Hivemind: Don’t Sleep on Ethena, Bull Case for Galaxy & The Hyperliquid Future

I still have all my spots, like I'm still very obviously, you know, long and bullish, but just short term, like tactically, like very cautious. And I think like we could spend more time in this, in this like $110 to like $115 area than a lot of people probably want.

As we break out of $115 right now.

Are we?

As it puts in a $1,000 candle.

Nothing said on The Hive Mind is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is strictly for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our own opinions, not financial advice. Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode Welcome to another episode of the Hive Mind podcast. The goal of the podcast is to provide an inside look into what we like to call the Delphi Hive Mind, bringing together some of our brightest minds from each of the divisions to share insights, alpha, and shitposts. Today with us, we don't have Ceteris actually. He's away on a company retreat. But we do have Jan, managing partner at Delphi Ventures, Ventures associate, or rather Ventures partner Duncan, who is a prodigious shitcoin and now also public market scavenger and galaxy KOL. And then we have Jason Yanowitz, who's a regular on the pod. What's your title again? Head of Markets at Delphi Research?

Yeah, yeah, it's fine. It's not a big deal.

Perfect.

I'm Jose. I lead Delphi Labs, our protocol R&D arm. It's been a hectic week. In, well, hectic two weeks, I guess. Um, we're gonna start off talking about markets. Maybe we want to start with you, Jason, actually, on markets. I've been reading your posts in the chats, in the pro chat, in the, in our, in our Pure Alpha chat. You seem to be making somewhat bearish noises, which, uh, which worries me. Can you give a, uh, a summary of like where you're sitting right now?

Uh, sure.

Um, So yeah, those more bearish rumblings were like probably like a week and a half, 2 weeks ago. I was, um, I was just getting like really concerned with, um, I put like out a, a post on Twitter. I was kind of just like more of like a sanity check for myself. It's like, okay, like what are all like the good things happening right now? Like what are all the not great things happening right now? Just trying to like gauge, you know, um, how the market is.

What are the not great things that are happening?

All right, let me pull up my post really quick. Take 2 seconds.

Uh, you can't remember because, uh, there's just nothing bad happening.

No. Okay, so, uh, positive signs, uh, at the time, and this was like, uh, late July, so like 2 weeks ago or so, um, you had a bunch of these DApps or digital asset treasury companies, um, announcing, right? We had I don't know, we have like, we had like 10 or 12 or 15 at the time and you continually seem to be seeing more pop out of the woodwork. So I guess like from a buying pressure perspective, both in the like present moment and in the future, that's probably a positive sign, but it's also probably at least a little bit of a sign of like, like frothy-ish behavior. At least it's, it's kind of like the way I, um, have been taking a bunch of these announcements recently. You see continual ETF development, right? So you have SOL coming probably later in Q3 and it probably maybe gets announced with staking, maybe not, but you probably get the SOL ETF soon. And then if not at the same time with that, you get, you know, staking versions of that for SOL and ETH and everything else that staking applies to. Obviously you have things like Genius Bill, Clarity Act, which are passing and gaining progress in Congress. You had pretty good stonk earnings across the board for most tech-related companies. Wasn't horrible, wasn't like the best quarter, but obviously, like I said, wasn't horrible. It was like pretty decent. Um, and obviously you have rate cuts coming in the next couple months at the, at the very latest, probably. So like, you have a bunch of like decently good signs in that. And then I guess like what I call it, like the not great signs, is you have all this really good, um, news headlines and things like that, and Bitcoin kind of was, was trending lower or sideways and, and lower while all of those things were, were kind of happening, which is Um, you know, usually a warning sign, right? You want to see price react to news in the way you would expect it to, and if it doesn't, then that's, you know, a good sign.

This had to absorb that, uh, Satoshi era whales.

I mean, you did have that, right? You had that $40,000 or whatever it was, well, selling his money or sending his, his coins to Galaxy for them to sell, which they did one weekend. But, uh, that did send prices down like you know, 1.5-2%, and it recovered pretty, pretty much immediately and then started rolling over again. So it's like another kind of like sign there. Coinbase premium, which is something that's like kind of accompanied all, all of the strong trends that we've seen for the last like year and a half, has started going negative again for the first time since like mid to late April, uh, after we started getting some like tariff resolution to Liberation Day. So that's another thing. Um, there's just like some, some technical related things as well that like people who are like trading or kind of like keeping an eye on like high time frame like big divergences. Uh, we saw one of my favorite like frothy indicators popping up a week or two ago, which is, um, altcoin OI and volume dominance was equal to or greater than that of BTC OI and, and volume dominance, which typically is something you start to see at like local tops or like trend reversal type things. Um, and then obviously you just always have like a tsunami of token unlocks. So like when I was like kind of like trying to figure out like how I take all of these things and like massage it into like a view, it's just like something that for, for me was just very easy to be just like very short-term, short to midterm, like cautious. I still think we, we make new all-time highs either in on, on Bitcoin in Q3 or Q4. That's like my base case right now. But, um, over the last 2 weeks I've just been— I've taken off like all leverage trades. I still have all my spots, like I'm still very obviously, you know, long and bullish. But, um, just short-term, like tactically, like very cautious. And I think like we could spend more time in this, in this like $110 to like $115 area than a lot of people probably want as we break out of $115 right now.

I, I think that, um, as, as it puts in a $1,000 candle. How big the $80,000 BTC sale was, like the total ETF AUM is $53 billion and we had a $9 billion sale in like a week.

So most of that got sold in like 24 to 36 hours. Market didn't really move on that. So actually, I think, yeah, there's a good bullish argument to make there a couple of ways, right? So you have that, that got absorbed. At the same time, you had, you know, Saylor has been deploying cash from preps. He dumped that $2.5 billion and he got that 117.2 entrance last time, which was actually pretty impressive because it was barely below that for a pretty short period of time. So he actually, you know, in that timeframe deployed well, but obviously we're lower now. But I think all that to say, the, the market's kind of outgrowing these individual buyers and sellers, which is, which is really good to see, right? So the big concern right now is that Saylor's, uh, what happened in the recent earnings call was, uh, anytime MNAV is below 2.5, he can't do equity sales into the market. So basically, if, if the, if the, the market cap to his holdings is below a 2.5 multiple, he can't sell equity shares into the market and use that to raise cash. And so he's been doing that pretty consistently. And, you know, there's a lot of concern that we've lost a pretty, um, consistent, basically passive bid into the market. And, and for sure, that's not great, right? And, and so you— it's, it's MNAV, so that means you, you need his market cap to outperform Bitcoin. So Bitcoin going up is obviously good for the stock in the grand scheme of things in terms of, you know, his continued ability to raise cash through different vehicles. But in terms of this premium specifically, it actually doesn't really help. Um, so, you know, you do need MicroStrategy to, to kind of bounce. And, and if you look like past couple weeks when equities are doing well, it was a bit of a laggard, right? And that's certainly, uh, a point of concern. I think part of it was just more selling. But at the same time, you have these one really large sellers and then him consistently buying. But in those times, price didn't really move around too much. So at this point, it's, you know, this is— Bitcoin is insanely liquid, right? It's arguably— it's probably the most liquid asset on earth right now. And so you, you, you have this world where we're basically Now it's kind of just a world-based passive bid. You're less reliant on these things. And so the reason I say it's bullish is because right now everyone's, everyone's focused on these digital asset treasuries and them being the source of the bid. And then what happens when the juice kind of runs out, right? And does this all kind of implode and go down? And so I think what you really needed was the broader belief in all of this and a consistent buyer. And so I think we've kind of evolved past the need of relying on these vehicles to keep raising cash. Obviously, it's great if they do, but I think the ultimate best-case scenario to get to a much higher high is that we're not actually relying on them and they will end up being good investments for those that participate. But the whole space isn't completely reliant on them, at least on the Bitcoin side, right? On the alts, stuff, I think they can be an outsized driver of price action because just the size of them relative to the liquidity of the alt is like the difference is much smaller.

Who do you think the BTC bidder is now? Just like in that group, just like more so like institutions, nation states.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, ETF flows have slowed down, right? And so if you look at like historic ETF flows, they kind of ebb and flow, but they've when you've seen money coming out of them has usually marked a local top. So I think that kind of adds to the argument for some short-term bearishness on BTC. But those have always been— or not always, but like the past couple of rotations which have lasted, you know, 4 to 8 weeks in terms of strong bids and then a slowdown. You know, we saw an outflow in March. I mean, in May you saw a bit of one in June at the end. And it's like, it's kind of, it's coincided with price action. So ideally, this is another one that just lasts a couple of days and then the second interest comes back, kind of get back. And I don't know when the— there's the big BTC vehicle launching in London from the same guys who did MetaPlanet. So that could be a big driver of kind of bid. And obviously, you know, when there's a Telegraph buyer, other buyers step in. So I think that that can be pretty positive. But yeah, so the original question, who do I think it is? Could be just a little bit from everyone. I don't know that you're going to get disclosures from a nation-state buying until they've, you know, fully decided they're done buying. If they're just a passive bidder, there's no real reason to advertise that until you think you're done buying.

So Jason Yanowitz, are you bearish here? I know you were bearish late July.

Um, he was bearish the top.

Yeah, uh, are you here?

I mean, like I said, I'm still definitely like very much bullish. Like, I, I, I'm still one— I'm still very much exposed to everything in crypto. Um, I just had, you know, a decent amount of like leverage trades on that were, um, that benefited from like the move from like $110 to like $120 and like I needed to figure out what I wanted to do with those. So like, I, I'm, I'm like, I'm not buying anything right now. Like, I would much rather just like buy something at like, you know, $117 or $118 or something when it's like pretty clear that we're gonna make another move towards all-time highs, or like when alts start like showing. Um, I mean, there's a couple alts that actually look pretty decent right now. Um, so maybe it's, it's time to start talking about Athena there, sir. Uh, I mean, Athena is like very much on the, um, the shortlist of positions that I would— or like, uh, coins I would like to have a position in that I don't already. Um, I'm like super late to this, but, uh, Jan posted like a really good, um, kind of like summary about like why Athena is like a— it just kind of like sits like perfectly at a bunch of different like narratives. Uh, you have like the dApp narrative, you have the stablecoin narrative, like it it, it seems like if there's still like, you know, some more juice left in the tank for, for the cycle, which it very clearly does feel like that, um, Athena is like very uniquely positioned to, to, to do well with a lot of the, uh, institutionalization we've seen.

Athena market cap is at a new all-time high because I guess they've had some big unlocks. Is that correct?

Yeah, yeah.

The price— so the price peaked in January at $1.30. It's currently trading at 58 cents, but market cap is up to $3.8 billion, which is an all-time high.

USDE yield or USDE supply at all-time highs too.

And that's my all-time high.

Yeah, everything like cruising.

Um, oh, what do the unlocks look like?

There's a cliffy one in March and then now they are monthly. There's like a big one in March and now they're, they're monthly going forward.

There was a big one or there's going to be another?

There was. That was the big jump in market cap.

Nice.

Yeah, I think it has been. Okay, that's good to know. Um, yeah, I think— is anyone bearish? Jan, you sounded pretty bullish. Um, Duncan, Ola. Yeah, Duncan, what percentage of your net worth is in GALAXY right now before we, before we start on this, on this, on this thread?

You just had to like 50% maybe.

Nice, dude.

Respect.

That's it for how much you talk about it.

All right.

Should we do this now? We've promised to give you 2 minutes on this thesis.

I mean, like stuff.

Let us fit that. I'll just, just quick on Athena before we jump into. To the Galaxy Jehovah's Witness show from Duncan. Like, yeah, supply has gone— like, funding pretty much— I think SUSD yield was like at 10%, 10-11%, and still you saw this like dramatic expansion in supply. Like last year we had, you know, like 50% SUSD yields at some point and funding was pretty elevated at like 10.8% right now.

Yeah.

Um, here, wait, I can share my screen with the Athena stuff because this is actually kind of cool. I really like Guy when we had him on last week.

Yeah, yeah, it was a good one, guys, by the way. I enjoyed it.

Thanks. And it's— they're just integrated in so many places now that just, uh, it's so much more sensitive to increases in it. Like, the supply just expands so much more, and I guess it's also more trusted and stuff than it was last year. And so like small increases in, in the SUSD yield are really like hit, like causing massive expansions in, in supply. And I think if we get this flywheel going at the same time as you have like digital asset treasury vehicle that was announced kind of going live, it's, it could get, and like the Circle catch-up trade sort of narrative that you're seeing a lot on Twitter, I think it could get pretty, pretty violent. And obviously we have a position in Athena. I also hold a ton of Vina personally.

Yeah, this is a crazy ramp. Wow.

Yeah, yeah, funding rates have ticked up recently. That was the big driver.

And then, you know, you expect it's so long cuts, like in the inflows, it's just like insane ramps.

Well, a lot of those were the seasons, uh, that if— because you're, you know, you're looking at, uh, what is that, like a 1.5-year chart? Um, so, you know, they did seasons and, and that got farmed, right? And so that was the kind of— I think those are the, the really accelerated elements. And then this recent one was just broader integrations and funding rates finally ticking back up with BTC at all-time highs. Yeah, the Aave, once you get the, uh, pretty dope, the Fed rate cuts, that'll be good too. Um, okay, so this is in terms of relative yield opportunities.

So it's pretty linear from here out. What is this? TBD, TBD ecosystem.

Yeah, that's— those are like the ecosystem unlocks in general for tokens are a kind of noise.

Yeah.

Um, they're unlocked, but they don't necessarily getting distributed. Um, it's like the, it's mostly optics. Um, they're going to get distributed when they get distributed.

Well, that looks good. They're crushing.

Yes, they are. Um, Yeah, one of the higher revenue protocols in the space right now.

Yeah.

So what is the flow through to ENA?

They haven't activated a fee switch yet, but, uh, it's reasonable to assume they'll, it'll happen at some point.

Yeah. And Guy's put together like some, um, sort of parameters on the forum in which he'd consider activating the fee switch. Like his, his goal is to grow market share first, especially at this point. Um, but yeah, uh, I think there's a pretty clear plan with different milestones of like supply, at which point he'd be comfortable like having different fee switches, different levels of fee share. Um, personally, I would be more, uh, on board with just like growing supply at this point and like trying to get to 20 billion USD, um, which I think is is super feasible, especially if we have rate cuts. Right. And I do think, yeah, like both yield on Athena and therefore like revenue is going to be like inversely correlated to rates, which is the opposite with all the other stablecoin companies. So I think in a world where we have like stablecoin mania and still people still want exposure to the stablecoin narrative, I think Ena is going to be one of the best places to get that.

Big driver has been so that the, the, the, the existing Digital Asset Treasury has been buying up $5 million a day, more or less. Yeah, off of the initial raise. But the basically they're going to get— they got in at a pretty good price for that. So once it goes live, the, the NAV will actually be pretty high with price having improved. And then, you know, you assume some MNAV premium on that. And so if you compare it to what the appetite is for the other pure-play stablecoin exposure in equities in Circle, and so I think they should have a lot more fuel to deploy and actually be able to play the MNAV game. And then, you know, once the fee switch is activated, that thing can actually generate meaningful earnings, right? And so you have combination of just pure digital asset treasury plus some sustainable form of earnings, um, and, and should help that vehicle.

Nice. Awesome. Yeah, well, they had a podcast with a guy who's really good. If you didn't watch it, check it out. Should I talk about Galaxy now?

Yeah, go on.

Okay, so I put out this thread or just long post a few weeks ago or a couple of weeks ago and just saying this is my biggest position. I think $100 a share is on the table in the next couple of years. I think how you think about Galaxy is in 3 main parts. So the balance sheet business. So I think they have around $3.3 billion in crypto cash, crypto venture investments. And the market cap's only like $10 billion. So that's like a big chunk of it right there. And they also utilize the balance sheet in their other business lines. So it's like a really solid base that differentiates them from a lot of other Bitcoin miners and crypto companies who don't have this much cash on hand to fund their other businesses. Maybe we'll do the crypto businesses first and then back to the data center business. So they just had their earnings on Tuesday and Novogratz said that it was by far the best month in the company's history because like they're— I think he said that they've signed over 10 custody and staking deals with these treasury platforms. They're looking at doing a few more. From that, they've added like $2 billion plus of fee-paying AUM to their crypto businesses. And then just going through their business, so their markets business, they have the second or third largest loan book out of all of the kind of centralized players in crypto. Nearly 1,400 trading counterparties. We saw them execute that $80,000 BTC sale for like $9 billion in notional volume, which was obviously huge. They're a big go-to player for these big trades. They have their investment banking division, which they're an advisor to Bitstamp on their sale to Robinhood. They took part in the CoreWeave IPO. On the recent earnings call, they said that they have the best-looking pipeline they've seen in the history of the company in terms of like quality of deals and the size of deals coming down the pipe. Uh, their asset management business. So yeah, they do like staking, venture funds, um, just general custody. Uh, so this number is like, I think $7 billion, but is up a few billion. So the treasury companies, they got $200 million venture fund. They're like a number 4 validator for Solana. They're doing ETH staking. I think they're rumored to potentially become a Hype validator. And these other cool parts of their business, which I think could be big in the future, are this like GK8, which is like a fully owned subsidiary doing tokenization. And then they own 33% of AllUnity, which is this first fully regulated euro stablecoin. The other 33% is owned by Flow Traders and then Deutsche Bank subsidiary. So like that could be pretty big in the future. For euro stablecoins and trading European equities. I think the next place to go is probably the data center business. So this guy on Twitter, Rittenhouse Research, put out a really solid report a few months ago on Galaxy's data center business. I think like the— I don't know if we want to get into the Goldman report because that might take too long, but the easiest way to think about Helio is they have 800 megawatts of approved power and now CoreWeave has like upped their lease from 600 megawatts to taking the full 800 megawatts. And so if you apply on the 800 megawatts, Goldman used a 27x multiple, but you know, anywhere from a 22 to 27x multiple, that's like 13 or 14 to $18 billion in total equity value. So like enterprise value, subtract the debt that they need to build out these data centers. This is going to be like fully cash flowing in 2028. Um, so like the market cap right now is like, I think sub $10 billion. So you have the $3 billion balance sheet. Goldman, you know, according to their estimates, assuming crypto prices don't change, think that Galaxy's crypto business arm is worth like $6.5 billion. And then you have, you Here in 2028, this could be worth like $14 to $18 billion. But the cool part about this is that they have another 1.7 gigawatts under study with, um, the Energy Council of Texas. So they're expecting another 800 megawatts to get approved by the end of the year. So if you contract that out at the same terms as the CoreWeave lease, you know, you're talking about $27 billion in equity value all the way up to like maybe $35 billion. which is multiples of their current market cap. If they get the full 2.5 gigawatts, you're talking about $40 billion to like $50 billion, which is like a 5x on their market cap just on Helios alone. Obviously that's going to take a lot of time to build out and they have to execute correctly. But the really cool thing about their earnings call is they announced they've acquired another gigawatt of pipeline here. So that takes this up to like $60 billion to like $80 billion just on Helios alone. And this is like a huge growth business for them. The biggest or one of the biggest data center players in kind of like the data center 1.0 world is Digital Realty. And they only have, for instance, I think like 2,800 megawatts globally across 300 locations. So these old data centers are like very small, like 10 megawatts per location, whereas like Galaxy and now Meta and Amazon and Microsoft are building these like multi-gigawatt facilities and Galaxy's, you know, at 3.5 gigawatts. I think Meta's trying to build a 5-gigawatt one. So like that's the biggest competition. So they're right up there with like the Mag 7 players in the magnitude of this data center. Plus like looking to do more land acquisitions, power acquisitions, you know, BTC mining acquisitions to convert into AI data centers. They're working with like a top-tier contractor. In Texas called Clayco to build the data center. They have this lease signed with CoreWeave. It's pretty exciting stuff. So you have exposure to, you know, the two megatrends that are going— or two of the megatrends that are going on right now, which is AI and crypto. So I quite like the stock from that perspective.

You quite like it?

I quite like it.

You couldn't tell, man.

What's the, uh, what's the biggest risk for this not playing out the way you want it to play out?

Um, I think it's like execution risk on that he's not long enough. Execution risk on building out these data centers. Obviously, like, the CapEx that's going into this 800-megawatt facility from Galaxy's End is like $6 billion, $7 billion, which is huge. And then when you add in like, you know, all of the chips, it's like, you know, like $20 billion or something. It's like an insanely huge project on the CapEx side. So they just really have to execute there. But so far they're on track. The first tranche is going to start cash flowing in Q1 2026. So I'm pretty excited. Things seem to be going really well. What? Any— okay, Jose, you said that you weren't that convinced on Galaxy before we started recording, so please speak up.

I said I just wasn't that interested. I don't know. I feel like I like having crypto exposure through pure crypto names and narratives that I'm bullish on, and I like having AI exposure through pure AI names. Uh, this stuff in the middle, and like, I guess more like value plays or stuff that's misunderstood on the balance sheet, which you kind of show here, doesn't interest me as much. Um, yeah, I also just haven't honestly like looked into it despite, despite, um your ceaseless shilling. I still haven't looked into it, but I will. And this was interesting actually hearing your thesis on it. I didn't realize the data center stuff they've got planned was that big.

Yeah, it's fucking huge.

Yeah.

Yeah, the data center exposure is the play, right? You're not buying it like crypto is just a nice to have for the narrative. It's a data center play basically.

Yeah, like I do think they're going to be a really big player in crypto and they are and will continue to be. But I think you just have like multiple outs with the stock, right? So if crypto does super well, they can do well on that alone. If crypto doesn't do that well or they like lose market share, they can do really well on the data center side alone.

And like, what's your time horizon on this, uh, on this hold, right? This is something that isn't playing out in the next 12 months. This is going to take—

yeah, well, I think you take it like, uh, the guy who wrote this report made like a really good point. He's like, just take it earnings call to earnings call. And so far management has like delivered on everything they said they would. And continue to deliver. And as long as they're executing, I think it's kind of hard to be bearish because this is just like such— it's going to be such a big industry in the future.

And how does it work? So they build out these data centers and then CoreWeave is renting them from them to actually run the operations on the GPU, on the— is it training or inference or what?

Yeah, it can do Given the size of it, I think it's like preferably going to be training. Um, but you can do inference. It has like a high-speed cable to Austin, so can do either. Okay.

Interesting. And this is just like retooling their existing like Bitcoin data centers.

That's what you're saying? Yeah. They had like 200 megawatts of Bitcoin mining capacity, which they're remodeling for the first tranche. And then they're just like building The next two tranches out fully with Clayco. So in CoreWeave, and I think like there's been some speculation online that in this 800-megawatt build, there's going to be like AMD chips and OpenAI is going to be like the customer of CoreWeave. And so, cause like AMD is like named their new rack or their new chips Helios. Coincidence? I don't know. But, uh, Galaxy, OpenAI, AMD, CoreWeave partnership would be pretty epic.

Yeah, it seems like a good time to get in, just with people getting kind of getting ahead of their skis going into earnings, plus like the overreaction to an EPS miss. And I think that the big news was the upsize in the data center.

Yeah, and Novo said like it was their best quarter on the crypto, or their best month in July on the crypto business, like by far. Like they're involved in all of the treasury companies. Um, so that's like a huge source of, of like recurring revenue for them.

Awesome. Um, yeah, what, what else are you guys bullish on?

And like, you gotta touch on the, the, the, uh, Bonq pump situation.

I'm gonna ask the guy if you had any updates on that, Jan, since we— looks like there's a shift kind of moving back in the other direction a little bit.

Yeah, what, what happened? I, I kind of didn't catch up with all this drama. Like, it seems like the Bonq people.

Yeah, basically Bonq was doing some— I mean, it's kind of unofficial, but casually understood that this took place, which makes sense. I mean, I think it's like, it's just one way to incentivize some activity and get some runners going and, you know, liven up the ecosystem a bit. And so, you know, that happened at the same time as Pump's launch, and Pump's launch didn't really come with any announcements or anything. So you had this perfect storm of buying of Pump without follow-up from the team, and then in tandem with Bonq really juicing up their ecosystem. So fundamentals and market share were really favoring Bonq. And so, prices reacted, bonked it well, pump sold off. Since then, you know, everyone was just— most people were assuming that the Pump Fund guys were doing something. They were just kind of silent. And so they had— there were two announcements, or one was end of last week, which was a shift to sending 100% of revenue to the buyback, which made sense, right? They sold the token at $4. and now they get to buy it back at 2-point-something. So that made sense. And it's just a good way to kind of create a bid into the market. And then Elon tweeted that they're going to be dropping some big announcement this week in terms of incentives and something that'll really juice activity. So as a result, you know, assumed that some of this, some of these rewards will be retroactive as well as forward-looking. And that stimulated a lot of the activity because if you look at, you know, a lot of these charts, I think they look especially brutal because they are shown on a 1-year timescale and everything's going to look brutal relative to the mania of the end of last year. But I think if you look at it relative to the past couple of weeks, there seemed to have been a bottoming in token creation and and now a spike up in the past 2 days, which coincided with a decline in Bonq ecosystem activity. So Bonq sold off, Pump Pump's kind of doing well here. I think you've definitely had pretty broad-based capitulation. I know a lot of people who have, and you also saw a lot of the funds do it on-chain because of, you know, the raises were on-chain. So you can kind of track those wallets. So you had a pretty good sell-off there. Seems to be on this kind of steady grind up, and I think people are just waiting to see what this announcement is going to be and what they're planning. Um, they, they do have a lot of ammo and a lot of tokens to give out, so I think it's hard to see it disappoint relative to where we are in terms of, uh, pump valuation, right? Like, they have a lot of firepower relative to a not that large of a market cap, and right now they're sending all the revenue to the buybacks, you have a bid there. But yeah, I think next milestone is basically a tweet from Elon or Pump itself describing how they're thinking of kickstarting the flywheel here.

Nice. Yeah, my average cost is under the ICO price finally on this thing. But, uh, yeah, it seems pretty— I don't know, seems like a buy, uh, below like ICO price, honestly, especially with them putting 100% of revenue in. But I haven't been following it too closely. It's not a large position for me.

Yeah, I mean, if you look at the, uh, the buybacks they're getting, and they released that new dashboard too, which is always useful, I think. If there's anything teams should do more of, it's really, if you actually have revenue, it's release these dashboards that people can easily look for and cite and reference. I think it's just low-hanging fruit and saves people time and just actually does more to stimulate a community than you can kind of imagine because there's no kind of confusion and it's just one canonical source and you can make them look pretty. But yeah, the buybacks are, you know, a couple hundred grand a day right now, which is, which is not nothing. And, and that's pre any real bump in activity.

Yeah.

Right.

You need to— I mean, that, that, that starts picking up a lot if I guess if they take back any meaningful percent of market share, right? Like that, that should—

and like the flywheel, right? It's like if we, if we're going to give out and just say 10%, right? That can be a lot of money and that stimulates activity, which leads to a bigger buyback, which leads to a higher price, which people will then anchor to. It's like, ooh, 10% is now this much. And so that is in effect the flywheel.

I thought, I thought I saw something today on Twitter. They've started, I mean, yeah, they've started taking back market share, but like you're starting to see more token launches on Pump again versus versus Bonk. Um, but yeah, I'm just, I'm just, I guess, kind of waiting. Like, I, I got wrecked on a per position, and I just holding spot, just, just fucking praying, just praying it goes up at this point. Um, but I mean, yeah, I guess the fundamental story is looking better than it did a week or two ago, which I guess is progress.

Yeah. And I guess it would only be fair to talk about the other big revenue generating token.

Hyperliquid.

Hyperliquid. Right. That one's— it kind of ebbs and flows, pockets of strength, and then you kind of see some weakness. I think you end up seeing a lot of people selling it when market sells off because it's the one asset they have in size that's liquid and they need to shore up some collateral so they don't get licked. And so it ends up being thrown out with the bathwater. Sometimes.

Yeah, I feel like when it got up to like, you know, almost 50, at that point there's just like so much UPNL from people who received the airdrop, people who bought on TGE, and then people who bought during the tariff shit that, you know, that's like got up to like, you know, 15 billion or so in circulating cap.

I mean, there's got to have been a decent amount of churn Well, I think a lot of big people held for this second run.

Like, they held through the first pump and the tariff stuff, and now on the second leg have taken some profits just because— yeah, I think like, you know, you're getting that churn now. But the reason it's kind of— it was kind of like the darling of the market for a while during the tariff stuff because like its volume was exploding. You know, you had that James Nguyen guy opening massive positions on it. It was like the fastest horse, like pretty reflexive cycle like dynamics. And then like Bitcoin slowed down and sold off a bit. Like John said, it's like easily available collateral. And then there's just this like huge bucket of money that's been made very quickly. It's also now into 2026 or 2025. So I think like that could be part of the reason, like the first run-up was in 2025, December. So like for tax purposes, maybe people want to wait until the next year. So I think it's more less so a fundamentals issue. It's more so like a flows issue for the relative underperformance here. Seems like it's doing really great across all of its market share stats, volume stats. And I think that, yeah, one problem with kind of per-protocols as you're very successful over a long period of time is you need to continually add new users or else your current user base just kind of gets chopped up and loses their money. So I think that that might be happening on some level to Hyperliquid. Obviously, they're still adding users, but you kind of need to find that, like, you know, consistently be growing your user base. And, you know, these centralized exchanges have massive marketing teams and campaigns to do that. And now with kind of like the initial season's over and like a lack of clarity on like future airdrops and like campaigns to get new traders and like, you know, competition popping up offering those incentives, you probably lose some of those marginal new customers that you need to sustain your business. I think two things that could really kind of reinvigorate them is if they add like, uh, like coin margin collateral. So like ability to use like BTC or ETH or Solana or HYPE as collateral on the exchange. I think that could bring in like a huge swath of new users. I also— and I think they just like, that's— they're working on that. It's just going to take time to get like their spot markets liquid enough to handle liquidations. And then also like more of a longer tailback, but if pulled off could be absolutely massive, is kind of like tokenized equities and like putting those on Hyperliquid. That would be pretty epic. And then also this like HIP3, like these new vaults from, from people making them. So I think like fundamentally there's still a lot going for it. It's just like kind of a short to midterm flows issue for, for like what Jan and I just spoke about.

Yeah, no, fully on the same page. Like if you look at the, the buyback fund, right, that they've, they've bought back about 28 million hype and circulating supply is like 330, right? So call it 8% or so. And that's, I mean, that's, that's, that's, that's, yeah, it's great. And then, you know, people have done the kind of the adjusted FDV calcs because you assume, right, like the ecosystem stuff doesn't really get distributed until it needs to. And the team is both, you know, very well off and there are no venture bets. So it's like a— it's not a true FDV. So yeah, on a market cap basis, it's not cheap, it's not expensive. I think a lot of the stuff ends up getting priced on growth though. So, you know, the multiple the market gives you is a function of how fast you're growing. And so right now, they're still doing well, but it's kind of plateaued a bit.

And did they do a treasury option?

They did. I don't know the one that Paradigm did. I don't know exactly how much that's deployed, but I heard it was going to take a few months for the money to be in and deploying.

I think it's a pretty good buy here. Again, I mean, I never sold any. But I do think this is a decent entry for it. I think HIP3 could be really huge for Hyperliquid. Like, and I think that's also how people can eventually add like equities and other pairs. And I already know a few teams that are considering like adding pairs as soon as HIP3 goes live and then subsidizing that. And when I thought like Recently we've been doing this thought exercise at Delphi. It's actually— shout out to Neil, who we should actually bring him on the Hive Mind soon. But he's— we all want to go back to writing research with, as sort of founders, at least like one report a year or so. And his idea is like, what does the new Mag 7 look like? You know, that there's been more and more turnover in Mag 7 over the years, and the next 10 years is going to be one of the highest turnover times And like, what are the companies that could be in that new Mag 7? Like the SpaceXes, the Andorrils, the, you know, depending what you like, the Palantirs, depending what you believe about the world. And one exercise that's interesting is thinking like what crypto companies, like what crypto projects could be in the new Mag 7. And when I think about it myself, it's basically like L1s, like ETH and SOL being the— obviously Bitcoin's already, you know, in the Mag 7. But I think about L1s and then I think about hyper liquid and, and the stablecoin company like Ena specifically, obviously is my bet. Obviously, just given flows, it has to— just given cash flows, it would have to grow so much to justify that. That could have to be a trillions of dollars market cap. So a longer term one. But I really think hype with, especially with HIP3, where you can literally trade anything in the world. On it. I really think it's like an interesting— yeah, I'm excited about it.

You also had probably, you know, next to the chain getting hacked and there being a massive exploit, one of the worst things you could have for it, right? When it went down and granted it didn't go down for that long. But if you're, if you're an L1 DEX, then one of the worst things that can happen is you going down because obviously positions can't get closed. And if there's a lot of volatility, somebody has to take on that bad debt if positions can't get liquidated. And so, and also just fear and trust, right? So I think the market reacting to that, or rather the lack of reaction, was pretty telling in terms of the degree of conviction of the holder base at this point. It's, it's not super fleety. Um, I think it happened at like low to mid-40s and, and price moved down to the low 40s. So, um, yeah, I thought that was pretty telling in terms of the, the conviction of the holder base. But yeah, I think, you know, going back to the original point, it's just, it's just a flows issue. It takes time to churn through the amount of money. And, and I think If you look at the chart, it certainly shows that same story, right? It rips higher, then there's just churn where you need new buyers plus the buyback fund to take out people taking profits, and then, and then next leg higher. And so, you know, without a meaningful exploit or a decline in volumes or just a broader decline in the market, it's hard to see a scenario where this doesn't end up going higher. Um, yeah, like one of the hindrances, right, is just thinking about the return multiple you get from here. Um, and obviously it's not nearly the same as it once was. So if you're— depends on kind of what return you're chasing. But I think the size of it, and it's— I think it's a lot harder for large liquid funds to make high conviction bets right now, um, with size, right? That being the really big one. And so I think this is probably one of those that they can. And ultimately, you know, in order to have that conviction, you need— you're either relying on narrative or fees. Right. And so I think it's harder to be confident in your narrative necessarily playing out and having the conviction there where it's just buying because of narrative, whereas here, you know, you have that bolstering of fees. And so, yeah, it seems like one of the better bets to make.

Yeah, one last point on Hyperliquid, I guess. Like, I think these treasury companies could be a really big deal for it because, you know, same argument that guy laid out with the, the ENA treasury companies is like, it's not easily accessible, whereas the BTC and ETH like ETFs are accessible. The Solana ETF is going to be accessible, but like, you know, hype even on centralized exchanges, it's getting a bit better, but it's not the easiest thing to buy. So the treasury companies could make a really big difference there, especially if you can get out and tell the story properly. Um, yeah, I think that's the last thing I'd add in because like within crypto, like there's a lot of big liquid funds have gotten in and like big size, but doesn't feel like there's a ton of like marginal buyers with that, you know, much size to kind of take this on the next run-up. But the treasury companies and tapping the public equity markets could definitely be a source of that demand.

Yeah, it's like on-chain Robinhood or whatever narrative they want to, they want to sell. It's like this is your way to play the beta of on-chain activity. Yeah, increasing over time.

Yeah, I think the biggest headwind is just like regulatory, like just what hap— like, is this, is this legal? Especially once HIP3 goes live, you can, you, you, you can believe some people are going to spin up equity markets, right? All you need is a million hype, either own it yourself or have it delegated, and you can spin up a market for any asset. You have your own order book. I guess you get listed on the front end too. I don't know how that works, but you can do your own front end. People are going to do like FX markets, commodities markets, like equities markets, and then it gets kind of real, right? Like you're really crossing hairs there with some pretty ingrained regulations and regulators. And I don't know what that— yeah, I don't have any— like, if you told me a year ago that we'd have this regulatory environment that we have now, I would never have believed it. So maybe there's a world where hyperliquid is okay. I don't know. You have to do KYC on top, but the protocol layer is left, which kind of ties into this latest Hester Peirce speech, the SEC speech. I don't know if you guys had a chance to read it, but it was insanely bullish. She really gets it. She's like kind of the most cypherpunk regulator I've ever seen. But it doesn't seem like you'll just be able to trade securities and commodities and stuff. No KYC on chain. I don't know. We'll see. And if you can't, then you always have like a limited time.

Recap of the speech.

Yeah.

I mean, yeah, I can try. It was just— she was basically highlighting the importance of self-custody again. She was talking about how regulators don't like it because they have these middlemen that they can impose regulations on, but that we shouldn't retrofit the regulations around these intermediaries and that this intermediation is a feature, not a bug. She's talking about privacy and like the Bank Secrecy Act and some of these other surveillance-heavy rules that need to be overhauled because you should be able to move value around with the same privacy that you can for communications, which, you know, basically in defense of privacy coins and in general of crypto, like asking regulators not to just put in an intermediary just so they can regulate someone. Also protecting open source devs, like no one should be put in jail or have any fear of reprisals for publishing open source code, which again, obviously super bullish and super relevant with the Roman Storm case. And just a bunch of other stuff, like everything she said was just so bullish. And also she's been pushing for this idea that like IPOs need to be overhauled, like we have less and less IPOs over time and tokenization is a potential solution for that. Yeah, I think—

Yeah.

The CIO of Bitwise put out a letter and he said, I'll close with this. I was caught off guard by the speech. I've studied and written about crypto nonstop for the past 8 years. I've been long bullish about the future of crypto. And I've said that all assets will eventually move over blockchain-based rails. But after reading the speech, I'm realizing that I have to think bigger and move to a faster timeline. If it wasn't priced in for me, I'm going to guess it wasn't priced in for others. Oh, okay. But that was about the Paul Atkins SEC chair speech. Is that different than you're talking about?

Yeah.

Okay. Well, even better.

Yeah. I mean, they're all like, they're all saying really bullish things. I'm curious how this gets implemented, but yeah, it's pretty insane, the turnaround that we've kind of had in regulatory approach to this space.

Yeah, it's been awesome.

Yeah. So we'll see. Maybe there's a world where Hyperliquid finds some kind of regulatory loophole here. I don't know.

Yeah, there's a non-zero chance that, like, because Hyperliquid's like the clear on-chain trading venue for, you know, crypto assets. So if that were to expand to equities and commodities on-chain, that would be obviously massive.

Yeah, I mean, I think when HIP3 comes live, it's gonna happen, right? I don't know, I just— there's just so much money to be made. So like anyone who proposes these markets and gets it passed can make 50%. Of, of the trading fees on that. Um, and obviously you have like 1 million HYPE at stake, so if you fuck something up or like act maliciously, then that can get slashed. Hello TBD, how? But it just seems like all those markets will get, will get added, like, which is—

oh yeah, no, they're definitely getting added. It's just like what happens after, regulatory-wise or in terms of— yeah, yeah, yeah, all of it. But yeah, they're good, they're definitely getting added. Like, you're not gonna— unless like the team doesn't allow it for whatever reason, but doesn't seem like that's what they're going for. Yeah, I mean, and you'll be able to like market make this stuff, right?

You'll have like an HLP vault for like— yeah, equity and stuff. It's gonna be pretty wild.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, Hyperliquid's easily the thing I'm most bullish on outside of, you know, Bitcoin, and it's reflected in my whole—

so what are we thinking, Galaxy Hyperliquidina? Is that the hive mind picks? That sounds pretty fucking good to me.

Hyenixi.

Pump.

Hyenixi. Pump, pump, pump.

Yeah, no problem.

Let's do those 3. Quote it. That's our new portfolio, a third in each. Prepare.

Not financial advice.

Yeah.

But yeah, I think all those are looking Looking pretty interesting here. Also, just a moment on this, on these treasury companies. I was thinking, I was actually reading some stuff from back in the day the other day and remembering like how every single bear market and bull market for like 5 years, everyone was saying like institutions are coming. Like that was the line that you heard everywhere. Institutions are coming, institutions are coming, you know, like, and, and I always was like skeptical that institutions were coming and like kind of proven right over the years. But, and then digital asset treasury companies come about, and it's literally like the wettest dream that any crypto person could have in terms of how institutions come into the space. Like, if it's one of those things that like you, you just, you couldn't write it, right? Like, you, you would never believe it if this is how institutions came into the space. They're literally just spinning up public vehicles to buy a dollar of your coins for $2. You know, like, it's, it, it's, it's, it's kind of wild.

Yeah, I think, yeah. Novogratz had this good interview with StockTwits today, and they asked about, um, like, you know, what's the regulatory environment? And the girl gave an example, like, you know when you're at like a pool party and just it takes like one person to jump in the pool to like get everyone to go in the pool. And Novogratz, like, I'd say the regulatory environment's the equivalent of someone took their bathing suit off and jumped in the pool.

Like that dude, like, fucking dancing on the hill at the concert by himself. Everybody's laughing at him, and then like 3 minutes later, like, the whole crowd just comes and joins him.

It's like, yeah, so he's like, it's fully on. He's like, if we get the Clarity Act passed, or like the market structure bill passed, he's like, it is fully on.

Like, What do you guys think about, um, like IPOs with, with like crypto companies? Like obviously Circle was, was an extraordinary success. Kraken is now surging in, in all of these, um, secondary, secondary transactions prior to their IPO, probably later this year. You have Gemini bullish, uh, a couple other ones are rumored like Falcon X, right? Like Seems like a lot of, um, the really established crypto companies that, you know, actually like have really good businesses, make tons of money, are, are now opting to go the IPO route versus token routes. Um, do you think that's something that like persists or maybe accelerates and you start to see more companies explore that versus, uh, going the early, early line?

Well, yeah, so basically you want to go, you want, yeah, if you like end goal is both, but you kind of want to go the path of least resistance, which is driven by where there's the most liquidity, right? And so right now, and realistically for a long time, it'll be in equity markets. Um, and these things are just like, some of these are just designed to go public. These, you know, very regular regulated exchanges, or it just makes sense for them to go public that way. It's, it'd be a bit of a nightmare to go the other way. But at the same time, we will see a lot of these stocks on-chain, right? And so if the end goal is to have them in both places, it just makes the most sense to go this path because it's also, you know, the IPO window isn't always open. You kind of need a couple of elements to align for that to happen. Regulatory, market, and broader market environment just appetite. And so that looks like it's there and ideally, it stays there for the foreseeable future. You don't have like a Lina Khan in there and others. So it seems like the environment is ripe. Yeah, Kraken is probably going to be the next big one right there. They're raising their Series C right now. I think they're doing $500 at $15. And so with the idea to try and go public either later this year, but probably more likely early next year. And, you know, hopefully we don't see an April 2021 moment like we did with Coinbase, where that was the top. I don't really think the environment's necessarily the same, but I think if it tops, it'll top for other reasons, not for these— not because these are going public. So now it seems like a good time for it. It'll be interesting to see what goes public outside of these exchanges, right? Or maybe even like the Falcon X is very like tradfi understandable businesses because ultimately that's your buyer and it needs to be understood. And so I'll be curious to see what else tries to go public outside of these that are, you know, that have proxies outside of crypto and are just, you know, the crypto equivalent of X, Y, and Z business. Um, and yeah, that I think will be the interesting part.

Do you guys think Base ever launches a token?

Maybe if Inc— so like, uh, Kraken has Kraken, right?

And they do it.

If that does well, I think that'll— they'll just sit there and think, we can have a lot of Base on our balance sheet and the stock will probably get rewarded for it, so we might as well. Um, I don't know if they'll do it beforehand because if they haven't done it already It'd be strange for them to do it now.

Yeah, I'm in this, I'm in the same boat on, on that. I was curious if you guys thought any differently. I initially thought like 2 years ago, zero chance. And then like maybe like a year ago I was like, oh yeah, they'll definitely do it.

Um, and now I'm just like, well, L2s haven't really been rewarded that much, right? So it's, it's also the last thing you want to do is force it and it flops.

Yeah, I don't think the juice is worth the squeeze right now for, for even for Coinbase. Like when you look at comps on, on L2s and like the Coinbase market cap, it doesn't really seem like it would move the needle at this point. Probably even versus their Sequencer revenue, you know, which accrues to the, to the stock.

Yeah.

But anyway, guys, this was a good one. I think we can wrap here.

Yeah.

Thanks everyone for tuning in again and we'll see you all in 2 weeks.

Yeah.

Thanks everyone.

Thank you guys.