Hivemind: Bitcoin's 2025 Momentum, AI Agent Platform Wars, and Liquid vs Private Markets

there's always going to be bid for, for memes and things like that, but I don't think it's going to be like that barbell portfolio in 2025 like it was in, in 2024. I think to what you— to the point you mentioned, like, I think there will be a bid to a lot of these more fundamental type of, type of coins, whether or not that's OG DeFi, whether or not that's like more new school type DeFi.

We get to kind of financialize every new cool thing that comes along. And so you always get to be at the forefront of that. Some people call that late-stage capitalism. I call it the best industry in the world.

The deeper you are in the space, the chances are the better off you'll be on the liquid side, just because you'll catch narratives early, right? If you're pretty passive, then I think this is a much easier pitch because you can actually get great access without having to put in the time that someone who would need to do this full-time.

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 is to provide an inside look into what we like to call the Delphi Hive Mind, bringing together some of our smartest minds from each of the divisions to share insights, alpha, and shitposts. Today with us we have, uh, the usual cast minus Duncan, who, um, is indisposed, I believe. So it's Ceteris Paribus, our head of institutional research. Jan Lieberman, managing partner of Delphi Ventures, and usual guest now, Jason, @3xliquidated on Twitter, who is— you head of markets at Delphi Research? What's your—

Yeah, I think that's roughly the title.

Nice. And obviously I'm Jose Macedo. I lead our protocol R&D arm, Delphi Labs, and split my time between that and ventures. So another good week for crypto. Well, as we're recording, there's just been a bit of a dump. I think Bitcoin's traded— trading around. So we're recording this on Wednesday, the 18th of December. I think Bitcoin's trading around $103K last I checked, and alts have taken a bit of a dive. Maybe to start with, how's everyone feeling about markets here?

I think that's a bit harsh to call this a dump. But yeah, I don't know, maybe we start with Jason on the markets.

Yeah, let's do it.

Um, I think I'm— I mean, I'm still very bullish markets. Um, I think probably people maybe de-risking into the FOMC later today, um, because those are, you know, generally pretty volatile, uh, events. I guess, like, you know, short-term trading events. But I don't know, I'm just, you know, still bullish. Like, I don't think anything's really changed in the macro outlook of things. I don't think anything's really changed in my outlook for, for crypto markets. I think we probably, you know, generally just grind higher through the end of the year. So I think, um, when I was looking last night, um I think we had like wiped a couple billion off Bitcoin OI, a couple more off like, you know, alts and global OI, maybe even more this morning. Um, funding's pretty low. I don't know, I just think things look, you know, pretty, pretty good generally. I think, uh, we maybe got a little bit ahead of our skis with the run-up to 108. We added a couple billion, so like we've pretty, pretty much wiped out all of the OI we've added this week. Into that run-up. So I don't know, quite, quite bullish still. I guess like if you're like super levered up, this, this move is probably uncomfortable, right? Like, I mean, I guess if you're uncomfortable on a 2% or 3% move in Bitcoin, that might be more of a commentary on your positioning than the market itself.

Still issue.

Yeah, you might have a problem. Yeah, right. Like if you're getting close to liquidation when Bitcoin's at $104,000 right now or $104,500 when we were at $108,000 yesterday, that's, that's a, that's a you problem. But yeah, generally I think the market looks good. Like I just, I, I think we just continue to grind higher. I think you probably get Saylor back in the books in the coming weeks. You have inauguration. Uh, midway through January, which, you know, I'm not exactly sure how that's going to play out. It might be kind of like the, like the, um, Bitcoin ETFs when those were like finally approved in January of last year, roughly around the same date as like maybe January 11th versus inauguration on January 20th, where you get like a run-up into that and then maybe like a week or two dump after it and then kind of a return to like, oh wait, this is actually really bullish. Type of thing. You could see end-of-year profit taking, but like, like I said, I'm just, I'm quite bullish on, on Bitcoin and crypto generally. I think the outlook is fairly constructive.

Yeah, I think on that point, inauguration thing, I think a lot of people have that thesis.

Yeah.

I also think that was the same thesis everybody had for the election, where it was like, you'll get this candle on the election and then it'll kind of sell off for a bit. Um, yeah, for me personally, it's— I don't know, I've kind of been in disbelief with this market since the election. I don't really have strong takes either way. Um, I don't know, it's like I— we, we talked about this in our group chat in 2021 when the Fed signaled they're going to start raising interest rates. You know, my opinion, I looked at that and I was like, okay, well, it can't be it can't be that easy. It can't be like they're just going to start increasing interest rates and they're just going to do it over a year and asset prices are going to puke because it was like too obvious of an outcome, right? It was too textbook, like too, um, you know, markets are forward-looking and everything, right? But then that's exactly what happened. Like the obvious case kind of just happened pretty systematically. Um, obviously in crypto you had more isolated events, but in like trad markets it was kind of just a steady grind down basically every day for like a year, right? And now I kind of feel like it's the opposite in a sense. Like, yeah, there's some dumb stuff going on, but it doesn't feel, you know, it doesn't feel too insane yet still, which I guess sounds weird considering like Farcoin's at a bill today or close to that. But I mean, hot air rises, so that kind of makes sense. I don't know, how do other people feel about the market?

Yeah, I mean, I think the consensus was there's like a— or going into December, there'd be a sell-off in December and then you get like Christmas rally. Inequities, um, and then, um, and then inauguration would be a sell the news. I think it's like hard to make those, uh, or hard to stick to those assumptions because it's also deterministic, right? Like, there needs to be a big rally for there to be a sell the news. So, um, as, as all of those things shift, it becomes, you know, what you kind of think is going to happen also shifts. Um, so why, why some of this stuff will play out. So on the, you know, you have Saylor that's been buying since, uh, I guess like late October, basically every week. Uh, and so, you know, the concern is what happens in Jan 1st because there's this blackout period.

Um, what is the blackout period? He can't buy?

Yeah, so there's a lot of like, uh, they're basically like, uh, around earnings announcements there's a, a period where you can't really— there's no activity, uh, that can kind of take place. And so, um, the question, it's usually related to selling stock, um, and he's been raising through convertible debt, so there's a lot of kind of confusion around, um, exactly how that plays out, the length of the period. And, and what that means for markets, uh, whether he will raise— if there's also, you know, you don't know what he's going to do in terms of how he raises money and deploys it, right? He could in theory raise it all ahead of time and then continue to deploy it throughout that period. Um, the blackout more so relates to the, the capital raising process, not the deployment side. So, um, I think that's also a driver of weakness. Um, it doesn't— I think you probably end up getting a very strong Q1 and probably first half of Q2, uh, just broadly in, in kind of equities and, and in crypto as well, um, where all the kind of euphoria around the policies is, is, uh, is factored in the markets. And then, um, naturally I think certain things, it won't all play out, right? Some of these policies take time to kind of take effect. And so you don't really realize the negatives until later on. So I don't think the inauguration ends up being that much of a sell-the-news event. He's continuously kind of talked about this, the reserve. And so it increases my chances of it happening very quickly, right? Because he obviously, doesn't want that to be a stain immediately. And he's got the House and Congress, even though he doesn't necessarily need them to even just get it started. So, right. So I guess going back to the blackout period, the concern is if you don't have Saylor buying, what happens to Bitcoin? What happens to the rest of the market? Do you get alt season? That's one kind of idea. Or do you get like a broader pullback? And I think that's kind of the two paths this takes. I think the least likely is like a strong Bitcoin rally in Jan if he can't deploy. Um, but if he somehow raises and, and chooses to deploy gradually over time, then, then that's certainly different. It seems like he's taken his foot off the, the gas a little bit. I mean, you had the massive ETF inflow yesterday while BTC was down, which was pretty unusual to see. Um, and then if you kind of Jason and I were chatting, if you look at kind of, you know, that relative to the perps premium on like Binance, for example, which has gone from premium to flat, you know, you could— there could be an argument that you're having, you know, ETF flows continue while traders are kind of de-risking a little bit. And, and, um, and so that's how you'd have that environment where ETFs still have inflow because that's where the buying happens. And then the, the APs are participating and then the selling happens elsewhere. But, um, my base case is, is you get— as we're going to get an alt season in Q1, I think there's going to be funds that, uh, are deploying. I think new money comes in. You know, if you think about the peer— like new money comes in monthly, quarterly, and annually, and in an increasing fashion, right? You're getting your largest amounts usually at the beginning of the year. And so I think you'll have funds deploying into alts in the— to start off Q1. And then, you know, the counter is that people who are holding will likely sell, like retail will likely sell in Q1 if they're up big because you're kicking back your you're deferring tax liability for another year, whereas you usually have funds sell in December, which I think we saw a lot of in the first half of December. A lot of funds sold because they need to kind of crystallize, uh, carry and then also sell losers to lock in some, um, tax loss harvesting. And so I think that's the kind of dichotomy. I don't know that there's going to be that much retail selling in Q1 that it's going to be a monster kind of, you know, dampening effect, have a monster dampening effect on markets. I still think we kick off the year and alts do well.

Yeah. Do you guys think we can get above like $150 without Strategic Reserve?

Nah.

Yeah.

Not soon. Maybe eventually, but I think The difficulty is that part of the current price already factors in the, the, the, the, the effective one.

Yeah. It seems like the latest—

oh, sorry, go ahead, Cedars.

No, I was just going to say, like, this is the one thing where I'm not as on board with some of these bullish predictions of like $180,000, $200,000+ next year. Because I think if you don't get the reserve, it like takes a lot of money to move. Like Bitcoin's over $2 trillion now, right? Like that's a lot of money to move it to those kind of numbers. Um, and if it's just like Sailor, and then, you know, obviously the average person is whatever increasing. Once you get the RA starting to like incorporate it and being able to pitch it, you'll get like— that will help as well. But it's still just a lot. It's just like a lot of money. And so I do actually agree with the whole like alt season Q1 thing. Um, just because Bitcoin has run so much. This is with the caveat that you do get like the surprise strategic reserve starts like right away, and then At that point, all bets are kind of off.

Um, what, what's the latest on the strategic reserve? Has anyone been like catching up? Because some people seem to say it's like impossible, not gonna happen. Um, and then, and then others seem pretty confident that it can happen. Does anyone have some like good research takes on this?

I definitely don't have like a, like an alpha take on this. I was listening to Nick Carter's interview uh, yesterday, and he seems pretty confident that it won't happen, um, at least not in the short term, which I think like that's, it's probably the biggest risk for Bitcoin is it like doesn't happen and it's like announced that it doesn't happen. Like if it doesn't happen but like everybody's still speculating that it will happen and Trump keeps talking it up, right? Like It's not, not ideal, but like, it, it doesn't take it off the table entirely. Whereas like, if, if they come out and say, okay, wait, actually we're not doing this, that would, um, be pretty bad. I think his reasoning was like, it calls into question like the, uh, like the reserve status of the dollar, which I'm— I, I kind of see the argument, but I also like see like the opposite side to the argument. Like, I, I see a world where it like kind of— it's like, oh wait, like they're actually like thinking about how— like, because like that argument, like, till— like, uh, I guess would take the view that, that like, that the reserve status of the dollar and like the financial situation of the US isn't already being called into question, which like it obviously is. Um, so I think like the perception of, of doing something like this probably, probably is better than, than not because it, it's kind of like the whole reason why, like, I think, um, like, like Trump coming in and, and all of these, you know, conversations around the U.S. financial situation and how they are trying to tackle it through various ways with, like, you know, Department of Government Efficiency, like DOGE, um, different things like that. I think, like, the market, like To set us this earlier point is forward-looking and kind of like gives, gives the incoming administration credit for even, you know, discussing these things in like a, a viable way and trying to think of, you know, like ways to, to get the situation like more sustainable. So I think kind of like doing this like probably falls into that bucket more than not. So like, yeah, I don't, I don't have any super alpha here. It just seems very, very clear to me, at least. Like, I remember back in Trump's first term in 2016, like, he, he would tweet about the stock market like all the time, like intraday. He would move markets with tweets and it was like super frustrating at the time because I was like day trading equities and stuff pretty frequently. And like, I would just like my positions would either just like get completely blown out by a Trump tweet or the reverse, like just like go straight up to the moon based on like what he said, like, oh, China trade war or something like that. So like the fact that he's like talking about it so much and seems to be quite like— he seems to be like, you know, taking credit obviously for, for a lot of market-related movements. So like I just don't see a world where he backs off easily from this. So I think it's more likely than not that we get progress towards the SBR in Q1 than not, which I think probably pushes Bitcoin towards that $150K area, which he like specifically pointed out. He's like, I want Bitcoin at $150 sooner rather than later. And like, that's just not something I would like want to fade because like he could get Bitcoin to $150 just via tweeting, not even with like an SBR.

Yeah, I think like that the, the market impact of an SBR, particularly because of how many others would likely immediately follow suit, is, is very, uh, I underappreciated.

Yeah. And just the front running, because I don't know, how does it work? You like announce it and then you— and then there's like a whole process where you have to go buy it, or you'd announce once you bought it.

Yeah.

Why don't you swap?

What's the opposite?

At the point where it's like announced and it gets— starts— it slowly gets priced in, like, just seems like everyone in the world would want to front run that, right? I don't know, it just seems crazy to me that this could even—

yeah, you have the You have the United States of America running a public TWAP. Yeah, it's hard to see. It's hard to see. Like, I don't know, why would you sell, right? It doesn't mean you don't get a big— you don't get another big 50% drawdown at some point. But it's like, why would you sell during this TWAP, right? I guess it's a good time to sell if like you really need the money. There's a lot of liquidity entering the market you can sell into. But like, Yeah, I don't know, it's kind of crazy.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think if you have a— if you have that thing going, I don't— you'd need some cataclysmic event to get a 50% drawdown in BTC if that— if that TWAP is running, because—

yeah, yeah. All right, do you want to move to the— so research side, you guys have just released your, your year ahead reports, uh, which were awesome, by the way. I recommend everyone Everyone checks them out. Um, do we want to maybe touch on a few of the key, key takeaways there? Uh, there's a few of the interesting, interesting themes from both the markets and the info report and the gaming one, but I think markets and infra had— we're pretty alpha-packed.

Gaming, I mean, to be totally honest, is just not an area that I'm like very well versed in, uh, but the gaming report is very well done, uh, if you are into gaming. You can get all the reports just like QuickShow, I think like $199 or something. Um, it's like try them out. We have, so we did gaming a couple of weeks ago. Last week we did markets and then infra. We did DeFi yesterday and then we're finishing it off with like the hot sector, the, uh, we're doing like a DePIN and DEAI one. So that'll be coming out Thursday, which is when this podcast I think will be coming out. So yeah, I think the markets and infra ones, Um, like both of them were bullish on Solana, uh, especially like the markets report, right? The info one was more about, um, I guess like the section I wrote was about like high throughput chains and that being where the industry is kind of heading. And that kind of is an extension of Solana's success, right? So for me, it's like, there's just been very there just haven't been a lot of like use cases of app chains or just like, you know, standard, I guess, like EVM chains, like Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid's an app chain. Yeah. Like PerpsChain, like Perps is the one use case. Like every, every single time somebody shills me on like app chains are successful, it's always a Perps DEX.

It's also pretty much the one use case of crypto though. Or like one of them, just a DEX.

Right, right. But I mean, for the most part, people want to use like a general purpose shared state with like nice UX, high throughput, right? So Solana kind of, that was their thesis. And over the past couple of years, that's been like proven very right. I think one thing people kind of neglect or ignore with Solana is sometimes they'll, you know, they'll come up with this, this whole, it's all meme coin trading stuff. But, and they'll make the comparisons to like, you know, BSC or Polygon or Fantom from last cycle when ETH got very congested and people moved there. But it really misses the point that like Solana got all this activity when the ETH gas prices were like 1 and 2 kuai, like it was very cheap, right? Like people didn't go to Solana just because it was cheap. They went for like a bunch of other reasons to do with like UX performance, all of that, right? So I really think that this is the direction the industry is heading in. And so you're seeing tons of like new chains launched in this direction from the EVM side. You have obviously like Hyperliquid is aiming right today. They're this perp DEX. They're trying to transition to like this high throughput EVM chain. You have Monad, you have some of these rollups like MegaETH, which is just, you know, going extreme on the hardware and like bandwidth requirements. Just to create like a performant EVM. You have Ithaca, which is by the Paradigm guys. You have Rise, which is like this gigagas thing. Base keeps increasing their gas every day. So you just have like all these chains going there. Obviously you have the Move ones like Sui and Aptos too, right? So for me, it's just like a clear trend that this is where the industry wants to go to. At the same time, I still believe in the long run the majority of activity is going to be like 3 to 5 chains and like there's just going to be an absolute graveyard of a lot of these chains over the next few years. And you're also kind of seeing it with like the L2s now where if you look at, if you look at DEX volume on L2s, like 90% of it is Arbitrum and Base, right? And so you've seen kind of this like mass consolidation in the L2 world to Base and Arbitrum. Um, and it's like just, I guess, like the standard theme we've been talking about over the past year with like token prices and stuff too is like consolidation just continues to kind of like drive, um, everything here. And I definitely still believe that like it's power laws that are going to kind of take all this.

Um, everything is going to be a high throughput chain, but I do still think there's definitely a world for appchains. And so I just think appchains will be high throughput, just like everything else will be. So you mentioned Anisha in your, in the report as well, which is kind of a thesis.

Yeah, there's Anisha and then there's also these ZKL ones. And so Anisha is going to be the first one coming next year, I'm assuming pretty soon. And so they're building with like, like the thing with the appchains is that no one's really built with like appchains first. Cosmos kind of did, but not really. It wasn't too coordinated. Anisha is coming with this very coordinated launch.

I think the main thing with Cosmos is that the idea was that the thing you need to prioritize for appchains is giving them security, right? Whereas I think what Anisha is prioritizing is UX. It's like, how do you give appchains the UX you need to just be able to spin them up and have everything you need, wallets, stablecoins, you know, like interoperability, access from, easy access from other chains, like all this kind of thing, bridges.

Yeah. So do you think Initial will be the first, like, actual well-coordinated attempt at this kind of like that we've seen? And then you also have some of these EKL ones like Delta, Hail, Pod, who is probably the endgame. For like AppChain modularity thesis.

Uh, yeah, would you agree though that the main reason for like shared state right now is just UX? Like there is actually very little sort of functional shared state, you know, in terms of— I don't know, all the stuff that people used to say like rehypothecation and, and like, you know, all the things people used to say why composability was important have kind of not been proven out. Like most people just use Jupyter or they just use whatever app, or would you not agree with that?

I don't know if it's like just UX. There's also, there's just like a lot more risk also when you're doing stuff with like two different state machines. There's like latency between those, which could like, I guess, theoretically be solved with like some of these ZK ones. Um, it's just like you're not going to be able to create a better experience breaking everything up than having it all one place. If, as long as it's like scalable, like you're always going to be a little bit worse off even with like ZK. Like ZK can't speed up native execution or consensus or anything. It just proves it, right? So you're never going to like, there's this tweet I put in the report from Zacky. He was saying like the black pill for ZK is if it's just used for transferring USDC between giant shared state machines, right? That's like a potential outcome where you get like 3 big like Solana-type state machines that can handle all this activity. And then you don't really need ZK because you don't need to do like proving for all these different chains and rolling them all up together, right?

I mean, I think the experience isn't— is definitely less easy to make the experience good between two different state machines. But within a state machine, the experience should be able to be better than on a general purpose chain. So the experience on Hyperliquid should be able to be better than the experience on Drift or whatever, right? But to get to Hyperliquid, Solana is always going to be harder.

Yeah. The benefit of like launching your app on Solana though is you have all this liquidity, which is also why I think the SVM rollups will have struggled and like will struggle because since Solana is always scaling the L1 as an app developer, if you're going to build SVM, it's like, why would I launch on a different—

But like, I think Hyperliquid kind of shows that it is a UX issue. Like with Arbitrum, they pulled so much liquidity from Arbitrum. And I think most people didn't even know that they were moving from Arbitrum because the bridge worked so smoothly that they were literally going to like a semi-custodial service.

Right.

It's just that the bridge experiences right now are terrible. I don't know. I think like, I guess my thesis is a lot of—

Yeah, it's a PerpDEX though. It's like, it makes sense. A PerpDEX, all you need is one collateral asset and like, you don't need anything else. And so it makes sense for that. I'm interested to see how they do when they have like the HyperEVM. Because it's like a separate component that needs to talk to the, like, native, the, like, Rust components. So then I guess we'll really see there. But yeah, fair.

What about Jason? You guys did the markets report. And by the way, you've— when Jason joined Delphi, you were known as the Bear King. Right? You were, you were—

Duncan actually gave me that nickname, who is now himself the Bear King.

Um, yeah, you were known as the Bear King, you, and you were, you were bearish all through like 2022, pretty much until very close to the bottom. And then to your credit, you flipped, you flipped bullish. Um, so like the Markets coverage has been, has been, for people who've been following it, have done really well off it. So I'm curious, what do you see for for, for 2025?

Yeah, so kind of like Ceteris was saying earlier, um, you know, last— I guess at the end of last cycle, like, it was relatively, um, like, relatively clear that, like, you know, the cycle was probably coming to an end. You saw, like, inflation ticking up, but the Fed was pretty slow to do anything about it. If you guys, like, remember, they were, like, talking about, like, transitory, transitory, transitory for, like, a while. And then eventually, like, I think most people probably realized that, like, it wasn't transitory before the Fed— or before the Fed admitted it. Um, so then, like, it was— it wasn't, like, a question of, like, if they would raise rates. It would be, like, how much would they raise interest rates? And, like, I think that caught most people off guard. Like, I didn't expect them to, to go from 0 to 500 basis points in, in a year or whatever, um, which absolutely, you know, destroyed everything, right? Not just crypto. Like, you the banking, the banking sector, the banking crisis in, in early 2023 was a direct result of, of how, how much and how quickly they moved interest rates up as a result of being behind the ball there, right? So I think like now you kind of get like the flip side of that, which is why like I'm just generally like bullish heading into 2025, even though like, you know, 2024 was, was pretty bullish as well, right? You had 2024 where you had like the early signs of like liquidity getting better, but like it's still like a relatively tight like monetary regime for the most part. The difference is we like had some pretty big crypto catalysts coming in, right? We had Bitcoin ETFs, which were massive, right? Obviously 2024 was like the big dichotomy. It's like, okay, Bitcoin did really well. SOL and SOL memes did well, and then everything else kind of sucked for the most part. Um, and I think a lot— like, a large part of that is obviously like Bitcoin had the ETFs, um, which were great, right? All of that demand, billions and billions of dollars. The, you know, number one performing ETF for the last, like, I don't know, 10 or 20 years with like, uh, Bitcoin ETFs like IBIT, all these things in terms of flows. All that stuff was really great. Tens of billions of dollars demand. Bitcoin went up a lot. From like, I don't know, I think it was like 40-ish to, to 70 or so, and then consolidated for most of the year. I think like, you know, April to the election for the most part, and then kind of started legging up again. Uh, so you had SOL do really well, which then allowed everything with InSOL to do well, right? Everybody who was in SOL did well. They got a 10x or whatever from the lows, like 20 to 200 or so. That money trickled down into SOL memes, NFTs for a little bit, projects like Jupiter, whatever, all these things, right? You had a good airdrop, a couple good airdrops with Jito. So you had like that pretty big wealth effect. So that's why you had like that, like split in like performance, Bitcoin, SOL, SOL memes, and then everything in the middle kind of just not great. And now I think with interest rates, you know, starting to be cut in September, and I think we have maybe like 4 to 5 scheduled or like predicted rate cuts over the next 12 months, even more if you like extend that outlook to like 18 or 24 months. You have the FOMC today. Yeah, today's the 18th. Yeah, today, um, which I think like the FOMC like Fed tracker tool or whatever has like a 99% chance of another 25 basis point rate cut today. So you have that coming in. Plus a couple more in the next several months. Uh, you have a new regulatory regime coming in, so you go from like an actively hostile regime and administration that effectively tried to kill crypto with like the Operation Chokepoint stuff last year and the year before, in addition to like the SEC just being really terrible and enforcing by litigation rather than goodwill enforcement and good faith discussions about like what's allowed and what's not. So when you have like these two things happening, it kind of like—

in my—

on top of this, you have like a bunch of global central banks moving from tightening to easing policy. So like you have like a pretty good storm of macro catalysts and like industry-specific catalysts that are kind of coalescing all at like the same time. Um, which I think generally bodes well for the industry. So like, I think you— like, absent some, some, you know, catastrophic events or macro-related things in, in the upcoming year, I think it generally is a very constructive outlook. Obviously there are some risk factors, and we, we do discuss some of these, uh, in more detail in the report at the bottom. I think it's like potential risks to the outlook is like the section. So if you just go there and click that or whatever, or listen to the podcast that we recorded based on the year ahead. We, we kind of discussed those. But yeah, I think the outlook's just generally good from a macro down to a more micro view. Um, interest rates coming down, so I think you can kind of like— my, my, my general methodology is just like keep it simple stupid. Like there's a ton of things you could get, you know, lost in the weeds with, with these types of macro outlooks. And I think it's just like, okay, like global liquidity is kind of moving towards easing. You have a bunch of, a bunch of central banks moving in that direction, so that's good. Interest rates are coming down after being held at 4 to 5% for a while, uh, that's good. You have ETFs, you know, that have been, uh, a like resounding success, which lends even more credibility to the industry, specifically Bitcoin. And now you see the ETH ETFs getting— I think it was like 12 or 15, maybe 18 days. I saw a tweet of consecutive inflows, which is fantastic, especially compared to when they launched several months ago where they got zero flows or negative flows, which was pretty terrible. And it was like a running joke for a while. Um, and then you have the regulatory regime changing to one that like is— they're promising to be good, right? Like whether or not these campaign promises are kept is still up for debate. But if you look at the early, you know, the early signs and, and signs of where they're going, the, the appointments they're making, the, the rhetoric coming out of the incoming administration. It seems like they are trying to make good on these campaign promises of, of regulating in a much more good faith way. So like, you have all of these things, it's just very hard to be bearish at a high level, right? And like, what does that mean for like specific assets?

Well, like, well, you actually talk about that a bit in the report, right, with the memes versus Yeah, because, and you've been, you've been, you were very early to memes. You've been, you've done well on them. But in the report, you talk about how this, the return to positivity and like TradFi coming in might mean, and it has meant in fact, like a bid for utility assets and things they understand with cash flows, like the traditional DeFi stuff.

Yeah.

Do you see that continue? Is that going to take the sales out of like the meme supercycle thesis?

Yeah, I think to an extent. Yeah, I think so. Like, I don't, I don't think I don't think memes are going to go away by any means. Like, I think every— like, everybody in crypto loves memes. Like, I think, like, you just look at some of the things that have run in the last couple weeks, or like, like Fart Coin, right? Like, zero to a billion dollars in the last couple weeks. I know it's like an AI type narrative meme, but like, there's always going to be bid for, for memes and things like that. I think the memes that are, you know, I, I, I've called them mega memes at this point, the ones that have like tier one Listings that, you know, do billions of dollars of trading volume a day, have tons of liquidity. Like, I don't think these are going to go away, and I think they'll generally do well as crypto does well. Um, but I don't think it's going to be like that barbell portfolio in 2025 like it was in, in 2024. I think, to, to what you— to the point you mentioned, like, I think there will be a bid to a lot of these more fundamental type of, type of coins, whether or not that's OG DeFi, whether or not that's like more new school type DeFi, um, whether or not it's things like Athena with like, I think I just got a tweet from a tweet notification pop-up that said they have a partnership with like WorldFi Liberty now. So like, there's—

yeah, so like, that's an important point though, because two of the, the two best performing DeFi tokens are AAVE and Athena, and they're both also kind of memes because they're like Trump is like working with them and buying like Barons aping ENA on-chain, right? And like, I don't know, it's— I don't think this DeFi rally is going to be broad-based. I don't think people are going to get eager to go ape like Synthetix or I don't know, man. There's a bunch of like DeFi. There's a liquidity actually looks— liquidity is kind of interesting, but like Maker, for instance, it's like Maker's done great like recently, right? Yeah. Which is partly because of Athena too, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Well, it's also just, if you think about like, where's the majority of fresh money coming from? It's likely funds. And so, you know, it's a lot easier for them to size into narratives they can rationalize both to themselves and to investors if things go south. Um, and so I, I do think there's gonna be some concentration in, in those winners. And I think, yeah, like, that's gonna be good for Hype. It'll be good for, uh, Ina, uh, likely Aave as well. Um, and then, yeah, you have the, the kind of sprinkling of, of Trump endorsement indirectly. And, um, it's, uh, yeah, you, you really see like this, this Even though we're in a PvE environment, there is still this kind of PvP hot ball of money that goes around. You know, you saw the winds kind of taken out of SOL for— I think SOL got hit from every direction, right? You have the unlock issues, you have hype cannibalizing flow, you have pump fun kind of volumes getting cut in half. Because there's been a shift to kind of agentic memes. And so I think all of those have, have, um, probably a good setup for SOL into, into Q1 as well. But, um, uh, it, it shows that, you know, if, if you're thinking about where to invest, like, it's not everything go up. And so if you're on the fun side, it's a lot easier to kind of rationalize those bets.

And, um, yeah, I think the, the SOL weakness has like made perfect sense over the last little while.

I still think that the, the agent sector and like not necessarily the agents themselves, but maybe we can talk about that actually, because you guys had a good discussion in our internal company chat, like you and, you and Jason Yanowitz just about, and I think it really highlighted like the different trading styles that people have. Where obviously you were, you were very, maybe not very bullish, but pretty bullish that AI-Agent Meta, GOAT, Virtuals, etc. And Jason was more, he's a dog coin or an animal coin maxi. Maybe you want to talk about that a bit, like why, I guess maybe why you see the AI-Agent Meta as super interesting and then why you haven't been convinced, Jason, from, for more, I guess, like technical reasons.

Well, I think I kind of explained this a bit on the last pod, and a big reason was honestly not a good one. It's just that it's pretty obvious that a lot of money is going to go into to this, uh, and like the valuations are pretty low. Uh, and a lot of that has to do with everything being kind of like on-chain, right? Um, you know, the big winner so far, my friend, these platforms and these frameworks, it hasn't really been individual agents themselves. Um, you know, you haven't really had an individual agent go to a crazy market cap, but you've had virtuals go from like $100 mil to $3 bil. You've had AI-16Z go from zero to close to a bill. You've had some of these other ones, like, I forget what they're called, like Arc or something, but you have a lot of these platform plays that actually have like fundamentals and people are just wanting to, you're just going to see a lot of people launching agents from these either, whether it's like just to be, I don't know, KOL shit posters. There's some game frameworks that Uh, you know, Virtuals has that you can kind of like work into video games and stuff. I think there's just going to be a ton of experimentation within this sector. And then where you look for that is like, what are people going to be using to experiment in this sector? And it's going to be the platforms that make it easiest to kind of do this, right? And the frameworks that make it easy to launch an agent, right? I don't think. At the beginning, like when GOAT came out, yeah, I was very bullish on GOAT, um, just because, just because it was like I just could tell this was going to lead to something big, you know. And it was the only way to kind of express that opinion at that time. And but I think now I'm like very— I still, I still own GOAT, um, but I'm like definitely not as bullish on it. And I'm also just not as bullish as on trying to pick out like individual agents. Because I don't know, it's still hard to wrap your head around like why an agent itself should be worth a lot versus the platform is just such an easier kind of like fundamental story.

Yeah, I think it's similar to the L1 trades back in the day where you're oftentimes better off trying to just get more exposure to the L1 than trying to trade all the different assets on it. And so this is similar, and I think even more so the case where, you know, back then those were tokens you can kind of rationalize because they had, you know, they were DeFi, so they had some type of cash flow or some kind of proxy on other chains. Whereas with these agents, like you said, it's hard to identify which is going to catch on and why. And I think, you know, you've had some that appear to be darlings and then have fallen off, kind of like, you know, Bully and some others. And so it becomes a lot harder to build conviction in those, whereas you can basically play the long tail through the, through the L1, and, and then those rather through the platform, and then they, they meme into an L1.

I mean, if you look at some of these trending GitHub, uh, repos, it's kind of crazy, uh, like Eliza The Eliza framework is still like top of the charts. It's totally blown past like comparing it to stuff like Tao, like a bunch of things. It's just, it's just wild to see these. And this, this looks like the area everyone's trying to like look into now is like the frameworks and like how the frameworks can monetize, right? If you create this easy way to— and actually, and also like the developers of the frameworks themselves, you've seen some other protocols come out that allow you to like launch agents under all these different frameworks and they haven't actually actually done as well token-wise versus the actual like creators of the, of the framework. And so I know there's like Eliza, you have Zero Bros has his, you have this, I think this, it's like called Arc or something. I'm not totally up to speed on it, but yeah, all these frameworks.

And there's more popping up.

Jason, give us, give us the, give us the bear, give us the bear case.

Uh, I think I actually kind of agree with a lot, a lot of what Satoru just said. Um, So when Goat came out, this was more of a discussion initially when Goat came out, right? Everybody's like, oh, this is like AI, fuck, agent, sentient meme, cool thing, whatever, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, no, it's literally just a meme, right? Um, at the time there was no virtuals, or if there was, like, nobody knew about it, nobody was talking about it, token wasn't doing anything, blah, blah, blah. Um, So like my, my thesis around like, okay, so like this is actually, I completely agree with what Jan and Cetera said about the platforms, right? Like Duncan's like pick and shovels type of investing thing strategy here, I think works extremely well. I think it makes total sense to, to buy the platforms because they will generally do well. And it's not clear which agents will do well. I think the agents that end up doing really well probably don't exist yet because based on what I see, the current crop of agents just are mostly memes. And that was like the way I looked at it, right? Like, like the, the early agents, early agent meta to me represented kind of like a more like mid-curve meme exposure type play simply because like, okay, it's like in this new narrative bucket, which is good. Like a very, you know, a very hot narrative. AI, yeah, a ton of, ton of exposure, ton of money is going to come in. It gets maybe people who aren't in crypto to be more interested in crypto because you now have like agents and tokens and things like that. You saw like people like Marc Andreessen, you know, start talking about these things more publicly. You have all that, great. But it's still like, like to me, like it was always To me, it was like, okay, the people, like the, the main buyers of things like GOAT were people who probably in crypto who didn't really want to or couldn't or just like couldn't really come to terms with just like buying straight animal coins, memes, stuff like that. Right. So like, they're like, okay, this is dumb. Dogs will probably go up, but like, I'm not putting my PA into this. Screw that. And now you have GOAT come out, which is like still a meme. It's not an agent, it's a meme. Um, and I'll die on this hill. Uh, but it was connected to like an overall strong narrative that was in its early infancy. So it's like all these people who didn't want to buy straight up memes, zoo coins, martyr fi coins, whatever you want to call them, right? They're like, oh, I can buy this because this is good exposure to this new narrative. And it did well initially, like really well, right? It went from like couple mil to almost a bill on the initial run-up. And a lot of people did extremely, extremely well. But then as soon as like you had actual AI things come out, like virtuals or things on, on like Clanker or whatever, right? All these like actual things. I think it just like totally killed the AI meme type. Meta, because all of those same people were like, oh wait, I don't need AI exposure through a goat meme, which also I don't think has like super mass appeal for like normies, right? Like, I've asked— it's a little experiment I've done IRL with a bunch of people who don't know crypto. I like showed them all like the top 20 memes by market cap a couple weeks ago. I was like, pick your 5 favorite. I didn't give them any real context to any of them. Just like, pick your 5 favorite. None of them picked Goat. All of them picked the animal. So I was like, okay, like, you got to show them the lore.

That's why you got to show them the lore, man.

They don't care about—

but see, that's the beauty with Fart Coin. And like, I'm actually very mad that I missed out to get the Fart Coin because it's the perfect AI but then appeals to everybody.

Right curve, left curve.

Most people don't realize that it's— it actually has a bit of an interesting story behind it. And it's not just like someone made Fartcoin. And so, but that's how you kind of get the best of both worlds. And also it's funny because Truth Terminal owns like 20x the amount of Fartcoin as GOAT in dollar terms. And so like the GOAT devs were kind of greedy and not giving Truth Terminal a lot, whereas the Fartcoin devs were very generous. And that's also like kind of a, I mean, it's significantly flipped GOAT now. It's like 30%. I don't know, I'm looking at it now. It's like 87 versus 65. Like, that's a pretty big gap, right? Um, so yeah, I know, I agree with your point though, that like AI memes— the AI memes now are the agents.

That's exactly it, right? The agents are the memes. When there's an agent that actually does something sick, like really cool, I will be the first person to buy it. Like, There's an, like, if there's an agent that goes around and like hacks protocols as like a white hat or something like that, like, yeah, hell yeah, I would buy that.

Or like, there actually was, there was one that did that. They found a bug in Virtuals, but they only gave the agent like $10K.

Well, the problem is like that.

Yeah.

It's when you start adding fundamental value to something like that and realize like white hat pays nothing, uh, that, that realistically this, this thing doesn't really make sense.

Um, the thing on the, on the platform is though, I would even do it. I would, I would ape more into a black hat agent. But like, as long as it's—

it like does something really sick, like, like it just redistributes like a Robinhood agent, robs protocols and returns the token holders.

Like, as long as it does something that's just not like a ChatGPT Twitter type, just like reply guy or tweets, like, that's like—

it was cool.

That, that thing is— I mean, is Yeah, it basically creates content. It's, it's like a, it's Do Kween. It's like a female reincarnation of, of Do Kwon, but the, the lore and the videos are like Hollywood AAA quality. And it, it kind of, yeah, it, it involves all of CT characters. It, it like shows its origin story and how all of this was happening for a reason, all for the greater good to like create Do Kween and how a feminine form of, of of Do Kwan is actually superior.

No, I'll have to actually go watch these videos.

He goes like, yeah, choosing the vessel, right? It's like, you want, you want an e-girl for Max Apio?

There's one of them where he goes through basically new vessels.

So he tries—

so he starts with Vitalik, then he's like, no, SPF doesn't work, that it's CZ. He kills Adam Cochran. There's—

yeah, it's a bunch of nerdy, right? SPF's too greedy.

And like, um, CZ's too much of a dictator.

Yeah, too much of an efficient dictator.

It's so good. Um, but yeah, I mean, like, because at the end it's all kind of— you're betting the same way you're betting on mindshare for regular memes. This is a bet on mindshare, uh, for this. And so it's like you either lean into some form of fundamental value or you lean into purely attention-based memes. And so I think that'll do well. But like on the platform side, it's interesting where you see you know, like you mentioned, uh, like the AI-16Z stuff, the framework that GitHub is blowing up, but the token's underperforming virtuales. I think, you know, there's other, other elements that kind of come into play. One being, um, the role of the token and the fact that it kind of exists as this cross pair. I think that's a huge sort of like driver of reflexivity on the platform and kind of keeps everyone needing to hold some of the underlying assets to participate. Um, and then, uh, I think kind of the distribution and the ease of use of the platform, um, because there— I certainly think there's a world where like the platforms can hit some insane valuations as comparable alt-L1 plays once these agents become more useful, because there's also like network effects to the agents themselves as they interact with each other. And so you do have kind of, you know, like Metcalfe's Law type effects on these in the same way you have them on L1s. And so, yeah, I think there's going to be like a pretty large consistent bid for these platforms as long as there are new agents being spun up and existing ones continue to improve.

There's also the potential like airdrop, a little extra bonus yield on top of this whole thing too. Like I did. I got one the other day and it's like, I don't know, it's like over $1,000. It's like kind of nice. And on virtuals you can just see. Yeah. And I don't know if it's because I own like virtuals or game, but you can definitely see that little like there's also just that small bonus. I would never buy something for like an airdrop narrative. Like when everybody's buying TIA for like expecting airdrops last year, I was like, no way. But if it's like a nice little add-on thing that like is a part of the whole cohesive thesis, it's just kind of like a nice little bonus.

What are you most excited about for these, for these agents or these platforms? Like what's the next, the next big development here that you, that you want to see with them that you're like excited about?

Value accrual. Yeah.

I think on, on Virtue's side, they'll start turning that on. Like, I think GAME is my biggest bag in that ecosystem. And it's kind of like a beta to virtuals where you get to play the same long tail, but at a much lower market cap with good liquidity. So I think value cap will be a big one.

Yeah. What do I want to see? Well, we're kind of in like the KOL agent era. Which was, which was kind of interesting for a while. It's gone kind of annoying, to be completely honest, having these AI agents reply-guying me. Um, and you know, people— I own AIXPT. I see a lot of people really like it. It's not perfect. Like, there's a lot of kind of like garbage that it tweets out and stuff. It's, it's like a decent news summary kind of You know, it's like we do Delphi Reads. It's maybe a different version of that where you can get caught up on things that are happening. I don't think it has any real, like, predictive, uh, power. If you look at some of the stuff it tweets, it's like 15 minutes after some threader just did, like, some big thread on it, right? And it's kind of regurgitating it. So yeah, I mean, seeing agents handle— I would never expect an agent to like actually outperform on the investing side, but seeing an agent handle tasks for people, right? If you had your own personal agent and you can just DM it and be like, hey, send, uh, I need to send like stables here, or do this for me, that for me.

And there, I think agents will outperform on the investment side too, honestly. Um, definitely depending who you, who you think they're gonna outperform, but like definitely the average definitely the average person, they could outperform. Like, I have a few— we have a team that we invested in that are building, uh, like copy trading bots now. I don't think I can really mention the name, but, um, and they've spun up some, some like copy trading strategies. We're just looking at wallets on, on SOL and Base that were early to things, and then basically, uh, like doing a bunch of stuff to avoid getting rugged and like, you know, building a bunch of things on top I think something like that as an agent, which is actually what they're thinking of, how they're thinking of releasing this, is going to significantly outperform. Even on the venture side, as we've built this stealth AI bot with Tom, kind of made me realize how good— I don't think it'll make decisions by itself, and this is kind of my thesis for AI generally. I think humans will always be the ultimate pacemakers that make decisions, but they could do a lot of stuff. Like they can, they can ask like questions to the founders, come up with really good investment committee documents. And I think eventually as, as you start, um, like training them on your own decisions, I think they could make like their own decisions and do pretty damn well. Uh, I think venture is harder than the, than the liquid market stuff, but I think on the liquid side they could definitely do, do really well.

Honestly, I think in very narrow focuses, right? Like on the early listing stuff, I think the tricky part there is you get alpha decay pretty quickly. It doesn't scale to a lot of liquidity just by nature of what the size of the market you're deploying into is. Where I think those can scale, because the idea is, you know, you have these agents that you build that can effectively, in one way or another, be a vault. So you deposit to an agent, it trades for you, the agent takes some fee, and the creator of the agent monetizes it that way. So if you're the creator of an agent that, that does really early stage stuff, then your alpha is best captured by you doing it yourself because you, you realistically can't support a lot of capital doing that strategy. If you're, if there's like some, you know, agents on really large scale assets that I think can be more scalable, but then you're just kind of competing with algo trading firms and a bunch of other stuff. But yeah, it's— I think the tricky part is you're still going to have to have human intervention, like you mentioned, for a while. So these like completely individual agents that execute completely on their own is tricky because just like hallucinations and stuff like that.

Yeah. I don't know. I think the bar is like lower than you. Than you think. And I agree, there's like hallucinations and stuff, but like Almanac has shown some pretty, some pretty sick results with some of their agents. And then I think like people are gonna— like there's gonna be a lot of money in, in, in figuring this out.

I just—

the issue is like, like you said, once you have fundamentals, the valuations stop making sense pretty quickly. Um, and so it's like, if you're, if your bot's doing really well, why would you why would you like do a token for it rather than just keep the gains? Because the token probably isn't going to trade at a massive premium to, to cash flows.

Um, yeah, that's what I've always thought with like trading type AI or agents or whatever. Like if you're like a— I mean, like you have to think, right, like all of the well-resourced, well-resourced trading shops that already employ like you know, type of algorithmic trading strategies. Like, they've got to be pretty far ahead of, of most people when it comes to these types of things at this point. And why would they— like, if I've always thought, like, if you have like a trading strategy that's profitable, why would you ever—

yeah, I don't think they're sending, uh, a couple million bucks to Truth Terminal to, uh, start aping coins.

Or like, why would you ever open, open that up? To, to anybody other than yourself. Like, it just doesn't make any sense if you're capital constrained, right? But like, it's, it's this Venn diagram that doesn't exist though, constrained for very long.

Well, it depends on like what kind of edge you're getting, right? If you're, if you're, if you're some kind of like delta-neutral, uh, market-making agent, then, then that's one thing. But then you're competing against, like you said, you know, people who are, are much more well-resourced. And so, uh, this is— you're like the Venn diagram to basically the overlap doesn't exist where it makes sense. Because if it's, if it's, if you can, if it can deploy capital at scale, then you're competing with much better quality things. And if it's early stage stuff, then it can't support a lot of capital. And in that world, you just take it yourself.

Yeah. Yeah.

That is, that is always the issue of this stuff. Uh, that's always like the bear case.

Like who is the—

that Venn diagram seems like almost a null. Set, right? There's just like not many people.

But I don't know, we'll see. I'm like overall excited for agents in general just to see where people take it. You know, I had this tweet a while ago. It's like no one gave a shit until they had tokens. I still think tokens are the most powerful tool we have in like capitalism to kind of get things moving. And so, uh, yeah, a lot of money will be made here. A lot of money will be lost here.

Um, I do think it'd be cool when they start talking to each other and there, I think some cool stuff will, will really come from that.

I don't know what will, but I think, I know it's new, it's on the frontier. That's the great thing about crypto is that we get to kind of financialize every new cool thing that comes along. And so you always get to be at the forefront of that. Some people call that late-stage capitalism. I call it the best industry in the world. But yeah, anyways, I think we should wrap it. I got to film another podcast in like 5 minutes.

Okay.

I wanted to do one quick, one quick, quick question actually. I did this post about ICOs, how people should sign up for Legion and Echo because there's like some insane opportunities on there. And people were upset. They were like, I don't think that's good advice. People like, if you're low net worth or like less than a million, you should, you should try and focus on staying liquid rather than investing in early stage stuff. Most of that stuff never launches and things. Curious, going around the horn, what do you guys think about that?

So my first reaction is I agree with the critics. I would rather be liquid than doing angel investment and stuff if you have a small portfolio. However, it also depends. Are these like, I don't, I haven't signed up on Legion or Echo, sorry. But like, Is it, is it this thing where you do this deal on Legion or Echo and then you have the same vesting terms as the VCs? Or is it one of these, you know, I know that, uh, there's been these like launchpads before where you get retail to come in and they get a very low valuation. It's capped at like $1,000, but they also are liquid from day one. And it's like a guarantee, not like everything is guaranteed, but it's like mostly guaranteed that they're going to make money on that. If it's that kind of structure, then sure, 100%, you should kind of be grinding that. Doing like all of those if you're getting it at like a known valuation that's so much lower than it's going to launch in like the next month, right?

That is what— well, so, uh, there's both. You're not liquid, like on, on Echo there's been some really good deals, but you're not, uh, liquid, I believe. But you've had deals like, I think MegaETH was at $200 mil, which is, is obviously like much lower than what it would raise in, in the market. I think they did Athena at $300. Again, I'm not 100% sure on, on these numbers, but it's my impression. I think they did Athena at $300. There's a bunch of like really good deals where you can get exposure to stuff that, that's clearly— yeah, and that's the thing that from my perspective, I don't want to say free money because I feel like I'll— it's not, not the right thing to be telling people. But there's some really good early stage deals on these platforms where you can grind out for like very high expected value stuff. And I do think early stage, I agree staying liquid and stuff, but I do think people also screw themselves a lot with staying liquid because they end up giving back most of their gains if they aren't good traders. Early-stage investment kind of forces you into a bit of discipline because of the lockups. And if you're like smart but not particularly disciplined or a good trader, it ends up being pretty good for you. And it's also just like how— I don't know, I would probably say the majority of people that have really made it in crypto, maybe that's not fair. Maybe 50/50 have made it through. Early stage investing. It's definitely how, how we made it. So I'm probably biased towards that, but I do think there's, and it's also a really good skill to learn, like being able to assess teams and, and stuff like this.

So I don't know. I think the broad answer is yes, it's a good idea. And then the, uh, the more granular one is it depends, but in most cases, yes, basically. So areas where it's like an obvious yes is, is if you're in the $500K to a mil range. Right, then, then it makes sense to deploy. Then like the share of your portfolio you're putting into illiquids is, is not overwhelming. So it makes sense. Um, if you're in the 0 to 100 range or like 0 to 250, it's less of a, of a definitive yes, but then it kind of depends on how deep you follow the space, right? I think the deeper you are in the space, the chances are the better off you'll be on the liquid side. Just because you'll catch narratives early, right? If you're, if you're pretty passive, then I think this is a much easier pitch because you can actually get great access without having to put in the time that someone who would need to do this full-time. So I think if you're like, if you're not full-time in the space, then it basically makes sense at almost every PA size. I think if you're 0 to 100, then You know, um, then it, it might make a little less sense and, and you should stay more liquid. Either way, you're not, you're not committing to anything, right? So at any PA size, it makes sense to sign up and see what you like. And then I, I think like the, the, the size of your PA is just like the amount you even—

it's sub 100, you could put like a grand, right?

Yeah. No, I, I agree. I think it's just like it basically, you know, it, the, the, the, the obviousness of the decision. Isn't as obvious or goes down as you get to a lower PA because in a raging bull, like, you know, it's just good to be in the market liquid.

Um, but yeah, yeah, I mean, I agree with Yan's take. I think, um, I think it just like, it just depends. Like, like, it's a like a not great answer that nobody wants to hear, but like, as with any kind of like, like financial type of like investing and like PA allocation type of stuff. Like it just depends on like your personal situation, your sophistication level, your risk tolerance, like all of these things. Like personally, I like, I've never really had access to a lot of these early stage deals. So like almost all of my money has come from like liquid stuff, but like most people don't make money in, in markets in general, right? Like if you're active, like, like fairly active. Like, most people end up losing money. They might make it, make like unrealized gains in a bull market, but like end up round-tripping most, if not all, of it in the bear market because they're not great at determining like when the key inflection moments are in the market. So they end up staying too long and they keep employing the same strategy that made them a bunch of money when the market was going up in easy mode and then losing it all when the market stops doing that, right? So like liquid trading and liquid investing is like not easy. Like it's definitely tough. Um, I think it's just a completely different skill set as well. Like to, to Jan's point, like you're not committing to anything like, like sign— I mean, if you're in the US, I don't think like— and if you're not like an accredited investor, which like this, this like discussion doesn't really apply to, right? Because I think like the initial thing was like, if you're sub-a-mil, you're not accredited. So if you're in the US, you can't really do it anyway. Um, but like just signing up and checking out these types of deals and seeing what exists, I don't think it hurt. Like it can only just kind of expand your, your type of, um, your type of knowledge base on these types of things. So like, you know, if you do see something you like and you are able to, to do it based on the jurisdiction you're in, or or whatever laws apply to you. Like, I think it, it makes sense. Like, I mean, it's something that I wish I, I spent more time with, and I probably will spend a little more time with going forward. Um, but like, I'm kind of like you, I'm kind of like biased in the other direction. Like, I've made most of my like crypto money just with liquid stuff because I think like if you're in crypto, right, and you spend like, you know, most of your time looking at crypto markets and you don't leave during the bear market, like you will do really well when the bull market comes just by virtue of being here. So it's like, it's just really, it's like really, and again, like, as being like a super liquid type of person, like, I haven't traded, like, this has been the least active I've been in markets since I've joined crypto in, in like late 2016, um, and I've done way better than I've ever done. So like, I think that's a testament to like the point, like, most people just like don't do well by being super active. And if you just like identify sectors or themes or narratives early and you just buy and hold, like there's no way your active trading is going to beat that. So it's kind of like a similar type of thing here, right? Like, yeah, I think it just like depends. Like, I don't think you can go wrong.

I think having a mix is like nice because they're kind of different things, different types of exposure. I'm the same, like I've never made— or maybe I just made my first dollar off of a private investment ever in this space. So everything's always been liquid for me too. So I guess I'm kind of biased that way. It's like nice to have the flexibility. But yeah, I think, yeah, it's definitely worth it to sign up and like check some things if you think they're—

you're going to get deals that funds don't get, right? So there's, there's, I think, immense alpha in just sitting there and seeing it.

Yeah, exactly. This community narrative just means that people are doing insane deals. For, for like Echo and Legion right now, to try and get community on board on like similar or even better terms than VCs. And a lot of these deals were better terms than, than the last VC round, better lockup terms.

So yeah, it's way better to do this than to airdrop to build a community, like 100%, right?

Yeah.

Especially if you can say, oh, we're giving you a deal like way cheaper than VCs, right?

Yeah.

You throwing shade at my hype airdrop, bro?

I mean, that's like, I don't know, hype's like an anomaly.

I'm kidding.

I'm kidding.

I mean, people paid for that. Everyone paid quite a bit.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's funny to watch like the other airdrops not perform nearly as well and then see market confusion. Why, why are you confused that billions of unrealized gains that just got dropped under— for a meme coin aren't pumping.

Yeah. All right, let's wrap it up.

Yeah, let's wrap. Cheers, guys. Thanks for— thanks for joining us, Jason Yanowitz. This is a great episode.

This is the last one, I think.

Oh, really?

One of the year, probably.

Yeah, definitely.

Oh yeah, I guess that's true. Yeah.

Yeah.

Next week is Christmas, so. Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah. So, all right.

Merry Christmas, everyone, or happy holidays, whatever the case may be. And yeah, see you again next year for another year of hive minding.

See you guys.

Thanks, everyone.

Later.