The Bull Market Confirmed With Santi & Yano | Weekly Roundup

For anyone who hasn't experienced like an all-out rip-your-face-out bull market, I find that the toughest thing is that everything is working. So in the last couple of years, your problem was where can I get a 5x return or where can I get a 10x return or where can I even get a 2x return? And now the whole industry is a 3x return. So you need to really, really, really focus. This episode is brought to you by Geodnet, the world's largest decentralized RTK network, delivering real-time, centimeter-accurate positioning around the globe. You'll hear more about them later in the episode. Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice, or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed. Folks, welcome back. We got the roundup.

Santi just announced that Inversion is pivoting to roll rolling up RV chains and, uh, yeah, I mean, listen, Bain, uh, I think it was like one of the best investments of Bain Capital was like buying like Pizza Hut chains in like Japan, IPO them, killed it, killed it. Like one of their best deals.

Interesting. Sometimes you gotta wonder, man, isn't Domino's the best performing stock of the last decade? I was gonna say like, uh, Domino's and Monster.

Yeah, Monster for sure. I mean, there, there's a lot of these Crazy stories where you're like sitting there, you're trying to reinvent the financial system, and then all of a sudden you say, man, I could have just— I could literally have just bought Domino's. This is like a classic left curve, right curve, right? Which is like, you know, buy something you like, and then right curve, buy stuff that you like. Middle curve, well, DCF.

And yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, we had this hedge fund manager come in, and when I went to Emory down in Atlanta, and we had this hedge fund manager come in and talk to us, and his daughter was in the class, and he said, uh, He said, you guys theoretically should outperform all of me because I'm, I'm not in— he's like, I'm 50 years old. I'm not in touch with what's going on. So I have to do the models. He's like, you guys have another decade from when you're 20 to 30 where you don't have to do the models and you can actually see what people are actually using. So he's like, best trade I ever made was when my daughter came home with an iPhone in 8th grade and I saw that and she was saying every single one of her friends wants that. Next trade I made was, was Skechers, right? When I saw that, like, they had the little— when my daughter wanted all the Skechers, the trade I made before that was Skechers. So yeah, it's an interesting takeaway. Speaking of markets, dude, we— I mean, hell of a week in markets. Let's pull up— we can pull up some prices and talk through this. I'd love to just get your take on how we're feeling about things. So to run through it in case anyone's not paying attention to the numbers, Bitcoin's up 6.5% to $118K. ETH is up a whopping 23%. XRP is up 32%. SOL is up 11%. Dogecoin 17%. Cardano ripping 27%. Hyperliquid 11%. What's your sense of the markets right now? Like, what do you do when you see this happening? What do you think?

Obviously, I mean, not all these are the same, right? Hyperliquid has been the darling of the cycle. Uh, but you know, everything else is pumping too. Memes have taken— catching a bid, particularly, you know, Pump had its ICO, which we should talk about that. And I generally think, look, Bitcoin's gone up from, you know, sub-$100K to now and stabilizing at $100— what is it, $118K, close to $120K, all-time high. Um, and you know, if it holds that level, it's just so much wealth creation after that, right? Yeah. So typically, and people know this, but I'm just gonna rehash it, Bitcoin rips, stabilizes, then higher, uh, beta, high riskier stuff catches a bid. You've had also— ETH has gotten a very material bid. There's been like half a billion of inflows on the Bitcoin ETF products. Uh, you had the Joe Lubin treasury company. Um, treasury companies are all the rage now. We should also talk about that. I have a very strong opinion on that. You and I were talking about that yesterday, that Sharplink Gaming Um, so, so yeah, look at who doesn't like when prices are going up. Like, just unless you're short.

So we have, we have, uh, this new, we have this new employee of Blockworks who's new to the industry. He's like, yeah, vibes are like so high in this industry. Like, I, this industry is like really fun to work in, much better than trad fi.

And I was like, I just, you should have joined, uh, 2 years later, 2 years ago. Like, crypto is one of those industries gives you the highest highs, the lowest lows. Uh, important, important not to use too much leverage or any leverage at all and just buy stuff that you like and be one to hold for a long time. Everyone, you know, Coinbase is all-time high, Robinhood's all-time high. You know, I think, uh, not just crypto markets are going up, right? Uh, you know, the general market, the S&P also hit all-time high, right? Yeah, Robinhood, we've been talking about Robinhood when it was in the 20s, now it's, you know, 100.

It's at 105. Coinbase above Coinbase, ripped through all-time high. I mean, now I have— here's a sign of the times. I think this is a good I had, I had my first retail text, actually. I've been, I was surprised that I didn't get more texts at $100K, but I had a friend text me, said, what alt should I be buying? Feel like we're about to see a run. I said, I said, brother, you're supposed to buy the last 2 years, not when everything is ripping through all-time highs. And he said, I felt really smart for selling at $100K until a little bit ago. So I think you start to see these. So that was, that was one thing. I also, my trainer, Jason Yanowitz at my gym said one of his clients was buying Hyperliquid, but they were trading on a platform with 25% fees. Oh, so they didn't. So I don't know. I don't know how they're buying this thing, but they're trading on a platform with 25% fees, but they want to know how to buy more Hyperliquid. So you're starting to see these things. I think we are clearly, clearly, clearly in stage 4. For anyone who remembers over the last 2 years, I've kind of laid out these 4 stages. I actually think I called the timing on this pretty, pretty well. So I'll pull this up. In this tweet back in 2024, I said, Stage 4, we're mainstream again. Forbes, Bloomberg, CNBC, they love crypto. Your friend texts you about Cardano. Your financial advisor recommends 5% BTC allocation. This was, I think this was the line here. TradFi races to quote unquote tokenize things. Then at some point in mid-2025, weird things start to happen. So walk me through your mindset of maybe what you think the next, like, several months could look like here.

Um, you know, putting aside macro commentary, which I think that always is a very strong, um, determinant of what markets do, and, you know, I do think that we're gonna continue to see more of these, uh, public company treasury deals they will continue to proliferate. And for the next couple months, you know, you just had this week one of Hyperliquid. You're gonna probably see more of ETH, more of SOL, and then, you know, a tail end of assets. Like, you know, people ping me left and right about these, whether, hey, do you have assets to contribute, or do you want to do these? Like, so I get why people are doing it. I had a tweet about it, uh, which I think it's going to be very valid destructive for the industry. I mean, this is like SPACs all over again, and it is very clearly like—

what, like what all over again?

SPACs.

Oh, SPACs. Yes.

Yeah, yeah. I was in New York last week. I was meeting with JP Morgan folks, and they gave me this guy, Michael Semblast, I believe. He's like very pointed, like old school guy. I love his like skeptical, cynical takes. And he had a He had a great report there that's actually public and you just go to read it. But you know, it's always good to go back and revisit like what has happened before. And like SPACs were like super value destructive for retail. Who won? The sponsors, right? Um, who did these SPACs and just, uh, got liquidity and got some pretty, pretty good terms on it. And then retail got crushed. Like you can't justify the premium on these things. And everyone says, wait a minute, wait a minute, MicroStrategy, and you're like taking an asset and then you're staking and you're validating and doing all this stuff. The reality of it, I have not seen a compelling argument of that coming to fruition or that justifying the premium. And so the reality is, like, if you're— it's just a word of caution for retail. Like, if you want to buy these things, fine, treat it as a speculative near-term thing, but just be very aware that the premium to NAV can also work and go backwards and go negative. And I think that I do wonder if that, to your point around the stages of a cycle, if that really derails. I think that's one of the biggest risks to like just being in a position where a lot of this unwinds, right? Yeah.

So are you doing any of these? Because there's a mindset.

Yeah, I did one back in the day, a SOL one, one of the largest.

And did you contribute your FTX bankruptcy SOL?

I have not.

No, no, because the dynamic— well, the dynamic that I think is happening right now that a lot of it are getting a lot of VCs excited. So originally you just had 3 VCs doing all these. It was CoinFund, Pantera, and Paradigm— no, no, CoinFund, Pantera, and Parafi. And now every single VC I feel like is doing these. And one of the reasons that they're doing them is a lot of them are sitting on locked Solana and locked tokens across the board. And with these vehicles, they're now fundraising. They realize that you can actually raise money with— instead of just contributing cash, you can actually contribute your locked SOL or locked other things. So, and then if you're a VC and, you know, you were sitting on some locked SOL that you thought was unlockable in 2027, now you can contribute it in July 2025 and get liquid in, you know, August of 2025 instead of waiting until 2027.

Yeah.

So what do you think for the person out there that's Maybe they don't have access to get in these deals privately, but they're looking at something like SBET, which is really just ripping. I mean, ETH is going up 30% week over week. SBET is up— what is SBET up on the week? SBET is up 195% on the month and 77% on the week. What do you say to the person who says, "I just want to almost get levered long these things right now"?

Yeah. And that's a fair thing to do. I'm not here to give any advice. I'm just saying, just be aware that you're paying a premium on this and relative to the underlying value.

Yeah.

And that's that. And look, everyone can make up their opinion. So I don't have a comment other than I think this at some point unwinds. I'm not here to tell you when or how other than this thing is not sustainable. And in the absence of showing material business justification for a premium, These things should normalize closer to NAV. And so what you don't want is to be long. The worst case is that what you just said, the inverse happens, which is the underlying actually does go up over the next 5 years. But because you bought it at 5x a premium, you might actually end up losing money if the underlying, what is held in the treasury, actually ends up going up. And that would be a shame that you were right on the thesis, but lost money because of the execution and the structure. Yeah. And you can buy these things, you can buy the ETF for Bitcoin and ETH, and very likely you're going to potentially be able to buy the ETF for other products. Yeah. Okay, let's always, let me ask you a series of question. You're gonna construct a, you have $100, you say, I am now of the mind that crypto is curing cancer. So I'm gonna invest all my excess savings into crypto. And you're gonna say Bitcoin, pick one, pick a few of these assets, Bitcoin, Robinhood, Ethereum, Coinbase, Circle, uh, right, and, and, or any of these treasury deals, um, or something else? What do you do? How do you allocate?

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Let's just assume that the vast majority of new people coming into the industry are just, you know, okay, they're like your friend.

Yep. I allocate to— I basically spread it between— I spread it for— I take $100 and I buy $25 of Bitcoin, $25 of ETH. $25 of SOL and $25 of HYPE. I spread it between those 4.

How do you buy? How do you express a view on ETH and SOL? Just like go on Coinbase?

I buy spot because I buy spot because the people who are— I don't think you should buy any used leverage at all at this stage of the market. I think we're clearly in stage 4 of the market. I wouldn't, I wouldn't be using leverage. But it's— I definitely wouldn't be using it if you're not like, you know, you know who should be using it maybe is like our research analysts who are literally like glued to the screens 27 hours a day right now. Like they can use leverage because they're paying so close attention to this. Like, I'll go days right now without checking prices. I know you're very busy with Inversion right now. Like, I'm going— I'm truly going days without checking prices. Yeah. And it's just like if I'm going days, you know, my friend texting me, he's excited today, but like, You might not check the prices for another month.

Yeah, look, I mean, I think—

What do you, what do you do? What's your answer to that?

I've actually, uh, would increase the allocation of Bitcoin, probably more like 50% Bitcoin, and out of the remaining 50%, I would sprinkle it probably You know, uh, I don't know, in some equal weighting between— or Solana, Ethereum, and Hyperliquid. Yeah, I would agree with that.

Maybe. And then you could also add Coin and Robinhood too, if you—

well, on that, yeah, actually, sorry, I forgot that I had given you that as an option. Yeah, I would, I buy 50% Bitcoin, uh, 25% or 20-25% HOOD, and the rest just like other stuff.

Yeah, yeah.

And, and, you know, the reason I continue to believe that while Robinhood has run up quite a bit, I still continue to believe that it has a very big distribution and funnel, and, and it's a founder-led organization, and they're going to continue to do really interesting things to leverage this technology and streamline their operations. And I think like I'm also solving for like how do these things behave in the down market. And like Bitcoin is a very useful asset that, you know—

Dude, that's why we just sell the top.

No, I think, and of course it just depends on what size you have and what percentage of your net worth that is, but As I think about my position, I'm just increasingly more of the mind that I should just put more and more into Bitcoin. And I appreciate that I've been on the record saying that I haven't owned Bitcoin. I now think that it has entered into a pretty interesting re— Now there's something so powerful a bit like the Bloomberg denomination now in a 0.1 million.

So good.

You best believe the anchoring effect of that. It's going to go to a million. Yeah. I just sort of— I think we're gonna be sitting here in 10 years and that thing is gonna go to a million.

And you can—

Yeah, I agree.

So are you rebuying? Okay, so there was at one point this cycle, I think you had sold all your Bitcoin and all your ETH. Are you, are you rebuying into either of those?

Bitcoin.

Bitcoin. Not ETH.

Bitcoin.

Yeah. Yeah.

Like, especially my situation is different. Like, I don't have any, any time. Any of the stuff that I invest in, they're early stage that I've gotten liquidity on. I'm basically rotating. The trilogy here that I see is SPX, like ETF, low-cost ETF. From first principles, buy stuff with low fees, play the law of 72, where divide whatever your annual rate of return is, 72 by whatever your annual rate of return is, and that's how many years it's going to take you to double your money. The market historically has given you anywhere from 12%, 14%, maybe 12%. Normalize, like, call it 10%. So like, you know, I'm gonna be super busy. If I wake up in 5 or 7 years and I double my money on size, I'll be happy. I'm a happy man. And, and it's money that I'm not going to touch. I'm just going to want to be focused. I've sold them for cash flow. Like, that's all set. Like, I have enough cash set aside for a rainy day. But I do think that Bitcoin continues to be a pretty, pretty interesting bet over the next 10, 20 years. And so I'm happy doing that, you know. Yeah, I think, I think there's a version of this world that does another 5x. And now people, you know, there's just something really reflexive of being a store of value, like a store of value, like the memetics. It's a perfect meme and everyone can buy it. The type of buyers, you know, sovereign wealth funds can't buy ETH. Yeah, they can buy Bitcoin.

Yeah, I want to call out something that's really important that you're doing, which is changing your mind on something. And, uh, as someone who's been taking a lot of— dude, getting a lot of heat on Twitter these days for not liking ETH for a while. I was— yeah, I was. You missed all this? Yeah. Well, how do you—

how do you hate the dude? How can you hate the man?

You know, I was like, okay, so I've been taking all these ETH maxis are like piledriving me into the— into the Twitter, you know, the proverbial Twitter ground here. And I went on a podcast like a couple of weeks ago and was like, I don't like ETH. And now, you know, now ETH is ripping and whatever. I would just remind people like, Now I'll just tell people now I like ETH and yeah, I didn't catch the absolute bottom on ETH. I didn't, you know, but there's a, there's something that feels crypto Twitter will tell you that you can't change your mind on anything and that you have to get these assets embedded into like your very bones and your DNA. I will just remind people listening to this that you're allowed to change your mind all the time. And I now, I now like ETH, I like Bitcoin, even though at one point in the cycle I had sold all All my ETH.

So no, I've actually warmed up to Bitcoin a lot. That's the first thing I buy now. Now, okay, people that can't change your mind are like, do you really think that you're going to get it all right out of the gate? Wow, you are truly delusional. Like, get off your high horse. And, and constantly, like, I don't understand this rigidity.

Also, it's funny to me because the price of ETH is— was similar, like, hadn't moved, and they're telling me you know, they're like, you know, getting on top of me and stuff like that. Like, you would have done much better if you just bought some SOL or some HYPE. And then yeah, you like ETH, so now rotate your SOL into ETH right now. You know?

Yeah, you know, it's—

I still—

yeah, you can't win. I don't know. I'm really— what else should we talk about on the public markets?

Let's talk— I have a question for you. What is the likely— okay, the— everyone now thinks 4-year cycle is over. That's like, I think, consensus right now is that 4-year cycle is over. Like, we're not playing in those 4-year cycle games anymore. Crypto is now mainstream, etc., etc. Macro markets have changed, macros changed and stuff like that. The contrarian thing is that the 4-year cycle is extremely intact and that this cycle we are right now, the market is ripping exactly when it should be ripping in a 4-year cycle. And that we top somewhere between November to December. Do you have any thoughts on that?

I, I don't ascribe to this thing that— well, the when-up-only narrative starts coming along, just, that's like top-ish. That's— you're entering, to your point, stage 5 or 6 or like— and so look, all of it is subject to M2. Like, you've seen— we've all seen the chart of M2 Bitcoin and the correlation around that. So I ascribe to that. I think it's just a flows game. Like, people are willing— the wealth creation effect of Bitcoin and the market then trickles down into higher risk stuff, and then that has a reflexive loop, and people push and then catch up trades. And like, again, I like to study Howard Marks, and I like to study Morgan Housel of the world, which say one thing over and over and over, is this: markets are ultimately dictated by human behavior, and that is super psychological, and that never changes. And people will push that to extremes. And are we at an extreme level yet? No. I think we're breaking out of— Bitcoin's entering new ground, and Coinbase is just hitting all-time highs. And I think this cycle still has legs. But of course, the economy and macro plays into that. So again, I would, I would, uh, I would like to think that this cycle and the drivers of continued like bid and interest in this industry are very different this time around. Like, you have a lot of institutions getting really excited, and you know, um, you have— we should talk about the stablecoin, the Genius Act. I know we're recording a policy episode tomorrow.

Let's get into that. Let's maybe pivot from market conversation into stablecoins because there was a There were, I mean, there are a few big things this week.

Before we go, we, a lot of the discussion last time with Rob, who abandoned us in this podcast, um, was Pump and the ICO. And Rob said something effective, like there's gonna be huge disorderly, like all the funds are gonna sell and there's gonna be a lot of, um, drama around it. I think we should just like spend a minute on just what ended up happening, what's been happening. And, uh, because I think Pump is sort of a pretty important, um, if you want to understand everything else other than Bitcoin, this is like, you always want to look at a new issuance, especially in this size. It has implications around ICOs and how other projects launch, and you have a whole pipeline of projects that are probably looking at this, uh, implications for Solana, Bonq, Fun, and other things, right? In future projects going to launch, are they going to go via the exchange route or go through and launch, uh, on, you know, directly on chain? So I just want to spend a minute on that because I think it's pretty important what happened. Yeah, let's do it.

Okay, there's two ways to look at this. So one is I'll just give an overview and I'm curious to get your take. So, so Pump launched. I mean, it is basically back to its launch price from what I can see on this chart.

It sold out in 12 minutes.

Sold out in 12 minutes. Yeah, exactly. Actually, this is more interesting to me.

So by the way, it was $500 million raised.

No, I think it was— was it $500 million?

$250 million or $500 million?

I thought it was. I thought they— okay, here's what I think originally. They originally wanted to raise a billion. They said that VCs were going to get $200 million and the public markets were going to get $800 million. What ended up happening, though, is that there was ridiculous VC demand. I think they raised about $750 million from VCs and then they opened up another— I don't know if they actually— don't know. I didn't participate in this, but another $250 million or something in the public markets. But I definitely could be wrong about this. Blockworks put together a bunch of data. It's free if you just type in like Blockworks Pump.fund ICO data, you should find it. So we had 10,145 unique people participated in the ICO. The medium— median price of Pump tokens purchased was $530.

Not the price, the ticket size.

Sorry, the ticket size. Yeah, exactly.

Thank you.

45% of the wallets were were created in the last 40— were created in the last 24 hours before the ICO. Another 40% of the wallets were 90 to 365 days old. I think that's kind of the— yeah, Bybit drove the most, then Binance.

You mean Binance, right?

Yeah, Binance, then Bybit. That's interesting. Radium. Solfi, Jupiter's Ark.

But look, it was the largest, uh, one of the largest ICOs ever.

Yeah.

And it was done all entirely on-chain. There was, there were some, uh, like, um, raise that happened, uh, some of these distribution partners like centralized exchanges, right? But it was, um, like entirely processed on-chain. Most of it was, which was—

oh, I'm wrong. It was $446 million raised.

Yeah, I was like, it was, it was like $400 million raised and that was sold out in 12 minutes. So like Look, clearly they sold out $275 million in 1 minute.

Look at this, just minutes post-launch.

Crazy. Yeah.

So this actually makes you think, are we— are ICO, IPO— are people going to go public on-chain in the future?

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's very much the case. And this is just a really interesting comp. And I think other projects are observing. Simon from Moonrock had an interesting take around like you know, praising the Pump team for not, you know, quote unquote, bending their knee to exchanges, as is Hyperliquid. And, you know, I think it tells you everything you need to know about the cycle. Meme coin activity is strong, and Hyperliquid is pretty impressive what they're pulling off. So yeah, it just— yeah, but yeah, like, look, the price is sort of stabilized, sort of range-bound between 50 like, what is it, $5 and $6 billion fully diluted? Um, it's so, so there's— I think I haven't seen on-chain data, but I think there's a lot of rotation, a lot of, as we discussed in the prior podcast, like, it feels like there's a lot of volume, there's a lot of trading hands. We'll see where it stabilizes. But, um, you know, yeah, do you, uh, over-under, do you think by next week? Because our producer, uh, Jared, was telling us about Kashi and how those micro markets and are what he's playing at, you know, he's betting on. So as is tradition, all of our producers retire after a year because they become genius traders. These are like the Empire Cubs, so to speak. So Jared, I hope you crush it. Um, but I— so, so you have a market. Is pump greater, like higher or lower in a week's time? And by how much?

I mean, you're always like, is it gonna rain in 6 weeks? Like, is it gonna rain in New York? Yeah, on like August 1st? I don't know.

Okay. Okay. You're making me sound like an idiot. But okay, like maybe in December's time. In December's time, is Pump at $10 billion or $2 billion?

Oh man, I would guess we see some sort of sell-off at some point in the near— in the next like 30 to 60 days, we see some sort of sell-off. I mean, if you're a VC who's struggled to book profit, to book any sort of like profits this, this cycle, you got to, you got to take some, you got to take some chips, right? Even if it's just a 50% gain. So that's like— I will try to do the short-term betting here that you're— what do we—

okay, okay.

So different short-term, short-term sell-off. Longer term, I think pump end up Pump ends up doing very well.

What do you think we see first? Uh, pump at $10 billion or pump at, uh, $2 billion?

And you're— and right now it's what, $5.4 billion?

What do you think we touch? $2 billion or $10 billion?

$2 billion or $10 billion?

Uh, right now, for what it's worth, for listeners that are not seeing the screen, $5.3 billion fully diluted.

I think we see $2 billion. Okay.

What would make you change your mind of the bet? What type of odds would you want to see on 10?

If the price chart starts to look something like Hyperliquid did, which is when there's just no sellers, right? Like if you look at the Hyperliquid original chart, like this thing just went up and then it actually, it went down. So this is what I think will happen to Pump. Like it'll, it'll do well, but like it will go down. But then look at this consolidation. It didn't— it just floated all of January and February around $20. Yeah. And this is just— there are no sellers.

You exhaust the sellers. So I think you have to go through a lot of that. But like, yeah, I think—

oh, sorry, here, this— I didn't get to the end here. I was missing this part. This is what I was trying to say. This is what— this is what I think will happen to Pump is like you do have to get through these sellers. Like there are people in Hype who are just like, this is— in Hype's case, it was the airdrop people, right? In Pump's case, it's the VCs. Like, people got to book profits and sell.

That's a full 3 months right there.

Yeah, exactly. So that took 3 months. It went and it fell down to $11. You know, April, it was at $10, and then it just, you know, steady climb up to $50. I think something similar happens to Pump.

Yeah. I don't, I don't think we see it below 2, for what it's worth.

You think 2 or 10 first?

Uh, well, because we don't ever— because we don't see it below 2, you invariably do hit 10 first. But, you know, I'm an investor, so yeah, I just, I just think that I continue to hold my thesis that if, if you're looking at this on like a comp to Hyperliquid and the buy— like, they started doing buybacks now. And, and so if, if you continue to see meme coin activity and, you know, the profitability continues to be there and the buybacks are there, then I think Hyperliquid is the most logical comp, and Hyperliquid at $46 billion and Pump at $5 billion is, uh, I think that's the opportunity.

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I, I still think NFTs catch a bid, and that's going to be late, late in the game.

There's a—

I mean, Pudgy Penguins, Pudgy Penguins are— I mean, I mean, look, how much is Pudgy Penguins up in the last, like, 30 days?

I heard there's a, like, Pudgy Penguins floor price.

It's up like 120%, 150%.

Oh baby, let's go!

Oh yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, look, it's up 2x.

Look at, uh, you know the best performing crypto of the last 90 days?

Pudgy Penguins is up 2x in the last 30 days.

You know the best performing crypto I think is Pengu.

Uh, Pengu, yeah, yeah. But yeah, okay, but that's, that's different.

But I agree, Pengu's up 500% in 3 months.

Uh, same as Hyperliquid, right? Everyone's talking about Hyperliquid, but Pengu's—

Hyperliquid's up 180%.

No, okay, so Hyperliquid since, since April, you just showed the chart, is up 4x.

The absolute bottom, yes, is up 10 to almost 5x.

Okay, Pengu, Pengu is up— do you know what was that?

Yeah, fuck, 6x.

That's what I'm saying. Now, it's a $2 billion, $40 billion, way different injection of liquidity. And so naturally, like, liquidity— I think there's a direct correlation between liquidity, like the size of the asset, and like how vocal people are. Um, but you know, again, like, every— everything's pumping, right? You're not—

you're not a genius. Let me rephrase my question. You've got— you have to allocate right now. You can't buy Bitcoin, ETH, SOL hype or Coinbase or Robinhood.

Okay.

What do you, what do you buy?

Yeah. All my bags.

Insert bag number one.

Insert bags. I'm just going to— no. All right. What do I not buy? So differently.

What do you not buy?

I'm probably going to get a lot of criticism for this, and I'm probably going to be terribly wrong, but Deepin is just so out of favor. And I just—

I'm—

I don't, I don't think it— on a relative basis, I don't think it outperforms. So I'm not going to buy it as much as I'd like it on a fundamental case. I just have a view on Deepin. But I think structurally there's a whole set of— okay, not just Deepin, by the way, it's companies where The market is like very focused on like this equity token distinction, right? Like Helium, for instance, like the market's just structurally, there's like an overhang. There's funds that bought at the top and are still selling, and there's dynamics. And I want to say like there is baggage from the prior cycle. Pengu doesn't necessarily have that much baggage. Yeah, sure, it launched in December, right, of like a year and a half or a year. It launched in December of this— of last year. And so you don't have as much baggage from prior cycle. Go look at a Helium chart for a minute and do the maths. And I can't explain it because fundamentally, like, it's getting a lot of traction in users, but Nova as an equity company, you know, is— that's what I'm saying. So you, you have—

it ain't pretty, folks.

Yeah, you have a lot of So helium, I'm not just picking on helium. Helium is one where that chart has some—

Though in the last month it's up 50%, but I guess everything is.

But it's trailed, right? In the last month, 50%. What is Ethereum or Solana up in the last month? Maybe less so. Ethereum's up more than that. Solana, not so much, I think.

Let's see, ETH, 37%.

Do you think you're getting compensated appropriately by going farther out on the risk? You're trading— Right.

You get an extra 10%—

I heard it from Brad from Ultimator. I like his framework. He says you have to think about how many incremental risk units are you taking and are you being compensated enough? Helium gave you 40, 50% in the month. Ethereum gave you 37%. How much did Solana give you? When you're making these lever— ultimately, I think you have to think about if you're buying anything on top of an ecosystem, it's a levered bet, right? That's Max here. Max, 119,000%. Yeah, in the last month, Ethereum's, yeah, we saw that, 37%. Solana?

SOL?

Yeah, SOL is, I think, similarly, maybe a bit less actually.

No, I think SOL's probably less.

SOL is less, yeah.

18%.

18%, okay. So that's sort of like, what I'm not buying are perhaps tokens that have a lot of overhang from the prior cycle. And this is a very crude analysis because you have to look at fundamentals and whatnot. But perhaps if I were to just make— you're putting me on the spot here and I appreciate that, but the DeFi ecosystem in Solana thematically is something that I like. It's difficult because I have positions like everywhere, right?

It's a tough question, right? Because you have to— is the revenue narrative Like we are, we are firmly like this is the first time in that like we are firmly in a bull market. No ifs, ands, or buts. Like I think there's been, you could debate it. Are we in a Bitcoin bull? Are we? This is a full-blown crypto cycle bull market.

Everything's up.

So does everything run? Does just right, like a year ago it was like Bitcoin was running, maybe like the revenue coins were running, things that were like real world things were Now, I mean, everything's gonna run. It's just what runs more. Totally.

But look, I'm gonna customize this to show 30-day. So I just filtered on CoinGecko, um, like top 100 coins by market cap, and looking at the 30-day, and then filter to show the ones that have performed the worst over the last 30 days. You have SKY, that's Maker, down 8%. Fundamentals clearly don't matter there. You have then—

I see what you're doing here—

Athena flat. Oh no, that's USD, sorry. Um, you have Virtuals, which was, you know, flat basically. So the AI narrative, maybe not so much. I mean, it's when it had a huge run-up.

The exchange tokens, that's interesting.

Like the exchange tokens are kind of flat.

OKB, KON.

Even though there's Visa with UAE, how real that is, is not as much. Filecoin up 10%. I mean, Polkadot, Tron, and then Hyperliquid up 16% over the last 30 days. What's gone up the most? Bonq. And I think a large part of that is Pengu, Bonq, Sei.

Sei is pumping.

Is that probably a catch-up trade to SUI? Maybe. Stellar out of nowhere. And then Algorand, Hedera.

You got the dino coins. The dino— you know what I'm buying?

Ripple. I'm just going on the record, I'm gonna buy Ripple.

Do you own Ripple right now?

No, but I would buy it. It's, it's, it's a part of my portfolio where it is gonna— it is still synonymous with, um with like DeFi. Again, again, Maker and Ripple. One has actually, you could argue, real— on a fundamental basis, SKY is actually pretty like— let's go call up the Framework guys and have them, or Ben at Parafi, scream their bull case for SKY. You know how many times, like, you know, for years you could have like set the narrative, and then you're sitting there and then Ripple just does its thing. I think Taking a very—

by the way, hats off to Brad Garlinghouse. That guy's about to pull off the—

but by the way, now, now it gets more interesting.

He's gonna— well, you're gonna pull it off.

He bought Hidden Road, and he's actually like what one should be doing.

He's going to use a meme coin to acquire real businesses and compete.

AOL, Time Warner. Now, now the question is As is he— do you keep it as a perfect meme coin? Because there's also the, the bear case is that once you start showing fundamentals and revenue, everything collapses because people then focus—

no, you don't connect the revenue to the token, okay? Ever. If you're Ripple, if you're Ripple, you never connect that.

Okay, okay, smart, smart. Are you an advisor to Ripple?

What?

How are you? Yeah, no, um, interesting. Yeah, like, look, Arbitrum's up 43%, I think, on the basis of like Robinhood Um, so okay, maybe let me ask you, so I'm gonna go on the record, I would buy Ripple because it has— you can throw in a lot of size, the market likes it, newbies like it, and it's well understood. And distribution and attention is king.

Yeah.

And I continue to think Ripple, it's just, it's just one of those things, right? It's a top 3 coin.

Yeah.

Like, what is it? What is the In what state of this world does Ripple not rip and something else does? You know what I mean? Like, there's just very few edge cases where I see like Ripple is going to catch a bid and then everything else also is catching— it's going to catch a bid.

That's a deal.

It's a levered bet. And sorry folks, you're going to hate me for it, but I—

yeah, I don't hate it. I don't hate it.

Um, what do you— what do you do? I would Like Blockworks Equity. You can IPO. You can IPO, by the way.

B token. That's interesting. You see Coin Metrics sold?

$100 million.

Yeah.

I was waiting for you to say it.

Yeah. Talk about that in a little bit. But I mean, I—

Jared, if Giano says we're going to go offline and he's going to talk about it, make sure to keep the recording running.

I, I mean, I still have a big Fart Coin bag. I think that like, I do, I do not—

a serious industry.

You can't be long in XRP and then laughing at me for longing Fart Coin. Like, there's no way this cycle— hot air rises, hot air rises, dude.

Honestly, can you buy Fart Coin on Robinhood and Revolut and some of these platforms?

I don't—

that's, that's the other analysis I would be making is like, which coins can you buy in the normie platforms. And I think just making sure that like you have exposure to that, right?

Yeah, that's interesting.

But because like, by the way, Hyperliquid is still not listed on, I believe, Coinbase and Binance. Is that right? Or am I speaking out?

Yeah, I think— yeah, yeah, you're right, you're right. I don't get why hype isn't a buy if it's like— can't you just buy on the fact that it's not listed on Coinbase or Binance yet?

By the way, like, you know how many people are pumping Hood stock? On the basis that it was going to get added to S&P 500. Because as soon as Coinbase got added to S&P 500, it went up massively. Yeah, like it's a flows game. Like, it's a distribute— I keep going back and you're going to hear me say time and time again, distribution is king. And so that is the lens by which I picked, uh, Ripple. It has attention and distribution. It's listed everywhere and it's easy to buy. To your friend that is getting ripped off 25%, God knows where, to buy Hyperliquid.

I don't even want to know where.

You know what I mean? It's challenging. Sky, challenging to buy. So, you know, you gotta wonder, like, if we're gonna onboard another however many billions and billions of dollars and flows, new flows come into the space, where is that gonna trickle into?

Dude, I have an app to shill. I'm not an investor or anything, but it's called— it's called Lootbase. It's—

say that again.

It's called Lootbase.

Lootbase.

L-U-T-E. L-O-O-T-B-A-S-E. Oh, loot.

Loot like loot.

I see. I actually want to try to invest in these guys because it's like—

it is—

it's the most addicting consumer— it's built on— it's a Robinhood UI on top of Hyperliquid. So look at this. Let's see if it's— I don't know if you can see it, but it's— this is, this is the UI. It's a really nice UI and it tells you like $100 20x long yesterday would now be worth $275 today. Like, and it— I actually went for— I know people think I hate ETH, but I did a 5x and I never trade perps and this is my only perps thing right now, but I did a 5x Perps long on ETH and it's like, it's actually so addicting. I now see why people like it.

Perps are killer product. Yeah, it's a killer. Okay. Even more addicting in your phone when you're like, yeah, I mean, Hyperliquid pump now that's sort of like— there's Hyperliquid Phantom, that partnership.

Yeah, yeah. But it's like, this is— it's the— it's one of the first, like, crypto, I don't know, Trading on Hyperliquid or trading on Fantom, you still feel like you're using a crypto product. Like, oh, perps with the UI of like a Robinhood. It's a dangerous thing.

There's a great app that I invested in, uh, shill time, uh, called, um, Euphoria, which is pretty cool, built on MEGETH.

Should we— are we just pumping? Are we just pumping investments right now?

No, stop me at that. But it's, it's good. It's a good trading experience, like very much easy to understand. And Nathan's a good builder and he had really—

what's it called, Euphoria?

Euphoria.

Yeah, yeah, Euphoria.

Yep, yep.

There's too many— there's a lot of Euphorias. Euphoria Crypto.

Yeah, I thought I forgot.

No, I can't even find it.

But anyways, it's mobile, it's super easy to understand for normies and whatnot.

I've got a question for you. So, uh, for anyone who hasn't experienced like an all-out rip-your-face-out bull market, I find that the toughest thing is that everything is working. So in the, in the last couple years, your problem was where can I get a 5x return, or where can I get a 10x return, or where can I even get a 2x return? And now the whole industry is a 3x return. So you need to really, really, really focus. Actually, uh, Dan Smith, who's our head of data, uh, tweeted this this morning and it really resonated. He said, first time of— first stretch of time in 4 years, it's truly felt like an all-out bull with a dozen things that you need to be giving 100% of your attention to. So how do you think about— we've been talking about allocating money. How do you think about allocating time? In this period?

Overtrading is a thing, and I think just assume that you're not going to time the top and work backwards from there and have parameters in place to protect principal, cash out, and optimize for mental clarity to play this game forever. Because it really, really sucks. If you can change your life, change your life. And everyone in this industry asks you one thing. So when you discover crypto, and they all want to get to the same thing of like, did you make generational wealth and all these arbitrary numbers? I was talking to Ben from ParaFi last night about it, and he said something that I think is very true. And he said in a way that it just crystallized it so well and says, it is incredible how much of a competitive advantage you have when you think in at least 1 or 2 years out, which means I don't think the cycle persists for more than a year. This is just markets doing the thing. If we continue on this pace where everything starts ripping 50% month over month, gravity at some point takes its toll, flows dry up, and the market corrects. So work backwards from there and say, if you came in with $1,000 and you right now would be happy with 5 or 10, do it.

Yeah.

But also don't overtrade because A, depending on your jurisdiction, has pretty material tax implications. And look, the Charlie Mungers of the world say don't compute taxes into your equation. Just do whatever it is that you think is going to A, protect your principal, and then B, never forget about rule A, which is protect your principal.

Yeah.

But, um, there is something to be said about like, I— the worst mistakes I've done is assuming that I'm going to tick-tock the cycle. You're never going to do it. So I'm happy clocking 50% of the whatever the total return this cycle is going to deliver. Bitcoin has gone up from $20K to now $120K. I mean, that's a 10x in Bitcoin, right? I mean, the low of Bitcoin was what, $20,000, $25,000?

Something like that.

That's like an 8x. Yeah, that's massive. So are we topped? Have we topped? Probably not, um, because we continue to see new inflows, and that's something that are monitoring. But like, I'm just comfortable saying if my starting base was 100, I'm happy to clock a 50% return because I have 5x the S&P, and that's what I should be getting for this type of asset class. And if venture delivers a 3x, you know what I mean? Like, if the IRR venture and private equity and other asset classes is X, above the benchmark, which is markets, crypto, because it's so far out on the risk spectrum, should give me some multiple of that or some incremental margin on top of that.

Yeah.

And I best— if whatever I'm allocating now, it's like, am I gonna really outperform Bitcoin? Because I can tell you, I've looked and invested in most or a lot of crypto funds. You know how many outperform Bitcoin?

Uh, like 10%. Yeah, yeah.

And so again, don't overthink it. I would just be wary of trying to catch trades, spreading yourself too thin, using leverage. Apply, stay disciplined, stay in your lane, pick 1 or 2, 3 things, and then go from there. But the reality is, I think the biggest regrets that I've— if I survey 100 people, it's like, shit, man, I discovered Bitcoin and Ethereum back in the day and I should have just stuck with it. And there I was, I was trading shitcoins and then I lost it.

Why you gotta pick on people in Alabama? Shit, man.

Shit. You tell me. No, man, I just, yeah, I'd like 5 years, 10 years time, you best believe this house is gonna be an order of magnitude higher.

Yeah.

I wouldn't overthink it too much. The real, I'm now working backwards. Of the top 100 coins, which ones do you ascribe highest probability of surviving over the next 5, 10 years? Start there. Yeah, uh, because I— yeah, I— there's some staying power, like Ripple, probably Bitcoin, probably Ethereum.

I don't know. Yeah, let's pivot.

Yeah, okay, you've had enough of this rant.

M&A. Let's skip stablecoins. We've done too much stablecoins.

We had two other— other than tomorrow is going to be an episode we're going to record on the policy and it's going to cover the Genius Act, which is really, really important.

Yeah, we'll skip. So there's three big policy initiatives. I mean, this is, this is DC, this is DC Week, Crypto Week in DC. Not even, by the way, not dubbed by crypto people, dubbed by policymakers in DC. This is, yeah, Crypto Week in DC right now. There's a bunch of big stuff. Actually, I just got a text saying Something big is happening right now. Vote, vote is happening. They did a verbal vote this morning. Chair said the yeses have it, but then Maxine Waters got a postponement. They're back to debate now. This would be the vote on the final passage. So when you're listening to this Friday morning, we will be late. A bunch of stuff will have happened this afternoon, but we're going to do a really good recap with the VP of Policy at Paradigm as well as Rebecca Redig are joining tomorrow morning. And then that episode will be out on Monday to give you a full recap. Mantle is pioneering the blockchain for banking, a bold new category combining traditional finance with the power of Web3. With UR, the world's first on-chain money app, users can manage fiat and crypto side by side using a Swiss IBON account in euro, US dollar, Swiss franc, and RMB, all posted to the blockchain. Backed by the Mantle Network, UR is the access layer that unlocks a purpose-built vertical platform for on-chain payments, trading, and asset protocols, including ME, TH, MI4, and functions FBTC. All economic activity within UR will be captured by Mantle Network to further drive value to MNT token holders. Follow Mantle on X @mantle_official for more. I wanted to take a moment to tell you about today's sponsor, ZenRock, the permissionless decentralized custody network backed by 1Roundtable partners, 10T, Maven11, and Spartan. Now available on Jupyter, ROCK is the native token for transactions within the ZenRock ecosystem and secures ZenRock's decentralized custody network. The first application launching on ZenRock is ZenBTC, yield-bearing Bitcoin Bitcoin on Solana. ZenBTC will be live in April 2025. To find out more, you can follow ZenRock on X or click the link in the show notes. I wanted to take a moment to tell you about Citria, the ZK rollup expanding Bitcoin's utility without sacrificing its security. Using ZK technology, Citria enables Bitcoin to function as a fully programmable financial platform. Citria is optimistically verified by Bitcoin, offering the most secure and native way to extend Bitcoin's utility to DeFi. With Catria, developers can build scalable payment systems, tap into Bitcoin's liquidity with financial applications, and build privacy systems. Catria is currently on testnet and approaching mainnet. To follow their progress, click the link in the show notes or follow them on X @Catria_XYZ. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply. So do you want to talk stablecoins or you want to talk M&A?

M&A.

M&A.

I mean, stablecoins. Yeah. I mean, other than what?

Well, you sent me a thing.

Oh, banks. Banks. Let's skip that for our now resident host, Rob, to talk about that next week. I think it's evolving, but obviously we can link that to the show notes.

But let's talk about So Talos acquired— there's two deals this week that were interesting. One was Ondo Finance. Ondo, like an L1 for RWAs, acquired Strangelove, who is behind— they're like the labs entity, I think, of a lot of stuff that happens in Cosmos. So that was, that was actually pretty—

we had Jack Samplin.

Yeah, exactly.

On the pod. That's him, right?

But this one's way more interesting and way more relevant to Blockworks. And I paid very close attention to it, which is that Talos acquired Coin Metrics in a $100 million deal. Coin Metrics was started by Nick Carter as well as Jacob— Jacob, what's his last name? Frankel. Frankel.

Frankel.

Yeah, he's one of the founders of Alliance. Yeah. And then was Matt Walsh involved in that too?

Maybe. I think so.

I don't know. But anyways, Coin Metrics has been around for a very long time. They're, you know, if you pull up CNBC and you look at you know, the prices on CNBC, it's CoinMetrics data. They are in the same bucket as their two main competitors are Keiko and Amber Data. And yeah, so congrats to the CoinMetrics team. They had raised about $60 or $70 million and this acquisition is for $100 million. So I'm not sure if it was a good or bad outcome for the team, but yeah, either way, big congrats to the CoinMetrics team. What do you think about this?

Yeah, very interesting. I mean, I think clearly the appetite for traditional companies to get on the space and add coverage, and, you know, as the space becomes more institutional, I think there's a very clear understanding that people are sprinting. I read this as legacy players are sprinting to get smarter and staff up and build a practice around crypto. And so I think that's thematically going to be one of the areas of big M&A activity. Information services companies that are facilitating legacy companies to build a practice. So this could also include Chainalysis of the world, data analytics companies, all of that. If you think about, if you're a legacy business that wants to serve their client base, you want to have really good access. And the reality is the information services space that covers crypto is still, you know, evolving and in the early days. So, um, but there's, you know, players like Coin Metrics, obviously you guys, um, and others that are— have built really interesting, um, indexing, reporting, data analytics platforms.

And you can clearly see what Talos is doing here, by the way. So Talos is an institutional trading platform. What's that?

Backed by Citi, right?

I didn't know that, but that's— that sounds right. That sounds right. Very institutional business. Yeah. Okay. Backed by BNY, Citi, Coinbase Ventures, Castle Island, Fidelity, Galaxy, Wells Fargo, General Atlantic, Andreessen. Yeah. Big, big institutional trading platform. I think they compete. I don't know who they compete with, actually, but maybe Paradigm. Not Paradigm the VC, but Paradigm the the platform. I actually don't know who they compete with, but yeah, their, their customers are like OTC desks, brokerages, asset managers, banks, hedge funds, things like that. So yeah, bringing data in-house is interesting. I will say, so the, so the business model of Coin Metrics is interesting. What you're seeing right now on the data side, just because we kind of live in this world, is that there are different layers of the stack of data. And for any founders who listen to the show, I think it's really important to think about what layer of the stack you're going to play at and the lower you are in the stack. I think people look at the L1 premium and they say, oh, it makes it— I really want to be at the infrastructure stack layer of the stack. Or they look at AWS and Azure and they say, I really want to be at the bottom of the stack because everything that's built on top of me, I value, get value from. Data is a little different, different. And I think a lot of other verticals are different as well. So data, there's— I broadly bucketed as 3 layers of that stack. There's storage, there's storing the data, serving the data, and processing the data. Storing the data is like data warehousing and things like that. Serving is like streaming the data, APIs, stuff like that. And then processing the data would be like analytics, insights, model training, helping users take actions on top of that data. Coinmetrics sits at the serving the data part of the stack, which has become a bit of a— it's a tough business model to be in the API for data, the API space right now for a lot of these data players. So, well, it'll be interesting to see what happens with the rest of these data companies.

M&A was a big category that we had. Yeah, it's really— I think we were a bit early to it. We were calling at one point that Coinbase was going to get acquired when it was like an all-time low of like $20, $30. Lo and behold, it's now at $400.

No, I didn't say they would get acquired. I said they would acquire a bank.

Coinbase? No, I said that someone— in my prediction 2 years ago, like when Coinbase was at an all-time low, I said someone should actually acquire Coinbase. Um, it was like, uh, yeah, the problem with that is they just—

no one has the balls to do that at the back then.

Yeah, it was, it was political seppuku. I get. Um, I'm curious now, who do you think— you know, I think this M&A trend is going to continue to M&A and IPO trend is going to continue.

Yeah.

Who is the next company that IPOs? Who's the next company that gets acquired? Or if you don't want to name a particular one, in what sector or like type of company?

Um, okay, well, we've got— I mean, the IPOs are obvious because they're— they, they kind of announce, right? You've got— I think the ones to pay attention to are like bullish. Wait, let me see if these guys have announced yet. Yeah, they just announced. Okay, I can— Figure just announced today or yesterday, they're targeting a $5 to $10 billion IPO. That's Mike Cagney's firm, who used to run SoFi. Gemini obviously is thinking about it. We have the CEO of Kraken, Arjun, is going to come on the podcast next month to talk about some of their IPO plans. So yeah, I'd be looking at those. On the acquisition side, I mean, I think other companies in the data space, people that Blockworks competes with, I think are going to end up selling. What do you think? I can't— I— we look— we've looked at a few of these. I don't want to share too much, but yeah, we've looked.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

Yeah. I mean, there's tons of like small teams, right? Like Coinbit that maybe doesn't really make headlines as much. So like Coinbase acquisition Blockworks like this, like Coinbase acquired Open, Open's leadership team. Oh, you can't see that.

That's a— I remember Open, it was backed by like Paradigm, I think at one point.

Options.

Yeah.

Yeah. So this is like options. It's like, it's basically like Uniswap for options is how I think about it. It's like the really dumb way to think about it.

But yeah, acquihires are all the rage now. Not just crypto.

There's tons of these types of acquisitions happening. Yeah, I mean, we're looking at a few of these. There's like a bunch of data, data platforms who have like 3 people or 7 people or 5 people. They have like 1 to 2 million ARR. Like those are, those are good deals.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I would say that's generally true. If you're a, if you're a team that like raised money 2, 3, 4, or even 5 years ago and haven't really showed much in the way of revenue but still built something interesting, then I think you're going to get a private workout.

If you're a founder that wants to go build something again, Like, think about it's almost more of a reputation game too. Like, can you say that you exited and get a good exit? Can you, can you basically have a successful exit instead of shutting down your company? And I think a lot of these, these founders, that's actually the better move.

So yeah, yeah, yeah. What else? I know we're bumping up on the hour here, but what else should we cover?

The fun drama of the week was Rob Leshner.

Oh yeah, liquor.

Leschner bought a liquor company that was trading at like a million-dollar market cap or two. I think it was trading at a $2 million market cap. He put a million bucks in. Oh, LQR House, YHC. Let's see how this thing's trading right now. Oh, oh no, it pumped and then went down. So let's— so this is pretty funny. So Leschner— so LQR House, the ticker is YHC, is an e-commerce Oh, there, you can't see it. There you go. Is an e-commerce liquid retailer and marketplace that sells a bunch of premium liquor products through their website, which is cwspirits.com. So Leschner, this is an incredible move, on his Interactive Brokers account, he didn't use a banker or anything like this. He just went on his Interactive Brokers account and bought a 57% controlling stake for $2 million, not $1 million, for $2 million. And he said— he then tweeted, he said, I bought a controlling stake in YHC, a low market cap liquor company with a somewhat shady history. My plan is to replace the board, clean house, and explore strategic alternatives. I have not done extensive diligence. There are signs the company is up to no good. I will sort them out. But please be extremely careful with any low cap, low market cap companies. I might lose all my investment and you might too. So then LQR turns around and they launch an at-the-market share sale to try to dilute Leschner's majority. So they're basically just— I mean, they're going to drive the price down, but they're just unlocking a bunch of new shares to try to dilute Leschner. So this is a fun game to watch.

It truly is. It's a meme coin. Meme coin of a stock. Yes. GameStop.

I think people are going to pump this thing. I don't own any, but pump this into Valhalla. Every— I mean, like, everything. Everyone wants to see Lesnar win.

Yeah, Marcus has just become so, you know, their games, right? And their entertainment, less so than just like boring, uh, places where historically old people like park their wealth and like didn't do much. Now it's just pure entertainment. It's like live streaming the shit, you know?

It's crazy.

Yeah, that's what it is. Uh, people, again, you and I said it and have said it before. You said it in the last episode It's a loneliness epidemic. And if you understand that and that being a pretty big problem, then it explains a lot of the phenomenon you're seeing.

Yeah, there's an article I have teed up to read, which is—

You're not recommending content you haven't read? I see how it is.

Oh yeah, this is my content rec. I haven't even read it. It's called Long Degeneracy by Jez. So I don't know if you know Jez. I think— Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I guess I don't know. I don't know if he's doxxed or not, but we can, we can just call him Jez. Long Degeneracy: Hyper-Gambling Is Going to Eat the World. So I have this queued up to read. He's a good writer. Entertaining.

Nice. Yeah, that's it. I mean, we're all—

oh, I have a content rec. Let's get to the content recs. My content rec is not this Long Degeneracy piece, but I mean, people could read it if they want to. It is The John Adams TV show on HBO.

Okay.

If you're into, if you're into history and like American Revolution stuff, John Adams TV show on HBO. It's a good one.

Who plays it? Is it the what's-his-name?

The— I don't know. I don't know.

I know I've seen the show. It's kind of old, man.

Yeah.

Yeah, I've seen this. Yeah, it's Who plays him?

Is the chubby guy.

Yeah, he's a guy to Billions too, the prosecutor. Yeah, yeah, Attorney General, what's his name?

Oh, Paul Giamatti.

Paul Giamatti, a great actor. He always plays the same role. I like it. Yeah, speaking of, um, we haven't talked about Susan a while. She was, uh, she was go— I was in New York last week, then she went to Jackson Hole, and it reminded me of a great show which I really like called, uh, Yellowstone.

Yellowstone.

And so folks haven't seen it, I think it's just the least interesting recommendation. Excuse me, everyone's seen Yellowstone. Okay, but it doesn't make it the less interesting. It's like everyone—

my recommendation is interesting because it's from like 2008 or something like that, so people have long forgotten about it. But yours is— yours is like—

okay, this whole rigmarole makes absolutely— it's just Okay, this is fallen unsaid. It's good content.

It is good content.

It is good content. You know, I'm starved for content.

Did you watch the sequels like 1913 or 1918 or something?

No, those are sequels. See, also I saw there's multiple seasons. I didn't see sequel.

Oh no, it's a prequel.

Hmm.

There's prequels. 1923 is a prequel and then they go even farther back and it's 1883. It follows the Dutton family's journey to Montana.

Interesting. Okay, I don't have any time for TV. I don't think I've ever turned my TV— I was thinking about putting a TV. I'm like redoing the office, and, uh, I'm— I was thinking of putting a TV on.

I'm like, you're flipping stuff, right?

I flipped it. So before you saw that, that was like the background, so now you see this. But you're gonna— I'm gonna change the book— the bookcase behind me.

Nice.

Yeah.

Oh, but I was thinking, you know, we were supposed to tell people what were on the books at the office.

I'm bringing up more books. These are just like— I usually now read everything on my Kindle, but I have the Harry Potter. These are really good. They're just illustrated versions.

They're not— sorry, I do have another content recommendation. I went to the Acquired, you know, the, the— oh, everyone was there.

That in, uh, yeah, I know, I know.

It was funny. I got there, there's like a line around the corner. It was at Radio City Music Hall and 6,000 people showed up to this thing. There's a line. It was like the most homogeneous audience I've ever seen. It was like a bunch of like, all the, all the bros are there, 34-year-old, like wannabe founder energy with like, wannabe founder energy. So it was so funny, but it was actually, I mean, they did an amazing job. 10 out of 10. Um, they had Jamie Dimon.

Yeah. Um, sponsored by JP Morgan Payments.

So yeah. Uh, Meredith, um, I forget the last name, the CEO of New York Times and then Barry Diller. I was, it was interesting cuz I was saying I just finished Barry Diller's book, which people should read, called Who Knew? Interesting. Interesting if you like the '70s, '80s, '90s in media. Barry Diller is an absolute beast. But yeah, I would recommend— I don't think the Barry Diller and the Meredith interviews are worth listening to, but the Jamie Dimon interview is phenomenal.

Speaking of Cable Cowboys, great book, and the founder's episode on it, John Malone. Fantastic book if you're interested in media.

John Malone at one point in time in the '80s was acquiring a company every 10 to 14 days for like 2 years straight.

That's crazy. Uh, do you ever think we would, uh, ever be, uh, in a position to have an Acquired type of, uh, in-person live podcast? I mean, we do it in the conferences and it's like—

Dude, we tried doing Empire meetups the last 2 years and you didn't show up to either of them.

You're in a mood of publicly shame. I don't know what's gotten into you, man.

I'm tired. I didn't sleep much last night. I'm tired.

Yeah.

Yes, we should do that. We should do that.

I mean, if— and that's when you'll know you'll sell. Like, if 10,000 people line up around—

yeah, sell it all.

You know, just sell it all, you know. Cool. But, um, all right, folks. By the way, by the way, one thing is on top of mind. Are— where are we in the podcast rankings?

In the crypto podcast rankings?

Unfortunately, just— we comp ourselves to crypto still.

Yeah, I know. We are unfortunately sitting at number 3.

Excuse me?

Yeah, I think, I think Unchained, I think Unchained passed us because they, uh, they've got these 2 shows inside of it, Chopping Block and Bits and Bips.

Okay.

So they've got a few shows in one.

Fair enough.

But we got to pump the numbers. Yeah.

Yeah. And then who's second?

Bankless numbers are moving now that ETH is moving. Now that ETH is moving.

We have to be like hyper-liquid aligned or something.

Well, it's tough because all the, all the big— a lot of the big shows in crypto have been around, uh, have been around price action, but I've been around actually like, uh, communities that form around coins. Like, uh, at one point in time, the biggest show in the industry was Peter McCormick, What Bitcoin Did, Bitcoin Show, then Bankless ETH Show. So, um, we will stay true to our holistic reporting of this industry.

And, uh, yeah, I, I guess, uh, We're going to be shaking up a little bit of the content coming up and adding more spice to it, I guess. Yes.

All right, folks, that's the show. Have a great Friday, great Saturday. We will see you guys on Monday. We have a really good recap of DC Week and Crypto Week in DC.

All right, folks, have a great weekend. Thanks for listening.