Has This Cycle Peaked? | 1000x

Imagine selling Bitcoin at $92K because you're worried about a nonfarm payrolls print 8 days before regime change in Washington. And not, not just any regime change, this regime change, right? So to me, like, I think we're in wait-and-see mode.

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Okay, welcome back to another 1000X Podcast.

We got a lot to talk about this week, don't we, Avi? A lot is going on.

We, we, yeah, we do, we do have a lot, lot, lots going on. Market has been very volatile, up and down, left and right. And we got a lot of hate for our last podcast because we talked about how much we hate SUI. We got attacked pretty, pretty mercilessly by the SUI community. They remind me a lot of the XRP guys, actually.

You know what's funny? I took another crack at trying to understand why SUI matters after the vitriol and the hate. And the best bull case I could come up with for SUI after all the vitriol and the hate was the vitriol and the hate, right? Like there was this moment in late 2023 when I put out this tweet. I was like, I'd had a bottle of wine. I was in Rome, sorry, Venice, having a good time. And I put out a tweet with a little bit of free time about how Solana is fucked. And I talked about, you know, like kind of well-articulated, but not that well-researched reasons why Solana is ultimately doomed to fail. The token was trading like $20 at the time. And it immediately got like 700,000 views. Everybody started hating on me. That bald guy who's like the cheerleader for the community started freaking out and telling, you know, calling me names and insulting my parents and stuff. And I thought, okay, wow, this is like, I guess this, this ecosystem isn't dead. In fact, the opposite of it. It's, it's vibrant, right? Like, people really care. They've invested their livelihoods in this thing. And then we got Toly on the podcast the next week. And then, you know, I don't know about you, but I got bullish $10 token higher than, than where I was max bearish. So, and obviously didn't buy enough. But I bought some. I think something similar is going on with SUI here, which is that if you bear post and you immediately have people coming out of the woodwork to tell you how, you know, stupid and ugly you are, that's a sign that people care. Like, you're— people are really invested in this chain. They're invested in working in it. The community's there, like, trying to pump this thing and make it go up. Um, it doesn't feel like a bunch of people who are just long on the highs unsure why. There is some clear technical advantages that SUI has. That was reflected also in the Blockworks research survey, where they asked a bunch of Solana developers, if you were working on another chain, you weren't allowed to work on Solana, what would it be? The vast majority picked Base or SUI, um, and those— the two responses, Base and SUI, were tied. Uh, every— nothing else even came close. So to me, the rabid community is the reason why we might see a self-reinforcing rally. Beyond that, I kept trying to debate people on Twitter and ask, what is the actual business case for this chain? And people would say, oh, you're so stupid. You don't understand the tech. It's just better than everything else. But I would keep, you know, prodding and saying, what's, what's the business case? Like, why, what, you know, blockchains sell block space. Why would buyers of block space prefer this blockchain to any other? Is there any unique product or service that can only work on this chain that can't really work that well on the more established chains? No one could answer my question with a straight face. They could only insult me and tell me that I'm a non-technical idiot. So I, you know, to me, it reminds me of previous blockchains that have been technologically superior to the incumbent. But that technological superiority hasn't necessarily translated into upward price action. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. I don't think there's enough— like, if you aren't holding SUI bags from the lows and, you know, rolling in money right now, I don't think there's a compelling reason to invest here.

Yeah, I mean, I agree with all those points. I think what's clear, what's very clear to me is that Sui has managed to build a pretty crazy community, but not just of retail investors. There are like a lot of VC funds and hedge funds that have started to take it seriously. And it's— I think it stems from the fact that these guys, you know, that they were, they were building at Facebook, they're building at Meta. Like, these are, these were a serious team. It was Sui, it was Sui and Aptos, and Aptos kind of shit the bed Nobody really talks about it anymore.

Yeah. What happened there? They were the more vaunted product when they launched and then the founder just quit. The hell's going on there?

I think so. When we were, when we were diligencing them way back in the day, what was always said to us is that the SUI guys were better, like actual better tech people, but the Aptos guys were better marketing and business development people. And I think what ended up happening with Aptos is that they just never really got the product to the place that they needed it to get to. And the Sui guys learned how to market their good tech, right? They did, they did build good tech. As far as I, as far as I can understand it, like, look, I'm not a dev. It's not like I've gone on and actually built something on Sui and I can verify, but I'm going off secondhand information of people that have built on it. It's like, okay, yeah, it's pretty good. Developers seem to like it. I've not heard anything of that sort from Aptos. So I do think that they sort of took Aptos' niche away from them. You know, Aptos wasn't able to capitalize on the initial hype that surrounded it. They weren't able to turn that into real usership. And I think what's happening right now is that Sui's just cannibalized it completely. Now, is it worth $52 billion? No. And I think it's kind of nuts to think that it will, it'll stay up here. But is it something that might actually stick around? Yeah, because I think what they've managed to do is they've actually managed to get to a place like, unlike a lot of these other chains, they managed to get to a place where people are taking them seriously, like devs are taking them seriously, right? Like nobody ever really took NEAR seriously, despite their claims of having great developer tools and, you know, a better ecosystem for building. I mean, they raised an $800 million ecosystem fund, but people— that was all Fugazi, right? And the people that were building on NEAR weren't actually building anything real. They were just porting over copycats from the rest of the world. I do think what it does say is that Like, if you go look at the top assets now, like SUI has reached parity with Avalanche, and Avalanche had such a huge head start on SUI. And I think what it tells you is that people don't want subnets, people don't want L2s, people want a fast base layer chain. And that's kind of what you're seeing with the fracturing of Ethereum as well. It's like people just don't want interoperability between all of these different chains. They want one good chain because otherwise it's too confusing and nobody has figured out the UI to make all of these subnets, you know, very easily usable.

That brings me back to my original question, though. Solana serves that purpose, right? You know, I understand, I've been educated by the online community of anti-JONAH people that SUI can do things that Solana can't. It's faster, it provides better, you know, I guess to use a non-technical term, better tagging for asset ownership than Solana, perhaps. Maybe it's less buggy. Who knows though? It hasn't been battle-tested, but let's just assume that it is. Still, like, that, that alone isn't enough. Like, I think SUI is the kind of product that you buy during the next bear market. Like, it will go through a winter. All of crypto will go through a winter. All these tokens will shank. SUI is probably one of those things that you're going to want to accumulate for the next cycle when everybody writes off all of these alt L1s as dead, but the SUI builder community is still strong. Still grinding, still trying to put apps together and achieve product-market fit. And then some smash hit will come out during the bear market that you can capitalize on in the next bull. I don't think, I don't think it's a good trade to be buying it here at $50 billion. And that's nothing against Sui. That's just, that's just markets and valuations, you know, um, this, it's, it's overpriced. Relative to what it is right this second, and it'll probably be a good dip buy for the next run.

I, I think that's an amazing framing. I think that makes a ton of sense. I mean, it's one of those things that if it exists through a bear market and if it maintains its community, that's going to be like another 100xer in— after the next bull. See, I mean, you can— you, you kind of could do this with Solana right? Everybody thought Solana died, but they maintained their core community, they maintained their developers. People never fully gave up on it, even post-FTX. And that led it from going, you know, went from $8 to $200 from the low to the highs in the bull just recently. So I think the same thing could happen with SUI if they manage to keep on to that hype I mean, but just like looking at, like looking, looking at the TVL on SUI, looking at the applications on SUI, they don't really have like a killer app yet in any, in any meaningful way. I think their biggest, biggest protocol is a SUI lending protocol that just looks like you, like you go to the website, it looks like any other borrow/lend protocol that's ever existed. But the one thing that I'll say is it's growing. Like SUI is growing quickly.

Yep. I mean, also like the amount of hate that we got for suggesting, God forbid, that SUI might not be a good value for your money at this particular point in time was not even close to the amount of hate that I got for suggesting that Solana was torched. Right. Like when I suggested that there were literally 100x as many Solana diehards coming out of the woodwork to engage. Whereas this time—

yeah, and actually at that point Solana was about— was that— was actually lower in price.

Yeah, I think it wasn't on the highs, it was close to the lows.

Let me, let me actually see where, where was Solana when— so Solana was right now is $92 billion in terms of, in terms of market cap when you decided to shit on it and call it stupid. That was last—

that was like, that was November '23.

Yeah, that was, that was no— no, I think it was October. October. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, up to October of '23, and it was at about $15 mil— $15 bill, sorry, $15 billion market cap. So actually about a third of the size that SUI is today, and it had a larger community, more, more, more active community around it. So I mean, look, I agree, the, the way, the way to play this is kind of just to ignore it until you get to the bear market, and then it's a freaking amazing, amazing trade if you get into the bear market and it still has a good community surrounding it. So, you know, I definitely, definitely keep an eye out. Um, you know, one thing that we actually haven't really talked about on this, on the, on this podcast is hype and its plans to become an overarching L1. What's kind of cool is that very rarely do you see an application go backwards into an L1 because, you know, normally you have like the L1s, they have a massive valuation premium. So if you're going to launch any project, you're going to launch an L1. Right? And if you're launching an application, you're probably launching it on, on an, on an L1 and you don't have any ambitions to, to become an L1. But now Hype is sort of backed in, backed into this, which has massively raised their potential valuation. And it's also cool because you now have an L1 that has a baked-in killer app, which is very rare. Like normally L1s are searching for their killer app instead of a, you know, the killer app becoming an L1. Um, so I'm, uh, you know, we're off like 50% from the highs. I think people have generally stopped talking about it, uh, in the way that they were talking about it 2 weeks ago when the entire timeline was just like bull posting Hyperliquid, which is almost never a good time to buy. Like when the big— when the biggest holders of this thing feel so good about themselves that like they can end every tweet with Hyperliquid, and they can like go after people kind of left and right mercilessly. I think like, so Flood is, I think, the, the biggest proponent of this guy, or that this, uh, this, this product. This guy was having way too much fun on Twitter when Hyperliquid was like $30. It's like he was having way too much fun. And I like Hyperliquid, um, you know, I'm a fan, I'm an owner. But when, when somebody's having that much fun on Twitter with their, with their number one bag at the highs, you know, you should probably start chipping out a little bit at least.

Easy to say. I mean, like, we're all, we're all having fun when crypto's ripping, and, uh, it's hard to know when it stops because you're not in it for like a 10 or 20% rally. You're in these, you're in these tokens for a 5 to 10x at a bare minimum, because at the end of the day, that's the kind of risk that you're taking to the downside too. So yeah, I don't know about Hyperliquid. I feel like, well, first of all, like, just to call a spade a spade, Hyperliquid is built using the Cosmos SDK, right? It's, it's like, it's— I, I mean, I looked into this when I did my research a while ago on Hyperliquid and ultimately concluded not to buy it on the lows, which was stupid in hindsight. But it uses a, um, it uses Tendermint. It's part of the Cosmos SDK. It's part of their ecosystem. So like, if they become an L1, is that bullish Cosmos? What else is going to get built on Hyperliquid other than their Cosmos?

Cosmos is done. Cosmos is now public infrastructure. Yeah, their token has no real use. They did great stuff for the crypto community by basically building actually a pretty good framework, but the token itself is like done, right? Like it's over. Like that's, that's in the past. I mean, I don't think it's ever, it's ever really coming back. They have no real leadership. Now, that being said, we are always going to be indebted to them for what they did for the industry, which is build a really phenomenal framework and come up with new consensus mechanisms to drive the industry forward. So we appreciate them for that. But I mean, I don't think buying the ATOM token makes any sense in any meaningful way.

Yeah, I agree. How ironic would it be if the most successful Cosmos outcome is Hyperliquid, which is basically built with Cosmos's technology, and they benefit not at all from it. I don't know. I think that with Hyperliquid— okay, so let's say they go backwards and become an L1. You already have a community of enriched bag holders sitting there. They want to keep the train moving forward. They're going to build all sorts of other interesting stuff on Hyperliquid, or uninteresting. I think that's the next move for Hyperliquid. You have to see, like, Is this just an exchange or are they figuring out other unique applications for this latency-sensitive platform beyond the same crap that's on every other chain, including, you know, SUI and Solana and Base and ETH? If it's just, if it's just a bunch of like Uniswap-style DEXs, I mean, forget that, forget it, forget about, forget about anything, Jonah.

Forget about anything. These guys, just based on being an exchange, are undervalued. And so if they figure out a way to even get a few applications, other applications built on them as an L1, they deserve to be valued higher. That's my take. I mean, right now I think they're trading at like a 12 to 15 when it comes to, you know, their forward multiple. So it's—

yeah, that's good. Yeah, I agree.

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I see a downward trend channel in the midst of a market where the benchmark Bitcoin is ranging sideways. So like my take on this is that the market has shown its hand for what's going to perform during the next phase of this bull cycle. And yes, I do believe there will be a next phase. There's a debate about whether we peaked or not in this cycle. I think, I think we're, I think we're going much, much higher. And I think when we do, the market has shown its hand in terms of what's going to rip. Hyperliquid is clearly going to rip, right? Like those cards got shown a couple of weeks ago. Maybe SUI, as much as I hate it, will rip. Um, the AI coins like AI-16Z and Virtuals will rip, but in the absence of sector-wide momentum, in the absence of a rising tide, I think it's interesting that all those coins are just kind of spiraling lower and lower. They're grinding. They're not like tanking, but they're grinding lower every day or every week. And to me, that's relevant because it shows you that that's hot money. That's what— that's where people are who feel rich are throwing their cash behind. And it's hard to feel rich when your Bitcoin's just like knocking around like a pinball machine between $92K and $98K. Right. If we take a neck— but if we take the next leg higher to $125K or $150K Bitcoin, the hot money is going to flow right back in and lift, like power lift those tokens. So to me, I don't think it's a good— like, you know, again, I have a more medium to long-term trading style than you do, but I wouldn't be buying hyper liquid for the sake of example here at $20 a token right now, trying to catch that falling knife, I would rather buy Hyperliquid at whatever price it's at when Bitcoin breaks through the top of the range and keeps sending, you know, or I mean, by the way, let me, let me just clarify one thing. I'm like, I'm not talking about how you accumulate your first position, right? Like, Yes, it would be good to have some hyper liquid here, but it could go down another 50% before it starts to rally. So I think like, I think your conviction buys, maybe you scale in buy for now with small size, and then if you're going to do a big slug on high conviction, it's when the market's rallying again. And that goes for Virtuals, AI16Z, and, you know, some of the other stuff that performed recently as well.

Yeah, I don't know if I— I mean, look, I think the, the thing, the thing with Hyperliquid that is a little bit, is just a little bit different to me is that there are so many people that miss this, that what I watch the most when I look at a chart like Hyperliquid is actually the flows of the token. So are the big buyers buying or selling right now? And basically since $30, what you started to see like once it, once it hit $30, a lot of the big wallets started moving and actually offloading and taking a ton of profit. And a lot of them were actually just starting now to buy back below, below $20 and $18. And so what I know is that they're like, there's actually like a significant amount of money that is coming back in to buy this thing below $20 and $18. And the longer that we hold above that, a lot of the people that missed out on that first rally are going to come, come back in. And I just don't see that many large holders offloading anymore. They're just not really selling. Whereas with virtuals, just, just like, just like talking about another chart that looks completely different, uh, virtuals from the time— so when we first talked about it, it was trading at like $225, or like when we, when we launched our 1000x token, it was trading at $225. Goes all the way up to $520 and is now all the way back down to $270, and people are just hammering thing. They're absolutely hammering this thing. And the reason that they're hammering this thing, as far as I can tell, is that there are a lot of competitors that have popped up that are better. I mean, look, I love Virtuells because it's where we launched our, our token, and they were very good to us in the beginning, but we actually migrated off their framework.

Yeah, I mean, to be fair, their no-code framework is what we migrated off of and we migrated to Eliza, which is AI16z's framework, which is a you write tons of code framework. And the reason why we did that was because a no-code framework just isn't good enough for most bots. However, to be completely fair to Virtuals, they do have their own you write a bunch of code framework. It's called Game. We just didn't, we, we didn't choose to go down that road because Eliza was so popular on GitHub. That it seemed like a no-brainer for us to explore that in the limited amount of time that we had.

Well, yeah, I mean, that, that's kind of what I'm saying is that there— I talked about this a little bit on the SteadyLads podcast that I went on on Friday, and somebody pulled up a chart of AI market cap versus DeFi market cap, and we're not even like— we, we weren't even halfway there, right? There's still so much more for the AI crypto space to grow.

I've seen, I've seen $15 billion estimates, right? Can you just state the numbers that you saw on the chart for the listeners?

Uh, I think I saw $10 billion versus $50 billion. Okay. What did you see?

I mean, I've heard that AI is $15 billion right now. It's probably $10 billion since I saw that. And that DeFi, in the peak of DeFi summer, DeFi market cap was $150 billion. I don't know, I haven't run these computations myself. At any rate, I just wanted to get the numbers out there for the listeners. Please continue your thought.

There's, there's a difference. I mean, there's a huge difference. The difference between these AI things and DeFi is that DeFi inherently has network effects built into it. Right? The larger an exchange gets, like a Uniswap, the more liquidity they have, the better it is as a product. The more liquidity a borrow/lend protocol has, the better it is as a product. And so inherently, as winners get larger, they become actually harder to displace, not easier to displace. Whereas it's— there are basically no switching costs relative in AI. It's so much easier, like, that we didn't— you don't lose anything by switching from one framework to another, really, in the same way.

I disagree with that. Moving off of— I mean, you're right in the sense that we could technically clone our agent on Game or any other framework, or just build one ourselves. Um, and then when we get our bot to a sufficient level of, of competency, uh, we just turn off our Eliza bot and migrate to the new bot, but that would be a heroic pain in the ass. What I will say is for a no-code framework, um, like what Virtual has promoted to get us on board, it is very easy to switch. You literally just copy paste a few, um, questionnaire boxes from one framework to another. So for the no-code stuff, literally as seamless as, you know, switching from Uber to Lyft for a given ride. For a full code framework like Eliza, It would be pretty heroic for us to switch. We'd have to do a lot of work.

Let me, let me reframe this. The more people that use a framework, that doesn't necessarily make it better.

Yes.

Right. Like, obviously, if you have better, smarter people contributing to a framework in larger quantity and like improving the framework, then it's better. But just like the usage of the frameworks don't make, don't make it better. And so I think that the network effects are a lot smaller. And that end, like what I'm trying to get to at the end here is that in DeFi, it was pretty reasonable to assume that once you hit like $20 billion in market cap, and you think you're going to $100 billion in market cap, it's very reasonable to just buy the top 10 DeFi protocols and say, if DeFi does well, these top 10 DeFi protocols will do well. Whereas in AI, I think it's a lot harder to say, I think AI is going to grow, therefore I'm just going to buy the top 10 biggest AI projects because it's so much easier to disrupt them.

Dude, it's, it's so interesting. I like that take. I hadn't thought about it that way before, but we've seen this now with 3 different protocols, right? Like we've seen first it was Bittensor, TAO, go to the moon and then just kind of stall out like plateau. It was weird. Okay, maybe that's a unique ecosystem. It's a little bit complicated, hard for people to understand. Maybe the space is going a meme-ier direction. All right. So then virtual shows up, virtuals to the moon. We're all feeling pretty—

dude, you forgot, you forgot about GOAT.

Yeah, GOAT was cool.

I mean, they were like, go to the meme coin basket. There's so many different cycles already.

Yeah. These things though, like I used to think that this was going to be like DeFi where it's like, okay, AI mania is coming to crypto. That's my conviction trade. I'm just going to be long the top 10 call options that position me for that. And that doesn't look like it's going to work. Like these things just rip and then they fizzle. And to your point about network effects in DeFi, not, not really like the analogy not working in AI. Like the more people that use the ELIZA framework, the worse it becomes almost, because your bot is going to sound like all the other Eliza bots. Like, the, the more people use a certain framework, the more commoditized it comes. And the attention you're trying to farm with these bots is like— you're not trying to be a commodity to farm attention. You want to, you want to stand out, you want to be unique to farm attention. So I take your point there. Um, I still think AI mania is coming to crypto, and I think— I still think that all of this stuff is going vertical but you've definitely made me more cautious and made me want to sell some, uh, you know, I'm deeply in the money on Virtuals, deeply out of the money on AI16Z, which I added on the highs. And then I've got a constellation of other little coins that I'm experimenting with that don't really move the needle in my portfolio. Um, I don't know, I think you're right. I think it's probably like you hold small percentages of those things just in case they come back, but you don't place big bets on them here. Virtuals and AI16Z.

Yeah, I— that's a little bit of what I'm thinking. I mean, Virtual is like, if it really washes out, I mean, I'm probably rebid between $2 and $2.30. I think that's a reasonably good level to get back in. But right now it's just full downward trend, and the conversation is it's being outpaced by every, every other framework out there.

Yeah.

And so therefore it doesn't really make sense to get in and buy it.

I don't know, we should probably talk about our token, podcasters launching tokens, and where some of these agents can go in terms of like vision and the future. Because I personally think agents are going to be the, the, the part of this AI sector that really sticks and achieves mainstream appeal in the next 12 months. Would you agree with that?

Yeah. Yeah, I think I think, I think that's, I think that's very reasonable. I don't really know where else AI fits in, to be completely honest.

Fits into crypto?

Like, like where else other than— yeah, like where, like where does AI and crypto fit in besides these, these types of protocols?

Maybe Deepin. Decentralized compute, but I don't think that's decentralized, uh, GPUs or something. But Render, Render's been trying to do that, Near dipped their toes. It's not really getting traction. To me, an agent is really the only thing where you could cross the chasm from crypto nerds to the mainstream. And, you know, we could talk about like what we want to do with our agent, uh, and how it could potentially cross that chasm. At this particular juncture. I don't know. Basically, to me, an agent, like a bot that posts content and that is interactive and that is trained on some unique training set, has universal appeal. It doesn't matter whether it's Tesla's Full Self-Driving trained on their millions of hours of driving videos, or a little Twitter bot that's trained on our podcast. Like, agents have universal appeal and can be understood by people outside of the crypto world. I think I'm still trying to understand why these, these projects need tokens, but it is sort of a form of equity that people can use to monitor the progress and traction of an agent. So it's useful in a certain sense. Tokens aside though, our 1000x agent has begun tweeting, you know, interesting crypto updates, synthesis, and, and takes on those updates. It incorporates, um, you know, momentum and technicals into its takes. It tries to understand the backdrop for that news and synthesize a bullish or a bearish opinion with degrees of bullishness and bearishness. It understands what's neutral, it understands what's not. We've built in a character file that references our podcast transcripts. We've built in crypto market niche knowledge that you and I have accumulated over years. Like, we—

the bot understands how to think about certain types of developments in the crypto market, which, by the way, is actually like a completely underrated portion of this, is that in order to train an agent to be good at something, you, you need to be good at it. Like, you can't just have like random devs building trading agents. Because they don't know how to trade. And so they don't know how to, like, how to even teach the bot. Like, what parameters do you put in? Like, what data do you ingest? What, what do you look at? How do you synthesize it? A lot of that is manual, that, like, we have to give it the parameters ourselves, right? Like, okay, if open interest goes up, like, what does that mean?

Oh, it means X in context A and Y in context B. So you and I have literally had to input that into the bot and train it. And like, building that for crypto is something you and I could do. Building it for oil is something I could do. Building it for like distressed credit, you and I might, you know, I might struggle, right? Like we need to bring on—

Right. But we can, but we can, we can bring— But I think one thing that's becoming very clear to me is how useful these things are going to be in a broad variety of contexts and how actually once you dive into it, I mean, Jonah, you've spent a lot more time on prompt engineering than I have, but there's some core tenets that hold true across whatever, whatever you're trying to do, like whatever market you're trying to teach this thing on. There's some, there's some core tenets. And so once you build one, it becomes a lot easier to build the next one. As you, you under, you understand the process. And so at the end of the day, this 1000x bot, it's going to start on crypto, but it's going to expand. It's going to come like a trading personal assistant for whatever market you want it to be a trading personal assistant for, which I think is going to be pretty sick. It's just going to require a lot of like, you know, we're going to grit our teeth and work through it, but it's going to be pretty broad-based and broad-reaching by the time that we're done with it. And it all started as a little joke.

Yeah, it was a pet project. Like, you launched it while I was sleeping, then we like started jamming on it together. It's so fun to work on this. Like, basically the roadmap would be we're gonna make this bot excellent at its current mission, which is your crypto market sidekick that keeps you up to date on everything that's going on and helps you understand whether or not it matters, and if it matters, why and how much, right? So we're going to make that as good as we can for crypto. Then I think it's a pretty light lift to copy-paste that into commodities. And we can just, you know, crowdsource the relevant commodities market context. Then we can put it in every other market as well. But even before we do any of that, you know, outside of crypto stuff, we, you know, we have sponsors, we have partners, we have people in our network that run interesting crypto platforms where we could incorporate the 1000x bot into their terminals, their user experience. Um, this thing could look at your positions and be your little sidekick that, that, you know, your voice in your ear that talks to you about what you're doing, um, in a way that you couldn't necessarily rely on ChatGPT to do for you. Um, so I think that there's utility there. And then the big vision, once we've got this thing going for all markets, is to replicate the process outside of trading and incorporate it into other businesses and have this bot be— this agent be present, uh, in other, like, categories of marketing or areas where there's decision-making and user engagement. Like, if you're deciding what movie to go see, maybe there's the Gladiator 3 agent reply-guying to, you know, politicians, uh, as Maximus. Maybe there's, um, the shoe bot shilling Nike in replies to Adidas's tweets. I don't know. I don't know where this is going. But like, this journey feels like it has legs. It's one of those like good gut feelings that's fun to work on.

Yeah. And it's, I mean, it's a great learning experience. For sure. Regardless of how, you know, things, things actually end up. What's cool is like when you get to interface with technology that is genuinely doing something new. It's pretty, it's pretty good stuff. Um, and I think it's only, it's only going to get—

I was going to say, like, yeah, this feels good, but like AI CC or some, some other podcast launched a token and it all went to diddly squat pretty quick. Like, what did they— like, should we talk about it?

I mean, first of all, it's still trading at $60 mil, which is kind of nuts.

Um, that is nuts.

But I think it speaks to Look, it speaks to a level of grift that exists within crypto. I think that the actual founders of this AI CC thing are not necessarily bad people. I actually think that they're good people, that they were trying to do— they were trying to build a good project. But you have to be very careful with the types of people that you allow into your project. I think what ended up happening is that they just got too close with the Bankless guys. And the bankless guys kind of took advantage of them, um, ended up getting a pretty massive allocation and then immediately dumping. But I think to take a step back for a second, I've been in this industry as a quote-unquote KOL for like 8 years now, and I don't do a ton of angel investments, um, kind of for this reason, is because the unspoken thing about all these angel investments, and this is going to piss off a lot of people, is that you get access to projects that you're guaranteed to make money on, not because they're going to be good long term, but because you get in at an unbelievably low price. And a lot of people invest in projects like that. I have tried to avoid this at all costs, but a lot of people, when they get these opportunities, it's a home run. It's free money because you're getting in at something at like a $1 million valuation. You know, it's going to go live at least $15 or $20 or $40. But you also understand that your entire edge is getting in at that low valuation. So of course you're going to sell right away. You don't believe in the project long term. You don't want to hold this thing. You think it's nonsense, but you have to pretend like you believe in it long term because otherwise nobody is going to buy it. But you know in your heart that this thing is making you money because you got in at a cheap price. And that's what I fucking hate about this industry. And that's why there was no round for 1,000x. There was no— and a lot of people, by the way, a lot of people got upset with me over this. Like, a lot of people were like, how? Like, I mean, you didn't fucking tell me that you launched— like, that you and Jonah were launching. You didn't tell us. What the hell? I'm like, why would I tell you?

You didn't even tell me. I woke up, I was like, might be a really good friend of mine.

Yeah, but I, I mean, to be fair, that was like, I was just fucking around. Like, I, I genuinely had no intention of launching this thing as like a real project. But like, what, even once you woke up and we talked and we were like, okay, maybe we should take this seriously, I still didn't tell anybody because why, like, why would I, right? I mean then what it looks like is that it's just a pump and dump. And the real way— I mean, if, like, if you have an audience and you want to go launch a, launch a project, like, I think that the best way to go about anything is organically. Let it be discovered organically because that creates a strong base, creates, creates trust between you and your community, creates a strong base of holders that don't feel like they were taken advantage of. And it absolves you of accusations of grift, you know.

Exactly.

This is, this is, this is, this is very key. You can't, you can't even seem like, right, like there are a lot of actions that you can take. Like for example, if you raise around because you think that raising around will, uh, you know, you'll be able to get in the right people, they'll be able to help you the right way. What I've found is that in 98% of cases, unless you're working with somebody that has like a genuinely stellar reputation, uh, most people that are KOLs will put in their money and then disappear. And then they won't— they'll ghost you and they won't talk to you and they won't help you and they won't do anything. And they're just like— they put in their money and then they're gone. Um, but people just want names. Like, people, people just want name brands. Like, oh well, I want to stick my name on this, I want to stick my name on you know, like, I want, I want that guy's brand. Let me, let me go raise. Um, it's not, it's not necessarily the right— it's— I don't think it's the right way to do things.

No, I agree.

I mean, you really want is you want people that are bought in, and that, and that, and that's at the end of the day our community. So like, the Bankless guys, I mean, I've never really had any respect for them in any meaningful way.

Oh shit.

But, you know, I I, but, you know, I think that this is like a kind of like obvious outcome.

They produce good content. They've been in crypto for a long time. What I don't understand is why you would, you would get yourself involved with a project to pump it up and then dump all of your tokens on launch day onto the general public because they made money.

Because the reality is these guys are probably— these guys are probably actually poor. And I'll tell you why that they're poor.

How's that possible?

And if you love Ethereum, you're probably poor. And all I can say, all I can say is torching your reputation for $2 million is the funniest thing I've ever seen in my whole life. Because if you've been in this, like, let me just— if you've been in this industry for as long as they have, and you've been running a podcast, and you have been on all these angel investments, and you've done it, done it. If you're not worth at least 10, 15 bucks, like, something is— like, you, you just— you're, you're not cut out for this. You're not cut out for it.

Maybe they're not even trading. It— to me, it's like $2 million, you split it between the two of them, that's $1 million each. They probably live in high-tax jurisdictions, and they're Americans.

You, you made— you made— you torched your reputation for $500K.

Are you kidding? 500K, like golf clap. I don't know. To me, it makes no sense. I'm, I'm so shocked by this. Like, we launched a token at the same time as Bankless and they rugged their entire community at the same time as—

just, just to clarify, they did not launch the token.

Sorry.

Yes, they got an allocation. But I mean, we, and we launched it, we launched our token at, I think, like a $100,000 market cap.

Yes. And, and our community is freaking awesome. We found our developer through the community. We found our like branding guy through the community. It's like, it's completely different. I think the way to build a community— what crypto is great at is incentivizing groups of people who don't know each other all across the globe to help each other out without like gigantic reams of documents and startup equity and lawyers and, and, you know, startup expenses. So like If you do it that way, you have to get your community involved at an attractive price. You can't let them in on the highs and then hammer it all the way down in their face and expect a good outcome. I wouldn't have pegged the Bankless guys there until this though, but now it's like they've torched their reputation. Nobody's going to deal with them anymore. That's fucking crazy what they did to themselves. That's epically stupid.

And it's just pure, pure, pure self-immolation.

For not that much money. If they'd done it for like $500 million apiece, I would have been like, okay, well, you know, hat tip. But this is, this is, this is like small potatoes. Um, should we talk about NFP macro and Bitcoin? Like, to me, just very quickly, I want to talk about it. I feel like the whole market got itself all worked up over an NFP print and it didn't matter, and Like, I, I've seen this a lot in young traders. I disagree with this. Maybe there are some interest rate guys out there that are like really good at trading around these economic events, or FX traders or macro traders. But like, for the most part, the only thing that's going to torch crypto, Avi, macro-wise, macroeconomic data-wise, is a screaming high CPI print. Like, if inflation is just back with a vengeance, 100%. We can all get worried about crypto again like we were in 2022. But like, job— like, non-farm payrolls, jobless claims, like, who, who freaking cares? This stuff, like, these prints come out regularly, they don't matter. The Fed's not going to change its policy because the economy is going well. We have like 90% of Washington is about to turn over in a week and a day.

You also, you also have to remember Like, a lot of these— a lot of the talk that you see is such massive hindsight talk. It's hindsight capital. I'll tell you, there was an article in Bloomberg that came out after the NFP print that was like, this is a huge shock, you know, rates, rates are going to go through the roof now because of all of the uncertainty around Trump and inflation's going to come back and rates are going to go through the roof and it's a screaming buy. And all I could think to myself was, where were you when the 30-year went from 4 to 5 from December to now? Like, if you look from December 1st to Jan 1st, it went from 4 to— 30-year rate went from 4 to 5. That's a huge move. It's a big move. And nobody was talking about it. Um, people only talk about it when it like like really hits you in the face. And by that point, you know, the move is priced. Like, it's really hard to make a bet on that, right? Like, you can't, you can't extrapolate. Like, the right bet would have been to say, okay, well, I think that there's going to be a rate move, um, before all of this goes down. But like, after you get a huge move, to talk about it just screams of, you know, hindsight, hindsight capital. And so, you know, the NFP, yeah, it came in strong, and it could be an indication that inflation is going to come back in a, in a big way. But that's not a given. And so the only thing that we have to watch now is CPI. What I will say is that Trump is likely to be an inflationary president, right? Like the things that he wants to do and the things that Trump cares about are, I think, inherently inflationary. Like he wants a screaming hot economy. He wants to pressure the Fed to cut rates.

No more illegal, uh, Laborers, high tariffs, no more illegal laborers.

Exactly. So I mean, you know, he is— there is the argument that with Trump in charge, inflation will come back, and that means the Fed will have to pause, and we might go into a rate hike cycle.

Um, if the Fed pauses, Trump is going to go ballistic on the Fed. Yeah, like, you know, I think what he wants is for the Fed to cut rates while inflation goes up, and pump the stock market and maybe Bitcoin this time too. But he can't really have that because the Fed's independent. All I'm saying is like, imagine if you sold— like, I think a lot of these people who pretend that they're good at crypto trading because they understand macro or know what NFP means, I think they're kind of larps, a lot of them. Like, imagine selling Bitcoin at $92K because you're worried about a non-farm payrolls print 8 days before regime change in Washington. And not, not just any regime change, this regime change, right? So to me, like, I think we're in wait-and-see mode. I think the, the one, the one thing that I would take away from a Trump administration macro trend-wise is I wouldn't touch bonds with a 10-foot pole. I'm bearish bonds. I think yields are going higher. You do not want to be earning fixed income in Trump land. Uh, that is, that is crazy.

Love you guys. Thank you guys for tuning in. That was a great talk, Jonah. We'll catch up soon.

Likewise. See you soon.