$TRUMP Takeaways | Livestream

The fact that the president of the United States, most important country in the world, has done this, this is unprecedented. And I think like the world will never be the same because of it.

At least in my opinion, this is unquestionably bullish for crypto and a massive inflection point in the industry. I do think there's a legitimate view on this as well, which is, you know, or there's a question that we should be asking is, should a president be allowed to do this?

The Trump coin is much bigger than just a meme. It's a global Trump crypto army. And 3, we think this was the biggest crypto onboarding event of all time, and we think we're just getting started.

All right.

We got 450 people in here. We got people are piling in. I think we should jump in. I think we should start with just what in the world. So thanks, everyone, for joining. We just— I'm like, there's so much that happened this weekend. It's probably the craziest weekend I have ever seen in crypto. Maybe there's a few other ones that go down that, you know, Santu remembers, but this is an insane weekend. So yeah, we just want to give our take on the weekend and like just thoughts on what this means for crypto, the US, different chains. But maybe I'd start by giving just an overview of what happened if you guys were maybe living under a rock and missed this. So I think I would start actually on, on Tuesday. So I was going into a meeting actually with Mike and got a call from somebody associated with the now president. We're recording this on Monday at 8 p.m. and they said, we have a really high-profile token launch, a really high-profile token launch happening either this week or next. Can you connect us with a custodian? We're doing this in the right way.

We, you know, we're—

and I said, what's— who's the token for? What is it? And they said, we can't tell you any details. And so I connected them to the CEO of one of the big custodians. And, um, and that was basically it. That, that was all, that was really all that happened on Tuesday. Fast forward to, uh, Friday night, there was a Crypto Ball. Both Mike and I, I think, and Santiago, none of us could make it there, but it seemed like it was a lot of industry insiders were there, a lot of big investors, a lot of executives were there. It's kind of the who's who of the industry. Everyone's hanging out at this Crypto Ball. You're seeing all these pictures on Twitter, and At 9:45 Friday night, when everyone's at this crypto ball, Trump sends a tweet out and he just tweets. He goes, my new official Trump meme is here. It's time to celebrate everything we stand for. Winning. Join my very special Trump community. Get your Trump now. Go to gettrumpmemes.com. Have fun. That was at 9:44 p.m. So the thing starts ripping, right? That people go to bed. I think it's at like 10, 12, 14 billion. Fastest, fastest coin ever to get that high. January 18th, coin just keeps full sending, right? We get to like 70 billion FDV, 75 billion FDV. I'm sending tweets out saying that, you know, Emperor's creating new coins. This thing's going crazy, right? So January 19th, everyone's still watching this thing and it's still going up, actually. And then at 4:42, PM Eastern, Melania launches, right? Melania sends out a tweet. I should have had this pulled up before, but I know, I know Mike did not enjoy this one, but he can talk about that in a second. It says the official Melania meme is live. You can buy Melania now, MelaniaMeme.com. And she sends the address. And that was just— that's when I feel like everything got catastrophic on the chain, right? The Twitter broke down, Solana went crazy. You couldn't send a transaction on Solana for a couple hours. Phantom wasn't updating. Yeah, it got nuts. And then things kept going, right? World Liberty did a token sale, sold out. They started staking like 15 million of ETH, I think. And then you started having other things like the Ethereum Foundation. There's all this other side stuff with the Ethereum Foundation. And all the while, right, I'm scrolling through Twitter earlier today. Mark Cuban is talking about launching a meme coin. So Anyways, that's my like summary. But I'd just be curious, Santi and Mike, like what were you guys doing this weekend? And like, were you, were you, were you all in and playing this or were you just kind of watching from afar? Like, yeah, Santi, maybe we'd just love to hear your take.

So I was actually flying while I was— while this came out and I saw the tweet almost immediately and I was like, really? My first reaction was he must have gotten hacked. And now there's actually leaked messages of a screenshot of someone DMing Elon. Elon's like, I don't know. He was like the shrug emoji. I mean, it just felt like surreal. And this was, mind you, in the last podcast we were talking about, like people were like, is the Trump administration really going to follow through with his crypto plans? And I'm like, my immediate reaction was it must be a scam. So I waited for like 5 minutes, pinged a few people. I was like, all right, I'm going to just like, just buy some, uh, just, just for the, for the sake of it. Uh, you know, and by the way, folks, if you're going to ever punt something like this, do it with a fresh wallet that doesn't have like a lot of capital, because if for whatever reason, malicious contract or whatever, it's just for safety reasons, I'm just going to as an aside. And then, and then like things really escalated. And then after that, it's like, I first saw it, it was like, uh, under a buck. So I bought some, then at $4, I really kind of loaded up, uh, after, after after a while. But and then like, and then I went to the gym, I landed, like, went to the gym and I was like, if this truly is like, I think at that point, yeah, a couple of hours had gone past. I was waiting for Trump to like just dismiss that. I was like, all right, at that point, if you're going to be the president, like you have the entire comms team. I mean, how many people does Trump have in comms? Hundreds of people.

Yeah, I think it took me 2 hours. Someone on our team messaged it to me being like, I think this is what your conversation with Trump's team was about on Tuesday. And I said, oh yeah, I guess so. And it didn't register in my head, right? Yeah, it took me 2 hours. Oh my God, this is the— yeah, this is the thing.

I'll give him an hour or two. If he doesn't discredit or take down the post, it must be legit. But it felt so surreal. I mean, I tweeted like, I've seen crazy stuff in this industry, nothing like this. And then after that, I'm like, I'm doing the math, right? How big does this get? And so I basically swapped my entire meme portfolio to this, all of it. One sweep. I was like, okay, this is like, we've just never had this type of stuff. Like, it's just, um, but yeah, thankfully I was in the, in the, in this part of the world because all our European brothers were fast asleep. Um, and also your point, like, I don't know why he launched it at that time. Like, everyone in crypto, like, a lot of people in crypto were at this ball. Like, they all sort of missed it, right? It.

Yeah, yeah.

Anyways, I also— I was— I picked like the worst weekend of all time to just be completely unplugged in the Catskills, uh, so I missed this entire thing. But I— yeah, which is—

I like hadn't heard from Mike all weekend. I was like, Mike, are you watching this? He's like—

I was like, no, I'm not. Yeah, just tough.

But let's like, just to put some numbers on it, when I say it's the wildest thing I've seen, like, your point— okay, this thing is now— it went from basically zero to, um, like $17 to $20 billion in the first 24 hours. Um, and then it went— and then it went parabolic from there. It just went to like— from there, the next day it was at $60, then $70, then $75. That's $75 billion. Yeah. And then that huge wick candle is when Melania So like one question I have, like I didn't really understand, like we should talk about like obviously Solana and how they perform because it's important to know for people that don't really know. So it was deployed as a Solana on Solana and I mean it just executed flawlessly. I mean, obviously the entire like Jito, you know, Mertz of the world, all of them were like on call. And up until Melania's launch, Solana performed exceptionally well. I mean, it just handled the amount of transactions. It was— we should pull up the stats.

But before getting into Solana, they're like, okay, let's talk. I want to talk about what this actually means for crypto. And then should this, should this actually happen? Like, how do we feel about the president launching a meme coin? And like, how do we feel about this from like the US perspective and then from the crypto perspective? So Mike, maybe I'd be curious. So, Mike, you tweeted, we as an industry have spent a lot of time building for a future where the US cracks down on crypto. We haven't spent much time wondering what would happen if the US embraced crypto. That is the most important question to ask right now. I'd love to get your framework for just like how you're thinking about this from the— I guess take it from either angle, the US perspective or from the crypto perspective.

I think, well, I agree with Santiago. I think this is the craziest thing I've seen since the time that I've been operating in crypto. And I view it as a major inflection point, probably in the, in the entire history of the industry when we look back on this. And yeah, I think that a lot of the assumptions and frameworks that we have built around crypto, whether consciously or not, come from Bitcoin and some of the very early ethos around Bitcoin and the vision and the types of people that were building there and all the ideology that comes along with that, which in a lot of ways is great. But I think that Bitcoin has always taken a little bit of an adversarial stance toward government, although that's changed a little bit since the ETFs. But, you know, it was basically built and the, the whole design and architecture of that coin was designed in such a way that it would be resilient if a large government, specifically the US, because the whole stated goal of Bitcoin is to be the global reserve currency, were to crack down on it. And I think that that has ported over, especially to Ethereum as a community. And, you know, you kind of talk a lot about this meme of being World War III resistant. But I think some of the other chains are probably not designed in a way that they're even really trying necessarily to be World War III resistant. And I think one of the reasons, at least I've been so supportive of just multiple different chains, is I think you should run every experiment in crypto and prepare for every different eventuality. Possibility, right? Like, why would you not do that? Um, and I think probably some discount rate has historically always been applied to coins because there was always the possibility that the US or some big government could come in and just outlaw this, right? Like, people talk about, uh, you know, the, the US government outlawing gold for a number of years starting back in the 1930s. And I think you probably have to just lift that discount rate, uh, or whatever discount rate you're applying, uh, to coins kind of today, uh, based on this, because I think a president launching a meme coin basically means that they're not going to outlaw this stuff, um, at least at any point in the future. Um, and so yeah, I just think it's a massive step change, and we probably have to question some of the core assumptions that we even built into designing, uh, L1s, um, and, and ask ourselves what would this industry, uh, look like if the US just did a full-throated acceptance of crypto. Yeah, I think that's probably decently likely over the course of the next at least 4 years.

Santi, what's your framework for— you said this, you said, I've seen wild things in this industry. This is the wildest by far. Still processing, dot, dot, dot. What is your framework for how this moment in time and this, this event impacts just, yeah, just your, your mental model for this industry for the next couple of years?

It's unlike anything we've seen, primarily if you scroll up, the amount of like it really shows what we internally in crypto know. But the world just now saw it at center stage at the weekend before he was, you know, before the inauguration and showing that the capital formation that happened in such short order truly just shows the power of crypto, like moving money, moving at the speed of light without restrictions, without markets being closed.

Just—

that's just that. I think like we've seen it in, in many ways in crypto, but like that I think just puts it front and center for every major country, company, celebrity that is thinking about any sort of raise. Um, it sets the tone and the stage for what this administration believes and will do with crypto. Um, I think the I'm still trying to think about the second, third order effects of that. But, you know, you obviously are wondering who, who will launch coins next from major celebrities. Are we going to have a world where, you know, every major NFL player, sports athlete has a coin? Like, we, we've teased at this. There's been early iterations in crypto celebrity coins, but I think that the fact that the, the president of the, of the United States, most important country in the world, has done this And it, you know, it's just unprecedented. And I think like the world will never be the same because of it. Yeah, certainly not. Certainly not crypto. And so who knows? I mean, obviously we can talk about these scenarios where this coin doesn't behave well. You know, it's obviously down a lot since the peak. It's down 50%. What does that actually do? Is this become like, you know, we've talked about political coins in the pod before. Right? Like Trump and Boden, some of these coins. But, um, yeah, I just, I just think just because it was an official coin, um, and Melania too, it just, it sets a tone for what I think will be far crazier than what we saw in 2017 with ICO capital formation. Because now you're going to see it with companies. Like, what— now, now think about, like, what's the role of capital markets in the traditional context when you have Solana DEXs processing like close to like $40 billion in volume. Like the Nasdaq does $100 billion.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think—

yeah, that's crazy.

That, that— okay, let's talk about what this did for tokens, right? Because one of the biggest— as soon as I saw this, one of my first thoughts was, boom, everyone in the world can go launch a token. There is no— there's no longer a risk of launching a token. Think of like— contrast that with 2 years ago where if you lived in the United States, you could not launch a token. Now everybody in the world can go launch a token. And so I think we'll very quickly go from, yeah, you had to maybe live in Dubai or Singapore to launch a token, to, okay, crypto companies who have a chain can launch a token, to— I mean, Santi, we talked about this, I think, on the last roundup or two roundups ago. It's like you're going to start seeing, you know, folks with no chain. You don't need to— like, just anybody's going to start launching tokens, right? And it's going to start competing with public markets. Jeff Dorman was talking about this. Trump token just signaled to every company, municipality, university, and brand that crypto can now be used as capital formation and customer bootstrapping mechanism. New York City will have a token. Harvard will have a token. Netflix will have a token. Mike, I'm curious to get your take on this.

Yeah, I think that's, I think that's pretty likely. I mean, I think I don't know. I agree with what something that Santi said resonated, and this is what I was trying to figure out or just think through on the way home is I think that crypto is showing how many, how much legs it has in terms of being just a new capital market. And I mean, one thing that's been interesting going through this cycle or basically the last 2 years of a bull market is you've seen much less traditional VC and like the US IPO market is still pretty cold in general. There's much less VC being deployed in general. But most of the successful exits that have happened in crypto have been through tokens. And so, you know, one way that you could just look at tokens and kind of these L1 platforms, which like most of the fees that are being generated on L1s come from DEX volumes, is just alternative capital market venues. And like Santi said, Solana competed with or was in spitting distance of the NASDAQ for the last 2 days, which is truly bananas. And I think if you just see, like, try to think how that plays out over a 10-year time horizon, you have way— you're global from day one, um, you have far less friction in terms of issuing assets, and there's going to be an enormous amount of capital that pours into these things. And so I think it's pretty affirming in general of, um, you know, I think crypto, when it, when it first started, you had kind of these big ideas, and you're starting to see some of those really play out, like There was originally the money alternative store of value use case for L1s, which I think is largely right. And then there's this thing that we've always known, which is decentralized finance, global capital markets. And I think that honestly, this token is probably a big affirmation more along the second lines there. That's kind of the way that I think about it. So, and I think you'll see a lot of experimentation. I don't know if a New York City token makes sense or if a Harvard— I assume there's probably going to be a lot of new tokens launch that don't immediately make sense, but maybe we actually do, you know, experiment with new ways of capital formation that do end up looking obvious in hindsight. But I think we're going to end up getting a lot more tokens after this, basically.

Yeah.

Santi, how does this change your mental model of the 4-year cycle?

Are we—

is it a 4-year cycle? Like, does it have to be?

No, nothing. I mean, Does— okay, here's what I was thinking about on the drive home today is, yeah, so I think my mental model was at some point in 2025 we'll top, right? I've kind of had these like 4 stages of the market. Maybe we're in stage 3 right now, maybe entering stage 4, and you top somewhere between like this summer and the fall or something like that. That was kind of my mental model. And now it's like, on one hand, you could say, okay, this is clear stage 4 top of the market behavior. This is what you start to look for. The other hand, it's like, hey, something— we've never had a pro-crypto president launching a meme coin. The cycle, the 4-year cycle's off and this thing goes crazy.

Yeah, uh, like, yes, like, I— there's like two ideas in my brain. One is we've never had a better setup for this industry. The other one is it's an M2 trade. Like, like, again, like, you have to always think about the downside. Like, the upside case, you don't need anyone to convince you of how powerful this technology will will be in the next 10 years, how it will transform finance, capital formation, payments. You go down the list on and on and on. Like, we, we shouldn't entertain that scenario. Doesn't compress it. Does it accelerate it? Absolutely. There's so many people on the sidelines that now are no longer going to be in the sidelines. It's akin to Paul Tudor Jones, what he did for hedge fund managers to buy Bitcoin. Now the president has done it in a way where sovereigns are now— like, you're entering the game theory of sovereigns thinking about buying um, and holding crypto assets through this strategic Bitcoin reserve may include other assets. But, um, but still, you know, you have to be mindful of, you know, you know, Treasury— you know, I'm not a macro expert, but I am mindful of— I don't believe that if we— if inflation gets out of hand and Treasuries are over 5%, I think broadly markets will not you know, will not perform well. And I don't think crypto behaves any different at that point. It's very correlated on the downside. And the other element that I should probably highlight is like, you know, there's gravity to things, right? You can't have an asset go from, you know, $0 to $70 billion. Like, naturally, there, you know, you see this type of behavior you're seeing in the chart. Uh, does this mean this coin's dead? No. Does it mean that it should have been worth $70 billion in the first place? No, I don't know. I have no idea. Um, but I do think that, um, like there's two components. One, like there's been more, um, dispersion in crypto returns this cycle.

Mhm.

And I've always felt that as this space continues to grow both in market size and just real adoption, there will be less of a correlation, intra-industry correlation. Primarily tied to Bitcoin, but you're seeing it, right? Like if you're, if you're, if you're a fund and you weren't in select assets, meaning Bitcoin, Solana, memes, and a handful of like AI stuff recently, which by the way, the last two categories, very few funds were, were allocated to, you wouldn't have performed well. Like ETH is still at 33. What is it? It's like the stablecoin of the cycle. It's like Maker and Ether just sitting there, right? Um, and, and so I, I think, um, yeah, all this to say is like, you know, is it a 4-year cycle? Maybe. Are we gonna top in 2025? Maybe. But like, Ethereum hasn't moved much. Like, doesn't mean that it's gonna rally from here. I don't, I don't necessarily believe it. So I just think that there's, uh, there's a pretty big shakeout happening. And I felt this for the last 2 years, which is when I updated my thesis and basically sold all my ETH for SOL, was like I do think that crypto for the last 10 years has been storytelling. Like, putting Bitcoin aside, it's been storytelling. And actually, Bitcoin has been also storytelling with like Austrian, like, whatever the mechanism is there. But like, in a world where you start seeing usage and traction, the distinction between have and have-nots becomes incredibly clear. Like, and so the thesis is like, can you have projects that over the next 4 or 5 years continue to really outperform. Because again, Solana is sitting at— let's just run the math purely on Solana, Ethereum. Solana is what, a, you know, over a third, like almost converging on 40% of ETH's market cap. Like it's 115 over what, 400? Yeah, like actually on a fully diluted basis, that's different math, right? But anyways, like Solana is a third of Ethereum's market cap. Yet you look at what just transpired over this weekend and you have to wonder, like, is one— should Ethereum be worth that or should Solana be worth that? That's a whole separate conversation that we should have, not necessarily for the purpose of this pod. But like what I'm trying to say is like, even if you believe that we top in 2025, like I still think that like I feel fairly comfortable running a trade where like I don't need to believe that every government starts buying Bitcoin to just assume that Solana converges on Ethereum purely on what is happening right now and has been happening for the last year. It's just a mispriced asset. And like, there's already that capital that sits in crypto. Yeah, I— as we run into what I think is probably— we're already like halfway through the cycle, I think. I want to be focusing on things that have a lot of liquidity because if I want to exit, I want the exit to be really big on the way out. So that excludes a lot of stuff. Pretty much every non-major meme, you know, crypto asset, NFTs, all that stuff is like kind of not something that I want to allocate to. But the other one is, um, I'm thinking a lot about just— I don't, I I don't necessarily assume the flows will enter the space, although I do think that there's a high probability that they will because we, you know, we just had the election in November and institutions take at least a quarter or two to allocate. So anyways, a bit of a ramble, but I don't know, man, it's, it's, uh, it's an M2 trade, but also over the next 5, 10 years, I think this is like pretty generational kind of entry points.

What do you guys think about— so I saw that there were anecdotally a bunch of just normie friends of mine reached out about this. And I saw that the Google Trends for how to buy crypto and Bitcoin and Solana and obviously Trump Coin pumped. So I'm curious what perspectives— like, how do you think this was received by kind of the rest of the world or just the average person in general?

I was, I mean, I was with friends this weekend and they, I think there was a, what's the right way to put it? They were very disheartened, I would say, at the returns that, you know, there's the meme of like me showing up at work on Monday or on Tuesday morning, like, you know, doing my discounted cash flow and like, you know, having grinded away in investment banking for 7 years while this like idiot online you know, just, just made, you know, generational wealth. Like that meme I saw in real time this weekend. I would say my friends were very disheartened and none of them work in crypto. Actually, one of them works in crypto. But, but it did get that once Trump happened, they said, what's the next one? And when Melania launched, they all wanted to put money into Melania. So that's like— I do think it ends up I do think it's— I do think this is a net positive from like a user onboarding perspective. I mean, what's the— what's the app that they use? Moonshot, right?

Moonshot. Moonshot onboarded like 400,000.

400,000, right?

They won. Yeah.

Yeah.

Now, the, the other thing is, I mean, we should probably talk about like the nuance here, like the allocation. And I think there's a lot of misperception around that. But, but the headline for someone that doesn't want to go in the trenches. What? Oh wow, they own 80% of the supply. And there was a few— like, there was just no communication from them. Like, why couldn't you have just come out and said, hey, we're gonna earmark this for airdrops, buying Greenland, I don't fucking know, but like, just communicate something. It's—

why do they need— but they— but the counter is, why do they need to? They don't— the mystery— the mystery of it was what was so interesting. It's not the 80% that tanked the token. It was Melania tanked the token.

I agree with you. But I do think that, like, there was— I just think, like, you're the head of state. I mean, like, it's— it's not— there is a— I appreciate it's a meme, but I do think that it it could have been from an execution handling transactions flawless kind of thing. The fact that this didn't leak, flawless. I mean, crazy meteor, like it was just pretty buttoned up. But I do think that there perhaps could have been more— there definitely should— could have been more thoughtful around communicating vesting. Like, your friends don't understand this, you know, like normie friends don't understand this. Or like someone, you could just imagine the, oh, 80%, which is friends of, you know, the 10 people that are best buddies with whoever just made like— set— they made like billions and billions of dollars. And that's not necessarily true, but you have to come out and lead with a narrative. Uh, and then— and I think the reaction of the market is very clear when you— I think that perhaps if he had done that and Melania launches, maybe this chart would look— would have probably looked different. There's all these kind of theories as to why they launch Melania, that maybe he I think it was you that said maybe he licensed this to someone else. He didn't make as much money and then they wanted to launch Melania. I was just— when you don't communicate transparently, it just lends itself to all this chaos. And the market's just been chaotic. It still is like shit's all over the place.

I mean, people forget, though, in the last, you know, Trump 2016 to 2020, the markets were chaos, right? He would tweet something and the markets would go haywire for a day. And I think, I think, I think extreme— I think we are entering back into a trader's market, probably. And I mean, I'm not a trader. You don't give me money to trade. But like, if you remember when Trump was president, like these, he would just fire off a tweet and the market would go crazy for a day. And we might just be entering back into that regime. I'm curious to get— yeah, yeah.

Also, I mean, also keep in mind too that even though this is a president who has embraced crypto in the United States, that doesn't mean they have a lot of detailed knowledge about how these, you know, how to launch a token and how to do it flawlessly, etc. Like the Melania— I mean, Jason, it sounds like you've got more backstory on this than me, but I feel like the whole market kind of had the same perception, which is you watch the Trump coin and I think it was— everyone kind of saw it as a pretty seminal moment for what it meant for the industry and acceptance in the United States and got pretty excited about that. But then when Melania launched, it just looked a little bush league and it went from kind of this, oh my God thing to wait a second, do these people know what they're doing here? And it just looked more like a— like the perception was built up.

So, Mike, do you think— so the industry definitely said, I think went from, oh, Trump's coin, Trump might be trying to turn this into currency, like this is the craziest thing ever to when Melania launched. I think it was, oh, this is just a grift to try to make some money. Do you think that the fact that these were launched by two separate teams matters at all, that there are two very separate teams and one was like very professionally put together and they used a professional custodian and market makers and, you know, they got listed on Coinbase in two days. Like, do you think— versus one, which seems like it was maybe just like Barron Trump just fired off Melania's token or something like that. Do you think that matters or not?

I don't really think it matters because I think only 2% of people are ever going to do enough digging to figure that out. And also it probably just says that there's not as much communication going on behind the scenes as you'd ultimately like. And I don't know, it just, you know, there is an element to this as well, which is, you know, there's a lot of different conversations around this that are getting combined into one. And I think there's a part of this which is, at least in my opinion, this is unquestionably bullish for crypto and a massive inflection point in the industry. I do think there's a legitimate view on this as well, which is, you know, or there's a question that we should be asking is, should a president be allowed to do this? Um, you know, like historically, anyone that's moved into, you know, any, you know, sort of public office, but definitely the, the highest public office, and, uh, you know, the leader of the free world, is you're supposed to be divorced from, you know, private, uh, conflicts of interest and, uh, you know, using that office to enrich yourself. And, um, yeah, I mean, I definitely— a lot of people benefited from Trump Coin. I think the industry will benefit from Trump Coin, but so did Trump himself, right? And his wife and whoever else ends up launching a meme coin. So I think— I don't know, I've always thought, at least with Blockworks, we've had this, um, thought that the real asset that we have is trust, the audience trust in, uh, the insights that we put out and whether or not there are conflicts of interest and, you know, is what we're saying accurate, etc. And it takes a long time to build that trust. And the United States has a lot of assets going for it. We've got the largest economy and military and reserve currency and all that stuff, but We also have credibility and people, you know, look at our leaders as, you know, we've solved a lot of those conflict of interest, trust, credibility things. And I think this is at risk of, you know, eroding that a little bit if the perception was that this was a grift or for personal enrichment or anything like that. But I think that's, you know, there's a little part of me that feels like that as well. But I'm curious what you guys think about that.

Yeah, I know. I definitely agree with you. Now, technically, like, you launch before— I don't know the rules, but if you exist, why you think they launch right before the inauguration?

I have no idea. Yeah, I'm not sure.

But we just need more. I mean, it's like, has Trump tweeted anything about this?

No. Yeah. And I mean, I guess we just agree that that just feels bizarre.

Yeah, even if, even if you didn't plan to come out and say anything, I think the outcome of like, you're sitting there, you're like, hey, Mr. President, like that coin that we thought it was just going to be like a little collection, because he's, mind you, he's launched NFTs, right?

Right. And there's World Liberty Phi as well, right?

Yeah, the World Liberty Phi was my, my second thought was like, I want to punt World Liberty Phi, by the way. And then I looked at the terms, I was like, uh, no. Uh, and then they updated the terms, right? So anyways, like the $5 billion, it was just, they updated the price too, you know? So anyways, um, shout out to Kai who did a lot of the work there. It was just like, you gotta think like someone would've gone and say, hey, Mr., I know he's busy running around all these events and whatnot, but it's like, Mr. President, like, you know, this coin is $70 billion, like, You know, I mean, like, if you're— let me ask you a question. You guys are in media. If you're the communications director of Trump, what would you have done?

Said, be as explicit as you possibly can here. Right. Like, I, I mean, it'd be like, yeah, why not?

Like, I would have— if I, if I had an open canvas, you know how I would have done it? The inverse, which is you have to prove you're American to buy this thing. This is the American coin. Fuck, launch an American chain on Avalanche or whatever. Yeah. You mean like run the— if you're going to run the playbook, run it like— and then warehouse that in the strategic reserve, like a USA chain. And the first coin will be the— my— me and my wife's coin, Trump Melania. Who else is going to do this? Elon, Mr. Beast, like Everyone. And then, and then you want to own the industry, do it that way. Like, you sort of— I'm now thinking you missed a really good shot at doing that. Now the window is kind of narrowing down because the longer you kind of like remain silent, people just start speculating and assuming, candidly, the worst, that it was a grift, that it was a— now I'm not saying that maybe they'll come out and have like all this very detailed plan on an airdrop and using that supply strategically. But how many times, guys, like in crypto, you have to respond and the market shows you that level of interest. Like you have to think ahead of that. Like you have to come out and say something along the line, just say something. But I think they could have been way more thoughtful. More importantly, I think they lost the shot here of like dominating this industry in one, like one kill, you know, like do the chain, do the coin. Invite others to do it and maybe solve government efficiency that way by financing it on-chain. Like, fuck, that could have happened. That can happen. Like, what's stopping you now? You have $70 billion. Like, launch coins for all the agencies, all the municipalities. Like, just run the whole show, you know what I mean?

So, so this is what, um, I texted their team. I said, we're recording a podcast tonight. Is there anything you want me to to mention, right? Is there any info that our listeners should know? And he actually just responded. He said, A, we had nothing to do with— we were not even aware of the Melania one until it came out. They weren't— they weren't involved, right?

B, there's a Pump.fund deployer.

So B, like, we see this as a movement. The Trump coin is much bigger than just a meme. It's a global Trump crypto army and it's just getting started. And 3, we think this was the biggest crypto onboarding event of all time and we think we're just getting started. So I don't know what you want to do with that information, but I think that's a kind of interesting text.

I got a question for you guys. What do you think about this American DeFi, American Chain stuff? I know that it's gotten a little bit of pushback on crypto and just CT in general, but I don't know, I'm kind of here for it a little bit. And it's applying a little bit of very traditional business logic to an industry which we think of as being very permissionless and global, which is, hey, we've tried to push crypto-based companies out of the United States for the last minimum 3 years, but we haven't really been wildly accepting of crypto for a long time. We've had some of the most stringent regulation in the entire world, right? If you live in New York, you still can't do shit because of the BitLicense. And now it's just saying the opposite of that, which is, hey, we actually want to be the epicenter for crypto and a global hub. So, you know, if you come here and you launch your coin here, you'll get, you know, whatever, you know, some sort of incentives, whatever the US can offer. So I don't know, I, it's, I, I think it actually kind of makes sense, right? Like, why would that not be a good idea, actually. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you— there, there's a very big opportunity to— I mean, not only for tax revenue but innovation. Um, I think it's very real. Someone asked me the other day, we were having a discussion, like, it, it was with— in Ryan's, um, pod, it was Hasiba Novicho and myself, and we're all wondering, like, how, how, how high up the list does crypto rank? Like, on Trump's priorities. What do you guys think?

I mean, it didn't— so it didn't get mentioned at the inauguration today. That probably tells you something. Mentioned immigration, mentioned crime, mentioned parenting, mentioned probably 15 other topics. Didn't mention AI or crypto.

Yeah, I would guess they're expecting it.

I was— I was expecting it. I was expecting a one-line about how America should be dominant in crypto and AI. Yeah, if only because of how much the industry gave to him. If only because of that.

Well, I think that he— so I think one of Trump's superpowers is he has an unbelievable ability to read the room at scale and he has a really good sense of what people want from him and what's going to resonate with people. And I think that's part of how he found product-market fit, essentially, from a political perspective with crypto. And I was listening to a podcast today, you know, Stand With Crypto alone mobilized, you know, 100,000 voters. Um, and that's not a small amount, right? Like, it definitely was super significant on the political stage this year.

I, I don't know.

Uh, the other thing that he does, you know, for better or worse, is he really does try to deliver on his promises. Now, if you don't like his promises, that's not great. But if you believe him, to kind of take him at his word, I think that he, um, you know, one way that you could think about it, funnily enough, uh, because he has this massive audience and he's extremely sensitive to catering to that audience, is he might actually, uh, you could view this as a positive or a negative, but he might fall prey to this sort of audience capture that you sometimes, uh, like influencers fall prey to when you build up like a Bitcoin-specific audience or an ETH-specific audience. And he does try to deliver on his words, his campaign promises.

So I— but is it top 10, top 20, top 5?

I mean, we should see tonight, right? He's doing the executive orders tonight.

Yeah.

Oh, is it? Yeah. And like in that some of the executive orders was like freeing Ross or right here.

I can't— Trump admin is uploading all the executive orders to the White House website gradually.

Hmm.

Yeah. So you'll start to see— I think there's like 100 or 200 of these things.

So the biggest one for crypto is tied to Ross, right?

Yeah. I mean, we haven't even mentioned the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. I would say this moves the odds of a strategic Bitcoin. I think it was 30% going into the weekend. I don't know what it's at now.

Now it's 50% on Polymarket. It's 50%.

Okay.

To say there's at least—

but we should, we should pull it up.

I think I'm pretty sure, uh, I mean, things are moving so much, so I, I was gonna say I put it at 70% odds, maybe 80% odds we get a strategic Bitcoin Reserve. It's at 36. It was up to 48, it's down to 36. I'm putting this thing at like 75% that we get a—

you know what, what, but what's the definition of the strategic Bitcoin Reserve?

So that's— yeah, that's where the kicker comes in. I, I do think the The US will buy Bitcoin. That's what I think. Is it going to be a million, which Lummis recommended? Um, okay, give us 5% of the supply. Probably not. I think that's too much. But I think that the— there will be a headline probably this year, the US is buying Bitcoin. I think that— I think that will happen.

I think buying Bitcoin is not enough. Like, I think the whole intent of strategic Bitcoin reserve is more than just buying it. It's the signaling of like an intent of we are accumulating it. Yeah, yeah. I like very much more different tone. And like if you telegraph that versus like you bought some Bitcoin, like maybe it's just the same thing semantics, but I don't know. Um, should we talk about anything else around the Trump and Melania coin? Um, I mean, obviously we didn't— not, not for the purposes of this part. Maybe we'll cover it and then round up, but like the The whole— hats off to Solana. Entire—

we should talk, we should talk.

Community.

Yeah, uh, just the highlights. I mean, like, you could even pull Mertz or, or Toly's feed, but like 40— what is it, 25, 27 billion in volume when it launched, and then up to 40? Just, yeah, crazy, crazy.

There you go.

Damn.

Yeah, it's been a massive day for, uh, uh, REV, um, so real economic value. This is basically, uh, transaction fees plus MEV, uh, so exclusive of inflation, but massive, massive day for Solana here. Um, and yeah, I think the DEX volume as well is just enormous. And, you know, you can see these spikes. I guess one that I'd be curious, uh, do you guys think that this was a flash in the pan? It's probably going to normalize from here a little bit, right? These are—

I mean, these numbers are way inflated, obviously.

Right. But do you think it resets to a higher level from here? You know, Solana ran up, it almost hit $300. I think it went to $295 or something like that. And I mean, to me, that's the market saying that, you know, Solana has won an enormously important use case, which is, you know, trading activity lives on Solana now. There was— I actually saw— so there's been a lot of consternation at the Ethereum Foundation. I don't know if you guys saw Vitalik changed his profile picture to Milady. What did he say?

The female soy?

He made a very weird— yeah, feminized WEF soy boy. We're not executing a vibes pivot to a Bronze Age mentality. But, you know, he discussed that there was an explicit set of goals and there are changes that are coming to the Ethereum Foundation. I think people have been talking about Danny Ryan coming back on, who I think was at the EF for 5 or 6 years, recently departed, and is now talking. And then there's another guy, I believe Jerome something or other, but you know, there's talk of new leadership there and potentially reevaluating what the goals are, etc. And I saw Danny Ryan tweeted out, um, what would you have, you know, Ethereum Foundation researchers do on-chain. And Koby, I don't know if you can find this tweet, but Koby replied something to the effect of, have them go on L2s and trade the native gas token, the USDC pair, and try to have them do it profitably. And then go on and have them trade some other form of cross pair, like a Pepe-Eth cross pair or something like that. And then go do the same thing on Solana. And his point was that you can't actually do that profitably in size on any L2 because there's just not enough liquidity. And it's much easier to do that on Solana than any of the L2s today. And what users want is to execute profitable trades in size. And that's who you should be basically building your blockchains for. That was a really interesting perspective. And so I don't know, I mean, I think that DeFi and just trading is emerging as probably the most important use case and it's going to drive the majority of our EV. I don't know, on some long time horizon, right? It already—

I mean, it's always been like that, right? Right.

But I think that one of the differences, at least in the Ethereum, you know, approach to building this, is that there are going to be all these other things, decentralized social media, all of these other use cases that we need to build for today.

And I mean, look no further than Vitalik's blog posts and you could understand that he lost, I think, the plot at some point of just not being practical. Like, he turned a cold shoulder on DeFi. Now it's very encouraging what he came out saying, like, we're gonna re— like, show some love to DeFi. And you, you know, it's, it's, it's encouraging for sure, because, yeah, enough of the ideology and more practicality. Then there was an interesting tweet by Jesse from, from BASE who was like, hey, maybe we should, uh, you know, focus on this— these like 3-year timelines. And here we go. No, not that one.

No, not that one.

He basically was like, you know what we discussed when, when the roadmap— I think it was Danny, right? Who, who actually put forth like, uh, Justin Drake? Yeah, around like the 3-year kind of like— probably was longer than that.

It was—

yeah, it was through— it was a 5-year roadmap, uh, for being 5-year roadmap.

It's just like, yeah, I know, it's just—

so does this feel— Santi, I, uh I think I know your take already, so I'd probably point this at Mike, but I guess I'd ask you too, which is, does this feel like a bottoming moment for ETH? I want your take on this, Antti, too.

Bottoming in sentiment, yes. Bottoming in price, no.

Hmm.

Yeah. I mean, why should Ethereum be worth what it is? Like, I mean, I don't want to get into a broad discussion of valuation. It's all referential to Bitcoin, but Can someone credibly— like, just, I, I've struggled to understand why Ethereum, the L1, the token, should be worth that much.

Well, yeah, I mean, I think that the— like, I think the reason why Solana did particularly well is, uh, it was, it was a very visible, very salient example of, you know, probably the most massive token deployment in the history of crypto. You know, whether or not you like that, the amount of eyeballs and attention that got, and it went to Solana, and it was just a very You know, everyone kind of understands at some level that that's going to generate an enormous amount of activity and fees that are going to go to Solana. But, you know, I mean, it just shows momentum, right? Doesn't it? I pretty undeniably. But I don't know.

I don't have any specific— so I want to make an interesting thing. Like Maddie said that there are now 18 Fire Dancer validators running on Solana, which I thought is news to me. The reason I bring that up is, look, Ethereum, I sympathize because the moment you decentralize and you have multiple clients, it just becomes harder to execute on a roadmap. Like the transition to proof of stake, probably one of the most important coordination feats in the history of the world. Just like that alone is impressive. EIP-1559, the more of these projects, the longer they exist and decentralize and you have more clients, it becomes hard, right? Every other or every other L1, Solana, Ripple, you know, and the list down from there, Avalanche, like they all have pretty top-down organizations that can execute changes and that matters a lot. I mean, they're agile and, you know, but I do think— I don't know, Mike, or I've always felt that Ethereum is in a position where Like, what would you change? Like, okay, extend further the, the recommendation that Kobe said. Fine, you have all the researchers go and try the L2s. They're going to come back and say this is broken. You already knew that. So okay, they understand that. And then, like, backwards compatibility is an issue. Like, there's only so— my lizard brain, if someone wants to correct me, but I've always felt that you you can't out-innovate necessarily, or as easily. Of course you can, you can totally try to reorganize, you know, reconstruct it, but it's hard, right? There's only, there's only so many paths or tracks that you can actually innovate in Ethereum because of this concept of backwards compatibility. Like, can you do parallelization? Well, no, right? I mean, it's like there are limitations of how much you can innovate in the current confines of like what Ethereum is and how it was built. And I've always felt that if you were to ask Vitalik today, hey, would you build Ethereum in the same way that you built it back in the day? Or Gavin or whoever, they'd be probably not, you know, definitely not. Um, and, and, you know, tying it all back to what just happened this weekend, like, I feel that one, chain loyalty is not a thing at all. The 400,000 moonshot new users that probably don't know what Solana is, may, you know, just don't, don't care about that. And so we are— what is really exciting is, man, I think we can really just accelerate the adoption of crypto, and it's going to become a) clear which chains, um, get the most amount of traction by number of users. Um, there's a very integrated approach with Solana has. It doesn't mean that other chains can't can do that. I just struggle to see it clearly with Ethereum. I, I could see it in other chains, like, you know, Off the Grid and Avalanche. Good example of a game that just is great. None of the users actually understand, or very few of them even know that they're using crypto, right? Um, so I think there's going to be a pretty big shakeout in the top 10 over the next 5 years. I just genuinely believe that's going to be the case.

Yeah, you could scale the L1. I still think like the advantage that Ethereum has, I think, is they've still got— they do have liquidity users and a head start here, but it's eroding, definitely. So, and I also think that, you know, the leadership challenge around it's— if it's the— one thing that I would actually push back on, by the way, is people always pushing back on the EF for dumping their ETH. I don't really think it's in the mandate of the Ethereum Foundation, like, take out loans on their Ethereum or whatever. I don't think that's a massive market mover. So they also are, to their credit, moving 50,000 ETH to explore in DeFi. I'm not sure what that means exactly yet, but they earmarked an enormous amount to do that. So at least they are changing and putting their money where their mouth is, etc. But I think you just need strong leadership. You know, this, this just looks to me like I just don't think decentralized leadership is a thing. That's—

but Mike, do we know exactly where they're spending that $102 or $108 million budget? Annual budget? No, they— this was a thing like last year. People were like, wait a minute, even the strongest mag— you know, supporters of Ethereum, the, the Sassanos of the world, and, you know, um, Anthony—

you can see, you can see Eric right here, who's like obviously giga ETH bull.

They, they were all super— this was when, of course, the EF sent some coins to Kraken and Coinbase, and they're like, Why? Where are you spending this money? Where's the annual report? Like, where's the accountability? I'm like, and they promised to do that. I just, I haven't seen it. And I asked a few chats over the weekend that, and no one seems to know. So if there, if there are reports, I'd love to see them. Feels like a little bit of an inflated budget for, I mean, it's just a lot. And when you look, you want to bring the best talent, I get it. But do we know how that compares to like some of the other projects? Like how much is Solana, Avalanche running up in costs? Putting aside like, you know, block reward, like inflation, like putting that aside, like how much are they spending as an organization? I think that's just feels like a lot.

Yeah, I— it feels like a lot to me too. I mean, that's a large headline number, that amount of budget.

They're going to run out of it in less than 4 years.

Yeah.

At current prices, of course.

It's just, I, you know, I can imagine. I don't know. I mean, I just wasn't privy to these decisions that they're being made. I could imagine, you know, at a very different point of development in Ethereum, maybe people are very worried about liability. Maybe there was this very idealistic belief in decentralized leadership and stuff like that. But I've never really been a huge believer that you can do that, or you need at least someone to very steer the ship during times of crisis. And the fact that— I mean, how many different ideas and directions— and you see people yelling in a very discordant way about all the stuff that Ethereum should do. And that's what happens when you don't have a firm hand on the wheel, right? Like, you get a million different ideas and it feels discordant. It feels very chaotic. I think that's the challenge right now. And there is a road.

I think there is a path to success here, which I mean, look, clearly a lot of activity still happens in Ethereum. Yeah, Ethereum and the entire ecosystem. Like, absolutely. I'm not, I'm not trying to convey or portray that. Now, the question is, now that we have a Trump coin or Trump coin on Solana, I do think about the fact that BlackRock did not deploy on Solana. It deployed on like Aptos, Avalanche. It selected a few chains. Solana was absent, I think, on that. And I don't know what it was. It was a bit interesting. Now, do you think that the— that changes if you really want to read too much into that? I kind of do. But like, do you feel that because the Trump coin was deployed on Solana, does that change institutional perception and inclination to deploy?

I think it does. I think— I think it does. B, the Solana ETF is getting more and more likely, I'd say. And so, you know, I think once that happens, that'll, that'll probably drive what you're talking about. I want to go back actually to, to tie this back to Trump and stuff. Did you guys see Mark Cuban tweeted out about a meme coin. Yeah, there are two topics I want to get your take on. One is kind of like what happens from here. The second is actually just this line that has become a meme now, which is like, crime is legal. And Mike, I saw you tweeted about this. I'm curious to get your take on like, I mean, it's like a funny one-liner, right? Crime is legal. But like, what do you, what do you think about just what, like, you know, is Mark Cuban about to start launching meme coins and Is everyone just launching a token? Doesn't matter if you have a chain or not. What is your take on what actually happens from here?

I think that there's going to be a lot of experimentation. This is the best part about crypto, and I agree with Santi that this is the cycle where you're seeing meaningful dispersion really for the first time. I know I was just defending Ethereum. I like Ethereum and I want it to succeed. I think you probably have to call a spade a spade and say that Solana is kind of winning at the current moment, right? Like they've got the momentum behind them. That doesn't mean that that's guaranteed to continue to exist like this. But, you know, let's call a spade a spade and nothing is guaranteed here. And I think you will see meaningful dispersion, that meaningful dispersion continue. So you're probably going to get a bunch of new experimentation. Maybe guys like Mark Cuban will say, all right, I'm going to launch a meme coin too, same 20% float, but all the profits for trading on this coin are going to go to the Treasury and I'm going to try to make a dent in the, you know, in the NAV, like the deficit. Maybe something like that. You're also going to start to see some experimentation, as always happens in crypto, in a system of permissionless finance, which is people pushing the envelope in a less good way, which is some of which those ways will be illegal. And I don't think that this is a get out of jail free card. I think that Gary Gensler has resigned. We're going to get Paul Atkins in the SEC. We're hopefully going to get some sensible legislation, maybe the FIT Bill and the Stablecoin Act. But that doesn't mean you can just do illegal things. And so we'll probably see some people do some pretty dumb things over the course of the next couple of years. I just remind people that crime is not legal and not illegal things. You will probably get arrested. And if you do them on a blockchain, you'll definitely get arrested because it's, it's recorded.

I mean, even recently there was an SEC action against Helium like 2 days ago or something. Yeah, these, these, these cases are worked on for a number of years. And so Long time. By the way, someone in the comments— I was just actually waking up to the fact that there's a chat here. It's FrankenDancer, not, not Firedancer. So sorry about that. You are correct, Mike. Hi, Simran. Or yeah, yeah. So anyways, anything else that we should cover?

By the way, can someone— can one of you guys explain World Liberty to me? It's like it did a token sale, but the tokens aren't transferable. They just started staking 15 million. Either you guys have any info on what World Liberty actually is.

Honestly, I haven't looked into it too deeply.

I don't know, Santi, I know you're looking at taking a punt on it, but I was just looking at it because it was like a 1.5 billion and I was like, all right, if Trump Coin's at 70, like this feels somewhat largely mispriced. I was like, I was thinking about like what other things could be interesting.

I mean, it's got, it's got, they're sitting on 300 million. Is that Bitcoin?

ETH?

It's a combination. I think they bought— they've allocated a lot of— didn't they buy like equal amounts in a bunch of protocols?

Hmm.

Hmm. Adam Bloom. Okay, you guys have gone very, very light on the corruption conflicts of interest part of the story. Have we? I mean, I don't know. What about it?

Hmm. Yeah, I am. I don't know. I think we covered it. Like, I said the way that I honestly feel about it, which is I think you have to separate a story this big into multiple different components, which is what does this mean for US crypto? What does this mean for US writ large? And then what is the appropriate way to talk about this stuff? In terms of the appropriate way to talk about this stuff, it's very difficult to know how this stuff is going to play out in the long term. I think you have to keep your mind pretty open to experimentation and stuff getting weird. And You know, there's a— I do think that crypto is a really new, very fast-moving industry, and people that have knee-jerk reactions and write things off as stupid ultimately end up looking stupid in the long term themselves more often than not. So, you know, anyone who is, you know, poo-pooed meme coins, including myself sometimes during the cycle, has been very wrong about it. So I don't know, I think it's important to keep an open mind about this stuff. Um, in terms of what this means for US crypto, I think it's undeniably positive. I think that— I don't know, I've never been a huge fan of this very adversarial stance that crypto takes towards governments. I think governments have to be a part of the story. And I think if the US government wants to be a part of the story, why would you not welcome that with open arms? And then I think there's a component of this, which is, is this corruption or graft or whatever? And to me, I think, yeah, I think there's a little bit of— I'm not going to call it open corruption or graft, but if this is naked personal enrichment, then I probably don't think the president of the United States should be able to do that. But, you know, that's my personal opinion there. So a lot of that depends on some of these details that, you know, sometimes you point out he just hasn't—

I just don't have the details.

Yeah, right.

See, like, so I guess we're just talking at Adam at this point, but like, I'm curious to Adam or to anyone who thinks it's extreme, there's a clear argument for this is corruption, this is grift, the president shouldn't be launching this. If 90% of the proceeds went into helping out LA and the fires, is it still grift? Right. If it's like $50 billion that was made, if it starts to get paid, you pay back the national debt or something. I'm making this up at this point. Is that grift?

Right.

I think there's— I think there's too much unknowns at this point, in my personal opinion.

Look, I mean, I think I'm left a bit shocked of how this all happened. I think it felt unordered. Yeah, it felt rushed, to your point, around just scrambling to find this stuff. Part of me thinks that they want to do it before the inauguration for reasons that we've covered. I just don't know, like, I'm not an expert on, on, on these things, but I still think, as we all here agreeing, it is net positive on a number of, on a number of vectors. But it did feel like I would have done it differently. And you guys are in the media business. I think there's a lot that— and maybe they'll come out with that. So I'm reserving judgment until I think the window of doing that in a place like crypto and markets needs to be kind of very proactive. You weren't proactive, so you have limited time to go out. Um, it's not all lost. I think it's still very— I still think it's, when I say impactful, the most impactful thing I've seen in crypto probably ever. I mean it. That doesn't mean that all the things are good or not. I mean, I'm just objectively saying impact can be both good and bad.

I think it will take time to understand a lot of the second-order effects of all of this, but Santi, I know you have to jump in a second, but as a closing, your closing thought, you swept all your meme stuff into Trump Coin and I'm guessing you sold it or maybe you still hold it. I don't know what you're doing with it. What does this do to— it kind of sucked all the liquidity out of the space. Like all I did the same, right? I just swept my, my Phantom account and put it in Trump. And what does this do for the for like Fart Coin and WIF and I don't know.

Well, Fart Coin was like the only thing that probably was— I think it performed fairly well, actually.

But like what it was. Okay, so you got this money in Trump, then I'm guessing at some point you sell it. Do you reallocate it to memes?

Like, oh no, no, no, absolutely. I think that's what I'm thinking a lot. I'm still— when I say so proud, I am thinking, okay, memes are not dead. You have the president just launch a meme. They're definitely not dead. Um, for me, the Solana trade is very much real, and the convergence on Ethereum is, is probably accelerated. Um, so yeah, I think that liquidity will, will rotate back. I mean, the market really behaved really poorly over the last couple of days, and so you have quality assets that you want to play the long game, you got pretty good entry points on really high quality, like, category industry-defining projects were sold heavily to allocate into this, that will rotate back. I think one is a trade for me, one is a trade, the other one's an investment, you know what I mean? Um, but, um, but yeah, the fact that they're like World Liberty and all these, they're using Ethereum, they're using DeFi projects, like that's very positive for a space like DeFi that has been left for dead since— how was it— Parafi towards the end. Um, Anything else? No, I mean, I think, uh, yeah, I'll be— the things that I'm looking out for are where is this— like, there's a great chart by dBridge, I think, that processed like 200 billion or 100 billion of flows, like where the capital rotated from. A lot of it was obviously Ethereum into Solana. Uh, bridges behave really well, and, um, all the different kind of projects like Jito and stuff like that. I mean, like It's, uh, so yeah, I think, I think it's a very interesting time in the market. Uh, would I would be paying a lot of attention into where that capital eventually sits and new flows coming in like the ETF this week, just the ETF of Bitcoin and Ethereum and any obviously executive orders. It's just a time that it pays to be paying attention and agile, like re-underwrite your thesis and, and, uh, an event like this weekend, it requires like a pretty 180 shift and a lot of things and moving fast is— can pay off sometimes.

Yeah. Santi, I know you got to jump. Mike, anything else you want to cover?

I would just watch DEX volumes as a pretty good indicator for successful chains moving forward. Like just straight up watching— watch DEX volumes. And I'd be curious to watch what happens to the DEX volumes on Solana over the course of the next week. I think it'll be very telling.

Yeah. Who's the second— who's the third most DEX volumes right now.

Third most what?

Chain with the most DEX swaps.

It's probably a research.

Let's see, do you count Hyperliquid for that?

Yeah, I guess you would.

Yeah, yeah, you have to count, I think, Hyperliquid.

Hyperliquid saw— I think it listed fairly quickly. Uh, yeah, probably Hyperliquid.

Yeah. Cool. All right, folks, thanks for tuning in.

First livestream of Empire.

First livestream. I think this went all right. I think people tuned in. So, Adam, thank you for beefing with us in the comments. Those were actually good questions. I appreciate them. This is great. Thanks, everybody. Enjoy the rest of the night.

We'll see you this week.

Thank you, guys.