Where Are We In The Cycle? | Weekly Roundup

First off, thanks for the motivational speech. I appreciate it. I needed— I needed the motivation.

Wow!

Yeah, here for you, man.

This is what— this is what The Block World Center does, you know?

Yeah, yeah. Um, uh, so exactly, I avoid doing things that'll get clipped on Twitter and make me look like a fool. I appreciate that those are rookie numbers.

You got to put Pump up!

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What's up, everyone? Welcome back to the Roundup.

We got Santi.

He's calling in from New York. Santi, what's happening, man?

Listen, I just want to let the record show, sticker is still on.

Ooh, look at that piece of merch.

You know when you're supposed to like the 50 cap that you take the sticker off? Yeah. This sweater might be worth at some point, might be a relic. I just may have lost a lot of value by doing that. But it more importantly, I'm going to take the tag off because I don't intend to sell this. We're still on 4 years, ladies and gentlemen, 4 years of sitting on this chair and I finally have earned my salt. And look, let's go.

Look at that nice, nice hoodie.

Nice, great hoodie, by the way. Great quality. You know, I can do an entire segment of just, you know, it fits well, it's good. I'm gonna wear it today. It's snowing, so it's a perfect day.

You are a sweater connoisseur, so true.

Yeah, I needed to up my sweater game. I think I was wearing the same sweater like for 2 episodes, and one guy in the YouTube comments— shout out to everyone that goes to YouTube— says, dude, is this guy like broke? Like, get him another sweater.

People stopped commenting on my looks a long time ago. I just rolled out of bed. So also, I'm getting They got— the team got me this influencer light. It is just blasting me. I got to figure out how to turn this thing down.

The funniest comment I've seen in a while was like, can you tell Jan to stop recording in his bathroom?

I can't get the record— I can't get the light right. I'm like, yeah, you're too bright.

But I— people might have remembered that, uh, I think there's a great— and we should do an episode with you and Mike about kind of like a founder segment of Blockworks. Uh, there's a great article that came out, by the way, uh, about like your journey and stuff and media and I think it was really good. We can link it in the show notes. Uh, but it was something to the effect of like, we were like, we were using stacked boxes as like standing desks in the very beginning. OG origins of Blockworks. I think Shane from Polymarket also was like, I started Polymarket like for my bathroom kind of thing.

And I was like, let me see if I can pull up that picture. Yeah, we had a nice, uh, nice article come out about us this week. It was actually, I mean, you can't really ask for a better headline from the than this from a, from a media company. Let me see if I can find it. When you get good press, which doesn't always happen, you, you like to shill it, you know. You got to pump this thing. It was, um, what do they say? Blockworks results best ever as competitors appear to struggle. I mean, you got to love that one.

It's not bad. I mean, we were talking about that. You had it as a prediction when some of these acquisitions started to happen. And so anyways, yeah.

What's happening? So you're in New York. How's the trip?

Very good.

Very productive.

I'm meeting with a bunch of people, so it was very good. There was an Ondo conference yesterday, I believe. I didn't go to that one, but the lineup looked pretty stacked, like a lot of traditional institutions. So it was great to see that. I didn't go, but I don't know if you were there. We can report on that.

But no, I thought about going, but I skipped. This week has, I think, been the busiest work week I've had in months, quarters. I don't know.

Like, interesting. Yeah. In terms of like, could you—

basic— I mean, basic for us, like, you know, one of the ways we make, we, we make money is like marketing dollars flow into Blockworks, like sponsorships and ads. And, um, just every single founder has, you know, the first thing that gets cut in a bear market is actually marketing. So, and, you know, so we had like 2 years of that where just marketing budgets got slashed, and they've been, I'd call it like slowly coming back. And then now it's like every single person is just like, okay, now, like, let's make hay while the sun is shining. And marketing budgets are like drastically getting ramped up. And it's actually, I think, a good tell of where we're at in the cycle. I remember feeling this exact same feeling as we like went into 2021 because, you know, our revenue was like 2018, 2019, 2020 was good. And then 2021 was just insane. Like exceeded all of our expectations. And it's because these marketing budgets just came back in spades. And you're starting to see the exact same thing happening.

For context, these are crypto-native companies, not traditional companies trying to tap into the crypto audience.

It's crypto-native, but also it's like, I mean, for DAS this year, we have— let me pull up the sponsorship lineup real quick because I should know this off the top of my head. But it's, uh, you know, like VanEck, KPMG, Perkins Coie, BNY Mellon. Oh, actually, we haven't put up some of the new logos, but I think like, I think there's some other big traditional names that are about to come into—

these are all sponsors like Flagship sponsors.

Yeah, sponsors. And we're talking to like some of the biggest like cloud providers actually, who are— who actually a lot of crypto is built on top of these guys. So, I mean, there's not many, so I guess you can guess, but, you know, about doing something huge and, you know, this year. So like they're, they're really making a push in. That's great.

Very good to see. So what's going on this week? I mean, there's, there's a—

you know, maybe we could just talk about the market for a second because so, so Trump on Saturday issued— so, well, so Trump had originally promised these tariffs, right? He promised like in his campaign he had promised tariffs and on, who was it, Mexico, Canada, and China. And he had talked about that a lot in the campaign, but I think everyone thought that was kind of a negotiating tool. And then he actually, I think it was on Saturday, he actually said that he was putting these things into effect. Right. So the markets actually, well, the markets can't move as we talked about last time when we were, you know, last round we were talking about Nvidia. This time we're talking about this. The markets can't move on the weekend. So everyone's looking at crypto. So crypto gets sent into a tailspin. Everyone was kind of trying to position themselves for this like incoming trade war and yeah, futures plunged.

There was $2 billion in liquidations, which is the—

so Ben, so Ben, so $2 billion. So exchanges changed how they report their liquidations. Actually, someone in the Empire channel— hold on, I can pull this up, but they've changed how they report their liquidations. And so it's actually a real understatement saying it's $2 billion is actually, I think, an understatement. Ben, who's the CEO of Bybit, said he thinks it's more like $8 to $10 billion, which I think it was more. It felt like more to me too. I think that'd be the largest liquidation day in history. Yeah. Not by like percentage, but by just total size, obviously.

Yeah, it was, it was substantial. I mean, Bitcoin, the interesting thing, Bitcoin held up reasonably well. It was down, I think it dipped to $97K.

No, it hit like, it hit like $90K or $91K.

There was a, there was a wick, right? When Ethereum hit like $2,100, uh, a lot of alts were down like 25%. Like Doge was down 20%, more than 25%. It was like down like 30%. There was like that final wick, uh, and then a rebound fairly quickly over the ensuing like 24 hours. But yeah, it felt, felt messy.

100%. It's a good thing you've gotten to, gotten some cash. I hope you, I hope you spent some of that cash.

I did buy some. I did buy back some positions. Yes. Not, not some. I didn't get filled on, on, on some of my orders, but like 20, 25% of the orders got filled, which was nice. Yeah. Because it happened.

It was the worst correction for ETH and SOL since August of 2024. ETH fell 34%, right, from is down from $3,200 to $2,100. Like, is that math right? Yeah, I think it's like 33 or 34%. So, and so, you know, it's annoying. I, my bank, so I had sent a bunch of wires and all of my wires cleared except for my wire to Coinbase. Oh, they're calling me. They're like, this seems like fraud. This is like the, you know, we can't process your wire. I was like, are you kidding me?

This was, this was Friday. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's interesting because, uh, people may forget now, but if when the Send Network existed, you could— this was a far easier process to move money from your Silvergate account to Coinbase Prime. Like, you could do that fairly quickly, and, you know, you could take advantage of these opportunities. And yeah, I mean, it's—

that's gone. The bank was like, why are you sending money here? I was like, I was like, don't you— like, this is my life. Like, this is— yeah, I mean, come on, guys.

I mean, as a— it's kind of, uh, when most people start discovering like money markets and DeFi, you're like— the question that I like to ask the most is, do you know what happens when you deposit money in a bank? And most people probably tell you that money is sitting in a vault. And you are— you, my friend, are very wrong. That money is rehypothecated, and therefore, if you wanted to get all your money back, uh, and everyone else in the bank, the depositors wanted to get their money back, their money back, they would, uh, not be able to process those withdrawals because they're, you know, they lend out— there's long duration asset liability mismatch and whatnot. So, um, yeah, anyways, it's, uh it's a bit of a, you know, interesting journey when you ask people like that.

But oh, that—

well, that, I guess, sucked. You're wired in clear till Monday.

Yeah. So which then the market had already rebounded and it's like, whatever. Actually, the market— yeah, the market hadn't even gone down, I don't think, by Friday.

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Anyways, let me, let me pull up some of these numbers. So, I mean, everything, it just is down basically, it feels like. And I want to actually talk just about the markets and like kind of just how you're thinking about things right now. I know we have been talking about this a lot lately, but it's still top of mind for me. So, you know, if you look, I got a new computer and my My security won't let me share my screen for some reason, but I'll just talk about it right now, which is, you know, if you look at the memes from the all-time highs, WIF is down 84%, Bonk is down 70%, Doge is down 64%, Pepe is down 65%, Pengu is down 82%, Trump is down 75%, Melania is down 90%, Fartcoin is down 75%. Layer 2s, Arbitrum is down 80%, Optimism is down 80%, IMX is down 80%, MATIC is down 90%. Blast is down 85%. If you look at DeFi, Athena is down 60% from the all-time high, which happened 6, 9 months ago. Yeah, I actually don't— I trust your call there. But, you know, Aerodrome 60%, AAVE 60%, Compound 95%, Curve 97%, Uniswap 80%, Jupiter 50%. This is a little misleading because this is down from the all-time highs, which, you know, if you had bought a year ago, you'd be up on some of these things, but actually still not even up. Even the AI agents, right, which had just been like— they were just— it was just the thing to buy. GOAT down 90%, AI-16Z 85%, Luna 90%.

Go back to Jupiter. Yeah, if you go to Jupiter and you look at market cap, um, how does that chart look? Because oftentimes the, the price may go down, but on a, on a, on a circulating, like, market cap basis, that may increase because, mind you, a lot of these tokens are— a lot of these projects are emitting tokens and have some pretty big unlocks. And so I think—

okay, actually, so we'll do a little Empire, uh, community corner here. I always ask people what they want to— what they want us to talk about in the Telegram, and one of the questions was, how do you think about market cap versus FDV versus price? So can you just expand on like, yeah, how you think about that a little bit?

Yeah. So typically most people would say, you look at the price, say that, uh, you know, Ethereum went down from, or a project was trading at $100 and then the token is down to $50. So, okay, you might just look at that and say, wow, it's down quite a bit from the all-time high. But say that that token had 10% of the supply in circulation. Um, so, um, on that basis, it would have been 1,000 FDV— sorry, 1,000 circulating market cap. Like, if you go on CoinGecko, you look, they were typically most of the time report on a circulating basis. So you take the 10 token supply that is circulating and unlocked, freely traded, times the price, so 100. So that probably you could have said, oh, it's 1,000. And then it's down 50, you could have said, okay, that's, you know, 500, right? Um, am I doing that math right, by the way?

Yeah, I mean, the, the market cap is just the price times the circulation, times the circulating supply. Yeah.

Now that is okay, one metric. You're like, it's certainly psychologically the market is looking at that and it's, it's important. But say that during that time where it went down from 100 to 50, it unlocked you know, 50% of the supply, and say that the total supply is 100 units. So it went from 10 units that were circulating, you know, it, it launched, whatever, it's been around for a bit. And so the total supply is 100. So that, you know, that project, when it was trading at 100, right, you have just for round numbers, it was $100 price times 100 total units of tokens, that was, um, what is it, 10,000?

There's a rule, man, we don't do mental math on the podcast.

Yeah, mental math, 10,000. That's fully diluted was 10,000, right? Then on a fully diluted basis, it's 5,000 because the token went down to 50. Uh, on a circulating basis, it was 10 units times 100, that was 1,000. So it was only 10%, right? Makes sense, right? There's only 10% of tokens. Um, and then it went down to 500. But actually, when you do the math, say, and we said it unlocked 50% of the total supply, so now there's 50 total tokens and it's trading at 50, so it's 2,500, uh, relative to the total, um, market cap. So anyways, putting, um, mental math aside, it is important because in some of these projects, if you go to CoinGecko, there's a tab that allows you to see like the chart on a market cap basis circulating. And I think it's just interesting because some pro— like Arbitrum, for instance, when it did the first unlock—

oh, here, I can share now.

Yeah, there you go. Exactly. Okay, people will be— so go to market. Exactly, click market cap. Go to JOOP. Yeah, so go to like max. Um, so in this case, like, look at how different these charts look. Exactly. Yeah, why is that the case? It's a case from projects where you have a lot of tokens unlocking, and I think that's an important metric. Like, the market cap chart is instructive because in some instances you might look at the price going down, but market cap's actually going up, and that's to me is actually quite bullish because market is absorbing those tokens unlocking. Um, now this may look quite different for other projects. I don't want to read too much into this, but my— I Assumption is when I look at a chart where the market cap's going up, a price is going down, is like, okay, someone there is bidding this pretty aggressively. Probably is an institution.

Mm.

Go to AAVE, which has most of the supply unlocked at this point.

Yeah. So this is the metric to look. So circulating supply, just to do that again in 20 seconds, if anyone's watching on YouTube, this is circulating supply. This is total supply. Total supply is the total number of tokens that have like been issued to anyone in the world. So a lot of, a lot of these projects raise a lot of venture money. So let's say, you know, you issue, you know, Pantera and Parafi and Electric do a big round or something in Jupiter. They have a bunch of tokens, but they're locked up. That would be in the total supply here, but it's not yet in the circulating supply because it can't be sold. And then as soon as there's unlocks, this total supply moves into the circulating supply. And if you can just do the math here, so market cap of 2.294 is 0.8723, which is the $JUP price times the circulating supply should get this number.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Go to Aave.

Yeah, go to Aave. Jupiter is a project that is unlocking, right? So Aave is a project that's already vested. Most of the tokens have not— like, like the vast majority of the—

see how tight— see, this number 15 over 16 is going to get you 90-something percent, whereas Jupiter was 2.6 over 7.

Yeah, so go to— now go to— if you go to Aave, the price chart and the market cap chart look almost the same, uh, actually.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, they do.

Exactly. And so it's just important, right? Um, because again, you want to understand if— there could be a phenomenon where I pay attention to when price goes down but market cap goes up for projects that have launched That tells me that there is a bidder out there that is really interested in absorbing that unlock. Uh, maybe go to Ondo, for instance. Now that we've talked about Ondo earlier on, another project at launch, it has, you know, again, a fairly— what is that, you know, you have circulating supply at 3 billion, total supply of 10 billion. So what's very—

what caused this? So if you're looking at the mark— so the price Price went up quite a bit. Price—

yeah, UNDO's up like 7% in the last 2 weeks.

So market cap ripped overnight from 2 to 4. Can you explain? Can you explain that?

There's probably a big unlock.

Is it— this is a big— exactly, exactly.

That's a big unlock because if you go to the price chart— because I want to make sure the price didn't spike. Yeah, I mean, it kind of did, right?

No, no, no, this is— it, it over— this is Jan 17th. It went from 2 to 4, and then Jan 17th, nothing.

Yeah, the price didn't move much. That's, ladies and gentlemen, what we call a bullish unlock. That's it. Go to— there's a website that tracks like all the unlocks. Maybe you guys track it. But, um, yeah, TIA. Okay, let's look at TIA because TIA is another interesting, um, so, you know, It's a different picture, right? You have— TIA has been unlocking quite a bit. There was a big unlock earlier, or last year I should say. Circulating supply, they should have— you know what, if I were CoinGecko, Bobby, if you're listening, it would be nice to have a chart that looks at like supply unlocks, like it's the growth of supply. There you go. This is—

we should really add token unlocks into our platform actually.

Yeah, I, I think so. Just give me the ability to like overlay like a chart of price and token unlocks, or like, like That'll be kind of nice. But look at, uh, Tia, for instance. Tia, Tia. All right, I think Tia is quite— Tia had a big unlock. Oh, we can't look at it.

Oh, I don't pay for it. Well, well, shit.

Well, shit, we're too poor to pay for it.

Don't— oh, shit. Wait, what is this? Is this the exact same platform? Tokenomist?

Oh wait, this is the exact same platform. It shows for a few projects actually, but nonetheless, you know, it's just— I think you understand the point.

This is— all right, this is what I was talking about before. It's like these are, these are the things down from their all-time highs, like AI agents down 90%, modular stuff, TIA and Dynamic and Saga down 90%, gaming these things are down 95%. The L1s except for Bitcoin are down 60, 70%. What do you make of this? Well, um, just, I mean, it's, it's a, there's a weird, we're in a bull market. We're obviously in a bull market, but these things are down like 80% off their highs.

There's a lot of return dispersion. Like, like I wouldn't have expected the beta between Bitcoin and some alts to be this high. Meaning you look at Bitcoin's down 9% from the high and you have Ethereum down 44%. I would be— I don't think there's been a moment— I'm going to go on a limb here. I don't think there's been a moment in crypto where that is— that, that beta has been that high like that. It's a 5x beta. Yeah, that's— SOL is down 30%. It's, you know, again, the SOL to ETH SOL having less beta than ETH on the downside is actually interesting. Um, you know, SOL behaving more like BNB, down 29%. Um, but yeah, it's pretty— again, I mean, it goes back to the point where we've been making the pod. It's like, it's just a have and have-nots market, and the divide is quite big. You had to be in certain very specific names to, to have you know, performed decently well. If you're a crypto fund or an investor and you didn't— and you didn't have your money in Bitcoin, BNB, SOL, and, uh, a few other— like Ripple here. Where's Ripple? Because Ripple's done very well, right?

I don't know if it's on here, but go back to CoinMarket—

CoinGecko, sorry. Like, XRP is doing quite well. Well, it's come down a bit, right, since it hit. It's down 20%.

That's a ridiculous chart.

Yeah, but look at, look at like the 14-day chart below. It's down 20%. If you go down to— go down a bit, uh, historical price down below.

What do you want me to look at here?

Uh, down below the— there we go. It's down 25% from the all-time high, which happened 7 years ago. But it hit, it hit, uh, $3.40, I think. Just, it almost touched that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was very close. But yeah, all right, Ripple again.

Anyway, I have a theory for you actually. Um, so look at, look at this. So everything's down a ridiculous amount except for Bitcoin. Why is, why is Bitcoin down only 10% off the highs? Why? Or, but actually, why is Bitcoin having an amazing cycle and everything else is struggling?

Um, you're asking me theories flow-wise. You have an ETF, you have the sailors bidding, um, and it's a different type of investor. We talked about it, um, in our predictions. Um, Trump got elected in November, uh, executive orders have been coming in, they're quite positive. If you talk to a lot of funds in the space, flows are not coming in yet into, into their, into their funds. It takes time, right? Takes a couple quarters for allocators to invest in funds that are going to bid alts because it's— that's where the money really comes from. Um, I would only preface that by saying, like, how do you explain then Ripple? Ripple, I think, has been this TikTok phenomenon where a lot of— I would want to see data to validate this, so my theory is that a lot of flows have come from, like, TikTok. Now, you would have expected, um, You know, Ripple has been an interesting outlier because you could say, well, what about memes, right? Because a lot of money, like, you know, Trump and a lot of these memes should have, you know, are also getting some of those flows. Um, but I, I think the retention is really poor for memes. Like, the half-life of most memes is really low. I think Nikita tweeted something about this. Rob from Dragonfly had really interesting data on the retention of Trump. A lot of the, a lot of the new— if you go to Rob's profile, I, I retweeted that because I thought it's just very instructive. So I'm going to read it. So Rob looked into this and said a lot of people took yesterday's Chainalysis report to suggest that the Trump token was a mass onboarding event, primarily because 50% of Trump Melania token holder wallets were net new to SOL altcoins. But that can— that continues to make the same wallet user fallacies and misses the distinction between interest in Trump versus on-chain users that are value-additive and contribute capital to the broader ecosystem. In the last 30 days, other than Moonshot, other than— other large access points to the token have had their App Store rank go down, not up, meaning Moonshot was likely the access point for most, uh, new users. Um, and if you continue to go down, uh, yeah, it's just, um, it was just interesting to see this data. Um, and Because if you look at the headline, like, Moonshot, like, great, you onboarded all these users, but clearly, like, a lot of these users, you know, may have bought Trump at $20, $30, $40, $70, and they just had a pretty traumatic experience of seeing Trump go from the high of $70 down to $18. Like, that, that user is not sticking around, is not putting in more money into crypto, you know what I mean?

So here's a theory for you, uh, Oh crap, where did this go? MicroStrategy. Here, let me go to our site. All right. I originally thought we were kind of mid to late stage cycle here going into the year. I was like, all right, maybe we top in the summer, fall, or May or something like that. But all these prices are acting very funky. I would say this is the single reason Bitcoin is up so much and everything else is down is MicroStrategy. MicroStrategy bought, what, $40 billion of Bitcoin? $20 billion of that Bitcoin was bought in Q4. So they bought $20 billion of Bitcoin in the last 3 months. So that's— that is propping up the price of Bitcoin. So Bitcoin should actually be lower than it is today, which to me tells me that we're actually earlier in the cycle than people want to say.

Yeah. I mean, again, I—

oh, and then I was confirmed.

You were confirmed?

I was confirmed by Dan.

CMS had a good tweet.

Yeah.

There.

This is what you need to know. So, so Dan's take, if you guys didn't read Dan from CMS's take, he said, what was the main takeaway from this? The main, the main takeaway is that there's basically still this kind of large overhang of 2021. Liquid still doesn't exist. There really are like venture is not flowing into the space yet. There haven't been the new raises yet. There's not really any flows. It's very PvP, you know, you know, AI agents goes up, but that's at the detriment of meme coins. Meme coins go up, but that's at the detriment of DeFi, like It's all just, you need more flows, you need more flows coming in.

They haven't coming in. If they're coming in, it's very selective. There's been a rotation from Solana to Avalanche. There's a particular meme coin on Avalanche that's ripping.

Yeah.

And so like, it is very PvP still. In my conversations with a lot of funds that are raising, they still haven't received all the flows. Maybe that's on the come, you know, with all this positive, like new regulatory 180, David Sachs, was put out. There's a couple interesting from a policy standpoint perspective. I think David Sachs went on the record this week saying we will have greater regulatory clarity. We will be more pro-crypto, like everything that you want to hear, right? If you're an institution that has been talking to a lot of funds that has been on this, on the, on the kind of ledge, hearing that, I think pushes you forward to make a commitment to a fund that is raising, right? A lot of crypto funds are raising right now. There are in market. That process takes time. As much as you have executive orders that are very bullish and a new regime, it takes time. So I would agree with this where we are in the cycle. The hope is that, you know, if you have flows, you know, funds, crypto funds are not going to invest in Bitcoin. They're going to invest in alts. Some of that will be in liquid, other— that another component will be in venture. Um, at the moment, for the last better part of the last 16 months, it's been Pump.fund and a lot of the capital, you know, moving around from meme coin to meme coin. Yeah, you know, you, you— if you look at— there was, there was a stat out there that I looked at, which is like, what, two-thirds of Solana fees come from Pump.fund. Mert, I think, had really good takes there, you know, pushing back a bit. But a lot of people are like, Pump.fund is extremely, you know, value extractive. It— look at all the, you know, SOL that it's deposited into exchanges. I mean, it's printing, right? And that's just a— that's just a— that's the state of— state of things, right?

Yeah. Let me— all right, last topic on this, and then there's some other stuff I want to get your take on. So Ryan Connor, who's Leads Research at Blockworks, had an interesting tweet. He said, for selling and SOL out, SOL with cash flows, reasonable valuation outperforming ETH. I'll skip that one. Kamino and Hype holding up, benefit from liquidations growing. Honey and Geode have barely moved. Revenues are uncorrelated to crypto. AI coins with massive valuations leading the way down. Who here still believes fundamentals do not matter? I thought this was an interesting take, which is a lot of the, a lot of the things with them kind of putting like the fundamentalores, but like the fundamentals like didn't go down that much actually in this, in this crash.

And Kamino rebounded substantially actually.

Yeah.

Um, and you know, full disclosure, I'm an investor there. I'm an investor in GeoNet. I'm, um, you know, might as well just say all the disclosures here, but I'm an investor in SOL as well. But yeah, I think, um, Yeah. How did, how did the Maker's— like, what's Maker up to? I always like to look at Maker every once in a while to see like if it's still a stablecoin or SKY or whatever it's called now.

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Going back to CMS, right? We like to always point to that chart where we're on the cycle. It's like the main— everyone loves to ask that question and, and bullpost. But, um, do you, in what version are we much later in the cycle and what would derail CMSs and your standing assumption that we're early.

I mean, what would derail it is probably like, I mean, you saw David Sachs came out and was like, Trump asked us to look into a strategic Bitcoin reserve. He didn't tell us to go do it. So the market fell 5% on that because he just asked them to go look into it. The market probably, I mean, we're probably late if like, I don't know, Trump and if the SEC kind of is a dick to the industry still, and if Trump, uh, and if the banks don't end up actually doing anything even though SAB 121 got rolled back, and if Trump ends up just being— doesn't follow through on any of his promises.

Yeah, this— I had a tweet around this, and I'll close out my comments around this— is, um, when this happens, it's a constant reminder for me to just— we— there are things we can control, and there are things that we can't control as an industry. I've always felt that I look at Uber and the resistance that they faced when they went to market. It had so much pushback anywhere they went. Taxi lobbies wanted to kill them. It just delivered such a great consumer experience that it was almost impossible for politicians and like to, to deny their license. And I think that That is the most important thing for us. Like, can we control— we can't control a lot of the— certainly not the price action. If you're talking to a founder, you can't control, you know, new institutions coming in. The thing that this is a constant reminder, at least for me, that it's actually quite invigorating because it's, it's like it just re-centers the focus, which should always be our focus, which is we, we need to really just focus on the fundamental use cases beyond just pure speculation. We have a broken funnel in crypto. We always have had a broken funnel. If people come to this industry just thinking, I want to punt Trump or the next flavor meme coin, there will be trauma in that, in that, in that journey. And they might come back and it's like, you know, but there are new mechanisms like prior relative to prior cycles. We have stuff today that can fix that. And so I think it's just a reminder, like, we have to— I keep talking about non-speculative use cases. I know I'm always going to bring it back to what I'm doing, but I get very excited because it just further validates the thing that as an industry we need to be— there is a sense of urgency that I don't think people have. In my journey, I've talked to most of the foundations, and I talked to them at a point where prices were hitting all-time high over the last 6 months. And when that is happening they're like kumbaya, you know, they're, they kind of take their, their eye off the ball, which is we need to really focus on fixing this broken funnel and fit and looking closely at the retention of these users and the experience that they have. And the best we can is servicing them real use cases like GeoNets of the world, Deepens of the world, like stablecoins. I know it's happening, like companies like Nubank, very encouraging. I was looking at Nubank data and remittance flows, like You know, remittance operators are feeling the pain. Nubank uptake of stablecoins has been very important. Like, most of the users now that, that are onboarded to Nubank, their first meme— their first crypto asset is a stablecoin. We just need more of that, uh, and less of just pure spec— I'm not being dismissive of stable— of, uh, meme coins and speculation. I just think that it's a broken funnel, and if we, if we are not focusing on improving and adding more funnels to this industry than just purely coming through an exchange, we're going to continue to have this problem. It's as simple as that. And, and I, I don't think we have 12 years. I don't think we have that much more time. And, and I just don't feel that the industry really feels that sense of urgency. It's like, oh yeah, BlackRock's going to come and RWAs, and it is. There's, there's a lot of really good people doing very good work. To try to fix this funnel. But it just needs to be a priority, much more so than it has been historically. And when prices go up, we kind of drop the ball because, you know, it's like, yeah, you know, everyone's gonna come and— but, you know, let this be a good, like, you know, kind of recentering event of, yeah, we just gotta get— we gotta fix that.

Yeah. All right, let's talk about, um, I want to get your take on this tweet. This was from Tom, Tom Dunleavy, who is a partner at MV Global, and it sparked a good conversation. So he said, no project in crypto needs to raise over $10 million, full stop. I frankly think a lot of these projects— BearChain, Monad, Abstract, Infinex, Movement, etc.— get their valuations strictly because of the need for big capital allocations from large VCs. When big VCs raise $300 million, there's functionally no way to deploy it unless you write some $20 million checks. Even if you do $5 million allocations, you have to invest in 60 projects and DD thousands. There's no way they need this much money. Monad, $250 million. BearChain, $100 million. Movement, $140 million. What protocols actually need— Omega, $20 million. What protocols actually need $20 million in capital with— in a business with marginal fixed costs that are extremely lower and just getting lower with AI? We're effectively funding these startups for 5+ years. Of runway when they also get additional runway on token launch. This creates terrible incentives, motivation incentives for the team. The valuations associated with big capital intakes set the bar so high that the price for perfection for what their user and revenue metrics will be 10 years in the future. If you admit the industry isn't ready for these kind of rounds, you have to return capital and not charge management fees. These project valuations are directly a transfer from VCs, LPs into marketing and yield farmers for these projects because you have no need to spend the money on anything else. No more raises over $10 million, no more FDVs over $100 million. Retail wins, price discovery wins, product market fit wins.

Yeah. It's not the first time we hear this type of narrative, right? I mean, it's quite popular when, you know, I'm not disagreeing with a lot of these things. I've actually, from my standpoint, I was just talking to the MegaETH team yesterday. Um, you know, I, I don't, I don't see the need to raise, uh, but that much capital. But, you know, the, the counter-argument to all of this is it is a competitive game out there to acquire talent and acquire, you know, teams, and a lot of grants are being doled out. And so it's like, if someone raises a war chest, then if you don't have that war chest, does it put you in a competitive disadvantage on the margin, right? You could argue, and I've always told teams this, it's like, don't necessarily go deploy in a chain because they offered you the most amount of incentives and threw the most amount of money at you. Go deploy there because you actually believe that this is where you can live for the next 10 years, and you will actually, you know, but it's, it's challenging, right? Um, it's kind of like a bit of wishful thinking. I don't think it's going to necessarily change. Because crypto is this funky liquid venture asset class and this is—

well, I don't think it changes because the opportunity set you're going after, there's no way to value what an L1 or an L2 is worth. So it's like it's either going to be worth hundreds of billions one day or zero. And that's why these things are getting funded like this.

It's like, yeah, the capital liquidity is shorter. There's a comp set out there. Everything trades on a relative valuation. So yeah. Of course. Right.

Yeah, I do. I do think— I mean, I think there's some— I think he's right and wrong, basically. I think he's right. I think he's right that you don't need— okay, I think he's— $10 million is way too low because at most $50. Yeah, I think you should raise like $30 to $50 if you're building an L1. However, eventually you do need more money and Uh, raising so much money actually does give you a higher valuation, just funnily, because it works like that. Um, not by logic, but because you can tell a story and get a high valuation and raise a bunch of money and stuff like that. Um, and so actually raising a bunch of money actually sets your token, your token price, I think, higher upon list, and people want that. It also means you only have to raise once. Or maybe twice, right? Like, like Movement didn't go raise $140M in one slingshot round. They raised, I think, 3 rounds and then 4 after, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Seed, uh, uh, A and then a B, and then after TG, they kind of did another round then and there.

Yeah. I would also say, I mean, people, people underestimate the cost that actually go into some of this stuff. It's like, I was talking to one of the Oracle, one of the protocol founders who's paying $3 million a year to one of the Oracle/bridge providers. That's 3. So let's say you only raised $10 million. That's 30% of what you know of your, of your costs or of the money that you raise is out the door right there.

So there's also pretty high stablecoin integration fees. I've heard some of the stablecoin providers like USDC, it's not cheap to have them come into your chain. If you're an L1 or an L2.

I think Tom has a point, but I think $10 million is way too low. All right, I got a question for you. What— I went to a hockey game this week with Jan VanEck. We went to the Rangers. We went to an Islanders game.

By the way, hockey might be one of my favorite sports to go watch.

We went to an Islanders game. It was great. Shout out, Jan. It was awesome. Had a great time, but we were— he asked me this question and it kind of just, it got me a little disappointed because he said, what are you really excited about in crypto right now? And I think for the first time, maybe being since I've been in crypto, I didn't really have a good articulate answer. Usually I feel like I've got like 6, 7, 8 things. I'm like this, they're doing this and they're doing this and this is happening here. And I was just like, I was like, I don't know, like stablecoins are pretty cool. And he was like, yeah, is that like the coolest thing in crypto right now? So I can't tell if I'm just this, like, if I'm too out of the weeds or if just nothing interesting is happening or if I just— this is a classic third cycler move. Like, I don't know. What do you think about that?

I'm here to tell you, sir, most of the time, a lot of people, the longer you are in crypto, the the more this could happen. I don't think you become cynical. I think you're skeptical, rightfully so. But there's a difference between being cynical and skeptical. I think cynical is just you're skewed pessimist. Skeptical is a healthy dose of skepticism is very useful, but it doesn't, doesn't preclude you from being optimist. I love technology. I'm a perpetual optimist, but I am skeptical of because I've seen just stuff. But I am constantly reminded that just because something didn't work in the past doesn't mean that it can't work, because technology moves very quickly in the space. It has. 4 years ago, the tech was not— is very different, you know. Um, you know, what you saw with Trump and how Solana managed that, it was, it was impressive. Like, Cloudflare would have gone down. Like, Solana was able to absorb that, and volume was really high. I look at that, I'm incredibly excited, because then you, you've heard Toly say since the inception of Solana, NASDAQ on the blockchain. And all of a sudden you have an event over the weekend that was able to absorb and process $100 billion of trading volume fairly flawless. And I look at that, I'm like, I'll say it again, like, there's just something very real about that. Just, I've never seen it. Um, Nick shouldn't be, uh, Jean should not be— I mean, Nick is his son, is building Agora. I spoke with Nick this week because It's just really interesting what he's building. Now, people might say that, how's that sexy? It might not feel sexy to you, but I'm here to tell you stablecoins are the sexiest thing of this industry. And DePIN. But stablecoins are an amazing category. And if we just stopped innovating there, there's enough reasons to be excited and there's enough reasons to take a long-term view in this industry and say, if we just stop there and kind of innovate it on stablecoins, That is enough to justify the existence of this industry by a country mile. And we are not even scratching the surface of what is possible with stablecoins and everything that happens on that. You are radically, fundamentally going to change consumer behavior and how people think about finance because finance has never caught up to the digital world. That's just the nature of the game.

Yeah. So that was actually Jan's take. I was like, ah, stablecoins. But like, I mean, I guess I don't know how exciting that really is. And he said, look, you get once every 50 years you can upend the financial system.

Maybe. Yeah. Once every couple of generations. I mean, I will pinch myself constantly and I'll say I consider myself extremely lucky because we're just at that moment where you are seeing a total transformation. And how the financial system and those rails are going to— are being built in real time in an open source manner, like building in the open. Sometimes it's messy, right? Because you see open works when you walk in the city. It's not great, right? Think about how buildings are being built. Like, sometimes they cover it, but if they're not, you're going to see the pipes, you're going to see the, the messy stuff, you're going to see the trucks coming in and out. Might be dust all over. But man, when they unveil that World Trade Center and you're like, holy shit, That's monumental, and it will be monumental. It already, I think, is monumental. You're already seeing data points that suggest that, and it fits so well with like other, other mega trends that are happening in the world, like AI agents. I still think like a lot of stuff will be automated. The more, the more I've— in this journey of building Inversion, I've just constantly looked at bank statements and consumer behavior. I'll just like offer one tidbit, which is you had high interest rates where people could have bought Treasuries and made 5% on their money in a relatively risk-free manner. Yet there were so many deposits, a staggering amount of deposits sitting on checking accounts that are not earning 5% for the simple reason that people were either unaware, uneducated, or just didn't go through the process of depositing that money in their checking account to a money market account. And banks like profited from that and didn't share the interest revenue that they were clipping. Now you talk to Nick Van Eck, who's building Agora, or USDC, who is now sharing some of that, and they're doing that work for you. That, that fundamentally transforms the, the consumer experience and the savings rate and the ability for that consumer, if they're earning 5%, You know, you need to automate finance. People don't like to— contrary to what a DeFi founder may think, no one wants to check their bank account daily. No one does. No one logs into them. Once you deposit in a Bank of America account, you're set for life. Most people don't ever leave. Betterment and all these robo-advisors learned this the hard way. Building distribution finance is very hard. But with stablecoins, you're breaking that. You're just making it— abstracting away all the complexity for the user that most people don't learn about this in school. You never get taught how to save. You never get thought how to invest or how money works or the counterparty risk of depositing in a bank account or what that money does and doesn't do, or that you need to deposit it by treasuries. Most people don't know this. It's very complicated. It seems easy because we talk about it here all the time, but it's really not when you look at the financial— like when you look at the earnings for these banks, they're making staggering amounts of money. They're not sharing that. They're not sharing that treasury yield back to the user. But, you know, that's the most powerful thing about this. And I was talking to someone this week and it's like— So what does success look like for you in this industry? I said, I still— the exercise that listeners should go do is walk around. And this weekend, go around. You're at a restaurant, you're at a coffee shop. I still think you go to that, you observe, and you say, what percent of these people— at this point, most of them have heard of crypto, heard of Bitcoin, heard of— it's everywhere, right? But what percentage of them are using it? What percentage of them are using stablecoins? And the reality is it's like less, like 1 out of 10 in the room at best, maybe. And before it was like, we need to convince them to use it. Now I'm like, you have the Stripes of the world, Nubanks of the world, PayPals of the world that are just going to offer it to the user, and the user is not going to be even aware that that's happening. And that is the end state of this technology. And I think, I think that's what gets me most excited because now you have the aggregators that are going to evangelize this without even telling their users. And that's really powerful. The second-order effects of stablecoins really working are like, I don't even want to go there because that just opens up. That's like the smartphone moment. Stablecoins are like that smartphone moment, which is no one really predicted that Uber was going to be possible. That you would have been able to stream Netflix. Like, you do everything with your smartphone now. No one really predicted that. Nokia didn't predict that. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft, didn't predict that. Companies just really missed the boat on that. And I think, um, I think that's why I get so excited about stablecoins, because they truly transform finance.

Yeah.

Um, so I don't know, it's a boring, unsexy answer. I was talking to Ben at Parify this week too. And we were like, man, we just go back to this simple pitch that, you know, I'll give you this. So when we were fundraising, for instance, uh, back in the day, they were like, what is DeFi? What is this thing? You know, I'm like, guys, listen. And the pitch to LP was very simple. It was like, hey, okay, go and try the stablecoin. Go buy USDC at Coinbase and then use it, or Tether or whatever. And then come back to me and tell me if you want to do a wire transfer again.

Go do it.

And the flow was like actually much broken back then. You know, you didn't have easy stuff like you didn't have Phantoms of the world. You have to make it super easy. But the majority of people that went through that flow came back to us and invested in the fund.

Hmm.

Back then, mind you, that was 2020.

First off, thanks for the motivational speech. I appreciate it. I needed the motivation. Wow. I'm here for you, man.

This is what—

this is what the Blockburn Center does, you know? Yeah, yeah. I avoid doing things that'll get clipped on Twitter and make me look like a fool. I appreciate that.

You just don't do rookie numbers. You gotta pump them up! By the way, we always give movie recommendations to go watch Wolf of Wall Street.

Yeah, yeah, I need a little bit of that in my life right now. Um, So two things that I think I had that I thought were coming, but like kind of was like, how long will it actually take? Tech companies. I think my prediction, one of my predictions of the year is about to come true massively very soon. Fintechs, tech companies, banks launching their own stablecoins. I think the banks are actually going to be much slower than people think. But there are some huge tech companies and fintechs that I think are about to launch their own stablecoins that is just going to surprise the whole world. So that's going to be really cool. Um, and then the other thing—

can you just explain what the biggest motivation for them is?

Oh yeah, easily. It's— I won't, I won't explain it. I'll just, I'll just show you this. It's right here. Where is this? Where is this? It's Tether. It's Tether doing—

you got to return that computer.

There. Yeah, there. That's all you need. Tether hits $13 billion in profits in 2024. That's not top line revenue, folks. That's $13 billion in profits.

That's like more profitable than most banks and most tech companies. And revenue per employee, probably all highest it's been for any—

it's got to be the best. I actually met the, um, I met the CEO, the old CEO of OnlyFans over the weekend, and we're, um, comparing notes of if they were more profitable per employee or was Tether more profitable per employee. But I think Tether, I think Tether still got them beat.

I think so.

So, but anyway, this is why. So everyone's looking at this being like, oh my God, we are leaking so much value to the, to the, to the old school L1s of the world, the banks, right?

The payment processing fees, the chargeback fees.

So I think they're all— so that's the first thing that's going to happen. The second thing that is, um, that I was also underestimating the timeline is I think on-chain equities is about to get turned on in a really big way. And, um, I think some of the biggest fintechs like Robinhood, like some of those kind of folks, are gonna, are gonna, are gonna basically launch stablecoins, figure out their own, how to do their own chains, and figure out on-chain equities. And I think you'll see a lot of some combo of their own chain, their own stablecoin, and bring on-chain equities. I don't know if this is Robinhood's or the Coinbases or the, or the fintechs of the world or the TD Ameritrades of the world, but those folks are— those are the two things to look out for. And it's going to be, it's going to be a huge paradigm shift, actually. Yeah.

So I had a— maybe we can wrap up with this because I had a poll which said, like, uh, Elon was tweeting something to the effect that in order to increase transparency for Doge, we should put the treasury on-chain, like the budget, to have more accountability of where the funds are going and whatnot. And, and I, I just did a poll which said, hey, where would this happen? Which chain? Uh, you know, Ethereum, call it L1 or L2. I, I said Ethereum L2, Avalanche L1, Solana, other.

Um, why didn't you put Ethereum mainchain here?

I don't know, I, I just felt it.

I actually think of all the chains, it's Ethereum, Ethereum. So one is most likely to do here.

But yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I was going to ask you that, but you just answered the question, so—

well, shit.

Well, shit. Well, shit. I guess that's the end of it, folks.

Have a great week. No, well, damn, I just killed that. I just love the conversation.

Yeah, there's a, there's a great, um—

so is it— well, Avalanche— Avalanche, for folks, we— I didn't let you complete that sentence. Avalanche L1 got 56% of the vote. Ethereum L2 got 22%. Solana got 13%.

Yeah. So there, there's a— and then I read, there's a great post by Morgan, um, at Avalanche, and she makes the case, whether you believe that it's Avalanche or not, go read that blog post. Um, and she makes a very compelling argument of like some of the, some of the features that are interesting. You know, the privacy, fee customization, like, even like a lot of particularly, I think permissioning and privacy were interesting. Privacy, I think, is really one of those categories that is quite interesting and relevant for this type of use case. And so, yeah, it was, it was a great blog post. Go read it. Maybe you have reasons why, like, yeah, but be— maybe this is something that in the Empire thread on Telegram, people can comment because it's inspiring to say the least, just to spark discussion. Yeah.

I'm actually not going to close with that. I'm going to actually call out something I thought was interesting this week, cause I want to get back into calling out some cool things and it's UniV4. So, and I actually wanted, I don't know if you looked into it and if you've been like following Uniswap and UniV4 and stuff, but they— so they announced this like 2 years ago, right, that they're going to work— that they're working on these like hooks and UniV4, and they finally actually rolled it out. They rolled it out over 12 chains over the past weekend. And it's a really big deal. I think one is I think it could spark— it could kind of be the anchor that DeFi needs for DeFi 2.0, like DeFi summer. And I think it's a really interesting innovation. And the reason for that is these things called hooks that I'm sure people, a lot of people know about, but hooks are basically these separate smart contracts that are kind of like hooked onto or like attached to Uniswap liquidity pools. And they enable developers and like any builder to implement custom DEX logic that triggers based on certain behaviors. So what that actually means is—

Intents. Limit orders. Where you want to provision liquidity on the curve, all these things, right?

Yeah. So like UniV3 pools are pre— have these predefined fee tiers and predefined features. Essentially, v4 deployers can essentially customize their pool logic with any sort of fee curve, adjust all the variables, adjust the volatility. You can punish LPs with a fee when you withdraw liquidity. You can introduce a fee switch, right, without waiting for the Uniswap protocol to do it. So they essentially let liquidity pool developers and deployers act as their own DEX and build their own DEX. And so I saw one called Flaunch. It's a meme coin launchpad on Base. And when tokens pre-launch on Flaunch, they can be bought at a fixed price for 30 minutes. And then after 30 minutes, all remaining tokens are sold. The meme coin is launched on the open market. So I don't know if Launch is going to make it or not, but like, I just think it's cool. Basically, any— we just essentially commoditized DEXs. Anyone can go launch a DEX. Like, Blockworks could go launch a DEX tomorrow, I think. Yeah. And it's just really cool. And I think you're going to see a lot of innovation coming of this. Yeah, it's kind of bearish for existing DEXs, I think, because the idea of building a DEX, I think, just got commoditized.

Yeah. There was an interesting experiment recently which was like a creative way to fundraise. Like, I think someone launched a coin that programmatically gave all of the fees to someone, and it was like a creator, an artist, or someone that needed fundraising for like medical research or something. It wasn't the guy that had like unfortunately a sick child, but it was something to that effect where like someone launched a token on, uh, for someone else, and it was like all of the fees are going to be diverted to this particular wallet address. I think that's what like these— the, this functionality enables, right? These hooks.

Yeah. I mean, it allows you to create a custom, essentially a custom DEX, um, custom DEX logic. So there's this site that, uh, Donovan, who writes the, our research newsletter, found it's, uh, univ4projects.notion.site. We can, uh, we can link it in the show notes, but it's just a directory of everyone using these hooks. Doppler, A51, Flaunch, Bunny. I guess Andre Cronje is building a new thing on here.

He said something, it's interesting. Can you go to his profile really quickly? I noticed like he tweeted something like something about fair launches and then yeah, maybe it's what his—

he tweeted, he tweeted, you, you liked me when I launched, did fair launches. You're gonna like me when I do unfair launches. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm really curious. I don't know what it's all about, but I'm, I, I, It caught my eye.

Last time I gave you all the fair launch, time to show you the unfair launch.

So yeah, anyways, anything else, sir?

Oh, I was supposed to do this at the top of the app. So shout out Joseph. Sorry, Joseph. Love you, Joseph. Joseph is no longer the producer for Empire and just want to give Joseph a big shout out for producing so many great shows. We are hiring a new producer and, uh, hold on, I've got the job description here, but I won't even read the job description. It's on our website, but we're hiring a senior producer. If you want to work with Santin and me, um, our new head of podcasts, you want to work with all of our podcasts, is a really cool role. We have a bunch of open roles like across research and engineering and sales, but the senior producer one is very cool. Um, we've had a good track record. We got a good track record.

Garrett is now at Squads.

Garrett was— Garrett was Empire's first producer. Garrett went on to then host the Lightspeed podcast, and then now he's head of BD at Squads, which is killing it. Then we got Joseph, was second.

Second. Yeah.

And Joseph's now retired off of his meme coins. So Joseph, no, this is like you come to Google and then you eventually become a good successor. So what can you do as the third producer here? The bar is high. The bar is high.

We're looking for someone exceptional. We, we, to be fair, like, I, I, I, I really like that role. Um, I think it's great exposure because you get to get the inside look into all the guests we have. Um, you know, I, a lot of my rambling here is when I don't read the excellent notes that our producers put together, but I'd be lying if I didn't tell you it makes me look smart, way smarter than what I am. They get to do a lot of research and then we just, you know, it's a really good role, I think. So yeah, we are excited.

Whoever you get to meet, some of the biggest people in the industry, like when we are having guests on, like the producer is the one interfacing with them and it's just a really cool— you get to like just embed yours. I mean, you're full-time at Blockworks, you get to embed yourself at Blockworks. What we need is someone who's really crypto native, like really, really, really crypto native. If you don't know what that means, then the role is not right for you. We need someone who really understands growth. Like understands like how to just get this show to rip on Twitter.

We want to make this the number one podcast in finance.

We need someone who's really good at making the trains run on time. There's a bunch of stuff that happens after Santi and I click end recording, and we need someone who's really organized and get the trains running on time. And we need someone who loves podcasts. So if that's you, go to the website and go to just type in Blockworks Careers on Google and you'll hopefully find our site.

And maybe you get to, uh, you most likely will get this beautiful sweater.

We will send you a sweatshirt. It'll take 4 years to get it to you.

4 years. It took me more than 4 years, by the way. Yeah, but you know, but yeah, so cool. All right, folks, well, have a great weekend. Thanks for listening, um, and, uh, we'll be back next week. All right, any good guests? Any good episodes launching?

Um, yeah, just recorded with Avery, the new About Avery's the co-founder of Aptos. He's the historically the CTO. He just moved into the CEO role. So the episode coming out on Monday is just about like the new Aptos. Like I think everyone's, a lot of people are familiar with the old Aptos. He kind of lays out his vision for the new Aptos. So enjoy that.

Excellent.

All right. See you folks. Enjoy the Friday. Enjoy the weekend.

Yeah. Have a good weekend, man.

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