Mike Dudas on Uptober and the Continued Bull Market

I like DeFi because it's composable, and I'd rather invest in that than in like stablecoin orchestration, even though it's super valuable to the world. And I'm much more excited about like what new business model doesn't exist today, um, that's, you know, going to be worth billions in 5 years.

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Hey, hey, I appreciate it. Excited to be here, guys.

Yeah, of course. Maybe we can start. Dudas, you're on a historic run. Actually, you got brought up at a dinner I was at the other day saying, uh, they said Dudas is on a historic run. Six Man's killing it. So you got Plasma, you got Pump Fun. How are we feeling these days?

Yeah, so we're, we're feeling good. So what's really exciting is the things that we're investing in now, uh, feel like truly like long-term sustainable products that I think in 5 years mainstream folks will be using. Uh, they're going to start using now and are using them now, but I think we can grow and we're moving away at sort of the app layer. So in 2017, '18, we had this like ICO phase where the things that were offered were like these grand, you know, layer 1 tokens and things like Dentacoin and just ideas. They were just pure financialism, right? The next cycle was like extremely speculative in terms of, you know, what assets were being offered. You know, we had kind of like NFTs and We had basically everything just focused around trading speculation, but it was kind of like wrapped in these big terms and ideas like Web3, but the underlying products just never existed and everything was sort of funded and bought and speculated on before anything existed. What is exciting about this cycle is that you finally have products that are actually generating revenue. And then frankly, using that revenue to benefit token holders economically. And so that is like the default, like the top apps, like Hyperliquid, like Pump, you know, they're different things. One is perps and one is sort of like meme coins and creator economy and attention economy. But there's real revenue, real attention and economics driving the performance of the token. So we finally have like tokens that do something.

Mike, I guess a question. Look, full disclosure, I'm an investor in your fund. So for people that weren't aware of it, but like if you were to go back and see the initial pitch deck of what Six Man Ventures was going to do and invest in, would that check out to what you guys have been doing? Or is it more of, look, you've just had phenomenal success in picking the right projects and you've morphed the thesis because the times change and you see that opportunity.

Yeah, so it's funny because now I'm saying it like it was obvious and everything in the last second, but I actually think like in our deck for the last fund, which we raised in 2022, was like something about Web3. What we really meant though was crypto application layer. So I actually think our website, which we haven't updated in like 18 or 24 months, still says like Web3 on it. I mean, it's embarrassing actually if you brought it up. It's like purple and it has a CryptoPunk on it. I don't know, it's kind of cool and it's like our personality, but Ultimately, what it boils down to is we weren't entirely certain what applications would exist in crypto, just as kind of like when the mobile phone finally like took off and hit critical mass. It was sort of unclear how the App Store would be used and what apps would, would burgeon and explode, but it was just clear that this is what people are using. You know, went from like 100% desktop to like 40% desktop usage in just a few years. You know, everybody had a phone and an internet connection. They got Uber, Airbnb, and all these other amazing things. Amazon became just even more magical. That is now starting to happen in crypto as these L1s and L2s become performant. So we knew we were going to invest in the app layer. That was right. The apps we started investing in— Yeah, it was the worst year of this fund or of our 4 years investing as a firm though, because basically we were looking at, we were thinking of the apps as those kind of like speculative NFT projects and things like that. Unfortunately, After the reset post-FTX, you saw kind of from the bottom, the really, really like mission-driven people who wanted to create real products stick around. And those are the folks who built the cool stuff we're seeing now.

If I were to characterize the success that you've had is because you actually use this stuff. I mean, you do LinkDAO, which, you know, you were very involved in the NFT stuff and it just pays to be close to the metal and understanding what's going on. Like you were, I think you were one of the creators or very involved in the core team of Bonq. Which was essential for the resurgence of the Solana community post-FTX. And so I think that's, look, I totally get it. Like you have to be sufficiently general in crypto to pay attention where the puck is going because we're so early with this technology, like circa early first smartphone iPhone moment. And you're like, the internet's not that great yet, but there's cool apps being built. And so yeah.

That's exactly right. So I tend to know that if it's something I'm using, you know, if it gets to the level where like I get excited about it, my instincts like over 7, 8 years have been pretty good about what crypto applications people are going to use. So like, you know, to your point, I'm actually stunned by the way, how many investors like literally don't have money on chain. And I have it, you know, all over the place, right? On Solana, on L2s, you know, Hyperliquid. And you know, figuring it out and just start investing actually in punk strategy. Again, none of this is financial advice, but I'm experimenting and it's just having a lot of fun again, which is partially, you know, we decided to chat today because I'm so bullish that we're not near the top and it's because I'm finding new and interesting things to do on chain right now and loving it across a bunch of different areas.

Before we go there, I want to get your thoughts on something because look, being, early, too early is indistinguishable from being wrong. Now you've been very right this cycle and you and I made investments like STEPN for instance, is an example that I want to go to because as much as Pump is working extremely well right now and look, it's had its ups and downs, but from, you know, it's executing hyper liquid executing some other consumer projects executing. But like the evolution of STEPN was I was running the New York Marathon one year and everyone had like, you could see it in the expo, like STEPN, STEPN, 'cause the rewards were super high and And then of course the supply sinks were not there, there. And so the project in its own right, I think, has been successful. It's just how do we transition this conversation into how do we, to what degree of conviction do you have that it's not going to do that same evolution where everything in crypto has just been tied to the market cycle and prices and like how do we break that self-referential dynamic? Or are we going to see a huge drawdown of these tokens and then we're going to say the technology sucks again?

Yeah, good question. So look, actually somebody tweeted yesterday about like narratives in crypto move so fast and, you know, be careful, make sure you get in and out of, uh, thing, in and out of things really quickly. And like, yeah, that's like true for the majority of things in crypto, but like there's a little Jeff Bezos quote like, hey, what's going to be the same in 10 years? Like those are the areas where I want to invest and, you know, Basically, we look for things now, 'cause I was investor in Stepin, I love it. I love it. I was investor in Stepin along with you and it, you know, when we invested, the idea seemed like something that would be durable. And actually, I think you're also an investor in Moonwalk Fitness, which I think has a much more sustainable model. We're investors in Sleepigotchi, which is basically, again, health and wellness related and tracks and gamifies it. So anyway, we're looking for folks who are building into areas and segments that we think will still exist in 5, 7, 10 years, and they want to stick around. So to get back to Pump, you know, basically the token meme coin launchpad was basically the wedge to a much, much broader long-term vision, which is, you know, look, we all kind of agree that more and more things are going to get tokenized over time. You're seeing it with everything from from real-world assets and, um, you know, to crypto assets, to stocks, you name it, right? I worked at Paxos for almost a year, and we believe equities, commodities, you name it, it's going to get tokenized. Well, the folks at Pump, um, and they're super native of this generation, right? They're, you know, in their very early 20s, you believe that there's this notion of, you know, that the creator economy and the attention and that like fandom and interacting with personalities is going to be represented through a token and through value. And so the reason I think Pump has a chance and a pretty good chance to be sustainable is that again, they just didn't view it as like, hey, it's a token launchpad and it's always going to be meme coins. These guys have now innovated to streaming, and I believe will continue to move into bigger and bigger areas of attention in terms of basically tokenizing that attention and allowing people to participate. And it's current form, by the way, it's extremely limited, right? Somebody streams, yeah, I can buy the token and the creator eats on the fees and volatility. Like if it just stays like that, I don't think that's super sustainable, but you can be confident that it's not. You'll get things like token-gated conversations. You're gonna get things like advertising coming, advertisers coming in, my guess would be in, you know, airdropping products or things to folks who, you know, hold the token or watch the streams. And you just kind of go from there and it gets bigger and broader. I think it is the first sort of sustainable big social product in crypto. But honestly, I'm not like, like I'm an investor. I'm not the founder for a reason. Like I don't have the very clear vision of what the next big innovative product and unlock will be on Pump or on most of our portfolio companies. I'm just confident that these folks who we talked to have been talking with a lot of people about How many of these nascent product projects are, you know, doing DApps? Well, the Pump guys like are getting begged by people, dozens of groups to do a dApp. And they're like, no, like we're not in here to make a, you know, $1 to $2 billion short term in the public equity markets. Like we want to be here in 10 or 20 years building out a generational, you know, social media attention company. And we're in the very, very early stages of that. Year and a half in.

So look, we've all heard the bull case for crypto as it relates to consumer, which is everything's an attention game. If you peel back, tokens can serve as better mechanisms to align contributors with the platform and in a more equitable way. So like if you're a creator, why would you go on Twitch and livestream when you can go on Pump and earn a more reasonable share of what your contribution is to these networks? Hasn't happened. We've had some flareups. I would say Pump is far along and I think it has a team to execute, but it begs the question for someone out there hearing this saying, we, these things have worked before. Like why would you reinvent the wheel? Like YouTube has distribution and, and all these platforms have distribution. It's so hard to displace social networks and change habits. Like do you think that price actually can work in you know, to the detriment of these platforms where creators just get super disillusioned with the price of their token? Because the reality is very few tokens actually break away.

Yeah, so it's a great question. And I don't think that the, um, I don't think that sort of call it the motion or the sort of playbook for sustainable creator token value appreciation has been cracked yet. And I think that's partially because the nature of the trader on Pump today is still very, very short-term oriented. It's primarily Sharps, and we haven't crossed the Rubicon to kind of like true fans feeling comfortable with tokens. In the bull case where this works, the reason it's better than YouTube is because I, as the fan, or I as the person who's excited about that personality, or it could be many personalities, it could be a brand, can participate in the upside. I can't do that on, you know, TikTok or YouTube. I can't really speculate on it. Um, but again, the, the sort of normal market participant and medium fan isn't there yet. What you're seeing, the ones that are really succeeding, um, Laura Shin just started, you know, streaming Unchained, which I thought was really cool. We're starting to move the Overton window on sort of what's acceptable and who can launch a token. I have an M. Dudas token. Again, no financial advice, but I just launched it. Um, frankly, it's like having a domain name. Like, I have my token, I have a domain name, you know, mikedudas.com. Like, I just want to make sure those are mine. Uh, but what Laura's doing is dabbling, right? So simulcasting, and she still can basically stream in all her other main channels. And so this is fairly low risk and additive, makes no promises to her audience. And, you know, if folks want to go in and sort of speculate, they can. And I think it will age well. Uh, but I think it's really early. There's going to be a lot of volatility. So the people who are doing it now, you have to have a pretty high tolerance for kind of like FUD and people talking about and getting in your DMs and saying, when are you streaming? And when are you doing this? So. We need to move forward. So I think things will develop. I think what's going to happen is for, I'll just give you one example. Um, there's a lot of individual token volatility today. I wouldn't be surprised if you start to see like tokenized ETFs of, you know, certain creator segments, things like that to perhaps reduce the volatility of individual creator tokens. So I think it's like there will be ETFs of these things, um, is my macro point. And we need to reduce volatility for this stuff to work.

Mike, maybe, um, taking us, zooming out from that a little bit. What do you think? I mean, for a fund to really hit it in a cycle, you need like one big winner, but you guys have had, I think, two big winners this cycle, which is Pump. And, um, I think, were you guys early investors in Plasma?

Yes.

Yeah. So, so invested in this.

How do you think about like, like, A, how did you find these two and how did you get the conviction? And then B, like, you know, Paul and then like Noah and the team and Alon, like, So these are all like pretty young founders. Um, how did you like, what similarities do you see between them? Like what, what, what's made Plasma and Pump do so well, would you say?

Yeah, good question. So what's interesting is they were sourced very differently. So, uh, Pump, so basically everything is sourced, almost all of our best investments are sourced by folks coming to me. We're not one of those like mega firms like Sequoia that goes out and has scouts and has a bunch of people and scours the earth and literally talks to every startup on earth. We just don't have that infrastructure. And then kind of like pulls back in and tries to select down and pick the top couple. What we try to do is put our personalities, our thoughts, and how we support the founders and companies and protocols we invest in out into the world. And then we have, we hope that, you know, basically either directly or via our networks, that kind of brings back folks who are building applications in the area that it's clear that we invest in. So that's what happened with both of these, but in very different ways. So there's the director route. Noah from Pump, you know, basically had seen me tweeting about Bonk and about meme coins. I was one of the few VCs who have embraced them, like helped launch Bonk many years ago at the Solana bottom. So he was impressed with that. He cold DM'd a lot of VCs, but I was one of the few who like responded. We grokked it really quickly. All of our partners used it. He didn't have a deck, he didn't have anything. We just launched, each one of us like launched a token and we were like, oh my God, like people are buying this. I'm sure on the backend, like Alan was like, you know, hey guys, like buy this token, like, you know, make the VC excited. But honestly it worked. It was just sort of magical.

Okay. With, so they didn't, they didn't have a deck or anything. They were just like, here's the vision.

Exactly. That's exactly right. And I asked for one. And so And I'll get to, you asked like, what's the common theme? The common theme, by the way, with all these founders is they're, they're extremely kind of like certain and confident in their perspective of what the world should look like in the future. And they tend to be doing things that you're just like shocked that, uh, I like, if I was in their shoes at the given age, 20, 21, 24, like I just would not have the aura, presence, confidence, um, and clarity to do those things. And, you know, crypto is out there on the edge where there's frankly, in most areas, there's just no expert. Hasn't been around long enough. So you're literally creating the, the knowledge base and expertise as you go. And I think both of these projects, again, Plasma's much earlier in terms of being— it just went publicly live. Um, but with Paul, as I mentioned, so we were fortunate enough that, um, a guy named Marius Bennett at Caratage introduced the deal to us. He's a friend and an LP. In our fund, and we had actually introduced him to Pump. So, you know, basically we've created this good network of sharing interesting opportunities. And, you know, he knew that we were interested in stablecoins. So the good thing is, as Santi was saying earlier, it's one thing to use the chain, but we've actually founded companies, our partners, and we've worked in the industry. So, you know, I'd worked at Paxos, my partner Carl had. We know a lot about stablecoins, regulated stablecoins. In the landscape. So anyway, we were introduced to Paul and, you know, we basically begged, scratched, and clawed to persuade him to take a little bit of our money. And he was kind enough to do so. And then, you know, the key here is the similarities. As I said, it's just fascinating. And we're going to use these two founders. Uh, they kind of like ask, they don't ask us virtually anything on like product or product direction. They're just doing things and then we'll just selectively say, hey, can you help me with this? Or I need this, or what's a quick, what's your quick take on this? We've, we've got our perspective, but you know, and then when I give them an idea, they reject it 4 out of 5 times. Like that's what you, honestly, it's a pretty good signal. Um, so. So that's one commonality I see.

As it relates to like maybe some of the investments that haven't really worked out, and look, you've been around the space for such a long time on the operator investor seat. What are some of the things that you've passed on or made investments on said, yeah, like that was a big mess for us. And is there like a general archetype framework that you now have adapted based on those learnings?

Yeah. So I would say the, the, okay, there's one like big one, which is just, you know, people who talk more about names and, you know, like credibilities and like labels and things like that than about like a passion for the product, like that they're working on, like a deep, deep, deep one. So you want somebody who's so deep in the thing that they do. So we're invested in something called Football.fun and the founder, you know, was a SoRare whale. He loves the sport of soccer/football and, you know, just that's all he could care about and talked about, you know, on the call and it was clear he lived, breathed. And then the second one is putting people around you, not being afraid to put people around you who are better than you at specific things. So I think a lot of Founders get bad advice where it's like the founder needs to do everything and you need to be like, you need to figure out like every single thing. Crypto is just not possible. There's like too many things that you need to be good at for any one individual. So the founders that, um, that we've seen be unsuccessful tend to like stay in the like really muck details of everything too long versus like putting really talented folks around them. If somebody to focus on token economics, somebody to focus on Um, you know, social and community. Uh, and then, you know, the third is just like failure to ship. Like you have to be default shipping. Uh, we've noticed a correlation between sort of complaints about a product, FUD, number of support tickets, and like positive likelihood to succeed. Okay. Um, and by the way, that's true not only of the consumer-facing stuff, but also on B2B. It's been really exciting. We have, you know, portfolio company Dakota, which is effectively, you know, stablecoin-enabled business banking. And so one, Ryan, the CEO, you know, he came from Coinbase Custody. He's very, like, he's a very serious person, like the other two founders I mentioned earlier. He will listen to our ideas, but he has a very clear vision of what he believes should exist in the market and will exist in the market, executes against it relentlessly. Uh, and then, you know, basically is not afraid to kind of like really sell features that maybe are 4 to 6 weeks out. I don't mean like publicly market them, but just to tell a customer, I'm going to take you on and we're going to be uncomfortable for a bit, a little period of time, and then we're going to wow you. And that keeps happening over and over again. And you, you sort of ladder up over multiple quarters or years. That's very different than folks who are like, I need to wait until this thing's absolutely perfect to ship. We have a few of those and honestly you just, you miss cycles, you run outta money, the winds change. Crypto moves too fast for that.

Yeah. Ship, ship fast, iterate faster. Yeah.

And you don't get dinged very much in this industry as long as you're continuously improving.

Yeah.

People just want you to stick around. They want to hear from you. They want to see the blood, sweat, and tears, the innovation, the creativity, and that you're aligned with them.

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Yeah, I mean, I can think of countless of successful now top 10 projects that started off very differently and pivoted multiple times. And they're there, you know, and so I guess like, let's transition a little bit to what everyone wants to talk about, which is you made a pretty bold statement on Twitter. It says, hey, listen, we are nowhere near the top and we got a lot more room to grow in this cycle. Give us your insight, like what led you to think that? And let's go into that.

So basically, I think that was over last weekend and, you know, hey, we're off to a nice start in Q4 and the week or 5 days since. You know, Bitcoin up $10,000, Solana up like 15% since then. But bottom line is I was super confused about why I was hearing such disillusionment from so many folks, you know, in the crypto sphere, in my private groups, sort of in public on Twitter, you know, maybe exhaustion from the conference cycle. I think part of it is that, you know, people have just been doing like perpetual motion for 18 months on like not important stuff a lot of people have, like trading, like farming, like doing the next meta, but actually like missing the real sort of like quote unquote insiders and public speak, you know, speakers just actually missing how, you know, some of these builders that we've been talking about, how much progress they've been making. Uh, it's like that iceberg thing, you know, under the water. Okay. Um, so, you know, you've seen an entirely new stablecoin mechanism in Athena, for example, be introduced and grow across multiple ecosystems to, I think, something like $15 to $17 billion in TVL. And it feels like the sky is the limit there, right? So you see that in stablecoins. You see Stripe building out a really momentous stablecoin business. You can see Tether and Circle and other stablecoin issuance increasing dramatically. We're closing, I think, on $300 billion now. You see on-chain DeFi vaults growing at like record pace. Our portfolio company Midas just, you know, I think it's closing in a billion five in TVL and it was below 100, you know, 6, 9 months ago. You see the DApps, you know, taking in more and more capital, you know, on the Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana front. I think as you get down the asset list, I get a little more nervous, but, you know, positive flows. And the regulatory environment is getting significantly better. You know, we have the Genius Act that was passed and they're working on a market structure bill. The president himself has like, you know, God knows how many crypto businesses at this point and is talking about it. Anyway, point is there was a massive disconnect between the sort of like exhausted, sort of burnt out commentator and the actual like pretty clear empirical market realities. Also, the stock market has been moving up and people are getting a little, you know, too short-term, like, why isn't crypto moving alongside it? Uh, but again, all of the things I'm talking about, like fundamentals across multiple chains, amount of value on-chain, uh, use cases that we've been talking about for a long time, like, you know, on-chain yield and DeFi vaults, stablecoins, Uh, we talked about Pump and social, you know, BASE has a really cool emerging, uh, social ecosystem, you know, Hyperliquid may be building out like the first true, you know, massive, you know, on-chain sex-like performance, uh, ecosystem where you have all the financial products of a centralized exchange. Uh, it's just been really exciting to see. I just can't imagine feeling bearish. Like the only reason, the only way that you could feel bearish in that environment is to simply say that the price of crypto assets will simply forever be tethered to sentiment and traders, a select small group of traders' sentiment and feelings. And I just don't think that's true. I think we have a number of liquid funds. As I said, we have a lot of inflow. To the bigger assets from, you know, longer-term institutional allocators. And it's just pretty clear that the flows we're getting have a longer-term horizon than that core trader who's moved and, you know, basically created the crypto markets for the last decade.

Mike, do you think that we will still see cycles? And you're just saying we're not at the top of the cycle yet, or you're like, look, this is just going to be 2004 of the internet on, you didn't really have cycles anymore. You just had like slowly upward growth for 20 years in a row.

Yeah. So I just, by virtue of how crypto is, it's going to, my guess is we're going to look back at some point in time, you know, whether it's the second half of 2026, whether it's 2027, and we're going to, and, and, you know, people who say we're, we, we don't have cycles anymore. you know, the other folks will say, haha, like you were wrong, look at it. Um, but meaning at some point we'll probably have a pretty big drawdown from a pretty high peak. And so, but we're moving so much more money now is what I would say. So meaning like we're at a $4 trillion plus, you know, total, um, asset class value. Like I do think we're going to spike up. Pretty hard here, like over the next 3 to 6 months.

So when do you think about taking some profits? If this is the—

personally or as a fund?

Um, I guess both.

So, you know, it's, it's interesting. Maybe I should just explain the dynamics here, um, because I think it's important for folks to understand fund or VC obligations. So effectively, you know, I'm a venture capitalist. As a firm, you know, people give us money and then we go invest it into companies, protocols, equity, and tokens. And so to some extent, we do have an obligation to, or we do have an obligation to return capital to the folks who invest in our fund. They're called our LPs, our limited partners. So we will typically, and most VC firms will typically, you know, sell at kind of like regular intervals and prices over a period of years. And it's different than sort of trying to time the top of a cycle. I mean, obviously you want higher asset prices that you sell at versus lower, but you're generally looking to return capital to your LPs. It's something that they value. So looking ahead, let's just say we were going to, 2x in aggregate from here on the total size of the crypto asset class, we wouldn't be looking to, you know, basically top tick that 0.2x from here. We would be looking on positions that are liquid to sort of like exit in intervals, you know, as we move from here towards that top. That's kind of how I'm approaching it.

Yeah. Because I'm basically saying, how do you balance two truths in your head? One is that you love pump. And your very long pump, and the other is that you have LPs who are like, hey Mike, you're up like 100x on this thing. Can we, can we get a little money back?

Yeah, so it's a great question. You have to have a conversation with the founders. One, you have to understand your LP base. I just kind of explained what they want to see liquidity. But two, you have to understand, you have to talk with the founders and understand what they're optimizing for. And, uh, too many, and I think there's been a movement towards investors who do communicate with the founders they invest in about, you know, their plans on, you know, kind of like distributing some of the assets of its tokens versus, you know, raising from like historically like funds that would dump like the minute every unlock occurred. So we're not that type of fund and haven't been for more than 4 years. We hold from our first fund, you know, the vast majority of the tokens that we invested in in 2021, and many of them are liquid.

Okay.

Um, we've done distributions, the, the, but the reality is, uh, to your point, if you're up, you know, 250x on something like—

are you up 250x on Pump?

Um, so maybe. So the, the, the point is that the— you're going to get sued if, you know, those tokens were liquid and like, you don't try, like, and they're not. Okay. So it's like, This is a hype, this is a total theoretical, but like, you know, it'd be pretty hard to justify to somebody that you don't realize some value on that at some point. Yeah. But again, we believe long-term and like, I would imagine the pump guys who are really smart would say anytime you sell, you're going sort of, you're, you're net short us 'cause you're not as exposed as you were. And it's just a balance of explaining our business model.

Mike, let me make it easy for you 'cause I think like, I face this issue too. Like you have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize returns for your investors. In the same way that, and so, and that's it. Like you just need to be, have a very honest conversation. Like it is unrealistic to assume you're going to hold this thing forever. You are not a perpetual, like permanent capital vehicle, right? You have a life to your fund. And I think thinking out loud here though, I mean like, look, if you have like a couple of funds, say you're raising a new fund, private equity and venture. They get into trouble sometimes because they are now like contributing a portfolio company in one fund that is, or hasn't DPI'd and is, you know, 10 years in and hasn't returned capital. And so they contribute that to the next fund. So you're basically selling a portfolio company from Fund 1 to Fund 2, and it's not, it's not looked upon nicely. Is there a version of this world with tokens being liquid where you could say, hey, listen, we're going to sell into the open market or OTC this in a graceful way, exit as gracefully as possible. And we'll do that. And then look, we have fund 2 that's maybe liquid and has a discretion to buy liquid tokens. So we might buy that. Like, is that something that computes? Is it possible? Is there a conflict of interest? Like, just kind of curious if that's something you guys have thought through.

Yeah. So we, we don't specialize in that. There are funds that do a version of that where they have venture funds and hedge funds And so I candidly, I think an easier way to do to— so there's a middle road, which is actually distributing in kind. So distributing the token asset to your LPs as opposed to distributing, you know, selling and distributing cash. And so some of the best investors in crypto who have really outsized positions relative to their fund size have historically distributed in kind. And so basically you crystallize the value, you send the tokens to your LPs, and then they can make an individual decision on whether to sell themselves and incur tax.

Yeah. And by the way, fairly common in venture too. I think like for some funds like Benchmark, like they distributed Uber stock, which is a huge, huge win for them. It's like, guys, do what you will with that. And I think, yeah, that makes sense.

Yep.

Yeah. Yeah.

Mike, is there, um, so what, what are the areas right now that you guys are still deploying into? Um, because you've got— and maybe one area that I'd be curious about, uh, and how you guys have played it or invested in is prediction markets. Um, because it seems like you guys kind of have perps covered and meme coins covered and stablecoins covered, and— but like, I don't really know how you guys have thought about the prediction market space. Yep.

So, um, we have made one prediction markets investment this year, uh, and what's interesting— so if you just look, so we're, we're— we do believe, like many other people do, that prediction markets will be a very large sector over time. It's, you know, look, calling them prediction markets is somewhat of a nice way of just expanding on what they really are, which is like, they're not that different from effectively betting, right? And we're just now like betting on more, more things. You know, maybe we're betting on events versus betting on, you know, sports, but that clearly is a business model that works. And, you know, because of crypto and maybe regulatory arbitrage, You can do things in offshore structures to now create new and interesting markets. So we think that's interesting and going to become very large. The existing market is pretty dominated by Kalshi and Polymarket. I think Robinhood's now getting in the market. There's going to be big players here. So our general belief is that you're going to have to go sort of out on the risk spectrum somewhat if you're investing in new businesses today in the quote-unquote prediction market space. So, you know, we've invested, lent around in to one who we haven't announced yet, but they're doing two things. One is basically AI or individual, like I can create a market. Okay. And there are a few public entities doing this now, ones that are already out there, like Myriad Markets, where like you can create your own markets. And then they're adding in leverage as well, which is really complex, really hard to make work, but if it does, you go from kind of like that binary outcome where, you know, it's hard to, to really get like really significant multiples and reasonable things to, if I believe in something, I can sort of add in leverage. So that's one area. We're looking at one other prediction markets deal right now. So yes, like we're doing, we're investing there. We think it's interesting. The one we're looking at now is very focused on like short-dated financial markets, right? So like zero-day options and shorter. And so bullish. Uh, and you know, we recently did an investment into Bulk, which is launching in November, bulk.trade. Uh, it's a Burp DEX on Solana. We just, I just fundamentally believe—

Solana responds to Hyperliquid.

Yeah, there's a bunch of like, I mean, Drift exists and, and Bullet, but like, it just makes sense that Solana, like, I'm as bullish as I've ever been on it and it's going to grow and there's a bunch of great applications and there's more every day and it's the most used blockchain, like If there's a really good Perp DEX there, people are going to use it. They just haven't had a really highly performant one with thick liquidity, great performance, et cetera. That should, I believe, happen over the next 6 months. And it's much better to have, you know, all of your different activities in one place versus having to bridge to, you know, 4 different chains to do this, to do this.

So can we double-click on that investment? Because I want to— we talked about this in the last pod, but What did Solana get wrong or didn't do and Hyperliquid stepped in? 'Cause like Hyperliquid has been all the talk this cycle. Why haven't, and maybe you can pick on specific projects or reasons why at the infrastructure layer or at the individual project layer, like something like Drift just hasn't really taken off because it makes all the sense in the world in a venue like Solana. I'm just kind of curious what has Solana not gone And what is uniquely enabled by this new project that you invested in?

Yeah, so first of all, I think culturally, you know, Solana was still, Solana DeFi has had, I believe, like a hangover from, you know, Sam Coins and, and FTX and the, you know, it was the Macalino brothers who had like 9 projects. It just, there was a lot of short-termism in Solana DeFi in that 2021, '22 era. That made it so that I don't even think Solana had a chance in 2023, '24 when Jeff was building Hyperliquid. Like even if an entrepreneur of that caliber had built something similar in Solana, it probably would've been difficult to bring in the traders, many of whom had just gotten wrecked on FTX and had like their, you know what I mean? It just had that association. So culturally it wasn't the right time. And so I wouldn't say like Solana got it wrong, but, and then, you know, the existing products were trying to do a lot like right on the L1. And I'm not a big perp trader, so I'm not the perfect person. My partner Carl knows the market and our liquid investor Bobby know the liquid, know the market and the products significantly better than I do and led that deal. But what I will say is everything I've heard from folks is that the existing perps products on Solana historically were pretty bad and not necessarily all of their own volition. They were trying to do things in the L1 that you simply like couldn't do in a clean way. And so people would get like tons of slippage on their positions. They'd get liquidated when they maybe didn't think they should. Like you would just do wonky things when you tried to enter and exit positions. And so, Bulk is, you're taking a new architecture where a lot of sort of like the matching, a lot of things are happening, not directly on the L1, but the assets always remain there. Okay. So the value always remain there. And the, a lot of the matching logic happens not on an L2 or an extension or anything like that, but they actually have an environment. Basically that is tied to Solana validators. So it is distributed and decentralized that allows them to achieve higher performance on some of the really, really complex things that they need to do. But again, the assets always sit in the L1. You don't need to bridge them like you do in other architectures, and they're not constrained by the latency of the L1. Yeah. If you have my partner Carl on, he can explain it a little better. But the point is, I think culturally it's the right time. There's significant activity on-chain and people are now exploring architectures that it would've been difficult to get through 18 months ago. And so it's pretty clear, like there are perps traded on numerous venues that are centralized. It's pretty clear now there are multiple on-chain venues with Lighter and Aster. There's just gonna be one that's gonna be large on Solana, at least one. So Um, it's a, but it's still a venture bet, right? Like there's a lot of companies going after, um, protocols going after the prize here.

Yeah. I know we want to go to something else, but before we go there, um, what is the, just double-clicking on the Solana DeFi ecosystem. Look, you just said that you, you've been as bullish as ever on Solana. Um, I think the bullishness in the timeline has subsided a bit and I think price action has sort of been muted and you kind of see this and it's normal. Um, Curious, is there still an overhang? Are you seeing more and more teams, like there's the Alliance DAO report, there's the Electric Capital report talks about developer ecosystems and interests of teams. From your vantage point, are you observing something different? Are teams still very excited to go build on Solana or are there other ecosystems that you think have just gained more market share, you know, as of late?

Yeah, so this gets to my point of, the timeline not really being representative of what's kind of happening, you know, under the water, like the iceberg under the water part. So the prediction market protocol we invested in is building on Solana. Bulk's building on Solana. We've looked at a lot of other exciting teams. So there's plenty of interesting stuff like stablecoin issuance. Solana is increasing dramatically, just a couple billion in the last month or two. Um, Kamino is like breaking out. There are a bunch of other protocols. Drift, Drift is, you know, seeing significantly higher open interest. Um, so there's definitely, there are things happening in DeFi on-chain. Jupiter has a bunch of exciting products that are growing rapidly. So there's a lot happening even while meme coin, you know, volume and trading volume is down. There's other things. The share of non-meme coin, uh, volume on Solana has increased significantly over the last couple of months. Uh, but it's just not the biggest story right now, right? The biggest stories are, you know, CZ fighting Hyperliquid, and that's per— that's fine because it's not stopping other, like, the actual folks building from their roadmaps. And what you're going to see is, again, Solana, the token's doing well because, like, there are so many interesting folks building to improve from the base layer, you know, all the way up to the application layer. So, uh, but it's not going to be the only ecosystem. So we've gotten— we're never the first, by the way, into a new ecosystem. We weren't the first into Solana. We weren't seed investors. We came in when the app layer started to develop, you know, Hyperliquid. We've started to invest now, like, you know, we bought some Hype and, you know, we're looking at private companies.

Is Hyperliquid the second most active ecosystem from the app layer that you want to invest in right now?

I would say yes, it's up there with Base is also, you know, in the conversation. Yeah, so those are kind of the 3 that we're looking at the most. Solana, uh, Hyperliquid.

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Yeah.

So I've noticed, um, and people have commented on this, not just me, uh, so I won't talk about any specific project, but there have been a couple really high-profile, uh, token launches recently where, uh, you know, I remember when like Trump Coin launched and that was a meme coin and people joked about like 90% to the team, right? Um, but it was always kind of like, there's always sort of the de facto structure that if you launched like a real coin, and I'm using that with air quotes, if you launch a real coin, well, hey, there's no reason to launch a coin unless like you're giving some to the community and there's going to be like participation and governance and ownership and things of that nature. And you do that through a mixture of airdrops or, you know, long-term incentives and community allocations. So you would, you would. So we were seeing that with most token launches. Until I would say like maybe midpoint of this year. And the biggest shift that I've seen in the last couple months is an increase in the number of launches where, you know, there's basically no community bucket, no airdrop, and where— or the airdrop is on a percentage basis pretty low. It seems big because there's a lot of shenanigans going on around ensuring that like the launch FDV of the network is really, really high. And so we've seen, you know, a decent number of those, but what it's starting to look like is more a creep up in tokens being allocated to insiders. So, you know, team through, you know, various different buckets and then, you know, investors. But candidly, I haven't even seen the investor bucket tick up that much. It kind of held constant. So it just seems like teams are finding more creative ways.

And is this a good, is this a commentary on the market or is it a commentary that this is a good, good or bad development?

It's, uh, we'll see. I think that, you know, the reason I was like, I like to pump sold tokens in the market, right? Sold like 30% of the supply to people, right? I thought like, so that there's actual distribution of that token amongst people who want it versus just insiders. Uh, I don't think it's a positive development in balance. My guess is it does not end well in the future. The, the interesting thing is it makes things look more like securities. Okay. So it's like, it's just, it's not a decentralized network if, you know, only 10% or 5% of the float is going to be in like external people, um, participating in the network. And if there's just not like a really clear way to give them substantial ownership of the network— and I think you, you've started to see folks getting like no action letters from the SEC before they launch your tokens. You don't need to do that unless you have some fear that your token's a security. So I don't know, I think it's something I'm going to keep a really close eye on.

Did, did you guys follow Flying Tulip? Andre's thing?

We did. Yeah, I took one pitch call. I think it's really interesting. It's outside of our mandate just from an evaluation perspective, but it, it is interesting. It helps to align, you know, folks who are putting in capital with everybody else in the network.

Yeah, maybe I'll shed a little bit of context on this for people who saw, um, Andre, who started both Fantom and Sonic, I think, um, and, and Yearn, by the way. Oh, and Yearn, and obviously Yearn. Yeah, of course.

And, and Wynter.

And, uh, yeah, you had like 9 projects so far.

Yeah, like 9 projects.

Yeah.

Um, so anyways, there's a bit, there's a big announcement. Flying Tulip is Andre's new thing and he raised a quote unquote $200 million seed round. And the reason I put quotes on that is, um, I think people maybe didn't read the fine, the fine text or maybe, maybe people just didn't understand what this raise actually was. So basically what, uh, the way that they raised this, I thought was pretty interesting, um, where investors contribute. Stablecoins, or I think stablecoins or ETH, and the capital goes into a protocol treasury and there's no, no lockups, no team allocation, nothing like that. Every token that's issued to an investor is actually fully backed by the collateral that the investor contributes. But the twist is that every Flying Tulip token— and it's funny to just— the name is a funny name, so good on Andre, but every, every token comes with a perpetual put. So what this means is you can actually, if you're an investor and do this, correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think you can return your tokens and get your original capital back at any point in time, right? No expiration, nothing like that. And if you exercise the put, your tokens actually get burned, which means the supply shrinks and no one else has to do anything. You can just, you can do this at any point in time if you're an investor. Um, uh, the catch is that if you're an investor, you're actually giving up What you're giving up as an investor is the ability to— is basically the opportunity cost of that capital. It's the ability to— if Mike, if Dudas put in $1 million into Flying Tulip, he's not earning anything on that, on that million dollars, right? It's, it's treated kind of like an investment. Whereas if he was farming that in DeFi, maybe he could get 15%. So really the investment is the opportunity cost of your capital. It's not the principal. So it makes it, it's not really a $200 million fundraise. It's $200 million got contributed into the protocol treasury of Flying Tulip. And then they are going to, the team doesn't actually get to touch those tokens is the way I understand it. Their upside to run the business only comes as a share of the protocol revenue, which are the fees that the $200 million is spitting off. Um, so I don't know, eh, Mike, hopefully I did that justice, but But B, I'm just curious what you think of this. Like, this is very interesting fundraising mechanism.

Yeah. So I, we, we took a quick meeting and I, I've only sort of read the headlines.

Yeah.

But that to me is a more sort of honest and open way to raise capital than many of the things, you know, that I've seen in the, like, I like that you have to put that the investors have to sort of put money in at a full value in a protocol they believe in. And then, you know, kind of leave that capital at risk in the protocol earning yield to then encourage people to come and build and, you know, build financial products on top of this to make it successful. It's different. It's very different than putting a de minimis amount of capital in by insiders. Like a very de minimis amount and then, you know, kind of market making to really high FDV, right? And then kind of trying to have retail come in and buy and sort of fund your exit in that way. This is different.

When you think about the dynamic of like, you see a kind of a hybrid here where Plasma kind of encouraged people to, and in fairness, like Blast kind of did this as well, which is like you encourage, you open up a vault where you get TVL and that in Plasma's case was a ticket to have an allocation and Is that an interesting mechanism to you guys? Would you actually think that more projects are going to explore the Andre route or is the way Plasma's done it maybe more of a good in-between? Because of course, raised from traditional investors and then they opened up, they did the Echo raise, which was very like ground level for community. Kobe kind of led that one and those people are been getting exposure from the from the early days, what would be like, what are you advising teams to do? Like, is it subject to the type of project that they are, or is there a preferred mechanism where you think it's actually going to be the, the default going forward?

Yeah, so it's so situation specific, I think. But look, I think the, the most common raise path that you'll see will be the something closer to what Plasma did. In the future, and frankly, what Pump did. So a mixture of private investment from VCs, uh, angels, and others, but not over-raising, because it's becoming clear now that if you're successful, you don't need that much capital right out of the gate to, you know, to proof-validate, followed by these, these public raises, whether it's like Echo Legion, uh, or direct in the case of what Pump did, or on exchange. And then I think what's more important than how the money's raised is what the purpose of the token is. You know what I mean? Like the, so with Pump, you know, and with Hype, like extremely different paths to get live. Hyperliquid never raised any money, but the most important thing is like, what does the token do and how does it accrue value once it gets out into the market? And that's where I think you're going to see standardization around value accrual and revenue generation to the token. Again, whether it's eventually, you know, you're able to distribute revenue in the form of like fees directly to token holders, which would look, you know, that would be like a security today. Today you kind of get around that by doing buybacks, so making the token deflationary. Um, but again, the only thing I'm certain of, these mechanisms are going to shift and we'll see, and I'm not 100% sure what's going to work, but You better have a token that has value in your protocol moving forward. And you see that, like, the reason Solana has outperformed since the bottom is because there's been so much revenue on the network and so much usage. So, you know, just outperformed as an L1. And the thing that I would be confident of, you know, you're going to have the old school meme coins, Litecoin, Cardano, et cetera. Ripple, you know, who knows what's going to happen with those. But I don't think you're going to have successful meme coins from like the 2022 era on. So meaning, you know, if chains like Aptos and SUI and Stori and others don't actually get usage, I don't think in 5 years they're going to be valued where they are today. They will go down.

Totally. Mike, elephant in the room. Beyond Pump, the most successful theme has been prediction markets on the consumer side. Those two projects do not have a token. Maybe they won't ever have a token. That doesn't mean you can't distribute earnings and/or allow active participants to participate in the upside of the protocol. There are different other mechanisms. Would you push back to that? Do we need tokens for every project? Because that's been the flavor du jour since the early days, right? Since the ICO, it's like, let's just have a token. Eventually will have a token. Uniswap kind of got forced its hand by SushiSwap with a vampire attack. Maybe there was a version of this world where they wouldn't have ever launched a token. Um, uh, and, and there's potentially investors that resisted that. Different environment, different regulatory environment. What do you— is there— do you think that there's a version here where like Kalshi, Polymarket don't ever have a token? And, and look, they've been successful in their own right. Or, or do you think, look, everything will have a token at some point, and it's just how you structure it.

Almost everything will have a token is my general guess, because there's— you just generally have an incentive to issue one at some point. Um, and again, I think it's becoming less and less— like, Base is issuing a token after sort of for a while seeming like they wouldn't and they didn't need it. Um, but it's, it's effectively, it's just, it The market is rewarding tokens even on top of equity value. It's just so far it's been additive. You're not sort of getting dinged. So I would expect there to— so there's definitely going to be things on-chain that don't have tokens, like many, like sort of stablecoin products. You'll probably have a lot of DeFi products in the future that maybe it's just a pure borrow/lend, like there's no need for a token. But, um, and there's just pure fees on chain that go to investors. Um, so I do think that, that type of thing will happen, but most crypto-native projects that are truly on chain will have tokens. Um, they're useful in so many ways and they're, they're just so much more flexible than pure, call it equity ownership, um, in terms of who they can include in terms of how value can be distributed to stakeholders.

Wouldn't be a Dudas podcast if we didn't cover NFTs. Any updated views there? Do you actually think that they'll recover?

Dudas is over here pumping Moonbirds.

Yeah, so Moonbirds announced their token's coming today.

Why do you love Moonbirds so much?

So NFTs are emotional, they're not rational. So basically, like every human, like we have, I, like I enjoy, I have, I like joy, like I like to have fun, you know what I mean?

Like, do you, I'm sorry, you're not supposed to, sir, you're not supposed to, I'm sorry.

Yeah, so I'm not like, you're gonna get canceled by that. Exactly. And fun for me means expressing, you know, things and like allegiances and being, I do like to be parts of like fun tribes. So anyway, so NFTs are what got me excited about doing things on chain other than just pure money, you know, like NBA Top Shot was what got me into, so point is, Moonbirds, it was almost symbolic for me. It was the NFT project that I got most wrecked on in 2022. I think I bought one for 43 ETH and I later sold it for like 1 ETH. Yeah, for tax write-off. The project founder, Kevin Rose, like basically abandoned the project by, you know, rescue selling it to Yuga. And, you know, just a lot of like He walked away with a ton of money and a lot of sort of like broken promises in the roadmap. And it was just awesome. It was very similar to how Pudgy Penguins was sort of rescued by Luca in 2022. In 2024, I believe, maybe early '25, Spencer sort of rescued Moonbirds. And I kind of, I was watching it and observing it. 1KX had invested in Pudgy, they invested in Moonbirds. Said, heck, like, let's, let's run it back. Like, this is a, I liked the art then, I like it now. It's silly. Spencer's cool. Um, um, so yeah, one day I just bought like, I don't know, don't, don't overthink it, right?

Spencer's cool. 1K. Let's go.

And so exactly, often the best investments are the simplest and I'm having fun now. So like, it's a good group. I've gotten to know Spencer a little bit and, you know, he is cool. I'm not, you know, like I'm like a boomer. He's like, you know, building out all kinds of cool merch and IP and he's traveling all over the world, all over Asia. Is spreading the gospel. I just, I'm having fun observing it, paying attention. I don't know like what's coming next in the roadmap. He's created the TCG game for Pengu, for Penguins. Maybe he'll do it for Moonbirds. Like, I don't know, but, but it's fun and it pairs nicely and gives some personality to my on-chain behavior, you know, next to the DeFi stuff and holding Bitcoin and Solana and the other big assets.

Well, last question for me and, and, um, and we're up in the hour. Distribution, in my opinion, is the name of the game. Being a consumer, um, I know putting aside like your role in, in Sixth Man that you're investing in your mandate, what about companies that have in the traditional world? Um, you haven't invested as much in stablecoin issuers, I believe. Like, I feel like that's a very tough segment of the market. Like, you are just going to be squeezed on both ends, rates cuts and just traditional financial institutions. Launching their own, like Bridge just enabled that and like probably killed 3 businesses with one whoop. How do you think about like companies like Robinhoods of the world, more of those companies entering the space using this technology and just crushing kind of like startups that are trying to like do the Web2 analog for crypto? Is that something that you've started to think more about? Like just, hey, maybe we shouldn't be investing in something that like JP Morgan can come in and crush you. And I guess the joke might be how many startups in Web2 and software, it's like always like, what if Google gets into the space? And, and you know, they never do. Like there's companies that just build around that and are successful. But yeah.

Yeah. So we tend to, as a firm, now there are, you know, even crypto native investment, you know, VCs who invest primarily in equity and, you know, companies that look more like, you know, on-chain fintechs. For the most part, uh, it's not an area that we do a lot of investment in. Okay. So, you know, meaning we like, you know, protocols that have tokens. Uh, we like things that should be on chain. We specialize and really can help a lot around, um, you know, token design, dynamics, marketing, getting folks excited, how it works in your protocol, et cetera. Generally, we've not done a lot of investments that look more like fintech than crypto. And we have fintech backgrounds on our team. Like I worked at Google Wallet, Google Pay, Braintree, Venmo, PayPal, Paxos. My partners worked at Paxos, PayPal, Google Wallet. We have a lot of experience. It's just honestly, I don't find it as fun and it's more of like, let's run a very predictable spreadsheet on what is going to improve the legacy thing by 2x. And I'm much more excited about like what new business model doesn't exist today that's going to be worth billions in 5 years. So we're looking for more of those. Examples that may not seem sexy, but I think are exciting like that are like on-chain DeFi that's composable where you can use all different kinds of, you know, asset classes as collateral, on-chain stocks and, you know, stablecoins that are yield-bearing and, you know, your SOL tokens and this, that, and the other thing. And you can cross-margin them to borrow, uh, to, to, to do, you know, invest in perps or you can borrow against them. Like, I like DeFi because it's composable and I'd rather invest in that than in like stablecoin orchestration, even though it's super valuable to the world. And I think you can make money in it, but the edge there is going to— is decreasing really rapidly to your point as legacy companies come in. Um, Stripe moves in. I'm surprised Adyen hasn't. Uh, and as the big, you know, fintech VCs invest and squeeze out crypto native VCs.

Mike, this has been a great conversation. I think we're going to have to have you on to discuss more of these new primitives that, you know, you're unlocking friction in financial services and flows, and that's going to unlock so much like exponential consumer behavior in, maybe not so much in the US, but in other parts. So there's just so much that we can continue the conversation, ex-US opportunities and whatnot. So this has been a real treat, man. I don't know if there's anything else you want to cover.

Yeah, content of the week, baby. Mike, we always do content of the week. We will not put you on the spot. We'll let Santi and I go first. Santi, any content of the week?

Oh no, you're going first.

All right. Bill Ackman conversation at the Citadel. The Citadel is a military college. Ackman went and spoke and it was actually a pretty good conversation, a pretty good conversation on just like failure and his investment philosophy, why they just took a massive long on Hertz rental car, which I thought was interesting hearing his logic. And yeah, just, I don't know. Uh, sometimes I feel that Bill Ackman, when he talks, is just like fully shilling his own bags. And sometimes I actually find that he's both shilling his bags and has a nice philosophical take on life and investing. And this was the latter.

So, so I really like Bill's an LP in Six Man Ventures. So, uh, oh, nice. His bags are our bags. Let's do it.

His bags are our bags. Yeah. Well, he didn't give Six Man the shill, but maybe next time.

Yeah.

Santi, what do you got?

Yeah.

Content for me, you know how much I love Founders Podcast. There's one most recently came out with the founder of Spotify, Daniel Ek.

He's got a new show. It's not—

he's got a new show where he's actually—

I've got that saved. Yeah, I heard it's an amazing conversation.

An hour, almost 2-hour long conversation. Daniel says something that's incredibly, um, resonates with me. He says he optimizes for impact, not happiness. And I think happiness is a derivative of impact, and it's very much in line with, with, I think, everything that— so great, great conversation. I'm really excited to see where David, uh, takes that format because I think it's, you know, This one was his first one. It was very, very good.

Yeah.

So I'll just give one quickly. So I listened to Invest with the Best and Dylan Patel was on this week talking about the trillion-dollar AI buildout. Just a fantastic listen for somebody like me who's not deep in reading. I'm not even an engineer, but I'm not reading like scientific AI papers. Really good. Overview that can catch you up to speed.

Yeah, I thought Dylan had great overviews on if you're like, if you want almost a hot take on like Meta, Google, xAI, Anthropic, OpenAI, it's a good, it's a very good listen.

Yeah. And then you follow it and I had, yeah, I'm like on ChatGPT searching 15 things that he talked about.

What does this mean?

Yeah.

All right.

I'm going to have to cheat. Dude, as you mentioned, Invest Like the Best, there is Colossus, which is, I think is his kind of magazine. Dude, amazing, amazing. Two articles that I read over the weekend. One was this story of the founder of Interactive Brokers. If you love DeFi, go read that. It is a phenomenal—

My fellow Hungarian, let's go.

Yeah, fellow Hungarian. And then there's another one. Jerry Newman is a retired VC. He has a take on value accrual for AI. It's so top of mind. Both of them will inspire. If you like crypto, these are topics that—

Where's the Jerry Newman one? Was it in Colossus too?

It was in Colossus. Yeah, he, he, I, I subscribe to his, Blog.

Colossus is so good. Colossus is like a good example of just put out world-class content and it just, it'll, it'll come, it'll bubble to the top.

They don't ship to ex-US/UK, but I want to subscribe because I want to get the magazine like it's, it's there in print. So yeah, pretty amazing stuff. So those two articles were amazing. Really thought-provoking.

Dude, thanks for coming on, man. Good to see you. Congrats on just a hell of a last year or two of investing and good to see you're, you're still having fun.

Awesome. Appreciate it, guys. Thanks so much.

Thanks, dude.