We Asked Haseeb Qureshi If The 'Proof of Stake' Top Is In

Transcript

And nominal yields sound good if you don't actually understand what it's doing to the underlying, right? Which is like if you're inflating 8% a year, but you're getting 8% a year in inflation, then basically you're just paying taxes. What do you think about that? Do you think it's the top of proof of stake is in? From your perspective, what are you bullish on? And what are you more bearish or more cautious about? Welcome back to the Rowup. We are your hosts. I'm Andy. I'm Robbie. And this is your home to learn from the biggest guests, the brightest minds at the tip of innovation. Our goal is to help spread the collective knowledge of everyone in our community. We are breaking crypto out of its echo chamber and taking it to the real world. Sit back, relax, and enjoy a quick word from some of our awesome partners who make

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Diversify your portfolio. All directly from your Bitcoin wallet, secured by ZK Technology. This is Asset Runes available now exclusively on Starknet. Well, let's talk crypto. See, we had um we had Tun on here yesterday and I asked him what he's bullish and bearish about. Yeah. and uh kind of like what we did at at at the dinner. And he said um he said he was he was bearish on the fact like he was bearish on staking yields and staking and proof of stake in in in the sense that the peak of staking businesses could be behind us uh from where we are today. Yeah. and and that

you know the proposal from Near and Celestia kind of moving that uh forward towards these different models and that he's actually he's bullish on a lot of that capital moving to actually wanting to be used for stable coin yields uh and and and earning yield in that way rather than doing staking yields with I guess more volatile proof of stake assets. Yeah. What do you think about that? Do you think it's the top of proof of stake is in? Um, it's pro we're probably going downhill from here because staking mania was definitely a little bit of an illusion. Like I mean there there I I was at a dinner last night where people talking about boomers love yields and like just the idea of like oh you can

make 8% on this asset great without asking what the asset is and whether the asset will go down more than 8% this year. Um, so like these are these are nominal yields, right? They're not real yields. They're nominal yields. And nominal yields sound good if you don't actually understand what it's doing to the underlying, right? Which is like if you're inflating 8% a year, but you're getting 8% a year in inflation, then basically you're just paying taxes. Yeah. Right. You're just paying taxes on 8% a year, which is tax, right? It's inefficient. And the original theory for this was that, oh, you're paying for security. And people have increasingly come to understand that this idea that you're paying for security is kind of a meme, right? like these layer ones, the thing that makes them secure is not oh, they have this this inflation rate. It's

like the robustness of the software, who the validators are. The other thing we realize with most these proof of stake networks, it's the same 12 companies that are running validators on all of these chains, right? Like we we're in a professionalized validator world, unless you're talking about Ethereum, which actually has, you know, homestakers. Every other chain, there's no home stakers. They're they're they're meaningless. So the security model is just not what we pretended it was six years ago. Yeah. When all this stuff was first getting created, right? And so as a result, it's only rational that we would be fixing this problem and moving away from this world where like right now if you're in an ETF uh and you can't stake the ETF, it's a big problem because you're getting inflated away.

And all the staking ETF, all the ETFs are like, "Oh, we want to include staking." Why? Because they understand that staking is basically risk-f free. Yeah. That they understand it's a meme and they understand it's like, "Oh, it's like a yield. you're getting, you know, nominal yield on this asset, but really it just means you're not getting diluted by the people who are staking, right? And everyone understands that. So this this kind of economic friction, I think, had to go away at some point when we realize the real way that it works. And that's what you're seeing now is that people are normalizing and saying, "Hey, you do need some amount of inflation." Yeah. But that amount of inflation is very low. So much lower than we originally claiming that it was. Um, and it's really just diluting people who are either too lazy to stake or who are

structurally incapable of staking. And that's kind of a it's just it's just not efficient. It's not fair. Yeah. So I think that the inflation stuff now is also a a result of the uh price action of a lot of uh proof proof estate chains. Yeah. And and really what that means is that you know the the unit price can go down. Yeah. But the person who's staking can still be up um because they're you know they're getting you know they're getting 10% a year or 8% a year. Even if uh the price is down less than 8% you're fine. Yeah. the person who otherwise is in an ETF and their price goes down, you know, seven, eight%, they're like, "Well, I got screwed and somebody else got got made whole for it." Uh, that is is kind of a dumb system at the end of the day if

that's all that's really happening. And then everybody's paying taxes on the whole thing, right? So, like that that that's a bad system. Um, I think at the end of the day, uh, like we're these these systems are rationalizing over time. uh Salana had this uh they had this big vote about whether or not I think it was SIMD 228 or something that was uh whether or not they were going to bring down the inflation rate very significantly but it was this very complex mechanism that had a lot of bells and whistles. I think multicoin was pushing it that one end up failing relatively narrowly. Yeah. Um but almost certainly there's going to be a second push within Salana to lower the inflation rate because everybody knows the right answer is Yeah. The right answer is much lower than where it currently exists. Yeah. Very interesting. So that's kind of that was

Terrun's answer to like bullish or bearish, right? I'm curious from your perspective, what are you bullish on and what are you more bearish or more cautious about? I mean, I'm bullish on the obvious stuff. I don't think I'm going to blow anyone's mind by saying that I'm bullish on stable coins continue to grow and getting more and more integrated into the normal financial flows in the world. Um, one area that I've been spending a lot of time on is u stable coin credit cards. There's one thing that I think uh people don't spend enough time thinking about is like how what's that like cast? Yeah. There's a bunch of them that are um basically saying so today the dominant way that people actually pay each other with stable coins is using something like Binance Pay. Yeah. Binance Pay is a

you know basically a non-custodial wallet and these non-custo wallets you you see them being adopted but mostly in places that where things are really bad. Yeah. Right. And so you see them in places like Venezuela or in places like Iran or in Turkey um where they're they're you know borderline failed states where you have very very high inflation and people are getting they're it's so bad that you're willing to adopt an entirely new application even at point of sale like merchants are saying you look you can scale this QR code pay with Binance Pay right but most places even where people want to use stable coins it hasn't reached a critical mass such that all the merchants are going to accept this right and so where do you actually get stable coins to come in in in a place where you know you're like in

um in India right where things aren't so bad that everybody's adopting stable coins but there's some people using stable coins and they're like yeah I like this because I want dollar exposure um and the only real answer is that you have to be able to piggyback on the existing rails. Yeah. Right. Now, Coinbase has a, you know, they have a credit card, but their credit card is not it's not like a stable coin credit card, right? It's like just a normal credit card. You get Bitcoin rewards. It's kind of like, you know, it's it's fine, but it's kind of like, okay, it's a different flavor on airline miles. You're just getting your cash back in something else. And, you know, it's a Bitcoin. Oh, maybe Bitcoin will go up more and you'll make your money. Yeah.

Okay, great. Fine. That's a good reward. But um these stable coin credit cards, they are what they're doing is they're literally drawing an onchain balance in stable coins the moment that you swipe your credit card. Right. Yeah. That is different. When you say drawing like minting the stable coin or borrowing against the position. No, no, no. They are drawing down against your stable coin balance. Right. So you have stable coins on chain in a wallet and when you swipe your card at point of sale, they take the stable coins out of the wallet, right? And because they're doing it in real time, you actually don't have to have stable coins. You can have whatever it is as long as they can sell it instantaneously. Yeah. And swap it out into stable coins. You can have it in Athena. You could have it, you know, in

in, you know, staked uh soul or whatever, right? You could have in a staking a staking token. Uh you can have in anything as long as you can swap it instantaneously into stables. And if that's happening at the point of O, then um at the at the credit card authorization, then you basically can have anything in your in your wallet. This translation layer I think it mirrors a lot of things that we've seen about how technologies get adopted. Okay. Right. Is that if you think about for example Apple Pay Yeah. Apple Pay now has taken over the world right in in the US uh we went from basically being all on credit cards and you know China and many other parts of the world were already on QR code payments and the US was like look we're credit cards are good enough right but we went from

basically during co from you know hunks of plastic to now it's your phone. It's just all your phone. Yeah. And why is it all your phone now? The answer is because we piggybacked on credit card rails. Yeah. Right. We we didn't reinvent the wheel and say, "Oh, there's a new thing that all merchants integrate and now you can incorporate Apple Apple Pay and and Google Pay and all this stuff." It's like, "No, we just piggyback on credit card rails." And that answer is how actually a lot of technology ends up getting moved forward is that we're not going to go into a new stable coin stack. is that instead we're going to just use the rails we already have and kind of adapt the systems that we've built. So you get both you get both onchain balances in anything in real time programmatic but when you're

buying stuff you just you know you tap your thing and it it all works. So if you're Mastercard or Visa and you're looking at the stable coin adoption that's happening are you thinking to yourself oh these guys could eat my lunch or are you thinking these guys are going to build on top of my existing stake? So you're saying is that I better make it that these people can build on top of my stack cuz if I don't let them then they're going to go around me and then I'm really in trouble right they might disrupt my monopoly if they feel like they have to in order to get adoption but if they feel like the fastest path to getting integrated everywhere same thing like imagine that uh Visa had said Apple we're not going to work with you screw you we don't want people moving away from credit cards

right and you're on your own okay if they done that then Apple would have said all right we got to build our own system we got to get merchants on the other side to to be willing to accept Apple Pay because Visa and Mastercard are cutting us out. Yeah. Right. Well, what what they said they did is they cut a deal and Apple gets 50% of the interchange on what they get to Visa. Now, Google Pay actually has a much lower uh split that they get with with uh with the their credit card uh uh providers because they they don't have as high value high value clients, right? Apple is known as being the premium product. there's a lot more spend there and so they were able to go first and scare them and say if you don't cut this deal with us we're going to go build our

own network right so the stable coins are now in a similar position is that they realize like look um right now bridge is doing this uh there's another company called Rain that's doing this uh there's a lot more players as you mentioned uh uh even Marqueta which is a traditional payments company is getting into this game of issuing these stable coin credit cards um and increasingly I'm I'm I I believe that it's going to look more like Apple Pay and Google Pay is that it's going to ride on the same rails because it's the fastest way to get to global adoption. Yeah. And at the end of the day, that's all we really care about, right? Um it's very likely that again this stuff is going to introduce more competition, but um like the the the reality is that that last mile of how do you actually get this

onto the merchant? How do you actually get, you know, Old Navy to take payments in this thing or like everybody in the world? It might be that okay, they all integrate Coinbased commerce or whatever. Yeah. But an even easier way is that you just have a stable coin balance that's connected to a credit card. Yeah. You know what's uh kind of weird though is I was talking to Robbie from your team and he was quite bearish on domestic US payments. So I I'm I'm largely agreeing with that. Okay. I think domestic US payments getting on these rail is going to be very very slow because I mean look you guys are American. I'm American. Like I'm not going to use these cards, right? Why?

Because I have money in a bank account anyway. Yeah. And like I I can use that and I'm getting credit, right? Most of these things actually there's no credit extension at all. Right? You're not actually getting credit. Right. That's it's basically like a credit card is the form factor, but really it's more like a debit card, right? It's basically like more of a charge card type like actual mechanic. Right. Right. So, um now the reality is that if you're using stable coins in emerging economies around the world, that's that's alone is great. Like I'm totally fine with that. Um credit extension is not where these things are going to shine because I don't actually know if you're creditw worthy by looking at your balance on chain, right? But I do know how much money you have and I can let you spend that money in real time. Yeah. Right.

That mechanism and a lot of what credit cards do is of course there's more than that. There's chargebacks and all this other stuff. Um so there's there's a lot of stuff the credit cards do but they they solve this payments problem. Uh but they don't solve the credit extension problem which that has to get solved another layer and we're not there yet. Yeah. With respect to you know actually getting crypto payments incorporated with credit. Yeah. One one more reason I've seen at least from a narrative perspective that these companies are are starting to think about either issuing their own stable coins or adopting stable coins for themselves is to lower their cost of settlement. But again, if they're just doing the the settlement on top of existing credit card rails, are they not still do they do they not still need to pay those fees even if it's

using a scable coin or is or is this sort of setting the scene for some sort of deal where they're able to start to split some of those costs and earn back some of those 3% credit card processing fees? So I so first of all say I'm not an expert on exactly how the fees break down with respect to stable coin settlement versus dollar settlement. Uh a lot of the a lot of the big question is can you settle directly with Visa or Mastercard in stables versus having to do that last leg of getting the stables out and back into fiat. Uh Visa is starting to do these pilots where they're allowing people to settle directly with Visaet in stables. Most people are not on this yet. So most people are still settling with fiat uh which is actually much less capital efficient because you have to go and you

know ping circle turn the USC back you know pay the 30 bips that you have to actually get. there's some latency there and actually getting that thing to get out and then go settle with Visa. So that that's actually a much worse um uh flow if you have to do that. But if the credit card systems are willing to take settlement in stables, then all of a sudden settlement is basically instantaneous. Yeah. Right. Um they're starting to get there. Visa is probably a step ahead relative to Mastercard on that, but they're both they both see the writing on the walls that they have to get there given what this the noises this administration is making, right? about wanting to allow stable coins to be treated on par with other forms of payments. Um, at the end of the day, like the the Visa system uh of charging

30 bips, they charge those 30 bips to the merchant, right? Uh uh uh that uh sorry, not 30 bips, obviously more than 30 bips. U they charge to the merchant. That's going to continue to happen, right? Because the end of the day, the merchant is the one if you're Visa, you have the merchant by the balls. Yeah. Right. I don't know if you're allowed to say that on this podcast, but I say say, right? And uh that that that doesn't change whether it's stable coins or not. Yeah. Right. If you have a supply side or merchant side monopoly, you're going to be able to squeeze them and say, "Look, these people are not going to trust you unless they have the ability to do chargebacks." Yes. A a stable coin credit card still has the ability to do chargebacks. It does, right? Because you can say, "Look, this guy defrauded me. I

want my money back." And Visa will say, "Okay, this guy defrauded you." They do the, you know, dispute window. D the whole thing happens and you can still do a chargeback. So um at the end of the day that is what you are like look if you want to take a Visa credit card the thing that you are guaranteed as a merchant is that Visa like you will get paid right as long as you provide your goods and services. Um and that policing job is the job that Visa is getting paid for. Um everything becomes more capital efficient and the FX costs go down if you can get stuff uh in stable coins directly. Um and the um you know the the the card programs the people who are actually making these cards they don't have to have as much cash up front. Yes.

If everything is being settled instantaneously and that gets passed on to the customers as well. Yes. Still not still not credit but but you know Yeah. It's a better system. Exactly. Innovating finance global institutional and onchain. Deep liquidity to drive capital efficiency. out. Maximize yields on institutionalgrade liquid staking with M. Unlock trillion dollars of capital via F Bitcoin. All of this secured by Mantle's treasury of billions in stables and ETH capital pools. This entire ecosystem is coordinated by a vast network of seasoned VCs that are aiming to create

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yield when you can be lazy? Start earning now at summer.fi, five, the home of the lazy summer protocol. So, I have this ever growing thesis that this type of matter that we're discussing here, very intricate financial uh conversation with regards to intersecting with the real world or traditional assets, stable coins, dollars, credit cards, RWA it that's like increasingly going to be a very very hot investable category from VC, from liquid, etc. And then I I am ever growing that on the other side completely on the other side $10 million FTV rounds the latest spin on prediction markets with like a a DGEN twist or like a you know this application with like a

little bit of extra sauce and like very very early stuff are like increasingly going to be more and more in demand and like wanting to be like invested in by most VCs and a lot of like the like the middle stuff like the L1's the L2 the infra the, you know, next DeFi app, the like these things are kind of like are almost not really that appealing uh from a investing perspective. If if if this is the case, I'm curious if you think I'm just full of it or or if this is what you're seeing. Like there's going to be two camps of of investors that go and and win these two categories in a big way. And I think it's going to leave a lot of investors kind of in the middle, not able to like

really capitalize on either that well because they they they're just not that far on the on that end of the spectrum. Yeah. So, so I don't know if this is Yeah. Let me make sure I understand your question. So, you're saying on one poll there's the fintechy stuff, super fintechy, super fintechy, and then the other side there's the applications that are more consumerf facing, super consumer and then the the sort of the lonely middle is the infra stuff. Infra and is traditional apps, traditional ideas. It's like very novel interesting consumer stuff. Yeah. And then like very like gigab brain fintech like you got to understand how payment networks work in in the real world and like everything else is just kind of like Yeah. Yeah. So I think this is a little bit too strong

of a claim. So here's why I think that. Um, first and foremost, it's always been true that with every passing year, there's been fewer and fewer infra investments. I think most people don't perceive this. They think that like infra somehow has been accelerating, but it's the opposite. Infra has been decelerating in that, you know, if you look at dragonfly vintages. In our fund one, we probably did like, you know, 11 12 layer ones. In our that was like 2018 vintage. Uh, in our fun two, we probably did like six. In our fun three, I think we did three. Yeah. And this fun we haven't done any so far. Maybe we did one. Yeah. Um and the reality is that with every passing vig that's not surprising is that the infrastructure stabilizes over time and we're seeing that stabilization start to happen. Now

that being said, infra is still unequivocally the biggest category. It is the biggest category, right? What are the biggest outcomes in crypto? Bigger than Circle, bigger than Coinbase is Salana, is Ethereum. These are the biggest games that there are to play. period. That being said, it's really [ __ ] hard to play this game and you have to be really, really good and you have to have a unique idea and unique angle of attack and very few people have that. Yeah. But what I also believe is that we're not done. Right. It's not true that in the year 2020 we figured out everything we would ever need to figure out about how blockchains need to get built. Right? There will be more.

Now, will there be, you know, 50 of these? No. Will there be five? Maybe maybe not even five. Maybe there's only one or two more that are going to matter that are ever going to get built. But as VCs, we're on the lookout for one those one or two things that will matter because when they do matter, they will be absolutely enormous. Yeah. Okay. At the end of the day, scaling blockchains is fundamentally one of the biggest problems in the industry period. Yeah. That's true for Salana. It's true for Ethereum. It's true for rollups. It's true for everything. Right. We still do not have enough block space to do this stuff at scale. Yeah. I don't care whether you're Salana or you're anybody.

Everybody knows that we don't have enough block space and everybody needs more scale. Yeah. So that's why I say um infrastructure still matters. Yeah. Um second there's a lot of stuff I think that that falls in the infrastructure sphere. Now look, there was an overbuild of things like you know me infra or all this kind of like really highdimensional ZK something something something. um that stuff people realize now demand isn't there and the problems that they're solving are too esoteric or just not important enough to really warrant uh a lot more investment but there's still going to be a lot more that happens as we see what happens especially in the in the field of AI that starts to intersect with crypto and

you and I have talked about this previously um both offline and and and on the rollup is that um when that tech is ready when the the AI side is actually strong enough. There's going to be an absolute explosion in what gets built at the infrastructure layer um in retooling how everything in blockchain works. But that that's going to take some time and that investment is not going to happen right now necessarily because um the the prerequisites for it aren't necessarily here yet. But when that happens, there's going to be a lot of infrastructure investment to be done in that space. I recall this this mental image of the the dog wagging the tail or the tail wagging the

dog. And I think you put this into perspective when it comes to crypto and AI. I think this might have been the last time you were on the rollup. At least I heard you on the roll up and that that was maybe few months ago, maybe even six months ago. And so I'm curious with recent developments in both crypto and AI, has your perspective changed? Do you think you know back then it was very much so that you know it was sort of an open question right which one is wagging the other. Have we do we have a definitive answer now? Nope. No. It's still just too early to tell. Yeah. The reality is that um everybody wants the space to move really fast. Chad GBT was now uh what is that two two and a half years ago? Yeah. Two and a half years

ago was the Chag moment. Um, everybody at that time, and I was among them, was like, "Humanity is cooked. Unemployment is going to rise to like 15%. Uh, the entire economy is going to be transformed and unrecognizable." Yeah. Here we are, record low unemployment. Nothing has really happened. Nope. Right. AI writes my emails. That's it. You know, like few people have AI girlfriends, but beyond that, like the world is kind of the same. I mean, I'm looking around like the world's kind of the same. Yeah. So things um you know the thing that they say over and over again in Silicon Valley and like I uh you know especially being in crypto like I used to laugh at this and now I believe it more and more every single passing year. The old saying in Silicon

Valley is people overestimate what can happen in two years and underestimate what happens in 10. Yeah. And with AI I was extremely guilty of this. Yeah. And I think probably most of us were uh is that it's really hard to change the fundamentals of how the world is is operating. And that's true in crypto too. Yeah. Right. Like I was telling a big story about stable coins in 2018. Yeah man. I was talking about how stable coins are going to change the world change international payments. World is going to be unrecognizable. Currencies are going to collapse. Blah blah blah. 2025. Took a long time. We're just getting start. We're just getting started. And look it will happen. The time frame two to 10. That's true.

That's true. So it will happen but it takes time. Yeah. It takes time. And as an investor, I mean, one of the lessons that I've had internalized is shut the [ __ ] up, learn to be patient. Yeah. Because look, everything, you know, Mark Andre used to say this about uh the.com bubble is that, you know, when they were taking pitches during the dotcom bubble and everybody was super excited and people were so convinced the internet was going to change everything. And what he says was that, you know, almost every single pitch that we got, almost all those companies failed. But the other thing he says is that almost every single thing that they told us in those pitches that the internet was going to do eventually happened.

Almost everything they said was going to happen did happen, but it took a lot longer than they thought it would. So the these companies were just they were right, but they were too early. They were too early. They weren't the ones to make it happen. So whether it's, you know, Chewy, which became Pets.com, or you know, Web Van, which became Instacart, almost every single idea eventually happened. Yeah. But anyhow, people saying, "Oh, you're gonna buy everything online." It's like, "Well, [ __ ] it. Here we are." Yeah. So, the lesson to to draw here is stay patient and survive. Yeah, that's right. I'd like to go through some of your uh predictions from this year, actually.

Okay. Uh we got a couple been pulled up here. Oh, good. Oh, it's only half the way through the year. You can't call me on this yet. But we need like a little bit of an update as do the update. Now, the update. How you think the halfway mark here? Okay. All right. Halfway mark. It's actually pretty much perfectly halfway through the year. First one, L1's, L2s, the distinction, the distinction between them is collapsing. Your prediction was effectively that um you know that they will kind of consider to or they will continue to collapse and they just kind of be known as like chains, but the blockchain landscape L1's L2s combined is overcrowded and due for a shakeout.

The consolidation will be less about technical superiority, be more about having a unique niche and building stickiness through GTM. I do think that's pretty good. Okay. Pretty well. Like you look at you I mean base hyperlquid salana. Uh yeah I've got monad and barachchain on here. Monet hasn't launched. Barachchain's kind of struggling. Um but otherwise you know name me a chain that is I mean aptto um couple these other kind of lines story came about. Yeah. Yeah. Like tell me a chain that is like that you know like yeah know you know the other thing the other thing about it that I think

has also aged well is that there are all these new chains that are launching and people don't ask are they L1's or L2s anymore. No, right. They just know they're chains right. So like is Hyperl an L1 or an L2? Nobody really cares. Converge. Um, you know, does anyone know? Like, do you know at top of your head? Is Plasma an L1 or L2? Yeah. I mean, I know it's an L1 cuz we invested. But like, okay, there you go. Yeah. But like, yeah, if somebody didn't know, they would be like, oh, it's a chain. I don't know if it's L1 or L2. Doesn't really matter. Like, matter. Doesn't really matter. And I think that I think it's part of like the L1 premium thing that people have been discussing with regards to that kind of losing its it. I I think that I think that that is going

away. And there's a um a premium on chains that people care about that matter. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see how it pans out. All right. With a unique niche and go to market. Yeah. Next one is uh token launches. Uh everyone doing huge air drops via points programs is over uh moving to two track. Track one KPIs. Northstar metric farm it be transparent about it. Track two, uh, smaller airdrops to reward social contributions, but the the majority will get distributed via crowdfunding.

Um, meme coins will continue to lose market share to AI agent coins. Uh, migration from nihilism to over optimism. Uh, you're coining that one. That was quite wrong. I would say I it looked really good in January and then it went straight downhill. But hey, there's still time. There's still time. There is there is there still time. So, as far as token launches go, I feel like uh you may have underestimated the the amount of infoi Kaido uh uh you know, things that were going to happen. But I think that maybe is with like it's kind of a KPI. It's kind of a social it's kind of in the middle of your two predictions. is like yapping talking about the the project allocating uh you know.5 bips or or half percent or

whatever it is. So I you're you know there's a social air drop but I think they're becoming bigger than I originally anticipated they would. Yeah. And Kaido has just completely taken over every pret more or less. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it does feel like Kaido is running away with it in the in the in the airdrop meta. Um but the thing about the airdrop meta is it never stands still. It always keeps evolving. But I think you're right about huge points programs and distributing out a ton a ton of supply. It's like tell me one token that has launched in the last three months that has had this massive points program leading to an airdrop.

Yeah. I can't think of one. Yeah. Can you guys I mean pump Fund is going to launch. We don't know exactly. That's this crowdunding thing that Right. Right. That is more the crowdfunding. So that might have a large airdrop but not via points program. Right. Yeah. Point. I I'm curious because you mentioned on the meme coins one, right? like the shift from uh from memecoins to AI agent coins hasn't right but you said there's still time and so I'm curious like virtual has made a little bit of a comeback you know genesis things yeah yeah yeah sort of winking back into into you know page one so so for this to come true over the next six months what would have to happen what do you think that could look like look I don't know I mean the the latter part of my predictions is

all that AI agent coins are cooked anyway but I think it's like a a short-term um mania And I think in many ways I was surprised at how quickly it receded. But it does seem to be getting back in the limelight. And look, I think I think the main thing once AI agents really start to work right, not just chat bots and you know like year 10ear thing maybe. But I think when you start to see uh AI agents doing things, right, and really taking on more agency in a more meaningful way, people will find a way to attach meme coins to that. Yeah. Right. Right. At the end of the day, what people find captivating is things that are new and surprising, right? Um once AI agents are able to start surprising people again, things that they're not today, I think you will

see a memecoin resurgence around those. Yeah, you're completely right. Like like they tweeted like they started tweeting and that was like surprising. It was like wow, it's kind of like a sentient Twitter bot. It's like not just like a normal bot. It's but that was shocking. Yeah. And then Yeah. So like whatever's the next thing that people are like wow that's exciting. Exactly. speculation just follows that. That's right. That's right. Next one is regulation. Stable coin legislation passes. Um, pass in the Senate, right? It has halfway there. Um, under Trump, Fortune 100 companies would be more willing to offer crypto to consumers, more risk appetite. Um, ex aggressive expansion of crypto integration into web two platforms.

Pretty good. Moving number four is pretty good. AI agent craze. Um, these things are not really agents. Of course, I actually quote this one, like a screenshot recently, and I was like, "Yeah, this is spot on." Like, I think it was, uh, this this novelty just dies out. People are pissed off. You're you put out a tweet, you've got 30 people commenting, and it's bots, 30 accounts. Yep. It's It's no fun. Yeah. Um, this is a long one, so I Yeah, but we'll see how that goes out. actual crypto times AI uh autonomous agents will use crypto to pay each other. AI agents are will start to fall deeper into this category, right? As the surprise factor

comes back and the more legitimate ones continue to rise. Yep. We'll we'll move the AI agent category into this actual crypto AI category. I'd say you're looking like 50/50 right now. Okay. What? Well, how about a six? All right. All right. Is there 50 cy? Oh, I ref I think review the video. When's L2's token launches got stable current? All right. Yeah. Yeah. All right. 50/50. Can you believe this guy? Like six months through the year. So, yeah. Couple what are your uh give us two or three predictions for now to the end of the year. Right. You're making do this. Um do you have any? No, not really. Like I look I I think it's um I think it's weird that we've seen so much malaise in

the cryptonative market. Okay. and all this mania in public equities. Yeah, man. Right. I've never seen this before in my career. Dislocated. It's very weird, right? It's like all the craziness that was buying Celestia before is now buying circle stock, right? And I think what we will see is that at some point it's going to reverse, but I don't know when. I don't know if it happens this year. I don't know if it happens in a year, in a year and a half, but like there will be something that just like kicks the fire off and things start to move again on the crypto side. Uh but I don't know when it is. Like when I talk to people, I don't think it's just lower rates, right? It's never just one thing. It's always like, you know, there's some story. Rates aren't a story. Rates are a

mechanical thing, right? But like there has to be some, you know, I don't know, some some, you know, Fortune50 company decides to do a thing and it like just goes crazy or something or Taylor Swift is like, hey, I love, you know, [ __ ] meme coins or something. And uh it just like reanimates the culture around something. The culture does feel like tired. feels just like it feels exhausting. Yeah. And to be clear, like that's important. Yeah. It's important that that happens because you have to shake people out first. Yeah. Right. Before you have to like kind of burn um you know the deadwood on the floor of the forest before you can actually start to to rebuild something of real energy and excitement. Yeah. Right. So, but one thing um so actually I remember I was I talked about this on my panel. Um so you

posted a while back like hey uh how long do you guys think the the revenue meta is going to go? And everybody was dunking on you and everybody was dunking destroying me. Yeah, they were destroying you in the comments of like you [ __ ] idiot obviously forever. It's never it never the revenue meta is never going away. And I think that u it's it's a cute answer, but I think this is wrong. Okay, I think it's actually wrong. I don't think the revenue meta is never going away. Like obviously revenue will always matter in some obvious sense, but like what it's obviously true for many assets, circle being one of them, right? That people do not focus so much on revenue as they focus on stories. Right? Why? What what what makes a difference? The answer is optimism. If you are optimistic about what is coming in the future, about the

growth of this asset that you're going to focus more on growth Yeah. and less on revenue on the here and now and less on revenue. Right. If if your focus is entirely on revenue, what that means is that I don't think you're going to grow. Yeah. It means that I think basically you've topped out. These are all the people are going to be on chain. These are all the things you're going to do on chain. Right. Like that's what people believe when they say the only that matters is revenue. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I think that will change, but we're not ready for it right now because nobody believes any of that. Yeah. Nobody believes that there's going to be more stuff on chain. They basically believe that onchain is cooked. This is it. It's just a big casino and I don't believe that. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So, but the

market doesn't agree with me. And like the answer is like look, I think I can outlast the market. Yeah. I mean, if you look at any asset, right, especially like equities, you you're looking at future projected cash flows always. You're always looking ahead. Exactly. And and Yeah. like the revenue stuff makes it feel like you're just looking at all right what did you do last month it's like looking backwards more so right open AI right now is making you know a few billion dollars their market cap is in what 350 billion or whatever their last round was and um why is it so high this is because people believe that they're going to make a lot more money in the future obviously because they believe in growth yeah man it's been an absolute pleasure chatting man always thanks for joining thanks for having me it's always a

pleasure