Did Memecoins Ruin This Cycle? | Haseeb & Avichal

I think the idea that, okay, we're going to get the motherlode of all bubbles. I actually think what you're going to see net-net is that things in crypto are going to get less violent because we just understand it a lot better. And Wall Street understands it better, right? And certainly when you saw the crazy internet bubble, nobody on Wall Street understood the internet.

We're in like DeFi summer where people are saying, oh, this is really fun, let me go do this. And everybody understands the game they're playing, but what it's creating is a bunch of noise. So I think what you see next are, in part because of what's happening on Pump.fun, the, the media cycle kicks in.

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Yeah.

I don't think it's a classic. It's the, the fans' favorite. So we'll be flies on the wall cuz people wanna hear about you guys. They don't wanna hear about what we have to say. So yeah.

Welcome guys. I'm, I'm gonna start this the way that we started the last episode, which was 9 months ago. Um, where we said, hey, I think the context for, for 9 months ago is, hey, look, it seems like the market's kind of coming back. Like we're just kicking off the year. Like things are doing pretty well. Maybe we're going into this actual bull market and. Yeah, sure enough, we're in a bull market. And a lot of the things that both of you guys called that would happen in '24, sure enough, came, came right. You guys nailed a lot of your predictions for the year. And I'd love to maybe start this episode by just actually reintroducing that question of where are we in the cycle and how do you guys think about like what this cycle looks like as we turn the corner on '24? So whoever wants to take that first, we can turn this into a conversation.

As the, uh, as the AI expert, why don't you, why don't you predict the future for us?

Yeah, what I should have said is, Avichal, thank you for joining us and gracing us with your presence after appearing on the Ben Shapiro show.

That's funny.

Ben's actually become a good friend of mine. Um, he's, uh, yeah, he's— his platform is unbelievable. I was telling— we were talking about it before. It's just the, the range of people that watch his, his material is just unbelievable. Okay, but to crypto, your question, um, what happens? Where are we in the cycle? What happens? Um, I think we're still pretty early. I don't think we've really seen like the, the media frenzy and the sort of retail and all that stuff. And, um, I think maybe to take it a slightly different way, I'm kind of curious what Asif thinks, but my, my concern for years at this point, I think, I think Asif, I probably told you about this like 3 years ago or something, like we're in the the mega part of the last cycle is my concern is that this cycle is actually too big. Like, I went back at some point and looked at the '99-2000, like, uh, internet bubble. And if you go look at that, it was— if you add up the NASDAQ and the S&P, it's something like 16, 16, 17 trillion. It's like 16.5 trillion in market cap. And if you look at where crypto is today, like 3, 3.5 trillion, something like that, it's very plausible actually that we get to something like 15 to 20 trillion in market cap at some not financial advice, obviously, but I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility. Um, and, and I think historically, if you look at, um, uh, like proper bubbles, like, I, I would, I would assert we haven't actually had a crypto bubble because you can't really have a bubble without Wall Street. And so now we have Wall Street involved in the mix, like all the rails are ready to go and they're all bought in. Um, and so I think the potential for this to be like a NASDAQ S&P 2000 kind of setup is, is actually a little bit frightening to me because I think that could really poison the well. Um, and so like getting too big too fast and then coming back 80%, well, if it's a bunch of crypto degens that have been doing this for, for years and years, people don't really care. When it's people's retirement accounts and people can like borrow against their homes and take out leverage to do this, and it's, you know, grandma losing her retirement savings, that's really bad. Um, and I'm a little worried that, that this might be the cycle where that happens. And I think That doesn't kill crypto by any means. I think like the tech survives, it does great. Like some of the best years of the internet were post-2001, but like the next market, I worry this cycle might actually be like a pretty brutal cycle.

So before we go to Avi on that point, what's more dangerous? Um, people punting meme coins or people punting MicroStrategy at that premium?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think it's actually the MicroStrategy, uh, setup. And the reason is that it's a little bit— it feels, because it's blessed by Wall Street, because it's a stock, because you can buy it in Schwab, it somehow feels more safe, you know, like that people are used to that. Um, but it's really like a wrapper for just a tremendous amount of volatility. And I don't— I worry that people don't really know what they're getting into. I mean, even with things like GME, at least the people that are on WallStreetBets like look at that and they know what's going on. They could— they understand the game that they're playing. And I think the, the concern is if, if people don't understand the game that they're playing, those are the people who get wrecked. I'm pretty sure right now if you're going to Pump.fun, like, you know the game that you're playing. Um, and so, you know, it's like if you get burned, you know, you kind of knew what you're doing. Um, and so yeah, that, that, that's— I think that's a really good way to put it. Something is like the, the leap that you see in the later parts of the bull market where it just goes into frenzy is people thinking this is the new paradigm, this is like the new, the new normal. And all of this stuff is worth what it's actually worth and most of it's actually vaporware, that, that leap before was just degens and now it's going to be like people on Wall Street and people in their 401s and stuff. And that's, that's a little bit scary. Hmm.

Hasib, how do you think about where we're at right now?

I— so, okay, I totally disagree with the story. So let's, let's go break down— let's break down everything that Avichal just got wrong there. So, okay, so starting from the top, I think the likelihood that we see another crazy retail cycle or a crazy, a crazy bubble to the same extent that we saw in 2017 or to some extent in 2021. I think that's, I think that's just actually very unlikely. And the reason why is that I don't actually see that much unrealistic expectations about crypto anymore. I don't see a lot of people saying, oh, this is the future, everything is going to be on-chain, everybody's going to be using this for everything. I see people actually having much more tempered expectations of what this stuff is like. There was, you know, there's a little bit of a GameFi rally that we saw just a couple of days ago. But for the most part, like, the GameFi tokens are still tiny. The AI tokens are tiny. The deep-end tokens are tiny. Most of what crypto market cap is, is just Bitcoin, a bunch of layer 1s that sling around stablecoins, and that's, that's like actually most of it, right? And then there's some DeFi and there's some other stuff happening on-chain. And I think people are actually pretty sober about it. I think the things that people are really bullish on— one, Bitcoin can become like gold. I think it's very hard to imagine that the increasing amount of consensus around Bitcoin is going to result in some massive, um, you know, value-destructive event. I think it's just going to be this— it's going to be volatile, but it's going to be this gradual accumulation of more and more consensus and more of a shelling point around Bitcoin. And then for everything else, like, the reality is that the metrics belie reality in a way that it's hard to be deluded anymore about where crypto is going, right? What you see is a lot of fairly linear charts, is that stablecoins are going up, uh, on-chain addresses are going up, transaction volumes are going up, DEX volumes are going up, but nothing is really exponential. And I think that's good. I think it's good because it gives people this healthy sense of reality that I don't think that it's very likely, unless you're talking about Bitcoin, that we're going to get like a $15 trillion insane bubble that just like everybody in Wall Street starts pouring all their money into crypto. I think that's much more likely for AI because with AI, there's a real coherent story you can tell about how this completely changes the world, right? That's what you need in order for a bubble to form to the extent that it did in the dot-com bubble, as well as the way it did in 2017. Is that people didn't really have a clear picture of what blockchains were going to do, who was going to use them. It was all a story. Today it's not really a story. There are a few things that are story-like of, you know, some of the AI tokens and some of the, some of the stuff that hasn't really proven its product market fit yet. But the core use cases of blockchains are pretty much here. It's less about talking about what's going to happen so much as it is just measuring the growth rates and looking at, hey, what do we think this thing is going to become in 5 or 10 years? But it's not, you know, wildly gesticulating in, in, you know, without data. Now we actually have quite a lot of data to point at. And I think that is making markets a lot more rational. Like, I think it's basically correct that everything should have gone up. I think it's pretty obvious that a lot of what was holding back this stuff is regulation. You know, if you look at some of these stablecoin businesses, if you look at Layer 1s, if you look at the people who are transacting on-chain, a lot of the reason why they weren't was because they were scared, was because they're worried about regulation. They were worried about, hey, is this stuff illegal? Is it going to be taxed out of existence? Is it going to be shut down? And now they know, okay, for at least 4 years, I can— I, I know that this stuff is going to be there, and potentially it's going to be even regulated in such a way that I can rely on it. Um, all of that is resulting in a huge growth rate. You know, if you look at S&P's adopting stablecoins, if you look at the total amount of transaction volumes on-chain, DEX volumes, all those things are going up. Some of that is speculative, but I think the idea that, okay, we're going to get the motherlode of all bubbles— I actually think what you're going to see net-net is that things in crypto are going to get less violent because we just understand it a lot better. And Wall Street understands it better, right? You got banks writing research reports about, you know, Solana transaction volatility and, you know, protocol upgrades. That wasn't happening 4 years ago. And certainly when you saw the crazy internet bubble, nobody on Wall Street understood the internet. That, I think, is the big difference between now and, you know, previous massive bubbles that we've seen.

I'm trying to think through whether Hasib has more faith in markets than I do or way less. Like, I'm trying to— I'm trying to— like, on the one hand, you're like, okay, the market should be efficient and like, look at the data and figure these things out. On the other hand, you sort of expect the people to take advantage, like the market to take advantage of the information asymmetries and do things like meme coins. I mean, how do you think about things like, um, the, the DeSci pump that's happening right now, or Crypto+AI, or like, I, I don't mean, I'm, we have like, we're very big fans of Solana obviously, but like, I mean, do you look at Solana and say, yes, this should be worth $100? $36 billion? Like, I'm just— how do you think about that?

Yeah, I think it's very hard to describe any of those things as bubbles. I think, like, okay, Solana has flipped Ethereum on a massive number of metrics over the last month, right? If you look at total fees paid, you look at MEV, you look at transaction— obviously transaction volume and DEX volume and all that stuff, it's been, it's been, you know, flipping back and forth for a while now. So I think it's pretty hard to argue that, like, okay, people are making a fundamental mistake when they're valuing Solana at a third of Ethereum. You might say that, okay, maybe it should be a fourth, maybe it should be half, maybe it should be something. But that's clearly not the wrong order of magnitude for what Solana could be 3 to 5 years from now.

But then do you think, how do you think, I mean, I'm not trying to paint you in a corner with like a financial, you know, from like the SEC perspective or anything, right? It's just like, but you look at things like Ethereum at $400 and are you like, you know, this should actually be worth $400? Or do you like, how do you, I'm just curious how you think about that.

So I don't know if you measure it right now on a function of what is the total amount of MEV or what is the total amount of fees paid. You get some crazy large multiple. I think it's pretty clear that ETH is not just being valued as a function of the fees generated on Ethereum. It's being valued at like this sort of sum of parts. And one part is the commodity demand for ETH as a, as a, you know, as gas. Another part is the total fee revenue by burning and, you know, sort of buyback thing. And the third is ETH as a currency and this sort of digital silver You know, that used to be the story for Litecoin. In reality, that's now the story for Ethereum, whether we like it or not. That's how Ethereum is treated. Um, and so, uh, I, I don't know. I think it's really hard to, from first principles, look at that thing and decompose it and say, here's how much each of the parts are contributing. On some level, you kind of have to take Bitcoin and Ethereum at face value, is that these things are really a function of supply and demand, and everything else downstream is being valued on a relative basis. To those two things. I think if you're trying to back into a fundamental value for Ethereum, you're wasting your time. I just think you're doing the wrong kind of thing for an asset that is so immature and so poorly understood.

I'm curious if you apply that framework, like, very simplistically, these networks are based on supply and demand right now, not fundamentals, nothing, and there's very little to grasp on, and everything is anchored on Bitcoin, and then you go down from there. Solana is a third of the valuation of ETH. How do you think about from the demand side of the house, whether it's retail or institutional, we had Eric Peters here before, he obviously like historically venture funds have legacy portfolios in Ethereum, newcomers, new funds, we don't have a sole ETF, but how do you think about the demand side of the house? And as you underwrite, like, okay, on a relative basis, Solana, Ethereum, I know we keep talking about this, but I'm curious, updated views on Solana as an asset relative to Ethereum.

Well, so the fundamentals of Solana are obviously very strong, as I just mentioned, in terms of the on-chain metrics. That being said, Solana has a huge dependency on the meme coin economy. And in that sense, it's very tethered to— it's sort of like a business that has one gigantic customer. And there's just a lot of customer risk of like if this customer goes bad or churns or, you know, let's say Pump.fund launches its own chain and sucks up a bunch of the on-chain liquidity that's taking place on Solana. that could end up being very risky for the overall picture of where the fees are coming from. And I think markets are pricing that accordingly, right? They sort of know that, hey, DeFi is very, very sticky. Meme coins, we don't know how sticky meme coins are, right? It's kind of too early to say because they just showed up like, you know, 10 months ago basically as being this huge force in crypto trading. So I think markets are being thoughtful about it. Um, at the same time, You know, the question of incremental demand— I mean, Trump getting elected has clearly been extremely good for SOL because of the fact that SOL was such an enormous target of the SEC, right? Ethereum, in a sense, like, was kind of the least of the beneficiary from Trump getting elected because the fact that Ethereum, even under the Biden administration, had cleared the bar to basically have that exit velocity that, yes, you are sufficiently decentralized, you get to be accepted into the mainstream financial ecosystem. And everything else was too short to ride. And Trump has basically said, okay, fuck it, everybody gets to ride.

Obviously we haven't actually seen it yet, but in principle, is that a direct quote?

That is a direct quote. That is a direct quote. In principle, it's paved the way to a sole ETF, a Ripple ETF, right? If— I mean, the logic is obvious, is that, look, if Ethereum, which is a decentralized layer 1 with a bunch of nodes and blah blah blah, like, why can't we, you know, look, from ostensibly I look the same. Now, uh, Solana obviously has a more muscular team than Ethereum does, also younger than Ethereum is, um, but I think they'll probably prevail in being able to, to make the case to the new SEC and the new administration that, hey, we should be treated the same. And if and when they are, I think you should see— like, I think that's a big part of the reason also why, uh, you've seen altcoins do so well post-election, uh, relative to Ether, is that they should because they were the ones with this big regulatory drag and a lack of access to, you know, these larger pools of capital that ETH has been benefiting from for the last couple of years.

And I'm still, I'm still, I'm still hung up on this. You don't think there's going to be— people are not going to get crazy? I'm still trying to reconcile that.

Look, I mean, people always are getting crazy somewhere, right? There's always cycles. There's always ups and downs, right? But what you're describing of like a dot-com level flushing of massive amounts of capital and just complete pandemonium. I actually, I just don't think it's going to be that likely. I think it's probably going to be concentrated in meme coins. It's going to be concentrated in certain assets. Santi, you were asking about DeSci and gaming tokens are pumping. These things are actually really small, right? Like, if you look at the meme coin complex, it's, I don't know what it is, like maybe $100 billion of total meme coins. If you look at DeFi, I don't know, I would guess it's probably less than $10 billion, maybe $5 billion even is a right order of magnitude for it. Gaming tokens are probably $15 billion, I would guess. Like, these things are tiny compared to crypto. Crypto is $3.5 trillion. So you will see speculative cycles popping up here and there in individual narratives. But, you know, writ large, I don't think you're going to see like, you know, $2 to $3 billion of value destruction. Maybe over a long enough time horizon, but I don't think you're gonna see anything violent the way that we did in 2017.

I really hope so.

Avichal, does this— does your, you know, supercycle with quotes around supercycle mean that it's a longer cycle or just a more violent cycle, right? Because I think, uh, just more violent, because I think a lot of people's framework is like this cycle tops out somewhere between like summer 2025 to the end of 2025. And so like, A, I'm curious if you guys agree with that timeline or disagree, and B, it sounds like Hasib probably says, sounds like you guys actually kind of agree on the timeline, but Hasib just kind of thinks it's more like maybe like the last cycle, like up into the right, there's kind of craziness at the end of each. Or you think it's like a cycle to end all cycles potentially?

I, I think, well, well, so a couple things there. So one, I think that the thing that's different to me about this cycle again is that like Wall Street is on board and institutions are on board, like you have sovereigns that are on board, like the real deep pools of liquidity have sort of gotten their heads around what Bitcoin is and, and sort of kind of conceptually understand Ethereum. They haven't worked their way down the tail, but, but that's enough that you could have like real dollars coming in, and that creates a wealth effect. And, and a lot of this is, as anybody who's in the meme coin ecosystem knows, it's mostly paper gains, right? It's not, it's not like you actually have the money. It's like you try to exit any of these positions and you just get crushed on the way out, right? You just have massive slippage. So it's all paper gains. But the reality is, the way that most people think about their assets is through these paper gains. Um, and so that's where these numbers like, oh, the stock market lost $10 trillion comes from. It's like, well, people didn't actually like cash out and then lose $10 trillion. It's like they went up a bunch and then they went down, and they might still be up, but psychologically they feel like they're way down. That, that's kind of the effect that I'm talking about, is a lot of people will feel like they, they bought in at, you know, $100K Bitcoin, and then it went to like $200, you know, and then it's back down to $120, and they're going to say that they lost 40%, right? That's how you feel psychologically. Um, And so, but I think that matters because I think what it does is it puts a, it's a, it, it's a, a huge overhang on the space. Like, I think people, you know, if you go back to the internet just as an analogy, right? Like, market crashed. Um, there were some real valuable things in there. They were, everything was just overvalued. But even when like Google was IPOing in 2005, people didn't understand it was real. Like, people didn't think the internet was real. And when, when Marc Andreessen wrote that, um, Software is Eating the World, uh, article in like 2008, that was a, that was a contentious article, right? People still didn't believe 6 years later that the internet was real, these business models could be real, and that software was going to eat everything. Um, which in hindsight you're just like, oh, that, that was, that's obvious. Like that, of course that's the way the world works. But in, and when he wrote that thing, it was like a very contentious assertion that software was going to eat everything, that the internet was going to be 10x bigger than anybody thought. Um, and so I think this is, you know, the fundamental drivers of that I don't think were technological, they were human nature. And the fundamental driver is where people get greedy, people stop ignoring the— you know, they ignore the fundamentals, they stop paying attention to what actually, you know, matters. They get over their skis in terms of what's possible. Um, and this time it's just at a larger scale. So I think like the, the crash just crushes that many more people. So I think the, the, the sort of the cycle thing is like, if that were to happen, I think the next bear market is a much longer bear market because I think it's extremely sobering because there's no there's no next pool of capital, right? Like if, if like the pensions and the sovereigns are all, you know, buying MicroStrategy or something like, and they all get crushed, who's like the next pool of capital to come in, right? So then you do have to value it on fundamentals.

I mean, we said the same thing about FTX and here we are, right? Like, like everyone and their mother, like the top, top guys got burned with FTX. Sequoias of the world. To be fair, they're not, they're not back. They're like, to this day, I think they very much don't want to hear the word ushered crypto in the investment committee. But we're here. I, I wouldn't have thought we would have covered this quickly.

I mean, that's still— I mean, venture capital relative to like the pension markets is still tiny though, um, or the bond markets. And, and so like now that you have Michael Saylor tapping into like the, the corporate bond markets and the pension funds and potentially sovereign wealth funds, Um, because they, they, they, they want the exposure, but they can't go buy the underlying. It's like a proxy for them to go buy it. Um, like, I, I think you're just talking about like the, an entirely higher, you know, it's like 2 orders of magnitude more capital that can come in. Um, now, not, I'm not saying this is definitely, definitely, definitely gonna happen. This is, this is my concern. My concern is actually that this is the, this, this is a setup for really, really crazy capital to start coming in. And the consequence of that on the other side, should that happen, would be actually a much longer bear market. I think you end up with not like a classic 2-year bear market. I think you might have to just like suffer through it 4 or 5 years. And then, because everything has to be valued on fundamentals. I want to go back to, I want to put things, which by the way, as an investor is like the best time to invest. Like if you were investing from like '02 to like '12 on the internet, you crushed, right? So actually it's a huge opportunity in the wake of that, but it's kind of brutal to go through.

I want to go back to, and this hopefully inspires some more discussion. We always compare against bubbles. So let's take a look at bubbles. ICO bubble, 2017, 2018. Just slice the numbers. $18 billion was raised in ICOs. $18 billion. I haven't looked at Pump.fund. That's the next figure I want to figure out, but it's nowhere near that. NASDAQ, like the dot-com bubble. Um, per day, VCs invested $500 billion each day. So that was $300 billion in 2000.

What?

Venture capital investments peaked at $300 billion in 2000, equivalent to $500 billion. Uh, okay, that's wrong.

Perplexity.

That sounds completely wrong.

It's wrong.

No, no, no, no.

Venture funds were much smaller back then. Yeah, that is definitely wrong.

So, okay, this is a data point. Perplexity. I'll blame it on you. When the bubble burst, when the bubble burst, approximately $5 trillion in market value is wiped out. So that's a crypto— what is it, Crypto Now 3? Um, right. I'll come back.

That's in like $2,000, right?

That's correct.

Correct. Today.

Yeah. But I'm trying to just like put it in perspective of how crazy things can get because when I was sitting there 2017, 2018, I'm like, this could go run much, much harder. And then it stopped. What do we have different here today? Onboarding is vastly more like— it's 100 times easier, right? People can go straight on-chain and go to Pump.fun. But you also don't have the ICO mechanisms. You could argue Pump.fun is kind of like the de facto. But I'm curious how you guys like just think about going back to this. You disagree on how far we can go and where we are.

Just kind of curious, like, look, I think one of the fundamental inputs to a bubble is unrealistic expectations, right? You kind of, you kind of have to be able to believe that this thing will just take over the world and be infinitely valuable or arbitrarily valuable. And I think the reality is that, um, people just have a lot more understanding of blockchains today than they did 10 years ago. And I think that makes it a lot harder to have these kind of crazy bubbles, right? It's a little bit like you know, mobile phones, in that once you see the mobile phone and you see, okay, I can see smartphones are gonna change things, is gonna be really interesting technology, but you can kind of— you can feel it, you can touch it, like there's not this like kind of crazy intensity about it. And you see the numbers climbing, but climbing in this sort of gradual and kind of very understandable way. It doesn't really drive the same level of mania that it would at a time when you didn't understand what the internet was. And people imagine the internet could be basically anything. I mean, we're fixating a lot. Is this— what is this? Oh, this is NASDAQ.

This is the NASDAQ. All I'm trying to show here is that you— it ran up and then it took 15 years. I think this is what maybe Avichal is trying to show is like it took 15 years to recover to the high.

Sure. Yes. But I think that the key missing ingredient there is like that lack of understanding. Um, the reality now is that blockchains are a lot less exotic. They don't make people crazy excited. They don't make people think like, oh my God, this thing could take over the world. Like, even the people in the show are not talking about it like that anymore. We understand what blockchains are. We understand what they're used for. We understand the kinds of people that are going to use them. I think we have a pretty good ability to draw the line out 5 to 10 years from now, the same way we did with early smartphones, and say, this is a useful technology. Here are the kinds of things you can do with it. More people will have it. and it will get bigger and more useful, but fundamentally in the same way that it already is in the first iteration of it, right? In 2017, nobody fucking knew what any of this stuff was gonna be used for, right? We had such wild, crazy ideas about, oh, you know, we're gonna securitize all the stock markets in the world, and we're going to, you know, every single business is gonna launch their own token, and every, you know, you'll have 1,000 tokens in your wallet for every business you interact with on a day-to-day basis, right? IoT devices are all gonna be talking to each other, using their own token. That's what we thought at that time. We had no fucking clue what people are going to be using any of this for. And then we invented DeFi, and then we invented stablecoins, and then we had, you know, faster blockchains and all this stuff that we have today. Now, of course, there is a lot of speculation. Of course there is, you know. But the thing is, the self— the speculation that's happening in crypto is much more self-conscious today than it was in 2017. In 2017, people who are wildly speculating didn't think that's what they were doing. They thought they were investing in technology, right? Today, people who are buying things on Pump.fund, they are not deluded about what they're doing. They have a very good idea that like, hey, I'm playing a game, I'm hoping to get that 100x, and I'll probably lose most of them, and one of them hopefully will pay for the rest of them. That I think is the big difference that just puts us into a different phase of the technology deployment and investment cycle than where we were at 5, 10 years ago.

Yeah, I really hope you're right.

Yeah, I, uh, let me move us into the next kind of phase of this conversation, which is the dynamic of this cycle is different than past cycles because there's actually return dispersion. So all the last cycles, everything went up and some things were higher beta than others, but everything either went up together or down together. And this is the first cycle ever in crypto where you're seeing where it's, where it's not that, right? So the winners of the cycle are what? Bitcoin, Solana, and meme coins. Everything else not, not a winner. There's like little, little booms, like, you know, AAVE goes up and, you know, maybe Uniswap goes up or something. But like, you know, they're kind of like little micro booms. How do you think about what happens in 2025? Is this just the cycle that's like dominated by Bitcoin, Solana, and meme coins, or does this roll over into the second half into, you know, the whole rest of the industry, basically?

I mean, I think it rolls—

reflexive.

I think it rolls. This to me is very, uh, this rhymes a lot with, um, with DeFi summer. There's sort of this like corner of people, remember, remember all like the, the vegetable farms and like, you know, all the like crazy dot finances and, and everybody knew it was a, it was a giant sort of thing. And then, you know, meme coins are just that. Everybody sort of understands the game that they're playing. Um, but it does create like this, this frenzy and it creates this sort of like momentum, and then there is some degree of non-zero wealth effect. Like, some people are big winners in that, and that creates, um, sort of an echo boom, and then people start paying attention. And then because people pay attention, they say, oh, that thing over there is actually valuable, Bitcoin's actually valuable, um, I want that. And so money starts to flow. So I think we're kind of in that, which is I think we're, we're in like DeFi summer where people are saying, oh, this is really fun, let me go do this. And everybody understands the game they're playing, but what it's creating is a bunch of noise So I think what you see next are, in part because of what's happening on Pump.fund, the, the media cycle kicks in, right? And so now reporters start writing these stories about like, look at all these crazy, you know, Pump.fund people like locking themselves in cages and doing crazy stuff. And, and, and then somebody writes a story about like, oh, look at this meme coin trader. You know, it's like some 16-year-old that's now a millionaire. But then of course what that does is the opposite of what, of what they think it's gonna do, which is now like all of the other 16-year-olds and college kids are like, Oh shit, maybe I could be a millionaire. And so then they start paying attention. So it has like the opposite of the intended effect. It's not, it's not like a cautionary tale. It's like, oh, pay attention. And then the whole thing starts over again. Like, you know, it's a, this is why I really personally, I love reading sci-fi, right? Because like, even though the technology has changed, we now have different L1s and we have DeFi that actually works and we have stablecoins that actually works. Like the technology is all different, but the human nature hasn't changed. Right. And so for like the last 10,000 years, right, like human nature is basically the same. So I don't, I don't see why that's not going to play out the same way. It's just like, I, this to me just feels like DeFi summer all over again. And, and, and actually the parallel there too is like, there's some really interesting stuff coming out of the meme coin ecosystem, right? From, from like an infrastructure perspective or technology perspective or culture perspective. There's like really interesting stuff there, even if 90% of it is garbage.

What, what is the really interesting stuff?

Well, I think, I mean, definitely stress testing, um, uh, the, the infrastructure I think is really, really interesting. Um, and so like how much throughput can you actually get and how do these things work concurrently? Um, I do think the, um, like this is what I always liked about NFTs too, is just sort of like this notion of micro communities. Um, and so like all the stuff that Iggy was kind of playing around with, Iggy's Alea, um, which is effectively a meme coin, but it's sort of like this, this affinity thing. And I feel like that's kind of, um, like, like we haven't quite seen what social looks like in crypto. And I think meme coins are like the closest that we have right now, which is like a group of people coordinating to do a thing. It's like a real money game slash social thing where there are a lot of like small groups of people talking about these things. Um, so I don't know what that becomes. It's sort of, it's sort of reminiscent— maybe another analogy is like it reminds me a little bit of Fcoin back in the day. Where if you saw Fcoin, you're like, what the F is this? Do you remember this? In like 2017, they invented liquidity, right?

How is this like Fcoin?

Because they invented liquidity mining. But if you saw it at the time, you're like, this is— this feels like a weird, like, Ponzi thing. What the F is this? But then that, that sort of spilled into DeFi. Like, that was actually a critical unlock where people looked at that and like, oh, that's really clever, I can use that to bootstrap liquidity. Um, and so I think some of these, like, mechanics that the, that the, uh, meme coin people are using around like, how does onboarding work? How do you like, you know, explain to people what's happening? How do you like— even the notion of like the Pump.fun feed is like a pretty interesting concept. It's so different than what you see on Coinbase, right? So for the first time, like, the visual expression of what these things are is so different than like a price ticker, uh, which all of a sudden to me is like way more interesting, right? So like some of these sort of like observations about how the UX patterns work or how to onboard people or how community dynamics work, I think spill over into real social. In the same way that FCoin, I just wouldn't have predicted that it would have kicked off like liquidity mining for DeFi as a mechanic.

Well, so the FCoin invented trade mining. Liquidity mining was, was Compound. But yes, yeah, I think the, the point about social, I agree. I think it's very orthogonal from everything else happening in crypto though. Like I don't see a lot of spillover from the meme coin people into other stuff happening in crypto because what they're doing is just, just a fundamentally different project. Than what most of the people who are actually building stuff are trying to do. Like, like people in— like everybody who's doing meme coins is trying to make money. There's nobody who's in it for the spirit or like trying to advance some bigger agenda. Like the whole spirit behind it is like this financial nihilism that nothing matters and it's all about just making money and getting yours. And like, yeah, I'm sure there are some subcultures that don't have that exact vibe, but you just see it with the rise and fall of these communities. Is that they rise and fall in price. Um, and so I think it's fine. It's very clear that this game, the game of trading meme coins, is a really good game. It's probably, you know, we talk about GameFi, it's the best game that crypto's invented.

Totally.

Is this like trading simulator but with extremely high volatility, very, you know, extremely easy to understand names. You know, I remember, um, on the NES there was this game, um, called like Stock, Stock Whiz or Stock— do you guys know the game I'm talking about? It's like a really crappy NES game, super shitty, um, but it was like a stock trading simulator. I remember playing playing it as a kid. And you could buy shares of companies that, like, resembled real companies. So, like, there was a— there was a company like Pan Am, but it was called, like, Mam Am. Uh, and you could buy Yapple. Um, and so, like, it was— it was like— it was a trading simulator, but it was so bad. It was just so not fun. Um, like, I compared that, like, what people think trading is like, to, like, meme coins. And meme coins, it's just such a good game. It's so well designed. You know, it's so engaging. The ideas are so simple. Instead of like learning a stock and looking at balance sheets, you're just looking at a funny picture and like some schizos arguing on Twitter. Um, and like that, it's so much easier for people to play that game and it's so much more engaging. Um, so I think like that is the best game that crypto's invented, and that game has gone mega viral. I think that's the right way to understand meme coins, is that it is actually the big success story of GameFi. And the form factor was not Oh, you build like an MMORPG or a MOBA, and it's like an analogy to these other games that you like to play. The game that it's simulating is crypto trading. The game that it's simulating is like buying Bitcoin and Ether and Avalanche and SOL. Like, that game is too much work now. It's not fun. The volatility is too low. You're going to lose money. But this other game is just like super high-octane, fun version of it. And demonstrably, it's like way— it's way more engaging for for people.

Was it called Wall Street Kid?

Yeah, Wall Street Kid. That's the one.

That's the one.

It's really bad.

Yeah. Hasib, I think that's a good take, actually. I've noticed, I mean, one thing that I've noticed from Blockworks employees is, you know, maybe, maybe half the company is like, does things on-chain and half doesn't. Now it's probably 90% of the company is doing things, are basically trading these meme coins, like just like almost after hours. I mean, probably during hours too, whatever. But like, you know, just like during the day, they're just like talking about these meme coins. And what it's actually forced them to do is they're all— they've all got a Phantom wallet, right?

They've all—

they've all got comfortable very quickly doing things on-chain. We're like, we've actually tried to get people to— the whole company to do things on-chain for years and it just doesn't really work. It's like everyone's got a mandatory start a wallet. Like, no, you can't do that. This has pulled a massive amount of people who otherwise wouldn't have been on-chain, on-chain.

Um, that's a perfect example, right? Yeah, the, the, like, um, the, the second-order effect of these things. And I agree, it's basically a game. And by the way, it is a real money game, but a huge part of the utility, which I don't think can be, um, written off, is that games are fun. And there is some value that humans put on having fun. So even if people lose money, you know, like, I think people understand they're playing a game by and large. Eventually people won't. But, but, you know, your point, like, you know, this, this very likely gets, like, I don't know, I'm gonna pick a number, 250 million people to onboard into, like, self-custodial wallets. Like, it's gonna be, like, an astronomical number of people end up on, um, you know, MetaMask and Fantom and Magic Eden and, and, and, like, the bootstrapping, which then opens the door to the real productive stuff. I don't think it'd be understated, which is, which is what I was getting at before, is he was like, I think there's real spillover in terms of like driving infrastructure, um, with these things, which is why I don't think it's like that.

The way I would describe that is it broadens the install base, right? In the same way that NFTs got millions of people to chew glass, install MetaMask, get ETH into their wallet, figure out how to sign a transaction, do an approval. You know, all the stuff you had to do to get onto OpenSea was so complicated, and millions of people did it, and they were being advised by like TikTok tutorials and all this stuff, right? Now obviously Fantom has massively lowered that barrier to entry. It's a lot easier now to get into the meme coin trading game, whether it's on Solana or on Base or wherever it is that you're trading your meme coins. It's a lot more user-friendly. The downside I would give though is that although I think it is the best designed game that crypto has made, and obviously the UGC element of it just makes it, you know, kind of perennially self-sustaining, right, compared to most games. The big problem with it is that I do think that it is too extractive. And the thing that most games do, and this is a thing I've said over and over, I think I said this on our last show as well, the thing that most games do is they balance the economy, right? A game designer makes sure that, you know, you're sort of controlling the rate of like gold emission or you're controlling the rate of bad guys popping up in, or dungeons or whatever, so that everyone's having a good time and nobody's getting overharvested, right? You're like sort of designing the whole game to maximize, you know, net player retention over time or net dollar retention basically. In terms of the amount that they're spending. And meme coins don't do that because of the fact that it's all UGC. Everything, you know, it's like this game that every single, you know, every single tile of the game is owned by a different person who's trying to extract as much value as they can. Or the analogy I like to give, it's like a casino where every single slot machine is owned by some different person. And as a result, anytime somebody comes and sits on your slot machine, you want to get as much value as you can from them before they move to the next slot machine or like go play a game of craps. So the casino, because it internalizes the entire, um, the spending pattern of the person there, it's like, well, I want you to leave some money left over after you're done playing slots so you can come play craps and then have a drink and then go do this thing over here. And you end up maximizing the net dollar retention, um, or the net, the net spend for your users who are in the casino. Um, and you only really get that if there's a single quote-unquote central planner for the casino. Um, and meme coins don't have that, which is why I think the meme coin game is going to end up being too extractive to be actually self-sustaining.

I, I actually, I'll take the other side of that. I think the market has solved this in a very elegant way.

Um, how's that?

I've talked to, I've talked to, um, some more portfolio companies about this. I think the pattern actually, because this happens with every cycle, it's happened with like, um, you know, Namecoin happened with ICOs, it happened with like DeFi. I think what happens is you get some sort of speculative thing where people are like playing this zero-sum game, and it's not real net value creation. Um, and they put money into it and they go up. Some people lose 60% of their money or 80% of their money. And the base, the base thing that you have to go back to historically has been either, you know, Bitcoin or ETH, because you're on the exchange and that was sort of like the base pair. And it might now be SOL with, um, with the meme coins as well. Um, and because those things are fundamentally valuable, um, then what happens is you like leave your dust, you leave like the 10% of money that you have sitting in Bitcoin or ETH or SOL, and you come back 3 years later 4 years later, um, and you're actually up. And so you kind of like didn't lose money because like Bitcoin saved your butt, or ETH saved your butt, because, you know, you just like kind of hung on to it. And so I think for a lot of people, it actually is like an even better bootstrapping mechanism into like, don't do the stupid shit, don't go play in the casino, or if you do, like, understand the game that you're playing and, and leave some of your stack in this thing that actually has like real long-term utility. And so it's actually like a bootstrapping mechanism, I think, for people to learn to hold, um, especially the things that are truly, truly high value. And there's like a very, very small number of those. So think of it this way, like, I think Binance and Coinbase get their butts saved because the base pairs are BTC and ETH, right? Like, all those people that lost a bunch of money on a bunch of stuff, like, maybe you hit it on some, some ICO or something, but I think a lot of people basically like ended up with some amount left in there, and they're like, okay, whatever. And I think a bunch of those people get saved, uh, when the market comes back. Um, you just sort of have this like 10 or 20% of the pack left in Bitcoin, and now, you know, it's sitting there, and now you're like basically break-even. And so I think it's actually a really interesting bootstrapping mechanism. I'd be really curious to see the data from any of those exchanges on like— it's kind of like the, um, have you guys ever seen the Schwab data, um, or the Vanguard data, which is like the people who perform the best are the people who forgot their passwords? Uh, yeah, yeah, just never sell. And I bet you there's a huge percentage of these accounts on these exchanges that like did a bunch of stupid stuff, lost a bunch of money, had like 20% left over and they're like, fuck it. And then they just like left for 3 years and now they're coming back and BTC is at 100 and they're like, oh shit, I should have just— I shouldn't have done all the stupid stuff. I should have just done the high utility stuff. Hopefully at least.

Well, it's, it's, it's a very sweet story. I, I'm a little skeptical that that's true. I mean, at least anecdotally, I know a bunch of people who bought NFTs and I, I don't know any of them who are like, man, I'm so glad I had 10% of ETH. Like, I feel like I really Yeah, we paid for everything.

I bet you a lot of those people that are doing NFT stuff were buying NFTs when ETH was like $1,200, $1,400, you know, back in '17.

And they ended up with a certain majority of people came in when the market was crazy. That's why the market was crazy.

Yes. And I bet if ETH works, if ETH goes to like $10K, they'll be like pretty close to break. I bet a lot of them will be pretty close to breakeven.

And you bought ETH at $4K and you have, let's say, 10% of your stack in there. You've got to get ETH to 10x. ETH has got to get to $40K for you to break even.

Or, or your NFTs in USD terms have to like be— some of them have to be worth something, right? Sure, sure.

I'm looking at the Punk that I bought for 125 ETH at the pico top.

I'm gonna have to find out.

Did you really buy that one?

Santi, just hold. Just hold 4K.

Dude, I topped, I was tick top the punk floor. I was like, fuck it.

No, but in ETH terms or in USD terms?

125 ETH. And in USD terms, it was like $500K.

Oh, okay, yeah.

ETH was at $4,000 and change. And you know, I have it, as soon as I walk into my house, I have it there and it's staring at me and whispering at me like, you're an idiot.

You have a hoodie, right?

Oh no, I'm not talking about that. No, that— no, the hoodie I bought for, uh, 79 ETH when ETH was like 2,000, before like the mania, before 6529.

Okay, so we, we have you here as a perfect guest. What do you feel— what is your lesson? What is your lesson when you look at that? When you look at that framed CryptoPunk, what do you feel like the lesson is when you, when you think about that?

I bought, I bought it. I'm a collector, not an investor.

But here's someone who— here's someone who—

I'll tell you, I'll tell you, I'll tell— I'll frame it in the current context of why meme coins are just a better mechanism to what NFTs tried to do. Um, it just— you don't have the unit bias, you don't have the sticker shock. Uh, NFTs are ERC or like just tokens and stocks on one end, and then you have NFTs on the far other spectrum. I would argue meme coins are like closer, like this is the middle. They have emotional cachet, but they have a ton of liquidity and they have like the unit buy, like it's cents, right? And so anyone can buy it. Not everyone can buy unless you're fractionalizing an NFT, but it further has issues with liquidity fragmentation. For that reason, look, clearly people want to punt things and I just think meme coins are here to stay. I would, I want to believe that NFTs come back. I think they're going to come back super late in the cycle when you have the wealth effect of, as soon as people make money, they do a couple of things. They open Zillow, they open Chrono24, and then they open Magic Eden, OpenSea, Tensor. And I think it's going to be a very, still very niche kind of, I don't think that the newcomers are going to like want to punt NFTs as much as like old school cool crypto wealth, uh, that, that, uh, wants to buy Punks, you know what I mean?

Like, that's actually a very interesting point, Santi, because I think what happens is that— so the new money right now, if, if the new money, like the people who made their fortunes on meme coins, right, they're the sort of the new generation of wealth in crypto. Those people, if they go buy a CryptoPunk and make that their wallet, they're almost like— it's almost like they look like their parents. And it's just like the cringiest thing you could possibly do is like have your parents dress you.

Right?

2 generations from now, then it's going to be retro. Then it's gonna be like you're signaling that you're a true OG because you know that 2 generations ago, this is what people were buying. So my guess is going to be the meme coin cycle is going to be like, yeah, NFTs are cringe, like these are stupid, there's no way we're gonna spend our money on this. And this generation, you know, 4 years from now in the next cycle is going to be all about the meme, all about the NFTs, you know.

But you invert to today, Hasib, and you're like, God, I mean, that's, uh, the compounding effect of you holding that NFT. Like, I guess if you have the NFT now, do you sell now? If there's a material— let me ask you a question. If there's like a slight pickup in the floor, you have to clear a lot of people that are in the red, which is another component to this dimension. And if everyone thinks like you, then you almost like want to sell almost immediately to then rotate into the meta, which is AI coins, uh, and if, you know, memes and the whole different derivatives and types of memes, and then just like other stuff, you know what I mean? Like the scar tissue of, of the people that bought the NFTs is, is very strong. And you're gonna— and like gaming tokens have this issue too, right? Like these narratives of the— it may be a broader conversation of like, as you think about narratives, like the gaming narrative, challenging, man. Like a lot of people got burned with Axie, the guilds, the play-to-earns. You know, people love punting new shiny toys. At some point the market overcorrects and totally, you know, it's just a price thing. But yeah, I even look at like in my portfolio, like tokens that are launching in certain verticals that are really out of favor. No, there's zero demand for them. Like zero.

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Okay.

The dynamic in both tech and venture where it's like, or in tech and crypto where it's, it's okay, you've got the venture-backed model. Big LPs give the GPs the money, venture invests in all these new founders, they go build things, they launch tokens, it works. Some of their employees go build new things, they raise seed rounds. And it's this like beautiful cycle that builds technology for the last 30 years. And meme coins are kind of breaking that, right? Like, you know, Santi mentioned the AI cycle. It's like it's not Render and Akash and BitTensor that are ripping. Which are like these venture-backed businesses that have great founders and have launched, you know, launched tokens and have employees. It's like these random AI meme coins or I mean, basically it's sucked all the juice out of honestly a lot of—

okay, like a lot of people totally do not buy the story. Yeah, you really don't buy this. Well, yes.

Well, you guys don't, but you don't buy it because it's your— I mean, you're, you're— I would argue your business is being hurt by these meme coins.

—like venture firms. I mean, so clearly we're not being hurt, right? Like, if you look at just the amount of people who are coming on-chain because of meme coins, right? It's like arguing, you know, again, if you think of meme coins as this game that has gotten— okay, I agree with it.

Yes, yes.

Yeah, it's like it's bringing demand for blockchains on-chain, right? Yes. There's this, there's this argument that many people have made of, oh, it's like this revolt of the public, and, you know, it's like this kind of, uh, we're throwing off the shackles that the VCs have placed on us, and we're now we're buying our own tokens. Um, I think this is just completely complete nonsense. It's just complete fucking nonsense, right?

We hear it every cycle, right?

It's for context. 100%, 100%, right? Like every— every— yeah, totally. Um, same thing we heard with the food coins, you know, every fucking time we hear the same story. Um, it's not about VCs, it's really about technology. The question is, is crypto about technology or is it about just trading speculative tokens and seeing the prices go up and down? Um, meme coins are about that because meme coins are this very fun simulacrum of trading that is, you know, this frenetic high-energy thing. And of course retail loves it because it's designed to be lovable, it's designed to be fun. Um, if you look at what, what is— what are most people doing when they're trading on Binance? Are they mostly trading meme coins or are they mostly trading like other stuff, like what we think of as tech? The answer is that, uh, about 2 months ago, before, you know, before Trump won, about 15% of Binance volume was meme coins, okay? Now that's gone up a lot. Do you know what it is today? It's about 23%. It's not the majority of what people are doing. What most people do when they buy crypto is what they think they're doing is they think they're investing in technology. Like, you know, people obviously investing a lot into XRP, into Cardano, into stuff that, you know, I don't necessarily think is the most exciting technology in the world. But when they do that, what are they doing? What are they telling themselves? They think that, okay, this is a, the founder, co-founder of Ethereum, This has great technology stack. They're gonna build this new stuff. They think they're investing in technology. That is their lived experience of how they understand the enterprise they're engaged in. Most people don't want to invest in meme coins. Most people don't want to do this nihilistic thing of I'm just betting that this thing is gonna go up and down, 'cause they don't actually think they're gambling. They think that they're investing in the future. That's what they've been told. That's what we're telling them. That's what you're telling them, is that this stuff is, that's what Donald Trump is telling them. And they believe it. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that, um, you know, this claim that this is somehow bad for our business, uh, so obviously there's the downstream effect is that, okay, well, this increases the bid for every single layer 1, for every piece of infrastructure has to get bigger in order to accommodate all the meme coin demand. Um, but second is that I also, like, I don't see any way in which it's zero-sum. Um, you know, if you look at the coins that were pumping over the last week, obviously, you know, some meme coins have done well, XRP, Stellar did well. Um, Grass is doing well. There's, you know, Near is doing well. AVAX is doing well, which we're investors into. Um, a bunch of stuff is doing well. It's just not the case that only meme coins are pumping. Now, what is pumped the most? If you go, you know, sort by 30-day performance, yeah, you're gonna get, you know, Peanut, um, and some other random stuff that just like, you know, rocketed to the top of page 1.

But has Shib— can you— I'm gonna have to drop in a minute, but like, can you guys just talk about when we say pump, it's like, okay, in absolute terms, but talk about like the weighted, like the volume behind the pump. Like, I mean, like the amount of money that flows into it is far more interesting to me. Like, I understand that an asset can go from like 50, like 15 million to like a billion and a half. But like, let's talk about Ripple at $1.50, like Cardano, like Doge, like putting Doge aside, like the 5% increase in these assets is like vastly more from a flows perspective that I would argue it's like, who's buying that? I, that's what I want to know. It's like, and how is it that some assets have transcended into this god tier of like, to your point around how the, how the internet like captivates the imagination. Cardano hasn't shipped and will never ship because once it does, it no longer captivates the imagination.

Well, and so it's like my earlier point is like, I don't think people, um, I don't think the market is is actually well educated on these, on these things yet, right? Like, I think most of the money that comes in, to Steve's point, actually comes from people who think they're investing in technology but are not able to actually underwrite the fundamentals on that technology. And they end up in these situations where they then are pouring money into things that, that will have, you know, price movements, but, but like the fundamentals won't support it. And then that has to correct at some point, um, which goes back to kind of the earlier conversation we're having. Um, Jason, to your question around the meme coin stuff, yeah, I, I think, um, I, I think I'm— I've been pretty consistent on this, is like, I actually just tweeted about this, like, there— I think about crypto as having like 3 very distinct stages, and a lot of the technologists actually jump to the third one. The first stage is the casino, the second stage is the capital markets, and the third is the computer. And a lot of technologists that are here in the space are here to build this like decentralized permissionless computer. Um, that anybody can write code on and ship, and we can run all these apps and all that stuff. But I think the path to getting there is through the casino and through the capital markets. Like, the casinos, you know, the ICOs and, and the, um, and the meme coins, like, bootstrap all the infrastructure. That's what creates the demand. That's what gets people on board to the wallets. That gets them comfortable with smart contracts. And then people realize actually the utility of this stuff is capital formation. Like, the thing— I can pool money and pursue opportunities in ways that I couldn't before. And that's, you know, Bitcoin or Ethereum ICOs or DeFi liquidity mining or DePIN. It's like these are bootstrapping mechanisms using global capital to get real fundamental utility off the ground. And once that's working, we can use that to actually go build fundamental computational infrastructure, which we've already started to do. And, and then that, that's like the final stage. And I think a lot of technologists are operating at level 3 right now, and we're actually, you know, somewhere between 1 and 2. We got to get through like the casino and bootstrapping of the capital markets with like stablecoins, and we'll eventually get to number agree, which is why I continue to think we're not at the point of like valuing things on fundamentals. Like, I think we're still in the casino, uh, and I think that persists for a few more years. I don't think that's, that's like a short-term thing. It'll take us a few years to get through that. Yeah, yeah.

Um, what do you guys think about ETH right now?

Um, I, I continue to be, you know, we, we're actually working on our developer report right now, you know, the annual Electric Capital developer that we do, and, um, And I won't, I won't, I won't blow any of the surprises. But, you know, ETH, and sort of ETH Plus, I think we're going to call it, which is sort of the broader ecosystem, when you look at OP and Arbitrum and EigenLayer, and like all of these things that are sort of like components of this, this whole stack, continues to have a lot of developers, you know, it's been, it's been the number one ecosystem from a developer perspective for a long time. And if you're looking at fundamentals, like, we, we have long held that, um, looking at where the developers are actually spending their time, uh, is a— the, the best leading indicator for where value is going to get created, which is why we do that report and try to do this analysis. Um, and, and ETH continues to perform phenomenally from that dimension. Like, it continues to have such, such developer mindshare. Solana, for what it's worth, is also doing exceptionally well on this. This is one of the things that gave us a lot of conviction in Solana in the bear market. Um, in like, you know, '22 and '23, um, kind of like after the FTX crash. You could just look, you could look at the developer numbers and you could see that they're actually very engaged long-term developers that were not going anywhere, um, which then I think turned out to be phenomenal signal actually that there was real value that was going to get created there. Um, so when I look at that fundamental signal, which, which is one of my favorites to look at, it continues to, to do quite well actually. Um, and, and for all its, you know, there are all sorts of challenges, there's all sorts of flaws, there's all sorts of messiness with it, but it does feel like there's some sort of network effect there at this point around EVM and Solidity and that infrastructure. Everything from custodians to exchanges to auditors to like, there's just so much infrastructure there now. I think it's going to be quite hard to displace.

Yeah, the point that I make here, and I think Avichal alluded to this when he mentioned the ETH ecosystem, or the— I don't know the word you put, but you know, this sort of this broader family of, you know, Layer 2s and, you know, things like Base and everything that's EVM-based that rolls up into the Ethereum world. I think what we're seeing is something we used to talk about a lot, but we didn't take that seriously. But now increasingly you have to take seriously is the distinction between Ethereum and ETH, the asset. And it feels like that is the biggest dagger in the heart of ETH holders this cycle, is that the Ethereum ecosystem has never been doing better. An ETH asset, has never been doing worse on a relative basis. So I don't know that this is likely to change anytime soon. Like, if I had to bet, um, I don't know many people who are actually bullish on ETH/SOL this cycle. Um, I think ETH almost certainly is going to go up over the course of the cycle, but it feels very difficult to imagine how it outperforms Solana given that Solana has caught up in so many metrics that I thought were just going to be insuperably large, insuperably large gap for Solana to make up. And Solana just keeps outperforming, just keeps getting better and stronger. And in previous cycles, Ethereum didn't really have a plausible competitor. The question was not, is Ethereum— the question for Ethereum's valuation was mostly how big can smart contracts be? That's fundamentally what Ethereum was being valued on, was like, how big is this story? And Ethereum was this sort of proxy for all smart contract demand. But now that's no longer true, and I think markets are starting to wake up to the fact that, um, L2s are in a large way obviously parasitic to Ethereum, in that many of the fees that would otherwise be attributed to Ethereum are getting displaced by L2s. Um, I think it's not completely parasitic, like there's some degree of mutualism where both of them benefit from each other. But clearly, if you think of the alternate universe where Ethereum had eventually shipped its sharding roadmap and you imagine that today we had many different shards of Ethereum that all interoperated with each other, all of which ran the EVM or eWASM for that matter, and all had this kind of redesigned execution environment, we'd be living in a very different world with respect to how Ethereum would be capturing value and the relationship of rollups to Ethereum, right? Ethereum would not be— there would not be so much insecurity and so much anxiety in the Ethereum universe. There wouldn't even be, you know, this whole thing about the Beam chain. This new Ethereum 3.0 quote-unquote redesign, in a way is a concession of the fact that the Ethereum roll-up-centric roadmap was a mistake, that it caused a huge amount of value leakage away from ETH the asset. And ETH now has to compete on some degree with the roll-ups, right? Like, why are we now moving to massively increasing the scalability of the layer 1 when in reality, if you want to extract more revenue from roll-ups, the way you do that is actually by constraining block space, not by making more. So the, the overall picture that I get is that is one where, you know, Ethereum— the thing about Ethereum, and I think it's not just Solana that is putting this pressure on Ethereum, it's not just the rollups, it's also things like Unichain, you know, where you see this almost, uh, you know, this defection where Uniswap, of course, huge contributor to all the TVL and the centrality of DeFi on Ethereum. If Unichain succeeds in its ambition, right, what Unichain has described is that Eventually they want to get all the Uniswap trading volume, or as much of it as they can, onto their own chain and internalize the MEV and give it back to UNI token holders, right? Makes total sense, very rational for Uniswap to want to do this given what a huge contributor they are to the MEV on Ethereum. Well, if they succeed, you can imagine it's not implausible that Unichain could successfully move over enough of the demand side that the liquidity starts migrating away from Ethereum over into Unichain, and pretty soon you sort of get this big gigantic sucking, just this vacuum that pulls the TVL off Ethereum onto Uniswap or onto Uniswap. And if that happens, I have no idea how Ethereum could recover, right? It's like this gigantic supertanker that is designed to move very, very slowly because of all the assets that sit inside. And it's rational for it to be very cautious and meticulous and careful with how and when it moves. But we see how fast liquidity moves in crypto. And if the incentives flip, you could see a very, very violent downturn to ETH asset. Now, again, I'm not saying that this is likely. I think it's actually very unlikely. I think most likely Unichain is not going to have the, uh, the sheer force of will to work that hard to try to suck up all the liquidity from mainnet. I think they're going to be too risk-averse. But I think what this thought experiment illustrates is that, that there are so many ways in which Ethereum can lose the mantle. That really were just completely unimaginable 2, 3 years ago. Um, and that's, I think, why you're going to see Ethereum have a much harder time outperforming other assets that are, that are in the same tax bracket. Like, those risks are not going to go away. I think they're probably only going to get bigger as the cycle gets more and more, um, more and more crazy.

I mean, in some sense it had to be that way, right? They were just so dominant on every metric that that there was no— yeah, maybe so much market share. It's just like there was no alternative. So I think this was in some sense inevitable. The other thing I'll throw out there, which I think most people know, I think is a really, really hard thing to replicate. Like even if Unichain were to go down this path, which I agree they probably won't, the, the thing that Ethereum has right now, which I think is very hard to replicate, is credible neutrality at a global scale, and the resulting regulatory clarity. And so if you're thinking about businesses that need to clear stablecoins, if you're thinking about cross-border anything, if you're, um, India or Turkey or Brazil, um, you know, any country in Europe, and you're like, look, I'm a little worried about the U.S. system. Like, do I really want to be subject to U.S. banks? And do I really want to be subject to U.S. law? And I don't love the Chinese system. Like, do I really want to be subject to Chinese banks and Chinese currency risk? What do I do? And what you really want, I think what the world really wants is a US dollar-denominated system that the US government cannot unilaterally kick you out of. And that's really what Ethereum is, um, and it's the only thing that right now has the claim to that. I don't know how that gets validated.

Why is it US dollar-denominated? Say it again. You said it's a US dollar-denominated system?

Yeah, I mean, like, the currency pair is fundamentally dollar. Like, the stable—

stablecoins dominate everything. But I mean, the stablecoins are under the, the domain of the US, sort of.

I mean, like, Tether is offshore, right? So it's sort of like arm's length. It's, yeah, like the US government could go to Tether, but there's like some hops there. And then you could also take your, you could take your Tether, USDC, you could put it into a wrapper effectively, right? Like a Frax or a Maker. Um, and so there are ways to get like layers of indirection there that it's, it's not, it's not so unilateral. Um, and if you think about it, like what a lot of the world wants, that, that's actually, I think, what the world wants. And so I think what you end up with is this sort of third credibly neutral place for the world to settle trade and settle business and do business in a US dollar-denominated system, which I don't think we're moving off the dollar as the unit of account of the world. That the only thing that, that currently has a real shot at that, I think, is Ethereum. Um, uh, and in part it's, it's sort of like it snuck through that window, right? It got through that regulatory clarity in 2018 and established itself as credibly neutral. That I think is the thing that, that is like very Lindy and very, very hard to replicate. Um, and so I think everything is like, I think that argument was more true before Trump.

Um, I think Trump creating this whole, this door that all the other layer 1s can walk through to basically share the same status with Ethereum of having this like, hey, this thing is a commodity, it's going to be treated fairly, it's going to get access to the same capital markets that Ethereum has. I think it just makes it that, you know, as time goes on— you talk about Lindy, right? Um, the reality is that the distance between these assets shrinks over time as they get older. So what I mean by that is that, okay, Solana is— what is Solana, 4 years old, 5 years old? Um, 4 years old, right? Okay, it's 4-year-old asset. Ethereum right now is 9 years old. In 5 years, Ethereum will be 14 years old, Solana will be 9 years old. In 10 years, Solana will be, uh, 14 years old, Ethereum will be 19 years old. Right? And like, the differences between these two shrink over time. They just become less salient of like, oh, this one is like the real Lindy one and the other one is like this newfangled thing. All these things diminish in their valence as, as the whole space gets more mature. Um, and so I'm again, like, I think the, the period for which that was true was the last 3 years. The last 3 years, everything was brand new, everything was broken, nothing was really stable besides Ethereum. But the longer we go, the less that— the less true that is. And the more markets are just going to say, look, I mean, the other thing that I think also gives me pause about this story is that we've just seen it more and more over time. Most people's interface to crypto is not Solana, it's not Fantom, it's not Ethereum, it's not MetaMask, it's Binance and Coinbase, right? Yeah, that is most people's experience of interacting with crypto. So if that's true, like most people are paying each other with stablecoins, You know, I mean, okay, yeah, they're using Tron, whatever, but they're not even using Tron, they're using Trust Wallet, they're using Binance Pay, they're using these other things that to them represent the crypto front end that they actually trust. And if, if Binance Pay is basically like, hey, we're going to start settling things on Solana now because it's faster and cheaper and it's more liquidity or whatever it is, I don't think most of users will care. I think like the whole goal is to abstract all these details away from users so that they don't have to care about this stuff anymore. And I suspect they probably won't. As this stuff gets bigger and bigger and more world scale.

So I think the Trump argument is, I think that's a good point, actually, that like that, that might change the window. And I agree with you, sort of over time, like the sort of resolution changes between these things. I don't think it's so easy to move off of some of these things. I do think liquidity network effects, it's sort of the same reason that I think the legacy banking rails just have so much, so much lock-in is like once businesses start integrating here, Once you get like a multitude of front ends, then you removing yourself, uh, like in the early days Binance or Coinbase might have so much market share that they can just say, oh, I'm going to move off and I'll switch to Solana or I'll switch to Tron or whatever else and my users don't care. Over time I think that gets harder and harder and harder as the ecosystem gets more and more robust. Um, that's not to say Ethereum has definitely won that, but I think, I think that's a thing that the market doesn't quite understand is tremendously valuable because it's not really an end retail thing. This is like, how do banks move money around? How do governments move money around? How do— how does like international trade and finance work? How do the, um, you know, how do the, the BlackRocks and, and the Goldmans of the world operate? Um, and I think that, that network effect is, is a behind-the-scenes infrastructure network effect. Again, I'm not saying that means ETH is worth $40K or anything like that. It's just like, I think there is something really valuable and unique about that, um, which I don't think the average like retail buyer of crypto assets really sort of appreciates or understands. Like, how many of those people understand how like the euro-dollar system works? Or like, you know, how SWIFT really works? Like nobody, right? But that, that's like, that kind of stuff is like the backbone of the entire GDP of the world, right? That, that stuff is super critical infrastructure. Um, again, no commentary on like worth, but I just, I think it's underappreciated.

Completely agree with you. And I think the modal outcome still is that Ethereum maintains its lead as being the number one chain. In 3, 4 years from now. But I think if you asked me 2 years ago, you'd say, you know, what is the likelihood that Ethereum is not the most important chain in 5 years? I'd say the chance of that was like less than 5%. Today I'd say the chance is probably at least 20, 30%, if not more. And that should really affect the valuation of an asset.

Well, I think the other thing which we've talked about, I think, in the past is I think people don't appreciate— there's like this set of cognitive biases um, that get in the way, which is why I think venture capital is both a hard business, but why we get professionals in the business, which is like, these are low probability outcomes. Like, what is the, what is the likelihood that something can actually displace ETH or, or that ETH wins ultimately? Two is you're talking about such large TAMs, right? Total addressable market. So when you're talking about 5 billion people in every business in the world doing a thing, you're talking about trillions and trillions of dollars. And, and, and our, our monkey brains are not wired to handle these large numbers. And then the third is exponential growth, right? And so we're not wired to think about what happens. We're so early in the evolution of these things. And so I think like the market structure at the end of this as well is not, you know, like Solana wins and ETH loses. It's— it probably looks a lot more like social networking where like Facebook can be worth a trillion dollars, but TikTok can be really, really successful, and LinkedIn can be worth, you know, $100 billion, and you get KakaoTalk, and you get, um, you know, international regional winners, and you get Telegram, and you get Twitter. And so like it's also not zero-sum in, in that way either. Like I think there's, there's there's actually an outcome here where, um, where, where these things actually coexist and they're, they're all actually significantly more valuable than they are today just because the way the markets work. Um, it's like not zero-sum in the same way.

Yeah, I think the biggest risk to Ethereum is that Ethereum really risks becoming Intel, you know. Like, if you think about like Intel versus AMD, right, once upon a time it was, you know, Intel might have acquired AMD. Today AMD might acquire Intel. Intel. It's like this complete reversal. And it's in large part, you know, Intel once upon a time was the only option. Like there was no alternative to Intel. And over time, the big weakness, and I think you see this in Ethereum, blockchains are still too dynamic for Ethereum to be done, for them to put down the pencils and say, we made the perfect thing. We have all the TVL. We like, all we need to do is be even more credibly neutral. We need to pile on the credible neutrality. And just like innovate in culture and innovate in like how, how great stewards we are of the tremendous ecosystem that we've built. And I think that works when you are the monopoly, but if your monopoly starts to even be slightly threatened, then I think, um, everything depends on you being able to out-execute your, your adversaries. And Ethereum very clearly does not have this psychology, um, and this is part of the reason why social media, you know, it's full of people kind of trying to diagnose what's wrong with the Ethereum roadmap, ecosystem, whatever, marketing. I think it's even more fundamental than that, which is just that Ethereum had this like Intel mindset, which is that we've won, all we got to do is keep doing what we're doing. And the landscape has shifted. It's very clearly shifted. And when the landscape shifts, if you do not remember how to like roll up your sleeves and write code and to innovate and move fast and potentially disrupt yourself, um, somebody else will eventually disrupt you. Now, it's not guaranteed, and it could take 20 years, but, uh, it does feel like that's the path that Ethereum is risking being on. Like, if Ethereum had just said, you know what, we're going to go back to the, to the sharding roadmap, and we're going to ship execution environments, and we're going to do all that stuff we said that we're going to not do, right? Why did they say they're going to not do that? The reason why they said they're not going to do that was because they said we are too slow We're not going to get there in time. The rollups will get there faster. So let's just embrace the rollups, right? It was an admission that, hey, it's not even worth trying. We're just too slow. We're just too— we're too much of a behemoth. It's like, you know, Intel just basically saying, look, we're not going to bother doing GPUs because, you know, whatever, it's too hard. Also, it's a small market. Like, who cares? We'll let other people do that. We're just going to be Intel. We're going to own the processor because, you know, that's where all the value really is made. And at a certain point, the world shifted. Now again, I'm not saying that that for sure has happened, but I'm saying that there's definitely much more of a risk that we'll look back in 5 years and that's how we'll write the history books. And I think Ethereum, the DNA of Ethereum is such that it's very difficult for them to change that mindset. And clearly people in Ethereum, you know, if you tell Ethereum core devs this, it's kind of blasphemous still to claim this because they're like, no, no, no, that's not what Ethereum is about. Ethereum is not about the ETH price. Ethereum is not about competing with Solana. Ethereum is about creating this very specific thing that we all agreed to create, this World War III-resistant, um, you know, trustless decentralized ledger. That's, that's all that Ethereum is trying to do. You want it to be this, you know, big competition for price with Solana, but that's not what we're trying to do. If you want that, go buy another asset, right? That I think is largely the answer that Ethereum has given, um, and I get that and I respect it, but it also has to then acknowledge that like, hey, all this price talk about, hey, you know, Ethereum down bad and people being despondent about the price of the asset, um, they can't then be surprised that that's the reaction that they're getting.

Hmm.

Hmm. Maybe as we think about, uh, wrapping this up, I'd love to get your guys' take. I know this is your professional job is making, you know, 5 to 10 year bets, but as you think about the next 3 to 6 months, um, one thing I've been thinking about is, uh, these events in time that pull-forward growth. So, you know, how the market should go maybe is like this, right? Like a slope of 1. But something like the Bitcoin ETFs caused the price of Bitcoin to go from $25K to $75K in 6 months. So it pulls forward this growth. And then what it, you know, the ETFs, you know, when you pull forward growth, you have to get this long consolidation period on the back end, which is what we saw actually most of the year. I think people forget. I think actually my take is that the Trump election is a similar moment to the Bitcoin ETFs, where it pulled forward a lot of that growth. And then outside of some, like, you know, outsized event, like, you know, a Bitcoin strategic reserve being announced, I actually think you could see just consolidation for the next, like, 3 to 4 to 5 months. And then, and then back into another big bull leg higher, maybe in Q2. But curious if— I know, I know none of the three of us are really traders here. And this isn't the game that we really play. But Yeah, just curious how you guys think about the next like 3 to 6 months.

I should go first so I can disagree with you.

Yeah, I honestly, I have very low confidence as to what happens from here. Yeah, I think it's very likely that, you know, prices are going to go up more. I think clearly $100K Bitcoin is like this kind of magical barrier that the market needs to cross. Once it gets there, I don't really know what happens. Um, I, I can see two worlds. This is kind of useless commentary, but one world is that we've kind of overestimated how exciting it is that Trump got elected, and that like when you actually see the real policies, not the imagined policies, when you actually see, okay, real new SEC commissioner, not the imagined SEC commissioner, it's kind of like, okay, well, you know, these people are still politicians, they're still responsive to the banks, they're still responsive to Treasury and FinCEN and all this stuff, and And the rules are not perfect. They're better, but they're not perfect. And you just end up with this thing of like, okay, well, crypto's up, but it's not like, okay, you know, everything's going to melt up indefinitely for the next millennium. So I think there may be a little bit of overexuberance about Trump. At the same time, like, the other thing that just is kind of obvious is that so much of crypto in the short term is oriented around spotlight effects. And the spotlight effect is just when everybody is looking at this thing, the price goes up. So if there's a meme coin that's making the headlines, price goes up. If there's any token that people start paying attention to, price goes up. So there will be a lot of spotlight on Bitcoin for the next 6 months, as there is a talk of strategic Bitcoin reserve and like, you know, other, um, countries starting to think about their own Bitcoin strategy. China having conversations about, hey, maybe we should soften a little bit on Bitcoin. Um, just even the rumors of these things is going to drive more headlines and more attention. And then just Bitcoin being over $100K, a lot of people will talk about that for a very long time. Um, and all these conversations that people have had, of reboots of conversations they had in 2021, um, will all have to happen again. And that will cause more people to just buy Bitcoin. Um, eventually that ends, and I think that probably ends after the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve stuff is done, right? So my guess is like, that's the big, um, milestone. And then the other big thing is Doge, which is that, you know, the Department of Government Efficiency is going to be extremely controversial. It's, you know, literally the most, you know, one of the most famous men on earth, uh, trying to cut down the biggest government on earth and fighting against the deep state and like all the stuff that he's, he's obviously going to play all this out in social media and on the front page of the New York Times. So this is going to cause huge amounts of attention on Doge for at least, you know, a year or two. So I think all that stuff is going to mean more attention, and more attention probably means more dollars. But where does it go? Where does it top out? What's the shape of the cycle? I honestly have just absolutely no idea.

Yeah, I have no idea. I— it's, it's, um, it's so hard to know because it's so, it's so event-driven and so news-driven, and, and who knows? Um, and, and I think in particular the, the sorts of people that are really driving the news cycles right now are themselves so unpredictable. Um, and so all you can really imagine is that there will be a, a whole host of unpredictable events, and that, that, that's just like, that moves you, you know, violently in one direction or the other. Like, I, I don't, I don't think this is my, my only, my only sort of base belief is I don't think it's, it's very slow and steady. I don't think it's like very linear, even if you have like a consolidation period. I think like The movements on the way up and the way down are just going to be like pretty, pretty volatile given who's involved and what's driving the cycles.

How, um, there's a debate, there's an Empire Telegram channel. Um, and there was a debate last night about how impactful a new SEC without Gary Gensler is and how impactful Trump instead of Biden actually is. Um, and people were talking about like value accrual to DeFi and turning on the fee switch. And, you know, other people were arguing like, hey, look, you know, we made it out of FTX, like You know, Coinbase's stock is doing well and BlackRock's in Bitcoin. Like, actually, like, the old guys weren't as bad as people thought. And just curious how you guys, maybe from the lens of like, you talk to founders all day long and they make decisions all day long about what products to build and do they build them in Dubai or do they build them in New York City? Like, how impactful do you really think this is? And like, what is possible under this new regime? Like, is the impact about tokens? Is it about product decisions, about location of where they build? Like, Maybe, maybe as we probably the last question here, like, just curious to get your guys's take on that.

Oh, I'll take that one first. It was huge. We talked to about a dozen founders immediately afterwards, you know, in the week after, and it was, it was like night and day. You know, literally founders that had moved to Dubai were like, okay, I'll move back. There was a sense of, oh, maybe I could offer my product to US customers. There definitely was this like, okay, maybe token models might make sense here again. And that's like, worth exploring. And I think that's been that, that sort of search space of how do we create value and then capture it and distribute it back to people, that whole search space, which I think is fascinating because we have this like very narrow definition of how equity works in the world today. I think that whole search space opens up. Um, you know, I think, I think it's really hard to overstate the importance of what the backdrop of a regulatory environment does to an industry or to, to founders. Um, and it's, you know, if you're constantly living in fear that, that some person, some agency is going to show up at your door and then like threaten to shut down your business, the cascading effects are like, well, now I have to go get 3 lawyers, then I really shouldn't do this thing. And it just sort of pushes you subtly in a particular direction and a risk-averse direction. Um, and you just don't do things. Um, and, and as soon as you remove that friction, I think it opens up the floodgates in terms of of what people will do. And I think, I think on balance, that's, that's really good. Um, so I, I think it's, it's, um, even if the, even if the next, let's say the next SEC commissioner is roughly in terms of beliefs, you know, like moderate, let's say they're not like mega crypto bull, they're just like, look, we should, we should be smart about this and we should embrace it. That alone is a huge win because knowing that the SEC will actually engage with you and have a conversation with you and wants to try to figure out how to make it work is such a win in terms of actually making innovation happen. Like, I don't think, I don't think the effect can be overstated. I think it's actually pretty dramatic.

So in the spirit of ending the show, I will disagree with Avichal, which is that, so you can sort of separate it into the micro and the macro, right? And the micro is what Avichal was talking about of like, what's the effect on founders? What's the effect on products? What's the effect on the individual decisions that people are making and whether to offer things to US customers or to turn on fee switches? I think actually that stuff matters very little. So like, you know, founders coming back to the US, it's like, whatever, they were building their startups just fine in Dubai. A lot of founders are still in the US. They were even during this, under the realm of this SEC. And if you look at fee switches, I mean, fee switches are a perfect example, right? When a DeFi project turns on a fee switch, token goes up like 15-20%, right? This is not a like, oh my God, now fundamentally this thing has value, before it didn't. Um, it's, it's good, like markets like it when you turn on a fee switch, but it's not, it's not, it's not a 2xer, right? It's not like the fundamental difference between being valuable and not being valuable. Um, and, and the other thing I'll say is that I think for Americans, I don't think that many Americans have that much to gain from using DeFi products, right? Americans already have extremely open financial markets and They can basically buy whatever the hell they want. And most of what they want to buy is investments. They want to invest in this stuff. They don't actually necessarily want to use these products. I think it's outside the US that the vast majority of actual demand for this stuff is, right? Of people who do want to use DeFi because they don't have financial freedom, right? Most human beings in the world do not live under conditions of financial freedom. You know, like, just take China and India, which are the two largest countries in the world. Both of them have very restrictive capital controls, very restrictive financial controls. Like, you can't just go buy whatever you want and have whatever investment portfolio you want if you live in either of those two countries. So, so now on the macro side, so the micro is like, okay, what individual decisions are founders making differently? My guess would be that if you fast forward to a year from now, you'll see founders being more aggressive. You'll see founders opening up to, you know, giving airdrops to Americans and marketing in the US and putting, taking out ads in the US and stuff like that. But I don't think it's actually going to change that much of what are the core things that crypto is doing. I think what does change a lot is that crypto is fundamentally about shelling points. It's about getting everybody to agree that, like, hey, we should all use Bitcoin instead of gold. How does that happen? It happens from people coming to consensus, right? It's because we're saying, hey, we should be using stablecoins instead of SWIFT or instead of eurodollars, right? How does it happen? It comes from people coming to consensus and deciding to use the same thing. And so much of why that happens at the scale that we're now talking about is just people believing that if I do this, it won't get shut down, I won't go to jail, I won't become a political enemy. I won't— you know, it's like just risk committees and, you know, just people who are scared or skeptical because they see what's happening in the news and they see the front page of, you know, every newspaper in the world talking about FTX collapsing and how Biden is trying to, you know, get these people shut down and get them, you know, criminals and scam artists and blah, blah, blah. All this stuff helps tremendously in making crypto feel less weird, more normal, easier to adopt, easier to integrate into your accounting systems and your ERPs and to use for cross-border payments and financial settlement and blah, blah, blah. You just will see the stuff all getting baked into the bread because it's just, it's just not a big deal anymore to use it. Whereas 2 years ago it was very weird for you to be using crypto. You just saw it from the cratering of willingness from the S&P, from the Fortune 500 to do anything related to crypto. I think what you'll see is over the next year that's going to skyrocket. And these companies very often are the intermediaries that actually put the stuff into the hands of users. So that's the thing I think that's probably going to have the biggest knock-on effect, not, you know, people in America directly using crypto products to a bigger degree than they were before.

Gents, another good one. Good to see you. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Mitchell. Thanks, Asif. 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.