It's worse than you think w/ Tulip King, Eli Ben-Sasson and Saeed Badreg
Tulip KingEli Ben-SassonSaeed Badreg
- Ansem is cutting risk while Tulip King calls this his “retirement cycle,” making asset selection and time horizon the episode’s central disagreement. Ansem’s October 22, 2026 view is that weakening memory and semiconductor stocks could drag crypto into another pullback; he initially expects the summer lows to hold, while later entertaining Bitcoin tests of the mid-$70,000s or mid-$60,000s. Tulip is looking across a decade at businesses that could absorb much larger on-chain markets: “Stop buying shitty coins.”
- Tulip’s portfolio framework separates coins that are money from coins that make money, leaving ETH and SOL under pressure to justify their valuations. His argument is that stablecoins increasingly supply collateral and trading denominations, while scaling reduces the fees native tokens capture. Ansem disputes the assumption that existing holders will suddenly abandon monetary and ecosystem valuations, but agrees that profitable applications might become money more easily than base layers become better businesses.
- Hyperliquid and Derive anchor Tulip’s argument that investors can own emerging financial infrastructure without predicting every new winner. His HYPE “100 bagger” case explicitly assumes Hyperliquid wins as assets and trading migrate on chain; his options thesis rests on convex payouts, volatility trading, and Derive’s claimed 90% share of options premiums. He would reconsider competitors when they establish durable share, rather than constantly trade between prospective challengers.
- Saeed Badreg frames tokenization as a distribution and market-structure opportunity measured against a roughly $160 trillion asset pool. Capturing even 1% would exceed $1 trillion, but moving tokens between chains is insufficient: Sunrise needs market makers, working mint-and-redeem arbitrage, and distribution through wallets, exchanges, and DeFi. “We have 8,000 stocks” is unimpressive if “you have zero markets”; the objective is liquid, programmable assets that unlock uses unavailable through conventional brokerage apps.
- Eli Ben-Sasson says Starknet’s community has supported exploring an L1 because Ethereum scaling demand and Ethereum-dependent security no longer settle the strategic question. He describes a potential post-quantum “ark,” with programmable privacy and account abstraction, while acknowledging that he cannot predict a quantum breakthrough. Asked when he would worry most, he says “over the next two years”; that is his concern window, not a claim that a practical attack will arrive then.
- Zcash and Pearl represent different attempts to capture demand for alternatives to Bitcoin’s existing design. Tulip categorically says Zcash reaches a trillion-dollar valuation but offers no timing, while Pearl’s appeal is its proposed substitution of matrix multiplication for SHA-256 to connect mining with AI infrastructure. He qualifies the miner-migration evidence and calls quantum a “pretty bad narrative,” creating a clear disagreement with Ben-Sasson’s emphasis without supplying a detailed rebuttal.
- Trading media’s commercial opportunity rests on audience distribution and trading activity, while its credibility depends on distinguishing evidence from mythology. Tulip describes sponsorship economics that favor customers who retain capital and keep trading, plus a clipping operation whose reach can far exceed live viewership. Banks sees Kimchi’s mainstream breakout as valuable, but also acknowledges manufacturing an exaggerated story for a viral clip; the hosts’ discussion does not establish the widely repeated $40 million trading-profit claim.
- The practical research edge described here is persistent investigation beyond headline dashboards, followed by enough patience to let a thesis develop. Tulip uses protocol testing, source-code activity, holder analysis, and AI-assisted data retrieval to ask why revenue should persist; GMX at roughly 1.2 times revenue is a research prompt, not a completed investment case. His largest stated equity exposure is Eli Lilly, and his reluctance to buy AI-stock dips reflects both concentration concerns and a preference for opportunities where he believes he has an edge.
1. Ansem’s bearish turn begins with equities failing to reward good news
Ansem explicitly reverses the view he held two weeks earlier. He expected another advance in AI-related equities, memory stocks, and semiconductors, with crypto extending its Q3 leadership. “I was wrong,” he says about expecting fresh highs. His concern is that stocks which have dominated since late 2022 and 2023 now contain substantial unrealized gains, creating room for sustained profit-taking rather than another shallow interruption.
The backdrop adds several pressures simultaneously: continuing war, sharply rising oil, still-high interest rates, and AI discovering software vulnerabilities faster than humans previously could. Ansem cites a significant PHP vulnerability as an example of processes being disrupted. He does not reduce the selloff to that technology story; the central call remains that equities might be approaching the “tail end” of their macro cycle.
The uncomfortable detail is that business results can remain strong while stock prices stop advancing. Ansem points to Micron’s substantial Q3 earnings beat, after which the stock failed to extend higher and effectively marked a local high. “The revenues are matching up, but they’re still not making new all-time highs.” He also sees memory stocks forming a second lower high after their parabolic advance.
His crypto interpretation remains a question, not a settled diagnosis. Bitcoin weakened in Q1 and Q2 while equities rose, then bottomed around the same late-June week that memory stocks peaked. Q3 strength might therefore reflect an earlier oversold condition rather than a fresh bull market. Tulip’s later challenge—why Bitcoin has remained “pretty damn strong”—gets this answer: relative strength can coexist with vulnerability to another equity-led decline.
2. Taking profit is a different decision from initiating a short
Ansem says he is both reducing exposure and shorting, but immediately distinguishes his own trading from what he recommends to viewers. BTC, ETH, and SOL are already near important support, so a new short would be “shorting into support.” Timing matters: getting stopped out before the eventual decline produces the particularly frustrating outcome of losing on the short and then missing the move.
For people up 2–3X on positions such as Pump, Zcash, or VVV, he thinks taking some profit makes sense. His initial expectation is a higher low, with the roughly $70,000 Bitcoin area offered as a possibility, and he says he does not think the summer lows break. Later, he entertains mid-$70,000s or mid-$60,000s tests while saying, “I’m not sure.”
The cleaner relative-value expression he offers is long Bitcoin against short memory stocks. That separates his belief that Bitcoin can outperform memory equities from the harder question of whether Bitcoin rises outright. He also recalls SOL around $60 near the earlier summer opportunity: someone who bought near those lows can still have substantial gains to protect without needing to declare the entire crypto recovery finished.
Banks pushes back with a familiar contrarian rule: widespread CT pessimism usually makes him more bullish. Ansem’s own experience complicates that instinct. He became bearish in September 2025, absorbed criticism, bought Bitcoin after it subsequently reached highs, and then had to sell into a decline. The exchange preserves the distinction between being directionally right, being early, and changing position under social pressure.
3. Paper Trade shifts its rewards from early farmers toward continuing traders
Ansem describes Paper Trade, launched by his friend Jez, as a synthetic perpetuals platform offering up to 1,000X leverage using Hyperliquid midpoint pricing for BTC and ETH. Positions are against the house rather than a matched opposing trader. Losses accrue to the house; winners are paid from its funds. When the house does not have ample funds, Ansem describes it as “kind of like a pool that collects over time.”
He describes a controversial change to the token distribution. At the beginning, he says, a large majority of the supply would be distributed based on how much the house was making. He recalls the maximum supply as 12.6 billion PAPER, and says it would be reached after a certain amount of time—“something like $500 million in the LP.” He is uncertain about the precise calculations. The supply has since increased; now there is no maximum supply and more PAPER is minted, though he says he does not know the exact calculation.
Ansem thinks the change benefits traders who actively use the exchange. “Before, it benefited farmers more than traders,” he says. He farmed early himself, but says the platform has changed how PAPER is distributed and people have been mad about it. His defense is that the revised approach better rewards active exchange use, while acknowledging that farmers benefited more under the previous setup.
Transferability has also been delayed: the token will be non-transferable for longer. Ansem says PAPER can currently be staked on the exchange to receive a portion of its revenue. He likes the platform and the changes, while recognizing that the altered distribution and delayed transferability are sources of user frustration.
4. Pump’s missing airdrop is a legitimate grievance; falling coins are another argument
Ansem separates two complaints that CT has bundled together. Anger that Pump is paying Kimchi, KOLs, and other promotional rewards before delivering its anticipated airdrop is, in his words, “justified.” Banks agrees that the airdrop was central to earlier expectations discussed on the show. Their defense of Pump’s business does not erase that unresolved distribution promise or the resentment around who has received money first.
The complaint that Pump should somehow make launched coins appreciate gets a different response. “Pump cannot make coins go higher. They’re just the launchpad.” Ansem says higher starting market capitalizations might produce different outcomes, but that remains an unproven counterfactual. Comparing today’s market against an imagined design that supposedly fixes everything does not establish that the alternative would actually work better.
His explanation for Pump’s resilience is its existing low-cap ecosystem. He says the platform can still make around $1 million daily during a bear market because traders and developers repeatedly use pre-bond and very small-cap markets, even without $500 million runners. Removing that activity to favor a different kind of participant could damage the users and behavior responsible for the platform’s continued revenue.
Banks and Ansem reject treating all successful exchange revenue as uniquely objectionable “extraction.” They point to Coinbase, Uniswap, Raydium, and Axiom as businesses that also charge for services. Their argument is competitive: users keep returning, and rival launchpads have failed to displace Pump. That supports their view of product demand, while leaving the airdrop criticism intact rather than answering it through fee comparisons.
5. Kimchi’s attention is observable; the trading fortune remains disputed lore
Tulip King repeatedly distinguishes Kimchi’s actual content from stories circulating around it. He says the 22-year-old has not personally confirmed the widely repeated claim that he made $40 million trading Trump. In one vlog encounter, a fan asks about that number; Kimchi laughs, says, “Good to meet you, bro,” and moves on. Banks had earlier summarized the persona as “hit big and logged off,” rather than publicly documenting a trading process.
Tulip also describes an on-chain thread presented as proving that Kimchi made “only” $6 million on Trump. He says the wallet was subsequently confirmed as Kenzo’s, Kimchi’s friend who travels with him, and therefore was not Kimchi’s wallet. Tulip says there was no comment from Kimchi and no confirmation one way or another about the $40 million claim.
Their strongest positive evidence is cultural reach: the vlog, luxury-brand attention around Bottega, and interactions with major streamers who appear genuinely interested in Kimchi. Banks argues that CT saturation is different from a mainstream ceiling. Someone can already occupy nearly all the conversation inside crypto while still rapidly expanding outside it; criticism within the smaller audience may become progressively less important to the overall business.
Banks sees a self-reinforcing commercial opportunity: attention itself could eventually allow Kimchi to make $40 million through partnerships and future projects, regardless of the original rumor. That is a prediction, not confirmation of the earlier trade. He thinks Kimchi’s advantage is having no obligation to debate CT: travel, friends, and compelling vlogs can continue working without turning the brand into a market-commentary service.
6. Tokenization’s market size matters only if assets become usable
Saeed Badreg explains Sunrise’s origin through an inadequacy in interoperability alone: “Just bringing an asset over from one blockchain to another doesn’t really solve the problem.” Internet capital markets require healthy, liquid markets and useful financial activity after the bridge transaction. He puts equities at approximately $160 trillion against crypto around $1.5–$2 trillion; even 1% migration would represent more than $1 trillion of value.
His stablecoin analogy is about demand invisible to people already well served. An American with easy dollar access can miss the importance of that access elsewhere. Badreg invokes stablecoins’ growth and Tether’s Treasury purchases to argue that making an asset globally accessible reveals demand that incumbents underestimated. The mechanism is distribution: “You completely have no idea how much demand is out there for a particular asset.”
Badreg says tokenized equities were below $1 billion “last year” and have expanded roughly 30X over about a year and a half. He describes the growth as a hockey stick and thinks even his own team underestimates the eventual scale. The hosts later loosely restate the $160 trillion figure as broader tradable assets; Badreg initially introduces it as the equity-market opportunity rather than supplying a reconciled market taxonomy.
7. Global access and cheaper capital formation are separate tokenization opportunities
Badreg’s response to Americans asking why they need tokenized US stocks is blunt: “It’s not for you then.” Their opportunity might instead be exposure to DeepSeek, Unitree, or SK Hynix. He says Sunrise has been meeting people and regulators internationally, including during a Shanghai visit, and hopes Chinese equities can reach these rails. “Hopefully soon” remains an aspiration, not a launch announcement or guaranteed access timetable.
Banks supplies the investment puzzle that made DeepSeek interesting to him: a valuation around $10 billion versus the roughly $300–$500 billion figures being discussed for major American AI companies at the time. Were the latter really worth about 50 times as much? The discussion does not resolve that valuation question; it uses the inaccessible comparison to explain why investors might want distribution beyond their domestic brokerage universe.
The second opportunity is companies raising capital without following the conventional IPO route. Badreg estimates that a serious US listing is unlikely to cost less than roughly $30 million and can require 1.5–2 years of organizational change. He qualifies that estimate as based on numbers he has seen, rather than personal IPO experience. A good company earning tens of millions might still find that process economically unattractive.
Banks corroborates the burden through his own SPAC experience with B. Riley, including the need to raise a PIPE, and says taking a company private is also expensive. Ansem connects tokenization to Hyperliquid’s distribution of value to users and team members. Badreg sees convergence with broader capital formation, citing a16z’s expansion into frontier businesses: crypto rails could serve operating companies whose businesses are not themselves crypto.
8. MemeFi exposes the cultural component already present in stock markets
Badreg says he initially thought pairing memes with stocks made little sense, then changed his mind after watching the activity closely. Traditional finance, he argues, understates how much assets trade on “narratives, community, culture, momentum.” Tesla, GameStop, and Nvidia illustrate his point: they are companies with financial statements, but also communities with identities. Tokenization makes that cultural layer more directly accessible to new trading behavior.
Eli Ben-Sasson interprets the experiment as isolating attention and narrative from the conventional asset, while Tulip King supplies the uncomfortable counterexample: the meme could perform well while its paired stock tanks. Badreg accepts that the structure can deliver “the best of both worlds” or “the worst of both worlds.” His enthusiasm is for experimentation and participation, not a claim that attaching an equity automatically improves an investment’s economics.
Tulip places the experiment in crypto’s longer history. Many assets traded on Bittrex and Cryptopia in 2017, or during 2020–2021, failed; he thinks those failures helped reveal which mechanisms worked. “They didn’t call them meme coins back in the day. They just called them altcoins.” Badreg also sees tokenization forcing public-company CEOs to take positions, with resistance and eventual acceptance resembling earlier battles around stablecoins.
9. Sunrise’s product is the market around the token
Badreg identifies a strong market-maker network as the first requirement for usable tokenized equities. Coming from the trading world, he emphasizes understanding how liquidity providers actually operate rather than assuming they appear after issuance. The goal is an asset that can trade reliably across an ecosystem, not a token whose existence technically proves that an off-chain security has been represented on a blockchain.
Mint-and-redeem infrastructure provides the second requirement. If a tokenized stock trades above or below its reference market price, authorized participants need a practical way to arbitrage the discrepancy. That mechanism is what can pull prices back toward one another. Badreg treats it as fundamental plumbing: without working issuance and redemption, an apparent listing may not become an efficient market for ordinary users.
Distribution is the third requirement, encompassing centralized exchanges, wallets, DeFi applications, aggregators, routers, and DEXs. Sunrise tries to combine the components into something that looks simple externally but is difficult internally. Badreg’s claim is conditional: solve enough of these connected problems and a team can launch 100 assets on Solana while maintaining functioning markets, then expand from there.
Asset selection also requires judgment. The initial heuristic was to bring whatever the community wanted, but Badreg describes that community as highly opinionated and difficult to satisfy consistently. His criticism of indiscriminate catalogs is memorable: “We have 8,000 stocks,” but “you have zero markets.” He prefers listings that capture attention, provoke research, and make a trader ask why this particular asset is arriving now.
10. Programmable equities and social participation create different sources of demand
Badreg rejects a simple contest between spot tokenized stocks and stock perpetuals. Spot markets support ownership and composability; perps support hedging and more complicated strategies. “You’re trying to make Apple stock programmable.” The objective is not merely replicating a brokerage position on another screen, but allowing assets to participate in financial operations that other protocols, bots, and agents can execute together.
His example is moving collateral through several operations that conventionally might require 2–3 days, 4–5 companies, and repeated reconciliation. On-chain infrastructure could let a user or agent coordinate those steps programmatically. The challenge he leaves to Solana developers is concrete: what can someone do with a tokenized stock that they cannot already do through traditional finance or the applications on their phone?
A different source of growth comes from younger people’s willingness to trade and share publicly. Badreg and Tulip King speculate about participation moving from below 1%, perhaps 0.1%, among earlier 18-year-old cohorts toward much larger current numbers; Tulip suggests 10–20%. They do not establish those figures as measured statistics. Their underlying observation is a cultural shift toward active investing, visible portfolios, and earning from capital rather than labor.
Ansem offers the darker version: AI could concentrate economic power in a few companies while displacing jobs, leaving ownership of those companies increasingly important. Badreg adds reports of banks restricting AI-agent access and cites the interpretation that bots were moving deposits toward better yields. He frames that interpretation as incumbent resistance to competition; the conversation does not establish it as the banks’ documented reason for restricting access.
11. Starknet’s L1 discussion reflects a changed problem, not an abandoned scaling capability
Eli Ben-Sasson introduces himself through academic cryptography, his realization at a 2013 Bitcoin conference that zero-knowledge techniques could help scalability as well as privacy, and subsequent work co-founding Zcash and StarkWare. His description of StarkWare is “the skunk works or the Bell Labs of crypto”: a research organization turning inventions into usable systems. That is his positioning, rather than a neutral ranking of competing technologies.
He says a Starknet community vote concerning becoming an L1 concluded that day with substantial support. The next step is to investigate and build toward that direction, rather than claim the migration is already complete. The intended combination includes post-quantum security, programmable privacy, and improved usability. He describes the prospective network as a “safe haven” or high ground if a quantum threat materializes.
The strategic change has two parts. Starknet successfully built Ethereum-scaling technology, but Ethereum currently has multiple scaling options and insufficient demand for that capability alone. Separately, Starknet’s security as an L2 depends on Ethereum’s migration speed. Ben-Sasson characterizes the community’s message as: “We’re not confident that Ethereum’s gonna move fast enough for our safety, so we’re gonna move ourselves.”
12. The “quantum tsunami” is a preparedness thesis with an uncertain clock
Asked when a quantum threat might arrive, Ben-Sasson first says, “I don’t have the crystal ball. I don’t know.” Pressed for a guess, he identifies “the next two years” as the period when he would be most worried. His reasoning is accelerating innovation across multiple quantum-computing teams and hardware approaches. He does not provide a probability estimate or assert that an attack is certain within that window.
The metaphor carries his prioritization: “This is the damn ark that you can board if the flood comes.” Living on an ark is not necessarily the most convenient experience, but convenience becomes secondary if a house and garden sit beneath 100 feet of water. He therefore frames the prospective L1 around safety under a particular threat, rather than primarily as another competition over transaction-speed marketing.
Ben-Sasson nevertheless claims Starknet already offers superior efficiency, cost, safety, and usability, and highlights account abstraction and privacy that can compose with DeFi. The interview does not supply comparative benchmarks for those categorical claims. His point is that these capabilities already exist in the technology; the new strategic argument is to make security less dependent on how quickly another chain changes its underlying cryptography.
AI enters the same discussion from both sides. StarkWare is exploring hyperscale transactions and micropayments for agent commerce, without announcing a finished product. Ben-Sasson also worries AI could accelerate quantum development or weaken existing cryptographic assumptions. He argues that zk-STARKs’ reliance on hash functions provides a safer foundation against those threats: infrastructure for agents, and infrastructure designed to withstand advances in the tools agents use.
13. A zk-STARK lets an untrusted operator prove that the work was correct
Ben-Sasson’s explanation begins with Darth Vader processing a day of Bitcoin transactions and reporting the new system state. Without a proof, the concern is obvious: Vader might simply assign the bitcoin to himself. A zk-STARK changes the acceptance rule. The operator can do the computation, but the result is accepted only after a verifier checks a short cryptographic proof that the required rules were followed.
In the example, the proof is smaller than a Bitcoin block, while standing behind the much larger set of transaction updates. Ben-Sasson calls it a kind of cryptographic “cement” enforcing integrity, reliability, and correct execution even when the operator is not being watched. He believes Satoshi would have embraced usable ZK, noting that early discussion recognized its privacy potential before practical implementations could deliver the broader scaling capability.
The eventual user experience he wants resembles handing over a $20 bill: a transaction between counterparties without an intermediary observing and controlling everything. He extends that intimacy to lending, borrowing, investing, and perpetuals, with usability comparable to Robinhood. The important addition is self-custody and privacy rather than a central application holding funds and seeing every action: familiar interface quality applied to decentralized financial relationships.
14. Long adoption timelines do not excuse waiting passively for developers
Ben-Sasson accepts Ansem’s observation that Zcash spent many years without strong market recognition. He dates the underlying paper he co-authored with six other cryptographers to 2014 and Zcash’s implementation to 2016; meaningful attention took roughly nine years after launch. “It was painful,” he acknowledges. The admission preserves a distinction between believing a technology is important and expecting markets to recognize it quickly.
His comparison is monetary adoption: paper money took centuries to become accepted, while ATMs and credit cards required decades of trust-building. On that scale, digital money taking years to establish which properties matter is unsurprising. He applies the same patience to Starknet. Privacy, scarcity, and security may each become salient at different times; his stated commitment is to keep building the properties he believes usable money needs.
He is less forgiving about the original ecosystem-development strategy. “Build and they will come” did not produce a great return on the funding deployed. Some strong DeFi and gaming projects emerged, but too few funded teams became durable, self-sustaining businesses. That assessment is an explicit change in approach: excellent infrastructure and grants alone did not reliably generate the applications and users the network needed.
StarkWare is consequently building some applications itself while continuing to support external teams. Ben-Sasson names SuperVega, at supervega.app, as a retail options product with a focus on good UX and exposure to assets including Bitcoin, Zcash, and STRK. He hopes internally developed applications can bring users and attention more directly, rather than leaving the entire demand problem to independent developers.
15. Tulip’s bullishness is measured in decades and contingent winners
Tulip King enters with the opposite emotional register from Ansem: “I’m, like, so fucking bullish.” He thinks the scale described by Sunrise is directionally right—trillions in assets and potentially quadrillions in trading—and asks who genuinely expects less activity on crypto rails two years from now. Repeated over successive periods, he thinks that migration adds multiple orders of magnitude to today’s markets.
His HYPE “100 bagger” statement has a stated premise: “Just presume that Hyperliquid wins.” He accepts that another perpetuals venue could become the better allocation and require a switch. Against the upside he imagines, hypothetical HYPE prices of $60 or $40 do not alter his long-term enthusiasm. “I’ll sell my kidney” is the deliberately extreme expression of that conviction, rather than an articulated risk-management rule.
He extends the opportunity to options, lending, spot markets, and other DeFi businesses, with buybacks supplying the link to tokenholders. The horizon is the next decade, not the next week. “This is my retirement cycle.” He says his own portfolio is at highs and criticizes treating a disappointing broad market as proof that no attractive assets exist: the distinction is which projects investors actually own.
16. Options preserve financial exposures that perpetuals cannot replace
Tulip’s Derive thesis begins with the payoff structure. A perpetual is a leveraged linear exposure with path risk, which is why liquidation exists to protect protocol solvency. Options can offer convex outcomes. In a market with extreme tails such as crypto, he regards that difference as economically valuable rather than an inconvenient product feature that superior perpetuals interfaces will simply eliminate.
Options also permit hedges, spreads, and positions expressing a view on volatility rather than the asset’s direction. Tulip allows that perpetuals might compete with retail zero-day options activity, but says the rest of the options market remains largely untapped. His argument is therefore not that one interface wins all speculative trading; it is that distinct exposures support a separate market as crypto’s financial structure matures.
He quotes Derive as having around 90% of options premiums and sees that leadership as a reason not to overcomplicate the selection. His estimates of remaining volume growth are deliberately rough: perhaps 10,000X, perhaps 100,000X, “however many zeros it is,” to reach traditional-finance scale. Those are his order-of-magnitude expressions of the opportunity, with explicit uncertainty about the calculation, rather than a detailed valuation model.
Competition does not invalidate owning the present leader. He would consider Lighter or Variational once they show 20–30% share, and names Hyperliquid and Paradex as other potential challengers. If another venue genuinely overtakes Derive, “you’ll see it coming.” He thinks buying after that evidence can still leave substantial upside, because the investment premise is expansion through another order of magnitude or two.
17. The barbell favors distinct exposures over multiplying correlated positions
Asked for his largest holdings, Tulip opens with “my entire net worth is Eli Lilly,” then describes Bitcoin, HYPE, and Zcash as roughly similarly sized positions whose relative weights change with prices. He also says early purchases of Pearl and Derive have grown into significant holdings. The conversation conveys strong concentration and several meaningful exposures, rather than a precise, internally reconciled portfolio allocation.
His governing categories are “coins that are money” and “coins that make money.” The first basket includes Bitcoin, Zcash, and Pearl, with possible comparisons such as Zcash versus Monero or Pearl versus other AI-linked assets. The second contains operating protocols whose economic activity benefits their tokens. He wants investors to articulate which role an asset serves, rather than rely on a generic expectation that crypto rises.
Cards and Venice appeal partly because they occupy different lanes from Hyperliquid and Derive. “I don’t think you should be chasing beta. I think you should be chasing exposures.” His proposed monitoring process is to identify each market’s leader, own it, and use a Grok bot for daily updates on competitors. Reallocation should follow durable competitive gains, not a single strong day or week.
Pump fits his operating-business framework through execution: PumpSwap, its application, and its bridge extend the business vertically. He also resists treating wallets and social trading apps as purely zero-sum rivals. A Pump coin traded through FOMO can generate income for both, while Phantom provides cash and spending functionality. He thinks the businesses benefit from one another more than their competitive public positioning acknowledges.
18. Stablecoin adoption challenges the claim that every successful chain needs native money
Tulip says he once liked the monetary thesis for Ethereum: growing blockchain economies would naturally use ETH as money or collateral because it lacked an external counterparty. The same logic could apply to SOL. His objection is empirical rather than a denial that the theory once sounded attractive: “It just doesn’t show in the numbers.” He says the assets most widely used as collateral increasingly are stablecoins.
Solana’s swap pairs provide the distinction. SOL still participates heavily because of meme trading, but tokenized stocks are being paired against USDC. Someone bullish on stock tokenization is therefore also bullish on USDC becoming the denomination for that activity. Tulip sees similar behavior in Ethereum’s lending and trading markets, weakening the assumption that ecosystem growth automatically expands native-token monetary use.
The resulting problem is counterintuitive: “The more mature Solana and Ethereum get and the more robust they become, the less and less the native asset is actually being used like money.” For Tulip, successful adoption can undermine one component of the token thesis rather than confirm it. His argument depends on following what users choose as collateral and trading currency, not merely counting applications or transactions.
He consequently thinks ETH and SOL need to be evaluated more as assets that make money. That is a categorical shift in his own framework, and he connects it to their disappointing performance around earlier highs. It is not a claim that the networks have no useful activity. The contested question is how much of that usefulness reaches the native asset through monetary demand or captured revenue.
19. Scaling blockspace can help users while weakening the scarcity premium
Tulip’s second objection is that transaction growth need not produce fee growth. He says Solana transactions have increased sharply while fees have fallen because the network is doing what it should: scaling. His analogy is NFTs. An individual collection can be scarce, while NFTs as an asset class are not. Likewise, existing blockspace can feel scarce before networks expand capacity or users adopt alternatives.
Ethereum’s expensive swaps helped make competing chains attractive. Tulip asks how much Solana could raise fees before Aptos, Sui, or another network captured marginal demand. He is not denying technological differences between chains; the issue is whether a network can preserve enough pricing power to support its valuation while continuing to deliver the cheap execution that attracts users in the first place.
He states the counterargument himself: a critical mass of applications could make Solana’s shared environment uniquely valuable. Users might pay for access to Pump, DePIN networks, and other interoperating applications rather than interchangeable execution capacity. “If I’m wrong, it will be for that reason.” He thinks investors can wait for evidence of stronger economics, because sustained fee generation is unlikely to appear invisibly overnight.
Tulip cites roughly $300 billion for Ethereum and $90 billion for Solana when arguing that a quarter-trillion dollars or more is misallocated. He explicitly rejects dollar-for-dollar rotation: $100 billion lost from one asset might redirect only $10–$50 billion elsewhere. His provocative comparison is investors accepting SOL at “20,000X earnings” while rejecting HYPE at 100–200X; those are his framing multiples, not independently calculated figures supplied by the show.
20. Ansem disputes how quickly holders abandon ecosystem and monetary valuations
Ansem understands Tulip’s mechanism but disagrees with the proposed capital rotation. He does not think ETH and SOL holders have historically treated the assets simply as businesses. They also represent money and exposure to applications that will be built later. Reduced native-token use will not necessarily make those holders decide, all at once, that “it’s not money.” Existing valuation habits can persist despite changed usage.
He grants more of the argument for new, traditional allocators. Someone asking “What am I buying here?” may struggle to value a base-layer token whose economic capture is unclear. Ethereum’s 2020–2021 fees once supplied a more straightforward numerical case, and the loss of that picture matters. Ansem acknowledges being an early ETH bear while also admitting strong personal bias toward SOL and its ecosystem.
Their clearest agreement concerns applications’ optionality. Ansem thinks a successful business token can become more money-like more easily than a chain can capture substantially more revenue. Pump using custom pairs illustrates the former route. His remaining SOL defense is exposure to applications that do not yet exist; Tulip calls that “an extremely reasonable take” and also recognizes the involved, talented Solana team as an advantage.
21. The dotcom analogy favors finding durable businesses after infrastructure scarcity fades
Tulip compares Ethereum’s earlier position with Cisco during the dotcom boom: investors faced an enormous new addressable market and bought the provider of scarce connectivity. The internet thesis could be right while the scarcity premium attached to its infrastructure supplier eventually became excessive. He thinks Ethereum occupied a similar position when useful blockspace was difficult to obtain, before broader scaling changed the supply picture.
His preferred point of comparison is roughly 2003. The broader technology index took many years to recover—he loosely recalls “ten or sixteen years”—while selected companies such as Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft became powerful long-term investments much earlier. His claim is about dispersion: investors did not need the old index leaders or the whole market to regain highs before identifying businesses with substantial future compounding potential.
The response he advocates is labor rather than prediction theater. Tulip says he has about 120 slides assembled and intends another multi-hour discussion of worthwhile projects. Four hours produced a list; roughly two weeks of investigation followed. He thinks a dedicated investor might be one to three weeks from developing much better theses. That is his encouragement to research, not evidence that those eventual selections are guaranteed winners.
22. Pearl connects Bitcoin’s security-budget problem to the AI infrastructure buildout
Tulip’s categorical Zcash call is “Zcash is going to $1 trillion,” immediately qualified on timing: “I couldn’t tell you when.” His broader monetary theory is zero-sum competition for liquidity and store-of-value demand. Bitcoin gained room because the dollar had weaknesses; alternative crypto monies need weaknesses in Bitcoin to create their own opening. In his formulation, “good” money succeeds by filling a vacuum left by worse money.
Privacy, quantum exposure, and the security budget are longstanding Bitcoin questions, but he thinks scale and proximity now make people care. Zcash reopening the market for alternative money is the signal he watches. He nevertheless calls quantum a “pretty bad narrative,” without developing the promised explanation. That remains a substantive difference from Ben-Sasson’s urgency, rather than a resolved debate between their technical positions.
Pearl addresses the security-budget branch of the thesis. Tulip points to public bitcoin miners moving toward AI because converting power into AI computation can pay more than mining bitcoin. He also qualifies the evidence: Bitcoin has experienced hash-rate downturns before, price weakness affects mining, and conditions are recovering somewhat. He explicitly does not want to over-project a temporary hash-rate decline into a permanent conclusion.
His simplified description of Pearl is: take Bitcoin, remove SHA-256, and insert matrix multiplication. Instead of competing independently for energy, mining could connect with the vast effort to convert energy into intelligence. He likes preserving a Bitcoin-like monetary design rather than adding broad programmability, and says proof of stake is “bad money” in his framework. The attraction is a differentiated monetary exposure, not merely another AI-themed application token.
23. Research begins by finding upstream thinkers and testing what seems stupid
Tulip says he lacks a rigid research template because markets occupy most of his waking attention. He deliberately seeks “off-path thinkers”: fiction, lawyers, new AI tools, and unfamiliar protocols all contribute to how he forms connections. When a rising project looks stupid, he buys a little and tries it. The discipline is exposure to evidence before dismissal, rather than treating the first reaction as a finished judgment.
Before Twitter likes became private, he traced good traders backward through what they liked before posting their own ideas. Following those chains could lead to an upstream thinker with 400 followers or fewer than 5,000. He applies the same method to podcast guests, books, and newsletters: someone with good taste may point to valuable sources outside an investor’s familiar subject area.
One discovery is a fast-rising chart associated with a Russian-ruble stablecoin, whose name is unclear in the captions. Tulip links interest to capital flight during the Ukraine war and conversion into Tether. Another route is inspecting GitHub integrations and commits around projects discussed by Vitalik, including privacy-related work. His point is that product dependencies and actual development can reveal connections that headline market commentary misses.
He also finds revenue-producing, buyback-oriented projects between roughly $5 million and $100 million in value, but identifies a moral quandary. Publicizing a legitimate undervaluation could attract followers who overbid it, creating an exit for him. He says he has not promoted those discoveries in that manner: “Integrity’s the most important thing in crypto.” The research opportunity and the audience-incentive problem appear together, rather than as separate subjects.
24. A dashboard multiple starts the investigation; persistence of revenue finishes it
Tulip gives GMX as an explicitly unfinished example and tells listeners not to rush into the low-cap token. Looking at DeFi Llama, he sees a valuation around 1.2 times revenue alongside several months of growth and asks whether it might be cheap. The multiple does not answer the question. He wants to investigate the actual markets and activity responsible for producing that revenue.
AI helps retrieve underlying information: “Claude, like, go pull, like, the actual holders on this.” His technical background makes it easier to check whether growth comes from something temporary or a mechanism he thinks will persist. The investment case is not merely that revenue rose. It is understanding why it rose, then connecting that explanation to a broader view of how the market develops.
Ansem emphasizes the time horizon required for information to become reflected in prices. Three or four months of weakness is not necessarily long against a thesis lasting six months, a year, or more. He recalls repeatedly wondering why an asset was not higher, only to recognize that other investors had not reached the same conclusion. His accompanying warning is that excessive leverage or short deadlines can prevent waiting.
Tulip adds an uncomfortable effect of daily media work: discussing the market every day made him more short-term oriented, and he had to relearn longer-term thinking. Sometimes the right content is explaining that there is no good trade. Ansem says producing the show has deepened his research without changing his trade frequency. Their experiences differ; constant market exposure does not automatically improve every part of execution.
25. Trading entertainment rewards communication as well as trading skill
Tulip’s route into the business runs through electronics and firmware work associated with CERN and a Beijing particle-physics lab, radar jammers, and four years in engineering at Messari. Crypto occupied his free time until he took a substantial pay cut to work in it. A public Aster trade brought him onto ThreadGuy’s stream, then into Counterparty’s creative work, partnerships, and distribution operations.
The career decision was partly about enjoyment: “Am I about to go from being a successful engineer to working for a Twitch streamer?” He chose the job because it looked exceptionally fun. The commercial thesis is more specific than simply liking streaming. He and the Counterparty team believe active investing is becoming entertainment, and that people capable of explaining trades compellingly can build valuable audiences around it.
His chess analogy distinguishes the best player from the biggest creator: Magnus Carlsen can be outstanding without being the largest entertainment channel. Banks extends the parallel to gaming, where elite decision-making and entertaining delivery are separate strengths. Trading content therefore need not be reserved for someone with a nine- or ten-figure P&L. It needs enough genuine ability and an audience that receives something worth returning for.
Kimchi supplies Counterparty’s observable distribution example: an offhand discussion became its best TikTok, then the next day’s Kimchi discussion did so again. Banks explains the feedback loop more bluntly, acknowledging that he once announced he would farm a big clip and told a “fabricated story” and an “exaggerated story” about Kimchi. The account is evidence of deliberate attention engineering, not corroboration of the lore being amplified.
26. The media business compounds through reach and distribution efficiency
Tulip asks listeners to imagine a stream with 100 live viewers generating a million clip impressions. The commercial audience is much larger than the live counter suggests. He focuses on two measures: live viewership, which seeds engagement, and total impressions, which reflect the distribution operation around the show. Clips are not a peripheral byproduct; converting a stream into widely viewed moments is part of the product.
Growth can occur in both dimensions. More live viewers expand the starting audience, while better moment selection, clipping, and distribution increase impressions per viewer or per stream. Tulip says Counterparty has grown both and has not yet found a ceiling. He calls the combination an “exponential business”: the practical claim is that improvements in audience size and distribution efficiency can multiply rather than merely add.
The operating questions are concrete: what sponsors pay per impression, what clippers cost, whether the impression base can grow, and how efficiently output is produced. Skilled clippers are difficult to find and need to be retained and treated well. Tulip describes that distribution backend as a major part of his back-office responsibility, rather than presenting the entire company as a host speaking spontaneously into a camera.
Ansem adds a trading benefit to working as a research group: discussion exposes missing assumptions. His example is a friend, Jeremy, being bullish on Serum, which prompted Ansem to investigate both Serum and Solana and conclude, “I don’t think it’s Serum. I think it’s Sol.” He thinks writing and speaking with people who disagree can create insights that reading another isolated market post would not.
27. Audience wealth and public records are proposed checks on bad incentives
Tulip argues that sustained financial-media economics favor an audience retaining and growing capital. Content is free and paid for by sponsors, who want customers with money and trading volume. A viewer who blows up provides little future activity. The claimed alignment is therefore lifetime customer value: “Your audience getting richer” is the win condition he describes, while acknowledging that saying something on stream cannot itself guarantee that outcome.
He contrasts that model with making a quick exit at the audience’s expense. The long-term business requires repeatedly providing useful information and preserving relationships. Banks agrees, pointing to trading volume as central to sponsor economics. Their claim is about incentives and intent, not an audited demonstration that every sponsor, recommendation, or trading decision benefits the viewer; the episode supplies the operating logic rather than quantified audience returns.
Tulip thinks public leaderboards can gradually reward better behavior. On FOMO, someone displaying large unrealized gains can fall down the rankings after losing them, while traders who preserved gains rise. He pairs that mechanism with public on-chain records and investigators such as ZachXBT. His expectation is that durable positive operators become distinguishable over time, reducing how much depends on a persuasive narrative at a single moment.
On copy trading, Banks argues that endlessly dumping on followers would eventually exhaust the follower capital available. Tulip suggests some rapid copying may come from sophisticated small funds or bots responding to publicly profitable traders such as Frank. Those are their explanations, not demonstrated identities behind particular transactions. Both think social interfaces make previously specialist wallet-following information accessible to less experienced participants.
28. Crypto’s reputation problem divides the hosts from Tulip’s adoption-first view
Banks sees crypto’s poor branding as an impediment to adoption, especially when people collapse different events into the same accusation. His example is a coin being rugged versus an unrelated community coin losing attention to another version: charts can look similar while responsibility differs. Eli Ben-Sasson adds that CT attacks even wholesome material, recalling hostile responses about his family after his following grew; changing the tone of content alone is no cure.
Tulip asks whether fixing the overall brand is necessary. People say they hate the internet, social media, and AI while using all three constantly. If useful crypto products keep growing, reputational dislike may not stop adoption. His personal answer is to run his own operation well rather than solve every public narrative: “It will resolve itself, or it won’t resolve itself,” but he can still try to behave responsibly.
Banks’s pushback is that finance demands deeper trust than using a search engine or homework tool because users commit capital. Tulip accepts that distinction as “a good point.” Banks expects the categories eventually to blend into ordinary finance and trading, perhaps without people saying “crypto” at all. Until then, he sees media and credible examples as important bridges; Ansem names Hyperliquid’s Jeff as an especially strong builder example.
29. Stock-market narratives can finance the reality they initially exaggerate
Ansem finds AI-company communications unsettling: relatively small stock declines seem to trigger reassuring headlines, making market prices appear almost as important as technical progress. He also worries about eventual OpenAI and Anthropic issuance after extraordinarily fast rises toward valuations he loosely describes as $1.5–$2 trillion. New models could improve the economics again, he concedes, so he expects substantial changes of mind rather than a simple one-way market.
Tulip disagrees that energetic promotion is itself strong evidence of weakness. He calls his view “hyperstitious”: acting around an imagined future can help construct that future. A higher stock price can improve financing terms, support employee compensation, and give a company resources to grow. He thinks corporate leaders have learned something crypto discovered earlier, when less constrained communications made reflexive price-and-adoption loops easier to observe.
Tesla during COVID is his main example. In his telling, Elon promoted a valuation the existing business could not yet support, issued substantial stock, financed gigafactories, and then expanded production toward the implied future. “The financial illusion that Elon created back-constructed the reality moving forward.” The argument is causal: an elevated price can become an input into operating success, rather than merely an inaccurate statement about current fundamentals.
He extends the loop to crypto. Publicity around a major successful trade might attract users to one exchange rather than another, creating the activity that later justifies enthusiasm. HYPE used as collateral supplies a more direct, though he says relatively small, connection between token price and trading capacity. Ansem accepts that companies understand their market impact, while the broader concern about late-cycle equity weakness remains unresolved.
30. Tulip would rather own a differentiated opportunity than price an AI utopia
Tulip shares concern about the AI complex unless government intervention changes the picture, which he says is definitely possible. He is not interested in buying dips there. Eli Lilly appeals partly as equity exposure less entangled with that trade. The episode does not develop a drug-level investment case; his stated preference concerns a separate opportunity set alongside crypto assets where he believes substantial upside remains.
His personal-game-theory argument starts from trillion-dollar AI-company valuations. If those companies outperform assets he thinks can rise 10–100X over a decade, the world may change so radically that his original portfolio choice matters much less. “I’ll either be dead or euphoric.” The nuclear-war comparison makes the same point: he sees limited value in optimizing a portfolio around an outcome that overwhelms the ordinary purpose of investing.
Fiction provides another way he explores extreme outcomes. Both speakers have read Accelerando; Tulip is reading Daemon and Neuromancer and praises Red Rising. Ansem worries about creative thought converging into an internet hive mind. Tulip prefers a variance framework: the internet and AI can produce much more low-quality consumption while also letting exceptional creators reach scales and niches that previously were unavailable.
The practical implication he draws is that original thought may stand out more amid automated replies and generic articles. He connects his own writing, following, and job opportunity to offering reasonably clear, distinctive ideas in that environment. The broader principle echoes the earlier discussion of intelligence becoming commoditized: commitment, consistency, agency, and the ability to produce something people actually value can become increasingly consequential differentiators.
31. Mature financial rails may let old crypto-social ideas work on a second attempt
Ansem asks why relatively few projects seem to emerge from nothing into substantial new businesses. Tulip admits he expected FWB to do much better and remains interested in Paper Trade, Cards, and Venice. His explanation is that large incoming flows require mature protocols capable of absorbing them. A slower pace of financial invention may be part of the same maturation that makes institutional-scale activity possible, rather than simply evidence of stagnation.
Beyond that initial concentration, Tulip hopes “everything old becomes new again.” ENS, IPFS, decentralized web infrastructure, and Lens-like shared social graphs could be reconsidered once scaled networks have real users. He gives a creator’s concrete frustration: Counterparty cannot simply carry ThreadGuy’s Twitter followers across every other distribution platform. A shared graph with different interfaces and algorithms could address a genuine operational problem rather than exist solely as a token story.
Ansem’s version is trading as “the world’s greatest MMORPG,” whose characters and histories are still scattered across disconnected profiles. Wallets can prove early protocol use, profitable activity, and experience, while ZK tools might selectively conceal details. If trillions of dollars and their associated users move on chain, he thinks systems that surface reputation and activity could become more useful. Tulip agrees, but says buying the old social tokens now would be premature.
Friend.tech keeps the optimism grounded in losses. Both loved the product; Tulip traded through spreadsheets and recalls high volume, large fees, gains, and eventual damage. Ansem says he may have had the largest airdrop, round-tripped it entirely, and “didn’t sell a single dollar.” Neither treats that experience as proof the category is finished. They expect to keep experimenting, while the exchange preserves how an exciting social product can still be a disastrous holding.
Full transcript
Welcome back to Market Bubble, a show about investing in yourself, where we feel an overwhelming majority of young men today are in a losing position. How are we positioned? Find out today and every Thursday live on twitch.tv/fazebanks at 1:00 PM PST, as well as... Oh, my God, it's been a minute.
Yo, what it do? What it do? What it do?
As well as Ansem's Twitter, and his Kick, and his Twitch, and whatever the fuck else he's doing.
Kick.com/Ansem.
Yes, sir. Yes, sir.
Kick.com/ B-O-K-N-O-I-Z-O.
Um, this is, this is pretty brutal, but I feel like I have to kick the show off with this because I just went on a 30- or 40-minute rant about Kimchi. My whole pre-show was basically the Kimchi show. His Twitter just got hacked. You actually broke that news to me as soon as we came into the green room. They just posted this tweet. This isn’t from Kimchi; it’s a fake link to some bullshit scam meme coin. Just stay away from this shit.
What happened? I saw you tweet about links or something. You can get hacked if you click on a link? Is there a bug or something?
Yeah, I think it was a bug on X’s side with showing how many sessions you have on your Twitter, not an actual hack type of thing. It was basically showing way too many sessions on your account. Bro, I had like 1,000 sessions. I was like, “What the fuck?” and cleared all my shit.
But I think it was just something weird on their side. I don’t think it was an account hack.
It’s insane.
Yeah.
Pretty brutal that he got hacked. Stay safe. Before we get into the show, is there anything you’d like to update us on? It’s been a little bit. We’ve been kind of locked back in this last week, but you’ve been traveling like a motherfucker. Do you want to talk about what you’ve done and sum up the last couple of months? Anything you want to mention about anything, really? We’re all ears.
Yeah, I’ve been all over the place. I’ve been traveling for 2 conferences. I was in Singapore and Korea. Both were cool. The Coinbase trading competition was probably the most fun thing I did. It was a 1-hour-long perps trading competition for their new Coinbase Pro product. It was pretty dope. A fucking intern beat me. I was winning for most of it—
Insane.
—and the intern snuck me at the end. But yeah, it was cool. I spoke in Singapore and did a Market Bubble Live. I did a meme coin panel. I also got roasted on stage by TJ Miller from—what’s the show called? Silicon Valley. He’s a comedian. The dude’s fucking hilarious.
Sick show, though.
Yeah, he’s cool. It was funny. I met a lot of important people and had some good conversations. I think people are generally bullish on specific assets in crypto and looking for new things to invest in, which is cool. I’m finally back in the seat, back at my desk.
Thank God. Um, we have an update coming from one of our sponsors at Venice AI, home of the VVV coin, which is one of the only things that's been crushing it the last couple weeks. It's about the Lumara Film Festival that we are judges on. Solana getting involved, and this is all coming to a head October 26th at The Roxy. Are you gonna be in LA for this?
October 26th.
Probably not, right?
It's in New York. It's in New York.
Oh, is it in New York?
If it's at The Roxy, I'll definitely be there. Shit, I'm that close.
Oh, there's a Roxy in New York?
Yeah.
Maybe I just extend then. I'm supposed to be in New York this weekend as well. Um, but this is exciting. Obviously they've been working on this for fucking months. Um, this is the motherfucker who did that crazy interview with us. What's his name again?
Oh, bro, fucking uh, damn, T- Simon. Simon? Simon?
Simon from, um-
Simon is a fucking GOAT, bro. That dude's-
What is it called? Solana? It's called-
That dude's Solana, Solana, the Solana, uh, weekly call thing, the ecosystem call.
Yeah, the ecosystem call. One of the best interviews I've ever done. Um-
I think it is. Like, it's up there for me too.
Yeah, it's really... It was... He, he's really good at what he does. It was great. Um, but yeah, they're getting involved in this as well. Great to see it. Great to see it. Keeping it local, keeping it in the fam. Um, yeah, man, listen, markets. Obviously, the title on this stream is “It’s a Lot Worse Than We Think.” We talked a little bit about this pre-show. It’s been a rough couple of weeks, very rocky. I know you flipped back and forth between bullish and bearish a couple of times. You want to give us your raw thoughts as of October 22, 2026, at 1:47 p.m.?
Time-sensitive.
Yeah, time-sensitive. And it could change, guys. It could change. How do you feel about markets? How do you feel about crypto right now? Where the fuck are we? I’m down a fucking crib today. Is Ansem going to come and save us? How are we feeling? What’s good?
1. Crypto Turns Bearish
Yeah, I’m pretty bearish right now, unfortunately. I was bullish 2 weeks ago. I honestly thought we were going to get another leg up on a lot of the AI names and stock names, and crypto was going to lead like it had been leading in Q3. I was wrong about memory making new all-time highs and wrong about semis making new all-time highs. They retraced pretty aggressively.
At the same time, from a technical-analysis perspective, we have the war continuing, oil ripping pretty hard, and rates still being high. I pulled back a little bit. We also have the confluence of all this AI shit disrupting a fuck ton of things. We’ve had all these vulnerabilities come up in the past week. The PHP one was huge. We’re at a turning point where AI is getting really good and being used to find vulnerabilities in software that humans hadn’t found as quickly. It’s affecting people’s processes, and I think we’re responding to that: What’s going to break? How are we going to have to respond to different things?
But the core issue is that I think we’re at the tail end of a macro cycle for equities. A lot of the equities that have dominated since the tail end of 2023 and end of 2022 are up a lot, and there’s a lot of unrealized profit there. We haven’t really seen any significant pullbacks in some of the main stock names, and I think we’re getting that now as people de-risk and take profits. Crypto outperformed equities pretty hard in Q3. Memory topped at the end of June, literally the same week Bitcoin bottomed. Crypto had front-run a lot of the weakness in equities, so it bottomed earlier. It was already oversold, and we had that bounce in Q3.
What’s really tricky here is whether we’re at the beginning of a bull market for crypto, or whether that was a countertrend bounce and we’re going to continue some kind of bear and consolidation trend. If it’s the latter, it’s going to catch a lot of people offside, which is why I took some positions off over the past few days. If you continue to see weakness on the equity side, especially in the big names—
Are you de-risking or shorting? Are you shorting?
I’m doing both. I don’t really recommend people shorting, because this isn’t the beginning of this downtrend. For Bitcoin, ETH, and SOL, to be honest, you’re at a pretty key support level, so you’d be shorting into support right now. You have to be very nimble getting in and out. It’s the worst to be wrong on a short, lose money, and then have the thing you were trying to short go down anyway while you don’t have a position. That’s doubly fucked.
I don’t really recommend most people short. You can de-risk and take profit if you’re up on positions, or cut positions if you bought near the top. Then you can reenter wherever you want once things get clearer.
You know, 432, Banks looks stressed. I am fucking stressed, bro. You heard the guy.
Yeah, it’s tricky, bro. It’s a really tricky spot. I’m not going to lie; it’s tricky. I was super bullish the last time we had an episode. I was like, “Yeah, I think we’re pulling back to a key level. Good spot for support to hold.” I expected equities to do well, and now I’m flipping to the bear side.
So we’ll see if I’m wrong. Hopefully I am and we bounce and rip back to the highs here. But, yeah, I think it’s a good spot to take profit if you’re up.
You don’t love to hear it, and I’m going to take the bear take a lot more seriously now that you’re saying it. We saw Flood screaming from the mountaintops about being bearish these last couple of weeks, and then we saw CT cannibalize him in brutal fashion.
I always like that, bro.
It’s insane, dude.
He’s like, “Fuck it, I gotta get offline.” I feel him, because I’ve been in that spot before. I flipped bearish in September 2025 when I thought it was the top, and I was bearish for a couple of weeks. People were like, “You’re retarded. You’re dumb. You’re an idiot. You don’t know what’s going on.” And then it ripped to all-time highs, and I was like, “Fuck it, I’m gonna buy some Bitcoin here.” Then it nuked on me, and I had to sell after I bought the top.
I feel like you’re especially susceptible to criticism and getting torn apart by CT in bear conditions, because people are losing money.
Yeah.
It’s really easy to dismiss people’s takes or opinions when everything’s up, everybody’s making money, and people are happy. But my real rule of thumb, from the perspective of somebody who’s more normie-coded and doesn’t analyze markets the way you guys do on such a technical level, is to go the other way from general consensus. When I’m watching CT and it’s been as bearish as it has the last two weeks, that makes me bullish.
Yeah.
That’s typically how it goes. Things are too euphoric, that’s when you sell. Things are too grim and bearish, that’s when you buy. It’s a pretty solid strategy when trading, I’ve found. But now that you’re saying that, it’s a little bit sketchy.
Yeah. I think we had a pinpoint call at the bottom, though. If you allocated near the lows like you should have, you should be up a good bit. I think Sol was around $60. Zcash was probably around, what, $400 or $500, maybe?
Again, if you’re watching your calls on Twitter Live, keeping up to date, turning on your notifications, and watching the show week in, week out, the data doesn’t lie. This is the Market Bubble call sheet. This is the maximum gain if you’d sold all of our calls at their peak. We’ve given you some really good calls. At this point, you should still be in profit. So I guess the question is: Is it time to sell a little bit, to de-risk a little bit? It sounds like it is. For our viewers at home who might have a Pump position, a Zcash position, or a VVV position, is it time to sell a little bit?
Yeah, I think it is a good spot to take profit. If you’re up 2x or 3x on those, you can take some profit. I don’t think the bottom from summer gets touched. I think those are the lows; I don’t think we break them. I just think we’re going to have a pullback into a higher-low spot.
Or around the $70K range, maybe?
Yeah, I think so. People are asking me about other coins. The good thing about crypto conditions, when most things are chopping, is that you can have coins that outperform, especially lower-market-cap coins that get a concentrated bid for something. People are asking about Ansem in the chat. A lot of the time I’ve spent over the past few months has been on that. I think I rushed out the first iteration of Ansel Maya because I wanted to show it wasn’t just going to be me bull-posting or posting about the coin. There are going to be other things attached to it, and that’ll be true in the future as well. I don’t want to rush something out that isn’t what I actually want it to be. I’ve been spending a lot of time on it, and I’ll give more updates soon. I don’t want to leak anything.
I can attest to this as well. Obviously, we run a show together, and you and I have been friends for a long time. I’ve seen how you move and operate more than the average person, especially behind the scenes. You’ve been working tirelessly on this. You’re globe-trotting and traveling—you seem to be in a different country every other day. I can attest to that anecdotally.
Yeah.
Paper Trade. Paper Trade.
Bro, I’ve been clicking hard on Paper Trade. Paper Trade is a platform launched by my boy Jez, one of my guys. He’s a very smart trader and investor in crypto. He essentially launched a 1,000x leverage platform on top of Hyperliquid that uses midpoint price calculations for Bitcoin and ETH. It’s a synthetic perps exchange, so you’re not actually opening a position against somebody else. You’re opening a position based on the price. If you lose, that money goes to the house; if you win, you get paid out by the house. When the house has a lot of funds in it, it has ample liquidity to pay out winners. When it doesn’t, it’s kind of like a pool that collects over time.
So we like Paper Trade, just to be clear.
I like Paper Trade a lot. I farmed it early. People have been mad at them because they changed how Paper gets distributed. At the beginning, a large majority of the supply would be distributed based on how much the house was making. They increased the Paper supply over time, but I think that’s good for traders who are actively using the exchange. Before, it benefited farmers more than traders. The max supply was 12.6 billion, I think, and you would hit that after a certain amount of time—something like $500 million in the LP. But now there’s no max supply, and you mint, I think, a million Paper for… I don’t know the exact calculation. You mint more Paper. Can you pull that up?
Sure.
Go down. Go up a little bit. Actually, it’s a more recent post. Could you go to one of their more recent posts? Up or down a bit. Down a little bit. Yeah, “Transferability”—that one. They made it so the token is going to be non-transferable for a longer period of time. Right now, you can stake the token on the exchange to get a portion of all the revenue from the exchange.
Can I just show off a little bit real quick? Nobody’s noticed it or picked up on it, but we’ve made a couple of changes to production. If you look at the theme of our overlay, Z, you can see it’s usually gray, right?
Mm.
When you were talking about being bearish on Bitcoin and the majors, we could switch it to red, so clips and stuff have a visual cue for the tone we’re talking in.
Oh, shit.
You were just talking about Paper Trade, which you’re bullish on, so we can flip it green.
Mm.
Chat, come on now.
That’s hard.
Dude, it’s sick as fuck. That’s so sick. I think it’s cool because—
That’s fire.
The idea was that if you’re scrolling through clips and you see me talking about Bitcoin and it’s green, you just know inherently, without seeing or hearing anything, that my take is bullish.
Yeah.
And vice versa, bearish, whatever. I don't know. It’s a cool little quip. That’s W production.
Yeah, one pair trade I think I’ll give, though: if you want to pair trade, I think holding Bitcoin long on one side and shorting memory stocks on the other side is an interesting one.
Yeah, so, okay. You think Bitcoin and majors—
I think Bitcoin—
—are gonna outperform memory stocks?
Yeah, I think Bitcoin will—
Okay.
—outperform memory stocks.
That’s good. That’s good.
Yeah.
I spent 40 minutes pre-show talking about this. I honestly want your take. I think you’ll have a pretty good take on this because you’ve experienced a lot of what this kid’s dealing with, as far as CT sentiment on CT and this whole Pump partnership, rollout, whatever. I want your take on the Pump side of things as well.
Yeah.
I just want your general take about everything. Obviously, CT’s been all Kimchi for the last 2 days. Kimchi’s everywhere on CT. It was pretty good yesterday, but—
It’s dominating my feed.
Yeah, facts. One hundred percent, that’s what I said. Obviously, naturally, CT’s hating. Do they actually care, or is this just an opportunity to farm engagement? Is this because markets are down? What do you think is going on here?
2. Why CT Blames Pump
No, they definitely care. They’re definitely not faking it. But I think the anger is misplaced. I do think the anger is misplaced.
I will say one thing I think is justified: people are mad at Pump because obviously they did whatever deal with Kimchi, they’ve done deals with KOLs, and they’ve done the callout reward stuff. But they haven’t done the airdrop, so a lot of people are mad at them for giving away this cash to those people but not doing the airdrop. That, I think, is justified. But I will say—
It’s a huge part of what we talked about on the show when we first started, too. It’s kind of where the Ansem stuff came from, too.
Yeah.
It’s a pretty big deal.
Yeah, I do think that’s justified. But I think they’ve been pretty intentional with giving away rewards to everybody in the app, not just KOLs. I think their ecosystem is pretty structured to reward everybody who gives back to it.
But I think the anger at Pump for coins not going up is wrong. Pump cannot make coins go higher. They’re just the launchpad. There’s nothing they can do to make coins go higher. You can argue that if the starting market caps of some of the coins were higher, maybe you’d have more runners, but that’s not a proven thing.
What people tend to do in crypto is compare the current reality to something that doesn’t exist and say the reality that doesn’t exist would be better. But you don’t know that it would necessarily be better. There’s no proof that it would be better. People do that a lot with different setups in crypto. It’s, “Oh, why don’t you just do this? That would fix everything.” You don’t necessarily know that it would fix everything.
I think the reason Pump has been so resistant to changing a lot of the default settings on their app is that it’s obviously working for them and for a lot of people who use it. Their everyday users aren’t complaining. That’s why they’re able to make $1 million a day, even during the bear market. They have this core user group that continues to come back, even when coins aren’t running over $500 million or higher, because they’re playing the super-low-market-cap games.
As we know, Pump makes a lot of its money on stuff pre-bond, but there are also a lot of traders, devs, and everybody else involved in that ecosystem at very low market caps, too. If you take that away, you remove a large part of the Pump ecosystem.
Every single one of these products and platforms charges some sort of fee. That’s how they make money. That’s why they’re successful businesses, right? It’s Coinbase—
The extraction point I don’t understand. Every business that’s successful in crypto, when they have revenue, people call it extraction. I don’t really know how Pump has gotten so much of the heat for this. You could say the same thing about Axiom. You could say the same thing about Uniswap.
All of them. Everything.
You could say the same thing about Raydium. You could say the same thing about—
Coinbase.
—Coinbase. You could say the same thing about all these exchanges. These are all companies that make money. The reason they’re able to have revenue is that user behavior enables it. If what they were doing in the market wasn’t working, they wouldn’t be making any money. But they are making money because people aren’t changing their behavior with the current setup.
Every other launchpad outside of Pump has not been able to unseat them, so it’s pretty clear that Pump is doing something right on the launchpad side of things. I think that’s kind of undeniable. But, yeah, I think CT’s anger is misplaced. No one ever—
Well, that’s the whole thing.
—
Nobody ever wants to take self-accountability or responsibility for anything. When markets are down, people just point the finger at whoever’s making money. They can’t bear the thought of platforms and products being successful through conditions like this.
But, bro, you don’t need to use these products. If you think there’s a problem to be solved, that’s how people get rich. If you think there’s a gap in the market or you can make a better launchpad—which, by the way, an infinite number of people have tried—go fucking do it.
Yeah.
No one’s stopping you.
Yeah.
Right? It’s just, I don’t know. It’s weird.
Yeah, I think the group of people who are maddest on Twitter are the traders who aren’t making money on coins and are just like, “Well, why don’t the coins go higher?” But it’s not simple. You can’t just make the coins go higher. I don’t understand what they’re asking them to do, because it’s not possible. What controls coins going higher is traders buying and selling them, not the launchpad. That’s not what’s happening. I’m confused about that. I don’t know exactly what people want on that side.
How do you feel about the general take from some of these older guys? The personal stuff, the personal criticisms of Kimchi and his video. I don’t know if you watched it. Did you watch the video?
Yeah, I watched it.
How do you feel about it? Just genuinely, with no bias—what’s your honest take on his video? More than that, I’m curious about your opinion on the attention it’s getting. There’s no question about it, right? He’s getting an absurd amount of attention for his name and his content. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen native to CT. What do you think?
I thought the video was hard. I thought it was cool. For a kid his age who’s made a lot of money, I think that’s the standard thing you see from people that age who’ve done well. I’m very confused by the older people on CT being angry at him and what he’s doing.
It’s insane.
He’s just hanging out with his friends and spending his money. I’ve seen some of the pushback from people saying, “Oh, how he made his money is what matters.” I don’t know exactly how he made all his money, so I can’t speak to that point or the validity of any of that, to be honest. I think it’s a lot of jealousy, and the hate feels extremely forced to me.
I could understand people saying that Pump in general doesn’t have a high success rate for coins doing well, and if you push people to Pump, you’re not necessarily pushing them to win. But I think that’s reflective of 99% of the coins in crypto. I don’t think that’s necessarily a Kimchi or Pump thing. Even with Hyperliquid, the large majority of traders on Hyperliquid are losing money. That’s—
Trading in general.
—the large majority—
Just trading in general.
—of traders in general are losing money. Yeah, I don’t know.
That’s always been true since before crypto.
Yeah. I thought the video was tough. I thought it was cool. I thought it was cool.
Regardless of anyone’s personal preference or opinion, or what kind of content they like to consume, I think exactly what you said is the take. This is a 22-year-old kid spending money he made one way or another. We can all agree he hit some sort of trade or made money in the markets. He’s kind of emitting this hit-big-and-logged-off energy.
All the specifics of it have been implied or speculated on. These narratives about $40 million on Trump never came out of his mouth. He’s never explicitly said that or alluded to it.
Well, he could’ve made something off of it.
For sure. But I just saw—did you see the Bubblemaps tweet? Bold Nav tweeted some shit. By CT standards, it went giga-viral. It got 1 million views and 4,000 likes, and it was this whole internet-sleuth, on-chain-sleuth, 4- or 5-tweet thread about how Kimchi’s wallet only made $6 million on Trump.
Okay.
And then all their friends—
For what?
By the way, only $6 million.
What the fuck?
It’s like, bro, what the fuck are we all talking about? What the fuck are we talking about right now?
What the fuck, bro?
It’s like, “Well, actually, it was only fucking $25 million.” Dude, what the fuck are we talking—
Yeah.
—but anyway, it gets worse. That wallet wound up being confirmed as Kenzo’s wallet, his friend who’s on all these trips with him.
Oh, yeah.
He’s one of his best friends, and they—
Yeah, I know.
—they’re traveling together, whatever. And that confirmed it wasn’t even Kimchi’s wallet. It was his best friend’s wallet. This whole “Aha, we got you. You actually only made $6 million” thing wasn’t even about his wallet; it was his best friend’s. Again, there’s no comment from him. There’s no confirmation one way or another. A fan walked up to him in the video, which I thought was interesting, and said, “Dude, is it true? Did you hit $40 million on Trump? Holy fuck.”
He didn’t say anything, right?
He laughed and was like—
Yeah, yeah.
“Good to meet you, bro,” and just walked away.
Yeah.
That’s the epitome of him. It basically sums up the discourse and the conversation—
Yeah.
—around this fucking trade. By the way, he has zero incentive to set the record straight or—
Zero.
—discuss this or engage with it—
No, not at all.
—at all.
He doesn’t need to at all.
Let people talk about it.
Yeah.
Let people speculate.
Zero.
It’s creating so much attention around his name that he’s gotta be off to the side laughing. This is my big take on it.
Yeah.
I think CT is typically very disconnected when it comes to culture and how things move in culture, specifically attention to media. I think anybody calling the top on Kimchi is fucking crazy. Obviously, he’s at the top of mind share in CT because he owns 100% of the mind share there. There’s no bigger than that. Everybody knows who he is and is talking about him. But out in the mainstream, in mainstream media, you can see the numbers. The numbers don’t lie, right? He’s on an upward trajectory. He’s growing exponentially in the mainstream.
The numbers are crazy.
They’re fucking insane. He’s just getting started. Orangy, we need that soundbite. We need that fucking button.
The “just getting started” bite?
Yes. Ultimately, my big take is that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. He’s for sure going to be able to leverage all this attention to go make $40 million one way or another. Between this Pump deal and future deals, he’s 22 years old. He has a long life ahead of him. He’s obviously—
Bro, he has to fucking partner with Bottega. What the fuck?
That’s what I’m saying.
That shit is lit.
There’s a relationship being built with Bottega. That’s—
That shit is lit.
—that’s what I’m saying. It is fucking lit.
That shit is lit.
Again, I don’t care if that’s your cup of tea. I don’t care if you want to wear Bottega or think buying designer is retarded. But one thing is fact—it should be an objective fact, something we should all be able to agree on: that’s good for crypto.
For sure.
Because crypto—
Without a doubt.
—biggest issue has been swagless, aura-less. Somebody who comes in and is perceived as cool by the stereotypical arbiters of culture—they’re embracing him. We want to see it. This is good for us. Objectively, this is good for us. It could legitimately be good for Bitcoin, right? So why can’t everybody just shut the fuck up and let some good shit happen? That’s my take.
It’s also very weird to see people highlight this. You had a good tweet. Ash Robinson said something along the lines of, “Crypto needs to highlight more stories about taking care of your family and buying a modest house,” et cetera. First of all, this stuff isn’t flashy and it’s not engaging. No one’s going to watch a fucking video of you buying a modest house in the Midwest for you, your wife, and your kid.
That’s just not gonna go viral because it’s average. It’s the median. By the nature of the content you’re suggesting we highlight and push, it can’t run to that level. So that’s the first problem. But the second problem is what you highlight: CT hates everything. That’s just a fact. CT will find a way—
Everything, bro.
—if somebody’s getting too big or being celebrated—
Bro.
—too much—
Everything.
—they’ll find some way, somehow—
Yeah, that—
—to vilify you and make you bad.
I can tell you, bro. I was on CT when my daughter was born. I was posting all these baby pictures, her chilling in the crib. Big mistake.
Big fucking mistake.
I was posting all types of stuff, and I had a lot on my profile. As I got more and more followers, I kept doing that, and then it got real weird. The responses I started getting were weird. People were saying crazy shit about me and crazy shit about my kids.
Insane. Insane.
All types of crazy stuff, and I wasn’t doing anything wild. I was just posting trades and taking trades. I’d be wrong on trades sometimes, but I wasn’t talking to anybody crazy or doing anything like that. It does get kind of weird on CT. I don’t know why it’s like that. It’s a very weird community, to be honest. That’s why—
It’s really—
It’s really weird, bro. The parasocial relationships are just bizarre. I responded to this because he was like, “Oh, well, why don’t we just post more wholesome content?” I’m like, “CT doesn’t want wholesome content.”
They don’t.
They don’t respond well—
They don’t.
—to wholesome content. It’s not like that gets a positive reaction from them either. It’s just not true.
This is the other thing, too: by the nature—
Yeah.
—of the market, how people operate in the market, and how people make money in the market, everyone has a different agenda, too. Some people are short, some people are long, some people want to see coins go up, and some people want to see them go down. That’s something to account for. Everybody has an ulterior agenda and motive that isn’t necessarily their 100% true thoughts and opinions on things. Everyone’s trying to steer some sort of narrative for some sort of reason. It’s a really important thing to highlight and remember.
It’s true. Yeah, it’s definitely true.
It’s definitely true. Everybody’s got their own agenda at all times.
Thought this was a good tweet.
So true.
Oh my God. Bro.
It’s true, though.
That’s so funny, bro. It’s literally them fucking anon PFPs, dog. It’s nuts.
With 3s on a PFP. That’s the other thing. It’s so weird, like people will inherently, or at least pretend to, trust anons with random PFPs and 100 followers on—
It’s crazy.
—Twitter over people who have—
It’s crazy.
It’s so weird. It doesn’t make sense.
No, it’s bizarre, bro.
It is bizarre.
It doesn’t make sense. But the truth is, we’re all imperfect as people. Not to get philosophical and, like, gay about it, but we’re all imperfect. We’ve all made mistakes. Just like you said, you’ve had wrong calls before.
All the time.
But if somebody audits your fucking Twitter and all your takes and calls, you’re objectively right more often than you’re not. That’s why you’re anon, that’s why you’re in the position, and that’s why people trust you. It’s dishonest to highlight moments of weakness or moments where you’re wrong and sum you up entirely based on that. I’m just using you as an example, obviously, because you’ve gone through this before. Lord fucking knows I can relate to this as well, right?
Yeah.
And it’s just weird. I don’t know. It’s weird. This will never change, though. Again, we’ve talked about this a few times. What is the solve? I actually think Kimchi—
The solve?
This is another take about Kimchi specifically.
I think the solve is kind of just pushing through the negativity. I think Thread Guy has done this really well. Thread Guy has done this really well, because Thread Guy—
Yes, he has.
—got a lot of hate when all the fucking LIBRA shit happened.
The LIBRA shit.
People thought he was an insider on that.
He got labeled as, like, the LIBRA guy.
He had insider information, all this other shit, like, “Oh, he’s a scammer,” whatever, whatever, whatever. And he basically was like—
By the way, 100% not true.
Yeah, not true. And he took a step back, and then he came back and was like, “Fuck you guys. I’m just gonna do this content shit, and you’re gonna see that I’m genuine in what I’m talking about. I actually am taking the trades. I actually am gonna study this, and I’m gonna get better than all of you at it.” And he did it every day.
He’s doing it in real time.
Bro, every single day—
Yes.
—over and over and over. You can see CT shift their perception of him in real time. Obviously, there are gonna be highs and lows still, but I think Thread Guy’s reputation and perception on CT have shifted a ton. You kind of just push through it. You just fucking keep putting out information. I do a similar thing: if you continue to be right on trades, there’s not much people can keep saying. Like, “Oh, he fucked up on this, he fucked up on that.” But if you keep coming back and being consistent with the content you’re putting out, I think we’ve done a pretty good job with this show of highlighting important projects and good founders—
For sure.
—and all of that. If you stay the course and keep putting out good content and good information, then the negative stuff falls away most of the time.
Agreed. Agreed. One last thought on the Kimchi stuff, and then I wanna watch this Thread Guy clip, because you mentioned him. I think he has almost a veil, a layer of protection, because he’s not forced to engage with any of this discourse at all. It has nothing to do with his content. He drops aura dumps and vlogs with his friends. He doesn’t need to engage with this at all, and he can fully ignore it. It’ll actually probably positively affect his content, in that the discourse continues and people speculate and talk, which is good for the viewership and engagement. But, too, if he continues to escape the bubble that is CT at this exponential rate, then it’s likely that 95% of all his engagement, his viewers, his fans, are not CT-native—
100%.
—on CT.
Not at all.
So the perception that CT has actually becomes less and less relevant—
It’s not gonna matter. It’s not gonna matter.
—as that becomes less and less balanced, right? So it becomes an insignificant, small little voice in the distance, as opposed to a lot of us who exist primarily on CT. I would say Thread pretty much still is primarily on CT. I’ve watched Rasmer escape it a little bit. But most of the faces on here, the talking heads on here, are subject to the sentiment and narratives that CT is pushing. I think Kimchi is in a different class and is probably gonna have an easier time with that, as long as he can keep his head on straight and just keep doing what he’s doing, to be honest.
He doesn’t need to change up at all, because his—
Yeah, that’s it.
—his lane is honestly really good. It’s the aura dumps, the pics in really cool places, the fucking vlogs where they’re doing cool shit.
It’s such an easy path forward.
And you don’t really have to give insight into how he’s taking the trades, all the trades he’s taking. I don’t think all that is actually—
Oh, fuck no.
—necessary.
His whole shit—
It’s not his thing.
Again, his whole swag is, “Hit big and logged off”—
Yeah.
—and now I’m living life.
Yeah.
The way he scales his brand and his content is, like you just said, taking pictures in cooler and cooler places, doing cooler trips with cooler people, or whatever the fuck.
Whatever the fuck he wants to do. It’s working. I don’t think he needs to change a fucking thing. We’ll see where it goes. I wanna watch this Thread Guy clip, though.
Look, I’m down to hate as much as the next guy. I love to hate on some shit. I’ll fucking hate on whoever: Uncs, plumbers, zoomers. I’m down to pocket-watch and hate, but it was tough. I don’t know what to tell you.
It was tough, bro. It was tough.
It was tough.
It was tough.
It was.
Bro, the Bottega—
King Cut.
Gifts at dinner? That was crazy.
It was.
It was tough.
Bro, by the way, there’s a clip in this fucking vlog of Jason Lewin and Asian Ray, two of the biggest streamers on earth. You can see from their body language that they’re excited to be with this fool. They’re engaged with him.
Yeah.
They’re asking him questions.
Yeah.
He’s the focal point.
Yeah.
He’s the center of attention.
Yeah.
He’s the center of attention in a room with a fucking star athlete in the NBA and 2 of the biggest streamers on earth.
Yeah.
Bro, why the fuck are we not getting behind this kid?
Yeah.
Honestly, before 2 days ago, I was like, “Finally, bro. CT woke up and had a fucking brain.” This is obviously good for us.
Yeah.
Right? This is very good for us, in my personal opinion. Again, it doesn’t matter what your taste is. I don’t care if you buy watches or care for any of that. I don’t fuck with supercars. I think it’s retarded. I don’t like cars. I don’t buy cars. I don’t even fucking drive. I’m also 35 years old, so a lot of that shit flies over my head.
Yeah.
But it’s obviously good. It’s obviously good.
Yeah, for sure.
That was tough. That was tough. The jet was tough.
It was tough.
The ‘Rari was tough.
It was tough.
The custom Bottega was tough. Sorry.
Sorry. It was tough.
Now, is it me? No. Would it be me if I was walking around mid-eight? Maybe. Hard to say. Guess we’ll never know until we know.
By the way, amazing take. And Thread Guy’s objectively the demographic.
Yeah, I watched his vlog, bro.
That’s the target demographic. Thread Guy is who Kimchi hopes to capture and engage with.
Yeah.
He wants him to watch the next vlog, and the next one, and the next one. If people like Thread Guy, who sit in that bucket, are consistently watching his shit and his output, it’s extremely valuable and can be leveraged in all kinds of ways. I personally think it’s plus-EV and good for the market. But yeah, we’ll carry on. Let’s do this boxing bracket thing. Where the fuck is that? What page is this?
Boxing bracket.
Right here, right here.
Boxing bracket.
Got it. You had a tweet? You have an idea? Let’s host the CT Olympics again.
Bro, can somebody make this shit happen, though? Please. Somebody please make the CT Olympics happen. I promise you, this is one of my best ideas. I’ve been saying this shit for years, by the way.
This would be sick.
I’ve been saying this shit for years.
This would be sick, yeah.
This shit would be crazy.
It would be.
Like a fucking triathlon where you trade perps.
Put me in a basketball match.
And then you got some boxing shit.
I’ll pull up. I’ll pull up.
Three-on-three. Do a 100-meter dash. Bro, I’m telling you.
It would be cool.
That shit would be lit.
It would be cool. Some ping-pong shit, just throw in some funny shit in there too.
Yeah, some random shit. Yeah.
Fortnite would be funny. All that shit. It’s a cool idea. So you had this, and our interns made us a little bracket. We’re gonna go through this. By the way, look how good this is.
Okay, cool. So we will make our picks. I’m going in here blind, raw, fresh. Oh, this is hilarious.
Raw. Blind, raw, fresh. Razz versus Keyboard Monkey. Wait, scroll down.
So you want to give the shot—
Scroll down a little bit?
You want… Scroll down, you said?
Chat, who you got? Razz or Keyboard Monkey?
Okay.
Not the beta. Chat, who you got?
So here’s Rasmer calling KBM a non-aspirational, fat alcoholic idiot, and here’s Keyboard Monkey talking shit.
KBM, this is for you, bro. Just one more bar. One more bar.
Oh, he’s such a comedian, bro.
You will die before I hit my prime, okay? I’m gonna have a multi-decade career publicly here.
Jesus Christ.
I will likely hit my prime in my 60s, 70s. The way that you’re drinking, man, you will be long gone—
Dude, this is brutal.
—by the time I hit my prime.
Razz, this is too much, baby.
Yeah, that was aggressive, bro.
I hit my prime, okay?
“You will die” is crazy.
So just get with that.
“Before I hit my prime” is insane.
All right?
Wow.
Be sad about it. All right.
I feel like Razz was coming for all the CTs’ necks, bro.
Plumbers. Plumbers.
He’s coming for their necks hard.
Chat, genuinely, who do we think? I mean, Razz was in phenomenal shape. He’s young, he’s healthy, he’s on fucking peptides and shit.
I fuck with KBM, though. KBM’s the one.
I love KBM. I was talking about this in my pre-show. I think his takes on the Kimchi shit were fucking insane, to be honest.
Bro, calling 20-year-old girls whores is nuts.
It’s crazy. I’m glad we can agree on that.
It’s nuts, bro.
It’s fucking crazy.
It’s nuts, bro.
It’s giving… I’m telling you, you ever see any of these popular girls online? Especially the girls who do the OnlyFans shit, the Breckie Hills and the fucking Sophie Rain—
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
—and this guy.
Yeah.
You’ll see people in their comments, older guys with their actual real faces on it. You’re like, “How the fuck do these people not understand how the internet works?” You click on their profiles, they’re fucking married with kids. They work some white-collar job, and they’re leaving crazy-ass comments.
No, it’s crazy.
Like, “Hey, come to Minnesota. I’ll take care of you. I’ll fucking—”
It’s crazy. It’s nuts.
—or whatever. Or they go rage mode and they’re like, “You’re a fucking gross, disgusting, dirty whore.” And it’s like, brother, what the fuck? Where is this coming from?
It’s nuts, bro.
It’s insane.
No.
It’s insane.
It’s crazy.
I don’t know. I think, I’m gonna keep it a bean: I think Razzmer’s got this one all day.
Yeah, Razz was in pretty good shape. I know he lifts and shit. He’s on the peptides, you know, he’s got some boosters. I think—
Razzmer for sure cannot fight, but I think he’s got this one, just from sheer biology.
I feel like we could low-key set this up. If we make the CT Olympics happen, I feel like we could get them to fight.
You think KBM would be down for this?
Yeah.
That’d be insane.
I think so.
Listen, on some brand-risk Adin Ross shit, I’ll play that role all day. I’ll make it happen. I’ll get you guys paid. We’ll fucking go nuts. I would love this. We could have KBM—yeah, Yeet. We’ll have Yeet sponsor it.
Bro, that shit would be lit.
Not the rapper. Yeah.
Yeah, we’ll have Yeet sponsor it. Bro, that shit would actually be tough.
FOMO on Razzmer’s side. You have the FOMO logo on his shorts.
FOMO versus Yeet.
Wow. Wow.
Yo, I think we’re cooking right now. I think—
I’m picking Razzmer, though. Can we agree on that? Razzmer?
I think Razzmer will win.
Moving on to the next. Yeah, it’s gotta be. Okay. Wow. The rematch.
Bro, just know that I could not lose this twice. It’s impossible.
The rematch of the century.
Oh my God, bro. Look at this fucking picture. How did I lose this fight, bro? How?
How did you lose that fight? How did you lose that? Wait, did you lose it? I thought you guys tied.
It was a draw. That’s a loss, bro.
Yeah, if you draw. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That’s a loss.
I agree. That’s hilarious.
Oh my God, bro. I’m never living this down. I’m not.
I won’t lie, though, BitBoy does look like the kind of guy who would talk a bunch of shit at a bar while wasted, then stand up and just start—
Bar fight? Oh, he would knock everybody out.
—and just start throwing hands like crazy. You know what I’m saying? He seems crazy.
He seems crazy.
He’s got that dad strength. You can tell he fought his way through life.
He did.
He’d been fighting since he was 10 years old. He does have that physiognomy.
That physiognomy.
But I mean, you’re fucking—we gotta pick you, obviously. Jesus Christ. Orangie and Choose Rich Nick.
What the fuck?
I mean, Orangie is—what’s the lore on this?
Who picked these matchups, bro?
Do they have any beef? There’s no receipt, so I’m assuming this is just completely random.
I don’t know.
Chat, what do we think?
Chat, chat, chat. Orangie.
It’s gotta be Orangie. Somebody said Nick for the win. Rich.
Dang, Rich. Choose Rich. Orangie.
The chat’s saying Choose Rich Nick.
Wow. Choose Rich Nick all day.
Choose Rich Nick all day. Yeah.
Choose Rich would own him. What is going on?
Draw. I like draw.
I’m gonna cry.
Draw’s a good take. There’s no draw option, though.
Draw’s actually a good take. I think that’s a good take.
Draw’s a good take.
Draw’s a good take.
I mean, bro, Orangie’s a big fucking kid, and that’s not a fat joke.
He is big.
He’s like 6'4". He’s like a big kid.
Yeah. He’s tall. I thought he was short, bro. He’s tall.
He’s sweet, though. He’s fucking sweet. He’s a little too sweet for me to think that he could fight.
He’s pretty nice.
He’s sweet. I think Nick is kind of low-key a bit of a crash-out sometimes, and I low-key—
Yeah.
Nick, healthy and ready to go, and both of them on their best day, I think I’m gonna choose Choose Rich Nick.
Choose Rich Nick. Choose Rich Nick.
We got him. Okay. Wow. Kobe and Thread Guy.
This is crazy.
I have a crazy take here.
Okay.
I think, fighting to the death, with both of them trying their absolute hardest, Thread Guy takes it all day. He’s an athlete. By the way, me and Thread have gotten this close to each other. We’ve almost come to blows many times playing basketball.
Really?
Yes. Many times. If this clip makes its way to TG, I’ll let him tell the stories. Neither of us are a pleasure to play with on the court, especially on opposing sides and especially when we’re losing, raging, whatever. A lot of talking shit. A lot of, “I’m gonna knock you the fuck out.” A lot of, “Do it then, pussy.” Thread’s got heart, bro. He’s down. He’s athletic, randomly, quietly. I think he takes it on any given day if it’s left to that. But I think Thread’s way too big of a fan. I think Thread would—
Of Kobe in general? Yeah.
Yes. I think Thread would consider the ramifications of what it might do to the markets and just be like, “Fuck, I’m long Bitcoin right now. Do I really wanna knock Kobe out?”
Yeah, we can’t take Kobe out.
Right? Like, “I can’t knock Kobe out.”
Yeah.
“We’re long Bitcoin.”
It would be like, “We need all-time highs.” I mean—
Or maybe it goes deeper, even deeper. He shorts the market and then goes and kills him, right? Maybe—
What, he tries to take his spot on some crazy shit? Like, “I’m top dog now”?
Facts. But for the sake of the markets, I don’t know. I think Thread Guy would win this objectively.
Yeah?
Yeah. What about you?
I feel like they’re kind of a similar build, to be honest.
I’ve never met Kobe, or seen what he physically looks like in person. I’ve seen videos and photos, but—
Yeah.
I know Thread got scrappy. I lived with the kid. I know it. I know he’d win. Trust me.
I don’t think Kobe really would wanna box, to be honest.
Trader Mayne, Clemente. We gotta go Mayne, bro. Mayne is fucking—
Yeah.
Mayne is solid.
Bro, Mayne can’t get knocked—
What’s up, Mayne?
Look at Mayne’s neck. Mayne can’t get knocked out. It’s impossible.
Bro, he is solid. He’s fucking rock solid. I think this is the easiest decision of the bracket.
Mayne. Trader Mayne.
CZ, Mert—I mean, this—
This is hard.
This Mert photo, by the way, is insane.
No, it’s hard, bro. CZ is jacked, and he liquidates people for a living. He has a lot of hate in his heart.
He’s a killer.
He’s a killer. He might have killed some people, to be honest.
49 years old. How old is Mert?
That’s a good question. I think he’s 30, 31—low 30s? 31. Chat, what do we think? Chat, chat, what do we think?
Yeah, I think you gotta take that.
Chat’s saying CZ easy. CZ is a killer, literally. I don’t know, bro. CZ is literally a killer.
I’m going Mert, bro.
But Mert, where’s Mert from?
He’s younger.
He’s Turkish?
Yeah.
Fuck, Turkish people can fight.
Mert looks like he could fucking kill somebody with his bare hands.
Yeah, I feel like Turkish people can fight.
If you could cast Mert in a movie as an assassin, like somebody who kills people—
Like some Jason Bourne shit?
Yes. Yes. I’m—
Low-key.
I’m happy to go Mert. What about you?
I’ll go Mert.
TJR, Nsendo. I mean, this is Nsendo’s chance. Love you, brother, but TJR’s got a full foot on you, and he works out and shit. TJR’s washing your shit.
Yeah. I’m—
Washing your shit.
Yeah, I agree. We’re like 6'5".
What the fuck is this receipt? Is this Nsendo's cleaning a toilet?
Yeah, I think so.
This is insane. You guys did him so crazy.
That’s fucked up, bro.
That’s crazy. TGR. Moving on. Frank, intern—I mean, brother.
Intern’s—
Frank, I love you, brother.
Intern’s waxing Frank, bro.
Facts.
Waxing. Quickly, bro.
I think Frank would—
Like, waxing quickly.
Frank would agree. In a trading competition, I think he goes all the way and wins the fucking chip. Frank is the GOAT. The GOAT. But yeah, intern, we’re moving on. Quarterfinals: Raz or Ansem.
Yeah, I wanna see Raz respond to this. I wanna know what Raz thinks.
I think he would agree that you’d whoop his ass. We’re gonna go with that. We’ll see what he says. Choose Rich Nick, Thread Guy. We gotta go TG.
We gotta go TG. We gotta go TG.
We have to go TG.
TG.
That one’s pretty easy. Maine and Mert is a good one. That’s a good fucking matchup. They’re both bald.
Damn. I don’t know if either of them…
Who have stamina. That’s the thing, though. I don’t know if either of them has stamina. I feel like Mert—
Oh, again, I’ve seen Mert—
Mert is behind the fucking—
A cigarette hanging out of his mouth, a beer in his hand, and I just… I wouldn’t want to fight Maine. Under those circumstances, somebody in chat says Maine.
Those are very different circumstances, though.
Facts. I don’t know why my head always goes there.
I will tell you one thing, bro: a bar fight is very different from boxing.
Yeah, of course.
A thousand times.
Of course. Of course.
Yeah, I thought that shit, too. It’s not the same.
This one’s tough, bro. I’m not gonna lie. This one’s a coin flip. I’m gonna go Maine because he’s my boy.
All right. I’ll go Maine.
That’s who I would have to root for.
Okay.
We’ll go Maine.
Let’s go Maine. Let’s go Maine.
TGR, Intern. This is another tough one, bro.
Ah.
This is another tough one.
I don’t know, bro. This—
TGR just has the size, bro. TGR is a full foot taller.
He’s got… Does he have the reach, too?
Yes.
Yeah.
He’s a full foot taller. He’s got the reach. I think he’s got to be 30 or 40 pounds heavier than Intern, too. And he’s not a slouch. He’s not a kid who’s sitting.
No, he’s not.
He works out. He stays fit. He’s in good shape. But Intern, though. Intern’s just a Chad.
Intern’s a Chad. Chad.
Yeah, he’s just a winner. Intern’s a winner.
He is.
You know what I mean? He would go and do a boxing match, and he would win.
Yeah. Like, if they trained—
I think Vegas would—
If they trained, I think Intern would probably train harder than TGR.
Yeah, he probably would.
I think so.
If they had the same level of training, if they put in the same effort, biology tells you TGR has the upper hand. I think Vegas would give TGR the odds. I’m gonna go TGR. What do you guys think, chat? Everyone’s saying TGR. Against all odds, Intern wins. I think Vegas would give it to TGR. Let’s go with that. Semifinals: Ansem, Thread Guy. Wow, this would fucking feed generations. I would love to see this.
I know. The clips from this would go crazy.
It would go nuts.
It would go crazy.
Who do we think? You’re TG. You’re in. It’s almost full.
Who do we think, chat? What do we think, chat? Let’s ask chat. Chat, who do you think would win in boxing, and who do you think would win one-on-one in basketball?
TG, I’m not gonna lie, he would whoop your ass in basketball.
Bro, whoa.
He would. He would, bro.
Whoa.
I’m telling you. Listen, TG—
Bro, stop.
See, I got you—
Bro, stop.
No, no, he would. He would.
Stop.
He would. I’m telling you. He’s filthy.
We’re gonna see. We’re gonna see, bro.
Oh, TG’s filthy. That has to happen.
We’re gonna see. No, we’re gonna see.
By the way, that can and will happen.
We’re gonna see, bro.
One-on-one, Ansem and TG—
We’re gonna make it happen.
You guys are playing one-on-one, 100%. We could do that whenever. I’m coming to New York soon. We should definitely set that up. Bro, he’s nasty. Have you seen him hoop?
I haven’t.
TG is nasty.
Only the highlights from Twitter.
I’m telling you right now, we used to do 15-person runs, 3 teams, real runs, good comp. TG was getting picked in the first two or three spots every time.
But we gotta hoop, then.
Not first overall. He’s getting picked first on a team, in the first two or three spots every time. He’s nice, bro. He’s really nice with it. One time, me and TG had a basketball machine at the crib. You remember that?
Uh-huh.
The shooting machine?
Yeah.
We shot 100 shots back and forth, and we went 97 for 100.
What?
It was some nut shit. We missed 3 shots out of 100.
What the fuck?
We went nuts. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever done in my life. I can’t stop talking about it. TG acted like it was just another day. He’s filthy. Boxing, though, I think you got it all day.
Let’s go.
Maine, TGR. We gotta go Maine.
Okay.
Again, that neck, bro. That image in my head, that neck. It’s that neck.
He can’t be knocked out. He can’t be knocked out.
You and Maine, championship. What do we think?
That’s my unc, bro. I don’t know.
This would be crazy.
That’s my unc, bro.
This would be a crazy, crazy fight.
That’s my unc.
What do you guys think?
Let’s see what chat said. Chat says Maine. Wow. I mean, I have zero wins in boxing, so zero wins.
Someone said Maine sliming.
Zero wins.
By the way, would it surprise you to watch Maine go through a bracket like this and go all the way? It wouldn’t. If I didn’t see the event and heard about it later, I’d be like, “Oh, who won that? Trader Maine? I bet. Yeah, that makes sense.”
Yeah.
Right?
For sure. Yeah, for sure.
Why didn’t Banks include himself? I didn’t make this bracket, you fucking prick. Maine’s so horny. They’re saying Maine. Do we give it to Maine?
Yeah, we give it to Maine. Give it to Maine.
Bang. There we go. It’s a little cliché to give it to yourself on your own fucking thing, too. We’ll go Maine. By the way, Intern, you guys are killing it. What the fuck?
Yeah.
That is all we got for the main show. We’ve had a guest waiting and waiting. That was fun, by the way. Intern, great job. Staff, production, great job. That was fucking awesome. We have somebody in the green room, but I have to take a piss bad.
Not yet. Not yet.
Oh, they’re not ready. Okay, cool. We have 3K more to airdrop. Drop one or two to the chat, Z. I’ll be right back. I’m gonna go take a piss.
What’s good, chat? Who wins in a one-on-one basketball game between me and Banks? I don’t think there’s anybody on CT who could beat me one-on-one in basketball, to be honest. I think FOMO’s doing a three-on-three tournament soon, actually. That shit should be lit. I got five on you. I appreciate you, BWB. BWB. BWB.
It’s alive.
Can we send BWB Jones some cash?
BWB.
What the fuck is happening? Why is it moving?
He’s alive.
I’m scared. I don’t like ghosts, bro. I don’t like ghosts. And L Chef. I fuck with L Chef D Soul. Somebody said the new PFP is fire. Yeah, I’ve had this one. This is one of my older PFPs. It’s Michiko from the show Michiko & Hatchin. It’s an anime. This is one of my old PFPs, bro. It’s been in the tuck. Bro, Micron looks so bad, guys. When I tell you this shit looks fucking disgusting, it’s nasty. Back to them old vibes. You got it. Who’s your favorite artist?
No, I’m serious.
Yeat, Juice WRLD, Frank Ocean, NBA YoungBoy, Michael Jackson. What the fuck? Giveon. I don’t know anybody whose favorite artist is Giveon. Mets fan. Somebody said Diddy. You’re a fucking liar, bro. Your favorite artist is not Diddy.
Yeah, Saeed’s ready.
Travis, Yeat, Yeat, Sia, The Weeknd. You guys are funny. Lucky. Mac Miller. Oh, Vexion Kick. Let’s send Vexion Kick some cash. I fuck with him. Mac Miller the GOAT. He was one of my favorite artists, bro. I was so sick when he died. I was fucked up for a minute.
All right, Saeed’s ready.
Oh, whoa, whoa, yo.
How many did you give away?
3K.
Oh, you gave all 3?
All 3.
Cool. Let's get some W Fanums in the fucking chat.
W Fanum.
Thank you.
I need a button.
Da, na, na, na, na. Na, na, na, na, na, na, na. We do need some audio shit. We do need some audio. We’ve got these fucking green themes and blue themes. What’s the blue one for? What can we use the blue one for?
That’s when we’re underwater.
When it’s raining outside?
No, when we’re long and we’re underwater.
Well, let’s fucking change it to blue, then. Paint me blue at this point. Let me get this teed up and ready. Is his thing in the C-suite chat, gentlemen? Where is this? Okay, cool. I got it. All right, let’s get it.
Are we ready? Are we ready for our—
Okay, chat, he’s ready.
—special guest.
Z, do you want to introduce him? Guys, let’s get some W Saeeds in the chat. CEO of Sunrise, Wormhole Labs. We’re excited to have him. Z, do you want to do a brief introduction, and then we’ll have him pop in and introduce himself?
Yeah, I can. So we’re gonna have Saeed on today. Sunrise is one of the protocols—
DeFi.
—that’s handling a lot of the DeFi. Handling a lot of the tokenized stocks stuff right now: cross-chain and all of the tokenization of these equities, which is driving one of the main narratives in crypto so far this cycle. So, excited to talk to Saeed. It should be pretty cool.
Without further ado, let’s bring him in.
Yo.
Welcome, brother.
What’s up? What’s up? How’s it going?
What’s good, brother? How you doing, man?
Pretty good, man. Pretty good.
I’ve had better days, I’ll be honest. But it’s a pleasure to meet you.
Oh.
Z and I did our very best introducing you to the chat. But in your own words, do you want to introduce yourself to our audience and the people watching?
Absolutely. CEO of Sunrise. If you’ve seen some of the tokenized equity stuff that’s happening on Solana, that’s what we’re primarily focused on.
Cool.
Cool.
Well, thank you for coming on. Z, you want to get us started?
Yeah. I guess we want to walk through how Sunrise came to be. I know you guys have the connection with Wormhole, but what was the thesis around Sunrise, and why do you think you’re playing an important role in the crypto economy?
I think it was a confluence of a bunch of stuff. There’s this thing that people started talking about a couple of years back: internet capital markets.
Mm-hmm.
We felt like, being in the interoperability space, we were helping build that. So we were front and center, facing all the problems of connecting all these different blockchains together and allowing them to work. Then we realized that just bringing an asset over from one blockchain to another doesn’t really solve the problem. It’s not really gonna build the future of finance. What you need is healthy, liquid markets. You need people to be able to actually use these assets once they’ve brought them from one chain to another. That’s ultimately what internet capital markets are, right? It’s the ability to get the entire financial system onto a brand-new set of rails, and to actually trade them and build stuff around them.
Including, but not limited to, RWAs and equities, et cetera.
Yeah. Essentially, the internet made information globally accessible. Solana has the potential to do the same thing for financial assets. I think Sunrise has a big role to play in that, and that’s what we’re focused on.
I’ve heard you describe Solana that way, Z: the internet of crypto and finance. I like that.
Yeah.
Does the average crypto investor underestimate how big tokenized equities could possibly be? Are people sleeping on this?
Absolutely. The average crypto investor is talking about whether a token can pass a $1 million or $10 million market cap, whether a token’s worth a $1 billion FDV. These are all denominated in millions and billions. Equities are a $160 trillion market.
It’s fucking insane. That’s crazy.
This asset class is denominated in trillions. Even if you scratch 1% of it, you’re still over a trillion dollars of new liquidity coming in, or new value coming in. So yeah, it’s massively underslept. I think even the people who are working on it, even people on my team, don’t really understand how big this can get.
That’s interesting. So the total market cap of crypto is what, like $2 trillion or something like that?
Yeah, it hovers between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion.
So that would be closer to 1% than 2%, right? Or somewhere in between that, 1% to 2%.
Yeah.
Yeah, that’s fucking crazy. I never really thought about it that way. I didn’t know that all markets are worth $160 trillion.
If you ask yourself where the next trillion dollars going into crypto is gonna come from, it’s very clear: tokenized equities, tokenized commodities, tokenized RWAs.
Has to.
The thesis is the same thing that we’ve talked about and that everybody’s been talking about: 24/7 trading, being able to trade, people in Japan being able to trade U.S. stocks and markets, and vice versa. Is that kind of the gist?
Oh, well, yeah. Global distribution is super important. Everyone should be able to have access to these markets and these assets. That’s a huge driver. It’s kind of like how stablecoins were.
Yes.
Nobody really understood that stablecoins would get this big because they were like, “I can get a dollar. I have access to the dollar market.” Even the U.S. government did—
People in Venezuela do not, and now they do.
Yeah, but—
Even the U.S. government tried to fight it and say it was bad for the system. Now Tether is a top 10 buyer of U.S. Treasuries, beating out countries in Europe. That kind of growth only happens when you’re completely wrong about something. You have no idea how much demand there is for a particular asset. You think you know, but there are 7.5 billion other people out there that could potentially want your currency. If you build the right technology that makes it super easy for them to get it, then you’ll really know what the true number is. I think stablecoins are a good example. I think tokenized equities and tokenized RWAs are going through that right now. Last year, we were under a billion dollars in tokenized equities. Now I think we’ve 30x’d that in just a year and a half.
Stocks and assets pre-IPO, et cetera.
Yeah, it’s crazy.
Things like that.
The growth is crazy. If you look at the data and the charts, you can see the hockey stick, the month-over-month growth. It reminds me of Jeff Bezos: “Why did I start Amazon?” He was working at D. E. Shaw, a hedge fund market maker, and there was this chart that was growing by, I don’t know, 13,000% per year. He was just like, “There’s no way the internet’s not gonna be a big thing.”
Yeah, makes sense. Definitely simplified. We talked earlier this year about wanting exposure to DeepSeek, the leading AI product in China. Obviously, there’s no way traditionally for Americans to get exposure to that asset or markets like that. I like the idea of knowing the true value of these things when they’re exposed to everyone, when everyone has the opportunity to participate or invest. That’s cool. We’re totally on the same page. Where does Sunrise play into all this? What problem is Sunrise solving? What’s the ultimate goal for you as the CEO and for the product?
On the DeepSeek point, I was actually in Shanghai during that whole Solana event. We’re making inroads globally and trying to meet people where they’re at, learn, talk to regulators, and talk to people, so hopefully soon we’ll see Chinese equities on-chain.
It would be so cool. That’d be awesome.
Yeah. I mean, people always think that you’re trying to serve the domestic market.
You talk to anyone in the U.S. and they’re like, “Why would I use tokenized equities? I can just pull up Robinhood or any one of the brokerage apps.” And it’s like, “It’s not for you, then.” Right? But maybe DeepSeek is, or maybe Unitree is, or maybe SK hynix is, or any one of these—
What was the idea behind that one? Was it really just the discrepancy between how much that was valued at? It was being valued at like $10 billion, and then you had Anthropic and OpenAI, at the time, at like fucking $400, $300, $400, $500 million—or billion dollars, sorry.
Billion, billion, yeah.
And we’re like, I mean, are these companies really fucking 50 times more valuable than DeepSeek?
I was gonna say, Connor, bro. Yeah.
Yeah, go ahead.
I was gonna say, I think that was an interesting setup, but do you think the tokenization piece will extend to private companies going public that way instead of doing the IPO route? For companies that aren’t traditional domestic U.S. startups?
Absolutely. This is just the fundamental primitive for capital formation. The rest of the world is locked out of certain jurisdictions and can’t invest in certain assets. Those companies building cool stuff all over the world also don’t have the ability to raise capital, go public, or do any of these things.
Even companies in the U.S.—it’s really expensive to go public. It’s insanely expensive, and you get a handful of—
It’s even more expensive to take a public company private. I’ve done both.
Yeah.
It’s an insane process both ways.
Absolutely.
Very, very expensive both ways. Yeah, it’s crazy.
You could have a great company that’s making tens of millions of dollars in profit and growing, and there’s no chance in hell you’re gonna spend the money to go public in the U.S.
How much does it cost?
It depends on the business, but I would say you’re not gonna go public for under, like, $30 million or something like that.
What?
Yeah.
Is it that expensive?
I haven’t gone public, but from numbers that I’ve seen, you have to hire so many people.
What the fuck?
It’s a one-and-a-half- to two-year process, too. And you have to change your entire company. There’s just so much stuff that goes into it. If you want to list on a proper exchange and be a legitimate company, not like a penny stock—
We IPO’d through a SPAC with B. Riley, and they handled all that. It was part of the deal and part of whatever upside and risk they took in taking it public, so it was a little bit different than just the traditional IPO.
Yeah. And you still have to raise a PIPE and get people.
Yes. Yes.
You have to raise a lot of money even before they would take you on to do something like that, right?
Yes.
So how many companies today that are actually good could do what you did? Probably very few.
It’s impossible. Yeah.
That’s interesting.
Yeah.
It seems like the trend is gonna be—I feel like crypto, in the future, is gonna be the foundational layer for how value is transacted and transmitted globally. I think we’ve already seen it kind of happen with stablecoins. They’re objectively better at being able to send a lot of money cheaply and fast across borders. And it seems like tokenization could solve a very similar problem for tokenizing businesses.
I think that’s one thing that doesn’t get a lot of credit in crypto, because a lot of these tokens are scams. But tokens like Hyperliquid were able to distribute value to all their core users and also to the core team members. The revenue is tied directly to the token and token holders, so it actually makes a ton of sense for businesses to operate that way.
It seems to me you’re probably gonna see a trend where some private companies that are doing well, and don’t want to do a standard IPO, just tokenize. Then they get access to public markets if everybody has access to Solana or whatever chain they do the tokenization on.
Look, you saw the news today from a16z—
Mm-hmm.
—they’re expanding their crypto fund to do frontier businesses. a16z in crypto isn’t just gonna do crypto; it’ll do defense tech and other things.
Yeah.
I think that’s very symbolic of VC capital, especially in crypto, but just in general across startup land and Silicon Valley. It’s all going down, right? And I think that’s where crypto can come in and start helping some of these good companies. They don’t have to be startups or C-stage. They can be good companies. It gives them a way to raise capital efficiently and without a whole bunch of intermediaries. I think there’s a convergence there that’s interesting to watch.
Yeah, that is really cool. What’s your opinion on meme-fi, meme coins paired with stocks? Obviously, that’s been a big part of driving the narrative for on-chain stuff in these early innings of this next cycle or whatever. What do you think about all that, genuinely?
I genuinely think it’s fascinating. I may have, in the beginning, been like, “This makes no sense.” But being close to it on the ground and watching it, I think traditional finance has historically underestimated it. Everyone thinks assets are traded only on fundamentals, but the truth is, even in traditional markets, assets trade on narratives, community, culture, and momentum.
Yes.
All of these things aren’t based on fundamentals. Look at Tesla, GameStop, and Nvidia.
Yeah.
These aren’t just stocks; they’re communities. They have massive identities.
Yeah, I think it’s just an opportunity for people to focus specifically on that piece—the narrative piece, the attention piece—and kind of decouple it from the traditional asset and be able to trade and speculate on that. But I don’t know, there have gotta be all kinds of ways to incorporate and integrate that into the traditional markets. I don’t know. It’s definitely interesting. Interesting is definitely the right word.
Where do you see it going?
I think it’s gonna expand, man. I think it’s all part of the same meta happening in trading, and it bleeds outside of crypto. You have these communities built around stocks, social trading experiences, completely new incentive structures, and markets that are accessible 24/7. It’s a phenomenon birthed out of that transformation, and I think it continues.
I really think it continues because it’s a fun way for people to get involved. You’ve got the meme coin side, but then you’ve also paired it with something real, right? I think people like that. It’s almost like you get the best of both worlds—or the worst of both worlds, depending on how it turns out, right?
Yeah, depending on which stock, bro. Imagine.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
You know?
That’s hilarious. Bro, imagine—
But I love it.
—you pair a meme with a stock, and the meme is doing really well, but then the stock starts doing awful, like tanking.
Yeah, it’s crazy.
That seems fucking funny.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
Nike.
Yeah.
And you know what I really appreciate? I appreciate that phenomenon happening on-chain because it’s forced the public CEOs of these stock companies to pick a side. You see a group of CEOs saying, “We love tokenization. We love that people are talking about our stock and getting involved.” And then you have the other guys who are like, “We hate it. We’re totally against it. How could this be?” I think you have to go through one of those battles anytime you’re doing something new in crypto.
I’ll go back to stablecoins. There was this huge battle where people said, “This is going to systemically destroy the banks,” and then, 2 or 3 years later, it turned out to be helping the U.S. borrow more. I think you have to go through these stages: laugh, then fight, then accept that this technology actually solves real problems.
Yeah.
I think a lot of the coins from older cycles—the ones people say were just speculation—weren’t unimportant. If you look at the 2017 cycle, and even the 2020–2021 cycle, a lot of those coins don’t exist anymore. A lot of the coins traded on Bittrex, Cryptopia, and all these places were experiments in delivering value to tokens or trying to, and people were trying different startups on-chain.
A lot of them failed, but I think without the failures, you wouldn’t have the most successful protocols we have today. Speculation is a way for a lot of failures in crypto to happen, so you can see what works and what doesn’t. Out of those failures, you get to see what’s actually going to do well and succeed. They didn’t call them meme coins back in the day. They just called them altcoins. It’s the same thing.
I always liked the line that Bitcoin was the first meme coin.
Yeah, it’s true, for sure.
I always liked that line. It just makes sense.
Yeah, it’s 100% true. When you’re tokenizing these equities, how do you get the necessary liquidity on-chain so it’s easier for people to trade?
I think it’s a couple of things. One is that you have to have a very strong network of market makers. You also have to understand that world very well. The second thing is that you need very strong mint-and-redeem infrastructure. If a tokenized stock trades at a discount or premium to its mark price or market price, you need mechanisms in place for authorized participants to arbitrage that and create an efficient market for it. I definitely think the mint-and-redeem infrastructure is super important.
The last thing I’d say is distribution. The great thing about Sunrise is that we take all of these things, put them together, and try to make something that looks simple from the outside, but is actually very hard to do all in one place. Distribution is super important. You have to be integrated with CEXs, wallets, DeFi applications, aggregators, routers, and DEXs. It’s truly an ecosystem-wide effort.
So, yeah, it’s a bunch of little problems and some big problems all together. If you do them all right, you can launch 100 assets on Solana and keep growing pretty quickly.
How do you pick which ones? There are so many you can choose from. How do you decide? Is it the markets?
It’s hard, man. The heuristic from day one was always, “Whatever the community wants, that’s what we’ll do.” The community is very schizophrenic and very opinionated, so it’s hard to stick to that. But I think there’s a level of tastemaking that needs to be done.
We’ve seen other people launch 8,000 stocks, but you have zero markets. I think you bring the stuff that you think has the ability to capture people’s attention. They can form their own opinions about it, whether they like it or don’t, whether they want to buy it or don’t. But if it has the ability to make people stop and think about it and say, “Why is this coming now? Is there something going on here?”—we always try to approach it with that question. If I were on the other side of the screen, trying to figure out what to trade, I’d want something that inspires me to do a little research.
I feel like you can also follow the flows, because the stock market right now is so driven by momentum and attention. You can pick up on which assets are popular. That’d be a thing for sure.
I know you’re competing with a lot of different people in this space. I’m curious how you think about perpetual futures on stocks versus tokenized stocks, the advantages of tokenized stocks, and why a consumer would want to use those instead of just trading the perp.
You’ve got the spot markets, obviously. Those are important because they power the rest of the ecosystem. One of the things I always think about is that you’re not bringing in a share of Apple or Apple stock. You’re trying to make Apple stock programmable.
That’s where I think the spot markets really play a fundamental role, and then everyone else can build on top of that and compose with it. I think the perps markets are super important to that ecosystem because they allow you to hedge. You can be doing complicated strategies: depositing collateral, withdrawing, and putting that into something different. You could be doing a lot of really hard things that would traditionally take 2 or 3 days, with 4 or 5 different companies signing off and reconciling all of it.
You can do it all on-chain, programmatically, with an agent. You can do it with your own bot, or by yourself. I think all of these different market structures and ways that people can trade help make the value proposition for tokenized stocks. At the end of the day, if you’re able to bring a tokenized stock onto a blockchain and provide liquid markets for it, the last question is: What can I do with it? What can I do with a tokenized stock that I can’t do in TradFi, or with the existing apps on my phone?
Mm-hmm.
I think that’s the challenge for the entire Solana ecosystem right now: You’ve got to figure out cool ways to solve that.
Yeah, makes sense. And you were at Jump Trading before, right?
Yeah.
What are your thoughts on trading the crypto markets in general? There have been a ton of inefficiencies in the past. What are your views, if you have any, on directionally trading the market? What areas are interesting?
Coming from that world, I always look for where the next large pool of capital is going to come from.
Yeah.
I think that’s something you learn over time: In order for markets to grow, capital needs to come in. Where is it going to come from? How is it going to come? Are there any barriers to it coming?
Obviously, I think it’s going to come from tokenized RWAs. I think it’s going to come from building better experiences. I also think social trading is very interesting. It’s having a culture moment, right? If you’re older, you don’t really get it. But if you’re keeping your ear close to the ground, you see that there’s the Millennial generation, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha. These guys are investing in completely different ways, and it’s not really bleeding up. CNBC isn’t talking about it.
It’s indicative of society and culture in general. This new wave of kids wants to share everything. They share the most intimate parts and details of their lives. We’ve seen this insane, meteoric rise in streaming. Streaming is fucking insane. It’s very Black Mirror-esque: There are people walking around sharing their entire day with you, unfiltered. That doesn’t make sense to guys like us, older people. But, like you said, if you keep your finger on the pulse, you start to understand where they’re all coming from. Social trading, adding that social graph on top of people investing and trading on-chain, makes total sense to me.
And that’s the crazy thing: There’s that much sharing happening. The average Millennial—if you took whatever percentage of Millennials were trading at age 18, I think it’s—
Yeah, less than 1%.
—less than 1%. It might be 0.1%.
Yeah.
If you look at 18-year-olds today, how many of them have traded, are trading, set up wallets, and made and lost a lot of money?
That number has got to be closer to 10% or 20%. It’s got to be, right?
Whatever it is, the delta between the two shows you there’s been a—
Yes.
—a fundamental shift in culture, in society, and in where things are going. So who’s building the—
You know, that’s new demand, right? We talked about demand coming from all these different sources that people don’t really understand. They don’t know where the growth is going to come from. But when you watch that, you think, clearly there’s going to be a lot more growth when it comes to investing and trading, and trying to make money off capital versus trying to make money off labor, right? There’s definitely a big shift there.
I think that’s one of the things. I’d say that, plus taking a $150–$160 trillion asset class and bringing it onto crypto rails, are 2 very distinct, very different pools of capital that I’m willing to bet are going to come in and grow the pie.
I agree.
Yeah, I think the dystopian take on why there might be a lot more people investing and trading is this: if you believe AI is going to be as disruptive as people say it is, it’s going to concentrate wealth and power in fewer, really strong companies. And if you believe job displacement is going to happen because of that, then a lot of the ways people will make money with their discretionary capital will be by betting on those companies. I think that’s one of the more dystopian takes on it, but I do think there’s some validity to it.
And you had the banks today, right? The banks basically started turning off AI agents from accessing their systems.
Yeah.
I think I saw a good post about this on Twitter where he was just like, “Yeah, they’re saying it’s security, but really what it is, is people are building bots to move their money to whichever bank has the highest yield.” So they’re like—
Yeah.
“We can’t make it that easy for people to just—”
Shit, game solved.
—do bank runs, you know?
The game being solved, yeah.
Yeah, it’s going to get a lot—
Yeah.
Oh, shit’s going to get a lot realer.
They don’t like competition, those guys. They don’t like competition.
No, they don’t.
I find it funny that one of the bigger bear theses for crypto is quantum risk, obviously. I feel like Frank DeGods has a really good take on this. If quantum can hack Bitcoin, then it can hack Bank of America, Chase, and your Instagram password. Nothing is safe. It’s just game over.
It’s actually more likely that the problem gets solved in crypto because we’re so focused on it, and so many resources and brilliant minds are contributing to solving it across the board. It’s an interesting conversation.
Production’s telling us to wrap up. We really appreciate you coming on. We’ll have to have you on again sometime. Is there anything else you want to say or leave with the audience before you dip?
Thanks for having me, guys. It’s been awesome.
Of course.
Yeah, I’d love to come back.
Great conversation.
Cool.
It’s great to talk to guys like you. You’re crushing it. Congratulations on everything. Keep doing your thing, and we’ll have you on again in the future. Pleasure to meet you.
Appreciate it. Thank you again so much.
Thanks.
Thanks, guys. Really appreciate it. Bye.
Later, brother.
Smart guy. Sunrise. Wormhole.
Sunrise. Sunrise. Bro, $160 trillion, bro?
Yeah, that’s insane. Did you know that before that conversation?
That’s such a big number, bro.
It’s disgusting. Z is referring to $160 trillion. What exactly is that? Is it just total markets?
I think that’s the total value of—
Tradable assets.
—all, yeah.
Tradable assets, so equities and crypto, et cetera. And obviously crypto makes up about 1% of that, or whatever, 1.35%.
Yeah, 1.2% or something crazy like that.
Insane. Yeah, that is crazy. That was a good little unlock. That was good. Next up, we have in the queue—Z, do you want to introduce our next guest?
Yeah, we have Eli, CEO and co-founder of StarkWare, and also one of the co-founders of Zcash. He’s a great cryptographer, one of the OGs in crypto, so I’m glad to have him on and give us the alpha on what’s going on at StarkWare and his history in crypto.
Welcome, welcome, Eli.
Hello there. Hi. Hi, Ansem. Hi, Banks.
Hello. How are you?
Good. Good to see you again, brother. How have you been?
Good to see you. Pretty good, pretty good. Excited to be on this illustrious show for the first time.
We’re excited to have you, bro. Z did his very best at introducing you, but in your own words, do you want to tell the audience at home who you are, where you’re from, what you do, what excites you, why you’re here, and what we’re going to talk about today?
3. Starknet Bets on Quantum Safety
I used to do math back in the day, when humans still did that. Now it’s all machines doing that. I invented a bunch of zero-knowledge technology that ended up being really practical. I think I was probably the first person to realize that zero knowledge can solve not just privacy, but also scalability—
What is ZK?
—for blockchain.
Just for the layman.
Zero knowledge. Zero-knowledge proof. It’s a form of cryptography that can be used for privacy in things like Zcash and on StarkNet, and also for scaling blockchains. I realized this at a Bitcoin conference in 2013, and ever since then I’ve moved over to blockchain, left my academic position, and co-founded Zcash first, and then StarkWare, where I am now.
So you’re a real-life genius. We’re talking to a real-life genius.
Yes, bro.
That’s cool.
Amazing.
No, by now I’m old and dumb. Again, machines—math is for machines now. We humans can’t do much there.
Being smart doesn’t mean anything anymore, right? It’s like what the Industrial Revolution did to big, strong guys. Who needs them?
Exactly.
Who was that? The Multicoin—
You know, it’s—
—the Multicoin guy who came on? He said intelligence is commoditized, and the thing that matters is agency.
Oh, it was—
It was—
Tushar?
Yes, it was Tushar.
Tushar.
That was a bar. That was one of the best bars on the show.
That was a thousand-bar.
Yeah, he said what AI—
Yeah.
—is going to do to society, markets, and industries is the same thing the Industrial Revolution did to big, strong, able-bodied guys. It kind of just—
I agree. I agree, yeah.
What did he say, Z? Intelligence is—
He said intelligence is commoditized, and the thing that isn’t commoditized is agency. So it’s how hard you go, how committed and consistent you are, that matters most.
How committed, yeah. It’s good. It’s really good.
Agency.
Yeah.
And attention is really big. We talk a lot about attention on the show as well. Explain it to me like I’m 17 years old. What do you actually do? Explain StarkWare to someone who’s never touched crypto.
I think StarkWare is like the Skunk Works or the Bell Labs of crypto. So much of the really cool, innovative stuff everyone is now talking about—for instance, post-quantum security—was invented by us, productized by us, and is delivered by us.
Another way to see it: Ethereum is heading toward where Starknet already is. A lot of things, like post-quantum security, privacy in a programmable form that you could define and compose with, very good UX, and massive scale—that’s what StarkWare does, and does best. That’s how I’d describe it: the Skunk Works of crypto.
Cool. Great.
By Skunk Works, I’m referring to the thing one of the aerospace companies had, where they had the Blackbird and invented a bunch of really cool technologies that everyone is excited about.
So there’s a bunch of stuff we invented that now everyone’s excited about.
I know you guys are an L2 on Ethereum currently. The L1 and L2 space has been so competitive over the years that people can get lost in the differences between the different L1s and L2s. Do you want to speak to why you chose for Starknet to be an L2, how you differentiate it from the other rollups, and how you’re thinking about it going forward? I know you’ve also spoken a little about possibly shifting to an L1 in the future.
Today was a very exciting day for the Starknet community because the vote on whether we should be an L1 has now concluded, and there’s a lot of support for it.
Oh.
We’re going to be looking into that very quickly and building something that’s hopefully going to be really useful: post-quantum secure, privacy-preserving, with programmable privacy, and a safe haven—a high ground you can go to if a quantum tsunami ever hits us. I think that day may come.
We set out to build technology that would scale Ethereum, and we actually succeeded. But Ethereum doesn’t need that scale right now. There are a whole bunch of L2s that scale it. Even though our technology is much better, with things like account abstraction that allow you to get post-quantum security and really good UX, and usable privacy where you can easily shield your assets and compose that with DeFi—a programmable version of Zcash—scaling Ethereum by itself is not sufficiently in demand.
But a bigger problem arose: our security is going to depend on how fast Ethereum moves and migrates. I think what Starknet just said today is that we’re not confident Ethereum is going to move fast enough for our safety, so we’re going to move ourselves.
That’s awesome. Big day. I didn’t—
It’s exciting.
—that that happened today. That’s huge.
Yeah.
Thanks for sharing that on the show—
Pretty exciting.
—and breaking that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You mentioned a quantum tsunami and that the day might come.
Yeah.
When, brother? When?
I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t know. But I think it could arrive much faster.
If you had to guess.
I think the next 2 years would be the time—
Ooh.
—I’d be most worried about. Yeah. Like—
That’s crazy.
—why not? These quantum computers are producing so much innovation, and there are so many teams and new technologies for building the actual computers. So, yeah, why not?
Fuck. That’s crazy.
“Quantum tsunami.” Chat likes that.
That’s a good term.
Yeah.
I like that term. I’m going to start using that.
You should. Yeah.
So, I guess you’re shifting to being an L1 with programmable privacy. It’s post-quantum secure. How do you guys see yourselves competing with the other L1s? You use a different VM than the EVM, correct? How do you envision competing on transaction speed and throughput and all those things?
We’re already crushing it. We’re faster, better, and cheaper than all the other technologies. It’s just that on Ethereum, for pure scaling, there isn’t enough demand today. On all these metrics, we’re way more efficient, safer, and more usable than any other technology that exists out there.
But I think the main thing with this L1 is going to be very high quantum safety. You ask how we’re going to compete. I’m not necessarily thinking about this as a competition. I’m thinking of a flood that may come, and rushing to build an ark. Living on an ark is not the most convenient way to spend your time, but if your home, with the garden and everything, is under 100 feet of water, then you very much want to be on an ark.
That’s the mindset my team and I have: we need to build this safe place for crypto if the quantum flood comes. It will have a better virtual machine, a better programming language, better UX, and better privacy. But that’s secondary. The most important thing is—
Mm.
—this is the damn ark that you can board if the flood comes.
Awesome. That’s a great way of phrasing it. You spoke a little about how you’re already faster and more efficient on competing metrics, and that you’ll also have programmable privacy. Would you say you’re kind of a combination of Solana and Zcash? Would you guys also have the same properties Zcash has as money when you’re using DeFi applications or other protocols on your L1?
Yeah, probably. I co-founded Zcash. I love the technology, I love the team, and I’m very friendly with them. I think we see this evolution, right? There used to be gold, which we thought was scarce. I saw on Twitter today that people are like—
Mm.
—“They found a way to turn mercury into gold,” or something. So, I guess, I don’t know.
Yeah, I saw that. It’s crazy.
It sucks for Peter Schiff, but at least your listeners know that there’s a better form of gold: digital gold. More recently, people are saying, “Digital gold for money also has to have privacy.” So Zcash is getting more attention, and that’s great. You know I love it.
Hans, in one of our earlier episodes, referred to Zcash as “Swiss banking in your pocket,” which I feel like was a really easy way to describe what the product does.
Yeah, I love it.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off.
Yeah, no. I love Zcash, you know. I co-founded it. I’m very proud of it. I wish it all the best. But as technology evolves, there’s now some demand, or some people are asking, “What about a form of money that is post-quantum secure and has all the other properties?” You want to add that as well. You want privacy, and obviously something that looks or feels a little bit like the Bitcoin style: proof of work and some scarcity. Then you also want post-quantum security. I think this is what Starknet is going to end up occupying.
Do you think—why do you think it takes a while for crypto participants to catch on to which properties are important and which properties matter? Zcash was not performing well for many, many years after its creation.
I hear you.
From 2016 until, whatever, 2025.
It was painful.
Yeah. But at some point, I think the light bulb goes off for people. It seems like right now in crypto, the fundamentally strong assets and fundamentally strong teams are getting more attention. The pendulum has swung one way and is swinging back the other direction. How do you navigate that? Do you even try to navigate it and evangelize why Starknet’s important and how it becomes popular and gets marketed? There are all these things that are overlooked in crypto, and eventually they do get attention and do well, but sometimes it just takes time.
Yeah. Zcash is a great example. The academic white paper I co-authored with 6 brilliant cryptographers in 2014 was implemented in 2016 as Zcash, but it took, as you said, like 9 years for the world to care about it—or maybe 11. I’m not good with numbers.
That’s funny.
So, honestly, I’m not good with numbers. A lot of mathematicians aren’t good with numbers. But it took a while.
The point is that, for money, this is actually pretty quick. Paper money took several centuries to be accepted in China, where it first appeared. People were saying, “What kind of funny money is this? We want the metal stuff.” Then, when it came to Europe from China with Marco Polo, or whatever, it again took a couple of centuries to be adopted.
If you think about things like ATMs or credit cards, it took several decades for them to be trusted. I’m not surprised that recognizing or agreeing on what properties digital gold should have takes a little bit of time. It took a bit of time for Bitcoin. It’s taking a bit of time for Zcash, and it’s going to take a bit of time for Starknet. That’s fine. We’ll wait, and we’ll keep building what, in our minds, is necessary for it to be a form of money that people can use.
How do you think about it as money, but also as an ecosystem? What do you think is going to drive a lot of the early activity once you shift over to being L1, or even now as an L2?
Yeah. Like many projects, we started by saying, “Build and they will come.” Build the best infrastructure, and then developers will come.
Yeah.
That wasn’t a great return on investment. We have a few very good DeFi protocols on Starknet, like Kubo and AVNU, and a bunch of others in gaming. But if we look at the amount of funding that went into projects and how many of them stuck around and became sustainable, it wasn’t a great return on investment.
Something we started doing recently is developing a few applications. One of them I think people should check out is called SuperVega. It’s at supervega.app. It’s a retail-facing platform for trading options and buying—if you want to go long on things like Bitcoin, Zcash, STRK, Litecoin, or other stuff—with a very good UX. That’s one thing my team at StarkWare has developed, and there are a bunch of others we’re building. So, to answer your question, in addition to supporting great existing ecosystem projects, we’re also building a few ourselves. We hope this will attract more attention and bring more users.
That’s dope. It seems like the hands-on approach is going to be a lot more popular going forward, especially when you have a strong team that can do that.
For retail, it seems like what’s caught the most attention with on-chain stuff is speculation. Obviously, meme coins lately have done really well, but perps on Hyperliquid have also dominated. It seems like the finance side of things is what dominates the most. That makes sense. How are you guys—
Mm-hmm.
—thinking about AI? We talked a little bit earlier in the show about how AI is disrupting a lot of things and finding vulnerabilities in existing companies and internet applications. How are you thinking about AI and AI agents transacting on Starknet, and how are you going to interact with that?
That’s a really great question. One of the things we’re exploring is that we’re very good at scale and hyperscale, meaning processing a very large number of transactions at a very low cost. That’s something we’re actively exploring as we speak. I hope to come on again in the future and make some big announcements about what we’re doing there, but right now it’s all in progress. We’re looking at things like hyperscale and micropayments for agent e-commerce and the greater agent economy.
There’s another aspect of AI: the threat it poses, both in terms of speeding up things like quantum computation and in terms of weakening all kinds of existing cryptography, including things like factoring that underlies some of the signature schemes out there. I think people are realizing that you need to move your cryptography to higher ground. The nice thing about zk-STARKs, the technology I co-invented about 8 years ago, is that it relies on a very safe form of cryptography called hash functions. Hash functions are probably the safest from AI attacks and quantum threats.
So the AI thing is something we’re both trying to address and cater to by building infrastructure for agents to use. But it’s also pushing the world to realize that zk-STARKs, which are based only on hashes, are a really important technology for saving blockchain.
Can you explain, at a low level for the audience, what a zk-STARK is and how that powers StarkWare?
First of all, it’s a proof. It’s a way of knowing that the right thing was being done, even when you’re not watching. I’ll give an example. If I were to give Darth Vader the task of processing a day’s worth of Bitcoin transactions and reporting the new state of the system, I’d be really worried because maybe Darth Vader would steal all the Bitcoin and put it in his wallet.
Yeah.
But with a zk-STARK, I can tell him, “Look, dude, go do that, but in order for me to accept the new state, I need to check this proof.” The proof is very short—it’s less than one Bitcoin block. The only way for Darth Vader to convince me that the proof is legitimate is to show that all the transactions he did in the UTXO set, and the new state of Bitcoin that he shows, are correct. It’s a kind of cryptographic cement that makes sure someone is operating with integrity, doing everything correctly, and not cheating. It’s like magic that enforces integrity, trust, and reliability. That’s what a zk-STARK delivers.
Makes sense. Thank you.
Cool.
Appreciate that. Would this technology that you’ve used to build Starknet have been used in the early days of cryptocurrency if it had already existed? Do you think it would have been—
Yeah.
I’m sure Satoshi would have loved it. Satoshi actually spoke a little bit about ZK. When he stopped speaking in 2011, we didn’t yet have ZK that was efficient enough to be in Bitcoin. But he did write that if ZK were around, it would solve privacy for Bitcoin. He wasn’t aware of the scale aspect, that it could also solve scale. I’m sure he would have loved it and brought it into Bitcoin. I have no doubt.
I have a question. If StarkWare totally wins, if everything goes right for you guys, what does everyday life look like in 10 years for the average person? What’s different for—
Okay.
—for a normal guy if you guys accomplish and achieve everything to the highest degree?
Here’s my vision. You’ll have the same kind of peer-to-peer, no-intermediary experience as cash—paper cash. If you give someone a $20 bill, it’s between you and him. That’s it. You’ll have that kind of privacy and intimacy, just you and the other counterparty, but applied to all of global finance, whether it’s trading perps, lending, borrowing, or investing.
Everything will be done in a peer-to-peer manner, in a decentralized way. No censorship, and no central party that sees everything.
Frictionless.
And with very good UX. The UX—
Yeah.
—will feel like a Robinhood app, but without a Robinhood where you custody all your funds and that sees everything you’re doing. That’s how it will look.
A valid effort. Appreciate you, man. It’s been awesome talking to you.
Yeah.
We have our other guest in the green room. That was Eli, guys. Eli, is there anything else you’d like to say to the audience before we let you go?
No. I love your show.
Thank you, bro.
Yeah.
You’ve been just lovely.
We’ll have to have you come back on. It’s incredible what you’ve done in your life.
Thank you very much.
Thanks for teaching us, man.
Thank you.
We appreciate you.
Thank you.
Appreciate you, bro.
Thanks.
Oh, he’s super smart.
Yeah.
Super smart dude.
Yeah.
He’s like, “Yeah, I just co-founded Zcash.”
Yeah.
“Like, created zk-STARKs,” you know? Just—
The best is when—
Just invented them. That’s all.
The best is when he said he’s not good with numbers. That was my favorite thing.
He’s like, “Yeah, we’re actually just better than everything else existing right now. We just…” It was just hard.
And following him is Tulip King, who plays a huge role at Counterparty, ThreadGuy’s show. I had the pleasure of meeting him in New York. We’re big fans of him. He has really, really good takes, and I know he’s been super bullish on Zcash. We’ll let him tell you guys—
—in his own words. But that’s kind of the gist of who he is. He’s younger, and he’s really close to trading culture. I’m honestly really excited to have him on the show. We were trying to do it last week, but obviously we had to cancel. Without further ado, let’s get Tulip King in here.
Tulip, Tulip, Tulip.
Yo.
What’s good, bro?
What’s up, boys?
Yeah, how are you?
How we doing?
Good. How we living, man?
Let me just follow up the fucking inventor of ZK technology, the head inventor of everything.
ZK of everything.
Come on, bro.
Let’s crater the IQ of the show as hard as we possibly can.
That’s awesome.
Sorry, bro. Every guest we bring on, we lower the average already, so we’re already fucking it up.
Yeah.
You guys know the role I play here.
Yeah.
It’s definitely a unique show. We do a unique service here at Market Bubble. But yeah, Tulip King, in your own words, do you want to introduce yourself? What do you work on? Why are you here? How do you know us and the show? Just introduce yourself. Who, what, when, where, why, how?
Yeah. I’m Tulip King. I’ve been in crypto for probably too long now. Not super, not unc status, but as far as how much you can deal with it for your mental health, I’ve probably been here a little too long.
I work for—
Tweet.
—ThreadGuy at the Counterparty stream. So I tweet a lot, but specifically for that team. I split about half my time helping ThreadGuy on the creative side and stream content. What are the takes? How can we be smart about what’s going on in the space? The other half is back-office work: our clipping operation, some of our business development partnerships, that stuff. And then I’m just a chronic trader and tweeter, and I love to write about and post my ideas.
Sick. Sick. Yeah, a lot of overlap. Obviously, we do a lot of the same shit over here. You know my background’s in traditional media, attention, et cetera. Z is on fucking Twitter all day. That’s where he thrives. That’s where people know him from. How are you feeling about CT this last week and about markets right now? Just how are you feeling?
I’m so fucking bullish.
Really?
I actually feel like—
Thank God.
—the best I’ve felt. Let’s talk about some coins. I feel the best I’ve felt about crypto, honestly, probably since I joined. I think the opportunity in the space is the biggest it’s ever been since—
Get some fucking tulips in the chat. It’s a great way to end the show, by the way.
It’s—
Thank God that we have you on, Tulip.
Dude, your past guests were awesome, but I was like, come on, let’s get bullish. Let’s talk about some coins here.
I love it.
But take the past guests, for example. Sunrise: whether you think they win or somebody else wins or whatever, the scale of the numbers he was laying out is correct, right? We’re talking trillions of dollars of assets coming on-chain, quadrillions of dollars of volume. Who right now thinks that 2 years from now, less trading will happen on crypto? Who thinks that 2 years from now, fewer assets will be on-chain and less of the world will have moved to these new rails? Two years after that, two years after that, we’re talking about adding multiple zeros to the current crypto numbers.
While that is an interesting story on its own, what’s interesting is, just presume that Hyperliquid wins, right? There will be competition. Maybe you need to reallocate along the way because some perps DEX figures it out or something, right? That’s a 100-bagger. A world where quadrillions of dollars of assets are on-chain and trading, HYPE is a 100-bagger, right?
And what’s your downside at this level? “Oh, HYPE goes to 60, HYPE goes to 40.” I couldn’t give a shit. I’ll sell my kidney. I’m not trying to overstress HYPE specifically, right? You can have your own preferences and stuff, but the scale of what’s coming is unimaginable. The perps DEXes have 100-baggers in there; there are 1,000x opportunities in there. It’s the same thing on the options side, the lending markets, spot, and all of DeFi.
Hyperliquid has shown that buybacks deliver value to token holders, and you’ll go up. There are probably a handful of coins you could buy right now that are a 100x over the next—
What are they? What are they?
—decade. I think Hyperliquid’s probably the most obvious, clear one.
Yeah.
I’m a huge fan of Derive. I think options have been critically undervalued. People love perps so much—and they should—that they got overly bearish on options. But options have fundamentally different payout structures than perps, right?
Yeah.
A perp is just a multiplier on linearity, and there’s path risk, which is why you have liquidations, because the protocol needs to stay solvent. But with options, you have convex payouts, which, especially in a crazy-tail asset like crypto, is incredibly valuable. You can hedge, you can do spreads. You can buy a bunch of options that don’t even express a view on the asset, but express a view on the price of volatility in the market.
Maybe options eat into zero-DTE retail, or maybe perps eat into zero-DTE retail options. But the rest of the market is completely untapped. I’m looking at it and thinking, “Okay, yeah, crypto is maturing. The markets are getting more liquid.” You’re seeing a protocol like Derive with 90% share in options premiums.
Yeah.
I’m like, “Okay, don’t overthink this one.”
Yeah.
And maybe it’s Lighter, maybe it’s Variational. I’ll buy those when they have 20% or 30% share. I think people are also overtrading this moment. What I’ll really say is, let’s take options. There’s probably a 10,000x opportunity, if I’m doing the math right. There might be 100,000x left in options volume on-chain just to get to TradFi levels, however many zeros that is.
If Lighter flips Derive, or Hyperliquid does options and flips it, or Paradex does, whatever, you’ll see it coming. If you buy here or buy when it’s already done the flip, you’re buying on the presumption that it will carry you the next order of magnitude or two.
Yeah.
So your payout in that is still massive.
Yeah.
Candidly, as a portfolio allocator in crypto, this is the easiest time to add zeros to your net worth since Bitcoin. The opportunity is just huge. People don’t wrap their heads around the numbers, and then they overtrade and wait for it to happen over a week. This is my retirement cycle. I’m locked in.
Also, I don’t understand: everybody keeps tweeting, “Oh, it’s a bad market.” I’m like, “Stop buying shitty coins.” I’m at portfolio all-time highs here. It’s not rocket science. It’s not trenching. I buy the coins where the project also buys its own coin. I buy the coins where the teams also buy the coins.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I’m the shit. You know, open DeFi—
What are your biggest positions currently?
Yeah, like HYPE, Pump.
My biggest position—my entire net worth—is Eli Lilly, actually, which is its own conversation, probably.
I love the Eli Lilly shill, bro. Love the Eli Lilly shill.
Yeah, I can definitely get into that if you guys are interested. Bitcoin, HYPE, and Zcash are probably all kind of equally sized. It just depends who’s trading at what day.
But I was very early to Pearl, and that’s just grown to be big.
I had put a little bit of that.
I was very early to Derive, too. That’s just grown to be big. I think Venice cards, some stuff like that. I’m trying not to have too many positions. It’s actually really hard. There’s so much opportunity, and I don’t want to be too cute.
Yeah.
I like that cards doesn’t overlap with Hyperliquid or Derive, and that Venice is in its own lane. I don’t think you should be chasing beta. I think you should be chasing exposures: What parts of the market will benefit from everything coming on-chain? Who’s the leader in that? Buy it, and then tell your Grok bot to give you a report every day if somebody’s catching up.
If somebody’s durably catching up—not just having a really good day or a really good week—play your risk ratios and reallocate. That’s kind of the portfolio.
You’re still bullish on Zcash? How do you feel about Pump? How do you feel about Solana and Ethereum?
Zcash is going to $1 trillion. I couldn’t tell you when, but it is. I think alternative crypto monies, like Bitcoin alternative assets, are incredibly attractive right here.
Pump is a team that knows how to execute. They verticalized with PumpSwap, the Pump.fun app, and their own bridge. They make more money than God. I think the VC class of crypto hates it for some reason. I know all the wallets are in a war right now, but I think they all win together. All of the social trading apps are awesome products.
Agreed.
People trade Pump coins on FOMO, and Pump makes money from that, and FOMO makes money from that. Phantom has a cash product.
Yeah, I think KATE has the most holders on FOMO specifically.
Mm-hmm.
And it’s a Pump coin.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then Phantom has an awesome cash product. Maybe one of these other two do, but if you want to start spending some of your crypto, there’s that. I think there’s so much room for all of them to grow. They probably wouldn’t acknowledge how much money they all actually make from each other.
Yeah.
I’m a team-let’s-all-get-along type of guy. I like it all.
Yeah.
I agree.
I agree.
4. Why Solana Is Not Money
I’m incredibly bearish on Solana, though. That’s my hot take: my bearishness on Solana, ETH, and most of the L1s.
Why?
My perspective for not just this cycle, but honestly crypto moving forward, is that you essentially want to be in one of 2 categories. You either want to be a coin that is money: Bitcoin, Zcash, Pearl. There are pairs in that category. You could say, “Okay, Zcash and Monero are both private monies,” and maybe you have a favorite for some reason.
Yeah.
Or Pearl versus some of the other AI monies, maybe Bittensor or whatever. But coins that are money trade with monetary premia, and then they have their own fundamentals. You put those in one basket—that’s barbell A of your portfolio. Barbell B of your portfolio is coins that make money.
I love this, by the way. I love this.
I don’t think Solana is money. The core thesis that ETH is money and Solana is money was essentially that block space is like an economy, and it would grow, mature, and develop. Ethereum would be the natural money of the ETH blockchain because there’s no counterparty risk. Solana would be the natural money or collateral of the Solana blockchain because there’s no counterparty risk.
It just doesn’t show in the numbers. On Solana, the most widely used collateral is USDC—stablecoins.
Yeah.
The SOL token actually does pretty well in swap pairs because of the meme coins, but what are all of the on-chain stocks paired against? USDC. If you’re bullish on on-chain stocks on Solana, you’re also bullish on USDC becoming the denominated asset in these swap pairs. It’s the same thing for Ethereum in the lending markets and the swap pairs.
You have this nasty problem where the more mature Solana and Ethereum get, and the more robust they become, the less and less the native asset is actually being used like money. That’s my core thesis as to why Ethereum got cucked at all-time highs in the last run-up we had. Same thing for Solana. I kind of think it’s over. Unless something radically changes in these chains, your thesis is not that these are money; your thesis is that these make money.
Now you have the problem that Solana transactions are up like crazy this year, and transaction fees are down like crazy because they’re doing what they should do, which is scale the network. You also have this problem we had with NFTs: “Sure, this NFT collection is valuable and scarce,” but NFTs as an asset class are not scarce. You can mint them as you please.
Yeah.
It’s the same thing for block space. Block space is very artificially scarce. Solana can add more block space and scale. Solana has unique tech, but would Solana adoption have been as good if Ethereum wasn’t $100 to do a swap? Probably not. How expensive can Solana get? How high can they raise fees before Aptos, Sui, or one of these other networks starts to eat into that?
I do believe the thesis that you could build Pump.fun and these DePIN networks on Solana in such a way that there’s a critical mass of protocols there that interoperate, so Solana block space is differentiated because you’re paying for the privilege of sharing block space with all of these other applications. That’s the bull case. If I’m wrong, it will be for that reason.
But again, you can just wait and see it. I don’t expect to wake up and all of a sudden Solana is printing a gazillion in fees and is net profitable.
That is true.
I check this shit every single day. I feel pretty confident I’ll see it coming. I hate to prey on the downfall of people’s bags, but pretend Ethereum was priced off of actual money: it loses monetary premium, and it needs to make money. Solana loses monetary premium, and it needs to make money.
If you look at the misallocation, Ethereum is $300 billion, Solana is, what, like $90 billion, and maybe XRP—maybe that crime finally falls away or whatever. There is literally a quarter trillion or more of misallocated value in crypto. It’s not the case that you’ll destroy this quarter trillion and get a quarter trillion somewhere else. It’s more like you lose $100 billion of Ethereum, and now $10, $20, $30, $40, $50 billion ends up somewhere else, just because of liquidity. But that’s actually your buyer.
Not only is all of TradFi coming on-chain, and not only are Phantom, FOMO, and Pump.fun bringing all the retail users on-chain, but we can reallocate hundreds of billions of dollars from badly allocated value into good projects. There’s your Zcash to $200 billion. If you’re comfortable buying Solana at 20,000× earnings, maybe you’re comfortable buying HYPE at 100 or 200× earnings.
I’m so adamant about the misallocation of value in these coins because that’s actually what flows into my good coins. I’m pretty bearish. I’m motivated to be bearish, and I’ll be totally transparent about that. That’s my take.
Listen, don’t ever sell yourself short. You’re an extremely smart guy. Z, I’m honestly curious about your response. My take on it? Your response. We’ve gone back and forth on this. Yeah, we have. We’ve gone back and forth on the timeline a few times. This is really good shit, by the way. This is great. We’ve gone back and forth a few times.
I do understand the thesis. I actually think it makes a ton of sense. The reason I disagree with it is because I don’t think people ever have valued Ethereum or Solana as businesses. I think they’ve always been valued as some kind of money, and as a representation of how many applications are going to build on top of them.
The people holding ETH and SOL right now aren’t just going to decide today, “Oh, it’s not money,” just because it’s not being used as much on-chain or because stablecoins are being used less. I do think this is an issue for outside allocators, though.
So I kind of disagree with the shift of capital, but I do agree with your point that somebody in traditional finance looks at these things as, “Well, how do I evaluate this? What am I buying here?” I think it’s more difficult for them to get behind a thesis, and I do think that’s why they didn’t do as well last cycle compared with the 2020 and 2021 cycles. At one point, if you looked at ETH, there was a period when it was actually capturing a lot of value in fees—
Yeah.
…like, on-chain.
For sure.
If you look at transaction fees on ETH in 2020 and 2021, they were insane. They were just crazy numbers. I think you could have done the math there and thought through what was going on on a forward-looking basis. What’s more interesting, and where I actually agree with you, is that the apps that are making money, are good businesses, and are doing well have an easier path to becoming money than the other way around—becoming better businesses. It’s much harder for Solana to capture a lot more revenue from the things building on top of it than for Pump.fun to become more money because they’re using more custom pairs of all the coins that launch on their launchpad. So I do agree with you on that.
Hmm.
Um—
Yeah. Yeah, I would say—
It’s an interesting spot.
What’s interesting about that is, I think you’re right: there’s a mental pattern, and there’s so much market cap behind it. The bet I’m making is to fade that. In past cycles, there weren’t really money-making applications.
Yeah.
So it was sensible to buy Ethereum and Solana. You could say, “Well, I’ll bet the ecosystem grows, and either they make fees or become money or whatever,” right?
Yeah.
I’d say the fact that Hyperliquid exists and is making money, and Pump.fun exists and is making money, is what derates the attractiveness of these and starts to wake people up. What’s at all-time highs right now?
Yeah.
In my opinion, at least, it’s either the better monies, like Zcash or Pearl, or the money-making protocols. That creates pressure to reevaluate your Solana and Ethereum holdings in a way that there wasn’t in the past.
I also think the dot-com bubble is a really good historical study of what we experienced in 2021. You look at Cisco, which would have been in Ethereum’s position: these internet businesses are new, with totally new economics. It’s unprecedented. The TAM is the world—it’s everybody, all the value, all the commerce, everything. Who’s going to win? Picks and shovels, like Cisco, selling connectivity. Connectivity is a scarce resource at this time in the species, so plow all the money in the world into it, and it’s the most valuable company in the world. That is the moment Ethereum existed in, when it had a monopoly on the scarce resource of block space. That just doesn’t exist anymore because we’ve scaled.
Yeah.
It took Cisco, God, 2 decades to get back to that all-time high. But the beauty of the dot-com bubble, and where I think we are in crypto, is that we’re around 2003, where the market has bottomed. Everybody should go home and look at the Nasdaq chart for the dot-com bubble. It took 10 or 16 years, or however long, for QQQ to get back to all-time highs after the crash.
Mm.
But you have stocks like Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft that were setting new all-time highs a few years after 2003.
Yeah.
If you zoom out and look at the chart, those have basically been in a 25-year bull market. I think what you can do is pick those businesses right now. You have to do the work. This is why I posted that video: I’m just going to do the work. I’m going to look at every single coin in crypto. I have about 120 slides right now, and I’ll do another multihour video just talking about everything worth talking about. Just do the work, because, oh my God, if I wasn’t 4 years old in the dot-com crash, I would’ve sat down and looked at every single business.
Yeah, literally.
And said—
And just like, “No, I’m going to buy them all.”
“This is a generational opportunity.”
Yeah.
Right? You know?
That’s true.
So—
True.
Everybody watching this stream, depending on how smart you are or how fast you work, is probably 1 to 3 weeks away from being able to develop a thesis on the generational assets. I think that will create a lot of pressure on Ethereum and Solana.
Yeah. I’ve been super bearish on ETH. I think I was one of the early ETH bears on the timeline. I’m kind of partial to this for this reason. Everybody’s like, “You’re insane.” I was like, “No, I think I’m right on this.” That’s why I’m partial to your thesis. I’ve always been so biased on Solana. Solana is one of my favorite coins of all time, dude. The other part of my thesis is, if you’re bullish on Solana capturing a ton of this value going forward but you don’t know what these applications are going to be yet, there’s no other way to really bet on that happening. But I guess, as you said, you kind of can—
I agree with that. I think that’s an extremely reasonable take. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
I think the Solana Foundation feels more involved as well than most others.
Yeah.
Yeah, that’s true, and that’s definitely an advantage. It’s a talented team.
Yeah. What’s the Pearl thesis? I actually met one of the Pearl founders in Singapore.
Mm-hmm. There’s the question of why it’s time for Pearl, and then there’s Pearl specifically.
Mm-hmm.
The reason it’s time for Pearl is that we’ve known Bitcoin has had the privacy problem, the quantum problem, and the security budget problem for a long time. Bitcoin is finally big enough, and those issues are now close enough for people to care. I have this perspective that money is essentially zero-sum: for one asset to gain monetary premium, another asset has to lose it. Money itself is just liquidity. It’s just the medium of exchange or a store of value. There’s actually no such thing as good money; it’s really only money that fills the vacuum of bad money.
The way I like to put this is: if the dollar was fundamentally sound, if there weren’t these issues—like, the Genesis Block of Bitcoin is “The Times 03/Jan/2009: Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” Bitcoin is a political project. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about that. If the dollar was fundamentally sound, you wouldn’t get Bitcoin. When does Bitcoin go up? It goes up when we lose faith in the dollar.
Bitcoin is good, but that wouldn’t be enough. You actually need the dollar to be bad to create the opportunity space for Bitcoin to grow into it. Now we’re in a moment where Bitcoin is, air quotes, “bad.” That creates the opportunity space for new store-of-value assets. Enter Zcash. Zcash is the market signal that maybe my theory is wrong. I think it explains what we’re seeing. The market signaled that we closed the doors on money assets after the block size wars. Bitcoin has been far ahead of Ethereum, even when we all kind of thought Ethereum was money. But Zcash has reopened that.
Now I think new money has to exist within the airspace of Bitcoin, the same way Bitcoin exists within the airspace of the dollar. Zcash is solving privacy. I actually think quantum is a pretty bad narrative, and I’m happy to get into that. What Pearl, in theory, solves is the security budget. If you look at the quarterly filings of all the public Bitcoin miners, they’re all switching to AI because they make more money converting energy into AI than converting energy into Bitcoin.
You’ve seen depressed hash rate on Bitcoin. This has happened; we’ve seen Bitcoin hash-rate bear markets. The price has also been down, which usually has an impact on that. It’s kind of recovering a little, so I don’t want to over-project there. But what if you strapped Bitcoin to the trend? What if you said, “Okay, obviously, as I said, we’re making a civilizational effort to convert energy into intelligence”? What if, instead of trying to have an independent energy sink, which is what Bitcoin is right now, we bootstrapped on that energy? So the beauty of Pearl is…
There are some other things, but practically speaking, you take Bitcoin, you yank out SHA-256, you stick in matrix multiplication, and that’s it. That’s actually kind of why I think it’s better than Nock or TAO, or some of these other things, because all of those have the same problem with moneyness that Ethereum and Solana have, at least in my perspective: the programmability kind of takes away from them. Proof of stake, I think, is just bad money in the first place.
Bitcoin works. Zcash kind of works because it’s really, really, really close to Bitcoin. It’s Bitcoin, but with a privacy pool built into the network. Let’s make that privacy pool as dope as possible. So the thesis of Pearl is basically: let’s bootstrap on all of this matrix multiplication, on all of this AI infrastructure spend. There are a ton of interesting implications downstream of that if you really want to get Pearl-pilled, but that’s the core premise.
Yeah, it’s good. I like the Pearl thesis a lot. I actually talked to Du for a little bit. I think it’s clean; I think it’s solid. You kind of already have the proof of concept of Zcash gaining some traction and doing well, which I think is good. It’s got a differentiated bet. That is the thing this cycle, I think. You spoke a little bit earlier about how everybody’s insanely angry on the timeline, and it’s like, bro, you’re just not picking the right coins. You’re just—
What?
—you’re just not picking the right coins. It’s really that simple. You’re just not picking the right coins. I try to hammer home the 70/30 thing as much as I can: 70% should be safer stuff, and 30% should be riskier stuff. But yeah, I do think right now in crypto, you’re right. If you spend the time and really do the research, you should be outperforming the market, because the people doing the research are coming to the same conclusions pretty quickly.
I mean, what do we expect, bro? 90% of people who trade or are in crypto lose money. It’s never going to change. It’s never not going to be that way.
Hey, man, we’re talking to the 10%.
Yeah.
We’re talking to the 10% on the stream.
But for the chat, those are the 10% we should be paying attention to.
Yeah, if you watch the stream every week, you’re in the 10%, that’s for sure.
100% facts.
5. Finding Alpha Through Research
What’s your process for research? How do you go about looking into coins? Where do you start? What do you do on the AI side? Do you have a standard procedure? I know you have a daily routine, and—
I have a follow-up to this as well. I’m curious, but answer that first, please.
Yeah, I don’t really think I have a structured process so much as I just live this. Even before I was working in crypto, it was the only thing on my brain. I fall asleep thinking about markets; I wake up thinking about markets. I’m addicted. I love it so much. I’m chronically on Twitter, but I also pride myself—and I think a lot of people would be advantaged by this—on finding off-path thinkers.
My biggest goal with my own persona and profile in public is to be an off-path thinker. That means I read sci-fi books, I hang out with lawyers, I mess around with new AI stuff when it comes out, and I try things out. For every protocol, I say, “This is dumb. Why is it going up?” Then I go buy a little and play with it. I try so hard to read what everybody else is writing and thinking, but not take any of it seriously. I do my best to put everything in my own words and draw connections between things. I’m a big walkmaxer.
The saddest day of my life—funny little aside—was when they made Twitter likes private. When I had the most structured process, I’d see somebody who hit a trade and think, “Okay, well, nobody really has original ideas.” So I’d go into their likes and see what they were liking.
Yeah.
Because people always like the stuff about the trade before they tweet it.
Yes.
So, Anton, I remember stalking your likes.
That’s so funny.
Then you find that account, and you see their likes, and then that account’s likes, and so on, until you find the upstream thinker with 400 followers or fewer than 5,000 followers. You can do the same with Substacks you like and books you like. If you watch somebody smart on a podcast, that podcaster might have good taste in people. You can see who else they’ve had on. It might not even be stuff you care about.
I read exceptionally fast, and I’ll read while listening to a podcast or watching a YouTube video. Just absorb, absorb, absorb, absorb, and then live life and let synthesis happen.
Yeah, live it and breathe it. That’s by far the best advice: live it and breathe it.
You have to. You have to. You said you sat down for 4 hours and researched coins above $3 million. What was the craziest thing you discovered in that process? What’s something that truly shocked you, that fully changed your mind about something, that blew you away?
I don’t know. There’s alpha everywhere. The markets are just so much less smart—
There’s got to be one, though, recently where you’re like, “Holy fucking unlock,” like—
I don’t know about a huge unlock. I’m still—those 4 hours were me just putting together a list. I’m about 2 weeks into actually researching the coins, but you see crazy stuff. One of the most up-only charts in crypto right now is R87 something something or 8787. It’s a Russian ruble stablecoin, and it’s going up like crazy because of capital flight. Everybody in Russia is getting their hands on this stablecoin to then swap for Tether to get their money out because of the war with Ukraine. So that’s in there, and then you’re like, “Okay, well, if these guys ever launch a token, or what’s going on there?”
You see that Vitalik writes about a lot of projects on his blog. Not like he shills them, but he writes about them, and you see what he likes. Then you can check the GitHubs. Railgun, Kohaku Wallet, and Ambire—you look at their GitHub, and you’re like, “Oh, they’re integrating this other coin, and Vitalik has made Git commits. He’s one of their lead developers, low-key, you know?”
I don’t know if there’s anything mind-blowing about any particular coin. There’s funny stuff, but honestly, it’s just shocking how easy it is and how much alpha there is. If you just do the work, you can find some real gems. I think the question I ask myself is: there’s an entire fleet of coins in the range of probably $5 million to about $100 million that actually make money and have the ability to do buybacks. Honestly, what I asked was, “Can I shill this?”
It’s a real project, it’s making money, and it’s undervalued according to the thing. I know if I tweet it, everybody will realize that and buy it, but there’s a fundamental case there. Then they’ll overbid it and I’ll sell it. So I was shilling fundamentals, right? There was actually a legitimate case that this thing was underpriced, and I was bringing attention to it. Obviously, I haven’t done that with any of those coins because it’s a moral quandary.
I look at it and think, or maybe I’ll just park money in here, and somebody— I hope this inspires some people to go tweet about my bags. That would be so cool, because I don’t want to improperly do anything myself. Integrity is the most important thing in crypto. But yeah, it’s shocking how easy it is and how much alpha there is. Again, everybody’s literally like—
Yeah, and I think if you extend your timeframes, it’s definitely a lot easier too, because—
Absolutely.
—that’s what messes people up a lot: being too leveraged or having too short a timeframe. Even a few months isn’t a long period of time. If something’s in a downturn for 3 to 4 months, it’s like, bro, if you’re really convicted on this thing and you have a longer outlook—6 months plus, a year or whatever—and you have a job and you’re making money, slam as much as you can into this stuff when you get the opportunity to. Your knowledge is not what everybody else knows. I think that’s what people mess up on a lot.
That’s what I fucked up a lot in crypto: “Bro, how is this shit not higher? How is this shit not trading a lot higher? What am I missing?” It’s just because everybody else hasn’t figured it out yet. And once everybody else has figured it out—
It’s because they’re all holding Ethereum and Solana. That’s why it’s not higher.
True.
Hey, full circle, that’s where the money’s at.
It is true.
And now you see why—
Instead of me bull-posting those bags, I’m just bear-posting where the money’s supposed to come from.
Yeah, bro. I think I pulled it off pretty good with the ETH/SOL pair a few times. No, it’s true. There’s a lot of money locked up in this stuff.
You’re very well-spoken and articulate. Obviously, you have an interest in the media stuff, the stream. You’ve kind of, like you said, full-ported the Counterparty stuff and are making massive efforts toward that and its goals. You haven’t spoken a ton about that. Where does that interest come from? Where do you see the future going for that? Shows like Threads, shows like our own—how important and crucial is shit like this to crypto? The Kimchi stuff, maybe speak on that.
It’s just very rare to find anyone with a significant understanding of media, attention, how all that shit works, and these markets. I feel like there’s a very small list of people who do, and I think it’s the most important and interesting piece of it, and the most valuable part of it. I’m just curious about your thoughts on all that shit.
Well, my goal in life isn’t really to be rich or make money. That helps a ton. It’s to be happy, you know? I got into crypto because I was obsessed with it. I was a full engineer, a nerd, before all of this. I was working for CERN, the particle collider, and the particle physics lab in Beijing. I was designing electronics and firmware for them. I designed radar jammers for fighter-jet warfare for a little while. I was an engineer, but I’d spend all night, every second at my desk, doing crypto.
So I thought, “I’ll just—why don’t I just do this?” I took a huge pay cut. I full-ported into crypto, and I was like, “This is dope. I’m so happy.” I spent 4 years at Messari and loved it, but I was on the engineering side. Then I basically hit a trade in public and ended up on the Thread Guy stream. He called me after. He and Malcolm—
Name of the trade?
Malcolm, who’s also the GOAT. It was Aster.
Yeah, Malcolm’s—
Aster?
Yeah. I binked the Aster trade. It was on stream. It was a blast. Then Thread Guy and Malcolm, his co-founder, who’s also insanely GOATed, called me up and said, “Do you want to join us? We’re building something here.” Honestly, you don’t have to talk to either one of them for very long to realize they’re generational talents. It’s not just a stream for the sake of a stream. I think we’re thesis-driven. We’ve had this view that trading is taking over, that people want to be active investors. I think the age of ETFs is done. There’s such a deluge of good content that, if you really put in the work, you can shine.
I was sitting there debating: “Am I about to go from being a successful engineer to working for a Twitch streamer?” I thought, “Well, it’s going to be insanely fun.” That’s deadass how I made the decision.
That’s awesome.
I was like, “It’s going to be the most fun thing I could possibly do with my—”
You know I lived with those guys, right? I lived with those guys for a period of time.
Oh, yeah. I hear the stories.
Yeah, yeah.
I hear the stories. And Thread would also say—
It was a lot of fun.
—that he’s nasty at basketball.
Yeah, he is nasty.
He’s also confirmed that.
Bro, we gotta play.
Bro, so can.
He’s not far away, bro.
You do. You do. You do.
We lived in Beverly Hills, in the Flats, and had a full court. We used to run four or five times a week. Thread is the truth. He’s really, really good.
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
And so—
But it’s funny, because it’s just cool to watch guys like you catch up and the entire market catch up. Obviously, we’re seeing this meteoric rise in the brand and persona that is Kimchi. It’s reached escape velocity outside of CT. It’s fully broken outside of CT. It’s—
People don’t realize that CT is—
Dude—
—its own little bubble. It is—
Like—
The Kimchi phenomenon is real. I remember—
Yes.
It’s very, very real.
It’s massive.
Unsurprisingly, I do all of our data and analytics and stuff, and I’d see we’d have Cupsey on or TJR on, and our live numbers would just go crazy.
Of course.
And I’d be like, “These guys? What?” Then you realize how authentic it is. You’re looking at the engagements, everything. We’re not being botted right now. You’re like, “Oh, these guys are real.” Then you get to know Frank and Rasmer as people, and you realize they’re not running some crazy scam. They’re actually just cracked. They’re really good traders.
Brother, if Kimchi went live today on Twitch, he’d have 50,000 to 100,000 concurrent viewers.
Right. Right.
Right now.
And so you’re like, “Oh, this is the moment,” right? We’re good. It’s small. The number of people who can trade and do content is small. I think of it more like chess, where Magnus Carlsen is the greatest chess player in the world. He has a big following because of that, but he’s actually not the biggest chess content creator.
Yeah, yeah. There’s golf and chess—
There are international masters.
Yeah.
Exactly. Exactly.
Exactly.
And it’s the same thing for gaming. You could be dogshit at League of Legends—
100%.
—and still have a big livestream because you’re entertaining.
100%.
So I think of trading the same way. If this is a new pastime, and this is what people enjoy and are learning to love, we don’t have to run a 9-figure, 10-figure P&L to—
I love the trading entertainment—
—to be good.
I love the trading entertainment versus gaming entertainment comparison. I really, really do love that.
Yeah.
I’m almost obsessed with the one-to-one between trading and gaming. The way I describe what makes a good trader is identical to what makes a good Fortnite pro. When you ask Peterbot, “Why are you so good at Fortnite?” his answer is likely, “I don’t actually know.” He can give you an answer, just like your answer here: you can put in the work, put in the time, put in the effort, but at the end of the day, the top 100 pros all put in the exact same amount of work, time, and effort. Peterbot is substantially better. He’s the consensus best Fortnite pro of all time. Why is that?
When you peel back the layers and the goofy cartoon figures and the rocket launchers, it’s all just code, right? A set of rules and circumstances that everybody has to abide by.
Mm-hmm.
And it ultimately comes down to Peterbot’s ability to make these decisions. That’s what a game of Fortnite is.
Yeah.
It’s just making one decision after another based on variables like—
Absolutely.
—the person’s health, what gun I have, where we are on the map, the spawn points, the storm closing, how many materials I have, how many materials they have. Do I use a shock grenade? Do I use a parachute? Whatever it is, he just makes these decisions more correctly than the average player. That’s why he’s the best. It’s the same thing with guys like Rowdy and Frank and all the best traders. It’s exactly one-to-one, and I love the way that you described it with trading entertainment, because it’s 100% the fact.
Hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah, it’s crazy.
And people don’t realize—I mean, the fact that Ansem, you have a million followers.
People on crypto Twitter don’t realize how insane that is.
No, it’s nuts.
Banks, you’re the GOAT.
I love it.
And here you are, running this show, building this brand. It’s real. It’s happening.
I finally feel like I’m in the place where I—
I don’t know how much more evidence—yeah.
—I’m finally in a spot that I’m super comfortable and proud of, and the path forward is so clear. Obviously, I got myself—
Yeah.
—involved with the trading stuff. I love to trade. I have burners and I trade, and I think that shit’s awesome.
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
I got involved with the NFT stuff, whatever. I’ve always loved that shit—an inherent love for crypto—but my gift to the planet is the media stuff. It’s being able to identify talent, develop talent, develop content IP like this. It’s the exact thesis we had with the Probably Nothing stuff. That’s what Probably Nothing ultimately was supposed to be: a network of people who had an interest in creating media and content IP.
Mm-hmm.
Nobody really got it. It did well—the CTV vlogs did well and stuff—but it’s cool to watch the entire market and industry catch up, and people start to notice and understand how important and valuable this stuff is. You know from your experience at Counterparty: when you can amass any sort of audience, it’s huge. In a market as lucrative as trading, when the entire purpose and the root of it is finance, trading, and moving capital around, it’s really something. I talked about this in the pre-show. I was at a dinner 2 nights ago, and Kimchi’s name was a fucking hot-button topic.
Mm.
We’re talking, and without naming names, this young billionaire—multi-billionaire—who owns part of an NFL team, a super-successful guy, goes, “Yeah, I know Kimchi,” et cetera, et cetera. Then, 15 minutes into the conversation, he’s like, “Yo, yo, look at this.” He flips his phone around, and his YouTube recommendations show Kimchi’s vlog at 70,000 views. I’m like, “There you go.” This guy’s like, “There you go.”
Yeah.
I’ve heard you guys talk about when Flood is in the chat, that’s a lot of extra capital in the chat, and they’re hanging on the words that are being spoken. It’s a real thing. It’s cool to watch people—
Mm-hmm.
—in real time catch up to that. It’s cool. It’s cool.
Yeah.
When Thread first moved in with me, Spaces was the meta. All these crypto guys were on Spaces.
He was driving the Spaces.
Yes, every fucking day. He would wake up in the morning, just like you woke up. These are things I notice, because I know what it takes to be successful.
Mm.
I know what it takes to reach that top 1%—that Kai Cenat, Adin Ross level. It’s a set of things, but one is being consistent and working 25 hours a day. I watched this kid get up every day at 6:00 a.m. and get on Spaces. In some of our early conversations, I’m like, “Dude, you gotta move these guys to Twitch. You have to stream this shit.”
He’s generational.
“You don’t get it. Crypto’s on Spaces. Crypto’s on Spaces.” I’m like, “Dude.” It’s really cool. It was one of my favorite eras and chapters of my life, living with those guys. Malcolm is a fucking genius. I think you’re exactly right.
Malcolm’s cracked, bro.
I think Thread is a generational talent.
Thread’s cracked too.
I think it’s—
Malcolm’s cracked, yeah.
—I think it’s super important that all of us who have an inherent interest and are working as hard as we’re working, specifically on the attention-media stuff in this market—I feel like I’m more excited about this than I’ve ever been about anything I’ve worked on or touched in my life. Obviously, I’ve been through my fair share of controversies and pivots in my career and stuff. I thank God every day, honestly. Q4 2026, I’m like, “Thank fucking God.” Thank God.
Yeah. People don’t realize how aligned financial media actually is. You can obviously rug and scam your audience and make your grand exit. That’s the path to quick money. But the win condition for what we’re building with Thread Guy, and what I imagine you guys assess as your win condition too, is your audience getting richer. That’s not to say I can say something and then our chat is going to get richer, but it’s to try to provide that value.
100%.
We don’t charge for content. Everything we produce is free, paid for by sponsors, and those sponsors want to work with us because our audience is rich and does volume.
Volume, yes.
A trader who blows themselves up or loses money isn’t rich and doesn’t do volume. It’s all about the lifetime value of these potential customers to our sponsors, which enables us to deliver good content for free. So we’re aligned. The Thread Guy’s huge outcome comes from being as positively intended, as plus-EV, and as focused on growing wealth as humanly possible.
Absolutely.
And honestly, it’s the same for Rasmer. He locks in on trenching content, and I understand people have different tastes about that. But people need to realize he has that audience because he’s a good trencher, and people are receiving value from him. You watch some of his videos—
And he articulates it very well.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He’s explaining it very well.
Right, right.
If there’s one guy—if a 16-year-old kid walks up to me and says, “Hey, I trade meme coins. I’m on-chain with a couple thousand bucks. Who should I go watch?” I’m looking at him and, without question, saying, “Go watch Rasmer.”
Absolutely.
He’ll explain it to you the way it needs to be explained. You’ll understand. Watch Rasmer for a couple weeks. You’ll come out the other side significantly better equipped to—
Yes.
—manage that capital. 100%.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. So I think it’s very aligned. I think it’s very plus-EV. It’s incredibly fun to do. It’s the best. I think it’s the future.
Awesome. What’s your opinion on Kimchi? The last couple of days, the rollout, him as just—everything, all the labels that have been put onto him, and all of his lore. From your view of the whole arc, what’s your opinion on this Kimchi thing?
Actually, let me—can I ask you a Kimchi question?
Please.
Because you’re the GOAT of the game here, right?
Sure.
My observation is that you have to have the talent, be the person, all of these things. Kimchi is obviously incredibly talented and capable. He has an eye for content. His last vlog was incredible. It was almost like a David Dobrik vlog—that hit of fun—
I was genuinely blown away by—
Yes.
—I would not have expected it—
Yeah.
—to be like that.
Right, right. But I also feel like I knew Kimchi would go big when—I run our analytics. We talked about Kimchi offhand, we posted that TikTok, and it was our best TikTok of the day. We were like—
Oh.
“All right, I guess we’re talking about Kimchi tomorrow.”
Of course, of course.
It was our best TikTok again.
Yes.
So I’m like, whatever. What I kind of want to ask you is: do you ever see the algorithm just anoint somebody? Whatever Kimchi has resonates with the algorithm. People think it’s forced. There are a lot of people who would love to be fucking famous and spend millions of dollars trying to be famous—
Let me explain something to you.
—and it’ll never happen, right?
Let me explain something to you. These streamers, for example, like Jason The Weens, Asian Reys, and Stan Renauds, are literally the best on earth at aggregating what’s happening on the internet and trends, and applying it, sharing it, engaging with it, and interacting with it for an audience.
That’s why they are the biggest streamers in the world.
Yes.
That’s why their clips go as far as they do. These guys are the best at that, the way that Ansem is the best at aggregating information around markets, et cetera.
Yeah.
They’re the best at that. Watching those guys consistently farm Kimchi for attention and views just goes to show you he’s at the apex of attention, not just in CT or in crypto, finance, or trading in general. So wherever that comes from, it’s very real. I went on this show—it’s the only time I’ve ever done this to date—and said, “I’m going to farm a really big clip right here. Bear with me.” Then I told a fabricated, exaggerated story about Kimchi.
It was so good.
About Kimchi.
That was a generational clip. That was so good.
100%. But I did that because I knew where it would go. I knew what the outcome would be, and I was confident enough to say that and make that call because it was obvious from my purview and with the experience I have. Rasmer did that before. Now all the lore around Kimchi is going giga-viral outside the scope of just CT or whatever. Now it’s, “He hit 40 million on Trump. He hit 40 million on Trump.” Kimchi becomes the perfect representation of the new American dream: 22 years old, played Fortnite, found crypto, pressed a couple of buttons, hit a big trade, logged off, and now he’s living lavish. Who doesn’t want to do that? How is that not going to appeal to a 16-year-old kid who has the same dream and plays Fortnite all day? It’s obvious, right?
People have fun with it. These narratives run wild. People notice that they can gain a ton of attention by talking about Kimchi, whether it’s positive or negative. Obviously, for a long time, people would just glaze him, and he became this mythological creature. But in the last 2 days, we’ve seen it take a sharp turn negative. Again, it’s the same thing: we see a lot of fake outrage on the internet. I don’t know. I know a lot of CT’s outrage is very real, but I think it’s also rooted in people losing money right now. The markets are down.
Yeah.
We’ve always seen CT kind of cannibalize itself, the snake eating its own tail. We’ve seen this behavior from CT a million times. We’ve seen CT turn on the biggest names and faces over and over, time and time again. We’ve never not seen it. We’ve never seen somebody go through unscathed, untouched. We just saw Flood get torn limb from limb because he might have been wrong. He might not even have been wrong. He might have been wrong by a couple of days about something.
I hope he was wrong.
Right? Yeah.
Yeah.
Me too. But Flood’s objectively the GOAT, right? I don’t know. It’s interesting. The big thing I’m trying to solve for is two things. I’ve said this over and over: crypto has one of the worst brands of anything. I think it’s one of the most poorly branded and represented industries and products of all time. The word is so -EV. So many people associate that word with scams, and it’s just not good. It’s left such a bad taste in people’s mouths.
The way it’s represented by people who actually understand the nuances is the big thing. These narratives aren’t helpful to our market or our industry at all because 95% of people are never going to do the due diligence themselves or bother to understand the nuances of the difference between a coin getting rugged and a coin being vamped. The chart looks the same, and the outcome is the same, but there’s a huge difference between Kimchi rugging a coin and some OG Kimchi coin that some other random third party made getting vamped. We understand all of this. The average person does not. So perpetuating narratives like this unfairly is something I think is fucking retarded.
I don’t know what the solution is. I think the solution for changing people’s perception of crypto is shows like ours, shows like Thread Guy’s, and examples like Kimchi’s and Rasmer’s. I think we’re headed in the right direction, but crypto does not do itself any favors. It’s so fucking—I don’t know.
Do you think we even need to fix that? The reason I ask is: what does everybody hate? The internet, social media, and AI. Well, okay.
Yeah.
Fucking everybody uses the internet. Everybody’s on social media.
Yes.
Everybody’s using AI to do their homework, right? The same people who will—
Yeah.
—tell you AI is the devil are doing their math report with it tonight. So I’ve kind of grown into the take that—
I think—
I don’t know, you know?
I think, yeah—
Crypto volumes go up. Does it matter?
I hear you. I agree with you.
Well, I’d agree with you. I—
I—
We want to be net positive with the—
Yes.
—Thread Guy’s stream, obviously. I think what you guys are doing is also incredibly net positive. But I’m almost just done worrying about it. It will resolve itself, or it won’t. I’m going to do me, and I have to face God at the end of the day, so I’m going to try to be a good person.
I agree with what you just said there.
And that’s it, you know?
What I will say, though, is that I like the take, but what’s different about crypto and trading specifically from AI, the internet, et cetera, is that you have to go layers deeper in terms of trust and commitment when you’re asking people to put their capital on something. It’s a little different from just using Google or using AI. It requires way more trust. When crypto as an industry has lost all trust and is painted so negatively, it’s on guys like us, shows like ours, to cure that and establish something different.
I think crypto is in desperate need of a rebrand and reform. I think it’s all starting to work itself out. Trading, finance—it’s all kind of blending together.
Yeah.
Ultimately, people born today aren’t even going to say the word “crypto” to each other. I think it’s all just going to be finance, trading, markets, you know? And I think that’s good.
Agreed.
This is my whole thesis with not only Market Bubble but everything I’m doing right now: I think this is the greatest story never told. Examples like Rowdies and Qwerties and Incentos, and even Rasmer, Thread Guy, and Kimchi—I think this is the coolest shit that’s ever happened. It’s the greatest game ever played. I just think there’s such a barrier to entry because of all the negative stigma and preconceived notions about what’s happening here. So many people are throwing the baby out with the bathwater and writing it off as a scam, a LARPer, fake, whatever. While that’s true for so many things, you have to meet in the middle and understand it can’t all be that. It can’t.
Right.
There has to be something there. I just wish CT would do a better job of championing the people who actually make a legitimate effort. We’ve seen it a million times: narratives run wild with completely false shit to attack someone’s character or steer a narrative or a market. That’s the other thing, too: everyone’s got a different agenda. Everyone wants to see a different outcome. There are people who are long, there are people who are short, and nobody’s giving a truly unbiased opinion. I try to pay attention to the ones who do, but it’s so hard.
I think the bag-buying space is strange.
I think Jeff is the poster boy, bro. Jeff got us. Jeff from Hyperliquid is doing all the heavy lifting from the public side, from the builder side. I think there’s kind of nothing people can say about him, to be honest, or about Hyperliquid as a product. So regardless of everything else that’s happening, he’s already kind of crossed the chasm, I would say.
I think we do have some really good examples.
Agreed.
Yeah. Hopefully, the public nature makes it all better, where you have ZachXBTs calling out people who do the wrong things. I hope we get another Zach and more people get into that. I remember when there was a huge discussion around unrealized P&L and all these meme coins, and people were asking, “What’s going to happen? Is it just going to be a rug fest or whatever?” My take was always that it solves itself, because either you made all this money trading meme coins and you’re high on the leaderboard, or you lose that money to people who sold earlier or bought different projects, and they’ll be at the top of the leaderboard.
I also think the same thing applies to the HYPE price. Something like the FOMO leaderboard will solve for net-positive long-term trading habits, because it’ll even out over time, and people will learn. The same thing goes for Jeff. Him acting the right way is reflected in the HYPE token, and everybody who wants to make money will start to copy that. I do think we’re at a moment where you combine everything being on the blockchain, with nowhere to hide, and the social inflection point we’re in. We’ll start to see net-positive operators really separate from the pack. And to your point, Banks, hopefully CT can get behind that.
Yeah, yeah.
I don’t know what they’re going to do, but hopefully.
By the way, I was talking more about the talking heads, the content creators, the personalities, and the media stuff than the product stuff.
Mm-hmm.
I think the product stuff has kind of worked itself out.
Well, I think the products will fix it. I think the products will solve for that.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
To the FOMO point, it’s the same way I feel about the criticism of copy trading. We see Frank’s name get thrown around a lot, and it’s like, the way the math works, nobody can have an infinite amount of capital following them and tailing them into a trade and getting dumped on. The money has to run out eventually. If that were the case, you’d eventually run out of copy traders. So it’ll work itself out.
And he’s the most—yeah.
Yeah.
He’s the top trader. If I were a guy running bots, I’d program my bots to buy right after he buys.
Yeah.
When people talk about copy traders and stuff, I’m like, “You know what? I bet it’s actually decently sophisticated hedge funds on the smaller side, or individual traders. They’re your copy candles. They’re the ones sniping it right away.” And why shouldn’t they? If somebody has a provably positive P&L, it’s not a terrible strategy to copy them.
Yeah.
You know?
And these social graphs and apps are just making it easier and easier to get that information to the bottom tier guys. This has always existed, by the way.
Exactly.
All the on-chain people who know how to read on-chain have always done this, and always known how to read this and make decisions based on that information. But now it’s just available to literally entry-level people, which is obviously a good thing. Goes without saying. I’m way over time. I was supposed to dip 15 minutes ago. Tulip, we’ve gotta have you on way more, bro. This has been a great conversation.
Yeah, please. We need the bullish shills, bro.
Anytime.
We really appreciate it. I’m gonna leave you guys to it. Z has a post-show, but you guys can keep going. I just have to dip. I’m traveling tonight. Where are you based?
I’m in New York.
Are you in New York? All right. I’ll be there at some point in the next few days.
All right. Sweet.
Yeah. All right, cool. I’m gonna leave you guys to it. Tulip, thank you so much for coming on. It’s been a great conversation.
Yeah. Thanks for having me.
You’re the fucking GOAT. Um, I'm gonna leave you guys to it. But yeah, without further ado, I'm out.
Cool. Peace, brother. Oh, what’s good? What’s good, Tulip?
You’re killing it. You’re bearish right now? I was just hearing you, or was this a reality check?
I am very bearish.
Huh?
Oh, shit. Yeah, I am bearish right now. I don’t want to say I’m super, super bearish, but I am bearish. I think stuff’s gonna roll over. I do think equities are just gonna pull shit down, dude. I think a lot of the momentum stocks and equities that have dominated the past couple of years are pretty topped out. I think the memory stocks are crazy parabolic, have put in their second lower high, and are selling off. I think stuff can cool off. But I agree with you, we’re in such a great spot for crypto generally. You just gotta have a little bit of patience, I think.
6. Stocks Create Their Own Reality
Why do you think, given the prospective stocks striking us down—it’s been happening for a little while, and rates have been going crazy and stuff—Bitcoin is shockingly, at least in my assessment, pretty damn strong right now? What do you think is going on there?
Yeah. Bitcoin has been super strong. I think part of it is because it sold off so hard before everything else. If you look at Q1 and Q2, Bitcoin sold off super hard while stocks were going up, and HYPE was going up too. I’ve done a lot of looking back at when stocks sell off and when crypto sells off, to see which leads. A lot of the time, crypto had actually been selling off first, before stocks, at all the local inflection points.
What I’m most concerned about right now, for this rally in Q3, is that we bottomed at the same time the stocks topped. Was that because we were just oversold and had sold off before stocks did, so there was a discrepancy and people were just allocating some to crypto? Was this rally more of a countertrend move to the ongoing trend where we were going down? Right now, we’re at range highs on ETH and BTC, arguably making a deviation over the range highs—a false breakout, arguably. Are we gonna come back and test the mid-70s or the mid-60s again? I’m not sure. I think we were so oversold in Q3. I caught that bottom pretty well with the memory top, but I’m concerned about equities being at the tail end of their cycles. They’re up so much, bro.
Yeah.
It’s really hard.
I mean, this is why I love Lilly, right? I think anything in the equities market that you can get that’s uncorrelated to AI—
It’s hard.
I’m definitely pretty spooked on that whole complex. I’m personally kind of bearish on most of the AI complex, unless the government steps in with intervention, which is definitely on the table. But it seems like we’ve kind of left reality over there.
Yeah, bro. It’s not even that the valuations don’t make sense, because I think what’s actually scarier is that the revenues are matching up, but they’re still not making new all-time highs. Micron’s Q3 beat was fucking crazy, and it didn’t go any higher. It was the top of the day; that was the local high. What’s more concerning to me is how they talk about the stocks. Every time stocks go down even a little bit, the CEOs of all these companies are slamming the news feed with, “No, it’s fine,” and so on.
The market seems as important as the technology and how fast it’s improving, because there are so many people with exposure to the market. We also have, obviously, the Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs. If you look at those rounds and how fast they’ve gotten to $2 trillion or $1.5 trillion, I don’t know if it’s the fastest in history, but it’s got to be close for how fast these companies have gotten to—
Mm.
—these crazy valuations. So you also have the supply on that side coming through. But it’s tricky because there could be a new model that drops in a few months and makes everything so much better, and it evens everything out. I expect a lot of flipping back and forth in the market over the next few years.
I’ve adopted a much more hyperstitious view of the market over the last year, maybe year and a half. To break that down, I think the CEOs hitting the news feeds as soon as the market goes down have actually realized the meta. Look at the environment we’re in: why does Apple, which is sitting on gazillions of cash, also issue debt? Wouldn’t they just use the cash they have instead of debt, if they’re getting less on T-bills than they’re paying out on debt? Using debt versus your own cash is a money-losing operation, right? It depends on your return on capital, but you can do the math where it actually makes money.
When you look at an environment of extreme debt, where all the major companies are operating like this, what you realize is that the stock price is an asset. The bigger our stock price, the more favorably we can raise debt. How did Saylor make it for so long? It’s because so much of his debt was at zero interest. When did Saylor start to run into trouble? When he couldn’t get zero-interest debt anymore.
And you see this with the Tesla COVID example, which I love. Tesla couldn’t scale. They couldn’t make enough cars to sell and get the revenue to justify their valuation. So what does Elon do? He bull-posts it to the moon.
Yeah.
Then he does what was, at the time, one of the largest share issuances ever, raises a fuck ton of cash, and plows that into the gigafactories. They scale, and all of a sudden they’re producing the cars that make that valuation at least make more sense. The financial illusion that Elon created back-constructed the reality moving forward.
This is something we’ve known in crypto for a long time. Take Hyperliquid and Lighter. Imagine they both started at the exact same spot, and Flood and Jez hit a million-dollar trade on Lighter instead of Hyperliquid. Would it have inflected and become the winner because of the publicity? Then the token price goes up, more people go to it, and they actually get the fundamentals. Or take Apple, which pays employees in shares. Take it even further: Hyperliquid allows you to use the HYPE token as collateral on the system. The higher the HYPE token goes, the more collateral is available to their people to trade with and do volume. Granted, it’s not a huge amount compared to their volumes and stuff.
I’ve adopted a much more hyperstitious view. Hyperstition is essentially this: if you live according to a fake reality, reality actually converges to that fakeness becoming real over time.
Yeah.
I think that’s the meta in the stock market. Crypto discovered this way faster because there was no regulation on communications. If you ran a crypto company, you could say whatever the fuck you wanted. If you ran a stock, at least before the modern “loot and rob,” the modern era where nothing is true anymore, stocks were constrained. I think they’re just converging on a winning strategy. I don’t really see the media presence of these stocks as a strong indicator of weakness. I think maybe these stocks are weak for other reasons.
That’s interesting. I think that’s fair. They’ve definitely realized they’re impacting it. They’re definitely aware of that. Are you buying any of the AI stuff, or are you mostly just watching it?
I’m not interested in buying dips on any of this stuff. If OpenAI, from a trillion-dollar valuation, or Anthropic, from a trillion-dollar valuation, outperform like any of the crypto coins I think have a 10x or 100x in them over the next decade, we live in a radically different world. It just won’t matter what I bought. I’ll either be dead or euphoric.
Yeah.
It’s almost like—
Yeah.
—I love to joke that the market cannot price in a nuclear war, because if there’s a nuclear war, we all die and it goes to zero. So what’s the point of discounting based on me dying and it not mattering? The market will never price in a nuclear war.
In the same way, I’m just completely uninterested in pricing in AI utopia, which is what any further growth in these stocks implies. From a pure personal game theory perspective, I’m probably minus EV to buy AI stocks. If you have perceived edge in something like crypto, or, you know, I love Lilly Pharma—there are other pockets in the stock market. But I just think it’s kind of minus EV. Why do it? You’re either going to die or you’re not going to die. It’s whatever.
That’s a good point. That’s fucking funny. I wonder what that shit would look like. I’m actually curious what AI utopia would look like. Maybe we’ll get to see.
Do you ever read a bunch of sci-fi?
I think the closest thing I’ve read to AI sci-fi is Accelerando. Have you read Accelerando?
Yeah, that’s what I was going to recommend.
I read Accelerando. That was good. I actually liked it a lot.
Yeah, great book.
That was good.
I’m working my way through Daemon and Neuromancer, making my way through all of those as well.
Neuromancer is a series, right?
I think there are a few in the series. It’s what the cyberpunk genre is basically based on. It’s a fun read, but also a slog, so—
Yeah.
—I’m making slow progress through it.
I think I might have ordered a ton of sci-fi books last year and haven’t gotten through them. I have them all over my crib right now. I think that might have been one of them.
Let’s do another book club.
Yeah. Some of the producers said we should do another book club. We haven’t followed through on our Market Bubble Book Club. We’re definitely behind on that.
A reading spread. I’m a big fan of reading books. It’s the easiest way to fix everybody’s one-shotted attention spans.
What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Neuromancer and Daemon right now.
Those are the sci-fi joints?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
I finished Red Rising. Dope as fuck. It’s so good. I think I’m going to do a fantasy book next or something. I don’t read nonfiction because my life is nonfiction. I don’t need—
Yeah, it’s boring.
“Everything I do is fiction. I don’t need any more of that in my life.” I’ll read fiction books for the rest of my life, and that’ll be plenty.
I read something online the other day that said artists are always the ones predicting the future. That’s why fiction, sci-fi, and fantasy books are often the ones you read from the past that have things looking forward that actually happen. It’s kind of interesting, like Accelerando. We’re kind of trending in that direction. And then—
Hmm.
—the engineers are the ones who build the vision—
Yeah.
—that the artists come up with. I’m actually kind of concerned about the trend we have going on right now, like you said, the one-shotted thing.
If everybody is consuming content that isn’t their own original thought, where does all the artistry and creative direction come from? It all converges to one hive mind—
Mm-hmm.
—of the fucking internet.
I think I really like Balaji’s perspective: the internet just increases variance, right? In the olden days, you couldn’t even have a MrBeast before a distribution platform as big as YouTube. He’s bigger than Elvis, right? It would be impossible to be that much of a right-tail outcome. Then you get the internet, and variance increases, and now you have a MrBeast.
But the unfortunate other side of that is that the MrBeast also implies what used to be 1,000 brain-rotted people listening to Elvis all day is now 100 million brain-rotted people watching MrBeast Shorts. I’m not critiquing MrBeast. We all just live within the world we live in, right?
Mm.
I think of it more from the perspective of variance. I actually think we’re in a music golden age. With Spotify, a small artist can have these niches. The leading genres of music used to shift from “rock is hot” to “hip-hop is hot.” Now every genre can be hot and have a genre-pushing artist, right?
I think of AI the same way. There will be a huge amount of slop, and it will one-shot a ton of people, but the breakouts—the people who can get away from that—will go further than we’ve ever seen before. So that’s your hopium. I think that’s why a lot of my writing stands out. You read Twitter, and it’s all reply bots. Most of the articles on Twitter are pure slop. If I write half-well-reasoned, clever thoughts, all of a sudden I have a big Twitter profile, got a job from it, and I’m on this stream now.
Yeah.
I want to be on a certain end of the distribution curve. Hopefully everyone watching feels the same way. You just have to be on the top of the K, basically.
Yeah. The K accelerates super, super, super aggressively. Have you seen the trader-celebrity stuff? I’ve seen The Timer has been very angry about it recently. What are your thoughts?
Dude, I was defending you in some of the replies. I think Wizard of Soho is a cool guy, but he had a quote like, “Oh, all the real guys making money are low-key.” I’m like, “Bro, what are you talking about? Warren Buffett is a media whore.”
Yeah, yeah, right.
He’s on CNBC. He’s 80 or 90 or whatever, and he’s on CNBC all the time. Ray Dalio is out here selling books and going on podcasts and stuff. Sure, some random portfolio manager at Goldman is running a big line and staying low-key. But all these top traders have been embraced and are doing media.
Again, the hyperstition is that they’re raising capital or trying to create their own reality, right? Even if you look at Jane Street: “Oh, Jane Street, everybody’s super secret and shadowy.” I’m like, “What do you mean?” They sponsor the Dwarkesh podcast, and part of that sponsorship is obviously to have Jane Street analysts come on and talk about working at Jane Street. They’re not low-key and super shadowy. That’s their aura. That’s the brand they’re trying to promote.
Yeah.
And the reason they hide their founder is because he was funding terrorists. That’s why they hide him. They’re not hiding him because they’re low-key or anything.
Yeah.
I don’t know. I saw everyone hating on your take, and I was like, “Don’t we already live in this world?” That’s where I was: “What are we talking about here?”
Bro, I was like, “Am I tripping, bro?” I looked at it again and I was like—
Yeah.
—“Am I insane?”
No.
Because I know what I’m seeing all the time. Yeah, Twitter is interesting, bro. Once somebody posts something, it’s like, “Oh, I’m gonna piggyback on that,” even if it’s not that personal with you.
Yeah.
I really liked your post on the counterparty strategy and everything. That was yours, right? Yeah, that was really good, bro. I liked that a lot.
Yeah. I think—
It was really good.
I think a lot of people, if you’re not on the other side of it, don’t perceive how much of a business it actually is. My favorite example is the clipping stuff. I’m sure you guys are the exact same way, right? Let’s say you have 100 live viewers, but you get a million clip impressions. Your business, which is selling views on those clip impressions, is actually based on your ability to convert the stream into clips.
Yeah.
And that’s obviously not fixed, right? As you become more efficient, build out your clippers, get better at identifying the right moments, and double down on what’s working, that multiplier can grow. I think the only 2 metrics that matter are total impressions and live viewers. Live viewers seed engagement in everything you do, and total impressions are essentially the efficiency of the machine you’ve built around distribution.
For us, I don’t feel like we’ve hit a ceiling yet. Our live viewers have grown a lot over the last year, and our average impressions per stream, based on live viewers, have also grown. If we can grow both of those, you have a multiplier and a multiplier. You have an exponential business, right?
A lot of other people who do what we do—you can tell who’s locked in on the business and thinking, “I need a team, or I need to lock in on this and make it a core competency of mine.” That’s part of the separation function: the people in this business who can lock in and grow the actual efficiency.
Then you look at how much you’re paying clippers, and you’re like, “Okay, my average payment from sponsors is this per impression. I’m paying clippers this. Can I grow the base of impressions? Can I make it more efficient?” Clipping talent is hard to find, so you obviously want to take incredibly good care of these people. How do you persist them forward? Because it is a game skill. That’s the other half of what I was saying about the back-office stuff. What I focus on a lot is how we have the most efficient, scaled distribution backend for our business possible.
Yeah, no, it’s really good. I think people definitely don’t realize. I didn’t know for sure before doing the pod. I was like, “Oh, I just have to talk about markets. I can do that. I do that all the time.” But there’s a lot more that goes into it behind the scenes, for sure.
I know you talk about how you trade 100% of the time and are always online. What’s also underrated about doing a pod or a show is that you have to be on so consistently. In theory, the trades you find should be a lot higher value because you’re always talking about markets, what’s going on, and what’s happening.
I think the sponsors and the money you make from that are cool, and the value you get there is great. But you’re also kind of running your own pod shop as a team putting on a podcast. It’s your own pod shop, and I think the trading upside of it is also really beneficial.
For people who aren’t doing a pod but are trading or getting into trading and thinking about markets, it’s really good to operate in a group where you can come together and discuss how you’re thinking about things and what your ideas are. It’s different talking about them in person or on the phone than just writing and reading them, or even just reading them. Writing and discussing with other people adds so much value to your thought process and how you’re thinking about the market, because you may talk to somebody who has a conflicting view and find something you’re missing.
One of the ways I found Sol super early the first time was talking to my boy Jeremy. He was super bullish on Serum, so I looked into Serum and Solana, and I was like, “Bro, I don’t think it’s Serum.”
Can I ask you something? When I was at Messari, I was an engineer. I actually wasn’t an analyst, so when I would tweet or write, I had the privilege of waiting until I had a good idea. There was no pressure to write about a project or produce research on a particular cadence.
If I saw a spot, I would take it, but I had a pretty long time horizon and focused on long trades. When I joined Thread Guy’s stream and we were talking about markets every single day, it skewed my trading style. I became so short-term-oriented that I had to reteach myself how to think long term. How do I engage with the topic of the day even though I low-key don’t think there’s a good trade here? How do I make good content around saying there isn’t a good trade here?
I’d love to ask you: as you’ve gotten into this side of the media, how has it affected how you trade, your research process, and how you think about it? In my experience, it’s a lot to adapt to, and I’m probably still not fully adjusted to it. I’m curious how it’s been for you.
No, it hasn’t impacted my trading, thankfully, but it definitely has impacted how I think about things. I feel like I definitely look more into things. As far as how many trades I’m taking and how frequently, not really. That’s just because I feel like I’ve been doing it for so long. I know how I’m operating.
How long? When did you first get into crypto?
I first heard about Bitcoin in 2016, and 2017 is when I first started trading. I was on Bittrex, BitMEX, Cryptopia, and EtherDelta. I used to be an engineer, too. I was a software engineer at Capital One.
Oh, nice. I laugh because all the electrical engineers always end up being software engineers. Throughout my early engineering career, I was like, “I gotta do hardware. I can’t be like one of those guys.” Now, obviously, anytime I do anything technical, it’s all software, but—
Yeah.
Everybody capitulates to software engineering in the end.
Bro, I loved physics in high school. I did electrical and mechanical, I think. When I was trying to figure out what major I was going to be, I thought, “I want to do something in math and science. What can I do that’s math and science and engineering?” Then I thought, “Okay, electrical engineering.” So I came into Georgia Tech as an electrical engineer. Before I started at Tech, I was in a freshman summer program, the Challenge Program, and that’s when I first started coding. I also had a field trip to an electrical engineering plant, and I thought, “I don’t know if I want to do this.”
Yeah.
That’s when I pivoted to computer science. I was comp sci at Tech the whole time, but the software stuff is cool.
Do you ever write any code nowadays?
Bro, I have not been coding. I feel like I should be coding more. I always say that, because even with the AI stuff, I mess around with it, but not in the building-apps way. It’s always the people around me.
Mm-hmm.
I feel like I should be coding more.
It’s funny how much alpha is still on-chain. I don’t code at all the way I used to, but going through my research, I’ll ask Claude to pull the actual holders of something. One example—low cap, nobody go buy this shit—but GMX, if you remember that perp DEX.
Mm-hmm.
If you look at DeFiLlama, according to its revenue, GMX is trading at about 1.2 times revenue, and it’s been growing for the last few months. So I’m like, “Is this a steal?” You look into those markets and see what’s going on. I’ve definitely integrated it more into my research flow. The fact that I understand what’s going on on-chain means I can dig into these things and ask: is it going up for some stupid reason, or is it going up for a reason that I think will actually grow and persist?
I think the generational trades aren’t just, “This protocol’s revenue is going up.” It’s, “I understand why this protocol’s revenue is going up, and I’m marrying that to this worldview, so I believe it will continue.” That’s the Hyperliquid or options trade, or whatever. If you can get past the basics—starting at DeFiLlama—and do any analysis beyond that, and you have the technical background, there’s still so much alpha there.
Yeah, no, that’s definitely valid. Do you think there are going to be more projects that start at super-low valuations? We think there are going to be trillions of dollars moving on-chain over the next few years, right? Those flows are going to be concentrated in things like Hyperliquid and other applications. Do you also think there are going to be more developers looking to build things around these on-chain products? Will there be alpha in finding those protocols, too? It feels like it’s been a really long time since we’ve seen something built from the ground up that became substantial and did really well on-chain.
Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know if you were in FWB at all.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I was in there.
I thought that was going to crush, you know?
Yeah.
I thought it would do incredibly well.
I’m clowning right now.
Yeah, same. We’ll see how Paper Trade does, which is a clever concept. I don’t know if Cards counts as new or old, or Venice.
Oh, absolutely.
I think we’re seeing new stuff, just at a slower rate than everybody’s used to. Maybe part of the reason tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars are coming to crypto is that there are mature protocols that can process and absorb those flows and are worth those flows.
Yeah.
That signal of maturity suggests there will be slower creativity and fewer new things on the build side. Honestly, I also think that’s part of why meme coins have persisted. If there were always an innovation wave of new things, that’s what OG DeFi projects were: all these worthless governance tokens were kind of meme coins, you know?
Yeah.
In the absence of new protocols to trade all the time, meme coins have kind of filled that space. One concept I’m playing with: you talk to a bunch of VCs and they all ask the same stupid question: “What’s five years from now, or six years from now?” They want to know what they should be venture investing in.
I think we’ll reach a point where everything old becomes new again. Go back to some of the fun, cool ideas from DeFi summer. You have ENS and IPFS, web servers, and a decentralized web—not just the value layer, but decentralizing parts of the web infrastructure. You have Lens, a shared social graph. Maybe someone builds a Twitter front end on that social graph, a YouTube video front end, or an algorithm layer.
I can’t tell you, Thread Guy has so many Twitter followers. I would love it if we had all of those across our other distribution platforms. Lens is an awesome idea, right? Or Friend.tech. I think FOMO is different from Friend.tech, so maybe there’s a version of Friend.tech that works again. I get excited about whether, once all this value and all these people are on-chain, we can revisit some of these old ideas with a fresh perspective, scaled networks, and real users. Maybe some of them will actually work.
I think it’s far too early to be buying any of those, but I think we’re in a phase where we inflect and then get creative again. This inflection curve will probably be localized to that small set of protocols. Beyond that, I at least have hopeium that there will be a wave of creativity where we can really revisit some of these old ideas.
The plumbers are sad that we've lost them, and I'm sad we've lost them too. They were so inspiring.
Yeah. Bro, I've always been super bullish on the social stuff, to my detriment, to be honest. I think it is one of the areas where crypto is uniquely positioned to do something differentiated from other existing social networks. I think FOMO is kind of in that direction. Pump is kind of also in that direction.
Trading is literally the world's greatest MMORPG, but right now we don't have any characters. Our characters—
Yeah.
—are all siloed to these social profiles, where our history isn't really represented well. I think it also would solve some of the problems around reputation and authenticity. We have the ZK tools necessary to obfuscate certain things or not obfuscate them.
There are people who are extremely smart on-chain, have made a lot of money on-chain, and have been active in all these early protocols. They can provably show that with their wallets, but right now there's no protocol or app highlighting or surfacing those things. I do think it's an interesting place, especially if you're thinking all this value is going to move on-chain—
Yeah.
—over the next few years. If there's trillions of dollars moving on-chain, there's also going to be all the associated user activity—
Yeah.
—with all those trillions of dollars. That's when crypto social networks make a lot more sense than they do today.
Yeah. Somebody will figure it out. Somebody will figure it out. I burned a ton of money on Friend.tech, and I'll keep burning money on social protocols. You pay the cost of the game. I'll keep losing money on that shit until I finally make money.
Until it works. Until it works and I make a million X.
Exactly.
Bro, I round-tripped my Friend.tech airdrop. My shit was worth over… I think I had the biggest Friend.tech airdrop. I think I was number one, actually. I think I literally was number one on the app.
Wow.
I round-tripped the whole thing. I didn't sell a single dollar, bro. Not one. Not one dollar.
I actually—I'm pretty sure Friend.tech is the reason you first followed me, because I was trading Friend.tech like crazy. I was doing spreadsheets.
Damn, I was.
I think I was one of your top key holders, and I posted in there, “Racer is Zuck.” I was thinking, “Zuck becomes famous because of Facebook, and Jack becomes famous because of Twitter. Racer built Friend.tech.” I thought, “Oh, I should tell his key holders.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I posted that in your room, and then a few minutes later I saw you aping the fuck out of Racer keys. Then I got the Twitter notification, and I was like, “Oh my God, I had someone follow me.” I loved the lore there. I loved Friend.tech. It was so much fun. It was the best.
Bro, I love Friend.tech too. That's one of my favorite apps in crypto. That shit was lit. That shit was lit as fuck.
But yeah, nothing has really hit quite like that. It was so dope.
Yeah. That shit was interesting. That shit was cool. Who else was on Friend.tech? I remember there was somebody on Friend.tech who was only buying and selling keys. He wasn't even in the rooms, but he was really good at buying and selling keys. I think it was D. Pats or something like that. I don't know how he was making money, because it was a 5% spread both ways, but he was still making money, or whatever it was he was doing.
Looking back, it was insane. I've never done so much volume, paid so much tax, been up so much, and then just gotten wrecked. I really went through the roller coaster on that fucking project.
Oh, bro, that shit was so fun. Everybody was tapped into that shit. Fucking 5% buy-sell fee. That shit was crazy.
People complain about the fees—the $100 ETH gas fees. I'm like, “Kids these days, they don't know about fees. You don't know what it means to really want to buy something, and then to really want to sell something too.”
No.
Yeah.
Oh my God, bro. ETH fees were fucking hilarious. I remember selling Pepe on-chain when Pepe was running up. Every fucking transaction was just knocking me over the head.
Crazy.
Oh, man. Anything else you want to hit on before we hop?
No. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks to you both for having me. That's everything I got.
Hey, we gotta do one more. We gotta do what? One more thing. Which one? Do I have the phone? It's right here. Okay, hold on one second. I appreciate you staying this long, man. It's usually a long three- to four-hour show. How do I fucking—
Yeah, you guys run a long show. Thread Guy, we tell him all the time, “Thread Guy, you gotta hit three hours. You gotta hit three hours.” Every time I see his eyes hit the clock at 2:45, he's starting to wind down. I'm like, “You're not at quota. You're not at quota.” He drops it anyway. I have mad respect for the long streams you guys do.
Yeah, bro. I don't know how Thread does it every single day. I was telling him the other day when I saw him in person, “Dude, you are a machine,” because that shit is not easy to do consistently at all.
Our other secret weapon is Dnap Daniel, who doesn't get enough love. He's also Counterparty-affiliated, if anybody wants to find and follow him. This kid is the smartest. He's the research-engine workhorse. He crushes it with topics and analysis. The other day we were talking about experimental monkeys to play the pharma trade, and he was showing us articles he'd found in a South China Sea newspaper that even Google couldn't translate.
What?
So, huge shout-out to Daniel for just being the man. It's a team effort. Obviously Thread Guy is a generational talent, but it takes all of us every single day to put this shit together.
You said Dnap? What's his @? Dnap? I'm gonna follow him.
Let me find it real fast. It's Dnapway, D-N-A-P-W-A-Y. This is the GOAT.
Oh, I do follow him. I follow him. Oh, cool.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's the best. Everybody here who doesn't follow him, definitely give him a follow.
Dnapway. Word. All right, I'm going to take the Bears because I don't like the Patriots and I think they suck. That's who we're rocking with today. Who else is playing today? Chiefs, Seattle. It's Chiefs-Seattle Sunday.
They're taking the Eagles.
You said Chiefs? Chiefs-Seattle is coming up. Seattle's gonna beat y'all for sure. Nah, nah, nah. Seattle's gonna beat y'all for sure. It's Kenneth Walker, for sure. See, they're already favored.
They're taking the Eagles.
That's bullshit. They're already favored. I'm taking the Seahawks to beat the Chiefs. I'm actually kind of surprised they're favorites here, to be honest. The Chiefs are undefeated this season, so we'll see. I feel like the Seahawks match up well with the Chiefs. They're a good defensive squad. They got Kenneth Walker. I don't need Kenneth Walker. It's gonna be like 6-7. Kenneth Walker. Okay, what else we got? Packers only put up 6. What do the Eagles play this week? We play the Cowboys—
Let's go, Cowboys. I'm a Cowboys guy myself.
You're a Cowboys guy? Okay, we'll hedge my pain, bro. We'll hedge my pain because my Eagles are fucking awful this year anyway. Who already took this? You guys did this when I wasn't paying attention. They already have the fucking… Let's see if I can clear it anyway. Yeah, bro, it's rough. Jalen Hurts is out for the season. Saquon got hurt for a second.
Fucking, our O-line is looking not great. It’s just not great. It has not been great so far. Maybe we’ll turn it around. We’ll see if Tanner McKee—maybe he’ll be the second coming of Nick Foles. That would be crazy.
No, he’s decent. He’s not bad. He’s not horrible. But yeah, we’re gonna have to fucking put some shit together.
There’s a lot of problems to fix.
For sure. Yeah, for sure.
All right, guys. All right, chat. Appreciate you guys. I think we are going to hop. Tulip, I appreciate you rocking with me for so long.
Yeah.
Gave us a great amount of alpha, I think. I know the chat appreciates it. Hopefully I’m wrong. I’ll be embarrassed. Hopefully we just fucking rip it. That’ll be great.
Yeah. Everyone get bullish. Just take good coins. That’s all I got.
Just take good coins. All right, cool. All right, guys. Later. We are out of here.