Hivemind: ETH Pump, Solana’s Edge & the New Meme Meta

I'm still holding my ETH and ETH/BTC is back to prices last seen 2 months ago and I am euphoric.

It's like that meme. It's like you bought here, draws down 90%. Yeah, break even. I'm a genius.

Exactly. Yeah. You get one ETH pump after 2 years, 3 years of underperformance and everybody's coming out with like these new threads on why ETH is going to flip BTC and it's like, guys, shut the fuck up.

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. So you were saying one of your friends from school— No, not friends. She videoed her birth.

Yeah, like put it on Instagram at home. At home you could go see—

that's bizarre.

Straight up live birth.

But like, what, what, what was the angle? What was the POV on the— was it like a candid shot?

Um, she's just like very into motherhood and all of that, and like just showing everything about being a mom and just kept going deeper and deeper into the— what she was showing. And it just— I think like showing a live birth is kind of the furthest you can go.

Jason's audio, by the way, good way to bootstrap, uh, an influencer arc.

Yeah, I don't even think she's like trying to do an influencer thing. I don't even— I should see.

Yeah, you know, you're not— your audio is not working, Jason. I thought you're a bit quiet. Yeah, and I haven't had any of those that I remember. Just a lot of—

is that better?

Breastfeeding.

Yeah, I think the strangest thing is breastfeeding past a certain age, right? So basically the book is, if you do it, if you want to do the first 3 months, like that's really where you get the lion's share of the benefit. And, you know, plenty of people go beyond that and that's fine. Hello.

Hello. Hello.

Old enough to ask for the when it's like 2, 3-year-old kids with a full set of teeth and hair asking for boob in public. That's when it's like, holy shit, this kid's going to be fucked.

Like the Tullys in Game of Thrones.

Dude, you build some real bad mama issues that way.

Are we done talking about births and like breast milk and stuff?

How many times did you watch that video, Satteras?

Yeah.

Just on 0.5x speed, just once. And then everybody I shared it to was like, dude, what the fuck? Why are you sharing this to me? It's like, I saw it. You've got to see it now.

All right. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Hive Mind podcast. Goal of the podcast is to provide an inside look into what we like to call the Delphi hive mind, bringing together some of our brightest minds from each of the divisions to share insights, alpha, and shitposts. Today with us we have Ceteris, head of our institutional research arm. Jason Yanowitz, 3x liquidated. Are you head of macro?

Yeah, markets, macro. Yeah, whatever.

Markets, macro. And Jan and myself. Jan is the managing partner of Delphi Ventures and I lead up our Delphi Labs arm. So this should be a happy podcast. I was actually looking forward to this. It seems at this— oh yeah, and by the way, congratulations to Jan. On his new child, Leo Lieberman. Welcome into the world.

Thank you very much.

You're back on the podcast literally less than a week after— people say giving birth, but you didn't really give birth, or like were pregnant or whatever. But, but yeah, you're still a, still a—

yeah, you're, you're, you're a bit useless early on, um, because it's, it's really just like breastfeeding and sleeping for the most part.

You're not breastfeeding?

No, only— I'm about halfway there, but, but not, not quite. Yeah, because yeah, we also have a 21-month-old and honestly there's a pretty strong relationship between age and difficulty that kind of keeps going and I'm just waiting for that line to, to the flattening of the slope a little bit. Because yeah, you can't really control them, but they're fully mobile and now they have attitude and manipulation skills and all this stuff. So that's basically where the handful comes in. And then, yeah, you kind of just suffer on sleep for a while with the newborn, but there's not much that I can do for a little while outside.

None of us, none of us know that feel. We're all just your classic crypto forever alone.

And so what's a woman? What are kids?

Well, bull market's back. May we all find women. I actually have a girlfriend, by the way.

That's fine.

But, uh, yeah, little flex.

Oh, she was— you— he was also born on the day of the ETH pump.

Wow. Was it May 7th? Yeah.

You didn't want to call him like Ether or something?

Or Vitalik? Yeah, I'm pretty sure.

I'm pretty sure it was like the main Was he the catalyst?

Yeah, I have some inside baseball now. Next kid.

All right, guys. So it looks like we're back. Are we back? Maybe we can start there with how's everyone feeling about markets?

They look pretty good. I don't know if we're— I don't know, Jason. I'm actually curious, Jason, because Jason is— I think Jason's pretty cautious here. I think like the difference though in this rally is that obviously the ETH pump, right? Like if I'm looking at, looking at our sector dashboard since our last podcast, it's like 44% ETH, 10% Bitcoin, 20% SOL, right? And this is like the first ETH-led rally. And what you're seeing is while like, while like, while like ETH ratios have gone down on most of these tokens, it has been more like broad-based with ETH leading versus kind of like in the past when it was just Bitcoin and you would have Bitcoin go up like 10% and you'd have these tokens' USD prices going down a lot too. Right. But I'm not sure if that's like, I honestly don't know the real reason for the ETH pump. Like there's this one entity on-chain that's bought like $500 million. Recently and is like borrowing against their ETH. So they're like lever longing ETH. And so that has like a bit of an impact. You haven't seen any like ETF flows yet. So it's like that meme, right? The two guys on the bus, like this is either a good thing or a bad thing, right? The optimistic way to look at it is that the institutions haven't bought yet. And the bad way to look at it is the institutions aren't buying. Right. Um, and I really don't know because there was, yes, there's been like this, I don't know, people get upset if you call it a pivot. There's been this like re, um, reprioritization of scaling the L1 recently. Right. Um, but yeah, like I'm looking at even yesterday, ETH ETF flows again, BlackRock zero. BlackRock's had, it had one day over the past. So over the past 4 days, well, ETH has added like $100 billion to its market cap. The BlackRock ETF for ETH had 0, 0, 17 mil, 0. Okay, so it's like ETH did get— if you look, like, ETH did go down an absolute shit ton. Like, even year to date, it's still down 23% versus Bitcoin up 11% and SOL down 6.5%, right? So it's really hard to say if this is anything else other than just like a bunch of shorts getting unwound.

That's what it is. I think it's just a positioning pump. It was just the favorite short leg of any pair. Um, I think people loaded up just to get levered long other stuff, play it cautiously. And, and so you've had this, this big unwind. I mean, it's crazy. It's like outperformed even SOL by quite a bit recently.

Um, yeah, I mean, I'm euphoric. I'm still holding my, my ETH, and, uh, ETHBTC is back to prices last seen 2 months ago, and I am euphoric. It's funny, but, uh, yeah, I don't know.

Zoom out, huh?

It's like that meme. It's like, you bought here, draws down 90%. Yeah, break even, I'm a genius.

Exactly.

Yeah, it is that. ETH pumps are just, they're just wholesome though. Like they just pump everything else. Like, ETH pumps are the most wholesome, I guess.

But you get one ETH pump after 2 years, 3 years of underperformance, and everybody's coming out with like these new threads on why it's gonna flip BTC. And it's like, guys, shut the fuck up.

Yeah, just by every metric, it's just like, it's hard to be optimistic on an asset this large, um, to have anything more than positioning really move it. Like, to have the amount of fresh capital you need to move this thing from here is, is a lot. So I think the most bullish thing for right now is, is that shorts haven't necessarily unwound. And, and if BTC keeps chugging higher, regardless of the ETH/BTC ratio, ETH will chug higher, and people are short on dollar pair ETH. So I, I think you, you have like this, this short squeeze that, that can continue happening. But I think ultimately it's just a good opportunity to hedge against ETH using stuff you're bullish on.

Yeah, like even with this reprioritization—

fighting words—

but even with this reprioritization, let's say they scale the L100x over the next few years, that still gets you to like 2-3k TPS. Years, which is over like 4 years, and you're getting to like 2-3k TPS, which is what Solana and like SUI and these other networks can kind of already do today. Um, and like in 4 years from now, those networks are going to be scaled like shit ton from here too, right? So I don't know. I think it's good. I think it's good that like money has gone into non-BTC biggest, you know, alt. But yeah, I just like don't really buy that. I don't think I need to like own ETH. I don't know, maybe I'll listen to this podcast in a year and be like, wow, that was stupid. But I just don't see a market environment where ETH just continues chatting solo for a really long time. Yeah.

I think to own ETH, you have to believe that it can catch the narrative of like flipping Bitcoin. Like, I don't see—

I think at this level you don't need to believe that as much, but once it crosses like 0.4 or something, and it gets to like that range going 0.05, then you need to— yeah, pretty much.

Yeah, which, which I do, uh, believe deep down in my soul. I'm not ashamed to admit it. Like, I definitely believed it more at the ETH/BTC top, which is a classic. But I— yeah, I still think it's the only like coin with actual like working economic model. Like, the— this thing is, is like slightly inflationary and that deflationary. Like, Bitcoin has not figured that out. Like, this is the actual thing that Bitcoin kind of wishes it had. Um, plus I'm just bullish on the, on the, on L2s. Like, I don't think they're value creative to ETH. I think that's clear, but I still think it's, it was the right move for them to, for them to pursue that roadmap. Like, it might not be the right move for ETH the asset, um, in the short term. Maybe, maybe not in the long term. I'm not sure. I think I think the history of technology is that if you have something that has traction, the value capture tends to figure itself out. Not always. And L2s clearly have product market fit. I think that's hard to argue against.

Yeah, I agree. So I think the right framing for the L2 is not necessarily does it help ETH, but is ETH better off with or without them? Right. And without them, you'd have even more activity on Solana and then other places. And so it's a good way to put it.

Sure.

You can argue it doesn't help, but like ETH is certainly better off with their, with them existing.

Yeah. It's just like, I think the problem that they realized is that you don't need to design, like, it was kind of weird. They kind of just gave up on doing a lot of stuff with the L1, thinking that that wouldn't be beneficial to rollups. But look at Solana, people are starting to launch. Random like extensions and rollups on Solana and Solana does like not give a shit about rollups. That's like not their thesis. But so I think Ethereum kind of took some of those learnings where it was like, oh, Solana, people are launching rollups on Solana now and they don't even really want them. Why is that? Right. And again, we talked about it on last pod about all the benefits of having like a more performant chain, like single-slot finality, shorter block times, why that's good for the whole rollup roadmap, right?

So, all right, you initially asked Jason for his opinion and then we just continuously interrupted each other and Jason hasn't spoken yet. So I'm going to pass over the mic to you, Jason. What are your thoughts on Marcus? I know you're a bit cautious here.

No, that was fine. I enjoy listening to that stuff. Yeah, I mean, I'm just, Um, I'm just, yeah, slightly cautious here. Um, like Bitcoin, like $104, $105 to me is like the, like, um, no man's land. Yeah, it's kind of like if, like, I look at it from like a couple different types of like perspectives. Like if, so like if you like longed, like, you know, somewhere near the bottom, like $75, $76, $77, you know, somewhere in that area and you're like looking to take profits, right? Like, you probably would have done so around like 90, maybe 95, and certain— certainly like 105. Like, it's like the range high. It's like very clearly like an area that you should sell if you're like not somebody that's like buying for like 6, 7, 8, 10 months, right? Like, it's, it's just a very clear area to sell from that perspective, from like a trading perspective, right? Like, if you like bought the range low reclaim at like $90K, you would want to probably sell range high, right? That's like a very common strategy. If you're somebody who's like tactical and trying to hedge out, right, you try to think of like where's it— where's the optimal place to hedge? Like $105 range high, like $104 makes a ton of sense. Um, and if you're like wrong, right, on like, you know, shorting or hedging at like $105, like you're risking all-time high break, which is like 108, right? It's like right there, your invalidation is super clear. And the, like, one of the best trades that you can like generally do in crypto or in, in like most markets is like buying the all-time high break of an asset after it's, you know, spent months or more below it, right? And once you get that like final or like that, that push through and you get like a breakout above all-time highs, like it's a very clear long. Like you just go back and look at go back and look at like any chart with assets, like it's almost always like a good, good buy over any kind of time horizon. So when I look at it like that, I'm just like, okay, like if I, if I want to hedge, like this is the area to hedge for me. We've— and then like to the point about the ETH move, like I don't think there's anything that's like happened. I think it was mostly just to Yann's point, just like positioning related. You see it in ETF flows like he was saying, like there isn't really like a huge spot appetite there. From what I can tell. And, uh, like a 25-30% move in ETH is like— like, this is the area I would be looking to, to like short ETH and long some other things. Like, I'm not like trying to short it immediately now. Like, I'd like to see it go sideways or whatever and like just like generally lose momentum before I, I short or whatever. But like, I don't know how you buy ETH at $2,600 or $2,700 and be like, yeah, right now is a good buy. Like, like, I— seems tough for me. Um, so when I look at it from like those two perspectives, I'm like, all right, like, this is an area that I would probably de-risk, or I am like, I'm hedging. I'm not like selling spot bags from the lows, I'm just like putting on some hedges, and I'll take those off if we blast through all-time highs. I'll lose a little bit, but everything else will go up a bunch more, so I should be okay. Um, and then When I look at like ETF flows, none on ETH, and then BTC ETF flows topped like 2 weeks ago, more 3 weeks ago, they topped April 21st or 22nd. So like Bitcoin ETF flows have been consistently decreasing over the last 2.5, 3 weeks as we've grinded higher up here, right? So like you don't really see too much appetite from institutional buyers up here. I know Saylor, you had a couple other people, you know, unload and buy stuff in the high 80s to mid-90s. Um, so it seems like a fair amount of that dry powder is probably done. Um, and then the Fed, like, obviously, you know, is in no rush, right? Like, I think they, they could maybe miss the boat here a little bit if they continue, you know, just not doing anything. Like, oh, we'll wait and see, we'll wait and see, we'll wait and see. Well, at some point that'll be a bit late. Um, so I'm just like looking at everything. I'm like, okay, like everybody's super, super, super, super, super bullish. And obviously everybody gets more bullish the higher you go with price. So I'm just like looking at all of this and then I see all of the, um, the like Trench on-chain stuff and, and the behaviors going on there as like another kind of like, um, just like, you know, red flag warning sign.

Uh, I mean, Mudang is a major red flag. Why the fuck is Mudang 5x? Nobody— why is anybody buying Mudang?

I woke up and I had a lot of that positioning too though. Peanut, Fred, people like— I had like 10 DMs messaging me about Mudang, Peanut, and Fred, and I was just like, all right, like, like, as much—

a lot of those got blown out though because they had like that OI that was bigger than market cap in a lot of these scenarios, and so they were just ripe for That's fair.

Yeah, there's been a lot of that. The Zeribro was like that too, um, before the dev fake.

And so yeah, I just see all of this stuff and I'm like, as somebody who is like pretty tactical, at least with like a, you know, a portion of, of, of my book, like I— it's just like a very clear area that I would, you know, hedge and de-risk. So I'm just like cautious. And if we break all-time highs on Bitcoin, like the hedges come off or whatever and we just go into hopeful hopefully price discovery towards like 1, you know, 120, 125 or, or higher. Um, so that's just generally how I'm playing it. Like, I'm not bearish by any means. I was talking to Quinn Thompson, um, yesterday and a couple days ago. I know he's fairly bearish on generally everything right now. I haven't gotten his like, his like full thesis, so I don't really have much to share, but I know he's been, he's been pretty spot on at least with his like macro rotations over the last, um, you know, several months to a year. So I'm kind of curious to see what he has to say when he flushes that out, uh, more publicly. But that's something else that I've kind of—

yeah, I did some de-risking yesterday and, and not— yeah, definitely not bearish, but just thinking about we've had a lot of good news, um, we've had a lot of buying happening from Saylor and, and the Canna guys. Not to say that Saylor's done, but They upped their total amount and it seems like there's still a lot of appetite from the debt market to buy MicroStrategy and those shares have done well. So it doesn't seem like that's going to slow down soon, but it definitely oscillates between $300 mil and $1.5 to $2 billion a week here and there. So it is interesting to see how varied it is. I would love to know what the driver there um, is— but so that you have him consistently bidding, which is, which is great. But we've— yeah, there's been quite the run-up, and it's just, it seems less likely that we just blast through all-time highs considering all of the info that we had to get us here. Um, you know, macro is still not really out of the woods. Uh, you know, you have some of the, the pain that's going to exist from the the China situation where there have been quite a few delays on shipping and then at the same time, like even with low tariffs are still not negligible. So it's kind of, you know, weighing the impact of that versus the, you know, the endless bid for AI, whether it's CapEx and everything that comes along, all the downstream effects of that. So, you know, you have the two kind of pulling on opposite sides, but But it seems like, yeah, labor market softening, um, uh, housing markets rolling over a bit. So it's, you know, I think there's, there's some rationality risk. I'd love to see just kind of a puke lower, um, because it, you know, like Jason Yanowitz mentioned, there's a lot of profit taking that happens at top of range. And I think we've had all the good news that's come through, so it's, it seems less likely that we'll just blast through all-time highs in the first try. I think you kind of need to absorb some more supply at these prices and have the, the endless bidders come in and buy. Um, and so what that kind of means for me is, is, yeah, I'm doing some hedging and ideally would like to buy a puke lower that, that punishes late longs, but still longer-term bullish, shorter-term kind of cautious and waiting. And then, yeah, happy to be wrong if it just keeps going.

I mean, to be honest, like, I I played the, uh, the move up from, um, like 95 or whatever to 105 extremely poorly, to be, to be completely frank. Like, I, I just didn't expect us to go from 75 to 105 in one move without like any pullback at all, at like at all. Obviously a lot of that was like, you know, headlines from Trump negotiations, the China deal, right? Like that or was there even a China deal, or is it just they're talking about a deal? Whatever it is, right? Like, I just—

they reduced their baseline rates much, much lower, so they're not these catastrophic ones like 10 and 30 for 90 days.

So like, yeah, I just like wasn't expecting that magnitude of a move without anything like pulling back. Like, I'm glad I had like some positions from the local lows, but I, I played it like pretty poorly. So like, I'm not here to be like, oh, I'm fully right on this. Like, I could definitely be wrong, and BTC could easily just go to $108 in the next 5 days if something happens or whatever. Um, but that's just generally my take and how I'm feeling and how I'm positioned currently.

Yeah, crypto just always surprises you. I feel like just when, whenever things are most bearish, right, it's just such a reflexive, like, asset. I think Hasu actually had a good post on this But yeah, I kind of agree with that.

Well, you guys are cautious. I was busy buying Jelly Jelly at the top.

Be greedy when others are scared.

How's his post? What are you talking about? The one when he was like, ETH went back up for no reason?

Yeah, yeah.

But the post was like, it went down for no reason. I was like, what are you talking about? ETH hasn't been going down for no reason.

I mean, I think there are definitely reasons, but I don't know, should we go— should we, should we move on to internet capital markets, or do you want to talk about like maybe what, what are people bullish on fundamentally, uh, here other than majors? Because I feel like SOL has a very interesting setup, uh, obviously like every time I think the market comes back, it's clear that like it comes back the most on SOL, like there's the most interesting stuff happening on SOL. Whether you— like, I'm not very bullish on this internet capital markets thing. I think that Believe is really cool. It's a really cool flow. It's cool that Nikita is advising. I think this posting a link to launch a token is dope. And there's a bunch of other cool stuff happening on Sol. There's this platform called dev.fun. It's like vibe coding. Yeah. Sort of vibe coding an app linked to a token. I just think, so I think that that's all. And also the Superstate thing launching on Solana and Ethereum, I thought was a big statement given it was Leschner, who's obviously Compound founder, generally more associated to ETH.

What I thought was big with that is that the regulation compliance is done at Superstate level. So no DeFi protocols, the protocol itself needs to worry about KYC or any of that stuff. And this is a pretty big win for like general purpose chains to me because a lot of reasons people say, oh yeah, all these institutions are going to launch their own L2s because for like compliance reasons and all this. It's like, that's a pretty bad outcome to me if we're going to get a bunch of institutions launching L2s for compliance reasons because that's like a terrible product at the end of the day. Like having a lot of L2s is just genuinely a terrible product. So if you can actually just kind of do this compliance right at the asset level, then DeFi protocols and the underlying protocol don't need to worry about it. Like, that seems like a pretty big deal to me, and it's a part of it that wasn't really discussed a ton. So yeah, yeah, that's pretty bullish.

I think it's worth just like unpacking what that means. KYC down at Superstate level.

Yeah, I don't actually know, to be totally honest. Like, but you, the DeFi protocols for trading it, they don't need to do any KYC or anything themselves. Like, Superstate handles all of that.

Yeah. Uh, somebody, uh, well, they need to do something about this on, on our portal recently.

I mean, I think this stuff's going to happen. I think IPOing on-chain. Seems like it's going to be a tough sell. I'm really excited about— by the way, we sidetracked from the point I wanted to make about Solana, but we can go back to it later. But it seems like I'm really excited about what Gabe's doing, and we're obviously investors and incubated it. But with MetaLex, just the idea of being able to tokenize startup shares and make it extremely simple to just raise money, do a SAFE. Like, the way it works right now, recommend everyone goes and checks out the demo. You can literally just sign a transaction from your wallet. It automatically signs the SAFE as well. Money is sent. There's no like, I've signed, send money, please send funds, like all this chasing around that founders have to do. It just gets done. It's sort of like a DocuSign plus funding. And then eventually you could have like Carta-like functionality on top of this and have like actual tokenized shares on chain. And I think if that becomes super easy, like you can just set up a company in one click and raise money, that can facilitate an actual pump fund or dev fund, but based on equities where people are actually entitled to have legal protections around the cash flows and efforts of people, which personally I think is much more interesting. And I'm aware that I'm mid-curving this, but I just think internet capital markets around meme coins just aren't that interesting and sort of never will be. Like, the incentives are too are too screwed up and you can't really fix them easily. There's always, whether it's sniping or vesting or moving the cash flow somewhere else or rugging, I think you either want fully on-chain protocols and cash flows like OG DeFi, um, or you want like tokenized shares where you have legal rights and you can sue the founders if they— and there's a whole body of company law that protects that. And I think Metal X is the best position to that I've seen. I would be curious if you guys see anything else to facilitate that.

Just one quick thing on Superstate. So yeah, the KYC is done at the asset level. And so basically you KYC with Superstate, but then they can trade freely like basically any, any, any address that has done the KYC with Superstate.

Yeah.

Can then use the assets anywhere.

Yeah.

So the DEXs and everything and like protocol are totally oblivious. To all of that. It just like wouldn't allow you to like the address. You just block the address. Basically, it's just like a whitelisted pool of addresses.

That's always been how security token, security tokens would, would work, by the way. Like even the old security token standards from like Securitize and stuff back in the day when Gabe wrote his like OG security token back in the day.

Yeah, but like a lot of banks have and stuff haven't been on board with this and a lot of institutions, they've been like, oh, we need our own environment. And there can't even be anything else going on on the chain. Like, that has been— because I've talked to people about this that have talked to, like, banks, and that's why a lot of them do these, like, Avalanche subnet type things where it's their own, only their own people are, like, actually using the, the sharing the same state. This is definitely the only model that really works long term.

On the Launchpool stuff, I do think there are still ways for this, this to, to do well, or rather some of the things built underneath it to do well. So I know, you know, the app itself is pretty cool. You basically have all the stuff listed there, and then they have a, you know, it's permissionless, so naturally you're going to get a lot of crap and grifting. But, um, they, they have this like featured section, right, where it's a curated list. And, and so you do have, you know, the issue is you don't have true ownership of these assets, but you can have tie into the economic activity. And I think you can, you know, make some adjustments on the, um, on the— with lockups to align incentives long-term, right? And, and all that can be kind of advertised. I think it's difficult to make a venture bet on something like this because it seems like it's probably gonna be, you know, a temporary fad, but there will be an evol— not a temporary fad, sorry. I, I, I think it's hard to make the bet that this will be the final form of it. Um, and so, you know, you're going to have this launch, there'll be a lot of activity, you'll start to notice issues that were initially probably obvious, and then some that weren't as obvious. And then ideally you kind of have things that, that iterate on these issues and, and land with a better product. So I think you'll have a flurry of activity, some cool stuff will come out. And ideally, you know, this sets the stage for the next iteration and a better version of it. But this is like a way to speedrun and test in prod, which I think crypto is really great at in terms of, you know, uncovering issues and accelerating progress because it's not academic, but it's very much live.

For sure. And internet capital markets happening on Solana is no surprise. Solana is really well set up here with the purchases not really having happened or maybe not being announced of the public companies that are buying SOL. We're investors in one of them, full disclosure, Upexi, right? Jan is the name of it. There's SOL Strategy. There's the other one, which his name now escapes me. But I think given— yeah, maybe Jan, what are your thoughts on it? You led this deal for us and you probably thought about it the most.

Yeah, no, I mean, I think it makes sense, right? Like, what you've seen, it worked with Bitcoin quite a bit, um, and now you're seeing it like MetaPlanet, right? So now that the Bitcoin play is just about tapping into different international markets, right? So you have, uh, the Cantor and, and the, and the, uh, MicroStrategy in the US, you had MetaPlanet in, in Japan. I think they're going to try and run this playbook in other markets and it, it works until it doesn't, right? So, so it's gonna keep working as long as you kind of have others buying in and there's a lot of kind of fundamental agreement around this asset being something that's worth holding long term. Um, so yeah, going down the stack, where else does it make sense? I think, you know, Bitcoin is, is stands on its own in terms of this, the, the value prop of it. Um, Once you start going further down, you kind of want to find other edges that you can take advantage of. And so what a big one with Solana that doesn't exist with Ethereum is that you can buy locked SOL at a discount. And so because you had the FTX estate and others and basically people selling large tranches of SOL that they needed to do in a hurry. And so in order to facilitate that selling, they needed to create an incentive, which was a locked amount. At a discount. And so, um, I think that helps with the bootstrapping for a lot of these. And so that's been the strategy for Apexi, right, to try and secure a large tranche because the market will value it at book, but you get to buy it at a discount, which helps your price to nav and kickstarts the flywheel. And so there's been quite a few of these. I think, um, the other element is the yield on, on the SOL. Um, it helps adjust So, you know, part of what was good with MicroStrategy was it was kind of, um, a sustainable-ish business. And, and so you were able to just buy without needing to sell to fund operations. And that was kind of the idea of, you know, looking for these— what's the ideal shell? It's something that's listed, something that, that has a clean cap table, something that, that can operate at relatively breakeven cash flows. And so with the yield on top, it helps you service debt or whatever else you need to do, expand and improve the premium to NAV. So I think Sol is in a unique position there, and you've seen quite a few of these. They still have— a lot of them haven't really deployed too much. They've talked about raising, you know, mid-nine-figure, some even billion-dollar facilities to help deploy. And I think, you know, some have deployed in the 140 to 150 range, but this move back to, you know, now we're at 175, I think. So, um, 176, there's still a lot of dry powder from these. And I, I think if you see the international Bitcoin versions do well, I wouldn't be surprised to see international versions for SOL as well, just to, you know, you're going to copy what works. So I think there's this idiosyncratic bid for SOL there, particularly relative to ETH, which I— so I think that like the SOL/ETH pair is probably going to do well from here because you kind of had this you know, positioning led ETH rally. While after that, it's hard to see where a sustainable bid would come from. Whereas on the SOL side, we know that there's quite a bit of dry powder ready to go. And as you're seeing, you know, all the new kind of launches happen there, it kind of begins to eat further into ETH's lead.

I think both UPEX and SOL Strategies have over $100 mil now. I think I saw both of those.

Yeah. They bought a big clip at a discount.

Why do you think there's none of these for, for ETH popping up? It can't just be because you can't buy ETH at a locked price.

There's an ETF. And it hasn't really had any demand. I think it kind of makes it less exciting for people to do this stuff.

I think the bootstrapping part is important, right? It increases the probability of success if you can get it at a discount. I agree. That's, that's, that's not the thesis on its own. But I think it's a contributor to it.

Surely somebody's going to try this with ETH, right? Like, I would like— I, as I mean, I'm sure people have tried and there's been zero interest. And huh, because I've been thinking about this, like, all right, well, BTC, SOL, like, why wouldn't—

like, it seems like it's been skipped. Like, we've seen one with TAO, there's one for TAO, and there's going to be others. Well, it's more so debt markets being able to tap into these assets, right? That's what you're— that's what you're like, you're funding doing with these.

Yeah, I think MicroStrategy like the reason they kicked off this flywheel initially at least was because there was no Bitcoin ETF, right? So people would buy this thing. Yeah, proxy exposure to Bitcoin. And I think the SOL— that's why the bet is sort of clean. Like there's no, uh, like way to get public markets exposure to SOL, so this can act as, as that. And then you have like the flywheel of, of the sort of MicroStrategy puns that you can throw on top. But I think with ETH it's tougher because you can already get ETH in public markets and no one seems to want it even when it's up like 40% in a week. Like, no one really wants it. So it's hard to— I don't know, that's my theory on it.

Yeah, cool.

Going back to what about on fundamental side? Like, what are you guys excited about that you've been seeing in crypto or trends that you're excited about, like, etc.? So you're still a Celestia bull?

Yeah, I mean, Celestia, they, unlike a protocol level, they keep getting more stuff moving over there. I think Celestia has like a ton of like low-hanging fruit that they can do too. Kind of just waiting for them to like launch their own TF-focused big rollup or something. Yeah, I still, I'm like, I'm like, I'm not going to sell you know, I've been buying Celestia between what, like $2.5 and like $4.5. I'm not going to like sell it here. If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. Like I'll just ride that to zero. But they, they got, they had a, what, they had a few rollups move over the other day. They've got Anisha that has started to perform better off the bottom.

Initial was a great launch, I thought.

Yeah. I mean, the tech, the tech there is still good. So one thing though, this is kind of, I guess, embarrassing to admit that I didn't realize is that Tia's vesting is only 2 years. So it's like actually a lot more aggressive than I thought it was. I thought it was like 4 years.

It was so like 1/3 upfront and then yeah, and then the 2/3 over 2 years.

So it's going to be like all the investor unlocks are going to be done in October. Which— so it's still pretty aggressive until then, but I guess like, I don't know, the—

yeah, I just think the cost basis is pretty much reset. Yeah, Celestia, honestly, at this point, like, given the volume that's happened, like, I think it can run fairly cleanly from, from here.

Yeah, and it's all— and it's like, it's, it's, it's only, it's only like a couple bil now. It's going to come a point, okay, where Celestia team is going to have to like just build a really good like execution layer or something. It's going to get to the point where the writing will be on the wall. Like this thing's going to zero if you don't pivot a bit from just being this like neutral DA layer. And so you see, and then it'll be priced probably like a normal L1. At that point. Um, and so yeah, I just think there's a lot of like pretty low-hanging fruit for them to do.

Yeah, I'm pretty— yeah, I'm pretty bullish in it as well, driving some more DA demand there. I think a lot of the, um, minishes are going to start going live over the next like few months. They have— they've been having like a lot of organic demand there. Yeah, I think that could be a good driver. But yeah, I do agree. Ultimately, they need to do their own canonical rollup. That's sort of the lesson of crypto.

Because there's like nothing to do with TIA, man. Like, I have TIA and I want to get some— I want to like use it in DeFi and do some other shit with it. And there's really— there's really like nothing. There's like Flame, which has like less than 10 mil TVL. I think there's like $100K in an Osmosis pool or something. It's like there's just like, just fucking build like a scalable— because they can make a really good rollup too with Celestia as the DA layer, right? And so it doesn't really seem like too complicated to me to like get a decent bid for TIA by just making a good, like, scalable mega rollup sort of deal, you know? And so I think that eventually, I don't know, someone else will do it or they'll just be like, okay, let's just do this shit ourselves because it's going to hit a point, right? As I said.

Yeah, agreed. What about you guys? Jason Yanowitz, what have you been seeing that's exciting you?

Um, obviously I, I still, I still really like Hype. It's my biggest bag outside of Bitcoin, um, by a pretty wide margin. Um, I'm also— I've started, um, over the last like 2 weeks or so, just started buying some, some RWA stuff. Um, I don't have like a a clear favorite by any means, but I think, um, I think with, uh, with all of these like, uh, like conversations around, uh, tokenizing securities, I, I think it'll be a fairly big narrative assuming we can get, yeah, a move across crypto. Like, you know, Bitcoin breaks all-time highs, you get excitement back into the market. I think there will be a pretty big like institutional meta or narrative around that. So I've just slowly been buying some different, um, RWAs. I don't really think Maple— I guess, I guess it's syrup now— is slightly interesting. Um, uh, but I've started just buying a basket of those mainly because I think there will be some kind of, uh, decent, decent meta or narrative that occurs over a couple weeks or several months, uh, later this year, especially if we get a move higher in Bitcoin to new highs and we kind of reignite that bullish sentiment across the board.

Um, but other than that, it's, you know, I got even more bullish hype, uh, when, when I saw like HIP3, the, the recent thing. Like, I actually think there's a real potential for people to build their own exchanges on top of Hyperliquid, and I never really saw that before. Like, for instance, let's say for Athena, like, what they could do with this is they could add— because like with, with HIP3, you can basically stake like 1 million HYPE and you can add your own pairs, uh, the, to the, to the HYPE, uh, exchange. And, and they list them on the front end too, as far as I understand, uh, which means they could basically add like a BTC/USD pair, an ENA/USD pair, like all the USD pairs here, right? Um, and then they could, they could say they could build like an HLP with USD in it, and they could say everyone who holds USD as collateral and trades these pairs on Hype, we'll just pay them out the USD yield similar to what they're doing on Bybit, plus some points, right? And effectively, they can like— this Ethereum initiative they're doing, they could sort of like have another shot at goal of having their own exchange by building on top of Hype. And they're actually capturing like 50% of the builder fees, right? So I can see it at a time when funding ticks up, this being such an interesting move. Again, I've just sort of thought about this very recently. I need to go look at if everything's possible, but it makes a lot of sense, right? You already have a lot of this flow and it just creates these ways for people to build exchanges on top of your— like very easily sort of deploy exchanges on top of your liquidity. And your front end, which, yeah, it's super, super interesting.

Yeah, it seems new stuff generally moves the hardest, right? So you've seen, you kind of just need to blindly throw money at minorly compelling new things and then look into them afterwards. So yeah, I think that's the case because you really don't have much of an opportunity to to due diligence, uh, before, you know, the thing moves wildly in your face. So I think that happened with Launchpool. I know, uh, Simbak on our side has been super bullish on, uh, KTA, uh, which is kind of like the, the permissioned high-performance DAG hybrid chain. Um, a lot of words there. Yeah, exactly. It's a big word salad. Um, So I know that stuff's moving. Like, the move on SUI has been kind of nuts, but I don't know how much more it really has. I think you're probably better off repositioning that into newer L1s. I think Initia, yeah, that there's still a lot of room to run as these initiatives launch and there are—

we're investors in Initia, by the way, just to be— yeah, just to be clear.

Yeah, I think that that's got a lot of room to run. So it's these new launches that are still in price discovery that don't have a lot of new supply hitting the market and have a lot of kind of catalysts. I think, you know, you kind of one-directional price action for a bit. So I think the setup is, is strong there. Particularly, I think SUI is, is like top— is number 16 or something like that, I, I think, as of yesterday. So it's, it's hard to see how much more it can really run, right? If you're, if you're buying here, what are you really targeting? And so I think you kind of get a gradual rotation down the L1 stack. And so thinking about what you can do, and it just seems like a really solid one because of, yeah, kind of a lot of interesting dApps launching there. We'll see what happens when Monad launches, right? I'm sure that'll kind of eat away into some of this speculative L1 demand. The memes, I think, you know, you, you kind of want to wait on a puke for those because they've run up quite a bit. Um, but it just shows that, that the demand is there. It's just they, they move violently. So I think if you're patient, you can get a pretty good entry on those. Um, if, you know, BTC takes a leg down to the high 90s, I think you kind of get a temporary bloodbath in alts. And, and not that it's just over, but it's more so just late entrance puking leverage, um, because I think there's been pretty strong FOMO across the board when BTC just kind of doesn't even give you an inch to, to get in. Um, but yeah, ultimately I think, yeah, BTC will be driven by, by the, the big guys buying, and so you kind of need to hope that that continues. The, um, yeah, I think the, the all L1 stuff is probably some of the more interesting ones. And then, you know, if you're in the trenches, like the launch pool internet, uh, ICM stuff is, is basically the new trenches now, um, because it's— you can argue it's not purely memetic, so you can actually begin to have some conviction in what you're looking at and have some fundamental basis around what to invest in.

In what way is it not purely memetic?

Uh, because you have some— you can tie some economic activity to the value of the token.

Um, but isn't the economic activity just the trading fees from volume?

Uh, they have other ones too.

Like, you could—

like, there's some activity that I think, like, Doop has.

Doop is like a furniture aggregator type thing. It's— I think it's like Wayfair and, like, Overstock or some— something. It's like the way I kind of, like, look at it. It reminds me a ton of, like, the AI platform Launchpad and Agent Meta. Like, it It's like a perfect mirror to that almost. Like there's some, there's like, you know, a couple things in there that are like kind of interesting and, and have, you know, uh, some semblance of, of like a fundamental backing or, you know, floor, I guess you could say. Like with Virtuals, right? Like, uh, I guess like you're like Virtuals or AI16Z or whatever, you could like kind of look and be like, okay, LaunchCoin is similar to that, right? Like, I guess like if this meta, you know, kind of pops off or, or whatnot. Like, the launch— the, the main launch pad's probably a fairly good, you know, buy in that sense. I'm not saying buy it now that it's, you know, up like 10x in the last 36 hours or, or whatever, but, um, it has that. And then you have just like pure memetic coins like, like Goon Coin or whatever. But then you have like some things that are kind of like in the middle, I guess, like Dupe or like Fitcoin or whatever, which are like kind of— it's like weird the way 99 or 95% meme, 5% maybe something cool comes out of it is the way I'm kind of thinking.

And if you think about how it plays out, right, it'll rhyme with previous scenarios, probably. Meaning you'll have— it'll be this gradual euthanasia roller coaster for sure, right, of just like slowly declining ones. But yeah, the initial setup is good in the sense that you have money rushing in and not enough— not enough dilution in terms of where that money can go. So, um, it forces concentration into a handful of plays, and then they tend to run, and then that brings in, you know, kind of the, the— a combination of grifty and, and new builders, but what that ends up leading to is just too many places to park your money and then lower highs on a lot of these tokens aside from, you know, potential standout few. So I think it's like the easiest money is made early on, um, and then, and then it gets harder because there's just too many things capturing attention and flows.

Yeah, but what do you own then? You're owning LaunchCoin or—

I have LaunchCoin and DOOP.

Yeah, you could go— there's this, uh, believescanner.com.

Yeah, it kind of shows you all—

yeah, yeah, it kind of shows you, I guess, like all the main, uh, main coins that I guess have been launched through this, uh, through Believe, through, through the Believe app or, or whatever. Um, so yeah, like the way I look at it is like this is like almost all meme. Right. Like the way, I mean, you have Dupe, I guess LaunchCoin is, is, you know, the launchpad. And then I guess you have like Dupe, which is kind of like a real thing. Fitcoin might kind of be a real thing, but like other than that, most of these are kind of like memes. So the way I look at it is like you, you, you own like maybe one or two of like the real things and then maybe like a meme exposure to it. Right. But I don't, I don't really know. I was, I was kind of like, uh, sick over the last several days. So like, I kind of really missed, missed most of this meta. That's, you know, that's how crypto works. You're off the computer for 48 hours and you miss an entire meta. Um, but yeah, like it's, to me, it's just like a rerun of the Agent platform launchpad thing. So I think you could probably run the same playbook. To that. Like, you, you barbell into like the useful things.

Is Dupe Eliza? Like, no, am I gonna get, uh, no, or is it not Eliza? Sorry, is it Luna?

Actually, maybe. It's not like a long— Dupe is like, uh, what's the website? I was literally looking at it, um, this morning when I was waiting.

Do you just feel like you're gonna get—

yeah, just dupe.com. Uh, so like, you— it's not like a lot. You don't like launch coins through it. You don't build anything on it. It's— I think it's literally just like a furniture aggregator across like Wayfair.

It's like, oh, I like this, um, uh, Ames chair that's $8 grand, find me a knockoff.

Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Um, so I mean, like, there's a coin there, I guess, right?

Like, but This token should be worth $1 billion, mainly because ceteris paribus.

Financial advice.

No, I'm in the, uh, I'm in Jelly Jelly. Jelly Jelly. I was looking, it was looking real good there, and then it just got cut in half. Like, what's that?

Share the thesis.

Uh, no, there's no real thesis. It was just like early to ICM. They're actually They are there. So they're giving a presentation at Salon Accelerate next week. Um, and they have a real like product, but you have to like, I don't think people really know about it. You gotta like do some, uh, waitlist to get on it. That's Sam whatever guy VC, the guy who like originally made the token. I mean, it went to like $2.50, right? Like a few months ago and then went to zero.

Can easily go back to $2.50.

So, I mean. I don't think the token— the thing is, it's like, I don't think the token is ever going to be meaningfully integrated into the app. And so then it's just back to this pure, like, dumb gambling.

Ceteris really just needs the hyper liquid, uh, exploiter to go back and pump Jelly Jelly again.

Yeah, the thing is, there's a decent amount of lore with Jelly Jelly, like from the terrible launch to being a part of the— I saw a good tweet yesterday from Sisyphus that was like, um, you could have bought Hype at like $10, but you were busy longing Jelly Jelly.

Uh, I mean, I, I bought, uh, I couldn't, I can't bring myself to buy Launch.

Like yesterday when I was looking at all of it, I was gonna buy it at like 8 cents and I was like, this is stupid. And now it's like, what, 25 cents or something?

Yeah, it's 225 $1 mil market cap right now.

Um, this stuff is really just not my game.

From $10 mil 3 days ago.

So yeah, I'm not too interested in this, this.

I just like have no— I just have like no confidence. And so I have like a bucket that I use just to buy random shit. I feel like that's like how you get to do it, right? Smaller.

Yeah, I don't have any meaningful exposure to this stuff.

It's just like, um, yeah, yeah, it just distracts me. Honestly.

And then, yeah, I don't even, yeah, I don't even find it interesting. Yeah.

Like it doesn't take that much time to figure it out for what it's worth. Right. You just like, it's, it's like 20 minutes of reading and then you're like, okay.

Yeah. It's like, okay, this is basically the same, slightly different because it's like Web2.

Yeah.

I mean, I was on a call with, uh, with a friend yesterday who was explaining all of it to me. I'm like, wait, so you're pretty much just replacing AI agent launchpad with ICM meme and launchpad. He's like, yeah, pretty much. I'm like, all right, fine.

Yeah. I'm surprised at how well Virtuals has come back, to be honest.

Same. Yeah. I mean, their hackathon was actually pretty good. Like, I know Stepan from Cyberfund attended. He was pretty impressed. And then he— I looked at a few of the projects and it's pretty high quality hackathon or accelerator.

I think the biggest critique with Virtuals is like, it's just a launchpad. The tech sucks, all this stuff. And that might have all been true. True, but they've seemed to just done a good job on BD.

Uh, yeah, you know, I was gonna ask you guys, since you're deeper in this stuff, um, I was like looking at, you know, everything pumping a lot, you know, meme coins kind of back with, you know, this meta. Plus you have like Bonk and Doge and Pepe and WIF all like, you know, doing really well in the last like week or two. And it seems like a lot of the attention has shifted away from AI stuff. I was like, oh, maybe this is my chance to start, you know, like maybe getting into some things that I was missed or whatever. And I'm kind of curious, like, are you guys buying more AI coins? I know like José and Jan are definitely very, you know, bullish AI in general. So I'm curious, are you like buying more AI coins?

Are you— the only big— it's actually the biggest position I've held in an AI coin is Worldcoin.

Interesting.

Yeah, uh, give us the show.

Yeah, yeah, give us the show here.

I'm pretty sure I gave us the— didn't I give like—

you gave it—

I don't think you gave it internally in, in like, uh, on one of our calls, like a research call or something.

I mean, honestly, I just met with the, with the CEO and SF when, uh, when we did our, our trip there, and I just got really bullish on on him and the team and their vision, their ambition. And the very simple take that he sort of gave me that I took away is that identity used to be something, a cost for business. It's something you have to do for compliance reasons. You need to do KYC and all this stuff. And in the era of AI, it's going to turn into a value that a business can offer. Its real customers, which is that you can certify that they're actually real people using your social network or your dating site or whatever it might be. You're not just interacting with a bunch of AIs. And yeah, that just made a lot of sense to me. Like their goal, I think they want to do like 100 million users this year and I think it's like a billion users by 2027. I think they're at 25 million users right now. And yeah, I just think it's like super ambitious. I think it's like one of the biggest sort of ideas in crypto. Yeah, that's— so I bought a bag and I'm holding on to that one.

Do the emissions not bother you?

Uh, yeah, the, the emissions, the, the emissions are, are annoying.

They're—

but they're, they're paying for users. Like, I mean, investors are, are unlocking too, but they've— I'm pretty sure I need to look at the latest numbers. We're actually, I think, working on a Worldcoin report right now, which— at research, um, which should help demystify a lot of this stuff because Yeah, I don't think people fully understand the dynamics there. And then I do think there's a lot of potential for value capture, actually, in terms of charging businesses to use this stuff, like an API to basically verify your users. Yeah, I don't know. I'm really excited about it.

And that's your biggest AI position, you said recently? That you've bought?

Yeah, I bought like— I bought GAME, um, like I thought I got a really good entry and it's, it's up like 5x from the bottom and I'm still down 50%, uh, like, uh, so that's my only other real— like, I, I, I never really— and that was just a FOMO, honestly, uh, like, uh, bet, uh, but, uh, yeah, in terms of AI coins, I'm really excited about some of the stuff that's happening in private markets like Prime Intellect and, and Noose, uh, a bunch of the stuff. We just did an accelerator in crypto AI and had like the 8 teams here in Portugal for about 2 weeks ago for a week. And yeah, there's people building really, really cool stuff. But, um, in public markets, I haven't seen, yeah, anything super exciting.

I guess the real question is, Jose, did you get your eyeballs scanned when you were in SF?

I did. Oh, you did?

Yeah.

Yeah. I'm officially scanned.

I think the easiest, like, biggest—

like the new Vax bear case.

Yeah.

Against World. There's 3 things. It's the emissions are pretty bad. That's number 1. Number 2 is regulatory-wise, there's already countries that have kind of like tried to ban it and you'll see more of that. And then 3, just like bad PR from like checking in gangs, human trafficking, people people to scan their eyeballs. And you can see how that could get like worse too. And so those are kind of the 3 main bear cases for it. Like, uh, for the bull case, I do agree with you. It seems like they're building a lot. It has kind of this like memetic thing with it, with like AI. Um, it actually is trying to solve a pretty big problem, the Sybil problem. They have like this whole ecosystem with the World App and all that stuff. So Yeah, I don't own, I don't own World myself.

It's just like, I mean, it's hard to buy it at like whatever it is, like $13 or $14 billion. But, but I still think also the connection with Sam Altman and OpenAI is sort of underrated. Like OpenAI is working on a social network allegedly. I don't know if that's underrated.

I feel like that's rated well.

I mean, I think it was, it was max rated when it was trading at $100 billion. On launch would like— yeah, that, that was sort of like, it was trading like, uh, yeah, the, the OpenAI to, to—

yeah, exactly.

Bitcoin chart is like, is awful, right? It was like, it was trading higher than OpenAI at some point, and then this is how you get proxy exposure. Yeah, exactly, proxy exposure to OpenAI. Um, it's a synthetic OpenAI long, and I actually think they're like trying to design it as a protocol. I don't know, it seems like one of the biggest— I'm very excited for this report, actually. I mean, we need to catch up with Lucas on it because I think it's interesting to model out how big the business could actually be, like, from a cash flow perspective, because it's hard to reason about right now.

Well, I thought this is a decent episode.

Yeah, agreed. Agreed. Oh, the only other thing that's interesting is I have been catching up— like, I was gonna do this tweet like 2 weeks ago, now it's a bit too late, but I— it really felt like the trough of disillusionment for crypto, you know, like in the Carlota Perez hype cycle or whatever, where everyone's disappointed but actually there's real stuff happening in the background. And I've even been catching up with, with a few like 2017 blast from the past ICO projects that are now actually getting traction on the stuff they were doing, like these really big ideas, whether it's energy on the— like putting the grid on chain or some other crazy ideas that are now actually getting traction and the use case seems to make sense. And I think we're going to see a few of those come out of left field this cycle.

What's crazy is that I realized that Powerledger is still like a thing.

Power Ledger. I forgot about that one.

Apparently it's still like a thing.

Um, yeah, they've been at like D-PIN events and stuff, whereas some others you just never hear of again. Like, what happened to Gollum? Like, those guys must still have—

those guys have so much. Yeah, those guys have a massive treasury.

I remember I looked it up like a while, like a year ago or something, and they'd released like a an alpha. I was like, sirs, it's been 7 years. How are you releasing an alpha? It's like, you know, Elon's built like fucking Neuralink in the meanwhile.

Like, yeah.

Anyway, cheers guys. Thought this was a good episode. And yeah, we'll catch you all again in 2 weeks. Maybe we'll do a live one for a change.

Yeah, I'll try and figure that out. See ya.

Peace.

Thanks.

See ya.

See you guys.