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Are we back? | Does Compute w/ @zeneca
Recorded: March 25, 2025 Duration: 0:53:54Space Recording
Short Summary
The conversation covers various aspects of the crypto market, including the potential growth of Ethereum and NFTs, the decline in shitcoin popularity, and emerging trends such as the increasing focus on stablecoins and the proliferation of new blockchain networks. Additionally, the role of grants in supporting app development is highlighted.
Full Transcription
All right, Mr. Zeneca.
Apologies there, dude.
Twitter Spaces.
We got all this technology, all this building with Grock,
and still have the worst podcasting, show hosting, tech in the game.
But stoked to have you, bro.
I'm happy to be here and yeah, nothing has changed in like the four years I've been in the space.
Twitter spaces still suck, but necessary evil, I would say.
Yeah, absolutely. So listen, before we start this spaces, I wanted to ask you, is this the last time to get ETH below $2,000?
Well, it might have already missed it. Maybe it'll never drop below 2000 again.
Here's hoping, right?
Dude, there you go. And I love it. I saw yesterday, I think you said, this is like your 37th time on the tweet, but I love that that's just a metric that you have and, you know, that you're tracking just EF crossing that boundary.
it'll eventually be right eventually it'll it'll stay above 2000 just like it'll have it has no stay above 500 for so long and on a thousand for so long eventually the state of a 2,000
Absolutely. But I really excited to talk to you today, dude. I know you've had a long history in NFTs, and I don't know if you remember this far back, but you were actually a part of my very first NFT group. I was in NFTC. They had that pineapple emoji as their discourse.
Yes, I do remember. That was my first group as well. It was so good back in the day. So many great. I just learned so much from the group.
Oh, dude, same here.
I mean, that was just like, you know, I think a huge portion of trading that you can take in crypto is information asymmetry.
And back then it was just like.
nothing else. I remember you calling out blit maps early, early on and just understanding that
that was going to morph into a different collection. That ended up being an enormous cook. Thank you
for that. But yeah, even just knowing that there was a Discord group or knowing how to mint from
contract or raise gas, like gone are those days of just, you know, everyday alpha coming down
the timeline. It was sick.
I miss those days. It was so much fun. Yeah, different opportunities now, but I don't think we'll ever get anything quite like that again.
Yeah, I think it's, I mean, I've thought about it for a long time.
I think part of it has to do with emerging asset classes.
I don't know if we'll ever see it in terms of like NFTs or the emergence of shitcoins,
but you could argue like some of the earlier days of shitcoin when we kind of had the
Whiff Popcat era, there definitely were like a ton of opportunities.
So I'm still optimistic.
We're going to get that next wave and still have some information asymmetry there.
So, you know, it might be a while, but maybe.
I mean, definitely.
Definitely.
It'll be something else. There's always going to be something else.
Absolutely. But I do want to talk to you about it because we started NFTs.
It sounds like around the same time, at least with NFTC, and that was definitely a different time frame.
What do you think of this market currently? I know that's a broad question, but I'm really just interested to know what your take of, you know, all of this has been.
Yeah, I would say it's definitely the weirdest market cycle or market period that I've been in crypto since, I've been since 2017.
All sorts of reasons.
You know, Trump being a big one lately, hitting a new all-time high pre-harvening.
And just generally this sense of, I think, fatigue or a lot of OGs that are kind of jaded and, you know, maximally crime season.
There's all these weird different things going on that makes it just a weird cycle.
I'm still bullish, though.
I think that the overall landscape for crypto is incredibly bullish with the regulatory changes, the...
countries and governments and companies and institutions adopting and wanting to buy Bitcoin
and use stable coins and just sort of have this greater awareness and use of crypto
So definitely bullish.
I think it's certainly tougher for individuals to find an edge and make money, trading, flipping, whatever.
But there's still tremendous opportunities everywhere.
And it's tougher than it was, but I still think it's a fantastic area to be working in.
And yeah, it's exciting.
One thing about crypto is never a freaking dull moment.
Yeah, that's for nang sure. And, you know, it's a really interesting place we find herself in the market right now because it sort of seems like we're on the cusp of having bottomed. I think there's people where you can kind of see the sentiment, right? We definitely see some AI tokens and some meme coins coming back off the like absolutely bottomed lows. But I really haven't seen a ton of signals
either way to say, hey, is this the pop that gets sold and we go right back down?
Or are we going to get the Bitcoin 100K candle, get everyone frothed up and have NFTs come
back or whatever else?
So I'm not sure if you're kind of in the same sense of underlying bullish but still
cautious or if you think it's like, nah, the signals are on, we're good to go.
No, 100%.
I've described it as like,
I feel like the market has got a knife's edge at the moment.
It can go either way where, like you said,
it can cool off and drop way back down,
or we just get a God candle and we're off to the races.
I do think with NFT specifically that there's sort of a buzz and momentum...
brewing, you can see it with the number of punk sales lately and a few other collections really taking off.
And just a general excitement on the timeline seems to be pretty bullish towards NFTs in a way that haven't seen for a little while.
So I think that a bullish market or even just a sideways market will probably be good for NFTs in at least the short term.
But market falls, obviously NFTs will also go down.
Yeah, it's definitely a conundrum of just, you know, is this nostalgia or is this just people realizing that this is the game they want to be playing?
I think at least from the traders that I talk to and just interact with an MVHQ, I think everyone agrees that NFTs were more fun.
Like there's just that that mint feeling, the post reveal, having a collection pump, sweeping floors, like the traits, the art involved.
It's so much more fun.
And it's interesting because crypto, it really is like always evolving.
And there's not too many other asset classes that you can just be on the absolute forefront
of and just like speculate as they're evolving in real time.
So it's interesting in terms of like a traditional stock market, you might see rotations into
the AI space and then genomics and then telecom.
And it's, you know, every couple of years you hear, oh, it's cyclical.
So it's interesting to think with NFTs, like, it could totally be cyclical where people are just like, hey, we've had our fun with shit coins, we got two extracted.
Let's go back to JPEGs where at least it's a little bit more clear what's going on behind the scenes.
Yeah, 100%.
And even if you look at things like Pokemon cards or watches or comics, like other collectibles, it's also cyclical.
They have like bull and bearish markets.
There's periods of time where no one really cares about collecting.
you know,
rare comics or
Pokemon cards.
And then lately it's like
the opposite and attention
and capital flows back
into those markets.
So it's,
or even just like the art market.
Like,
you know,
so much of NFTs,
the NFTs space is built on art.
And you look back over history and art has also gone through similar things where
it is times when art is valued highly, sometimes when it's not.
A lot of the time, some of the most expensive or valuable pieces just take years and decades
to be valued, sometimes centuries, significantly highly.
So I think that as time goes on, NFTs will evolve and are evolving from this little
very much like a micro bubble in 2021 that blew insanely high and had all this mania and like
PFPs and just madness into very much an established asset class with like within like intra-class
bull and bear market. So it could be that you know, NFT art has its moment while the rest of the
NFT space is not really doing anything or or NFT gaming is really taking off because there's a big
blowout game that's getting a lot of attention.
So, yeah, I'm very much still bullish on NFTs.
Like, that has not changed at all.
I love that.
Yeah, do you mind tell me some of the stuff you're interested in?
I definitely think notably, as you pointed out, that this week we've gotten some crazy
crypto punk sales, a lot of stuff above the floor.
I forgot the exact phrase that you use.
And it was like, if you're in a bear...
Yes, bears don't buy rare.
And I completely agree because back during the heyday of NFTs, that was always a good sign for me to start sweeping a collection or taking note.
Like if you saw major sales like 10, 15 times above the floor for those rairs, well, hey, the whole collection is going to go with it.
So definitely some notable crypto punk sales.
I think we got the zombie yesterday or two days ago for like 800.
K and just a ton of the floor being swept.
So Cryptopunks, it's a really obvious play right there.
Are there any other collections that you think have the pedigree or just the community
behind it where they can still bounce back even after all this time?
Yeah, definitely.
Actually, this was the, I wrote a newsletter on this very topic this week.
And I referenced two other things aside from Crypto-Punks that sort of, you know,
signaled this maybe this beginning.
One was Good Vibes Club.
They minted out and the floor multiplied,
but you had a bunch of sales well above floor.
People were getting Rairs, collecting traits,
sharing them on the timeline.
There was just positive energy around that.
And then the masks of Lucci by Sam's Bratt
was just another collection that really captivated
the timeline and got a lot of attention.
And people made a bunch of money on as well,
because the floor went up.
So those are really appealing things.
And then in terms of what I am looking at,
because I agree, I think that there's opportunity out there.
There's upcoming mince.
I think Final Bossu is an interesting one,
over on abstract.
Very bullish on that.
But also looking at some of the older collections,
parallel avatars being one of them, the
like PFP-ish project by the parallel team.
So they're doing this Wayfinder AI project.
They're creating an AI slash like an AI agent video game.
And I just think that there's so much momentum and,
I guess, narrative around AI and gaming at the moment that they could really take off.
I think Max Payne and Friends, the Xcopy collection, like Xcopy is just, is timeless.
And it's hard to imagine too much, too many X copy pieces being a bad investment over a long enough time frame.
Max Payne and Friends is just his largest collection, lowest floor.
He might introduce new burn mechanics.
He's done a bunch of those in the past.
So I think that's something good to look at.
And the last one I'll say is Terraforms by Mathcastle, which is just, it's impossible for me to try and describe it in 10 seconds on the space, but it's just a fascinating on-chain art land-type project on Ethereum that I've been a massive fan off since 21 when it minted or 22 whenever it was.
Oh, dude, you're making me nostalgic for art blocks here.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, that's another one.
Squiggles, meridians, so much of...
Obviously, not everything on Arplocs is going to go up again,
like we've seen in the past because there's way too many collections,
but some of the... I guess the...
most valued, I guess, collections are like, I don't want to say blue chip, but just, you know, the better collections that have performed well in the past are, I think, going to perform very well over a multi-year time horizon from here.
Yeah, I completely agree with you.
I think the market just needs to get a little bit more comfortable with pricing.
Because I mean, if you think about the traditional art world, there's millions and millions
of artists out there and even more paintings that exist.
And obviously not all of them are worth it.
And I think that's just what we saw with the NFT space as time went by.
Like I'm sure you remember the release calendar days of NFTs where it was like, hey, this
is the big mint for this week.
And there's the only one or two NFTs coming out this week.
And if you cop it, you make money.
And it's like the whole idea of inflationary supply, which we've seen with the US dollar,
for starters, shade thrown, whatever, but like sports cars, trading cards, the more they print,
you're just kind of inflating everything so it's hard to sustain.
People always criticize art blocks for that because they continue to just make so many collections.
But again, those collections still have a merit on their own.
And it's the same thing with NFTs.
It's like, yeah, we got to a point where there was 100 new projects every day.
Of course not everything was going to pump.
It just wasn't feasible.
Yeah, 100%.
I like the analogy towards just the traditional art world because I make that the same.
It's like, you know, we've thought of for so long NFTI as a separate thing.
And in some ways, it definitely is.
But it still falls under the umbrella of all.
all art. And if you look at the history of art, like, you know, the starving artist is,
is a meme for a reason or a trope for a reason because it is really, really, really tough
for artists to make money selling their art. 21 was like an exception where the vast majority
or a huge percentage of people creating NFT art artists, which was amazing, were able to make
significant money. But that was, I think, the exception rather than the rule. And now we're just
you know, reverting back to more of a mean and a standard situation where I still think that the overall
art market is increasing due to NFTs, but it's still really tough. vast majority of art will
just not have significant value as it always has been.
Yeah, completely agree.
And what's been interesting to me is seeing that exact same structure play out with
shitcoins.
Because you could argue it was the exact same thing where, you know, as the rate of tokens
and stuff bonding from pump fund increased, there's obviously a little bit more of an
extraction backdrop there, which we can certainly discuss if you'd like.
But, you know, the attention and the limelight that shit coins had when it was brand new
in a novel concept and we had stuff like Pepe go parabolic.
We're not just seeing that anymore because there's just so much that it's really hard to maintain attention in this time frame when the market just has a million other things propped up that it has to pay attention to.
Yeah, 1,000%. It's the same reason why I think most people agree that we're not going to get a quote-unquote alt season where everything just pumps because it's just too much of everything.
It'll be select things that outperform. And I think that's...
kind of more healthy and natural anyway rather than being able to throw a dart at a dartboard and
have it go up only for it inevitably come crashing down a short time later this is this is healthier
100%. And a question I love to ask guests on the show is, you know, with so much stuff going on in crypto now, with so many projects that have risen, have fallen, still have new projects coming out, where do you as someone who's seen a couple cycles, has them under their belt? Where do you spend most of your time and most of your attention? You know, as you talked about at the start of the episode, there's still opportunities for people in crypto. What are the things that spark your interests the most?
Yeah, it definitely varies.
Yeah.
I, when I'm like in trading mode, I would say, so when I'm actually like,
in the trend to all spending, say, 10 hours plus a day trying to make money in crypto,
specifically via trading.
It's just following the trends.
You just kind of have to.
So it's, you know, it's meme coins when they were going crazy.
It's meme coins on Slana, the meme coins on base.
And then there's a brief Avax season.
It's NFT, but NFTs are getting the attention.
It's, you just have to keep, you know, the meta shifts every couple of months.
We'll probably get a gaming one.
There's AI agents.
It's just it's for,
sort of keeping your finger on the pulse and just following that.
And you just do that by being in so many Discord servers,
telegram chats, following a whole bunch of people on Twitter
and just spending a lot of time and curating your timeline and information feed.
That's kind of what I do.
when i'm trying to trade and make money and you know it's it's it's a lot takes a lot of time
doesn't always work you you win some you lose some but i think those are the opportunities for
sort of i guess a trader or someone trying to make money that way and then um there's so many
other ways to make opportunity to make money in crypto so you could you know airdrop farm you could
be a content creator so i'm back to focusing a lot more on writing myself um you can invest in in
companies from like an equity or early stage perspective, which used to be very much gated towards, you know, VCs and certain
select sides of angel investor, but now we see like Anko and Legion, it really is opening that
sort of avenue up for just about everyone. So yeah, I sort of bounce between all of the above.
It just depends. So like, you know, a few months ago, I was very much trading mean coins.
Now I'm very much sitting on my hands and not trading anything, but I'm writing my newsletter
and I'm worth you on a book. So it's just changes in time to time.
Yeah, that's pretty exciting. Definitely want to ask you more about this book because I don't think I've talked to, I guess that's written a book before. But just a lighthearted question to segue into the next topic. What was your favorite meme that you've traded over the last couple of years here, just in terms of like
For me, I always love when a meme genuinely makes me laugh.
Was there ever a token that you're like, this is just so funny?
There is.
I can't remember the name of the exact one, because I remember specifically,
it made me laugh lots, and I was like, I have to buy it.
And then it basically went to zero.
But another one that basically had the same effect was when all the political means were coming out,
so there was Boden, there was Trump, there was...
Warren, Elizabeth Warren.
Those ones with it, but yeah, those were funny.
The, even the, the one that came out yesterday, the day before with Trump and like that, that portrait of him that he hates, that was funny.
Yeah, I didn't buy that one, but I'm a big believer of when a mean makes you laugh, that's a really good signal that it's at least going to get some attention in the short term.
I mean, all these things are fleeting, but yeah.
It's been a lot.
Yeah, great shout, dude.
The political stuff was definitely very funny in that portrait of Trump was pretty awesome, though short-lived.
And Puees was hilarious.
I mean, that was just such a funny arc there, also just given how, like, you know, how visible it is now is the funniest part.
Like, you know all the politicians are seeing it.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, another one recently, EIC, which was Everything is Computer.
which is when Trump had all those Tesla cars outside the White House, he got into one of them.
And he's like, yeah, this is great.
Look at us.
There's no buttons.
It's just a screen.
Everything is computer.
And I just cracked it up.
And of course there was a meme coin.
I think it's close to zero now unless it bounced back.
But yeah, that was funny as well.
Yeah, totally agree. But what a smooth segue to talk about your book. Feel free to talk about as much as you'd like and as much as you don't want to talk about, feel free to keep that close to the best as well. But what inspired you to decide to make a book?
Yeah, I've always wanted to write a book. Like,
Even before crypto, I actually just the other day found some old notes and like New Year's resolutions and goals from like eight, nine years ago.
And one of them was write a book. And I had nothing to write about at the time. So obviously it didn't happen then.
But, you know, I've always been a writer. I've loved writing. I've loved reading. I've loved words and language.
So I think I was always going to write a book. And then finally through crypto, I feel like I have something that I,
and write about and deliver value via a book.
So the book I'm working on is basically a collection of...
Things that I've learned as, you know, a crypto trader and investor for the last seven years,
as well as a professional poker player who about 15 years before that.
So things like managing risk, managing a bankroll, finding alpha and opportunities, a bunch of
the theories around investing, all these kind of things is going in the book.
And I'm just hoping that it will be this, like a guide for people who are...
like new to the space, but even people who have been around a while will hopefully get some value out of it to just sort of think about ways to
improve their results and either make more money or lose less, which is basically the same thing anyway.
Yeah, 100%. And I saw an interesting thread that you put out a couple days ago in terms of this cycle and having some gains be round tripped.
And I don't know if you felt the same way. I thought this was just sort of a more difficult cycle than before.
I think a lot of it is the level of competition was higher, but also the abruptness of which it ended was really tricky.
But in that theme of just lessons learned, you know, that you're talking about in the book, was there anything specific to this cycle? And I'm talking like it's over. It might not necessarily be, but just kind of this, you know, break that we've had so far of, let's say, October to end of January when things cooled off. Was there any big takeaways from you from that cycle?
Yeah, I mean, there's nothing in the book specifically about the cycle, but I think like just a bunch of general theories in terms of like making sure to take profit in systems so that you set like exit prices in advance would have certainly helped and did help me to take a decent amount of profit.
Not as much as I would have liked to, of course.
I mean, everyone could have done better.
But yeah, I think this was...
It was abrupt, like you said.
I don't think it's over, but if it is,
it was certainly just the weirdest cycle we've had,
and I don't think many people predicted it to work out like this.
But again, it all just comes back to the importance of having a plan ahead of time
and setting some targets for selling your positions and taking profits and
de-risking along the way, because if you were just like 100% all in,
didn't take profits, didn't take your initial out of some positions, didn't,
plan for this eventuality, then you basically would have round-tripped everything by now,
especially if you're heavy in Alts.
If you're heavy in Bitcoin, then you're probably still definitely doing fine.
But yeah, just like, that's another part, like portfolio allocation.
How do you decide how much you want to put in Bitcoin or the other majors?
How much you want to keep in like your active trading account with memes and NFTs and the higher-risk things?
Yeah.
Yeah, there's so much to it that it's not easy.
Otherwise, everyone would be making lots of money, but it's tough to do all this thing,
all these things right.
And I certainly don't do it myself.
Like I say at the beginning of the book that I'm writing about a whole bunch of tools
that I think people should have in their toolbox.
And then some people will use some, others will use others.
I definitely don't use them all the time, but it's just about being aware of them
and then finding out what works best for you instead of trying to have to be like,
understood picture perfect with everything all the time because no one's no one's like that yeah no
kidding and you know i've always found that with nfts or crypto it's always a little bit tougher to
stick by the rules i do think at some point in this episode you talked about fatigue and i think it's
just so real that you know being on a screen for 10 plus hours a day every day and and just seeing so many
pace games be made, fortunes won and loss. It's really difficult to stick to those devices
where in poker, at least you could, let's say you had like a perfect calc. You would know your EV.
You'd know when to risk up accordingly. But it's really easy to have some heuristics that don't
really account for the market, but you think you do in crypto. I don't know if you resonate with
that at all. No, 100%. Yeah, you're right. In poker, it was...
I mean, a lot easier to calculate your expected value, like you said, or risk or just,
and especially when, because you saw the same situations over and over and over again.
Like you see the exact same hand with the exact same odds or almost the exact same odds.
And you get to play that situation 10 times, 100 times, thousands of times, millions of times
sometimes. Whereas in crypto, it's like, it's always changing. Every situation is different. It's very hard to
accurately define your edge. It's all a lot of like guesswork and gut instinct and ranges.
And like the next time around, like the next mean point is going to be just a completely different
situation because the market will have changed. Yeah, it's what keeps it interesting and fun and
exciting to me. Like after 15 years of poker, I was kind of getting over it and bored with it.
Crypto, I don't think, will have that anytime soon at least. It's such a fascinating space and,
you know, you're dealing with
the minute or the very specific details of like,
did the dev sell, what's the vibe like in the telegram chat for a meme coin?
How's the, you know, did they up?
update the deck screener and what's the Twitter account like.
That's the most minute detail for a crypto token all the way up to what's the president of the United States saying?
What are nation states doing?
What legislation is being passed?
So you have like political and legal stuff and everything in between from just it's everything.
So it's it's I don't know.
I love crypto man.
Dude, I feel ya. And it really is a crazy year and timeline that we're in when the president is launching meme coins. And, you know, day by day we see legislation come out. I mean, we used to pray for legislation. And we used to have times when collections would get delisted from OpenC. And it would be a huge deal. I remember jail turtles. If you recall that collection, people were pissed. It was like, oh, you got delisted. It was crazy.
Dow turtles or something, right? And, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I made money on that collection, but I still had a bunch that I didn't sell it.
They went to like, I don't know, one-eath, two-eaf?
Something's really stupid, like everything back then.
Ah, good times.
Oh, such good times, dude. But I'm really curious, what is your take as someone who is a crypto
enjoyer? And I mean, it's the most fun space imaginable, but it's so funny from where we started,
which is this dream and promised land of decentralization. And now I see it split on CT.
I think there are some people who are really stoked to have a lot of attention from government
and, you know, countries all on crypto and some people adopting them. But then there's also the current of
Well, how decentralized is it if Black Rock is going to have a major ownership of Bitcoin
and stuff like that?
Do you have any perspective there?
Yeah, definitely.
I think, I mean, I very much am a strong believer in the original ethos of crypto.
Decentralization, anti-authoritarian, censorship resistance, all this is super important
to me.
And I think it's the bedrock of the entire crypto space.
I'm going to think connection lost.
You still hear me?
I still got it.
Okay, cool.
Yeah, so that's all super-dooper important.
But if the goal was for crypto to go chronic mainstream, if we want a global adoption, if we
wanted billions of people worldwide to be owning and using interacting with crypto,
it you're just going to lose some of that hopefully not all of it and and that would be a disaster
but i think that there are like necessary evil trade-offs you just have to make to sort of i mean
centralized exchanges are a great example like the ethos and culture of um bitcoin was you know um
self-custody you own assets but that
that was difficult to do. It was hard to onboard people. A lot of people lost seed phrases,
etc., etc. So centralized exchanges popped up as this like conduit between, you know,
normies and normal culture and banks and traditional finance and the crypto worlds. And yes,
there are risks by keeping your money on there, but there are also risks self-custody.
And so I think that like BlackRock and ETFs and micro strategy and government strategic reserves
are just like more in that vein where it's,
just like a bridge between the old world and the new world.
And yeah, I don't think it's particularly harmful the way it's currently going about.
Like, you know,
The amount of supply and money it would take to someone to or several entities to actually attack the Bitcoin network would be monstrous.
So 2% ownership is a lot, of course, but it's not.
I don't think it's an existential threat by any means.
So, yeah, necessary evil.
I'm generally a fan of it because it leaves to greater adoption, but I understand why some people aren't as thrilled.
Yeah, no, I agree with you there. I think it's definitely going to be interesting. And I mean, I definitely think the adoption of stable coins is where it could get really exciting because I think that will legitimize the infrastructure, just sort of the backdrop of larger crypto. And I think in theory, that could create some really interesting pockets of trading for people like us that like to, you know, find the new edge and and.
obviously it's going to be faster pace because as we've seen a lot of these emerging assets don't last very long.
But I think as we start seeing Ethereum and Solana and Bitcoin go higher and higher, you're definitely going to start to see that risk curve appetite increase.
And we'll be back in the casino, so to speak.
Yeah, definitely. And I think stablecoins is the most interesting thing happening in crypto at the moment, or the most significant thing happening. I'm working on an article about them right now, actually, it doesn't go out next week because, yeah, it seems like not that many people were paying attention. Just the last one or two days, I've seen way more stuff on the timeline about it. So it does seem like more and more people are waking up to just how impactful and significant this is. Like the last few months of just bearish shock for...
Bitcoin and crypto basically, sample coin volumes and adoption just kept going up, up into the right.
And it's like the perfect use case of crypto. It's just sending money to someone on the other side of
the world. It's like infinitely cheaper and faster than traditional methods. So yeah, I think it's huge.
And one of the tough things though is like as a trader, it's like it's not easy to invest in,
there's not too many ways to like make money off of it right now. If you can,
find ways to invest in protocols or buy specific stable coins and get exposure to that way,
but it's not quite the same as other narratives and matters,
but I also think that's totally fine and healthy.
It's nice to have a non-speculative narrative taking the dominant role instead of meme coins
or something else that was highly speculative.
Yeah, I completely agree with you there.
And it is interesting because I know the Trump media company announced USD1, and then I think Japan announced their own stablecoin.
So for me, there's always been that question of how much of something do we need?
And you're spot on, right?
Stablecoin is such a good innovation in terms of like the actual adoption of it in a good use case of crypto.
And this might be a little bit of a jump to a different topic, but I'm really curious like 2025.
Are you tired of there being new chains yet?
I personally just get kind of burnt out at some point where it's like,
here's the next chain and here's the next transaction speed.
And it's even faster.
But there's going to be a giga-eath.
It's like, all right, dude, I don't even know at this point.
I don't know if we need a new chain.
We already have so many chains that do work.
Do you ever feel that way with crypto and there's 50 versions of the same thing?
Oh, yeah, all the time.
I mean, how many chains do we really need?
Yeah.
Yeah, we don't need that many.
But in the same breath, I don't think that there's anything wrong with lots of chains.
Because eventually, in the not too distant future, I think it'll all be abstracted away from the end user.
Like there are people working on chain abstraction where you have an app.
I mean, they're already apps live where you can buy a token and you just put in the token name or whatever.
And it doesn't matter if it's on.
AVX or Solana or base or whatever, it just, you just spend the stable coins or whatever currency
you have in your wallet.
you buy that token. And I think that is the future where all of these chains, like on the one hand,
it's good that people are trying to optimize and make things slightly faster, more efficient,
cheaper, safer, secure, all that kind of stuff. Like that, it's good that that is happening.
But you're right, it's exhausting as like, if you're trying to like trade or like follow narratives,
like, I'm going to go trade meme coins on this brand new chain that just launched for NFTs or
to do defy on this, you know, bearer chain or then Monad or this, that, and the other. I think that
For a while, there'll still be these opportunities for the people that want to put in the work and grind and find them.
But in the not too distant future, there's just going to continue to be more chains.
I'm pretty convinced of that.
But it's also that most of us will just have no idea anymore.
And it'll just be, it'll all be app focused.
And it'll be absolutely what's going to.
Success is based on users, and users come for apps.
And so it doesn't matter what chains are running things behind the scenes.
It's just the apps that will dominate, I think, in the future.
Yeah, I completely agree, man.
And I'm really curious because I know that you've talked about abstract a lot over the past couple of weeks,
how you think that comes into play as a chain with usable apps.
And another notable point I think over the past year is probably blasts because it really
had a notable concept of native yield.
And I think just so many people were really enthralled with the ecosystem.
And for whatever reason, the apps just usually don't gain traction.
It seems like the only ones that really get the job done are the uniswaps, obviously native
wallet apps.
But I'm just curious in your mind, like, is there any app that you think lends itself really
well to crypto?
Hmm.
I mean, I do think that the thing that is the apps that lend themselves best to crypto
in terms of use cases or things that you can't do without crypto, because that's always
a question I ask you.
Like, it's not really a crypto app if it could be done better without crypto.
But defy, like, again, it's not sexy, but just like all the defy protocols, getting yields
through swaps and trading, whatever, without a centralized.
entity in the middle i think is is probably one of the most exciting things about that crypto um
and then there'll be apps like um
Fantasy Top, which is, speaking of Blast, it is the blast, just the blowout successful app on that chain.
I think I saw a tweet yesterday that said that fantasy top made more revenue than the entire Blast blockchain in a 23-hour period, which again just goes to show that like the chain doesn't matter that much.
I don't really know anyone using blast anymore other than people using it for fantasy top,
but people will still use the chain because they want to play the game, that you want to use the app.
And the same will happen for every chain.
And this is partly why there's such a like a bidding war that goes on between all these
blockchains and anyone building.
If you're building an app.
an app and you've got like you can prove that you have a ton of interest, a ton of users,
then you'll get massive grants from, you know, the Avax foundation, the Suey Foundation,
Salana. I don't know if they give out grants or they just give you all this dev support and help. And
you know, every chain wants to encourage people based in another example and encourage builders to
build apps on their chain because they understand how important
users are and how important is to have apps that bring people to your chain because
again at the end of the day that's that's all that people care about is is apps and making money
and um yeah
Oh, it was having trouble on muting there, dude.
Please, let's put spaces on Web 3,
have someone make a better version of it.
Dude, I love the example of Fantasy Top
and MVHQ has Fantasy Top down on Thursday's,
quick little shameless plug there.
But yeah, it's crazy that it stayed so relevant,
given that none of the other apps
you know, maybe a bit of hyperbole with none,
but I really can't think of any other apps on blasts that have maintained attention.
But the fact that so many people are still playing day after day,
week after week is really a great testament to exactly what you're saying.
That if you build something good that people want to use, they'll stick around.
I also loved your answer there. The best crypto app is one in crypto.
That was like, you know, outsmarting the sphinx riddle type beat.
So that was cool.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's just true.
Yeah, I mean, I love fantasy as well. I play every single week. It's just a fun game.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's just one of the most fun in crypto can be had. And like, usually when the money is flowing the most is just when people are having a good time. And it definitely seems like I have never seen the timeline sentiment so negative as it was probably in that January, February stretch when it was just like,
extraction play after extraction play.
People didn't seem excited to be in crypto anymore, right?
We were just kind of marching to like, well, this one might be good for 30 seconds before
the rug is pulled.
So I definitely love the idea of just genuinely fun experiences for users and then the,
you know, cash being the thing that we stick around for.
That's definitely in my mind the ideal version of crypto.
I don't think we're moving in that direction.
You know, there's obviously...
a lot of bumps along the way, but slowly but surely, I do think we're moving in the right direction.
100%. I do want to ask you because you brought up Pokemon cards at some point here, at least as an example of people still being interested in artwork and collectibles.
What are your thoughts of the real world asset narrative? It was a really big leader in 2024, at least in Mindshare.
There was definitely a lot of talk of Black Rock and the real world asset fund.
In terms of practice, haven't seen much beyond courtyard I.O and their crypto Pokemon drops.
Do you still think that's going to be a major theme that we see in coming years?
I think so. It's an interesting point. It's kind of like the same as what I was talking about before with centralized exchanges and governments in terms of it's like this bridge between the old world and the new world.
And I think that to me, the, what you're probably the biggest part of RWA is or certainly one of is just the liquidity it opens up for markets that maybe had less liquidity. And so, you know,
Pokemon cards are a decent example, just now anyone with the ability, anyone who owns crypto anywhere in the world can just now buy a Pokemon card that's rare and they can see it all verified on-chain.
But obviously, in order for that to happen, you have to have like off-chain companies that are like escrowing it or making sure that it all works well behind the scenes.
It's not purely on-chain.
So it's this weird hybrid between off-chain and on-chain or the real world and...
our crypto world. But then there's other things with the world. Like people always
like real estate and bringing real estate on chain. Imagine there's a
big billion legal and regulatory hurdles. But if it's possible, if it's done, that could be a
massive unlock. Like, um,
Imagine, like, I'm in Australia, right?
It's relatively easy for me to invest in real estate in my city.
And anywhere in the country, it's not too difficult, but it's not easy for me to invest in real estate in Japan, easily from here, or in New York or Los Angeles or wherever.
And if...
RWA has somehow unlocked that ability for people globally.
I think it will just generally be a good thing.
But it seems like it's a very difficult thing.
And probably a lot of governments are going to be against it for one reason or another.
Probably some good reason as well.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think at least in my mind, the biggest concern is like how do you even authenticate the real world version of those physical goods? Because like, let's say you had RFID as just a way of like, cool, here's a chip within the item to improve or prove that it's authentic.
what's to prevent someone from ripping that out of the real one, putting it in a fake one.
I think that's the difficulty, but I like your example a lot of real estate because that would be great to have that proved on chain,
especially just kind of in a digital age where you have 10 different versions of every story or every angle.
It's really difficult to solidify an exact this is the truth and people can really change a lot.
But I think just in this society that we have where, again, things can just change so easily, something that's completely immutable, it definitely seems like it would have a lot of value in the right use cases.
Yeah, definitely. And it's still pretty early. Like, you know, everything in crypto, it's going to take a long time for it to be the details to be figured out, the kings to be ironed out, and for it to sort of be adopted and mainstream. And there's a long way to go. But I'm generally bullish on the concept. And I think that it's tokenizing everything. I think that there's.
maybe not everything, but I think that there's like in terms of existing capital markets
and investment markets and collectible markets and art markets, I think it makes sense to
tokenize those at least. Yeah, I mean, I completely agree. I also think it's just
You know, I know we even had the concept with NFTs in terms of fractionalizing NFTs.
It makes a lot of sense in theory that like if you're someone who wants exposure to crypto punks,
but you can't afford a crypto punk, it would be great to get in on something like that.
So if you really believe in Pokemon cards but you can't buy a first edition Charzard, why not?
Yeah, definitely.
So have a bit of a lighthearted, but genuine question for you.
As someone who is in Australia...
Have you ever felt like it's harder for you to keep track of the market due to a lot of trading being US hour centric?
Um...
Only a little bit here, but that's only because I really moved back to Australia last year in July.
Before that, we were living in Dubai, and then before that, we were living in Munich in Germany.
And so during 21, 22, like that entire mania, I was in Germany.
And I felt to death, for sure.
Like, I would go to sleep at 6 a.m.
Because 6 a.m. in Munich time, was, I think, midnight.
New York time. And so I would just, yeah, that was my schedule for months and months and months.
I would just sleep at anywhere from 5 to 8 a.m., wake up in the afternoon.
And it was very unhealthy. It was very just, yeah, nocturnal lifestyle.
Since getting back to Australia, the time zone isn't the best, but it's also not that bad, I think.
Yeah.
especially like you basically if you just wake up relatively early you can you can catch most of it
but also i'm just doing less trading now um again focusing more on content and and more of my
trading is um bigger picture stuff or like like like longer time frame trades i'm trying to do less like you know
buy a 100K market cap token and sell it at $5 million or like the really, really microcap stuff.
And more of the things where like I'll size into a bigger position, maybe it's a 10, 20, 50, 100 million market cap and then hold it for days or weeks or even months and then look to exit.
So it requires a lot less time and especially requires a lot less timing of the market.
It doesn't matter so much if I'm online at the right time.
Yeah, I totally agree with you there.
I would say this being the third or fourth cycle for me, I'm the same way where I really don't even look at a coin below 3 million market cap anymore.
Maybe on virtual's ecosystem or just like something brand new that's emerging if that's where I'm spending all my time for the week.
But, I mean, there's just too much stuff coming out.
There's no way to catch it all.
So definitely agree with you there.
Yeah.
But going into content, and I know that we have 10 minutes till the end of this episode,
so definitely keep it as brief as we need.
But I'm curious what has been the experience for you, founder of Zen Academy, 333 Club.
You've got a huge following.
And like I said, I've known who you are for a while.
So just crazy to see you close to 400K followers.
How has that just changed your life and how you perceive the world as someone that people pay attention to?
Yeah, it's been interesting. It all happened so quickly and it was very unexpected. So like when I started in, I created my Twitter account in March 2021. I started my newsletter in June. And there were just very few people creating any sort of content around NFTs. And so that combined with the fact that
NFTs were just blowing up and everyone in the world seemed to be talking about them,
I just happened to get a whole bunch of followers really, really quickly.
And there was definitely this transition period where it was just a lot to get used to.
It very much does change your life, I think, in many, many ways.
One is just like dealing with the fact that, hey, if I tweet something now,
lots of people are going to see, especially with NFTs.
I could impact markets significantly.
So I wanted to be particularly careful.
You're going to attract haters and trolls and a lot of negativity as well,
no matter who you are, a certain point of audience size.
People will just disagree with you and somebody will strongly disagree and hate you.
And that's just part of life as well.
These days, I think I've just sort of like settled into it as the new normal where I honestly most of the time I forget that I have a lot of followers or anything like that. I'm just sort of living my normal day to day life here and working on my content and
Yeah, it's just, I just try not to think too much about it, but definitely it creates like all sorts of opportunities in terms of getting access to investing projects or being asked to be an advisor for projects or things like that, which I'm very grateful for.
Yeah, that's about it.
I appreciate that.
And follow up question for you there.
I'm always just intrigued and also impressed
with big founders such as yourself,
people like Tyler does it,
where you're able to just constantly get content out
and be on top of so many breaking stories
Is there any pressure on yourself that goes into that in terms of just being on top of the news?
And then in terms of CT today, where it seems like if you've seen it once, you've seen it 50 times,
are you ever discouraged when you have something that stands out to you,
but you've already seen, you know, 10 other accounts report on it?
Yeah.
On the first part, I don't really feel any of that pressure because I don't really report on the news so much.
Like I...
I will occasionally talk about things that are topical in the news, but I never feel bad if I miss something.
Because, as you say, 10 or 50 other people are going to report on it.
Tyler does a fantastic job.
I really like his content.
And, yeah, I know that it takes a lot of work to do what he does and stay on top of it all.
It's not easy in a space like crypto that's changing all the time.
But for me, I...
I don't really feel the pressure to create content.
Sometimes I'll go day, weeks without really doing any of it.
It's pretty organic for me where at the moment I'm like in my content creation mindset.
So like I just have thoughts all the time.
Sometimes I'll make a note to be like, hey, maybe I can make a tweet out of this later or
I'll just take an idea and decide to write on it or expand on it and see if it turns into
something that's worth tweeting or not.
And just sort of like go with it.
go with the flow and see what happens and yeah it's it's not that much pressure certainly in the
past i've felt more pressure but these days it's a i'm pretty chill about it that's awesome man i feel
like that's a great way to be how much uh time would you say per day on average do you spend writing
If there is a ton, like I said, some like weeks, it'll just be none at all.
But lately, like, let's say this last week, probably like two, three hours a day.
Like, I'm really, which to me is a lot.
Like, I know some people can write crazy amounts, but I struggle with, like, I have ADHD brain and actually ADHD as well.
So I struggle with paying attention for too long to any specific thing.
So a couple, two, three hours a day.
And I feel I can get a lot of writing done in that time.
Dude, super impressive.
And I mean, you're preaching to the choir, bro.
I'm part of the content team for MVHQ.
There's meetings where I just say off the cuff,
like, hey, my brain's in 80D mood today.
So just be on high alert.
We're going to have some fun ideas coming out here.
Absolutely, dude. So definitely want to start wrapping up just to be mindful of your time.
But I really just appreciated the conversation. I was just like a chill dialogue.
Is there anything else top of mind that you've been thinking of a lot this week or just the current market,
either just general insights in the market or any wisdom you want to impart to people listening?
Let me think. I think it's just sort of
It's just a general philosophy, but like having patience, I think.
And I think this last week and really last month or two has highlighted how important that is because often the best trade.
I've tweeted this not the long ago.
Often the best trade is no trade.
And I think too often people are...
are looking for the next thing to buy.
They're like, I want to find the next meme coin that's going to, you know, 100x.
I want to find the next token.
I want to find the next gem.
I want to find the next NFT project that's going to take off.
I think that that's generally a dangerous mindset.
It can work, but it's dangerous because it almost always leads to people finding and buying too many things.
And so I try to revert, invert that and think, all right, instead of looking at tokens, you
be like, should I buy this?
Should I buy this?
Think about why shouldn't I buy it?
And find all the flaws in every token and every meme coin.
And then when you finally come across something where you're like, well, there's actually
no reason not to buy it because X, Y, and Z reasons are.
all relevant or it's all going to go up because of these other reasons, then I think is a good
reason to buy. And all that sort of requires just patience and being able to sit on your hands
and be able to resist FOMO and be able to watch tokens pump and dump and go by without you getting
involved.
Yeah, that's great advice. I mean, I think you hear that from just best traders in every industry. And I'm sure your experience as a poker player really helped. You know, I've never really played poker to that level. I've definitely read some books on it just to learn more about EV. It is crazy the amount of hands that professionals don't play. Oh, yeah, just bold.
I mean, that's not represented in movies or media or anything like that. Like, they assume it's just going all in and high stakes and bluffing every hand. But for sure, like you're just...
I think most great traders are not trading a majority of the time.
So that's super stage advice.
Yeah, poker is, you know, the first thing you learn if you're trying to get better at poker is just fold more, play less hands.
100%.
Well, this has been great, Zeneca.
I really do appreciate it, dude.
I thought it was really cool.
I know you talked about which podcast should I pop in on or which spaces and you just wanting to get in and have some conversations.
And I was shocked just how readily accessible you were.
You've been given just the amount of people you have following you.
So I really appreciate just taking your time being here today.
It's been a pleasure chatting with you.
No, the pleasure has been all mine.
Thank you so much for having me.
Yeah, it was a really great conversation.
I enjoyed it and appreciate you.
Absolutely, man. Likewise. I hope you do well on the rest of your circuit. I hope you have fun writing the book. Enjoy the time off from Trading, bro. We'll catch you later.
Thank you so much. Take care. Take care, Zanaka. Thank you, everybody, for listening. Appreciate it.
