122. Christmas Special with Tapping Into Crypto: Wins, Losses, and Projections

G', day, guys. Welcome back to a very special episode. I guess we'll call this a bit of a collaboration episode between Tap Into Crypto and the Ben and Bergs podcast.

Two of the greats.

Two of the greats. Yeah. Two of the biggest out there. So by my side I've got the great man, Pav Hundale, and sitting, you know, comfortably over in Melbourne is the great Ben Simpson. Ben, how you doing, mate?

Thanks, guys. I'm doing good. I've lost my right arm today. Burks is crossing crook, so just going to be me coming in from the pods. It's just the Ben show today, unfortunately, but great to be you guys and what a way to round out the end.

We'll, we'll sort out another episode soon.

Yeah, absolutely.

Redemption.

Yeah, for sure. So we'll post this, this episode on both our channels. For anyone that doesn't know Tam Crypto, we're a swiftex sponsored podcast. Pav and I are both swiftex employees and we like to touch on, you know, market news insights. You know, we'd like to throw a bit of banter, have a bit of fun. Pretty similar to what you guys do over there at bennetbergs.

Yeah, no, we, we love the relationship we've had with you guys for a long time now. So, yeah, for the Bennett Bergs fans that are unfamiliar, SwiftX is one of the biggest exchanges here in Australia. We provide some research to some of their users over on the swyftx Analysis and Learn platform. And we really love the partnership that we've had and definitely go check those guys out if you're looking for a new exchange or, or looking to switch. But yeah, it's been, it's been a big year, boys. Lots of things happened. So keen to dive into the year that was, yeah, huge year.

Where do we even start?

Huge year. So, yeah, we'll, we'll try and wrap up 2023 in crypto as a whole. Starting off with some of the bigger headlines. Pav, what do you think was the biggest headline of this year?

I think just overall, the bare market.

Right.

Like at start of this year, everyone was still pretty elated thinking, oh, yeah, 100K Bitcoin, let's go. Like, oh, it's got pretty sick just hearing that. Constantly being rammed down everyone's throats. I don't know about you, Ben. But then, yeah, I don't know what it was. I guess the. It was. It probably took the ftx. Not the ftx, I don't know. Yeah, where am I going with this?

Don't know.

Yeah, no, I feel I'm in the wrong year.

2022.

Yeah.

Mate, you need to get with the time.

We're gonna have to edit that out.

No, we're keeping in.

That's what happens when you go to sleep at 2:00am oh, my God.

Do that. Do you want to get this back on track?

Hey, I don't know all right.

Anymore.

Okay.

I mean, yeah, like huge headlines to. To kind of name drop a couple. Obviously we had the. The Ripple win versus sec. Pretty much a majority win there. XRP declared not a security by the courts over in the US So saw a huge jump in the price of xrp, I think was a pretty bullish catalyst for the time. And yeah, kind of was a big blow to the SEC and Gary Gensler. So I think for anyone, you know, native to the crypto market and enthusiastic about crypto, that was a pretty big win.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

I guess a big one for me was the whole Binance saga. I mean, that's been sort of tricking along for many years now. But I mean, we've got a. I guess a. I don't know if. Do you put a bow on it now? CZ's sort of left. They've been handed down a pretty massive fine. Department of justice have done their thing in the U.S. i don't know. For me, I guess that was a pretty big standout. And that was pretty recent, I guess, but it's been carrying out for the last couple of months.

From a collective shift standpoint, what was kind of the biggest engagement in terms of a news piece on your platform?

Yeah, it's interesting. I think the year. The sort of the trend of the year was more of like a clean cleanup year, you know, getting rid of, you know, all the bad boys of crypto. And I'm sure we'll touch on it, but, you know, like you said, have the FTX stuff coming to somewhat of a conclusion with sbf, you know, being found guilty in court. You know, the terror founder Do Kwon that was arrested and extradited. You know, Alex Mashinsky now arrested from Celsius 3ac founder Zhu Su was arrested, and then obviously the Binance and CZ settlement. So, like, it was just a year of cleaning up all the crap, really, from the past sort of 24 months cleaning out the industry, which I think was needed. And heading into 2024, probably really good timing just to leave the role in the past so we can sort of move forward as an industry.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think we. We needed that cleanup. But despite all that, you know, I think Bitcoin's up 150% since the beginning of the year, so really looking nicely heading into 2024. So, yeah, I mean, and we've had some bullish stories as well. Like, it's not just been that, those cleanup stories. We've had, you know, PayPal launch their own stablecoin web two company jumping into the industry. What else? We had Coinbase. They launched their own Layer two. I think that was the first of its kind, like a, you know, a centralized exchange. One of the bigger ones, you know, launching a Layer two. We've seen Binance launch the marching, stuff like that. But Layer twos were a bit of a hot trend this year and they launched Base, which had a fairly big opening month or opening two months and a lot of meme tokens and a lot of action there. I think it's kind of died down since. But it'll be interesting to see how that goes in 2024.

I think a big one for me too. In the same vein of Coinbase and getting out the bad actors, a lot of talk around the whole regulation piece. Finally squaring away, hopeful. At least something landing for every consumer out there in 2024. At least somewhere the UK seems to still be ahead. Australia is not doing too bad, but we'll see what happens next year. But that's been a pretty big standout, too.

Yeah, for sure.

And I think 2023 will be looked at historically as probably one of the best times to have accumulated bitcoin and some of your top assets with the tightening of the Fed over the last couple of years. Know, bitcoin really had that, that big retracement and so did the market. Things are pretty boring there for a year or two. You know, as much as we can push the research and push the. The narrative that, hey, this is a great time to buy. The reality is most people aren't interested in a bear market. And I think we'll look back, you know, running from 16,000. You know, about 12 months ago, we hit 16,000 around early December 2022, and, and now up to sort of, you know, in the, in the 40000s at the time of recording, like, you know, what a time to accumulate bitcoin. And I think 2024 is just now going to build upon that as people get back. And even the Fed recently, where they've sort of come out and said that we might be the end of the tightening and it might be starting to potentially loosen up, which is just a massive catalyst for growth.

Yeah, I mean, everyone always talks about like, you know, the bitcoin millionaires and the crypto millionaires and like, oh, I should have got back in when they did. I think last two years has been, you know, we're going to see a lot of. We're going to see a few millionaires pop up next year and they're going to say, you know, how it happened. And it's like, I'll keep you.

I'll keep you grounded. Ted.

My, my biggest bet for 2024 is that Pav owns three yachts by.

The end of the year.

So have my bi Swift X. I just, I just hope that he invites me on board you.

I want it.

Cool. Well, we kind of wanted to have a bit of fun with this episode and kind of look back at 2023 and name some of our, you know, our favorite projects and we're going to call this the MVP for 2023. So Ben, did you want to kick us off with what was your biggest project for the year?

Yeah, I had Arbitrum as one. I think just the Layer two, Layer three space has just been massive this year. Obviously had a great airdrop, you know, the TVL. I think we're at 2.3 billion TVL and just really tapping into the scaling of Ethereum in Q1. It's going through another big upgrade, the Dan Cancun upgrade on Dan. Can I kind of pronounce it? But yeah, they're going through a big upgrade in Q1 and this is going to make the layer two, you know, ecosystem, you know, even greater. So I think Arbitrum and you know, a couple of other Layer twos have been, you know, phenomenal this year.

Yeah, nice, I guess. Me, I think Chainlink's been a standout. I mean fundamentally and technically I'm definitely more on the technical sort of ship. But massive accumulation range, which was probably one of the first ones to break and blow up out of the altcoins at the start of the 2023 run. But I mean fundamentally it's. It's making partners left, right and center. Like we've talked about partnerships that seem more for show, but this is actually seems like purposeful partnerships for real world asset tokenization, working with the likes of Blackrock and even on in our shores Nab and Anz to launch those sort of stable coins. So what they dubbed their cross chain interoperability upgrade, that seems to be something that everyone's biting at at an institutional and technical level on a Highest, high level, so above our pay grades. But I think that's been a standout because the one thing we've always talked about, crypto is great, great idea. How do we actually use this bad boy? So I feel like they're making the biggest sort of gains from my perspective, fundamentally.

Yeah, absolutely. I, I couldn't agree more. Arbitrum, obviously the layer two narrative has been huge this year. Arbitrum had their airdrop and, and token wise it hasn't done huge gains. But I think, yeah, they started off with the bang. Yeah, start off as a bang. Kind of plateaued since then. But yeah, I think in terms of the, the project and the network itself doing massive things over there. Arbitrum being the biggest layer 2 by total value locked and things like that. Pavlov chain link. Interesting one. I don't, I think you're dead wrong there.

Yeah. So both good choices. I think it's tough to go past Solana this year. Yeah, it's a bit of an obvious one, but obviously after everything that went down with FTX and Solana got pretty ruined in that people thought it was never going to come back. And then to come, you know, from the ashes to where it is today to be like, you know, top five, top six tokens. I think it's done 10x since the start of the year. Like if you're looking at, you know, the top 50, top hundred, it's, it's gotta be the best performing in terms of roi, in terms of like the tech. It's, it's had zero outages. Something that was a, was, you know, pretty major flaw at Solana. Everyone was looking at Solana before everything went down. It was like the kind of golden child. But that was the one caveat that was like, it's, you know, its outages, its downtime was the major issue.

Yeah.

No downtime this year despite, you know, growth in ecosystem and things like that. So massive move forward there for Solana. We spoke about it on our, on our podcast this week. There's the overtaking Ethereum in Dex volumes and NFT trading volumes.

Yep.

So like temporarily but still a milestone.

That's a pretty big thing from a community perspective. That's where the people are.

Absolutely. And I think people saw like Ethereum is like untouchable from one's point of view. So the fact that it's done that, you know, albeit temporarily, it's, it's still pretty, pretty huge news. And then lastly, like the partnerships. Right. Partnerships is one of those things that can be, you know, From a retail perspective, quantified quite easily, where they see value in it, because they see brands that they know and they trust and they're partnering with these crypto brands like the likes of Solana and Chainlink and things like that, and they see that and be like, okay, that they. If they trust them, I can trust them too. So in terms of partnerships, we saw Visa facilitating stablecoin settlements on Visa. They're partnering with Solana for that. Shopify, Stripe, Meta, Google, major names, major web two brands there. So, yeah, I mean, that's my pick for the year.

Yeah, I think now that. Ted, I think Solana has been a great one. We sort of put out a little bit of research earlier in the year around Tao. A lot of the on chain movements versus the price hadn't really accounted for that deep of a correction. I mean, Solana really got hit. I think it just got bundled in with the FTX sort of narrative. It was sort of known there for a little while. It was like the FTX coin, so everyone was just getting the hell out. And obviously it had a lot of the problems with its uptime on the platform. But then when it went through the Fire Dancer upgrade and then, yeah, as you said, Ted, all the partnerships and things that have sort of come, come back. Solana's definitely had the layer one narrative now for the last few months. I think that will change next year when Ethereum sort of comes back in the limelight with the upgrades. But that still doesn't take away from Solana's growth. And I think Solana is definitely much here to stay. And even like the, the recent airdrops and new things that are happening on Solana, you know, with the, the new phone they're launching, you know, There was the G2 airdrop recently. We just went gangbusters like it. You know, it's got a lot of, you know, retail interest back and excited about the platforms. They've done a great job turning that around this year.

Couldn't agree more.

Yeah, and I think the fact like each, each one of those tokens are arbitrarium Solana Chainlink, like the fact that They've had really strong 2022s and 23s or 23 in this perspective means, you know, it's positive signs moving forward into the next cycle momentum. Yeah, absolutely.

Cool guys. So the next kind of segment we want to touch on is the rookie project or up and comer of the year. Pav, did you want to get us started off here?

Yeah, this is. I don't have a good think about this one, but I really like sei. Sei, Yep. So I think this is my sort of forecast for what's coming. I feel like the next like we, we saw the theme being layer twos in 2023, I think in 2024 to be parallel settlements, these parallel blockchains. So long story short, allowing transactions to settle in multiple instances through a single transaction. So that's how we're going to bridge something. Like we talk about Ethereum, we talk about Solana. Well, what if there was something that actually brought the two together? So I think that'll be a big play and that's why I'm sort of looking at SEI probably and it's been a top performer in the recent last couple of weeks, last couple of months. The massive, massive investment from some pretty big VCs like Circle, you know, Coinbase is in there, Jump, crypto, GSR, Delphi Digital. So for me I like that too.

And yeah, I just, I think it's a good way of taking the current momentum that's sort of propagating through the layer 1 space at the moment and showing about how that tech can be made better. And that's kind of what I like to see. So. And I think it's early days too for that narrative as well. So that's something I'm kind of looking at as a bit of a rookie.

Yep, nice have. Yeah, that backing that's got some big names behind it. When you look at Circle, Coinbase, junk crypto like you know, your eyes sort of light up when you see something like that back from those places especially you know, in the last couple of years. So mine's a project that just full disclosure, I own. It's called Maple, Maple Finance. The tick is mpl. It's a decentralized like Defi marketplace for institutions to get access to capital. So actually originally based out of Sydney, the founder Sid is based out of Sydney, went live back on Ethereum in May 2021 and initially was really focusing on under collateralized on chain lending. Then we came into the defi winter and everything basically died in the defi space and they sort of pivoted and went towards over collateralized lending and real world assets starting with US Treasuries. So I think the real world assets trend and narrative is going to be a really big one over the next couple of years. And now Maple, that's lasted through the defi bear market, a lot of its competitors are no longer there. They've got a really great TVO I think across chain. I'm not sure where it's up to at the moment but they're on Ethereum, they're on Solana and Base as well. So yeah, what I like about these guys is they're not completely decentralized. They have a centralization mechanism where they're actually looking and cross checking their lenders as well which kind of kept them out of the waters in the bear market. So they're not only servicing a web 3 demographic but a web 2 demographic as well. So yeah, been a long term holder of this one. It's done really well this year, up about 300% since July when we shared we invested into it and yeah, I think it's going to be a good market leader for the years to come.

Yeah. Awesome. I actually had a brief chat with Sid, the founder of Maple, but I wouldn't say I'm an expert on the project at all by any means. Do they have any major competitors in the space? Because it kind of sounds like it's, it's a new, you know, sort of project idea, that sort of thing.

Yeah, right now not, not that many at all. But Coinbase's new institutional lending arm I think is going to be the biggest sort of competitor to come into the market. It's not exactly a like for like, but I think Coinbase Credit are going to try and capture that lending and borrowing activity and giving their credibility. I think they're going to, you know, probably have a pretty good decent chance of grabbing some market share. But you know, Maple, the where it is at the moment in terms of having a sort of three, four year head start, I think it's, it's got some, you know, got some firepower about it.

Is there anything that Coinbase isn't doing at the moment? Far out.

Yeah. They're getting into like remittance and everything. Right.

They got fingers in pies.

They do lots of pies.

A good way to put it.

Cool. I, I'll quickly touch on mine. Mine Celestia Ticker is tia. I actually came across this originally going through collective shifts, research content. So this is before the Token actually launched and the main net went live and that you guys were covering off on on some of like the, the unreleased projects that you keep an eye on and so that's kind of first where I came about it and then, yeah, since then like the mainnet went live, Token went live listed on all major exchanges and it's, it's just done huge things and then there's been this big focus on its modular sort of architecture, which splits up the core functions of a blockchain as opposed to like Solana, which is, I think, monolithic. Correct me if I'm wrong, Ben, but which kind of does everything itself. So it's kind of. It does like, I guess you could say it outsources different functions of the blockchain for more efficiency, scalability, you know, all the above buzzwords. But yeah, like, tier, I think it's done, you know, it's done 500% since the airdrop, so people who got in early did incredible. It's now sitting in the top 40. And yeah, really strong team and strong ecosystem as well. So despite that only launching in September, I'm going to call it my token of the year and full transparency. I do not own any tier yet.

The fact you read that and then didn't take action, you sound like me.

Team are putting out and I missed so many opportunities this year. It's.

It's just.

It's sickening and I'm sure we're going to get to that into a second, but, yeah, that was another cracker. We're very bullish on Celestia. I don't own it either, but it's, yeah, going to have a good future ahead as well. Yeah, for sure.

Cool, guys. So this part I wanted to touch on, you know, game changers for the year. Things that really kind of changed the narrative of crypto and the industry as a whole throughout the year, whether it be leading into 2024 or happened at the start of the year, I'm kind of interested to know. What do you think was the biggest. Played the most pivotal role in kind of changing the way that, I guess the whole world look at crypto and how we move forward from here.

Ben, let's. Let's start with you, mate.

How many go. I think, like.

Whether or not you call me boring, I just think bitcoin this year really came to the limelight when we started to get the increased interest rates, inflation was going up and institutions. I mean, microstrategy sort of leads the way. And this hasn't been a new narrative, but just continues to just showcase the market and the rest of the world, like how people should be thinking about bitcoin. And that is just buying relentlessly, no matter the price. Now, I think at the moment, people are starting to really feel that pinch, whether it be through the rising interest rates and then mortgage payments going up, rents going up, everyone, oh, shit. What's going on in the world right now? My wage is staying Stagnant, but everything else is going up. Like people are really feeling that an inflation rise, I think that's starting to get people thinking about alternatives to just cash and actually investing and looking at the different options.

And.

Even the last few weeks, I saw somewhere that in the US they've changed the way they calculate inflation. They've literally changed the, the equation to make it basically look better. It's just, it's unfathomable when you think about it. It's like, oh, this is looking bad, guys. Let's just change the rules. So no one, like, you know what I mean? It's just, it's. The whole thing, in my opinion, is just a complete joke. And, and that, you know, that sort of trickles down to cash and fiat and I just think heading into the halving next year for those people that truly understand supply and, and demand economics and look at what, what can you actually buy? That's, that's, that's going to help you against that inflationary nature. And if the US starts to print money again next year, like, oh my goodness, like, you know, that is just going to flow into risk on assets like, like bitcoin. So, you know, whether or not that's been a narrative change, I don't think it's necessarily been narrative change. I guess it's just, it's been something that has just been a real driver, I think, of bitcoin rallying to 160, 170% this year. And that's why I'm super bullish on that next year.

Yeah, good shout. I think I'll keep mine short. I think for me.

A little bit uncharacteristic for me. But yeah, I think the SEC ripple one only because I think Ben summed it up nicely, like 2023 was the year of airing out the dirty laundry. And I feel like that's been a bit of a specter over the space for a couple of years now. So I think just that being put to bed just kind of helps create some precedent, which means that there is less gray. There probably is still a lot of gray until there's actual complete, you know, rules and legislation in place. But I mean, it kind of gives people a little bit of something to stand on to sort of fight these battles. Because I know like, projects like Polkadot have gone down the route of saying that they're a software, not a, not a, not a, an asset, which is pretty, pretty clever if it works. But, you know, it's stories like, you know, Ripple not being classed as Security that, you know, it just sort of bolsters the, I guess, sentiment in the space. And Tommy jokes as well. He sort of sums it up quite nicely. It's like Ripple had the best news it's been waiting for and how many years and it's like in the middle of a bear market and the market did nothing. So, you know, it's. If you're like a staff member at the XRP or Ripple Labs, you'd be a bit gutted. Just all that work just to see. No, no sort of commitment from the market. But it is what it is. But I think that's a standout for me for this year.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Mine probably, you know, only happened a couple weeks ago, but the, the Binance settlement with the Department of Justice, maybe a bit of recency bias involved there, but I just think, you know, things are starting to look a lot better as the year went on. The only, you know, remaining thing that, that could have been a big risk to the market in the industry was that that Binance investigation, you know, was it going to turn out like ftx? Some people were speculating and people are going to find, you know, a bunch of dirty laundry behind the scenes that could really cause a bit of a blood bath in the market similar to what we saw with ftx. That wasn't, that wasn't the case fortunately. So they did breach like anti money laundering laws and things like that. And cz, the founder and CEO, he stepped down and had to pay a pretty big fine. But I think overall the fact that, you know, we got through pretty unscathed apart from, you know, binance leaving the U.S. you know, bit of an inconvenience for finance U.S. customers and things like that. The fact that, you know, there wasn't much of a reaction there just means like, you know, we've got a bit of Runway leading into this next cycle and don't have to worry about things like, you know, centralized exchanges going bust and doing dodgy things, hopefully behind closed doors. Hopefully that's the last bit. Obviously. No guarantees.

Yeah, yeah. No great content. I think that trust and credibility over the last 24 months, that's the thing that's hurt our industry so much. For outsiders looking into the only thing that made mainstream media news over the last two years was the fraud and the scams and the capitulation, like nothing of the good stuff. So hopefully we can build upon that. And a couple other sort of honorable mentions I wanted to mention just from an institutional space which kind of gets, goes a Little bit unnoticed, but there's been so many financial institutions launching or offering crypto tokenization services this year. So just to name a couple, Visa continue their stablecoin settlement. Pilots on Ethereum and Solana, you know, PayPal launching their stable coin as you mentioned, the start, Ted, like that's huge. You know, even PayPal was at the oldest crypto con a few weeks ago. Like that's not, that's unheard of. NAB as well. Early in, early in 2024 they're launching an institutional custody service. This is NAB bank here in Australia, partnered with an institutional custody service, Zodia, to help them with cross border stablecoins. So that's a big one that they announced recently. And then even another Aussie bank anz started testing on, on chainlink cross train interoperability. So that's just out of Australia. And then you've got, you know, leading German banks like Deutsche Bank, DZ bank and Commerzbank were granted crypto license, crypto licenses and custody services. So I think we're going to just start to see more and more banks start to warm up to the idea, figure out how to do this properly, figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't ruin their reputation. They're not going to get scammed. They do it properly and that's just going to bring on, you know, the waltz advisors, going to bring on the superannuation funds. It's just going to make it easier. Everyone's waiting for those trusted entities to really land in this space. I think once that happens, no one ever wants to be first, but no one wants to be last. So it's just kind of, you know, get that can sit down that. Yeah, a continuation.

Ben, I'm keen to get your thoughts obviously at Collective Shift. You guys and the research team there do a lot of this stuff where you're looking forward and trying to pick trends and understand where the market's going. So you're probably best placed to answer these sorts of things. Any key thoughts to start us off?

Yeah, it's interesting, like we were pretty on the money in the last cycle, so where I made the most of my money was in the last cycle was the metaverse. Before the metaverse was really a thing, this was, you know, early to mid 2018. You know, a lot of these metaverse projects were 10, 20, 30 mil market caps. And then, you know, if we, if we rewind to those days when Facebook renamed to meta and everything just absolutely exploded from there. It was just game on, like There was a lot of money to be made there. We don't believe that what we can see right now, there's going to be those like that sector that's not really there right now that no one really knows, it's going to come out of nowhere and explode. I think it's more around getting into underappreciated sectors. So, you know, one for me would be the defi space. We think there's going to be a pretty big reversal in the, in the market in the next 12, 24 months.

You know, if we look at, you know, some of the decks, so the decentralized exchanges to centralized exchanges, trade volumes like it's really decreased over the last little while. So I think that's going to start to reverse. Even if you look at some of the things like Uniswap and, you know, some different things as people move away from the centralized exchanges back to some of the decentralized ones, I think that's gonna be pretty big. As Ethereum goes for the upgrade next year, I think that's just gonna be a good, a good sort of tailwind. So yeah, that's why I'm pretty bullish on Maple, but there's a few others in the space. I think it's gonna come back. The biggest headwind though for Defi is still regulation. That's still like one that we've gotta be aware of. So yeah, that's definitely one for me. There's a couple other sectors that we like as well. I think crypto gaming is going to be big. Out of the $7.2 billion of capital raised in the last year or two, 60% of that's gone into Web3 with another $2 billion added this year. So there's a heap of money going into the Web3 gaming space. A lot of those games haven't really launched yet. But it's not only those crypto native gaming platforms that are coming in the space, there's also traditional studios that are developing games. So players like Ubisoft, that built Assassin's Creed, Zynga, who, who built farmville Square, nx, that built Final Fantasy, you know, they're starting to build their own native mobile games, crypto gaming experiences, and also building, you know, web3 developer blockchain ecosystems as well to build. So yeah, the gaming space is going to be big. The biggest problem I see in gaming is actually picking the right horse. It's like backing in the Melbourne cup, but there's 300 horses, not 24.

True, isn't it?

So from an Investment standpoint. We actually put out a research piece recently on like how to get exposure to the gaming sector. Because I think, I mean if you can pick the token, hats off, I think you're going to be well, you know, well profited from that. But I think it's going to be very difficult to pick the right tokens. So even looking at either indexes or back in the blockchain. So for example, like.

Or something.

Yeah, exactly, yeah. Getting in on the blockchain itself. Even the technology that's building this game. So like going even a layer deeper, looking at like the actual hardware. So yeah, we've done a little bit on that. But yeah, I think gaming and Defi for me is going to be big in the next couple of years.

Gaming, Defi. Love it. Yeah. I think we've spoken about it a fair bit before. Like gaming, we see it as a big trend, you know, it seems like.

It'S got the best use case. Right. Like if you could make, you make something in an in game, like an in game item and go to a free marketplace and sell it or whatever the market says it's worth. Like who doesn't want that?

Right.

Like who wouldn't want to use that? We all kind of use it in some way. If you've done online gaming, like played something in the past, there's always a marketplace. So imagine a marketplace but between games and between different.

Yeah.

Genres. Like I think that'd be absolutely.

And kind of what. What you were saying as well. Like it's so hard to pick individual games because they all look great, you know, when they put their trailers out. But you don't know, you know, unless you're actually playing them on a daily basis and understanding the mechanics of the game, it's hard to pick because there's a lot of them. So I think we, we tend to focus more on the infrastructure, the gaming infrastructure within Crypto. So yeah, like you were saying, Ben, Immutable, I think being as part of. With Immutable, they're two of the bigger plays there in terms of individual games that we always talk about Illuvium, right. That seems to be the one that everyone's got their eye on, but could.

Be another one coming next year. Right. Who knows what pops up?

Yeah, I think there's a bit of disappointment that it hasn't launched yet. Obviously with a, you know, big game like that, where you want it to be, you know, you want to look. To look awesome, you want it to function great, it's going to take time so understandably. But I'm just hoping 2024 is our year for illuvium and finally we can get to get our hands on that game.

Yeah, I mean, I've got nothing really more to add, honestly. Like, it is gaming for me for no other reason than you guys have already stated. I think Real World Assets is something that's probably still a bit away from actually making material impact. I think a lot of that comes down to the regulation falling into place. So that could be a Watch this space. But I hope there's significant advancement in this next year, probably from some great players overseas. Like likely going to be like your Onyx blockchain over at BlackRock or something like that, like really paving the way of changing the way they do business. And then that kind of sets up the next sort of steam train, which could be Real world asset tokenization. So I think that'd be pretty cool.

But yeah, gamefi for me, so have Honda, we've got Real world assets and GameFi. Ben Simpson, we've got DeFi and Web3 Gaming or GameFi. So.

Think of that. Look at that.

Very easy.

Yeah. And I think. I think another one is important to remember. Like, simple narratives. I'm not necessarily simple, but narratives that, you know, people will buy into. And I think that's like a dog with a hat. Yeah, yeah. Like a frog. Green frog.

You know that. Then that's where like the retail money sort of come in. And I think over the next 12 or 18 months, there's going to be some good altcoin opportunities to jump on some of those narratives as they start to take off. There's a few that we're looking at.

In that space where it's trying to get some of that exposure to sectors that are really yet to capture the spotlight. Easier said than done, just with so many projects. But, yeah, I think if you can get a little bit of exposure to those sectors, really before the retail come, you're going to be in a good position.

Yeah, that's it.

Diversification, baby. Yeah. Next, we wanted to kind of touch on what our biggest wins and losses were for the year. We've spoken about some of the bigger narratives in the space, but now we want to get personal and we want to find out how much money you made. We want to find out what works for you, what didn't work for you, and what were your learnings from it. So, Ben, let's start with you, mate.

Yeah.

So my biggest win this year was Maple. It's been a bit of a theme of this podcast, actually. But yeah, I posted that. So one of the things we do over Collective Shift is basically share what we're doing with our portfolios from our analysts. So I put out back in July that had a pretty big position in Maple. I'm not sure what the market cap was at the time. I think it was like $5.50, the token price, and then hit about $22 in the last few weeks. It's had a nice little correction at the moment, but that was my biggest win. I went a little bit earlier than what I used to in terms of buying altcoins. So during bear markets, I don't hold any altcoins just because BTC and ETH tends to outperform pretty much 99% of the market in bear market. So I was being pretty patient for two years, then had a pretty heavy position in Maple. Went down to probably $4. So I sort of maybe was. Was holding a, maybe a 10, 15% loss at that time. And then, you know, after about two or three months, it's really started to rip. So I think, you know, having patience is one of the biggest lessons I've learned in crypto. If you, if you're holding onto an altcoin, don't get, you know, too impatient. Even if you're, you know, underperforming against other alts in, in a period of time, different sectors have their runs, and if you start to go chasing, it's where you can really hurt yourself because your coin has a move. So then you go to chase the other old coin and that has a pullback, and then the one that you're in has a run. And now you're just in this loop of forever chasing. And I see so many people overdo this. And we speak to our members all the time about just staying patient, having convictions to stick with the plan, because if you get too emotional, you can sort of get yourself in a rut. So that was my biggest win. My biggest loss was just missing all the airdrops that were just right in front of me. And we covered like four of the major ones we actually haven't. We literally have an airdrop section in the plectorshift platform that has ratings and an action list. Like our team have done an action list. We couldn't make it any more simple and I just never got to it. So the JITO airdrop, that was minimum 20,000 Australian dollars. Like minimum you got no matter what you did. So 20k verjito arbitrum sell like Celestia as you were Talking about before Ted, that did 500% on launch and then Blur like literally they were all star ratings in our platform action items and I just completely like just dropped the ball on all of them. So.

Lucky our members made a bit of money but I certainly didn't. So that was.

A loss that went a Maltese. It probably one of those funny ones. But just to add to that like it is kind of at the tailwind of like when the markets are running they start to come in. It's really hard to time.

Yeah.

But yeah, another round.

Yeah, I know. For me my biggest win was Solana. Probably got on about 12 bucks at the start of the year. I know Pav was a, was a big one for. I can thank him for that one.

Papa's always financial advice but no, we.

Would never have always kind of backed it even though like the sentiment around it was just disastrous and PAV seems to you know, take things and, and views them in a different kind of way which is really refreshing. So I had a listen and yeah I got on Solana pretty early and it's now sitting about $76. So sure what that is. Maybe 6x from there. I think heading into this bull markets it's going to do pretty big things particularly around like the sentiment at the moment. You got the phone coming out and you know, fly off the shelves and things like that. The bonus air drop, got the bulk air drop. It's taken market share away from Ethereum. So there is that narrative for Salana there. So was probably my biggest win, biggest loss. I don't know if I had any major losses there. I was kind of, I was pretty sensible with my trading similar to you Ben, just sort of dollar cost averaging into BTC and eth. Took a bit of a punt on Matic. I wouldn't really call it a punt. You know, made an investment in Matic at the start of the year and expecting some, some kind of above market returns on that one given the, given the state around like the partnerships and the sentiment around it pretty strong, like very strong.

2022 they got a rebrand coming. I think that'll be big.

Yeah but like just this year didn't really do much. I think it's, you know, it's probably stayed where I bought it so not really a loss but in my mind a bit of a disappointing investment. But hey, you can't win them all.

Yeah for me biggest win definitely is a lot Solana but I've, I would say like the biggest win technically has just been Trading through October and November. That's probably been the biggest moves that have come in the recent time. And just when the, you know, when the sun's shining, you gotta. You gotta make a. So, like, that was some pretty good days. Biggest losses was probably, I'd say, middle of this year. I sort of thought there was a bit of a shift towards the Pooh coins, if we'll call it that. There was like, that Sonic Obama INU20. Like, I started seeing stuff like that. I'm like, all right, cool. They might. Yeah, there might be some more of these that just start popping. So I put like, a percentage I was happy to say goodbye to into some of those ultra micro low caps. I'll call them and. Yeah, to no avail. Like, I just was not, not, not having any luck fishing on those. So they're the hardest things to catch to begin with. And the trends don't last very long. So I wasn't surprised at all. But I would say that was just, you know, giving back a little bit. But I'm happy I had a crack, I guess.

Here he is on the podcast saying, you know, stick to the mages. No, but don't get emotional. And he's out there investing in Sonic Obama Inu.

No, I didn't. I missed that. But I'm saying the fact that that happened, I got in on, like, Pepe John's. Like, you know, when the bitcoin pizza day was happening, there was a Pepe John's. And I was, well, we won't go there. But it sounded like it made sense in my head at the time.

I. I will say Deep Genie in a bull market is way more fun than DJ in the bear market because, like, yeah, bear market's like going to the casino and you just literally can't win at all. Like, there's just no way.

Yeah, you just had, like, money. You get no chips back.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But they'll have sign of good things to come, hopefully next year. But yeah, I was just a bit too early on the mark, I would say.

Yeah, cool. Well, thank you so much, guys. Pav, Ben, really appreciate it. Appreciate your time. Hopefully we get a few more listeners from the. The Ben and Bergs podcast and. Yeah, like, vice versa.

Versa.

Yeah. Yeah. So I like the. The little collaboration podcast we got going on. I think we. We could be onto something there.

Yeah. More episodes and I think we're slinging banter at each other a bit more freely.

Yeah, see, I'm. I'm way more comfortable talking.

There it is. It's the same with, you know, you.

Guys remind me, you know, our podcast of bit of. Bit of slinging. That doesn't go right.

You need that.

You need that on your week. You do.

The listeners love it. Yeah, cool.

They don't, we do. So that's fine.

Yeah, exactly. Cool. Thank you so much, guys, and we'll chat to you in a week's time.

Thanks, guys.

Thanks, guys.