Hivemind: Will 2026 Be Bullish & Crypto's Token vs Equity Problem

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 for our institutional research arm, Yanowitz, managing partner at Ventures, and Jason Yanowitz, who is the head of macro at the research arm and a common guest on the podcast. A lot of stuff to talk about today.

He's an official mainstay now.

He's an official mainstay now. Yeah, that's right. Do we need to, do we need to address that?

No, uh, no, he's just, you know, head of markets. Markets is an important part of Delphi, you know, so, uh, he's an official hive minder.

All right, I'm sure we'll be bringing, uh, Flood back from some, for some guest appearances now and then. He doesn't miss it. He won't miss a chance, especially when we're talking GALAXY or some other one of his bags. Cool. So it's been a good few days. At time of recording, we've retraced some of that goodness. So we're recording at 3:38 UTC on a Wednesday. Crypto has just started going down after a good few days, which is unfortunate. There's a lot of stuff to cover today. There's actually some real stuff happened since our last episode. Maybe we want to start with markets. How are people feeling here? There's a lot of bull talk on the timeline yesterday. How are people feeling right now? Maybe Jason Yanowitz, let's start with you, head of markets.

Yeah, sure. Yeah, no, the start of the year was kind of nice, right? We rallied a bit, and then the 9:30 New York open seller returned, uh, again yesterday and again today to pick up where he left off, uh, pretty much every day for the last 3 months, it seems, uh, heading into the end of the year. So I mean, I, uh, I think, I think the market kind of maybe got over its skis a little bit when you got like that MSCI announcement, uh, the other day. You saw like a really quick pop. A lot of, a lot of people put on some leverage and stuff, uh, you know, the highest point in the last several months. And then like, you know, it was a good announcement, but like it's nothing like concrete. It's, it's not saying like, you know, strategy is gonna be included in the MSCI, which we could talk about more in depth in a bit, I guess. But I just think like it's more of like a positioning thing, like Uh, equities still look great for the most part. Um, I just think crypto is still kind of like— I, I think Q1 will generally be good for crypto. I think you're— I think we're going to get a, a pretty nice like mean reversion relief rally, um, at some point in, in the first quarter. I just think there's, there's just Uh, I guess like still a lot of underwater positions that need to be worked through, right? Um, I think you're starting to see institutions step back in. Uh, ETF flows have been, you know, really, really good the last couple days into the new year, which is something you want to see. You're starting to see trading volumes pick back up on places like LIDR and Hyperliquid. Open interest is increasing, right? So, um, To me, that kind of signals like risk appetite is, is starting to make its way back into the market. But I still think, um, I still think, you know, the market is, is just obviously relatively weak to, to, um, to TradFi and, and other places where people, you know, want to speculate and stuff. I'm also looking at, you know, things like Coinbase Premium, like pretty much all of the strong like trends or periods of price action that we've had over the last, you know, 2 years or so have been, um, on the back of, you know, a, a relatively strong Coinbase premium, and we still don't really have that. We've, we've seen signs of it maybe coming back in the last couple days, but I think we need a little bit, you know, more confirmation. So like, you're starting to see appetite return. I, I'm not sure it's, it's fully back enough for like, you know, a long-term rally, but I do think, you know, just oversold, mean reversion flows coming back in in the new year, um, from institutions and, you know, retail risk appetite on, on the DEXs like we're seeing could lead to like a nice, you know, reversion trade back up towards like $100, maybe a little bit higher. And then who knows what happens after that. But like I said, Q1 I'm generally bullish for. I, I'm looking to get positioned for a bullish Q1. I took a lot of time off in between Christmas and New Year, so I'm pretty flat on, you know, trades and positions right now. So I'm kind of like looking for an opportunity to allocate right now.

Yeah, I think you had— if you were to kind of think for a look for proxy, you'd think of end of '22, right, where you had a rough end of year. And so you have your natural tax loss harvesting and a lot of people selling to do that. And right afterwards you kind of see those anticipation of that bidding. And so I think you had a repeat of that where, you know, some of this positioning is long-term, some of it is strictly trade-based. We were chatting earlier, it's like you don't love to see equities up and crypto down because then, you know, it's very symptomatic to just crypto itself being weak and not just a broader market. I think you're— it probably takes some time where people who are looking to allocate are waiting to pick their spots. And if certain levels are kind of defended, I think it gives people conviction. So I'm in the same camp where I think after the rough Q4, things should start to look up in terms of catalysts as well. You have, you know, Jay Powell is now on the clock, right? And so You assume stuff like that gets front-run. I think the, um, the Venezuela situation is pretty bullish for that from the perspective of, uh, oil and, and input costs and, and what that means for inflation. You know, shipping comes down, everything like costs can come down, and I think it's very conducive to a, uh, more friendly Fed. Um, and, and the argument gets stronger. And, and so I think Yeah, the setup is pretty bullish for Q1. You assume that, you know, I think Jay Powell is either May or June ending, but that typically will get front-run. So I think the argument is pretty strong for a bullish Q1 and then kind of reassessment. You still haven't really found a consistent bidder. I think Saylor's probably going to be out of the market. You had the MSCI element come through, but I think, you know, that was indicative of two things. One, the market isn't that strong because you saw a pump and then a pretty quick retrace on, on good news, which, you know, is typically telling you that the market isn't that strong where you'd expect for something like that to be more bullish. But then the counter is that it did come with some, uh, stipulations in terms of what can be purchased, and so it wasn't as bullish as it seemed on the surface. So maybe the reaction was actually relatively appropriate and not, uh, telling you that the market is pretty weak. But I think generally, you know, funds receive new capital and deploy beginning of year, and then, and, and just the amount of kind of selling you've seen across the board, uh, I think does set up for a, a good bounce. But I'm, I'm with Jason Yanowitz where I don't see this being a clear path to all-time highs, but, but a clear path to a move higher and then kind of a reassessment.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I have much, much to say there. I do think that, you know, in like November and then December of last year, just like the consistent selling we had every day, there was like a lot of, um, new like long-term conclusions, I guess, people were coming to with crypto that I was like I don't know if this is like, like with valuations and with like, you know, how to, how to value these things, you know, or like L1 tokens dead forever, stuff like this. I think sometimes like the really strong price moves in one direction can kind of like overshoot some of that stuff in some sense.

I do.

Yeah. Like I do expect Q1 to be good just because of the mean reversion and how bad like the end of the year was, you kind of think that like New Year's kind of a clean slate. And just like even like there, I'm sure there was a decent amount of like liquid funds that just shut down or something. So we'll see. Like it was interesting to see the coins that did the best kind of to start the year. It was— there's like a lot of stuff that was clear that like nobody wanted to have on their balance sheet to like end the year. And then as soon as the new calendar moved over, it's like—

You're telling me you don't want Fart Coin on your LP statement at the end of 2023?

So it's like, you can trade the meme coins between like, quarters and stuff, right? Like, if you ever want to show it. So it was interesting. You had like, a lot of things that got hammered to end the year and do pretty well to start the year, whereas you had like, Zcash actually was kind of weak to start the year, right? It's something that did really well to end the year. And so maybe it was the reverse, like people waiting until the new year and Zcash take profit and stuff like that. Um, but yeah, we'll see. Today's the first day all year to me that feels like 2025 Q4 again, right? Like the first few days did genuinely felt like a little different and like you're, you're really skeptical of it, right? But it's like every day you keep getting it. Crypto's such a trending asset class that like the the more days in a row you get what is different, the more likely it's going to like keep continuing, right? So we'll see like if this day here is just kind of like a one-off thing or if we really do kind of like kill this trend here. But I don't know, the overall— I guess it's like, yeah, I just always have— the thing is I always just have like a bullish bias in general. Also because I'm not like a trader, right? And so I'm not really in the game of like predicting what this quarter does, to be straight up. And it's like, it's, it just feels like there's so many good tailwinds for markets in general. And the only thing that really concerns me is, yeah, days like today where equities are all-time highs again and we're back to being bad again, right? And you kind of, you kind of hope that most of that was flushed out. That was kind of what I was thinking, right? Like most of that was going to get flushed out by the end of the year and then New Year's kind of like a clean slate, which you saw for the first few days. So yeah, we'll see. I feel like I said a lot without really saying anything there.

How do you feel about everything, Jose, since you've been pretty like bear-pilled going back to like September, October-ish or whatever? How are you feeling now that you've had some time to reflect without getting too hammered in the market?

Yeah, um, I, I still feel, uh, yeah, like the same thing I felt then, right? I felt like there was a risk of me getting bear-hold whatever, whenever our retreat was. I still kind of feel that, um, you know, at the bottom there's always like a reason why it's never gonna— it's never gonna be the same again. Um, and for me, the— I, I— it's not that I'm like bearish all of crypto, but I don't like— for, for the first sort of, I don't know, for since 2017 when I, when I entered crypto I was always just similar to you, etc. It's just like bullish long term, and I didn't really care about the short term. I was just going to hold this stuff long term. I didn't really care about FOMC. It was— it just seemed up only to me. Um, and for me, that— I don't see it that way anymore. Um, like, I don't see it as obvious. I think there's certain things in crypto that have clear product market fit and will continue to exist. I think those are all gen— generally like pretty well priced. Um, like they're, they're— I think they'll do well, but they're not like— other than something like Pump, I guess, which has its own, you know, risks— that things are priced pretty well. And then for the rest, I just think that the really exciting opportunities that you just like want to hold on to, um, and watch the growth are, are mostly outside of crypto for me now, which is kind of sucks. But, uh, because, because crypto is obviously like— I love crypto and it's just a lot more interesting than, than, than the other stuff and a lot more open. But that's kind of how I still feel about it.

Yeah, I mean, I, I agree with you on a lot of that. Like, you can't just be blindly bullish on crypto, um, like taking an index type approach doesn't really work still and is actually getting worse if you want to do that. Um, so you really can't be like super passive. You can, I guess you could just hold like Bitcoin if you wanted to and then like go about your life. And that's what a lot of people I think do, right? Um, but there's still, I don't know, I still think there's like when you're talking about liquid markets with like the big opportunity, crypto is still that for me. We are going to get some things that do really well. Again, you've had some good liquid stuff recently. Zcash went up like 10x, MetaDAO went up 10x. Um, I don't know what else has, um, like there, there is, there are going to be pockets. But I do think that it is— it's just tough. Like a lot of new stuff still hasn't even had unlocks and it's trading below private valuations, right?

Yeah.

And so on the one hand, you can say that the unlocks are going to be less impactful because valuations have already come down so much. Um, I don't know, somebody had a poll in the, in the Delphi chat and it was like, what do you think is going to outperform this year? Bitcoin, crypto x Bitcoin, uh, NASDAQ, or other. And I picked crypto x Bitcoin, which I guess is a bit, uh, you picked crypto x Bitcoin. Yeah.

How do you define that though?

That's the thing that, that it's exactly my point. It's like very hard to define because like, like, I don't know if I— I'm like, so much of that is ETH, right? And I don't know if he's gonna outperform.

So you're just saying just like literally market cap of crypto minus BTC?

I mean, that's what the poll had, but I don't really like that answer per se because like I don't believe that we're ever going back to, you know, one of those type of markets. But I do just think that like there are going to be some like pretty massive winners this year. The question is like, is it going to be like last year where it was really just Hyperliquid, right? Like, because what else really won last year? And actually Hyperliquid ended up even finishing flat, I think, year over year. Yeah, I think it's because it was all like November, December.

The snapshot is all— is a big part.

Yeah, I mean, so what, it TGE'd at the end of November 2024, right?

But it was like the last big winner, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Last like sustainable winner.

Yeah, so it's like, are we going to have more of those this year? Like, part of me does think, was 2025 just some crazy anomaly in like a bad way? Or is it the— that's like the question I think everyone's trying to answer, because it's actually impressive how bad both Bitcoin and crypto did last year considering everything else. And some of that with like, you know, Bitcoin specifically is that Bitcoin just front-run a ton of gains after the election. To an extent that like other assets didn't. And then it kind of spent like the year distributing out.

That's the thing is, yeah, usually these snapshots are really what drive the comparisons because you, like you said, you had that big rally end of year '24.

But no, I guess like the way I'd answer that question is like, what's the large cap alt that I'm most bullish on? It's still Solana. Do I think at the end of the year Solana will have outperformed Bitcoin? I'll say yes, that's like kind of how I'm viewing the market right now. But we'll see, like if it doesn't, then I have a hard time to believe that it'd be like Solana and like a specific Solana reason why it didn't. And so it could just be real apathy towards like L1 tokens and just more speculation in general.

There's a world where, where revenue continues to be what's— and like, I think it's the likely path where that becomes the overarching thing that people focus more and more on, which hurts the L1s, helps the apps. And so it does create a situation where you have, you know, what you're describing, but there can still be some solid opportunities. It's just going to be harder to find them.

Yeah.

Because you don't have the rising tide, you just have the, I can beat the hot ball of money.

Yeah, and I mean, L1s doing badly hurts a lot of the other stuff too.

I do think it could be like, I do think we could be entering like a golden age of application investing in crypto. And I don't know if we want to segue this into like the ownership coin stuff, token versus equity models, things of that nature.

Um, yeah, I think though that like last year too, by the way, right, we, we, we kind of thought there was going to be an application golden age, I think.

Did we? Yeah, yeah. Well, the thing is the tokens are still tied in. Yeah, I think that like the big change now is this is the first time that we're actually seeing people really fight back against the way tokens are designed. And basically, you know, since tokens don't have any real rights on any of the revenues of the protocol, the only way you could really trust that a token was valuable is if they did buybacks, right? And that's why like Hyperliquid did so well. Hyperliquid was just like, hey, we're going to commit to doing buybacks. And so, you know, Yes, there was like a lot of structural buying, which helped that too. But it was also like a really big signal to the market that like this token is valuable and like we're going to accrue value to it. And I just think that there was tokens doing this already, right?

Like Hyperliquid wasn't the first to do this.

Sure. Yeah. Yeah. They weren't the first to do it. A lot of times though, buybacks too, they're like discretionary. They're like a small amount. Um, But yeah, I don't know. We've seen so many just token kind of like rugs over the past few years that it seems pretty clear now that, um, like, Laiter is a good example of this where they launched their token out of like their USC corp and they're doing everything to like accrue value to the token, right? And I think that if you launch a token in, in today, it's like you do need a pretty clear strategy for like why your token's not bullshit. And I think this dual equity token model, like personally, if there's a dual equity token, it's really hard to get behind the token unless it's like super clear that the token's going to be a priority.

Yeah, that's the thing is like it can exist, but it depends on the way that they coexist. If you have value accruing to both, um, I think the sum of the parts is, is less than if you were to just send it to one of them. But less of the equity if there's no real exit opportunity. I think it's more so the token. So basically, if you have value flowing to both, no one's really going to want to buy the equity if they have this weird token obligation. Maybe they do, and then there's a, uh, you know, some issue with kind of the community after that. So I think it's just a messy situation where you're sending value to an entity that you can't really get any kind of value from. So I think the ideal scenario is sending to Token. I think, like, zooming out, you need a couple of elements for this to work, which, you know, one, there has to be some degree of trust with the team. And, you know, the tricky part is, trust can be lost. So you can go into it with it being there, and then, you know, the various things can happen. But I think part of it is that needs to be there, which I think you could probably say might be an issue with the design if, if you rely on trust rather than some form of legal or regulatory certainty that you— so you don't have to necessarily think about that. Um, but in a world where you have this, uh, the value flowing to the token but the equity basically operating in a way to just encourage value to the token. So it's, you know, a cost center.

You can—

I think a popular thing now is these foundation models, right, where you basically have a foundation that owns tokens and it can sell those to help with funding operations. I do think the whole idea of 50% of the supply going to the community isn't— is going to fall by the wayside a bit more. Um, I, I don't think it's necessary and it typically ends up—

or it'll happen, but you, but you have to pay for it. It doesn't just get distributed, right? It'll be like an ICO or something. Yeah.

At that point they're investors, right? It's like, rather than incentives, because I think in most cases those incentives get gamed.

And there's always a dual, there's always a dual thing structure. There's always like equity and token, right? It's just how much value gets Siphon the vote. There's always—

we used to do SAFEs, right? But there was just like no legal protection. So people stopped doing them.

But there's still like an entity that's paying out salaries and like holding any IP. And like, there's always a legal entity. It's just like whether that thing will accrue any of the value. And like, yeah, historically, and we've been talking about this since 2018, I think when we started talking about this, but like, Historically, you always prefer if all the value goes to the token. And so the equity entity either like makes money by holding tokens. And we kind of saw some of this in back in the day where like Axie raised a bunch into the equity company and the main monetization was like holding tokens, plus they like owned the IP and there was, you know, some idea that you could potentially monetize that someday. Uh, and you've seen a few other situations like that. Sometimes you see like the equity company has like different business lines in the token. I think that gets really murky. I think whenever there's any value that basically is split between both, like Jan was saying, it gets super murky because shareholders just have like real rights and token holders don't. And, and like the, often the founders have different ownership in both, right? Like sometimes they own more of the equity in the token. And so it just misaligns things quite a lot. And obviously you saw like a bunch of cases back in the day. Where like equity would capture all the value and the token would, uh, be used to subsidize that value, uh, in the expectation of future value capture that never came, right? Like the FrenTex of the world, um, where, you know, the airdrop subsidized a bunch of trading volume that all went to the equity and then the token was just totally rugged. Um, and there's many, many such cases. Um, so there's like a few solutions to this. I think people have gotten really creative to— yeah, the SAF is obviously one that, that came along to, to, to fix this. Um, but like initially how we thought things would work is that these things would run fully on-chain, right? And so there would be no need for an equity like that. The, the, like how we thought about this back in the day was that the equity vehicle will just be one of many organizations that works for this DAO, right? And the DAO will be governed by token holders and all the value flows will go to token holders and everything will be on-chain. And therefore it's a parameter that the DAO votes on, right? Like the fee switch and stuff like this. But I think when this changes is when you start, first of all, these things start looking more like startups and more like applications, right? With websites that are valuable versus on-chain things. And they have like BD arms and like strategic decisions they have to make. I think DAOs are really badly suited to that and have kind of proven to be. And so now you need a new model, right? A model that gives you more flexibility, that lets you capture value that's not necessarily on chain, that lets you decide whether you want to distribute it or whether you want to invest in growth. And so I think that's the context in which MetaDAO comes into the comes into the fray with this ownership coin and then with the Coliseum stamp. I don't know, Jason, you want to say anything or maybe Ceteris, you can introduce the ownership coin stuff.

Yeah, I think the ownership coin stuff is just like MetaDAO's new narrative. You know, they still care about decision markets and futarchy, but their main thing right now is, is this ICO platform where when you invest in a protocol that's launching on it, you, the coin is essentially like equity. In a sense where it owns the IP, it owns the revenue. And so it's very clean and like very aligned from that perspective. And then Coliseum, who's like this Solana incubator VC fund that only does Solana stuff, they released this new legal structure called a stamp. And it's like a token agreement for, it's essentially like a SAFT, but it's through MetaDAO.

So how does that work exactly?

So you invest into this stamp, um, and then— sorry, I'm on the site. Um, basically you raise capital, you sell the stamp, and then instead of being like this SAFE plus token warrant, which is the way it works today, there's no equity portion. And so when the, when the protocol— so this way, so like a big critique of MetaDAO is that like Oh, when you go, if you ICO a MetaDAO and you're ICOing from day one, you have like this liquid token day one and your protocol. And it's like, do you really want that? Do you want to be a founder who like when you start your protocol, you have a liquid token? What the stamp does is it says like, hey, we're going to be doing a MetaDAO launch in the future, but we're going to raise money now and kind of like stay private. Right. And so you invest in the stamp and then when the token goes live on MetaDAO, it converts to pure token. There's no equity portion. It's like a very clean this is kind of how you go, right? And so right now, actually, there's the first one. I don't know if they're actually using the stamp, but like Ranger Finance is, they're like a PERP aggregator on Solana along with some other stuff. They're doing their MetaDAO ICO. They're the first MetaDAO ICO that has previous investors and they're doing the MetaDAO raise. And so it'll be a good test to see like if this does a product market market fit because like all the MetaDAO raises so far, they didn't have prior investors, right? They just came in and they did the public raise and then they went about their ways. But the thing is, you still want to raise from VCs, right? There's like, for a lot of teams, right? Like if I was, if I was creating my own, look, if any of us were creating our own product protocol, right? Would we go directly to retail day one with a liquid token? Would we do that? Like I wouldn't, right? I would probably raise from VCs that could help me out. Like think about MetaDAO, like MetaDAO itself, they have been fully liquid from day one. Okay. And so anybody could buy MetaDAO from day one on the public market, um, which is great. Like I love when everybody has access to something like if totally public, if it becomes like totally public unicorn, I think that's like, those are, those are the outcomes that crypto is like meant for, right? Like totally public, people can do it, but MetaDAO still has a lot of VCs involved, right? Because like after their token was liquid, They sold OTC to Paradigm. They sold OTC to Coliseum. They've sold to Theia, which is like a liquid fund, right? And think about all the work that like Coliseum's done for MetaDAO, right? And like Paradigm has done stuff for them, right? So like people still want VCs because they can help them in certain ways that they can't necessarily do themselves. But you also want, you know, retail to also get in at like fair prices and everything. You kind of need to like balance all that. So yeah, I don't know. I think that there's just a big, there's just tons of demand. Like I said before, Lighter's token too, right? Like Lighter's not doing a stamp or an ownership coin or whatever, but they are making it so that they're trying to accrue as much value to the token as they can. Right. I think like anything that I think that, you know, we always talk about like tokens aren't equities. Because we don't want them to fall under securities laws. But that doesn't mean that we want tokens to be like bullshit and valueless, right? Like what we really want is we want tokens to be equity. We just want them to be like compliant. You want to be able to comply with it, right?

I think that the one thing is that, um, you have kind of unfortunate, uh, cash use dynamics for these early startups as a, as a product of how the environment thinks about value accrual, where because there is no— there's not a lot of certainty around the fact that value will accrue to the token for a lot of these projects. These projects are forced to distribute value to the token immediately as a show of, yes, we are actually going to do it. When in reality, for a lot of these early stage ones, they— the logical approach is not to send value back to the token, it's to use proceeds for something useful to grow the business, right? And you're kind of forced to buy back or yield or whatever it might be because that's the only way you can actually demonstrate certainty around that value accrual. And so that's kind of why I was going back to the, you know, the Foundation model as well, where, you know, in an ideal world, you accrue revenue to a wallet, right? That is basically like retained earnings for for the company. The company funds operations initially through the private sales, can be VC, it can be on Legion, it can be like, you know, a mix, and uses that to grow the business. And then over time you have this foundation that's also sitting on a bunch of tokens and they would use the proceeds from that to fund future operations. And so, and then at that point after that, you have basically this system where you know, the, the, the company requests, you know, annual distributions from this wallet, uh, to fund operations and it's a proposal. And realistically, you know, from, from a governance perspective, you're not gonna say, you know, some people will say no, but I think the majority of time, right, the risk is, oh, we're gonna request, the community will say no, and then companies starve. Realistically, sure, some people will say no because they'll think it's too high, but generally you're, you're not gonna starve the business of cash and continue to hold the token. You're usually just gonna be like, this is too much, I don't like it, I'm out. And so you have this reallocation of holders who actually believe in the way this is happening. But what that means is this value is governed by the token, but it doesn't necessarily need to be returned to the token. You could also implement some kind of mechanisms to actually directly send value to the token, buyback, dividend, whatever it is, and set thresholds where it can't be pillaged by the token holders and then it goes away. So there's— you can parameterize all of that. But I think that is the most effective way to ensure that the, the, you're not forcing day one distros to the token, but you are basically benefiting to the same degree from a value accrual perspective.

Yeah. Like the, from my perspective, the reason buybacks got so big was to like, for your point, prove that the token is not valueless. And so if you do have these like ownership coins, you have these tokens that are essentially equity, that it really negates a big portion of the need for buybacks or distributing dividends or anything.

Yeah, because it's the trust thing, right? It's like Hyperloop, 99% buyback, so you know all the cash is going to be used for that, right? And the less you have trust in that, the more discounted these cash flows trade, which is why you have this bizarre phenomenon where like crypto has both the most overvalued assets in the world and like some of the most— some of the cheapest on a multiples basis, right? Because people just don't believe the business is durable, they don't believe the cash flows, but like you know, they're like Robit or like even Pump or like insanely cheap for how much money they're, how much cash they're spitting off.

Right.

And so, yeah, that's kind of an interesting, and like, that's the foundation thing is interesting too, because like the reason that was cool was because it can basically be a transparent vehicle to the token. Right. Because foundations can have beneficiaries that aren't necessarily like people or entities. You can have a beneficiary that is the DAO and all its constituents or the token holders or something like this. So you can have like a legally enforceable mandate for the foundation to act in benefit of token holders, which is nice, right? Because with a company, shit can like— it's almost like the law working as intended actually screws you as a token holder in many scenarios because the company's meant to optimize for— it has fiduciary duties to its shareholders. So that was nice. But then foundations have all sorts of issues, right? They're like extremely bureaucratic. And there's a bunch of 2017 ICO foundations that are like literally family offices for these people at this point. They have like 9 figures in ETH and they've never shipped anything and the money is going to be stuck there forever, right? And their descendants will live on in doing this thing like the Golem guys or whatever. I don't know. Not to call out particular ones. I have no idea what they've built. But like, yeah. And so this is it. The ownership coins is an interesting concept, I think. And we need definitely more of this to instill trust in tokens. I guess my thing is like equity is just the best thing. And so I think the issue with Yeah. And maybe the other point is, if everything was on-chain, you wouldn't need any of this, right? If these things actually ran fully on-chain as DAOs, you wouldn't need any of these constructions. It would all just run through governance. You don't even have admin keys, nothing. So these things aren't— they're looking more and more like companies, which is not initially what we thought it was going to be. We thought these were like new, actually new things. They were going to DAO, they were decentralized, there were going to be a bunch of companies working for them. And so it's a new class of thing. It doesn't— it's not an equity. Now I think these things are like companies. Like there's very little decentralized about a lot of this stuff. Not all of it, to be clear, but a lot of it. And so in that case, why not just make it an equity? And for the most— and my biggest problem with MetaDAO, and I love MetaDAO, I'm a holder thanks to Rinko, and I love what they're doing. But my biggest problem with capital formation generally, like the the biggest hurdle is negative selection, right? Adverse selection. Like, you want— like, in general, the founders that want to go direct are not the best ones for the reasons that you mentioned before, etc., right? If you're a good founder launching something, why would you not just raise from VCs who are like extremely experienced? They're going to be able to help you out. Uh, they won't whine about a $10K check and like try and sue you in class actions and stuff because that'll ruin their reputation. They're, they're like, you are their customer. Why would you go direct? And historically, that's, that's always been, been a pretty good indicator, right? There's very, like, um, and, and I, I don't think this mechanism, like, solves that. I still think if you're the best founder, that's what the stamp does.

You raise from VCs, and then in the future you do the MetaDAO raise.

But why would you do— why do the MetaDAO raise, I guess?

Like, if you, if you're building I think there's some value in building community.

If you target a small, like you want that sweet spot where it's, you know, you're not spending, you're not selling too much, but you're selling just enough to raise from the community and kind of build that. And then at the same time, you're probably giving them, you know, decent terms so you can raise at a pretty good val. I don't think you should primarily do that. I think, yeah, like, you know, for all the reasons you guys mentioned early on, venture stuff makes more sense. But at some point I think it, it, there is value in getting community involvement.

I mean, yeah, this is what we kind of, the airdrop debate is kind of like this, right? Like instead of airdropping, have people do, give a public ICO at like a good price. And that's kind of what this is doing in a sense. Like if Rangers ICO, Rangers did a whole point season and what their points give you is like priority access to the ICO, right? Which I think the MetaDAO, all the MetaDAO ICOs have been priced pretty cheap. They've all been priced under like $10 mil. I don't know what Ranger's priced at. I haven't looked at it specifically, but that's kind of what they're trying to do with this is they're trying to get like, if you can do, you can go do the pure MetaDAO thing from day one if you want. But if you want to do like the VC, then public, there's still— this is like the path to it.

Do you think there's actually going to be a lot of people using or going the route of, you know, raising from VCs and then going through like the stamp process or whatever? Or do you think it's gonna— MetaDAO will mostly just be retail raises only, kind of like what we saw with the original ones? Like, like, what would this look like? What would success of this look like to you? Because like, this was launched in December, so like very clearly, like Ranger, like you said, Ranger's the first one. So like, like what would like actual success of something like this look like? Show that it's gaining traction? Like how many teams or how much capital would have to be like raised for you to be like, okay, like this is actually something that I think you need like one or two home run ICOs, like one or two good success stories.

I think the biggest risk for MetaDAO is that like kind of to Jose's point with like the adverse selection thing, but to get more granular, it's like bad founder experiences with it. And then that gets around and then people decide that this is not the model they want to do. So I think that like, you need to have a couple projects that actually surpass MetaDAO market cap and become like highly successful protocols, like just to be like theoretical. If Uniswap did this right, where they had, they did their raise and then instead of doing the Uniswap airdrop, they did a model like this with the ownership coin and everything. And then Uniswap becomes this like super highly successful protocol that would at last, that would give a lot of credence to this model. And then it would convince a lot more founders to like end up doing it.

We got to give credit to Gabe here. Uh, like, MetaLex is at the, is at the back end of what this whole MetaDAO is building. And MetaLex, Gabe predicted this like years ago, you know, his whole thing. He's like, these, these, these companies need to be like borgs that are like legally, legally, which, which is exactly what, uh, like MetaDAO's like ownership coins are using. Like, these things are borgs, which are basically like real-world entities that are contractually obligated to act in predictable ways that favor token holders, right? So you, you actually have like, as a token holder, you have legally enforceable rights because there's an entity that's been built, like purpose-built for that, right? And he's built a bunch of them, I think, for, for Lido and others, uh, but it's cool to see it being rolled out with, with, with MetaDAO because, yeah, it's like a genuinely necessary kind of primitive.

The thing is, like, at the end of the day, what has been crypto's main use case? Like, you can say Bitcoin, yeah, sure, but in my opinion, it's like capital formation and this idea that, like, people from all around the world can come together. You have this super liquid financial market, people can easily raise money, and all we're trying to do is, like, make the tokens useful, right? And we've just beat around this for so many years because nobody wanted to get in trouble with securities laws. And I mean, Gabe had an interesting— he quote tweeted one of my things yesterday talking about this and was like, more people need to get securities reform pilled because his main concern is that what the legislation ends up coming out as is actually going to disappoint a lot of people, right? Because if you do get legislation where it's like tokens are commodities, then you're kind of like, not like I, for L1s, like, yeah, tokens, commodities makes complete sense for me, but it, you know, it doesn't make sense for like an application. Right. And I think that we shouldn't have to have some kind of bastardized model where we pretend like the token is not equity.

Does a commodity classification hinder their ability to send value to the token?

I think the way it is right now is a lot of this stuff is like programmatic. Where it's like you need these programmatic rules about distributions and everything. And that's just like not— it's just not flexible enough, right? It's like too rigid to like kind of have this. And again, distributing back all this stuff programmatically for a lot of cases does not make sense.

I think that initially these things weren't supposed to be secure. And like Gabe was very— I mean, Gabe is very much like a cypherpunk, but trying to do it by the law is how I would see it. He's like, he thinks this thing has to be cypherpunk because otherwise it's just regarb, right? Which I think is like a valid point. Like, I think a lot of these things are securities and you can't— like, the best way to change that is, is to change securities laws and let people just do equity instead of having to do all this complex stuff, right? Just let people do equity and have like lighter accreditation requirements. Like let more people trade and get into this stuff because like we have AI now. All the value is going to be captured, like all the value has, or like a lot of the value has been captured by private markets, right? Like OpenAI, like, uh, Anthropic, um, all the robotics companies, they're all like over a trillion dollars of private market value that like retail will never see. People's 401s and stuff will never see. You need a change to this. And I think it's loosening securities regulations so more people can own them rather than allowing people to create these weird instruments that they use to flaunt all the point of securities laws. They dump on the public, they don't put any value through them. These things don't actually run on chain. They're not actually decentralized. So I basically think if it's not DAOs, if it's just on-chain companies, then they should just be on-chain securities, which is kind of like a grumpy old man take, I think, which is kind of what gave— it's kind of Gabe's brand to some extent. But yeah, I agree with him.

Yeah.

I mean, we should have brought him on actually to talk about this.

Yeah, for this it would have been great. I don't know, like, but like, when's the last time like there's actually been like a real like US securities law, like reform or upheaval, right? Like, pragmatically, it doesn't sound like—

like, apparently this guy wants to do it. Is it Paul Watkins? I think he wants to—

the new one? Yeah, I mean, apparently he wants to do it, but I guess there's been a couple, right, in the last 20 years. So I guess it's like not out of the question. It's just like, I guess, I guess I'm just so jaded after the, you know, the Gensler era of of SEC that we actually get like anything like real passed.

But, um, yeah, but it's just like when you just think about it from first principles, like what do you want? You want people to build profitable businesses on the internet, like essentially.

Exactly.

And everything is, is been against doing that. And the solutions are these convoluted, really complicated legal structures that—

are you including Stamp in that?

I don't, I don't think Stamp is that complicated, but I don't know if Stamp is—

I mean, it still requires like entities abroad to, you know, right?

I mean, the difference with Stamp is that the, the foundations are actually for-profit, whereas like every other kind of model has nonprofits for the foundation.

A for-profit foundation?

Yeah.

When you do the stamp thing, like, does Coliseum or whoever, like, run— is it done for the team or does the team still have to set everything up when they go through? Like, how did—

like, uh, I'm sure, um, I'm assuming— I mean, I'd hope they make it relatively easy because they're like—

it's still relatively costly to set up these offshore entities, right?

Like, oh, I think that they— yeah, because the stamps— the stamp requires you to go through metadata. You can't like use the stamp and go through another platform. So I think that they do all this stuff for you. MetaDAO is still a, um, it's not permissionless, right? Like it's totally curated by them. Um, which is like, there's pros and cons to that, right?

Uh, it's how you start for sure. I think it's how you need to start something like this.

Yeah.

Sorry, Ian, you were going to say something before.

Um, yeah, I was going to say, I think like the, the DAO element of these things, particularly early on, I'm strongly against. I like that. I don't—

me too.

And I think you can have, and like the insurance against that is basically twofold. One, you can enable governance from day one, but a lot of contracts now allow locked tokens to participate in voting decisions.

Right.

And so you have team locked tokens plus, you know, with this foundation component, you, um, you basically can corner any decision for many years if you, if you need to. And, and that I think is the right move for the most part, especially early on. Like, you're investing in these people to build these products, and ultimately you don't want anything to kind of hinder that progress. So I, I'm, I like the idea of, of futarchy, but I think the application, like, the, the, the surface area of application for it is massively exaggerated, and it I think that like there are times when it works, but I think there are many times when it doesn't. And so I think that is probably one issue I do have with Stamp is that they mandate futarchy. And, and so I don't know how early that comes into play, but that I, I don't love.

Yeah.

And like, why would the best—

no, no, no, no, no.

Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

I was just gonna say like on that point, the Stamp, again, the Stamp lets you stay private for a long time. Right. It's not until you actually go to MetaDAO that, that then this all comes into play. And then when it comes to the Futarki, the only stuff that is really being used right now is like the monthly budgeting for the team. It's not used for like decision makings. Like you still have centralized decision making. That's something that they've changed recently because it just wasn't going to work. And so right now, it's like when teams do these MetaDAO launches, like Ranger is, when you're going to this Ranger ICO, it tells you every month there's 250K USDC that's going to be given to the team. And then this will be used for salaries and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And like, this is it. And it's like programmatic and they can't do more, but like all the decisions for Ranger and what they're doing, they don't need to go to a decision market.

But again, like why would it? You know what I mean? Like, why would a good founder— and I'm not saying I don't know the Ranger founders, and they're obviously like market dynamics with having tokens and stuff— but like, in principle, if you're a really ambitious, really smart founder, why would you give away control of your treasury, not have control of funds when, you know, when you can just literally raise from VCs with like carte blanche? Like, that's why I think anything that makes the founder proposition to the founder worse is just going to lead to adverse selection. And adverse selection is the killer for, for platforms like this.

The argument is that your token will trade at a premium. And that's like the bull case is that if you do an ownership coin where you have these protections, where it's transparent, yes, some things are going to be a bit harder because you're going to have this monthly stipend. And if you want to increase it, you got to go to the market and stuff like this. But because these protections are in place, it's kind of like how the US equity market trades at higher premiums than everywhere else in the world. It's not just the fact that, yes, it is obviously the tech is the best and you have the best companies and everything, but you also have the best protections, right? The best investor protections. And that's kind of the same angle here. And so whether or not that, that ends up being true, like your token trades at a premium here is, we'll see, right? But that would be the argument, I think, um, for why you would do this as a good founder. And like the Avicii money guy who has a real product, that product they've had for a while. They were never going to do a token or anything, but Prophet basically convinced him that like, this is like a very legit way to do a token. And he got comfortable with doing it. He didn't feel comfortable doing a token any other way until the MetaDAO mechanism. And he was like, okay, this is something I feel comfortable doing. So we'll see. I don't know, we'll see. I'm, I'm— I have a soft spot for MetaDAO.

Me too.

Yeah, for sure, because I think they're trying to do the right thing, right?

Yeah, I think it's a really cool— yeah, I was gonna say, on one thing, it is on these platforms, uh, and, and the, the incentives are aligned for them to really pick good projects, right? Because you— if you think about, uh, normal private markets and public markets, many private companies fail, right? And, and they fail privately and no one really knows. There's not this gradually declining price. It just kind of, you know, it raised at the last price and then it goes to zero. And that is typically funded by people who are doing— who have experience and are doing a lot of diligence, right? And, and they get it wrong all the time. Uh, with these liquid markets, the, the gate to capital is much lower, so the, the threshold of diligence is, is much lower, and the failures happen publicly, right? Like, public companies in equity markets don't really fail nearly as often because they are very longstanding, durable, have gone through a lot of diligence, many rounds. And, and so there's, you know, there's huge filter here. You don't necessarily have that Um, you have one round of investing and then they'll go kind of public. And so it, it like, and, and when I say the incentives are aligned is, is that, you know, these platforms have kind of two motivating, uh, uh, kind of pillars, right? One is ensure that the raises go well, uh, because that's an important marketing tool for, for the next company that they want to, uh, help raise. And then also ensure that these raises happen at good values and you don't have down-only action because then you cannibalize your, your, demand-side customer base. So like, there it is, it's definitely going to be on them to, to really ensure that they are picking top-tier quality projects because these things are, are much less battle-tested than any other very retail-accessible, uh, investments.

Yeah, I, I think MetaDAO is one of the most like, um, innovative and one of the coolest experiments in, in this area I've seen. Uh, but my take is like increasingly that just for, for this stuff, like tokenized equity is, is going to be, is going to be the thing.

I'm hoping we can get, we can get there where we straight up have tokenized equity natively, not like bringing our WAs on, but, uh, we can do it in a way that makes sense. And, uh, is actually, you're actually able to comply with, right? That's like the holy grail. But that takes like securities reform maybe, which is Gabe's point.

Yeah. Well, he's, he's, he's doing, he's doing some really cool stuff with, with Metal X in that respect.

We should get, we should get Gabe and Rinko back in a couple of months after this stuff has had, you know, a few months to percolate, get some projects and kind of—

that's a really good idea.

Get the inside scoop there, you know?

Yeah. Gabe's doing some really cool stuff with tokenizing shares directly. But yeah, it would obviously hugely benefit from securities reform. Yeah, but I don't see why in the future you want— because you're going to have so many RWAs on chain. I really think everything is going to be— I still think everything is going to be tokenized. I just think there's a lot of accredited people on-chain. I'd be curious, like, what the number is of the, you know, however many users are on-chain. Uh, you know, I think people estimate what, like 50 to 100 million, like, unique users on-chain?

Depends on the price of Bitcoin that week.

Yeah.

Um, how many accredited do you think there are? Like, I feel like there's, there's got to be a couple million, uh, people with over a million net worth on-chain.

Yeah, for sure. There's like, I mean, there are stats on like how many crypto millionaires are are there.

Yeah, because the thing with Gabe's, uh, thing that's really dope— I actually went through the process today, uh, I got a credit. By the way, we're, we're investors in, in, in Meta X, but I, I, and, and I also hold, uh, Meta, uh, so by the way, ChatGPT—

yeah, I hold Meta too, obviously. I talk about it all the time. Uh, ChatGPT tells me that there are around 240 K crypto millionaires. So like 250K.

Interesting.

Less than I would have thought.

It says centimillionaires is around 450.

What was it on October 9th?

Yeah. So it is— you're right, it is lower than I thought it would be.

Yeah. I mean, that kind of tracks, but so the— I don't know how the hell it calculates that.

Very specific number, 243,000.

No, no, no, it said— yeah, well, what's kind of specific here?

The, yeah, the thing he does that's cool is like you can basically verify accreditation by just signing a transaction from your wallet. So like if you have a wallet with over a million bucks in it, you can just literally sign a transaction, put in your name, you sign an attestation to say that you don't have debts. That, you know, net out to less than a million net worth and you're accredited, you have an accredited certification and then you can participate in anything. Like, that's super dope. I think like that's a very low barrier to entry to getting a bunch of on-chain accreditations minted. And then suddenly you can have like an actual on-chain securities ecosystem that can trade, you know?

Yeah, you're like some meme coin gambler who like runs it up as soon as it hits a mil. Like, you signed that fucking— I'm staking, baby. Now when you retrace 90%, you've still got it. It, right? And now you're good.

Exactly. Show that to your dates.

Or you just like basically you and your 10 friends pool all your money in one wallet and then just rotate.

That's illegal. That's fraud.

It's fraud. We're not endorsing fraud. Do we want to talk about anything else? Or, I mean, we're up to an hour here.

Um, no, we could probably keep like the perp deck stuff for a couple weeks. It'll give us more time to see if people are actually back or if it was just a 2-3 day New Year's pump in, uh, in activity.

Yeah. Also, I think the— I do think the PolyMarket Parcel thing is cool, bringing like— I think like getting more liquid real estate prediction markets is cool because like real estate's one of those industries where it's actually really hard to express a good short side, uh, play on it, right? Especially in certain markets like in Canada. It's like the Canadian real estate market has been so overvalued for years, but there's also no way to short it. You have to like short the banks, and it's like, that is just not clean.

Relax, Michael Burry, chill.

So I think getting like liquid prediction markets on real estate is, is pretty cool. Matt Levine had a good piece on it about like, you know, shorting your, your equity, your, your housing market, buying like an index of housing markets. Like there's a bunch of different kind of stuff you can do, right? If you think about like industry, like places like Detroit where it's like very industrial, it would have been actually super valuable if you could have shorted the real estate market there as you work there. Because when the, when the, when the Depression came or whatever, right, all the jobs went, the housing market went down, you lost your job. It's like cascading effects, right? So there are like a lot of interesting use cases from having like very liquid. Yeah.

How do we short in New York? Real estate market.

New York's one of those markets that's just like—

parcels trading at 30—

everybody owns the real estate in New York now.

What did you say, Jose?

Parcels trading at 30 mil FDV.

Yeah, well, I mean, they have Parcel Labs, right, which I think makes like all the money. So this goes back to our token equity thing, right?

I don't know, they need to become an ownership coin.

Yeah, I remember talking to the Parcel guy— well, he was like an intern— but a couple years ago when I went to this, uh, uh, Solana thing. And, uh, yeah, it's— Parcel is really cool. Um, but I looked at, I looked at some of these markets, I looked at these markets on, on Polymarket, and it's like they're just like so like illiquid, right? So still a long way to go.

Yeah. I think being the canonical price oracle for a market that becomes globally relevant is like a pretty big business actually. Like the other, the other one I'm interested in, I think real estate's an interesting one. I think private markets is the one I've been spending most time thinking about, just like how you tokenize the entire private markets. Like it's like, uh, I think it's $150 trillion, the size of the global private markets, which is—

bring that on-chain, baby.

Huge. And it's the most similar thing. Well, take startups. I think startups are the most similar thing to the exposure that on-chain degens like, you know. And they're mostly actually building like real things. Yeah, yeah. I think it'd be interesting to find a way to do that. Cool, cool, guys. This was a good one. I enjoyed the, enjoyed the chat. It made me more bullish Meta than, than, than what I came in, actually.

Yeah. One thing I guess I'll say before we end is just pay attention to this new, there's a lot of infighting on Solana right now with like, I would say it's like Jito and Ellipsis. I would say it's like Jito and Ellipsis guys on one side and then Harmonic slash Temporal slash Humidify on the other side. And it's like Solana block building. Over the next year or two, it's either going to go down 3 different paths. It's going to be Jito's BAM model. It's going to be Harmonix model, which is like what works on Ethereum, the PBS, or it's going to be if Solana Onza can ship MCP, multi, multiple concurrent proposers. So there's like a really, a lot of like really interesting stuff having on, happening on Solana market structure.

But Jito still needs Yeah, but you release it, it's like the block packing thing. Yeah, sorry.

MCP is an alternative to, to Jito and to, uh, yeah, because you'd have multiple leaders just kind of like sending shreds at once.

Um, okay, I haven't caught up on the latest.

Yeah, yeah, but right now there's a lot of beef with, uh, the Harmonic and the Jito teams. So it's definitely something to like keep an eye on. Jito released this dashboard the other day around like validators that are doing timing games, which is basically like you're, you're waiting right until the block. So like Solana works on this. The blocks are supposed to be continuous. So like as transactions come in, they're just executed. They're just streamed. But Harmonic has introduced PBS type model where it's discrete. And so it's like they wait for a bunch of transactions and then boom, they send the block every 400 milliseconds, right? And this has like a lot of knock-on effects to Solana. The, the Harmonic guys, you know, have their own reasoning why this is a better model. I'm not going to, uh, I need to look into it more, but for like, I totally have like my full-fledged take right now. I'm kind of just like watching how this plays out. Um, what was interesting though is that the largest Solana dApp, Forward Industries, was doing these timing games. But that is because Galaxy runs their validator and Galaxy does these timing games. And basically the TL;DR is that when you run these timing games, you get higher yield as a validator at like expense of the network. So yeah, anyways, that's something to pay attention to. We'll probably go deeper into that in the future once like, I just, I expect this topic to get a lot louder over the next year within Solana, because it's kind of like existential to Solana's future and like where it goes. Yeah, I think with that we'll wrap it up.

Thanks guys, we'll wrap.

See you again in two weeks. See everybody.