We're Still In A Bull Market | Weekly Roundup

there is more tailwind behind crypto adoption than there has ever been in the history of our industry. I think there was a title of a podcast that Santi and I did earlier in the summer that said, it's a bull market, just not the one you want. And it seems like that still is true, right? It is a bull market, just not the one people want.

This episode is brought to you by Blockdaemon. You'll hear more about them later in today's episode. Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice, or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

All right, everyone, welcome back to the Roundup. We got the trio. Back in action. We got Rob, we got Santi. Summer's over. Santi's throwing up gang signs. We don't know what it means, but everyone's feeling good, looking good, busy. What's going on, Santi? What's up, Rob?

We're cooking. How's it going?

Listen, it's, it's middle of September in New York and it's still 85 degrees. Got nothing to complain about.

Yeah. And we're all just inside like 14 hours a day. So I— so update for longtime Empire listeners, you'll be excited to hear we are pivoting the podcast. We are going to be moving the show on to Pump. And, uh, the— and, uh, changing it from a podcast into just open sourcing the Inversion board meetings.

Yes.

Fun part is Santi and Rob don't know this is happening, but this will be— I thought this would be the more entertaining version.

We gotta turn every opportunity into a revenue opportunity. Every minute, every customer, every prospect needs to be monetized.

So we're gonna monitor the number go up, number go up, higher token.

Yes, exactly.

Some of these creative ones done pretty good actually. Like, you know, $40 million on the FDV basis. They're not like, you know, the runners, but they're doing okay. So can help fund an acquisition maybe.

Yeah, dude, this is sitting at like a million bucks right now.

Goddamn. So, so all that, how does, how do the economics work? I need to seriously go spend some time. I mean, it's already midnight over here, but you best believe I'm going to be up until 6 in the morning trying to figure out how to monetize my board meeting.

We should do it.

Let's go live on— There's literally these two guys who are like just standing in the corner of a room together with lampshades on their heads like they were like lamps. And just stood there for hours and their token ripped to like $30 million. So this is how—

I mean, this is an exact replay of what happened 18 months ago.

I mean, it's gonna— we know how this ends. People are gonna be— someone's gonna have a gun cocked to their head on pump again.

To be fair, I think they're aware of that going in, and content moderation is gonna have to be a thing, right? But it's hard, right? You gotta clamp down on it in real time.

Yeah.

Um, on this point, like, real quick, like, don't you find it some— sometimes, like, when you're having a really heated discussion with someone about like what drives value, like the meme coin discussion that we had like 1 or 2 years ago, like November 2 years ago where it was like, or January of like 2 years ago. And you go and you hear folks like Chris Dixon be super against meme coins. And, and it's like, okay, you peel it all back. Like, what is it? Like, what drives value? It's an attention economy. And so I get that you might be against people like being on the internet and documenting their lives, like reality TV, Jersey Shore, Kim Kardashian. But How's that any different from marketing spend to drive a consumer action to buy a product? Like, it's really not, right? And so if you boil it all down, it just— can you capture attention? And that capturing attention just becomes harder and harder in this economy. And so honestly, I hand it to people that are good at it, whether you agree with their content or the way they do it, as long as it's principled, I don't have a problem with it.

Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with you. I think Um, you know, the way they're doing the creator, uh, economics, like, I think that's positive. I think it's— I actually think they announced some new content moderation, um, kind of policies. Like, I know it's on top of their mind. It's pretty clear to me that, you know, this is streaming a lot of different types of things, or streaming and livestreaming more broadly. I think, you know, you talked about this when we talked about Pump maybe a couple months ago. But live streaming is the future, I think, in a lot of ways, you know, TBPN, let's just look what that business has done. Um, and congratulations, by the way, to Dylan, uh, becoming president of TBPN. So, uh, nice new role.

Yeah.

Nice new role for him.

I actually think TBPN should, uh, should sell right now. I think, I think they're— see, you see this so much in media that there's a, it's actually, you can kind of catch fire with the media company in the beginning and you can get these like crazy overvalued multiples. Um, if you're like lightning in a bottle and they have lightning in a bottle right now, and then if.

Like by bringing on Dylan, now they have to build, build like a real business.

Like they're doing like $5 million in revenue.

It's not like a real business.

It's like it's a fun plaything for a couple of people.

But I'm—

I think TVPN should sell is my take.

You hear that? $5 million of revenue out there. Fun plaything for a couple of people. Not a real business. You heard it from Jason Yanowitz.

Okay, I'm just going to bring back this question over to you because you're a media guy. You've been building this empire, like quite literally Blockworks. How do you think about what's going on? You see something like Pump and livestreaming, and is that relevant to your business? Like, do you, like, do you think about it? Like, was that a missed opportunity for you guys? Do you still think it's an opportunity for you guys? Like, how do you think about it?

I don't, I don't think it's a missed opportunity. I think it's a thing that we are going to— I, we are very excited about livestreaming. I think kind of the endgame of social-led distribution of audio and video is two sides of the spectrum. You have livestreaming and you have short clips. And I think there's a reason why people are so I was giving them TVPN a little shit, but like they have figured out the model. That is the model. Thread Guy. Thread Guy is the model. And you'll see that model like right now. I think people could list only two people doing it well, TVPN and Thread Guy. Give it, give it 12 months. There'll be hundreds of these in all the different areas— longevity and tech and finance. And I do think the 60 Minute Podcast that we do has a role in consumption, but I actually think we will look back in 5 years and like the 60 Minute Podcast will be seen as outdated. It'll be seen as like a little like millennial boomer-y to just be like listening to a 60 Minute Podcast.

I mean, we are millennials, so that makes sense. But also like, so what are we going to do? What's the future of Empire then?

We're getting on Pump, baby. No, we're, I mean, we are, we're building up all of the backend capabilities at Blockworks right now to go really heavy into live streaming and short clips. So like right, right, right now I'd give us like a D-minus job of, uh, of short clip. Like we like maybe put out one short clip for an episode. It doesn't really get viral. We sometimes livestream, we sometimes don't. It doesn't feel super organic. Like that's just, that's like very, we're like a very MVP right now for what that looks like at Blockworks, but eventually it will proliferate across the network.

What's like the winning handbook, if there is one, for livestreaming? Like what's a half-life? How do you sustain it? Like, like What is it, like Speed, or what's his name? Like I Am Speed, that guy just kind of blew up. He's maintained that. How do you, like, what is the secret formula of success for live streaming?

I think people could say that there's a, yeah, there's like a speed, like time to the news, or it's, you know, you wanna be in the background hanging out with someone every day. Like they, you know, you're kind of the second screen. But I basically just think it comes down to who's the creator and who's the host. And the dream for us at Blockworks, I look at one business which is Barstool Sports, and I think they did such a good job of bringing all the different creators and hosts together. And it's actually an extremely hard backend job, like Erica, their president, and Stu, their CEO, and even Portnoy. Like the thing that they've mastered that other people don't understand is they have two really amazing abilities which most people in the world don't have.

They can spot talent super early.

Right. So they can find someone with 2,000 followers and be like, that person's going to rip. And then they can figure out how to economically incentivize them to stay at Barstool for a very long amount of time. And if you can figure out those two things and you can keep control of the RSS feed and the IP, that's, that's how you build the future media business. It's not like you need— it's, it's very creator-led. So that's what, that's how we try to think about it.

We should talk about prediction markets in this episode. We've talked about, like, is there a scenario where you, like, you combine live streaming with prediction markets?

Obviously, that's the model. Yeah, exactly. It's not just prediction markets. It's all markets, by the way. I think it's like you look at the FOMC, like, that was just live streaming for adults. Like, that was fantasy football. That was a prop bet. You know, will, you know, this person run for a touchdown on the next run? Like, that was, that was that, but for 50-year-old men. And women, of course. But that's a— that was like, I don't know, you look at livestreaming, I think people look at livestreaming as like just this Twitter kind of native thing or Twitch or you, but it's, it's— you actually start seeing the exact same behavior and mechanisms show up all the time. Like I'm watching the US Open. I mentioned this, I think on the last episode or with maybe it was, maybe it was with the Kyle episode, but watching the US Open, just texting friends being like Djokovic is going to get the next shot. Yeah, but you $5, I bet you $5 Djokovic wins this point right here. What is that? That's kind of You're watching the live, you're watching a live stream of something, plus you're kind of betting like that. That's where, that's where this goes.

Well, I think that the component of the attention piece is when you introduce value into the equation, like, like, like money on the line, like people are just more vested and pay more attention. So it brings back like that into higher engagement. Maybe last question here. Are you more bearish traditional media companies, Disneys of the world that just haven't really caught up? To this. Um, I was like, uh, just reminded there's like a new, uh, show on Netflix where it was like, I think it's Adolescent or something, which I think they— there's like every episode they practice for such a long time, weeks on end, but it's just like one shot. Like there's no edits. They apparently, they just kind of filmed it all. I don't know if you know this, but I found it like deeply fascinating.

Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I, I mean, never bet against someone like Disney. Disney will figure it out. Many of the, um, Disney will figure it out. Many of the traditional publications, like the financial news outlets you read, the traditional mainstream, mainstream media folks will not figure it out. Um, what I do think though, that is not obvious to others is that I do think all of them will have a prediction market. I do think many of them will have a prediction market embedded inside of their platform, whether that's through, uh, either Kalshi or Polymarket APIs or whatever that is. Like, I think it's very likely you'll see CNN have the CNN prediction market. In a year from now. Fox will have the Fox, you know, the Fox Business prediction market in a year from now.

You know, it's funny, um, we were talking about this. What actually got me excited about Polymarket when I decided to make that investment was, um, if you remember, Sam Altman got fired, you know, like 2 years ago now, right? And he got fired on a Friday and he, you know, got reinstated on a Monday. And I don't know about your group chats, but my group chats, like, that's all everybody was talking about that whole weekend. Yeah. And, uh, Polymarket had a, a, it had a market on whether or not he would be reinstated that was actually the most volume they had ever done, not in an election market. By that time, it was, it was de minimis by like current standards of how much Polymarket is doing. But, and I realized in my group chats, that's, everybody was talking about it. They were like, oh, is this happening? And they were talking about, oh, we should, we bet on Polymarket about it. And that was when the light bulb clicked for me that, you know, and it definitely later than for a lot of other people who invested in Polymarket and others, but the light bulb really clicked for me then that, you know, this is something that is going to be actually be a social platform. Like it is not just an economic one or a financial one. It is social, right? And so when, you know, I get asked by LPs, like what categories do we invest in? And often they'll say like, oh, do you invest in social? And I'll say, well, You know, maybe we haven't done Forecaster, but I consider Polymarket an inherently social investment in a social platform. And, you know, I consider that, you know, the, the, um, social investment that we have in, in that fund.

Yeah, I'll overlay some commentary because, uh, I was at Parafi when we did the, the seed round. I think Parafi is the largest, second largest owner now of Polymarket. I think it's probably going to be— I was talking to Ben the other day— one of our best investments. But it was more around, at that time, I think it was 2020, 2021, it was markets are arbiters of truth. And so, you know, you can infer way more knowledge from a market versus a political pundit, you know. And this was on the back of like the election where people totally missed Trump winning that election. You're like, you're sitting there and you're like, what did the Nate Silvers of the world get wrong? And you're like, hey, if you had a prediction market on that, like, it'd probably be a better signal. If you have all that money on the line. But yeah, I know it's become a social phenomenon for sure. And I think I'm really excited. It's probably one of those categories where it's super relatable for people and it's onboarding so many people.

And what was the valuation of that deal? Do you remember something?

Like, like, whoa. Well, I'll tell you what, not to—

I asked that because I think there was some stuff got leaked. It was either this week or the end of last week. I think it's Polymarkets raising it like I don't know the real numbers, 5 to 10 or something.

Rumor is like 5 to 9. Kalshi is like— Kalshi is 5, Polymarket is at 9. I don't know. It's not confirmed. I'll tell you, it was at a time where Augur had not been successful. And it's a classic example for anyone that's interested in investing in technology. And you could have sat there and said, hey, Augur is not successful. So this is definitely not going to be successful. The reality is it pays to re-underwrite the thesis under new circumstances. And Yeah, you can laugh sitting there all day long. This time is going to be different. But credibly, like Augur didn't work for a number of reasons that we can talk about here. My main diagnosis is you didn't have a stablecoin, and if you can't settle the bet on a stablecoin, it's just, it's just really noisy, right? Imagine if you put 30 ETH on the line and then all of a sudden ETH crashes 80%. It hurts to be right and then lose money. But Polymarket, I think, got it was just different scenario where you had stablecoins, and that was a big part of re-underwriting our thesis because we had exposure to Augur. I had done the Augur ICO, and, you know, you, you could just be licking there your wounds. But I think it— the question is, what are some of the other sectors that didn't work last cycle that are really going to work? Maybe it's gaming, maybe it's NFTs, maybe it's a combination of that, right? And so I think it just pays to re-underwrite the thesis, um, and, and obviously it worked for us in a very big way. It has worked.

I think to your point, one point to make like very clear there is stablecoins. You know, we're all invested, I think, in stablecoin stuff, and, and, and I think Dragonfly has been very publicly invested in a lot of stablecoin things. But stablecoins are also, to your point, the enabler of other types of financial markets and financial ecosystems on-chain, right? If you don't have a dollar denomination, or, you know, some sort of— you have to take a lot of FX risk, to your point, or ETH price risk, to your point. It's just much harder to do financial activity in any real way over any long period of time on-chain. And so I actually think like, you know, stablecoins are at the, you know, infrastructure layer for a lot of the things that you now need to re-underwrite, or a lot of the things that you now need to rethink about will exist on-chain. So I think that was actually a very astute point you just made because it, it now applies, I think, to many, many other assets, many, many other verticals in the space. Yeah.

Yeah. One of the I'll just say one thing, which is I heard it from one of the best investors and it's just stuck with me forever, which is anytime you remove friction from a system, it unlocks nonlinear consumer behavior. The internet, e-commerce, and then stablecoins, I think, are that primitive for like from e-commerce to gaming to everything in the middle. Like it's just, it's just explosive. And I think, I think we're just scratching the surface of what is going to be possible here.

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All right, we got a lot to cover. I want to just get your guys' gut sense on— so we just had FOMC this week and the markets are going a little crazy, right? Bitcoin's up 3%, um, ETH is up like 5 or 6%, SOL is up like 10%, and yeah, the coins are running. So, um, I just want to get your— it's a— it's, it's one of the most torn I've ever seen the market in terms of like what, what people's sense of the market is. I got— had lunch with, um, A big investor who's in from Asia yesterday, he said, we're not even halfway through this cycle. He said, we're not even halfway. We're loading up the tank, levered up. The next person's like, we just started trimming everything except for Bitcoin. The next meeting is like, I'm going public via SPAC. Like, it is the most torn. And then I think you've got people like, you know, who these influencers that people follow really closely, people like Ansem who have had some really good calls. Basically saying like, we've topped. I think that is kind of— I don't know if you guys have seen Ansem's takes recently, but Ansem is basically saying like, this, this is it. This is the last time to sell at $115,000. Pack it up. We're going home. You've got— I was looking at open interest. Altcoin OI is greater than Bitcoin OI for the first time all year, actually, since the January local top. And yeah, there's just a— just OI in the alts is getting really high, which is kind of a sometimes a telltale sign. But just want to get— I know we're all long-term here, but I do want to get your sense of like just short, shorter-term markets and how you guys are feeling about things.

Yeah, I'll start. Again, we're not traders, to your point, and I don't exactly know what will happen, or I definitely don't exactly know what will happen over the last month or next month, the month after that. Um, I think if you zoom out again, and we've talked about this a bunch, like there is more tailwind behind crypto adoption than there has ever been in the history of our industry. There is the Genius Act, there is Clarity Act, and some sort of reconciliation. I was at a fundraiser for a senator a month ago who said, I will guarantee that we will get some sort of Clarity Act reconciliation done in October. Now You know, that's a politician, and I don't know if that's actually true, but this, this person was willing to put their reputation at this fundraiser on the line, right? There's at this time right now more Fortune 500 and more institutions, more businesses building on blockchain rails than ever before. There are more of these people that have RFPs out to integrate blockchains and crypto and stablecoins in their businesses than ever before. Like, these things are happening. Like, it is not— it's not as if we can just, like, you know, I think, put it to the side and act as if it's '21 all over again, because it's not. You're actually seeing real economic flow exist on-chain, right? And so it really— I really struggle with a lot of this, like, oh, this is the last time you'll ever be able to sell 115. Because I mean, clearly, you know, people who say things like that are, are really, it's about just pandering to an audience, right? And like continuing to increase, you know, the amount of engagement, but it's, when I look at this from the outside in, it's hard for me to say anything other than we are getting what we want. Right. I think there was a title of a podcast that Santi and I did earlier in the summer that said it's a bull market, just not the one you want. And it seems like that still is true, right? It is a bull market, just not the one people want. And so, you know, it's funny to your point, like I was on the phone with one of the smartest liquid fund investors that I know of in the entire space earlier today. And that person was like, oh yeah, we have 2 months, 2 months from now. Like, you got to be out of the market, right? And I asked them why. And they like, they're like, oh, just like kind of flows and, you know, like macro and etc. And it's all like very wishy-washy. And it seems like people like want the market to fall out underneath them. Like, it's like all of these pessimists who just aren't used to winning, right? You know, it's like, then they're like, oh, like, this has to go wrong, right? And I don't think it is going to go wrong if you have the right, you know, like longevity.

That actually encapsulates so well, I think, what's happened. The market's in this spot where every— everything is actually doing well, but there are so many people wanting to buy a dip, right? People are constantly, more than I've ever seen, calling tops, even taking profits, and trying to almost ensure that prior cycles never really happen, right? Like, like that these excess greed never really happens. And there's these little pockets of greed, but once that starts happening, everyone's like, no, no, no, no, no, take profits. Um, and that is not the sign of a top. I'm just going to say that is— Bitcoin's at all-time low volatility, like after almost one year of consolidating around $100K. Like, that's not how something tops. I'm just going to say that.

To overlay what Rob and you guys have said, just so true, which is there's only one thing that people hate more than losing money, and that's seeing someone else make more money than you have. And that gets to you. And I think that's a bit of the dynamic that you're seeing. I mean, important note, I've never met anyone that can systematically time markets, not in crypto, not in any other market. If you're led to believe that they are calling all the tops, then they're deleting tweets, ladies and gentlemen. So I think the reality is, the way I see it, and, uh, you know, again, I'm not a trader, is Bitcoin is holding its ground in this range above $100,000, and that's giving room for that wealth creation or rotate into other stuff. And you also have this phenomenon called DApps, and you're seeing incredible amount of buy pressure, right? You have the forward vehicle buying over, what is it now, 5 billion of SOL in the open market. Like, they're very well telegraphed buys in the market. And that was all cash. And so, you know, not all dApps are created equal, but yeah, it's, again, of course, Jerome Powell and Jason Yanowitz are the two most important characters that you should be paying attention to. And if any of those two guys have a bad day, you best believe crypto is going to take a hit. But, you know, it's— I continue to believe that this setup is unlike anything we've seen before, to Rob's point. And, you know, of course, macro and AI can really derail this industry because it's risk-on. But I continue to believe there's a lot of room to grow. And, you know, I'll go as far as saying if people want a prediction from me, we have a bit more than 2 months. It's at least 6 months, I would say.

Rob's like, why are we talking about specific months here?

I mean, you said you were like, I will go so far as to say a bit more than 2 months. That was going out on a limb here. Like, I'm waiting for like a big, like, proclamation. Like, oh, like Bitcoin will be $250K in a year, you know? And you're like, I've got a bit more than 2 months.

Yeah, I was, I was in CNBC earlier today, and it— and then I, I was with—

oh, you did CNBC?

India though, to be fair. I'm starting, I'm starting the minor leagues, ladies and gentlemen.

But it's okay, I did CNBC Crypto World yesterday, so like, you know, I don't know how you rank those two.

Yeah, well, Rob, you know, you're ahead of me, man. Um, I, I, I use this line now, which is crypto is sort of a weird state. Like, I hope that we get to a point where like companies don't make decisions to use AWS or Azure because the stock of Amazon or Microsoft took a hit. That's like, we're gonna get to a state of the world not too far from now where companies are starting to use this technology and it's totally independent of the price of Solana or Ethereum. And I think that's probably something that most people are bearish on because there's trauma of a bunch of enterprise pilots. But again, I've said it before, we are at a time in an industry where industry executives are more interested in applying the technology than your typical crypto trader investor that is just jaded because alts haven't ran up as much. And I think, I think this time, like, that's really the big setup that we have over the next couple years. It is like a secular trend, and, and that really bodes well for the adoption of the industry and, and, and the price of these assets.

Yeah, let's get into some of the news stories. So, um, there's— I think there's probably some interesting ideas to talk about, like what, what actually happens with these dApps as a lot of them are starting to trade below NAV. Rob, I will let you or Santi, where do you guys want to go?

I was going to ask, I was going to ask you guys, there is a market on Polymarket of Plasma's market cap FDV one day after launch. What do you, what do you think that is? Greater than $8 billion, greater than $6, greater than $4, greater than $2, greater than $1.

It's at like $6.5, $7 right now in the pre-market. Right. Yeah. Like, I think as a general rule, if it's— you expect it— if it's, you know, whatever it is in the pre-market, you should expect it to be a little bit lower, um, the, the day after. I'd have to actually go back and look at some of the data around here, but there's enough people that are like hedging, right, the unlock, that I would expect it to be maybe— actually, I'll just say, I would say I expect it to be in range. Like, actually, what we saw on Pump was that it kind of, you know, traded up a little bit. Um, now that was obviously very different because it wasn't a long unlock. There there was people funded and they got unlocked right away, etc. Um, but usually the way I like to think about it is whatever it is in the pre-market, it's likely to be within some short time frame a little bit below that. And then, you know, then we'll see how the fundamentals take over, we'll see about the long-term holders, etc. So if it's at, you know, call it, uh, whatever, $7 billion today, my guess is it hovers in this, you know, call it like $5 to $7 range. And so I, you know, I see here it says greater than, uh, 94% greater than $4 billion, um, 57% greater than $6 billion. Like, you know, I don't know what the options payouts are here, but, you know, my guess is like somewhere, you know, call it like $6 billion is probably the midpoint, uh, of like what people will probably expect.

Yeah, you guys, uh, didn't end up investing, did you?

No, no, we're not investors.

Well, why do you think Plasma has had such parabolic success?

What was that?

Why has Plasma done so well?

Well, Rob, you want to take— full disclosure, I'm an investor, but Rob, I'll take it.

So Santi, why do you think it's done so well?

I think, well, you'll hear Rob say the story, like when they started, they had sort of the blessing of Tether and admittedly, like other chains, like also ended up having that to some extent. But I think there's a strong signaling from from, from the Tether organization. But like, Paulo, I think, personally invested, and, and that gave him, you know, momentum. And then on the back of that, they kind of did what I think other protocols have done, like, like, uh, like, uh, Blur, for instance, like, you know, receive a bunch of deposits and TVL. I guess the nuance is like, how's this any different, right? Because Blur, um, or was it Blast, like, attracted a bunch of TVL and then a bunch of farmers. It was Blast, right? And then that money kind of left, right? I think here it overlays with the stablecoin narrative and thesis, which is incredibly powerful this cycle. And I think people just want to have exposure to that, and I think it's really playing, um, you know, to their advantage. Um, I think, you know, Paul and team, you know, they keep growing. They've done a good job in terms of like, you know, building community excitement and whatnot. And so, um, so yeah, I think the, the— it's been pretty impressive, like the caps that they've hit in terms of like just deposits willing to I think it went— I think they did an echo program, which was like you could deposit stables to get an allocation in this round, which is fully unlocked. And so, you know, people again want to get exposure to stablecoin thesis. And this is like the— you always want to think about like, how do people think about it? Like extreme left, extreme right. It's like, don't overthink it. It's like long stablecoins, stablecoin chain, like, you know, and I guess the comp here maybe is like Tron, right? Like Tron is in many ways has been the silent USDT chain, right? Most of us, a lot of USDT sits on Tron, and Tron is a, you know, $35+ billion, you know, $35 billion FDV protocol. It's obviously done many, many things to get there in many, many years. Um, but I think that's what people kind of like get excited about when they think about Plasma. Yeah, I don't know, Rob, if you'd say anything different.

No, I mean, listen, I think That probably didn't give enough credit to the execution that they've done, if I'm being honest, because I think the reality— and, and, you know, I spend maybe a little bit more time looking at like a lot of the things in venture land here, but, you know, at the time that they were raising, there was like 3 or 4 stablecoin chains raising, of which like 2 or 3 of them had, you know, pretty, you know, had actual investments by Palo and by Bitfinex. And so it wasn't actually that unique that they had had this, you know, backing by USDT, and that they were— and they were fundraising on that backing, but so were others. And, you know, at the time, um, there wasn't a lot there. They were early, right? There was, you know, Paul and his team, and, you know, they were, you know, somewhat close to Tether. And, um, I think if you, you know, go back to those days, you know, it was still very unclear like which of these chains would win. And it still is unclear. Obviously they've gotten the most hype, and I think there's room for more than one, obviously. But like, clearly what they have done since that time to differentiate against, you know, Stable and others who also had some of this backing, um, is all just down to execution, right? At the end of the day, they built a better community, they built more excitement, they were able to do better, you know, kind of just ground marketing. They were able to put out some, you know, materials and some content that people really resonated with. And yes, it was at the right time of, you know, stablecoins really proliferating, people getting really excited. But there's a lot of, you know, proliferation and of stablecoins, stablecoin chains, and, you know, uh, startups. And around that, they've kind of uniquely captured at least the crypto native zeitgeist, and they've done a really, really good job on the crypto-native side. I do think there remains to be seen how they actually tackle a lot of the real-world problems that they're talking about, and I think that's where maybe they, you know, haven't made, you know, or haven't shown yet that they've made the same, you know, steps forward. And so I think this launch will go really well for them, and then I think sustaining or becoming Tron, right, to your point, $35 billion, that will be the next stage of execution. And can they actually go and build a product that real people will use versus a crypto ecosystem that has a lot of, you know, farmers, and a la like a Beara chain, which then, you know, or Blast, as you mentioned, which then kind of, you know, just, uh, kind of, you know, has— I don't say died, but did really kind of just like trend down for a long period of time.

Look, I'll tell you, I'm an investor in all three.

What did happen to Blast?

And, um, uh, look, we should have T-Shane on, um, I think, uh, he's like gone.

I think he's like Right.

Product. To Rob's last point, you know, it remains to be seen, like product. And it was—

you know what, you know what's funny to me? There was a time when they were ripping and you said, you told me, you said, look, yeah, this guy's, he's young, he's pretty cracked, really good developer. He, he never sends investor updates though.

No, here's the thing. I, at one point, it came to me and said, hey, I want you to be on the council. And then Casey and a few other people like Jess, we're on the council. I started observing some of the projects when I, when I make an ecosystem bet, like, like Plasmid, I was like, okay, I'm going to bet, I'll then reserve capital to invest in projects building on top of that. And I invested in a number of them, Wasabi and a few others. And then I started noticing a lot of those teams going elsewhere, going to Solana, going to other chains. And I think it just, they, Messaging and honoring the messaging needs to be like, the follow-through of that needs to be clear. And I think they delayed the points program, especially for teams. And I think that just, you kind of live and die by that, right? The community is strong, but it can be very fickle because it's, you know, you can just port over and deploy somewhere else, especially if it's EVM compatible. And so I think there was a lot of that. I saw a lot of teams kind of migrate and go elsewhere. And I think that was just, uh, yeah, it was, I think, down to the points program that it wasn't honored to the extent that it was communicated. And then just, you know, yeah, the community just got pissed off and left. Barra, different, I think, in many ways. But the reality is, like, it is a bit, I think, unfair, uh, you know, Barra's had a bit of a comeback recently into just the price of it. But there are certainly more projects building on top of Bera. What I will say is these things take time. I think every, every— the evolution of every project in crypto is this sort of hype. The hype cycle is very real. And then can you survive is if you maintain true to the community. And look, Solana went through this too, man. Like Solana after FTX, it just kind of went through and had to really kind of like a phoenix kind of forge itself back. And it stayed true to like core things. And you had Bonk and you had deep-end projects really come together. And dude, I mean, I think single-handedly, I think 4 or 6 projects in the Solana community really took it, like took it to where it is now. Like it's— and yeah, unfortunately for Blast, it just, it didn't pan out. And yeah, I mean, if T-Shane wants to come on and share his story, all the better. I haven't heard from him in a long time.

Yeah. Getting back to—

can I actually— Santi, can I ask a question? Have you tried to reach out to him and he just hasn't been responsive or—

No, I haven't actually. So I'll ping him now in fairness and see if he wants to come on. Yeah. One of the things that, look, Rob, you know this, but like I now I'm acutely aware of this. I think it's incumbent on, if you're a founder, you should be sending quarterly updates. Like there is, there's a good— and by the way, respond in the first 5 minutes unless you're like sleeping, but like, you know, be responsive, dude. Like respond.

Don't sleep.

I, I, you know, I actually pinged Rob, uh, super early, uh, the other day, and I was like, yo, you up? And he was like, bang! It was like, let's go!

Hell yeah, Rob!

I think it was literally 4:30 in the morning, and I was like, yeah, I'm up, of course. You think you're gonna catch me? You can't pull it over me.

Should we talk about that next? I guess it overlays to what we want to talk because I pinged Rob the announcement of the head of crypto at Stripe going to Polygon. There's a— there's been a couple of big domino movements you had. So let's, let's start there. Obviously, the, the head of crypto at Stripe, Josh Egan, John Egan, John Egan, yeah, John Egan left and went over to Polygon. Comments there, Yano, Rob, I don't know him personally, but you know, the comment is, uh, basically Stripe had two crypto teams and it was not—

it's, uh, Stripe had a crypto team, they'd been building crypto actually for a while, working and tinkering and stuff like that. Then Stripe acquired Bridge That team comes in and becomes basically Stripe's crypto team. Now you have two totally separate crypto teams, different types of people. Some people are more like different— how do you build products, different languages that they like to write in, different strategies and different like people who they see as their leaders. And the, the old Stripe crypto team, from what I've heard, is— I think John was part of the old Stripe crypto. So I think that team is starting to— I think, I think you've seen some, some movements and you'll see some more movements.

One of the interesting things about that to me, and this is kind of a, um, a separate point, but I had one or two people say to me, he's like, like, why do you go to Polygon? And, you know, there's, I think one thing people don't appreciate about Polygon, and we did some work with a team called Artemis, who's also a portfolio company of ours, who does a lot of data. And sorry, Yanowitz, I know they're a competitor to your—

we like Artemis. Yeah.

But they, so that we did a, a paper with them that was, um, looking at like cross-border and business like stablecoin payments and like how stablecoins are actually used for payments. And one of the things that you see all the time is Polygon is always near the top with Ethereum and Tron. It's always Ethereum and Tron number 1 and 2 in terms of actual like stablecoin payments. Polygon's number 3 often, right? And they actually have a humongous amount of flow that's going between India and elsewhere because they have kind of this deep just relationship with that part of the world because of Sandeep and the team there. And so it actually made all the sense in the world to me that he went to Polygon because Polygon is actually very focused these days on payments and they actually do have a lot of real payments existing on-chain, even though I think that's like not everyone's like totally aware of that.

Do you know where else I see this show up? Is, uh, so Alliance DAO always shows their, um, where the founders are building and I think it's usually like, you know, Ethereum is usually first, I think Solana is second, and I, and, uh, I think Base now might be third, but I think Polygon is fourth or fifth.

What, uh, I mean, Polygon probably might be one of the most hated chains out there. Um, honestly, one of the reasons why I was very discouraged in the broader Ethereum community, like you have, like people love Optimism because Carl and Jason Yanowitz, you know, and there's like, they hate the Sandeeps because it just doesn't fit with the norm. It's like, it's a very cliquey, had been a very cliquey ecosystem. I mean, Polygon, no ecosystem gets it right, but they've done a lot of stuff and I think they're probably one of the most underappreciated protocols out there. I don't know if you guys would agree with that. And if so, like, what are some of the other super deeply overlooked or underappreciated protocols? I mean, we talked about Tron. I think that's another one, but any others that come to mind?

Yeah, it was interesting. I mean, there was a, there was an idea like we hosted a dinner last night with some Blockworks Research customers and some of our analysts and stuff like that. And the main one that everyone's talking about obviously is Hyperliquid. But as you start to go down into other ecosystems, the two that got brought up a few times. One was, and there are very torn, heated debates on this. One was Worldcoin, actually, and one was Telegram. Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

So, so the TON people were basically extremely bearish on TON. Everybody was not, not bullish on TON as an ecosystem until they just got this new guy who just joined as their president. And basically the thought is like they just really haven't had capable leader until now. But, um, yeah, now they've got a killer operator running, running the business over there. So they could, they could pull it out.

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the ways I like to think about this a lot is like you need to go actually talk to the builders and the developers.

Yeah.

And if you actually talk to the builders and developers, like everybody pitches this, oh, like Telegram TON integration, 900 million users. It sounds so good as an investor, like surface level. And then you go talk to the developers and they're like, this is a disaster. And like you hear a lot of that. Now I know they're fixing a lot of it. So it's not necessarily, you know, some of what I'm saying is legacy and they're working to make it a better developer ecosystem. So I do want to give them credit for that. And I have heard better things as of recent, but there has been for a long period of time, I think for, you know, especially kind of more global developers, a lot of concerns about, you know, being able to, to, you know, do the things that they want to do in that ecosystem. And so I'm hopeful, um, that considering they're like top of funnel, that they can bring a lot of people on chain. I mean, this is in many ways like Santi's thesis, right? Then, then hopefully they can pull people through, but we just yet haven't seen, I think, the ability for them to go and build you know, developer tooling, build the infrastructure that is helpful for making sure that they can build a robust ecosystem. Yeah, it's kind of a different story. And I think a lot of that has to do with like people find it creepy to scan their eyeballs, uh, and there's still just, I think, a lot of that conversation. But I, I, the Worldcoin team is like cracked and like, you know, everybody there is, is really good. And I expect we'll continue to see really interesting things come, come out of that ecosystem. I do think probably the, you know, the other thing we haven't talked about is I— right now there is a lot of tailwinds, as we talked about before, around like institutional, like, work and adoption that's happening, uh, in, in crypto. And obviously we've talked a lot about like, okay, well, Robinhood's building an Ethereum L2, and, you know, Stripe is, you know, Stripe has been kind of distancing themselves from Tempo the last couple of weeks, I think, for a lot of reasons, but like, you know, kind of has their own L1 with Paradigm. And, you know, some others that are institutions that are building kind of rolling their own L1s. But we've also seen like a ton of announcements recently, like the Avalanche team, specifically on like new people building there. I think it was like the state of Wyoming is doing things like, you know, they're doing like tax returns on stablecoins on Avalanche and FIFA has been talking about doing like actually ticketing for the World Cup and their whole loyalty engagement thing on Avalanche blockchain. So I think like when you start to think a little bit about like some of what we talked about before from institutional adoption, like I think there's a world in which, you know, they don't get enough love. And you actually tweeted yesterday, Jano, also, I think it was a bunch of data around Avalanche specifically. And if you actually look at like the DEX volume and just, and a lot of like the stablecoin transfer volume, it's really, it's completely skyrocketed, I think since Black Hole. Ended up launching as well. So MapleStory and a few others. So, um, there's some pretty interesting stuff there, I think, happening as well. So, um, but I, I do think that's probably one of the legacy ones that people have a lot of this like 2021, like, you know, corporate pilot, um, sort of, you know, overhang that they're like, you know, concerned about. Asante, as you mentioned earlier.

Yeah, I mean, um, I will say on just a couple things. One, on Telegram, I don't know if you guys have made an investment. I didn't invest in TON, so then I again, look to invest in a couple of projects building on that as levered exposure. They both of them have flopped. They're like, it's impossible. They knew going in it was hard to build. It's gotten— it hasn't gotten better. So I hope they can remediate that because look, I hope every project in crypto wins. But yeah, it's a challenge, right? To your point, it really pays to pay attention to that. On the point of Avalanche, so they just hired Ariel who used to run comms at Solana, moved over to Avalanche. So, you know, kudos. I mean, amazing hire. I think a lot of this is just the attention game. Can you capture, you know, and can you paint the really good narrative? I think, you know, they've certainly been able to capture and convert a lot of the enterprises like FIFA and whatnot. You know, a lot of people, when we made the choice to build on Avalanche, I'll tell you, we did an extensive RFP talking to other projects that deployed like Maple, Godzilla, in my portfolio, Stani, like Avis of the world. It was the only project that I evaluated that I didn't have a financial exposure to. And it was the one that I ended up picking. Seriously, like I had evaluated Arbitrum and a bunch of other L2s and other ecosystems where I obviously had exposure to, but objectively, look, you're always, when you make the choice of where to build, every ecosystem has a trade-off. So I actually don't respect, you hear a lot of projects go out and say, we're unequivocally the best. We have the highest TPS, the across every metric is like green, green, green, green. It's like, Don't treat me like I'm dumb. You know, it's like every smart engineer and developer, if you want to build a really good community, treat your customers with respect and as if they're smart, right? You can't— many like— and so I think that's one of the things that Avalanche has done very well. They've sort of understood their strengths and like L1s out of the box, and they've gone out and played their own game in a quiet manner. And I think, look, respect to them. I don't think you get any love. Um, uh, you know, they're it's good to see that they're getting more love these days. And, you know, obviously we have bias, but, you know, they've been a phenomenal partner across 30+ networks and 180 endpoints.

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Let me, let me shift gears a little bit. Did you guys see that the SEC approved generic listing standards for commodity-based trust shares?

This, uh, you're gonna have to talk about that, don't we, with this?

I mean, we got to talk about at least like some— I don't know, it feels like the ETFs, like, so basically the SEC approved generic listing standards for ETFs, which paves the way for crypto ETFs. Actually, I mean, we could talk about DApps in the sense that this is probably actually bad for DApps. So there's this long list of tokens where they— that qualify, which is, I think, mostly going to be based on like how long the futures contracts have really traded on things like either CME or maybe Coinbase too. And it's a, it's a funny list. It's like Bitcoin, ETH, Uh, but it's also like Litecoin, Dogecoin, XRP, uh, Avalanche, Stellar, uh, Chainlink, Solana, Cardano. It's kind of like the, the, the OG list a little bit. So I'm curious to get— Rob, you see more of these DApps than most people. Curious to get your take on like bucket all this into one, like the ETFs and CME listings and, um, the, the DApps. And there's people combining companies with treasury companies now, which is, I think, going to start to get a little more public, but What do you think of this?

Yeah, so the generic listing standards are great for more ETFs, essentially, right? So there's going to be more public access vehicles for crypto more broadly. Um, that's pretty clear. The— I mean, the SEC actually has, as just kind of friendly as the SEC has been to the ecosystem, they have actually been dragging their feet on the ETFs. So we haven't seen— I think a lot of people thought we'd see a lot more, you know, ETFs and a lot more assets this year, and it just hasn't been a priority for them. But, um, you know, with this coming out, like, I expect there to be, um, a just a much easier route for a lot more people, you know, going forward. Um, and I do expect that more of them to get approvals pretty quickly. I, to your point out whether or not that's, you know, call it bearish for DApps, it's probably bearish for, um, the gold rush that we're in right now for DApps, the ICO era of DApps, the ICO era of DApps. Because, you know, what is happening right now is like everybody is like saying, oh, I'm like rushing to put together a vehicle because if I'm the sponsor or, you know, whatever else, I may make some economics. And it's, um, often done with like very little thought to what does 6 months from now look like? What is this supposed to be like in 9 months from now? What is it supposed to be like in 18 months from now? Right. And so you've seen really just haphazard types of, you know, vehicles get put together for these DApps that, you know, are— serve really no purpose other than to allow some of these, you know, sponsors to, to make money. And so what we're seeing right now is, if I saw a tweet, I actually— I didn't confirm this is true, but approximately a quarter of all Bitcoin DApps that are publicly traded today are now trading under 1x their NAV, right? We've seen NAVs generally come down, um, significantly over the last, you know, month, month and a half. And what we've just ended up seeing, the same thing we've seen actually in the broader crypto ecosystem, which is just bifurcation between the haves and have-nots, between the high quality and the low quality, right? And that's what's going to happen to the DApps as well. If you do a DApp correctly, it is a better wrapper than an ETF for exposure to an ecosystem. Like, if there is an ability to raise more capital, if there is an ability to increase that token per share by— whether it's different types of, um, you know, whether it's like a convertible debt or whether it's you know, being able to, you know, when the market is more bullish, you know, go and do some sort of like ATM and increase, you know, at a, um, uh, and play that R between the, um, the, the premium to nav and, and one, or like do things that are like somewhat interesting that are like maybe more operating, uh, to create yield. So things like what we're seeing, I mean, Kyle's been talking about this a lot and unclear to me how, um, how able he will be to do as much as he's talking about, but he's been very bullish around saying, listen, we're going to do as much as possible for, um, his, his digital asset trading company on-chain. Like, we're going to try to do some trading on-chain, we're going to try to tokenize our equity, we're going to try to do securities lending on-chain, we're going to try to do staking, liquid staking on-chain, and we're going to try to further the Solana ecosystem, right? And I think we're seeing a few other dApps and other ecosystems trying to do that as well. And that is clearly a product that is worth existing, that is different and wholly differentiated from an ETF. And that provides essentially some, I think, you know, maybe levered or additional exposure to the success of NFTs. And there's a flywheel that exists there. So those I think will continue to do well. And I think all the others will, will go away.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think that the last thing about— for people who didn't listen to the episode that we did with Kyle on what he's working on, I think the most interesting thing is, yeah, you can— an ETF will let you get exposure to SOL, and that's great. Or you could go buy spot on Coinbase or something like that. But what they're going to do is they're going to— I mean, they're deploying all that capital into on-chain, into Solana to be able to do more and more things. And you see this in the price, right? You see Kamino, I think, went up for me.

I love being an investor there. I mean, it's up 50%.

Yeah, yeah. Kamino.

The funny thing about that is I think he was like, oh, talking about like Dflow and like Jupiter and Kamino. And then they put a total of like $2 million entirely on-chain of the $1.6 billion. But all the tokens ripped.

Yeah, come on, man, you can't do that. Rob, Rob, Rob, did you get the memo of what we are allowed or not allowed to talk about?

I didn't kill the vibe.

No, but people are excited about what he is going to be doing, what he's saying he's going to do, and that's a good thing, and that is exciting, and it should— it does deserve to exist. It is a better product in that case than an ETF if you want exposure to the success of an ecosystem.

Yeah, look, I think the argument that DApps can sustain a premium is at the heart of that is this: can you create a cash-flowing business because you're staking, you're doing strategies on-chain that, you know, the reality is like SOL and ETH are more productive assets or have more ability to earn yield off of them, like proof-of-stake networks or whatever. So, you know, if that's the case, I think Great. The question is, does the premium today support that? Because a lot of that, to your point, is on the come. And so as an investor, should you be going long this debt or should you just call it a day and buy SOL because they're buying 4 billion of them? I don't know. I don't know what is best over a 6, 12-month timeframe because I tend to think that we're in the second half of this cycle. And I want to be in assets that are just clean without structure and noise, I guess.

I mean, but, but I will say this, like, for the best performing DApps, if you look at MicroStrategy, right, you would— if you held MicroStrategy last year, and again, I know strategy is his own thing, and you know, we can, we can talk about how that's not replicable, but you would have made 75% more holding strategy last year than if you just held Bitcoin spot. Right. That's how much they increase their Bitcoin per share, but by— right. And so there is an ability potentially for the best performers, and I don't think that performance is, is, is repeatable for like now in this, you know, era we're in where there's so many of these things. But I do think it is repeatable that like you are getting better performance than just holding spot if you're in the right one that is doing the right things around the ecosystem, that is aligned with the foundations and labs teams. And then all of the others will probably just kind of slowly die and they'll get acquired. And, you know, there'll be, um, I don't know, Yanowitz was talking about them merging with, uh, like, you know, other, uh, doing like reverse takeovers with like other private companies. So I think we'll see a lot of interesting things happen there, but for the right digital asset treasury companies, like, I am a believer that they not only have a right to exist, but they provide really differentiated exposure. To the underlying.

Uh, one last point on this. What do you think is the most important thing? Being first out of the gate, size, or foundation signaling and support?

I think it really depends on the token we're talking about, right? So if you're, um, you know, Bitcoin or ETH or Solana, um, you know, it's not foundation support, right? It is— and it's not being first out of the gate, right? You know, Strategy was first out, but You know, on the Ethereum side, um, you know, the first out of the gates haven't performed the best, right? On the Solana side, the first out of the gates, I don't think I performed the best, right? Um, the ability to get size was really around the credibility of the sponsor team, of the management team, um, and of their belief that they can do the things we're talking about, right? And that they can create a really good ecosystem and that they can go and raise additional capital, both from Wall Street and crypto natives alike. I really think it's been about that, you know, team that's involved there. Now when we go past those, the, those, those big three, and we go into more of the alts, um, I think it becomes really, really hard for any of those dApps to do well unless they are extremely aligned with the leadership of that blockchain or of that ecosystem. So foundation support, you know, um, foundation on maybe in part of, you know, advisory boards um, you know, lab supports, like things like that I think are really, really important. And that allows you to, um, really get this flywheel going in a way that, you know, maybe Kyle can do in Solana because of how deep he is in the ecosystem. But that a, you know, outside of those big ecosystems where the investors don't necessarily know it as well, you can at least go to that investor base and you could say, but look, This is this deal we have with this foundation or this labs entity. We're able to create this ecosystem and around these tailwinds that exist here, and it becomes a, a really interesting consolidated offering where I don't think you need that with the, you know, those, those investors, uh, in call it the big 3 tokens.

Yeah, we got a little bit of breaking news, which is, um Uh, so there's been a rumor for the last couple of weeks that, uh, Brian Quintenz was not going to get the CFTC position. Um, the, uh, CFTC chair position. And it looks like that news has finally kind of leaked out into the public and is breaking. So I thought that's pretty interesting, Rob. I don't know how kind of in the clued in you guys have, you guys have been there, but it sounds like Brian's not going to get the chair position. Uh, Bloomberg just wrote a story about this and it looks like they're seeking some other people. Um, some names are Michael Seelig, who is the chief counsel— or I think he actually currently is the chief counsel to the SEC crypto task force. He was at Wilkie before. Also Tyler Williams, who's counselor to Scott Bessen, could be it. I've even heard some things as crazy as, you know, this is kind of the first step in— maybe they just have Paul Atkins, putting quotes around this, interim do it. This is step number one in combining the SEC and CFTC. Robbie, shaking your head at me, but this is how it exists in nearly every other country. And the only reason we have the CFTC here is because of these legacy rules from 100 years ago, because we have so many commodities and farming and stuff in America. But yeah, I don't know if you have any takes on that.

No, I mean, I think this was expected. Yeah, we had been hearing that this was unlikely to happen for, you know, a couple of months now. And, you know, there was obviously been some back and forth and like social media, which was kind of wild, to be honest. Um, and so I, I'm not surprised. Um, you know, we'll, we'll see. I think, you know, Michael Selig would be pretty interesting. I think there's, um, you know, some, some interesting names you, uh, you put out there. Um, we'll see what happens. I, I think a lot of it depends on— and how much this matters really depends on, in my mind, what the reconciliation of the Clarity Act looks like and if that gets passed. Because if that gets passed, there's going to be more clear guidelines, most likely, around, um, you know, depending on the version, around, you know, what the CFTC's jurisdiction is relative to what the SEC's jurisdiction is, and how we define that, how we define what a security is. But in a world where, uh, that continues to get pushed and maybe we don't get that legislation, the rulemaking is going to have to come still, and it's going to come from the SEC and the CFTC. And the White House has essentially said to Paul Atkins and to the CFTC that you guys need to not wait for new legislation, you need to start doing rulemaking. And so if this continues to, you know, go on and be a little bit of a, you know, kind of a sideshow, I do think that means that more power will consolidate under Paul Atkins if we don't— and especially if we don't get legislation. So So we'll see. It'll be an interesting, I think, next 6 weeks or so.

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Last thing I want to talk to you about is the— or something. Do you have anything there? I want to get you guys to take on the base token.

Wow. Is it, is it real?

It looks pretty, I mean, so here, okay. Here's, here's my take on what happened. So my take on what happened is maybe Jesse went a little rogue. Um, and there was, uh, here's, here's what I think happened is like Jesse was doing this presentation. It was a great presentation. They had Basecamp. I heard it was really successful. So shout out to the Base team. Um, had a lot of like developers and stuff there and builders and stuff like that. Jesse did this announcement and just kind of said like, we're thinking about exploring a Base token. And then Brian, the reason I think this wasn't like a perfectly communicated, uh, comms plan is I think Brian then had to tweet, um, I can pull it up, basically something along the lines of like, uh, we, we are, oh, here we are exploring a base network token. To be clear, there are no definitive plans. We're updating our philosophy. As of now, we're just exploring it, like kind of a lot of legal, legal language. And I'm guessing what happens is their chief legal officer called up Brian. He's like, what? Yeah, Paul. What the— Brian, Jesse just announced this. Brian's like, I didn't know that. And Brian, he's like, dude, you got to put out a tweet.

This is crazy.

It is funny though. I do think people forget, and the DAT stuff kind of reminds me of this, just how much people forget like what it means to run a public company. And you know, how, you know, your language and what you say and how you say it and the relative effect it can have. On, you know, your stock price and like the disclosures that you need to have, um, how that matters, right? And so I think we're— I— one of the things I'm actually interested in seeing is a lot of these like kind of OG, uh, crypto founders taking their companies public over the next, uh, next 18 months and or 24 months and just seeing, you know, what that looks like from a, um, like a PR, uh, disclosure perspective. And in a market where everyone's used to just like tweeting their way to some sort of token price I talked to a founder of a crypto company that's been around for many years.

I was like, what are you working on? He's like, oh, we're doing a— we're going public. Cantor's working on the deal. We're going public. We're combining with the treasury company and our business. We're going public. It's like, oh, that's— I was like, that's a big deal. He's like, yeah, it sucks that we've been around for like 8 years, not auditable at all. No, very unauditable company. I was like, oh boy, this is good. I was like, so are you going to get out? He's like, oh yeah, we'll get out for sure.

So, um, well, well, if it's unauditable, he will not get out. Um, So like, that is, uh, yeah. Um, whatever. It is, it is funny. People just forget, like, the— I have been having this discussion with a bunch of people recently too, and just there is like a level of just like, you know, seriousness that like is required if you're going to be public. It's not just a TGE into some equity and like you're like, you know, wipe your hands of it and then you, you know, uh, whatever, you sell a forward to a market maker and like, you know, forget that it exists. Like, this is a This is a long-term business that you're running with shareholders who like can sue you if you like don't look out for their best interests.

Uh, let's put it this way, if you haven't been sending quarterly investor updates and you, you best believe that running a public company, brother in Christ, is going to be very, very much more difficult than that. So let's just start by sending quarterly investor updates and then we can, you know, take on them.

To be fair, Trump said he wants to get rid of quarterly, twice a year now, so That's how they do it in Europe. No, uh, I think that's right. Yeah.

Yeah.

Under IFRS. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, what, uh, maybe on last question here, what does that do to the price of Coinbase? Like, or is there an interesting structure here where you map out an airdrop to Coinbase shareholders? Uh, if there's like a base token. Yeah.

It's either that, that's, that's the right question. It's like, does that, does that mean that they, if you, okay, imagine you had base, imagine you had Coinbase equity on chain. Like we talked about this a couple weeks ago with the Superstate thing, how Galaxy did, I think it was 5 or 6% on-chain via Superstate. Imagine if Coin was on-chain, then you could actually airdrop base to Coin holders. I don't like that though. I think that you should—

cannibalizes—

I just think you have one, one asset that shows the price of what the, of what the underlying business is going to do. It just gets too confusing. It's like the same reason I don't have like having Uniswap token and Uniswap Labs. It's the same reason I don't think Amazon should have Amazon and AWS and AWS stock.

Oh, hold on a minute. If you're a Coinbase shareholder and they do this thing, it's a spinout or whatever, but they keep some ownership. And so you're going to see it in the books, right? You're going to see the treasury value like that value of the base token that they have in treasury grow pretty substantially, whether the market appreciates it or not fully TBD.

But then like the coin, but then in coin, like it's a one-time good, good thing, I think. Right. Unless— disagree with me.

Well, no, because they're going to capture all the MEV. And if you think if Again, I think there's a way to craft it where you can optimize for the KPI, which is retain the user, drive more capture, continue to capture more of that economic activity within the Coinbase ecosystem, whether it's the wallet, the exchange, the perps, base, keep it all in one. If you've got onboard 100, if you have 100 million users and the aggregate KPI is ARPU, like what is the ARPU of a Coinbase user retail? Particularly for base. If that— if you can demonstrate that because of doing this and you believe and that's your thesis and you can prove it, go for it, you know? And I think the market will appreciate that. I don't know.

I don't know. I think it's— I think it confuses the market on a long-term time horizon. Like, I've thought about this with Blockworks. It's like, do we put Blockworks into it? Like, the Blockworks, the media business, into one company? And then maybe you could make the argument that Blockworks, the data company, should be in a separate holding company, and then you could— oh, if you're doing that, do you put the events business in a separate company? Because they all kind of have different return profiles and multiples that they should realistically get, and you're kind of blending everything together. Um, and I've seen when it's like, I don't know, like Amazon, Google, like there's just one stock. There's just one stock and they keep it simple.

Yeah. I would say in the history of like crypto investing, our perspective has always been that if you look across like all these companies that are like, oh, I'm going to have equity value and token value, often 1 1 0.75. Like, it's very, very often that, you know, it just confuses the market. To Jano's perspective, I think it's a rare company that can theoretically have equity value and token value. We have started to see, I think, some signs that the market will support that, at least in the private markets. Companies like— actually, a company, one of our portfolio companies, Cato, who people might know, they have like an enterprise SaaS business that I think has like, you know, people actually excited, real revenue, etc. And then they have a, you know, a token that has also earns revenue essentially for some of the things that, that they do. And so, you know, there's an argument there that because there's like the equity business is really an enterprise business, and the token is really for the consumer business, that they're, they're actually, you know, accruing more than, you know, it's 1 1 maybe 1.5 or something. But that is, I think, the exception, not the rule. And so we usually want founders to be very, very clear on, you know, where we think that the value is going to accrue, because that usually results in the best returns. Now, all of that said, this is a new paradigm, right? To re-underwriting our thesis, to Sandeep's point, to the idea that like, you know, there is going to be tokenized equity, to the idea that there's a public company like Coinbase who might also have one of the biggest ecosystems on-chain in crypto and will also have a token that'll be used for those consumers. Like, it's actually not clear to me that will still continue to be true in this case. Especially because they have a broad set of sort of, you know, consumer applications that are on-chain that people would utilize this thing in that are somewhat disconnected to the financials today. Because Base actually, in terms of like the bottom line and the top line of Coinbase today, Base contributes basically nothing, right? You know, it's part of the story, but it has actually not really reflected in the financials at all. And so in that case, I do think there's like a network value the, of the token, and then there is maybe a business value of everything they do otherwise. And I think there's— it's possible, maybe not probable, but possible that they're able to make a lot more money for their shareholders by doing both.

Dude, I mean, here's the thing, uh, there are going to be Asia-based exchanges coming into the US, and they're gonna— and they're gonna list. Uh, if you're Coinbase, like, how do you get a leg up, right? I mean, you have— okay, like you have to think about, okay, how do you preserve that market share and continue to be the dominant player in the US market, which is the gold mine that they have. This might be it. It ultimately comes down to an attention game. We're going to close this episode talking about the same thing we started with. And so if Beys, to your point, has this intangible value of capturing attention with builders and community, and retail is probably the area of the market where they have the highest margins, will continue to have the highest margins, because of the convenience, then yeah, I think it's, it's worth— if you're Brian and team, yeah, I would be shocked if they haven't thought about, you know, launching a token. And I don't think it's a random mistake or a slip that Jesse kind of like randomly said this in a conference.

Well, it would be remiss to not just out of all this conversation, just talk about the success of BNB considering it hit $1,000.

Oh my God. BNB is just BNB, BNB ICO'd at $0.10.

It just hit $1,000.

It is— I love looking at the BNB chart because it's such a perfect example of how Western crypto Twitter is so removed from a lot of what's actually happening in the industry. And it's not just BNB. A lot of these exchange tokens are pumping. Not a single person on the feed talking about it, right?

Again, totally underappreciated. But the, the BNB token has been so instrumental to driving more activity deposits and activity to the exchange, right? Because you had the launchpad. It's huge. It's huge. So yeah, kudos to CZ. And I guess CZ's back in charge.

He's back. He's back. They said CZ will never be back at Binance. One year later, CZ is fully back at Binance. I mean, we didn't even talk. They just launched— I don't know if you guys have been following— I think it's called Aster or Asteria. Aster, it's basically the Binance Hyper Liquid is the easiest way to explain it. And Obviously token pumping and users going up.

Did the token continue to pump? Because I thought it's like the chart seemed crazy when I saw it last night and I literally only know about it because people were like messaging me about it. I didn't see the tweet. I'd never heard of it before, but a lot of people were messaging about last night.

Um, I don't know, because there's like 4— there's an Aster, there's an L1 called Aster from Japan, I'm pretty sure. What's the, what's the token of this thing? Aster Hyperliquid.

You just know we're not a trader podcast. Like, we're struggling with tickers here. Like, you gotta be honest, man.

You gotta be like, the 0x Research podcast, they're like, they're fire. They're trading live out here. We can't even find the ticker. Scrubs. I don't even know how to find this thing. I'm out here using Google still, just Googling like Aster Hyperliquid like a boomer. Oh, that's all right. I don't know what's happening.

It's, uh, look, it's, it's 0.61. Is it— how many— what, what is this, uh, 10 billion? Is this— is this $6 billion?

No way. Wait, what's the ticket?

Uh, it's Aster— Asterdex.com.

Ah, I got it. All right. Oh, it's— oh yeah, that's a— that's— that thing's That's a good looking chart. That thing's going up. That thing's going to keep going up.

John, are you seriously doing TA on the pod?

You want to know my TA? Last time I did TA on the pod, I nailed it. Pump.

What was it?

Pump? When Pump went live, I said Pump's going to fall to $2 billion and then rip to $10.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I called that.

I picked it up at, uh, unfortunately for me, I am an idiot and did not buy a single dollar of Pump when it hit $2 billion.

Continue to believe that the, the comp here is hyper liquid and on a revenue basis, burn basis, like the market, market totally has missed that. But hey, listen, whatever. I, I'm obviously have bag bias, so I'll excuse myself. Yeah, from this discussion.

What, uh, what else? Anything else you guys want to cover?

Uh, I think that's pretty good.

Good content of the week, baby. Rob, what do you got for us?

All right, so I'm, uh I'm supposed to be heading to Bermuda for the weekend where I was supposed to spend some time on, on the beach. So I've got a little fiction for the beach, as you know, which is abnormal for me. I know, as, as you guys know. But, um, a, uh, I picked up a book called Rejection, which is like sort of a, um, it's kind of like a bunch of anthologies, short stories, um, kind of futuristic that are like very focused on just like chronically online millennials. It's like a satire comedy about how we're too online and like too anxious.

Tony Tula Hamut.

Yeah, that's the one, right? Uh, and so I just, you know, I think it's a love to a little bit of self-reflection.

The first truly incel novel. This is, uh, Rejection by Tony Tula Hamut. The first truly incel novel.

Yeah, so a little bit of beach reading for the weekend.

I'm into it.

That's a good one.

Are you going to Bermuda or not?

So I am going. I just, unfortunately, because work has been pretty busy, I might just be on the phone on the beach the whole time, not reading this book. But that's fine.

I got my auto-sends Friday, Saturday, Sunday at 5:05 AM.

Eat them up, baby. Don't let them—

don't let them— You can't pull one over on me. I'm gonna be up. I'm gonna text you back.

You, you, you, you passed the test this week. I was impressed, man. That was good. That was good.

Okay.

For me, Yano, you want to go or I can go?

Go ahead.

Recently been— so I wanted to reread Alex Ferguson's book called Leading. I think Sir Alex Ferguson with Michael Moritz, the Sequoia partner, just an absolute book about leadership. I mean, Man United, I'm a Man United fan and obviously legacy of— he's just a legend, right? Managing Beckhams of the world and building a cohesive team, obviously relevant to what I'm doing now. Because being a founder is like parenting, which I don't have experience with, but I guess it's going to be a good experience as I look to have kids. But I found another book called How to Win the Premier League, which is the Moneyball version of soccer. And it's a guy, it's called The Inside Story of Football's Data Revolution. It's by Ian Graham. I think this guy is like Cambridge PhD and really fascinating. I think he spent some time at Liverpool and Liverpool went on to do during his time there extraordinary things. Really fascinating stuff. Like just statistics. I think to your point, if you have statistics on a sports like soccer, didn't have it, you then overlay that prediction markets, right? If you have not data, then you can bet on everything. Yeah, really fascinating. I think it fits into nicely with discussion and it reads really, really well. It's awesome.

I'm enjoying it.

I'm finished it.

I don't have the attention span that you guys do right now, so I'm not, I can't say a book. I got a podcast for you guys, which is actually Ben Horowitz did a, there's a podcast I like called Lenny's Podcast. I'm spending a lot of my time on product right now, more time on product than I've ever done at Blockworks. Lenny's podcast.

Why have you been spending more time on it?

Um, I'm probably spending 80% of my time on our data business. And, um, it's just like by far the fastest growing area of the business. Um, we will like roughly 10x the revenue on that side of the business this year. The data and analytics is kind of going crazy as the institutional market heats up. Um, so I'm spending a little, but the, there are all these products that we're missing because the demand wasn't there. And so we've been sprinting to launch things like dashboard builder and chart builder and an API. So I'm spending a lot of time with the engineers and just on the product side of things and with the data team. So there's this podcast called Lenny's Podcast for anyone who's trying to get deep. And he also has a great Substack. Anyone trying to get deeper into the product world, it's very, very, very good. But Ben Horowitz went on, did an episode called The $46 Billion of Hard Truths from Ben Horowitz: Why Founders Fail and Why You Need to Run Towards Fear. And it was, it was a good episode. So I'd recommend that one.

Uh, by the way, um, I am looking for a crack product person. So, um, this is the, the required inversion chill. So send them over.

I actually have maybe someone for you, but how senior?

I care, uh, not necessarily. I care less about like that. It's just like crack product person.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Cool.

Good.

Rob. Rob, you're going to come back more tan next Thursday?

Well, I'm not going to be here next Thursday, unfortunately, because I've got my 19-hour flight to, uh, to Singapore. Leave, uh, I leave 10, 10 PM.

Dragonfly put you up in that, like, you know, 40K seats, that overnight toilet.

They don't even have that in the New York to Singapore flight because the, the planes that that's in are too big to make the 19.5-hour flight from New York to Singapore, so they have to have the smaller plane. So it's like only business and premium economy only. Um, and so, so the answer is no, but that was a, uh, it would have been no anyways, even if those did exist.

I still would have, but yeah, it still would have been no.

But yeah.

Yeah. Are you going to Token?

I'm not going this year.

Yeah.

Rob, it is tradition where Jono and I have recorded in the most awkward setting. People should go look at that episode. It's like literally Jono and I in a room.

All the comments are like, do they have their pants on? Like, do they have clothes on? They're like in a hotel room huddled around, no mics, basically like touching cheeks, doing the podcast.

Let's find a place to do it in person together. I'll do it.

I mean, Alex, the—

I'm going to bring Alex in. Live segment. We did it in Dubai. Let's do it in Singapore. Alex, you listening, man? We love you. Let's make it happen. Yeah, I'm booted.

Yeah, do it. All right, folks, thanks for listening. We have a Dan Moorhead from Pantera, founder of Pantera, episode going live on Monday. We have a lot of really good guests coming up. We're, we're booking Tarek, the founder of Kalshi, Jeremy Allaire, the founder of Circle. We've got Mike Novogratz recording next week. We've got Dan Morehead. I'm recording tomorrow.

Mike Cagney at any point.

What figure?

Mike Cagney.

I forgot to message Cagney.

Yeah, let's do that. I can message him.

Yeah.

All right, folks, thanks for listening. See you next week.

Have a good weekend.