Big Tech Earnings, DeFi United and Pump Fun’s Token Burn

This episode is brought to you by Fidelity Crypto. You'll hear more about them later in today's episode. Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed. All right, everyone, welcome back to Empire. Good week. Good week to have a good week. People were making fun of me for saying that on TVPN this week, but I think it's true. It's a good week to have a good week. So Rob Sontu is up, gents.

What's up?

How's it going? No, nobody's having as good a week as you.

So, I mean, I think you are. I heard you're the, the paddle champion, Rob.

Yeah, there's, uh, well, I have to give Ro, Ro Patel, a little bit of, uh, credit in that as well. And so, uh, You know, we, we, it takes two to win, uh, to win a paddle tournament. There's also a little bit of asterisk there, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna give a, uh, wait, because I did have a— I got us to the finals, but then had a little bit of a, a little bit of a shoulder thing, and so I actually sat out the finals. And I had, uh, I had literally— so we have this paddle tournament and it's at Reserve here in, in New York. It's Dragonfly and Rain sponsored. It's like all crypto people. It's like Argentinian kid walks in off the street and is like, hey, listen, like, I really like— I like padel. Just starts watching the games, watching the matches. And then when I was like, hey, listen, I need to sit out the finals, he's first one to raise his hand. He's like, I want to play. He's in khakis, he's like, shoes aren't tied. And we're like, okay, like, I guess like whatever. Like everyone's kind of like, you know, um, like walking around having a beer or whatever. Comes in, smokes it like way better than me.

The Argentinians, they're nasty at padel. Nasty.

Yeah, yeah, he was, he was just nasty. Uh, and so there's a little bit of an asterisk because I didn't play the finals, but I got, you know, I got us, I got us there. Yeah, yeah.

Santi, how's your paddle game?

That's all right. I'm actually wanting to get back in the tennis game. Uh, so, so, uh, there's good courts out here. You guys have seen them. So I, I want to get back. I want to do a different kind of sport. I want to learn it.

So I'm going to start You guys have the clay courts out by you, right?

Clay courts, yeah, where they're pretty fun. The issue though is like there's a lot of pros in the play, and then the first time I went there, they're like, oh, buddy of mine invited me, and I was like, oh, let's play. And they give us like the center court, and there's other courts next to it. I think Djokovic was playing in the court next to me. I'm like, yeah, definitely no, I'm going home. I don't want to— and everyone sees it, right? Because they're having lunch, is like everyone's seeing your play, and you're like, yeah, I'm not doing this.

No, no, no, you can't do that at the club. At the club. All right. It's a big week. Do you guys want to— so we had some earnings this week. A lot of the big AI companies, hyperscalers, you know, there's probably the most important fundraise, you know, in the industry did happen this week. So that was a big one.

We should talk about that.

We should definitely talk about that. We should talk about hype for, you know, I don't know if you guys looked at the, the HOOD earnings. But, you know, we had a guy, Shonda Devins, on our team. I actually still don't even know his full name. He's been at Blockworks for 2 years. I just know his Twitter name, but Shonda Devins. And he compared Hype versus HOOD. I thought that was interesting. DeFi United, I'd love to get your guys' take on like, so, you know, is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Is it a bailout? Does that matter? Did it need to happen? So DeFi United, uh, love to get your guys' take on PumpFun is doing a lot of, uh, buy and burns. So I would love to get your guys' take on like, is the buy and the burn model a good model? Um, and then actually Stripe had Stripe Sessions. So maybe there's some, you know, Rob, we can tee up for, you know, Stripe, Western Union had earnings. So they talked about, you know, their stablecoin. We can, yeah, I know that's your, I know, I know you thrive there.

So this is going to be a spicy episode, ladies and gentlemen. It's going to be spicy. A lot on the menu.

It's going to be spicy. All right. Where do you guys want to start? I'd love to get your guys' take on state of the markets. So Rob, Santi, you know, a bunch of earnings. We had Meta, we had Amazon, Alphabet absolutely ripped through, you know, Microsoft, Robinhood. So, you know, a lot, I think a lot of, a lot of misses, right? Except, you know, obviously Google absolutely smoked it. Would love to get your guys' take. I don't know if you have any takeaways from these.

Santi, we're going from left to right. Rob, you are exactly right.

You just, you love the public equities, so like, I always want to prompt Claude right now to sound smart on, on micro. No, no, listen, I, I think broadly, so like maybe there's like the HUD, and we've got, I think we've got Coinbase on the 7th, we've got, um, Circle next week as well, maybe, maybe it's the—

yeah, Circle's on the— yeah, Circle's next week.

Yeah. And I think the— there's a, there's a broad expectation here that like, I mean, crypto-specific stuff is just getting crushed, right? I mean, they're— I think Hood on their crypto trading was down 40%.

Yeah.

Uh, but they made up all of that with their prediction market trading, which is not surprising considering like how excited people have been or at prediction markets specifically. I expect Coinbase earnings to be, you know, and I think everyone expects them to be something similar. In terms of retail trading volumes. We'll see what happens on their institutional derivative side. There's a bit of, um, it's a little bit hard to compare, uh, year over year on their quarterly financials because they changed the way that they're reporting at the moment to consolidate a bunch of their like offshore and, um, uh, and institutional products and trading with, with some of their onshore stuff. And so we'll have to see what it looks like, but I expect like the retail side, which is where they make most of their money, is going to be you know, quite bad as well. I mean, even, you know, to your point, you know, that there's, you know, been a lot of talk about Hyperliquid, which is obviously continue to do well. I mean, it's still down 30%, uh, you know, quarter over quarter in terms of trading volume on the perp side, which in perps continues to take some market share relative to spot. And so I think there's, you know, no denying that trading crypto, the tokens, is in decline. At the moment. The volatility is in decline. There's been a lot more excitement, um, on the equity markets. Frankly, a lot of equities are trading like meme coins today. Like, it's actually been insane the way we've seen the volatility get back into the equity market. Uh, and that was true of the quantity markets obviously earlier in the year. And so, you know, well, well, I don't think any of us are going to be surprised. And so again, it continues to be more around like, what is the long-term opportunity? What is happening in the space? How excited are we about that? There's, you know, the other side of the coin, which you talked about, which is Google and, and, and Meta, and like what's happening, you know, more broadly in terms of the equity markets, which continue to hit all-time highs despite, I think, tremendous tailwind or headwinds across most of the macroeconomic, you know, kind of market right now. But CapEx, man, I mean, I mean, there was a— I continued to hear somebody, uh, talking about, um, you know, the, the amount of CapEx that we're going— it's going to be required for data centers, is going to be required for AI. People just still do not understand it.

I mean, you can feel it. You could— I don't know if you guys— so internally at Blockworks, we do— so we do this survey every 90 days about like AI and stuff like that. So last quarter it was 81% of the company was on Claude, 19% was on ChatGPT. The company has mostly switched since F5. The company is mostly back on Codex. And, you know, one of the— probably one of the main reasons is Claude feels like it's getting worse. And they just don't, you know, Dario had this, you know, a measured approach to, or I think he called it a disciplined approach to scaling CapEx. And it's, and, you know, he, you know, he's kind of giving Sam, you know, a bunch of crap for like YOLOing all their CapEx. It seems like Sam's approach might have been the right approach, right? So, you know, I don't know if people have— I was like a Claude Maxi and now I'm, yeah, back to using Codex and ChatGPT, you know, now that Phi-Phi is out.

Um, so I guess we're going back to your question around, uh, macro, just to overlay some of the stuff that Rob is talking about. Um, like, uh, Visa, for instance, is interesting. They posted a really strong quarter. They're up 17%. Um, uh, management called it the highest revenue growth since 2022, and they mostly attributed that to Visa as a Service. And they called out Agentic and stablecoin capabilities. So obviously that's something I think coming into the year with predictions, you know, Visa is a company that we should be tracking and like what's actually really happening with stablecoins. And Western Union reported earnings last Friday. Stock was down quite a bit on the day and then it rebounded a bit. Your guys posted an article about it and it got picked up. There seems to It seems like they're launching their stablecoin next month with a couple of partners, and then they are working towards a digital asset network. So obviously that I think will be something to monitor as well. Um, it wasn't pretty though. Western Union's operating margin just got crushed from 18% to 13%. Like, if you look at agent receivables, like, number, it was like not pretty at all. You basically have had declining revenue and growing agent receivables, which means like, like to give you an example, Western Union used to be exclusive with a lot of agents, like, you know, in the, on the, on the cash out side. Now they're not. And so it's more competitive and you're seeing that in margins. It will be interesting to see how and to what extent a public company can pull off a transformation of this scale. In many ways, Visa is probably like Kai and the, and the, and the team there is been very early on this train. But yeah, that was another thing to note. We've talked about Western Union in the pod. I've talked to a couple of people in the, in the industry about this in particular, and I've learned a lot about like how money moves like from Africa to China and why Tron, why USDT. If you hear the Western Union management team, they talk a lot about like the— they haven't figured out how to incentivize people to hold their own stablecoin, which I think is something that we— maybe I would love to— guys, Rob or Jan, your take, because a lot of times it's like We talk about Circle and, and, and Tether and other stablecoin issuers, and we've commented on the pod that everyone will want their own stablecoin, but it's not as easy, I think, as what I've appreciated. It's like the reality is USDT is the preferred currency. I've heard some people go as far as saying like, why does Western Union need to launch their own stablecoin when they— are they better served working and just working with like USDT or USDC. I think there's like obvious reasons for that. But the other example here is PayPal, right? PYUSD was heavily incentivized out of the gate and then it's kind of been, you know, not lived up to expectations. So before I go any further, Rob, I don't know if you have views on that or you, Janu, but it's something that I want to just talk about for a minute around like are we going to see more businesses launch on stablecoin, or are they going to just work with Circle or, or Tether or Paxos?

I mean, just to be— yeah, I mean, just to be clear about, about PYUSD, I mean, it's up like $3.5 billion. Like, it's still continuing to grow. I think they're, they're down on the, the month, uh, a decent amount. But like, it's— well, it's been heavily incentivized. Like, they continue to push it and it continues to grow year on year, right? You know, I, I think at the same time, to your point around, you know, call it like USDT, everybody wants it. Just be very clear, like USDT is losing market share at the moment. Now, the number one beneficiary of that is USDC, and we are, we're in this period of time right now where there's this interesting thing that's happening, which is, uh, it is now, and we've been talking about this a bunch, but every single fintech that I talked to today is doing things on stablecoins now if they're going global. And I think we've long speculated that this would be the case, and it's been something that I, you know, assumed was happening as I had conversations. But my deal flow as a venture capitalist now is like, I'm talking to companies that were like, you know, the best fintech companies a few years ago, and that everybody knows had nothing to do with crypto, have not been public about crypto, have not been doing anything with crypto. And then you talk to them like, oh yeah, a year ago, or after Genius, or right before Genius, we started moving all of our infrastructure to stablecoins, and now all of our business is stablecoins. People that you would never hear of, that would never talk about it, right? That is universally true now. Like, you know, I, I do not think that there is a global fintech today that is not heavily, heavily using stablecoins, whether they talk about it publicly or not.

Yeah, right.

And so No, well, just to add one point to that, which is that I will say one of the things that's happening here is, is, you know, so there's Western Union with, um, uh, what, USDT?

Yeah.

And so, you know, they've, they've been very public, like, this is not an externally facing stablecoin, this isn't an internal settlement mechanism. Klarna USD, same exact thing, right? There continues to be a lot of people focused on these, like, internal settlement mechanisms. Um, not for like a PYUSD where it's like, hey, we're gonna go and try to get this integrated into a bunch of other people. And I still continue to hear that that's happening in a lot of places. But for the people, there is this kind of push-pull right now where people are saying, okay, well, let's do that, or let's— you know, a lot of people are asking for not USDT at the, at these like fintech levels. Now they're asking for something else that they feel more comfortable with. So it'll be interesting to see what happens over time with that because That's been surprising to me when Tether's had this just like stranglehold on emerging market finance.

Yeah, one of the other things to comment is obviously on the CapEx front, like, I mean, earnings this quarter have not rolled over. I mean, we still have like double-digit earnings growth, like on the, the S&P's posting 13% earnings growth. I mean, that's massive. Um, one last tidbit that's still really concentrated, right? Like it's very, it's very concentrated. That's right. Um, the other— which, which leads me to the last point I wanted to make, which is, um, I mean, Paul Tudor Jones came out with a really good podcast, Investing with the Best. We've all seen it. He said something that I want to, I want to put front and center, which he said that, um, the stock, uh, he, he, he said that this might be the— it reminded him a lot of the 2000s. He's like, um, I think it's something along like, this is the easiest bear market since 2000 dot-com bubble. And he, he has the nuances that he felt that the stock market was really, um, like most of Americans are really levered on the stock market. And his metric to see that is there has historically been a lot of buybacks of stock, and now as we're going to have more IPOs, he's like, I don't think we're going to be able to absorb all that, and that might be the unwinding event in 12 to 18 months. I don't know if I got it right, but, you know, I, I hear you nodding.

Yeah, yeah. No, I'm nodding to all this. So we can, we can touch on the Paul Tudor Jones episode in a second. There's— so there's two things I want to comment on. One is I think with the stablecoin adoption, you're going to see the— there's going to be a dichotomy of companies here where you're going to have CEO-led companies and founder-led companies. It's like if you go talk to, you know, I have a lot of respect for, you know, did the fireside chat with the Western Union CEO, got dinner with, you know, one of the high-up people at PayPal the other night, like I think it's— I wouldn't understate how tough it is to move the bureaucracy in these companies, whereas a founder-led company, like, um, like we just published this data on WAP today, W-H-O-P, like founder-led business, boom, they can pivot in 3 days. Klarna, boom, they can pivot in 2 weeks. It's, um, so I actually think you'll see 2 different types of companies here with the stablecoin adoption. I would also say in the earnings, because I know, you know, this crypto podcast, like you know, I don't know if we need to pontificate too much on the hyperscalers, but I actually, I wrote down some of the highlights of earnings calls as it relates to crypto. And this was my big takeaway, was how much crypto was mentioned in the earnings calls. So Visa, Visa said Visa is positioned as the hyperscaling bridge layer between stablecoins and real-world solutions. SoFi, SoFi said the crypto supercycle, you remember, you know, Suze, we used to talk about the supercycle all the time. You got the SoFi CEO saying The crypto supercycle will transform money movement, positioning SoFi's national bank charter and stablecoin as foundational infrastructure for frictionless global payments. The Mastercard CEO, Michael Maibach, said Mastercard is diversified, future-ready, and delivering. Building on our strong foundation, we're advancing agentic commerce with Mastercard Agent Pay and expanding our stablecoin solutions through our acquisition of BVNK. And then you had Vlad. From Robinhood, who, no surprise, he's a big fan of crypto. He said the price moves up and down, but crypto as technology infrastructure is going to be big. So I don't know, I just, you know, I'm not here to say earnings, you know, this company should, should beat earnings or miss earnings. But like, I am pretty blown— it's the most, uh, you know, it's the most I've ever seen CEOs talk about crypto in, in an earnings season ever in the, in the history. Like, and we're only a couple days into this, right? So I would expect that to be the big trend of this earnings season. And I would just encourage folks to zoom out of like, did they beat, did they miss? Like, it's really amazing what's happening on these earnings calls, right? You know, Visa card payment volume with Rain and Bridge is up 200% year over year. They have 160 stablecoin-linked card programs. They've added, they just added support for 5 new blockchains. We haven't even talked about this. One of the biggest, I feel like least talked about news of the week was Facebook rolled out stablecoins. right?

Um, payouts.

Yeah, stablecoin payouts in, uh, I think it was like Columbia and Colombia and one other place. Um, and they did it on Polygon and Solana. So that's— there's a lot of really good stuff happening right now.

Yeah, I mean, I think to your first point around like how hard it is to move an organization, I do think you have to give a little bit of credit to Western Union for, you know, trying— like, they're launching the, the Santi's over here gloating because he loves Western Union.

So, uh, I like that I'm, I'm getting a— you're also in it, right? You're getting a bottle of wine, or we're getting a fancy dinner in November.

You know, this is a good thing about being the host. I get, I get paid either way. So I'm joining whoever wins. I'm joining—

you're the escrow agent here.

Yeah, but listen, they've got the stablecoin launching next month. They've got the Rain card that they're launching, I think, around the same time. They've got this, you know, digital asset network that's kind of connecting— they're trying to go outside of the, you know, correspondent banking network and they're connecting everybody, um, you know. And to that point, like, you know, Meta, they specifically said it's USDC payouts, um, that they're doing, I think, with, uh, with Stripe on Solana and Polygon. The— I mean, for Visa, I mean, the fastest growing part of that business for a while has been their services business, uh, which is like a lot of their software that sits on top. The fast-growing transaction part of that business, or transaction revenue, has been their Visa Direct business. Visa Direct is their non-bank network settlement, which is— they've started to put entirely— they've tried to push more and more towards stablecoin rails, right? And so the fastest-growing parts of Visa right now, and I know it's small, is the stablecoin settlement on their cards and their non-bank settlement network on the Visa Direct side. Mastercard has Mastercard Send doing the same thing. They're also trying to catch up on the stablecoin settlement, uh, for the, the cards directly. Um, I mean, we didn't talk about Stripe Sessions, which is going on right now, but happened yesterday. Stripe Sessions, they're literally only talking about two things right now, which is agentic commerce, like, and command line commerce, and, and stablecoins. Literally the only thing they're talking about right now. Visa's talking about the same stuff, um, you know, almost entirely. Like, the, the market kind of cares about two things right now when it comes to these businesses, and it's stablecoins and it's how are agents going to transact, how are they, what type of commerce is gonna happen within the, in the age of AI.

This episode is brought to you by Fidelity Crypto, a platform built in-house with the same discipline Fidelity applies to everything, so you can invest in crypto confidently. Trade crypto backed by industry-leading security. Get started at fidelity.com/crypto. Crypto is offered by Fidelity Digital Assets and A is not insured by FDIC or SIPC and includes risk of complete loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC, member NYSE/SIPC. Yeah, can I say something controversial here, which is—

sure, absolutely not.

Yeah, guess I'll shut it down. Shut it down. I think, you know, this is going to frustrate, I think, a lot of people listening to this. I think that people are really trying to grapple with in crypto the fact that Stripe's blockchain— and I'm, you know, I know this is going to frustrate people— Canton, those two blockchains have been able to get more adoption in one year than most chains were able to get in, in five. Yeah, I know you're looking at me because of Canton's incentives.

But how do you define adoption? Because there's not really any flow going through Tempo. At the moment.

Okay, it's been live for like—

great headlines, great headlines, great headlines.

All right, well, they've got more. Okay, I mean, how much, you know, how much is flowing through, you know, insert most of the chains?

Here's a controversial take, here's a controversial take. There are more stablecoin payments today— here's, yeah, here's a controversial— there are more stablecoin payments today going through Polygon than any other blockchain.

I do.

Stellar. I'm not surprised.

Polygon has positioned themselves as the payments.

Is Polygon the chain that gets the least amount of love amongst crypto natives? Certainly within the Ethereum community, it's like the hate that Polygon has gotten from the Ethereum since the very beginning because it was like, are they an L2?

Are they not an L2?

Because no one made money on Polygon. The insiders didn't make money on Polygon. This is like the double standards within the Ethereum community. I've always, you know, uh, I'm not saying Tempo won't do great.

I have no idea if it'll do great or not. Uh, I'm sure they will build great product on top of Tempo, which means they can route things to Tempo. I think most of the headlines they're talking about, they're building cool product, they got a lot of things coming out. Most of the people they're serving and the, you know, these kind of partnerships they're talking about are people who are blockchain agnostic, do not care about the blockchain. And so they will route to whatever, you know, service that they are working with decides to route to for the best transaction flow. And, uh, Stripe will probably do a good job, and, and Matt and, and the team, they'll probably do a good job integrating into that. But they're also going to launch on Polygon and Stellar and, you know, Solana and, you know, Monat and whatever other chain, if it makes sense.

So I was, um, I'm gonna, I'm gonna show Blockworks data, if I may, because I was on a podcast earlier this week and, uh, the protocol revenue is really down. And now hyper— like, the question is more around, like, stablecoin transfers don't make as much money as, like, you know, meme coin trading. Um, and so the question is like, okay, like there could be a lot of growth in stablecoin transactions, but that doesn't mean that the L1 is going to accrue a lot of value. Um, like, like we've talked here before, like Tempo probably does a lot of things for Stripe as a business, but the, the blockchain itself, like we talk about, okay, is it worth $5 billion? Like a lot of the Stripe investors put money in it. I think the margins of Stripe just get better because they get more customers and it's just They're bundling a product. People always make money with bundling. But if you're like a standalone payments chain without the muscle of like Stripe that is selling other services, I mean, it's just, it's a struggle. I think it will be a struggle.

I think the counter is that Tron actually does make decent money. Tron has decent fees, right?

Yeah. And I love that.

They, um, well, they've jacked up the, what probably Ethereum should have done, right? And other chains should have done. Um, what one thing, can we just go back to one thing? Like, okay, so we have two of the smartest macro guys telling us that they're bearish. You have—

except he likes Bitcoin. So I don't know about that part.

Well, he mentioned Bitcoin as like, that was a good setup in a trade. And he actually astutely kind of pointed out like, hey, the quantum thing is a threat. Like cybersecurity is a threat. He was bearish AI. But okay, like Paul Tudor Jones comes out and says like the stock market is a percent of GDP is like at an all-time high, like 250% of GDP is like in stock riding the stock market. And then Druckenmiller is also bearish. And he's like, he's seeing a lot of these narrative, to your point, like the stock market, go look at photonic stocks. They look like WIF did back in the day, you know. And so I mean, to me that feels like late cycle kind of behavior.

Um, but I can ask you a question, and I actually don't know the answer to this. This is an honest question, but have Drunken Miller and, uh, and Paul Tudor Jones— have they been bearish for a while? Have they been bearish a lot recently when, you know, things have continued to do well? Like, like, do you know what their what their view has been over the last couple of years?

I think so. Anytime there's something on, on Druckenmiller, I like to just drop everything and, and listen to it. I mean, he was bullish NVIDIA like 3 years ago. Um, he was bullish— so I, this is the— I'm referencing this interview that he did with Morgan Stanley recently, and that's where he was— his tone was bearish. He was long energy, but he was like, he was bearish a lot of these narratives. And Um, Paul Tudor Jones, I don't, I don't know how many public appearances he's had, which is a good question, Rob, but, um, I mean, they're both traders.

He flipped bearish. Um, I, I was actually trying to answer this, Rob, yesterday. I think that's a great question. I, uh, I think he flipped bearish mid-2025 is what I can tell. So like, let's call it summer of '25.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What has the stock market done since then? Do we know?

Yeah, it's like up, uh, 30%, 20% or so. Yeah, uh, no, and he does say—

he actually, he, he said in mid-2025, he said, I think he's like, I'm flipping bearish, but I think we will have— he said this feels exactly like 1999, talking about last year. Um, and he said— hold on, there's fire trucks.

One sec, I'll step in here. Um, there's, um—

all right, let me finish that thought because I think he actually did call— he called— he said 2025 was like 1999. He was flipping bearish, but he said it's pretty likely we get a blow-off, a blow-off rally, and that he's just comfortable missing it. So that actually aligns with— it's now a year later and he's calling it 2000.

That's what I mean. I think like, uh, they're both saying the same thing, which is you're— as a trader, as an investor, I don't think you should be positioned to like try to squeeze out 100% of the gains in that cycle. And you should be comfortable more like just clocking, you know, 70, 80% of the gains and then just protecting principal. Um, or, or you could just— and he, and he said it in his interviews, like, just be like Warren and just like be long and compound and not do anything.

I loved, I loved the piece of that podcast where he was talking about Warren Buffett and he was like, I had such cope about Warren for the longest time and then like he just kept compounding. Uh, that was great.

So, so then what do you do? Like, I mean, Santi, you're in two, two camps there. There's the Warren camp and there's the PTJ camp. Like, do you Try— you do try to time the market, or do you not?

I went through a lot of cash in November, and like, does it hurt to see a rally? Uh, yeah, I mean, we're all psychological. Like, you know, you're sitting there and getting, you know, markets ripped in your face, and, uh, but I, I don't know, I feel comfortable like holding decent amount of cash to take advantage of— my view is that the world just becomes more volatile, and there will be just dislocations in the market from time to time, and I want to be able to have cash cash because I know myself psychologically. I just feel better when I have a big bucket of cash and I can be very aggressive. The strategies that I'm doing have like yield pickup. Like, I'm still, I'm still long. I still have equity exposure. I'm still long. I don't short by any stretch of the imagination, but I, I like, um, like some like long, you know, but I have like probably 30% cash.

Yeah.

You know what's funny is I always thought that crypto volatility would start to compress over the years. And what's actually happened is crypto volatility has just spilled out into the rest of equity, like rest of equities. If these earnings calls, like things pump 20%, that shouldn't, that shouldn't technically happen.

Uh, I just think, I mean, it's been happening as we've gotten, uh, as more and more of the market has been driven by kind of like algorithmic flows, right? Instead of like, you know, call it—

and retail flows, right?

And retail flows, yeah, right. So like the marginal buyer today is like a retail trader, and there is more, more retail trading, um, and there's much more retail trading in derivatives than there has ever been specifically, um. And then, you know, you, you add in that like a lot of the market is like algorithmic, and like then you're having people like refine these things over time. I, I expect that like we'll continue to have, um, you know, a decent amount of volatility across all assets, uh, just because like this, especially in this like hyper-financialization that's happening right now. Um, I mean, crypto has gotten lower volatility though, but the volatility, like the volatility in the equity markets have come up and the volatility in, in crypto markets have come down. And maybe we're just like the right equilibrium in the future is like somewhere between historical equity volatility and, you know, historical crypto volatility.

Let's switch gears a little bit. I want to hear your guys' take on the DeFi— what's it called? DeFi Union? DeFi United? DeFi United. So, you know, we talked last week about this big, this big hack, right? 1:1 DVM setup on Kelp's Layer 0 bridge. You had these forged cross-chain, forged cross-chain message. DPRK, North Korea gets like, you know, a couple hundred million bucks. And there's all these spillover effects and we talked about it in more detail last week. So now what's happened is all these companies have basically put in money to stop the bleeding and to— there's like a, you know, there's a big hole that we talked about last week. I forget how big the hole is, like 90,000. I don't know if one of you guys knows it, but there's like a $90 million hole, $90,000. I forget the exact number.

It's $300 million.

Yeah, yeah.

300, 290, 292 million was that? Yeah, I think they raised over 300 million.

Yeah, of course. 292 million. So there's a big hole. And so a bunch of, a bunch of folks stepped in, right? Uh, Joe Lubin and ConsenSys put in like 30K ETH. Uh, Mantle put in 30K ETH, I think on a loan. LayerZero, I think put in 10K. Stani, Stani kind of kicked it off, right? And put in 5K of his own, 5,000 ETH, which is like, you know, $10 million. Kelp only put in $2K. Solana, Solana put in some. I think Circle was buying AAVE, and there's a big pending vote for Arbitrum on Arbitrum right now that I'll abstain from talking about because Blockworks is the second biggest delegate in Arbitrum. But anyways, I'm curious what you guys think of this DeFi United. Some people were kind of upset, right? Because it's, it's a, it's a quote unquote bailout. So yeah, curious what you guys think of it.

Well, there's a couple of observations. One, I think the Solana Foundation also stepped in and brought AAVE to Solana. That was like always a big head-scratcher. Like, as much as I'm an investor in Kamino and other, and MarginFi, like AAVE coming to Solana, like, I think, you know, you take advantage of an opportunity and it was good to see other communities step up and contribute. The more cynical— there was like a tweet out there that was like, North Koreans waiting for the DeFi United to refill so that they can go at it again. I'm not in that camp. I do think that like, Luigi joined the team from Avalanche and I hope, I mean, this is a learning opportunity and I think there's like clear areas of improvement for the protocol, but like, gun to your head, would you rather not resolve it or resolve it in this way? I think, I think resolving it, like, I don't know if bailout is the right term, but, um, but I'm more in that camp. Like, I, I, you just, there's a lot of good work done there and it's a backbone of DeFi. So as an industry, you shouldn't let it die or, or, you know, severely impaired.

Yeah. I mean, I think this, like the pushback against the, the, this happening is like completely brain dead. Like it's like a very, like a a real inability to understand like second and third order effects, frankly. Um, and clearly this was needed. This was obviously very important for the future of DeFi. It was obviously very important for the future of Aave specifically, which is, you know, it's still, I think, the largest, you know, kind of money market in crypto, although it's, you know, that Morpho are, um, getting closer and closer. Uh, it's, you know, the argument around like, oh, you should just like let things— I mean, there's a lot of people have been talking about like TARP, right? Uh, if you remember the global financial crisis, I know this is similar, and there was a decent amount of people around, you know, the global financial crisis, oh, we should just let the banks go under. And every single one of those people would have been, you know, in a food line trying to like get like, you know, some handouts if, you know, we'd actually done that, right? Like we would have been in a global depression. And so, you know, this is obviously not at the same scale, but We— this was very important for ensuring that there— we continue to be able to take advantage of the momentum that we're talking about here in terms of adoption of tokenization and of stablecoins and of, you know, these, you know, large corporates coming on-chain. Now we have to learn from it. We have to change the way we operate. We have to make sure that we have better security measures. Uh, but you know, without that, this was going to be just a massive, massive overhang for the industry for a long period of time. And you know, it's nice to see so many people kick, you know, pitching in who understood that, who technically have no exposure whatsoever. Like, you know, Solana had no exposure whatsoever. You know, John had no exposure whatsoever. So it's nice to see that, um, you know, that everyone come together.

I circle— come back around or no? Didn't they donate a bit?

What I, I think what I saw was they were buying AAVE tokens, but they didn't contribute to the fund. But, uh, so I'm not quite sure. I'd have to go back and look. I don't know if, you know, you know, uh, exactly what's, what's going on there. But listen, I think this is, this is, this was important.

And I expect that Circle Ventures, by the way, I think Circle Ventures is just buying AAVE tokens. Okay.

All right. And frankly, like, going forward, you know, we've— we're now in a situation where it's not as if Lazarus was going to stop trying to hack things, right? Like, they're— this is their profession. They wake up every day and they say, how can I hack, you know, different types of financial institutions? How can I, you know, be on-chain protocols, etc.? And so that was going to continue to happen whether we did this or not. And so now we just need to operate better.

You know how much Lazarus has hacked since like 2017? $6 billion. You know how much they've hacked? Probably more revenue than the crypto industry has produced. You know how much this year, year to date— this does not include some of the recovered funds, but year to date we've had 30+ incidents, including today Wasabi Protocol for $5 million. There's been like 770 million of hacks, and roughly for you, like, uh, 3/4, so 75-76% of all hacks are attributable to this entity Lazarus, right? Tied to North Korea. So it's, um, I don't know, a lot of people are speculating, but it does feel like there's this— like, we are May— April 30th, and we're already at this pace, we're gonna have the record year in terms of DeFi hacks and total value lost, because historically it's been between $600 and $900 million, up to a billion. If it continues at this pace, it's alarming. Obviously, things to monitor is, as we bring on guests and conversations, is like, does this actually impact some of the deployments that we've talked about? Does this impact institutions coming? Doesn't seem like that's the case, but what I will tell you is one of the largest funds that has historically been a very, very active, if not the most active on-chain, has not been on-chain for 2 years in a row. It's just totally out and they have zero interest to do yield strategies on-chain for this reason. They just don't. They— I spoke with them this week and they were like, there's no interest. They're doing other CeFi kind of carry trades and like delta neutral strategies, but nothing on-chain. And that is, it's pretty damning, to be honest. Hmm. Probably one of the largest, like zero. And like, I haven't touched on-chain for the last 2 years.

I was like, okay, well, and is it because of the security or because the yields are too low or what's the reason?

Uh, security.

Security.

Yeah, because the yields, you can, you can always like, you know, if, if you're sophisticated and active, you can, you can still clip decent yield on-chain. Uh, you have to be really on it, and there's still people that do it, but it hasn't been as lucrative given like the risk-reward is just not there.

At least not even as we're recording this. Hundreds of— I'm looking on, I just saw this on this alert come through. Hundreds of wallets Just got drained by the same address on ETH mainnet. Seems like a new live exploit worth flagging.

So is that like a 1Password, like a password manager? Not a password manager.

This is, this is like 3 minutes ago. I'm just seeing this. So, uh, say more about it.

What is it?

I'm, I'm, I'm literally on Etherscan looking at the funds go out. Um, funds just left. Funds left my wallet to this address. Not sure what the vulnerability surface is. Others are getting zeroed out as well. Mainnet ETH only. Yeah, so this is— I mean, look, I don't know if it's impacting things right now, but I would say this is a big problem. This would be— I think this is like an enemy number one is North Korea and Lazarus right now. And I actually think it's a huge problem. Yeah, yeah. And I think you'll— but look, like, you know, free markets end up solving the problems is my belief. And like, you know, people like there'll be great entrepreneurs and founders who step in and try to solve this problem. And there'll be great capital allocators like Rob, I don't know if you guys are getting pitches yet. Like I haven't seen many companies doing this. But like, I'm guessing you will start to see companies doing this, like trying to solve some of this stuff. I think there's one called HyperNative, which is like real-time security and threat detection.

And I mean, HyperNative is a decent company. There was a Series B a couple years ago. They're very good.

Yeah.

So like there's companies like HyperNative, and then I'm, but I'm guessing there'll be many more HyperNative-esque companies and I, I don't know. I'm— I don't think fundraising—

yeah, fundraising in the security market right now is actually picking up a lot, as expected, right? So like all of the like securities are out in market, right? Um, uh, and so like it's very clear that this is a problem that, that needs to get solved and people are trying to solve it. You know, I was talking to one of my portfolio companies, we had a board meeting, uh, earlier this week and they, you know, this is not a portfolio company that has ever had a security issue, that has ever had a hack. They've been, they're probably one of my most professional portfolio companies in terms of thinking about, um, you know, these like OPSEC and, and things like that. And they, for a period of time after what happened with LayerZero, just kind of locked down their protocol and just did a full like 2-day review. Of every single thing they do, and they've just decided that they are going to be— they're going to make a bunch of changes despite the fact that they've, you know, never done anything as— never done anything nearly as reckless as what we've seen for some of these guys happen today. But they're saying we're going to even go the third or fourth or fifth extra step because we know that this is happening. We know that people are— the attack vectors are widening, and we know that it's getting more sophisticated. And so we're just going to do a full-scale review and we're going to, uh, we're going to change the way we operate. And one of the things they were doing was they were getting a bunch of kind of real-time alerts through, through HyperNative. And then I saw, I saw, um, one of the founders at our Paddle event yesterday. Uh, and they were telling me, I think we have too many alerts now because I literally get an alert like every minute that like something could be happening. Uh, and now I, and I can't sleep anymore.

I was like, I haven't slept in 3 weeks.

Like, yeah. Uh, but so, um, but, but I think very clearly this is something that everyone needs to be taking extremely seriously, no matter how seriously you think you are already taking it, right? Because it is only going to get tougher and tougher and tougher.

Take a disciplined approach to crypto investing with Fidelity Crypto, a platform built in-house using over a decade of crypto experience. At Fidelity, you can trade crypto and stocks together, backed by industry-leading security. When you can see When you see your accounts in one place, it's easier to make smarter decisions. Get started at fidelity.com/crypto. Crypto is offered by Fidelity Digital Assets, N.A., is not insured by FDIC or SIPC, and includes risk of complete loss. Securities offered by Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE/SIPC. Let's, uh, let's shift gears a little bit. So Pump Fund just did, uh, just started doing these. So Pump Fund has been buying back their token and burning it, and it's part of these like, yeah, token— okay, so Pump tweeted out, the future of Pump: we have burned all of our bought back Pump tokens, which is around $370 million worth of purchases, which is roughly 36% of the circulating supply, in order to gain trust with our community. On top of that, we've initiated a programmatic buyback and burn scheme at 50% of the of revenue for the next year to instill trust, predictability, and sustainability for the underlying ecosystem and to remove as much of the supply from circulation as possible. Pump is changing for the better of token holders, the team, and the ecosystem. And Alon followed up that, that post and said, uh, today's a turning point for Pump. I want to give more context on the bigger picture. Over the past 9 months, 100% of revenue went into buybacks. Basically no other platform has done this at that scale. However, we received ongoing feedback on the feeling of a lack of trust. I wouldn't— I have many thoughts on why that is. Um, and he said, you know, today we're changing that. Um, so, uh, and he said, why not 100— why not use 100% of revenue to buy back? Said the short answer is the business simply needs the other 50% to grow. I have thoughts on that too. Um, but yeah, I would love to get your guys' take on this.

I'm actually interested in your thoughts on that because you give us your thoughts. Yeah, because, because I, I, um, you know, my perspective is that actually the most interesting thing out of this announcement was the fact that they said, hey, less than 50% is going to go into growth capital. And I think they specifically talked about the, you know, quote unquote, like, big bets, uh, and things like, like M&A. And I think, you know, there's been a lot of discussion online, which is totally correct, which is that, like, the idea of using 100% of your revenue to, like, buy back a token just tells people that the, the product is the token, right? Instead of like growing the business and building new product and trying to find things that people want to use. And so I, I thought that was, uh, actually a very good thing that they did that. But I'm interested in your perspective on like how you think about as a founder, whether or not— in a— I know you don't have a token, but like how people should be managing the token versus their business.

Yeah, I mean, first off, like, I think that, uh, there was a great piece that, um, There was a great piece on investor relations that a fund— I'm trying to remember the fund's name— it was Runa Digital Assets wrote, and they talked about the hidden driver of token performance is investor relations. And like, I'm as biased as it gets here because like we have an investor relations product and I think it's, you know, it's the fastest growing thing at Blockworks right now is this IR product. But I think that companies need to start treating— okay, here's, here's, here's the problem that's happened in crypto to date, in my take, for investor relations. Is you've treated the users and the shareholders as the same group of people. And because there's this idealistic dream, right? Like, you know, imagine if Uber started and the first Uber users were the ones who own the stock. Like, it is kind of this utopian dream, but actually the user, your customers, end up being very, very different people than your shareholders. Like, imagine if you owned, you know, you've got Apple has their customers of the iPhone, and then they have got their shareholders, and those are two really different people, and you have to communicate to them very differently. And so, you know, I think there's some groups who do this really well, like EtherFi does a really great job of this. Maple, I think, does a good job. I think Athena is starting to do a good job. I think LayerZero is starting to do it. Like, there's a few people who are starting to do a good job at this. But for the most part, people don't do a good job. I think Pump, this is them. This, I think this is 7 months of investors telling Elan and the team, like, guys, you need to communicate. Your story. You have to talk about investor relations. And while I like this, like you can't just do it one and done. Like imagine if, you know, Tim Cook just like never showed up to quarterly earnings calls. And then like once was like, guys, guys, guys, calm down. Like Apple's a good stock. We're going to be fine. You can't do that. You have to do. And I, and my concern here is like, this is just like Elon trying to sat— he could, you know, cause they, they basically say oftentimes in this tweet and in in both his tweet and Pump's tweet, like, we're doing this to, you know, to gain trust with the community. It's like, don't do this. It feels very like one time. So I don't like that. And then in general, I don't really like buybacks that much. Like, I don't think that— like, buybacks to me tell me that a founder doesn't know what to do with your cash. Like, it tells me you don't have better ideas. And, you know, obviously crypto is weird. Like, there are some companies that just end up with this huge amount of capital Right? Like, they're like, they should be a Series A company, but they end up with like a billion dollars. So like that, it's a bit of a weird market in that way. Like a lot of the L1s and L2s ended up with that. But yeah, I just don't think, I think it's oftentimes better used for like R&D or like product development. Now there's a counter, which is if you really genuinely believe that the token or the stock is undervalued, then you should probably buy it. But yeah, I just think it's a lot of money to use to buy back a token to satisfy a very small amount of investors on Twitter who are kind of complaining.

They burned a third of the— over a third of the token and the token's down. Makes you wonder, like, should they have—

It's like, is it even working?

Like, I mean, look, it makes you wonder, like, do you need a token for this business?

Would, would they be better buying back these tokens or having Elan do what like most founders do, which is like tweet about the product development and how many users they're getting and like how they're winning the market? Like Pump, Pump is in an amazing place actually.

Like they have the most profitable protocol in crypto.

Such a sick business and amazing, like huge market share and like all these users, like they're one of the few companies in crypto with like real revenue, real profits, real users, massive market share. But like, but they're just talking about the buybacks. Like, I just don't, I just don't get that. That's not what I would be doing, I guess.

Just, just honest question, like, um, should Pump have launched a token? Because sometimes, I mean, it goes back to the core of it, like, what is the role of the token here? Like, like, I get, I guess, like, run it like an exchange or like incentivize people to, to get on the platform and, um, you know, uh, get some discounts on, on fees. But like, they're running a phenomenal business before that. Like, like, does the token hurt you or help you? Like, what is, what is the calculus? Like, is it going to increase like user interest or volume on the platform?

I actually don't hate having a token, but it's, you know, you hear all these public company CEOs and oftentimes the founders when they go public, they tell their team, we will not focus on the, on the, on the equity price, right? Like, yeah, I heard Brian, you know, Armstrong, when they went public, like told the whole Coinbase team that, you know, Bezos famously has like really banged that drum at Amazon. Like, you know, I've heard Tobi at Shopify, like banging this drum, and obviously it impacts mood and morale. But like, you, I think, as a founder need to show your team that it's about growing revenue, and users and the profit and the business and being innovative. And instead, what I think a lot of crypto founders do is they tell their team the whole focus is on the token. And that's what— yeah, I just don't— I don't like it. I don't think it's the right strategy.

How much did they raise in the— in the— in the— was it like in November of last year?

They ended up raising, I think, $500 million, right? Or $600 million. Yeah.

And so they now burn back here.

Here's the ICO stats.

So they burned more of that at this point. There's more value destruction. Um, look, and, and it's like you can't look at it in a vacuum because obviously the market's down, but you know, they're still, they're still cranking some decent volume. And like, how much are they making on a weekly basis?

Like, look at that. They had 8, they had 8 billion across PumpFund and PumpSwap. They had 8 billion in volume. Volume in just March, right? They had their Q1 alone was $27 billion in volume. Like this is a sick business. And they should talk about how amazing of a business is. That's what I would be doing if I were— that's why I don't like— I don't have a— I'm not—

I don't think— yeah. I mean, it's either you don't have enough growth opportunities to invest behind. But, uh, or you're trying to instill confidence in a brute force mechanism that I think, to your point, is probably better to just be more communicative on the daily and just go out there and really talk about Pomp. And that probably goes, uh, and the market's speaking, right? The, the, the token's down, uh, after this burn. Like, it's, it's, it was very clear to me that, to your point, it's like one time. And I mean, look, I'm biased. I mean, I'm an investor. I was an early investor there. I, I still hold my tokens, like, um, but I, I mean, it's a cash machine. I don't still don't understand why I need a token.

There's, um, I had an interesting conversation internally yesterday because there's a, uh, uh, you know, kind of a— we talked about this, like, I, I mean, maybe this was 2 months ago when ACROSS announced their take private, uh, And, you know, I had a couple conversations right after that with a bunch of protocols that were considering something similar. And then I talked to another company yesterday where they're just too big to do a take private, uh, because it's, you know, public market cap is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, but similar thing where their revenue is just kind of like up into the right. Their adoption is up into the right. Their, you know, usage is up into the right. And the token has been down to the right and like has literally not stopped, uh, going down for, you know, call it, you know, 3— I think the whole year, uh, and I think has halved since the beginning of the year. And there— I don't believe that this is necessarily like a long-term trend. I do believe that there are reasons to have tokens. I think some of these tokens will do very well. How you design the tokens continues to matter quite a bit. But we certainly are in this point of time where people have forgotten the thing that matters most in markets, which is liquidity. And there is just no liquidity for these tokens at this period of time because of, you know, access reasons, interest reasons, and, you know, the weight of everything else that has happened in the space. And as markets consolidate, as You know, I think right now, like, crypto tokens and equities are seen as, like, you know, distinctly different asset classes, where I don't believe that'll be true over time as people kind of, you know, reinvent themselves and reinvent their tokens. But in this, like, short-term period of time, like, that's going to continue to be true until liquidity comes back into the space. When we started this, you know, podcast by talking about the fact that, like, you know, Robinhood trading is down— or crypto trading is down 40%. Coinbase will be the same thing. That is going to have knock-on effects. It doesn't matter if you're the best business in crypto, it is going to have knock-on effects. And so there is this, you know, in the same way that the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the same exact company trades at a discount to the, uh, some, the company on the NASDAQ, like that is essentially what is happening here. And so I don't, I don't expect that this is a thing that exists forever. But it is something that you have to think about right now. And I think a lot of these protocols are thinking about it.

Yeah, I agree with all that. I agree. Um, anything else, guys?

No, but to your point earlier, just to say, I think Santi asked the question, Pump is still, if you take like their first quarter, is still probably going to do over $300 million worth of revenue this year.

Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying. Go talk about the business. Like, you know, you get one day a year to go talk about your valuation, which is when you announce your fundraise. That's why.

So just to put a finer— talking about that, just to put a finer point on that, so Pump now with the burn, I'm looking at, they are trading at— if they're gonna clock $300 million in revenue, Rob, to your point, this year, give or take, at the current pace.

That's what they're run rating towards.

Yeah, it's, you know, half of the market cap. It's like the cheapest protocol in crypto out there. And, and you can rest your head on, like, meme coin trading, even in today's depressed environment, is still going. Um, so yeah, like NFA, but from a pure cash-flowing durability perspective, this is as good as it gets.

Yeah. Content of the week.

Well, I already said this, I'm going to cheat here, folks. You should go listen to the Paul Tudor Jones Invest Like the Best episode. I think it was just any, you know, very good. I mean, the man wakes up at 3 in the morning to go see the, you know, Asia market open. Works out 2 hours a day, has been doing the same routine for the last 20 years. The man loves the game. Like, he's just out there. Like, it's incredible stamina, incredible— like, just his routine and discipline. Like, and something he said, which is like, um, you know, he thinks that it's much harder today than it has ever been. And that's something that Drunken Miller also says. Like, I'm like, you would think that like a veteran like me, like, trading gets easier, but it's, it's harder and harder and it's like, there's just this wealth of information and it's really hard to stay on top of it. Whereas 20 years ago you could have just focused in. Um, so yeah, that, that's my content of the week. It's really, really good. Uh, podcast.

My content of the week was you on TVPN yesterday. Didn't even, and then we didn't even talk about the Blockworks fundraise. Like, you know, I can't, we talked about the Blockworks rebrand last week.

I don't wanna turn this into the Blockworks shill, shill thing, but yeah, we raised, you should talk about it.

You should talk about it.

Yeah, we raised, we raised, we raised around, we raised around, we just announced yesterday, raised at $192 million valuation. Parafi and Reciprocal co-led, good folks participated, Coinbase Ventures, MoonPay, a bunch of other great investors. Rob did not, so I will keep, you know, keep drilling him for that. Just got to beat him on the paddle courts. And what else? I don't know, 20 of our customers invested, you know, founders and operators from like 20 of our customers. That was cool. That was a good win. And, uh, yeah.

So, can I just say something? Beat me on the paddle courts. Did I dominate you last time we played?

I'll let you get one. I'll let you get one. It's like you get one day a year where you can talk about your valuation and talk about, you know, how great the company token is and, you know, the equity value. And then you got to go back to building. It's like, I'll let you get your one day. And then, yeah.

Uh, well, congratulations. Great, uh, great team. Great, great business. So, uh, you know, that was great to see that come out and you guys are Great investors. So awesome.

Appreciate it.

Um, so other than TVPN with you, content of the week, I have pre-bought my, my tickets for this weekend for Devil Wears Prada 2. So I'm excited about the first one. It was a banger.

Okay. I love you. I love you. That's great.

People did not give it enough credit.

So, uh, are you going to, I mean, not to dox you, we know where you'll be, but we're not going to say just for security reasons, but you will be, um, Uh, I love the fact that you pre-bought the tickets. Do you snipe them? Like, you refresh?

Didn't get enough love, you're saying? Devil Wears Prada? Wow, look at it.

Look at the first one, got a ton of love, but I think people— I mean, maybe sleeping on the second one.

So is there a poly market on it? Like, box sticker?

I want to see the poly market on, um, on the, the box office.

So look at this. Yeah. Whoa.

There you go.

Wow. Wow. How much, how much do you think that costs?

Uh, I have no idea. You know better than me about, about AdWords.

Google's up 7%. So I think they're printing.

Printing. Devil Wears Prada 2. All right. That's a good one, Rob. I like it. I can get behind that.

I mean, I like, listen, I think all of us listen to the PTJ, uh, Invest Like the Best, which was actually the best content of the week.

I'm just, I'm just boring, guys. I, I, that's, that's a read.

I got one. I just started a new book because mostly for the reason that 6 of my last 6 recommendations were either Invest Like the Best or David Senra, and I just really need to see more interesting and creative than that. So I just started a new book by Jack Weatherford about, uh, it's like the book about Genghis Khan. So it's called Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.

Oh, yeah, dude. So good. You should read the sequel to that, Mongol Queens, which no one really knows.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I saw that.

Genghis died. So like most of like his daughters inherited the big part of the empire.

Yeah. So Mike is going through hardcore history just like every day, just hours of hardcore history. And then, you know, we talk, basically calls me and we talk about the business, then we talk about history, nerdy stuff. And he was like, look, one of the, you know, one of the interesting episodes, he just, he just got through the Mongol episode of hardcore history and they were talking about how the, this, yeah, this idea of revisionist history, basically. Like, Genghis Khan was like this horrible, horrible, horrible human who killed more people than anyone in history until Hitler came along. And, you know, and then at some point we started like liking Genghis Khan. So it's, uh, and th— and this book was kind of the book that kicked off a lot of the revisionist history, or so, or so this podcast makes the claim. So yeah, I'm excited to read it. Rob, you'll have to let us know. I hope you enjoy the show, man.

Well, I mean, the other thing, by the way, what everybody should be watching right now too is NBA playoffs.

So who's on the finals?

Well, it is the first round still.

Oh, okay, okay.

But you know, I went to the Knicks game this week, um, and you know, they, they blew out the Hawks. Cavs are up 3-2. Two teams I care about.

So Knicks are up 3-2, right?

Yeah, Knicks are up 3-2 and the Cavs are up 3-2.

Yeah. You're a Cavs fan, right, Rob?

I'm a huge Cavs fan, but because I've lived in New York for as long as I have, I, I, uh, they're like my second team. And so I went to the, I went to the game on, on, uh, I guess that was Tuesday in, in, uh, you know, isn't there a—

oh, go ahead.

No, I was about to say it was just, you know, it was, uh, it was a lot of people were there so that the person in front of me kept zooming in and taking pictures of Timothée Chalamet. Like, literally spent the entire time not watching the game taking pictures of Timothée Chalamet. It's a fun event at the— go to the Garden.

Uh, Knicks, Knicks in the playoffs, uh, Knicks in the playoffs is a good time.

Isn't there a Miami GP this weekend for people that are going to Consensus and stuff like that? Rob, are you going?

I'm not going. I'll be at Milken instead.

So nice, nice, right on.

All right folks, that's all we got. I'll be in Miami if you're at Consensus. Say what's up. Cheers folks, have a good weekend.