Hivemind: BTC's $100K Run, Ethena's Yield Meta, and Our Bull Market Bets

Look at this HawkTua thing from like yesterday, right? There's like some massive rug where all these insiders were like pre-mining tokens. This is the kind of stuff that— that's all that pump was. It was just people want to trade. Think about the whole presale.

I know, but that's what I mean. It's not like— it's not a real thing.

No, but it solved a problem where people want to speculate on memes without the risk of getting fleeced.

Yeah, that's, that's the problem solved. It doesn't feel like it's that aspirational of a problem. It's all this kind of trading these things. But I'm thinking, is there more of like a— but that's That's everything.

Even like, I know, that's my point.

Even the DeFi stuff we talk about is maybe this cycle will get something more.

Well, that's what maybe the AI stuff is, that, right? Like, dream a little, man.

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, 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 brightest minds from each of the divisions to share insights, alpha, and shitposts. Today with us we have the usual crew Ceteris heads up our research arm. Jan, managing partner at Delphi Ventures, and venture partner Duncan, also known as Flood Capital and self-proclaimed gem hunter. I split my time between Delphi Ventures and Delphi Labs, our protocol R&D arm focused on incubating and accelerating new Web3 primitives. This is a special episode. Bitcoin's just hit $100K. I think 2 episodes ago we ended the episode by making predictions of when Bitcoin would hit $100K. I think all of us said next year except Jan, who said this year, which seemed pretty bullish at the time. But yeah, giving you your credit, Jan, you can take a little victory lap on that. And maybe we can go around the horn and see how everyone's feeling about Bitcoin and markets generally. Can start with you, Jan.

I think everyone's kind of going forward expecting You know, there was, do we get a big pullback into end of year or is the inauguration kind of a sell the news event? I think it really boils down to the strategic reserve, right? If that happens, I don't think you're really going to get any kind of meaningful pullback. So far, every flush that we've seen after funding got hot Uh, it was, was bid up pretty quickly, and so you kind of had these like mini dips. Um, and yeah, I mean, if, if, if the reserve happens, you're kind of just going to continue grinding higher. Uh, you know, Trump loves when markets are doing well. He's, he's made that clear many times. He even did his, his own congratulatory tweet on Bitcoin hitting $100K. And so I think he's going to take a lot of kind of personal pride in, in seeing that thing go up. Um, which I think, you know, only increases the chances of, of getting this reserve done. Um, I guess the, the, the question, because it's all, you know, it's all about, uh, market expectations versus like what's priced in versus what happens. And so I, I think the, the base case is we kind of just continue going higher. I think biggest opportunities for any kind of dislocation would be, um, if we start seeing a lot of, uh, basically seeing the reserve really get priced in and then there's some kind of a delay. I think that would probably be the, the reason for a flush. But outside of that, I mean, I think it seems like Saylor is going to continue bidding with Master Premium staying strong, so he's going to continue deploying. And if he's doing that, then, then others obviously No, because it's pretty telegraphed and kind of causes a lot of reflexivity there. You're even seeing like ETFs starting to get inflows, which is kind of unexpected, I guess, for a lot of people. Yeah, I mean, market looks good. I think you're going to get these periodic flushes. You know, we're talking on a span of like a weekly basis or something like that, or maybe even shorter as as, uh, leverage gets a little ahead of itself. And, um, and then I guess to add to the bear case, there's a lot of tokens going up, right? And so there's only so much money that can kind of support all this. So I think you'll, you'll see Bitcoin become an easier high conviction long, but as you get more dispersion, um, it's going to be harder to, to pick winners. And so You know, you can be confident around BTC and then probably some of the majors, right? Like, you know, your, your ETH, SOL, and, and some others. And, you know, whether they outperform or underperform Bitcoin, TBD. I think you kind of need to think about it on like shorter time horizons if you're trying to trade that.

But question, um, what, what do you think about like XRP and Cardano? And I guess like Dogecoin, to a lesser extent, doing really well. Like, is that concerning at all, or you think that this is just like too— like the strategic reserve is just too powerful, or do you think that kind of—

yeah, yeah, no, it's definitely a red flag. Like, if you, if you know, if you map historical times that, that XRP has done these kind of moves, they were very close to like cyclical tops. Um, the difference being that, yeah, the reserve I think is, it's, it's there— if there's ever a time for this time to be different, this, this would be it, because you have this monster bid that, that can come in. And, and it's usually, you know, those have been tops because BTC has made the majority of its move, and then the risk shifts elsewhere, and, and basically everything periodically pumps. And after everything is pumped, there's basically nothing left to go up, and, and capital kind of starts to flee. But If you still have money moving into the space, then I, I, I, I wouldn't fade solely because, you know, the, the previous top signals, um, are triggering here.

Yeah. Also, I think, I mean, we kind of talked about it on the last pod about the XRP thing. It didn't— it hadn't happened yet. Um, we kind of talked how it wasn't like retail, it was like kind of smart money talking about this. And a lot had to do with the regulatory environment, with the Ripple guys being like pretty in tight with the Trump admin. I mean, Ripple XRP, um, it didn't participate in the last cycle, right? Which is actually kind of rare. Um, and the float, like the actual float that is tradable, is so low. And I think you can make the case that like last cycle, the reason why it never did well is because Ripple was just selling XRP like the entire time pretty aggressively. And this cycle, I don't know, like if they just like stop selling, I guess, and then retail likes it, and then you have other traders getting into it, like it doesn't— I don't think it takes— the market cap is massive, right? But it's like there's, there's so much supply that is just held by like the team. It kind of just depends.

What percent of the supply do you think is not— is actually tradable? Because they're doing pretty massive volumes, like Just today, $30 billion in volume. It's pretty crazy. Like, what do you— like, the market cap is $130 billion. Do you think it's like— how much of that do you think more than half the supply?

Like, I know more than half the supply is just like insiders and like Ripple and everything. I don't know how much is actually being traded. And like, listen, I'm not going to— I'm like out on the dino coin rotations. Like, I'll let other people play that game. I just know that I'm going to lose money if I do that. And so Like, if you told me today that in a month XRP is $10, I would be like, honestly, yeah, maybe. Like, I can see it happening because, like, it's just— I don't think— I think it's easier to move it than the market cap would, like, suggest.

Um, on the— just one, did you guys see the, the Powell comment about how Bitcoin's a competitor to gold and not—

yeah, he sent it.

That seemed, like, ridiculously bullish to me.

He said that before, I think. That's not—

yeah, but this time we have momentum.

Yeah, did he? Those two birds once—

yeah, I, I looked at— I saw that he said that in 2021 as well.

Um, yeah, it's a good way to deflect away from this being a risk to the dollar while also winning favor among all the, the Bitcoiners.

I guess I think like going back to what you were saying, Jan, about like Bitcoin versus alts, like So do you think it's possible we just go back into the regime of like March? Like once BTC kind of tops and starts consolidating, you see like obviously when it topped just like recently, just before $100K, we saw Bitcoin dominance fall a good chunk and then we had a lot of these alts run. But do you think, um, because I agree like the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve seems super powerful and you know, if the US is buying, that's probably going to make other sovereigns buying and You know, it's pretty hard to fade that when it's literally the people with the money printers deciding to buy Bitcoin. But on, on the alt side, do you think it might be a situation where, you know, Bitcoin might top or go under a period of digestion and then alts like just fall off a cliff, like kind of like what we saw after March and earlier this year?

Um, I think if they'll, they'll nuke for sure, assuming we're at a like very frothy point, right? They've kind of been trending higher with it. Funding has been going nuts, and you've seen anytime it pauses, like lots of things fall 5% immediately. So I, I imagine you get a flush, but I think the difference from here in 2021 is that not everything will bounce. Um, you, you've seen things that bounced really hard a few weeks ago no longer bouncing, right? Like certain memes just don't have the same bid that they did. Um, so I think, you know, what ends up happening is there's still this hot ball of money around, but there's so many alts that before you'd see everything kind of pump uniformly, and now it, it's, you know, you kind of have to get ahead of the next narrative to some degree. Um, and it's, it's a hard game, right? It's like, if you can nail that, you, you, you can really do well. I think the, the best thing to do is is not to try and get ahead of every single one, cuz you'll end up just being late to a bunch. It, it's, it's two, two things. So on one hand, you don't want to be the first one in because there's a chance, like you're, you're gonna have a higher hit rate being like the second or third one in once you see the trend happening. But you kind of have to have like a few potential trends in mind and then see which ones are picking up first and then immediately hopping into those rather than I think trying to be the first money in. Because yeah, like you'll make more than being second or third, but, but, you know, there's a much higher rate of missing at the same time.

So I'm personally not trying to nail the rotations at all and just kind of staying put in the stuff I'm high conviction on.

Like, well, I'm like, I'm definitely merging the narratives.

I'm— yeah, I'm not. I mean, I have like— yeah, I'm not. I know that, that, that kills me in the bull market, not just in terms of returns but also just like mental strain of just like keeping up with a bunch of different narratives, trying to catch them. Um, and I think the one thing to remember in the bull market is all you need is one in size that you have high conviction on, which is— which brings us to Athena, which—

no, but I was gonna say though, the narratives, it's like, yeah, it's important that you're not rotating between every narrative, but when you recognize a narrative that seems like pretty likely it's getting much, much bigger, like the AI stuff, that like doesn't make sense to just ignore that, in my opinion. Um, this is like the first thing, and we kind of talked about this a while ago, uh, like this meme coin speculative capital was looking for something else, and I think a lot of that is going into the whole like AI narrative.

Um, yeah, I agree, you should have some exposure to the AI narrative. I think we've been We've been talking about that for a while on this, on the show.

Yeah, yeah, I agree with your point of not trying to catch. That's what I said, like, you don't need to catch the XRP move, you don't need to catch the Litecoin move, like, I know, can't—

coins and then animal memes back to AI memes to Ripple memes. Like, I just think that stuff is, is, uh, yeah, it's just tough to— I think there are very few people making money trading like that. And also just knowing what you're good at and what you like to do. I think. And like, just doing— like, especially if you've had a cycle or two, like, not trying to— yeah, I was listening to 1000x, Javi was talking about trading like the dino coins once they've moved, and like, that's something I would never do. Clearly it's working for him. Uh, I think everyone has their own— well, this is diverging in the bull market is the worst thing. It's like the, the way you can cost yourself the most, I think.

But yeah, your point, your point about like, what do you actually care about too? Like, I was talking to Jason Yanowitz about this who, you know, likes trading the animal coins and all that. And I was talking about the AI stuff and it's like the AI stuff, I actually have a genuine interest in trying to figure out and trying to think about like how that can evolve. Whereas the animal coins, I have literally zero interest. And so the odds that I'm going to do just as well on animal coins than like the AI agent stuff is like way lower, right? Because I just don't have like a natural interest. I don't care about it. So I think it's important, like, yeah, your point of like staying in your lane when it's a bull market, you see a lot of people, you see a lot on like Twitter, you see a lot of, um, yeah, it's just a lot going on and being able to like kind of be, I guess, like zen.

Yeah.

Not FOMO, not be like coping about everything. Like you're going to miss a ton of stuff. You just need to kind of like relax.

Yeah, you're gonna miss most things. And then the last thing you wanna do is start like rage chasing because you're missing. And, and, you know, people on Twitter are gonna say like, they're gonna pretend they caught everything because part of it is just building a follower base.

Right.

So, so don't take that as, oh man, they're, everyone's doing well except me. And so now I need to compensate somehow. Like, the last thing you want to do is kind of lose your mind doing that in a bull and just massively underperform because you're late to kind of everything as a— yes, because you're chasing.

Yeah, whenever someone messages me like, oh, this coin's up 100%, I'm just like, FOMO is the mind killer. Just like find a few things that you have like high conviction in or feel like the fundamentals are good, can size into, and just wait on. And then just like wait, like you'll probably get your turn, you know, sometimes it doesn't happen, but you know, at least on one of your things you'll get your turn. And then, and versus like trying to chase all these things, it's just impossible. And then there's also like a massive survivorship bias on Twitter where not only do people like, you know, kind of LARPing about catching all the moves, but just a survivorship bias of like if someone hits an insane trade that gets shared around a lot versus like, you know, the 99 other people who like missed or didn't do well. Yeah, no one— that doesn't get shared.

So most people, most people have like jobs as well, right? Like even if you're working in the industry, like very few people are full-time traders. And I think it's really going to detract. And like the returns on your job have probably gone up a lot during the bull market too, just like making the right investments or whatever it is. If you're distracted with like 50 coins that you're holding in small size, low conviction— like small size, low conviction is, is the most distracting, I think, at least for me personally. It's like you just forget about it, then you feel bad, like, ah, I forgot about this thing and it's dumped now. Or like, you know, you feel bad that it pumped and you didn't buy enough, uh, you feel bad that you missed it. Like, yeah, I think lower, doing less things in bigger sizes with conviction, and remembering that you really only need one, um, and you're gonna get— and, and, and yeah, I prefer that. That's kind of how I prefer to operate.

Yeah. And part of, part of the, the real benefit of, of operating with conviction is that you're not constantly— if you're, if you're low conviction and, and you buy something and it pulls back, and now you're just like kind of second-guessing the entire, uh, situation, right? And so you're constantly in this unnecessary like mental battle of, oh man, it's down, should I, should I sell, is it going to keep going lower? Whereas if you can actually build conviction, then, you know, if you have dry powder and it pulls back, it's an opportunity. And, and then if it doesn't and it goes up, then you're just like, oh, I should have bought more. But like all right, sure, but you're still doing well. So it's, it's also just, it makes dealing with pullbacks a lot easier because you view them as an opportunity, not as a mistake kind of thing.

And this is like why I avoid dino coins, because I have zero conviction in dino coins. And so the minute I buy XRP, it's gonna dump and I'm gonna feel like an idiot, and I'm gonna have absolutely zero conviction to like hold on to XRP, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

Imagine owning SWIFT. So, Ceteris.

Did you see, did you see the Gork tweet about it?

I think that, that's what I'm quoting.

Yeah.

Um, all right. Do you want to move on to, yeah, go ahead. Go on.

No, I was going to say like the, uh, like the, all the tweets. I mean, the, the humor is, is unmatched. Just like market cap. Nah, it's one of those like stupid metrics that they need to compare because they don't have a price.

Yeah.

I know. I'm kind of thinking about what, what Murad said about like, the meme coins and how you're kind of just like stripping away a lot of this other stuff. And it's just like, comes down to the coin and there's no kind of illusion that it does something. But I feel like a lot of these dino coins is kind of like that, but instead of selling them on the narrative of like, okay, like, you know, this is a dog that's cute or something like that. You have, you're selling them on like the narrative that like, this could be the next like innovation in finance, even if there's nothing really there. It's just a much more compelling pitch that you can like pitch to a lot of people. Like, I was watching a TikTok video that got sent around on XRP, and it's like this guy's saying that, uh, you know, all the real-world assets are going to be tokenized and put on XRP, and like it's going to have an XRP stablecoin that's going to be used for like cross-border payments and like embraced by like the US government. And you know, who knows the degree to which that stuff's true, but that sounds really convincing.

No, I mean, listen, Like, XRP is a real cult, right? Like, people are trying to make cults for meme coins, right? But if you're trying to like make yourself a cult, it's like too obvious. You're not really a cult. These, these XRP guys literally DCA'd for like 7 years, right, with it going nowhere, and have just been— have never changed, have never wavered in their conviction, right? And let— listen, like, now they're winning, right? Um, But that, that is like an actual cult, right? And you can't— the XRP thing is just such a fascinating, like, case study. And that's something that you can't really recreate in, like, because you want to make it in, like, your meme coin, right?

Um, so, well, just, it's, it's so much more like, it's such a bigger idea to believe in, like, this is gonna completely change how finance is done versus, like, Oh, you know, this dog is cute, or this dog is a hat, or something like, we're gonna take this coin to a price above the price of the S&P.

Yeah, that's got to be the dumb— I'm sorry, that's like the dumbest meme in the market.

Um, yeah, let's do Hyperliquid. I think you probably have the best, um, you've done the most coverage on it. Do you want to maybe summarize just like the key stats of of the airdrop and what happened, and then we can go into just discussing.

I think so. It gave away, what, 30% of its supply?

It was 30%.

It was all to community and it's trading at, I think, what, like what, $13 billion fully diluted right now?

It was well over a year points campaign, right?

Yeah, it was like a, it was like a year-long points campaign. So yeah, I mean, I don't trade perps, so like I didn't use it. Um, I think so. Now Hyperliquid is basically— well, you want to talk about like the product?

I think like a lot of people have been, uh, as, as they do, saying like, this is how Hyperliquid has shown, this is how you do, this is how you treat your community, like huge airdrop, no insiders, no VCs, um, and like this is going to be the, the playbook going forward. And I disagree, but maybe we can go around.

Yeah, I agree with that too. Basically, Hyperliquid created a product people wanted.

They did it really well. Exactly.

Yeah.

And they launched it in a bear market.

And they launched in a bear. And so the challenge for like Hyperliquid now is right now Hyperliquid is 4 validators in Tokyo. Okay. They're all co-located. They're all beside each other. It basically operates like a centralized exchange. And so that's the reason why it was such a good product, right? Is because of that. And now people are excited because they're going to add the HyperEVM, right? And so they have like HyperLiquid right now is an app chain, right? It's like this perps app chain, which I mean, every app chain that's been successful has been a perp chain. And it's such a massive market too, right? Like you're talking decentralized Binance. It's like, that's like the holy grail. And you've had, you've had all these perp exchanges over the years come and go, right? Like Synthetix, GMX, dYdX, I think Perp protocol, right? And so there's a lot of churn between it, but like the theoretical ceiling is so big for it, right? And now they're slapping on this EVM too, which will be like isolated from the actual Perps exchange. So it'll be like two separate VMs. And so the challenge there will be like fragmenting liquidity between these two VMs, right? Like the spot Perp exchange and the HyperEVM. And so like how does—

I think the idea is that you're going to be able to like tap into the vaults and stuff.

And yes, but they're still separate. They're still separate VMs. So there's still communication between them. There's still like a latency thing. And also they want to like become an L1 and like decentralize. Right. And so when you have a system and you're coming to consensus and you have 4 validators run by the same team that are in one spot, you can come to consensus very quickly. Right. Like that's part of why it had such good UX, which is you ask like anybody, what's your favorite Perp exchange? All these— I've talked to a lot of like traders, they all love Hyperliquid, right?

Hyperliquid.

And so that's basically the challenge. Like the upside, the bull case is that they keep the same great product. They add this EVM stuff on, they get all these other EVM applications. It just becomes this massive L1, right? Like high throughput L1. It does really well. The bear case to me is like they can't maintain the same product quality when they actually trying to create a decentralized protocol. Right? Because it's just a lot challenging when you're communicating across the world, trying to like come to consensus, right? There are, there are like physical limits or bandwidth limits, right? This is like the whole Solana thing, increase bandwidth, reduce latency, right? And so yeah, like they have this massive community behind them, which we know is one of the most important things to get. They kind of, are building backwards in the sense where they're getting the community first and then they're trying to create the finished product. They have something, they have something live to market that people like using. They have two-thirds of their supply is like not issued, right? So which is valued at billions of dollars. And so they can do a lot with that. So yeah, it's been like a pretty big success story. But yeah, the takeaway about Like everyone should just airdrop a lot of their supply. Like the next project that does that, that's not good. It'll just all get sold and then everybody will move on.

Yeah. The big ridiculous product.

Yeah.

Like that's the, once you build that, you have a lot of flexibility with what you can do and your outcomes will probably be all successful. And then you could say, oh, see, you should have done that. It's not because necessarily because of the path that was taken, but because you've built this monster product that everyone wants to use. And like using it as a launchpad, you can do a lot.

I think it's the most product— the fact that they launched the product in a bear and the token in a bull, and then the fact that it's also like pretty easy to do a points campaign for a Perp DEX and like target it properly so you don't get like just, just pointless, um, you know, farming of it, uh, so you can actually like incentivize usage. And I think, yeah, people are way kind of over-indexing on that generalizing. I kind of made this point about Swyland, which is also doing a massive airdrop now that I said, and obviously big fan of the protocol. We're also investors, but I just think that an airdrop that big is kind of a strategic mistake just because you end up just blowing your load too early, right? And you know, if you want to do future seasons of points, if you need to incentivize, if you launch a perps product or something, you need to incentivize it later, you have less ammo. Also, all things being equal, token with higher float's going to trade lower, and so your future points campaigns are less efficient. Um, I just think for, for where— for things where you're going to do multiple points campaigns to incentivize supply siders and usage, low float, high FDV, uh, as bad as it is for like public token market buyers, it's kind of hard to beat. Uh, I think it's like the right from the perspective of the builder and the product, I think it's like ends up being the right decision sometimes. And yeah. Yeah.

If you're starting at T0 and, and like future point going either one of those paths, you're, you're gonna have more activity and more success going with low flow, high FDV with seasons over time versus jumping a bunch of the supply early, having a lower FDV, and then trying to use, use less valuable incentives for sure.

Mm-hmm.

But like Hyperliquid also didn't have any VCs, so they had more ammo to give, right? Like a lot.

Yeah. But it's not like that. It's like 20%, right? So like, all else held equal, you're, you're, you'd be able to, you're able to kind of do the same in terms— it's more of the narrative.

Well, I think it doesn't happen a really strong—

yeah. But like ammo-wise, you're not really limited because you do or don't have the 20%, right? Because none of these guys have run out of ammo. It's more just like the narrative of future. Supply and stuff.

But they still have 40% allocated to future supply, which is like quite a bit. And like, they're trading at $13 billion FDV, $4 billion CIRC, something like that, without, you know, any major exchange listings. That's— I think that's honestly the most impressive part, is they only launched the token on Hyperliquid, which has like essentially sucked in hundreds of millions of dollars of USDC into the platform. And, you know, they just did an all-time high volume yesterday. I think like $8 billion in volume yesterday and hit an all-time high open interest. So like, I think how they did it was pretty ingenious. Launch on their own platform, suck in like hundreds of millions in capital.

And yeah, the bridge contract to Arbitrum, I think, was also pretty, pretty smart. It's kind of the thesis we've been talking about for a while where, I don't know, I feel like Centralized exchange is kind of like the— alongside, I'd say, you know, stablecoins, probably the two killer apps of crypto. I think if you have a centralized exchange that people want to use, you can probably vertically integrate upwards and build the rest of the stack, like an L1 and things like this. And that's kind of the bet that they're— the people are making here, right? That these guys have the traders, um, they have the, the retail flow, and now they can, they can actually build an L1 around that, which I think makes sense.

Yeah. And like a billion and a half of USDC, which is like a lot.

Yeah.

Right. Like that's a lot of USDC. I guess Setters, I had a question for you. How difficult do you think it is to like slowly decentralize a validator set versus like building the product? Because I guess like that was kind of the bet they took. It's like we're going to build a really great product and have a lot of users and like build the killer app first and then we're going to decentralize the validator set. Whereas like, you know, some other teams work the other way where like they want to have the, like the chain working fully. I mean, you can build the killer app.

Yeah. I mean, you can, they have, they have like their, their HyperBFT consensus that they use. So like they have a consensus mechanism, right? It's like derivative of HOT stuff, which is like comes from Tendermint. It's like instead of 3-slot, it's 2-slot anyways. So like they can theoretically like do it. They have their testnet now with a lot of validators on. I guess the two questions are like, first of all, I mean, they can literally, if they wanted to, have like 100 validators geo-disperse like the next day. It would just be kind of like a shock to the system. And so you want to do like the testnet for a while. But my question honestly with it is like, Is it even the right move for them to want to be like a distributed global validator set? Like, I mean, there's been other chains that have done like, like SUI, for instance, has co-located validators. People don't use SUI, but nobody seemed to really care about that.

There's at least like more of them.

There. But oh yeah, there's more. There's way more validators there. They're just co-located. So if you're trying to do— it's just hard. Like if you're trying to do a Perps exchange, you need to be like the fastest. And so with their co-located validators, it's like they have 200 millisecond latency or something at like the best case, which is really good. Once you start going beyond that though, like performance degrades pretty quickly. For a perps exchange, right? And again, there's just like sending a message from New York to Tokyo is has like a physical, that's like 200 milliseconds or whatever in itself, right? So, and this is why, for instance, like multiple concurrent proposers is something that Solana wants to do in the long run and other chains want to do in the long run because of just kind of like this global latency.

Yeah.

I mean, I guess the question is like, does it Does it need to happen?

I mean, um, that's what I'm saying. Like, should they even do that?

Well, like, what's the, the unlock for, for people? It's, it's the execution and it's the fact that I can go trade KYC and withdraw all my money in an instant whenever I want. Like, that's 95% of what the people on the platform care about.

Yeah, but you're eventually going to get like shut down if you have like validators, 4 validators.

I think it's, it's just like a bet on, on, on lax regulatory standards too.

Yeah, but this is like, you can't, you know, there could be like kids trading on there, there could be like North Korea could be trading on there, you could be accidentally lending money to Kim Jong-un. Like, I, I don't think this is like basic stuff. I think if they get big, there's, there's just like, if it— I don't know, my mental model for this stuff is it doesn't matter until you get big. Um, and then anything that any, any like centralization vector that can be applied pressure to, like, will be. And if it's just a data center, it's extremely easy to stop. And it's also like a lot of liability for the people running the validators. And to some extent, I do think that them decentralizing and becoming an L1 is like baked into the price right now. Like, I think if they said, we're just going to keep this data center model and you're going to have KYC-less trading, then it starts being, being priced more like Robit or something, right?

Like, uh, to some degree.

Um, so right now it is custodial, so it is different still, but, um, I mean, it's kind of different.

I think it really— like, so if you think about like valuation stuff, it's, um, you know, in, in like TradFi, for some, for a lot of— I think that some of the most important things are kind of growth, uh, like, you know, things that grow quickly have higher multiples. Whereas others that don't, don't. And then also a big one, I think, in crypto especially, is defensibility, right? A lot of— when you're doing multiples, it's, it's because you're thinking long term, right? Whereas crypto, things fade in and out pretty quickly. And so I think what you've seen is a lot of fundamental plays typically have very low multiples. Because it's, it's, you know, they're, they're typically cyclical. So you have that issue. And then it's also, you know, you don't know what this specific space is going to look like. And we haven't really had dominant players remain dominant for extended periods of time, particularly on the DEX or decentralized side. So like they, they—

like how, how much can I forecast these revenues into the future? Or like how quickly could they disappear?

Right, exactly.

Yeah.

And so, I mean, right now it's not like trading overly expensive, right? Like, I think, um, trailing, uh, 30-day volumes like $80 to $90 billion, you annualize that, a trillion. They can extract 1 to 2 basis points realistically, um, per dollar, right? So, so they're generating $100 to $200 mil annualized, um, fees, which, I mean, if you're doing it, you're like, you don't necessarily need to do this on, on FDV.

Right?

Because it's not as if FDV is fully investors. It's— there's some team. So I would include circulating and team in the, in the multiple, and then the rest is kind of ammo. It doesn't necessarily need to be deployed if it does, if it, if they don't want to. And if it is, it's, it's, it's beneficial, right? So I would, I would kind of include team and circ. And so like, yeah, it's trading rich, but, um, if you bring a lot of, you know, uh, lending and other forms of utility, then you assume volume can pick up as well, right? So it doesn't necessarily need fully priced in on the L1 side. Um, I think like it's still fundamentally reasonable.

So on that, it's like what, a 40x PE or something on—

yeah, like valuation 20 to 40 on trailing 30-day. The thing is like, I think volumes will keep going up, but like, you know, if we go through a bear, they can fall off a cliff, right? And that's the trickiest part.

Um, yeah, yeah, because I think you have like that element where like you can justify some, some valuation there and then just like they have such a good growth story of like, okay, we have 1.5 billion USDC here. That's just like literally been going up only. Volumes in OI have been going up only. The team is like extremely competent and ethical. If they actually do execute on the vision of launching a fast EVM and, you know, there's, I think there's something like 30+ teams building on there probably now. Like that was before TG, like probably after TG, it's going to go up even more. Then you have, it's like, okay, like why can't, in a lot of people's minds, like why can't this compete with like a Base or why can't this compete with like a SUI? Just, I know Ceteris is different on a technical level because of like decentralizing the validator set, but from a narrative and an actual like perception level and user like UX level, it doesn't feel that different. So to kind of like think a few steps into the future like that, I think is not unreasonable. And you also have the other catalyst of like, this hasn't been listed on any major exchanges yet, right? And they didn't give any allocation to like market maker exchanges, investors, anything. So, you know, if like Binance or OKX or Bybit or whoever wants to go and list this spot, they're gonna have to go on by hype, then go list it. Like, there's a lot of kind of interesting catalysts that are yet to come. They haven't launched staking yet. Like, that could be a huge supply sink. And it is truly like the community is like extremely strong. And you've just made like all your community members rich. So there's a lot of ingredients for like a pretty massive bull market run here on both the fundamental side and kind of like the, the, the narrative side and just usability side.

Do you think there's a world where centralized exchanges kind of all band together and, and try and not let this get listed? Because I'd say, you know, it's, it's definitely the, the product that's been that has the highest probability of really kind of disintermediating them, right? dYdX, but that kind of didn't— never got big enough to really be like existential for them. But this potentially can. Yeah. Is there a chance that they don't want to list it?

Bybit listed perps already. Like maybe they just list perps and don't list spot. But even if they— like the cool thing is even if they don't, like it's literally like on the night of TGE, like all these centralized exchanges had to suspend suspend Arbitrum USDC withdrawals because like Hyperliquid sucked in like $200 million USDC of deposits, which is like a massive amount of stablecoins, right? Because all this stuff trades at, you know, a dollar of inflows and stablecoins adds like, you know, a multiple of that on market cap. So if they don't list it, then there's just— and Hyperliquid continues to do well and there continues to be kind of hype around it. It's just going to keep on, you know, attracting USDC. So yeah, I could see a world where they do that, but at the same time, like, they're kind of like vampiring them because this is like the hottest launch of the year and they're just sucking USDC onto their platform. So I can see there being a very good bull story here. I definitely also understand Sether's and Jose's points, but like, while the bull market is hot, I could see this being like a pretty big story. Like, you have like people like Ansem being like, this is like SOL last cycle.

Right.

Like that is the narrative on Twitter, which is obviously like pretty big. And I think a lot of people don't have any exposure to it either.

Yeah.

No, you need crazy comps for it to really run. If you start, you know, comping it to something 2 to 3x, it's not really going to run. But if you start memeing it as an L1, then yeah.

Yeah.

Like animal spirits can take over.

Yeah, do you want to move on to just what people are bullish on right now, like what your, what your guys' portfolio looks like? Yeah, I think that that's what we wanted to discuss here, right? Um, I continue to be bullish on Athena, as I've sort of been harping on this podcast for, for a while. Um, I kind of posted our internal chat today that the YTs have the, the Pendle ATHENA YTs have just gone insane in terms of yield. Like, they, uh, a few weeks ago, maybe a month ago, they upped the points on the SUSD YT to 30x and to the— and on the S— on the USD YT to 50x. And I don't think anyone really noticed because the— it didn't reprice. And so this thing has just been paying out like equivalent of 700% APR, like 200% ROI until March 25th, like, um, March 2025, which is when season 3 ends. Um, and you can basically, uh, like, if you want to, you can lock it in and, and hedge out the ENA, and you're actually getting paid for it right now.

I'm long.

No, because you understand it better, and maybe you can, you can—

I just want to know, like, what that is. It sounds like— it, I don't know, it just doesn't sound real.

Like, like, it sounds too good to be true. Yeah. And what I'm saying is, Jan, you understand it. You've been as deep into it as me, and so probably you can just play devil's advocate or whatever. I mean, the biggest risk is obviously that like USD collapses somehow. We've covered this in previous episodes. We have thread about it, like the risk of that. I personally think those risks are— I mean, obviously I have 90% of my stables in this thing, so I don't think the risks of that are high. And also, if you hedge out the ENA, I do think you do well even in that outcome, right? The idea is like, all right, you buy, you buy the YT, um, you lock in, like, uh, you, and then you short ENA the amount that you're expected to get at the end of Season 3. Um, and then, you know, once Season 3, you get your airdrop, you, you sell it and close the perp, right? And so if USD like collapsed or whatever until then, uh, your ENA perp I think would, would print and probably more than compensate for your for your principal loss. Um, the risks are like, yeah, there's many risks. It's, it's, you're assuming that they're gonna pay out season 3. You're assuming that they're gonna pay it out the same way that they did season 2 and season 1, like 5% of supply. Um, if you don't hedge, you're assuming that—

so you don't know what, like, you don't actually know what, like, the points will translate into?

You don't actually know. You're just assuming that it's going to be the same as season 1 and season 2, um, which it doesn't be, obviously. And then with SUSD-YT, the yield is actually like half, basically half of it is just pure like basis yield and then half is points. I think that's like a little bit more de-risked. And even if you assume basis drops down to like 5% and ENA price halves from where it is now, you're still making money on that. So there's like a lot of like space there. And then even if you don't want to go into the YTs for whatever reason, like even the Morpho looping is paying out like 200% APY. Again, with all the assumptions I mentioned before of, you know, them paying out season 3, it being the same as the other ones and all the handle and smart contracts and all of that.

Yeah, I think like an interesting impact of it though is like what it's done to the other stablecoins. Because you can like, if you don't want any, if you don't, if you don't, if you just want to hold like USDC or something, I think on AAVE it's still like 15, 20% or something just to lend like USDC.

Yeah. Because I'm personally not hedged, to be clear. I'm just playing this on the, on the long, I'm also like a long spot ENA too. So yeah. And it has, yeah, the stablecoin rates have been like, it's just, and also like Maker itself, I think. Like it's just increasingly like an Athena wrapper. I wonder when people realize this, that you're like, like, and I think they're gonna have to compete for sDai to compete. They just have to put more and more into Athena. And then why would you hold Dai if like you're basically getting like a cucked version of sUSD? So yeah, I don't know. The reason I'm so bullish Athena is sort of the same reason I was bullish Luna back in the day. But obviously this thing doesn't have the reflexivity, the negative reflexivity, which is just that I think— I mean, actually it's not the same reason because Luna had more of a decentralized stablecoin story. With this, it's just like I think it's going to be the highest yield-bearing stablecoin at scale. And I think over time, yield-bearing stablecoins just consume like normal vanilla stablecoins. Like, why would you hold something that doesn't pay you anything if you can hold something that does? And over time, people get more and more comfortable with the risks, assuming nothing bad happens. And I think it just— and especially with their USTV integration, then you can sort of guarantee that your lower bound rate is the Treasury rate. So then for crypto degens, like, I guess the initial market, there's like what, nearly 200 billion stablecoins on-chain? I just think that's like the initial TAM, and then you have all the TAM from TradFi of people looking for yield on dollars that can like plow into this. To me, it's like, I don't know, a trillion-dollar TAM, honestly, for a product like this if you really execute it properly. Yeah.

Yeah, it's funny. CDP stablecoins just don't have— they haven't made sense in a while, but like especially now.

Can you guys explain how the YT and PT points work? I'm just looking at the website right now, seems super confusing.

So yeah, it's basically you're stripping like the, you know, you have a principal portion and a yield portion, right, of the underlying asset. And so those, if you take the underlying asset and you don't want to deal with the volatility of the risk, you could sell the yield and lock in a fixed return. And so what it was doing is stripping the two. And so everyone who wants to lock in a fixed return can sell their YT's, and everyone who's buying YT's is basically buying yield, and they're agreeing to pay a fixed percentage for the, the upside of the yield. Um, it's kind of like an interest rate swap in, in TradFi. But yeah, the idea is, you know, the yield is a function of, uh, the rewards and the activity on the platform. Form, right? And so if you believe there's going to be a lot of natural yield that comes from the product plus the rewards from the airdrop, then you buy the YT. And the— because the rewards from the product are in the form of ENA, YT is kind of a leveraged exposure to ENA is the idea.

Gotcha. And then how Pendle— so it says this like vault cap. So basically they only allow a certain amount of this to happen and then they also boost your points if you use these tokens versus just holding sUSD?

Yeah, the— you get higher points for doing the YT than, uh, sUSD, which just like also juices the, the PT yield, obviously. And they want to let people be able to do PT at scale.

Um, yeah, yeah, because basically they can just lock in their rate and then sell it to speculators.

Yeah, exactly.

Cool. Yeah.

Such as myself.

So they have $1 billion in this already? Yeah. That's like a lot of the Athena, like stablecoins.

There's also just a lot of people looping, like as we've kind of brought up. I just, yeah, I haven't looked into it because I don't like hold it or anything, but I wonder like what, there's got to be something out there. There's so much like leverage around this trade.

Yeah, yeah, it really depends on kind of the liquidation process, right?

If on Morpho there's a real risk, right?

It's a— it's not an index prices. Exactly. Yeah, so, so like the unwind can't happen because someone dumps into thin liquidity kind of thing.

Um, because it's based on what?

Because Morpho lenders just take the hit, right?

Well, it's a fixed price. Uh, yeah, it's more so the assumption that the, the dislocation would be very temporary. Right. And so there's no need to force this monster unwind for a very temporary dislocation because—

but yes, collateralized that if there was a not temporary dislocation, then Morpho lenders would take the hit because the price is hardcoded to 1 to avoid like liquidation cascades on thin liquidity, basically.

So do you guys like, like Morpho, Euler Pendle? Aave, that type of stuff in a bull market where it's just like, you're just, you know, as these products, um, kind of grow and they offer more leverage and more flexibility. Do you like that sort of stuff?

Yeah, it's, it's so it's kind of going back to the whole valuation thing. I mean, if you try and do Aave valuation, it's pretty uncompelling, right? It's basically a bank. It, it lends at a higher rate, it borrows at a lower rate, and it keeps the spread. Um, and so it's, it's been one of actually probably the, the best ways to, to play ETH recently. Um, I, I haven't been in that trade though.

Uh, it's—

yeah, I think part of it's just like the, the Lindy element. Um, and the fact that it's pretty slow and steady upside has— or like in terms of returns has allowed it to trade at a kind of a crazy multiple. But, um, I just, it, I don't, I've really ever seen growing into it. So I, I've, but I've been wrong on the trade. And, but I guess, I mean, like, trade and fundamentals are two different things.

Um, so yeah, feel the same thing about Pendle.

Um, yeah, because I'm trying to think, last cycle Maple was huge. Like Maple was pretty big. Like any of these kind of DeFi burners that allowed access to leverage are really big. I feel like Maple is the big one. And then it's all kind of all this CeFi, DeFi, undercollateralized stuff like Genesis and all that shit that blew up.

Well, can we talk about how like all the best tokens recently are all CeFi, DeFi? Yeah, Athena, Hyperliquid, XRP, Tron. Um, there's something else.

He ate the banana, bro.

Yeah, Solana. Just kidding.

Eat the banana, add $15 billion in market cap.

Yeah, I think that the— is it? Yeah, it is, it is kind of interesting. Like, um, these things have all been looped into DeFi. Like, part of it is because like the regulatory environment, right?

It now— CeDeFi isn't as big of a risk.

Yeah, it's like a repricing, you think?

Yeah.

And it's just easier to build those products, much easier, right? So like from a user experience perspective— or I'm not putting XRP in that bucket because isn't a product, but, you know, specifically like Hype and Enya.

I think Hype and Enya to me, and like suddenly iCoin, make a lot of sense to be the best performers like, uh, this cycle, just because you're kind of recreating like the two best businesses in crypto, right? Like Tether and Binance. Like, it's the— it's like a way that you can invest in theoretically like Binance, um, or, or Tether, like on-chain. And then I think in AI, like, I think there'll be a bunch of AI coins that crush it too. But those two narratives I think are really strong. Yeah, yeah.

Athena's product is pretty both defensible, consistent, predictable cash flows. And then as they expand into yielding assets outside of purely basis trade, you know, it adds to that. So I think like a premium multiple. The other thing, but like, you can, it's, I think, yeah, it's easier to rationalize.

Yeah, to be clear, we're like big investors in Athena. And we also hold a lot, I think, personally and bought it. So like, take everything with, with, with a grain of, of chill salt and do your own research. I think that the thing, another thing that's interesting about Athena to me is that, like, obviously stablecoins have a massive moat, like, And right now, everyone just wants to integrate them for free, right? You almost don't have to pay like BD because it's like you don't want to compete with the Athena yield. You want to be able to offer it to your users. So you want them to grant points for people putting like USD on your chain. You want them to grant points for people putting USD in liquidity pools on your chain. And so they just like get every single chain integrating them. And I think that's going to be the dynamic this cycle. I think you'll see Monad, Anisha, like all the new launches, they're going to go big on, like, integration with Athena. And then Athena is going to offer points for putting USD there. And then Monad and Initia are going to offer, like, or the protocols on there are going to offer points on top to kind of compel users to move from ETH01 there. And it's just such a powerful dynamic when everyone just, like, wants to integrate you. And the other thing with the mode is that, like, because of this points and the, and like huge FDV, you just end up, um, having a bunch of like people stake USD or lock it up in Pendle or whatever, and that's just like leverage on the basis yield that they can offer to the sUSD people, right? So it makes it really hard for anyone coming in to really compete, um, and, and for— and it also makes it so that even if you're doing it yourself, like, you can't get as high a yield as actually you could from from using like Athena's product, which is like super powerful. And then, then yeah, I think obviously the BlackRock integrations, the USTB, I think Guy's just been like absolutely crushing execution on this thing. Like, yeah.

And, and so with like, so I think there's like something like $4 billion in TVL in Athena, right? Something like that. $4 billion. So a billion of it is in—

it's nearly $5 now.

5. So a billion of it is in just this Pendle, like March 2025. And then like there's a lot of it in these products. Like what do you feel like? Yeah, I guess Cedric says there's a lot of leverage involved. Like what are kind of the unwind risks?

Well, I mean, I guess I don't necessarily think the, the, the fact that it's in there is bad because it's not as if the yield they're able to generate a meaningful amount of returns on that yield, right? So like, it's not as much like why it's there, but the fact that when it's there, it's actually being able to be used productively, which is more so, you know, the harder thing is not to get the money, but to actually be able to use it in capacity and use it productively, right? And so the fact that you can do that is really the harder problem to solve. And then everything else is just kind of of like customer acquisition tools. Um, uh, I, I think like, yeah, if you wanted to think about, um, I don't necessarily know that there are bad unwinds here, you know, maybe you can argue it suppresses price to some degree because people are hedging, right? And so, um, like if you look at ENA, it's consistently had flat funding in an environment when everyone else is, is going up. And so I think there is some evidence of that taking place, um, which probably just adds for some like short fuel, short squeeze fuel in the future.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's just probably— they're very, they're very reflective to funding rates, right? Like you kind of saw in like earlier this year when funding rates went down, like, uh, supply of USD contracted pretty heavily. Um, let me actually look at what it was. I think, I think it contracted by like a couple of billion. Um, but it contracted pretty heavily. And also obviously ENA price is like super reflexive to that too.

Um, do you feel like the more the risk is in ENA just like chopping or like being very reflexive to this rather than in the actual stablecoin?

Um, yeah, that's my assessment of it. I want to be careful recommending stablecoins to people, like, to be honest. But yeah, my assessment is that, yeah, that I'm invested.

And just chatting with Guy about it too, he's very aware of that. And his goal isn't to just kind of grow at all costs either. And realizing it, like, once it does, as it gets bigger, the small mishaps are amplified. Right.

And so it's just that the fact that it's CeDeFi makes it like so much safer. Unfortunately, right. Because you don't like the capital is in a custodian. It's not like on-chain on smart contracts, really. Their exposure to any single exchange is just like the short leg. Of the, of whatever exposure they have, right? So because the capital is in a, in a custodian, so it would only be, you know, if the exchange went bust and they were short and then, uh, the price, uh, went down or whatever, they wouldn't actually have that P&L. Um, I didn't explain that very well, but I guess, I guess you know what I mean. Um, and then I don't think the, the, there's really like this death spiral, like this death spiral dynamic doesn't really exist. You kind of have the opposite where as yield goes down, people naturally like want to come out of this thing. And also with the USTB now, you kind of have like a floor on the yield. Like if, you know, if basis goes negative, you can just plow all your money into Treasury bills. So yeah, I feel pretty comfy.

What one funny or interesting, I guess, side effect of of Athena's existence and chat about it with Duncan is, you know, it's one, I think, broadly reduced the cost of going long, right? Because they're, they're, they're providing the short leg and they're suppressing funding rates. So it allows for animal spirits to exist a bit more cheaply, but also a bit more hidden. Right? Because on one hand, typically funding rates are very responsive, uh, to, to kind of quick jumps in leverage. And so you can, you can kind of immediately see that. But as that happens, the, the, the TAM for Athena picks up, and so they step in and help bring those down. Um, so you do have like, uh, basically the ability for cheap leverage. And even if, you know, um, it makes its way down the stack, right? If, if like all of it takes place on BTC and ETH and Solana, you're still going to have the basis traders that then move down the stack to capture it elsewhere. And so it— even if they're not doing the— like, even if you don't have like other assets collateralizing or being used to put on the basis trade, the funds that do basis trades are kind of moving down. And so that helps there. And then the other one is kind of, you know, OI is typically long and short, right? You have one leg of each, whereas here it is, uh, more on the naked long side because they're the short leg. Um, so it's, uh, yeah, because they can't get liquidated, right?

Like, because they have the collateral, whereas the longs can still get liquidated. Even between like Binance, Bybit, and OKX, there's like $25 billion, $26 billion in open interest just between those 3 exchanges. So it's like Athena is a big chunk.

Maybe one more interesting dynamic to talk about is just the fact that Binance launched their competitor product. I don't know if you guys saw that. Yeah, they did their like, because obviously Bybit integrated Athena so you could like trade with USD as collateral and earn the yield. And then Binance kind of countered by, even though they're investors, kind of weird, but they countered by like launching their own yield. Like, it's basically the same product. They're not calling it that, but it's basically like a very similar product. And I'm really interested to see how that plays out because for the dynamics we talked about before, like their users are just going to get lower yield from this, right? Like it's always going to be lower yield than doing it through Athena because they only use Binance. and also they don't have like the leverage from, from the unstaked USD. So I wonder how long they can, they can kind of keep that up before users sort of demand like the higher, the higher yields. And I think other exchanges are probably gonna like pounce on this and integrate USD, as a sort of a response. But it's an interesting dynamic to see like Binance kind of, yeah, go one way, kind of help.

They can adjust is like, I know USDE gets 90% LTV on a lot of these, uh, sectors, whereas they can give 100% LTV against their stablecoins.

That's a great point.

Yeah.

Interesting. Okay. We can stop talking about Athena. Sorry, I said I was interested in some questions.

Um, no, a couple of things. We, uh, we released this like Bitcoin 100K report today that's free. So definitely check that out. And then Yeah, anybody who's like a Delphi subscriber, we dropped our first year ahead report gaming, and then we got 4 more coming out next 2 weeks. So a lot of good, uh, year ahead. These aren't year look back reports, right? These are year ahead reports.

So, uh, yeah, you guys have been crushing it. The alpha feed's been on fire too, like the Hyper Liquid nodes and, and yeah, a bunch of the like Clanker node made a lot of people some some money. Yeah, it's been, been really good. Been enjoying reading the research.

Yep.

Nice.

Um, anything else you guys wanna touch on before, before we go? Anything like, et cetera, you've been really deep into the AI meta. Is there any updates? Like, are you still—

I mean, I think that like, I think, yeah, just like Virtuuls is probably the winning platform right now. Mm-hmm. It's been doing pretty well. A lot of people launching stuff there. Um, we'll see though. I haven't seen like, I haven't, well, um, like what's the moat? The moat as the platform? Mm-hmm. Is like it costs, like why people keep launching on you instead of like somewhere else? I guess it has to do with like what kind of models you've integrated and stuff.

Yeah. I guess like what's the moat of Pump? It's just like lots of eyeballs on it.

Attention. Yeah. It's creating like the best two-sided marketplace. Because you need, like, you know, speculators bring quality agents and quality agents bring speculators.

And if people think that if they launch an agent on virtuals and they'll get a bigger market cap, then like there's a lot of, there's a lot of agents. So like the difference between BASE and Solana, Solana has been like more ad hoc, like a bunch of one-off type things, right? Whereas BASE is all consolidated around virtuals, right? And a lot of the Virtuals agents have gotten— I mean, the biggest agents are actually both on Solana, but Virtuals has done pretty well recently. And so you can kind of like tail Virtuals, I guess. Virtuals is a success. So yeah, I don't know. That's like mostly what I'm paying attention to.

You still holding your GOAT? Still GOAT to 10B?

I still have— I don't actually. Yeah, I still own, I still own GOAT. The, I think the upside is probably a lot lower than it used to be, which is good though, because the, I think the biggest upside for GOAT is that it was like the only thing kind of, and everything else kind of fizzled out. But now that you have like actually a lot of stuff going on and the meta is actually growing beyond like a flash in the pan, then you're going to see it more like dispersed. But it's like good for, I think it's like good for the, the whole like sustainability of, of the whole AI agent trend overall. It would be kind of sad if it was just like GOAT and then nothing else happened and then it was just like a meme coin that people sent really high, but that was it, right?

So yeah, it seems like Virtual is crushing. That's probably the best way.

Have you invested? You love your picks and shovels.

No, I was, I was looking at it at like 50 cents, but I never pulled the trigger. Big mistake. Should have bought those picks and shovels flying off the rack.

Yeah, they don't make any more of them, right? So yeah, it's tricky.

I mean, like, yeah, like you mentioned, Solana has the, the biggest agents, but it feels more kind of PvP and GD there. Like you have a lot of just stuff that, that dies pretty early. And then if it, if it happens to kind of get past like that $30 to $50 mil, then it can, they can go further. So I guess it just kind of depends on, on how deep you are in the trenches, right? If you're, if you're really in there, then, then maybe, you know, playing Solana, but I think trenches will actually expand on virtuals as well as more and more agents launch there because you kind of have some. Comfort around, um, the fact that you have Virtual's beta kind of built into each of those as, as, uh, because it's like the cross pair. So I think that's a huge tool. And so, um, and then everyone's just sitting with a bunch of Virtuals. Yeah.

Every agent's paired with a Virtual.

So Virtual is going, that's, it's a great way to—

you also have to pay, you also have to pay Virtual to make an agent, right? So it was like, it's been for the last few days, it's been like a million bucks a day people are paying. In Virtual that gets like pump level. Um, it depends how long I guess it like goes on for and stuff, right?

But most of those successful agents weren't actually built with like the Virtual stack, right? They just launched the token on, on Virtuals like AIXPT.

And that's the only one. The other highest market cap ones are all launched by a Virtual team. Okay. Yeah. AIXPT was actually a guy that was like scraping just like crypto news and like CT for years, I think.

I think so. Good.

And then it's, it's, yeah, they're still, it's not perfect, but yeah, it's not perfect.

It's got its cool, but it's great.

Yeah, it's good to keep up to date on stuff. It's good to keep up to date on stuff. Like honestly, having it on my Twitter feed, I just see things that sure, I could have seen somewhere else.

But, and then the terminal is cool. You have some utility too, like you have you know, you hold 600K XPT, you log into a terminal. Terminals, basically you search a ticker and there's a bunch of chronologically timestamped.

Yeah, I don't know if I— I don't know, I use the terminal once and then I just like don't really— I think there's definitely a trade right now where people are just like using it as like the new Elon and any, any coin that this thing tweets about, they buy. And so it's like this self-reflexive loop. I think that's probably going to die out soon. And then we'll see kind of how it goes.

Yeah.

I mean, Virtuall is basically their goal, I think, is to kind of reprice as the agent L1, right? And then you can fetch a pretty big premium. You have a lot of utility built into it.

Oh, they want to do an L1?

No, I think—

No, but that's how you like, you view it.

Yeah.

What? I mean, it's kind of like Basis. Like if you're looking, I mean, in my opinion, in my opinion, That's like the, that's like the L1 Base token because like what else is happening on Base, right?

Yeah, that's a good question. What do you guys do? Because I feel like I've seen just like in the Twitter sphere, people talking about like all the like Solana, like we're rotating back to like Base and like Hyperliquid, like more like fast EVM chains away from Solana. I don't know if I really fully believe that, but what do you guys, what do you think?

Uh, there's probably, there's definitely some, like I didn't use Base before and I'm using it.

Now.

But like, I mean, it's still—

yeah, right?

Yeah, you're chasing the app. As long as you get a good— as long as you have good apps, people will like— I don't know, man. If you look at all like the Solana DEX volumes and all the metrics are still pretty good, like they come— they came down a little bit recently and Solana is only just going to like keep getting better.

But it's kind of funny that like the Kingmaker thing on Solana was pumped up fun. And then this Kingmaker thing on BASE is like these agents, and it's like they're both really like, don't like, they're not really like kind of bullshit long term, right? Like, call a spade a spade.

No, Pump is, Pump is, uh, I think people have the wrong framework for Pump. Like, yeah, it just regulated launching tokens and did a really good job of it. And people see like the live streams and stuff and, you know, whatever, they go up in a fit and everything. But look at this Hawk Tua thing from like yesterday, right? There's like some massive rug where all these insiders were like pre-minuto. This is the kind of stuff that— that's all that pump was. It was just people want to trade. Think about the whole presale.

I know, but that's what I mean. It's not like— it's not a real thing.

No, but it solved the problem.

It solved the problem for users.

You want to speculate on memes without the risk of getting fleeced.

Yeah, that's That's the problem solved. It doesn't feel like it's that aspirational of a problem though.

Well, people are building stuff on top of Pump now too, like this agent stuff, right? So it uses Pump's contracts to launch agents.

It's a pick and shovel, sir.

I know it's a pick and shovel for the meme economy, but it's like, I think that—

What is Banana then?

Yeah, it's the same thing. It's all this kind of trading these things, but I'm thinking, is there more of like a—

But that's everything. Even like—

I know, that's my point.

Even the DeFi stuff we talk about is all being—

Michael will get something more.

Well, that's what maybe the AI stuff is, that, right? Like, dream a little, man.

Yeah, I don't think it's bullshit.

And I also—

yeah, I had someone I really respect recently, uh, said they, they spoke to the Pump Fund founder. And obviously, like, Neil knows— I think, I think knows him too. And they both said he's like very smart, um, like 21-year-old sort of visionary kid, and his vision is really to build like a financialized TikTok sort of, you know, on PumpFun. And I think we kind of saw the very rough around the edges early innings of that when they came in. But you could definitely see how something like that could just like catch fire, right? And we've always said that crypto social is going to work, but it's going to have to lean into its financialization. And obviously financialization has parts and like some very terrible parts, people tying up their kids and pets and shit. But, you know, like if they— assuming they can get over that stuff, I don't know. It's definitely more interesting than what I had considered them previously.

I think one simple framework is it's like it's a I mean, this is probably a bit pedantic, but, uh, like higher EV casino, right? In times when flows are positive, if money's flowing into the ecosystem and you're playing in it and treating it like casino, you're going to have better odds than you would at a regular one. Then when money's flowing out and you're playing, you're going to have worse odds.

Yeah. I just feel like something like XRP, it's making me want to dream a little, like, oh yeah, like we're going to put You know, real world assets on this, everything's going to be tokenized. But that's like, we're going to have a really disingenuous shill to people. Yeah, I agree. But it's just like, that is something that I feel like would be like a cooler, bigger vision than, you know, you know, the tokenized TikTok is, is interesting, but like, is that really adding like value, right, to people's lives? Or is it just like increasing the access to speculation? And maybe the AI stuff's different. I have no idea how that's gonna play out. I think the agents could definitely be useful and, and add value to people's lives, but it just seems like there could be like a bigger vision here. Maybe it's the AI stuff, maybe it's RWAs. Then just speculation. I want the vision to expand beyond speculation.

Yeah. I mean, I, I think on the agent side, the, the speculation accelerates the progress massively. Right. Because now there's a huge financial carrot to try and build something productive because of the path to, you know, material upside. Yeah. So yeah, I think, yes, speculation is a feature, right? And so if it's speculation for the sake of speculation, you know, I get, or like speculation with no path to something more productive, I get that, you know, that, that, that, uh, kind of negative or not as optimistic, um, viewpoint. But I do think with, with virtuals, yeah, there's definitely—

Pump has definitely helped lead into this, like, agent narrative too. Like, GOAT was literally created on Pump. And so you— it's hard, you can't just look at everything in, like, point in time in a vacuum. These things evolve. And, uh, I don't know. Choose to be optimistic, Duncan. You've really, you're like, uh, you're really a boomer and you're like very young. You talk about gold all the time. You only buy picks and shovels. Uh, you know, shit is not pumped off fun here. I just think you need to live a little. I think you need to get a little more optimistic. Maybe take up like a nicotine habit or something. I don't know. Just like something.

I want to be more optimistic with this stuff. It's just, and I get that it evolves. And, you know, maybe there's hope of the agents, but it's just like, it's kind of hard not to see like a bit of it as just like one big casino.

No, I think you need to be— you can be optimistic but not delusional, right?

Yeah.

It's important not to be delusional. That's something I'm definitely not being this cycle is delusional. Even though I'm bullish on the AI stuff, I'm well aware that all this could go like like 80% of the day, right?

So yeah, well, I feel like the reason I got into crypto is because like Bitcoin, like what a vision, what a vision. And I'm really happy that it's kind of fulfilling that, but it's just like, I'm trying to find something else that's as exciting as Bitcoin within this. And it's, it can be—

I know the AI stuff is like legit the first thing I've been excited about in a long time. And maybe that's like a mid curve take, but sometimes mid curve is the right position, you know?

Yeah, no, the AI stuff could be cool for sure. It's gonna be crazy. Like, what's gonna happen? Like, the humanoids. Have you guys seen that? Like, the Tesla humanoids? It's like you put a decent AI in those things and it's like, wow, a lot of—

I don't know, man. Remember, like, remember Bonzi? Because maybe you're too— maybe Duncan, maybe Duncan's too young, but there's this thing called Bonzi Buddy, okay? And you could, like, install it on your computer, this little purple ape. And you could like ask it stuff. Imagine Bonzi Buddy is just this AI agent and you actually just tell it to go do stuff for you, right? Like, and everyone's going to have their own like little agent that's running these tasks for them. It's like your own little personal assistant. So you think ChatGPT now, that's just a chatbot. Like these things are going to—

Yeah, that stuff is going to be really cool. I just think it's, it's like when you get Optimus, like taking away all these manufacturing jobs or one of these humanoids, There aren't that many manufacturing jobs. Well, maybe not in the US, but in the world there are.

But a lot of the stuff that's in manufacturing has already been automated by like specialized robots. You know, you don't actually need—

yeah, service jobs. Like there's a lot of jobs it can disrupt.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's everything.

Anyway, we should, we should cut it though. We're way over time.

Yeah. All right guys.

Just as, just as we start getting into the important questions. About where we're heading.

Well, we'll save that for next episode.

All right, guys.

Yeah, good episode.

This has been The Hive Mind. Thank you for tuning in, and we'll see you again in 2 weeks.