Hivemind: Conference Circuit, VC Coin Comebacks, and Crypto's Next Narrative

you're starting to see like memes again, just like these new memes that are launching have like sustained multiple week just straight run-ups, right? And I think it's just like indicative of the shift in risk appetite and sentiment in markets.

How much VC coin outperformance, uh, do you need to see before you rotate?

Exactly.

Uh, I want to see what happens after.

That's like, let's catch the fucking hot potato. It's like, let's play hot potato with the piece of dynamite.

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. All right. Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of the Hive Mind podcast. Today we're joined by the usual cast, myself, José Maria Macedo, Yan, Duncan, plus special guest Jason, who is now a regular on the Hive Mind. A lot to talk about.

The market's going up. So we had to replace our head of intellectual research with our head of dog coins. And markets is only proper. Yeah.

Now, Cedrus has got it. I think he's on holiday. He was in Singapore grinding it out. And maybe let's start there. What was everyone's— actually, you guys, two of you guys didn't go, but Jason, maybe start with you. What were your thoughts on Singapore and the whole conference circuit?

Yeah, absolutely. So this is one of the first conferences I've been to in quite a while. It's not usually my scene. I don't typically go, but I figured, given everything that's happened with Solana over the last like year or so, pretty much, yeah, pretty much dating back to last year's breakpoint. I figured I would, you know, make the 20-hour flight over there and kind of give in my bonk bags. Yeah, yeah, see the exit liquidity. No, um, and kind of just see what's going on, right? See what progress has actually been made in the ecosystem, see if it's all hype or not, right? Just kind of get, get the, get the ground level info, so to speak. And I was honestly really, really, um, kind of impressed with what I saw for the most part, right? I, I spent a fair amount of time listening to some of the different panels. You know, they had like the left stage curve, which is, or left curve stage, which was like a lot of the consumer apps, games, uh, things like that. MetaDAO, those, those, those types of, you know, types of projects. And then you had like the right curve stage, which was more updates on a lot of the more technical things, technical infrastructure updates like Firedancer and stuff like that. So, uh, between the two, I was, I was extremely impressed with both. One, uh, starting like on the left curve, like those consumer apps. I, I'm a big gamer, kind of like Pierce, if anybody knows Pierce. So I was really interested to see like what's going on in like, you know, the GameFi ecosystem within Solana. Um, as we've had a lot of, you know, like promise and hype over the years for games, and a lot of it hasn't really come to fruition. And I was Really glad to see that there's actually fun games coming to market. I've had the opportunity to playtest several of them, right? We have Off the Grid, which is something that Delphi Ventures has invested in, which I've, you know, put probably 15 hours or so into the playtests over the last several months.

Oh, really? I didn't know that. What have you been playing it on?

What was that?

PC?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. PC. Um, only a PC gamer. Anything on console, I'm not going to touch. So PC is where I'm at.

And then there's a couple— how is Off the Grid relative to like other battle royales?

Uh, so obviously it's, it's still like, you know, in development. It's still very early in its development, but there is, uh, I would say there's a lot of potential with it, right? There's really good gameplay loops. I like the movement mechanics. The shooting mechanics are really good for people who care about lore and stuff like that. They're, they're You know, there's, there's a fair bit of that involved as well. It's not really stuff I care about. I just like clicking heads and stuff like that. But, uh, I had a lot of fun playing it and a good barometer for, um, for these things is I have a, you know, a normal IRL friend from college that I used to play video games with. Doesn't do any crypto stuff. You know, it's not that he hates it. He's just, you know, a normal working person who doesn't have time to get in the weeds with this stuff. But every time there's a, you know, a gaming playtest, I kind of tried to get him involved to see what like the normie take would be on it. And he sunk more hours into both Off the Grid and the Neon Heroes, um, kind of like Overwatch-style game. Uh, he's— I think he sunk— I think he said he sunk like 35 hours into Neon Heroes and maybe 20 hours into Off the Grid. And he said that he would have played those games, specifically Neon Heroes, even if there wasn't an airdrop. He had a lot of fun doing it. Obviously, you know, like they're early, so like there's like bugs and stuff, like glitches. It's a little janky sometimes.

Have you played since the last update? Since the— because they've done a big patch on Off the Grid specifically, they patched a lot of the movement stuff.

No, I have not. I plan on doing it. I think they open up playtests usually like every weekend or so. So I, I'll probably play this weekend because I don't want to do anything. I need to recover. So yeah, I'll probably test that out and I'll give you guys the updates. I know Piers put out a pretty big post on this recently as well, and I echo a a lot of the same sentiment there. So in terms of like the GameFi stuff, stuff that I'm really interested in, I still think, you know, games are one of the, one of the ways we will actually, you know, get tens of millions of normies on board into crypto because gaming is so huge. Um, so I'm really bullish on these, on these games and, you know, future iterations and future things that come to market there. And then like with the infrastructure stuff and the Fire Dancer, I'm not going to pretend like I knew, you know, like 80% of what Kevin Bowers was saying. Um, but the fact that they've made such, such immense progress over the last several years, and now that, you know, Firedancer's live on mainnet, you know, it's only replaying blocks, so it's not, you know, fully live, but the fact that it's there, I think that's probably going to, in my opinion, be the next, like, Solana catalyst, like the, the big catalyst for Solana going into year-end and into 2025.

There were a lot though. Like, the thing I did go, I have gone to a few conferences last 2 years, and this was definitely the most bullish one. And specifically Breakpoint was like such a difference from ETHCC. It's actually crazy.

How so?

Yeah, like ETHCC, I feel like sentiment was an all-time low. And there was, everyone was building infra on infra. There was a bunch of jaded people. Like people kind of, even people pitching you were kind of like jaded and repeating the playbook rather than showing any excitement about what they were building. And then it was just like, there's just a lot going on. People get angry about, you know, there's a new layer 2, there's these side events, everything's kind of competitive and zero-sum. Whereas on Solana, it was just like announced, like the whole ecosystem just coordinated all these announcements. There was like announcement after announcement on that day, and it just felt completely different. There's also way more people building apps, actually trying to bring users on chain. Yeah. And just way more like excited builders, I would say. Yeah, very, very different vibe. It was— I almost capitulated on my— I was saying in the— I almost capitulated on my ETH bag during Breakpoint, which would have been max pain. The reason I didn't was actually because it would have been more painful for me for it to pump after I sold than to continue underperforming. I've accepted continued underperformance at this point. Also, Token2049 itself was crazy. I think there's like 20,000 people there. Like wherever you went in Singapore, it was just crypto people, like crypto shirts, you know, weird looking crypto people everywhere. It was like the city was taken over. It was pretty wild. Alex Fiskum, the organizer, does an insane job with that. Like, yeah, pretty, pretty impressive.

And so for like the vibes between ECC and Breakpoint, um, I think obviously, I mean, I would imagine a lot of it has to do, you know, like ETH hasn't— ETH's performed like, you know, decently well. I mean, I guess it wasn't— it was kind of flat year-to-date up until a couple weeks ago. It was up.

Yeah, if you find this really narrow window relative to USD.

But like, do you think it's mainly because ETH has just like underperformed, so everybody's just kind of like, you know, very jaded, and SOL is just kind rip. So everybody in Solana is just super pumped, or is it like actually people within the ETH ecosystem realizing that like the roadmap and everything isn't really fully aligned? It's, it's really fragmented. There isn't like a clear, you know, a clear solution to that at the— at this point. Yeah.

Um, honestly, price action, or is it fundamentals, Jose?

Yeah, I was gonna say, like, there's definitely price action. There's definitely a lot of price.

A big nail in the coffin was, was just the, the apathy from institutional investors post-ETF. I think once that happened and there were no flows, it— you're looking ahead and it's like, what's the next real catalyst? This was kind of supposed to be the saving grace to some degree.

But ECC was before that though, right? It was before even people were still hoping that the ETF would drive some flows. I do think part of it is ETH, it's like the cosmosification of ETH or whatever. Like there's no Like with Solana, there's this shelling point asset that everyone's aligned around. Like every builder owns SOL, everyone's bullish SOL, everything happens on Solana. And so there's this camaraderie and just alignment between the ecosystem that I think is really important. And when you launch on Solana right now, you get all the benefits of that. Like you get a captive user base that wants to use and shill your project. You get investor interest, you get cross-promotion. Like Solana Foundation promotes you, you get slots at Breakpoint. Like everything's very aligned. Whereas with ETH, it's sort of like Balkanized, right? There's like a bunch of different L2s which are competitors. And then there's like L3s. And a lot of what was happening with ECC was like L2s pitching each other to be L3s on themselves, right? It's like the Spider-Man meme, but like L2s and L3s. Like, no, you be my L3. And everything, these things are sort of like competing. And also the value doesn't really accrue back to ETH. So I think there was a lot of that. And also it was just like market. I think market timing generally was more depressing than like it was meme. It was like meme season and stuff like this. But I do think part of it is this cosmosification of ETH where there is no ecosystem anymore, right? There's a bunch of tribes that each have their own tokens and ecosystems to pump. And that just makes the vibes a little bit worse. But it isn't necessarily bad for ETH, I don't think, because I do think that's the endgame for Solana too.

Yeah, but because I was gonna say, if Satoru is here, you know, I feel like he'd remind us that this is probably where Solana is eventually gonna get to, but right now it's like, it's not there yet. So it'll be interesting to see what happens.

How much further ahead does, does Fire Dancer push that inevitability though, right? If you can Continue to scale the base layer then.

Well, I think last time we had a big talk about it with Cedrus, he probably has updates after Breakpoint because he was there and understands the stuff much better. But he said like you'd probably get at least 30,000 TPS live. But apparently, I don't know, I saw some tweets about them saying like a million.

I mean, that's what Kevin Bowers said in the speech. He said it was live on mainnet doing a million TPS. Yeah, like Ceteris seemed to think that was obviously was all like synthetic transactions and everything. But, um, but yeah, we, we need somebody with an actual giga brain who, who knows, who knows that stuff a bit more.

What's ETH TPS?

Yeah, Ceteris was super excited about, about, um, about a lot of the Solana stuff. Was taking victory laps.

And, and while you're looking up that, that number, I, uh, that point you brought up, Zay, about the foundation, right? I think that's a, it's a pretty big one. Um, I, I was walking around with a bunch of people who work at Solana and the Solana Foundation, just meeting a bunch of the different, you know, devs working on different aspects of, of, of the ecosystem. And it seems to me that the Solana Foundation is extremely good at supporting teams across the entire stack. And it doesn't, it doesn't really feel the same way to me with, with the Ethereum Foundation at this point in time. Um, and I think that's—

yeah, no, for sure. They're very different.

I don't think that was ever the case with Ethereum Foundation, right?

It was mostly— it was never the case.

Yeah, playing that role.

So ETH's TPS and ConsenSys, right? ConsenSys was like the, the better, the best equivalent of the— yeah, I mean, ETH's TPS is like 10 or 15, right? Yeah.

So even if they get 30,000, then it gives them a lot of runway.

Yeah, but you're not comparing to Ether, you're comparing to L2s.

I know, but yeah, and then L2s I looked at, this is from Cointelegraph, June 17th, 2024. They say L2beat data shows Ethereum scaling networks, including Layer 2 and Layer 3 blockchains, registered a combined 245 TPS on June 16th.

145?

245.

There's definitely, it's definitely higher than that. It's definitely higher than that. I mean, we did that report a while ago. Which is probably a better source than the, than Cointelegraph, to be fair, the, the realized TPS of our report.

But, um, anyway, so Solana is like a few, like 1 to 2 orders of magnitude higher is what they're saying Firedancer will be.

And I think you'll like, I mean, there was no real timeline that they put, but I think you'll probably start to see things like Q, like within Q1, Q2 of 2025.

So yeah, just in time to offset the unlocks from the discount sale.

Well played. Perfect timing.

Yeah.

So yeah, I guess my takeaway is like, I went into Breakpoint and, and the week extremely bullish on Solana, and I think I came out more bullish, which was hard for me to, to think would happen. I was like, I was kind of going expecting to be like, oh wow, a lot of this is like all hype, but like not really. I came out kind of, you know, pulled up and—

What if the price had gone down over that week? Would you have been as excited?

I've been holding things down 70% for the last 6 months, dude. It's fine. It wouldn't have fazed me one bit.

Yeah, I do imagine it adds a completely different vibe to a conference.

Oh yeah.

Most conferences are associated with down moves and it's just like everyone kind of—

Yeah.

Coping with, you know, the crying face behind that.

It is kind of impressive though, right? Because last Breakpoint was, I think, like October of last year in Amsterdam, and prices kind of ripped, right? And then everybody's like, oh, like, are we gonna have the curse again?

And we kind of, you know, part of it is just like, you know, there's a lot of historic seasonality to these asset prices. So having a conference in May and July, probably not going to get great price action versus a conference in October or late September kind of thing.

Wow.

Yeah.

Solana just doing, just really 1000 IQing this thing.

Yeah. ETC is what, July? And then Solana is always like—

And then Bitcoin Miami is always like end of May when everything nukes. Yeah.

That is a really important point though, right? Like a lot of this stuff is very seasonal for the most part.

The other conference that was cool was the Network State Conference. Biology's conference. I don't know if you went to that, Jason Yanowitz.

I watched it when I was in the airport leaving.

Nice. Yeah, there was like Bryan Johnson and a bunch of people. Honestly, I left that one a little bit disappointed. I'm pretty interested in network states and I've been following one specific one for a while, Prospera, which is like in Honduras. And Honduras is a really cool one because they specifically altered the constitution to allow for effectively network states. They can basically sell land and people who buy the land get to alter, fork the civil code. They can't have their own army and they can't change the criminal code, but they can change the civil code and the tax code. And Prospera were these guys that were backed by Peter Thiel and Andreessen Horowitz and a bunch of people. They bought land there and they really have a really good blog post on this, which maybe we can put in the show notes. I feel like we've said we were going to do that and I don't think we've ever done that, but we should probably start. Yeah, but it's a good post about just like every— they thought through everything, right? Everything from medical, like every drug that's legal in America or Europe is legal there. If you have a doctor's degree from anywhere, a medical degree from any of their accepted states, you can practice there. They've also made it so that if you buy land on Prospera, you can actually have your mini Prospera within it. So you can alter the civil code on your land. So basically it incentivizes competition within Prospera because they don't ever want to solidify. There was just a bunch of stuff that was really exciting. And then I kind of found out at the conference, I don't know how I'd missed this, but Honduras basically rugged them. So obviously it was a previous government that had made this that had given this concession, and the current government in Honduras in 2022 just basically like rugged them, and they're now suing Honduras for $11 billion in damages for like the value of the real estate and stuff like this.

In a court in Honduras?

No, no, in an international, um, I forget the name of the court now, but it's like an international like trade. Yeah, they're suing the Honduran government. I'll find out the name of the the thing they're suing them under, but it's going to be pretty tough.

So that's, that's like kind of like an interesting one, right? Because I, I was like, uh, when I was listening to Balaji, because he did like a little, a little spiel at Breakpoint on the last day or something, um, and I, I've always just kind of like wondered that, like obviously like you kind of mentioned it, like, oh, like you can't have your own military, so I assume, you know, like the Honduras military or whatever country you're buying land from, that's like what you what you use or whatever. Um, but like, yeah, like what happens if the government just decides to rug you? Like, what do you— like, is there like actually any recourse? Like, like, it seems to me like— I love— I think the idea is fantastic, but like it seems so difficult to pull off in like a practical sense to me that like it's hard for me to get super bullish.

This was the one I was most bullish on because of everything they thought through and also the backers and the fact that they actually had the ability to edit the civil code. Because I think without that, you just have these pop-up cities and these kind of hippie communities or whatever, which are cool, but it just lacks teeth, right? Like, you really want to be able to do a proper experiment in governance. And to do that, you do need to be able to to make some changes to the civil code. And like, I don't know, the problem is that the countries where they're open to doing this, you can't trust that they'll honor their promise. And the ones where you can trust they'll honor their promise don't want to do it. But it would make a lot of sense for like Portugal or Italy. Like, we have so much land in the interior that's just totally abandoned, like beautiful land. Like, you know, in Italy they had this campaign, like Casa €1, like houses for €1. You could basically buy a house for €1 as long as you invested. 50K into doing it up just to try and repopulate their interior. And it's like you could generate so much more GDP per meter squared of land if you had something like this, right? You just cordoned off some part of the country to do an experiment in governance, got a bunch of people to invest, like a bunch of entrepreneurs would go there and remote workers.

It's just a shame that European Union is very far from Well, even more on that relationship in terms of, you know, the country that you'd want to do it in being the less, the least kind of, uh, likely to do it, and then the countries where you're, you know, um, is the fact that when it's successful, it also becomes a bit of a bounty, right? And so it's, and it's particularly in a country that, you know, might not be doing well because they were open to it in the first place. And so the, you you know, you have two things traveling in opposite directions and the one that's doing worse has kind of jurisdiction in like a tail risk scenario over the one that's doing well. And yeah, it's a tricky one.

I mean, and yeah, exactly. And the whole media, the whole like liberal media jumped on it. Like these, it's like these VCs are like neo-colonialists taking over Honduras. Yeah, exactly.

You need like El Salvador or something to do it. Like some guy, like, I feel like that guy would do it, you know, adopted Bitcoin, he's into this stuff.

I don't know if they have the land for it. Um, it's, yeah, I don't, I don't know enough about it, but the, the idea, the idea for this is actually from a Nobel Prize economist, right? It's the idea of like charter states. I think he won the Nobel Prize in like 2012 or something like this. What's the name of the guy? I forget his name, but basically it's the idea that some countries have really good natural resources and stuff, but they just can't govern themselves. So what if every country was governed like Switzerland? Like, you basically just outsource the governance of your country to Switzerland and pay them like some percentage of tax revenue or whatever. And obviously you have some contingency so you don't completely relinquish your sovereignty. But it's a pretty cool idea. I just felt like everything I saw at Network State was like, no one— the only one that was close to that kind of got rugged. So I was a bit like, I think we're— Praxis is probably the next most promising one. It seems like they're negotiating with Mediterranean. They keep saying like Mediterranean countries. So maybe they get something done.

I don't know. Should we move on to markets?

Yeah, let's do it. Oh, should we do— you want to do markets or the sectors from sectors that were most hated and loved at Singapore?

Let's just stick on Singapore real quick. We could run through it. For me, what I felt when I was, you know, walking around all the panels and all the booths and listening to a bunch of the different debates and panels, to me it seemed, you know, like obviously there's hype around, you know, the infrastructure developments with Firedancer and everything, but like I just kind of keep that to the side. I feel like that's a default. Uh, for me it was kind of DPIN and gaming. Um, I think we start to see, you know, a lot of progress with DPIN projects, uh, a lot more coming to market or in development, right? You had, regardless of their pretty terrible, uh, uh, panel on stage, you had like the Jambo phone. So like, you know, more hardware-related things kind of building off of, you know, like that Saga phone, right? You have all of these like really cool, actual real world things being, you know, built and stuff, uh, integrated within, uh, you know, the Solana ecosystem. And then obviously, like I mentioned at the start, like games, like the hype is, is quite real there. Um, and I, it's just the one that I personally am most, most excited about. I was really excited about it going in and I'm, I'm, I'm even more so at this point. I'm kind of curious what, what you think. Jose, since you were also there.

Yeah, I think DePIN was the number one consensus sector people were bullish on. I'd agree with that. And probably the second one I'd say was CryptoX AI, although that one's a bit more polarizing. There's some smart people who think it's vaporware. And then I'd say the third was probably TON ecosystem generally, which we can chat about. And interesting, GameFi, I thought was like the least— the one people were most capitulating on. Maybe it was who I spoke to, but it's like there was so much pain, like, and I saw so many projects that had raised monster rounds 2 years ago and are now like trying to raise much smaller rounds at the same or lower valuations. Like the token prices were terrible. Like a lot of the investors, I felt like were capitulating on the sector. So that seems like one where there's going to be some interesting opportunities. There's also some liquid stuff there that's interesting.

I agree with that entirely. And right, like, I think a lot of that comes down to a lot of people just funded really shitty games. Right. Like at the end of the day, the games just need to be good games and fun. And then the other stuff will come, assuming you can, you know, design good, good economics around it that aren't really like super obtrusive or most hopefully abstracted away. Right. Because, you know, gamers don't really care that much. Right. Like obviously it's, it's in their best interest for these types of things to be adopted. Right. As somebody who. Has an obscenely big Steam inventory for Counter-Strike: GO skins. It would be pretty nice if I actually owned those, right? Um, and, you know, Valve couldn't rug me whenever they wanted. Um, so like, yeah, it is in gamers' best interest. It's kind of like you just have to convince them, and I think the best way to do that is just deliver them good games, which is starting to happen. Like, this is the first time in all of crypto gaming where I've like actually had fun playing these games.

And yeah, I was gonna say, because good, good games take time, right? And everything in crypto is very short loops.

Yeah.

And it's hard, it's hard to make good games. Just look at like the AAA studios in gaming that have, you know, that put hundreds of millions of dollars into development, uh, for their games that end up being absolutely garbage and churned like through 90% of their player base within a couple of months.

And those games are also massively de-risked, right? Because they're generally just iterating on previously very successful titles.

Yeah, IP, exactly.

Yeah.

And it's also a very hard area to invest in. And I think a lot of crypto investors sort of wisely actually stayed out of it because it's half venture investing, but half of it's like almost like art. you know, or like investing in a movie or something. Like you're betting on this very subjective, um, sort of very subjective ability of a team to, to build a compelling experience.

I wouldn't say many stayed out though. I think, I think you had many jump in headfirst '21, '22, and then the, the kind of staying out started in '23 when, uh, expectations which were a bit short in terms of, you know, the time it takes to, to build this stuff. Uh, it didn't match, uh, what was delivered. And so, um, now you have a scenario where, you know, naturally when there's a gold rush, you're going to get a lot of crap, but there's going to be some good stuff mixed in. And so you're starting to see some of the quality ones that were funded, like all the games that are going to be coming out, um, over the next year or so that are exciting, haven't they weren't built in the past 12 months, right? So it's all stuff that was funded a long time ago and takes a while. And so, yeah, it's like the— it's a multi-year development cycle. And so I think, you know, the quality ones will start to show now.

Yeah. The alignment with like when people want distributions on their investments versus how long it actually takes to make something that's actually good. And like, to Zay's point, like there's no like, cookie-cutter approach to making a very good game. All it, it's all different from one to another and specifically from one genre of game to another. Um, yeah, there's obviously best practices that go, go involved into, you know, making mechanics that are compelling and fun to use. Um, and you know, like making sure that there's like an adequate skill ceiling for people to, you know, get to, but it's also not impossible to pick up. There's like all of these things that, you know, you need to balance. And I think a lot of it also comes down to like, Um, I think this is probably like a sector where like you probably want to bet on, on founders who have built something in the past versus like other things in crypto where like, you know, we get these super young founders who are like making the first foray into, you know, entrepreneurship sort of things with building these protocols. And that stuff is, I think, you know, good and fine. But I think within gaming, you, you do need some kind of experience of what works and what doesn't work to know what you can and can't do in the future for these things.

And particularly, I think, you know, on the first-time game builder side, I think one of the most frequent mistakes we've seen is inefficient use of capital and more specifically a poor job of understanding how much capital you need to get from where you are to where you want to be. And so, you've had a lot of situations where, you know, development is usually going to be delayed by something. And so, where they plan to be for their next round, they're not quite there yet, which makes raising the next round even harder. And so, you kind of get this downward death spiral for some of these guys. And so, yeah, the multi-time game founder, it's one, you know, just building a game, but it's also managing a team, managing a budget, managing a timeline, which is really hard and generally doesn't necessarily overlap with the original skill set that you're looking for in a game designer. Yeah.

Also, so switching gears a little bit, a lot of ton ecosystem activity. I don't know if you guys experienced the same thing. That was like one of the sectors that people were talking about the most. I know I had one of our portfolio companies, shout out Fanten, take us through like the, the Telegram wallet experience, and it's actually pretty smooth at this point. They also have this deposit campaign where you can earn up to like 50% APY. You can earn 50% APY on up to $10K if you just KYC with them. So I'm very curious what— who's paying for that, and also how, how many users they've gotten through, through that, because there's like a billion Tether on Tron now, a little bit over that. And so I wonder how many, how many like unique users actually signed up for this campaign, because that bodes well for, for distribution. And then there's like so many mini apps with, with tens of millions of monthly active users at this point. Like a lot of them are clickers, but there's like a dating site I saw, like a Tinder on, on Telegram. There's like, uh, all sorts of stuff on there. It does feel like an interesting, like, distribution method, but also a lot of these Telegram mini apps do literally nothing on TON. In fact, one of them upset everyone because they launched a token on Solana. They had a TON minigame and everyone thought it was going to be an airdrop on TON and then they just launched a token on Solana because literally none of this stuff runs on-chain. So it's like bullish distribution and the UX. But yeah, I still don't see the full picture of how this will end up.

Yeah, I don't have too much insight into TON. I know Duncan looked into TON quite a bit a couple of months ago. I know lots of things have probably changed since then, but, um, it's, it's a distribution thing for me. But I think it's kind of telling that, you know, the TON project would launch on, launch their token on Solana, right? I think that kind of tells you a bit that like the users that you want, or, you know, or maybe the users are just there and ready on Solana versus on TON. It just, something doesn't feel right there to me. Like I've ever, like it, it looks like it should just, you know, take off, but like Nothing really is. So I'm kind of just like curious. I'm kind of sitting out on it mostly because I just don't understand enough of it and like where, where the value really is. And like there's— there haven't been too many like compelling apps or projects that I would want to get involved in. I think a lot of them you can make good money on, like, you know, that Notcoin and stuff back then and all that stuff. But like I'd rather, I'd rather take the time and spend it in Solana, to be honest.

Yeah, what do you think, Duncan? I'm curious.

I probably wouldn't over-index for that one token.

Yeah, but maybe, yeah, it's just, I think it's just like an early like flag post.

Yeah, I definitely think it's kind of interesting that like you could use Telegram's distribution and then just go and kind of do your own thing on a different chain. But yeah, it's probably like kind of a one-off because I'm sure it's a lot smoother having it on TON. But definitely they have a ton of distribution. I still feel like they need to make the chain a little bit less clunky. And yeah, like I think it has definite potential. They just need to work on the chain, I feel like.

What do you think of the Catizens and Hamster Kombat launch?

I—

yeah, how did it go versus what you expected? I was expecting bigger launches, honestly. I mean, Hamster Kombat's traded like 500 million, um, like in the first few hours, but Cadizens I think settled somewhere like 800 million fully diluted.

Um, yeah, yeah, I think you definitely have a kind of like after Notcoin was like such a success on Binance and these games, like relatively speaking, pretty low lift, right? They're just clicker games, which are like incentivizing kind of like you to go and follow their social media and join their Telegram group and all that stuff. So they can get pretty insane distribution and like they're kind of fun, but Like, it's kind of the thing with meme coins, right? It's like, you know, once one meme coin goes to 4 billion, there's 10,000 launched a day, right? So, you know, when Notcoin pumps to a billion and like there's a very low cost to create these things, then there's probably like, you know, hundreds of clicker games a day being launched on Solana. And obviously Hamster Kombat and Cat Citizens are two of the bigger ones. And got traction early, but there's just like, you know, the effort it takes to make that game versus the potential payout, you know, reaching like billions dollar valuation.

Yeah, but there's been, there's been like, there's like millions of them now. There's like hundreds of clicker games that haven't done what Hamster Kombat or Catizen. I mean, Catizen's been building for like 2 years, and I think Hamster Kombat was—

it's the same thing with meme coins though. It's just like, just the fact that they exist and they're such low lift games in terms of like NotCoin or Hamster Combat, like the massive incentive to just spam, spam development of them.

Do you guys know what the last Hamster Combat round was? I actually don't. I think the Cadizens one was like 200 to 300 mil. So not a great launch, probably up 2-3x on at this point. But Hamster Combat looks to be like almost 60% diluted, like, sorry, 60% of the float is out there.

Yeah, they airdropped a lot.

It's like a half a billion market cap. And it traded its entire market cap in volume over the first 2 hours on Binance, it looks like. Yeah, pretty wild. All right, we want to move to markets. It looks like we have reawoken. Specifically, I'm interested in getting you guys' take on, I mean, markets generally and also like VC coins that have been very hated, including sometimes by, by us on this podcast, have seemed to have come alive and actually outperformed memes over the last 7 days. Curious. Yeah. What's— how's everyone feeling about the market? Is this, is this real? Yeah. How you guys? How are you guys feeling?

I'm kind of worried a little bit going into the election. That's like my one thing that I'm a little bit worried about. I feel like there's a lot of uncertainty there. But like, yeah, I think things are looking pretty good. Like one thing that I like to look at for Bitcoin is like gold and gold has been making like new all-time highs every day for the past like month. And I think that Bitcoin fundamentally is like pretty similar to gold. So on a fundamentals basis, I think it should kind of follow, but it does have a super high correlation with stocks and kind of more risk assets. So we still might be going through a bit of digestion, but I think like the big kind of question mark, um, and maybe I'm just overthinking it or maybe the market is like kind of over-indexing on it, but I just feel like the election is in the US going to be really important for what are the next regulatory steps? Because if it's priced basically 50-50 right now, 50% of the market is thinking you could get a Trump win, essentially a massive easing off of regulatory bodies. He appoints a new SEC chair and head of the CFTC, and then it just a big safe period for crypto and alt-founders and other projects can take on a lot more risk and there probably won't be too much action. But then if you get a Kamala win and it kind of continues with these more unclear rules around crypto, maybe even like a further crackdown because we haven't really seen the SEC, I feel like, slow down much during this election. Cycle, and they keep on cracking down. So like, if there's another win and it just goes further in that direction, I think that, that could be, that could be scary for alts longer term.

On the SEC point, I think that— I forget the cutoff date, it's either end of September, end of October, where basically everything they prosecute after that won't count as a feather in Gensler's cap. So they try and rush everything and then They— so you can kind of— that's why you're seeing a flurry and then it'll kind of stop. Um, this is kind of the understanding I've gotten from talking to other people. Um, yeah, markets-wise, uh, I think my base case is we don't break all-time highs until after the election. Uh, if you like zoom out, you know, from the all-time high in March, uh, we've kind of— or late February— we've kind of made lower highs consistently 65 most recently has been a pretty big, uh, source of resistance. Uh, so I think, you know, if we can break through that, we probably teleport to high 60s. And then I, I would be surprised if we broke out. I think there's like low chance we break out to new all-time highs before election unless you're starting to see, um, a lot more confidence in a Trump victory. Um, so, you know, but during that time, I do think you'll see some, uh, degree of alt season, which is kind of what we're seeing now with Bitcoin dominance being super high. You're starting to see kind of total 3, uh, breakout, which is just like a look at crypto market cap outside of BTC and ETH. Um, and, um, and so, so you think it'll run from here?

You You're—

I think we kind of chop until, um, election. I mean, alts, alts, I think, yeah, also I think are pretty well set up. I think, you know, decent amount, um, dominance still pretty low. The, the, the, uh, total market cap of, of, of Total3 is, is getting up there, but I think part of that is also just a function of unlocks and, and new token launches, right? So it's not necessarily appreciation per se. It's, it's just creation of new market cap, uh, just through, through new tokens. And so, um, I, I do think alts can run decently well. It, um, you're not seeing an insane amount of new money come into space though, so it'll probably be a select subset of alts and, and not a broad-based rally, kind of what we've seen, you know, um, over the past year or so. It hasn't really been an everything up type of environment. Um, and then, like, because you also have a lot of macro, uh, tailwinds, right? China easing, uh, is, is pretty bullish. And like, the, the measures they're going with are pretty hilarious. It's like a pretty blatant, uh, attempt at manipulating the stock market upwards in terms of, you know, what they're doing. To the point, you know, it's not just kind of interest rate cuts, but incentives to buy homes and giving money basically brokerage firms and insurance funds to help to basically deploy into the stock market. And so I think that'll increase liquidity and serve as a, as a, as a tailwind. And then, you know, US markets are looking a lot better. The rally there is broadened out, right? So it's not just a Mag 7 story again. And at the same time, you know, the China stimulus should be good for a lot of hard assets and commodities. So that'll broaden out the rally in stocks, which should help on the crypto side as well. And then, yeah, so I do think alts will do well. You're probably going to get some occasional flushes, but I think there's a chance we can break to all-time highs before the election. But ultimately, I don't think it'll happen until afterwards.

Uh, yeah, I, I— so yeah, I echo a lot of the same thoughts, like, at a high level that, that Duncan and, and Jan just shared. Um, I'm quite— yeah, I think, I think, um, you know, you have— so yeah, on, on, at the high level, you have China issuing a, you know, a ton of stimulus coming into the market through various sources and, you know, into, into various, like, places, right? Stock market, Commodities, everything, houses, all that stuff. On top of that, you also have, you know, we started cutting interest rates, uh, what was it, a couple weeks ago you had a 50 basis point rate cut, and the, you know, the bond market is kind of pricing in maybe another 50 basis points before the end of 2024, and then another several cuts in, in 2025. All of these things are super, super bullish for risk assets, uh, as everybody knows, and, uh, quick plug to our, you know, last year's Year Ahead Markets report. Those were like the two things that we kind of pointed to as what would need to happen in order for us to get, you know, a real bull market in crypto, in crypto markets. Specifically China taking the liquidity baton, which they just kind of did, and then interest rate cuts, right? Interest rate cuts for me are really important because they kind of catalyze the two missing ingredients uh, that we've, that we've been missing this, this bull market or this cycle relative to, you know, last cycle or previous cycles, right? All the other cycles occurred when interest rates were quite low, which is very, very good for things like stablecoin creation and, you know, credit expansion, which are super important for risk assets, right? Credit is very good for speculation, and you just need more stablecoins to have a bigger broad-based rally like we saw in, in prior cycles. Something that I always like mention on Twitter or in our chats is like stablecoins grew from like, I don't know, $5 to $10 billion at the start of 2020 to like $190 billion at the cycle peak versus, you know, bottoming out at around $130, $120 billion after FTX exploded. Uh, and now we're kind of back at that, you know, like $190 billion market cap. So like you had a 40x increase in stablecoin market cap last cycle versus, you know, like a 30% increase so far this cycle. And then obviously, you know, credit is a huge thing. We don't have any real crypto credit from an institutional standpoint this cycle, right? Genesis's loan book was like $15 billion on its own, and then you had, you know, several other, other institutional lenders that had several billion dollar loan books themselves. And most of that money was, you know, pushed back into markets via speculative funds and, and things like that. So without these two things, like, it's kind of like you can't really expect everything in crypto to go up like they did in prior cycles because there's just simply not enough money to push everything up. And then, you know, Duncan always brings up the other side of the equation, which is the supply side. Supply only continues to grow in crypto. So if, if everything's to go up, you just need more money. I think this is the start of that, which is really, really exciting for me. Um, in terms of the sectors, right, um, yeah, to Jose's point, over the last, like, you know, like 7, 7, 14 days or so, a lot of the best performers haven't actually been meme coins. Uh, they've been, you know, kind of things like you mentioned, the, the quote-unquote VC coins. I think there's, you know, a question— I'm pretty sure Duncan would, would cast some doubt on this, right? You have a bunch of unlocks coming up, so you probably had a ton of people positioning like, oh, I'm gonna short this VC coin into this unlock, and then they just get absolutely blown out, right? You saw that with, with TIA, right, having absurdly high, uh, negative funding as well sometimes. Say SUI, I believe, as well had that dynamic going on for quite some time.

And I think to some extent, although, yeah, I don't know, funding looked to have normalized on— yeah, I don't know. I find it hard to— it looked like it had normalized at the bottom, actually, for these coins. That's why I'm kind of interested in— because people were bullish majors and bearish a lot of these alts. And so what is it that changed that? Is it just the fact that basically rates, rate cuts, China stimulus just means people go out on the risk curve and that's enough to undo the effect of the unlocks and the supply coming onto the market and positioning starting up?

I think a lot of people just got too—

that trade got too consensus basically.

Over the last 6 months, you could have just shorted pretty much any of these coins at any point and got away with it. Right. So it really, it creates like a lot of really bad habits for people in the market. If I— if, if you've been around crypto for a while, it's like most people aren't actually that great at short-term positioning. It's more so, you know, you're just in a market that's very, very forgiving most of the time. And then when that, you know, when that kind of sentiment shifts, like a lot of people continue trying to do the things that worked for the last couple months. And I think like over the last couple weeks, you've, you've, you've seen this big— like I felt this big like shift in price action and sentiment and things like that. So people that like maybe don't have as much experience or just like aren't in the, you know, the weeds of, of these like shorter time frame types of moves as much just kind of go back to the well that's been working. And unfortunately, like a bit— an example I like to use is like the T1 that had extremely negative funding. And like regardless of what you think about, you know, like DA and, you know, cost of this and all that and alternative DA, whatever, right? Like just looking at that chart, I was just like I wouldn't short this. Like, it's already down 80+%, and you just saw tons of people coming in to short this thing. And then you had a bunch of VCs go on Twitter to, you know, like, put up their threads about why Celestia is great, blah blah blah blah blah. And I just—

the round of—

I just get this, like, really— yeah, right, you just get this really weird positioning mismatch in the market. And in the short term, you just get a lot of, um, blowouts to the upside. And I think, I think you will get your answer, your actual answer as to like, are these coins now more in favor after this like next couple, couple weeks or month or so of unlocks hits the market, right? Is there an actual organic bid to absorb these things or not? The jury is still out. I lean towards no, as, as Duncan is saying. Um, but interestingly, something that I've noticed outside of those V— like the, the the VC cabal coins or whatever is, uh, if you look back to like the start of the year and the end of last year, AI coins were the first like sector to really start ripping, right? Because you had ChatGPT like really hit the market in, I think it was like October of '23, like people actually like starting to use this and see like all the cool stuff and applications that would be unlocked by this type of tech. And then you had Render, you had Tao, whatever all the other ones were, I forget, Fetch, right? All of these things rip and do like absolute insane moves to the top. And then after that, you saw memes follow, right? You saw like, uh, like WIF, you saw all the memes, right? And I, I'm seeing like the exact same thing happen right now in the markets, right? Like if you look at a, like a, like a sector breakdown over the last couple weeks, like yeah, the, the, those coins that we just talked about are like the VC coins are doing quite well and have been doing better than memes a lot of the time at large. But some of the bigger moves have been in a lot of these AI names too. Um, and then, you know, in the trenches, which I know Setters hates, hates that term, but like you're starting to see like memes again, just like these new memes that are launching have like sustained multiple week just straight run-ups, right? And I think it's just like indicative of the shift in risk appetite and sentiment in markets. Like over the last 6 months, any meme that came was pretty much dead on arrival. It maybe pumped for a couple days and then would fucking go to zero. Whereas like now you have a bunch of these things ripping to $100 million market caps and kind of holding for, for weeks on end. So I think it's like, um, I think the market is kind of telling you that, you know, risk appetite is kind of back on the menu. And I think the only thing that really derails—

really derails—

no, no, no, no, risk appetite, risk appetite. Is back on the menu. And I think to, to Duncan's point, what really potentially derails us is the election. That's like the only thing that I see that can stop this train.

Yeah, I feel like, you know, and we're recording this just for some context, like Bitcoin's in the middle of a massive green candle. Um, so Bitcoin's $65,500, um, and I don't know, I kind of feel like you on the alts and some of like the longer tail stuff, like what we might see again, like I wouldn't at all be surprised to see like maybe Bitcoin like rally up to 70 or something and like hang in there or come back a bit. But then as soon as Bitcoin starts rolling even a bit, just like another full-on alt puke on all of as these unlocks hit and these coins come out.

The unlocks have started though for a lot of these.

I know, but when the market's going up, everyone is 3-3ing, everyone is holding, we're going to infinity. You know, Bitcoin goes to $70K, no one sells a single coin, and then all of a sudden Bitcoin goes from like $70K to like $67K like that, and all these things get fucked.

That's kind of— yeah, unlock related though, because I think they're all gonna be— I agree, they'll all puke, right? It's not even gonna be tokens with unlocks, I think.

Yeah, everything will puke because it's just marginal selling. And also the other thing with Total3 that, um, it's not really that great of an indicator because it only shows 100, the top 125 coins. If you go to like CoinGecko and go to like the total market cap, it'll show you everything. And obviously there's a lot of like, I'm sure they filter out the ones that are clearly scams or like unverified, but like Total3 is only the top 125 and we are launching so many more coins. So I'm just looking at, you know, March 11th, which was like the peak of the market. The market cap peaked at $2.85 trillion and now we're at $2.4 trillion. So it's down like 5%, the total, total market cap.

$2.4 trillion on what, on CoinGecko?

Yeah, if you go to CoinGecko and then at the top you hit market cap. So it's basically like the market. Cap is down 5%, but many alts and many coins are down fucking 70%. So this is this whole dilution thing that, you know, yeah, the thing is though, that's just a huge, a huge mismatch. Like, if you look at this, the market cap's down 5%, but a lot of these prices are down 50% plus. So that's the only thing that I would be careful about.

Yeah, the stuff down there is going to be heavy, heavy low float, high FTV, because CoinGecko tracks by market cap, not FTV. So like, it's it, it's, it doesn't really come into play as much. And I agree, I don't think it's a great signal. It's more just, are we breaking out, are we breaking down, like another view on it. I do think though that we've churned through a lot of BTC supply. So, uh, you know, over the summer through all the selling from, from, um, governments and, and, and all the seized Bitcoin, everything else in between. So, you know, having that out of the way in a friendly environment is going to be very constructive for price. So, um, like even pullbacks that we've seen, like we thought— I thought the chop would be worse on the way down, right? Because over the summer, we— if you, if you plot kind of, uh, BTC against equities, that we were underperforming, right? Downside similar, if not worse. Upside less. And then right now, it's at least today, but today means nothing. It's, it's reversing a bit. So I do think there's a slightly more constructive environment for BTC. And ultimately, I think, you know, BTC is going to be fine either way with either person in office. But I do still think you get a broader puke with Kamala, including on BTC, not from the regulatory side, but from just the increase in taxes. Right. And what and how that plays out. I don't think— I'm not pricing in a very, very, very low chance of the unrealized gain tax, but just increasing individual, uh, taxes, both cap gains and income, and then corporate taxes. This is going to be a big drag and create a lot of panic, I think.

Yeah, I think that, yeah, we're just going to continue to see, like, you know, positioning on alts got really terrible and like sentiment got really low and people got really short. And now we've had like a solid BTC run and alts are now moving. But I think you're gonna see on like a macro macro picture, this dynamic of like BTC hanging in, going down a bit, and just like, you know, maybe some alt outperforming on, on the upside. But I think basically all alts are going to just really, uh, on the downside, like kind of get crushed. Or when BTC is chopping, just they have such weight to them. And I think like as the market matures, it's like, you know, if you have like— just because Bitcoin, the outlook for Bitcoin does well, yes, there's going to be certain performers, obviously, and, you know, you'll probably do really well if you can find them. But it can't carry all this other shit up, especially without the environment that Jason Yanowitz was talking about, which is like, you know, retail environment, more credit in crypto. Like, if you want everything to really, for a sustained rally, go up, you need, you know, retail and credit back. And I don't think that happens until like Bitcoin's like probably like $80K to $100K, and then maybe you could get something that's like really crazy for a sustained amount of time. But until then, I think every like big BTC sell-off, you're going to see a lot of these alts get puked pretty hard.

I think you're right. Um, just one thing that's like very— it just, uh, it's just like, so if I think back to you and I, you know, look back at how, how things I've owned have, you know, acted and performed you know, from— I would say, you know, don't laugh.

Okay, Jason's gonna be telling us about the meme sector.

No, no, from June— no, from everything from June to, uh, for, you know, beginning of September maybe, or like, you know, August, right? Like everything, even when, like, because like, you know, Bitcoin has done like decently well. Like, yeah, you had like a pretty big sell-off, uh, you know, at— when was that? Like, uh, at the start of August, right? When you had like that Japanese macro blowup, right? Um, but like, that isn't really indicative of like crypto. That was everything. So I kind of just like take that really big puke and drawdown and I just like remove it, or I try to like just pretend it like didn't exist. As like, you know, like, I don't think that's indicative of like crypto weakness or anything like that. And the way, like, just the way that, that markets have— or crypto markets and altcoins, not just memes— but like, it's, it's— I think it's like a very good barometer for just like pure risk appetite. In speculative frenzy, which is why I go back to it. The way that the market has traded since the beginning of September to now is very, very, very, very different than the way the market traded from like May to the beginning of September. Very, very different. Um, like I'm looking at my, you know, my watch list, literally everything is green. Every single thing is green except ETH/BTC, which is—

Jason, this is what I think. Yeah, like, right, but like, this is not done accumulating Bitcoin, and, uh, the cabal is pumping these VC coins into unlock.

I don't have many coins on my watch list.

That's my current positioning right now.

So like, the way I look at it is like, the market is trading and acting differently than it has over the last several months. So I think that that should be a sign to people that like, hey, maybe things are starting to like resemble more of what we saw from October '23 to March of '24 versus what we saw from April to September.

Yeah, I think this is more of a mean reversion than like a market structure shift. Like, we're not done working through that. Okay, we can make it.

We'll see. I mean, we come back, you know, a couple months.

I don't think this is a market out of curiosity to season. I think this is just positioning.

I agree with that, but I don't think it's all—

I agree with that, but I think it's a start.

Interesting.

I'm a key.

You think it's a start? You think it's the start of alt season?

I think so.

But you, but you mentioned you've obviously been playing the beta through, through mainly memes, um, and you know, you're, you're, and doing very well through it. And your argument was sort of, they're the fastest horse, as long as they're the fastest horse, I'll keep, I'll keep betting on them. And it's like, I guess, how much VC coin outperformance, uh, do I need to see before— do you need to see before you rotate?

Exactly. Uh, I want to see what happens after.

That's like, let's catch this fucking hot potato. It's like, let's play hot potato with the piece of dynamite.

Positioning. It was all like, the outperformance is positioning based.

I, I just— so my— yeah. So what you just said is like my theory for why a lot of these hated VC coins have done really well over the last month or two. And to your question, like, what would I need to see? I want to see what happens to them after the unlocks. I have no problem being late to things, right? Like, I don't need to buy the bottom of stuff. Like, I think that's more of like an exercise in ego than it is anything else. So like, after all of these things hit the market, after these unlocks hit the market, I will kind of see how price, you know, how price trades. Do we still see all of this, you know, like bull posting from people on Twitter or, you know, or not? Like, I'm kind of curious for that. Like, I'm not sold on it. It's— it was a lot easier for me to get into, like, identify SOL as like the main thing I wanted to— the main ecosystem I wanted to be invested in, you know, last year after we had a couple of those early reports that, you know, Seteris wrote, you know, Solana the Monolith blah, blah, blah. You started to see a lot of stuff happening on Solana with, you know, like Jito, Jupiter, very reminiscent of, you know, like ETH DeFi Summer in 2020. You know, like you're actually starting to be able to do stuff as opposed to just speculate, uh, on, on the native token or, you know, just random stuff. And it was just like, to me, it just seemed like very clear that like, okay, like if Solana is where I want to be, right, and Solana goes up to $200 or $500 or whatever it is, obviously that money is going to flow through into the ecosystem. And looking back at what happened with ETH, like, the best performers last cycle were memes. So it's just like, okay, like, I'm just gonna run that back and kind of hope that plays out. And you kind of got confirmation of that playbook with Bonk after Breakpoint in October '23. So it was like, it was quite easy for me to then kind of go into the, to the memes that were trading absurdly high volumes very, very liquid very early on, like, right? Like, WIF was even before it did its like 10x to the billion-dollar market caps, right? It was trading in like the hundreds of millions, $200 million, and it was trading like it was trading the amount of volume per day. No, no, no. I'm trying to explain what you need to look for for healthy trades. Let's say that trade more in volume than they do in market cap per day. Like, for example, WIF was trading more daily volume more 24-hour volume than Solana and ETH at times.

When— so do you see a setup? So, so are you, are you positioned like that on memes now? So when you say alt season is starting, you know, like you're playing that through memes, right?

I haven't bought any more memes. I haven't bought any more memes. I, I hold, I hold the memes I owned, right? Because my thesis was I'm gonna hold these memes until I think the cycle's done. Um, and at no point over the last 6 months, even though we've gotten annihilated, have I thought the cycle was done. And I still think Solana goes up to make probably new, new price all-time highs. I know market cap all-time highs, whatever, blah, blah, blah. But like, I think it goes up and makes new price all-time highs. And in that world, I don't— I still see these things moving up, you know, multiples from here. Um, that said, I am looking for other things, right? Like, and maybe, maybe some of these other, you know, VC coins, if they do prove strength after unlocks, I have no problem buying them. I just won't be super early. But like, I think it's more about expectation than, than anything. Like, I'm not expecting meme-like returns out of those coins. I'm expecting to be able to go into those with, you know, more size and, you know, more liquidity available. So it's just like kind of like, what game do you want to play?

What about you, Jan?

I think on the VC side. Yeah. So if you think like why they've outperformed recently, you know, in a complacent market or a market that's like kind of gradually trending lower and you're trying to make some money, you know, you start shorting. What's, what's easier to short? Uh, a meme coin that you— I mean, a VC coin that you know will have some degree of guaranteed sell pressure, or, or a meme that can kind of rip in your face a bit more? So I think it was a lot easier and, and a lot easier to rationalize shorts in the VC coins. And so, you know, they've underperformed quite a bit worse. So they're going to bounce a bit harder, especially with that short fuel. You also have some VCs that themselves are shorting them, right, to lock in, lock in gains. And then you've had scenarios where they've gotten blown out. Yeah.

Give the alpha. I haven't heard of this.

Yeah.

I'm not going to name names, but, uh, and so you, you know, like, that contributes to it, right? And so, like, um, especially with how consensus it becomes, right? Everyone's talked about these unlocks since they've been known, which is a year ago. And, and so, um, I think that explains some of the short-term moves, uh, but, but yeah, outside of that, it's just easier to paint a ridiculous valuation on something that has no fundamental value. And that kind of just goes back to the reason, you know, memes end up pumping is it's so reflexive and there's such a kind of winner-take-most market. It's pretty barbell, right, where you have the best do well, but once they get too rich, there's not as much upside there. And so anyone who's a smaller player then tries to play in the pump.fund, and that was what led to that whole kind of element. But yeah, I mean, ultimately it's still a really hard market to outperform Bitcoin in, right? And I think one kind of way to gauge that is if you look at BTC DOM this cycle, you know, you've had pullbacks, but— and in those pullbacks, alts went nuts and everyone thought they're, you know, they're making a bunch of money. But BTC DOM has just been kind of up and to the right. If you look at, you know, from, uh, let's say like start of last summer, right, when, when we kind of floored. We're at 50%, even starting at June we're at 47.5%. Now we're at 57.5%, you know, 10 percentage points or like a 25% increase in DOM. Um, and, and so, and that's with the, the launch of all these new tokens that are, you know, keeping that naturally dragging that level lower. And so, um, I'm sure—

I think Bitcoin dominance takes the—

the—

doesn't it take the total market cap, which just includes the top 125? Are you sure it includes all the new launches in how it calculates the—

you can, uh, check it out as well.

And real quick— oh yeah, you go, Zay.

No, that, that, that's it. I, I— yeah, I really enjoyed the discussion. And what would it take to like invalidate that, I guess, for, for both of you? Like, would it take—

I don't know. I'm even kind of confused on people. Why don't we do everyone go around, all 4 of us, and say what we're thinking happens at the end of the year, like 3 sentences. Clear, clear, concise.

Are we going to assume that like Trump wins? Because like, obviously you can, you can give, you can give out. Yeah.

Just like clear, like Trump wins this, Kamala wins that. Just, just like, so we all understand.

Okay. So I'll start. I guess. So really quick before I get into that, just to kind of put numbers to that volume number that I was, you know, spouting before. If you go look on Binance right now, you know, the most liquid exchange, Bitcoin's 24-hour volume 40 billion, ETH 16 billion, SOL 7 billion, Pepe is the next highest at 3 billion, Worldcoin 2.5, SUI 1.93 billion, and then WIF at 1.8. Nobody's trading WIF and it's still a top 5 coin or top 6 coin traded on Binance in volume. So when the market heats up, yeah, obviously it's going to trade absurdly high volumes. That's, that's kind of what I mean about, about things. And then going to your question about now until the end of the year, if Trump wins, I think Bitcoin hits all-time highs this year, uh, or, you know, moves to new all-time highs. Does it go to $80K, $100K? I don't know. I think your point, Duncan, about $100K is where like retail starts paying attention to crypto again. Makes a lot of sense. I know Seter has said a lot about that. I've posted like it's just a big psychological level, like seeing Bitcoin $100,000 is going to cause a ton of FOMO. Um, I think over the next, you know, couple months we're going to get additional liquidity injections from China. You'll probably see another, uh, 25 to 50 basis point cut. which should start catalyzing those two things that I mentioned in terms of stablecoin growth and, you know, credit creation. Um, and I think, you know, things like Solana, ETH even will do like higher. Again, I'm, I'm still kind of like bearish ETH relative to SOL and Bitcoin. Like, in order for me to buy ETH, I would have to sell out of my Bitcoin stack or my Solana stack, and I just, I don't see the, uh, I don't see the risk-reward there for me. Like, I just don't see it at this point in time, especially coming out of like Breakpoint. I'm, I'm more bulled up on Solana, which is probably where I would have sold out anyway, or sold, sold from to go to ETH. So you're bullish majors and bullish majors, and I will— so memes that, like, not all memes, like only memes that, like, benefit directly from, like, a native token. So, like, I wouldn't buy, like, many ETH memes. Like, the— honestly, like, I own Pepe as my ETH exposure because I think if ETH ecosystem rips, that's going to be an obvious Uh, no, I mean, it might not be, right? It could just not outperform, but I think it will. Like, history has shown that it generally does. So like, that's my like ETH beta play. Um, and in terms of SOL, like, there, there are a couple things that, that like I'm kind of maybe looking to buy, but like in terms of what I currently own now, yeah, it's, it's like WIF, it's BONK. Um, and I think that if Solana does go up and goes past $200 again, uh, maybe $250, $300 into the end of the year, depending on if Trump wins or not, I think both, you know, both those memes will go on to perform quite, quite well. Um, and I'm kind of sticking to that thesis.

What about you, Jan?

Where are you?

Where you at?

3 sentences.

Good. 3. Sorry, that was like a mini paragraph.

So pre-election, low probability of all-time high, high probability of chop. I think as long as we don't really get any kind of scary macro numbers or, you know, serious escalation in geopolitics, there shouldn't really be too big of a reason for us to nuke I imagine will chop between like $60K and $70K. But, and in that time, you know, alts will, will, will do worse in the drawdowns and they'll just basically be higher beta BTC. Post-election, I think, and even on that front, right, you have like DOM might come back down a little bit, but basically as long as it pulls back a tiny bit, you see, you, that, that kind of is commensurate with pretty big alt moves. So, um, I think you'll start to see, you know, alts do well. In terms of which specifically on the majors, yeah, I've kind of moved out of, um, most of my ETH stack on this recent ETH/BTC move higher and, and kind of shifted to, uh, uh, BTC and, and SOL. Um, I mean, I was already not very heavily in the ETH, but, um, I kind of just— it's, it's been too painful to endure.

Trader.

Um, and then, and then I have, uh, yeah, I have a decent— like, I basically also shifted some of that ETH exposure into Pepe. Is, is kind of— I think it'll outperform ETH, so I'm like getting that same—

such a ridiculous market.

Yeah, unfortunately. I gotta— so I have, I have some Uh, other memes-wise, I've like, you know, I have decent bag of, of WIF and PopCat. I think those are going to continue kind of doing well. Uh, and then I bought a bunch of Floki for, uh, CZ's stuff with that.

I've been sitting on a little while.

Yeah, that, that's done well, although they're trying to do some, some real world stuff, which is kind of bearish utility on the memes.

What does the gem hunter think? The fundamental investor.

I'm thinking, um, we rally into the election across the board, although alts, you know, BTC sells off, alts will sell off more. Um, and then I think the elections, like, I, I don't know, I'm putting a lot of weight on the election. I think if we get Trump in, yeah, probably BTC to new highs and pretty, you know, good environment for alts. And there could be just some like craziness because people are so excited. Um, I think if Kamala gets in, then yeah, BTC could still get to new highs maybe by the end of the year. I'm not quite as excited. I feel like, uh, Larry still needs to accumulate more. So like, I wouldn't be— I wouldn't be surprised if we saw like more range-bound action. And then I think like alts would really get kind of crushed in that environment as just like the realities of the supply come online. Like I just think that Trump, the excitement around Trump could offset that. I still think those things exist. I just think that there could be an excitement that could maybe, you know, push BTC to new highs and then get retail in. I really think that you have to be bearish alts like on a 6 to 12 month view, unless until BTC breaks new highs and gets retail. And that's kind of my like broad alts, broad.

That's regardless of who wins.

Um, no, well, like I said, like if Trump wins, I think it's a higher probability that BTC goes all-time highs, and then you could, you could offset that. But I still think the supply picture for alts is, is pretty tough.

How would you position? Like, are you positioned? Are you cash? What are you, what are you thinking?

Um, I'm thinking like You probably—

Gold Miners.

Yeah, I have a lot of Gold Miners. Um, but I think you probably want to kind of take some risk off into the election, um, is my thinking, and reassess afterwards depending on where we are, right?

If we're in the high 60s, then I'm— and, but, and then obviously weight that against how I think the outcome will be, which we'll have more information on going into it, but it seems like over time her chances should trend lower as she's forced to do public engagements and kind of, I don't know, mutter the same useless stuff. But I think it gets really dire if she wins. I'm, I'm—

that's what I mean. So I just think you just have to kind of— yeah, uh, like I've been taking risk off like slowly, like throughout this move up, not in like massive ways, but it's like, okay, like this thing's doing really well, like is to sell a little bit of it. And I probably will continue that mindset into the election.

That's my view. I mean, I think I agree with most what you said. I'm bullish majors. Um, I do think alts as a general category will struggle given unlocks, but I do think select alts will do really well, including ones that don't have unlocks coming, which there are—

have you heard of Banana Gun before?

I have heard of Banana Gun, surprisingly. I have some Banana Gun. It's been disappointing me, actually.

What?

It's up 4x this year. We're crushing ETH.

Um, and yeah, I do think some, some, some alts will do well through unlocks. Like, I think, yeah, unlocks can be over-indexed on. Um, and yeah, I think Venture will do will do very well generally, honestly. Um, and then memes, I don't have much of a view, to be honest. I have a few select memes, but it's not a big, a big percentage-wise of my, of my portfolio.

Yeah, yeah, venture's definitely gotten harder.

I, I only own one, I guess, pseudo meme.

Yeah, venture's gotten harder for sure.

I think that's more, more a function of where it started. Than anything else.

Yeah, no one— yeah, exactly. There's just, there's just a lot of it now. Um, yeah, I think some of the, some of the like older vintages are gonna really struggle to return. Like, if they, if they can do— if they can return just people's money back, they're going to be very happy.

I think some older or, or newer—

ah, sorry.

Yeah, some of the newer vintages, some of the like Yeah, it's what, like 21s?

Yeah, yeah, no, I'd say, yeah, I mean, 21 is, is definitely going to be tough.

Isn't that kind of just like a— it's similar to like the IPO market, like it's mostly a function of like what market you deploy into?

Well, I mean, venture returns are, are the biggest explanatory factor for vent— for venture returns is vintage.

Okay, yeah, yeah, that's right.

Yeah, but there are, there are some like we know as well Yeah, I mean, crypto, there's a lot of dispersion.

Do you guys think— I mean, this may be like a— do you think we'll see more liquid funds start to, you know, pop up and deploy into markets? Like, I feel like the— like, I feel like crypto markets are like literally a paradise for people who are good at liquid markets. But like, I feel like we just don't see many, many funds do that.

I've just never seen— And I've just— it's rare that you see one do well over a long period of time, right? Like, it's, it's just, it's a paradise, but it's also like hell, right? There's like, it's, it's so PvP and like so hard. You can get nailed so bad. Um, there are a few that, that I know that do really well, but I've, I've not seen like someone be long-term really successful with that, especially people who are, who are like short to medium-term trading. I think the hedge funds that did the best that I know of are the ones that just played it like Liquid Venture and just like took positions and stuff and held it for the long term. And I do think that will always do well in general. I think just being long in crypto is the easiest way to play this. And I still think venture is going to do pretty well as long as you don't have a massive fund and you have a decent brand and you're in the right name, you're in the right projects.

On that Liquid Venture side though, I think the— so the reason we haven't seen too many and particularly too many do well is if you think of the setup that's required, right? So new guys coming into the space, I think, will struggle to do well in liquid venture because you kind of need to have seen enough cycles, need to have seen enough stuff play out to, to know where to avoid the pitfalls. And, and, and those will often end up, you know, undoing a lot of, a lot of, uh, strong performance, right? It's just like mistakes that, that would have probably been avoidable had you been around previously. But And then at the same time, those that have been around long enough typically have done well enough that they don't— the rationale for going liquid venture don't— yeah, it's the carrot's not there. Because, you know, if you're going to make the fund 20% your capital, 80% outside, you're probably going to see a massive drag on performance, a massive amount of headache. All of this stuff just doesn't rationalize you up-sizing your liquid bag large enough to, to be able to do that. And so you kind of have like an adverse selection issue where the, the best guys really won't do it. And then the new guys are going to kind of struggle because you need to have—

I agree with that—

enough to do well.

That makes a lot of sense.

All right, I think we've gone on like nearly an hour and a half. Maybe we can, maybe we can call it here. Um, anyone want to— anyone have any last things to say about Marcus that you haven't said yet, or, or alts that you that you want to show? Looking at you, Gem Hunter.

No, I would just say like if things get crazy for a little bit here, like just, you know, everyone remember things can turn really fast. And I just think like the structural outlook for alts is just really tough. But, you know, there's still opportunities.

Yeah, I think the other thing is, and I've been victim of this myself, not victim, but I've made this mistake. Uh, is you'll kind of go into a bullish setup with a plan, and then things start to rip and you're like, ah, fuck it, and you just start pulling all your, your, you know, your sells. And so I think that can often come back to bite you and cause you to round trip a lot more than you realistically wanted to or planned to based on how you initially set out, uh, how you wanted to exit.

Agreed. All right, guys, it's been another episode of the Hive Mind. Thanks, Jason Yanowitz, for stepping in.

Appreciate you guys inviting me back.

And we'll see everyone in 2 weeks.

Yeah, thanks, guys.