Crypto's Euphoria, Mass Stablecoin Adoption, and What Santi's Buying | Roundup

I think that I'm earlier in this industry than I was a decade ago for the simple reason that a decade ago it was, let's become digital gold, it's $10 trillion. And what is both daunting, exciting, but also really amazing is that the aperture has opened up in a way that things are working.

I don't think that triggers euphoria, that triggers like a, like sort of sits on you, it takes a while, and then you're like, oh fuck, like legislation comes, banks start holding, banks start issuing, tech companies start issuing, US dollar maintains global reserve status as we basically figure out how to export dollars to the entire world. And so that was just biggest takeaway from that, from the Multicoin Summit, was like, I think people are grossly underestimating. I think people think that there's like, oh, stablecoin bubble on Twitter and people are talking about that. We're like inning. We're not— the game hasn't even started for stablecoins.

Exactly. Absolutely, this is spec of us.

SKALE is the blockchain that is simply built different. Other L1 networks have costly transaction fees, clunky user experiences, and lack true adoption in AI and on-chain gaming. Explore the gas-free ecosystem at scale.space/ecosystem and follow their journey on X @skale_network. That is SKALE with a K. Hit the link in the show notes to get started. Hey everyone, excited to share with you that Cronos zkEVM has launched its Pioneer Program, offering early adopters a chance to earn not only loyalty points but also potentially win part of a $30,000 ZK CRO giveaway. If you're interested in being an early adopter, visit zkEVM.cronos.org/bridge. Big thanks to Cronos. For sponsoring today's episode. Are you a project founder that wants your team to be paid in stables or even just give your team token grants? Both of these things can become complete nightmares. Toku simplifies every part of global token compensation, all in 100 countries on one platform. Reach out to their incredible team at toku.com or by hitting the link in the description of today's episode. Hey everyone, Jason Yanowitz here. Wanted to talk about something that's been on my mind a lot recently. We should not be just recreating the track industry. That's why I'm excited to share with you that today's sponsor, Magic Eden, is getting into token trading, and their vision is to become on-chain Binance and then much more as the entire world moves on-chain. Stay up to date with Magic Eden's journey by giving them a follow on X @MagicEden. Hey everyone, Jason Yanowitz here. For Black Friday only, Ledger is offering $70 in Bitcoin if you upgrade to the Ledger Flex. You can also save up to 40% on selected Ledger Nano wallets and accessories. Offer is only valid until December 5th or while supplies last, so be sure to hit the link in the description of today's episode so you don't miss out on this really good deal. Ah, man. Yeah, put on, uh, put on your podcast face. All right, what's up everyone? We've, uh, we've got the roundup this week. Um, bit of, bit of an odd week. I feel like vibes are like Vibes are not as high as they should be with Bitcoin hitting $98K. I don't know. Trump did some cool stuff. AI agents, options went live, some stablecoin stuff. I don't know. What's up, Santi?

I feel like the vibes are— well, I tweeted about this yesterday. The market doesn't feel euphoric at all.

Yeah, let's talk about that. Why do you think that is?

Yeah, the way I think about it is when you believe in something and it happens, it doesn't create euphoria. Euphoria happens when something that you don't believe in happens, or that you hadn't considered. And I think, you know, if you're still here, like, it's been a difficult couple of years, um, and so whether you've been investing in Bitcoin, but like something like Solana is, I think, 5% off its all-time high. I was at the Multicoin Conference, you were there too, I think it's the people that are still here really believe in the technology. You've sort of been hardened by difficult times. And so you're not euphoric because if you're still here, you believe it, like you fully understand the potential. From my perspective, I have said this many times, I think that I'm earlier in this industry than I was a decade ago for the simple reason that a decade ago it was let's become digital gold. It's $10 trillion. And what is both daunting, exciting, but also really amazing is that the aperture has opened up in a way that things are working. And not only that, but a lot of the obstacles and the oppression has been cleared with this incoming administration. And so you're— it's almost like a deep sense of appreciation and excitement, but not euphoria, and that, okay, now we have a really good shot at scaling this. Now it's really on us to get this to where we want it to. And that's I don't think that triggers euphoria. That triggers like a— like sort of sits on you. It takes a while and then you're like, oh, fuck. And, and I've been thinking about that a lot, obviously, with what I'm doing, but also just as an industry as a whole.

Yeah, I have a different take, actually. I think you are right. So it's not a but, it's an and. It's meme coins have been great for some reasons because a lot of people have made a lot of money and actually a group of people who usually doesn't get to make a lot of money, I would say, has made a lot of money. And that's been a really net positive. The negative is that I think it sucked the air out of a lot of the rest of the industry, right? As a, you know, like crypto kind of has worked the same way that tech has worked in that it's a very venture-backed industry and it's predicated on the venture deals actually working and making a lot of money. And for the last 10 years, they did, right? They were working. You know, you would invest in an L1 or L2 or an app like Uniswap, and then it would go live at a valuation higher than the last round. And the, you know, the system was really working. And, and there were all the— there was like the majors, and then there were the alts, right? There was the DeFi tokens and things like that. And the downside of having these meme coins going parabolic is that it sucked the air and the energy out of, out of the rest of the industry. And we're, you know, in crypto, price drives narrative. And so even like, as you know, I was prepping for this podcast for a little bit, and I was like, what are we talking about this week? Like, Trump did some cool things, like there were some AI agents, but really, those are just meme coins right now. Like some, you know, MicroStrategy went up more than it did last week, like, you know, so there's no narratives right now. And there's no things that the industry is kind of holding on to as like, oh, this is what the exciting new thing is. And so I think that's driven some of the vibe not being as high as it could be.

I agree with you with that. And I still think, you know, let me ask you a question. Like, I think a lot of— we'd like to talk about narratives in this podcast, but like, do we need— I feel like we're in constant search of narratives when we already know a lot of things. And so, like, are we, are we in a place where, like, I don't think we have an identity crisis. I don't think we need to find more narratives. I could go back to when I was first investing in DeFi before it was a term, and I could have told you we just stopped innovating if we just stayed at stablecoins and Bitcoin. Even today, that's a thesis enough for this space to meaningfully grow, you know what I mean? It's still a speck of dust. Like, yeah, we're getting traction with stablecoins. There's $7 trillion being settled on stablecoins. A lot of that is speculative, and a lot of the reports that I've seen— businesses are still not using stablecoin. But you have PayPal and Stripe really appreciating how it can, can transform what they're doing. We don't need to boil the ocean. We don't need 100 narratives to justify the existence of this space. Like people that are not in crypto are just beginning to appreciate that narrative and how explosive that is. And oh, by the way, for them, that's massive. And so we like to bring on people here to talk about the cutting edge of blockchain and, you know, fully homomorphic encryption. I mean, like a lot of really cool use cases will be opened up. The non-skeuomorphic, totally new What's, you know, you know what I mean? But we don't need to justify. We don't need to create 100 narratives. I think we just need to double down on the, on the things that are working. And that alone is enough to push this space an order of magnitude or two.

Yeah, I would agree with you, except that narrative narratives are more important, important than people realize for directing capital, but also human capital. So let's, let's take like a real world example of like a person, right? If you are a founder and you want to go build something today, Do you think it's more— let's say there was a massive stablecoin narrative happening today or a massive like DeFi 2.0, DeFi Renaissance narrative happening today. That founder is going to go build in DeFi or they're going to go build in stablecoins. Today, what's happening? I mean, I have a really smart friend. He— I'll put quotes around this because he should be building a company on-chain. Instead, he just decided to launch a meme coin fund.

Now, meme coin fund.

Yeah. Now that's the third really smart person I've seen in the last 4 weeks launching a meme coin fund. Is that better or worse for society? I'm not here to tell you it's not the most productive use of your time. I'm sure he'll make a boatload of money. However, would that— that person is a phenomenal engineer, really gets crypto, really gets how capital markets work. I would love to see that person go to try to build a big business, but because there's no narratives, he's like, I just don't know what I'd go build right now. Like, I don't know. It seems like the money's in the meme coins, so.

You think he's a good builder?

Yeah, I think he's a great builder. I think he's a great builder, but he just sees the risk reward right now is like, it's like, look, I could go build something. It's really fricking hard. But like on the other side, I could go launch a meme coin fund. People, he's doing no fee, no fee. So it's like, I think 0 and 25. So he's like, yeah, I'll just get people to give me money because people know that I'm smart and like, I'll go make some money and that's how I'll ride out the cycle. And like, boom, we just lost a great company?

Well, if I were to meet him, I'd ask him, uh, smart people don't necessarily make money. I do appreciate narratives drive a lot of interest and speculation, and speculative drive is super important for adoption and capital market formation. Don't— I, I'm not dismissive of the value of narratives. I just think some of the best builders are obsessed with an idea, and they are counter— they counter sort of the mainstream consensus. Like, you know, you really— you want to build that.

That's a really good point. If he wasn't really a good—

the best— why am I doing this thing that I'm doing? Do I need to do it? Absolutely not. Can I just chill in the garage and just—

that's a good point—

each all my life? Yeah. But you just— one day you wake up and you say, I couldn't live with myself not doing this. I don't care if other people don't see it. I see it, and that's enough for me to go one speed, full speed, and that's it. If you want to— I know that at some point, like, I— the best people that I've come across just are like that and will. And I, on the other side, when I meet them, I, I sense that they're gonna do everything in their power to make it and will it into existence, and they will just literally not stop. And then of course they control cost, they raise enough money to, to be able to execute. I'm not saying that starting a meme coin fund is not, to your point, going to be successful. Good for him. Great, all the success, but is that really going to drive you?

Yeah, that's a good— that's a very valid point. Is he really the builder that would have built something big?

I'm starting to question if he's that good of a builder or that's okay person. I'm not— I would like to break— maybe you should come on the pod and we can just—

I was gonna say, my friend, without picking on my friend too much, maybe let's zoom out from that. I'd be curious You know, right now it's like Bitcoin is ripping. Bitcoin's— I don't know the price today. It's like $98K, I think, or $97K or something like that. And the meme coins are going up. Solana is going up and really nothing else is going up. And it's— we're now going on like month 7 of this dynamic, basically. And so I'd be curious how you're thinking about maybe what 2025 could look like. I know you've, you know, vocally been very— obviously everyone knows who listens to Empire, like bearish ETH, bullish Solana, You're right. Well, you know, pat you on the head for that. But like, man, no, I know. But no, I know.

I'm just looking at my portfolio and I'll be fine. I don't say thanks or whatever.

You're like, you know who, you know who you're— you see the Naïve Bukele Instagram story?

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

Because he made $100 million in the trade. He's like, we are right.

This is, this is amazing. I told you so, he said, right? He said, no, he didn't even say that. It's just a screenshot of $573 million in his portfolio. Total profit of $300 million. He just sent the portfolio chart with two kissy faces. Love it. Love it. Okay, so what do you think about what— what— so I think the big question on people's mind this week has been like, you know, a couple of weeks ago people were calling for like BTC/ETH is at the lows, but it keeps— or ETH/BTC is at the lows. It keeps going lower. So I'm curious to hear your current framework on like ETH, and maybe more importantly, less about ETH, but more importantly about like just the alts and like DeFi tokens and DePIN tokens and that kind of stuff. I don't know if you have current thoughts on this.

I'll answer the question telling you what I did last year. Um, I don't like to adjust my portfolio or thinking, uh, just because things— reacting to the market necessarily. I do pay attention to it constantly. But, and it serves as an impetus to update my thesis, like, hey, what am I missing here? On the meme coin stuff, for me, it was like, okay, I'm certainly missing something here. People, you know, and you update your thesis. But with something like Solana and how I think I did a very drastic change in my portfolio, I don't own any L1 like ETH other than to pay gas to like claim some positions that are vesting. So, but other than that, I don't own any ETH, very little Bitcoin. Uh, and so, but, but the ETH one is for me, like, I was willing to do that drastic of a change in my portfolio because it— I was processing the thesis for Solana and then high-throughput chains, and it took, took me a bit. Was I super early on it? No. Did I catch Solana at the absolute pico bottom? No. But I'm okay with that because I have a— my thesis is that Solana flips Ethereum and then some. And then so I'm going to hold that and I'm going to just see that through. So I don't necessarily like— I'm not— this calendar year re-underwriting makes no sense to me. Like, what am I— I know allocators, institutional allocators, like, let's sit. What is that? And we do predictions here for the—

yeah, yeah. It's— it—

we got to do them. I get it. But you got to do it. You got to do my standpoint. I'm like, yeah, I'm not doing them. I'm, I'm like, okay, I just— I'm holding to the thesis. I don't see anything that will invalidate it. And that's it. Like, so if I make, if I make more money on stuff that I've done on the venture side, I'll just rotate into more Solana.

So, so then let me ask you this. Can the alt— okay, without talking about Solana, Can the altcoins move? Like, can, can like AAVE and Maker?

And I'll give the answer that yes, I'll give the answer that the audience wants to hear. Now I'll entertain the exercise. Yeah. What's going to happen? Go listen to the episode of Eric Peters along the way there. He says something that is true. Institutions huddle up at the end of the year and say, where are we going to put our money? We just had the election. Crypto is in flavor now. Every fund that you talk to is getting inbound. The institutions don't move as fast. It takes one or two— Eric said it too— one or two quarters for them to update, right? They're going to go in there, they're going to say, we should allocate more to Bitcoin, crypto, uh, how can we express that view? They're going to do a couple of things. They might buy the ETF, they might also allocate to crypto funds, and then that liquidity takes a couple of cycles to play through. Absent anything major on the geopolitical side of things, you have a very, I think, a really good setup for the space. Like liquidity will come in and liquidity flows. And then so it doesn't take much to drive a lot of these assets, which you're right, Solana, Bitcoin are hitting all-time highs. Meme coins are just all the rage right now. Most of the other stuff is still well, well below their all-time highs. And so the question is, where do you want to allocate your money? How do you want to play that? How far on the risk spectrum? And from a portfolio construction standpoint, what are the funds like? You're inverting— where are the people going to deploy their money? Are they going to continue to deploy and do the trade of Solana, ETH, and looking at that chart? Or are they going to punt out? I think the correct assumption is people are going to go farther on the risk spectrum as things, you know, Bitcoin continues to rally. I could see it go up to $120,000. Before the end of the year, then all of a sudden it's like, all right, well, let's— if that holds, then people are going to punt. At some point, ETH is going to come out on favor, you know, the flows into the ETF are going to be strong. And then, you know, like everything catches a bit in a bull market is what I'm trying to say. And I think we are in that situation right now. Just everything you're seeing on Bitcoin, Bitcoin historically has led, um, But, uh, so yeah, like, what outperforms is maybe the more interesting question. Like, what on a relative basis does well on a year time frame? Kind of really impossible. Much, much more impossible on a shorter time frame. On a multiple year time frame, I'll tell you with a lot of conviction what I'm doing.

But yeah, so will we get— so here, let me pull up this, um, we did this story with— I think it was HashKey put this out. It was like outlines the three, like, kind of 2013-2014 alt season, 2017-2018 alt season, 2020-2021 alt season, and like basically where Bitcoin dominance was at for those. What were the catalysts? What were the key events? Um, we can, we can link in the show notes to, to the story. When, if you just compare the alts to meme coins in this cycle, um, what do you think, like in the last cycle, retail pushed farther out on the risk spectrum and started buying things like, uh, Compound and AAVE and Uni and things like that. And then they pushed even farther out and bought, bought the NFTs. The— we're skipping steps in this cycle, it feels like, and people are kind of saying, oh, I know how the cycle is going to go, let me just go straight to meme coins. So one, one thing I have zero conviction on is, will the alts ever get bid, or is it just It's a meme coin cycle because people know how the game plays, so they're trying to skip to the end.

Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know.

What do you think?

I mean, it's already happening, right? People have totally skipped the—

it's like, you know, that strictly speaking, all together, skip them. They've gone straight out now.

TikTok, Meta is all the rage and, you know, yeah, it's like my—

we— that, that my friend who texted me last week that we were talking about on the, you know, I think we were talking about her texts with me on the podcast last week. She didn't say, hey, I'm you know, I want to buy Bitcoin or like one of the majors and I want to buy like one of the real businesses built on chains. She said, give me— should I buy Bitcoin, Ether, Solana? And should I— what meme coin should I buy? Yeah, right.

Yeah.

It's like the bell curve that you buy something at the right side, you buy something on the left side, you don't buy something in the middle.

So yeah, I think like the right side part of your brain or the right side would be What are the best assets like Bitcoin? You know, if you're going to hold Solana or ETH, well, you can come to your conclusion. And then extreme barbell strategies. I think how the market just is operating, not just in crypto but traditional too. It's like I'm going to hold something like stable, like quality, and then I'm going to go really like, you know, left curve, like kind of like the Family Feud style of investing, which is it doesn't matter what I think. It's like what other people are going to do. And then you just kind of operate like that or allocate like that. The issue though, I don't know, like this meme coin stuff is— I certainly surpassed my expectations. It's just the meta is so quickly, rapidly evolving. I think Xiao or Darren or someone down low said like, wait a minute, historically it was like institutions dumping on retail. Now retail is dumping on institutions. Or like, or not. And also like newcomers, right? A lot of these people that like, if you're not on TikTok, you're at a material disadvantage, like in asset selection for meme coins, something like that.

Yeah, yeah. I'm pulling up the picture of that kid. Did you see the kid this week who rugged? He launched— oh my God, I gotta find the picture of this kid. He created a meme coin and then it went to like, he made like $30K in SOL and rugged. And then people found out who he was and like saw this video of him rugging and being like, he's like 15-year-old kid, he's like flipping off the camera. And then he— oh my God, you got— I got— I'm gonna send this to you afterwards, it's freaking hilarious. And then people sent his meme coin skyrocketing and he would have had like $5 million. So I don't know, funny, funny video. Um, any takeaways from the Multicoin Summit? By the way, shout out to the Multicoin folks. Um, I saw a, uh, I saw, I saw a thread on Twitter which was like, whose opinion do you trust? Or do you trust this person's opinion or something? And it was all these like people, and I think it was posted by like a very big ETH person, like Croissant or Bread, or yeah, I forget who posted it. But, um, it was like Kyle, Kyle from Multicoin. It was like 80% don't trust. And the thing that I think people, uh, nobody realizes on Twitter right now is that Multicoin is actually probably one of the only mega funds that has actually outperformed Bitcoin when a lot of the other mega funds have honestly just underperformed Bitcoin. Um, so I don't know, just wanted to shout out the Multicoin folks. I thought it was a really good summit. Um, I don't know if it was, it was like an off-the-record summit, so I don't know, can't share too much from it obviously, but like any, any just like generalized takeaways?

I was catching up with them because I went to, I think, their first summit in 2000 and 17 or 16, 17, 17 or 18. I forget.

It was like we hosted, you know, Blockworks. We were desperate for money, so they hired Blockworks.

But this was Half Moon Bay.

No, the one after that in or maybe before in, in a trip. I think it was Cipriani in New York, maybe in 2019. I think.

No, this was our first summit, I believe.

Yeah.

And I was going back to that. I, when I first met Kyle, I reached out to him because I thought his writing was very clear and compelling. And it's not someone that is afraid to voice his opinions. And he's a strong idea guy and he follows through and very high conviction. And I think the combination of Tushar and Kyle, if you know them or have met them, or you can go listen to their podcast, they're, they're different. They're different in how they operate and think, but I think the combination works very well. So my thesis when I gave them money back way back in the day for their hedge fund was these guys are going to capture something that I don't. They're gonna see things. It's sort of a hedge against myself, and it turned out to be very true. So I don't know, like, I, I really— I don't think they've had it easy after the FTX stuff. The constant question for Solana, uh, is very polarizing, but he knows that. And like, I know he blames like Cunningham's Law also like, you know, this idea of like tweeting, like getting a lot of information but like just staking an opinion. They, you know, he really— I think he, he's smart in that way. Um, so I thought, yeah, I mean, so what is Cunningham's Law?

Cunningham's Law is like the best way to get to an answer is to post a statement and people are going to tell you, or it's— yeah, you want to post the wrong answer and that will feed you the right answer.

Exactly like that. Like Cunningham's Law states, the best way to get to the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, is to post the wrong answer.

Yeah, yeah.

So I think there's an element of that. Um, so yeah, like, uh, at the end of the day, returns are all that matter and how you do— like, and so if you go talk to their portfolio companies, I think single-handedly maybe the better poll is to ask that question. I've asked founders that they've backed. They're there, they're in the trenches, and that's all it really matters— that and, you know, outperforming.

Actually, I did a very informal survey of probably 25 founders. This was like end of last year, beginning of this year, because I was thinking about like, should we have like a, should we have a database basically of all the VCs and rank them and publicize it and decide not to do that. But yeah, actually Multicoin ranked, it was Multicoin and Union Square Ventures were the two most helpful venture firms we found.

I think it will only become more important as the space has proliferated. Like if a lot of the, a lot of the bigger funds or the biggest in the space started at a time where it was very much just ETH and Bitcoin. But if you didn't get paid or you didn't raise to allocate to Bitcoin, you raised to allocate mostly to Ethereum. And, um, the name implies Multicoin, you know, they've gone out and they've, they've, they're very focused, I think. And that becomes, I think, more important, you know, as the space continues, as the aperture of the investable universe expands. And it's equally valuable to understand the things that you want to invest in as much as the things you don't want to invest in. And so I think ultimately, I'm not suggesting that maybe generalized funds are not going to do well. Like, you certainly could run a strategy like that. But, and, and Multicoin has different vehicles, right? They have venture fund and liquid fund. That's, I think, more of a structural reason, and I would do it the same way. And I think a lot of other funds do it the same way, just purely from a type of allocator perspective. But at the core, I think they're more focused. Like, at ParaFi, we were very focused on one idea. It was decentralized finance before it was a term. It was DeFi. Ben and I were of the opinion that decentralized finance is a killer use case, and we were seeing it because we're on-chain looking at— it was, I think, in order to come up with big, bold ideas, you have to focus on like key insights. The insight that we had was looking at like stablecoin usage on-chain and saying, wait a minute, actually cheaper to swap stablecoins on-chain, something like Curve, than it is with Coinbase or Binance. And then seeing ETH collapse 80% and Maker die, which is backed by ETH, hold its peg. Those two, I could tell you there's other things that we were observing.

And well, holding the peg almost didn't— I think you guys played a good role in holding the peg.

But well, there was moments where it was tricky. That's— we, we, we—

oh yeah, you guys were in the trenches. You guys were in the trenches.

March Black Thursday, we were non-stop. I was on the phone for like 48 hours because there was a— yeah, there was a credible chance of single— at the time DAI was only backed by ETH and our proposal was we have to expand collateral. And the hardcore Ethereum people were like ideologically saying, oh, you know, it's gonna censorship resistance, and adding USDC as collateral is gonna be really bad. I'm like, fine, keep— you want to die or do you want to survive? And it's, um, I find that people like think of risk in really binary terms. Risk is always, uh, risk is always a matter of probabilities in a spectrum. And very few people, I think, understand that. Anyways.

Yeah.

Like, we— I shout out to them. I mean, I, I know they haven't— it's not like I told you so. In many ways, Trump also had this tweet, actually, maybe transitioning a little conversation a little more. He had something that I thought was really impressive. He said, I'm not out here to go and chase after the people that made my life very difficult. I'm actually willing to give him a second or third chance. I'm like, well, I bet a lot of people didn't expect Trump to tweet that.

I mean, he did say that, but he also just sued the news companies for $10 billion. So he is holding a bit of a grudge. Just, just putting that out there.

But I mean, okay, fine. I hear your point.

But yeah, Anyways, yeah, um, all right, I have one takeaway.

I think like a more important thing is, well, I'll be observing is as Solana reaches all-time high, how does that community take that all in? And I know there's different factions within the community, but like, I don't think the right strategy would be to say, I told you so, or, you know, 100%, we're here and we, we were the best. I actually think that what has made Solana so powerful is that, uh, and, and in the, in this Multicoin Conference, there was Raj there and Johanna Tully. They've stuck to one really core idea, which is NASDAQ on the blockchain, increase bandwidth, reduce latency, like two very core ideas. That doesn't mean that, by the way, there's other technology in crypto that can address other use cases. Be on NASDAQ on the blockchain. Like, stand for something but be very opinionated and understand the trade-offs. That's what I tell every other project that I come across.

Yeah. SKALE is the blockchain that is simply built different. Let's face it, other L1 networks have costly transaction fees that increase as the network gets busier. SKALE has solved this problem with a gas-free, scalable infrastructure where users never pay gas fees. SKALE was awarded the most active gaming chain in 2023 by CoinGecko and hosts 5 of the top 25 games on DappRadar. You should definitely check out SKALE. I was using it the other day. It really is incredible to use. That's SKALE spelled with a K. Hit the link in the show notes or head on over to scale.space/ecosystem to get started today. Hey everyone, Jason Yanowitz here. I wanted to quickly talk about Cronos zkEVM, a next-generation zero-knowledge layer-2 blockchain network focused on scalability, security, and innovation. Secured by Ethereum, it further expands the Cronos ecosystem using zkSync tech. Cronos zkEVM has launched its Pioneer Program, offering early users loyalty points for engaging with Cronos zkEVM and its dApps. Join the first quest by depositing CRO in the Cronos zkEVM bridge to receive zkCRO and loyalty points at mainnet launch. And that's not all. In addition to receiving zkCRO and loyalty points, you could also win part of a $30,000 zkCRO giveaway by depositing in the bridge. The more you deposit, the better your chances of winning. Visit zkEVM.cronos.org/bridge more info. Now let's get back to today's show. Are you a project founder struggling to pay your team in stables or even just giving them token grants? I've seen this issue firsthand throughout the space. Traditional payroll or EOR providers don't support crypto. Even if you wanted to do it yourself, it's really complicated to figure out all the tax withholdings, report to the IRS or any government, and manage local filings. Toku simplifies every part of global token compensation. Everything from paying full-time employees in stablecoins, issuing token grants to your team and investors, all in 100 countries on one platform. You can plug Toku into your existing payroll setup or even choose a fully managed service. No guesswork, no missed deadlines, no complexity. Reach out to their incredible team at toku.com or by hitting the link in the description of today's episode. Hey everyone, Jason here. I wanted to take a second to break down why Magic Eden is getting into token trading. Their team is extremely concerned that crypto is still consolidated in the hands of a few centralized exchanges who act as gatekeepers, ultimately recreating the TradFi space. They believe that crypto is still missing an on-chain Binance, and their aim is to move trading completely on-chain, fully decentralized. They've done $6 billion in NFT volume in the last 3 years and have had more than 1.4 million users visit their platform in the past year, making them the number one NFT platform in the market today. They are the ones that can do it. Stay up to date with Magic Eden's journey by giving them a follow on X @MagicEden. Earlier in today's episode, I mentioned Ledger's latest products, the Stax and Flex, and I wanted to take a few seconds to tell you more about them. For Black Friday only, Ledger is offering $70 in Bitcoin if you upgrade to the Ledger Flex. You can also save up to 40% on selected Ledger Nano wallets and accessories. These wallets are virtually impenetrable to online attacks because they store your private key in a secure offline chip. You can manage more than 5,500 tokens and install up to 100 apps. Offer is only valid until December 5th or while supplies last, so be sure to hit the link in the description of today's episode so you don't miss out on this really good deal. Do you see the Solana roadmap website? I think Mert created it. It's just a, just a blank page. Iberl just says increase bandwidth, reduce latency. All right. So I had one takeaway from the MultiCoin Summit. So there was a— Kyle had a great chat with Senator Hagerty. And without sharing too much of the details, it does sound like positive stablecoin legislation is going to come. I'm now on your page that the Stripe acquisition of Bridge is an Instagram moment. I was like, I wasn't as convicted as you were at the time, but I'm now after hearing Hagerty speak. So I do. So here's what I think will happen in stablecoins is I think we're going to see positive legislation come out in January. I don't know if this means approval or like bills starting to get really proposed and pushed forward, but like something in early 2025, good stablecoin legislation will happen. Once that happens, we're going to see the banks get comfortable holding stablecoins. Once the banks get comfortable holding stablecoins, we're going to see the banks start actually issuing stablecoins as they see how much money folks like Tether and Circle are actually making. After that, The tech companies, I think, are going to see how much money the banks are making by issuing stablecoins, and they're going to say, whoa, wait, we've got the relationship with the users, not the banks anymore. And so I think you'll start to see one prediction that I'll probably end up having is Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp— I guess that's one company— Telegram, they're all going to launch their own stablecoins. And I think there's this like domino effect of like legislation comes, banks start holding, banks start issuing, tech companies start issuing, US dollar maintains global reserve status as we basically figure out how to export dollars to the entire world. And so that was just biggest takeaway from that, from the Multicoin Summit was like, I think people are grossly underestimating. I think people think that there's like, oh, stablecoin bubble on Twitter and people are talking about that. We're like inning. We're not— the game hasn't even started for stablecoin.

Exactly. Absolutely, it's a speck of dust. Yeah, no, it's like, why wouldn't you want to have, uh, increased dollar reserve, like, status and demand for dollars worldwide? The question that, um, yeah, it'll be interesting. I'm not like an expert on legislation, how long in the process, but some people, most of the smarter people, like, of what I've heard, like, that takes time, like multiple years. It's more of a question, can you get it through in the next 4 years? But yeah, maybe we'd love to have someone come on and really kind of lay out different scenarios of the most aggressive case, the more like how it has historically been done.

And then, yeah, you know, because I think there's, I think there's 2 main bills right now, which is one is the Lummis-Gillibrand Payment Stablecoin Act. This was, this was introduced in April. So it's bipartisan, right? Gillibrand is Democrat. Lummis is obviously Republican. And then there's the— who's the guy who's retiring? McHenry and Hagerty proposed the Clarity for Payment Stablecoins Act a couple of months ago. And then I think you had the House Financial Services— it was McHenry and Maxine Waters are also working on a bipartisan stablecoin bill. So I don't know whose bill it's going to be. I don't know the process, but I think there's 3, 2 to 3 bills and I think something will get— will go through, right?

Yeah, hopefully.

Yeah.

Like when you say go through in the— like you're saying the next 4 years or the next year or like what's the timeline?

Well, I guess you could— the most optimistic is that a stablecoin legislation passes during the lame duck period of Congress coming up. But I think the— yeah, I mean, the timing and likelihood of that are pretty low, I would say. I think, you know, there's regulatory pressure from folks like Yellen, the Treasury Secretary, and then federal banking regulators. And that's obviously going to flip come January once Trump is running the country. Then you've got— but I think you'll just have like real strong global competition. That ends up forcing this through and people will realize. I also think governments have historically underestimated the power of crypto in keeping them— what's the right word here? Solvent? No. Yeah, honestly, like, yeah, like, I don't know. I think, I think stablecoin providers are going to become the buyer of last resort for these, for these bonds. Yeah.

And we talked about it, we talked about in the episode with Erik, like You know, historically there have— you had to dance around like from a policy standpoint with China because they were such an important buyer of Treasuries. But when Tether— imagine a world where collectively the stablecoin issuers like Tether become— surpass China. Like, well, you're going to have to negotiate with or at least take care of that contingent. And I would argue it'd be easier to negotiate with that type of contingent than it has been with China.

Yeah, I mean, I'm way out of my depth in talking about this, but like, if the Treasury— if the Treasury market, you stop having demand in that market, the yields start to go exponential. And who's keeping these yields from going exponential? It's— I mean, could be the stablecoins. So, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Depends on the paper you buy and the shape of the curve and all this, like short-term.

But yes, I don't know.

Jordi from Cellini, if you're listening, you can tell us how—

what I do know is that Bullish week for, for Trump and crypto. So maybe just to give a highlight of some of the things that happened and the reason, by the way, that I think these things are actually important is because there are a lot of people saying, hey, look, if Trump gets elected, will he actually hold his promise of like being pro-crypto? And a lot of people said, look, he won't actually be pro-crypto. He's just telling you idiots this so you'll give him money and then he's going to rug you. And I think this week was actually a pretty clear indication that he will be pro-crypto. So a few things happened. One is he met with Brian Armstrong, and you could say this is just a meeting, but I think this is important because the last administration, I mean, you could give them, you give them $50 million in donations and they wouldn't, they wouldn't schedule a 30-minute meeting with you. It was impossible to get a meeting with, with Biden, impossible to get a meeting with Warren, impossible to get a meeting even by the end with Gensler. So this Brian meeting, I think, was pretty important. Two was He announced that he is appointing a crypto czar within the White House. This person is, quote, going to be armed with a small staff and tasked with serving as a liaison between financial regulators, Congress, and the White House on crypto policy. And then third is Howard Lutnick is getting a key role. We already kind of knew that. And the fourth, which is the craziest one, obviously, is Truth Social, which Trump obviously has a huge stake in, is entertaining or late stages to buy Bakkt. And new crypto people might not know what Bakkt is, but Bakkt was like the exchange, the darling of zero volume. Yeah, the darling. So there's this company called International Continental Exchange, ICE. They own the New York Stock Exchange and a myriad of other exchanges and market infrastructure companies. They launched this company called Bakkt originally as a custodian, institutional custodian, and then they layered on an exchange. And it, it, I mean, it just has done absolutely nothing. They went basically, they went public, but the stock is trading at next to nothing. They, I think I thought they went bankrupt, honestly. I thought they were out of business. I think they've been trying to sell this thing for years.

But yeah, volume has volume not done anything really. I mean, I know the first week was like, like, like even the shittiest AMM in Tier 4 chain was doing more volume than BAK.

But I mean, here you go, I'll show you the, uh, here's the, here's the chart. So yeah, I'm not talking about the stock price, I'm talking about the volume of BAK.

Yeah, like the actual volume back, like in comparing it against like, you know, other, other players.

I don't even know if they're big enough to get— can you get volumes? Oh yeah, I guess they're public, so Yeah, yeah.

But I think you might be able to see it.

But all right, this is a week— this is a week ago. Um, 200— yeah, I mean, $165 million in 12 days.

That's just November alone.

No, no, this is $165 million in October.

That's what Binance does with a—

yeah.

In hours, right, with a shitty asset.

Yeah.

So anyhow, like, you know, let's look at here. I'm looking at CoinGecko markets. Solana, just Solana alone does $2 billion in volume on Binance a month. No, a day.

A day, right? Yeah.

Of course.

Let's go back. These back numbers were a month.

Let's pick GOAT, which is, you know, talk about AI and all the rage there. So, okay, markets. Gate.io does— has done $68 million in volume in the last 24 hours.

Don't sleep on Gate. Don't sleep on Gate.

Yeah, like, well, I must say some of this volume is a bit off, but you can feel good about like, I guess, Radium. Yeah, well, yeah. Okay.

Radium's volume— you see Radium's volumes past Uniswap's volumes?

Radium? Yeah, I was looking at Radium last couple of days. I'm like, that could have been— I missed it. I'm like, out of curiosity, I was like, well, most of the volume— because when you go and trade on Jupiter, like, a lot of you see where it's being routed. I'm like, oh, like, I was seeing like Radium and I'm like, I'm an idiot. I could have like traded Radium when I was buying all these memes.

So Radium— talk about a partnership deal. Radium, uh, pumped off fund deciding to integrate with Radium. I mean, that's so, so radium. Radium did $5 billion in weekly volume last week. Compare that to Uniswap, $3.5 billion. I actually think there's an interesting takeaway here. So Uniswap is deployed on 23 different chains. Radium is only on Solana. There's an interesting strategy of like, does it really make sense to go super multichain? I guess this is more just Solana meme coins are ripping. Don't look too— don't look into it too much. All right. Pivoting topics here. Let's talk about the one narrative that is happening, which is AI agents. So it seems like the timeline is basically dominated by like AI agent stuff. So we talked about GOAT a little while ago and I think you had said you're like, GOAT could be the lightning bolt for AI agents starting to happen. And I think, I think that was a good call. So you're seeing social media influencers that are AI agents, Luna, venture funds, AI16Z. There are launchpads, virtuals, Spectral for trading. There's actually an ETH Global Hackathon after DevCon. There were 700+ projects submitted. AI agents just dominated those. Yeah, there's like Industry AI, which is creating like a gamified interface for multiple agents to work together to complete tasks. I'm just reading our research newsletter where they were talking about these. But anyways, there's a bunch of Coinbase. Oh, this is the big kicker. Coinbase's developer platform has AgentKit SDK where they're running LLMs under the hood that let you launch an agent super quickly. So I think a lot of this is happening on Base, it sounds like. So I don't know, that is a— I guess that is the real— that is the narrative that's happening right now.

That was my— yeah, that was my thesis going in. Go.

What do you think of the— I mean, I've— I'm— this is the wrong podcast to listen to if you want to get super deep into these because I haven't been paying super close attention. Unless, unless you have. I have a good scope, but like there's so much that has proliferated in terms of like, tell me about Luna, like tell me about AI 16Z or like Luna.

I got to pitch Luna. Luna is this platform that like allows you if you're a creator or a KOL or an influencer to create this AI persona that like is your bot basically, right? It's an AI persona that resembles like—

I can tell you, I can tell you.

No, I believe so. Yeah, there's like different platforms that are allowing you to do this, but it's like if you're a recognizable figure, you have like your own AI here.

This was, this is Sandra, the, I think, founder of Kaido. She said, in the AI agent space, we've seen the first viral AI agent trained on 4chan data, Goat, AI agent launchpads, virtual creator bid, FiFu, AI influencers, Luna on TikTok, autonomous VC agents, AI16Z, general agent infrastructure, Spectral, AI agents creating tokens anonymously, Luminous, agent creating an entire soundtrack, ZeroBro. I actually listened to that song, kind of slapped. AI agent that gives you market alpha, AIxBT, and an AI agent that trades for you, Spectral. Yeah, pretty cool. This feels like a go spend the weekend playing with some of these things.

Yeah, I agree.

Yeah. Anything else here?

No, I should mention that I have a position in GOAT and it's not small and this is not financial advice and I'm biased when I talk about these things.

Barry Silbert, big, big boss. He's back. He has been— he launched Yuma, which is a startup in the BitTensor ecosystem under the DCG umbrella.

Wow, interesting.

Big week.

Big week, I guess.

Um, okay, other things that I'm thinking about are, uh, MicroStrategy. Um, MicroStrategy is basically just trading as a— here, let me pull up this chart of, of the old sailor pump here. I thought this was a pretty good chart from, uh, David Canales at Blockworks. Uh, so the orange shading in the background is the supply of Bitcoin that MicroStrategy owns. The orange is Bitcoin, and then the purple is MicroStrategy. So you can see it tracking it for a very long time right here, and then it— in the last couple of months, I guess this year, it's really just ran away. So, uh, yeah, MicroStrategy is on absolute tear. Stock is up about 600% year-to-date. It's hitting just daily 10% jumps. It now has better returns than Nvidia on an all-time— on, on the, uh, these all-time time frames. I think that's the time frame that we're looking at.

Um, no, but Nvidia is still higher, but close.

Oh, it's right here.

It may have changed, but close. Okay, it's coming very close.

It's coming close. Um, but yeah, the, uh, what else happened?

They—

oh, so they announced this, their latest convertible debt offering. Is increasing to $2.6 billion. Um, they announced, yeah, the $40 billion or $42 billion buy. They bought $4.6 billion worth of Bitcoin last week at an average price of like $88,000.

Um, collectively, their entire holdings are— I think the average price before maybe this latest purchase was like $50,000 or so, sub-$50,000.

Yeah, but $50,000 price— I— well, now they hold— I think they hold like 330,000 Bitcoin. Which is like 1.5% to 2% of the entire circulating supply of Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah, I guess the bear— so I mean, just very interesting. I don't fully understand this, honestly. It's, it's trading at like 3 to 4 times their, their net asset value against the value of their Bitcoin.

I don't think Grayscale all over again.

Yeah, this, this doesn't I don't know. I'm like, why would you be buying this if there's a Bitcoin ETF? What does make sense to me is what this guy Dylan LeClair is doing in Japan with— I think it's called Metaplanet, where there's no Bitcoin ETF in Japan. So they just did a— I think I'm pretty sure he just did like a PIPE, like a private investment in a public entity and just kind of flipped it into this like shell company where they've been buying up Bitcoin. So I think what you'll end up seeing is in all these markets where there's no Bitcoin ETF, you'll start to arbitrage. You'll see a random company just start like a shell company, start buying Bitcoin. And that makes actually sense to me.

But doesn't make sense is why Microsoft, you would trade at a premium where you have the ETF.

I see. That doesn't make sense to me. My other prediction for these, for the, for these markets is you saw Rumble. So Rumble's like an alternative video streaming platform. They teased a Bitcoin treasury allocation. Their CEO, Chris, posted a poll on Twitter about should they add Bitcoin to the balance sheet? 300— 36,000 people voted, 90% said yes. And the market actually on Rumble pumped like 11%. So what that— and you saw a bunch of other people, Genius Group, Cosmos Health, Semler Scientific, Marathon. They're all—

it is now popular yet again.

They're announcing Bitcoin purchases and the price of the stock is going up. And do you know what this reminds me of? Long Island Iced Tea.

Yes, sir.

Long Island Iced Tea. And the reason I say Long Island Iced Tea is because, I mean, was it the last market or was it two markets ago? I think it was a lot. If I think maybe two markets ago, I forget honestly when, but if you would, if you put blockchain, yeah, Control F and then yeah.

Or yeah.

Yeah.

So people have been, people have been doing this with AI for the last like two years now.

It's like, so that's what's going to happen.

All right. That, that, that pumps over.

Let's, uh, if I, if I'm a CFO, I'm like, wait, wait, wait, I could move 1% of my treasury into Bitcoin. Bitcoin and I could get the market to jump 10%, I'm doing that all day long. So I think next year you're going to see all these, uh, all these purchases. I, I'm actually now, not because it makes sense, but because of the incentives.

What phase of the cycle is that?

It's euphoria, phase 3. Don't you read my Twitter threads?

I do. I'm asking the question. I gotta jump soon, ladies and gentlemen, before Jano convinces me to sell and mortgage my house and do some crazy stuff. With all this bullishness, stay— I don't think a lot of you guys are euphoric. I guess housekeeping. We are thinking of, as it is no surprise, I've been spending more time in New York. We're going to be maybe doing an event in the first, like, early December. I think the best way to—

are we? Are we?

I was like, what are you talking about?

Our event operations team just shed a tear.

Yeah. But yeah, no, no, no, like a small, small-scale event. Yeah, uh, it'll be—

you have to be in the Telegram.

You— yeah, yeah, join the Telegram. If it happens, if it's gonna happen, you're gonna listen, learn about it first there. Uh, but it'll be nice to see folks before the end of the year. It's been, it's been a good year, and, um, you know, great community we have going there. There's how many people going strong there? 1,000?

We've got 670. 670. So you got Pump the numbers. Last but not least, we have a code for you guys for DAS. We just announced Novogratz is joining us. Eric Peters, who came on the podcast, is now in. We haven't publicly shared that yet, but yeah, Empire 10. Santi is— it's not just fighting for a spot.

You see how I get treated here, ladies and gentlemen? I've been sitting in this chair for 4 years, but is close to 30 years in crypto.

I think I'm going to get Inversion Cap swag before you get Blockworks swag. That's the best thing. So 100%.

I mean, that's a— that's a— that's a no-brainer. The designers who I am working with, which are fantastic, uh, sent us like the creative stuff, the logo and the website. And of course they put swag. I'm like, when they— when they slap it on a sweatshirt, I'm like, I want to see—

I want to see how it looks like on a t-shirt. You got to do it. You got— yeah, no doubt. It looks good.

It looks like I'll, uh, maybe I'll do the unveil of the logo, uh, next week. Or I don't know if we're recording next week because of Thanksgiving, but Anyways, maybe I'll just do the first unveil here in the pod for people to do it. Not that it's super like, you know, interesting or whatever, but.

All right, guys, thanks. Thanks for listening. Enjoy the weekend. We have a great podcast coming out on Tuesday with Santi's alma mater, Parify. Ben and Kevin. It is a banger 2-hour episode on their 10 predictions for the year 2030. I would highly recommend it. So, and then that's it.

We're not going to see, we're not going to see folks, uh, like a roundup next week because of Thanksgiving, right?

No, we're, we're cooking over Thanksgiving. We don't stop.

Oh, I love it. Let's go.

Or, or I don't know, or, or we might cancel it last minute.

Not a mindset. It's my favorite holiday of the year, but I'm down to cook here, um, because I can't cook in the real kitchen.

Yeah.

So let's, uh, yeah, let's do it. I was gonna wish people Happy Thanksgiving, but I guess I'll save that for next week.

Save it for next time. All right. Enjoy the weekend. See you, folks.

Thanks, folks. Take care.

Hey, everyone. Thanks for watching today's episode. Just wanted to quickly thank today's title sponsor, SKALE. SKALE really is one of the best chain experiences out there today, and I've used so many different chains. There's a reason they are gaining so much adoption in both gaming and AI use cases. Hit the link in the show notes to explore the SKALE ecosystem.