Hivemind: Crypto's 2024 Winners & Losers, Bitcoin's 2025 Price Target, and AI Agent Mania

I think the pure AI agents and frameworks is about $10 to $15 billion. I think the whole thing could go to like half a trillion in 2025. Honestly, like, I'm so bullish on AI.

I think stacking Bitcoin is probably the single best thing most people could do over time. I think probably most people in crypto just like don't outperform Bitcoin because they try to do too many different things.

It's just hard to see I think a bigger winner overall than Bitcoin, but Solana is definitely the other one. I think that it is— it's the first real credible threat that Ethereum has ever had.

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. Hello everyone and welcome to 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 Ceteris Paribus, who heads up our institutional research arm, Yan Liberman, who's managing partner at Delphi Ventures, and then Jason 3x liquidated on Twitter, who is our head of markets at Delphi Research and a regular guest on the podcast. I think our shitcoin scavenger is still on holiday, so I think he'll be back probably for the next episode. So for this episode, it's the first one of the year. We want to do a special episode. We're going to go over some of our highlights from 2024. So we have a few categories. We have biggest winner, biggest loser, biggest disappointment, best founder, best investor. And then we also have a bunch of predictions for 2025. So this should be a good one going through all this with the crew. So to start off, let's start with biggest winner. Who is everyone's biggest winner of 2024? Of 2024? And maybe let's start with you, Seterus.

Yeah, I was going to say Solana originally for this, and I still think it's like Solana is the biggest winner just from like overall ecosystem standpoint, everything. But I think you have to say Bitcoin is the biggest winner. Like Bitcoin outperformed both ETH and SOL in 2024. It's, it's really, I think any, obviously there's some people that still believe in flipping and all this stuff, but I think for the most part, it's really kind of like broken away from that. It's really cemented itself as a macro asset. And yeah, it's just hard to see, I think, a bigger winner overall than Bitcoin. But Solana is definitely the other one. I think that it is— it's the first real credible threat that Ethereum has ever had. Um, and they just like continue to execute and, uh, yeah, and like, so I think, I think those are like two biggest winners, I guess, in my opinion.

That makes sense. Anyone else have, have Bitcoin? Or maybe Jason Yanowitz, you wanna, you wanna go next?

Sure, yeah.

I mean, Bitcoin was the one I was gonna pick for sure, um, as somebody who, who loves the orange coin, uh, you guys know probably in our chats I, I say, you know, I'm like, I guess kind of like Saylor in that, like, I think stacking Bitcoin is probably the single best thing most people could do over time. Um, I think probably most people in crypto just like don't outperform Bitcoin because they try to do too many different things. Like, um, so yeah, and then you got ETFs at the start of the year, uh, and then the end of the year you get, you know, rumors of some kind of Bitcoin strategic reserve fund in the United States. So like, you, you got like the whole range of the gambit pretty much with, with with all the positive things that could happen to Bitcoin. Like Cetera said, it outperformed both, um, SOL and ETH, I believe, over the course of 2024. And I do think there's probably a de— like, depending on how 2025 goes, right, I do think there's a decent chance you, you see Bitcoin outperform most other assets again. In our Markets Year Ahead report, I think like 60 or 70% of the assets in the top 100 crypto by crypto list by market cap underperformed Bitcoin as well. Um, and I think you probably will see something similar to that again in 2025 depending on how the first couple, couple months of, of the new administration goes, right? I think we'll get clarity around, um, like the new crypto czar position and what that means. I think you'll get clarity around stablecoins and legislation there, and I think you'll probably get some clarity around a possible strategic reserve fund and what that could look like. I know there's, you know, varying thoughts of what people think and, and, you know, how likely the strategic reserve fund is to come, like, come into existence and like what that looks like. Is it like the Loomis bill? Is it something more like just holding the existing Bitcoin somewhere else within the government? Um, but regardless, yeah, Bitcoin is definitely my, my biggest winner of 2024. I think it's probably good for crypto in general.

Go ahead, Jan. Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, for the first 10 months, I would have said Bitcoin for sure. And I still think you can defend that. And, you know, not going to rehash the previous points that were made. And then with the election, I would kind of say like crypto and as a whole and kind of in the US I think in particular, um, which, you know, you'll likely see Bitcoin be the biggest beneficiary of in the short term through the reserve. But in the long run, I think ideally you see kind of an improved regulatory framework which brings talent and, um, and experimentation and growth. And so, um, I think with the new administration, uh, crypto in the US— crypto as a whole and in the US in particular— will kind of be the biggest winners.

Nice. Yeah, I agree with all those. Maybe just to be different, I'd say c) DeFi. Like, pretty much all the biggest winners of this cycle— Hyperliquid, Athena, AI agent stuff— they all have various points of pretty serious centralization. It's very far from the sort of stuff that Vitalik had hypothesized early on. And, you know, in terms of purely on-chain stuff, decentralized front ends, all this kind of stuff. We've strayed very far from that. And as of right now, I think that trend is sort of set to continue. Like, I think we're going to see more semi-centralized, like, companies issue tokens. We're going to see more projects sort of focus on growth and product and UX over decentralizing every single part of their stack. And so far, that's proven to be the absolute right decision for everyone that tried it. And everyone that's sort of gone the opposite way has gotten screwed in various ways. So yeah, I think that's definitely a trend that like won in 2024 and the market kind of showed it doesn't really care about purist decentralization stuff.

Yeah, for now, until like there's a reason why you have to care. I mean, yeah, we'll see.

Yeah, I think that, I mean, I've sort of been— this is probably against myself, this trend. I do think that everything that can be attacked will be, and sort of all these points of centralization will get pressured as these things grow. But as of right now, it's like pretty tough to argue against it, I think. And if you're advising portfolio projects or whatever on strategy, you'd probably not say to spend too much time on on, you know, like thinking about how to decentralize your front end or, yeah, decentralizing every single part of the stack and rather like take shortcuts to have a good user experience and decentralize later once you have a working product with traction.

Yeah. I mean, I wrote in the In For Your Head, like, should Hyperliquid even try and decentralize? I think the reason why you would is it, you know, if you're relatively centralized product and you have a lot of money that you're custodying, you're like, you're going to get attacked a lot. And so I don't know.

Yeah.

Like, it's like people forget when people forget when things people forget, you know, after a while of honeypots not getting like exploited. People kind of forget about it. So I'm not saying anything's happening to like Hyperliquid. I'm just saying, you know, people don't care when the times are good.

Yeah. I think that the middle ground is basically though where you kind of decentralize enough to get rid of this single point of failure level honeypot risk, but not enough to the point where performance degrades.

So in the sense that everyone's trying to find that sweet spot to some extent.

Well, no, no, no. Like it would, it's basically the sweet spot is a lot closer to centralization. I think, I think it's just like, I think Athena's in a pretty good spot with it, with having, you know, uh, a, a bunch of individuals kind of, or entities having, uh, like the multisig access where it's not like a single point of failure. With Hype, you don't necessarily need to get to an insane amount of nodes, just enough where it's not 4 out of Japan kind of thing, but expanding beyond that, you know, enough to where it's like, it's— Yeah, go ahead.

I just do think with something like Hype, it's going to be tested. Like, you know, they will eventually, like, some regulator will subpoena all the validators. Like, clearly, you know, there's so much money going through this. There's— and this is like, as Gabe likes to call it, buttfuck jail stuff, like money laundering and things. It's not like white-collar crime. It's actually like— yeah. So I don't know. I do think this stuff will get tested and a lot of the things that people talked about early on will kind of prove to be right in terms of decentralization. But I mean, 2023, 2022, and even 2021 to some extent was like people going to the extreme of this governance theater, right? And the founder calling himself a steward of the network or something like that, or I don't do anything, I just guide this thing. Whereas now I think we've really swung the other way. Like, you have Antonio Giuliano talking about founder mode and coming back and making dydx happen and founders posting about fee switches and things like this. So I think we're very much on the other side. And sort of it seems to be just paying off. Like the, yeah, regulators don't seem to be going after this stuff as much, at least. So yeah.

So maybe the biggest loser is the teams who are building decentralized from the start.

100%. Like the rise of the world.

Kind of sad.

Yeah. Yeah. So let's go to biggest loser then. And maybe let's start with, with Yan this time on the, on the biggest loser. Who is your biggest 2024 loser?

Gary Gensler. Yep. I think that, that, yeah, it kind of speaks for itself. Um, he's, he's gone from being, you know, the, the, the darling of the party, of the specific part of that party, you know, the Warren camp, and, and kind of trying to cop on the beat. Yeah, get himself into a higher position in the administration, to effectively kind of tarnishing his reputation and being a bit of a pariah and not liked by really anyone to this extent because he's no longer useful, right? So, um, I think part of his, uh, his, his appeal was his utility, and, and now that Um, so many things have failed, you know, things that no one expected, like the Ripple case. Everyone thought that was a layup. And, um, you know, regulation by enforcement, um, and, and kind of even blocking the BTC ETF, right? Like, it's crazy that, you know, so many of these things took place. Um, and just, you know, huge miscalculations that I guess in a world where you think you can go unchecked, those, those decisions make sense, right, to try and block something which is pretty obvious. Um, it's something that should have been passed, uh, considering the other things that have been allowed, or naming like the Futures ETF. And so, um, I think now, yeah, he's in a position where he probably just retires or maybe goes back into private life if he wants to work. But I don't know.

Goldman to Elizabeth Warren, back to Goldman.

Maybe he starts— no, no, maybe he starts an L1.

GG.

He's going to raise money for a crypto fund. He's going to make it all back.

Yeah.

Who's your biggest loser, Jason Yanowitz?

Uh, uh, I would have like, I guess it's tough, uh, for me. I mean, I guess this could be like kind of part of an upcoming segment, but for me, like, um, it was ETH for 2024, uh, compared to something like Solana even, or even, you know, like Base, right? Like Base and ETH, like everybody's like, oh, like Base is, is, is Ethereum, but like, it's like kind of not, right? Um, all of the activity happened on Solana for the most part. And then, you know, when activity did start moving over to EVM land, it happened mostly on Base with like virtuals and stuff and the AI agent, like, I guess, meta that happened since early November or so. And it just seemed like, yeah, like you, it's, it's very, I don't really want to rehash everything we've talked about all year, right? With, you know, Rinko writing in his Solana vs. ETH reports over the last year, as well as in the Markets Year Ahead report, there's just like a pretty big, you know, narrative, I guess, dispersion here. Like it's pretty, pretty clear, like what the investment thesis for something like Solana was heading into 2024 and even, you know, the back half of 2023. And it just wasn't as clear, like what would happen with ETH, like, okay, like where do I invest if I think it's going to do well? Is ETH even going to do well? You had the ETF launch, and then pretty much for the first several months after the ETH ETF launch, you just had like outflows, and on good days, not zero inflows. It was just like not a great year for ETH from just like a cultural standpoint, an ETF standpoint, pretty much until the election happened and you kind of had like the floodgates open for, for crypto risk appetite, which, you know, did make its way to ETH for, for a little bit. Um, but even then, like I said, it seemed mostly siloed to places like Base as opposed to like ETH mainnet or something like that, or even some of the other L2s. So yeah, for me, ETH was just a pretty big disappointment for the past year plus, and I'm not sure that's going to change too much, honestly, going into 2025, but we could talk about that.

So I, so that was also mine. I think to get a bit more. Specific. So definitely ETH just because, I mean, it underperformed massively, both Bitcoin and SOL. Solana is like a real competitor now. The market caps are getting a lot closer. Ethereum's had to go war mode. That just means there's a war like worth fighting. And that wasn't always the case before. So it's definitely a loser in the stance that now they have to like fight a war. I think the biggest, biggest loser though is like these, I call them first gen rollups. You know, I wrote about this in the Infra Report. It's basically all Base and Arbitrum doing everything. And even Arbitrum, like a lot of the, they have like a big eco there, but like who's getting the recent metas? It's Solana and Base, right? All of these, you look at a lot of these, there's this tweet yesterday that I saw, Blast went 13 minutes without a transaction, right? Right? Like, that's insane to go 13 minutes without a single transaction. So I think, and you're seeing all these high throughput chains now after the success of Solana, right? Another thing, like I kind of wrote about, you know, in EVM land, you're seeing stuff like MegaETH, you're seeing RISE, you're seeing Ithaca by Paradigm, right? You're seeing, I mean, Unichain is kind of going to be like this. You're seeing Base is like jacking up the gas limits pretty much every week. And I think it's just going to be tough for, you have these, you know, ZK-Sync, Scroll, Optimism main chain, Blast. Like it's very hard for me to see how these ecosystems like really thrive. Especially if you believe that Base is going to continue. And I think that Base being the leading rollup is a loss for Ethereum. Straight up, it would be a much better outcome if Arbitrum, I think, was like leading rollup for Ethereum versus Base. So yeah, that's my biggest loser. I'd say the other biggest loser is probably just Celestia. Like, they've— my hot take for 2025, which I guess we'll get into later, is that I think Celestia is going to like destroy every other DA layer. When it comes to like data posted to it. But I think TIA is still going to be a pretty bad asset to own. And so, yeah, I don't know. It was just so high. I think modularity in general was so hyped over the last like year and a bit and like restaking and all this stuff. And the biggest winner has been what, Monolithic? Right. I think these distinctions are like kind of dumb moving forward anyways. Like, who cares at the end of the day? That like, it doesn't really matter too much to me.

But yeah.

Yeah, you guys kind of said all of mine. So I'll just go with everyone who pivoted out of crypto at the bottom. Like a bunch of people I know, I'm sure we all know a couple of people who who I like. It's funny, it was most— for most of it, like, the highest volume was definitely very close to the bottom, like, of people I know sort of capitulating out of crypto, calling it all a scam. Um, and crypto continues to sort of prove that you really need some long-term conviction to, to make it. It's, it's not, uh, it looks like easy money in the good times, but you kind of have to make it through the bad times to get there. And and it's really hard to stomach the volatility if you don't have conviction.

I have a tweet from the Literal Pico Bottom that says, the best way to be early for the next cycle is to never leave. And that's like, basically you just have to like not leave. Bitcoin was like $16K or $15K then. SOL would like just hit $8 or whatever. But it's true, like, yeah, I don't know if you just believe, if you just have blind faith that this industry can—

that, or you have no other career prospects.

It's like that GIF, I didn't hear no bell.

Yeah, I think a lot of the people who stayed also have like no other career prospects, which turns out to be a great moat, right?

Like, I mean, dude, I left my old— I didn't, I mean, I, I went full-time April '22. Right, which is right before, like, I left. And I left those first 6 months, I was like, dude, but I, but I knew I could always kind of go back to what I did before. Um, but it was a good— that was a good entrance, you know. I thought I was joining in the bear market because Bitcoin was already down like 50%, and then it was just 6 months of like Yeah. Okay, let's go.

I just get hit by surprise.

I could never feel lower than that.

What's the, what's the biggest positive surprise? And we can start with, you start with Jason Yanowitz on this one.

Oh, biggest positive surprise, huh? For me, it was besides my meme coins doing way better than could have ever imagined. Bitcoin's flows, ETF flows were like— I remember I was writing like when, when they were going live, I guess like January, like pretty much a year ago, almost to the day, maybe like a week off right now. Everybody's like trying to estimate like what the flows would be. And I'd be like, oh, like if they got like, you know, maybe a couple billion dollars of flows in the first year, like, you know, maybe like $5, $10 billion in flows in the first year, they'd be like really good, especially when you compare it to like gold flows. And then over the course of the year, they've pretty much exceeded all expectations by a significant degree. And like, not just my, like everybody's expectations, the Bloomberg analyst expectations, all funds. They outpaced gold AUM at this point. It's pretty incredible. I think, I think, I think it's pretty anomalous to see like an ETF do something like this. And obviously based on, you know, like statistics of what most ETF launches do and what, what flows they get in the first like year or so and what their AUM tends to be like. Obviously this is slightly different, um, you know, Bitcoin, I guess you could look at it as like a commodity digital gold. So I guess like the TAM for like a Bitcoin ETF is probably, probably higher than, you know, general launch ETFs for, you know, different like equity type strategies or, or whatnot. But even still, uh, the, the flows that we saw last year were nothing short of incredible for Bitcoin ETFs. And I think a lot of it, you know, comes down to what we saw happen in, you know, 2023 with like the whole banking crisis. I think a lot of people started losing, losing some faith in the general banking system. And like one thing I always kind of like point to is like, imagine we had those big, like these big— yeah, imagine we had these Bitcoin ETFs when we started having that banking crisis back in March 2023. Like what would Bitcoin have done? like, how would Bitcoin have moved? Could trad fi actually invest in Bitcoin at the time, right? And I say that because, like, these banking crises, like, like, that wasn't like a one and done. Like, you're definitely going to see another, you know, macro banking crisis, especially as yields continue to kind of, like, tick up. Like, I think the, the risk of, you know, kind of banking-related issues probably continues to rise, uh, at least while we have this kind of environment. And it kind of just like, okay, so like if something like that happens again, I think you could see like another, you know, surge in, in, in ETF flows into 2025 as well. So for me, Bitcoin ETF flows for 2024 was probably the craziest thing, um, that I could have expected. Much crazier than I expected. And I just didn't want to say meme coins going up like they did, but I did like that too.

Yeah. Who wants to go next? Ceteris, you want to go next?

I mean, the— yeah, the ETFs definitely blew out my expectations. I don't know. I think like probably just everything since the election. I mean, We had the podcast after that and I said $100K by like Q3 or something. I just very severely underestimated how much of a positive that that was going to be. It's kind of like biggest positive surprise is Trump moving his head a couple inches. Maybe that's like the biggest, like positive, like It's kind of scary to think about that didn't happen, where we would be. Kind of like wake up, get nightmares, wake up in the middle of the night over that. But yeah, I think the ETF flows is overall.

Yeah, my one was similar. It was like just crypto's political power and relevance, honestly, was surprising to me. Like how much of, how much it got mentioned by Trump. Like the fact that he's doing a, you know, BTC 100K, you're welcome tweet, like the President of the United States. And the fact that we're talking about a strategic reserve, the sort of overwhelming consensus that Gensler is an idiot, you know, and like, just not just from like, it's probably the only thing that like Mark Cuban and the all-in guys like agreed on, on that podcast they did was, you know, the Gensler's an idiot. And yeah, just like the sort of realizing the importance of stablecoins. Like, it just seems like it happened suddenly where crypto went from the ginger stepchild that, you know, is not just like actively hated, but at some point, like, also like ignored. Like, it just seemed like everyone was indifferent to just like seemingly, obviously from my perspective, like seemingly a pretty central theme and played a pretty important role in the 2024 election and is a pretty big part of Trump's mandate. There's literally an AI and crypto czar. Even the fact that crypto is included with AI in that role is so insanely bullish. And I would never have predicted this a year ago. Yeah, it was such a different political situation. Like a year ago, it's almost hard to fathom. So that's my biggest surprise.

Yeah, that's good. I actually think my biggest positive surprise, the more I think about it, is just crypto in the courts. Like, we just did really well in the courts with basically everything. Like, we didn't really lose a lot of cases. And this goes hand in hand with like Gensler being the biggest loser, but I mean, there's just been a lot of positive court wins that it's like we can't— it's that, you know, you're gonna get tired of winning so much. Um, that's definitely— I didn't— my expectations were not that high for that.

Yeah, I mean, like, some of the court wins made a lot of sense, others were definitely surprised. Like the, the— I mean, the BTC ETF ruling, right? They ruled that, that blocking it was arbitrary and capricious relative to kind of, um, allowing the futures ETFs. But then I think that the Ripple case caught everyone by surprise. Everyone assumed they were toast, and that was the biggest layup of all. And then seeing that reverse kind of kick-started, um, a lot. It's like, all right, if that's winnable, then what else is? Um, yeah, yeah, mine was—

can't get Ripple.

Yeah, yeah, it becomes a resources thing too, right? Um, they go after companies that are capital constrained and can't necessarily fund the same quality of defense. Um, yeah, mine— and I had ETF flows, right? We— I, I thought there'd be 10 to 15, and we came in at, I think, 35. Um, which is, which is nuts if you think about it. Um, in the first year before even having, you know, a lot of these advisors fully equipped to go shill. And now you're seeing gradually increased allocation recommendations from 1 to, you know, 2, some as high as 5. Yeah, so that's pretty nuts. And just it's hard to see a world where it stops without some crazy negative surprise.

Yeah. Let's, let's move on to biggest disappointment, biggest negative surprise. Maybe just keep going with you, Jan. What was your biggest disappointment 2024?

Yeah, so I guess disappointment and loser can kind of overlap a bit. I had, it was kind of between ETH just in terms of, I think their scaling roadmap and listing out 2029 dates, I thought seemed pretty ridiculous thinking that that would go over well. And just not really having a roadmap at all. And then I think the other has been Uh, and, and this will tie into, you know, part of an answer for 2025 is, is kind of, uh, lack of quality games launching. And, and I, I think the, the bullish element to that is it's not that we've seen games launch and they were incredibly underwhelming. It's more just a lot of delays. Um, and so I think that, that, that was a bit disappointing, but I, you know, that, that sets up for a strong 2025. In that area, which we've said for the past 3 years, to be fair.

But yeah, true. Mine was similar. It was L2s and UX. Like, just going between L2s is still such a nightmare. And the fact that, you know, most of these L2s are still running on, like, don't even have, like, fraud proofs in production. Um, yeah, and, and just the UX of, of going between them. Like, you'd think with the amount of billions of dollars that are, that are like at stake, someone would have fixed this issue. Like, there would be incentives for someone to fix it. There would be incentives for the EF to, to like enforce standards, which I know like Vitalik has started to do later in the year. But it's just, it, I would never have thought that it would be this, this bad by the end of of 2024. Um, and yeah, I guess ETH is, is there too. Like, seems the Ethereum Foundation is pretty disconnected. Um, it's just this, like, my biggest thing is like all these blogs by the Ethereum researchers that the example is always like Alice pays Bob, you know, and there is no Alice paying Bob on-chain. Like, this has been the thing since 2015, like 9 years ago, and like Alice still isn't paying Bob. Like, Alice wants the ape meme coins, you you know, or trade tokens on leverage, like, and they just refuse to accept that, right? They have this, this like sort of ivory tower view of like what people should be doing on-chain and public goods funding and like futarchy and prediction markets and stuff and Alice paying Bob and they just don't use the chain. And it's like very clear from the criticisms of Solana as well that a lot of them aren't using Solana. And yeah, I still hold a decent amount of ETH and I'm bullish ETH for reasons I can't really, I guess, verbalize that well. But yeah, that was a disappointment for sure. I think L2 UX is the biggest disappointment for me.

For me, it's the L2 security, which you kind of talked about. The fact that they're all— if you look at L2 beats, they're pretty much all stage zero. There's a few that are like stage 1, like Arbitrum, Thinkbase now. Uh, this has been like 4 years. Uh, and it's still basically the whole optimistic rollup thing is just going to be skipped. Basically, we're just going to go to ZK rollups because the tech is just like going a lot faster. Um, but yeah, I think like no excuses on that front in 2025. Like if you haven't made a stage 2, you roll up stage 2 by the end of 2025.

You wanna explain the stages briefly just for people who, who, who don't know?

I gotta go to L2B. Uh, don't worry. No, it's like go to L2B. You could go to L2B to look at it and basically there's like 5 criteria. It's like the DA, the exit window, proposal failure, sequencer failure, and like state validation. And it's kind of like. You know, how centralized are these? You know, where do the multisigs kind of exist? Can users actually exit? Like on Optimism and Base, like there's no exit window, right? Which is kind of the point of rollups is that if something happens with the L2, you can always exit to the L1. Yeah. Getting rid of the multisigs is like something that's never going to really happen in my opinion, but they can still be a lot better.

Jason Yanowitz.

Best, uh, oh yeah, he was going disappointment. I feel like disappointment's similar to like loser.

Yeah, to, I guess it implies high expectations. Yeah.

Yeah. Uh, I guess like the quick thing I jotted down was, um, the lack of like, uh, because the lack of like, uh, centralized like lending and institutional lending that has like never come back to the space since FTX collapsed, uh, and kind of blew everything up. Um, there's a huge driver of last cycle's gains, right? You had a lot of funds borrowing, a lot of different players borrowing money, a lot of that coming from institutional lenders. And then pretty much since the end of 2022 when everybody blew up. Like, you really haven't seen any big players enter the space to kind of fill that void, which I think was a pretty big missing ingredient for most of last year, um, which is probably why we saw a bit of dispersion across all the sectors, right? You only really had like one or two sectors do well at a time, um, as opposed to everything do well at the same time. And I know Coinbase has, you know, started to launch their institutional lending program and has kind of grown that loan book. Um, I think last time I looked, it was around like $700 or $800 billion or million. Uh, and when you just like compare that to, to like 2022 or 2021, Genesis had like a loan book of like $15 or $16 billion on its own. And that doesn't, you know, include a bunch of the other ones. Um, so just like the lack of institutional lending that has not really repopulated the space. Um, it's kind of been a pretty big disappointment for me, at least from just like, you know, what, what that means for, for prices and, and just general, uh, crypto outperformance across the board. It's kind of hard to, to see, uh, the cycle or to, to see different sectors doing as well as they did last cycle without that kind of thing, right? And hopefully, you know, as rates decrease over the next year and continue to hopefully tick down you might see that, that dynamic start to play a bit more. But again, I'm not too, not too bullish on that even heading into next year as well. I think most of the growth will probably have to come from stablecoins.

Yeah, actually, I'm going to change. I think biggest disappointment is that I didn't find my wife. Let's move on to what do we got?

Best founder.

You had some high expectations.

I've just been on a lot of dates. It's like, it is disappointing.

It'll, I mean, your market value should increase with crypto, with crypto too, to be fair. You can start to tell people you're in crypto maybe next year.

Maybe. So there's like pros and cons to that.

True.

Yeah.

All right. Best founder. I'll start. I don't think this will be a surprise to anyone, but it's Guy from from, from Athena. Um, they launched— it's hard to believe, but they launched in February 2020, uh, 2024, and in less than a year they went to 6 billion supply. Uh, they, they outpaced DAI to become the largest stablecoin outside of the big two, uh, Tether and USDC. They generated over $100 million in, in actual revenue, uh, became the second fastest app to ever get to $100 million revenue after pump.fun, actually. And they also just became integrated with centralized exchanges in a way that no other stablecoin outside the top 2 has ever managed. It's now listed on 3 out of 5 of the big 5 centralized exchanges. And I think this is probably one of the biggest markets that was ignored by a lot of the decentralized stablecoins and a lot of the sort of USDC, USDT competitors. It's in over $100 billion in sort of centralized exchange collateral for perps. And they're really, I think, as like the LTV goes up, they're really going to have a strong chance to be the winner there. And then they obviously partnered with BlackRock recently to launch USDTB, which eliminates one of the biggest points of FUD for USD, which was this negative funding. And overall, Guy, I think, has just like combines having a massive and very specific vision of delivering this like internet money with consistently taking incremental steps and executing towards it across all dimensions. He understands the crypto-native side of how to tap into the right narratives with Athena Chain, how to make the right strategic moves with integrating with centralized exchanges, but at the same time also just consistently executes on these partnerships, on the airdrops, which is the best airdrop outside of Hyperliquid. And yeah, a lot of people don't know, we've actually known Guy and been impressed by him since way before Athena in like 2020 when we were early on starting Delphi. He was a research subscriber on the highest tier we had at the time, which is Institutional Plus. And we used to talk to him all the time and he impressed us so much that we actually offered him to kind of join Delphi early on and be almost like a a co-founder type, but because it was still that early where you could do that. And at the time he had like an actual real job at a— in TradFi and turned us down. But then obviously came back and just crushed it out of the park with Athena. And he's also just like a really nice guy with who— yeah, so I think definitely that's my pick for best founder.

My pick is going to be Mert. Um, because that's a good one. He's probably, he's like just important as Toly for Solana. Um, he's also, you know, I don't know if we're going to do best shitposter, but he's also up there for best shitposter too. Uh, I think the way he ends when he reply guys someone, he just ends it with hope this helps. I think that's like a great way to end a, uh, reply after you take someone down. But no, I mean, the guy hustles. He's, I don't really know how he does it. He's 24/7, obviously he's working on Helios, like big Solana RPC. But I just think he's very important to Solana. Like I remember it used to be the guy who used to defend Solana on like Twitter was Zen Lama, who ended up going to Monad like a year and a half or so ago. And then Mert kind of came on the scene. And was doing that. It's like such an important role, um, for an ecosystem, just like dispelling.

And he's also like a really good spokesman, right? Like, he's pretty intellectually honest, like will regularly admit and like steelman Solana's faults. Yeah, it is pretty— he's a pretty impressive guy, actually.

It's a good pick. Yeah, so that's— yeah, that's my pick.

Uh, I guess I could go. I This might not be a surprise. I don't talk to too many founders too frequently. It's just not, not really where my time overlaps. Not nearly as much as these Ventures guys, obviously, or, or, or Labs. But I guess I'll just have to say Jeff from Hyperliquid with building out a product that everybody, regardless of the centralization aspect of it and, you know, the risks associated, I'm not going to talk about that. I don't know anything about that really, my opinion. On that stuff is pretty, uh, invalid. But in terms of a good product that everybody wants to use, uh, it's, it's up there with some of the, some of the best, um, you know, trading exchanges that I've used in crypto for sure. They, you know, have, have a decent little ecosystem starting to grow, uh, with a couple of their other, you know, projects. Like they have their own, uh, pump.fund with, with H-Fund. They— I think like 60 or 70% of USDC on Arbitrum is pretty much in Hyperliquid. So it's, it's pretty much Arbitrum is what people use to go do stuff on Hyperliquid at this point. Uh, in terms of like trading stats, they have like, I don't know, somewhere between 5 to 10% of open interest that Binance has, which is really impressive considering the exchange, um, launched fully I think in January of 2024 and, um, only really got popular in the last several months as people realized you had this airdrop coming. And then obviously the TGE with the airdrop was a huge, you know, wealth generation event. Probably one of the, one of the better airdrop, you know, executions that's happened. There wasn't really any issues claiming, um, there's no issue doing any of those things like you've seen with, with recent airdrops. And it kind of just goes to show that like if you build a product that people want to use, right, in crypto, and there's not many, not many, you know, uh not many like straight up use cases that everybody agrees on besides, you know, speculation, stablecoins, things like that, right? And this allows everybody to kind of do what they want to do, right? You have perps, you have spot, you have, I guess, you know, pre-launch markets. You now have these, you know, Pump.fund type markets with HFund. Um, it kind of just goes to show that if you build a product that works well and everybody wants to use, it'll probably be successful because there is a lack of those types of products in crypto. And then obviously TGE was, was really good for a lot of people, which kind of goes hand in hand with building a community, right? Like a thesis that like, or like a theme that we, we've written about quite a lot is like, um, like making patrons of the chain, like effectively, if you make like early users of your platform pretty wealthy, like they are more likely to stick around and help, you know, facilitate growth. Of the project and of the ecosystem over time. It's kind of what you saw with like Bitcoin early on, with ETH early on, even with SOL. And I think you're kind of starting to see that with like the cult forming around Hyperliquid post-TGE. And yeah, so that's, I guess that's what I'll probably go with.

Yeah, no, I think that makes a lot of sense. I'm also going with Guy, no surprise. Yeah, I mean, the current success of it has been pretty— I think the growth has been pretty unprecedented. Yeah, like they mentioned, we met him back in 2020. I think his background is kind of perfect for this in the sense that he was deep in the DeFi trenches and like as degen as it gets, but, you know, was at the same time you know, very successful kind of private equity background. And so I think that the combination of the two, um, with a very driven individual sets himself up well for, you know, uh, executing. Um, but there's still a lot more to do, and he's really nailed it on, on all fronts without, without a hitch, really. The guy's, you know, on 24/7, um, at every hour of the day. It's, it's pretty absurd. And so, yeah, across, you know, the design itself in the early stages to the growth, to the partnerships and the broader integrations, I think it really helps. Plus, he's, you know, very personable. And so I think, you know, part of that growth is just meeting with these exchanges and teams and getting along well. And so I think, you you know, all of that really plays in well. It's funny, yeah, we did, um, try and bring him on, and considering the current success and future success, it would have been a decision he would have never financially recovered from. So for his sake, he made the right call. And so, um, yeah, I think they're poised to do really well, right? As interest rates come down, the appeal for their product comes up. It's also now really, you know, we've talked about trying to bring in, um, non-crypto users into the space. And so, you know, we talked about gaming being one of these channels, but, um, you know, the, the— there's broad consensus that stablecoins are and, and likely will be the top, if, if not one of the top kind of products. And so, um, being able to bridge the yield that's generated from speculation in crypto as a product to normies to bring them in and get them interested, I think is huge. And so, you know, stablecoin supply is likely going to go up quite a bit. I think it's like 200 or so right now. I can see that likely doubling next year as rates come down. And just, you know, there are people are looking for additional ways to source yield and get more comfortable with kind of the environment. And they should be a really strong beneficiary of it and are positioned really well to do so.

Nice. So those are good. Moving on to best investor. This one's obviously tough. Because you never know. Like, we're investors in a few funds, uh, only a few, but even there it's, it's really interesting. Sort of the ratio of people being loud on, on Twitter and apparently doing well versus actually doing well is, is pretty skewed. Like, there's people that are very loud on Twitter and you think are absolutely crushing it who have like abysmal returns, is the only way to put it, and others who you never hear about who just absolutely crush it silently. So it's, it's hard to do this one. Um, I kind of wanted to focus on someone that I, that I do know, uh, and at the— it's, it's Jan actually on the, on the pod. He's— it's gonna be a surprise for him too. But yeah, I've been following obviously like very close friends for, for a bunch of years and following his, his trading career. And for most people who don't know it, he crushed it on the first cycle in 2021 and then got the double whammy of Luna and FTX, both of which were like very sizable net worth hits, uh, like very sizable. Um, and since then he's pretty much caught like every single meta on, on PA other than SOL. I think you caught like pretty much every single one and like executed with, with size on it. Like in the bear market, like JMX, uh, Rowbit, Uh, then memes you, you caught in size, like Trump with Doge, uh, like Ina, the AI stuff. You've been, you've been crushing like virtuals and, and stuff. So it's, it's been pretty impressive to, to watch. Um, and I feel like you've also like improved a lot over, over the years. Like you used to be just like a giga ape. Uh, I think you told me once that you took like 3 90% drawdowns in the 2020-2021 bull cycle, like like in a bull market, which is pretty absurd. And he's definitely like, your risk management is definitely improved from, I guess, getting bummed by FTX and Luna. But so yeah, I think that's my one. And then maybe some shoutouts on the fun side. I think Dragonfly. Yeah, sorry, you wanted to say something?

No, I was just going to say that's really kind of you. I appreciate that a lot. Yeah, thank you.

I would appreciate it if you managed some money for us, for us all on the liquid side. And yeah, so on the fun side, I'd say Tangent and Dragonfly are really impressive. Tangent has always been good. They're similar setup to us with prop capital. They hit Sei, Athena, MegaETH. And then I think Dragonfly at scale hit it out of the park this cycle with Monad, Athena. I think MegaETH and Monad will both do well. And a few lesser-known ones I'd say is sort of Bitscale, like Zohrab at Bitscale actually like silently crushes it, has done really well in a bunch of stuff. And then Brevin Howard-Nova, like Kevin and Ashwin, those guys have crushed it on the liquid side with serious size and still have time to be very active angels and be in a lot of the really good angel deals. So yeah, those are my, those are my picks. Who wants to go next on this one?

I don't really like— I don't really have— this is hard again because yeah, you don't really know what people's returns are like. And also in a bull market, I don't know how some people like some, some out there. One that I was going to say was that Bonk guy who's just been like a giga ape and but he's been right on like everything that he's aped. But at the same time, I also he's like, I don't think he's taken profit. And so it's like, I don't know if this guy is just going to like lose it all when the tides turn, right?

The tides will never turn.

It's hard. It's hard to say. Like, obviously there's the standard, like, funds you can go with that we know have done well. I don't know. I would probably say, like, just like what I know personally. Also, I guess on this pod too, like, I thought Jason Yanowitz was like pretty good on being early to from being the Bear King to being the Dog King is like a pretty wild rotation. You know, being— having the conviction on Bitcoin, like Bitcoin, Solana memes, that was like your MO and that was the place to go. And so you never got like mid-curved on anything.

And so AI came around.

Yeah. Till I guess.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, you were right on Goat. Um, so yeah, that's probably what I would say.

That's a good one.

Cause yeah, I don't, I don't know a lot of people. Yeah. There's like a few people on Twitter that, you know, the AI stuff, they, they've been pretty right on. But again, you don't know if people are just like tweeting about stuff, right? Like I, I even do it too. Sometimes I'm like right about stuff and then I kind of get lazy with the actual like execution.

So yeah, that's the thing. I think across the hive mind, like, that Delphi Pure Alpha chat has hit pretty much every single, uh, like meta this cycle, which is pretty insane. Like, from the bear to here, everything was hitting that Alpha chat. It's just, I think Jan is the most disciplined about like executing in, in size as well on, on these, on these narratives. Um, yeah. And then yeah, Jason's a really good pick from, from— yeah, the Bear King to Dog King thing was pretty insane, and the pivot was very close to the bottom as well. Yeah, yeah, I remember Yanowitz and I, we used to talk like, Jason, Jason's bear case makes a lot of sense, uh, but is he just someone that's going to be stuck in this— that there's just an, you know, there's these like perma bears, right? Like the, the Shifts or whatever of the world. Is he someone that's going to be stuck in this perma bear? And he wasn't at all. He went full—

somehow that's become Duncan now.

Yeah, I mean, he's the one who gave American name.

You and Duncan switch places. It's wild.

Yeah, I don't know. Duncan still did pretty good, I think.

No, no, we got— I can't talk shit. He's not on the pod. He's got to defend himself.

So I think he did really— or I think he did pretty well. Obviously he didn't do any of the memes, but he, he definitely had a few good things this cycle.

Yeah, yeah, he's got a good— he's got a good— he plays a different game.

Like, yeah, the picks and shovels, baby.

Yeah.

For me, I don't know who I would pick, honestly. I don't, I don't have— I'm not like an LP in many of these funds, so I don't even get to see what their returns are. I just see screenshots that people share in different group chats, and some of them are really fucking bad. There's that, that, that guy on Twitter, Eugene, @oxenas, E-N-A-S. He posts, I think, like monthly Binance screenshots of his like roundup P&L card type thing, and they're always like fucking absurd. I don't, you know, I don't know him personally. I just, you know, kind of follow him and read his takes. And I think a lot of his trading takes have been good. I think he's based on what I see and I'm assuming these aren't, you know, like edited screenshots. I'm pretty sure if they were, somebody would have called them out at this point. Um, so he seems to be very good with his perp trading. He does, uh, he's consistently, I think, on the Binance leaderboard as well, um, on these different, you know, monthly roundups and stuff. So I've seen him hit a lot of decent trades from GOAT to, to WIF, uh, to a couple of these ones. Um, And he also posts when he's wrong too, which is, you know, usually people who fake and LARP don't usually post when they're wrong. So I do appreciate that. Um, and yeah, I just— he, he reminds me a lot of, um, this cycle's like Haska, or however you pronounce his name, right? I don't know what happened to him, where he went, if he— if maybe this is his alt, who knows. Um, but just catching a bunch of different rotations, um, and this was before like he had a ton and ton of a ton of followers. Um, I know, you know, as you get more followers, as you break like 100K, 200K followers, it's relatively easy to, to move markets in the short term with, with a tweet, right? Um, a lot of people, it's, it's got other strategies, right? You're like, oh, take a position in something, tweet about the ticker, and then you get like a nice 5-10% pop in the, in the, in the stock price. And, um, It's just been interesting to see this guy absolutely crush perps because I don't think there's many who, who crush leverage trading and perps. And like I said, assuming these Binance P&L scorecards are real, which I'm sure somebody would have called it out for clout at this point over the last 6-7 months, um, putting up $10+ million months is kind of absurd. Uh, so yeah, I always kind of take a look out for what, what he's posting, different ideas he has. He also kind of puts out long-form thoughts. He's done some on Athena in the past, uh, as well. So, uh, whenever I see his, his name pop up on my Twitter feed, I always take a few minutes to, to look at what he's saying, what his trades are, stuff like that.

Yeah, no, I mean, Jason's absolutely crushed it. Uh, it was like one of the earliest to the dog coins, um, especially on SOL, and, and just kind of realizing that they were going to be the fastest horse this cycle. And yeah, the entries he got on some, on like Wyvern Bonk are pretty absurd. I mean, I'm really happy with how our fund's done in terms of the investments we've made. And I'm looking forward to seeing a lot of those kind of come to fruition in 2025 and even just the ones in 2024. And, uh, there's individual guys on, on Twitter for sure. It's always tricky. So yeah, same guy Jason mentioned, you know, there's evidence that I'm inclined to believe, um, showing that he's crushed it. I think there's some of these other guys, uh, that have called out a lot of these tokens really early. Um, there's like, uh, him and Mick Sleuth. These guys have crushed it on the, uh, the AI Agent side and, and kind of the AI meme stuff. But the tricky part is knowing, you know, how much they've held. Um, there's, there's no way of knowing, um, and, and, you know, how much of it got paper-handed. Um, because of, you know, just getting really early entries, it's really hard to kind of sit on your hands when, when something starts to balloon massively and you just need to like kind of, you know, take a step back and, and think about it relative to where everyone else is. And understand that just because, you know, it's a monster position for you doesn't necessarily mean you need to downsize if you think there's still a material amount of upside because everyone's pretty underexposed. Um, and then on the fun side, yeah, like, um, I think Brevin has crushed— I think it's, it's really hard to, to do well in size in this space. So I think, you know, it's, it's impressive for sure for some of these guys in the trenches, but they're, you know, working with much smaller size portfolios, and then it's easy to get— easier to get monster returns. But I think, you know, some of the larger funds, it's really hard to— because, you know, your, your space is limited, um, and, and so you kind of need to be pretty nimble, um, and, and, and make a decent amount of moves to outperform because of— I think it's been the hardest bull market so far. Um, narratives have changed. Bids will go, you know, from uber strong to just absolutely zero overnight. And so, um, I think holding positions for too long has been pretty unforgiving. Um, if you've used even any amount of leverage and not managed risk, you've probably gotten wrecked just because of how big some of the swings have been and how quickly they've happened. So, um, I think yet to continue outperforming has been tough. And, and, and you've just seen Meta shift on a dime, and, and these like kind of like smaller cycles last weeks at times. And so it, it really has been, um, a much harder market to navigate, but I think it creates opportunity for, for outperformance, um, because it's not just all up only.

Cool.

I'm gonna join together the last ones, like best researcher and best shitposter, and I'm gonna ask us to be fast on this because we, we're an hour in and we haven't gotten to 2024 predictions, which I feel like— or 2025 predictions rather, which I think will, will take us a while. So yeah, best researcher and best shitposter. Uh, for me, the best shitposter is— this is probably going to be a, a common one, but it's Quart. Like He just had some, some bangers in, in 2024, just sort of shitting on, on absolutely everything. Um, and then I think like Rinko at Delphi, who probably has like, I don't know, like 1,000 followers or something, he has some underrated, uh, really good tweets and memes. So I'm going to mention both of those. And then best researcher, um, I think Pondering Durian was my pick. Like, he just crushed the The DAI series, like before this narrative went to what it is now. Just an awesome writer and a lot of alpha as well. Like actually unearths alpha because there's a lot of people who are good writers, good explainers, but don't really provide much alpha. And he kind of combines both. And then I also think, yeah, your pick, Jason Yanowitz, he's actually been a pretty good researcher, as has a few other people on Twitter. DeFi Squared has also done some pretty good research. Yeah, those are my picks.

I have the exact same picks as you, so I'm not going to add more to this.

Nice.

Yeah, research-wise, Pondering. Yeah, the quality of writing, quality of alpha. The way he can kind of synthesize a bunch of topics in a complex way and have it flow really well. I think it's really impressive and it's been kind of the best research I've seen by a pretty wide margin on the topic. And so excited to see everything else he puts out. And then shitposting, I like Base16z. That guy's pretty funny on Twitter. He does a lot of like regular tweets and reply guy stuff that's really funny. So I enjoy following him.

Yeah, I like, I think we're all gonna probably say PD for, or Pondering Durian on Twitter for those who don't know, for best researcher. Yeah, I didn't know shit about AI stuff and then I was like, all right, I guess I should spend a couple days just reading all of PD's reports.

Well, he also ties everything back to like history and like, yeah, he's very well read.

Yeah, he's a big lit guy. He loves, uh, loves his, his lit, his history. Uh, it's good. Yeah, just read his stuff. It's good. You'll like it. There's no way you won't. Um, for sure. And then, uh, best shitposter, uh, honestly, I don't, I don't really know. I like how, uh, Flood, the ThinkingUSD guy on, on Twitter, is is bullposting and shitposting my hype bags. So I guess I'll just say that it's not for everybody though, but I appreciate it. Somebody's got to do it.

Yeah, he's definitely done really well this year. I think he's probably one of the—

I, I, I'd bucket him into one of the best traders.

Yeah, because he, he's been trading on that platform, so his airdrop must have been disgusting. And I know he's just been sizing in since day one, and he has size.

Yeah, his size is size. Yeah, for sure.

Interesting.

I didn't know that actually. Yeah, good to have some diversity. This podcast definitely like the Obama putting a medal on Obama meme to some extent, the last few categories. But, uh, but yeah. All right, let's, let's move on to the 2025 predictions. So we have a bunch of different predictions. Let's start with Bitcoin price, um, and maybe we can say like the highest You can say like, what do you think the highest price it reaches and when? I'll start. I think it reaches $200K at some point in 2025, driven by, yeah, lower rates, Trump strategic reserve discussions igniting like global FOMO. Yeah.

I think like $150K.

I have it at $170K, which is basically like, I think it hits $250 if you get the reserve, and then if it doesn't, I think it hits $140 without the reserve. And I'm saying 25% chance of reserve, 75% chance of no reserve. And so just the sum product.

Uh, I'm pretty much exactly where Jan is with that, honestly. Like $130 to $150 without a reserve, with a reserve $200 plus. Um, yeah, without a doubt. And I think that— I think the peak is Q4. Or yeah, late Q3, early Q4.

Do you think summer— do you think it's like the summer's been pretty shit the last few years?

It's always shit.

Yeah.

Yeah. Q1 will be good, I think. Generally good. I think Q2 and Q3 will be generally shit. And by shit, I mean just sideways and choppy. And I think Q4, like end of Q3, Q4 will be good.

Yeah, it really depends on how many other countries join in the, uh, the race too, right?

Which—

that domino effect.

Strong opinions loosely held, as, uh, as Peter Brandt would say.

All right, uh, total crypto market cap, um, what do we think? What do we think there?

What's it right now, like 3.5 or something?

I think it's 3.5. Yeah, I'm, I'm gonna say 8 is an ambitious number. I think there's just going to be a lot of tokens created in 2025. Like, there's a bunch of big launches still to come. And I think, like, if we assume that Bitcoin does go to $200, then that by itself, or even $170, that by itself is going to drive, you know, a couple trillion. So Yeah, I think, I think, um, $8 trillion is my, is my number, especially with a rate-cutting environment. And I think stablecoins could touch like $350 to $400 billion in '25.

That's—

I'm definitely being ambitious in these predictions, but yeah, um, the stablecoin one I think has legs, especially with rates, um, in a rate-cutting cycle.

Yeah, mine's 7, which is like pretty similar. I don't think, I know a lot of people calling for 10. That seems a bit too ambitious for me because it's just like, that's just Bitcoin. It's, it's, I mean, here's the thing. It's like, yeah, my BTC was like 150 because I don't think the reserve will be implemented. Right. Obviously, if the reserve gets implemented, everything changes. So it's just without— I don't know, 7 is a lot. That's a double, um, after an already really good 2024.

Yeah.

Damn. Yeah.

Go ahead, Jason.

Uh, yeah, I was— I'm somewhere between like 5 and 7, honestly. Um, I think a lot of that's going to be Bitcoin. A couple hundred billion of that will be, um, stablecoins, I guess. And then I just don't see like ETH doing that great, like, like, which is a huge— another huge, you know, percentage. Yeah, total crypto market cap. Um, so maybe I'm wrong, maybe it does really well and doubles and helps, helps out with that, but I'm not too sure.

Yeah, I'm at, I'm at like 6.5, 7 basically, if, you know, I think BTC goes to $170, um, I think that, that puts it at, uh, like 3.4, right? And, and I don't think dominance is, is gonna go that much lower in a world where, like, I, you know, I see dominance probably staying in the, the 50s, low 50s, if BTC makes that crazy of a run. And so I'm, I'm in the 6.5, 7 range.

Makes sense. Alright, what do you, what do we think the best performing sectors and tokens are going to be? And I think maybe we could use Seterus's spreadsheet for this as like the categories. I don't know if you want to run through that.

Well, we actually, we're actually updating it on the portal. We just added agent platforms frameworks as a category and we added agents as a category too.

Okay.

I do think it's just like, I don't, I don't know, man. Like maybe this is the fucking top on all this AI stuff, but I still feel like the, the, the frameworks, I don't know. It's hard. I have like, obviously like taking profit on this stuff too, cause it's run up so much. But I still think like you're trying to pick the best performing, you know, it's only been like a couple months of this AI stuff. And like it is by far where all the attention is. Um, I don't think it's like meme coins. I don't think it's DeFi. I think like, you know, I still think SOL, like you'll have your L, some of these L1s do well. Um, but it definitely just feels like the most explosive one for 2025.

Yeah.

Um, I also think it's going to like, be absolutely brutal once it ends. And so it's like, yeah.

Yeah. I'm in a similar camp. Just also, you know, you have a lot of prevailing tailwinds with these models improving. I think right now the main criticisms are that they're kind of wrappers, but I think, you know, that ends up being a bit shortsighted. Plus, I do think, you know, for certain specialized ones, the fact that you have a way to monetize them and accrue value to them via token, you know, we were all in the camp that tokens or cryptos are one of crypto's biggest unlocks. And so I think the combination of the two and the incentives it provides will help that space grow. I think like 10 or 15 bees altogether. And so it is relatively small and it's come up quickly. And so, you know, you're seeing a pause now as there's just kind of end-of-year profit taking and they're just— it's been more or less up only for a couple of weeks. So I think it's reasonable to expect some churn and it's combined with, you know, the doubt that comes up. But I think it misses what how much these can improve and what else can get built on top. And so, yeah, I think the frameworks and agents for sure. Even, you know, even like something I know Kang's been showing it a bunch. I think it's really compelling after asking a buddy of mine who's like a PhD in the space and a founder in AI, particularly on the science side. And so, um, and he thought it was a really interesting model, the Yes/No/Maybe, I think, um, or Yes/No/Error rather, um, some, you know, specialized bot that goes through and checks, uh, errors through a lot of historic papers. And so I think a lot of these kind of hyper-specialized ones are going to come out, and, and so that, that space as a whole will grow. Um, and you don't really have, you know, it, it takes a lot of boxes most of these aren't VC-originated tokens. And so you don't have the future unlocks kind of element being a big headwind. And so a lot of these are kind of organically created without needing a lot of upfront capital. So I think, you know, the setup is certainly there for them to go up quite a bit. And so, you know, that combined with the space growing outside of crypto, should really kind of keep interest and focus on it. But, you know, I definitely expect it to be pretty volatile, but relative to the others, I think it's just a very interesting space that's still relatively small. And so I think it's a reasonable bet to make as the best performer.

Yeah. It's tough, right? Like last year I had like a pretty you know, ideal. It was pretty easy for me to be like, okay, like what's going on right now? What's gonna, what's probably gonna do really well. And it's a bit less clear to me this time around, like looking, looking ahead. In terms of sectors, I know we mentioned this dashboard that we just updated on the website. It's free for everybody. I don't even think you need to have like a subscription for it. You could just log in and check it out. Maybe we'll share the link in the in the notes or whatever of the, of the episode. Um, but looking at this, right, it's very, it's very difficult to like, uh, bet against like the AI type of, type of like narrative or meta going on right now. Um, some of these charts look absolutely absurd though. Like, uh, like I don't, I don't see how something like Virtuals or AI-16Z, like, can, like, continues to rip. Like, obviously they're like at, like, going parabolic at this point. So like, you never want to be like, oh, like, I'm gonna fade something that's mid-parabola. Um, but at the same time, it's like, I don't think it's like early anymore. I don't think it's super late. Um, interestingly, since the start of the year, AI, since, okay, which is 3 days, not a lot, but The AI sector, like agents, frameworks, whatever, right? All the different categories. They're actually the worst performing sector so far year to date in the last 3 days. And I think that's a lot to do with what Ceteris mentioned of, you know, profit taking on Jan 1 after, you know, going up so much. But even with that, like, I, what's the best sector going to be in all of 2025, right? I think the obvious answer is probably AI given, you know, Yan mentioned all of these external AI catalysts going on in TradFi, which probably just, you know, add more fuel to the fire for these. I think you'll probably get like actually, you know, useful agents that do things. I think I mentioned last time I was on the show, I'm like, I just haven't aped anything because like none of these, like it's not clear what these agents like do. It seems like they're just kind of like memes. And now you're starting to see a couple examples of more specialized ones. Uh, which is interesting. Somebody tagged me on Twitter, uh, about that yes/no error. He's like, oh, Jason, based on the last Hive Mine, this kind of fits your criteria of like an agent that does something, right? And I was like, oh, okay, take a look at that. And I do think things like that are pretty interesting. Um, I do think you could see like a sneaky like renaissance in not like the whole DeFi sector, but like specific names. I don't know which ones, like things like like, you know, it's not even really DeFi, but like CeDeFi, I guess, right? Like, I think you could see like a really sneaky year out of some of these, um, some of those names as well, especially given all the, uh, tailwinds from regulatory Trump administration, etc. So I'm kind of split between those two, but I think it's— I think you can't— you can't really bet against AI at this point. Like, the sector's super strong. It's not old. It's not like super new, so you have, you know, enough like price history and enough history of everything going on to like make some more educated bets and guesses. And you just have things in tradfi and just like outside of crypto, like just normal tech, AI, where you have all these new, um, advancements coming. And all of that I think just flows through into crypto via attention, and you'll probably just see bids throughout throughout the year in a lot of these sites.

Yeah, I think like the bull case on this, like the chart thing, is that normally these charts are hidden because they all happen in private markets. And it's just the fact that this whole AI thing has just been on-chain and like public from day one. And so you're not used to seeing things go from literally zero to a couple bill in such a short period of time. But like the speed of just with, with the AI stuff is actually accelerating, it's hard to like kind of fade. But yeah, like someone was asking the other day, like, what's your top pick for 2025? And like, I had a pick and I was going to put it on, but then it's like, it's been up 25x in like a month. And it's kind of, it's tough because you just know at some point anything that goes up so much, at some point there is a lot of like profit taking, right? And so that's just um, the, I guess, the tough part for that.

Yeah, yeah. As you guys know, pretty bullish AI. I think we were, we were pretty early to this narrative on the Hive Mind and at Delphi generally. Um, I do think, yeah, depending how you measure it, like CoinGecko counts it as like $50B, which includes like Near and, and, you know, a bunch, bunch of other stuff. But I think the pure AI agents and frameworks is about $10 to $15 I think the whole thing could go to like half a trillion in 2025, honestly. Like, I'm so bullish on AI. I literally think it's like a once in a—

Actually, so actually this is a good resource, sentient.market. They have it as 12.38, and that includes like AI-16Z, Virtuals, Fartcoin, Turbos, Rebro, Goats. So that like, it looks like a pretty good— so 12.38 billion. You think half a— I don't think that.

Yeah, I'm saying that much is, but I wouldn't count, I wouldn't like just include those though. I'd add like IO, Grass, I'd add a bunch of tokens which are clearly AI tokens, like Akash. Like, yeah, the whole sector of like actual AI things, I think, I think would go to $500 billion. Yeah. And for me, it's just, there's so many big launches as well. And for AI in 2025, like potentially Naus, which is, I guess, the darling, by the way, we're investors, so obviously biased there, will launch Ritual, you know, a bunch of the AI ones that people have been working on. And I think, I don't know, I think we kind of maybe already have AGI, like an O3, even upside even more. And I think if if progress just stopped here, like there was no more AI progress, I already think, you know, O1 or O3 would like create multiple trillion dollars of value, you know, in the economy. And progress is not going to stop here. It's actually going to keep accelerating. Like if you look at CapEx budgets for the hyperscalers, like they've all been pretty clear they're going to keep spending like crazy in 2025. You're going to have more efficient chips. Like, I just think like AI is not priced in. Like, I think AI is the first thing which is like, this time is different. It's just like up only for AI and like the economy kind of driven by it. And like you said, I think crypto captures a lot of that via attention. And I do think there'll be some legit crypto AI things built. My take is that the things that exist now are kind of like the TAOs. You know, they're like shelling points that liquidity flows into, but they're not the long-term winners. I don't think the long-term winner has really been born yet. Although I think like Grass and IO are both executing really well, and they're both portfolio companies, again, for disclosure. But I do think the winner probably hasn't been born yet. So I think it's like a really exciting, but that's my pick for the most exciting sector. And probably the second I think would do really well is like, I think L1s will unfortunately like continue to do really well just because they have in the past. And I think the trend will keep going and we'll have a bunch of like AI L1s launching, like Ritual and some of the ones that we invested in as well, Ambient and others. So yeah, that's my— but then I do think in other sectors there's going to be a lot of dispersion. Like, I'm not bullish ETH DeFi as a whole, but obviously I'm super bullish Ena and I'm bullish stuff with PMF like Aave too. And then I'm not bullish like modular really at all. I think there's a lot of vaporware included in that sector.

So I mean, this is my worst performing sector pick. Yeah, it's like basically all that will crush it.

I think Initial will crush it though, like within modular. I think they'll show like what UX can be. And the same with gaming. Like, I'm not super bullish gaming, but I think like OZG, Off the Grid, is going to crush it. I think there's going to be like intense dispersion in these sectors where you'll have some things that are huge winners and then most of the sector will like flounder, I would say.

Yeah, I was going to touch on like gaming. There'd be, I think, a handful of plays that I think will do well. Yeah, Off the Grid. And then these are all bags, right? So Bias included, um, Godzilla, Off the Grid, uh, Utopia. I think Fableborn is going to do really well. And, and Cypher, um, they have Tatsumiko, Own Play, um, and, and there's definitely going to be others that I'm missing, but, um, a lot of these, yeah, are launching in 2025 and, and, um, If they don't—

what's the other one that the gaming team is bullish on that we don't have a bag of? Is it Mapleborn or something? Um, it was in the gaming year ahead. I forget now. Anyway, doesn't matter too much.

Guys, we gotta wrap this soon. Are we, um, worst performing? I mean, we kind of just talked about it. I just think like L2 tokens in general, right? Like if BASE had a token, it'd do well and it doesn't. And so that's why— that's also why I think virtuals has done a lot better than some of the Sole AI stuff because it's the proxy to Long Base Season as well. It's kind of like the L1 token in that sense. Um, I just think, yeah, like I'm not, listen, I think Celestia is going to basically get a lot of like the most DA posted to it. I still, I'm just not interested in that token. There's just a lot of things you can, you can own stuff like Eigen. I'm not interested in like, you know, all these L2 tokens. I, it's just, I just feel like there's better places to be. I also think some of these new L1s coming up will get bids, um, like there's a lot of stuff that's still coming. So yeah, definitely not interested in like the modular thing. Like they can do okay, it's just hard to see them like really outperforming, right? And at the end of the day, like, you know, in a market where everything goes up, sure, you might feel better because it's up in USD, but like what's really going to outperform, it's just really hard for me to see that, that sector like really outperforming.

Agreed. I think AI is the only sector where you'll have like broad outperformance, like just a lot of things going up. I think everything else is going to be very high dispersion.

Just flows, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

I think, you know, uncompelling VC bags with big unlocks are probably going to suffer, right? There's just not going to be that strong of a bid there. Um, it might go up in, in USD, but it, you know, uh, I think there's gonna be pretty significant underperformance. Um, I think some of the, uh, there's a few L1s that, that are like— there are going to be L1s that just don't perform well because there's no narrative for them, right, that, that have existed and have kind of gone past the point of being interesting and are now just kind of, you know, searching for a narrative rather than having one that they're going to market with from the beginning. So yeah, for me it's going to be mostly those, um, just, yeah, heavy unlock coins that aren't— that don't have a reason to exist, and, and, um, some of these L1s.

Yeah. All right, I wanted to end with just some wild predictions that anyone has that wants to throw out. Like, um, you know, it can be anything, any, any sector, and then we can end it there. And let's, again, maybe, maybe try and keep it a little bit short given, given how, how much we've overrun. Although I think it's been, it's been a pretty good chat overall.

I think, uh, I think Solana is 0.1. I don't know if that's wild. It's like 0.06 now.

Yeah. Um, you think it hits— you think it is 0.1?

Yeah, which is close to— it's close to a double on the ratio. It's like an 80% move on the ratio. It's like pretty big move. That's like kind of the meat at this point, I feel like, for, for that. But I do think it hits 0.1. Um, I think the, like, you know, the meme coin critique is kind of going away now because you have all this AI stuff. It's like the, it's just, I, uh, you know what, as my also hot take, that the monetary premium is dead, uh, except for Bitcoin. And so if you don't have fundamentals, um, for like, uh, like infra-type token, people are not going to give that monetary premium anymore.

Yeah.

Okay, um, Jan, Jason, any of you guys want to go next?

You go ahead, I'll grab you.

Sure, yeah, um, I don't know, I don't know if this is really a super hot take, um, at all, to be honest, but I think, um, I don't think ETH/BTC gets above 0.05 this cycle. I think it just kind of flounders and goes sideways. Um, I think it could even make a new low in the coming months depending on how the Trump administration, uh, releases plans on NSBR. Um, yeah, I've, I've tried to get bullish ETH. Like, I, I like ETH, I just don't think I can buy it. I, I don't think there's any— there's The way I look at it is it has to come from one, one of my buckets, SOL or Bitcoin, and I'm more bullish the other two than I am ETH still. And I know a lot of people think it, you know, this could be the year where ETH, you know, outperforms and does really well. I just, I don't, I don't think so.

So yeah, no, I'm, I'm in a similar— the SBR kind of changes things for sure, where in previous cycles, you know, people pile into Bitcoin and then pretty quickly look to rotate elsewhere because everyone else was going to do the same. But with, you know, SVR and just the flows that, that can continue to go into BTC, it makes, I think, other very large assets difficult to get excited about on a risk-adjusted basis. I think they're going to be like pockets of outperformance, right? And so if you see things swing too far in one direction, you'll, you'll definitely see you know, poor positioning, get punished on, on ETH, and ETH will have its rallies. But I, I think it'll kind of be that, that like roller coaster that declines, or like ETH/BTC in particular. Um, I, I think SOL/ETH, yeah, uh, 2.1 is, is not really a hot take. I think it, it's pretty reasonable. Um, it's, yeah, what is it, like a 70% move? So in terms of outperformance, um, I think once you're through unlocks, or at least like, yeah, the question is like, where, where does, where do those get priced in? Um, I, I'm, I'm kind of in the camp that I, I don't think, you know, SOL goes new lows from like 20, you know, it would like, it ended in December, it was like in the 190s. I, I would be pretty surprised to see it go below that. Um, because the unlocks themselves are like on a percentage basis of supply, it's not that much, right? You can kind of churn through that. I'm assuming there's a decent amount of hedging. And, and so yeah, they're, they're gonna, they're gonna sting a little, but I think, you know, they'll, they'll get priced in beforehand. And so SOL should have a, a pretty good year.

Um, I think with SOL, just on that, like, I think there's not a lot of— I just don't think there's a lot of downside on the ratio for SOL. Like, so it could also— it could just oscillate between like 0.05 and 0.08 all year. But I don't see it going like below 0.04 or something like that. Yeah.

All right, my— I'll just do quick predictions to— I don't have much to say on the ETH stuff. Um, I need to capitulate, I guess. I don't know, I'll have a long think about it tonight. Um, I think, yeah, I think my iSector prediction was pretty, pretty outrageous.

Like, yeah, 500 million is Yeah, that's a lot. It's outrageous.

It's a cheap deal.

With the L1s, I think it's reasonable. With the, like, L1s start getting pretty big. I think it's like if you said AI frameworks and agents, that would be crazy.

No, no, no. Yeah. No, no, no, not AI frameworks and agents. Um, then I think there's going to be some wild agent stuff happening, like agents making, like, becoming like 9-figure millionaires, you know. Um, like multi-agent swarms, agents paying each other, crazy stuff like that. Um, I think PumpFun is gonna like win crypto social. Like, I really think that, uh, which is going to be like very unexpected for people. I think their streaming launch, like, the amount of attention, uh, to be fair, a lot of it negative, but the amount of attention that their streaming product got kind of shows like, I don't know, I, I think the, the The thing I always believed, and I think about CryptoSocial, is just that you have to put financialization at the core of it because that's the crypto superpower. And I think like PumpFun with streams, like the way you can insert tokens into that in so many different ways is going to be like insane. And I think they will do that. And it's going to— it's like, be careful what you wish for in terms of CryptoSocial taking off because I think that's going to bring a lot of brought a lot of negative and positive attention to crypto. And then I think crypto payments might finally take off in 2025, like crypto stablecoin payments driven by Stripe and their Bridge acquisition and stuff like this. And like just overall stablecoins growing, you know, if they grow to $400 billion or $350 billion, I just think people are going to want to start spending stables and we'll finally have that take off. Um, yeah, that's pretty much, that's pretty much it. I guess none of those are that wild, but, um, yeah.

Yeah.

How much do you think the, the AI agent speculation cannibalizes kind of the, the pump fund meme demand? Because we've definitely— there's definitely an inverse relationship there, right? If you look, memes struggled while the agent space ripped, and right now you're seeing a bit of a reversal where agent frameworks are taking a breather and memes are going, but I think you could also point to just broader market strength for memes and the fact that they're pretty under-owned.

Some of these are built off of Pump though. Some of these agent framework launching platforms actually just use Pump contracts. So that's it.

Yeah. And I also, I don't know, I think the AI agent stuff is going to look really different in 2025. Like I think these social agents are pretty boring, like these just like influencer agents, which is basically what you have now. And I think you're going to have like specialized platforms come in, huh?

I was saying we should get Jordan on here to give his takes about the Twitter agents.

Yeah, XBT especially. Yeah. Old man screams at wind. Jordan hates something. He's the, yeah, I think, I think they're going to look pretty different. You're going to have like a lot of specialization in these agent platforms. And I don't, I think these frameworks, like, I don't know. Yeah, the best agents are still, I think, for the foreseeable future, going to be like closed source. And but anyway, that doesn't matter too much. It's a bit of a mid curve, honestly.

Yeah, and I agree with that. The Swarm stuff is massive just because it, you know, increases the amount of kind of activity by a magnitude or two because it can just all happen in the background. And so And if you can strap on some compelling value accrual, right, I think that's where the flywheels can go nuts.

Yeah. I mean, you already saw that, right? Like Luna paid some other bot for like a design or something, didn't they? And they paid— like Luna paid someone for an album too, I thought. Like another bot.

Yeah, like partnered with some musician.

Yeah. Which is pretty wild. Yeah, I think it's going to get pretty crazy. In 2025. Um, yeah, I do think that meme, like, you have 5 years to hyper-gamble your way out of the permanent underclass or whatever it is, uh, holds some, some truth. Like, if you actually get like AGI and then superintelligence, then it's like either you, you own capital, you know, and the means of production, you own these things, or the, the, or the companies that own these things, Or it's going to be hard to make it, you know, to like outcompete. Yeah, I don't know.

Yeah, the haves and have-nots will be much more similar to Gotham City.

Exactly, exactly. And on that cheerful note, I guess we'll call it on that. After having the most bullish podcast ever. You're screwed if you don't end it on— Yeah, you better fucking make it this year. All right, guys, thanks for joining us. I think this was a good one. Thanks, Jason Yanowitz, for jumping in, and we'll see you again in 2 weeks. And happy New Year to everyone, and excited for another year of the hive mind.