How Politics is Reshaping Crypto's Future | Roundup

you had Germany sell close to 3 billion of Bitcoin. So you're telling me that you're selling a hard asset to buy for euros that you can print? And imagine a country like the US says, no, we're actually going to print money to buy Bitcoin. Regardless of whether Trump or someone like Jamie Dimon goes out and says that publicly, I think again, the narrative is intact. We had an ETF that legitimizes this asset class incredibly. You best believe that this has just become— you couldn't even whisper Bitcoin when I was at JPMorgan in the elevator. I mean, and that has been the case for forever until recently.

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GM everyone.

What's up?

Well, stark contrast to last week, I guess there's a lot to talk about, so we just dive right into it. It feels like a big turnaround.

We, I mean, we would have looked much smarter last week if we said this is the calm before the storm, but instead we said there's nothing to talk about. But yeah, I mean, week-over-week difference from last week to this week. Last week it felt like not much news, Germany selling, prices are getting hammered. And this week, yeah, it's, uh, feeling pretty bullish going into today.

So yeah, let's talk about like the— like we always talk about narratives here, right? And trying to hopefully get ahead of narratives. And a common theme that I keep going back to is like we look at prior cycles and we say it was so obvious, we overfit it. COVID stimulus checks, people inside, they're punting, they're bored, they're punting. And somehow it's just important to recognize that in the moment the market gives you plenty of reasons to be sidelined, to be, uh, really, uh, shitting your pants. I think the conclusion is position sizing. I'm almost certain— I'm never certain of anything— that it comes down to position sizing. Because in moments of choppiness, moments you're going to be more predisposed to, to like be shaken out. And it hasn't been comfortable for anyone. Like, investing is not meant to be easy, right? But like, let me ask you a question. What is— as you sit here today, and I texted you this before we went on the pod— for me, this cycle, the narrative is intact. It's not up-only narrative. It's not— there is a cycle to things. There is a psychology to things. But the narrative is very much intact, and that is we just had an ETF approved. We've been waiting for it forever, and this asset class was hugely legitimized, and all the work that has been going on in the background for the last decade plus of evangelizing, of convincing people this is actually important, then it could be properly implemented.

Right.

And we're not even seeing the full extent of that. But it's that, right? If you fast forward 3 years from now, where we're back in down 80%, we're going to look back and say, oh yeah, it was so obvious. Like we had an ETF, we had all the signs pointing to greater regulatory clarity and things on the margin obviously make it more in the moment. But like, I don't know, like, why are we— why Why does the timeline, I guess, go from peak extreme to euphoria from week to week? That's kind of something new I've observed. I'm just kind of curious, like, how could you explain that? I don't really know.

I think the explanation is because in past cycles— so here's my working thesis— is that in past cycles, the— it felt like deep bear— like the bear market was down, then we started— it was like smoother cycles. There were some like bad cycle—

there, um, Like, 'cause you always have these 10, 20— I mean, my God, in 2014, like, yeah, you had the— shit your—

yeah, you had these, what, 6 drawdowns of 30% that people like to look at. But this one feel— I think this bull market feels a little different than other ones. And so people are kind of like, like, what's going on? Like, what's going on here? Like, and, and, and actually we gave a, um, so we had the company all hands for Blockworks yesterday and, um, We have, we have 70 people at Blockworks now, 24 new people. So 24 people, 23 people started in the last 6 months. Wow. And a lot of those folks know what is happening, know what is happening on their teams, but they wanted to know like what's happening at the rest of Blockworks and like get everyone aligned. But also they wanted to hear Mike and my thoughts on this cycle. And, you know, Mike kind of led this part of the conversation, but I can do it. I can maybe abbreviate what he talked about. He said, look, there's probably like 3 working theories on what's going on with this cycle. Um, the, the first working theory is that ETFs have kind of changed the game, right? The institutions are here. ETFs have changed the game. Previously, the cycles were so violent because it was just retail-led, and retail buys and they get very exuberant, and then they sell and they have to sell everything because they use a lot of leverage, and that caused these violent upswings and downswings. But First, maybe narrative or like thesis is that the ETFs have arrived. Institutions are just going to keep buying. That kind of leads to a slower grind up. That's theory number one. Theory number two is that ETFs actually pulled forward a lot of the growth in buying. They probably pulled it forward by like 6 to 9 months. So we actually have a pretty normal, like normally observed cycle, which is intact right now. The growth that you might see in like a little later just got pulled forward. And then that's why we've been like kind of choppier down for the last couple of months is because the, the, the growth that was supposed to come maybe around this time or in the fall got pulled forward with the Bitcoin ETF. And then I think the third theory is like, look, maybe it just gets easier to buy these ETFs and you buy it on your Robinhood and Schwab accounts. And, uh, you don't actually pivot into like the long tail. And retail ends up staying in, in these ETFs and they don't spill over into on-chain products. And, um, I think the third one, I would agree with Mike on this. The third one is probably pretty unlikely in my mind. I don't think retail just buys ETFs and stays, you know, stays inside of their Schwab accounts. I think it's some combo of one and two, but that is making it feel, the cycle feel a little weird because it really is. There haven't been new people. Like when you hear people bitching about ECC. It's like, why are people bitching about ECC? My theory is it's not about the side events. It's not about overhyped infrastructure or whatever. It's there's no new entrants and a lack of new entrants makes these things really like, it kind of breaks some of the, some of the what should happen in cycles. So that's my working theory of what's happening.

Yeah. I would agree with some of that. I think it's really painful to observe the Nasdaq and the market rip all-time highs and crypto not move directionally in line where it's been high beta, and you would— this is very difficult. And so I would agree with you, a lot of it is there's just more— there's still money being made. It's PvP. Like, a lot of people didn't benefit from like the meme supercycle mini cycle that we had. Um, um, and then it's all kind of the, the range of universe of things that you can invest in this space continues to go up. And there's like hot pockets that like last months, right? And then people move on, this hot ball of money. But yeah, I don't— I've talked to like, um, it's funny because like I, from time to time get pinged from more macro funds that invest in crypto. This week, two of them ping me. They wanted to talk and they all put back size. They're all flipped super bullish, which is a hallmark of a good investor, just being able to flip.

They flip super bullish on the markets or on crypto?

On crypto. They invest, they're macro guys, but they invest in crypto and not just Bitcoin. They invest in, they have crypto funds, but their background is macro. So I'd like to talk to them and they both reached out and they had flipped bearish. They'd gone to stables a couple months ago. Um, primarily because of this construct of like there's no money, new money coming in. You look at ETF flows and they're just not there, um, which is what you're saying. But they are now put all the size back on, they're fully allocated, and they both seem to think that the narrative is intact for the rest of the year and going into the, you know, going into the next couple years. My question to them was, what really changed because I don't think, A, you can really predict why things move, just sentiment, I guess. Um, and it's like, well, you know, now we— it's become more and more clear that Trump's gonna win. I'm like, well, prediction markets had him at 70+ for a while. It's not necessarily new, new. Now he's like, uh, you know, and this solidified himself. But it's like, and yeah, you have Jamie, you have JD Vance. We'll talk about this in the pod, but you're more of a political person. I want to get your take on that. But Howard Marks has put out a good memo today, which is like, what has really changed? And like when people talk about certainty and try to predict markets, it's impossible. That's like my takeaway. It's like you, it's gonna become more and more difficult to predict these markets. They're not gonna be smooth. There's gonna continue to be vol, but markets do what they're gonna do, you know? Yeah. Now memes are back on the menu. You know, like the hat's on.

Santi, say more, say more about, um, what you're looking like, what met crypto-native metrics you look at. I know we were talking about leverage and stablecoins. Can you talk about those two metrics?

Look, um, Joseph, our producer, was like, we haven't really seen leverage as we did in prior cycles. I'm like, have we? I'm pretty sure we have. Like, there was a, uh, when the market was going down, I mean, we had one day was like the second highest liquidation day in crypto after FTX. So there is open interest, there is leverage in the system. It's moving around, it's getting wiped. I would attribute that— so it's not leverage, it's just there's not new inflows. And when we talk about new inflows, particularly on-chain, like alts, right, ex-ETFs, you look at stablecoins. That to me is the most important metric, um, like stablecoin circulation. So when you have the Tether printer coming back on, then, um, you know, there's like a Whale Alert account on Twitter, which is like, marks a lot of these like new prints for USDC and Tether. And I think to me, that's probably the most important metric that I'm following on-chain, at least.

I don't know, just the stablecoin volumes, basically.

Yeah. Stablecoin circulation.

Yeah.

Because like, that really went down after FTX. For a number of reasons. People didn't want to— like, you're going to stables, then rates go down. Rates on chain on AAVE and Maker and Compound are like less, like less in treasury. So stablecoin volume just like— like when I— sorry, stablecoin circulation just went down. Um, but now it's coming back up. So I think that to me is like the most important thing because then that would be telling you people are— exactly, stablecoin supply.

Yeah, maybe we can look at it here. So, so stablecoin supply is now— so I'm looking at this Visa chart. Yeah, it's starting to trend back up. So, so I mean, it, it ripped up, trended down in the bear market, and starting— what is this month?

September, October 2023, starting the Bitcoin ETF, right? You see the meme supercycle. If you were to extrapolate here, like meme market cap, that would have gone off. That's where like WIF and some of the other things peaked, really. Um, there's a bit of lag, right? But generally speaking, yeah, when you see that chart go up, it's that people want to allocate on-chain. And most of the time they're probably going to allocate to some of the majors, but I would say like a lot of that's like a really good barometer for people's willingness to put money on-chain and punt kind of higher-risk stuff.

Yeah. What is your— look at these two charts. So USDC versus Tether. What is your theory on why Tether just continues to print higher, whereas USDC is like making a pretty slow comeback, I'd say.

XUS.

Yeah.

Um, you know, Joe McCann has a really good newsletter. Of course, we've had him on the pod. He was of the mind, and I think he very accurately predicted, um, inflows were coming in. Central banks were printing, injecting liquidity in the system, Q— end of Q3, Q4 last year, but not in the US. And then you— anecdotally, I've talked to some of the largest fund of funds that are investing in crypto funds I've talked to crypto managers that are open-ended, so they're raising money. Still crickets. Yeah, like they haven't— it's been a very challenging fundraising environment for crypto funds. So we still haven't seen new institutional allocation to funds. And to me, that's two things. One, we're early in the cycle still. And two, funds are not getting new capital. And so most of the money coming in is retail, probably from central banks printing, printing money, ex-US. So Tether is more global.

So let me, let me ask you this Joseph question, which I think, um, to pick on— I love you, Joseph. I think Joseph is sometimes a good proxy for what retail can be thinking. Um, and I love— that's why I love asking Joseph, like, what are you thinking about? What do you want us to ask today? And what Joseph wanted us to ask is Um, he said, I'd love for someone to play devil's advocate on meme coins, just not continuing to send if there's a next leg up this cycle. It feels like the same market conditions that led to meme coins previously are still around, except prices are higher even after the major correction. You've got AI coins still underperforming memes, altcoins not catching bids, SocialFi had a start but fizzled, no mega useful apps, ETH continuing to focus on infrastructure. Why don't meme coins just continue ripping higher here if you think the market sends higher? So would love to hear your thoughts on that.

Yeah, well, I guess it's important to have two simultaneous conflicting theories in your brain. I probabilistically think the memes, if the market goes up, memes go up. The case where Joseph is describing is, in what scenarios does the market go up and meme coins don't go up as much or just go down? I guess certainly anything's possible. It's just a matter of probabilities. I just need to say, I, I would describe a low probability event where the market goes up. I guess Bitcoin can go up, Bitcoin can hit an all-time high, and the rest of the market may not move as much, including meme coins. Then that's your theory, which is most of the capital just goes to the ETF. I mean, you extend that further, if we have an ETF, which it sounds like we're going to have it pretty soon, then you could see a scenario where Bitcoin and ETH go up and the rest of the market does not, um, including meme coins. And that might be for a variety of reasons, including just macro shits the bed and it's not a soft landing and we don't have rate— you know, for a variety of reasons. You know, I guess savings are down and people— although people tend to punt more and go to the casino during a recession. But you know, um, I mean, I don't know, like, it's going Is there going to be a resurgence in— so with rate cuts, for instance, imagine a world where we have 50 basis point rate cuts in Q3 in September. Then I think it would make a resurgence for DeFi projects where the yields go higher. So now people are more inclined and interested in farming and, you know, capturing that juicy yield. That would be my working assumption. Like, so maybe that on the margin, like DeFi just becomes far more interesting and people just move more towards DeFi. But like, have we had any cycle where memes haven't performed on par or better than everything else in the market? I guess memes as a category, right? I mean, it's gonna be— of course, within the meme bucket, there's like a chi-square distribution. Like, it's a power law. Like, there's very few names that like actually command most of the market share. Everything else kind of like dies away. The half-life is really short. So like, you have consolidation into, you know, last cycle was Doge, SHIB, um, and what else? I'm missing one. Um, this cycle you have the Pepe, you have WIF, uh, you know, you have PopCat and a few of these things that are kind of wanting to hit a billion. But then there's a whole slew of like tail end of stuff that just doesn't do well. Um, but if I were to— there's this guy that, uh Sir, what is PopCat?

I've never heard of PopCat.

Is like this cat— uh, the whole theory is that if Dogecoins do really well, like cats should be some percentage of that. Um, I don't like it.

Wait, wait, say that again. Say that again.

The whole— we're doing fundamental analysis on me right now.

Slow down and just say that again and listen to yourself again.

Listen, listen, listen, the idea is— and I'd love someone to come in here and be more, uh, educated on this particular topic. I'm sure I'm gonna get it.

You know who we should have on is, um, do you remember— do you know Murad? Murad?

Well, yeah, he blew up.

He blew up. But he, um, he's like— by the way, one of the greatest podcast episodes of all time was Murad on Pomp's podcast in like 2018, giving like the most—

the market's going up—

like the world's most bullish Bitcoin episode. That was the most articulate Bitcoin episode maybe you'll ever hear in your life. Unfortunately, Murad's fund blew up because he was too bullish and got wiped out on, I think, Black Thursday in March of 2020. But, um, very eloquent speaker. He's positioned his whole fund into meme coins.

Yeah. Yeah.

Um, and he's got all these elaborate theses on how to buy meme coins. And so we should bring—

yeah, the theory of Popcat is, yeah, if dogs do well, cats should do well as well, maybe on a more relative basis. And it's like that, it's like that spread of like Bitcoin dominance is like dog dominance for meme coins. Um, again, this point on Murad, by the way, I think he, I think he's a, he's not a dumb individual. I mean, Princeton guy, like smart, um, articulate. Position sizing, long-term capital management. That book I mentioned last podcast, like the Forgotten Billionaires, it's all about position sizing. By the way, it's written by a guy, Victor. Who was at Long Term Capital Management, ex-Lehman. It's all about position sizing. Every fund that blows up, you might have a right thesis, but if you're using leverage or the position sizing is off, you're going to blow up or lose money. Anyways, just as an anecdote. But Murad, you know, more than welcome to come in here and educate us about memes because I'm a noob. I'm just very simple. I just literally own one. When I, um, or two, maybe in 2016, I was working at this venture firm and would walk into, uh, wait, by the way, is this the first time on the record that I've heard this? Because I had no idea. I mean, Yana was a VC, ladies and gentlemen.

I mean, nah, nah. But I would walk into my boss's office. There are these like angry old sterns, like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers guys. And I would walk into my boss's office. His name was Tim. And I would show him like, I was trying to get them to do some crypto deals. I think, I think they looked at like, I don't know, maybe like BitGo Series A or B or something, or Coinbase Series B or C or something like that. And I would, I would show them, they're like, alright, fine, send me some information. So I'd send them like, you know, Crypto Panda on Reddit, or like Crypto Bobby doing a big Twitter thread. And they're like, look, I'm not listening to that. I'm not, not listening to Crypto Panda. About this new asset class. Uh, talk about this new asset class, like, get out of my room, kid. And I'm picturing Santi, you talking to these big macro funds, and then they're like, look guys, you got to go listen to this Santi guy on Empire. And then they listen, and you're like, I don't even know the name of it, Bobcat or Popcat or whatever. You're like, look, the thesis is cats more than dogs. Let's talk about some other— let's talk about some of the other news of the week.

Um, for sure.

So there's—

by the way, have we rounded up this discussion on— was this a sufficient, like, I don't know if sufficiently clear answer of like, in a scenario where memes go down, the market goes up?

Oh, maybe I'd ask you to round out the conversation. Like you mentioned sizing, how do you then think about sizing of meme coins? Because I know you're like, I know you're very bullish on like WIF, for example, but you— and so like, is WIF 1% of your liquid crypto portfolio or 5% or 10% or 50%?

It's greater than 10%. Yeah, it's a top 2 position, uh, top 5. Well, not by dollars invested, to be fair. So the capital, capital that sits in the account, sheer appreciation of it. Um, yeah. And so that then requires a whole set of things we won't go into this podcast of how you manage a position over time, but do you ever hedge a position?

Like, will you do, will you hedge or you're just like, if I don't like it anymore, I'll just sell it.

I don't short. Yeah, I don't short. I'll go to cash, I'll rotate to something else. I don't do pair trades. Like, I tweeted about Ondo Maker. Yeah, I'm sure someone's gonna look at that and say that FTV converges. I am not, uh, shorting is something that I never want to bet against. I never want to do because your loss is uncapped. Yeah, and it's a timing game.

I had a neighbor growing up, he was a short-only hedge fund manager. And I just thought this man, he was also one of those people who doesn't have to sleep. He would sleep like 2 hours a night. Just thought this man was nuts.

So this is why Peter Thiel probably said it best. The difference between an optimist and a pessimist. I tend to think that short sellers are like skewed pessimists. It's like if you go on a test, an optimist is like, you can say, hey, uh, so most of the time when you say I may get an A, And if you don't, you know, you may land somewhere in the middle. But a pessimist is someone that says, I'm definitely going to get an F, and you most of the time get an F, right? If you go into an exam saying, I'm going to get an F, you're most likely going to get an F. That's a pessimist. An optimist is like, I don't know, like, I don't really know it, but it's not saying you're getting an F. And so, yeah, like, you're hedging your response. But yeah, I think Peter Thiel, some of that effect. And I just think short sellers are like incredibly cynical or skeptical. Yeah, most of the time don't make money. There's good ones out there.

Let's, let's talk about, um, let's talk about some of the news from this week. A lot of it was really related to what I would call, I'd call it two buckets. One was elites getting behind Bitcoin and, uh, Trump and political decisions. So I'd actually love to just talk about JD Vance first. I think there are two, uh, there's like the headline crypto news, which is Trump picks— so Trump picked JD Vance as his running mate. And this, like, the headline crypto news is that this means for the first time ever, we have a Bitcoin holder on the presidential ballot. So for context, like, and I think that's very cool. But there's actually, I think, a much more interesting, like, political lens on this. Well, I think it was just such a smart decision. Um, so I'd love to talk about that. I think it's, uh, third, the— I don't know if— do you want to talk about that? Is that interesting? It's not even a crypto.

Yeah, of course. I mean, everyone is asking for context. Everyone's asking if this is, uh, JD Vance pro-crypto, what is his views on that? As soon as that came out, should I get background? I mean, I knew about JD Vance 2016. He put out his book, which is a New York Times bestseller. I think it was a Pulitzer Prize nominee. I don't think he won. The hillbilly eulogy, which is this idea, like, he grew up in a really rural, poor area of Appalachia where most of his classmates were like, ended up being unfortunately meth heads or didn't go to school, didn't go to college. He, his point, at a time where inequality in the US has continued to grow, his point was sort of very refreshing, which was No, the system gives you the opportunity. I went to public school. Everyone in my class had the opportunity to go, is free. I went, I applied myself. Then he went to college, then he went to, I think it was Yale, got his law degree there, and then worked at a venture fund, a pretty good one at that. And so that was like where I stopped, 2016. And then I was like, oh wow, it's actually this guy. And then he went into politics. He was like in Ohio Senator, I believe.

Yeah.

So that's the TL;DR on this. I put politics aside. That's like a self-made man, and I respect that a lot. I think that represents a lot of what America stands for and what makes it great. Yeah. Yeah.

He's done so right. He was Marine in the, in the Marine. He was in the Marine Corps, deployed to Iraq from 2003 to 2007, 2007, 2009, went to Ohio State. 2000. Yeah, Buckeyes, 2010 to 2013, went to Yale Law School. Then he started— that's when he kind of started writing his book and stuff. He worked as a law clerk in the US, I think it was in Kentucky, I'm pretty sure he was a law clerk. Then he went to, I think he went to Sidley Austin, practiced law, and then 2016, obviously, he kind of got put on the map, wrote the memoir Hillbilly Elegy or Eulogy, whatever, whatever the title is. And then 2016, I think after the book, Peter Thiel hired him to work at— what's his venture fund? Mithril. Mithril Capital. It's like his family office. Yeah. And then—

which, by the way, that family office has been pretty good at buying Bitcoin. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Very well.

And then 2017, moves to Ohio, becomes a— continues being a VC, but I think leaves Peter Thiel's fund, I'm pretty sure. Starts focusing on investments in startups kind of in like, as he called it, the American Heartland. 2022, he does that for like 5 years. 2022, elected as U.S. Senator for Ohio. 2023, obviously sworn in. And then 2024, we get this big announcement. So that's kind of the resume from a political perspective, because, you know, I like to nerd out on this stuff. It's not even related to crypto. People did not think J.D. Vance was going to get elected. People thought it was going to be— people thought you kind of had to appeal to— people thought it was maybe going to be Vivek or Nikki Haley or whoever's, you know, one of the other— another candidate, basically. J.D. Vance, I think, is such an interesting strategic choice because he sits at the intersection of basically the two groups of the GOP right now. On one side of the GOP, you have like the, like, middle, middle America whites in Appalachia, like that kind of group, like working-class Americans. And then on the other side, you have this new group that's came into— like, came into the market, came into of the party, which is like the new tech oligarch class, like the Peter Thiels of the world and Chamath and David Sacks and people like that. And I think his ascent, like JD Vance's pick, or like his ascension kind of speaks to the influence of like the new right-wing, like right-wing conservative tech elite. But then his policy positions of like isolationism, restoring manufacturing, restricting immigration, those are all theoretically beneficial to like the, you know, forgotten working class. And I think it's just— I think it's a very, very, very savvy pick because the Trump— like how— I think a big question is like, how will the Trump administration or campaign deliver to both of those groups? I think that remains to be seen. Right. Those two groups have very, very, very different asks. And you can only expend so much political capital to satisfy those two coalitions. So picking someone who sits at the intersection both satisfies, satisfies both of those. I think the other interesting thing is it shows how confident Trump is that he's going to win, right? If you were not as confident, you would have to kind of court the old school conservative campaign beliefs, which is like, you know, maybe had that in the back. Well, the old school, the old school GOPers, if you were trying to appeal to them, you would have picked Nikki Haley. If you were trying to do— then there's like trying to appeal to the evangelicals, right? That's why he picked Mike Pence in 2016. Vance is this like new right candidate who despises the institutional GOP. And he either— so Trump either— this tells me Trump either clearly sees those groups as either already in the bag or now irrelevant, which is just an interesting evolution of the, the GOP political party. But I just think it marks this turning point.

So Yeah, you know, it definitely shows, uh, like I'm not a political expert, I'm not even gonna go into it. Um, nor is this a political pod, it's relevant for crypto. Um, unlike, and we should get into Vitalik's blog post, by the way, correction, he, um, so he actually did not, I believe, worked at Mithril. He ended up raising money. Uh, he started a venture fund, I believe I'm looking at here. So he, He worked initially in Revolution Capital. That was founded by Steve Case, who is the co-founder of AOL. It was like a pretty hot VC, um, may still be, but not really. Um, and then he, in 2019, he co-founded a fund called Narya Capital in Cincinnati, and he ended up raising money from Thiel, Eric Schmidt, Marc Andreessen, a bunch of other people. Um, and I think he raised, uh, $93 million. So, you know, it was investing in like the middle, as you pointed out, like kind of industrial Middle America kind of thing. Um, so he has a connection with Yale, which is obviously ultra, like, right. But he's— I don't think he worked for Mithril, just FYI.

I think he did. I've got it, and Axios says he got connected with Peter Thiel via a 2-year stint at Mithril Capital. Okay, but either way, either way.

Yeah, no, I mean, I, I I'm just looking at Wikipedia.

There's a great— there's a— we won't summarize it because it's a 30-minute video, but he— Y Combinator asked JD Vance to give a talk on policy, on his basically like tech policy, I would call it. And there's a— that video is floating around Twitter. Maybe we can find it and put it in the show notes. But for people who want to find out his like JD Vance's broader stances on tech policy, I would recommend watching that video.

For sure. Yeah. I think there's also really good videos circling around of like he's talking about crypto and particularly around social media and the role of tokenization and how it's important. And his point is something to the effect of like most of the smartest founders and investors are actively paying attention more and more to crypto. And it's like it's going to be more difficult for incumbents to like compete in a world where you have, uh, sorry, uh, for, um, legacy firms to compete against like startups that are leveraging this technology. So I think he's pro-crypto, um, although I haven't seen more to that or his views particularly. Yeah. What is interesting though is like if you look at Polymarket, which by the way, I was catching up with Shane and ECC, they hired, uh, Uh, was it Nate Tiller from Crazy Hire?

I actually wanted to talk about that. Amazing Hire, which we can—

Amazing Hire, I love that. Yeah, um, he has a great book too. So the odds of, of Trump, obviously after the unfortunate incident, um, like jumped from 60-ish to all the way to 70— was it like 70? I saw up to 77%, and then they've sort of subsided. They're now back to kind of close to where they were before all of this happened. Uh, so they spiked a bit. They're now still at 66%. Um, you know, there's like a quarter of a billion dollars betting on this market, so I think it's pretty high signal. Um, so yeah, I'm curious. Um, you know, I guess on the— I don't know if you read anything into that, the fact that the odds have kind of come down and are back to where they were before the assassination attempt.

No, I mean, the Biden campaign put out something that said that he would consider dropping out if there was a medical condition. And I think that—

I'm sick. And it's no thread.

Like, it was like, yeah. And so, you know, maybe that pulled it back down. I think if you look at— if you compare like PredictIt to Polymarket to like— Polymarket tends to skew actually more in Trump's favor if you look at the betting odds, because the people— and I think the theory there is the people betting on Polymarket tend to be more crypto native. And therefore more—

they want crypto, right?

Yeah. So anything politically related, like Trump might be 65%, but then unpredicted at 60%.

So can we talk briefly about Vitalik's post?

Yeah. To close the loop on JD, the last thing to add about him is he— I would call him very pro-crypto. There's just— I pulled a couple of different things, like 2021, he issued a statement opposing an amendment to the infrastructure bill, and his reason for, uh, opposing it, he said it would, it would amount to a backdoor ban of Bitcoin and other popular cryptocurrencies. 2022, he disclosed that he held between $100,000 to $250,000 of Bitcoin. And then 2023, he actually introduced a bill that would protect crypto firms and exchanges from being cut off from traditional banks, right? That was around the time of like, uh, Chokepoint. So, um, I think there are other things that are not great about JD Vance, but from a purely crypto perspective, I would say he is a very pro, uh, crypto vice president.

I want to make a pause here to recap all the crazy timeline that over the last 7 days, right? You had an assassination attempt on Trump, dodged by inches. God knows what would've happened if he hadn't moved his head. Um, and nomination of a vice president that is very pro-crypto, understands industry. You had the Paxos SEC lawsuit dropped. You have Jamie Dimon, which you tweeted about, changing his tune on crypto. Also rumors that he might be the nominee for, what is it, the Treasury role. Yeah. And what else on the regulatory side of things I'm missing?

Did you say the stablecoin SEC dropped their stablecoin investigation with Paxos?

Yeah, yeah, that. I also saw a headline that State Street is looking at getting into the stablecoin business.

Yeah, I looked into that more. I think it feels pretty private blockchain-y. I think that's not as real of a thing.

Yeah. On that point, because people are all texting me like, oh, what are you reading? Jamie Dimon. Jamie Dimon has been vocal about, like, critical of, like, Bitcoin, crypto. Um, internally though, we've had on the pod, um, you know, the JPMorgan team that has been pursuing, like, Onyx, and there's been internal efforts at JPMorgan, quite substantial, I would say, uh, which is sort of like, to me, the most important thing. Um, I don't know, people might be saying, how real is that? I don't know what your interpretation of that is.

So my, my take on it is, um, I mean, Jamie Dimon definitely doesn't like Bitcoin. So his company has a 300 to 3— like, JP Morgan has a 300-plus person blockchain team. And we had an interview actually with Tyron, who either runs that team or is like second in command over there. And so you guys can go listen to it if you want. But like, let me read you these quotes from Jamie Dimon. He said this, and this is a man who said, quote, Satoshi is going to come on there, laugh hysterically, Go quiet and then all the Bitcoin is going to get replaced. How the hell do you know it's going to stop at 21? It's a hyped up fraud. It's a pet rock. That was earlier this year at Davos. And then another quote, this is from last year, he said, I personally think Bitcoin is worthless. I could care less about Bitcoin. If you're stupid enough to buy it, you'll pay the price one day. This is the last time I will ever answer a question about Bitcoin. The other day, my daughter sent me an email saying she owns 2 Bitcoin. This is my smart daughter. Well, my formerly smart daughter. Well, So he definitely doesn't like Bitcoin. However, Larry Fink used to say similar things. Like people can change, change their mind when like either Putin, when someone who is more powerful than them twists their arm or when their capitalist incentives line up.

And like my theory around that is, uh, there's a lot of money to be made by selling this ETF product and Wall Street now can make money on crypto.

Also, UBank with JP Morgan, like they're the, are they, they're probably the largest, the largest private bank. in the world, I think, in the world.

Like, HSBC may be the largest, but JPMorgan's not far, and certainly in the US.

How many people bank with JPMorgan? And this is— so the private bank, for people who don't know, is where they'll— so they'll make a lot of their money from people who have maybe assets of— I think it's, what, $10 million or more is the minimum to bank with JPMorgan. You have $10 million or more assets, you get a private banker, and you can basically do all of your investments and all of your activities through JPMorgan. They make a lot of money that way. The number of people who are saying, wait, I can't hold my Bitcoin here. I can't buy Bitcoin through you guys. This is, this is ridiculous. I've got Larry Fink going on CNBC saying we're buying Bitcoin and JPMorgan won't let me buy it.

So Jamie Dimon— and I'm positive as soon as you start losing business, right?

It's like, exactly. So there was a Forbes article where it said Trump— actually, Forbes quoted Trump saying Jamie Dimon has, quote, suddenly changed his tune on Bitcoin. Um, I have mixed thoughts.

That'll be, I mean, that'll be amazing. I mean, of course I have a ton of respect. I love JP Morgan. That was my house, my home starting off my career. Um, I'll do it again. Um, so that would be amazing.

Like, um, but they don't forget Trump, like Trump picked, um, uh, the Goldman guy, Gary Cohn. Gary Cohn was his, I think was Treasury Secretary for the first year or two before Getting fired. This episode is brought to you by Sei. Sei believes that the EVM is here to stay, but they also believe that the EVM in its current iteration lacks performance and scalability for developers. Sei's recent v2 upgrade has introduced the first high-performance parallelized EVM coupled with lightning-fast block times and finality of just 390 milliseconds. This V2 upgrade unlocks a new design space with 100x throughput of even the fastest EVM L2s. Stay up to date by following Sei @SeiNetwork. That's S-E-I Network. You can also experience Sei's speed firsthand at sei.io. Special thanks to Sei for sponsoring Empire. This episode is brought to you by Polygon. Polygon Labs is developing the next generation of open-source, zero-knowledge tech to aggregate crypto liquidity and user bases, empowering developers to grow in a unified web of interoperable chains with the AggLayer. That was a big mouthful, so I'm going to tell you what it means in my, in my words. There's all these things popping up, L2s and L3s, and it's chaos, right? If you are building something, you no longer have to worry about bootstrapping liquidity you can basically just build in the AggLayer to tap into the liquidity of the AggLayer and the users of the AggLayer. You get the users, you get the liquidity. It's the AggLayer, it's hot, it's by Polygon Labs. They've got the, uh, Polygon Community Grants program. It was launched with 1 billion tokens just for Polygon builders. Season 1, it's live right now. It features $35 million in MATIC to support the next generation of Polygon builders. Join the aggregated future today by applying at polygon.technology/grants. That's polygon.technology/grants. If you talk to anyone, let them know Blockworks sent you. Hey everyone, wanted to take a quick break to talk about your crypto security. I am excited to tell you more about Harpy, designed to keep your wallet safe 24/7. Harpy is the most advanced wallet security tool. It monitors for risks, blocks detected threats, and recovers your stolen assets all in real time. Picture this: you're browsing late at night and accidentally approve a shady transaction, and it's too late to cancel it. I know, I've been there before. Well, now Harpy's got your back. It jumps in, intercepts that transaction, and takes your assets away to a vault that you control, all completely free. It works with all the major wallets on Ethereum, Base, Polygon, and Arbitrum. Head over to harpy.io/empire and set up your free protection today. That's Harpy. Copy.io/empire. I promise you that your future self will thank you. Now let's get back to today's episode. Hey everyone, wanted to take a second to talk about MyPrize, the first multiplayer casino where you can watch, chat, and play together with your friends and favorite creators. Getting started is super easy. Use a credit card, PayPal, or even crypto to play over 500 games from classic slots to live table games. Join the MyPrize community now and use referral code EMPIRE to get $20 for free when you make your first deposit or purchase of $10 or more. Head on over to myprize.com/invite/empire. Link will be in the description of today's episode. Let's talk about Larry Fink on CNBC. Did you watch Fink's, uh, beautiful boomer commercial for Bitcoin?

I mean, every other day he's going out.

Oh, let me, let me, let me read you this. I'm going to read— let me just— this quote for a second. So Larry Fink goes on CNBC, Jim Cramer asks him about Bitcoin. He goes— I'm just going to quote, read this whole thing. He goes, as you know, I was a skeptic. I was a proud skeptic and I studied it, but then I learned about it and I came away and said my opinion the last 5 years has been wrong. So here's what I believe today. This is Larry Fink on Bitcoin. Said, I believe Bitcoin is legitimate. It is now a legitimate financial instrument that allows you to have an uncorrelated type of returns. I believe it's an instrument you invest in when you are frightened. It's an instrument you invest in when you believe that countries are debasing their currencies by excess deficits. I believe we have countries where you are frightened for your everyday existence, and now you have the ability to invest in something that is outside of your country's control, giving you more financial freedom. I'm a big believer that there's now a role for Bitcoin in people's financial portfolios. I believe you're going to see that as one of the— I believe you're going to see that as one of the assets we all look at one day. I look at it as digital gold, and I think there's a real need for everyone to look at it as an alternative to optimism in the world. If you want to hedge, Bitcoin is not a vehicle for hope. It is a vehicle for people being able to express their fear about something in the world there is now a great industrial use for it. So the summary of that is, if you believe that your country is going to experience dollar, you know, currency debasement, if you cannot get access to a bank account in your country, if you believe that there's chaos in the world and you need a way to hedge, the way to express that trade used to be maybe by shorting something and buying gold or something, or buying gold. And Larry Fink says, look, there's now a good new way to do that, and it's by buying Bitcoin.

Agreed. And the marginal— the ratio of people that are doing that is extremely slow, uh, small. So there's been— there's no surprise, right? The US fiscal, um, situation is untenable. Everyone agrees with that. The question is, at what point will the market, one, disagree with that, and then bring it to its knees and humble a country? If it's not the US, any other country would have already been humbled by the market. Yet people continue to buy treasuries. Like, this— the demand for that, these auctions have not subsided. There's at some point going to be a day of reckoning. It's, uh, yeah, go listen to, uh, Ray Dalio, uh, St. Druckenmiller. Everyone agrees it's like, it's an unsustainable budget. Um, what is it now? Like, I want to say up to 40% of like the, uh, spending of the government goes to cover interest expense or more. Um, so anyways, a bit unsustainable. However, Japan's been in this situation for a while, yada yada. The, the thing that like most people seem to say, so what happens in a scenario where macro really takes a shit? What happens in a scenario where like the market kind of wakes up to this? And at what point does that happen? And what does that mean for Bitcoin or other assets? Like, where do you hide? And I think the conclusion that I've heard from most people that are way smarter than me in macro, again, the same people I've talked to this week, I was like, I think you just want to be in assets that historically, or you believe going forward, are going to beat inflation, whatever that rate may be. Yeah. So what are those? Historically, it's been real estate, treated you very well. Gold to some extent, maybe a basket of other currencies like Swiss franc, the, you know, maybe you can look at like the, some of the Gulf currencies, but they're small, right? There's not enough. So that's like where people like Mark Cuban goes on and says, hey, Well, in that scenario where Bitcoin catches a real bid, you know, where's the ceiling for that? Now, not only that, the second point I want to make is, which we've talked about it here at length, is stablecoins. Going back to stablecoins, it's mostly US-denominated, and they're just increasing the demand for dollars globally. Everyone wants to hold dollars, continues to want to hold dollars. So this is like, if you're Jamie Dimon going into the position, right, As a Secretary of Treasury, what is the most important thing that you're monitoring? That the demand for dollars continues to be strong. Yeah. And stablecoins don't interfere with that. Regulated stablecoins like USDC is a godsend. Tether as an organization holds— he's like a top 5 or top 10 holder of treasuries. You have a constant buyer for treasuries and it's coming from this world that historically hasn't had easy access to hold dollars, right? It's all been black market. Argentina, it's not. And so this just immediately increases the ability for people anywhere in the world to hold dollars. Wouldn't you want— like, why would you be against that?

Yeah, you have an infinite bid for treasuries. Yeah, you know what I mean?

And so I think he's seeing that. Um, uh, the other thing that now people are like, of course, putting their super bullish cap on this. Imagine, like, what is the probability— and Shane and Nate, if you're here, I'd love to get your thoughts on this— but like, what is the probability of someone like Trump going out saying, hey, we're actually going to hold Bitcoin in reserve? And you had two—

you had Trump's first talk at the Bitcoin conference, and people are speculating about it.

I mean, imagine that scenario. Let's just, let's just be, you know, drink the Kool-Aid for a bit.

Oh my God, Santi's putting on the hat.

I know, right? Not that we needed it. We always skew bullish here. Um, you had Germany sell close to 3 billion of Bitcoin. So you're telling me that you're selling a hard asset to buy for euros that you can print? And imagine a country like the US says, no, we're actually going to print money to buy Bitcoin. If that— I mean, two— couldn't be polar opposites. You know who I'm betting against, but I I mean, if you're a central government, like realistically, if you're in that position, like whether you want to be public about it or not, but yeah, I would print, you know, fiat and buy Bitcoin. Hold it in reserve.

That's what I was talking about last week. Germany is selling and El Salvador is buying. And this is a hard asset and a commodity that is moving from one government to another.

Of course. We've all seen how the president of El Salvador has taken it to the chin when Bitcoin went down from $60,000 to $20,000, and he was mocked and ridiculed. Now, the impact of what is transpiring now, even regardless of whether Trump or someone like Jamie Dimon goes out and says that publicly, I think again, the narrative is intact. We had an ETF that legitimizes this asset class incredibly. You best believe that this has just become— you couldn't even whisper Bitcoin when I was at JP Morgan in the elevator. I mean, and that has been the case for forever until recently. Yeah. That can't be overstated. Do you agree or do you disagree?

I agree. I agree. I mean, I think— why are people trading chop? You mentioned the Mark Cuban thing. The Mark Cuban thing. Let me just read this tweet for anyone who missed it. He said, here's a contrary opinion on the— by the way, for context, Mark Cuban does not like Trump and does not want— I think does not want Trump to win. He's been pretty vocally against Trump. But he said, look, here's a contrary opinion on the emergence of Silicon Valley support for former President Trump, which, like all opinions on here, probably won't be popular. It's a Bitcoin play, not because the former president is a far stronger proponent of crypto. That's nice, but it doesn't really impact the price of crypto. It makes it easier to operate a crypto business because of the inevitable and required changes at the SEC. What's going to drive the price of Bitcoin is lower tax rates and tariffs, which, if history is any guide, and it's not always, will be inflationary. Combine that with the global uncertainty as the geopolitical role of the USA and the impact on the US dollar as a reserve currency, and you can't align the stars any better for a Bitcoin price acceleration. So how high can the price go? And again, this is Mark Cuban continues in part 2. How high can the price go? Way higher than you think. Remember, the market for Bitcoin is global and the supply has a final limit of 21 million with unlimited fractionalization. Keep that in mind as you consider what happens if, because of geopolitical uncertainty and the decline of the dollar as the reserve currency, Bitcoin becomes a safe haven globally, which means that Bitcoin could be what countries and all of us look to buy as a means to protect our savings. Crazy? It already happens in countries facing hyperinflation. And if things really go further than we can imagine today— and I'm not saying they will, just that this has a possibility somewhere above zero— then Bitcoin becomes exactly what the maxis envision: a global currency.

There you have it. I mean, Uh, I don't know much Bitcoin, but I think it's ultimate meme, right? I mean, of course, once you hit 80, 90, once it clears 100, what's stopping it from going 150? And then once it hits 200, I mean, it gets memed into existence. Like, what's stopping it from going to a million? Of course, flows. I'm not dumb. Um, but I was having a conversation with the founder today, and I referenced one of my favorite books, which is Scale by Geoffrey West. And basically his point is the brain doesn't understand exponential phenomena, and that continues to happen in this world as we're becoming more connected and capital is moving freely. Yeah, I think the size of the market, like imagine like Bitcoin at a million would entail, you know, pretty large market cap at that. But you know, if central banks come on board, or even a large institutional place, certainly possible. Yeah. Yeah. People should go listen to Cathie Wood. Of course, she's, she's not afraid to put out bold predictions, not just on crypto, but also on things like Tesla. And yeah. What was her prediction? $150,000?

$250,000? No, I think it was $1.5 million.

Oh, $1.5 million. Exactly. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. In many ways, it's pretty refreshing to have people outside the industry, newcomers, come in and be less cynical? Because I think there's a phenomenon where the longer you stay in crypto and you see cycles, like, you can turn cynical. Not— you should always be skeptical, but cynical is just, uh, yeah, I think it's like pollutes the mind in many ways. And you're like, you become like incredibly, you know, and I think that probably happened too in the internet and other technological revolutions. I don't know if Carlota Perez talks explicitly about this, but like, if say you lose money, then you become like disheartened, and then all of a sudden you don't believe in this tech, and you don't believe in memes, you get burned and like you hate it and then you walk away. And yeah, in many ways, maybe TradFi is what probably makes the most amount of money in this asset class over the next 10 years than like crypto OGs, you know what I mean? Vitalik's post. Do I what? Vitalik's post. Just to round out the political discussion. Sure. Um, crypto is political whether you like it or not. Vitalik puts out a blog post. We're not going to go into too much detail. People should go read it if you want. But he says something to the effect of you shouldn't vote specifically for candidates that are pro-crypto. You should take a longer-term view and vote for— make a decision that is not just purely based on ideology, single issue.

Reminds me of an op-ed that came out a couple weeks ago.

Right, exactly. Well, you guys tied into the stick.

I saw that, I saw that post go up. The response was quite different. I was like, put it that way, I was like, hey, Vitalik's about to write the same post we just wrote and get away, get away with it. And B, well, yeah, the favoritism is, uh, Godspeed to you, Talik, because you are also about to get shredded online. He was shredded on a number of—

I mean, vaccination, people like to— the mob likes to comment. My point is, look, it's not a practical post. It's like, people need to vote for— and so, like, I get it, I, I get what he's trying to say, which is be long-term, have a long-term mindset. But let's just ground the discussion, right? We've been in a very hostile environment and how do you expect people to react to that? I mean, I think the reality of things, and you're a far better political, you know, expert than I am. I'm not, but something that I've appreciated and I'd love your take on is this idea that like political dynamics across the world have unfortunately become more polarizing. Not just in the US, you have extreme left, extreme right. You're seeing it in Europe, in France, in the UK, in the Netherlands. Um, in Germany, across Latin America, it's just extreme right, extreme left. In large part, I have my reasons. I think like inequality, disenfranchisement, this feeling of like, you know, no one's serving you, so you need to go to extremes. So unfortunately, um, Paul is, you know, when you're going to vote, it's like you're cornered into taking a far extreme, right? Either left or right. And so You just have to like put it in that context. And when you do, then you say, okay, you invert and you say it's not so much as choosing who's pro-crypto, it's just more so, you know, voting for someone— not voting for someone that's very much against its existence, right? If your livelihood depends on it, if you truly believe you're here, you believe this technology can have a meaningful impact, um, and be positive for society and really change, you know, I, I believe it, then how would you not vote I guess, who in their right mind would vote for someone that is extremely hostile and has been? It's not a, I mean, it's, I don't know, like, I don't know how other way to say it, but it's like, I take, I'm thinking long-term as much as Vitalik is here. I'm not thinking in 4-year terms. I'm thinking, how do I make sure that this industry thrives? Because I believe its potential. I think it fits to solve so many things. It's not perfect. But it's not perfect in large part because it's been handicapped by the— and so when I see a window of opportunity, I don't— it's not to say that I agree with policies either extreme left or extreme right. Um, I don't necessarily believe in, like, you know what I mean, like other topics outside of crypto, like abortion, or, you know, where foreign aid goes, or or whatever other policies that you might get, you know, a politician needs to talk about. Um, but I just think, I don't know, like, I'm not, first of all, I'm not voting in the US, but like, if I could, I don't know, like, I'm not going to vote for someone that's hostile to the industry. Simple as that. I'm not going to maybe abstain, but like, I want to vote. So what do you do? Yeah. I don't know. I think it's one of these things where people are just like very ideological, grounded. To the fucking ground and what are like, you know what I mean? Like just give a sense of reality. It's so abstract and it's kind of frustrating to see that, especially coming from him. And I agree, I get his point, I get his message and it maybe in his position I would do the same. I'm not in his position to have liberty to speak more freely.

So I, so I thought Molly Jane's piece on Blockworks was, was much better than Vitalik's piece. Um, Vitalik was asked, cuz Vitalik's piece centered around one question. He said, if a politician is pro-crypto, the key question to ask is, are they in it for the right reasons? Do they have a vision of how technology and politics and economy should, should go in the 21st century? And does that align with yours? And do they have a good, positive vision that goes beyond near-term concerns? And if they do, then great, you should support them. And but if not, like, if not, don't, don't vote for them. What I'd say to Vitalik is like, that is the most unicorn and like fairy tale.

What's a real politic? You know what I'm like, what's it like?

How to Bon Bismarck. Fairy tale idea of like what a politician is and like, they're good. Good luck trying to like this idea of are they in it for the right reasons? Like at the highest levels of politics, they're, they're in it for the power of politics and to be at that level. And that is my like extreme belief.

I think at the congressional level, the difference between theory and practice. This.

I think in local politics, people like really do get involved for the right reasons. And like, even at the congressional level, people get involved for the right reasons. But at the presidential level, like, why is Trump going pro-crypto? Honestly, I don't think Trump gives a damn about crypto. I think he's—

I think he just realizes that like the fair shake, the third largest pack, because it's for the reasons that we've been advocating for this technology, because you're seeing entrepreneurs leave the US because You know, you see that it's, uh, you know, stablecoin is increasing demand for US dollars because you want to keep the US at the forefront of innovation because it's becoming a frontier of tech. Like, what more reasons do you want? I mean, it's, it's, it's again, like, yeah, I don't know what to say. It's other than, like, people have interest in— like Jamie Dimon or like other people— like everyone has a motive. It's kind of surprising in many ways because blockchain, we think that we understand incentives and then you come out with something like this and it's like, okay, well, the reality is that I think the operating assumption, if you go as back as a white paper, Bitcoin is like people act in their self-best interest. That should always be the operating assumption. That's the reality of things. And it's hard to understand Or even like take an opinion of like the, the ulterior or the deep motives of why people like tech. It's like that idea of like, oh, people are just here because they want to make money. And is that a bad thing? It's going to drive adoption. It's going to fund projects. I don't see a problem with that. Markets, like there was a time where I was really interested in politics, but then I came to the conclusion that the real impact happens in— you just got to be pro-market. Because the market is far more efficient to allocate resources and to coordinate. And you just have to be pro-market and as government light as possible because governments are just not very good coordination to coordinate and allocate resources. They're there to like provide security, tragedy of the commons, protect parks, taxation, mostly provide security. But when you have like failed states or you have like places where like What happened in California in 2 years, 3 years that I was living there, it just went from being this idyllic, like, best place in the world to like, holy shit, I need to get out of here. Yeah. Musk is now endorsing, um, Trump, which is a big impact, is now moving the headquarters of both X and SpaceX away from California to Texas, I believe. And that all just happened last week. Dominoes are falling. Why? Because I believe that there was a new law that was enacted in California that like they could take something effective, like they could take your kids away for some of this transgender stuff.

Um, but like it was that I think if a kid comes to the school and says I want to convert or something like that, then there's a now a law that just got signed in or is about to get signed in that says the school doesn't have to tell the parent or, or can't tell the parent or something like that.

Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So when you do that, if you're a politician, like putting aside whether that's right or wrong, think about the tax revenue that all of a sudden California lost and has been losing for the last couple of years and other states, like, and everyone's moving to Miami, like Ken Griffin moved from Chicago to Miami. Kit Griffin was like single-digit percentage of tax revenue for the state. Now he's buying $45 million dinosaurs. Kudos to him. Um, but you know what I mean? Like, that's a practical reality of things where like, if you have these policies, like, that's what I'm thinking. Like, say you're pro-crypto, that's going to bring more tax revenue because it's going to bring— ensure that businesses like Coinbase that have created so much employment continue to be built in America And I think that is the most important thing, particularly at a time where the budget is like, you know, not particularly sound. Yeah. So anyways, that's a little bit of a rant, but I think it's just, we ought to be practical and, you know, yeah. Like do you, if you disagree with things, I totally get it. I'm not, but I go back to this idea, like political dynamics can just are— have become extreme, right? You need to put one name on the ballot, and that— you can't choose 50% Trump and 50%— I mean, it's no politics. You need to make— it's that unfortunate trade-off that you always have had to make. Yeah. Good pod, sir. Yeah, anything else?

No. Blockworks is hiring. We got some open roles, so if people like the pod, you should come work at Blockworks. Work, come work with Soundtune. We actually have a head of pod— we have a head of podcast ops role.

Oh, really? Oh yeah, I mentioned, I saw that in your update, by the way.

Yeah, director of podcast operations. Uh, so here are the open roles. We have a director of podcasts, someone to like basically run the P&L of the, of the podcast network and run all the operations. We have a podcast host role for the Lightspeed podcast. We have 3 engineering roles open, uh, senior backend engineer, senior data engineer. And then another senior backend engineer for more data products. Uh, we have an event operations role, a senior research data analyst, and then actually a director of sales, uh, role. So someone to lead the media and ad sales, uh, team, which is a 9-person team, 7 sellers and 2 account managers today.

Nice. So we tweeted about what other people want to listen. I'm just going through the list. I think we covered a lot of it. Meme coins, we covered. DeFi narrative to some extent and why that could go up.

Oh, I have a thing, Santi. So one thing Santi and I've been talking about that I'd love the listeners' take on is we both want to cover more companies that are doing interesting things that haven't been seen before in crypto, because it really does feel like there's this like kind of big infrastructure fatigue and just like kind of infra exhaustion and like, what can crypto really do? So a company like that would be— so we were talking about having SkyTrade on. So Santi and I both invested in this air rights company called SkyTrade, but they're pre-seed, right? Like, so they're pre-seed company and they're, and they're basically creating the— there's an air, like the air rights marketplace, bringing it on-chain. So my pro for doing that episode on Empire is I think it's a really, really, really interesting use case that literally nobody's talking about. Also, I think that like just air rights in general, crypto side, are very interesting and not many people know about them. The counter is you bring on that guest, it's like, wait, this is some pre-seed company that like Jason Yanowitz just invested in. So I think I'd like to bring on some of those guests. But if people think like, hey, I don't want to listen to these people, I'd love for you guys to DM us or post, post on Twitter and tag us and let us know if you want to see more of those or less of those.

Yeah, it'd be great. I mean, historically, we've done some of that. We've tried to skew more to more repeat guests that people tend to enjoy talking about. What's kind of most interesting to most people, but it would be useful. I, I, the way I've initially, when you and I thought, thought, talked about Empire and what direction we wanted to take, is there is some element of getting ahead of narratives, bringing on people that are going to talk about things that they're building that proves that crypto is meaningful, that it touches real world and impact, can impact your life, more so telling you things that you haven't seen yet that are going to become important in 6 months or in a year. And I think we've done that to some extent. Of course, we can't cover it all. But yeah, I tend to think it's super interesting. Something like Skytree is a perfect example, by the way. I can't tell you how many, how many people reached out like, wow, this sounds super interesting.

More people than I ever have.

It has been the company that I've gotten the most amount of inbounds from funds being like, can I get an intro?

Because it sounds super interesting. Same with me. Jonathan was like, oh my God, a lot of investor intros. I was like, I've never had so many.

I made Made like 5 investor intros to Jonathan.

Yeah, I made one last night and they said, uh, Santi already made this one. So I said, all right, fine. Uh, we got huge breaking news to wrap this podcast, which is Trump to announce a USA Bitcoin strategic reserve in Nashville.

Really? No. Is it?

I'll show you this. I mean, this is from this random guy named Dennis Porter. Huge breaking. Trump announced sources. Sauces.

He should have capitalized sources. P.S.

This is not a joke. My sources are credible.

Yeah, it's like that, uh, Paul Graham post, like, some very high people I know cautioned you to hold Bitcoin.

Yeah, yeah. No, so I actually could see— so I know, so David Bailey, so David Bailey is Trump's main Bitcoin advisor, and David Bailey runs Bitcoin Magazine, which is how they got Trump as a keynote speaker for the Bitcoin conference. I actually could see Trump saying that they're doing a Bitcoin reserve, but then, which would be like obviously ridiculously bullish. I don't think they'd probably follow through on it, but I would say non-zero chance that he actually says that.

So always thinking probabilities. And yeah, there's a lot of things that I didn't have in my bingo card. So Truly. Uh, just to round out the discussion, Howard Marks, which I love, uh, him and Sandrock Miller, probably my favorite two investors, and Soros. He came out with a, uh, good post today or yesterday, and I listened to it today. Um, very nice. People should go read it.

Super shorter. Nice. Yeah, nice. Um, the thing we didn't talk on— talk about— ETH ETF comes next week.

So like 3 days we'll have ETFs. Yeah, just As a parting thought, ladies and gentlemen. Yeah. So who would've thought that this would just be a brushed over comment at the end of the pod? Oh, the ETH ETF is coming. Side note. So just a side note, footnote.

Appreciate you guys listening.

Hope everyone's listening from some beach, running, getting some exercise in, some sun. And yeah, enjoying touching the ground.

To the listener who said, can you stop sipping your drink and chewing ice? Like, what the fuck? You don't know how annoying it is to listeners. I will let you know. I did not chew a single piece of ice and only took 3 sips of my coffee today. So you are welcome. You are welcome.

Yeah, seriously, I also saw that. I'm like, I'm here to serve you. No ice. Sorry for the slurping. Anyways, thanks everyone for listening. We'll see you next week.

See you next week. Cheers, folks. Cheers. Thanks again to Sei for sponsoring this episode. There are a ton of reasons to build on Sei. Reach out to me if you'd like to get in touch with their team. But if you're itching to get started building or using the ecosystem, head over to say.io to get started and be sure to let them know that we sent you.