The Next Phase of the Bull Market | Weekly Roundup

You ask 100 people in the world, not your 10 crypto degens and natives, and you tell them, what is the— how do you express a DeFi trade? Like crypto taking over payments. What are they going to say? Aave or Ripple? Maker or Ripple? Ethereum or Ripple? What's a payment chain?

Yeah, Ripple.

Honestly, I've learned a lot about investing about like in crypto. Like, you can, can you distill— and I asked this question a lot of the founders, like, what is a one-liner for your project? If you don't have one-liner for a project, it's going to be really hard to capture attention.

This episode is brought to you by SKALE, the next evolution in Layer 1 blockchains. Explore the gas-free ecosystem at scale.space/ecosystem and follow their journey on X @skale_network. Thanks to SKALE for making today's episode possible. Hey guys, Jason here. Just to let you know, we have Permissionless 4 coming up in June from the 24th to the 26th at Industry City in Brooklyn. This is a conference for the developers and builders where we'll be focusing on the DeFi Renaissance, applications, token design, and much more. Click the link in the show notes to grab your ticket today and use code EMPIRE10 for 10% off.

What up, everybody? Happy Friday. Happy Saturday. Happy Sunday if you're slow. Happy Monday if you— I don't know. I don't think people are listening to the Roundup by Monday. Santi, how we doing? Who knows?

Doing great, you know, lot, lot, lot to talk about. I mean, it's, it's amazing. I mean, we're heading into the summer, you know, who doesn't like summer? I guess if you're in Northern Hemisphere, but, uh, no, a lot going on in crypto. Uh, I think, I mean, last roundup we just went bang, bang, bang, like news articles.

I think we'll have another— I think we got another bang, bang, bang roundup.

Totally. So let's just jump right into it, right in.

Big news of the week, I got a haircut, looking like a child, but at least my chin bruise is gone. So, you know, you one step 2 steps forward, 1 step back, you know? Yeah.

I was hoping you'd finally come through with our bet, which is you still have to shave your head.

But hey, what was that bet? What was— oh, it was a Twitter follower bet. Yeah. I don't remember making that actually. I don't, don't remember. I thought we got contracts, man.

By the way, there's one guy or there's a couple of folks in the Empire channel that like always DM me. It's like, when is Janno gonna shave?

Dude, someone tweeted about it the other day. I was like, shh. We got to block. I just start blocking people.

That's good, man.

Yeah. Let's talk markets first. So, and then, okay, so here's what I want to cover today. I want to talk about two interesting acquisitions, the Robinhood acquisition, and then Anchorage actually made an interesting acquisition of Mountain Protocol, which we had on the pod with— Yeah, we had— so the founder's name is Martin. We had him and Nick Carter on the podcast. They were like the first regulated yield-bearing stablecoin, I think, if I remember correctly. So we'll talk about that. I want to talk about Coinbase added to the S&P, but also they had this hacker, this breach. Public Treasury companies, eToro IPO, meme coins are coming back with, with Believe. But maybe first we can just talk about the markets. So we just recorded this ETH podcast. ETH has had this like you know, god-tier candle in the last week. You know, it's up from kind of $1,500 range, $1,600, $1,700 to up— what's ETH trading at right now? $2,500 bucks, roughly? Yeah, $2,565. What is your— did that— what's your sense of ETH right now? And did that podcast make you more bullish, less bullish? I'm just curious of your sense on ETH right now. ETH in the whole, I'd call like the ecosystem.

Ether, Ether, Ethereum, because there's two different things when we talk about like, what am I bullish on? I am, I've never been sort of super bearish on Ethereum as an ecosystem. There's many reasons to be excited about the developer community, the research that goes on, the thriving ecosystem, companies continue to come to Ethereum. It has like, It's an important piece of the crypto ecosystem. So I've been very constructive there, especially now. I think the Ethereum community sort of like has a renewed sense of urgency that I think you're starting to see now. And we covered it a lot in the pod. I asked in the podcast, like putting that aside, like, you know, a lot of people talk about, oh, there's been a lot of negative criticism of Ethereum. Like, can we just still agree that Ethereum is the second largest crypto asset? It is still a $300 billion asset. So like, how do we get to that valuation is a question that I'm going to continue to press every team, every founder that comes into this podcast. It's like, why is it worth $300 billion? Not just Ethereum, every other crypto project. And what do you need to believe for this to be $300 billion? And I think that is the ultimately the question. That I don't have a good answer to.

So I have a good answer to that. I think the only reason any of these things are valued at what they're valued at is the same reason OpenAI is valued at $80 billion, or whatever their last valuation was, which is OpenAI is not an $80 billion company today. It's that if you close your eyes and you can kind of squint, and if they get everything right over the next decade, that is all, you know, all information will flow through ChatGPT. And boom, you've got a trillion-dollar company.

And I hear you, I hear you, I hear you. But you know, again, it's like, when you run a fundamental analysis, discounted cash flow, go talk, listen to the podcast I recorded with Jeff Dorman about Coinbase. Funny enough, Coinbase now got added to the S&P 500. We'll talk about it in this podcast.

Actually, I'm gonna be honest, I didn't listen to that episode. What was Jeff's take on Coinbase? Was he bullish or bearish?

He was like, look, bearish. I would say the product suite is not very integrated. You know, it's gonna be facing competitive threats from traditional financial institutions and you know, across different line items, you know, it, it, it, the moat is not there, there. So anyways, that was Jeff's take. You know, Coinbase was at like $140, $150 then, it's now $250, got out of S&P. Every manager now is buying it because they have to, right?

Yeah.

They can't afford not to have Coinbase and underperform the index. Nonetheless, when you, like, I agree, like, ultimately you have to do a discount of cash flow, 10 years, what does this look like? And then terminal value to get to some semblance of evaluation.

Do you, that's not how you, that's not how you value a startup. Like you invested in Blockworks. Did you build a discounted cash flow for us? Yes.

Like, like, did I model it out? Like, I looked at the different pieces of your business, and I say, okay, you have a lot of dependency on the event space. Do you believe that you can move away from that? And since I've invested, you've like executed on a number of other line items that move away from one-time cyclical revenue source to a subscriber type. And ultimately, that was the bet that I made back then. I think you guys have executed on that. And so yeah, like you, You know, are you going to model it to the nth decimal? But at least you have to have a reasonable understanding of like how many users are using ChatGPT? What is the average revenue per user? And then how does that flow through the P&L and what's the margin profile of the business? I continue to struggle with the Ethereum value, like the ETH value accrual. And we don't have to spend too much time on that, but in a lot of what we talked about was like the L1, L2 dynamic and rent and how does that accrue? We talk a lot about security being like a very valuable piece here and like, you know, rent and whatnot. So anyways, it was a helpful episode. I still am not fully convinced on ETH being a $300 billion asset. Like, I just— I'm cautious. I'd rather— I see more opportunities in other parts of the ecosystem.

Okay, let me ask you this. So the market is starting to develop where— did you see this Believe app? It used to— it was called Clout, and then now it's called Believe.

$100 million in revenue.

Yeah. So to me, this is like just a different kind of spin on meme coins, obviously. So, okay, so basically we had Pumped Up Fun, which was like meme coins. We all called them meme coins and stuff like that. And then we had Zora come out on Base and ETH and ZoraChain, and they called them creator coins, but really they're just meme coins as well. And then we have Believe come out and they're actually calling— I don't know if you've seen this, but what Believe is, is it gives you the ability they're marketing it as like, hey, founders don't go raise from VCs. They've kind of made the VC the enemy. And they're saying the way, the way to fund your company is actually go launch a token. And this is just, this is just a different marketing spin on Pumped Up Fund and Zora. So Pump calls them meme coins, Zora calls them creator coins, Believe calls them founder coins. It's all, it's all the same thing. But it's got me asking the question of like, So the original cycle, right, in 2021 was Bitcoin. Then we rolled in, then you roll gains into ETH, and then it goes into altcoins, and then it went into NFTs. So I think a lot of people went into the cycle and they said it's going to be the same thing— Bitcoin, then into ETH and SOL, then into the alts, and then into NFTs or whatever. What actually happened is there were so many people have been in the industry through 2021 that they just skipped all the middle steps. And they went straight into NFTs, which this version of NFTs were meme coins, obviously. So we went straight from Bitcoin gains from the Bitcoin ETF in January of last year directly into the meme coins. So many people got hosed on that trade now and have lost so much money on meme coins. They made a lot and now they've lost a lot because people didn't sell the top that I think actually this resurgence in the market, Bitcoin's going up, ETH is going up, SOL is going up. I actually think this is when we could start to see a classic cycle, which is Bitcoin. You roll those gains into things like real revenue-generating token, whatever, whatever the alts— like, I'll broadly call it alts or something like that. And then maybe later on we get memes. I'm curious, curious what you think of that. Or because the other side of that would be, look, go look at a chart of meme coins. Boom, we've got it on Blockworks Research. Memes are coming right back up and everyone's just going to skip the alts again and go right into memes. Uh, how do you think?

I mean, let's— I always look at when the market rebounds, like, what are— what rebounds the fastest and hardest?

Okay.

So, so like, that's always to me a strong signal of what the market wants to bid.

Okay.

And so like 7 days, like, I'm looking at CoinGecko, has pretty good categorization. So you have like smart contract and platforms, You have proof-of-work chains, proof-of-stake chains, um, you know, world liberty portfolio chain, you know, so they bucket these things. Uh, I'm looking at like, you know, memes for instance. Uh, that bucket is up 34% over the last 7 days, outperforming, uh, right here.

So we've got, we've got WIF, Pi, Pepe, ETH.

Obviously they rebound quite hard. Again, it's a Simplistically, it's a flows game. Like, it doesn't— like, how much flows are required to move the price of an asset by 1%? For a very mature asset like Bitcoin and Ethereum, it is obviously harder. I'm saying obvious things, but it's just like, it's important to contextualize. Like, it doesn't take that much capital to, you know, that flows into particular lower-cap market coins to double. Right.

Yeah. But if we're being intellectually honest with that take, we've got WIF obviously is at the top. It's up 60% on the week and Pepe is up 40%. But then, so then you've got all the ETHs, right? Like WETH and STETH and wrapped ETH and Kelp, RSETH and all these ETHs. So then you have to scroll down a little bit. Then you've got, then you've got Athena and Radium, which are, I would call like fundamentally driven tokens. I don't know if you'd agree with that. Then you've got the L2s, which is like Optimism, Arbitrum, and then you've got like OG DeFi with AAVE. Then you've got Hyperliquid, which I'd bucket in the same Radium, Athena category. So it's actually not as clear to me what this is. I don't get a clear signal from this, but maybe you're seeing something I'm not. Okay.

Look, remember that time we talked about like, what are the top 20 coins? Top 20 coins, uh, in crypto continue to be like legacy coins. They just have brand recognition and power, right? When, when investors— I don't pretend to understand all the pockets of flows in the crypto ecosystem. It's like really hard, I think, for me to like visualize. But like, for instance, Ripple, like no one was expecting that. And, and, you know, Ripple is now like a top 4 asset, right? Uh, up from Solana and BNB. Where's that money coming from? Who's bidding this asset? Like, Ripple is, you know, a lot of the Cardano, Dogecoins of the world, like, there's like, there's one, like, try to piece together, like, fundamentals. Do they matter? Like, we'd have a whole intellectual discussion on that, and I would argue no, not so much. Uh, but of course, like, for Hyperliquid, you know, you have like a reasonably— and Maker and Aave, like, DeFi protocols, like, you have a buy and burn mechanism that you had— guys have put together a great research piece recently about like looking at buy and burn tokens and how the market has like rewarded them, like Maples of the world, right? So it's that whole category. The other simplistic arguments, like what are the main assets that people— how can people express views? And if you look at like what are the assets that are offered to people at the wallet aggregator level and exchange level, it matters, right? So naturally, like all the meme coins are readily easily like understood by the market and a lot of the retail participants. And so, you know, when people feel that they want to put risk back on the menu, Are you going to buy Solana or are you going to buy a levered exposure to Solana, which is perhaps WIF or BONK?

Yeah.

Or are you going to buy Bitcoin or are you going to buy Dogecoin? Um, and, and so I think like that's sort of how the market views it when, when risk is back on the, on the menu and on the table. People like to express levered bets.

Yeah.

Whether it's through a perp or options, but memes kind of do that. I'm not here to tell you that memes are dead. They're definitely not dead. They're, they're— they've been a core component of the crypto ecosystem since day one. Bitcoin is the ultimate meme.

So I don't— so are you buying memes right now? Because we're going back—

I don't have time.

Yeah, yeah.

All right, let me answer this.

I would have, I would have put on a trade of me, like, yeah, with, for instance, open up the chart of WIF. I think it went all the way down to 25 cents. When I look at them, like, yeah, this is Yeah, yeah. Like, like, yeah, all the way down to $0.25. Yeah. Liberation Day, right? It was like, I think the low there was like, yeah. So it rebound really hard, right? Again, it's a billion-dollar asset now. It traded all the way to $200 million, which, which is, you know, or we can look at the better meme coin. Yeah. Hot air rises kind of thing, right?

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To learn more about Marinade, visit marinade.finance or click the link in the show notes. So help me answer this question. I got a question from, from a friend. He said, look, I'm finalizing the sale of one of my houses. I'm going to dump that cash into the market. Here's what he said. He said, I'm going, I'm going heavy into— or is it going to go heavy SOL, memes, and then some real revenue-generating projects like Radium, JOOP, Jito, Hype, and Athena.

Anything else you love right now?

How do you, how do you answer a question like that? And I'm curious what you think of that actual basket, but—

Well, A, what's his time horizon? Does he need that money? And what's his return profile? Like, what is he expecting to get out of that? Can he hold this for 10 years, 5 years, or 3 months? Or 1 week? Yeah.

Let's say he's very risk-on, very comfortable with risk, and has a multi-year time horizon.

I think Bitcoin deserves an important part in that portfolio, and I've come around to that actually as of late.

That's funny, that's what I said. I responded to him, I said, can never go wrong with, with a bit of BTC.

Like, like, you, you can look at Bitcoin dominance and maybe that comes down, but as a whole, I mean, I think there's a great chart going around, around like M2 and Bitcoin. Uh, Ro Paul and a few other folks like, uh, Eric— not Eric, but, uh, I think the Bitwise guys, a couple of them tweeted about it, which is it is really— and we've talked about it here, it's sort of look at M2. And the correlation between M2 and the price of Bitcoin is actually quite strong, uh, if you look at just, um, and so yeah, like Bitcoin's great as an asset because you can do so much with it. You can borrow against it. The vol is, you know, less than your altcoins. And so, you know, it just, it, it allows you to just build a little bit, dampen a little bit of vol and still capture. I mean, Bitcoin could be at $150,000 Heck, could be at $200,000 by the end of the year. It wouldn't surprise me. And that's a great outcome, I think. I would argue like put some in Bitcoin, some in gold. And then of those assets, I don't dislike— I would be curious how he would express the meme trade. Is he buying a basket of like the top memes? And what I've seen other really smart investors like, okay, Pick your favorite meme in a particular ecosystem you feel excited about. Solana, Ethereum, Bitcoin, you know, Pepe, WIF, Bonk, and Fartcoin, whatever it is, right? I'm not here to like, these are all hypotheticals, right? None of this advice or whatnot. But I think that's how normally a lot of people think, right? That I, what I like to think about is, say you have 100 people in a room. They all describe the scenario that you just described, which is they come across some liquidity and they want to put on risk. I think it's not so much like, what do you believe? It's the Family Feud style of investing is how I would describe it. You know Family Feud, this game in America? For listeners that don't live in America or have been living under a rock, Family Feud, go watch it. Because the game is sort of like survey says, and they survey 100 or X amount of people. And so it's like, what is— and they ask a bunch of questions, right? Like, whatever. What do people do on a first date? Like, what are the top 7 questions? And so how do you play this game to win? Not to be right, it's to win. Again, you're playing a game to win, not to be right. This is a classic CMS out there, probably listening. Do you want to be right or do you want to make money? And so that's what you need to anticipate is what is the— what is—

it's not the—

it's not— it's not the objectively right answer. It's like, The social consensus. Yeah, what's— what does the crowd think? And so that's the exercise, I think, for crypto, which is in the episode again with Jeff Dorman. It's like we came both to the agreement that a lot of value in these networks is the social currency. And because it is a social phenomenon, then you just sort of like invert and you say, yeah, okay, so how do people— like, you could be sitting there all day saying Ripple has no value. It's a ghost chain or Cardano. It's like, yeah, but you know, that's how the masses, like somehow Brad and team have like really developed this brand that Ripple is synonymous with DeFi. You ask 100 people in the world, not your 10 crypto degens and natives, and you tell them, what is the, how do you express a DeFi trade? Like crypto taking over payments. What are they going to say? Aave or Ripple? Maker or Ripple? Ethereum or Ripple? What's the payment chain?

Yeah, Ripple.

Honestly, I've learned a lot about investing about like in crypto. Like, you can, can you distill? And I asked this question a lot of the founders, like, what is a one-liner for your project? If you don't have one-liner for a project, it's gonna be really hard to capture attention.

Yeah. Let me ask one more markets question, then we can move into the news because there's a lot of it. I tweeted this out. Got just attacked by the Bitcoin army here. I said Bitcoin dominance calling the top at 65%. We're currently— so we've been on a multi-year since actually the end of 2022. Basically since like FTX blew up, we've just been on a multi-year uptrend for Bitcoin dominance, and we just hit 65%. I said that's the top, 65%, calling the top Bitcoin dominance. Uh, today it's at 63%. Uh, I don't know if you have thoughts on this one.

Again, yeah, I think I sort of agree with your take. Um, normally what happens is, so you saw like a pretty, pretty big rally here of Bitcoin dominance and Bitcoin Usually when there's a relief rally, a rebound, Bitcoin leads and then everything else follows, insofar as Bitcoin is stabilized. So Bitcoin holds— it typically goes— and you'll hear a lot of these traders say, like, if Bitcoin holds this level of like $100K, then it's breathing room for other things to rip. And so naturally dominance comes down.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, that's historically how the pattern has sort of behaved.

But yeah.

At the end of the day, like, I would characterize FOMO has always been ever-present in crypto because you hear stories about people making life-changing money with fart coin or whatever. And so it's always the, this is already ripped, so I missed Ethereum train because it's a $300 billion asset. Then, oh, uh, Solana is at $90 billion. Oh wait, um, this Avalanche is at $10 Oh wait, this project in these ecosystems is at 1. Oh wait, there's another ecosystem at 100 million. Oh wait, there's another at 10, there's another 1. And then you keep going down that path.

Yeah.

And then you sort of like say, okay, how many people are going to allocate to these things? And of course there's some truth in like the narratives of AI and, you know, memes and particular sectors within memes. Like, so it's just Uh, it's, it's— I will say it's hard to, objectively speaking, like, it's very hard to outperform Bitcoin, Ethereum, the majors over a multiple cycle, like, period. Some of the best investors, some of the best funds that are actively doing this 24/7, have teams doing this, struggle to outperform.

Yep. Yeah. Um, all right, let's get into the news. A lot of news. Um, First, first piece of news is two acquisitions. We had Robinhood acquired WonderFi. We had Anchorage is acquiring, is acquiring Mountain Protocol. So Mountain Protocol we've had on the podcast, we mentioned earlier, Martin, we did that episode with Nick Carter. I think Multicoin, and they'd raised an $8 million Series A, Multicoin, Castle Island Ventures, obviously, they were innovators in the sense that They wanted to— their idea was that you could actually have a stablecoin with native yield baked into it, which, as we're seeing more and more and more, that's already happening. This is a pretty interesting acquisition because— so they're actually— I don't know if you saw— I don't know if you followed this acquisition at all, but so Mountain has USDM as their stablecoin. It got to like $150 million market cap and then now it was trading down at like $50 million or something like that. USDM is actually being wound down as part of the integration. So I originally tweeted out, oh, this is interesting. We've got this nationally or federally chartered bank with, with Anchorage, and now they're going to have a stablecoin. That's very interesting. I was wrong about that. USDM is actually going to be wound down as part of the integration because they need to comply with the Genius and Stablecoin Acts. So it's not— this isn't Anchorage getting a stablecoin. What this is, is Anchorage is now the first OCC crypto bank that can help other institutions issue stables. So as Anchorage now tries to go head to head with the State Streets and BNY Mellons of the world as this big custodian, they need to layer— being a custodian is actually a pretty crappy business model. You need to layer other services on top. So the service that this acquisition gives them is the ability to help institutions issue stables, and you'll see it in this line, or maybe it was in their tweet, basically everybody's going to have a stablecoin in their mind, or at least a stablecoin strategy. So I thought this was a pretty smart, pretty smart acquisition.

What does their business model look like over the next year or two with this acquisition?

I think they basically just start layering. So the first thing that a custodian needs to do, right, is so they all start with being a custodian and then everybody, whether it's BitGo or Coinbase Custody or you know, Gemini's custody business or Zappo or Copper, whoever it is, they all started as custodians. Then they started layering trading services on top of that. So they all started launching the ability to trade on top of the crypto that you had custody with them. Then they offered the ability to borrow and lend against it. So I think Anchorage today has one of the biggest lending desks in the industry and now as you— as that becomes a product that other people— that becomes really competitive, you need to offer more and more and more services. So, and, you know, stablecoins are obviously at the heart of the industry today. So I think it's a pretty good service. I like it. I thought this was a good acquisition.

Yeah.

All right. The other one that's interesting is Robinhood acquiring WonderFi. This one, there's probably a little more meat on the bones to talk about. I thought this was a brilliant acquisition. For 5 reasons.

One is regulatory fast lane.

Robinhood just bought the only crypto platform in Canada with full CRO approval and CIPF insurance. Basically, for those not familiar with the Canadian licensing space, which I assume is most listeners, they just skipped this like multi-year regulatory nightmare. They bought a compliance engine that other people can't replicate. And they basically skip this like regulatory nightmare trying to get the licenses. And so that's number one, regulatory fast lane. Number two, and by the way, I got a lot of this from Simon, Simon Taylor. So just big, big shout out to Simon, who's that? Yeah, just very good fintech guy. Second is instant Canadian footprint. So WonderFi has 1.7 million KYC Canadian users. They've got a couple billion in trading volume, $1.5 billion in custody. So they've got the staff to run a big, you know, Robinhood Canada, basically, let's call it. So they've got— they get it. They get almost 2 million KYC Canadian users. That's big. 3 is Canada actually has clearer crypto regulations than the US right now in some aspects. So this actually gives Robinhood the ability to— like, if you think about, you know, we were talking about this with, with talking about Deribit, this actually gives Robinhood this interesting sandbox to kind of test like derivatives trading and trading and perps and staking products and cross-border trading solutions. And right now, if they didn't do this acquisition, they would have had to wait for the SEC to give them approval to do all this. Now they can go do this in Canada. By the way, I'm not a lawyer, so I don't actually fully know what I'm talking about, but this is my guess. Number 4 is they can now layer on all of the existing Robinhood things on top of their Canadian products, like their X1 credit card and zero-commission trading and all the classic stuff. And then number 5 is, yeah, as Simon said, this is a competitive chess move, right? So they are basically paying— they paid a 40% premium to keep WonderFi away from, you know, there's 5 big Canadian banks. There are other US crypto exchanges that were, you know, looking north, probably like Coinbase and folks like that. Wealthsimple is the Canadian equivalent of Robinhood. So by doing this, you're basically saying, look, all the competitors can't have this business.

So I love it.

I think it was great. I thought it was smart. I don't know if you have any thoughts on this acquisition.

No, I just love to see the M&A activity in crypto pick up so much. I mean, I think we're pretty early in our predictions. I think not this year, but last year we talked about the We even speculated that Coinbase might be acquired by a big bank, uh, and, you know, at the time Coinbase stock was trading at $25. Now it's 10x that. So someone missed an opportunity to buy Coinbase. Um, so yeah, I mean, it's, it's pretty impressive. The question is, what gets bought next? Like, who do you think is up? Like, who, I guess, who do you think is the major—

the number one M&A that's happening right now are, are actually— it's a little boring, but the number one thing that's happening is, uh, exchange license acquisitions. So there are a million, I mean, basically what happened for the last 5 years, or for 2017, let's call it 2016 to 2023, let's call it where you could actually, it wasn't that hard to go get a license. This could be anywhere from in Singapore to Malaysia, to Indonesia, to Mexico, to Argentina. Like, oh, think of all these global, think of all these countries around the world. You could go get a license. Around 2 years ago, after everything blew up, all these countries stopped giving licenses. So you have a lot of countries around the world, whether it's Canada to Brazil to the Netherlands, where there's like 1 or 2 exchanges that have become dominant and they've got the licenses. So now if someone like Coinbase wants to push into that area or Robinhood wants to push into that area, you're going to have to go through like a 2 or 3 or 4 year regulatory hurdle to just break in and start trading crypto, all those companies are going to get gobbled up because they own the—

it's really an—

it's really a licensing acquisition play is what it comes down to.

So yeah, yeah, absolutely.

What do you think? Anything? That's kind of a boring play though, because like exchange acquiring exchange. Any other more interesting things that you think will happen? Inversion acquiring something?

No, no. Listen, I heard you. I can't talk about Inversion too much in this pod.

Like, I hear you.

No, Circle is probably one where might be acquired. I don't know if it actually gets acquired or not, but I could see them potentially be acquired.

Yeah. Oh, the obvious one is data companies. Okay, so I mean, this is just the world that we play in. So I've got kind of a unique insight into it, which is there's all these data businesses. So there's kind of the big player. So there's there's like the data companies that most people know. Then there's this basically like 50 data companies in the industry that let's say they raised— either they didn't raise any money or they raised somewhere between like $20 to $60 million. And they, they actually have amazing data in like one little area, like they've got the best derivatives data or the best staking data or the best hyper liquid data or something like that, or the best aptos data. And they've got like 2 engineers and a product person and a founder or something like that. And they've been able— a lot of them are maybe have $500 million of ARR, or excuse me, $500,000 of ARR, $1 million of ARR, $2 million of ARR, but they're more like a feature, less like a company.

Right.

And basically all of them are selling right now.

Do you think there's any protocol-to-protocol M&A happening or could be happening?

Not good. There's not good protocol-to-protocol. I think—

When's the last time we saw that? I mean, it was, uh, well, there's, there's a Synthetix was looking. Yeah, yeah. That's what I was thinking about.

Synthetix and the trading. Lira.

Lira, which was Lira. It used to be called Lira.

Yeah. Yeah. Whatever. It's, um, this one. Um, so this was yesterday. Synthetix proposes $27 million token swap to acquire options protocol Derive. Um, Synthetix—

Oh, I remember looking at that.

Derive, formerly Lira. Via an SNX for DRV token swap. Yeah. So yeah, there's deals like that, but like, those are less interesting. I think what ends up being really interesting is, look, some of these companies are— or some of these foundations and protocols are sitting on billions of dollars, literally billions of dollars, and they're not doing anything with that money. They're literally— they're staking it and they're getting a little yield.

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So I heard this week, I had a meeting with, uh, someone's really involved in the Rootstock community. They have like 2,000 Bitcoin.

Yeah. Yeah.

In cold storage, ladies and gentlemen, $2 billion sitting in cold storage, not earning 5% on treasury. It's like, you know what I'm talking about? It's like, what, what are you gonna do?

Yeah.

What are you doing with that capital?

Yeah.

No, I, I think like there, if I were Here's what I would buy. Where do you think most of the value accrues in the stack?

Um, I don't know.

Go just, I don't know, user aggregators. Go buy a wallet. Argent, ladies and gentlemen.

Yeah. Yeah.

What's Argent doing? They built some really cool tech. It's not going public. Probably has, you know, at this point, 10 years of investors sitting there. Probably some of them want liquidity. You know, yeah, if you're a protocol, you want users. Well, there's a lot of users, people using Argent. Yeah, if you're a protocol, I mean, that to me feels like a pretty interesting acquisition. Yeah, we spent a lot of time looking at like fintechs, like traditional fintechs that just have gone nowhere in places.

So that's what I think will start to happen is like, like, um, what's a fintech? I don't know, Acorns. Like, what happened to Acorns?

Yeah, Betterment, Acorns. There's a myriad of fintechs in Latin America that we have in our, in our, in our shortlist of companies that we're looking at and poking around. Um, I just read, uh, Coinbase— uh, sorry, JPMorgan just put together a, um, I just got their, um, just note on Coinbase. I, uh, this is like the analyst there, uh, Kenneth Worthington, uh, and they just had like Worthington, hell of a name, to work on Wall Street. Yeah, yeah. So he, uh, you know, Coinbase, he's like, they're neutral on coin. Anyways, like, they're like TMC conference takeaways, and they hosted Coinbase President Emil Choi and their CFO They had some really interesting, like, topics— that 4 main topics. One, legislation, which, you know, clearing up, um, the derivatives and payments. Obviously, the Derivit acquisition. They talk about, uh, the competitive landscape to— listen to this— competitive landscape presents opportunity of white label. I was like, white label? What do you mean white label? Coin? They're like, Coin is uniquely positioned to withstand most competition as legacy crypto participants have been honing, broadening, diversifying its products. Their whole point is 'Coinbase currently provides 200 partners technical support and infrastructure to engage with the crypto ecosystem.' And so I think they think, and this is the first time I hear this term, crypto as a service, CAS offering is notable. And they think of Coinbase acting as, quote, quote, acting as a principal—

JP Morgan wants to go launch crypto. They'll just be like, hey, Coinbase, you got everything, you got the licenses. Yeah.

It is the first but not the last time. And I powerful terminology like this could really spark some interest. So crypto as a service, obviously the internet had software as a service.

Evan Worthington, let's go, buddy. Coming on.

Yeah, like kudos to them. This is the first time hearing it, so I'll give them credit for it. I'm going to start using this. I've been using crypto-enabled businesses.

You want to hear a great marketing line? One of our data— one of our data or one of our research analysts posts on Twitter. He said, access to Blockworks research dashboard gives me data privilege. He's like, he's like, you didn't know that SolFi was gaining DEX market share on Solana or that Radium's launchpad hit record volumes or that Ethereum reclaimed market share or that app revenue on Aptos just reached an all-time high. I thought this was common knowledge. I've got data privilege. Oh, whoa.

That's powerful right there.

That's a stud line. Data privilege. One more note on this line about the protocols having so much money. I thought there was a— I thought this there's a post by Dean, Dean Eigenmann that I thought was spot on, which is he said if there was proper activist investor in this space, companies like Golem Project, Golem Network, TBT, right, wouldn't be sitting on 100,000 ETH. That's not $100,000 worth of ETH. That's 100,000 ETH while having a $270 million FDV. Wouldn't have been a no-brainer target before the pump. So 100,000 ETH, mental math, I think $250 million, and their FDV is $270 million FDV. Yeah.

Well, so this is something that I want to talk about, right? Because you have— we're going to have an episode with ParaFi and a few other folks talk about like these— the strategy of the day is taking a public company and like injecting one crypto asset.

Yeah, exactly.

So everyone's now doing this. You know, you have the Sol Strategies of the world and a few other—

many of these things launching right now.

Plenty of this now, which is they're trying to basically do what MicroStrategy has done.

You take a holding company, you seed it with $10 to $20 million, you reverse merge it into a public shell company, and you're playing the market.

The market's giving you— you're gonna trade, uh, 2, 3, maybe 4 times any, right?

Right.

For now, uh, I would be cautious for now. You know, it's like at some point that the classic Charlie Mungers of the world come out and say, hey, yeah, this goes away. For everyone that remembers the widow trade, which is the GBTC Grayscale trade, where you're doing effectively this. But it's interesting, right? Because you have in the public markets, you have this dynamic where these holding companies are trading at a premium, pretty substantial one. On the other hand, you have golems of the world that are trading at 1 to 1. NAV, right? Golem has 250 million of ETH in their balance sheet and they are trading at right now. Let's see, just to make sure that— yeah, 278. So it's basically 1 to 1. So you're assuming there's no value to Golem and what they've done. Basically, it's like a, you know, holding company of sorts. Um, why is it not trading at a premium? Because again, they're not probably doing anything without Ethereum, right? They're not, you know, recursive. They're not like—

Kevin O'Leary said they're building Octant app. And my response would be, you need $250 million to go build an app? Please.

Like, I mean, yeah, that's something that I've like paid attention to.

You'd get sued by investors if like, if Blockworks raised $250 million, we were just building a little app. And I mean, we probably get—

I mean, like, wait, listen, Berkshire Hathaway has like $300 billion in cash or something like that. So the question is like, are you a steward of capital? Like, what is the purpose of Golem? Uh, you know, and so they, I mean, the incentives are kind of not there, right? If you're the Golem team, you're kind of like probably putting some of that ETH and buying treasuries and you're clipping 5% on $250 million. Well, you know, that's pretty substantial amount if you ask me.

Yeah.

So, so like they're basically, you know, a dormant hedge fund of sorts that is clipping a 5% management fee. They're doing things correctly. Now they're earning like anywhere between at most $12.5 million by putting this on treasuries.

Yeah. And by the way, where did they get that $100K ETH from?

Uh, the ICO.

Investors gave it to them.

Yeah, exactly.

Investors. Yeah. But okay. SAFs are nice receipts of thank you for your money. Here's a receipt that you gave us this money. There's like very few investor rights attached to that. Yeah, true. Of course you could corner buy Golem and like—

and that's a SAF, let alone, you know, going on Ether Wallet in 2017 and just signing up for an ICO.

Yeah. To be fair, like if you're sitting on $250 million, of ETH, uh, you can't put all that in treasury. Like, you could like borrow against it and put some— like, maybe at best they're clocking 5-6%, you know, you know, half of that you could, you know, diversify or, yeah, you know, allocate correctly. But yeah, there's a— by the way, it's not just Golem, it's like so many other companies.

No, I know, I know. Can we talk a little more about this PIPE strategy, or basically these like public treasuries that are happening, and just your thoughts on them? So there was one that was, um, so David Bailey and Bitcoin native. Oh, they merged. Oh, that's interesting. Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah. Okay. This is the pipe. This is the exact same thing I'm talking about. So David Bailey and Bitcoin native holding company Nakamoto announced merger with KindlyMD to establish Bitcoin Treasury. So this is the exact thing that I'm talking about. You get a holding company and then you reverse merge the thing into a shell company. So they raise this $510 million pipe $200 million in convertible notes, making this the largest capital raise to launch a Bitcoin treasury, the largest pipe for any public crypto-related transaction. And so really what they're doing is they're just buying Bitcoin. They're just, they're just creating another Bitcoin MicroStrategy. Same thing happened here. This was Spets announces strategic partnership with Sonic Labs ahead of closing their current financing round. So Spets is pleased to announce a strategic collaboration with Sonic Labs, the core development team behind the Sonic blockchain. As part of this collaboration, Sonic Labs will be making a direct investment into Spets, the parent company of Sonic Strategy. All this is saying is you've got a holding company that's going to be a publicly listed company now that where their only thing that they're doing is buy the token, market the token, and you put in place very key to this strategy is you hire a mini markets mini Michael Saylor, and you market the hell out of that token. How does this end?

I don't know.

I mean, am I just mid-curving this? And I'm just like, risky, risky, risky, and, you know, left curve, right curve, or like, just buy the token, be okay with it?

I, again, like, I don't think that the premium is sustainable. It's a function of, I think, of a couple of things as I try to understand it. There are some parallels, I think, between the Grayscale premium. For a refresher, there was a time where the only kind of way to express a long crypto view was to either buy and store crypto, and many institutions didn't want to do that. The only alternative in the market was going by GBTC products, and they had some tax advantages and you could put it on your 401. And so there's like a lot of benefits to to that. It had a convenience factor, therefore it traded at a big premium. And the premium like kind of moved around quite a bit. That eventually went away, right? Like it's sort of like financial engineering. Now the question is like, it's not perfectly comparable, but like why does MicroStrategy trade at a premium? And I think we discussed this in certain episodes with Bitwise folks. What is it? What's his name? I forget, but Jack or Jeff. Jeff, I think it was Jeff.

Oh yeah, from Bitwise.

Yeah, Jeff from Bitwise. And we had another guy in the pod and we talked about this. So, but their whole point was like MicroStrategy is basically borrowing against its Bitcoin in a very friendly way. And like the way to go levered long an asset like Bitcoin is best expressed via MicroStrategy because they have muscle and they have negotiated really interesting terms with creditors and whatnot. Fine. I've actually been impressed that they're— What's the premium now of MicroStrategy? I forget. But I was a bit worried when options— Of course, the Bitcoin ETF launched and the premium was still there. And so I was like, "Okay, what's going on?" And then, all right, if you want to go leveraged on Bitcoin through traditional markets, you could use options and a whole suite of products that are not as fully robust, out there. Um, but I think like over time, like, uh, basically there's levered long vehicles, right? If you want to express a levered long view in a particular asset, what they'll do, in my understanding of SOL strategy, is they'll take SOL and then they'll stake it and then they'll earn that. And then, you know, that's a— your investors get excited about that versus holding, um, you know, an ETH ETF, for instance, or whatever. So, um, I honestly don't understand, and maybe I'm a left curve here, um, um, or middle curving it, sorry. But I would— I, I don't know, I don't want to play— I guess the worst— what is the worst case that can happen for these companies? It goes back to like trading one-to-one NAV, right?

Yeah.

Maybe there's some creative way to like hedge that. Um, like you sell puts or something like that.

Yeah.

I don't know. I personally feel more comfortable holding an asset that I like and just being plain vanilla. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, it'll be— so there's like 20 of these things coming out for all these different tokens, which you can probably imagine what the tokens are. And it'll be interesting to see what happens with them and if they're able to successfully do it.

Is there one for Ethereum, by the way? And if there isn't, why not?

Um, I don't know, maybe because the Ethereum ETF exists. So it's like, why is Sol Strategies valuable? It's like, oh, it gives institutional capital access to Solana before the Solana ETF.

Yeah. But what is interesting though, is that you have these vehicles for Bitcoin.

No, I know.

I actually don't.

You have for Ethereum, for Solana, but I haven't— correct me if I'm wrong— I haven't seen one for Ethereum.

Maybe Ethereum should get on it.

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Um, all right, last thing I want to touch on is, um, eToro. The eToro IPO happened. They got out and it was successful. They're trading at like $6 billion. So first off, um, I do want to give a massive congrats to Yoni, uh, just the founder of eToro, because he has been running that business for almost 20 years. They founded eToro in 2006 or 2007. Uh, so for anyone who's built a business and has done it for more than a couple of years, it is a grind. And yeah, so big shout out to Yoni for, for building eToro for, uh, yeah, going on, going on 20 years. I think it's 18, 18 or 19 years here. So yeah, big shout out to Yoni. It also— more, more publicly traded companies that are related to crypto is amazing for the industry. First off, it gives these crypto companies or crypto-related— I would call eToro crypto-adjacent, the same bucket as Robinhood— gives them access to the capital markets, which is only going to further accelerate M&A, which accelerates venture, which is just very healthy for the, for the whole industry. And then it also gives more pricing. Right? So if you actually talk to late-stage investors or bankers who price IPOs, nobody knows how to price something like a Fireblocks or something like a Chainalysis or something like an Anchorage. It's very tough. Or even something like a Kraken, by the way, because they only have one company to compete against, which is Coinbase. So the more crypto-related companies that go public, the more we get to price these companies. And so it's very, very, very helpful. And it'll actually have— it'll, it'll just help the IPO markets and the late-stage venture markets, which have been incredibly dry as of late. So eToro did roughly, I think, $900 million in revenue, $800 or $900 million in revenue last year. Adjusted EBITDA was about $300 million. So they're trading at like 6 times revenue, 20 times EBITDA. I think I got that right. Crypto trading accounts for like almost 50% of the revenue now. So yeah, just more pricing is very helpful. So congrats to eToro. That's what I'd say. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

No, no, really good. I definitely agree with you on the point around like you could start seeing a crypto basket, right? And it helps pricing for future companies. It also paves the way for more IPOs. This is going to be really interesting how Coinbase trades and what multiple, what premium relative to other things that are, to your point, crypto adjacent or in the space like Robinhoods of the world, Nubanks of the world, stuff like PayPal, maybe. One interesting thing is we haven't talked about here, I referenced earlier, but Coinbase, obviously one of the more probably impactful things that happened was Coinbase got added to the S&P 500.

I thought you were going to say Coinbase got hacked.

Well, well, that too. Or their employees got bribed. There's an interesting—

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But Coinbase got added to the S&P, first crypto company added to the S&P. It's, it's, it's massive.

It truly is. I mean, the stock kind of like went from It's just gained roughly, what is it? It's now at 247. It was like sub 200.

It's up 47%.

People ask you like, why, why is this so important? Because now every, if you're a large institution, A, like you need to rebalance your portfolio because the name of the game in institutional management is can you outperform the index? So you cannot afford to hold stuff that, you know, you want to like outperform. If you want to outperform the index, you best, most managers just scramble to buy stuff that gets added to the index. Right. And so you have new flows coming in. Um, and you know, still Coinbase is still trading, you know, 40% off its high of $340-ish, $345, which happened like end of last year. Um, but still, I mean, it's a, it's a pretty important milestone. And of course everyone comes out and says that Coinbase is definitely not— I mean, it's just more to your point, there's just more awareness, more coverage of Coinbase now that it is in the S&P 500, right? There's just more eyes on it, more visibility, more managers have to get exposure to it. All these 401s have exposure to it. So point, super, super important for the industry. My prediction or question to you is, and there should be a Polymarket for this, is like, when do we have a second crypto-native company added to the S&P 500? How many more, how much more time does it take?

I think a few years. I mean, because I mean, you should be a contender for it. When's the next, let's start here, when's the next crypto-native company that's going to IPO? Is it right?

Kraken, uh, Circle, but TBD.

BitGo, Anchorage, like, you know, so first we got to get a crypto native company IPO and then, and then we can talk about that. So I think, I think it'll be a couple of years actually. So this is, yeah, it's huge.

The other metric that I'd be really curious in a perfect world, you guys are data guys, but like of the S&P 500, which businesses derive revenue from crypto in some way, shape, or form. Maybe like in a version where Stripe and their business becomes far more crypto stablecoin, like derived in the S&P.

Have you seen what's— have you looked recently at what's in the S&P?

Uh, yes.

My computer's lagging.

I completely—

like, my computer's not glitching out. It's like the Mag 7 are like, what, 40% of the S&P?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, I mean, let me read these to you. Tell me if you've heard of any of these. Ecolab. This, this isn't even number 400, this is 150. Ecolab, AutoZone. Well, no, Roper, Air Products and Chemicals, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, CSX Corporation, The Travelers Company, Carrier Global, Freeport-McMoRan, Newmont Corporation, Copart, Norfolk Southern Corporation, Truist, Oneok, NXP Semiconductors, Kinder Morgan Insurance. Yeah.

So oil and gas commodities, oil and gas. Uh, yeah, a lot of tech, like go to the top 100.

Yeah.

Then, then there's, I mean, you obviously know these Microsoft, pharma, pharma, tech and pharma and tech and financial services, basically some healthcare. Yeah.

Soon to be crypto data.

It would be interesting. Maybe, maybe you don't have like a pure crypto native company join the S&P near term, but I would argue a lot of these businesses are going to start using stablecoins. Um, whether they—

I agree.

You know what I mean? And so like, as a— it would be really interesting if in a portfolio you have like the revenue or profitability of the top of the S&P 500, how— what percentage of that gets— starts being derived because of the crypto line item.

Here's a different way to think about it. When does the Coin50, which is Coinbase's index product, which I think is just going to end up taking over— when does the Coin50 become as important of an index product as the S&P 500.

Fair enough. Yeah, I think that takes a while, sir. As much as bullish as I want to be.

I got, I got two more things. One is there's a Bloomberg article, Morgan Stanley digital assets head quits to start a new DeFi fund. I've become pretty close with Andrew Peel, who's— he's the guy, he's the head of digital assets at Morgan Stanley. He just left to start his fund. To invest in and issue digital assets and tokenized assets. That's not just the story, though. The story is that there's a lot of these folks leaving traditional capital markets to get into crypto, right? So you had Andrew just left Morgan Stanley. You had Tony McLaughlin. Tony basically created Citi's regulated liability network. He just left to start It's, it's like Ubyx, I think it is Ubyx. And they're building clearing infrastructure for stablecoins. You had Caroline Butler, who was running crypto at BNY Mellon for a while, she left. You had Jay Biancarmano, who was the head of crypto at State Street. He left, he's at Platonic now. So you've got all these heads of—

someone at Goldman may have left to join Some startup called Inversion.

Yeah, great, great first hire.

Um, so she's actually in Garden League. We haven't been public about it, but yeah, it's happening soon.

Yeah. Is it public?

Um, no, not public yet. Yeah. But, uh, it will be soon. Uh, I want to talk about something else.

Okay.

MapleStory, pretty interesting.

Uh, is this the avalanche? Is this the thing that just happened? I also wanted to talk about this. This is, um, so they are trading at like $3.5 billion.

Yeah, trading at, but the more interesting thing to me, like putting, putting price aside, it's like they've been around for more than 20 years. It's like a pretty cool game. They have 100 million registered users. The company is like $3 billion in revenue and they launch on Avalanche. Um, I think like, uh, talk about like resurgence of narratives, like GameFi was like all the rage when like Axie happened. But again, it was like, was it a fun game? And I think like MapleStory is one of those, like, to me it's like a huge— it's a reminder of like, you're gonna see more— like, I think the gaming narrative is not dead. I think we're starting to see like Gonzillas of the world and MapleStory, which is pretty— like, you should be paying attention to this narrative is all I'm saying. Yeah, these are actually fun.

Look at this tweet. Wow, MapleStory with a huge launch day on Avalanche. What a flashback, used to play this game as a kid.

Yeah, I did too.

This is a real, yeah, it's a real bit. This is a real game. Real, real.

It's a real business. It has a ton of users. We're going to have these guys on the pod. Yeah. Yeah. I just added you to the group. Like, cause I asked Luigi, hey, like, uh, can we get these guys in the pod? Cause I want to hear what did they see as the benefit of launching a chain. Right. Cause I think like, um, this is like, it's not a crypto game. It's just a fun game with crypto elements.

Yeah. Here's this Luigi tweet. MapleStory is a free-to-play game which has been around for more than 20 years. Over 180 million registered users, $3 billion in gross revenue. Yeah, it's trading at $3.4, $3.1 billion.

Yeah. So we're going to have these guys on to talk about like what was their thinking of launching a chain? Like what, what is it actually the benefit for the gamer? And I think it's like, we're starting to, we're going to see more and more of that, you know, real businesses coming to the conclusion that like they can layer in some crypto elements to like enhance their value prop to users. And I think that's, that's really powerful. It's not like, never lead with crypto, lead with a good product and then like have crypto kind of like embedded in there. But it's really exciting.

Um, all right, sir, let's wrap. What are, what are we consuming? What's the content, content of the week?

Well, I've been reading a lot. Uh, shout out to this person I hired actually from Goldman. She recommended this book, The Surrender Experiment. Have you read it? Story of Mickey Singer. Really awesome, honestly. Like one of those books that just have like—

what's it called?

The Surrender— I think The Surrender Experiment. Yeah, The Surrender Experiment. But my journey into life's perfection. And I thought it was going to be one of those like guru, like, uh, Deepak Chopra kind of books, but it's actually like just a Who's it by? Really refreshing. Um, Michael Singer, Mickey Singer.

Huh, I don't know who that is.

Yeah, no, honestly, I mean, it's— but it's a pretty— I really enjoyed it. Um, and just go read it.

Have you surrendered?

I will be lying if I didn't tell you that throughout the day I now repeat this word, surrender. And, and most of the time you come up to the conclusion, it's like surrender has like— can have a negative connotation, which is like you give up, you, you, you like throw in the towel. But it's the way that he comes at it is like surrender to what life brings at you. And I've like, for me, it's like oftentimes, um, so I'll tell you, for me, like, um, I usually don't like to ask for help. That's just like just not what I do. Like, I rarely ask people to, for favors. I like to help others, but I don't not, but I do come across a lot of people inbound that like, hey, we want to help you in X or Y or Z. And I'm like, you know what, I'm going to start paying more attention to that. Like, you know, because there is something good that comes out of that. So how many times have I deprived myself of that happening? And I think there's a lot of magic that can happen when you just surrender to that. Someone comes across your life, and all I'm saying is, after reading this book, I've started to pay more attention to these people that come into my life. And, you know, a lot of times it's, it's, there's a lot of noise in there, But every once in a while, to your point, like some of your best hires came around inbound on a DM on Twitter. That's what he talks about surrendering, like actually paying attention to those people coming into your life. And for me, obviously it's important because I'm on a new journey and a lot of people reached out and I've just started to pay more attention to that. Whereas before I'd have been like, listen, I just got to like heads down, build. But I think I've become a bit more aware to these travelers that come into your life. And giving it a shot of like, hey, like, I'm gonna pay attention to this. Maybe some good comes out of that, you know. You just never know. It's perhaps oftentimes because there's a lot of noise, we tend— or I've tended to discount a lot certain random strangers that come in. It's like, as opposed to being skeptical or having your guard up, I think there is value in just opening up to people.

Interesting. All right, that was very— what is your philosophical— I have something that's way less philosophical than that. You're like Yeah, White Lowe's was good. I actually didn't like it. No, not that good. Um, I know I listened to— so there's a podcast actually called My First Million hosted by one of my friends, this guy Sam Parr, and then another guy, Sean Perry. Um, I'm sure there's some crossover with Empire List. I'm sure some Empire listeners will know it. There's, um, there's actually two really good episodes for founders on it. So I got kind of burnt out of the Founders Podcast just because I can't stand David Senra. Telling me why you should be listening to The Founders Podcast for like the thousandth time. It's like, this is why we listen to The Founders. I'm like, I get it. You already got me. I'm listening. So I stopped listening to the show.

People must be like, why do you have ads on Empire?

Yeah. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. But there's two good episodes. That one is with Blake Scholl, who started a supersonic jet company called Boom.

Oh, I'm an investor.

You're an in— oh, so that was an epic episode. Yeah.

Yeah.

With Blake Scholl. And then there's another one with the founder of NFX, the venture firm.

Yeah.

And that was called, uh, from sell, from making the clickbait title, from making $6 a week selling worms to making $110 million. So ignore the clickbaity title, but it was a really good episode about like, Almost. I mean, here's the philosophical part to maybe tie this into what you're saying is like he talks about, he's like, look, I run in the circle of like Elon and, you know, he's like, I was on a friendly basis with Steve Jobs and all this kind of stuff. And he's like, what game do you want to be playing? Like, do you want to be playing the game of like buying boring businesses and cash flowing? Do you want to be like world domination game and be on Elon's level? And he's like, you got to kind of understand the game that you're trying to play. So But then he talks about for 90 minutes just about the power of network effects and how network effects go beyond just your business and they tie into your life and network. Like his mental model for the world is network effects are at the center of everything. So I thought those two episodes were good.

That was great. One point on that, as you were saying that, there's a really good tweet by Marc Andreessen that I really like and it goes, I'll quote, the world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would have thought. You would have thought.

That is a play on a Steve Jobs quote. That is not a Mark Andrews quote. So Steve Jobs said, life can be so much broader once you discover one simple fact, which is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people who are no smarter than you, and you can change it, you can influence it, and you can build your own things that other people can use. And I think that Mark— so Mark's pretty good. I think it's a play on that Steve thing.

Anyways, and Steve was a play on someone else's, you know, probably Socrates or, or—

yeah, not allowed to steal anything in life—

or Marcus Aurelius or something. You know, we're all standing on the shoulders of giants.

I did watch Gladiator 2 on a flight. That was my, that was my fun content play of the week.

I didn't, I didn't like it as much.

As good for an airplane movie, you know, but Gladiator 1 is the OG. Anyways, folks, good roundup. Hope you guys enjoyed. Always good hanging with you guys. We have the ETH Bull Podcast coming out on Monday. Podcast. And then the week after on Monday, we've got a really, really, really good episode about treasuries, this whole like token treasury public company strategy with someone who's actually in the middle of it all. Plus someone who's looked at a ton of those deals. So yeah, two really good episodes of Empire coming.

Rock and roll. Well, have a good weekend, everyone. Thanks for listening. Yano, good haircut. Maybe shave your head next time.

Cheers, folks.