Hivemind: Liberation Day, Timing Token Launches & Circle IPO

Trump announced the tariffs and I don't know, I think they were probably the worst that, that people expected.

Like, I think they were worse than expected because they were made up. We're just going to throw out the most ridiculous made-up math out there. And this is where we're going to start at. You thought there'd be certainty, right? That's what everybody was saying is like, at least we'll get certainty on April 2nd and now we'll know. And there's absolutely zero certainty.

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You look like the kids I used to play soccer with when I was 15.

Thank you.

That's just— they had the same haircut. They were filthy though, if it's any consolation.

Huh?

They were—

they were pretty filthy. If you saw a kid rocking up with that haircut, he's either really good or a complete shithead.

All right. Bro, that looks weird. All right.

You can just trim the back if it really bothers you.

Yeah. He also did like a weird, like, it's like.

It's also just funny because like, it's one thing to be running around like this in Portugal. It's another thing to go to SF with this.

What happens in SF with this?

I don't know. It's just, they're gonna be like, who the fuck is this guy? You'll stand out because you're gonna be the only person in the entire city with that haircut.

Nah, surely mullet is an SF thing.

It's not really a mullet though.

What is it then?

Um, I think, I mean, it is, I guess, yeah, technically it's mullet, but, but like, there's a, it's a flavor of mullet.

You just look so much like shockingly younger. Like you, it's taken like 5 to 10 years off your age.

I think side, when you fade your sides, you instantly look younger.

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 the usual cast: Ceteris Paribus from our Ceteris, from our institutional research arm, um, Jan, managing partner of Ventures, and our shitcoin scavenger Duncan, also known as Flood Capital. And I lead Delphi Labs, our protocol R&D arm. So probably we're just going to talk about tariffs. That's really top of mind for everyone. We're sitting here on April 3rd. Yesterday, Trump announced the tariffs, and I think they were much— they were probably the worst.

I don't know.

I think they were probably the worst that people expected.

Like, I think they were worse than expected because they were made up.

Yeah, he like made up the tariff rate for a bunch of the countries. The formula he took, like a bunch of people derived it on Twitter, is just basically you take the deficit because it's this— there's a lot of Greeks in the formula, but basically the elasticities in the denominator like add up to 1. So effectively it's just like deficit is bad. You take the deficit that you have with the country and then that like reverse engineer the tariff that you need to bring the deficit to zero.

So it's like deficit divided by total, huh? Basically deficit divided by total.

Yeah.

What's crazy is that like we talked about this right as he was elected or around there. And I remember Jose, you're asking what's his deal with, uh, like why does he care about like trade deficits so much? And like he just doesn't like trade deficits. Like, that's it, right? He just doesn't like a trade deficit necessarily.

It's more the, the lack of free trade, which to his credit, he's been harping on that for a long time. It's basically what we charge them isn't what they charge us for the same good, like the premium that they add.

The thing is, when you look at actual tariffs for the— but anyway, they released like a 400-page report, which I recommend everyone throw into ChatGPT to, to get the summary about, because the— and it's basically like, I think you called it community adjusted, you know, if it does, like how he came up with the tariffs and that, that's basically what this report kind of justifies. It's, you know, Europe, he's like, we— you guys have the trademark on Parmesan, you don't let like our Wisconsin farmers use the word Parmesan, and, and like, um, that you ban our GMO you know, hormone-infused meat from being sold there. Like, so basically adding all these sort of more qualitative things. And the same with China, right? They're not looking at just tariffs. They're looking at the subsidies for the— that they use on the Made in China campaign that they've had, like apparently $500 billion or whatever in subsidies for high-tech industries. So they try and justify these very high tariffs There's been a lot of— I mean, coins are down terrible. I think market hasn't opened yet, but it's down a lot in the pre-market. I think Nvidia is down like 8%. Yeah, gold's down 2%. The 10-year though, nearly at 4%. Only a couple trillion.

Yeah, let's keep blowing shit up.

It only took a couple trillion of stock market losses.

Um, from my perspective, it's just like, at this point, I just, I don't know, I just kind of like laugh it off.

And, and wasn't there this penguin island that he tariffed? There's some funny things in it. Like there's this island that only has penguins in it that now has, uh, I think a 50% tariff on it or something.

He doesn't discriminate, huh?

And they sell nothing to the US. I mean, as you'd expect from penguins. But, um, and then the— also Ecuador is like accused of currency manipulation in their, their currencies, the dollar. So there's a couple funny things in there. I guess that my, my main thing is like, what— how do people react to the— what are the second and third order effects?

And like, that's the thing is that you thought there would be certainty, right? Yeah, that's what everybody was saying is like, at least we'll get certainty on April 2nd and now we'll know. And there's absolutely zero certainty. It's, it's just back to, they came up with numbers so ridiculous. And also it's, it like, they're, they're provably just completely made up. Right. And that is also kind of unhinged. It's like, are you trying to just show that?

Isn't this like your starting point for negotiation though?

Yeah. Okay. But your starting point is like, you're completely insane. That's your starting point. Like, you haven't come up with anything thoughtful. It's just like, we're just going to throw out the most ridiculous made-up math out there, and this is where we're going to start at. And so you're kind of just putting that down as we're willing to go to this extreme.

Yeah, I mean, I think if you, if you work backwards from what the end goal is, right, is to have the other countries drop their tariffs. And, and so you kind of can do it two ways, right? You can go one where it's completely reciprocal, and so it would have come in a lot lower. Or you can kind of go this nut job path. And if you assume that, like most incumbent presidents, they lose the midterms, right, they're like— the House loses midterms, and so they lose control of the House. And so he has a shortened timeline to kind of get this stuff done. So if you come out like a crazy man, then the chances of people folding is much higher. I think the US represents like a third of global household spending, right? So you do have a decent amount of leverage there. And so, um, if you apply max leverage and, and reduce the duration of pain, there's a chance that it can get reversed quickly. I, I know we brought this up earlier about there being permanent damage. Now, I think permanent damage is done more as a function of, of the amount of time that these tariffs exist, or I guess like time times rate, right? So it's just like the volume of dollars that are, that are tariffed. So if you, if you max front load the, the pain and countries start caving one by one, then in theory there's a chance that the duration of the tariffs times the amount of volume.

Just to understand, is your position that if the EU comes out and says we'll remove our 2 to 3% tariffs on the US, then the US—

2 to 3 is not like a— 2 to 3 is an effective rate because the rates are much higher and, and so countries— so the US isn't competitive with certain products, so they just don't ship those over, and thus the effective, like, the actual amount that gets tariffed is much lower than, than the headline number.

What do you mean? Sorry, the 2 to 2, it's lower.

So 2 to 3 is, is the effective rate, right? That, that's like what actually gets tariffed, but there are second-order effects from the tariffs in, in terms of countries not actually being competitive in certain products. The US doesn't ship a certain product, so it doesn't get tariffs. So that is an effective 0% tariff, right? So if you're not competitive, then you're not going to ship.

The, the other goal not only is like to get these countries to drop their tariffs, but also this reshoring of the US industrial base, which I think is like pretty important. And he talked about that in his speech. He's like, China makes more ships in one factory in a year than the whole of the US. So, you know, there's probably an element of, yes, getting these countries to drop their tariffs, but also trying to reshore some manufacturing.

The two are like in contradiction, right? Like if you want, like if it's a negotiation tactic to get countries to come to the table and reduce their tariffs and then you reduce yours, then you're not going to get manufacturing back to the US, right? If you—

and if you want manufacturing back to the US, though, it's definitely going to be better than the current degree, though.

Yeah, because like they do have tariffs on American-made goods, so they're already not as competitive. So if you—

but they're very small tariffs, right? Like it's on the margin.

It's—

I don't think these like 5 to— like it's like 2 to 10% for most of these places. Like Is that— is nothing that margin gonna make it?

Nothing with high tariffs are things that the US actually wants to like onshore. It's all the lower stuff. It's, for instance, like India has high tariffs on like their cars and stuff. US isn't buying fucking cars from India, okay?

Japan has pretty bad tariffs on US cars.

The, the, the, the problem I have with the China angle playing into this is that everything that they're doing right now is like uniting the world with China. And if you're— if your point of view on this is like China has been the biggest beneficiary of globalization and, you know, they're threatening the US empire and all this, well, slapping all these tariffs on these other Southeast Asia company, uh, countries, uh, like some of the— some of the tariffs are just so— I understand trying to onshore production for a lot of things in the US. I think, you know, there's a lot of merit to doing that. A lot of that makes sense. But, you know, like Cambodia, right?

Well, because China sends their stuff to Vietnam. Yeah. And then send it like they skirt the rules like that.

I mean, not everybody. Nike makes all their stuff over there. Nike is down like 12% today because of this, right? They're a US company. They're US capitalism. They represent like US sports. Their brand is is, you know, all around the world and they make their products in, I think, like Vietnam or something.

Right. But I mean, like Vietnam announced all tariffs, they're cutting all tariffs on US goods. Like these countries are dropping one by one. Right. And so if, if the tariff is just so much harsher against you, you're even more incentivized to drop yours, particularly when it's the country that's consuming so much of your exports.

Yeah, I think they have no choice but to drop it. At the same time, they're going to become a lot more aligned with like China now. And even like Europe is now talking with China a lot. And so this is the angle that I don't see because this also reduces, you know, the amount of— I think the big thing now is how much foreign capital is actually going to be pulled out of the US over the next like few years, right?

Yeah, I think the stuff that Trump is trying to do, like this admin is trying to do, is like kind of completely changing the structure of what the US has been in international trade and the dollar. They are trying to reshore, which is just not really compatible with how things were previously. So there's going to be a rocking of the boat for sure, and it could blow up. But no matter how you cut it, this is a massive change. And also when you look at just like actually where like the real manufacturing goods are made and like what's happened in Russia and Ukraine, like the NATO and the US have basically lost the war against Russia. And that's like a huge shift in power dynamics, right? And just like the warfare is completely changing. You have like in the Suez Canal, like, you know, these drones that are like 10 grand, you're firing back like a million or $2 million rocket at them. And so like the US really has to change a lot of stuff to kind of like restructure their position in the globe. And this is like one of those steps because they don't make anything in the US anymore. And if they've lost their like military prowess in terms of like this Russia-Ukraine war, that, um, they've essentially—

but the US and NATO didn't get involved.

They like sent money, a ton of weapons.

Yeah, but that's a—

it's a proxy war and they, and they've lost it basically. So it's kind of like a wrapping up of foreign wars, you know, reshoring of production. It's a pretty massive change to, to how the US has operated historically. So there's obviously going to be some casualties in doing that and let's see if it works. I think probably long-term this is better from the US because if you didn't change this at all, it's just going down that same path of like insane debt, no manufacturing base. All the real stuff is made in other countries. Yes, you have like capital markets and intellectual property, but it's like when push comes to shove, like if China goes to invade Taiwan, it's like the US, they can't help out Ukraine. It's like they They're not going to be able to do anything with Taiwan unless it goes nuclear.

But this real stuff thing, like all the, like the US has the like biggest, most profitable companies in the history of the world. They're all based in the US.

Yeah. But think about Apple. All of its factories are in China. If China wanted to, they could just literally steal Apple. Think about Nvidia. Everything's in Taiwan. Like it's very fragile. In terms of like actual production. Like those are like two of the biggest companies in the world. It's like, yes, they have the capital markets and the intellectual property, but like if things actually like escalate, like, you know, you saw in Russia and Ukraine, you know, potentially China and Taiwan, like what happens if China invades Taiwan? Does Nvidia and Apple just go to zero? Because all that's like their entire business is over there. It's, it's much more fragile than I think people understand. And I think this administration understands that and you're just going down a further, like, you know, like you're just entrenching yourself further if you don't make these changes.

That's fair.

Yeah.

Like, I feel like everyone's been the Palmer Luckey argument for a while.

He's—

yeah, I think there's some good podcasts with him. I'll find the article. There's another guy who just did— he like owned a US—

there's definitely a lot of merit to the reasons why they're doing a lot of this.

I think part of it's also just like, if you, like what you meant, your earlier point, if they continued down the current path, there were going to be issues regardless.

Yeah. And everyone's like super focused on stocks right now, which is like fair because that's the industry we're in. But you know, when you hear some of these like kind of people lay out the bigger picture, it's like, it could be a lot worse than like stocks going down. There is here, there's a real—

yeah, but I don't know if alienating the entire world against you is—

yeah, maybe I'm not saying they're going against it in the perfect way, but like, this is like, they're, they're radically shifting stuff up. Okay, it's Eric Prince, The Future of War speech. Um, yeah, anyways, he just writes about how like stuff in warfare has completely changed, and with drones And like what's happened in Ukraine with like Russia being able to jam like all the new high-tech US weapons within a week. And then also like just the, the cost mismatch of like a $10,000 drone versus multimillion-dollar rocket is just completely restructured war. And also like that was kind of the US's thing, right? They have the most powerful army, they can exert their influence all over the world, and that could be coming to a change now. So there has to be kind of a shift in what they do. Mark Andreessen has talked about this in the past, but all of the drones are made in China apparently. I don't know how this is true, but he said that US military drones are from a Chinese company or drones that the US military uses were from a Chinese company. So I just think that obviously this is pretty crazy for markets, but You know what Bessant said, I think yesterday after the announcement, you know, what's good for MAG7 isn't necessarily good for MAGA. So, you know, we'll see. They're, they're making some pretty radical changes, but I understand where it's coming from.

Yeah, I also, I feel also like the market is like, stocks aren't down that much, especially considering everything and how extreme this is. And so I still feel like this is either bullish or bearish, but I think like the ridiculousness of the calculation they did, it's like making people still think that it's going to be something that will quickly be like resolved or pivoted from, right?

Um, yeah, I think it's, it's so, it's like worst case scenario is these, these things stay on for a a prolonged period, and then you see real businesses breaking because margins are no longer there.

And inflation and retaliation and—

like, right? So if you just go crazy with it, then, then you have a higher chance of, of people dropping these. And, and the more like that drop, basically, you know, if you're gonna do it, you might as well be first because then you suffer less if you're gonna do it either way.

But is, is there something the countries can do, you think, to get their tariffs lower?

I, I think they drop and then it probably goes down to that baseline 10%, and then I, I see a world where eventually if—

but you're like, Europe would have to increase their tariffs to match the 10%, you know? Or is it the case that like you have zero percent, like the everyone else has zero percent and the US has 10% now going forward? Is that like the baseline, or is it the Parmesan thing? Like, you want to be able to have Parmesan in the US?

Like, yeah, eat our cheese.

Yeah, we don't want your shitty food though.

Yeah, I don't blame you.

On other macro stuff, beef—

that was, that was the funniest thing that came out today was the Lutnik comment where he's like, dude, the EU won't, won't take our beef and their beef is weak. One step too far, bro. Insult our beef.

Yeah, I think like the other thing aside from tariffs where they're like making some pretty big changes and they like risk blowing something up is like obviously this Doge stuff. Um, so like we'll see what happens. I know there's like those rumors that Elon was gonna be stepping back yesterday. I don't know, we'll see if those come to fruition. But there's definitely risks in the plan that they're trying to do. And yeah, tariffs, you know, people, if you go into a recession, that would really blow up the deficit. So you got to assume that this is, you know, they're starting really high as both partly negotiation and then partly to help reshore. But if you were to get a recession in the US, I think that would be opposite to their goals of of like, you know, shrinking the deficit and stuff.

The DOJ stuff is kind of tiered, right? There's, there's the, the job cuts that won't really lead to pain in the near term because they have like 6+ months of severance. But there's the, the outright like fraud and money laundering through USAID, which will have an immediate impact because it's still just less money going into the system. It's good to obviously cut that out, but yeah, you can't neglect the economic impacts of that. It's just TBD how much there's actually gonna be reduced. I think, you know, there's, that's been some of the criticism against this is it hasn't necessarily been as effective, but it's still uncovered a decent amount of shenanigans.

Yeah, probably take some time.

You know, just got sacrificed, like pretty, pretty rough.

Well, I still think Ludnik— if they sacrifice anyone, it's going to be Ludnik because he's the one that's like pushing all the tariffs.

Yeah, it's like Trump's been so behind this though, it's hard. Like, I don't think there's a world where he can scapegoat this on anyone because he's just been so pro it. It's, it's, it's impossible to separate them from himself at this point. Yeah. And yeah.

I agree with that. So how are you thinking about crypto specifically?

What's the bull case here for, I guess, like more rate cuts?

Uh, we're gonna get the tax rate cut soon. Yeah, biggest tax rate cuts in US history.

I think I gotta say, and like, this is obviously bad timing, but like you get reminded of it every like tax season, just like remember if you didn't do it this year, like settle up your taxes at the end because we literally have just nuked straight down. After like last year ended till now. And it's always just so risky, like gambling. Because if you think about it too, there was no bear case in anybody's mind at the beginning of the year. Like we all thought, like people were looking for a bear case and everyone was like, I can't find a bear case, you know?

And that should have been the tell.

I guess it's like it's just crazy how fast everything just changed. And I mean, that it can go the other way too, right? That's the thing.

Um, how so? Like, what's the bull case? Is everyone capitulates one by one?

Countries start capitulating.

Yeah, everyone capitulates. Um, there's rate cuts, but you're probably gonna have like a pretty big shock to inflation, right? Assuming these things get implemented.

Well, inflation's a trend, right? This would be a more one-time step up.

Yeah, it'll be a one, but it'll be like, there will be a one-time step up that's gonna look scary. Is it? Wait, yeah, I guess it is a one-time step up.

It's also like, I mean, it boils down to how inflation's measured, right? Because it won't be the same across everything, whereas money entering the system broadly increases the price of everything. This is kind of going to be very idiosyncratic. Imported goods, yes. Domestic goods, no. But I think it'll smooth out for sure. So you'll definitely see a step up, assuming all of these countries keep it.

And what do you, how are you guys positioned? Is everyone, uh, like pretty, pretty similar?

Did people I've been doing nothing. Like, as I've been saying that for a while, it's just there's no— nothing within— nothing on my thoughts within crypto, within, within like what assets I think look good, what ecosystems I think look good, has changed at all. Like, it has not changed at all. Um, and so it's just entirely unpredictable.

What about you, Jan? I know you shorted ETH yesterday. How's your— are you still net long?

Are you—

yeah, I'm still definitely not long. I just like help myself sleep at night a little bit more by shorting a bunch of ETH.

What about you, Duncan? Are you pretty similarly positioned? Like, I know you always keep a decent cash position.

Yeah, I'm holding on to my cash just to see.

You're still like 70% or something long, right? Or Something along those lines.

Yeah, well, I did an investment into this robot company, so that took off a decent amount of my— like, I sold some crypto for that. But yeah, I still have like a good chunk of crypto and then invested in this robot company.

What's the robot company?

It's called Uptronic. It's like a humanoid robot company.

Yeah.

So that was like decent check for me just cuz I thought like if, if you lay out, you know, the future of, I, I feel like this is a very clear case to like monetizing AI. You know, you have these robots that, that can do stuff and you put an AI brain in them and now you have like the whole case of, of like infinite human labor. And if the US is going more protectionist, this is like a US company. You know, you got to like reshore manufacturing. This could be an interesting source of labor. I don't think they're going to let in like Chinese humanoid robots. So I think Tesla, Figure, Uptronics, Agility, and maybe there's a, you know, Boston Dynamics got sold to Hyundai, but like there's maybe like 5 or 6 big players that are kind of like North American in this humanoid space. Uptronics partnered with Google. So like on the brain of the robot. So I think it's gonna be like kind of once these things can actually do useful work at human speed without like being babysat, it's gonna be kind of like the ChatGPT moment again.

Yeah.

You don't even need human speed, right? You need 70% of it because they're working 3 times as long per day. No sick days. Infinite demand. You'll start getting like EV subsidies for these things too, probably, or EV-like subsidies.

Agreed.

But yeah, in terms of cash, I feel like I'm just kind of waiting to see. I feel like this stuff, like everyone kind of wants it to be like a, like let's puke and then V-bounce. Um, but I like the Terra thing might be drawn out the Doge stuff might be drawn out. If inflation comes back a bit, the Fed stuff might be drawn out. So I think ultimately we're going to go higher and it would be really cool to see, even right now, Bitcoin is a decent amount higher than its lows kind of earlier in March. So it would be really cool to see Bitcoin re-correlate with gold or something, even a little bit. And some sort of signal like that, but I'm just not rushing anything, I guess.

Yeah. Unless you see everyone drop them all at once, it's hard to see a world where we rebounce.

And it's also tax day in the US soon, right? So that's historically, people don't plan well for that and some forced selling potentially.

Yeah, but that can often get kicked back to like October.

Oh yeah. Okay. Well, we will see. I think like if you have specific names you like that you're long-term bullish on, like it's good to watch them if they like weirdly sell off more than other stuff because there's like a forced seller or like a fund redemption or something. You know, because that can happen even, even if the broader market hasn't bottomed, like some funky dynamic of like a fund redeeming or some big seller for taxes, you can maybe look to build positions in those names, but that's more on the alt side. I wonder if Hyperliquid will get a sell-off because obviously massive airdrop in November. So some tax implications for people.

Yeah, they did that really low airdrop price thing. So I think it's still all mostly cap gains.

Yeah.

Yeah, for the airdrop, depends how you treat it, but it like ran from like 2 to 30, like so fast in such like a small amount of time that like, you know, probably more opportunities for like people to have pretty big gains versus like an asset like SOL that's, you know, been around for a very long time. I feel like there's just probably a higher chance.

Well, I think if people took profit, they probably would have sold in like Jan, right? Like wait until the new year to lock in things that have gone up a lot and then you sell in Jan. So the selling pressure would have been—

I just want to bring that—

the forced selling would be basically people who sold half their position, reinvested that cash into stuff that went to zero.

Yeah.

Now one of their few remaining bags is hype and they have the tax bill.

Yeah. The selling pressure is people who bought AI agents in October, sold them in December. Put it into Hype, right? And now are like, oh fuck, that is a massive tax bill and I have to sell all my Hype to pay this.

Yeah. To be fair on those agents, like the door is very small, right? On the way out. So it's, you know, you, you didn't have enough people ideally realize too much.

Oh my God. The fucking agents. That literally feels like I just pulled up the Virtueful chart. Oh, this feels crazy.

Picks and shovels, sir.

Literally 5 cents or $0.50 to $5 back to $0.50 in like 5 months, 4 months. That was pretty insane.

Yeah, everything is so bad and it's like you try and find charts to like dunk on people who are bullish on one thing and then you remember all the things that you were bullish on too. It's like literally everything.

Yeah.

You can't even dunk on ETH anymore because it's like, oh, it's only down 50%.

Yeah.

I think looking for specific things you really like and then if they get weirdly sold off, maybe start starting that process now and tranching in could be good. It's just, yeah, it's definitely tricky because there's so much uncertainty right now.

Yeah, the big thing will be upcoming earnings season and the guidance that they give. I think that's going to dictate a lot in the coming months.

Yeah. Wait, did you guys see this creatine stuff that was on Twitter the other day? Like that, that like 20 grams of creatine after not sleeping for like 20 hours, like reversed all the sleep deprivation.

20 grams is a lot.

20 grams is a lot. I've done 5 scoops.

5 is like 20 or 25. 25 grams, like 4 or 5 scoops. Awesome.

The first time I went to take creatine, I did the loading phase and it made me feel like shit. And so I just never did that again.

You don't really need to do loading.

No, you don't. It just takes a bit longer, but it's fine. It's like the loading phase just makes you get saturated quicker. But once you get—

loading phase I did in college when creatine was a lot shittier than it is now.

You, you should watch this podcast. They have this like Canadian creatine PhD on, and he's just like literally shilling it on everything. It's like for your brain, like for your muscles, for your immune system. He's like, I flew today, I'll take 15 grams because my body's a little stressed.

And so what's the angle here? Is there a token or is this just better?

Yeah, what's the contract?

There's not a token.

There's just a therapy session on the tariffs today, I think, for all of us.

Like, you got to be chugging so much water if you're taking that much, otherwise you're gonna be charley horsing left right?

Yeah, I, I'm, I'm gonna start to take 10 grams, see if it makes a difference.

You did the— what? Ah, yeah, I don't know. That feels like a waste, but up to you.

Cause I was on 5 grams, but also eating like 80, 90% red meat. So I thought I was like getting probably enough, but this guy's like, really just like, if you can take more, do it. And you'll just, if it doesn't give you any issues, cause you'll just like pee it out if it's. Doesn't give you any issues. Oh, did you guys see that RH stock? What was that?

So bad we're discussing Creed saying on the hive mind restoration.

They got dinged on everything though, they— because they have, uh, they import, they produce internationally, um, and then the demand side too, just from broader slowdown.

Did you send in the earnings call where the guy's like, oh fuck, yeah, yeah, oh shit, oh shit, I just looked at my screen, we're down 25%. 100%.

All right, here's something we can talk about now. Should projects launch like their tokens now? Like, is this a good time? No, I actually think it might be a good time.

Well, GUNS launched their token, uh, now I don't know. I think like, you know, Hasib and a few others always say that it doesn't matter when you launch your token at all, it's like irrelevant. Uh, or other people say it's better to launch in a, in a down market because you get let people buy at lower prices. I personally still think the best is to launch at peak euphoria bull market.

But for who though?

It just gets better for the team. For the team. And obviously it's not better for the people buying it on the open market, but I think for teams and projects, there's just like some psychological anchoring that happens. I think that's tough to like I just think, do you guys think if Movement, sorry to pick on Movement.

Yeah, I think best is like 2 months, a month before a prolonged bull is the best time to launch. Cause you get like an accumulation period and then, and then like you get the benefits of a long bull.

TIA last year, actually their timing was basically perfect. Cause they launched right before the bull started. Maybe they launched too, like it was literally right as the bull started. And then they did that run to like $20. And then obviously they just sold off for like a year. But I think when you launch high, like think about something like Eigen, right? It launched at like $5. It's sub a dollar now. It's just been a steady grind down the whole time.

Yeah. It depends what your goal is. If it's like, if your team's looking to extract as much money as possible, then yeah, you want to launch.

But you're never going to get back there. So as an employee and like, I guess you could sell TC, but like, isn't that kind of demoralizing that you've hit like your high watermark?

You're still at $1 billion. Like, what are they at? At a dollar?

It's like $1.5 now. It's getting close to sub a bill. Like, that's which I don't think anybody—

any large company like $1.5 billion is like a company that will make like hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

I know, that's the scary part.

Is there anywhere you can buy guns on like chain or anything, or is it just only sexes?

Will be available shortly.

Yeah, this like $27 mil market cap, $450 mil FDV is like— yeah, particularly with— I could definitely see unlocks being just gameplay over 10% over the next year. Yeah, like that could be pretty squeezy at some point.

Yeah, I don't know. I, I understand the high watermark. Like if you're paying, if you're using your token as currency to like give out grants or like pay for any kind of work done, you have more money to give. Right. And so that's obviously very powerful and useful, but a lot of the, basically every project that succeeded and lasted over time. Traded relatively low for a period. Um, I kind of feel like it's inevitable that you have to go through that period at some point. So it's like, do you want it at the start? Like, Solana launched, what, the day after, uh, Black Thursday in 2020? And Solana's all-time chart, you could accumulate— you had You've had two occasions for like a pretty long period of time to accumulate SOL, and that's why it has like such a strong and vibrant community.

Yeah.

And, you know, maybe, maybe like something like TIA can end up being that too if it just trades at like $3, sub-$3 for like a year or something and then figures its stuff out and comes back.

But like something like Solana is like, okay, If you know this product's super successful 5 years later, then yeah, it probably doesn't really matter. Right. What we've seen is 99% of these projects are overvalued when they launch. So for the insiders and team, it's best to launch at the highest valuation possible. But if you think you're going to make the next Solana, you have super high conviction in that, then yeah, it doesn't really matter when you launch. Right.

It doesn't matter, but it's path dependent. Right. Matters to some extent, like being able to have, you know, more efficient incentives, more efficient grants to attract people to your project. Like, I don't know.

Yeah, but you have to balance— I guess, I guess that's the question. Do you want to balance like having a big war chest on paper? Um, like, it's not always on paper though, right?

Like, a lot of these projects can convert these through like treasury sales. Um, like a lot of the times the foundation's unlocked and it's dumping on these high launches, right? And, and getting cash. Like There's, there's a lot of ways.

The big treasury, or like, you know, have a chance to build like an organic community, or you could do kind of a mix of like big airdrop and good valuation so you have a community.

Yeah, I think if you're, if you're optimizing for 5 years out and you know you're going to have consistent cycles, then it's probably best to launch in a bull where you can raise the most cash, like peak bull, raise the most cash. Survive a bear, and then the next bull, you're better set up than in any other scenario. But like, you'd need to know all of those other things to be true in order to rationalize that.

Yeah, that's kind of tricky.

Possible.

I feel like something like HyperLiquid, they obviously had a really good product, but the way they did their launch I think was pretty solid, right? The big airdrops, they have a really big community, and there's like a couple days to get in at a pretty cheap price, and then now it's at like a pretty good valuation where they have a good war chest.

Yeah, I think though, one thing with hype is that people don't acknowledge enough that the team was just buying a shit ton.

Yeah.

So you're not going to have that with like any other launch. Like Monite isn't going to launch and then start aping the treasury into like Nat token.

Like founders that are, yeah, just very, very flush. Yeah, Chad.

What's this like?

Is this—

yeah, how'd you know that?

No, no, it wasn't the founder, it was the, the accumulated fees. They had like $80 million in accumulated fees that they just like were aping in on launch.

Yeah, well, no, it's also like you're gonna have— you have a scenario where the founders don't need to sell this thing. Yeah, at all.

And the founders are super wealthy, so yeah, but they're not unlocked anyway.

No, no, but, but yeah, it doesn't really matter kind of thing. I also think with Hype, it's hard to have made a mistake because of the success of the product, right? Ultimately, that can correct for any other token-related mistake.

But they could have fucked it up with a smaller airdrop.

Yeah, it would have been a much uglier chart.

The thing is, though, like, Hype is trading like one of the worst assets right now, and markets are extremely volatile. And theoretically, Hype is the type of product that would do well. And very volatile.

I think it depends on the window you're using, right? Like, I think because it didn't draw down as much earlier, it's drawn down more, more recently.

Yeah, it went on an absurd run. It went from $2 in November to—

and but even from like peak, right, it didn't draw down. It drew down to, to the mid-low to mid-20s and sat there for a while while everything else nuked considerably. And then it now down another 50.

Yeah, I get it's down more than everything you would compare to year to date though.

Okay, year to date. Yeah, I know. But what about since November? Still up like 5.

Oh, well, yeah, sure.

November or like all-time highs, you know, it's down basically two-thirds.

Yeah, definitely not fantastic, but everything down like this much, right?

Everything's down more.

Yeah, it's down 70%. From the very peak. What's SOL down? Is SOL gonna cheat death and not that Trump pump?

Oh yeah, it's funny how we were talking about how is this a top signal, and it absolutely was, and we convinced ourselves that it wasn't because this was like a new paradigm.

Like, we'll be at $500 if Melania didn't drop.

SOL has bounced off $110 1, 2, 3.

No, 120. And now it's, it's 120.

But on top, like 110, 120, like 5 times. You think it's gonna survive again? I think it's gonna—

who knows?

It's gonna cheat death.

Who knows? I still think that eventually, whenever the market comes back, SOL is still good though.

Yeah, like, but if SOL, if SOL breaks down here—

oh, it could go to like $80.

Yeah, like juicy entry on it.

Yeah. $80 would be 10x the last bear market low, which is still pretty high considering it was only a few years.

Yeah, I mean, we see crypto typically front runs a lot of this stuff, so it would be interesting to see if that happens again here.

But like, the thing is, BTC is like not even— like, if you look at it relative, obviously on an absolute basis it's down a lot, but March You've had these like really sizable idiosyncratic buyers though, right?

You know, Saylor bought last week and somehow managed to get $86K execution on $2 billion, which is like impressively bad. Uh, then, um, you know, GameStop announced that they raised $1.5 billion. Who knows when they're deploying? But there was a big Coinbase premium earlier in the week. We did see some inflows yesterday, uh, from the ETF. So there's that, you know, decent size. I think, uh, one of them had over 100. Um, and so yeah, and then Mara is raising a bunch. Let's see if that's getting deployed. There's that one tweet about an Indian company that, that, that's selling shares to buy BTC, but it's— they, they fail to mention that it has a market cap of $6 million.

Uh, yeah, so like QQQ is down 2%. Since the March 11th lows, and Bitcoin's up like, it's up 8% from there. So it's like, it's hanging in.

Yeah, yeah, I think from the election is, but it's probably the where you want to measure the most, and Bitcoin was what, like 68, 69 or something.

So yeah, so like, I don't know, some part of me is like, if you, if the US economy really moves to like real, and the whole world kind of moves to like this more realist approach. Like it's multipolar. There isn't just someone, the US, protecting everyone. Everyone needs to develop their manufacturing base. You're building like, you know, missiles and planes and stuff like that. I just feel like it is long-term bearish, like magic coins, like alts in general. You know, and in the sense that they were sort of, uh, uh, like a lot of the, like, animal spirits and alts were like an offshoot of, of printed money and, and like debt.

How do you think they're gonna find all the military spending?

Everyone would be printing money.

Exactly.

It's in, it's in, it's like extremely—

but the US is not, is not like— I mean, the, the US right now is taking like, trying to take like a trillion dollars out of the market right? Like between tariffs and, um, and yeah, I don't think that that's gonna work.

I mean, there's no way Doge is saving that much money.

I don't think that, that it's gonna work. But like, even didn't the— like, didn't Germany announce like some insane stimulus package?

Yeah, 500. And Germany has been in austerity for like—

yeah.

So it's like if everyone individually is like, okay, the US isn't protecting us anymore, and like everyone needs to rebuild, that's like pretty stimulative. Yeah, it could be inflationary, but I think it's going to create like a lot more need for investment and printing money. Like, I think Bitcoin actually— this positions Bitcoin really well. Like, for sure.

I mainly mean like the long tail of—

if Bitcoin has like another period of outperformance, this other stuff's probably going to run as well. It could be that kind of meme of like the roller coaster getting smaller and smaller, but there's still going to be some stuff that, that does well. Like there's some stuff that's like super linked. Oh, what about the Circle IPO?

Yeah, their balance sheet looks trash.

It's not that attractive of a business.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So they spend so much, like Tether does not spend any money. Unlike partnerships and stuff.

They sold to Coinbase.

Yeah, Coinbase is the one who makes money. Coinbase makes money off USDC and Coinbase makes money off ETH, like with their rollup base. It's like Coinbase has just figured out how to extract the value from both of those businesses.

Wait, so can you—

and then Circle's margins are going to go get even worse once rates come down.

I think on paper people were thinking that Circle had probably be pretty sweet. But you got— I haven't looked at the numbers at all. So, so what's the agreement with Coinbase?

It's basically like a customer acquisition cost. You know how you can earn, um, on your USDC on Coinbase? They just take a fat chunk of that.

So how much is there?

I mean, I think they made $150 million in, in profit.

Yeah, only made $150 million.

Don't they have like that income? And then EBITDA was $300, but, you know, if it's launching at, um, at, uh, at $5 billion, that's like 40 times earnings on a bank.

Jesus Christ. But so they have $60 billion in USDC and they made $150 million.

They have a lot of employees too, but so they should probably gut some of those.

I don't think you need 1,000 people to run Circle at $60 billion at whether interest rates 4.5%, that's $2.7 billion, $2.7 billion in interest. But they pass through most of it to people in Coinbase.

Well, just, I mean, it's, it's low margin to begin with without, without Coinbase even being there, right? Because you need to be competitive on the yield for other people holding cash.

Tether doesn't pay yield.

Yeah, Tether's just figured that out, how to inject itself into every trading pair and it doesn't need to.

I mean, Tether's just a perp collateral, right?

Like, and also I feel like it's probably the most that's like real world used as well.

Yeah. Anyway, guys, I gotta jump to a, to a call.

Yeah, we can, we haven't had a lot to talk about today, so we haven't, probably fine.

We should probably leave the beginning too. It's pretty on brand for the I said we should leave all the issues in the beginning too. It's pretty on brand for the episode.

Yeah. Yeah. The issues of what? Joe's Asian food?

I don't know. Maybe, let's see, 2 weeks from now, maybe things, uh, even the combo before Joe's Asian food is interesting. A lot more interesting things to talk about in 2 weeks. For now, it's kind of just like, let's see how it goes.

All right.

Everyone remember to take creatine.

Cheers, guys.

See ya.

Hey, everybody.