Don’t Overtrade The Retail Cycle With Jason Yanowitz & Rob Hadick | Weekly Roundup

I will say the place where you will go wrong right now is overtrading and trying to chase different things. That is the only real guaranteed way. If you just sit back in something right now, you, you probably will make money. You just might not make as much money as the person on Twitter who's tweeting about how much money they made, but the guaranteed way to lose money is to chase every single trend. Because you'll always be behind.

This episode is brought to you by Geodnet, the world's largest decentralized RTK network delivering real-time, centimeter-accurate positioning around the globe. You'll hear more about them later in the episode. Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice, or necessarily The views of Blockworks, our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

All right, everyone. Welcome back to the Roundup. We have no Santi. We do have Rob.

Rob, what's up?

Eh, how you doing? You know, it's really sad because I've been on this like a few times now and it feels like getting the three of us together has been really tough. So I'm, I'm waiting for the three of us.

You're just trying to take our job. One, I mean, it's like you're coming after me for a few weeks. You're coming after Santi now.

You know what? I could never replace either of you. I'm just glad to be here. So thank you for having me.

The feeling is mutual, Rob, though we did miss you at dinner last night. It's good, good dinner.

You know, there's just too much going on in the markets right now. Uh, you can't— you have to be working if you're going to make money right now.

That is true. That is true. Um, all right, before we get into the markets, I have a, a new update. So we used to— I used to read some of the YouTube comments, but now the YouTube comments are, um, like a cesspool of people shilling random coins I've never heard of. So I, I've actually stopped looking at them, but But if you want us to— there were some really good roasts back in the day on YouTube comments of Santi and me. And unfortunately for you now, Rob, you too probably will get pulled into these roasts. So I'm going to read two of them from back in the day. One is, uh, regarding vampire attacks, Janno, you are so pale that the vampire reference seemed appropriate for you. Sorry, dude. Uh, the next one is, is it just me or does every episode Janno's eyes get closer and closer together? Another year of the show and it'll be Santi and the Cyclops. So if you want to roast us like these and you want me to read them, uh, just leave us a 5-star review and include your roast in the review, and then I can actually read them. So that's, uh, that's the new thing we're doing if you want to get your roast in.

Rob, I really hope that like I get a few of these. Like, that feels like, um, you know, just like I made it finally.

So all right, maybe we can just roast Rob this week. That could be the theme. Um, Rob, where are you making money? You're working— you said, uh, you have to just be working a lot to be making money? What's the— how do you make money in these markets?

Well, uh, I mean, we're not traders, we're VCs. Uh, that said, like, I think there, there's a lot of excitement about what's going on in the public market right now.

There's a lot of overlap between VC and traders these days though, I will say.

So, so that's not true of us. That's definitely true of, I think, a lot of people in crypto. I think the reality is, is this, like, what our LPs want is us not to trade. Um, and so really to depends on like how you define like the vehicle that you're, you're trading out of, or you're investing out of. But that said, like deal flow is also really, really picked up, especially in like certain hot vehicles or hot verticals, things like, you know, stablecoins continues to be really hot infrastructure, a lot of prediction markets, a lot of people just excited about like general, you know, financial applications, DeFi, I think is picking back up. And so You know, we're, we've got a lot going on and, you know, I think there's just a lot of tailwinds behind the industry generally. And so a lot of people are excited about, about building new things.

I saw you guys did one of the predict, uh, one of the prediction markets I looked at as well with, um, I saw a job post, a careers page, and the careers page said like Sam Altman and Dragonfly have backed this.

Uh, I do not know which one that is, but we, I mean, we're, we're large investors of Polymarket, I think, as I've, I've said on this podcast before. And continue to be very bullish there with the, uh, the acquisition they did at that DCO, uh, earlier this week.

Yeah. Um, what, what was that? So they spent $112 million to get licensed in the US?

Yeah, essentially that's right. So, um, they are now a derivatives clearing, or if this goes through and when it goes through, they will have a derivatives clearing organization, um, uh, in the US. So they will actually be able to, uh, in a regulated manner, serve US customers. Similar to Kelsey.

Yeah, yeah. What do you think? I think of these markets in general, I can pull up— let's look at some of the prices just week over week. Like we had another week of basically just up only. I mean, you've got ETH is— I mean, it wasn't as crazy as last week, but ETH is up 8.8%. BNB is up 8%. Solana is up 8%. Dogecoin is up 13%. Cardano is up to I mean, everything's up. SUI's down 5, Stellar's down 6, Hyperliquid's down 8. Interesting. What, um, Hyperliquid's down 8. Let's talk about that in a sec. But on the other side of things too, you have, uh, actually Matt Levine had a good piece on this. You like the meme stock mania is kind of back. Like Opendoor ripped 300%, um, Krispy Kreme ripped 70%. I saw Sydney Sweeney did an ad with, uh, Abercrombie and it ripped like, I don't know, 100%.

I think it was American Eagle. Yeah.

American Eagle. Thank you.

Yes, it was up like 28%.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. GoPro's up 100%. Kohl's is up 50%. So like, just like, uh, you know, animals— animal spirits are definitely back in the market. What do you— what do you make of this?

Yeah, it's very clear animal spirits are back to that point, uh, and they're back in a— in a way that retail hasn't been back for a long time. You know, if you look at, um, I mean, we'll start with the meme stocks, right? So, you know, like you mentioned, you know, Kohl's was up 90%. In one day, right? And it was— they had 11 times their average volume in that day. It was halted multiple times. And if you actually go and you look, it actually looks very much like 2021. It was, you know, a very much like WallStreetBets-driven— there was a lot of short interest. People were trying to, you know, were posting on Reddit about trying to, um, you know, cause a short squeeze. It just sounded, you know, a lot like the GameStop, uh, mania. And we've seen that across, you know, a bunch of these Kohl's, GoPro, Krispy Kreme, Opendoor. Um, you now, you've seen it also in, in crypto. And I mean, for instance, it's not just like Bitcoin and ETH and Hyperliquid and the things that we think are good that have been running, but, uh, Tezos is up like 90%, uh, month over month. Um, yeah, Zora ripped, uh, earlier this week. You know, it's, it's, it's everything, right? People are, you know, excited about, uh, about investing again. But we're seeing people get a little bit over their skis. Like if you zoom out to like month over month, you know, it looks, it looks great. But for instance, um, there was something like, like 30% of the OI or the open interest, the leverage in the market was washed out between Friday and last night. And then we've, we've actually rebounded like quite heavy again. So you're just seeing people get so excited about, you know, uh, potentially investing that they're taking on tons and tons of leverage. I think, um, XRP open interest, so leverage on XRP perpetuals last week, on in one day increased 26%. And this is, you know, the third or fourth biggest token in the market, right?

Is this where you go to look? Are you going to CoinGlass to look at this, or where do you see this?

Yeah, typically CoinGlass is my, um, my go-to for, for open interest. Um, it's, you know, a little bit tougher to, to kind of parse some of the, the information over extended period of time. Um, but, but yeah, it's the— I think it's the best for open interest.

Wait, so tell me what you— so when you see these metrics, like, what do you think about?

Yeah, I mean, so I think when you start to see a really rapid increase in open interest, that's when you can see the froth coming, right? And you start seeing funding rates blow out, uh, and that means that there's like significant amount of leverage coming into the market. And especially, I mean, you go and look at hyper liquid at parts of times last week, which structurally the way it works is that the, the, um, Funding rates are always higher on hyper liquid, but at times last week, the funding rates on XRP were like 90 to 100% annualized, meaning that people were willing to pay 100% annualized to get leverage on XRP because they thought after it blew past the all-time high, it was going to keep going, right? It's like the froth is just incredible in the market right now. Um, and you know, a lot of that got washed out. So hopefully we've kind of, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll kind of bottom here, or we'll get a little bit, I guess, like less volatility, uh, into the coming weeks. We're also actually— interestingly, we're going into a, um, a part of the season that is usually bad for markets. So what's starting around, uh, the early August— August is usually bad for markets. There's just not a lot of volatility, there's not a lot of volume. Um, and so it'll be interesting to see if this can, uh, keep up.

Yeah, I think what people forget is that if you're looking— so we're looking at this, uh, The monthly chart of Bitcoin, people forget that, you know, we ripped for like 7 months straight in 2020 from like what, September, October of 2020 straight through what, like roughly May 2021. We had this nasty pullback in the summer from, let's call it $60,000, $65,000 down to, we wick down to $28,000. And then that was like for a couple months in the summer, actually most of the summer. And then we ripped back higher to 68 and then topped. So I'm curious. Yeah. If you, and we had this like double top, right? I'm curious if you think this pattern could play out again. So I mean, obviously anything's possible, but like, yeah. How do you think about if this is a likely scenario?

Yeah. I mean, structurally, I think the market's very different now. I think I've said this, I've been saying this for over a year, but now I think it's a lot of people are saying this, which is that the typical, like, 4-year cycle is over. The market has gotten more sophisticated. There's more institutional participants. We have an ETF now. Um, now we have all of these, you know, DApps that have, you know, structural buying pressure, like, on these tokens. And so you probably shouldn't see this kind of 4-year cycle play out in the same way. Despite that, we've shockingly seen this year look a lot like 2021 in terms of price action. Um, it's not clear to me though that we should be in a situation where, like, Yeah, we've, we, we kind of pump up and into the end of the year and then we pull back and we kind of go into another 4-year cycle. I do think in a world where the institutions are, you know, buying Bitcoin just for, you know, kind of portfolio diversification and because it's digital gold, or they're buying Ethereum because they believe that this is going to be, you know, the infrastructure for a future, you know, digital financial market. Same thing with Solana and et cetera. I do think in that world, The institutions are not going to, you know, uh, they're not going to observe a 4-year market cycle. They are going to invest with different timeframes in mind. It is going to be less volatile and potentially, and it's going to be, um, I guess a, uh, you know, probably not on the same timeframe of what we are used to seeing.

Yeah. Okay. So I know Dragonfly obviously is not trading these markets, right? You guys are long-term venture investors, but in your PA, are you starting to trim? When you see things like this, even outside of crypto, by the way, like you look at what Zuck is doing with these billion-dollar acquihires. I mean, that's like meme coin mania, like meme stocks are back, the AI acquihires, uh, the digital asset treasury companies. We should talk about that in a bit. Like there's kind of all signs of a froth. Do you start trimming around now?

So I am personally a very bad trader.

Uh, that's unfortunate for the listeners.

You and me both.

No, I— it's just not my focus, right? Um, and I'm a long-term believer in the space, so like, I'm just like, I'm long-term long Ethereum, I'm long-term long Solana, um, I am long-term long XRP, um, and, uh, and Bitcoin. It's just, you know, kind of give me those like large caps, um, and things that I think are doing really well, hyper liquid, Athena, etc. I'm like I just believe in these things. I think they'll do really well over time. And, um, I try not to like look at my PA every day. Um, that said, like, you're, you're totally right, right? Like, there's, there's froth everywhere. Uh, you know, when you look at the big beautiful bill, uh, that, that got passed a few weeks ago, um, you know, it's very clear that we're going to be in a, again, a structural devaluation, uh, of, of the dollar. We're going to be in— continue to be in a world where there's going to be liquidity injected into the market. And as we've seen time and time again, you know, crypto markets track liquidity, uh, in the market. People need something to put to, uh, somewhere to put that money to work. And my expectation is, you know, that plus the buying pressure from the DApps plus, um, they're just being bullishness around rate cuts will probably lead us into, you know, continued upward price movement over time. You know, on the short term, like, who knows? But, you know, over the medium term, I might expect, uh, that at least the music hasn't stopped, uh, playing yet.

Yeah. Uh, let's talk about digital asset treasury companies. So we had, I mean, just every, every week you get more movement.

This episode is brought to you by Geodnet, the world's largest decentralized RTK network, delivering real-time, centimeter-accurate positioning around the globe, powering technologies that enable precise navigation for drones, autonomous vehicles, first responders, farmers, and robotics, Geodnet shows that blockchain can be a truly transformative force. By delivering real-time, centimeter-level accuracy, Geodnet enhances emergency response, boosts construction precision, and enables advanced navigation for drones and surveyors far beyond the limits of standard GPS. To find out more, click the link in the show notes or follow them on X. Hey everyone, Jason here. Earlier in today's episode, you heard me mention the weekly CIO memo from Bitwise. In an industry as hectic, fast, and complex as ours, it's incredibly hard to get an easy, no-nonsense stream of what's actually moving crypto. The memo comes from Matt Hogan, Bitwise's Chief Investment Officer. He's been on the show before, and he has this amazing ability to take the most complex topics and break them down with clarity. Trust me on this one, the Bitwise Weekly CIO Memo is really worth the 5 minutes of your time. Check it out at bitwiseinvestments.com/ciomemo/empire, or just hit the link in the description of today's episode to get started. Carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before investing. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply.

I think the most notable thing was actually that we started the Athena one was pretty notable because I think if you're every crypto treasury, uh, every crypto protocol is looking at what Athena did to see if it worked or not. Um, and I think there was a lot of consensus that like, okay, you could do this with Bitcoin, you could do this with ETH, maybe you could do this with SOL. Um, but beyond that, like, does it work? Does it not work? And so I think a lot of folks are paying attention to Athena. So again, I don't know how much you can share. I think you guys are one of the largest shareholders of Athena, so I'm not, I, you know, I don't know how much you can share. You are the largest shareholder of Athena. Okay. So Athena launched a $360 million treasury play where the headline was they're buying locked tokens. So I'll just read the news story. Athena Foundation, the nonprofit organization backing the stablecoin project Athena, announced the founding of a new company called StablecoinX to buy up the project's native ENA tokens. Um, uh, let's see. Of the $360 million raised, StablecoinX sold $100 million in shares in exchange for locked tokens, with the remaining $260 million denominated in cash. So sounds like $360 million total, $260 million was cash, $100 million was locked that got contributed. Over the next 6 weeks, the company will spend $260 million to buy, buy up more locked Athena tokens from the Athena Foundation. The Athena Foundation will then use the proceeds from the sale of the lock tokens to buy spot Athena tokens. Okay. Walk us through what's happening here.

Yeah. So I think high level, and there's some things I probably can't say, you know, it's a public company or it is, it will be a public company, which the SPAC, de-SPAC has done. But broadly, like the point that they're trying to make here is they're trying to make this vehicle attractive, not just to the PIPE investors, but also to people who might buy the, this, you know, these shares over time by allowing this vehicle or this company to buy discounted tokens at, you know, some future cadence, meaning that if you own a share of this, you can get exposure to an ENA token for less than $1 of ENA token for less than $1. Right? Like, that's the goal here, right? And what we've started to see in a lot of these treasury companies is over— is, is when there was so much froth before, people were willing to pay these big premiums, or they were even the PIPE investors willing to say, okay, well, we'll come in at 1.1 or 1.2 times the net asset value because, you know, you know, we're buying these assets plus, you know, the advisors and, and the asset managers need to get paid. But what we've started to see is a little bit of, um, what I think is The market's been a little tired of some of those, uh, those products, and they're looking for vehicles where they've— there's an expectation that maybe they can actually get discounted tokens so they can actually get an uplift relative to the, you know, current spot market, right? And so I saw a couple vehicles over the weekend, um, there's one I know, another one I know of happening right now where you can get exposure as a PIPE investor at, you know, 0.7 or 0.8 times NAV. And then you can maybe go ahead and do an at-the-market offering, you know, right after you do the PIPE that increases that per-share price again. And so you have multiple people who are able to get exposure to that token at a less than, you know, $1 of that token at less than $1. And so that's where we're seeing the market go a little bit here. And, you know, that's part of what is happening here on the Athena piece. At the same time, they are going to go back and they're going to buy back, uh, you know, up to 8% of the circulating supply, um, which is a really, really significant amount. And so that's been the way they were, they were thinking about it. And I think we've started to see those vehicles get a lot more traction and people be a lot more interested in those versus the ones that are typically like, you know, come in at some sort of premium.

Hmm. Okay. So let's look at the price of Athena. It is up. It's up from, yeah, it was kind of sitting around 25, 30 cents for a while. This thing gets announced and it, uh, it actually hit, yeah, 55. It's sitting around, yeah, it's sitting around 50 cents today. So if you are the founder of another protocol, you're looking at this saying, okay, the price just doubled. So what would you say to other people who are looking at this saying, should I go do this? It's like the different way to ask the question is if this worked for Athena, is it going to work for everyone else?

I mean, it's definitely not going to work for everyone else. Like, there's no doubt about that. I think structurally there are types of protocols that it will work for if they're able to put in place some sort of, you know, discounted buying program where people can get exposure to these tokens at that discount. Because there's always going to be arbitrageurs and that, you know, want to have exposure to that. There are always going to be people who are willing to, you know, hedge out that risk and take that, you know, discounted token. Um, I, I expect the market will get, you know, or will continue to get tired. You know, for a little bit of context, I, I, um, was emailing a banker, one of the best banks in the world, uh, last night, and they were telling me that they had 5 people reach out within 24 hours looking for a banker to be a placement agent on one of these, uh, one of these vehicles. Uh, same, similarly, I was in And so I was, I did a fireside chat with Anthony Scaramucci yesterday at this, um, uh, conference out in the Hamptons. And I had stayed in the Hamptons for a couple of days before that. And I was with some, some friends in the industry and every person that I knew in the industry that was at this house that we were sharing, all of them got multiple calls over the weekend for new digital asset treasuries, meaning that people were trying to place, like, call it like another 6 new vehicles over the weekend, last weekend. So the froth and the amount of people trying to rush into this is incredible. There's just not going to be enough to buy and demand for all of these. There needs to be some differentiation if you're going to do it. It needs to be their protocol that's differentiated, like Athena was the first one. And there needs to be, um, some sort of like, you know, I think foundation support, especially when you go beyond those big, um, you know, those big names we talked about. And you need to be able to give people, you know, exposure to the underlying and some yield that they can't get exposure to themselves.

Yeah. Yeah. Who, who should, who's this right for and who is this wrong for? Like, why would, if you say it's not right for other people, like why would this work for Athena, but it wouldn't work for, you know, insert XYZ protocol?

I think it's, it's not going to work for the long tail of assets that don't have like a fundamental story people can buy into. Right. So I think Athena is one of the few, call it applications that people fundamentally believe in, like, the revenue story, right? We've talked a lot about there being this kind of revenue story right now. Hyperliquid, you know, for instance, they had a vehicle that was put together, uh, in a thing called San Therapeutics a couple weeks ago, and that stock price has been down only. And the reason that's been down only isn't because people aren't excited about Hyperliquid. It's been down only because it was structured extremely poorly, and they didn't actually do a good job of thinking about how do we incentivize people to want to own this thing. Right. So I think it's, it works for protocols that people structurally want to own because they believe in the thesis. It works for some, you know, kind of the top most liquid tokens. If they can structure these things in a way that makes it attractive to those investors that we just talked about, but it's not going to work for, you know, this long tail of tokens that maybe don't have a big float. They don't have a story that people can buy into. Like, how do I. You know, I've heard there's, um, there's a vehicle coming out for, you know, a project that you and I know. It's got a big, big VC backer behind it. Somebody I was shocked to hear was behind it. Um, but they haven't even had their first, you know, cliff unlock yet.

I know who you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It should not happen.

Yeah, yeah. There's no reason for that thing to happen whatsoever, right? When that comes out, and that it makes absolutely no sense for anyone other than the VC Who wants to contribute their own tokens to it. Right. And so I think these things to, to be successful and to make sense, they need to be mostly unlocked. They need to have a real fundamental story and people need to be excited about, you know, where they could go in the future. And the foundation needs to be involved in trying to structure these things in a way that is good for all investors, not just the PIPE investors or the VC investors, but also the retail investors.

Yeah. Um, yeah. Interesting. Athena's, you know, So disclosure, I started buying— we had— I added this to our financial disclosure. I started buying Athena like a month or two ago based on the only thesis. The only thesis was that institutional capital wants to ape the stablecoin narrative, and the single way for them to do that is Circle stock. And Circle— so, and that was correct. Circle stock ripped. But like, I feel like there is— there needs to be other ways for them to buy the stablecoin narrative. And obviously like a vehicle like this is going to be good for Athena's price. Their market buying, I don't know, roughly— I was trying to back into the math— $4 or $5 or $6 million a day.

It's around $5, I think.

$5 million a day every day of Athena for, I don't know, I think I saw 6 weeks somewhere. So, um, okay.

I'll tell you, on the stablecoin mania side, yeah, there was, um, you know, after Circle ripped, right, which is just incredible what's happened in Circle. You, if you looked at like You know, like there was an insurance company and a bank in Hong Kong that was in the like Hong Kong stablecoin sandbox, um, that was doing literally nothing with stablecoins other than like being part of the sandbox with the Hong Kong government. Stock ripped 300% the week after. Like this stablecoin thesis around like people wanting exposure to stablecoins, it's also not a US-centric thing. Like this is a global phenomenon. And so I think the Circle stock is one way to get exposure. But, um, you know, you can't get Circle stock everywhere in the world and you can't get Circle stock for all types of investors. So to your point, I think like getting exposure to stablecoins and that thesis is something that there's a lot of hunger for, you know, all parts of the world.

Yeah. Let me read two tweets. Um, this is Nick Carter and Chris Burniske, I think slightly hinting at the fact that these digital asset treasury companies are not going to end well. Um, this is Nick saying, in the end, it's going to be very funny that people earnestly tried to get you to buy a dollar. For 105 cents with the idea that other people would then willingly buy the dollar for 300 cents. And that, uh, this is Chris saying, still laughing, that TradFi is going to repeat the same cycles we made as an industry last cycle. What do you, what do you, um, agree or disagree with these guys?

Um, it's not clear to me what Chris is talking about. And listen, we— the GBTC trade was like clearly terrible for the industry. It was clearly like, there was an expectation that if you bought into this closed-end fund that was non-transferable and non-tradable at a, some sort of premium, that it would continue to trade at, uh, some sort of premium, right? Um, and people then took leverage against that, uh, so that when it traded and it came down to a discount, like, they had significant capital calls, right? Or they had margin calls. And that was clearly dumb because it was non-liquid collateral, right? Like, in this case, it is liquid collateral. And if you're only taking equity— so I, I think I, I totally agree with any of these vehicles that have like debt on them and they have debt instruments that are coming due, um, and that could cause, you know, them to have to go and sell the underlying. There's a much bigger issue with those vehicles. But if you're just diluting shareholders with like, call it at-the-market offerings and, you know, convertible, uh, equity, um, I think these things could easily deflate. And so to Nick's point, like, yeah, you could easily buy this thing at 105 cents and it settles at 90 cents because, you know, there's a tax obligation, and so it should structurally trade at something under a dollar. But it doesn't strike me that there's like any sort of, you know, quote unquote like widowmaker trade unless there's like a bunch of hidden leverage in the, in the, the industry where like people are using these as, you know, collateral to go and borrow against. But securities lending is a lot safer than, uh, you know, lending against Bitcoin in an opaque way, or lending against GBTC in an opaque way where nobody understood what was happening. Like, the people— you can go and see, you know, what people own and, you know, what their exposure is on in the equity books, um, and they can go work with their primes to do that. And then there's like, you know, real risk management at these, these primes that are are adding leverage on it. So it's, it's unclear to me that, um, that point of view makes a lot of sense. Um, but Nick's like, I think it's completely fair to the point we made earlier. Like, yeah, if you're buying this thing at 105 cents and you're hoping it trades at a premium, maybe it structurally should because like you're getting some 10, you know, 10% yield, uh, every year. So it should trade at 1.1. But if you're expecting, if you're buying at a premium, expecting someone else to buy at a premium, like That strikes me as, you know, potentially a very, uh, risk-on trade that, um, is hard to underrate over a long period of time.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, anything else on digital asset treasury companies that you're thinking about?

No, except for, you know, what did you think of the one where the, uh, they're buying Punks in one of these now? Uh, did you see that?

Oh yeah. Um, what's it called?

They bought— they bought, uh, Leschner's Punk.

Yeah, they bought Leschner's punk. Um, I'm blanking on what the name is, but that was a little bit crazy to me.

Yeah, I mean that— oh, Game Square. Yeah, Game Square. So Game Square paid— just tweeted, they said, uh, Game Square has acquired the iconic Cowboy Ape #5577 CryptoPunk from DeFi pioneer Rob Leschner and a $5 million strategic investment. We added 10 million of ETH to our treasury, bringing total Ethereum treasury holdings to over $52 million. Yeah, I mean, this is just, this is silliness. I think that's, I don't know. I don't know how to, I mean, what's the market cap of this company? Hold on, let's look.

Yeah, let's see. What is the market cap?

$125 million market cap.

So you're spending, you know, yeah, I mean, they raised $100 million or they, sorry, they raised $70 million and they, you know, spent some of it on a punk and then bought some ETH.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, it's, it's not the time. I mean, I can tell you, like, you know, Blockwork sits on crypto and for the last 2 years we've been like, we're not selling this crypto, we're not selling this. We're now, we're now like aggressively trimming our crypto positions because you are. Yeah, yeah, we're starting to. I mean, we're not a hedge fund, we're a company that has operating expenses and I'm not in the business like, yeah, when I don't know, ETH is at $2,000 or like SOL is at like $20, like we're not, we're not, or Bitcoin's at, you know, $30K, like we're not selling that. Like that's just a objectively like a bad idea to sell it. But yeah, Bitcoin at $120K and SOL at $200K and ETH nearing $4K, like, yeah, you want to start— we're going to lose a lot of upside, I'm sure, because like the most amount of money in a cycle is made at the very end, like the last 30 to 60 days. But like, that's not the business of Blockwork. So yeah, we'll start really aggressively trimming our crypto position this quarter.

How did you guys make that crypto? And then how do you actually manage your like treasury strategy?

Um, we manage it very conservatively, I'd say, where, yeah, like I just said, like, I, you know, I am in a bunch of founder group chats and stuff like that, and I think we're trimming earlier than most are. But our mentality is like, in an industry as volatile as crypto, sometimes all you need to do is survive, and to survive you need cash. And I know everyone says 4-year cycle is dead and stuff like that, but I think Mike and I, Maybe we just have— we're just too scarred by the last 8 years. But like, we still believe we could go into like a pretty nasty drawdown at some point. Maybe it's '26, maybe it's '27. I don't know. But I'd rather be overly safe than, than too aggressive with the, with the Treasury management. So I think that's how we think about it.

This episode is brought to you by Geodnet, the world's largest decentralized RTK network, delivering real-time centimeter-accurate positioning around the globe, powering technologies that enable precise navigation for drones, autonomous vehicles, first responders, farmers, and robotics. Geodnet shows that blockchain can be a truly transformative force by delivering real-time centimeter-level accuracy. Geodnet enhances emergency response, boosts construction precision, and enables advanced navigation for drones and surveyors far beyond the limits of standard GPS. To find out more, click the link in the show notes or follow them on X. Hey everyone, Jason Yanowitz here. Earlier in today's episode, you heard me mention the weekly CIO memo from Bitwise. In an industry as hectic, fast, and complex as ours, it's incredibly hard to get an easy, no-nonsense stream of what's actually moving crypto. The memo comes from Matt Hogan, Bitwise's Chief Investment Officer. He's been on the show before, and he has this amazing ability to take the most complex topics and break them down with clarity. Trust me on this one, the Bitwise Weekly CIO Memo is really worth the 5 minutes of your time. Check it out at bitwiseinvestments.com/ciomemo/empire, or just hit the link in the description of today's episode to get started. Carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto. Before investing. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply.

Let's talk about Pump. So let me pull up the price of Pump.

What is it, 0.03? 0.03?

Even below that? Down to— it's down. It's sub-$3 billion. All right. All right. Here's the chart. Sub-$3 billion FDV. Santi and I were doing the roundup last week. Santi asked me, he said, could this hit— oh my God, I'm getting targeted for Aman Resorts. That's how you know it's a bull market. Fuck, got to close that thing.

Bull market, baby.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Santi said, do you think it'll hit $10 billion or $2 billion first? And I said $2 billion. What's the dynamic that's happening here? Why is pump basically— I mean, this chart is down only. What's going on? Outside of his, uh, tough interview with Thread Guy, which I don't know if you caught any of that, but yeah, that was tough.

Uh, that was not good. And so I said this 2 weeks ago, I think, when I was on, you know, we talked about like what we thought would be the outcome. And I think I mentioned to you that, uh, 2 things that happened that I'd heard about. One was is that they had upsized pretty significantly the amount that they were going to go— that they sold to the liquid funds. And so originally they had, they had told people, or at least I had been told that they had told people they were going to raise $250 million from the liquid funds. And then the rest was going to be, you know, to retail. Um, and then when they kind of released the tokenomics, it looked like it was like more like $770 million to the liquid funds. And so, you know, that alone had raised people's concern that there just wasn't liquid fund demand anymore. Everybody had gotten filled on the demand they had. And so when it launched, there was an expectation that frankly everybody— there was no buyer left who had like real size, right? And I think we've seen that play out pretty significantly. Um, a lot of— because it was unlocked 100%, uh, at the, you know, at the outset, we saw a lot of people dumping right away when, uh, you know, on a 30, 40, 50, um, gain. We, you know, there was a lot of people who had hedged between that period of time because there's pre-market perps on Hyperliquid and others. Um, so a lot of people had like hedged that, you know, 30% gain and then got out of it really quickly. People were essentially trading around it. They weren't, you know, functionally, um, you know, really bullish about, um, being long. But I think the other thing that has happened here is the, the protocol itself is getting absolutely crushed in market share the last week. And so if you look at the, um, the 30-day metrics, Pump has now less than 50% of the market share relative to Bonq or Bonq.fund. Um, if you look at the 7-day metrics, the, uh, Pump is now like 10% market share. Like they have gotten absolutely crushed in terms of users. They, I believe, are now under, um, 10,000 tokens, uh, getting— got launched recently. Um, which is like the lowest they've had in a really, really long time.

And so this chart you're talking about—

yeah, this chart exactly I'm talking about. Yeah. And so if you look out, you know, all the way to the right there, um, on the, on the last week, you know, Bonq is, is, is by far and away the biggest, right? And you look at, you know, all those other weeks, it's all pump, right? And so the, the— there is something happening here, which is, you know, either people were only farming the airdrop before, now that the— they're not farming the airdrop, they're more excited about Bonq. A better product maybe, um, or they think there's going to be, you know, some sort of, um, you know, Bonq airdrop as well. There's also— I mean, we talked about this a couple weeks ago, but Bonq is sharing more, uh, revenue with, with the creators, and so there's more, you know, demand for— or there's more incentive from the creators themselves. And so I think this tells part of the story as well, not just, you know, the dynamics of the, um, of, of the the share and the ICO itself.

Yeah. Um, how low do you— so this was the debate at dinner last night that I was actually sitting in your seat. You, you missed a good one. Um, uh, some— so the person to my right said they are aggressively with leverage longing pump. Uh, the person to my left said it's going to $500 million. Which bucket are you sitting in?

Uh, I'm definitely not aggressively with leverage long pump. You know, it's funny. I've been tracking a little bit all the way down and like every time it has like a little dip, Uh, the funding rates on Hyperliquid just blow out. Like, people are like clearly, you know, paying 50, 60, 70, um, annualized to go long with leverage on pump, and they just keep getting liquidated all the way down.

There's a lot—

I've never seen so much people, so many people trying to catch a falling knife right now.

Every time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um, I don't know how it goes to $500 though, because like the balance sheet, uh, value that the book value is, is higher than that, right? You know, they raised, uh, right, the book value is 2.

So it's gotta— my thought is if it gets near 2, I mean, you, you should long the hell out of this thing, was my thought.

But yeah, I, I mean, I think that's right, right? Like, they're— it's unclear to me if they're dividending out or what they're gonna do, you know, from a team perspective. But yeah, I mean, it's, it shouldn't trade to $500 if they have $2 billion worth of cash on hand.

Interesting. Um, okay, let's go back to the beginning. We were looking at, um, We're looking at the price, the 7-day price of all these things, and it's up, up, up, up until you get to Hyperliquid, which is, um, one of the worst performers on the week. It's down 8%. How much of this has to do with the fact that, uh, Coinbase announced that they are launching perps? And people already knew they were launching perps, but I think it, I think it did launch.

Um, yeah, it launched like 3 days ago.

Yeah, perps have arrived in the US. No monthly expirations, trade with up to 10x leverage, fees as low as, um, 2 bips.

Yeah, I think the price action has basically zero to do with that. Um, like, like Coinbase has had perps internationally for a while, and you know, these perps in the US, uh, obviously, you know, they're not exactly a perp, it's like a 5-year, uh, future, so it's a long-dated future. Um, if you look at the, the volumes and the OI in the first few days, uh, this, this week, like, they're not particularly high. Like, I Hyperliquid is still significantly higher. And it's not clear to me that, you know, the US KYC user base is Hyperliquid's core user, right? So I think, you know, in the US, my guess is that a lot of people are using Hyperliquid are people who are not KYC, not wanting to KYC necessarily. And outside, and then there's a lot of like people outside the US who are using it. I don't expect that the core user for Hyperliquid will be the core user for Coinbase. I would also just, I would make a point that you had that CoinGlass page up earlier, right? If you look at the open interest relative to the volume of— on BTC, uh, perpetuals of Coinbase. So scroll down here. They're, uh, I think they're number 20 or 19. Yeah, number 20 there. So their number— their number 20 in BTC open interest was like 295. So, you know, below a lot of others, including significantly below Hyperliquid. And then their open interest to OI on the 24, if you go to that right-hand column, is 0.1633, right? If you went and looked at CME or Binance at the top, you'll see that that, um, uh, is much higher. So CME is, you know, 1.66, Binance is 0.6, OKX is 0.5.

All of these guys— for people listening, this is open interest to, uh, open interest to 24-hour volume.

Yeah. Open interest divided by volume, which means, um, if, if that metric is higher, meaning that the open interest divided by the volume is higher, there is more people who are actually like takers who are long this position, right? If that's lower, it means there's a lot of volume, but not necessarily people who want to hold the long risk over time. Right. Or the, um, not necessarily long, could be short as well, but they want to take the leverage risk over time. What does that imply to me is that Coinbase is saying they're doing a lot of volume in this product, but it doesn't sound like they're doing actually volume from people, from like takers. It sounds like what they're doing is like a lot of makers. Yeah, one of the market makers, and they're probably incentivizing a lot of that volume. So when I look at this, it strikes me that Coinbase has basically no demand for the product at this moment on a relative basis.

So let me translate that a little bit. So Coinbase has all these relationships with the institutional crowd and the market makers and stuff like that. And so they're saying, hey guys, we've got this perps thing, can you please come over? Maybe we'll give you a little incentives, or maybe it's just like we've got a longstanding relationship. Please, please, please come over and make markets on these.

Yeah, they're probably paying people for volume. They're probably— that's probably negative unit.

And so, but then, but then you've got a market where it's a bunch of market makers, but there's no— you're saying there's no users in retail on this thing.

There's no retail users. There's no sophisticated institutional, like, long-oriented takers as well, or people who actually want to take these positions over time. And, and Coinbase has been, since they launched perps internationally, you know, a year ago or so, they have been the worst on this metric. And so it feels to me like that's just, uh, what's been happening this, this entire—

who will win this, Rob? Is this like a Hyperliquid keeps winning it? Is this, um, I showed off this app that I keep degenerately trading on called Lootbase. Um, is this, uh, like someone like one of these apps does it? Is it a, is it a Robinhood? Is like, will Coinbase gain? What's— who, who wins that market?

Yeah, it's hard to bet against people with a lot of distribution already. So, you know, I know— too bad Santi's not here, who can tell us how bullish he is Robinhood still. Uh, but you're, you're, you're—

I was the original hood, hood long.

Uh, but yeah, I mean, it's hard, it's hard to see how, like, you know, if Robinhood, uh, launches perps to, to their users, they don't do a really awesome— or they don't take a lot of the market share. Yeah, we've continued to see Robinhood take market share from Coinbase, you know, over the last year. I, I think there doesn't have to be one winner, right? I think we'll continue to see, um, you know, the current exchanges that are doing well continue to do well. But the interesting thing is it was just, uh, I guess a year and a half ago, so it was like November of 2023, where CME open interest, uh, surpassed Binance open interest. And now if you go up and you look at the top on that Bitcoin, um, uh chart that you were just showing, CME open interest is, um, uh, like multiples of, uh, or no, not multiples, it's, it's, but it's pretty significantly above of Binance, like 20, 20-ish percent, 25-ish percent higher than, than Binance.

I mean, if people haven't looked at this, so CME's open interest is $18 billion, then you have Binance is $15 billion, so it's close, but then it, it really drops off. I mean, Bybit's $8 OKX is 5, Gate is 8. I'm surprised Gate is that high, honestly.

I'm not sure it's that high.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fair, fair. But it really drops off. I mean, yeah, Coinbase is 300 million compared to—

I mean, even Hyperliquid is 4 billion. So like, you know, significantly higher.

Where do you see that Hyperliquid data?

Uh, scroll down a little bit. You just passed it.

Uh, yeah, no.

So I think, yeah, you were, you, I see. Yeah. But, but I think, I think the point here is that like we've essentially seen the market kind of fragment, right? So like the sophisticated institutional, uh, traders and takers, like they, they're especially in the US, like they're on CME, right? That's where they've been. The CME has been the leading platform since, um, since November of 2023. Beyond that, it's been basically a Binance, Bybit, maybe Bitget, and now Hyperliquid story, right? And, you know, these are, you know, the retail users, many outside of the US, who have been using this, uh, type of product at these exchanges for, for years, right? They're not probably net new to this. They're, you know, people who probably started on BitMEX back in the day. And I think they will continue to do well, frankly. Um, but I do think it's, you know, Coinbase is sort of trapped in a middle area. Because they want to sell to institutions. That's 80% of their volume, but they make all of their money from retail. And these retail guys are on, you know, these places that have, you know, just more— they offer more leverage, they offer more products.

Do you think the Deribit acquisition will help this? I mean, we've got Deribit here, $2.7 billion.

It, it probably will on the institutional side. I mean, Deribit, uh, their futures product has been you know, pretty mediocre, but they're, they're by far and away the leader on the options side. And options is definitely more of a, you know, differentiated, uh, product for like sophisticated institutional users, especially when you have perps that, you know, is much better for, for retail users anyways already.

Mantle is pioneering the blockchain for banking, a bold new category combining traditional finance with the power of Web3. With UR, the world's first on-chain money app, users can manage fiat and crypto side by side using a Swiss IBAN account in euro, US dollar, Swiss franc, and RMB, all posted to the blockchain. Backed by the Mantle Network, UR is the access layer that unlocks a purpose-built vertical platform for on-chain payments, trading, and asset protocols. Including mETH, mi4, and functions FBTC. All economic activity within UR will be captured by Mantle Network to further drive value to MNT token holders. Follow Mantle on X @mantle_official for more. I wanted to take a moment to tell you about today's sponsor, ZenRock, the permissionless decentralized custody network backed by 1Roundtable Partners, 10T, Maven11, and Spartan. Now available on Jupyter, ROCK is the native token for transactions within the ZenRock ecosystem and secures ZenRock's decentralized custody network. The first application launching on ZenRock is ZenBTC, yield-bearing Bitcoin on Solana. ZenBTC will be live in April 2025. To find out more, you can follow ZenRock on X or click the link in the show notes. I wanted to take a moment to tell you about Citria, the ZK rollup expanding Bitcoin's utility without sacrificing its security. Using ZK technology, Citria enables Bitcoin to function as a fully programmable financial platform. Citria is optimistically verified by Bitcoin, offering the most secure and native way to extend Bitcoin's utility to DeFi. With Citria, developers can build scalable payment systems, tap into Bitcoin's liquidity with financial applications and build privacy systems. Citria is currently on testnet and approaching mainnet. To follow their progress, click the link in the show notes or follow them on X @citria_xyz. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply.

All right, let's, let's shift gears a little bit to the other side of the market, which is NFTs. So we've got, uh, there's kind of big news is that, uh, the, the Punks floor was getting swept, uh, and Punk started ripping. Punks went from— oh yeah, here's the chart of Punk. So Punks were down at, uh, trading at like 38, 39 ETH about a month ago, and now they're almost at 50 ETH. Um, and that, that price action is kind of the same for a lot of other NFTs. So Lil Pudgies are up 23% week over week, Pudgies are up 30%. Mutant Apes are up 14%. Ringers are up 100%. Yeah, NodeMonkey's up 11%. Taproot Wizard's up 20%, 19%. Meebits are up 30%. Doodles are up 16%. Is this just like, is there anything to make of this other than people are making a lot of money on-chain and they're flipping into what people always flip into, which is like flexing on-chain?

I don't think there's anything else to make of it, right? Like, all of this stuff is linked. We talked about the, the meme stocks. We're talking about, you know, people trading, you know, on alts, on in crypto. Like, now people buying NFTs who, at a time where, um, ETH is up like, you know, what is it, it's up like 150% off the bottoms, right, in April, right? And so when you take all that into account and, you know, people take a little bit of profit, they try to rotate it into something else. And especially they try to rotate into things that haven't, um, you know, yet had that, you know, similar, you know, pump, uh, that, that, you know, something that they already had owned. And so I think that's really all to make of it. Um, but I'm curious if you have a different perspective because I think you're probably deeper on NFTs than I am.

No, same exact rotation that happened a year ago. People made a bunch of money and they rotated into meme coins. Now people make a bunch of money and they're rotating, rotating into NFTs. I think it's— I like the way I see it is what's happening right now is like quote unquote the real cycle. And what we got in the beginning of, or, uh, in 2024 was kind of a— it was like a jump start. It was kind of what I'd say DeFi summer was. So you had 2020, you had DeFi summer, then the market cooled down a bit, and then 2021 you just had an all-out ripper of a bull market. Every— everything was going up compared to 2020 where it was really just like I don't know, Bitcoin and some other coins, but mainly like DeFi. It was kind of a contained bull market. That's how I would say 2024 was. It was like a contained bull market. And now it's a— everything in the industry is going to go up. You know, the dino coins are going to go up, meme coins are going to go up, NFTs are going to go up, the L1s are going to go up, the L2s are going up, right? Arbitrum was up like 80%, right? So now it's just a rip-your-face-off type of bull market where it's tough to really go wrong. I will say the place where you will go wrong right now is overtrading and trying to chase different things. That is the only real guaranteed way. If you just sit back in something right now, you, you probably will make money. You just might not make as much money as the person on Twitter who's tweeting about how much money they made. But the guaranteed way to lose money is to chase every single trend because you'll always be behind.

Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, most of those guys on Twitter are LARPers, right? Right? Like they're influencers, like they're, they're full of shit, to be honest. Um, and so like comparing yourselves to them is definitely not the way to, to be like thoughtful about how you manage your own money. I think the, I completely agree with your point about like, listen, we're just seeing more retail-driven rotation in the way we used to see before relative to, I think to your point about '24, I think we also just saw a lot of institutional capital, especially into Bitcoin, you know, ahead of, of the election. Um, and I think it's, it's worth it to keep in mind with the NFTs that like, yeah, all of these are up a decent amount by a percentage basis, but I think like the total NFT market cap is up $6 billion in that, in, in the last week or so, which is pretty de minimis, honestly, on a relative basis.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Okay. Um, moving back into maybe more of the institutional side of things, there was, uh, I actually thought the most interesting announcement of the week was, uh, this, which is that PNC is going to offer crypto through Coinbase. And so what this does is crypto trade here. Actually, there's a better— I won't pull up my own tweet. I will pull up the head of crypto as a service at Coinbase, this guy Brian Foster. So Coinbase, I'll read Brian's tweet. Coinbase equals infrastructure. We're excited to partner with PNC via our crypto as a service platform, enabling PNC clients to trade crypto and use USDC. We're powering over 240 banks, brokers, fintechs, exchanges, and PSPs. And on a mission to help arm the financial institutions to build leading crypto products for their clients in every major geo around the world. Spot trading, regulated futures, perps, trade finance, subcustody, non-custodial wallets, embedded payments, USDC-based tokenization, and more. I thought this was a really interesting announcement because not only does PNC get the ability to offer crypto trading to their customers, but now Coinbase gets more banking infrastructure. Uh, which is just like furthers Coinbase's push to become, to become a full-on bank. I've always said that like the main thing that Coinbase is missing as a product set is, uh, the just like the last mile of banking, like the ability to accept and send wires. Yeah, just like a few other things like that. And so I think maybe the PNC partnership will help with the, uh, help them with that. And then I think it's just, yeah, important to take a step back and realize that 2 years ago PNC was debanking people who owned crypto and now they're offering crypto trading to their customers. Come a long way.

So yeah, we've come a long way. I think it's, it's very clear, like with the Genius Act, that we're going to see pretty much every bank try to, you know, enter the space in some way, whether it's stablecoins, whether it's crypto trading. You know, we had the Fiserv announcement, you know, a few months ago around, you know, offering crypto or offering stablecoin access to their community banks. I think it's very clear the direction of travel is, is really good. This, this type of announcement though does remind me a lot of 2021. We got a lot of announcements, we're like, oh, like, you know, FIS and Fiserv and, you know, these community banks and this bank. I think there was US Bank announcement back then, there was a, uh, a Bank of America one, a Wells Fargo one back then that was all around like trying to access or allow access to crypto for, for their customers. And these places are are— that's just not what people want out of their checking account. Typically they want to be in some other, you know, platform where that serves their financial needs, whether it's trading, uh, et cetera. And they also— these places are not digitally native. Like they don't offer good product experiences. They don't offer good user experiences. The products are really thin. Typically it's usually, you know, just call it like buy and hold type products. And so it's never been clear to me that like these types of announcements are anything other than a good headline. Now, it implies something good about where the industry is going, but it's not clear to me that you'll see any real volume on this. I would tell you, I was talking to somebody, uh, maybe it was a couple days ago, who was saying, hey, listen, like, we've been talking to Fiserv about this community bank stablecoin product, and I can tell you for a fact it is less than a million dollars of volume since they announced it a couple of months ago, right? And so, like, Listen, and I think that you— that's what you see a lot of, uh, in, in these announcements. They're meant for headlines. But what is also happening is when you look at, you know, we're in earnings season right now for Q2. Every single corporation clearly feels the pressure that they need to talk about stablecoins at least, or they need to talk about crypto in some way, because you're seeing it across all of these earnings calls. People are getting asked about it. It's clear that their boards are talking about it. They feel like they need a strategy because you know, the U.S. legislature is putting their weight behind this now, and there's going to continue to be an excitement and acceptance of crypto in this space. So people want to be putting out these headlines, they want to have a strategy, but it's unclear to me that they actually mean much in the near term.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The other one that was interesting was, uh, JPMorgan's eyeing Bitcoin-backed loans. So like a month ago or a couple weeks ago, they said that they might, uh, or that they will let you borrow against your crypto ETF holdings. Um, and now they're— yeah, now they're eyeing Bitcoin-backed loans, which is interesting.

So, uh, yeah, I mean, that's great. So, I mean, why wouldn't their high net worth, you know, uh, division do that? There's a lot of, you know, very rich Bitcoin people who, um, don't want to sell their Bitcoin. And, you know, it's, it's no different than— I mean, famously, like, Adam Neumann took out billions of dollars worth of loans to JP Morgan, you know, secured against his private stock. You know, this is a more liquid collateral. So like, why wouldn't they do that?

Yeah, exactly. You following Galaxy's stock?

It's ripping. It's actually funny how much they're leaning into this data center side of their business though.

It is. I think their data center business is now larger than their crypto business.

Is that right?

Or will be soon. Yeah. I mean, they got so— I don't want to say lucky, but like they got pretty lucky with some of their Bitcoin mining miners that they, that they, that they lent to who then couldn't, couldn't pay. And then they seized and then they got the electricity contracts. And then, I don't know, we have Novogratz coming on the pod soon, so I'm going to get into all the details. But yeah, just said it's up 160% this year. Anything else we missed? Market structure bill came out. I don't know if you read it. I didn't, so we can skip talking about it, but there's like an early, early iteration of the Market Structure Bill, I guess.

Yeah. You know, it didn't pass the House, right? Which is great. Um, in a bipartisan manner, I think there's, you know, we'll see what happens in the Senate. There's definitely, I think, a lot of debate around like how good the current version of it is for the industry. Um, it doesn't actually give that much clarity, even though it's called the Clarity Act on like you know, how or a token might be classified as a security versus a commodity. It kind of tries to punt more of that specifically to the, um, to the three-letter agencies themselves. Um, but again, it's a good thing for the direction of travel, I, I think. Uh, but there's a lot of devil in the details in that one specifically. Same thing with Genius Act, but, you know, I think Genius was a little bit more, you know, down the center and much easier to to understand and for people to get excited about.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Anything else you're paying attention to that we, we didn't cover?

No, I, I mean, I think that's it, right? So the markets, the Digital Asset Treasury Company is like, that is what everybody is talking about. I don't know, you know, in your chats, the people you're talking to, that is all.

I mean, I'm getting—

I, I think I get 2 calls or emails a day about these. It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, content of the week. You got a rec? People liked your fiction recommendation.

They did. People, you got some comments about that?

Yeah, I've got one. Um, I listened to, there's a podcast called Lenny's Podcast, which is the biggest podcast for like product managers and product people. And, uh, he did an episode with, uh, this guy Dan Shipper, who's the CEO of a company called Everi. And, uh, it's called The AI Native Startup: 5 Products, 7 Figures in Revenue, 100% AI-Written Code. And it's a good peek into, uh, the podcast called Lenny's Podcast, good peek into what a 100% AI-native business looks like. So I would, I would recommend that to, to operators out there.

Okay. I, I've, um, this is kind of a, a, uh, one that's like straight down the middle, but there was a, um, there was an Odd Lots podcast. Last week about what, um, what AI was doing to the legal industry, uh, that I actually thought was like fascinating. Uh, and it, I think it's a harbinger of what's happening to a lot of these service verticals and these service industries. And, you know, there's a, there's a bit of, I think, maybe concern around like what the future of work looks like in AI. I've been a little bit on the other side that like my expectation is like, this is net good for everybody.

It's.

GDP expanding, like people will find other things to do with their time and we'll just all be better off. Um, but I think people are worried about how work, uh, gets done. And so I'd listen to the one on the legal industry about, um, how people are adapting to that on all of us. I thought that was, that was awesome.

Yeah. Yeah. Long, you're positive long-term or short-term?

I'm positive. Uh, I mean, I think short-term people overstate what we can get done. People always overestimate what can get done in the short-term and underestimate what can get done in the long-term. It's always true, but I'm positive, uh, for both the short term.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, Rob, thanks for coming on.

Thanks for having me.

Appreciate you. See you guys. Uh, we have an episode with the one and only Charles Hoskinson on Monday. So we're recording that, uh, later today. It is either going to be a hilariously good episode or a total flop of an episode, but you'll have to tune in on Monday to see.

Are you guys going to talk about Midnight? Are you going to talk about?

Honestly, I don't think I'm gonna ask him one question about Cardano. I plan on asking him about his, like, why he spent $10 million on a Blackhawk. I think he's the largest owner of buffaloes in the entire United States. I do want to ask him how he got Cardano in the hands of every Uber user, but no, I don't plan on asking him too many technical questions about Cardano.

All right, well, I didn't know about the buffaloes. I definitely want to know more about the buffaloes.

Yeah, yeah. He's also trying to find, like, aliens in the ocean. So, uh, like I said, could be a great episode, could be a flop. We'll see. All right, folks.

Rob, thank you.

See you guys on Monday.