Hivemind: Does Bitcoin Have More Fuel to Run?

And I'm just wondering, like, where does the fuel for higher come from if we've gotten all these really good headlines right now? Obviously in the short, like, the short term, right? Like, I do think Bitcoin goes to new all-time highs in the back half of the year. But like, at this point, like, I feel like we've kind of exhausted a lot of the really good fuel for higher. And I mean, like, we did go higher. We went from $74,000 to $95,000 in the span of a week and a half, 2 weeks. Which is, you know, a really strong move. 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 everybody, and welcome back to another episode of The Hive Mind podcast. Jose is away today, so I'm doing the intro. Of course, I am Seterus, Head of Research at Delphi. We are with Duncan, Flood Capital, whatever, Altcoin Gem Hunter, Yan, Delphi Ventures, and Jason joining us from the research team. He leads markets and he's been on the pod a few times. So Yeah, I think getting into it, we'll just kind of start how we always do, talking about overall market vibes. It's Wednesday, April 30th, 10:38 Eastern Time. Uh, I think the market's kind of dumped this morning on that negative GDP print and then Navarro going on TV. Now looks like they've rebounded a bit, um, but the, like, the, the last couple weeks have been pretty good for crypto markets in general. Really. Bitcoin came back to like $95K. I don't know, how are people feeling about like where we are right now?

Trump tweeted this morning, this is Biden's stock market.

Yeah.

And then there is that meme of like Trump being like, this is a good time to buy. And it's like the person smiling and then it's like Biden's stock market.

It.

And then it's like, oh no, what does that mean? Is that foreshadowing something?

I don't think so.

I think it's more just trying to shift blame for the pain. GDP print is definitely Biden's administration. Like the impacts of kind of tariffs wouldn't really have factored into this print that much.

Yeah, I feel like the market's rallied a lot. It's like almost back to like levels pre-Liberation Day or like near then. But I don't feel like a ton of stuff has changed. I guess that's the biggest— other than like, I guess like Trump's admin seems more willing to make deals. Other than that, like they seem more eager to make deals.

Alts haven't rebounded as much. It's definitely been a Bitcoin-led—

yeah, Bitcoin and like stocks aren't down much from that level. I guess like the risk is because I've been watching like the stuff like China's been putting out from like their state media channels, and if they like want to slow play things or are like not super gung-ho about making a deal instantly, I wonder if they will try and do that to get leverage on the US to make a better deal. I feel like that's the big bear case if China actually has some say versus everyone's just kind of assuming it's whatever Trump wants at this point. But I feel like he's pissed off the Chinese quite a bit and their state media propaganda videos are like, we won't back down to a bully. It's like pretty explicit, like we're not going to get pushed around by the US.

So yeah, I don't really know what's going to happen on that front. Do you think, uh, I don't know, Jason Yanowitz, how do you think this Bitcoin— like Bitcoin is up from Liberation Day. Yeah, uh, it's, it's outperformed actually I think everything including gold from Liberation Day, or maybe from Inauguration Day. Maybe not from Liberation Day.

Liberation Day, it's like flat.

Yeah, I guess.

Well, I guess like that. Wait, no, no, no. Liberation Day was Tuesday, right? August or August 2nd or April 2nd. Sorry, Jesus. So yeah, it's up from Liberation Day. Stocks are kind of almost back to where they were. Not, not quite. They're still down a little bit. Yeah, it's definitely been the best performing asset. The only thing like I I'm like, like, I'm like, kind of like in like a weird spot right now after like all of this rally, right? Because you had Liberation Day on April 2nd. Right, which kind of started off a whole lot of this. And then since then, we've had like, quite a few, you know, decently good headlines. Going from, right? You had like, uh, you had like a week or two where maybe like a week and a half where you had like just like a barrage of really good headlines. So you had like a kind of like a softening stance on like the whole China trade deal, right? Like it went from like pretty much like fuck China to, uh, we'll, we'll, you know, we'll work a deal with them. Like, you know, we'll, we'll find some common ground type of headlines. You had that period of time where, where Trump was, you know, coming out and saying he wants to fire Powell, even though he's been saying that for, you know, a while now, though, you got, you know, you kind of got a bunch more of those headlines. And then he kind of walked that back as well. You started to see like the early parts of like trade deal negotiations with several countries like India, Japan, things like that. Other countries have come out and said that they, you know, are very willing to renegotiate trade deals under this new type of, you know, tariff regime, Israel being one of them, you know, other countries as well. You had Paul Adkins confirmed as the SEC chair, I think last week or maybe, you know, maybe the end of the week prior. And then you had things like Cantor Fitzgerald, SoftBank, that Tether partnership thing. Um, you had a whole— and then like, yeah, you had like just like a shitload of really good type of headlines, um, which then, you know, kind of blew shorts out of the water for the most part. And then, you know, Bitcoin climbed up above $90,000 to $95,000. And pretty much like since we got these headlines— like, I tweeted this, like, you know, something with all of that stuff in it, uh, on, on April 22nd. And pretty much since then, like, we've just kind of been sideways, right? Because like the way I look at it is like like how many more really good headlines can you get without an actual resolution of some of these things, right? Because like at the end of the day, nothing has actually been resolved, um, with respect to these things. So that's like the, the part I'm most cautious about at this point, right? Like we've had a really, really nice run-up in Bitcoin, you know, strong alts have done really, really well. Things like SOL have, you know, performed pretty well off the bottom hype. Fartcoin is up like, I don't know, 3.5x or something off the bottom, right? Like you've just seen like a really good week or two in crypto names. And I'm just wondering like, where does the fuel for higher come from if we've gotten all these really good headlines right now? Obviously in the short, like the short term, right? Like I do think Bitcoin goes to new all-time highs in the back half of the year. But like at this point, like I feel like we've kind of exhausted a lot of the really good fuel for higher. And I mean, like we did go higher. We went from 74 to 95 in the span of a week and a half, 2 weeks, which is, you know, a really strong move. So I'm just kind of like wondering at this point, like, what do you guys think? Like, that's what I'm most cautious about. Like, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say I'm like super bearish. I think, you know, you could see some. You could see some, I guess, like turbulence within, you know, TradFi markets, equity markets, things like that, which could weigh on crypto, obviously, given, you know, correlations and, and things like that. But, um, yeah, I'm just like kind of like at this point in the short term, I'm just like a little bit— I'm not, I'm not like too sure at this point, like where we go next. Like I wouldn't be surprised if we go to $100 or if we go back down to, you know, 90 or 88 or something as well. Like, to me, it seems like a coin flip at this point, given how much of like the good headlines we have exhausted in the last like week or two.

Yeah, I mean, I think the bull case is— so we've definitely seen a bit of a decoupling, right? It's been very pronounced, right? The fact that you just have less dollar flows into US assets means when things get bullish, maybe they're not the most obvious horse. And so I think that was some element of front-running. And, you know, Bitcoin typically front-runs risk-on, and so there's always this debate whether it's front-running risk-on or a true decoupling that's not necessarily, you know, based on the notion that risk-on will come back. Um, so initially when we saw the decoupling, the confusion was always Or the question was always, is this Saylor? We, we saw a couple times where it really wasn't, right? He announced, uh, low 9-figure buys, which relative to his standard pace is pretty low, and, and I think relative to the size of the market isn't going to move BTC up a couple thousand bucks like it, like it did move on those moves. So, um, granted you did have some positive headlines, I think. So I'm, I'm I'm somewhat bought into the decoupling idea, particularly with how well gold's performed, right? So you do have the setup there for a more kind of macro-led bid into BTC rather than it being like a pure risk-on situation. I think the other stuff— so you have, you know, Cantor's play, right? That's not just a headline. That's actually a lot of dry powder coming in. So I think, yeah, right there. Putting together this $3 billion vehicle. I think it's $1.5 billion worth of Tether, worth of Bitcoin from Tether. And then SoftBank's putting in $900 million, Bitfinex is putting in $600 million, and then they're issuing shares at a valuation of $80K, $5K of Bitcoin, right? And so you're starting at a pretty flat premium. And the idea is they're kind of going to run the same playbook with converts. And that's a lot of dry powder, right? And I think you're seeing some of these other Treasury plays start to happen now. And, and sure, you know, you can argue this is, is kind of bubble territory, but, you know, it— I think it does create a bubble, but, but further down the line, right? The, the buying has to take place first, and this is a pretty material amount. And so I, I imagine there's going to be a pretty consistent bid hopefully from there. So there hasn't really been any confirmation in terms of whether those guys started deploying yet. So it's hard to attribute any of the performance to them. Obviously, we hope they haven't, but—

I thought that they had bought their Bitcoin at like $85K or—

Well, they contributed to it. They contributed the cash and issued shares. Yeah, at $85K is like the the, the premium or the, the, the market cap to NAV. Um, so there's that. I think SOL probably is, is in a pretty good situation, right, with all these treasury plays. And especially when you consider the, the notional, like SOL Strategies is doing like a billion dollar vehicle. Um, uh, Apexi is one that, you know, disclosure, we're investors in that, but they're going to be doing a large vehicle. And so you're the, the amount— like, that's the, that quantum isn't that much less than what some of these guys are doing for Bitcoin. And but like, it'll move the SOL market quite a bit more, right? So I don't necessarily know if that's been priced in. Um, I, I don't think it has because those vehicles have just started. And so yes, you could say there's definitely going to be some front running, but that buying still has to take place. And, and those vehicles are in an interesting spot where they can, um start their flywheel in a, in a, in the, in the, in a more compelling way in the sense that they can buy locked SOL, right? You can't really buy locked Bitcoin at a discount or locked ETH at a discount, but you can buy locked SOL at a discount because of the FTX auctions. And so, you know, for simple math, if you have $100 and you buy SOL at a 50% discount, the market will price it at par, right? So now you have $100, you bought $200 worth of— you spent $100 to buy SOL. It's now worth $200 on your book, even though it's locked. And then the premium to NAV is applied to that larger base. So I think the flywheel there can definitely get going and really drive a bid for SOL. And then the question becomes, is SOL the best way to play a SOL rally, or is it just kind of long-tail memes?

Yeah, I do think— I don't know, on the topic of SOL, I still just feel like that is the cleanest non-Bitcoin play for the entire cycle. Obviously stuff will outperform it, but it just feels like they're just right in the entire direction they've gone in. Yesterday, the EF has like officially pivoted to— I mean, I don't know how much of a pivot is, but there's like a lot of changes going on there. They're finally going to scale the L1. They are obviously going to like scale blobs and stuff too. I think I'm just really interested, curious to see where like Ethereum goes from here. And then if they actually do scale the L1 somewhat meaningfully, like some people were critiquing this and being like, oh, you're kind of like rugging the rollup roadmap now. You know, rollups need to compete for the L1 for like developers and stuff. And it's like, yeah, that's all true.

Um, wait, so how much faster do you think the L1 is going to be?

They want to scale it 100x over the course of 4 years, uh, which can get them to like, I think, 2, 3k TPS or something. It's still not going to compete with the high throughput chains, but it'll be it'll definitely keep more liquidity there. It'll basically kill a bunch of the more longer tail rollups. Um, you know, there's still going to be stuff like MegaETH that obviously will always be able to do way more throughput than Ethereum. Like the rollups will, even just like the Optimistic rollups will still be like more performant than Ethereum. Um, But yeah, just overall keeping more liquidity on L1, like a refocus on the L1.

Is 4 to 5 years too long?

Or is it—

it's pretty long too, right?

Atrophying liquidity and activity.

The thing is, it's like 4 years and then the goal again is like that 2-3K TPS. And 4 years, like, that doesn't seem like it'll be enough anyways. I really just feel like Ethereum's in a weird spot and has been in a weird spot for a long time. Um, and I just don't want to shit on everything they're doing because I do think that a lot of people in the community, like, do believe, like, they're building a good thing. That's— and, you know, I, I respect that. It's just like, I really don't know, like, what the right move is for them. I think they should have done this a few years ago. You know, I think it's better to course correct at some point and realize, because scaling the L1 is still helpful to the rollup roadmap too, especially if you get like shorter block times, you know, if you get like single, like what, a bit more. Yeah. So like one thing now is Ethereum has this like hybrid kind of like consensus mechanism with like it, it finalizes after like, to EBOX, which is what, it's like 12 or it's pretty long. You'll notice this when you deposit assets to exchanges, right? If you deposit from Ethereum, it takes a while. If you deposit from Solana, it's quick, like SUI is quick, right? Avalanche is quick, right? Cosmos, like instant. Anything with like single slot finality because there's no going back. And so this is very, this is hard when you have this whole rollup ecosystem, when you're doing all these like cross-interop rollup transactions and you need to wait for like Ethereum mainnet to actually finalize to kind of like legitimize each side, each rollup. Right. And so the way it kind of works today is that you have solvers and like market makers just fronting liquidity and taking that small risk or whatever. Right. But if you get single-slot finality and shorter block times, then you can do it's much easier to do all this like cross-chain, cross-rollup interoperability stuff because it's like fairly instant, uh, on mainnet, right? Um, and so that's something that they're also— I saw Dankrad. Dankrad seems to be the one leading this from the Ethereum side. Um, but I don't know, there's just been so many— it's like they had this thing, EOF, that they're working on for like Ethereum Object Format, which is totally going to change the EVM for a few years. And they just— it was supposed to go live in the next, the next hard fork. And they just took it out after like a few years of development. And it's the right move to take it out. Right. But I think there's also kind of like an issue there on why does something get worked on for like 2, 3 years. And then people don't realize that it's a bad idea until it's literally about to be implemented. Right. So I don't know, like, I just, I just don't know. It's still like, it's not cheap, right? That's the thing that you always need to come back to. And like Wall Street institutional investors, I mean, I was listening to a podcast with the BlackRock lady the other day too. It's like they have a bucket for Bitcoin, right? They don't want another monetary crypto asset. Like, they don't. They decide on one. That's how like social consensus kind of forms. And Bitcoin is a macro asset. And none of these other chains— all these other chains have to like have another reason why people buy it. And why their native token is valuable. And you're seeing it with things that, you know, it's like I'm— I like taking a shot on like Celestia here, like less than $3 billion, but they have a lot to prove and they're not going to— that token is not going to turn around until people start believing that there's a path to like significant revenue for TIA at some point. Right. Because it's still— you have to like, there's so many things that have to go right for them right now to actually see that play out. Right. And so the market is taking a more of— in the past, I think people would bid narratives very easily without thinking much, without thinking too critically. And I think now people are more in tune with like, you know, you look at a lot of these recent launches too. For L1s and stuff are launching like around last private rounds, right? They're not launching at— like a year ago, Dimension and Saiga both launched at like 5-7 bil FDV, okay? They're both trading at like 200 mil FDV today, okay? Over just over a year. You're not seeing these projects launch at these crazy FDVs anymore. I'm really interested to see what monad, like in Disclosure, angel investor, Monad. But if they launched a year ago, I'm pretty sure they would have launched at like $20B FDV or something like $10 to $20, right? Like, what do they launch at now? I think that'll be a big tell on how much the market has changed. And I think it is probably healthy for the market because it's healthier for retail, right? Um, it's, it's you know, a lot of people always try and optimize for having this very high TGE launch valuation because, you know, you're richer on paper, you're, you're in your native token, use it for like grants or whatever, you can spend more. But all of these like launches from the past few years just have the most horrific charts and it's just like demoralizing and crushing. And so I think that you know, these new projects launching at more reasonable valuations, I think is a good thing. And you can actually have, you know, you need, you need people in the public market to do well. Um, and I actually think this is like the ideal market for liquid traders now, um, because you, you can just avoid like pretty much 95% of shit out there. But I still think there's like pretty good upside in a lot of some of these liquid tokens. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how other people feel about all this. I kind of ranted there.

Yeah, well, I feel like that had to happen, right? Like stuff was insane. Like stuff made absolutely no sense a year ago. So at least now it's starting to make more sense. Like launching at more reasonable valuations, but still a lot of these things don't make money. And you can call it reasonable versus what it was a year ago, but is it like, would someone non-crypto buy this business? Probably not.

Yeah, it still might be like, they still might be too high, right? But it's getting the closer it is to zero, the closer it is to a fair valuation, right?

Definitely improving. Yeah. Do you think with like a lot of the meme stuff dying off on Solana, it's going to affect like how excited people are about it in terms of like a lot of the stats were from all this meme activity that's like fallen off quite a bit?

I think, yeah. But like if you look at Solana, If you look at just, uh, REV across all chains, it's come down a lot. And including on Solana, it's come down a lot. Like, if you look at Solana in isolation, but if you look at all the chains, Solana is still doing 50% of total industry REV. It's just kind of like, as the speculation comes down, what is the chain that people were doing the most speculation on? It's Solana. It's not like it's moved to You know, a lot of people had this theory that when meme coin trading died, Solana would like self-implode, um, in like a reflexive loop. But it's kind of like, well, these people didn't go do something else somewhere else, they just like stopped trading in general, really. Um, and you can say some activity probably went to hyperliquid and stuff too, right? Some trading activity. But I think for the most part, I think Solana DeFi honestly it is starting to like— you're starting to see more DeFi stuff, you know, a bunch of yield trading stuff. I think more people are like market making on Solana. There's something from Natasha from DeFlow the other day about how many market makers are like using Solana without incentives, right? Just market making on there because they can be profitable. And that is a very good sign when you just naturally, that's like a good place to be. And the reason why I still just believe high throughput chains are where you're going has to do with like market making in general too, right? Like you need to carry your inventory somewhere. And this has always been the hard thing with the AppChain thesis to me is like, you cannot just carry inventory on a million different, like Appchains and stuff, it's so much easier to just carry it on like Ethereum L1 or on Solana, or maybe you're going to carry some on Base, right? And yeah, I still think, yeah, I don't know. I still think that Solana is like the winner architecture right now.

If you look at like the universe of investors, they're all, you know, they're buying for a variety of reasons. I think portion of them that are buying Solana for the fundamental, like the pure multiple fundamental value is pretty small. It's certainly there. So, you know, as the meme coin situation fades, you might lose some of that bid, but I think you probably gain more. There's still, you know, the people that want to allocate it to the space and want to be part of it. And so, I think what you lose on that front is more than offset by the just general consensus around Solana kind of eating ETH's lunch on a longer time horizon. I think that just kind of happens more and more. And I think the amount of kind of money that would shift over from one to the other is more than the bid that comes in to take advantage of potentially increased staking yields when activity is higher. And then you have the Treasury, the equity Treasury plays also creating a bid. And so I think the narrative around it becomes quite a bit stronger. And what helps during washouts is that you have a kind of a reconcentration around quality. And so it becomes a bit of an easier market to invest in because things aren't pumping randomly. In a way that you can reason and position in, right? Like, you can kind of relate and rely more on kind of a bit more rational investing, which makes the, uh, investing side easier and hopefully brings in capital.

Yeah, I think you can definitely feel more confident about, like, allocating to Solana long term. At this— at the same time though, it's like Solana now is again getting up to a pretty big valuation where it's like hard to move. And what's the FTV right now? It's a— it's, it's under 100, but it's like bumping up on 100. And I think, you know, Ethereum— I really believe Ethereum was a victim of its own success in a way, because it got to such an insane valuation last bull market, which was driven by what? It was mostly driven by NFTs. Right. If you really think about it, NFTs were like DeFi Summer kicked stuff off. Yes. And all that got people excited. New primitives, all this stuff. Very good. Innovative, blah, blah, blah. But then ETH like really started pumping because of the whole NFT narrative. And then NFTs, if you remember when people were minting these things, they're paying like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5K in gas fees, like just to mint stuff. Right. And so this then went with the loop. Of like it being very deflationary. And then, you know, you have Bored Apes going from like whatever it was to over 100 ETH, like floor price half a million dollars, right? Just like stupid, insane speculative activity. Um, and this just made ETH get so highly valued. And when they got to that point, it was like, you know, the— it was, it was hard to justify beyond it being like this money asset, right? And so that's why they went more and more into this, like, we're money and all this stuff, because how do you really get it when you get to that high of a valuation? Like, how do you actually have this keep moving this thing higher and higher, right? And I think that maybe influenced the roadmap and stuff too, in a negative direction. Um, And over the last few years, the market has kind of just been coming to reality, to the reality of that. Um, and you know, now Solana is getting to— apparently Solana didn't go up because of NFTs or anything. It did go up because people, you know, the meme coins, and people saw the increasing like fundamentals. But again, it's, uh I know that there's a lot of people out there that believe in these like multi-trillion dollar platforms and Duncan just dropped off again for the second time. But dude, you got to maybe return that computer, get your old one back. Yeah. But I don't know, are these smart contract L1 tokens going to be like a couple trillion dollars? Can they actually get there? It's just a lot to ask for.

Yeah. You need a lot more activity to move on-chain. Yeah, it's tricky.

And they need to scale. Like you literally, if you do the math, it's like Solana actually has to hit these million TPS type metrics. Right. And if you then, if you add in, you know, if you do think, Jesus, Duncan. If, if, uh, if you do think that like, you know, stuff like app-specific sequencing and apps are going to start to capture more of their MEV, then that's also, uh, takes away a bit from the L1 economics. Um, so yeah.

Yeah.

And like the, the reflexivity on the, with ETH NFTs is, was much larger than I think, uh, SOL memes. Um, because it's like one-way flow. It just eat one-way flow here. You know, you had trading in and out, you have people cashing out, there's much more GD. And then you also had PumpFund dumping a whole lot of SOL every so often on all the fees.

Yeah, which makes me feel better about the Solana bid overall, uh, as like a long-term structural bid. It will be interesting to see when Solana gets an actual ETF, uh, because obviously the Ethereum ETF was quite disappointing.

Uh, I feel like these treasury companies are better than an ETF.

Well, they're better than an ETF if they trade like close to NAV. I don't know if they're better—

they're better for Solana price.

For Solana price. Yeah, I think that—

I think they're gonna flip to a discount eventually. Like, there's so many of them. There's gonna be so many of them. Yeah, I mean, there's, there's the Soul Strategies one, there's the Janover one, there's the, I don't know, the UPX.

Right, UPX.

There's going to be more, like if everyone's going to start, this is, this just gives me like GBTC flashbacks super hard, like different mechanism, but yeah, I mean, yeah, but it's like same, same reflexivity, I think.

Well, so the thing is, it's— yeah, it's the reflexivity gets worse, uh, as more join because, um, it's the late joiners that— so basically when they go at a discount, what do you do? You sell SOL and buy shares, right? And so it's the late—

do that—

well, the late joiner. So if you only had— if you only had early joiners, then it's okay, it's less of a thing because they get in at a lower price and, and, and things run up and, and it, it gets less kind of insane. But it's the late joiners who, you know, get in towards the end of the cycle, and then they're gonna have to be the first sellers, and that exacerbates the move on the way down. And then I think that's where you can have like a big negative move.

Yeah, but do you think they'll even sell? Like, do you think like— I think so— will ever sell Bitcoin to buy MicroStrategy?

No, but I, I think the, the sole ones will be more nimble and strategic because they, they won't spook the market as much individually. We'll see what happens if they all follow the strategy though.

But what if they're buying locked SOL then?

Yeah, but you wouldn't, you'd also have plenty of unlocked SOL. Like there's only so much locked SOL. It's more of an initial bootstrapping mechanism than it is like a viable long-term strategy because there's only so much of it.

And it's probably going to be pretty crazy for a little bit and then like go the other way is my guess.

Yeah. So I think like the benefit of these structures is that one of the hard things about getting, for instance, an Ethereum staking ETF is that you always need liquid ETH for redemptions, right, with an ETF. And Ethereum has a pretty complicated, like, unstaking queue process. And so even if you got an Ethereum staking ETF, you would only be able to stake like, I don't even know, probably not even half of it. It depends like what kind of what you're— and so then your staking yield on the ETF is cut in half right there, right? Because you're only staking half the funds. The benefit of these things is that you can just stake the entire amount. And then also you don't have to stake through an institutional custodian investor that like takes a fee. You can also just stake it yourself, right? So that's kind of the benefit of it is that you can get the full yield and like with no commissions. But again, that, that kind of that benefit goes away if they trade at crazy premiums unless you just think it's going to stay at a premium. But you know, if that compresses—

basically, how many of these do you like need to exist in order for there not to be a premium, right?

It's like Well, it's less so about the number of them. It's, it's more so just kind of broader. If like the broader market's rallying, then these will keep doing well. It's like when there's a downturn.

Yeah.

How many?

Yeah. The thing is you can buy even as like an American or like you can, you can actually buy a spot Solana ETF right now in US dollars. It's just listed on the TSX. But like if you actually wanted spot USD, so a lot of exposure you could, uh, but people are gonna buy these things instead still, right? Because it's like has this speculative kind of like game in it, um, and it's, you know, it's like people buy the triple levered Qs instead of the Qs, right?

It's also just the, the debt market's getting access to this stuff and that's what gets the flywheel going. Through the converts.

I saw an interesting tweet from Will Clement about— he just said like, now with, you know, MicroStrategy, you have like the leveraged ETFs, you have like options on iBit, you have, you know, Coinbase, HUD, like all these different ways to get kind of like leverage or beta to crypto. He's like, I think— and now all these like new Solana vehicles. Um, he's like, I think this is going to take away the demand for like some of like the stupider alts. It's like, why wouldn't you just like you know, buy options on MicroStrategy or buy like the 2x long international market. Yeah. So, so that's, I guess, yeah, I take away US demand, but maybe not global.

I was gonna say, like, is the buyer of these things the same as the buyer for Fart Coin or whatever? No, like they're just different buyers.

Yeah, it's just like an interesting, like, as there's like more ways to speculate and get leverage through like the historically better performing assets? Do you think that's going to take— because like, I guess like the big argument with people like don't want to buy Bitcoin is like, oh, it's only like double or something.

But I guess I think like the, the, I think the, the meme coin community is mostly probably 20s and some early 30s, right? And, and they don't think they're going to make it on a 2x on BTC gamble to make it Yeah, much more attractive.

Like options, like Robinhood, like, uh, lists like perps or something. Like Robinhood starts doing perps. It was just interesting.

I think, uh, on Robinhood, I think Robinhood is gonna become the big, like, the big winner out of all the centralized crypto.

Yeah, it sounds like people hate Coinbase. Like, all I see on Twitter is people fucking Dunking on Coinbase.

Yeah, I think Kraken's been doing good moves too, uh, but Robinhood obviously already has like the way bigger distribution and everything.

Um, and they bought that, uh, what was it, BitDumb or something? They bought some exchange a while ago, like in 2024. I forget.

Yeah, so what do you think is going to be the best way to— so if, if, you know, we get these things launching on SOL and, and SOL makes a move over $200, right, from just the buying and the anticipation of the buying and, and those— the premiums being there, and they're then able to raise more, like, what is the— is it leveraged SOL? Is it Fartcoin or Popcoin or PopCat? I mean, I feel it feels like it's the latter of the two. Like, yes, you had— so, like, so basically the risk is, you know, SOL runs and they don't. The only time we really had that was on Trump Coin, and that was just purely because people were piling cash into the SOL ecosystem to buy Trump, right? So I think that, that was a pretty isolated event where— and broadly, when, when you had SOL do well. SOL meme beta did very well.

Yeah, I mean, I, I don't know what would change, right? Like, it's always been that way, right? So like, if, if you expect SOL, like, it doesn't matter, like, at any time, you really have to nail the timing on it.

You just have to nail the timing on it because like, look at all these other ones. Like, all the memes have gone super crushed. Like, maybe they'll have like a really—

that's good, right? Like, that's the setup you want.

Yeah, I mean, like, if you expect SOL to go to like 200 or 300, like, it's the same, it's the exact same kind of like rationale or thesis or whatever that you would have had like in at the end of like 2023 into 2024. It's like if you expect crypto to go up and you think SOL is going to be one of the, one of the ecos that has the most attention and most stuff going on, like, and, and you want to make as much money as possible and you don't really care too much about the, the risk or the volatility associated, right? Like you just move further down the risk curve and like it's always going to be the thing in crypto, at least, at least now, right? Like maybe in a couple of years that changes. But like, yeah, like, I mean, I think SOL is very good. Like, I mean, I have a big, you know, percentage of the PA in SOL and it will stay in SOL. Um, but like, I, I think, yeah, I think, I don't know which, which memes or agents or AI things will do the best, but like, I know the winner or the couple big winners will probably come from those buckets of names.

Um, but we're gonna remember to sell this time.

Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna pull back at the pico top this time.

The dogs are gonna get sold, right?

Uh, we, we sold some of the dogs at the top and then mostly on the, on the way down.

Yeah, easier holding SOL.

Like, there's a lot of like Solana restaking stuff that I feel like is a nice little way to kind of juice like your SOL return if you don't want to buy memes and stuff.

Um, what are like the—

reduce your SOL return? 2x long SOL.

Well, no, there's like, for instance, you can there's like fixed, you can buy like the fixed PT tokens, like whatever, 18, 19%. You know, it's like pretty good. And then you can also farm like the protocols involved with all this. You know, none of the restaking protocols on Solana have their own tokens yet. None of the yield trading things have tokens. There's like a lot of new protocols that have kind of popped up around Solana restaking. And so Yeah, to me that feels like a lower risk, obviously. I mean, actually, I don't know if it's low risk because you're taking a lot of smart contract risk doing all that versus just like holding a meme coin, right? But that kind of seems what it is. It's like restaking and then what memes. Those are like the most interesting areas.

I mean, right, of like Like if you go on Delphi's website to like the sector performance dashboard and you just like look at it over the last like 60 days, like the, the 3 buckets that have done the best is, um, agents, platforms, and memes.

Uh, I know it's like, I feel like you need to adjust.

And over the last 30 days it's agents, platforms, and memes.

Yeah, the agent, the platforms are getting a bit of a bit. So crushed, or since this Jan 1, like, that's just sure at the peak of top. You can't— I don't think—

well, you have to anchor to the bottom, right? Like, to the bottom, like, what has performed best out of the bottom.

Oh yeah, if you're buying everything in the— I feel like there has to be some sort of like risk, risk-weighted performance or something for those. Sortino ratio.

Well, we're talking about what's going to outperform a sold sold as well.

Yeah, right.

So like, if, if the base case is SOL goes to $250 or $300 or whatever it is, right, like, obviously I think everybody should own SOL if that's what you think happens. Like, that's a very obvious given. But like, if you were to take some percentage of that SOL—

what about like Radium? Radium's gotten crushed.

Yeah, they lost part of their, uh, honeypot.

Their market is like, yeah, completely different.

Yeah. Or Jupiter. What's Jupiter at? Or Jito.

I mean, hey man, even, even, uh, ZeroBro pumped like 3x on the bottom and then it looked like its tweets were trained on Kanye or something. And, uh, or the dev was just tweeting. I have no idea. Yeah, that was definitely true.

Well, wasn't that like some short squeeze or something?

I saw there was definitely shorts getting squeezed.

Yeah, the OI was bigger than market cap.

Yeah. Yeah.

Anyways, um, I mean, the other one is, is like, is Hype, right?

I mean, I mean, Tao has actually been getting a bit too.

Yeah, Sweet Tao and Hype have been.

Yeah.

Yeah, the Tao stuff is, I mean, I know they have a halving, uh, over the summer, but like the emissions are just still hard for me to, to get comfortable behind. Maybe that's somebody else's opportunity, but like Hyperliquid's doing like $500 million in buybacks.

And then these other two are doing fucking inflating.

I was seeing they— people were talking about them like all, uh, altering the, the fee, the fees on, on, on Maker orders. Is that— that's in effect now?

They basically just did a blanket 30% raise across everything, but then if you stake HYPE, you get a discount. So like you can actually make it cheaper than it was before if you stake HYPE. But like it was already super, super competitive on fees, so I don't think— I think it's probably boost the revenue by like 10, 20 20%.

I mean, it's, that's still meaningful, right?

Like, that's for sure. Yeah, it moves the needle. Um, because I don't think people care that much and are optimizing for it. Basically, your bigger competition is, is people are farming some of these other, these other like DEXs, right? Because that actually does move the needle.

Yeah, yeah.

But then like, I think you could have some big whales like actually go and buy— I think that the top tier is like 500,000 HYPE, uh, so that's like $10 million or something if you're like a market maker. And you could like, you know, maybe hedge that out. But that, that gives you like a— I think it's a 40% reduction in fees. So that could definitely—

and they also launched— there's like a new season of points. Yeah. So kind of indicating that there's going to be— I mean, there's—

is it a testnet page?

There's more hype.

If they'd been running it, it would lower. Well, we tried to short Bitcoin, Jason Yanowitz.

I was gonna say, isn't— aren't the rewards, or at least like the hype, set aside for, uh, for like community rewards and incentives? Isn't it like there's still more than was initially given out at TGE? Yeah. So like with— yeah, I would imagine people are probably going to continue like farming or using Hyperliquid even, even with all these other you know, potential, you know, DEX airdrop things like Ostium, Lighter. Uh, there's a couple other that I've covered.

It's funny, others that I was looking at, because we've gone from like, all right, I'm gonna trade here to get a direct token incentive, then it was I'm gonna trade here to get points. Now it's just like, I'll trade here because maybe I'm getting points in the background. It just keeps moving further away, which is, which is actually like economically efficient for the protocol itself.

Yeah, I was gonna say it's great for them, but they've definitely reached like enough volume where I don't think the main reason people are trading there are for incentives. No, it's just because it's like the best place to trade.

And like, yeah, if you look at like the performance of things outside of, you know, those 3 buckets that I, I talked about before, like just like in like, it's very clear that like the, the 2 big winners are like from like, I guess you could like majors, um, is probably SUI and, and HYPE in terms of most recent price action over the last like month or so. Like, it's— those are the very clear outliers in terms of relative strength to the rest of the market, up like 50% each in the last month or so. So I don't know, like, that's pretty much all I look at to be like, all right, like, when we get pullbacks, like, what things do I want to buy, it's going to be those types of things.

Um, things that barely pull back.

Yeah, they might not pull back much, but no discount. So that's kind of like where I'm at with those things. I'm curious, like, I know, I know Satoris has his, um, his TIA thesis. Anything else you're looking at, Satoris? I'm curious.

I know, I got one for later.

Um, I mean, I'm like mostly— I consolidate a lot. I said this before, into like SOL and just SOL stuff, uh, during like the past few months when the market was shit. Um, I don't want to stray too far from being pretty heavy SOL. Uh, even TIA, it's like, yeah, I have a TIA. It's like material. Um, but you know, if it goes to zero, take the L and like move on sort of deal. Um, I think it's like, you know, I think so. It's, it's hard. We're talking about the Solana tokens before, right? It's like, you know, it's like Metaplex is such a good fundamental protocol, and it's something that's going to stick around on Solana. And especially if SVM gets more adopted too on all these changes, they're like, they're buying, they're buying back and burning like 1, 1.5% of their every month. But like, it doesn't have, it doesn't have any good exchange listings. And it was kind of like hedge fund hotel, like all these hedge funds bought it in like November or something. And then when the market turns, it's like, are people going to buy this fundamental token Metaplex? Or are they going to buy Fart Coin? Or like the AI framework?

It's just the long-term ones that are—

And so this is, this is the I don't know. This is the tough thing. It's like, I don't know why Metaplex trades like so cheap and like doesn't have major listings. It's like one of the only few actual fundamental tokens in the entire industry that has like a moat, like a pretty good moat. Like it makes money off of every token minted on Solana. And, uh, yeah, I don't know. I mean, SUI is such a funny token to me. Just like SUI is like very con— like I was, I was bullish on SUI like, uh, over a year ago.

Um, yeah, you actually got that one pretty good.

But like at the same time, I've been in disbelief a lot during the entire like year and a half. It just goes on these crazy rallies. And I think it's a hard one for people to reason about because it's like the tech and the team objectively very strong. Like, it is legit. It's not like vaporware. It is legit. Um, they still don't really have an eco though. There's not like a ton of stuff still. Um, and then reasoning about the FDV is hard. Like, if you just look at it straight up on CoinGecko, it's like $34 billion. But then there's like 53% of tokens don't unlock to 2030. And then those are like unallocated. I think they're just like foundation or like Misten Labs tokens. And then it's like, okay, are those like, how real are those? Those are being used for staking. Um, but then it's like, realistically, how long is— they're never going to spend like 53% of the FDV. And so it's kind of hard to like think about what is the actual like coming up with these like adjusted valuations for different protocols, right? Like something with an FDV that fully— 34. Yeah.

That seems expensive. I think they do a lot of KOL, right?

And yeah.

And then there's like all these other rumors about like, they're doing all this. And like, I think the KOL stuff's probably true. I've heard it from like a lot of people. And so there's just like a lot of moving parts to it with like, and it's just very hard to.

Hashtag Grant.

Yeah, hashtag Grant. It's just like very hard to, I don't know, reason about that one, um, and like kind of predict where it's going to go from here, right? When it is at— even if you, even if you take the FDV and you cut it in half and say it's like 17, that's still pretty, that's still pretty high for something that doesn't have, um, that is still working on building out an ecosystem and everything, right? So yeah, um, if you look, those rallies have been pretty spot-driven.

If you kind of check out CVDs, um, someone's been buying in size.

High-stakes capital. I think one of the reasons is that it's very— I think that SUI is very like Asia-focused too, and so I have like a bit of a blind spot, I guess, to like market Participants, I think like Asia versus like North America or like Europe-based crypto investors are very different types of people. I think they like very different markets. And so just like way different market dynamics. But yeah, I don't know what else am I looking at? I mean, those are kind of the main one. Yeah, go for it.

So Galaxy Digital, they just announced today they're uplisting on the 16th of May. Finally, I've held this thing for fucking 5 years.

And isn't the vote in like a week or something?

Yeah, the vote's on the 9th, but they just put out a tweet today they intend to uplist on the 16th. So that's like going from, you know, the TSX. We're on Gate.io right now and we're getting Nasdaq. So we're going to Binance, we're going to Coinbase, we're going to Upbit, we're getting the works here. So I'm excited, I'm excited for that. And, um, they basically have like, like a trading business, a staking business, a lending business, like trading slash market making, staking, lending, uh, an M&A business. Though all those businesses, those operating businesses are kind of like break-even, but they're starting to like really scale up now. Then they have like a venture portfolio, crypto and cash on the balance sheet of about like $2 billion US. And then they have this data center that this like they bought this old Bitcoin miner in 2023 that they're converting into a data center, which is like potentially one of the biggest data centers in the US. And they've signed like, I think like over $10 billion worth of contracts with CoreWeave to like build out this like massive data center in Texas. So it's like a good crypto plus AI play and they finally gained their uplisting if you can buy it on—

Yeah, I have some Galaxy. I think it's like a decent—

So the Canadians finally get to dump on the Americans with this, uh, with this uplisting.

I'm excited about it. I think the, the data center piece could— is like pretty huge.

That's like the moonshot if that— kind of like works out.

And so far it is like they've signed, I think, a deal with CoreWave recently, right? Yeah. They've signed like 600 megawatts of the 800 they have approved for CoreWave. And if like the deal's relatively the same, I think it's like $13.5 billion of revenue over 15 years. So these are like long contracts, like predictable revenue. They're building out this massive data center. They have another 1.7 gigawatts of capacity under study. Which is like if they were to get to the full 2.5 gigawatts, it makes it like one of the biggest data centers in the US or the biggest. So it's kind of cool. Crypto and AI narrative.

Yeah. Cool. I think we're actually going to end it now because Jason Yanowitz and I have something we need to be at. But yeah, good pod everyone. Thanks everybody for listening. We'll be back in a couple weeks, um, and José will probably be back then. And, uh, yeah, I don't know, hopefully there's some more. I still be— I feel like we've still been this kind of like weird limbo zone for a few months. Um, hopefully you get like more concrete direction or something. But, uh, yeah, thanks everyone and, uh, have a good rest of your week.

Thanks everyone.

See you guys.