Hivemind: Fed Cuts Rates, Crypto's Mag7 Moment & Why We're Still Bullish

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 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 have Ceteris Paribus from our institutional research arm. We have Yan Lieberman, managing partner of Delphi Ventures, and we have Jason Yanowitz, also known as 3xLiquidated, a regular on the podcast who heads up macro at Delphi Research. I'm, I'm Jose and I head up Delphi Labs, split my time between Delphi Labs and Delphi Ventures. So should we start? We always start with markets. I think it's a good time to, to start with markets given FOMC yesterday. Uh, we're recording this on Thursday, so FOMC was yesterday. It was kind of like what everyone expected, pretty much a nothing burger. Markets sort of dipped and then, and then recovered afterwards. Does anyone have any, any hot takes on just like where we are in markets.

And yeah, um, yeah, very briefly, right, to your point, kind of what the market was expecting and pricing in, probably you could tell by the price action, or like the lack of price action. It was just kind of just like, just like algo seismograph type stuff in the after— in, you know, the immediate aftermath as they're trying to parse through the 3-word changes in the FOMC statement or whatever it is. Um, the dot plot was like kind of interesting. Like, it's, it's very clear that like the, the committee isn't super aligned on what the, um, what the path looks like, right? Like, as of now, it seems like we probably have another 50 basis point, uh, basis point rate cuts left throughout 2025. You had that one really big, uh, dissenting opinion, which is probably from the new, uh, the new, the new Fed member, Moran. Um, uh, so other than that, right, like, I think, I think it's kind of business as, as usual, right? Absent any, you know, massive, massive, um, outlier data prints from, say, employment or inflation, like, it seems very clear we're just like starting to now like re-embark on this, um, you know, rate cut path, whether or not it's 50 basis points, 25 through end of year. It seems very clear that we're gonna have several throughout the rest of this year and through 2026. So it seems like kind of in line with what, um, what Kevin over here at Delphi or myself have kind of, you know, been expecting. Um, it's, it's clear that they're starting to kind of pivot away from their inflation fears, right? They've been kind of hammering home, you know, tariff inflation, blah blah blah, when the reality is a lot of the risks are probably to the employment side of the mandate versus the inflation side. There was quite a bit of questions around, like, questions and debate after around, like, are they too focused on returning back to that 2%? Is that even, like, a, you know, a plausible or realistic expectation at this point? So it seems clear, like, everybody's now shifting away from the inflation mandate towards making sure employment doesn't blow up, which is probably a good thing. And I think the, you know, the outlook from here through year-end probably, you know, hopefully I don't eat my words here, but looks pretty good, right? Like, I think the macro regime is, is looking decent. I think liquidity environment starting to pick back up again, um, and I don't know, I'm personally pretty bullish, you know, bullish not like the broad spectrum of crypto assets, bullish the strong, like the strong names that I've, you know, talking, that I've been talking about: Bitcoin, SOL, probably ETH, right? Um, the revenue-generating names like Hype, Pump, Athena, right? All of these types of things I think are probably poised to continue doing well through, through year-end. And that's kind of where I stand at the moment. Um, there's a lot of technical things I think that you could point to, but probably not worth it to jump into those. Maybe I'll just follow up this podcast with like a Twitter thread on, on some of those charts as well.

Yeah, no, I'm, I'm with you. I think we've kind of market expected some softness end of summer, just seasonally, and it didn't really materialize. Every, you know, potential hurdle or just point of concern has been resolved in a pretty good way, right? Whether it's inflation numbers, employment numbers, GDP numbers, and then the Atlanta Fed come out projecting like another 3.4%. Quarter, which is just, yeah, bullish to see. I'm sure a lot of that's on the back of just the AI CapEx spend and kind of everything that's happening on that front. Yeah, I'm pretty long going into the end of the year. I think you've seen BTC drag a bit, right? You know, part of that's been just a concern around where the incremental bid is coming from since the DApps are all seeing the MNAPs compressed, but at the same time, I think it's worth kind of zooming out and knowing that there's a bid that comes in outside of the DEX, right? So the concern is always if you don't know the bidder, then there isn't one. And since, you know, if we know that the DEX aren't really deploying a bunch, then there's concern that there's no incremental buyer. But at the same time, when we saw that big whale that was selling you know, tens of billions over the course of a couple days that got absorbed pretty quickly. So there is a bid that exists and, and so I think, you know, gold's done really well in this environment and there's potentially a world where you see a decent catch-up trade with BTC. We had this period where BTC was kind of going down and chopping and alts were doing well, right? And, and that's, great, but at the same time, that's kind of reminiscent of a top, right, where BTC is kind of exhausted and everyone moves down the risk curve. And so, um, it's good to see strength in BTC again, right? And, and it— and so it seems like alts are kind of pausing a bit, or at least most are. Some are still doing really well, but, you know, pausing, letting BTC go. And ideally, um, you can get a strong move here. I think If you look at CT sentiment, there's, there's a decent amount of loud bearishness, which you certainly want to see, right? That means if everyone's a bull, then, then, you know, it's— chances are everyone's going to be wrong together, right, versus everyone being right. And so, um, I think that, that's another constructive signal. Not to say that there aren't, you know, your whole host of, of random top signals, but I think just because they flash doesn't mean that the top is in immediately. It's just, it's something to be wary of. I think probably one of the bigger ones that I know Jason follows that, that's been a pretty high hit rate is when, when alt OI has, um, is, is grown beyond BTC OI, right? It's just a signal kind of froth and, and where, uh, the money's going. And so that has historically led to some reversals, but, you know, I don't think you have enough data points on any of these signals to really just think that when they hit, that ignore everything else and that means the top. So, um, yeah, there's plenty of reasons to kind of argue both ways. And so it's not this— the, the best risk-return environment to be massively long, but I still think there's more upside to be had.

I don't know if— did you guys see the Dorman article slash tweet thread? And, uh, he was like, this isn't really a bull market. If you look at the percent of tokens that are positive year-to-date, it's, uh, 25%. The ones that are down 40% or more is, uh, over 50% of tokens, and positive over the last 5 months is about 55%. So he kind of likened it to like the Mag 7 doing well and then the small cap index, which has basically been pretty bad for a long time. Like if you're a value investor in trad fi, you've got kind of crushed for like, I don't know, like 2 decades now. You know, this is something we've been talking about forever and it's like, I think people are kind of, as much as people are aware that this has been happening, I think there's still a lot of hope that this isn't the new normal, right? And I think that it's pretty clearly the new normal at this point. There's just like too many tokens, we have too much market cap. Um, it's like, even look at, um, Again, it's, it's like what's done well this year, it's the stuff we've already talked about. And then SOL's done good with the DApps. But even look at something like Pump. Like Pump has been crazy strong off the bottom. What pump coins have done well? It's like none, right? It's kind of this weird market where it's like you need— you want pump coins to start doing well at some point because to keep the game going. Uh, you kind of need this like influx of money, right? And so you kind of want people making money. Um, but yeah, I don't know, it's, uh, it's still hard. Every time I think about like, oh, maybe I should sell, it's like every pump that I've sold for some like pump beta or like streamer coin or whatever, I've just lost like that money and I regret just like not holding on to my pump. And it's the same with like, if you look at— I went on our Sector dashboard today. And it's like, if you look at 90-day returns, right, SOL and ETH are both like 80, 90%, something like that. The average DeFi token return in both ecosystems is like 40% or so, right? You have a few outliers, like you have ENA on the ETH side, you have, um, which one on the— one of them on the SOL side is, is outperforming, but but I think Metaplex, but it's like you're not even getting the beta within the ecosystems too. Um, so yeah, it's just like a really challenging market. And I don't know, do you guys think that— I think if we do get an alt season, it's going to be like a week or two, you know what I mean?

Yeah, I think we kind of have— this is alt season, it's just not all alts. I don't think it's ever going to be just this like broad bid on everything. I think you'll have rotations, but it's just going to like, you're basically going to have this world where the, the obvious ones run, and then once multiples there get stretched, some people cash out, some people will end up round-tripping, and then others will, will cash out and move into riskier dogshit stuff, right? And so, um, I, I, I don't see a world where you just get like broad, unless you have, you know, just breakout on BTC to new all-time highs, then I everything, all alts will just probably move up same percentage as BTC, which is not much, right? Because BTC is not really moving massively percentage terms.

I mean, last year, I think last week we had a, like, a few days where 75 out of the top 100 were, were green. It's like the closest thing I feel like to an alt season that we, that we had. Um, I, I still think, I, I do think we're kind of having— yeah, I agree with Jan that we're kind of having an alt season, like depending again, if you're in the strong alts, which is kind of what you'd expect as the industry matures and what we've been talking about for ages. But even if you look at total 3, it's still up like 10% this year, depending when you start, when you start measuring. I think that's the best way to sort of measure whether we're in a bull market or not, like the kind of trend in total 3.

You'll have those weeks where everything's up, but then you zoom out a little bit, it's like— I look at TIA because it's still— I mean, I don't know about TIA anymore, but like, I still own it. And it's like, I feel like every time I look, it's like $1.80. Like, I'll see it'll have a really good day and it's up like— it's up like 15%, and then I look and it's like, oh yeah, it's still like— because it just grinds down like every other day, and then it'll have a couple days where it does really well. And that's the way a lot of these tokens are just trading. And so yeah, you'll get a few weeks where it's like, cool, you could have caught this move from down, uh, 87% to down 85%, but you don't want to hold it too long because then, you know, the next time that move happens, it'll be like down 90 to 98. Um, I don't know, what do you think about this SamaniDat? I think it is kind of interesting, like I have never bought one of these DApps and I never will. They're obviously good for, um, crypto though, like if they keep getting inflows. I'm not totally sure why people still buy these things at like a 2x MNAV, but you know, the, the new Solana DApp was trading at like 2x MNAV when they announced that equity. Um, they'll sell up to like 4 billion or whatever. I don't know how much they've they've managed to sell yet. But, uh, I think the, the SOL one's interesting because the dApps are kind of starting— it's like SAILr, just buy Bitcoin and that's it. Issue equity, issue debt, buy Bitcoin, put it in. The ETH one was mostly like that, but then they started doing some staking, right? So you started moving to a little bit more activities. And now the SOL one, it seems like it's turning— these things are like slowly turning into basically like yield farming funds are kind of like hedge funds, which is kind of crazy because there's no way you could go public with this kind of company and just like IPO is like a hedge fund in the public markets, right? But that's kind of what these guys are doing now. And if you listen to Samani's talks on Forward Industries, we're really going full circle. Like, people joked about putting DApps on chain, but that's literally what he's going to do. And then instead of um, doing these debt issuances through TradFi, which they, they're obviously going to do some of those. They're also going to start borrowing against the tokenized forward shares in like Kamino and like MarginFi and like stuff like that, right? They did it on ChainSwap the other day. And so they're really— these are, these are quite bullish to me because they are now directly juicing all the on-chain metrics, right?

So on one hand, I'm all for deploying it into DeFi, right? Because you're just going to balloon TVL and then it's, it's good for liquidity. It's, it's obviously, it's obvious why it's good. Um, the, the downside though, if you— I mean, it's, it's almost a situation where the borrowing against the, the equity on-chain it's either going to be too small to make a difference, but if it's enough to make a difference, then it's probably enough to blow up, right? Like, if you're going to borrow against like 5% of your float, cool. That's just like, it's, it's sure, it's more novelty than actual value accretion to the entire pie of the equity ownership. But if you're borrowing in some material amount, then, then, you know, these DApps are, when they're, especially when they're at MNAVs, above 1.5 or whatever, so pull back, they pull back twice as hard.

And then, yeah, I wonder though if they're going to use like Maple-type credit facilities too, like the unsecured stuff. Um, but then they're still getting like, they're still getting like stablecoins on-chain.

Um, yeah, I'm kind of gutted we missed it. I was on holiday, so I missed the, the whole dot, but I definitely think it was a good— I just think in general, especially one with, with Samani. I really think he was born for this, like for being the sailor of Solana. Like there is no—

for sure. I think that, I think the DApps are great, but like, I don't really want to own it personally. Cause it's like, I can kind of do all this stuff they're doing myself. And I still don't think that these things will trade. I don't get it.

Like you're literally, if you can get in close to mNAV and you're just rotating some of your SOL that you're holding long-term into this thing. I feel like if you have like a 2-year timeframe on it, you're always going to be able to get out close to MNAV.

I mean, these things have fees though, right?

And yeah, but like the, the, I just think that the odds, like for most of them, you've been able to, to, they've, you've done multiples on, on, on your investment.

True. You're talking though about doing like the PIPE, which is like fair.

Yeah.

I'm talking about doing the PIPE.

I'm just like, who the fuck keeps buying these on public markets when they're at like 2x MNAV? You know?

Yeah. I just think the, the marginal, like there's, there's a chat I'm in where there's someone that always posts that, like, who is the mar— whatever alt thesis people post, he's like, who is the marginal buyer? And it's, I don't think it's just like the most mid-curve, like bear hold comment you can make. I, I totally get that flows matter and stuff, but like reality is like we don't know who the marginal buyers are for like all this stuff, but okay.

Buying any of these dApps on the public market, you would've got crushed against the native. So it's not mid-curve. Yeah, definitely. Like buy buy them anywhere.

I wouldn't buy it anywhere, like, but if you can get in in the pipe at 1x and have or close to it, I just feel like—

yeah, but no one, no one's talking about that. Like, no, that's the, the obvious part of the trade.

Oh, we were talking about it.

No, I think that the concern is what's happening afterwards once it's trading.

Yeah, but we discussed actually the, the— this one specifically, right? Or like these, these kinds of ones. Like, I think you were less interested in the DOTS generally.

At a high. It was, uh, yeah, the ones that had high MNAVs. Yeah, I like sub-1 investing.

It was 115, right? I don't think it's—

even still, I wouldn't— I like— that doesn't really interest me. 115 to do— just do a 2x long SOL. Yeah, it's because you, you know it's gonna come. I don't know.

And, and you get— and you get liquidity when you want it.

If I, I just think you're gonna get— yeah.

Fair.

I mean, I prefer the spot on the, on, I prefer the, the DAT trade, honestly, if you can get in anywhere close to MNAV. And like when you do the, I've been, I ordered this book actually on the Kelly Criterion to actually dig into it and position sizing and stuff. I don't know how many of you guys—

I read that book. I bought that book too, because I saw you tweet about it or something. And then I opened it up and it's just like, it's a formulaic— yeah, yeah. Entire book is just formulas. I'm like, oh, this is I'm not going to read that.

Like, I'm ChatGPTing it.

Back to school. Well, all right.

So I mean, if, if Samani, the Sultan of Solana or whatever, is going to, um, sorry, just one thing before you jump into Sultan of Solana.

On the, like, when you run the, the, like, uh, Kelly or like EV maths on stuff where your downside is extremely limited, you don't need that much upside for it to be like an insanely good trade. And I don't think it's necessarily intuitive all the time. Like I do find running the Kelly makes it a lot more obvious, but yeah, but no one's talking about the, the whether or not to do that.

It's more about, is there a better way to express the same bet?

Yeah, but I don't, I don't see 2x long SOL being the same, the same bet though.

Um, yeah, but anyway, I mean, when it was announced, it was, SOL was what, like 200?

Yeah.

You could have just made 40%. You could have longed on the announcement and then—

or I guess 80%, right, if you're doing 2x?

Yeah, I mean, the thing is up to 2x though versus like—

it's not liquid.

It's trading, it's trading.

It's not liquid.

Yeah, by the time everyone unlocks—

congrats on your paper gains.

Yeah, that was like Tom Lee retweeting people talking about his 30x on the Worldcoin debt. It's like, dude, this thing is not— you're not going to be able to sell this 30x.

I don't know. I think you'll be able to do more than 2x over time with on the, on the stat. But, um, I'm, yeah, I get the, I get the sentiment. Anyway, Jason, you were talking about the Sultan of Solana.

Yeah. Right. So like if, if Kyle decides to, you know, start putting this stuff on chain, right? Like what, like isn't the obvious play just to like long a basket of multi-coin investments like Drift or Kamino or things like that? Like they're very clearly have been running like a lot. Like, I'm pretty sure like Kamino's up 100% or some, some something over the last week or so, uh, or Drift, maybe Kamino as well. Um, like when I, when I look at this, it's like, it's, it's super interesting, obviously, like, like what the, what the playbook is for, for Forward Industries. But like, if they are going ahead and deploying on-chain, like, what is the actual— like, is it 2x? Oh, is it maybe looking into like where this stuff will get deployed and where TVL might balloon? Like on Kamino, right? It's not up— Drift was up 100% This is up like almost, almost 100% in the last week and a half, 2 weeks. So very clearly, like, people are expressing the trade, um, via like a basket of multi-coin investments, which I think make a lot of sense, right? Like, if I'm Kyle, like, I'm clearly gonna take, take the SOL we buy, and if I'm gonna put it on-chain, I'm gonna put it in things that I've invested in prior, not just for my bags, but because theoretically you'd expect him to have confidence in these, in these protocols, which is why he invested in the first place. Right. So like, clearly that seems to be a decent way to express like a trade around this kind of idea. Um, I'm curious if you guys thought about doing that. Have you done that? Like, are you interested?

I bought Jito recently, but that's not necessarily the DAT. That's mostly that like, um, they have like the fee switch and, uh, the ETFs coming. Um, yeah, I mean, I saw that they use Dflow, which is one of their portcos. I don't think that— I think— I don't think that he's gonna start like aping those tokens, right? Um, but I mean, Multicoin is invested in like most of the big Solana protocols, right? So yeah, I don't, I don't know. We'll see what the Camino thing— obviously a lot of people thought about that trade. It's not like Kyle's the money that he hasn't put any money into Camino yet, I don't think. And so it's not like the— it's not like fundamentally that's actually making me go up. It's everybody thinking about these.

No, yeah, it's the anticipation of it.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think I, I, for me, I was— I wasn't really by my computer at the time, so I couldn't really to look into it deeply, but I think the math would just basically be, um, which— I think the, the price would— you'd be multiple expansion on all of these, right? Uh, because it's not like the fundamentals would improve 2x based on the amount of TVL. And so, um, the idea would basically be, you know, which one would probably fundamentally improve the most, or which one would be helped the most, and then, you know, crossing that relative to unlocks and stuff like that. And are there going to be painful flows? Are there going to be a lot of profits taken into a pump? Right. And so you basically see which protocols would benefit the most incrementally, balance that against unlocks, and then do like a weighted basket. But for me, I just like didn't have the chance to. So I basically just kind of long SOL and followed it.

This is where I just go 2x long SOL actually.

Yeah, yeah. Like the Solana DeFi tokens too have such shit liquidity.

Yeah, it's just like you could do long, sell and size and then just not think about it.

I mean, long, sell is the trade I put on. So I was just curious if you guys—

same.

I don't know, maybe somebody is going to start streaming on Pump. Want to get the, get the, get the Forward Industries.

Nice segue. Let's, let's, let's talk. Let's talk Pump. I think we're all bullish and holding Pump, either participated in the ICO or long on Perp. So disclosures there. But it's been pretty impressive, like, uh, both the obviously price performance off the bottom, um, but also just the, the streaming and like their, their execution. It feels like there's— I mean, and also, GG, Jan and Anil, on your podcast with Noah, I think, uh, I was already long, but that really made me, uh, double down because I just think he's, he's much more compelling than, than Alon, honestly. In terms of the vision and, and stuff like that. Um, and it actually made me, made me feel like they, they, yeah, they could really win. Like, not only is it cheap on like a fundamentals basis, but actually like the TAM is huge if they execute on, on what they're doing. Um, yeah, and, and the— I think streamers, like, some of the numbers on the, on how much the streamers have made over the last like, like week and, and 24 hours are pretty absurd. Um, That said, going on the app, it's still really hard for me to find shit that I'm actually interested in. Like, I've spent, I don't know, maybe an hour overall trying to find like a good, a good stream. And it's just like some dude sleeping.

I mean, this is how it like drips into the Black Mirror episode, right?

Just like, yeah. Yeah. Um, I mean, you're definitely going to have some, you're going to have some bad publicity again, of course. Um, every streaming, every, every site that does streaming, like, man, people do some pretty bad stuff that on like Facebook Live and everything, right? Um, the fact that this is financialized now, like, you're gonna, you're definitely gonna see it go viral on like mainstream media. Like someone, I don't know, someone's like giving birth.

Um, but yeah, I saw that too.

Wow.

Not the actual birth. I saw the tweet.

Um, yeah. Yeah.

So, I mean, cause you can, you can moderate a bunch of that stuff out, but the issue is what they do live afterwards. You have no control over.

I think the, the tough thing is you have somebody who's been good for like half a year and then they do something. And the whole time you thought that, like you had kind of vetted these, it's like, you know, Razmer, for instance, that guy's been on there forever. It's like if one day he just— they're never gonna moderate Razmer at this point because he's been there forever. One day he just did something like really stupid. Um, so I don't know, but, uh, I think that it's the economics, as long as it keeps up, like as long as people are willing to kind of like spend money in this streamer content creator game, are just like way too enticing to not get in. A bunch of people trying to make some money, trying to stream.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, because the bear— the bear case is the tokens aren't doing well, right? And so you're kind of just churning through the audience, right? But that's an issue. Even if you zoom out, Perp DEXs, right? Most traders lose and eventually people like run out of money to trade. But the idea is you build enough of a product where there's just like the user base is massive and yes, people churn out, but enough new people come in. And I think in order I, this thing hasn't been going nearly long enough for that churning to be enough to actually destroy demand. I think, you know, realistically, people will show up for cool streaming. And so you kind of want to appeal first to the streaming side and get the best content over. And then afterwards, you need to obviously address the other end, which I think there are some like solutions where you can redirect some fees into the token or to the holders of the token and enable features for holders and kind of a bunch of other things. But I think, you know, like the, the most incremental improvement you can make is just onboarding a better— creating a process where, where streamers can make materially more, like an order or two magnitude more than they would anywhere else.

That's the other thing. And I think there's just like what I see, like I think maybe Jason Yanowitz, you coined this with Solana, or some, someone did on our team, like the narrative shuts on goal. It just feel like feels like Pump has a lot of like narrative shots on goal where there's, there's a lot of ways this thing could go viral. A lot of like a streamer making a lot of money like the Bagwork guys did, a big streamer joining up and, and doing really well, you know, streamers putting ad revenue or whatever back into the token or, or like gifts into the token, this, this kind of thing. Um, and, and yeah, it just feels like there's a lot of ways it can go well. The concern is, yeah, the tokens aren't doing well. You definitely need one to do really well to, to tell that story. But also I feel like the, the having to have a token to stream is a bit limiting. Like, I don't know, obviously, like we would never, we, like we would maybe stream the Hive Mine on there or whatever, but I don't think we would ever have a token for it. And so like, it feels like there, the, the mechanism of trading fees is really interesting because it feels like a very good proxy for attention. And you can see it in the numbers right now, right? Like these guys are making way more money than they would on that, on those eyeballs being monetized via ads. But it doesn't really work if you don't have your own token. Like, and if, if you start doing tokens, I don't know, like we want to do a stream and we do it for SOL or, or ENA or whatever hype, like a portfolio company. But how do you, obviously those aren't pump coins, but if they were a pump coin, how do you like attribute the, the volume from our stream to the token? There's probably some way to do it either in the, on, on the front end or have some like affiliate code or something like that. I feel like if you could crack that, it could get pretty interesting where you can like do a stream that for, you know, where you're kind of sponsored by a certain token and the volume that you send to it, you get like a share of or something like that, but you don't have to have your own token. But, um, I feel like you need something like that because not everyone's going to want to have their own token because these things go to zero and they create a lot of liability for the, for the person.

Plus people just don't want something tied to them because then it's just like, yeah, you get people yelling and yeah, I agree that there shouldn't be barriers to adoption on, on either end. Right. And so this is a barrier to new streamers joining because ultimately if you have good streamers that join without a token, just, just to do it right, like people in crypto would, then you're just bringing more eyeballs to the platform, which will be indirectly monetized on the streamers that do have tokens. I think like, you know, sending advertising revenue probably won't move the needle on fees for a lot of this stuff.

Sponsorship revenue could potentially.

Yeah, you're just never going to make as much as the meme coin with the trading. It's just hard to like, like it's a, it's very high fee model.

Uh, but the meme coin does better if, if you're— if there's a narrative that you're sending all sponsorship revenue and stuff to it, right? Like, even just on, on Pumpamentals, it kind of like does— it's a better story.

Yeah. Um, that— but then it's like, if you're creator, it's, it's like if we did we're not doing this. People have asked us to do this. I won't talk about, but let's say we did Hive Mind on there, right? Um, it's like, I would not want to do anything that actually like made that token go up. So like, I would not want to like put our fees into it or sponsorship or something because it's like, then it becomes too much like pressure. And then it's something like eventually one day. Again, this is the problem with all these things, is like eventually one day you don't want to deal with the token anymore. I think that these tokens would work for the very small niche people who are these like online celebrities for their whole life. So like if MrBeast, if this is like how he started his career, was on like a pump stream today, I think that token would still probably be worth a lot.

Um, even if he was like not necessarily on pump streams anymore, in a world where he guaranteed like 5% of all future revenue, like you do some kind of like tiered thing where in the first couple years I'll give up 20% and then over time I'll give up a smaller percentage that just goes into the token. Because if we did it though, like it would be— it'd have to be people who aren't like financially necessarily incentivized, right? Like we don't do this for the sponsorship revenue. So it would be a world where like we take no team tokens, all sponsorship revenue goes back into it, all creator fees just go back into it. And then we're kind of absolved of any guilt if it goes up or down, because we're actually losing money doing this to begin with. So it's just like a fun experiment to bring attention.

Yeah, the thing is, is like, I don't even know how that would work from like, what do you have to pay tax on the creator fees? And then you just spend it right away. You know what I mean? There's like these things that are kind of hard to figure out. So, and also you'd still get someone like bundling it and owning it and you still get people pissed at you anyways, even if you made no money off of it.

It's like there's no way everyone would know that you're not making money off this, right? You aren't doing their DD. They're just going to—

yeah, people would see the chart get like full stacked one day and they think that you were the one. I don't know.

That's the annoying thing.

It feels like there's something there's something there.

There's like a way. Yeah, there's something there and a way to crack it. And obviously people have gotten like some, like sort of fads have worked with this, whether it's Bitcloud or FriendTech that lasted, you know, from weeks to months. Pump is definitely the most sustainable in the sense of at least like revenue and fundamentals and people coming back to this. But I still, yeah, it definitely needs some iteration, but I feel like if, if they, if they get there, it's just so big. It's like, it's such a massive TAM. Like, I don't think it's even Twitch or Kick. It's sort of like TikTok, you know? It's like everyone, uh, it's like just being able to ape creators and they're actually making really good content and attracting the best content creators there.

I do think that like, yeah, so we can critique all this and everything. They are doing something unique in the history of crypto. Every time we onboard something, what is it? We onboard people to become traders, right? That's like literally every single time we onboard people, it's— they're becoming traders. This still relies on people trading, sure, but like new people coming in don't actually have to trade or anything. They just need to like stream. And so these kind of experiments, when you're doing this where the person coming in doesn't have to actually like buy tokens and like trade tokens, I think is good. And I think, you know, Pump is always traded— people like to compare Pump versus Hyperliquid because they both make money. They're like very different products, but Hyperliquid trades at like a way bigger multiple than Pump, right? Because people don't believe in kind of pumps. They think like it's just a launchpad, it's kind of this vanilla, easily replicated thing. But I think that there is this scenario that if Pump does hit like these competing after like Twitch and like TikTok and all this stuff, then you can make the case that it actually should trade at a higher multiple. Than something like Hyperliquid. Because now you're gone from like Hyperliquid is this perp exchange, crypto-native thing, whereas Pump now really, if it breaks into the mainstream, can be like this massive conglomerate and it could just do like fucking everything. Um, so I think that's kind of the bull case for— yeah, the Pump has—

I—

yeah, yeah, Pump, like the multiple is basically two things, right? It's growth rate, which I think Pump will get a more favorable multiple. And then it's predictability and kind of defensibility of cash flows, which I think Pump has less of an argument for, and that hurts their multiple. And then if you look at what it's trading at, right? I mean, if you do like 7-day annualized, that's $950 mil in buyback. And then if you do 30-day annualized, it's, what is it? $720 in buyback. And let's pump right now, um, it's like a bill FDV, right? So it's even on FDV terms, it's still trading pretty reasonable. Obviously on, on market cap, just pure market cap is trading insanely favorably, right? It's like 3 to 4x.

Well, yeah, 3 to 4x.

They're not like— you have the airdrop, which they haven't really mentioned, but that'll be the next source of liquidity. But after that, there's no liquidity coming for you know, basically 9 months. So for a while it's going to kind of trade on that. Um, yeah. And then the cash they've raised, right, which enables them to do this buyback and sure, they've upsized the team, but like that, that's just a gargantuan amount of money and it's like a huge war chest. And so, um, it's up a lot, but it's still, you know, pretty reasonably priced. Some might say still cheap, but I don't know if I would say cheap just because it's up so much, right? Like I think you do need to disconnect the two, right? And say that. Price should be. Valuation is separate from price trend over the past couple days, but it's always, you know, risky to chase something that's up quite a bit. That being said, I haven't sold a single token.

Yeah, I've sold like a small portion, but my position's still bigger than when I did the ICO. But I do think, yeah, we're in the zone now where it makes sense for it to kind of like maybe cool off a little or I mean, it went up a lot. Like, it was literally the only coin in the market outside of SOL.

Um, it's just like churn through, right? It's like consolidation. It's reasonable. People need to take profits. New people come in, form the base, then next, like, higher.

Yeah. And streaming has like— I think the Bagwork token was kind of the flagship of the streaming success, and that thing, uh, um, I bought something.

Something happened though.

Well, they did an NFT collection. It's like, people need to know, you can't, man, you can't do an NFT collection. Like, it's just over at that point.

But yeah, that's, that's peak grift right there.

Unless you're Donald Trump, and then you can do 4. Yeah, and then launch token and have a trade token and then launch another token.

I think, yeah, I guess he wasn't Melania, but yeah, that was so funny.

People were like long the first NFTs. They're like, this is a way to play the Trump presidency. Like, we're gonna, you know, like these things are gonna pump once he becomes president. And then it did like 3 more.

Well, yeah, you know what's crazy is that those original Trump cards were very contrarian, right? Um, but you would have been, you would have been so right about longing Trump. But those cards, I don't like, you never would have made money on those, right? That's the thing that is just, well, you got diluted by like 75%.

That's, that's the thing.

I think he launched two more collections. I mean, the best Trump trade was the unofficial Trump token.

Yeah.

Because that one you could get in trade pretty early on and in decent size and then it ran up.

Well, I mean, the official one, didn't that go from like a couple bill to like 20 or 40 or something in like a day?

It went to like 80 or 70, but it was— that one's just like so much harder to, to size into once it's at 20. Like, you're not, you're not saying I'm gonna get a 3, 4x out of this at 20 bill.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, World Liberty 5 was a really good trade. Yeah, you already made back your money on the unlock.

I faded that.

So did I, because it was like the tokens are never going to be unlocked. And then they just decided after.

And then you had the, the Justin Sun thing, although I don't think that he— that just like, that's not the way you'd pull off that trade, right? Like, you don't need to have everyone give you their— you can just short it on perps and do it much more.

By the way, yeah, by the way, talking about Justin Sun, and this is a good segue, is it seems like CZ yesterday is doing this Aster thing, which is a Hyperliga competitor. This morning I saw a Justin Sun thing.

What did you see about Justin Sun?

He's doing again another— let me see who tweeted it. I think this, uh, Minion, I think was the account.

Yeah, I didn't, I didn't see this.

Let me see, what is this? Sun Perp Dex. Yeah, he said— and he had a tweet yesterday. Sun is late, but finally the big one is coming. See you on Twitter tomorrow at 8 PM. And there's this— yeah, SunPerp DEX.

So he's, he's doing what CZ did, uh, it kind of looks like it. What do you guys think about these hyper liquid competitors?

Sent it in the Telegram chat. It's on Tron.

Yeah, yeah, that's the problem. I mean, he's, he has, you know, basically infinite money. Infinite money, like actually infinite money.

Yeah.

And so he, he'll just pump this and like he can pump 9 figures into this and that's just like bips of his network.

Yeah. It's so crazy.

I don't think it's bips, surely.

Uh, I mean, low 9 figs is, is, it would be, it could be bips. Yes. Yes. It would be under 1%.

You think so?

Must be.

Um, where is he on the richest people in the world? Like top, like 20, top 10?

Yeah, I have it on pretty decent authority.

Are you guys buying this thing then? Aster?

I don't know, I, I faded it yesterday because I wasn't really— I, I didn't buy. I saw it at like, uh, like 10 cents or 15 cents or something, and it's like 65 or some nonsense now.

But CZ took X, uh, X, uh, X Binance um, off his profile. Off his profile. Yeah, so it seems like he's back, uh, and there's that DOJ— there's that DOJ rumor that they're going to come to an agreement. So it seems like he's going to be back, which is—

he's never gone, let's be real.

Well, he was in jail, but he's gonna be like— yeah, yeah, he's probably— it's, it sounds like he's gonna be fully back, um. Which is quite interesting, to say the least.

Yeah, but what's the thesis for this, for this thing?

It's just like, yeah, what's the thesis for any BNB token? Look at CAKE. Look at CAKE, man. That thing, when that thing came out, I was like, this is such a scam.

And yeah, but it's on Tron, this one. It's not a BNB token. It's a token.

CAKE is BNB. Oh, you're talking about— okay, Aster. Aster is BNBs. Yeah. And Sunbird is this Justin Sun thing.

Oh, okay, okay, okay.

Yeah, yeah, Aster is the, the CZ thing.

I mean, I think the, the move is basically just like shift your majors trading there. That's the easiest thing you can do.

This thing's at 72 cents now. Yeah, it's a like 400— it's a 5.6, 5.8 billion fully diluted now.

5.8 billion, you said, for the CZ Hyper Liquid?

Does it work well? Have you— anybody, you guys used it?

No, I have not used it. I was planning on playing around with it like today or tomorrow.

I think Marcus used it from the Markets team. I think he said he did like 100x.

So yeah, the same like Rollbit thing where you could do like 1000x and it's like that line chart or whatever, you know, the same exact thing that Rollbit used to have, or I guess probably still has. They have that and that works apparently.

That's, that's peer-to-peer though, that's not peer-to-house.

I, I believe so.

I'm not swapping the order into the order book, basically.

Yeah, I'm—

and I think so. And like, they, they cap upside. I'm pretty sure they like force you to exit at like 200% gain or whatever. Like, they don't let you hold it open indefinitely either.

That's pretty shit. Um, I don't know why you do that. I mean, I, I— it seems much less necessary on a peer-to-peer DEX. Instead of like a—

don't quote me on that. I haven't fully looked into this yet. This was a Today, a Today thing.

Yeah, I saw that message too. Um, that's kind of not great. Even if it, even if it actually only affects a very small percentage of people, it definitely influences behavior. And just like, I don't really want to do that there if I'm trading a certain way, like just in the off chance that you do hit a position that triggers that?

I mean, I don't know, like, I think you're right. I think, like, I mean, I'm probably not gonna go and just, like, buy the token. I mean, I don't know enough. I need to, like, do more research. But I think, like, maybe, like, farming it with, like, you know, just, you know, like, like you said, Jan, with some of your majors trading, with your, with your entire fund to offset all the losses. Uh, because I think they have, like, a 9% airdrop. Or like they distributed like 9% for an airdrop. I don't know if there's like more coming down the line, kind of like what's hinted with, um, with HyperLiquid or, or some of the other ones. Um, but yeah, like, what do you think about the HyperLiquid unlock?

What's your take on that? It comes in— what is it, like November?

Yeah, end of November.

Yeah, yeah. What's my take on it? Uh, I mean, I think it'll be mostly out by then. The team—

yeah, you think it'll be bad? Yeah, because if you get a lot of mixed takes—

no, I don't think it'll be that bad, honestly. Um, I think the team has like an incentive to not make it bad. Like, that's kind of like the, the whole like image, or like, I guess a lot of the, uh, the lore, I guess you could say, around HyperLiquid and the team.

Um, is that the only buy?

Is that it?

Yeah, ideal case is you get a good dip buying opportunity, right? Just they sell plus panic and then you get it to give it some cheap multiple.

Yeah, I feel like there's a number that is a good sell that's actually bullish, you know, maybe like to like lock in a couple of years of runway. Yeah, it's like, oh, they sold 20% of their tokens and it's a lot of tokens.

It's a fuckload at this point. Well, they could stake it, right? Like they could stake it and then just sell staking rewards and stuff. Like there's, there's other things they could do with it. That would, that, you know, signal so little to the market.

And I mean, they could borrow against and buy more.

That's also viable.

Yeah, not gonna do that.

I'm, I'm probably, uh, I mean, I don't know what, what price will be, um, in November, but like, I mean, if we get to November and it's like long-term capital gains on, you know, the airdropped portion of, of my position, like, I'm just, I'm obviously gonna you know, lock, lock in some profits on that. Um, but like, I'm not like super worried about it, generally speaking.

Um, what do you think the upside is on Hype from, from here? I'm, I'm, yeah, curious.

I was always at like $100 to $150 a token is like where I think this, this will probably end up once the EVM and everything gets built out, once the ecosystem has some stuff going on. Um, and once they've had like a year to to like actually make, make an effort at, you know, chunking away at Binance and Bybit's, you know, incumbency. Um, that's like all— like, that's always been like my, my target, like 100 to 150, I think makes, makes sense. Uh, obviously it's a very high val, but again, I think— I mean, it's an exchange token of the fastest growing exchange in crypto, like It seems like these tokens historically just command very high multiples within crypto. Um, BNB is like a very clear—

maybe hit $1K today.

It did. It's a— yeah, it's a great, great token.

That chart is ridiculous. It's so good. No dips.

The ICO was what, 10 cents? Was it? 10,000x. That's pretty nice.

Um, so yeah, like, I don't know, like, I just don't— I don't see a reason to sell my stake, or at least not yet, um, in what I think is like probably, I don't know, the, the best— what, top 3 crypto protocols to come out of the industry in the last 5 years or whatever. Like, I don't mind holding it. I've held meme coins longer, so like, I don't, I don't mind.

The L1 premium is probably going to start being like less of a thing, right? Just because it's the, you know, they haven't really been delivering much on that front. And so it was highest when anticipation was highest relative to what they delivered. But as it becomes more obvious, not obvious, but just like clear that it's really hard to deliver or perform an L1.

I also think with Monad and MegaETH coming, it's like performing EVMs. If you're like a real EVM builder, you still— I don't know, I still feel like I— and like, yeah, I'm biased, I did Mondain Angel, but even like just think about something like MegaETH, right? Um, or Base, like Base just as— I don't know, the Hyperliquid EVM is tough because it has this weird, like, the throughput is still— there's just a lot. Building an L1 is hard, basically, is my point. Building. And this is the thing with like the other day I saw people talking about like making Pump an app chain against like guys like just fucking stop talking about this. Like let's take a project that's making millions of dollars a day and just totally move it to like a new infrastructure. It's like, do I think Pump will do their own chain in the future at some point? Like probably. I think that Pump should always be exploring like what is the best infrastructure for us. But I think that people don't appreciate, like, when Pump is on Solana, they have the entire Solana team and like all those engineers continuously improving the infrastructure. And like, it keeps just getting better and better. If like, if Alpenglow ends up crushing it, um, you know, and like Solana just keeps getting better and better and just keeps scaling and scaling, it's like there's not really incentive for Pump. Like, people talk about, oh, but like, look at all the transaction fees that were paid for people using like Pump contracts and stuff. It's like, okay, but you're, you're kind of— you're just assuming that like everybody and all the liquidity and all the users are just going to move to PumpChain, um, and they're not going to use— lose any of their millions of dollars of revenue a day, um, which is like a pretty crazy assumption to make, in my opinion. And then anyways, with like Jito launching BAM, which is their application-specific sequencing market, it's like Pump is going to be able to start making a lot of these like MEV and priority fees and everything for people interacting with Pump, right? So, which is like another bull angle to Pump that I don't think people really incorporate into their revenue aspect right now.

Um, I don't think it should do any of that, but like it is a worthwhile thought experiment, just because what would it trade at if they had their own L1? What would it trade at if they had perps? And that's like, I think, also some of the upside that can be baked in. But I don't think they should do any of that shit until they've nailed the product. I think they're pretty focused on that. Even on the podcast, you mentioned like the stablecoin, which I think would be like a huge mistake. I don't know why everyone wants to do a stablecoin. I don't see why a pump stablecoin makes any sense, really. I think all that stuff should be, yeah, secondary to them just nailing the product experience.

I mean, an easy thing they could do, and I don't even think they should do this, but they could, is like they could start pairing Pump on launches instead of SOL.

Um, yeah, I think part of it, part of it is just a lot of these projects in crypto, when they don't get PMF for whatever they're building, they look at where there is PMF in crypto and it's like, okay, let's, let's integrate that, right? Whether it's a stablecoin or whether it's the PMF of an L1 via the L1 premium, they kind of gravitate towards that, but they actually have something here, right? And so it just makes sense to actually focus on the product and then—

I mean, the ironic thing about that is that you have the exact example of somebody who went after pump doing that, like the Bonq and everything, right? Who, they're like this meme coin, but a big community and they do all these different things. And they went after all the launchpad stuff and it's like, well, Pump just does that better, right? Because they're just kind of like laser-focused on that product.

So yeah, yeah, I think that's it. I mean, I think— is there anything else you guys wanted to—

well, what do you think about the— what do you think about the base token?

Yeah, I was going to mention that.

Oh yeah, that's a good shot. Um, I mean, yeah, probably going to be pretty big, probably going to do pretty well. I wonder how, how they're going to airdrop it or do an ICO.

Um, well, the big, the big issue is what, what happens with equity holders, right?

And yeah, um, is that value getting leaked away from I know, like, you put billions of— like, let's— okay, first question: where does BASE token trade if it was launched today? 10 bill, 20 bill, 30 bill, 40, 50?

Like, probably between 10 and 20.

That's what I think.

It could easily— it could do like more though. I think it could do— I think it would never be less than 10. I would be shocked if it was less than 10, but I think it could be like 40.

It depends. If it's just like a meme coin, then I, I, it's gonna be hard for—

I mean, what's for a LibertyFi?

Yeah, but that's not like— that's like a, a low FTV or low CERC, high FTV thing.

So I think BASE would probably be too though, no?

That's— yeah, so that's the other thing is like depends on how they do the distro. I'm assuming there'd be some pretty sizable airdrop based on wallets and on-chain activity.

One thing I do think is that like Base already does basically all the EVM chain activity. This is just going to make it even worse for competitors, especially competitors that already have a token, because now it's like, well, uh, now I can get this Base airdrop if I move my EVM activity, or whatever. Even Solana users too, theoretically, although I don't know how much carryover there is. But like thinking about like the Optimism, Arbitrum, um, all the other smaller ones. Um, it's kind of like, uh, you have this, you know, you— the thing is, sure, a lot of people are farming it, and so you're going to be diluted that way, but it's going to have a pretty massive valuation. Um, so that's going to put a lot of pressure on just— there was already a lot of pressure on all the other roll-ups. And I'll tell ones, but this is just going to even make it even harder.

Could you argue that if this thing reprices way higher than the others are— I mean, they're pretty beaten down at this point— they actually get a bid because the spread between them is so wide?

I don't know, man. I just cannot, like, buy an L2 token.

Tight stops. Tight stops.

I agree.

Is there anything else?

I feel like there's—

I mean, the— as a, as a show for, uh, for, for Labs, Legion has just announced the partnership with Kraken today. So basically, Kraken's 15 million users get access to early-stage fundraising deals on Legion, and Legion projects get access to Kraken's 50 million users plus tier 1 centralized exchange liquidity from, from day one.

Are there any, um restrictions for like users in the US on Kraken that want to do this? Or how does, how does that—

not sure if you can participate in the—

as a—

I think you probably can, but I'm not sure actually.

Well, one thing as an anecdote, as an anecdote, as a Canadian, I was allowed to do the Pump ICO, but I wasn't allowed to do just Pump ICO on Kraken.

Interesting.

So Kraken has their own separate risk that they'll take with offering ICOs, even versus the platform that they're like using. Or, well, this is different, I guess, because it's a platform. This was Pump. And so Pump probably just doesn't give a shit about Canadian regulators because they're like small potatoes, right? But Kraken has a big business in Canada. They're like one of the biggest exchanges. So they probably don't want to take that risk. And so that's kind of where that fell on the spectrum there.

We're sorry.

But yeah.

What I hope, guys, is a good model for how Legion wants to think about it is that you should be able to access this on Legion, but also everywhere that has distribution. So in all the centralized exchanges, or at least some of the big centralized exchanges, starting with Kraken, and then just making the API work a lot better and a lot more smoothly so you don't have what happened with Pump where everyone got fucked on the exchange.

On-chain did great for Pump. Like everybody—

On-chain was easy.

I literally just sat there and did it.

The KYC was just like the easiest KYC ever too. One thing, one more thing before we go is, did you see this Base Solana bridge?

Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How are you thinking about that?

I just think it's you know, as we've noticed over the past year or so, there's literally 3 chains people use, right? And I don't— like, Ethereum is different. It— like, a lot, but a lot, a lot of, like, whales and stuff use Ethereum. But I mean, like, an average, like, retail end user, for the most part, is using, like, Solana. They're using Base, and then they're using Hyperliquid to trade, right? And so this kind of makes sense that Base and Solana now, they're going to make it easy to go between these 2 chains because they're just kind of like what everybody's using. Apparently Solana tokens now, when they're on Base, will all show up and like you can buy them from your Coinbase account on-chain on Base. Um, I saw the Zora team yesterday is adding support for Solana now. So Zora, this like EVM project, Ethereum community forever, they're on Base and now the second thing they have is like Solana. It's not like Arbitrum, it's not Optimism, you know, it's, it's Solana. And so at the end of the day, it's like chains and bridges, right? That's what these things are. Um, and Base and Solana are like been pretty big competitors in this respect, is that they do, you know, they're the two leading chains for these kind of like social consumer apps and stuff, right? They're really the only chains doing it right now. Um, so I think it's pretty good for— I think it's good for both of them and it's bad for other people. People try to make the, make the— I think people make the argument like, oh, this is gonna like— this is good for Base and Ethereum because it'll get like Solana liquidity. Solana people might say the other way. I just think it's good for, for this, for both of them. It just entrenches them more as being like two chains that are going to grow in size together.

Was it really that hard to get from Base to Solana?

I feel like no, you could use like a cross or something probably, or exchanges, but now you have the official one. It's not just the bridge, it's the fact that now Solana tokens, like Solana apps, you can use like a Coinbase wallet. And I don't, I don't know how they're going to do all this because exactly, but that's what they've said. Um, so there's how they execute that. The bigger winner I think is Solana because yeah, because you get Coinbase. Yeah, they already had that distribution.

Yeah, awesome guys. All right, let's— should we wrap it there?

Yeah, let's wrap it there. It's been over an hour, so good episode.

Good episode, and see you all again in, in 2 weeks for another one.

The October—

thanks everyone.

All right, see ya.

See ya.