Hivemind: Bitcoin Decoupling, US Trade Deficits & Worldcoin

The whole point with this Bitcoin decoupling thing that I'm talking about is like on the margin, I could see foreign capital going towards, you know, things like gold, things like Bitcoin. The onus is on Bitcoin to prove that it's actually decoupling because like there's been so many like false signals in the past. The biggest driver is still probably going to be NASDAQ for the time being, but on the margins, I think it's shifting away from that a bit.

Nothing said on The Hive Mind is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is strictly for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our own opinions, not financial advice. Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of The Hive Mind Podcast. The goal of the podcast, as always, is to provide an inside look into what we like to call the Delphi hive mind, bringing together some of our brightest minds from each of the divisions to share insights, alpha, and shitposts. Today with us, we have the usual crew, Ceteris Paribus from institutional research arm, Jan, who's managing partners in our ventures arm, Duncan, shitcoin scavenger and investor, and I lead Delphi Labs. Our protocol R&D arm. So it's been— last time we talked, we pretty much had a, had a like counseling session live on air about the tariffs that were happening and destroying our bags. Two weeks later, not too much more clarity on that, but I don't think we want to spend 45 minutes crying about tariffs again. The thing a lot of people seem to be talking about is, is this Bitcoin decorrelation. Talking about/hoping for. Is the moment finally here? Right. Mostly Bitcoin trades correlated to the S&P. If it's to fulfill its promise as digital gold, this uncorrelated hedge asset, then eventually it should uncorrelate. And recently there's been some evidence that it is, although this has happened before and people always get overexcited. It's kind of like every ETH pump this cycle. But, um, yeah, curious, what do you guys think about this?

I mean, one— yeah, one issue I have with this is that— and I'm just going to jump in talking because there's drilling today— um, it's like SOL's been up like 30% over that period too. And so it's like, I don't know if it hasn't been like specifically Bitcoin. Yeah, well, no, but there's a lot of assets that are not Like, I mean, Fart Coin was, has been like very strong recently too. I think that crypto just, when crypto sells off first, but it also gets bid first. Right. And so I don't know if the fact that Bitcoin looks like if stocks puke, Bitcoin is puking 100%. And gold might honestly do okay in that scenario. I, it's like, I think it's just, yeah, it's, there's no evidence that it's acting anything like gold. And I think the decorrelation right now is kind of just like people waiting for, I think like the market, it does not believe that these tariffs are still like sticking because if they did, it would like, the market would be down so much lower, right? Like S&P would be like 4,500 or something. And so there's still a lot of like disbelief or just not believing that this is still a long-term thing. And so I think everyone is still kind of waiting for a kind of like, you know, pivot or something, and Bitcoin is obviously going to rip in that scenario. And so that's why I think it's kind of decorrelating a little bit recently.

Yeah, it's not— it's been trading decently well. I mean, yeah, I think that the, the disbelief is just a function of, um, Trump crying uncle or the Fed stepping in. If things get too bad. And so, you know, markets bottom like 6 to 12 months before recessions end. And so, you know, as forward-looking mechanisms, it makes sense to try and price that in. Bitcoin was definitely catching a bid before Jay Powell's speech yesterday. Market in general was, but Bitcoin in particular. And so yeah, that kind of hammered things completely.

And yeah, but then when it sold off, it was pretty strong. Like anyways, this is obviously like day-to-day PA, but I think I agree with like said, like it said, it's like the onus is on Bitcoin to prove that it's actually decoupling because like there's been so many like false signals in the past. But I still think like the drivers of Bitcoin could be shifting towards, you know, less away from the NASDAQ to these other factors over time. Because if you think about it, like fundamentally, if the US and China are getting into a massive trade war and the US is, you know, trying to eliminate its deficits, its trade deficits with the rest of the world and, you know, increase protectionism, kick out foreign investment in some critical industries, reshore, um, reshore investment. It's like, okay, does it necessarily want— or at least does this administration necessarily want like the pattern of the past 20 years where everyone just takes their dollars that they make from these trade surpluses and individuals just buy US assets? And if that's changing, if that's the goal of the administration, then maybe you know, on the margin, Bitcoin does get a bit of a bid. You know, it's, it's at the levels it was pre-Liberation Day where tech stocks and S&P are down like 5-10%. So, and it held up pretty well on Friday.

Why would that be a good goal, like wanting foreigners to stop buying US-denominated assets?

I think that it's kind of the problem with the reserve currency is everyone Or like the problem with the reserve currency, if you want to have manufacturing, it's like everyone wants US dollar stuff, so they bid up the US dollar. It's really uncompetitive to make anything in the US, right? Like you need to kind of export dollars. That's your biggest export to the rest of the world versus like building these, these critical things. Like I think we can look it up, called like the Triffin dilemma.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. We wrote about this in our— COVID macro piece, but like, I don't know. Do you think on net being the reserve currency is a bad thing?

I think that we're seeing, I think that the hollowing out of the manufacturing has been pretty bad. If things are to turn into a war, like in a world where everything's perfect and globalization works and like everyone's friends, probably a good thing. But in a world where like you might be fighting, like your biggest adversary also makes all of your stuff, probably not great.

It's also not binary though. You don't necessarily have to choose like reserve currency or total shitcoin, right? There's a spectrum where the, as you gradually devalue, you become more competitive on a global exporting scale.

Reserve currency though, you could use that, you could use the surplus to reinvest into building up US manufacturing, right?

I don't know.

I, and like, it's also a very useful tool in a war to be able to sanction like both treasures.

The surplus isn't from the government necessarily.

It's not, I mean, I mean the surplus, I mean the, the like surplus of demand for your currency that, that comes from like you can print more dollars. You don't have to necessarily buy Chinese gizmos with it. Like, you can just reinvest them into the US economy if you wanted to. I feel like it's more a question of what the US has been doing to satisfy that surplus demand versus that always being a bad thing. Like, I don't know, being the reserve currency, I agree there's some drawbacks, but overall it's like just, just an amazing—

how they've, how they've managed it so far is pretty shit. Yeah, well, if they had spent up a ton of time building a sovereign wealth fund and like having critical industries in the US, yeah, that would have been great, but they didn't. So now they're in like a tricky situation where if they're escalating this kind of economic trade war with China, you know, China makes a lot of important things and has a lot of important exports. But anyways, the whole point with this Bitcoin decoupling thing that I'm talking about is like on the margin, I could see foreign capital going towards, you know, things like gold, things like Bitcoin, which like we're seeing gold and maybe like a little bit of Bitcoin. The biggest driver is still probably going to be NASDAQ for the time being, but on the margins, I think it's shifting away from that a bit. At least it makes sense fundamentally.

It basically like it trades as a percentage right? It's like a certain percentage of its exposure is, is NASDAQ, a certain percentage is gold, a certain percentage is liquidity, but that kind of overlaps with gold and NASDAQ. But, um, it's, it's always— it's usually just a price driving the narrative thing where the second it starts doing well in a certain environment, then it's now trading with this and people start to pile in. And so you kind of— it's a combination of, of what's driving the narrative and just the, the kind of liquidity and demand dynamics at the time. Where right now you kind of have gotten to a point where, you know, there's a decent amount of seller exhaustion, but we're still pretty range-bound, right? Like, we sell off at high 80s pretty consistently, and then in no man's land, there's not a lot of speculative interest because of the macro uncertainty. And then, you know, it's bounced off the high 70s twice now, and so that's proven to be decent support.

So, um, I would just have expected Bitcoin to be way lower if you had told me that like the S&P was gonna get 5 days negative 5% and like all this stuff is gonna happen. Historically, I feel like as a risk-on asset, it's traded really well. If you chart Bitcoin versus QQQ, it's like 10% off the highs. Right? It's like really hanging in relative to stocks. So I think on the margin, this is definitely happening.

Um, and I also think a lot of like, if, if you— a lot of the like $109K top was kind of this like SBR speculation. Like if you take that out, then I think we're down kind of even less relatively. I mean, clearly gold going up, I think is good for Bitcoin as digital gold. I think that like when, whenever people used to refer to gold, it was like stuck at this $10 trillion asset, right? It's now like a $22 trillion asset. So I think like Bitcoin at the market cap of gold is a million dollar Bitcoin, which, you know, is, is kind of pretty, pretty crazy to, to think about. I feel like, um, and I do think the move to gold, I don't know. Yeah, go ahead, Cedars.

No, I was just gonna say, I think like, yeah, the value of hard money assets getting going up is like pretty bullish for crypto in general because I think a lot of crypto assets kind of exhibit some of that to different extents. Obviously Bitcoin, the main one, but I just think like non-sovereign, like even something like some like weird AI stuff, for instance, too, that people— that kind of just sits outside the system. It will be interesting to see like if there is this mass— like the rest of the world's been outperforming US pretty strongly over the past month or so. And if, if the US really wants to reduce trade deficit, then it's just like the math is just less dollars going to foreigners. And so they have less dollars to buy US assets. Right. And so it will be interesting to see how Bitcoin trades versus like US equities, European equities, Chinese equities. Right.

I think that trend reverses violently at some point. Right. Like the reason it's been happening is because the whole world was just massively overweight US assets.

Assets.

And so the, the outflow just kind of creates a lot of knock-on pain and, and people having to reposition and reconsider. Um, but I mean, in the grand scheme of things, no other— there's very few other places building compelling companies to invest in. Like, the Europors have nothing interesting going on in their market, and that's why it trades at such a discount. Like, the best companies are still being built here, and, and the assets will still flow in.

I mean, the US definitely has the best capital markets, assets, like entrepreneurs in the world. But, um, I don't know, I do think— I mean, first of all, Trump's like instability and uncertainty, I think, is the, is the worst for, for this stuff, is much worse than actual tariffs. The worst is just not knowing what's gonna happen next, like stuff all the time. Um, And then, like, on the rest of the stuff, I do think people are still like— I don't know who said it on the podcast— sort of hoping that this reverses, like, that the tariffs are reversed, that we come to some kind of agreement, that these deals get made, which, I mean, hopefully they do. And I don't know how to put probabilities on that at this point. I think that's kind of the issue. It's a very hard thing to put probabilities on. But I do think there's also a world where it's actually like the beginnings of war. You have a trade war is normally how wars begin. You have these very high tariff hikes. You have China stop shipping rare earths to the US or limited the rare earths that are being shipped to the US. And I think makes up 70% of the US imports of those. You have the US telling countries that they have to choose between China and the US. There's a lot of signs which historically, if you study Second World War or whatever, you could easily tell the story of how this was actually the beginning of this Cold War. A lot of people say it's already started, and if that's the case, it's like a pretty drastically different regime even for, even for assets, right?

I think like my point though with the bid for US assets is not even a whole like political, all this pissing off everybody. It's just like the pure mechanics of if you're going to reduce the trade deficit, then you just have less dollars going to these other countries. And so they literally just have less, there's just a less of a bid because all these countries do is like they, they export products to the US, the US prints dollars and gives them it. And then they just put that into US dollar assets. Basically for the most part, right? And so if you're taking away that whole mechanical flow, like the biggest US export is like US Treasuries, right? And so like if you're kind of like taking away that flow, then that's just kind of like a big change long-term in like, it has nothing to do with fundamentals or the companies involved in everything. There's just been this massive passive bid from the rest of the world. For US assets just due to the nature of running trade deficits, right? So that's like the part that could honestly be like pretty materially changed if they're hell-bent. It seems like, yeah, I like, it seems like they're pretty hell-bent on lowering these trade deficits that aren't, I don't know, I feel like eventually they're going to come to this point where it's just the critical industries. And the critical manufacturing they really want to get back. That seems like the most rational kind of end here, and they'll be okay with running trade deficits with like, um, Cambodia, right? Um, but I guess we'll see. It's still—

it's more so just, uh, moving, uh, opening up the door for other manufacturers to eat into China's manufacturing market share, right? And that way you're less dependent on China specifically, but you're still doing a majority of your exporting for all these non-critical goods. I think that's the goal with the non-critical stuff. And then the critical stuff, I agree, is to move it onshore.

Yeah, I feel like—

sorry, what's the goal with the non-critical stuff?

Uh, basically like the Vietnams of the world, to, to allow them to— it opens the door for them to expand their manufacturing capacity and it allows you to be less dependent on one producer, but rather a handful. And so from your side, it gives you better leverage and better security. And then from their side, it opens up the door for them to kind of run China's playbook to some extent and leads to a lot of domestic prosperity.

So the goal— so to keep tariffs on China, but take them off Vietnam and other countries like that, is what you're saying?

Right.

And allow that production to move there.

Yeah, I think you wanted more back in North America, right?

For everything? For like gizmos and—

well, no, for the critical stuff. Yeah, North America is possible. It's just tricky. I do think that this is kind of the beginning. It's like the Cold War. I kind of subscribe to that view. Although that's like pretty scary and sucks, but like just the actions that they've both taken, it's just like, I don't know how this was not gonna eventually come to a head. If like you have two, you have like one incumbent power, another rising power, but then the incumbent makes all of their critical stuff in the rising power's country. Like that just feels like inevitably it was gonna come to some sort of you know, some sort of conflict or change up. I don't know how that continues forever.

Yeah, and then we hear these whispers in these times of like Russia settling oil contracts in Bitcoin and stuff. It would be dope to start seeing, because we're definitely moving to this multipolar world. Like, this is kind of the world Bitcoin was built for. I just haven't seen that much, that many signs of like fundamental like adoption of Bitcoin as a neutral asset other than people sort of buying it on the speculation that it will become one.

Yeah, there was that headline that, that, yeah, uh, countries reaching out to Binance to set up sovereign wealth funds or Bitcoin reserves.

Yeah, yeah.

Like it makes sense that it's gonna happen, I think. And this, these forces are pushing it a little bit more because also like as an individual investor, right? Like this actually does start to go— like, we're at the point now where like Bitcoin's accepted enough where I think you can start to like really give some weight to, to the fundamentals of, you know, if you're a really wealthy person in China or Russia and you're scared about capital controls, you know, gold is like a difficult thing to put all your wealth in and move around, but like Bitcoin on the margin is like super easy to buy and store and, you know, hold globally. I think those those sort of things actually start to matter now.

Should we start with this Neutral thing? This is pretty interesting. Basically, this Neutral is a synthetic dollar that's backed by an even more degen version of the Athena trade where they're trying to close this arb on the funding rate of these, or basically you can get paid to short a lot of these low float, high FTV tokens that we've talked about over and over, while at the same time, there's secondary transactions happening at like 50 to 60% below the market price, right? Which doesn't really make much sense from a market structure perspective. And we, I think, talked about this in an episode and kind of talked about a lot of reasons why this could be the case that, you know, VCs aren't set up to short and the team doesn't have collateral to do this. And then, you know, there's not really a healthy market for secondaries, etc. These guys are trying to close that, that loop. As far as I understand, most of the capital is going to sit in like Athena, basically, and like yield bearing stablecoins. And then a small portion is going to be used to run this trade where they're buying secondaries at a discount and then shorting the PERP. What do you guys think of this? This seems pretty dangerous to me. I don't know, I think it's unfortunate that Athena has kind of opened the Pandora's box in terms of calling things synthetic dollars that are sort of like just vault hedge fund strategies. This one in particular seems like there's a lot that can go wrong.

I haven't looked into it, but who's— so they have centralized exchanges that are that are valuing this locked collateral. So basically token A—

I don't think so.

Trading—

no, I don't think it's delta neutral. I don't know how they'd make it. Well, I think— yeah, I actually don't know.

Um, because like the most elegant way would be somehow getting these exchanges to value the locked assets at par, right? But I don't know which would do that. Because you can't liquidate them at par.

Yeah. Does anyone actually know the answer to that? I haven't. I looked briefly what they're saying. They didn't mention many details. I don't know if there's documentation or whatever on their site that could look at on this. I mean, I very much doubt exchanges are going to be letting you take out leverage against these secondaries, which means they have to acquire— if they're going to be Delta neutral, they have to acquire the actual tokens. Spot and then just short them, I guess. Yeah, I'm not really sure. It's—

yeah, and then most of these assets don't get valued at 100% LTV. None of them do.

Yeah, I think they'll have to use leverage for sure, which is again something that Athena doesn't do, to be able to recreate the exposure here in an efficient way. Anyway, it just seems like a lot of stuff can go wrong here. Probably have to understand the details better. Cedrus, you unmuted briefly. Do you want to—

I was just going to say, if there is a way to long synthetic robot labor and short human labor, that'd be a more interesting stablecoin. That was a bad shitpost. But yeah, I think we should talk about PumpFund versus Radium. No, I'm like curious if you guys think that Radium— I think the, the first, my first reaction to like Radium, uh, Pump launching an AMM, and then obviously Radium was going to come back and launch their own launchpad, was that Pump had all the, all the leverage here because they kind of like have just owned the user from day one. When Pump Coins, uh, finish bonding, they like go to Radium, but then users go to Jupiter. So users basically go from Pump front end to Jupiter front, front end, right outside of like Snipers and Bots too, if they're using those front ends. But nobody ever like would go to Radium, right? And so I always felt like Pump had all the leverage here to just kind of like cut out Radium. But Radium now has launched their launchpad, and I think the Radium token actually responded pretty well to this. So I don't know, I'm curious, like, if you guys have takes on this. I also saw that AI16z is also launched like a launchpad. It seems like everybody's launching launchpads these days. Like BASE has a ton as well.

But yeah, probably get the euthanasia roller coaster. Users win because now these guys have to compete on UX and fees. So I think at least there's that element. But it's just like you're getting a smaller slice of a shrinking pie now too with just the amount of activity in these. Launchpad platforms.

I don't know, I've always been a believer in this aggregation theory, right, that if you own the user, you can vertically aggregate upwards. And I think the person who owns the user here is Pump. I would imagine they have like an AMM is just naturally more infra, right? Like most people who use Radium probably use it through Jupiter or through, you know, Backpack or whatever other services integrate them. Whereas with Pump, people are going to the front end and minting a coin on it, right? And now live streaming themselves threatening their kids or whatever. So I think if you own the user, it's just way more likely— like, users won't even know that their token's being traded on the Pump AMM rather than Radium, right?

I think they'll Wouldn't that be like, uh, Jupiter and Moonshot kind of have— like, they really are the ones who own the user could launch.

But I mean, if you're owning it, it's the user who's launching the meme coins, right? Like, I feel like the user who's launching the meme coins goes to Pump at least right now rather than Radium or, or anywhere else.

Well, they're gonna go where the liquidity sits.

Yeah, they go where it launches and like the liquidity just sits idle. That's like, Radium was cleaning up because everyone would just be trading all that stuff.

But if you launch on Pump, your liquidity was automatically like migrating to Radium, whereas now it'll migrate to Pump. That's what I'm saying.

I'm, I'm, I agree with you on this.

No, I think that it's, they're gonna launch where the traders are. And if like Moonshot and Jupiter have all the eyeballs of the traders, that's where they're gonna launch.

But Moonshot doesn't have its own AMM.

I, I just think that that's like an easy thing for, like, if you're talking about verticalizing the stack, I think it's easy for Jupiter. Well, they— doesn't Jupiter kind of have like Meteora? Isn't— aren't they in a relationship?

No, I mean teams, yeah, but it's like similar tokens and NFTs and all that.

Yeah. So anyways, Meteora, Jupiter, Moonshot.

I mean, I think Jupiter could do a launchpad, but, um, Jupiter, I saw something yesterday, they've acquired like 8 different protocols. Yeah. They even acquired a Cosmos team.

Yeah, like they, they've done a ton of it. Like they've also acquired things like an Explorer, Solana FM, uh, SonarWatch, which is like portfolio dashboard, Moonshot, right? Um, they, they're kind of just on like this acquisition spree. They really are like the front end of Solana. Um, and yeah, they could absolutely do some token launchpad thing.

Right?

Yeah, I mean, they're well positioned to do it by the same theory, but I think between Radium and Pump, I think Pump wins this. I mean, obviously Pump started it and Radium kind of responded, which is the right thing to do, and I hope they succeed for users' sakes, but I think Pump is kind of crushing it.

Do you think that whole meta comes back to the same degree?

To the same degree is hard to say. Um, I do think the meta comes back, like, but I don't know if it can from these depths.

Yeah, I mean, people were launching a ton of tokens.

I mean, the thing is, live streaming really enables like a completely new level of like meaning, I think, for these, for these, for these meme coins. Like the lore around some of these memes that will be launched on ridiculous live streams is probably going to be like pretty absurd. So yeah, I don't know. I think the live streaming feature is super interesting. I think it's actually like the closest thing to Web3 social we've had, I think, is PumpFun, which, you know, I don't know if that's for better or for worse, but I think that's the case. So I'm interested in— I think that it will come back and there'll be some really interesting meta happening, but it's hard to imagine it to the extent—

yeah, the tricky thing is just the sustainability of the, of the ecosystem, right? If it's, if it's people are just trading around a handful of tokens back and forth, then it's kind of the same money. It's money sloshing around across less assets, and when you lose, you don't go to zero, more or less. But the problem with like the dilution is just so many things go to zero, and that's just money that can't come back.

You kind of need to fix the launch mechanism too, right? Like people, it became too overt how much was being extracted like that. I feel like the Kelsey on Coffeezilla was like the peak of that where people realized like, oh shit, there's this whole industry just extracting tens of hundreds of millions from these launches. I think you need like a launch method that's resistant to sniping. And it's not that hard. There's been like loads, loads of those done, but it just— I think all the solutions have some like UX trade-offs and stuff like that. But I think they need to, they need to fix that before people, before retail can really come back in a, in a big way.

Yeah, unfortunately, like retail onboarding means trading shitcoins, right? And that's like, like whenever people talk about onboarding people, it's always about becoming a trader. And it's just like, that's not— if that's all crypto is ever going to be is onboarding people to become traders, it's never going to be like anything too interesting. So I don't know, I'm still pretty bull up on that Nikita joining Solana as an advisor. Like, I think that's a good move. I don't know what consumer crypto looks like that doesn't involve gambling. Like, I really don't. But maybe Worldcoin. Worldcoin seems payment. I'm not going to scan my eyeball, but like it does seem I scanned my eyeball. I also think that there's like OpenAI announced that they're going to make this X competitor, right? Like is Worldcoin going to be integrated in that to like to have the civil resistance? I could totally see that being a thing, right? I think that I think I do think Worldcoin and like the Worldcoin eco I haven't looked too deeply into it recently, but there are things like happening and they have, they do have this like civil resistance mechanism that is pretty powerful if like actually used properly.

It does feel like that's where things are going. Like the AI models are pretty damn good.

I met with the Worldcoin team and CEO when we were in SF and came away pretty bullish. I think the main thing that stuck with me that he said was that identity used to be like a compliance thing, right, that you just had to do. And it's going to become actually like a business need. Because for social networks and anything where you're talking to people, you want to make sure that you're not talking to a bot, right? And really, like, I think the only compelling solution to that at scale is is Worldcoin, or at least the best one right now. I think they have like 25 million users or something that have scanned their eyeballs, which is actual unique users, not like wallets, right? And their goal is to reach like 100 million. It's kind of telling that Sam founded this. I think it's pretty long-sighted and I can see it starting to be integrated across a bunch of different things on the internet, like especially as bots become a worse and worse issue and more and more indistinguishable from, from just humans. Like, I don't know, I can kind of see it. Uh, the ecosystem, as far as I could tell, I've done like a little bit, just did a little bit of research, doesn't seem like there's too much interesting happening there. They have integrated like SDI on the wallet, so users have like a savings account on their Worldcoin wallet, which is pretty cool. And I think payments work pretty well too, as in like paying someone.

But yeah, I need to look at— I mean, because Worldcoin, it's just under 7 billion now, FDV. I need to relook at the FDV because I, for some reason, I think that the vesting goes out to like 2040 or something. But I might be wrong. That might be a different project.

It's just a constant drip of emissions though.

No, it's a long list for sure.

Yeah, I guess it depends. There's definitely a point though where it becomes interesting. Like, I do think Worldcoin— we talked about this when we did the Year Ahead AI pod, um, back in like December. I do think Worldcoin is one of the protocols that actually does have pretty big theoretical upside.

So I could, if I scan my eyeballs, I could claim 40 World Coins. It's pretty good.

That's like $25.

That's like, used to be like, yeah, the trafficking and stuff that's happening, that's, that's pretty awful.

That's the thing, there's a lot of bad stuff with it too.

And it's also happening, well, the, the, you basically have cartels and militias, uh, human trafficking, just I'll give you $2 or I won't break your leg. Come scan your eyeball. And then they just collect the distribution.

What the hell? That's—

I mean, that's an obvious— that's an obvious thing. That's an obvious thing that would happen. But it's like the claim now is— if you said it's 40 Worldcoin, then the claim now is like $25.

I mean, yeah, that's a lot. That's a lot in some countries. Yeah. I'm just looking at the different games on here. That's crazy though. That doesn't seem good.

They have— so they have their own World app, a mobile thing. Yeah, you download, you download. Okay, so you download the apps like into the app, right? It's like apps.

Yeah.

Um, so $27. There you go. Look at that. What are you gonna get?

Well, I don't want to scan my eyeballs.

Why don't you want to scan your eyeballs?

I don't know.

No, it's like, realistically, it's fine. It's just, uh, um, I don't know. I feel like I had a really good tweet meme a few years ago about eyeball scan bad. Now I feel like I can't scan it out of like principle of staying true to that meme.

I just don't feel like jumping through any hoops for 4 bucks.

If somebody came, if somebody like came I don't know if it was super convenient. I was just there, whatever.

It feels a little weird.

It feels weird. That's the thing. It feels weird. Like, as much as they delete all the data and all this other stuff, like, dude, I don't know.

I mean, it's just like, I don't—

I don't—

that argument's kind of whatever. I think it's just pure entertainment. I mean, you know, like, if you're doing anything like 23andMe or any of the other stuff, then you can't really die on this no eyeball hill. It's a bit hypocritical.

I think the main thing is there's just not enough utility for it, right? If games start demanding it or having special lobbies or social networks start promoting your posts if you're not scanned, that's really how you see this thing get adopted. And I think that's all you have to believe, really, to believe in Worldcoin, is that bots are going to be such an issue online for these social networks, for games, for stuff like this. That you'll need something to be able to filter them out. And the best thing is Worldcoin. I think that's kind of like, yeah.

I think to kind of change topic a little bit, we're talking about consumer apps. I think the one new consumer app I saw that looks kind of interesting is this thing subs.fun, I think it's called. It's kind of like a new Reddit, but every Uh, community has, I guess, like a token attached to it, and then the moderation of it is actually kind of done through— I think it also trains an AI on all of the content. And so each subreddit essentially has like their own AI that is learning based on what everybody's saying, and then I think they end up kind of like being the moderators and stuff. I don't know if any of you guys have looked into it, but it Actually seems like a somewhat maybe potentially useful, like, consumer application. I know I kind of just sprung that up, so if you guys haven't looked into it, it's fine. But I think it's one for people to, like, check out. It seems kind of interesting.

Yeah. I mean, I think— still think the most interesting one is definitely payments. I think we're starting to see, like, we've seen enough stablecoin stuff that I think they'll happen this this cycle. I don't mean like payments at the point of sale. I mean more so just like people and businesses paying each other. I think that's going to happen with stables in the back pretty soon. I think people really underestimate the adoption of stables in some of these countries too. People already kind of see this stuff as their bank account.

400 million Tether holders, I believe. Something like that.

Yeah.

It's a lot of people.

It is so crazy how Tether just became super legit after all these years, and USDC is seen as like the more unsafe one.

It's the Fed coin.

Yeah, it's just—

I think it's— I think US hostility towards crypto screwed USDC because then you just didn't feel safe in it, whether it's the assets they were holding that were like the, the assets in those banks, or just the ability to freeze, whereas I think if US, if US was a lot more cooperative, USDC could have thrived. And it's funny, Tether had to share zero of their yield.

Yeah, Tether, the Tether business model is just insane how ridiculous it is. What do you guys say? Hey, here's a question. What do you guys think about everybody launching fucking stablecoins? Like, it doesn't seem— it seems like that's the legit thing to do, you know, like the serious investors. Are— this is the new, this is the new private blockchain thing, right? Serious, quote unquote serious investors always will come into crypto.

And basically the opposite of zero interest rate phenomenon. It's like, oh, yields came up. Let's all try and farm.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's just, I don't know. It all seems a bit ridiculous to me.

I think that's literally what it is though. It's a high interest rates phenomena.

Yeah.

I don't think it's stable. You're not going to have thousands of stablecoins. People have talked about this at various points in crypto, like everything can have its own token, everything can have its own stablecoin. There's nothing that has more network effects than a stablecoin as a product in crypto, like integrations, liquidity. Yeah, it's so—

liquidity is a big one. Unless you're redeeming directly, then you are subject to liquidity and that meaningfully eats away into whatever yield you're trying to get.

Yeah, exactly. And like also trust, like you don't want— like it's a pretty hard thing to manage a stablecoin properly, especially if people are doing stuff in the back, like which is what is the reason people want to have stablecoins, right? Is to be doing some stuff in the back with it, whether right now it's treasuries, but when yields go lower, you best believe they'll get creative with their floats and you don't really want to be— I don't know. I do think there's a lot of interesting stablecoin infra startups being built. I'm not too interested in like more stablecoin projects.

Yeah, at least Tether keeps buying Bitcoin with some of their proceeds. I think they did like $800 mil last quarter or something like that. I forget the exact amount.

Yeah, I saw a tweet the other day. It was like Tether owns Bitcoin and gold and Circle owns SUI.

They also have their gold product, right?

Which is, I think, so I'm pretty bullish on it here. Um, so one thing we've seen recently on L2s is like wrapped Bitcoins are actually starting to get a decent amount of adoption on L2s, which is something that, I mean, it's kind of interesting because they like wrapped Bitcoin never got too much adoption on ETH L1. And I think part of that is just ETH was like a pretty bullish asset in the past. And so that was just the major that people wanted to do all these major farming things with. But Bitcoin is really becoming more of a stable, like BearChain made it a big focus of it. Wrapped Bitcoin on Arbitrum is going up a decent amount. Like Sui has these, has like a few Bitcoin versions on Sui. I saw yesterday Fragsoul, which is like restaking on Solana, wants to do like FragBitcoin. So you really are seeing Bitcoin across all chains. Really becoming, like, actually becoming a real collateral asset now in DeFi, whereas it never really was that way. And you are seeing a little bit of gold stuff too, right? Not to the same level that Bitcoin is, but I think, like, I think there's—

guys, it's happening. It's fucking happening.

It kind of is happening. Like, let's get some Bitcoin gold.

Digital gold is happening. Gold on chain is happening. I guess the problem with the gold on chain thing is even though that now digital gold, if you know it, like, like, I guess you can trust Tether because they have so much money. But this whole paper gold, this whole paper gold.

But isn't Paxos like— Paxos is fully redeemable, right? Like they'll actually ship it to you.

Yeah.

I want to see like a live cam on the vault. I want to see a live cam on the vault. I want to see a live cam in Fort Knox.

Yeah, did they come out with that audit?

I don't think they did it because it's not fucking there, boys. Gold to $10,000 announced. Digital gold to follow. If gold goes up, it's just bullish for Bitcoin because it just makes our ceiling higher.

I saw a chart yesterday, gold versus silver. Silver's been flat. Like, silver has not gotten any bid from gold going up.

Yeah, Bitcoin.

I mean, it's literally the Bitcoin versus ETH. Like, it's literally the exact same thing.

Yeah, I don't know.

Oh yes, sir, go ahead.

No, anyways, I don't know. There's some crazy people about silver on Twitter, so I don't want to say anything bad about it. I don't really know much about silver, but it feels like it is Litecoin or Bitcoin.

Yeah, I remember when I first got into— like, I bought, yeah, gold. There was— there are— there's a crazy silver conspiracy. Theory on Twitter that I briefly subscribed to and bought some silver. And then I was like, man, these people are insane.

I mean, I've followed these like really like gold bug accounts and sometimes like I'll venture over into the silver Twitter and this guy's like, I just bought like, I don't know, like 5 tons of silver. And the guy comments, he's like, you fucking idiot. That's like $200 million of the silver. He just like responds with like a photo of like just these literally like crates of silver, like these like pallets of silver. He's like, look up my name. He's like some like mega rich dude, literally just ate like $50 million worth of silver.

Yeah, the silver guys, I feel like you don't want to— the silver guy's got a few screws loose. I don't know if you want to piss those guys off.

They should start a cryptocurrency, honestly. They're like the perfect community to have like an XRP type cryptocurrency.

But I might have to look at— like, this guy literally bought like $35 million worth of silver or something, and he posted a photo of it. I'm like, maybe there is something here. Maybe they do know something.

We don't want to touch on, on OHM falling 90%.

Well, I think like, I think, okay, so we've talked about high FDV, low float to death, but I think what it seems like what might be changing is an actual like re— like risk adjustment from exchanges or something. I don't know, because you saw it on 3 tokens recently. The OHM thing obviously was terrible, went down like 95%, which is just like an insane chart. But then you also saw it on another token, I forget. And you also saw it on like Story Protocol dropped 20%, 20% in like a minute.

I think that went back and then it ended up going back up.

It ended up going back up. But, um, I don't know, maybe people are coming more cautious with like, I don't know, there's not a, yeah, I don't know if there's much to say about it actually.

I think it was just people trying to find the next OM and then the reflexivity kicking in.

I think the analysis by that guy, what was his name?

Um, yeah, it was a good, I forget.

Yeah, it was good. I mean, I heard that there was someone got liquidated basically on OKEx that was borrowing against their own pretty heavily. It seems like based on the analysis, on the analysis this guy did, which I'll find his name.

It was like a big staker from like a year ago or something, right?

Yeah, it's TraderView2 on Twitter. His name is Dom. Like apparently it happened on— yeah, that, but also that it happened on Binance Perps first. And then OKX spot, basically. So I don't know, people are speculating that this person had like, was borrowing against a bunch of stuff on OKX and like slowly moved the good assets away and just left the OHM there and then like liquidated themselves. Yeah, on Binance, because like it's hard to take because it was like people, someone was slamming shorts on Binance. Like I think it was a million every every 5 seconds or something, he said in his post, which is pretty wild to do with that level of conviction if you didn't know that there was some position on the line. Problem is these centralized exchange lending things are completely opaque so that there's no way to know what's next. But I did look at some of the other tokens that are accepted as collateral for lending on OKX. I'm not going to mention them, but yeah, there's a few. Huh?

But they must have lost. So like, OKX must have got taken to the cleaners on that. So they're definitely going to be tightening up. Like, everyone freaks out, HLP lost $3 million. Like, OKX probably just got absolutely rinsed on that.

Yeah, I agree.

Um, these exchanges are cash cows. Like, I think, uh, the stat where it's like Bybit made a boatload of money on their short on ETH, like after all.

But they borrowed, but they, they borrowed ETH from counterparties just to like service withdrawals. I think, I don't think they actually like just sold it for USD or whatever. Like they never, I don't think they made money on their exploit and like borrowing the ETH after.

Well, no, they didn't make money on that, but they probably got off not as bad as it was going to be. That feels like not that long ago. Wasn't ETH like $2,600?

ETH was like $30. I swear ETH was just $30. I remember ETH was $0.33 on the ETH-Bitcoin ratio. I remember capitulating on most of what I had left of it. I was like, oh fuck, this is probably the bottom. That was only like a month ago.

Straight to zero.

Do you think, uh, ETH PTC hits, uh, 0.1 or 0.3 next?

Uh, 0.1, probably, unless sort of bounce potentially.

Yeah, without new info.

Yeah, I just feel like, do we think, like, literally it's so, like, if it's overvalued, it doesn't matter if it's consensus, but it is so insanely consensus that it's just like worthless.

Yeah, it's not as worthless. It's still the number 2 asset.

It's probably gonna be like a big $200 billion asset, right?

I know, still very expensive and it's priced at the margin, right? And so like, I just don't see there being a lot of bid for it.

I know, but I'm saying like potentially a squeeze. It just seems like everyone like just so bearishy.

Well, people definitely like— there's definitely a lot of people shorting it more.

Yeah, that's what I mean. Like, I feel like there could be like a bad squeeze at some point. Yeah, because so many people—

it's hard to squeeze.

It's sad because it's so big.

There's still like a lot of naked longs, right, via Athena. So it doesn't necessarily like—

I looked at Athena's breakdown. I looked at Athena's breakdown the other day. It's like 90% just the treasury backing now.

Oh yeah, it's funding rates in the fucking tube. Yeah.

All right, all right guys, is that it?

Chat, it's good.

Is there anything else? Let's see, markets are— they don't look terrible right now, you know. We'll see how it goes.

Yes, there's just like, uh, you know, closet BTC bidders Bro, it's literally, it's literally digital gold, guys. Yeah, Bitcoin looks good.

It's fucking happening. That's my hope, BM. I think it could be happening.

Yeah, I mean, it could be happening. That the decorrelation is completely possible.

Okay, fine. I think it is happening. I think it is happening. Recorrelate. I think it's going to break out versus stocks this year. New all-time high versus QQQ this year. Even if QQQ stays in like—

Well, we did a Delphi episode on the portal last week or something. We all thought that it hit a new high. We all thought that it would hit 150 this year.

Have you guys used Ostium?

No. Okay, but it's doing pretty well.

Oh, you have, Jan? Is it? How is it? Kind of, kind of cool. You can trade stocks.

Yeah, with leverage.

Woohoo, use cases, let's go!

I mean, if there's no leverage, it's not really crypto, right?

Alright, alright guys.

Yeah, thanks very much for tuning in and, uh, we'll see everyone in 2 weeks.

Thank you.

Thanks everyone. See ya.