Have We Topped, Aster vs Hyperliquid & Tether's $500B Valuation | Weekly Roundup

You either approach this two ways. You can't be caught in the middle. You're either a trader and are glued to the screen and like monitoring Ansem and accounts and, you know, or you're not. Where you get slaughtered is like when you're, you're just like in the middle and you try to be a trader and you try to be an investor, long-term investor.

I so agree. I so agree.

Don't tell me you're a long-term trader and you're refreshing CoinGecko every 5 minutes. Like, you've got it wrong.

This episode is brought to you by Blockdaemon. You'll hear more about them later in today's episode. Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice, or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed. What's up everybody, welcome back to the Roundup. No Rob today. So we are free to bash Rob and talk about his horrible takes on the pod. But no, I hope you guys have been enjoying having Rob. Rob is off, I think, to probably Token. I don't actually know where he is, but I think he's probably at Token. Santi and I are getting some real work done back home.

That's right.

Look at us in the button-down shirts.

I know, right?

What's going on? We're growing up, man.

It only took us 5 years to just, you know, wear— maybe it's the state of the times, you know, we just got to be more enterprise-friendly. For blockchain.

I thought it's when the market is peak froth, you're supposed to wear t-shirts and hoodies. And then you go into a bear market and you're like, oh, I do have to appease to the suits, you know?

All right. What is the most frothy, peaky thing you've heard this week?

Oh, okay. Two. I mean, two for you. Tether raising at $500 billion. I mean, it's a little, little frothy. And NVIDIA investing $100 billion into OpenAI. I think it was 10 gigawatts of data centers.

Uh, for me it was an ETF on DATs.

Hmm.

That was just felt CD— it felt like credit default swaps, CDS squared, you know, like Big Short.

Yeah. Yeah. God, at times I just rewatched The Big Short actually. Times like these, you gotta go watch that movie, you know.

I think I'm gonna be— you remember the scene when they're in Vegas and Michael Burry's— not Michael Burry, uh, Steve Carell's like calling his trader and he's like, sell short.

Short it. Yeah.

And I'm going to go to Token next week. I might, I might give you that call.

Short it. Short it. Let's talk markets, actually. So we, we started the week with the biggest liquidation cascade of the year or in many years, I think at least definitely of the year. And I think it spooked a lot of people. People basically said, you know, been kind of calling for the top. It feels frothy. Maybe this is the top. You've got some other very frothy things like, um, what we— I mean, those 3 things that we just mentioned, right? Tether's raising at $500. Uh, you've got every IPO that hits the market is just rips higher. Um, how are you feeling about just the market and the cycle? And yeah, how are you feeling about things?

Tell you the truth, I haven't been able to look at that. I'm not checking my portfolio much, which is a blessing. I was on CNBC Uh, uh, yesterday or day before, and then everyone, they asked me the same question. Um, Q4 historically has been a good year, like a good quarter for crypto historically. Um, you know, feels like September is always a bit choppy in the markets. Um, but look, we had a rate cut, um, that I think bodes favorable. Um, the thing, okay, people want to say, okay, what should you be monitoring if you want to trade this thing? ETF inflows, I think, are probably the primary barometer you want to be looking at. Um, and that I think is just going to continue to be the main driver. Uh, how am I feeling about it? I'm not touching my portfolio. Um, I still think that, um, so I was looking at, um, like options I think also are pretty indicative of what traders kind of are expecting. There's, there's like pretty equal, like, um, there's like $90K and $130K as key levels. I think traders just expecting volatility, but the reality is like, dude, we've been in this cycle and it takes one tweet to rattle markets in a very big way. And I think we're just in that state. So I don't know if Bitcoin holds. I think we have alts running. The thing I'm most worried about again is just this stat stuff. I think it could just like get pretty messy really quickly. Just don't like it. I'm just seeing a lot of continued just nonsense in that department. And I think it's a sign of the times.

Yeah. So you're not touching your portfolio. You're not selling anything. You're not buying anything new. You're not buying Aster.

No. So I missed that. We should talk about it. I feel, and I have for a while, that we are in the second half of the cycle. When I feel like I'm in the second half of the cycle, I want to consolidate into things that I feel good owning long-term. Bitcoin, I feel very good at. So I am rotating when I have some spare time on the weekend, just selling stuff that has ran up quite a bit this cycle. Yeah. Yeah. And like Plasma just launched, you have Astro, you have, you know, these are pretty big upticks. I mean, multi-billion dollar valuations. I want to buy stuff that has endured at least one cycle. Yeah, I mean, like, the thing— the stuff that hasn't gone through one cycle, I think, typically has the largest drawdown. And so, you know, I feel very comfortable holding Bitcoin, and I want to continue to rotate stuff into Bitcoin as I vest and stuff.

Yeah, I feel the same way. I actually just did rotate— I, I just did the consolidation because I was feeling the same way. Yeah, I was.

What were you most exposed to? What were your kind of your biggest wins this cycle?

I had a lot of Athena. So I actually sold, sold all of my Athena. I sold, I had a bunch of Kaito from like the airdrop. And I had bought some more. So I sold, sold Kaito. I'm really only holding 6. I sold all my Fart Coin. Yeah, like just a bunch of other random stuff that like you don't really realize through the cycle that you accumulate this stuff. And then you're like sitting on different stuff. So now I actually only hold 6 different coins now, which is Bitcoin, ETH, SOL, Hyperliquid, Avalanche, and Ripple, actually.

Interesting.

Yeah. Why? Yeah.

Should we talk about Athena and just double-click there? Because look, the stablecoin thesis has been all the rage. You talked about Tether raising at $500 billion valuation. And then you have Circle, which, you know, I think they announced some interesting stuff this week around like reversible kind of transactions and whatnot. But I'm curious, like, Ina, what drove your decision to sell that one versus hold on?

So first off, I think Guy is probably the— I was going to say not— I was going to say single greatest executor in crypto right now. He— I don't know if it's single greatest, but he's top 5 right now. I think like very, very, very highly of Guy. It's just that sometimes, no matter how good of an executor you are, if the cycle— if you get caught on the wrong side of a cycle, you're gonna, you're gonna be in for a nasty time for an extent, for maybe an extended period of time, a year, 2 years, 3 years, however long it is. I believe very strongly in Guy and Athena on a long-term horizon. I just think that like, when you— to me, the market feels extremely frothy. And I think you want to get— I think you want to just— I just feel safer sleeping at night when I'm in just like, to me, safer things. Like, this doesn't feel like the time in the cycle to be exposed to maybe things that are further out on the risk spectrum. And I'd say there's things like Fart Coin that are way out on the risk spectrum, but there are things like Athena that are maybe like medium term where like, I don't know, 2 months ago I felt great about holding it, even a month ago. And now I'm just seeing these things where I mean, I saw a fundraise this morning with like a very notorious crypto scammer is on the, is on the deck. And it's like the people who are raising right now, the people who are actually, they got $30 million of committed capital already. It's like these, these are just from this startup. Signs of the times. Yeah. Like this, this, this company that should never be raising in the first place, they're able to raise capital because of how frothy the market is and I just, I just see these little things and I probably have PTSD because I didn't sell at the top in 2017. I didn't sell at the top in 2021. I'm, I'm probably going to, I'm going to lose. I'm going to, I'm going to— people are going to— should hold. If you like Athena, you should just keep holding Athena. And like, it'll probably go up because Athena is great and Guy's a great operator. But I'd rather be a little safer this cycle. I'm also, I think, similar to you right now, spending so more, more of my time on Blockworks than I've really ever spent. It's just like 7 days a week. It's crazy right now. And I don't like the feeling of having trading getting like, what should I be doing with these tokens getting in my head at all? Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. No, look, it makes sense. I was just looking at the 7-day and 30-day performance of the top 100 crypto assets. Like some of the worst drawdowns here have been Pump had a big run-up from point 2.8, 0.3 a couple weeks ago, up, up now to hit 0.9. Sorry, it hit like 9 billion, uh, it dipped to 2, then went to 9 temporarily, and it is now sitting at 5. So it's the last 7 days gone down 33%. Hype has come down 28%. Pudgy Penguins 27%. Bonk down. Worldcoin down, even though it's up on a 30-day quite a bit, 40%. Wonder what that was driven by. Uh, Uniswap feels like everything's just getting—

Worldcoin was a DAT. I think Worldcoin was Tom Lee saying that they're going to add Worldcoin to the Bitmine or something like that.

Oh, okay. And then things that have performed quite well on a 7-day period, really just like a Bitcat token.

Not much has done well on 7-day. Yeah, yeah. Everything's down 7-day.

Yeah, it's interesting. So on the 30-day pump again up up 87%. Story, I know you guys had a conference, I think in Korea, it was up 50%. Immutable, Provenance.

Oh my God. I actually gotta give a shout out to Story. We did this event with Story in Korea. I have never seen someone execute partnership deals like SY is the founder of Story. I, this guy is just, I've never actually seen someone execute the, it was like, I mean, K-pop Demon Hunters, see, the guy, person who created K-pop Demon Hunters, like Baby Shark, like Parasite, the director of Parasite, like he is just doing deals left and right. Like the Wall Street Journal of Korea. Like, I mean, the names that came to this event, we could never have— if you are an American going into Korea, you couldn't have gotten a single one of these names. There are like 30 of these names there. It was pretty remarkable to see.

I look, I paid attention. Like, I still don't understand what IP does. Like, what's a one-liner, two-liner of what this thing does? Like, they're putting blockchain, like IP rights on the blockchain.

I think probably the idea is like AI is going to train on all this. Well, this is, this is maybe what they would say is like AI is going to train on all, all this IP. And right now they just steal it and maybe you need a way to monetize it.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

Look, I missed that trade. I—

the more interesting thing, I— so IP on the blockchain, I don't know, I don't know if it's real or not. It's a very early thing. But SY gave an opening talk at the Origin Summit, and it's really not about IP on the blockchain. It's about Korea as a country. And I would really recommend people go listen to this talk on Korea. Here, I wrote down actually some of the stats as I was watching it. South Korea stats. Second most paid ChatGPT subscribers in the world is South Korea. The number one is obviously the US. The second most paid ChatGPT subs is, is South Korea. More Korean won was traded against crypto than US dollars. Yeah, so more Korean won traded against crypto than USD. They have the number one YouTube video of all time, the number one boy band, the number one girl band, the number one rated movie in the world. The number one most viral soundtrack, the number one show on Netflix right now. Like, Korea is a—

Wow, it's massive.

Yeah, yeah. Korea is very—

Dude, Terra.

Terra. Yeah, exactly.

So it's Kimchi Trade. If you have been in crypto—

I'm sorry, someone sent me a video of like, it was like probably 400 people at this event and they're all looking at a screen and then it zooms in on the screen and someone's just perp trading.

Like, yeah, yeah, that was a—

I saw that.

Like, they have esports, but like, yeah, it was nuts. Yeah, it's a fascinating culture. I didn't make it out to Korea Blockchain Week. I was there last year. Been to Korea a couple times. Like, if you're in crypto, it pays to understand what's going on in Korea. It just is such an important market.

Yeah.

Um, and has been historically. So yeah, that's interesting. Is there, are some of the chats, like live talks there, like posted on YouTube? Like if people want to learn more about this summit?

Yeah, I think it's, it might be on YouTube. It might be just go on the other story or Blockworks's Twitter account and you can see some of the videos. Um, We did actually Blockworks livestream the whole thing. So just go to the front of the livestream. You should watch SY's talk. It was quite good. So Ansem had this tweet. He actually mentioned you guys. He said, let me pull this up. I don't know if you saw this.

Ansem has been quite bearish, actually, as of late. I think he's one of the guys.

I wanted to get your take on this. So he said, I'm going to— this is a bit of a longer thing. I'm going to read it, though. He said Doge is a good analog for this cycle. 2021 was batshit crazy with how high we pumped altcoins. COVID crash directly into never-seen Fed-assisted economic stimulus. This cycle has been lower highs across the board for most alts and liquidity has flowed elsewhere. I simultaneously believe that we've seen the peak of crypto price action driven purely on speculation about future growth, and also that we are entering the most bullish period for businesses, for businesses augmented by blockchain rails. The revenue meta being a term is just a reflex, is just reflective of how far distanced from reality crypto markets have traded this past decade. The difficulties in determining how to get long this new trend. Two main drivers of majority of revenues in crypto: users' willingness to absorb high fees because of how much speculation is present, efficiency of low cost and low cost of blockchain rails compared to traditional systems. We are near peak of the former and we'll see more success stories focused on the latter. Solana has dominated both of these verticals and still think it's valued way too low comparatively to other assets. Also cool to see teams like Inversion that realize how transformative blockchain rails are while also being pragmatic enough to realize that it may be more efficient to improve existing businesses with distribution rather than build everything from the ground up. Side note, is Ansem an investor?

He's not. He reached me, he DM'd me. I think I shared with him the deck way back. I invested in his company, uh, Bullpen. We've known each other for a while. Um, and he, he DM'd me and said, hey, congrats, man. Like, this is, you know, good to see you back in the, you know, on the driver's seat or whatever. And, but no, I, I, I just retweeted this.

So, um, he said, so to conclude, uh, we can link this in the show notes, but to conclude, he basically said, um, I don't agree with rate cuts being the main driver for bull market continuation. It's also clear to me that we do not need lower rates for bull market price action. As we've seen with how high stocks and crypto have performed since late 2022. It looks like stocks are parabolic, momentum slowing on crypto assets. We've entered a period of the most uncertainty we've had in a while with regards to the economy. I'm expecting lower over the next 6 months and higher into the back half of '26 through '28. Would flip bullish on crypto if Solana weekly closes at $250. Bullish weekly closes above $120. Optimal strategy. At the moment is to sit majority in cash and have an Ape stack set aside for researching new launches and finding outliers with momentum and price action like Pump, IP, and Aster. I want to bid $90K Bitcoin, $25K to $30K Hyperliquid, undecided in SOL and Pump. What are your thoughts when you read something like this?

Look, gotta hand it to him. He's been fairly right on some of his calls, and I think Anson is one of those guys that really is you know, pretty good trader. He's got really good calls. He had the Solana call right. I think he was, you know, reasonably early on, on, on, um, hype and pump, um, and, and, you know, trading around meme coins. So, you know, the guy understands like the order book and flows and whatnot. Um, I, I don't know. I don't know what to make of it, to be honest. Like, I'm not as close on flows, um, but it does feel like the market wants to go lower. And in, in those instances, look, you either approach this two ways. You can't be caught in the middle. You're either a trader and are glued to the screen and like monitoring Ansem and accounts and, you know, or you're not. Where you get slaughtered is like when you're, you're just like in the middle and you try to be a trader and you try to be an investor, long-term investor.

I so agree. I so agree.

Don't tell me you're a long-term trader and you're refreshing CoinGecko every 5 minutes. Like You've got it wrong.

Or you're flipping based on an Ansem tweet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So look, and the other thing is like, you're not going to be an expert in all this stuff. So if we had a live stream right now and you asked everyone who missed Aster, you probably would have had like 80% of them just raise their hands like, oh, I missed it. I was late to the game. And then psychologically it puts you in such a bad spot because you're like, the catch-up trades will kill you. Like, oh, you know, I was late to the game and then you buy Aster and it goes down 20%, then you sell it. And you buy back. I'm like, why don't you for a second just go look at Aster and go look at Hyperliquid and say, is there something real here? Am I willing to hold this thing for a year? And like, I just feel that like, how many people have you met that tell you, oh, I discovered this thing Bitcoin and ETH super early and then I didn't make much of it and then I bought it and then I sold it. I'm like, yeah. And then in hindsight, it's like, you could have just like sat there, developed a thesis, re-underwrote that thesis, but like, just make up your mind. Are you going to be day trading this thing or are you going to be holding it for 5 years? Don't change your mind. Like, just, you know, but anyways, um, I— it never hurts to have cash. Um, like, are we going to see Bitcoin below $100,000? Yes. Like, 90% confidence that we'll see it at some point below $90,000. And so if you, if you have, if you're, if you feel overly exposed, maybe hold cash and be in a position where you're going to be feel, you're going to feel great buying it at 90 if you, if you love the asset. But the problem is most people are overly exposed, right? And so if you're, if you're max long on something like Bitcoin at 106 or whatever, it goes down to 90, you do A, don't have cash, B, you're going to be you know, panicking thinking it's going to go down to 50. And so maybe just hold. It's so psychological. Even if you have—

or maybe just don't do anything and just hold your— or just hold your Bitcoin. Just don't touch your Bitcoin.

That is true.

I think that's honestly the best thing for 98% of people to do. Just don't touch your Bitcoin.

But some of the people that I think have made the most amount of money is guys that I was telling you at like 2014, like Bitcoin's like couple hundred bucks or whatever. It's like, dude, put up a mill— and they were a family office and like, put a million bucks, do not touch it for 10 years.

And those guys, I think, you know who I think did this? I was hearing about the other day is, do you remember the Institutional Case for Digital Assets by John Pfeffer?

John Pfeffer, yeah, the KKR guy.

John Pfeffer wrote the piece in 2017 that was like, this PDF got passed around, it felt like the world, like it was like everyone's reading this article. It's called The Institutional Case for Digital Assets, I think. It was by this guy John Pfeffer, J-E-F-F-E-R, I think it is. And someone mentioned the other day, they're like, yeah, you should have just done what— people should have just done what John did. It's like, oh, what John did? He's like, they're like, yeah, he wrote this piece, loaded up the stack, did it in 2017, market went down, bought more in 2018 and 2019, and then has just walked away from the industry basically, and hasn't touched anything and has just ridden it from $3K, $5K, $7K up to $120K. And he's He's, he's sitting pretty.

I mean, that, that's sort of what I feel when you asked me earlier about what I'm doing with my portfolio. I'm now, because of Inversion, taking a super long-term view on things that I just want to literally wake up in 10 years and say, okay, is this thing going to persist, endure? Is there durable stuff here other than Bitcoin? I don't know. I, I honestly don't know. And then the question is, is Bitcoin going to outperform the compounding of what you see in the stock market? And that's, I think, the point that Anson is making here, which is I'm of the mind this cycle that it just, there's a couple of different dynamics here. You can get exposure to crypto through other instruments and other ways that weren't possible in other cycles. And I think that has certain implications of how tokens actually behave.

Coinbase, Robinhood, Galaxy Stock, Circle Stock. Yeah. Yeah.

One, the OPSEC, right? If you buy the ETF through your brokerage account, very different. I mean, of course you have to trust like custodians and the setup of BlackRock and whatnot. But for most people, you know, when Normie's asking, hey, what should I do? I'm like, honestly, go buy iBit or something. Like, keep— do not— like, most people are not equipped to do it themselves. And so, um, but then, you know, I just— I don't want to get into the fundamental discussion, but like, is Ethereum worth 300, I don't know, what is it now? 300, 340, 500 billion. What is it?

Oh God, I don't even want to go.

It is, it is 400, is it 500 billion? 483 fully diluted. Is it worth that? Like it was cranking out REV and if you price it on that basis, what would you rather own, Tether or ETH? It's funny because Tether is now valued a bit more than ETH.

That's funny. Yeah.

Who had a nice tweet about Tether around, like, sign of the times? It's like, um, I think it was Tushar. If you want to pull up his tweet, he was tweeting something about, uh, Tether along the same lines of Circle, which is like, these businesses, stablecoin issuers are, you know, some of them have more than others, but rates come down, that business gets impacted. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So Tushar said Tether's raising 20 at 500. There's currently $173 billion of USDT outstanding. The market— the market expects interest rates to average 3.6% over the next year. Given the expected Fed cuts, this implies $6.2 billion in revenue for Tether. That comes out to a 77x multiple. Obviously, 3 threats to the sustainability of earnings. One, lower interest rates means less revenue for stablecoin issuers. This is true for all of the stablecoin issuers, not just Tether. 2, post-Genius Bill, there are a lot more stablecoins coming to market with huge amounts of distribution. WhatsApp, Facebook, etc., you know, maybe would try to do it, things like that. And 3, as the USDH discussion showed, this is the hyperliquid conversation from a few weeks back. There's increasing pressure for crypto-native stablecoin issuers to pass their interest income back to holders and developers. So, yeah, all good points.

Yeah. Who is, uh, do you have any insight into that round? Like who would be giving them $20 billion? Um, the Ballas of the world, like, or like the same guys that invested in Binance.

I think you should look at the people who are investing in Binance. Um, I think you should also look at the people who are investing in, uh, some of these mega OpenAI, NVIDIA type deals. These big data center type deals. And you should look at the capital partners behind those deals. And you should look at the connections to Howard Lutnick and Kanter, who is, by the way, just on a fundraising tear. I don't know. I mean, Kanter, like, you see these— that crypto is like—

Kanter's like number one by a countrywide mile.

Like, we met with the Kanter guys, and they kind of walked us through a bit of their playbook of just like how they're doing these. Like, they've got the They got the distribution into the webinars, the webinar converts into the lead list, converts into the one-on-one calls, into the dinner. Like, they've got fundraising down better than anybody I've ever met. And yeah, I think Paolo and— I mean, Cantor took a bet and a risk on Paolo and Tether back in the, you know, years ago, and banked them. And I think there's— I think Cantor actually owns What, 5% of— 5%?

I was thinking about that in the shower, thought who had bought in Tether and had ownership in Tether. And, um, you know, there, there were times where, like, not long ago, like during the prior administration, where like they were FUDing Tether. And I don't know if you— like, if you had the capital, it's one of those counter signals. Like, you want to maybe— and this goes back to Ansem's point— is you want to bid when when everyone is running the other way, you know, it's like, and I think that's about the Cantor did. I mean, that is probably going to be single-handedly his best trade in his life, right? Other than building Cantor from the ground up, right? But it's like 4% of this business, it's monumental. It's $40 billion.

Yeah.

No, $20 billion.

The what, the raise?

Yeah, no, if he owns 4% of Tether.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. $20 billion.

Yeah, that's crazy.

Yeah.

Anyways, um, good for them, honestly.

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I mean, yes. I missed it. I didn't put a position. Did you?

No.

Yeah, no.

Yeah. Well, I mean, what do you— just maybe zooming out from like the price of the token of Aster, like, what do you make of just— I mean, this is the first like real competition this market for against Hyperliquid.

Yeah.

What do you make of it?

Well, should we give a quick overview? I mean, it sounds like, look, CZ at one point woke up. CZ is back at the helm of Binance and he, you know, obviously you poke a bear enough and he wakes up and obviously a lot of teams, you know, probably Binance exchanges, but also crypto-native teams like Solana saw Hyperliquid and what they did and they want to do something about it. CC being the phenomenal builder that he is, launched Aster in competition and to, you know, capture that opportunity. It's deployed on BNB chain and it's captured a decent amount of volume.

I think others too, ETH, Solana, Arbitrum, I think, or is it just BNB?

No, you're probably right on that. But it's gotten a decent amount of traction. A lot of other BNB chain tokens have rallied as a result.

It's gotten a lot of traction, you should say. It's gotten a—

you know, it's got a lot of traction for sure. It reminds me a lot when you had— what was it when Uniswap was all the rage? I think BNB responded with it with its own AMM like DEX. What was that? PancakeSwap. PancakeSwap had a ton of traction. What you need to remember is, you know, by BNB, like the chain has all that distribution from Binance exchange, which is the largest exchange in the world. And so, you know, when Binance launches something, it immediately gets traction because it has the mindshare, it has the distribution. Is it going to persist? I don't know. It would be interesting to look at like what PancakeSwap has done since, right? Like, you know, Uniswap is still Uniswap. But yeah, something to, you know, I don't know, it's too early to tell for me, but obviously impressive that they launched it, especially in a space where most other things haven't really gotten off the ground in the perp space, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if people remember PancakeSwap, so PancakeSwap, was that summer of '21?

Yeah, this was like peak DeFi summer.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think it was summer of '21. They— I mean, they ripped it, hit like $5 or $10 billion in TVL, fell, got cut in half, then ran right back up to like $5 or $10 billion and then just kind of like slow drag down for years. And now I think it sits around like $2 or $3 billion of TVL. Aster is interesting. So hyper liquid. I thought this chart by Hasib put this chart together, volume versus OI. Yeah, you can pull it up right here. You see this? This is the 24-hour volume and the open interest of the different perps DEXs: Hyperliquid, Lido, Aster, EdgeX, Paradex, Orderly, Jupiter. So Hyperliquid and Aster— Hyperliquid did $5 billion in volume. Aster did $3 billion, but Hyperliquid had $15 billion of OI. Compared to Aster's $368 million. What do you make when you see those two numbers? To me, like, I think the— to me, I see this, I'm like, oh, someone's just washing a bunch of volume through Aster, but there's, there's no real ROI on it. But what do you make of this?

Yeah, I think so. So I don't know this. Do you know? The only reason that you'd be doing that is for some sort of rewards, right? Like you're farming and trying to get, you know, a lot of times the airdrop is—

I mean, that's like most of the— like edX, I think edX is going to have a big— I think it's one of the hot airdrop farming things right now. It's like, why is there a billion, billion and a half volume?

Yeah, I think open interest is a far more enduring and interesting stat here. And it's staggering, right? I mean, nothing really comes close to what Hyperliquid is doing. Yeah, because that, that relationship is pretty damning, right? I mean, what's that, $5 billion in volume? Yeah, that's 33%. That's like a third. And you have, you know, very different dynamic with, uh, Aster. Yeah, that's one-tenth. Yeah, yeah.

Talk to me about, uh, it's funny, so Mike, I was talking to Mike months ago about Hyperliquid and he's like, I don't— he's like, look, I don't, I don't You know, you're like, you believe— oh yeah, my co-founder. And he said, he's like, I'm not sure I see it. He's like, I get it. But like, he's like, I think people are too quick to forget that these perps— there's always the next great perps platform that's going to take on the sexes. And yeah, Hyperliquid seems like it's doing quite well, but like, he's like, I feel like everyone's forgotten, like, GMX and dYdX and like that we were just— these things were just fighting and then we moved on to the next one and there's always the next one and maybe shed some light on like 2020, 2021, dYdX, GMX, just like the, the long evolution of perp, perp DEXs.

It's, well, it's the holy grail, right? I've invested in, in a few of these. I looked at the round of dYdX, ended up passing, was too expensive. I think Three Arrows let that round, you know, made sense. Like CZ being like at the time, like one of the most prominent like traders and they were using it extensively. It was not a cheap round. And then GMX, I had a small position in that. It's a holy grail, right? It was like everyone, and the thesis is something along the lines of, you know, perps are a killer product since, you know, Arthur Hayes kind of, kind of, and BitMEX, right? They're the moneymakers for exchanges. And it's a super novel product. It should catch, it should work on-chain. And there's like a variety of reasons why they haven't really worked before. You could have pointed to like slow execution environments or high fees back in the day. And then some sort of like internal stuff, like the team wasn't as competent. And I think just, you know, without diagnosing specific protocols, but like a lot of times, like if you were to talk to traders, like I remember looking at dYdX, a lot of the, there was very heavy concentration among certain traders. It wasn't as, it wasn't as efficient to do it on-chain. It hadn't been, I think until Hyperliquid came around. And by the way, are you there? 'Cause you're—

Yeah, yeah, I'm here. I'm here.

You're just frozen. Yeah, so I, I think it's one of those where like we talked about Polymarket last episode. I think in this case, as it relates to perps, You just have, um, a much more different execution environment, low fees, which allow people to do it without— because, because a real comparison is traders don't really care whether you're doing it in a centralized exchange or a decentralized exchange. It's like, where do I get the best execution? And historically, execution on-chain was nowhere near execution off-chain. And so you wouldn't do it in your right mind unless you wanted to play these airdrops or whatever. But Hyperliquid is actually just very novel and it reminds me a lot of, you know, Hyperliquid, I think cracked that nut in a very interesting way in the same way that Curve way back in the day cracked the stablecoin swaps.

Yeah.

Like, and this was like a key thesis Ben and I paraphrased. We were sitting there 'cause, you know, Kevin who runs the quant fund was trading these stablecoins doing like stablecoin arbitrage and the credit fund. And he is like, wait a minute guys. Like, it's, it's actually quite interesting. It is cheaper to— you get best pricing on-chain through Curve than what you do with Coinbase. Like if you wanted to go from USDT to USDC, and that was like a huge aha moment for us at the firm. It's like, okay, like this is— there's something here because it's so rare to get better execution on-chain versus off-chain. And I think that's why I think Hyperliquid has worked. Now someone in the here might say, wait a minute, like GMX was pretty good. The way— what you need to look at when you're looking at PERC is how is the funding rate calculated? How is that being calculated? And are you getting good execution? And sometimes it's a function of liquidity is very low. So like when you talk about Asif's quote about open interest, yeah, if there's not a lot of OI, if the— if it's not really— if you can't really trust the way the oracle works on-chain, like, you know, it's not going to be viable for traders, especially traders that put on big size. So anyways, that's my conclusion. I don't know if you're familiar with other Perp DEXs or why Hyperliquid really just worked the way it did.

I mean, people are looking at like people like Edgex and Lido and stuff like that, but I don't know. I'm actually looking— I'm looking at the platforms right now, like for the Aster pair itself, OI is 6 times higher on Hyperliquid while the volume is 1 billion versus 2.5 billion platform versus platform. Like, I don't know, it seems like a lot of this volume is either just fake or wash volume or Yeah, I don't know. I'm— I think basically it's a CZ trade, right? I think that's it. I actually think this as I'm looking at these things, like it has nothing to do with perps or Aster or whatever. It's like, see, how do you bet on CZ? And it's like, I mean, you can— it's like, it's like Elon starting a new company. It's like, just take my money. Just like, I'm just gonna like put a blindfold on, just like take my money. It's like CZ is like starting a new thing. It's like, just take my money. But I'm not—

at a time where BNB just hit an all-time high of across $1,000.

What did BNB ICO at? $0.10, I think, BNB ICO. It's just $1,000, right? So you've got so many people have made— I mean, you and I know people have probably made $100 million off just being BNB, right? Like there are people who have made so much life-changing money from just BNB and Binance.

Like BNB is a top 5 crypto asset right behind Ripple and quite ahead of Solana. And so I'm super impressive what he's done and it really is just a reflection of the industry, right? And so again, you're not gonna, you'll look at that, you either missed it or you made a lot of money. Either way, you're gonna support this project.

Yeah.

The other thing that I wanted to just bring up is interesting this week. As we think about BIX fundraise, you have BulkTrade just raised capital. It's a reasonably small round, $8 million. It was led by Robot and Six Man Ventures. You know, Six Man has been very active in Solana.

Oh yeah, this was the trade anything. Did you do this one?

No, I didn't. I mean, indirectly through Six Man, but you know, you had really good, mostly the Solana cabal kind of investing in this. I think this is a response. This is Solana response to Hyperliquid.

Oh, interesting.

Just reading behind, Toly was part of the round and you had Big Brain and Six Man and Wintermute and some of the bigger guys. Look, for a while Solana has tried to, you know, I think they were caught offside with Hyperliquid and they were thinking there and sitting there and saying, what happened? Because you had Drift.

Yeah.

And, but it, you know, hadn't really gone to this nowhere near the scale. And you haven't had a really good perp in Solana. And so this is, I think, the restart and an initiative. And so we'll see. Yeah. I think internally the Solana team is just, this is probably one of the biggest misses that Solana's had.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's the thing they're most nervous about right now.

That's a best, that's a better way to put it. They're definitely very nervous as is everyone else about Hyper. Look at what they've done.

Totally, totally. All right, let's talk IPOs and fundraisers and things like that. So I put out a list of upcoming crypto. Did you see BitGo filed for— BitGo filed their S-1? Very interesting to read through. I love, I love when these companies file their S-1. You can read through like, you're like, oh, like, they— that's how it works. So this is how much they're sitting on. So I thought it was really interesting.

Can we— this is a great list, but before we go there, okay, you're gonna go and— BitGo wasn't— didn't Galaxy have a Like that transaction fell apart.

Yeah.

Okay. We should, as we go through it and prices, we should think about—

I mean, that— so yeah, Galaxy had a deal to buy BitGo for, I think it was $1.2 billion in the last cycle. And then the market started turning and I think Galaxy basically said that we got to get— do anything we can do to get out of this deal. And I think that there was something in the acquisition from what I've heard that was like, if they're— they can pull out if they're not listed on NASDAQ at a certain point in time and they weren't listed in NASDAQ, they're listed in Canada. And so they were able to pull out— I think they— I think there was $50 or $100 million that changed hands in a— someone in like a part of the pullout deal or something like that. But yeah, anyways, they did not spend $1.2 billion. Now BitGo's IPOing. Do we have a price on it?

No.

Yeah, I don't think so. Um, let's pull up the numbers. All right, Omar, looking through the BitGo filing and the headline number— numbers benefit from some generous accounting. Digital asset sales and staking revenue are both done on a gross basis, i.e., when a client buys $10 million of Bitcoin, the full $10 million is reflected as revenue. Okay, this is what I was— I knew that number looked inflated, even though the— even though the net 2.5% in H1 is only $25K. Ah, okay. So on a— okay, so client buys $10 million of Bitcoin. The net on that is $25K. They're booking $10 million of revenue.

These are fees, right? You got to look at the fees, right? Is so.

Okay. So you can see the true net with the sales cost line item on a net basis, still impressive with $171 million of net revenue in H1 of '25, but 4% of the headline and far closer to the economic reality of the business. So really, so the business doing— so the $171 million of net revenue in H1. Annualize that, $342 million. Okay, so we've got a business. Okay, that's exactly in line with— if you had asked me to project BitGo's revenue, I would have said somewhere between $300 to $400 million. Yeah, this makes a lot more sense to me.

What you need to look at when you do this analysis is that take rate of BitGo. In the same way that every analyst that is looking at Coinbase is thinking about the same thing, which is what is the difference between gross and net revenue? And that's going to give you an indication of how, what's their relationship with their clients, what's the spread, are they able to capture? Because what you don't want to see is, so say that the gross revenue, which is all the volume in the platform that they're, you know, custodying is going to go up. Okay, fine. But maybe you have a compression because Fidelity and State Street and other folks are going to get into the custody game. So the percentage that they've been able to charge historically will come down as you have competitive pressures in the industry. And this is something that I'm intimately familiar because when I, you know, when I have positions like a lot of these projects, you know, will custody in either BitGo or Coinbase or Anchorage, the pricing of some of these platforms is not very competitive. And BitGo, I've had very good experience with. Some of the other platforms, their pricing is just a bit off. And I, I just don't think it's sustainable, to be honest. And so those are kind of— you just need to spend a little bit more time looking at that take. It's, it's a take rate number, effectively. Marketing platforms, same deal. Um, hyper liquid, same deal, right? You're going through a ton of volume, ton of custody assets. What's the take rate of this business? That's a main KPI of, of these type of businesses.

Yeah. It sounds like they're IPOing. And I mean, I think we'll get it in October in a couple of weeks.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't think they've listed a range there, but thinking through what's their EBITDA number, you know, off the top of your head, I'm going to make it pretty—

like flat, I think.

Well, no, no, no. But what's their, what's their like just a gross like EBITDA? Like, is it 100 million, 50 million, probably. Here, hold on, because you said 300 million of revenue. That's it.

Uh, expenses of 25, loss from operations, net income. No.

Okay, yeah, well, EBITDA will be heavily adjusted in this case because there's not gonna— this is not gonna trade on a PE basis. But yeah, okay.

Yeah. Oh, here we go. Adjusted EBITDA. I got it in their S-1. 2022, 8, they lost 8. Okay. 2022 is $8 million. 2023 is negative, negative $29 million. Got to look at it.

$6.8 in the first half of 20. I'm doing this live. 2025. I'm going to run rate that generously. Going to run rate that. This business is maybe going to do $13 to $15 less than $20 million of EBITDA for the full year of 2025. So their guidance, maybe next year you're generous, you say, God, this business, I don't know, got to do $30 million of EBITDA on a forward basis. And, uh, what's Figure trading at? Like, uh, Coinbase trading at? I guess, I guess Coinbase probably the better analogy here. I'm gonna ask chat, what's Coinbase trading at? Like $60, $70 billion? Okay, $300— yeah, yeah, that's Coinbase forward EV-to-EBITDA multiple 24 times. Okay, I wasn't that off. So anywhere between 20 and 30 times. So if this business generously— so remember folks, it did 7, 7, 6.8, uh, million in the first half of the year, maybe does 15 if you're aggressive. The second half is going to be greater, right? Um, maybe next year it doubles, so it's going to do 30 times 24. This is going to be, uh, surely not a $720 billion enterprise value business? Sub a billion?

Sub— no, no, above a billion. It'll— this thing will trade higher than the billion.

Well, that's what I'm saying. Look, let me, let's just, let's just, let's just get these facts straight. You're telling me EBITDA was $6 billion, $6 million in the first half of '25. Did we get that right?

Yeah. So we're annualizing it and giving them a little bit of a bump to $15.

15. They're gonna more than double. Next year they're gonna double it.

Sure. 30.

Let's just say 30. Maybe it's 40. You need to believe that this business, if it's going to trade in line with Coinbase, by the way, and it's going to crank out $40 million of EBITDA next year, which by the way, big uncertainty as we thought about macro and stuff and competitive pressures in the industry. And if it trades like 25 times, which is it Coinbase forward EBITDA, it barely cracks a billion. This might be the smallest. What was Gemini's smallest IPO of the Coinbase, of the crypto names that have gone public? I figure was at 6 to 7. Circle obviously much higher than that and has certainly run up. Gemini, what was Gemini? What's Gemini?

Gemini's trading at 3 billion.

Gemini EBITDA. Let's go, let's do this. Sometimes these things don't trade on, but I don't think Gemini is profitable really. There's always— sir, you will always— well, you will always adjust EBITDA such that it is a great number. Okay, Gemini— no, Gemini Space Station, not— what's the ticker for Gemini?

No, it is Space Station. It is Space Station.

Gemini said— wow, that's great. Gemini Space Station is trailing— sorry, trailing 12-month EV-to-EBITDA is 32— oh, negative 32. Ah, yeah, you're right.

That's what I'm saying, we're not in the market. That's what I'm saying, you're trying to fundamental analyze this, this thing. Like, we're, we're— Gemini's trading at, uh, $3 billion market cap with an EV-to-EBITDA ratio of negative 33x.

Gemini, you're right, is $4.7 billion EV. 4 to 5. Okay. I might, I might just, uh, have mid-curved that. Honest to God, as I was doing that exercise, what do you think?

That's a good ex— that's a good, it's a good exercise to do.

We should do more of these live exercises. You gotta do quick. Okay. It just tells you everything we are in the cycle. It, it's a great, it's a great way to probably end this discussion of back to Anson's point, it is, it is frothy. I'm sorry, but like Gemini at $5 billion and it's not a profitable thing. I don't want to own it. I wouldn't want to touch it as much as we're like going to the moon or whatever. It's something that I've said before, which is I think more value is going to be captured of this industry in other names that are going to integrate this technology. Man, Western Union, go look at Western Union. EBITDA. I'm going to do this live. There are, there are like deeply unsexy businesses that are trading at distress multiples.

And then there's like, there's like a very big divide of like, yeah, Western Union's out here.

Yeah.

Two, three times Western Union's got a, a PE ratio of 3.

I'm going to go call Ackman or the Elliott guys because—

Wow, this thing's trading horrendously right now.

Distressed steel mill operators in like century, we're trading at 8 times P/E ratio. This thing has been left for dead. I'm way more excited looking at like businesses that are deeply overlooked than punting something at 20, 30, 40 times forward EBITDA baked on the most aggressive assumptions that bankers are going to peddle on the fucking, you know, marketing materials. I'm like, you need to believe that a biz like EBITDA, you can buy businesses, by the way, for 3 times, 4 times, 5 times EBITDA, 10 times EBITDA. I remember even in good times, like investing in enterprise software with contracted revenue, durable businesses, and you're sitting there like you're paying 10 times, 12 times. There is nothing contracted of businesses. Like, dude, assume that a business is going to double next year. And giving it a super lofty multiple. I don't care how bullish and how excited— I mean, you and I don't need more bullishness than any, you know what I mean? Like, we're skew very, very bullish. I wouldn't buy it at 20, 30 times forward EBITDA because there's just so many stacked assumptions of this business. Go buy a fucking business at 10 times EBITDA, you know, do the work. But I'm just saying, I get more excited about this Western Unions of the world that are deeply overlooked across 30-plus networks and 180 endpoints.

Blockdaemon Earn Stack, unites staking and DeFi into a single institutional toolkit for crypto rewards with multi-layered security, full asset control, and 24/7 support. Blockdaemon Earn Stack is built for scale and regulatory clarity. Non-custodial staking and seamless DeFi access all in one stack. Direct access to DeFi with no intermediate smart contract or vaults. To book a demo, make sure to click the link in the show notes or head over to Blockdaemon Earnstack to find out more. Thanks to Blockdaemon for making today's episode possible. The machine economy is here. Devices are monetizing data for their users all over the world. Tokenized robots are generating revenue for token holders. The first machine economy free zone is live in the Emirates, and it's all happening on Peak, the machine economy computer. Head to peak.xyz to find out how you can benefit The Age of Automation, or click the link in the show notes to find out more. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply. List of who's coming next. Here's my watch list 2025: BitGo and CoinShares. CoinShares is like a Galaxy of Europe. They're going to— they're doing a SPAC.

They can list on the NASDAQ or in like London or whatever.

Maybe London. I don't know. No, no, uh, maybe the States. Maybe. I don't know, actually. 26, BitHum, Kraken, I think Ripple will IPO. Uphold. Uphold is doing like similar to BitGo, $250 to $400 million top line, I think. Chainalysis, FalconX, Bitpanda, Grayscale, I think IPOs, and Ledger. 27, I've got ConsenSys, Anchorage, Fireblocks, OKX, Crypto.com, Bitvavo, MoonPay, Blockchain.com, Uniswap Labs. Some of these guys from '26 will go in '27. Some of them in '27 27. We'll go in 26. But yeah, who of these— you have to pick 3 that you're buy and hold for the next 5 years. Who are you buying and holding? Public markets companies: Anchorage, Fireblocks, Uphold, Kraken.

Goddamn. I mean, depends on the price, man. I don't know. Can't tell me. I'm going to— I'm like, I'm sorry, but if I don't know the price, I can't give you an answer. It's like price dictates your return. This is the point I'm trying to make. I don't care how bullish you are on the business model. If this thing is trading at like 70 times or 100 times or negative 50 times EBITDA, I'm not touching that. I'm not touching. I mean, I remember my mom one day is calling me, said, I want to buy Amazon because I'm using it all the time. I'm like, okay, everyone thinks like that. What's the price then? It's like, I don't know.

Yeah.

So even you can, you can buy a great asset at a terrible price and it's going to be a terrible investment. You could buy a dog shit asset at a great price and it's going to be a phenomenal returner. I'm telling you, Western Union at 2x PE, that business is not going to— that Western Union will not go out of business. And this is something that like, I, this is something, a framework that I've adapted now is like, as much as if you love technology, I think the market is like, has this starry-eyed version of technology and gets super excited about AI and all this stuff. Crypto now again. And, and because of that, you then say, it's easy to just do the lazy analysis and say all these businesses, like creative disruption, they're going to be going out of business. Newspapers, they're all going to go out of business, right? And you're sitting there, it's probably saying, you're hearing the Collison brothers say, you know, stablecoins are room temperature semiconductors. They're going to totally borderless finance, blow up businesses. And then the lazy thing is like, oh, Western Union, Remitly, they're going to go out of business because stablecoins are going to eat their lunch. And you're like, Yeah, go talk to smart stablecoin guys and people that understand payments, and they'll tell you one thing, which is you still need connectivity to the real world.

Yeah.

And I'm gonna tell you folks, Western Union has a lot of connectivity in the real world. It has a moat that's not gonna go away. It's mispriced. That's all I'm saying. This is not a recommendation. I'm not telling you to buy—

why are we talking so much about Western Union here? You know what we should be talking about? Cloudflare. Cloudflare.

Let's have— let's have fun. I'll end my rant here.

I'm done hearing about Western Union. I was in a cab the other day. This Western Union support team was just ruining this cab driver's day. And I felt— I was like, I don't like Western Union.

Yeah, but I get more excited about a business trading at 2 times EV-to-EBITDA.

I get it. I'm trading at 3. Cloudflare is— so Cloudflare sits basically behind the whole internet. A lot of things are built on top of Cloudflare. They introduced NetDollar, which is a new US dollar-backed stablecoin that will enable instant secure transactions for the agentic web. Little unclear who— how they did this. Actually, Robbie Rob said— had a nice tweet. He said, Cloudflare not announcing their issuing partners. Weird. Could it be that it's a partner who is not yet public? Maybe a white label product that someone like a large bank or Circle are launching and they aren't ready to announce yet. But yeah, very interesting to see Cloudflare launch. This is the first like big tech company, I'd say, to launch a stablecoin that I can think of. And I think it will open the floodgates for many, many, many more.

We said it before, Stripe doing it with Tempo just has opened the aperture here of companies exploring this in a very meaningful way. We should— if there's anyone Cloudflare wants to come on, we'll would love to have you guys on. Um, my bet is on Paxos probably like doing the backbone infrastructure here, or like someone like Anchorage, right?

Yeah, I could see that.

Yeah. Who's doing a lot of the Genius side? What's the first Genius side compliant stablecoin? Is that like Athena's?

I think Anchorage is doing a lot of these from what I've heard. Yeah. Because they've, with their acquisition of Mountain Protocol.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

So it's probably Paxos or Anchorage or, or a combination. I don't know if it could be a combination, but that, that's where I'd Yeah. What does this do, by the way, just on this point, like what does this do? Okay. If you're a stablecoin issuer, if you're like, or you're a lot of these crypto native projects, like trying to like build in this space, I've invested a number. I think you have invested in others. Like when you see this, aren't you like super nervous? You see like Cloudflare or Stripe? Or, you know, JPMorgans of the world, like large companies trying to adopt this technology?

Dude, I don't know, because it's like I was talking to some people who were at the actually annual exec planning of JPMorgan, and it was, it was, it was last week, basically, like their whole budgeting for 2026 meeting. And without sharing too much, half of the conversation supposedly was about crypto and stablecoins and It's like, yeah, these companies, these big companies do set their plans for 20— for the next year, you know, months, months ahead. And you've got a bunch of companies sitting there basically planning for 2026. Anyone from Stripe to JPMorgan saying like, what's our plan for 2026? I don't know, AI and crypto.

So is crypto going to make the cut for this budgeting like AI and crypto? Is that—

I think it will. I think it will. Now, what's what could happen is, you know, like prices go down and things still get built.

But well, that's what I'm saying, because if you've set the budget for the year, this is the point that I made before. It's like companies are not going to make a decision to build in this space because Solana went down 80%. I think we're past that. I think the tech is sufficiently viable from a regulatory perspective that companies are now going to credibly deploy and not just sit on pilots, you know, because, because it's going to pump there like the Long Island Teas. I think that era is gone. I think now if JPMorgan's like now committed, by the way, they have a massive team and they have the muscle and they have the resources and they're committing for next year. It doesn't matter if it's a bull bear, they're just going to deploy, right? And the same with it, like companies have adopted, you know, Excel and CRM and stuff like that, no matter the micro environment. So yeah, I mean, look, it's open source technology. And so I, I'm, I don't know if there's been any updates on Tempo. They came out with a pretty interesting, um, you know, ecosystem tweet. There was a lot of really good, you know, a lot of interesting companies there. Um, that's the latest I saw, but that to me, that's one that I'm paying a lot of attention. Like, can Tempo be the— it's almost like on, on, on, on left side is Tempo, like enterprise chains. And then on the right, it's like Codexes of the world that are trying to be just crypto native ground up. I don't know who wins. Is there an opportunity for both? Maybe.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Oh, there were two interesting fundraisers. Archetype Venture Fund raised $100 million. Also, ZeroHash raised $104 million at over a billion valuation from Interactive Brokers. And I think Morgan Stanley, or maybe they're just integrating with Morgan Stanley. But actually, it was very— this was the second order thing was more interesting. Morgan Stanley's stock went and jumped like 2% on the news that they're going to roll out crypto through ZeroHash. So maybe a sign of the times, but yeah, shout out to ZeroHash, shout out to Archetype. I think this will start to be the norm moving into Q4 is these mega $100 million raises, $200 million raises. I think a lot of the actually Series C and D companies that raised in 2021 at these crazy valuations that we've talked about for years and years and years, they're actually finally now able to raise at valuations that are roughly similar to what they raised at in '21 and '22. So I know a lot of these founders who, you know, run crypto companies that were valued at $3 billion or $4 billion or $5 billion, but they can't IPO yet. And now they're actually raising again at similar valuations. So I, you know, I think I will be— have been wrong on this. I said that they would never get back to their valuations, and I think I'm going to be proven wrong, which is great.

I mean, to be fair, I'm seeing a lot of emails like traditional allocators, uh, sub-10, 50, 100 billion allocators just want to deploy. And these are probably the same people that are like looking at Tether and looking at some of these names for pre-IPO kind of rounds. And so I think, look, there's a, there's a lot of capital out there, and, and, and that capital is now wanting to direct and get more exposure to crypto. And no surprise, but someone probably says, wait a minute, why didn't we invest in Circle pre-IPO? Why didn't we invest in, you know, Figure? Why didn't we have exposure to these things? They're performing very well. So, you know, they want to put size in and you can get it in some of these companies.

Yeah. Last thing of the week is Plasma just went live. It's trading at, I think, $8 billion. Yes. What's it set? It's priced at over a dollar now. It's priced at $1.05. I'm sure that'll change throughout the day. And by the time you're listening to this, it'll be too late. But yeah, I mean, another thesis of like what can get bid will get bid. Like the main attention things, if you can bid them, they will. They will get bid.

So Plasma, interesting. It is, um, the— we talked about in the last pod, it was the pre-market, um, Poly market was like $6 billion. It's currently at $10. But yeah, remember, I think your point is let's see where it is next week. Like, pump obviously was, you know, came down quite a bit. Um, so there's a lot of all, uh, in the first 7-30 days of these things.

So Yeah, yeah, but yeah, content of the week.

Yeah, want to go?

Yeah, you go.

Well, uh, speaking of Korea, there's like this Netflix show of, uh, basically— what's it called? They're like trying to manufacture like a K-pop from scratch and they're documenting the journey. And, uh, I've been watching, I've seen like two 3 episodes now, but it's like they're casting and it's, uh, they'll, they'll select people from like TikTok and socials and then they'll put them together and they'll train them for a year. And it's like the main studio, um, um, and directors from Korea that like have mastered the K-pop theme and like, what's that, Gangnam Style and all that. Like, I think it's K-pop and they like combine it with like LA Hollywood people. And they're trying to like create like, uh, the next star band. And like, uh, and I think there's gonna be multiple seasons, but it's kind of pretty, pretty neat to see that inside world of, of like—

what's it called?

I forget, man. It's on Netflix, uh, Korea. I'm just gonna say, uh, K-pop Netflix series. Oh, I don't even know, man.

All right, we'll find it, we'll find it, people. That's part of the hunt. All right, I got one. I also have a Netflix one, which is, uh, Popstar Academy. Pop Star Academy.

Yeah, Pop Star Academy, I think. K-pop training program. Yeah, aspiring pop stars. I go K-pop training program.

Dude, I have a great Netflix show. It's called America's Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys. It is about Jerry Jones. Jerry Jones, baby. Jerry Jones. Oh my God, I, I'm a— I love Jerry Jones after watching this.

It is the best.

It's— he's a savage. He's a savage.

Jerry Jones is not trading fart coin. The man—

I'm like, I love this man. This guy, this guy's a legend. I know, I know Jerry Jones, like the old NFL owner. I don't know the young Jerry Jones or the story. Like, I don't know. Like, I mean, he's what I've heard actually. So I've like, I've now, I've now since watching it, I've messaged some people who know Jerry Jones. I'm like, what is there to learn about his life? Like, tell me, like, you know him, like, tell me about his life. They're like, there's nothing to learn from him. He has bet everything in his entire life. He's bet the farm more times than anyone else, and he just wins every time. They're like, you shouldn't take any lesson away from Jerry Jones. They're like, he's just a savage.

What was it? The opening scene for— I was captivated by this first episode.

Oh, the music is so good too. Yeah.

He made some money on— this is like Yellowstone, but like real life. Like, um, um, he bet— he made money on an oil well in Oklahoma, in Tulsa. I think he's from, uh, Arkansas. Arkansas.

Yeah.

He made like $100 million. He parlayed all of that stack into buying the Dallas Cowboys, and like the first couple of weeks of ownership is just crazy.

And I remember the scene of where he's 1 in 15, he fires like one of the most legendary coaches of all time.

Like, he's like the nemesis of doubt. It's crazy. But man, incredible story. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For all you Deejans out there.

I also liked it. So when I was, when I was 18, I got like, I was really into, I was just like, I'm never working a 9 to 5 job. Like, I hate this. And like, I was like, I was seeking mentors basically. And I found these two— there's a thing called— there's a guy named Zig Ziglar who was a like, he's like a 1950s, '60s, like sales for 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, like sales guy who was like, he's basically like the Tony Robbins of the 1950s. His name is Zig Ziglar. And I hadn't— I listened to hundreds of hours of Zig Ziglar when I was like 18 and 19. And I hadn't thought about that name in like 10 years. And Jerry Jones goes, look, when I was a teenager, I listened to Zig Ziglar. I was like, that's my guy. Let's go. I was with Dana. She's like, I was like, Zig Ziglar. She's like, who? Like, what are you talking about?

He just looks at you with the strangest face. Yeah.

Dude, yeah.

Everyone go watch that. It is just phenomenal life story. And, you know, honestly, amazing, amazing what he's been able to do. Yeah. So is that the most valuable NFL franchise right now? Probably.

I think it's the most valuable sports team in the world.

Yeah.

Most valuable sports team in the world. Let's see. Yeah. Dallas Cowboys, $10 billion. $10 billion to be—

yeah. Yeah.

For the 9th straight year in a row. And the thing, okay, so it's Cowboys. The Golden State Warriors are number 2. That's interesting. The Rams, the Yankees, the Knicks, the Pats, the Giants, the Lakers, the Jets, the Niners, the Raiders.

Just because it got traded recently.

It's basically NFL, the Yankees, but NFL, it's mostly NFL, some NBA and MLB. And then Real Madrid is number 12 and Man Utd is number 14.

Surprised no Formula 1s there. Like collectively Formula 1 is, I think Saudi—

the league is the size of the league, size of these teams. The league, they just got bought for what, $5 billion I think it was?

Uh, Liberty Media. Liberty Media bought it for like—

no, no, no. I think that— I think F1 just sold to Saudi guys. Yeah.

Oh, wow. Bernie Ecclestone sold it for 3.

Oh, no, excuse me. I'm wrong. I'm wrong. There were rumors.

There were rumors that they were bidding on it, but they're not.

McLaren. I think— I think the McLaren team sold.

Oh, interesting.

I think that's great.

Amazing. Anything else?

That was great. We have Mike Novogratz episode dropping on Monday. It was good. He's a stud.

Yeah, we will. The next up, are we recording? When are we going live? Is this DAS in London?

Maybe.

Probably. Rob and I might do a, you know, intimate recording at Token.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Get the hotel recording, run it back. All right, folks, thanks for listening. Good hanging with you guys. See you on Monday for Novogratz, and, uh, Santi and I'll be back next week. Peace.

Thank you, guys.