquid reaking token r s now I've talked about liquid reaking on this program before I think it is going to be a massive tectonic shift for ethereum and I am super super excited about it and I like the swell team a lot goes without saying do your on Research this is not Financial advice you guys all know the drill again I like this team and if you stick around I'm going

to describe how you can restake your eth in swell earn pearls I layer points and a whole bunch of future rewards so thank you very much for swell for making this episode possible hey everyone want to give a quick shout out to this episode sponsor flood protocol the optimal decks aggregator now if you are a listener of bell curve you know that m is a massive problem which is why we are so pumped to partner up with flood on this season flood is the only gasless and me free aggregator that not only gets you the best execution but also gives you back all the extra Surplus that you create every single time you swap now this is relevant for both swappers and developers but you're going to be hearing all about them later in the program so for now thank you flood and back to the all right everyone welcome

back to another episode of bell curve before we jump in quick disclaimer the views expressed by my co-host today are their personal views and they do not represent the views of any organization with which the co-hosts are associated with uh nothing in the episode is construed or relied upon as Financial technical tax legal or other advice you know the deal now let's jump into the episode all right everyone welcome back to another weekly round of edition of today you're joined by Michaels one and two just the two of us will down the fort Michael how you doing buddy you know doing well doing well uh getting Denver fomo uh excited to hear how that's been for the last day and uh yeah you know we uh we trim the fat we just

continue forward and uh better faster stronger Just the Two of Us lean and mean baby lead and mean yeah Denver's been great I I was just telling you off air but I did get a surprise right when I got here which is that the airb BM standing and doesn't have heat how many of you know dude the story about how this happened though is so funny so you know how like a little while like at 24 hours before you get TR every be the host like hey here are some details that you need to know for your visit here's the lock box go in the back door here's the Wi-Fi password oh by the way there's no heat what what you gotta you gotta lead with that my man like also I mean how is it even possible that someone has a house in

Denver that doesn't have heat don't understand that it's February it's febru it's like 15 degrees out yeah I literally there's like one space heater in this place that and it doesn't work so I dragged into my bedroom last night I like went to the other bedrooms I grabbed the blankets there I slept in this and I like Beetle positioned in the bed but that's fine because we're live if someone's listening to this and still in Denver someone get mik new air yeah yeah yes please help my brother out um all right I'll give you a quick update though on on the conference so I've only been here for for 24 hours but you know I was I was expecting a little bit just because we we'll talk a little bit about markets but I was curious to get the the overall sentiment and Vibe because you

know you could this could very well be a period of euphoria obviously with Bitcoin and eth doing what they're doing right now it really doesn't feel like that at all um actually if anything I talked to a lot of folks who like joined the industry over the last couple years and they're in this like really fun period where their their faith is basically being affirmed you know so if you're someone who's listening to this and you joined like a couple years ago right in time for the bear and you were like thinking about leaving like shout out like this is your time and this is actually one of the more fun times to be in your crypto Journey um so there's a lot of that there was but it really didn't feel too fomy or anything like that with the exception of two areas I

would say uh to a lesser degree I would say reaking is like really starting to pick up steam tons of reaking events uh not even just igen lay specifically but other types of Solutions and I think that's definitely going to get pretty hot there's a lot of speculation about when token for igen Lair what it's going to come out at in terms of FDB stuff we've maybe briefly touch on the show the area that does feel like there's a lot of interest and potentially hype is AI and AI to me I'm actually yeah it's I mean you see it in the private markets right Michael like I I started hearing this a couple months ago from friends they were like yeah there's like every other Round And Then There Were the AI rounds and they're raising 10 times more at a way higher Val valuation with way

less product and all that stuff and I my personal take on it is that I think the stuff is actually very real but it's probably going to take a little bit longer to play out than everyone thinks but it's shaping up to probably be the hypi area of this cycle maybe similar a little bit to nfts where last cycle nfts were clearly real but they just ran away so hard so that's my kind of really nfts nfts there was an nft collection that hit almost 100 billion FTV last cycle I don't remember that yeah actually that's a good that's a really good point honestly we're already kind of at yeah you're talking about world coin here but yeah this they're at this point of the cycle where I did this post about how ridiculous that is and I'm just getting

called actually pretty funny mid curve Mike thought was a pretty funny nickname I like all right just getting called mid curvy here for pointing out that this shouldn't be at100 billion do valuation but they uh they they got you on your own podcast title they did I know I me what do you think about that though so I just to further the point I I had a a check in with one of our Founders um who yesterday who started Aur which um you know for those that don't know about it it is um it's a new platform for for AI technology and model proliferation um excited about what they're doing they haven't launched yet we we've been you know a partner of

theirs over the last few years and seen that all the progress for for those of remember it's it's the original upshot brand that is now you know developing its own developing its own L2 to take the upshot technology as the first model within the allora ecosystem and uh Nick was telling me that he made some merch that said um something and I'm getting a butcher the exact phrase but like the first self-healing uh self-replicating AI L2 and he was walking around Denver and people were just coming up to him saying how can I invest can can I can I give you money like come on what what is going on here um I think we're so I think two things are true at

the same time number one the excitement and um all the attention I think is warranted um to a certain extent there is real technology here there is real applications that are going to be developed There's real use cases for blockchain technology that fit within the AI ecosystem rip large um and to your point I think we're also probably furthest away from this being real um in terms of all the other application categories that we're talking about and you know that are launching in and so you know for anyone who can develop something that works right now and something that has applications right now there's going to be that real attention grabbing the real kind of capital grabbing elements but I do think that you know maybe this is something

that when we looked at last cycle or two cycles ago everybody was investing alt layer ones kind of at at the at the bear at the bottom um and it took basically another three years for all of that to be realized and that's kind of what we saw in 2021 the recognition of all of that and and so maybe AI is the thing that people invested in in 22 and 23 and it'll take until 24 25 26 for it to actually materialize um so in terms of sort of like the investment phase the application Phase and then like sort of like the adoption and recognition phase I think we're kind of in the like application to adoption phase yeah I would agree with that and it's actually it's part of the it's one of

the reasons uh that I actually came to e denro the series to learn more about this because I don't know that much but from my understanding there's a couple ways that you could approach it you probably know more than me even just from talking to allur but you know the two there there are different layers of the stack where it makes sense to intersect Ai and crypto but the two use cases that people are pretty excited about is Agents so you can sort of like we' talked a little bit about these intent type Frameworks where right now a user of crypto you kind of interface directly with a smart contract or a protocol we're moving to this world where you actually interface directly with Searcher solver or filler which is really just a market maker and you could and then they will do this complicated

you know cross train transactions and just abstract all that away from you you could imagine a world where you're not actually interfacing with a market maker you're interfacing with one of these smart AI Bots that just does all of that for you and it makes a lot of sense that for that to be in crypto because it's much more permissionless these a IOD can just use eth as money and do all this stuff whereas in a in a more tra by type World there are just way more frictions around that so there's the agent angle and then there's the um decentralizing ownership of the models model and this is where I I'm just so early and learning about this I I still don't fully understand it but the way that I would think about it is everyone saw the Gemini images that that Google's been

generating right and whatever your politics are you could probably agree there's definitely a strong bias or worldview you can say it's a good thing you can say it's a bad thing but it's definitely there and if AI becomes as important as everyone thinks that it's going to be you probably want it to not reflect the biases of one particular centralized entity you want it to be a little bit more the governance structure should be a little bit more distributed and so I think people are trying to figure out how to do that in crypto point so yep not not to make this a total you know a AI pod uh we got to sit back to our uh to back to our macro Roots here um but I hey I I think about it in terms of the value chain right and it starts at the

hardware level and right now that's frankly why Nvidia is riing that's why open AI is going after the7 trillion doll raise build their own Babs build their own chips all the things that kind of go into the creation of h100 a100 all the GPU capabilities to do this actual work not to one angle yeah and there's a couple of protocols that are working on how do we democratize access um based off of you know Supply demand Marketplace for the actual chips themselves I think that that's pretty interesting frankly right now we're just so the entire world is so Supply constrain for these chips and and these capabilities that's it's really hard like you you have Mark Zucker talking about uh you know in a Facebook post

about how many chips they're buying from Nvidia and like that it is becoming a moe if you have you know those assets those physical assets so but over time if you assume that Supply kind of catches up with Dem band you're going to be able to have sort of decentralized Market market place for that chip uh capability that's number one number two is their model creation and model cooperation with which is the jaap that what you're talking about I think my personal view is that the jury is still out as to whether or not you know private proprietary models retain the value or to your point if it's going to be more an open source model creation model generation and and the value doesn't ACR necessarily to the model

itself um it could be something where you know we've talked about this for years where it's like the Facebook algorithm versus an open source algorithm in terms of what content you see and everyone would say oh well we don't want the bias of Facebook or we don't want the bias of you know whoever that proprietary company is creating that algorithm and feeding us whatever whatever content it is that we actually see and I think that the same way with model creation it it's possible that you know chat gbt or Gemini you know they have some biases but they're also the biggest and the ones that are going get the most trained and and the ones that are most useful therefore um and so I I think we're still in the state of like we don't know the value Cru for models yet or how that will look and feel um

but then there's also the inference side in inference side which is sort of like the output side of the models and I think that's actually probably one of the most interesting it's like what can you do with all of this back end and have it applied to something and there's actually like D5 protocols that are working on stuff like this right now I know you know Ru has talked about doing governance through AI um like there there's going to be some really interesting applications of this that will touch on you know the back ends of decentralized computed decentralized model creation but the INF side I think is is one of the areas that's probably least explored right now yeah and I think one of the things to consider as well on the the value proposition of making it more neutral and More

decentralized in terms of ownership than a company that has a bias like Google keep in mind Google owns YouTube which is one of the largest proprietary data sets that you can feed into an AI algorithm on the planet um and the other thing is at some level no matter what you're gonna have to make decisions about the answers that these things spit out like because as soon as you just to use really extreme examples right you don't want on something like Google to be able to search like snuff films or something like that right so as soon as you have a that sort of decision then you're operating on a spectrum of like someone has to make decisions about where the line exists someone's going to have to do that for these AI models as

well and I I agree with your point about the the inference level being super interesting and frankly I think it's just going to take a really long time for protocols today to experiment with what's actually useful so you know I'm not an expert on this at all I I'm just learning about this too but my best gu I think there's going to be a lot of money thrown at this there going to be a lot of ideas and Manpower r at this some of it's going to work a lot of it's not but I I would guess we're on like a four or five year timeline here for actually building pretty useful things two two thoughts coming down to that number one so yeah you're exactly right the data ingestion is sort of how you define a lot of what that model will say at the end of the day and that

business I think is is actually flying kind of under the radar right now I don't know if you looked at the Reddit uh S1 and as they prepare for their s for IPO oh almost 10% oh we got Vance here look at this that's such a nice surprise man what's up buddy sorry guys just got off Bloomberg you know doing God's work had somewhere more important to be than you know your humble or little little local TV station called Bloomberg not sure if you've heard of it appreciate the good word to the Boomers been doing a lot of that recently both Michael and I reconnecting with our our Boomer friends nice well we Sorry step step into our step into our AI

office it was better late than never but you know yeah well la last few thoughts on this Mike uh so number one Reddit almost 10% or I think a little bit over 10% of their revenue in the past 12 months has been data selling basically like selling all of the data that they have in Reddit for AI model generation I think this becomes for anyone that has a proprietary data source this becomes a huge business model and I think also people it's kind of like when AT&T had the unlimited data plan for the iPhone they didn't know how to Value it because they're like oh like what are people going to do with data on their phone like they and then like the app market came out and like all the different apps became richer denser and 182 was like okay kill that we can't have that I

think we're kind of at that stage of data within AI where all the companies that have proprietary data are like wait a second we can make more money just by selling you know the stuff that's in our databases and they're totally under evaluating it because that's exactly what is like the most important ingredient into what generates these model output can I ask you a question about that do you think there is an analogy here to like the more traditional um I'm not even sure the word for these types of business but like the cbs's and the NBCS that used to license their content to Netflix where it was this juicy Revenue stream in the short term But ultimately ended up creating an enormous amount of equity value for Netflix um and then they were able to just vertically integrate their own content Studio I wonder if it could

be the same thing for these AI platforms where it's like hey give us your data to to train ourselves on then we can create so much that we don't you become sort of commoditized do you think there's a well it depends on I mean you have to keep the data fresh and the reason why Reddit is so interesting is because you can continue to have that refresh rate really high with you know all the different subreddits and the moderators continuing the conversation so you have to that element is important but if you're talking about a look back it's like who wants to buy you know the rights to to every single previous news article or publication blah blah blah but it's not relevant if you're trying to get you know chat GPT or or Gemini to be up to date with you know what happened last week so what I was

thinking about was I actually remember uh do you guys ever watched 30 Rock the show this silly stupid reference but remember a Seinfeld Vision where Alec Baldwin's character Jack donie uh because they own so much of IP around Seinfeld that they could just get Jerry Seinfeld to say anything that they wanted in every TV show it was a funny it was just a funny plot but actually here's something pretty cool I don't know if you guys are Abba fans but in the UK in London right now there dude this exists you can you can go oh I love ABA dude you can go and their holographic performances of Alba they they like you will go and they just projected these four people and it's

like a live concert with Abba in their Prime and apparently it's awesome and so I do wonder if there's kind of like a there's a need to to stay current with sources like Reddit or something like that but there could be these weird Niche use cases where you could do a one-off data set and then produce something super valuable like that but maybe you don't need all of this all of this is to say like we're the starting gun has been fired but we're at the at the very start of the race yeah maybe that's a good transition speaking of starting guns being fired let's talk a little bit about so lame we crashed up we crashed up we crashed up the market crashed up hey everyone want to give a quick shout out to the Wormhole

Foundation if you a bell curve listener you know that transferring across chains can be a massive pain I certainly do I complain about it on this program all the time that's why we are super pumped to have partnered with the Wormhole Foundation the stewards of the Wormhole protocol the Wormhole protocol connects over 30 blockchains and six different run times including salana soie ethereum ium layer twos and more and the coolest part about this particular partnership is that they have made custom bell curve nfts which you can get and mint for free you can claim that by just going down into the show notes and clicking on the link all right guys on with the show hey everyone this episode is brought to you by swell a liquid reaking protocol in the issuer of the ru liquid reaking token now if you're a listener bker you

know that I am just so fascinated by reaking and liquid reaking I think it is going to be one of the most important Trends in ethereum and I am really excited for the benefit that it unlocks both users and also ethereum the protocol itself now disclaimer whenever there's yield involved in a product do your own research this is not Financial advice you guys know the drill but swell is a great team they have a non-custodial product and they are Missi driven on giving you the best liquid staking experience if you take one benefit away from using liquid reaking make it be Capital efficiency now you can earn passive yield from ethereum you can earn yield from multiple actively validated services that stack on top of that and then you can still use our S as collateral in D5 and because I know y'all are a bunch of Deens there's a

points angle here as well but in swell we call them pearls so pearls equal points and if you stake your eth with swell you can earn pearls and future igen layer rewards when there's a token generation event you can swap your pearls for swell tokens head over click the link at the bottom of this episode again just pause what you're doing right now go click the link at the bottom of this episode check out swell than you later hey everyone want to give a quick shout out to this episode sponsor flood protocol called the optimal decks aggregator now flood is the perfect partner for this episode on the multi-chain future because flood is solving so many of the issues that we're going to be talking about this season and this is relevant for both Traders and devs so if you are a Trader you should definitely head over to flood

Swap and start trading because they solve three massive problems one gasless trading no more pesky trading fees two you don't have to worry about getting front run M free and then three they have excellent order routing so that you know that you are getting the best price so head over to flood Swap and click the link in the bottom of the show notes we're going to send you right there for the devs out there you can leverage floods flexible hooks allowing you to make swapping a first class primitive by adding custom order types like t- wops or if you're a wallet Builder or something like that you can actually build your own orderflow auction in and start recapturing a bunch of that me if you want to reach out to them go to devs flood. bid or just jump right in the Discord all right guys thanks very much

appreciate you flood big price action this week obious Bitcoin is now trading somewhere around 63k you up over I think in the last couple days bitcoin's up over 10,000 eth following salana following uh and people are feeling pretty pretty excited obviously we're flirting with all-time highs I actually just saw Bitcoin is at an all-time high in terms of market cap we have more Supply than we did last time um and it I I guess a question that I would have for you guys is do you think retail is this is a big question that people within crypto circles like to ask like is retail coming back there's a great I'll pull it up actually but there's a great bot that actually just tra where coinbase is in the App Store and they'll tweet out like every six hours or something like that where it is and it's

been pretty aggressively climbing the ranks and anecdotally I I haven't had people reach out to me this entire time about crypto but I'm just starting to get like friends and acquaintances those first early texts so ju would just be curious about what you guys make of this Market action and whether or not retail is sort of returned let let me let me tell you something you know what the Boomers see they don't even know that the price of Bitcoin is like 63,000 all they see is that ibid is making new all-time highs every single day well in the world of of Boomers Bitcoin is $33 a piece you know they're already in an all-time high like the bull run which which is which is the price of of the Black Rock yeah yeah

just to be clear so I mean also the other thing I'll say is like every other currency on the planet Bitcoin is now at a new alltime High um so the Boomers and all these other countries are living in in the future it's like crypto people who haven't broken the all-time high in USD yet so it's funny it's great to see yeah and to give everyone a sense of you know what inflows are doing I mean these the volume I think actually yesterday Eric valkunas tweeted out that ibit the I shares you know Black Rock ETF had more volume than QQQ which is bananas which which is absolutely crazy

yeah all of the that's the most popular NASDAQ ETF that's [ __ ] yeah sorry that's what I should said yeah the NASDAQ ETF we beat that and and one other thing is like the like you know there's news that Morgan Stanley and UBS are going to approve these things and like all of the other National Prime brokerage accounts and warehouses are like still kind of dragging their feet like UBS has a or Morgan sty has like a 90-day product approval thing that apparently has been cut to 45 because people are just you know fighting and clawing and asking their advisers for this product so you know it's like somebody said one to three% of all assets are going to be in crypto from these raas it's 150 billion of

money how how does that work how do you how do you put that into crypto like we again we we've said this before but like we' bought nine figures of crypto over the past few years and it's actually hard to get the coins um on a on a mechanical level and you know people are offering us like I it was 4% to lend out out our Bitcoin overnight like four weeks ago now it's up to 15% and that's that lending Market is driven by you know you have the ETF inflows on like call it Thursday and like they can't figure out how to buy coins or they don't have balance sheets so they like borrow Bitcoin theoretically from us if we let them and then they'd give it back to us the next day but it's like a repo market and it's just like an indication of how

tight this Market has become and think what happens if like that 150 billion is real and think of what happens if like the eth ETF happens um which we think it will at least this year um that's pretty wild to think about this is the difference between any prior cycle we never had Larry think buying 85,000 Bitcoin in the past 20 trading days well and and the other thing too is like that money that goes in it's a black hole it's not it's not going to be it doesn't look like it's going to be anything that is flighty especially given you know the Boran Stan lays the ubs's when you're talking about getting and and the other one too is Fidelity has gone across all of their sort of

like Target allocations I don't know if you guys saw this chart too it was like 6040 stocks is what they've been uh you know assessing previously now it's like 60 40 or whatever it is 59 uh 383 and the three is crypto and it's across all of their different platforms they have one to three% allocation and and what I'm meeting with that specifically is if you have one or three% allocation into those types of funds that money is going in but that's a retirement account that's not changing it's not like they're you know rebalancing and changing it and yeah all all the above so I I think you know we also have the inflows but we also have the sedentary nature of what those inflows made so just to give folks a sense by

the way in terms of order of magnitude how when we say flows how much are we talking about yesterday there was record flow day for the newborn 9 or the Kentucky Derby or what what James and Eric are calling this these new these new ETFs but ibit took in alone 612 million the net uh for the entire group was 673 million which is a record and that's despite a pretty big outflow day from gbtc at 216 million so yeah these are real dollars coming in here I I've got two questions for you guys about this maybe just to add some context for folks in the audience who are listening we talked about this a little bit before but there's a bit of a debate going on about you know who where this money is actually coming from is it from hot muddy hedge funds or these raas and the

other question that I had for you guys is do you think this is around the time where people say this is all going to go into Bitcoin but I do Wonder as well especially if coins are really scarce if some of this ends up bleeding over into something like coinbase like crypto equities or miners or ethereum or alts in crypto like what does the spillover look like and maybe to just frame that first question of about who's actually uh investing in the or buying these ETFs one thing I did so last since the last time we talked I talked to a buddy of mine who works at Galaxy and his take was it actually takes a little while for these like wirehouses and everything to get set up and he actually didn't think it was mostly raas that were were buying these for the for the time being but so

I think probably there is a really good argument to be made that it is the hedge fund Community but I'm just I don't really know that that really matters very much like the the the groundwork has been laid at this point that from Fidelity and black rock and others I don't think it's just going to take a little while I just think it's kind of a meaningless question to even be asking to be honest with you well it's not meaningless in terms of you know who's the net buyer right now I think that that's kind of a relevant question I just think that that net buyer profile changes in like what we're talking about the next 45 you know 60 days yeah because you know the I I think you're probably right like the the people that are Vine andh Vine now are basically the

the people who are front running what they know is impending which is all the people who are watching this happen and not able to access it the Morgan sandal ubs's the Raa platforms I think last week H horley kind of tweet saying that Carlson which is a$ 30 billion doll ra platform based in Omaha like they just added it to their plat like you're going to have to clip off these like tens of billions of dollar Ras one at a time and then they added to their platform they add the allocation you know waiting and and then they start to buy in and so I think it's the the more liquid the more um the quicker who are able to buy it now but the people the the number one thing that we have seen in terms of you know Market psychology is when markets

go up people want to invest and and maybe it's not the smartest people but it's the people who are more you know following the markets only because the price action is is happening so price action but get more price action I think the the fastest moving in right now the people who are watching on the sidelines are the ones who are going to be buying and holding and they're they're coming and then and frankly this price action will pull more of that second category in because they're excited and and want to get in as well I agree with that I mean balunis did this analysis of the like the uh individual trades he's like there's you know a bunch you know that are like $1 to10 million tickets maybe those are funds

maybe those are or you know High net worths whatever uh there's a bunch that are like 100k and then there's like a ton that are like $1,000 $5,000 $10,000 and I mean I think it's people like my mom and dad who who you know my dad has been holding eth since uh I think 140 he used to hate crypto and I just got him to buy eth and and now that he's up a bunch he's like really pilled um and now he's like looking at all these products and he's saying you know like what why not and when you're making daily all-time highs that's a pretty compelling marketing message um so I think it's true what you said you

know most of the RAS and warehouses don't have access to this product that is like even crazier to me like what are we going to see in terms of Daily net inflows if we're already at a billion dollars is it going to be like $10 billion like we're already at a million Bitcoin per year Pace there's only 1.9 million BTC across all these exchanges yeah unless we start re hypothecating coins like I there's just not going to be enough to go around yeah okay so that begs the question I was just I was just having this debate yesterday with a buddy but do you think because this is around the time where and you're already starting to hear these arguments where Bitcoin this cycle is going to be different Bitcoin is going to outperform everything because it has these ETFs and this argument was made last Cy too right it's like money

printer go bur mem only applies to bitcoin and that's where all the liquidity is going to flow but we all know that Bitcoin did really well last cycle but it underperformed all these other assets and so I guess what I'm wondering is especially maybe Bon LEL to your guys point if Bitcoin ends up becoming really scarce I feel like one thing where I've seen people consistently get this wrong is they're just going to drive that infinitely higher whereas they look for Alternatives maybe that's eth maybe that's coinbase in the miners maybe that's other things but ultimately that money that wants to speculate ends up pouring out into other assets and I want to get your guys perspective about do you think that's going to happen similarly this time or how would you be thinking about that Dynamic I think the question is between

Ethan and Bitcoin like I I think broadly if you have all of these flows um they matter like Financial gravity matters of of you know the buying pressure um there is a wealth effect like in crypto fund managers if bitcoin's at 100K you know and they're looking at like L1 blockchains at like two or three like they're going to do that math pretty quickly and rotate um but Bitcoin probably goes higher than people think um like fun Strat has a target of 150k this year um and people were ragging on him for that but like look I mean something's got to give if they're buying this much crypto at the end of the day um but I think the real question is eth um it's a much smaller asset uh

there's 12 or I guess there's 11 million eth on exchanges today so there's even less eth available than Bitcoin um and if you see even a fracture of the inflows from or you know from Bitcoin or if there's like a 50-50 eth Bitcoin ETF or if the eth ETF is popular um and a lot of Wall Street trading houses are already shelling this as like their their trade like you know uh I I think it's that is the question of like do these flows matter you know five or t times as much for eth than they do for Bitcoin because Bitcoin is going to be a lot bigger by the time the eth ETF gets approved um and so yeah I just think all the models are broken to to quote Michael sailor

um like how high this goes I mean Michael and I have recently kind of like recalibrated just based on the ETFs Alone um I don't think even the wildest expectation for Bitcoin flows uh this is beyond that you know prf versus post ETF so we'll see um the other thing about eth is like it's all locked up and restake and staking and Defi and nfts and bridges and all this stuff Bitcoin doesn't really have that and so you know like there's just a lot less of it and their flows are probably going to be higher than its Pro share of its market cap relative to bitcoin not sure this really matters

either in terms of where bitcoin's price is going to Trend but one thing that I just like a lot about what's happening in Bitcoin right now is there's a little bit of a Renaissance in terms of building new tech on top of it and being more open-minded than I think people have been in a long time and there's a little bit of an investing angle here because you know when you have these things like ordinals and the bit VM Etc you're packing more transactions onto the blockchain that's directly relating to more uh or translating into more revenue for miners but just as someone who really loved Bitcoin for a long time it was kind of frustrating for me to see this s pretty religious uh kind of lasery crew really take over the dialogue and it made me less interest interested in it for a little while but

it's been cool to see that there's a lot there's a real Resurgence in terms of open-mindedness and pushing the boundary in terms of innovation and yeah it's happening in a pretty cool way so not that that really matters for the overall but I think it's cool at least the the other thing I I'll say is like um it it does feel like the ordinal people had a moment as the main Narrative of Bitcoin but now it's like trafi and I think that's like kind of interesting trfi is just buying all the coins it's kind of sad too because like the ogs are maybe selling their coins or you know the coins are maybe you know just sitting on Exchange but like trafi is going to take most of this run upwards if we're starting at if we started at 45k and it goes to 250 or

whatever like trafi is taking most of this run so so the meta narrative that I think applies to this is not necessarily trafi being the the Victor here but trafi changing its tone in terms of the entire industry and one of the things that happened this happened this week I I know we all saw it was a changing uh almost a complete about face of Elizabeth Warren and her talking about how she wants to start working with the industry so long as everybody follows rules and it's like you know people forget you wanted to start a crypto Army and and uh or against crypto she did start a crypto Army it's just the wrong wrong side but I I do think that yeah exactly here we go

uh the one of the one of the The Meta narratives of about trafi winning in this Bitcoin Gambit right now is that we're going to get them on our side and I think this is you know Mike never talking about this before but this is one of you know I I think the um the trends that is becoming more and more obvious and frankly one of the reasons why everyone is getting excited about things like the Unis swap P switch you know the the trends of regulatory wins for this industry are are heading more positively now that we're seeing success within a collaboration between the crypto industry and the trafy people yeah I would I would say just just a couple notes here as well on so I

actually have the um sort of fortunate or unfortunate experience I've been hosting podcasts for a long time I actually started the first podcast that I was hosting on the lgin in like March of 2021 so all of my views are like on the record at that time and I will say a lot of those views do not hold up particularly well with what ended up playing out that cycle so like this is the time to have fun you know it really doesn't get better than this particular span of time before it gets like totally ludicrous we're winning you know all this stuff is trending in the right direction but also like I don't know just because last time I lost my head a little bit you know keep your head on the swivel right nothing nothing has changed too much like I just ear like

like a little bit of D happen yeah what you talk El yeah dude I had some dumb takes I like I mean honestly so did we so did we yeah we all do right I mean it's part of the fun right it's part of the fun of going through this gaming was going to happen in 2022 but gaming but you guys were just a little bit early on that I mean that feels like we were talking about AI is kind of the next narrative I mean I don't know I feel like gaming is we we had Robie on I've gotten much more published since that since that episode do we have another hour to talk about gaming because I do I know I killer yeah he is a killer and I I I think Gaming's going to be huge this year but to to just call it like warrant here we're

we're looking at this article and it's just funny that she says this it's you know I want to collaborate with the industry what I don't understand is why the industry seems to be saying that they the only way they can survive is there's plenty of space for drug traffickers and human traffickers own and terrorists and RW scammers you know you don't want to she doesn't want to collaborate with this industry she literally it was the title you guys were referring to I'm building an anti- crypto Army how does that say collaboration that doesn't say collaboration this this is this is the equivalent of Gary Daner being like come in and register we're we're open for business we saw how yeah frustrating so so weird that we don't like her given that she just tried to kill our industry for the past four years it's like I know look like if we

we've gotten approximately zero bones thrown To Us by the Democratic party like this shouldn't be a mystery as to why we don't want to work with you all of the rules that you've put forward are not workable and I actually come I grew up in Massachusetts I likeed Liz Warren like there was a period of time where I really liked her I thought she had a really rational like she did a good job and but she did a good job in Massachusetts before all this and now yeah I'm just totally flipped on it and you know I was sitting next to a I don't want to blow his spot up but a guy from coinbase um on the flight over here and he was describing you know interacting with regulators and well actually I don't know if I want to get into the story but basically

these people do have a really good understanding of of the technologist are regulating but there are really I'm not sure our interests are fully LED I think they will be in the in the long Mark of time but yeah I mean listen there there there from from the way that the Democratic party or or frankly like any government official reports itself to be uh wanting uh Fair markets to have open transparency egalitarian ecos like all the things that are literally the tech and ecosystems that we're building are should be represented by what they're talking about it's just that there are ulterior motives at play and they they put up a good facade to be able to win

elections but in reality there's there's stuff that's deeper that's Jo don't I I do feel like it's shifting though with the FED coming out positive on stable coins like it's also an election year and I think this bleeds into crypto where it's like look crypto's popular no matter what you think like a lot of people own it 70 80 million Americans um like it feels like a lot of the pace of the enforcements and the court cases have slowed at least like that's kind of my perspective um the Bitcoin ETF obviously step in the right direction but like if crypto keeps ripping I think it's really hard to be it's easy to be bearish or like you know like crack the whip

regulatorily wise on an asset class that's like [ __ ] imploding like when it like people forget but 2021 they were kind of positive on the space 2022 when we blew everything up they were like all right let's go after these people but now it feels like we're kind of in up only mode and I don't know how much room politically there is to be trying to rain on that parade basically that that's my thought process at least and I think that will influence things like the EF decision um not not the coinbase court case because that's like in the court of law but um like there's there's a lot of levers that this type of positive price action and environment can can pull I agree and I think it's a I think

Matt LaVine actually wrote a really great article about this but you can think about it from the perspective of a regulatory agency there's sometimes demand for them to do their job like when coins are going down and everyone feels like they lost a lot of money they know they've got public opinion on their side so they're going to do everything they can to get that through but when prices are going up and everyone's making money there's just not much political appetite out there to crack down on on an asset that people are liking and holding so I agree with you that's I it's a good point perspective it's so much fun thinking about how much coke Ben McKenzie and Jim Bako have right now I I know Jim I I you know I like Jim a lot and he's he's been constructive on

this space for a while he's Twisted himself into an intellectual pretzel like bro stop stop tweeting stop shooting they're not they're not going in yeah did you see CIT uh Citron citrone uh yeah research these people short coin long BTC what are you talking about yeah this is the best trafi will see an asset class like crypto ripping and they'll do things like short tether and like pay funding to to do that maybe just sharing um what I did this week uh so I was at this I was at this uh pension fund conference two-day pension fund conference in Austin and you know uh really a really great conference put

on by great people um they have like a crypto specific one that they do kind of like once a year and you know it's it's like well attended uh but this one was the like overall you know we did like there's like private credit there's long only there's long short there's uh energy there's you know all real estate there's all the asset classes and then there's crypto and you know crypto crypto me and hi did a panel at 8:30 in the morning we got a half hour you know everyone's like drinking coffee and eating danishes um it it was well attended but like the crypto people only got a half hour and this is like a two-day thing um and you know like a lot of the uh the younger people who work at these Pension funds and like the more

techsavvy ones had meetings with them like they're like super receptive to it um but the vast majority are extremely skeptical and you know we did like a show of hands in the audience like who has exposure via crypto fund or you know like owns crypto on the balance sheet of the pension fund or whatever maybe 10% maybe um the those people will have to chase at some point as well because like if you miss the birth of a new asset class like in you're like a strategic like you know you have like you've got like scholarships that you need to pay for and like you know people's [ __ ] pensions that you know are need to be paying like if you miss a new asset class I think you're probably you know going to get fired at some point um and

so it's just it's like it's starting to come around but these people are not like they don't even know what the price of Bitcoin is basically I I think that this is you know it it's dual wielding what you're kind of talking about V which is both on the lp perspective as well as the GP perspective if you are a crypto GP and you're underallocation to liquid crypto over the last six months it's going to be a really tough ride and if you're an LP and your job is to find new emerging alternative managers and new asset classes to to your points it's going to be a really tough ride and and you have no crypto it's going to be a really tough ride and the are you know and we've talked to a number of them um but there are a number of major uh

endowments foundations institutions that most people would know the names of who have actively said listen we're going to wait one or two fun Cycles to be able to see how this industry matures oops you know we missed 2021 but good we missed FTX like that's great and now they're coming back in so there are people who are you know re-engaging at at like a very high level and I me broadly this SM ones are the ones that are going to be the first to do so but that's kind of the other signal that I think we've been picking up as well which is the excitement around smart LPS investing in smart managers is back and I we're we're kind of at that point where it used to be like oh like gonna have to stick my

neck out at at our IC to be able to invest in this crypto manager now it's more like if we miss crypto again we're going to be in trouble you know what I think maybe just have a little bit of a concern opinion it's it's actually good that LPS take the time to build the conviction in this because the worst thing you can do like how many times have you guys seen this from retail or professional investors alike you you know you wait you don't buy during the bear it breaks out on the all-time high you finally are like all right I'm just going to close my eyes and buy and you don't build any conviction and then you buy the all-time high and just sell it as soon as it dips I mean how long does that how many times have you guys seen that play out so many

times so all the time and you know they buy eth at 4,000 then it goes to a th000 and they can't get approval for their IC to back up the truck right so and they're just sitting there with that eth it's like sucks gota help yourself and equivalently on the lp side you know for all these managers you know foundations and dallars Etc who missed funds one two and three potentially for these different uh firms it's going be hard for them to get an allocation to fund four like that that's the other sentiment too I mean if you're not in already you're going to have to build relationships and hope that you can get in inside in a size that matters for you and and so there is a risk on the El side for missing out on these you know

ups and downs as well because you haven't built relationships with managers that are going to perform totally and it's not it's not a massive world of super sophisticated managers in crypto you guys know that better than better than most there's less than a handful there's less but like what what is good is that like you know most of the fund managers that are like good are like kind of on their fourth funds now and so you have like track record and you have like you know you can tell that you know they have their reputations intact and they didn't do anything sketchy with like internal politics or Dynamics or like you know there's all these things that just over time you can get a read on um and even two years ago like remember all

the crypto funds that launched two years ago yeah like hundreds like how do you decide between those um but now it's kind of starting to shake out where just like traditional hedge funds and Ventures like you have kind of like the five or 10 name brands that are you know somewhere between like a safe Pair of Hands but also like extraordinarily risk on and and crypto saaby yeah well I mean a lot a lot of people a lot there will be some new fund managers who make their career on this cycle there'll be some some people who lose their head and blow up all the same fun stuff that happened last time I'm sure we'll we'll get another dosage of but yeah this I guess if you're especially if you've made it just I had

this conversation with a buddy of mine who he literally started at a at a protocol that you guys would know the name of two years ago right during the the absolute Peak and I've been talking to him recently he's like I'm not sure feels like we're treading go inside I was like buddy just stick it out and I saw him here yesterday and we were both like let's go and it was just a great you know you made it brother let's go you made it yeah so it's it's just nice and so if that also applies to you congratulations this is definitely the fun part so pre- rich pre Rich baby um I fell I gotta run but this was a f one cheers hey everyone Mike here if you're a bell curve listener you know that transferring assets across chains can be a massive pain I certainly do I

complain about it on this program all the time that is why we are incredibly excited to have teamed up with the Wormhole Foundation the stewards of the Wormhole protocol and the coolest part about this particular partnership is that they have made custom bell curve nfts which you can get and mint for free click the link at the bottom of this episode take you get your free [Music] nft