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ETH treasury companies buying but the price isn’t moving. What gives?
Recorded: July 9, 2025 Duration: 1:54:31Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, crypto enthusiasts explored the implications of leadership changes at major firms, the stagnant price of Ethereum despite significant institutional interest, and the ongoing development of Layer 2 solutions. The conversation highlighted the challenges and potential growth opportunities for Ethereum as it navigates a competitive landscape.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Andrew, what's going on, brother?
Andrew, can you hear me?
I can. Yeah, the music was glitching for a bit, but you're me? I can.
Yeah, the music was glitching for a bit, but you're good now, buddy.
Haven't had you on in a while.
I'm back, bitches!
I've been in some deep trenches, my friend, learning some things that took me three years to figure out.
But I figured out a lot in the past couple weeks.
So, yeah.
And we're going to we're going to talk about it tomorrow over the phone.
Correct.
I can't talk about most of that here, but I can talk about some of it.
Probably.
Awesome.
Awesome.
By the way, breaking news, CEO of X Stepping Down.
Real talk.
That's my old boss for a number of years.
Wait, Linda is stepping down?
Yeah, Linda Iaccarino.
Yeah, I worked for her for like three years.
And I wasn't surprised when she took the job.
Like this was what she's gunning for real talk is she wants to be a Republican politician, right?
And I think she thought by this role, this would become like her launchpad to that. But clearly, you can see the riff that happened between Elon and Trump probably is doing no favors for her in that plan. So anyways, I see. I see. I didn't realize. Yeah, that's is that like maybe a couple hours ago. Yeah.
I got you.
Well, I am sitting here scratching my head at why the ETH price is not reacting more to all these companies.
Not just – not specifically the announcements but the companies that are saying they're actually buying ETH.
One of them swapped all their Bitcoin.
The names are escaping me.
I have to pull this up.
One of them, BitGet, I think, they swapped all their Bitcoin to ETH. I'm just having a hard time understanding why there would be all these inflows, but the price would more or less.
Are you sure? I guess my question, like I haven't dug into it a ton, but like one of the first kind
of things that comes into the back of my head is like, are you sure these are quote unquote public
buys and not OTC deals? Because typically when you see large scale buys or you see, you know,
these types of events, like they're usually OTC deals that are done, you know,
with the market makers. And then obviously, like a good market maker, we can talk about market
makers. I mean, really, at the end of the day, like, they're, you know, a good market maker is
ethical and trying to hold, you know, price at certain levels and things like that. But,
you know, again, if you do an OTC buy, you're typically not going to see that movement.
That's why a lot of times in the industry, like, you know, if in the industry, if you're a CEO or a founder and you do
a large raise with your VCs, a lot of times those founders will say to the VCs, here is the point
of contact to the market maker. When you decide to sell your tokens, please do them OTC instead
of open market. And then they're typically doing it on a TWOP or something like that. And that's
why you don't see violent moves typically on the chart. Um, because again, it's being done OTC. I see. Okay. So I guess that answers the
question. The space is over. We don't need to talk about it. Um, I mean, there could be other
factors. Um, you know, the other thing I will call out real quick is like, it's, you know,
become increasingly clear to me over time, like how much of this industry is manipulated and like you know um
there are there are certain teams that just don't manipulate and as a result like you know you don't
see that type of action as as frequently so i mean that's another thing to think about
justin what are your thoughts um i also have a short answer, actually.
And I'm not really the one to really speculate over price or anything.
But I'm more focused on fundamentals.
And from a fundamental point of view,
I could see why Ethereum might be lagging behind the market.
You know, I mean, to me, Ethereum has made very little, I think, insufficient commitment
to scale.
And if you and if you don't scale a blockchain and you can't actually build products on it,
and I think that's problematic if you're selling yourself as a smart contract protocol.
Right.
So I think I think smart investors, at least I like to think and can kind of see the writing
on the wall.
And if you believe in utility and you believe in high throughput applications and you don't buy the entirety of the L2 scaling thesis hook, line and sinker, then, yeah, I don't think Ethereum actually makes sense as an investment from that point of view.
So I think that's a factor.
I mean, look, the real answer is there's probably 10 answers, and then it's going to be a combination of all of those, right?
Like the world is not that simple, that there's just one reason for anything.
And sometimes the price is just fickle.
Like I think sometimes the price moves, and we try to think, like apply reasons to it.
And sometimes there is no good reason.
It's just supply and demand.
It's just fear and greed, right?
I think fundamentals take many years to play out in the market.
And that comes along with narrative, et cetera.
Yeah.
Andrew, thanks for all the 100% there.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I was going to say like one thing I would call out when you're saying price is fickle
um one thing i've noticed over time is like and i don't i'd have to crank the numbers but like
looking at liquidity depth right so if you look at like what's the liquidity of a token um uh
compared to market capric what is that percentage um you know what i've heard many times with with
many teams that i've talked to is like you you know, in those liquidity pools, you know, based on that percentage, it can make moving a token up or down extremely
difficult, or it can make moving a token up or down extremely easy. Meaning, you know, someone
that has a very, very shallow depth, you know, a $10,000 buy moves something up a couple, you know,
percentage points, whereas something that has like really, really thick depth, you know, it takes
six figures to move at 1%. And this is for like a small cap gem. And so I think that ends up when points whereas something that has like really really thick depth um you know it takes six
figures to move at one percent and this is for like a small cap gem and so i think that ends up
when you say things are fickle like that's probably one of the things that's creating that fickleness
yeah and that's why as as like a value investor as like a researcher and focused on fundamentals
i think the investments really have to be long term. And like if an asset underperforms
for, you know, a while, then, you know, you shouldn't really bat an eye at it, I think too
much. So yeah, I think I think for me, things come more come down to the fundamentals. And if
you look at the history of cryptocurrency, I do think those fundamentals are rewarded in the long run, even if sometimes it's a bit of a perverse and roundabout way.
Okay, well, in the short run, we have companies that are trying to do with ETH what MicroStrategy and many others have done with Bitcoin.
Bitcoin. And I think it would be foolish to accept the same result. Maybe it's, I don't know,
And I think it would be foolish to accept the same result.
maybe it's better for ETH than it was for Bitcoin. Maybe it's worse. I don't, I can't,
I don't have a crystal ball. But BitDigital, for example, executed a public raise of 172 million
and converted Bitcoin to ETH. So they currently hold 100,000 ETH. And I would think
that, I guess I got to do the math, but I would run the same kind of the same plot that we saw unfold
with Bitcoin. Now, most retail investors are not as sophisticated as Justin. And so I know why
Justin doesn't want to hold and invest in Ethereum. But I sometimes just try to think like a retail investor.
And when I'm being told the Genius Act is going to pass and all these stable coins are going to live on the EVM and Ethereum is going to be the backbone.
I mean, these are relatively easy concepts to digest.
And ETH is staking
you can earn yield from it
at the end of the day
I am scratching my head
at why the price
is not reacting more
to all this news
maybe I'm missing something
can I jump in and say something?
yeah of course
I love this topic too yeah yeah go for
it i've been doing this for a while now too just retail investor i'm not some fucking
dude with 100 million dollars liquid who's sharking around i am a normal person i have
invested a lot of my time and energy into the Ethereum ecosystem as a hobby and as an
investor. And from what I have noticed, starting with Bitcoin, there's no meme coins on Bitcoin,
or there wasn't back in the day. And I don't even know if Bitcoin necessarily was meant
to just go directly straight up in price. That's something we've witnessed and realized and noticed.
directly straight up in price right that's something we've witnessed and realized and noticed
but then obviously smart contracts came out in uh the ico phase for ethereum and then meme coins
right these meme coins that all of us in this room can really say mostly don't have any value
whatsoever except for vampiring off of ethereum guys like Richard Hart made this very clear.
A million guys made this clear.
It's a leverage play.
So everyone did their leverage plays, and we had the DeFi summer of, you know, a couple
DeFi summers and crazy gains on stuff that really was 100% speculation, and we all knew
it, right?
Now, we know Ethereum's a little bit different but my
theory is some of these big players that got in that made so much money from bitcoin and had no
downside they're really just using this and i'm not saying this is why the price is going up or
down but there is people with hundreds of thousands of ethTH that are waiting, waiting, sitting there, waiting.
We're not talking about me.
We're talking about guys with hundreds of thousands of ETH that are waiting for that
thing to blow off top so that their scams will do bigger numbers than that.
And I think the longer that the market goes sideways, it ruins these guys, their whole
marketing scheme,
their entire ethos of, hey, we'll just wait for ETH.
But at what point is it so much weight from all of these guys?
I mention Richard Howard all the time because he's the number one scam guy to me.
Give more examples.
Now I want to know which ones you're talking about.
Well, I just mean in general.
As a DGEN, I've watched five or six people really put their full life's effort into leveraging their entire marketing scheme off of Ethereum going up.
And it makes perfect sense on paper. If I come out with a coin called Jimrat coin
and I pair it with 100,000 ETH,
now all I'm doing is leveraging that.
It's just a leverage play.
When you put something in a pool, it becomes one coin.
When Hex is the oldest pair on Uniswap, the oldest,
if you go to oldest tab and click,
what was the first pair on here? It's that
one. It's still around. There's still people talking about it on repeat forever because of
marketing and naive investors, right? And my theory has always been until these guys get out,
until these guys capitulate, until these guys realize this is not a good game plan,
Vitalik and the big players are totally
okay with this thing going sideways and unless these people are buying directly on the chart
which people are not anymore people are not going on uni swap and just oh here's my dca for the day
boop it's like no this trust company and this news article that came out saying that Michael Saylor or whatever, whoever's
the next guy on the block.
So really in my heart.
Oh, sorry, Jim.
You broke up for me for a second.
Oh, but really in my heart as an investor and seeing so many people get preyed upon,
I almost hope that this thing keeps going sideways because I cannot stand to see these
guys that have no downside risk because
they got into bitcoin so early because they were advanced at the time but they've used it all as a
financial vehicle none of it had to do with smart contracts none of it had to do with future
technology it only had to do is how many how can we ride this and make as much of the position
in ethereum just like people trade and then send it back to bitcoin a lot of people do the same
with ethereum and for the health of the market like i feel as if these marketing guys because
really all it is is marketing they come out and they talk and they talk and they say i'm rich
come out and they talk and they talk and they say, I'm rich.
I'm famous.
I can, I have more than you'll ever have.
And it creates FOMO for the new investors because they don't have so much.
And then boom, here we go.
Another chain that's useless.
And then we see all the layer ones.
You could say most of those layer ones are useless.
I mean, almost all of them, if not all of them. Solana's
cool. It has a little bit of speed and maybe scalability and stuff like that. But what I,
I don't even know how to be cool about it. But, but in my eyes, every day that Ethereum stays
stable and sideways to me is a win, right? Like it's a win because these guys, their whole thing is hype, hype, hype, hype, scare
people, FOMO people, and then get more Ethereum for themselves.
So I think a lot of these big players that have been playing in this ecosystem as only
some sort of tactic to get more Ethereum in their bags. Really, the market is just correcting for meme coins.
It's correcting for useless garbage.
And that's what I've noticed and seen.
And I have a lot of Ethereum myself.
I want it to perform really good.
I'm just, I see it on the feet so much.
People that are hoarding so much of these coins, they got into Bitcoin at $300.
Their downside is zero to just do whatever ploy that's legal.
They're all not legal, by the way.
But whatever ploy will not get them in federal prison directly right away.
So that's kind of how I see things.
I see there's so much waste.
But in a vacuum, Ethereum is so powerful.
But maybe we have to get closer to the vacuum again.
Maybe we have to get a little more narrow with what people are actually doing.
McDonald's coins and all these things.
That's my take on it.
And this is something I've been thinking about for a lot.
And I really appreciate this conversation with everyone just acting like you know adults about it rather than
crazies so thank you for hosting the space my pleasure and for people just joining
jim gave us a very long-winded description of shit coins vaporware and how founders and folks
with money are leveraging those shit coins and vaporware to stack more sats or in this
case stack more ethereum i i hope you're wrong i don't want to go sideways for too much longer
with eth i also have a i have more eth than i than i I had, if I'm being completely honest.
I wish that I had just put all that in.
At the time, I remember thinking, okay, well, I'm just going to keep my stack split, 50% Bitcoin.
I was in 50-50, but it was like of the 80% that was in Bitcoin and ETH, it was about 50-50.
Bitcoin and ETH, it was about 50-50. And the rest of that is kind of history, right? So
And the rest of that is kind of history, right?
I wanted to perform and I have my qualms with ETH, but yeah, look, they're totally
shitcoin prize. It's much easier to do this on ETH as well because you're actually building on
ETH and it's easier for that money to flow into ETH. I get it.
I think that shit coins and vaporware are never going to go away. And if anything,
ecosystems like Solana have allowed for companies like PumpFun, protocols like PumpFun to hyper saturate the number of shit coins and i mean i'm cool
it's whatever to me just let the free market decide i don't i don't want the other the other
option is having regulators but good luck trying to regulate regulate this industry i mean
you can try but it's going to be quite difficult when some you know know, random folks in North Korea or wherever are just
launching shit coins and rugging.
So I might as well let everyone participate and hopefully investors are smart enough to
avoid these, um, uh, these mousetraps, uh, Empress, it's been a while.
How are you doing?
Oh, lovely.
How are you, my friend?
Pretty good. Pretty good good what do you think right you have
all these companies that are announcing east treasuries you have ones that have already
started to buy and the price is not really moving i i can't remember when michael saylor
when michael saylor announced the you know this bitcoin purchases in 2020 was this what was it what price was bitcoin
at bitcoin crashed and then it kind of stabilized at 5k and um at what point did sailor say hey we're
gonna start buying bitcoin and then you know how soon after did the price start reacting to that
i don't remember you're not asking me that you
know you know i don't math but go ahead i want to i want to hear your thoughts i know it's like
this is kind of like coming into an og bitcoin room the way you guys are talking about ethereum
which is funny because um i'm an eth girl too but the reverence is funny. Okay.
Meme coins are a thing.
Come on, get over it.
We know these people are out here.
I actually just put a tweet out.
The fact people are talking about them right now is killing me.
It's amazing.
Look, I think that Ethereum has a real problem.
It's being used like a dirty whore, honestly.
Everything is being built off of it. There's
no actual business model on it. It's not being taxed or any, it's not taxing anyone for the,
what it's being built on top of. And that was great find when we were going to stay decentralized,
right? But we're coming into regulation. We know it's all coming. We know all these private corporations, Robinhood, whatever else, they're all coming in.
And as long as we're going to keep this peace, love, kumbaya, just keep using me and throwing
me away, everything else looks more enticing.
All the intersectionality of TradFi is coming out of the EVMs and everywhere else.
of trad fi is coming out of the evms and everywhere else so if you are an outsider looking into here
even as a big investor ethereum doesn't look like a sexy lady they need to revamp that policy and
how they're working that out yeah look i'll say go ahead go ahead justin and then i want to get
some of these hands.
I mean, I can talk on this subject for hours.
So I'm going to restrain myself, depending on how deep we want to go.
But I've been a big critic of Ethereum ever since it really adopted its L2 scaling plan.
And Empress is actually describing, I think, the the l2 scaling plan let's say is actually
a symptom of a deeper problem that i think impris was touching on um but yeah i really i don't i
don't really see a viable future uh in ethereum there were some like um claims that they're going
to scale on chain but all of that's really died down. And like a lot of the GitHub proposals have kind of been shot down for the most part.
So I'm really not confident.
And this idea that, oh, you know,
you have to wait five years
until, you know, Ethereum is as fast
as Solana is today.
Sorry, no, only a sixth the speed of Solana
that Solana is today. And the plan is
for five years, right? That's like the beam plan, for example, to address speed.
And in terms of capacity, yeah, it just doesn't seem forward-looking at all to me. And it's just
not competitive. I think this is really, like, Ethereum was successful because it was offering a single composable state, a computer for the world, right?
This decentralized computer that was part of the original pitch.
And by taking this L2 scaling roadmap plan, I mean, what it means to me, and Empress, I think, actually described it perfectly.
It's like rolling over on your tummy and just letting the predators have their way with
you to use a different analogy.
But I think really like not scaling just means you're not competitive.
And then you're basically just giving all of your users and fees basically to these
what are basically competitive blockchains.
And they're handing it over.
They're all centralized as well, right?
Like the top, I stopped counting after 20.
But if you look at the top 20,
every single one of them can censor and steal user funds.
So, right.
So, we're not scaling the blockchain.
And we're doing it all for L2s
because it's such a grand, amazing vision.
And like, this is the result, right?
Like, what is it?
60, 70% of users is all in base?
Like, are you kidding me?
Like, that's not the cryptocurrency revolution,
like as far as I'm concerned. So like, to me, this is very much a betrayal. And it's a repeat.
It's exactly the same thing that happened in Bitcoin, which to me speaks to deeper systemic
problems around governance. So it fits that Ethereum has very much rejected the notion of
on-chain governance as well. And it kind of comes of the territory. So, yeah, I'm seeing a lot of complacency.
I'm seeing a lot of, like, ivory tower thinking
and just not at all addressing the problem, being competitive.
So that's why, you know, that's why the majority of usage is on,
like, is on Solana today, right?
That's why a lot has been shifting over.
It's for a reason.
And I think investors, I i hope are also seeing what's
happening and it's sad because you know i was a huge ethereum supporter too so i i totally agree
with justin and i don't know if this is feasible but l2s should pay their fair share to to ethereum
to the layer one and they don't and i can understand the parasitic argument i certainly
can't understand that one thing though justin when you say 60 percent 60 percent of users are on base
can you how are you pulling that number is that active addresses sorry i was just pulling that
off the top of my head so i'd have to like double check well let's just but how do you how are you
measuring users are you going
to define i'm just curious what metric you use to measure users so did i say users because that
that would be very difficult to message i thought i might have missed i might have misheard usage
well what sorry excuse me what do you what do you how are you deciding what in that there's
more activity over base than there is over ethereum right activity and they're all on hyper liquid
now so don't worry about it it's fine yeah it's fine don't worry and and you know just because
they use like a celestial for data availability it's still it's still ethereum centric so don't
worry you know are you talking about as long as these days can raise hundreds of millions of dollars
right hold on hold on tvl volume what are you referring to i'm trying to understand what you
mean by usage.
Okay, I mean, if you want me to be exact, I'm going to have to look up some figures here.
No, no, I don't.
There's $64 million in liquidity in Bitcoin.
No, no, no.
On base.
No, no.
So $64 million.
So I'm talking about, like, when you say usage, what do you mean?
I don't need numbers.
If you want, you can give numbers.
What does usage mean?
No, no, usage like actually, users using a transact.
And how are we measuring that?
Exchanges.
You're asking a very complex question.
I mean, I can dive into it.
I think the point is, I don't think it should be complex, right?
We should be able to adequately measure the number of users, like how useful the chain is.
I'll break it down.
You can't measure usage because there's no layered in identity system.
That's kind of the issue.
But I can break it down for you if you want.
I'll quickly break it down for you.
We can do TVL just fine.
Yeah, no, no.
But that's just one metric.
I know.
I know.
And it's cherry picking.
Or 24-hour volume.
But Ethereum people today love to say, tvl is what matters most well i that wasn't the narrative a few years ago because
tvl is the only metric that ethereum leads in right that's that's why they choose that
sorry to generalize ethereum sure but even look so even daily volume right so solana solana leads
in usually in daily it's a lot bnB chain right now is really high in daily volume.
But then I also wonder like how much of that volume is legitimate people
versus bots.
I mean, if you're asking really interesting or answering the question,
I'll answer the question. So like one would be TVL. That's,
that's a metric, right?
Another one would be the amount of transactions on that blockchain, right? That would
have to come along with like an analysis of like those transactions. So like with Solana, for
instance, you would discount consensus transactions, things like that. You'd also look at the volume
on decentralized exchanges. You can do on-chain analysis to actually do estimates of users, but
then you need to do address aggregation. That's a lot more complicated.
There's a number of different, you can also look at like wallet downloads. I think that's also a
really interesting metric. If you just see how many people using that wallet, there's a lot of
wallets within different ecosystems that actually share metrics there as well. So like ideally,
and this is something you're doing, I think in a lot of crypto research, you put all these metrics together and then you kind of create like a weighted score based on a
bunch of different metrics and then kind of weight, which you think are more important. So like to
really answer the question, like where is the most usage? Like that's how you would do it.
And there's probably a few more I'm not thinking of on the spot, but yeah.
There's probably a few more I'm not thinking of on the spot, but yeah.
Right on.
Yeah, I suppose it's easier said than done.
I've done that analysis, and I can't just give you the numbers off the top because I don't want to be wrong, right?
Sure.
I've done that analysis.
I can say of confidence, yeah, I think there's more usage on base.
And it's not even that controversial because that's exactly the plan.
That's what the core developers have been saying for years is that Ethereum is
not to be used. It's the L2s is where all the usage goes.
So in a way that's a success. It's just the,
the outcome is maybe not what people have been promised.
And it's something I also predicted because I've never,
I've always been a critic of a lot of these modular scaling ideas, unless you do like an enshrined roll-up type setup.
But I would consider that more monolithic personally.
But that's maybe going a bit too much in the weeds.
Yeah, no kidding.
And we can certainly do that.
I love going into the weeds with Justin.
It's always an educational conversation,
to say the least. Let's pass it over to Ryan.
Oh, I was on mute. I was enjoying the back and forth. I do hear a lot of people saying
the majority of the volume is on bass. I think people look at exchange volumes.
So they'll look at Aerodrome and Uniswap or whatever,
and they'll say, oh, a lot of the money moving back and forth.
But it doesn't necessarily mean like this is value added to the ecosystem.
It's just flow of money.
I really do think Ethereum kind of shot themselves in the foot when they moved away from proof of work and they moved to proof of stake and they became just like every other network.
with no cap on issuance, combined with the general degen ethos of the ecosystem, where
it is essentially just speculators and gamblers.
And there's a few people, a few adults in the room trying to make actual businesses,
actual companies and adding value to the chain.
I think what they're going to find out over the long run that it doesn't play well with corporate America or just, you know, the global banking world.
So I do think Ripple has positioned themselves as the adults in the room for years.
And that's why they're kind of laughing stock or the joke, you know, early on, you know, circa 2013, 2014.
Everyone was looking at ripple going why on
earth would i own ripple because it just it's centralized it doesn't make any sense um now
banks and governments are coming around going well we want something we can control we want something
centralized um ethereum is going to keep going sideways i'm surprised ethereum is worth as much as it is right now, given the current sentiment of the crypto world.
I definitely would not back a treasury company that's based on Ethereum.
There's no cap in issuance.
It's the same accounts are, you know, just kind of moving funds around between layer twos, layer ones.
But I don't know.
I just I'm highly skeptical of Ethereum.
I like the technology.
I like using a lot of the tools on Ethereum.
But at the end of the day, it's just a means of earning more Bitcoin.
Yeah, I think I look at it that way as well, long term.
In the short term, though, I'm hoping it gets a little bull run
because otherwise, I think a lot of us, not just me,
I think a lot of us will have asked ourselves why
we didn't just put that into Bitcoin to begin with.
I will say, though, it's Ethereum's, if Ethereum, the EVM, leads the on-chain economy and everything
moves on-chain and you have all this volume, then
it is not inflationary anymore. Right? Ryan, at that point, it becomes a deflationary asset
because there's so much consistent usage happening on Ethereum and on the EVM. What are your
thoughts? I mean, it's never going to be a deflationary asset unless people are burning it and locking it up, right?
No, but it is, though, right?
Because if there's consistent usage and a lot of usage globally, AIP-1559 has made it so that it is deflationary.
Am I missing something?
Well, real fast, remember all these layer twos and all,
you know, everything coming out around Ethereum ecosystem
is to get you to have to transact less Ethereum, right?
Like the whole reason why base is taking off,
one, it's fast, and two, it's incredibly cheap.
It's pennies to transact
which is less ethereum movement right um that's the the benefit of centralization the more central
the system the the faster consensus happens uh i i just justin go ahead and jump in no no no
actually never mind you absolutely nailed it that. That's what I wanted to say.
Like, Ethereum is rejecting usage, right?
And by rejecting usage, they're breaking their own economic model, right?
What it was supposed to become.
So I'm actually, I'm not a big fan of supply caps myself.
I actually think that Ethereum has an ideal economic model, which is low tail inflation
plus fee burn. The problem with Ethereum is that the
L1 is not suited for high throughput or actual usage and applications. They very much, as you
well said, shot themselves in the foot. And that's why a lot of the usage is moving over to things
like Solana, Sui, et cetera, right, today. So I think that if you want to bid on usage and application and a smart
contract platform that also potentially can be more scarce than something like bitcoin and more
secure right and have utility to me crypto is very much about combining all of these attributes into
a single asset i think i think it comes with some incredibly um good properties that way
um yeah then i think i think a lot of these high throughput chains achieve that solana actually has with some incredibly good properties that way.
Yeah, then I think a lot of these high throughput chains achieve that.
Solana actually has that model, right?
Tail inflation plus Feeburn.
So it's the same model and it actually scales. So I would be far more hopeful that such a deflationary
in the long run model would work over something like Solana.
But in Ethereum, no hope in hell, in my opinion,
that Ethereum can actually become deflationary again because they've screwed it up unless they massively
pivot but i just haven't seen the evidence for that sorry uh ryan go ahead i was just going to
say you know yes massively pivot but you don't see chains surviving a massive pivot it's just it's
the marketing and the narrative gets completely destroyed well well they pivoted right they pivoted to l2s that have to pivot back basically and that they're just
their egos won't handle that so yeah well so here's the thing is in this ecosystem when you
when you really zoom out if we just took this you know 100 000 foot view and just look at this macro level, you know, you can build financial systems in a centralized
way that are faster, cheaper, and they are backed by the trust of governments with guns.
And that's why, that's why people believe in them is because there's governments with guns that are
trusting other governments with guns to do the right thing on a centralized system
where there's a few players that control it, right?
I would have agreed with you a few months ago,
but I've been looking into multi-leader architectures
and wow, I actually think we can be faster
and all of that as well
because of the way centralized systems
still have central locations.
If you have multi-leader, you can actually send to the closest leader because of the way centralized systems still have central locations.
If you have multi-leader, you can actually send to the closest leader and you have extremely low latency.
It's a really fascinating break from blockchain.
Well, you're mixing distributed.
Yeah, you're mixing decentralized and distributed.
So you can have a centralized system that is fully distributed, right?
And that's where you get low latency, all that.
I don't think I am mixing them up, actually.
I think it's possible to do this in a fully decentralized way,
but that's a much longer discussion.
I'm going off on a tangent. My apologies.
Yeah. No, I've, yeah.
I spent the last 10 years like diving into the difference
of distribution versus decentralization.
I was just really excited about the tech.
It's Alpenglow.
Okay, cool.
And some other stuff like that.
Yeah, sorry.
So my point being...
We don't agree here, but you guys,
if L2 usage goes up to a level
that we've never seen before, right?
And talking every roll-up like
arbitrum base optimism who the fuck uses optimism but they all have they all have to commit their
state to the ethereum mainnet so um you know those settlement tries that forget the settlement
transactions paying gas and eath but, but that adds up over time.
So the number of L1
data posts
increases. The total gas
consumption increases.
You're right, but at the end of the
day,
this is why I wanted to go to the 100,000
foot level, because at the end of the day, it's
Bobby sending Alice $100 from her bank account, right?
Or Bobby sending $100 from his bank account to Alice's bank account, right?
It's Joe going to the coffee shop and buying a $3 cup of coffee.
He doesn't want to think about chains or roll ups, or any of this other stuff. There is a in the grand
scheme of the financial world and 7 billion or seven and a half billion people in this world,
there's such a small amount of people that are actually care about DeFi or worry about stable
coins or for now, yes. But remember, the majority of the people that are in the banking systems,
Yes. But remember, the majority of the people that are in the banking systems, they don't know tech. They don't know the underlying technology. But the people that do are the banks, and they're the ones that want to earn fees on it. And they're the ones that want to generate products on it. So they're going to use their own system, or they're going to use a system that they control.
But a lot of them are going to use L2s, Ethereum L2s, and they will control those L2s,
and people might be able to... I don't think it's going to be Ethereum.
Oh, okay. I think it's going to be... I think it's going to... If it is going to be a system,
it's going to be something like Ripple or a very controlled Solana or something where they get to
paint the narrative. i think you're wrong
i think we're seeing it roll out already we've got world liberty financial coming out on arbitram
we've got everything is is being staked ultimately back down to eth as a foundational layer even our
um dmv protocols that they're trying to roll out in california i think at the end of the day the stable um secure method that crypto is leaning towards and i wish we could pull landy up here
i think um the banks are going to stick to ethereum as the foundational layer as they're
rolling out these tokens but how many users is that like were we talking like tens of thousands of users
that's a hundred thousand users no i'm gonna jump in because x is like fucking rugging all morning
but i i 100% agree with you ryan like this is something i talked about like two years ago like
so for background i was the former cmo arbitrum right you see this blackrock deal like there is
no doubt in my mind and just for background like i like I've worked with JP Morgan, Citibank, Amex, Visa, all these companies over the years, there is no doubt
in my mind that all of these companies are going to want centrally controlled layer ones that they
own, that they control. Like you're not going to build on top of someone else.
No, no, no. But here's the thing. It's value extraction right now. They're not like, think
about it. If you're BlackRock, like the bigger opportunity for you is bringing in everyone
that's not in crypto right now. I think we're up to like somewhere between five and 7% of
the populations on chain. Right. And so right now the game is let's extract value from this
current quote unquote ecosystem that exists. But long-term, like the reason why these bigger,
you know, finance companies are working with these companies in crypto right now is to get inside and see what's going on and see how it
works. But if you think that like BlackRock doesn't have the money to go build the number
one layer one right now to build better on ramps, better systems, take all the best developers from
every single chain, like everyone is basically fooled, right? But that's where we're going.
And I would say like going back to GRC for a second,
like, you know, some of what you're saying,
like I think the average person could say,
oh, this is conspiracy theories.
Like, no, dude, like a lot of this stuff tracks with me 100%.
Like you're like, I know dudes sitting on hundreds of thousands of dollars of Ethereum.
I know dudes sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars of Ethereum.
And I think the other thing going back to what I said about OTC deals
that people don't understand, like why is price not moving?
Well, a lot of OTC deals are giving you a 20 percent discount.
I know folks that are getting 40 percent discounts.
So what are they doing?
They're just getting even better entries, you know, compared to retail that they can dump on.
But at the end of the day, NFA, DYR, the only two pure tokens are Bitcoin and Monero.
And that is it. Right.
And yes, I sold all my Ethereum before this entire downswing, rolled it into BTC.
And then there was the last thing I'll call out.
I'm just sitting here trying to get into this fucking chat because of X.
But like TVL, manipulated as fuck.
Transactions, manipulated as fuck.
Revenue, manipulated as fuck.
All these things are manipulated, right?
Like Bitcoin is not.
And I've had this like epiphany over the past six months.
You know, I worked with the founders of Twitter when they first launched.
I'm like, why is Jack so focused on Bitcoin and only Bitcoin?
Like, think about it.
Like he's on the inside with everyone.
Like he's known how this game's worked for a lot longer than most of us had.
So anyways, that was my rant.
I'm done.
Can't we at this point, as long as we've been in ct just always stipulate bitcoin
is daddy and do we always have to like go back like we know this guy like no no no no you do
because of people like me right that's not important you can't just say it's daddy you
can't just say it's daddy without explaining because that's what every maxi does they always
say is it's daddy btc is daddy but guess what nobody uses it on chain
it's a useless mean for money but real quick real quick it's not the most secure one it's nothing
all the smart guys figured this out a long time ago and they copied the model without the trust
the thing that bitcoin has is trust and fat liquidity. So fat.
But trust, right?
Nobody trusts Vitalik.
Nobody trusts these guys in OTC deals.
Oh my God, my heart exploded when you said it.
OTC deals are the biggest scam in crypto history
because guess what?
When guys come out with coins,
before they launch, they tell all their rich friends.
Every single dude that's got a couple hundred grand to put together, they give them the best deal of the lifetime.
And you know what they do?
They sell their soul.
Sorry, there's a cop car going by.
But they sell their soul.
So if you really learn about Bitcoin as best as you can for years at a time, you'll realize, one, I like it.
I think it's the best of all of this stuff.
But it's more or less an energy Ponzi that guys got in early,
and its marketing is absolutely great because you have no downside.
It's the first thing.
But calling it daddy is one thing that pisses me off.
I hate that because, oh, it's just a matter of fact, right?
I meant through the rhetoric.
Nobody has to convince anybody up here that it's the better
chain was my point. I was being glib, Jim Rapp. But it's not the better chain. It's lower. It's
more expensive and no one uses it. All right. All right. I don't want to turn this into a BTC
conversation. This is not what I want to talk about. We literally just did almost a two-hour
debate between Justin and Iago last week.
It's a video interview.
You can go on The Aquarium and check it out.
It's retweeted if you want to watch that.
Justin talks about why he doesn't like Bitcoin, and Iago talks about why Bitcoin is great.
So just check that out.
I want to talk about Ethereum.
I want to talk about whether these treasury companies buying are going to eventually move the price, right?
Is it so far announcements? Are they OTC purchases that have been done so far?
How long did it take for Bitcoin to start reacting to micro strategy and Tesla buying?
I think when Tesla bought, it was a big deal.
But I want to focus on E on eth i don't want to go
down a bitcoin rabbit hole please um anyway so uh so i'm gonna just stop go okay um look i i want to
just give a bit of perspective because i've seen this you know my whole my whole life in in crypto
over the last uh 13 years whatever that I've been doing this, is that
there's this focus on institutions.
The institutions will come, the governments will adopt it, or these corporations will
adopt it.
And I've seen that and perceive that as kind of the winning formula and the thing that
will really drive crypto home.
And I think I've always disagreed with that view on things.
And actually, if you
look at cryptocurrency historically, what's actually driven cryptocurrency is actually
grassroots adoption and like crypto native adoption is actually what's brought a lot of value
into crypto. So I'm much quicker to bet on that than some sort of virtue signaling because XYZ
company, like if the thing doesn't scale if you can't build competitive
products i don't care like i don't care what kind of companies are supporting it like if the system
is permissioned and they can still use a funds and sensor like that's not that's not cryptocurrency
right like cryptocurrency is competitive cryptocurrency is the future because it has these
attributes that make it a better attributes that make it a better
money that make it a better financial system so i i don't believe at all that blackrock can come
along and create a better l1 there's no way and that's also maybe misunderstanding the way large
organizations are coming i would be skeptical of any large organization creating an l1 just because
it the the disc this unity of vision, let's say.
I think smaller teams.
I agree, Justin.
At least at the initial stage, I better suit it to that.
No, I totally agree with that sentiment.
And with respect to ETH, we can talk all day about the tech or whether it's good or it's
bad or it's the reason that the price isn't pumping.
The point is that companies are announcing ETH treasuries.
Companies are starting to build up ETH treasuries.
And we're trying to understand, or I'm trying to understand, why the price is not reacting as quickly as people expect.
I want to go to Dave.
Dave set his hand.
I want to go to Dave.
Justin, I'll come back to you.
I promise.
You know, it's funny. Every time I listen to these spaces and Justin, I love you,
but you know, markets is not your forte. And I think you'd be the first to admit that
the reality. And I was thinking about this analogy, simple. If Linus Torvald decided to pop up and create Linux token.
And people said, okay, great.
Linux is the operating system of the world.
It's used on more computers than anything else.
It was done for free.
Companies are making fuck tons of money by providing value-added services in times of Linux.
Let's have Linux token.
And maybe I can pay developers to make the kernel better.
I don't know, whatever. People would scratch their heads and say, why the fuck do I need Linux token?
It already works. It's already out in the wild, et cetera. The question is, ETH is a $200 billion
plus token. And it has exactly the same questions. You can build on it, you can do it, whatever.
You know, it's what is the need for the actual token in the ecosystem?
And the same can be said for every L1.
Now, there are good answers for some, and there's probably answers for ETH.
But the question and the simple question is, how much ETH do you need to build upon it?
If the answer is you don't need very much then why the hell and i'm sorry for my
my my language i'm i do i default i default to trader lingo and speaking like i was on a trading
desk when when i get annoyed but it's the question why would jp morgan invest what would be an
enormous amount of money to build their own layer one without any economic benefit there'd be zero reason to do so
if they can use a fract a tiny amount of ethereum or optimism or arbitrum or go to and down to
different chains you sui or aptos or solana and it doesn't cost them anything close to what it
will cost them to build a layer one they won won't build their own. There's literally no point in doing so. And that's how these companies work. Now, for someone who spent
an unfortunate period of my life working for Citigroup, I can tell you a few things. First
of all, the big banks always gravitate. When things are a utility, they gravitate toward wanting to
spread the cost out, and therefore they end up with these,
what they call, you know, consortiums.
Now, the consortiums sometimes own a piece of a company,
like Market, which now is part of S&P,
being a multi-billion dollar company,
because they were able to repackage
credit swap default data.
But when it comes to actual utilities,
like, you know, plumbing, like FIX,
FIX is this incredible standard of lots of people developing on FIX. But FIX is not for profit. It's
just a consortium that's used by all of Wall Street. So Wall Street will tend to want to use
a token ecosystem for tokenization that doesn't cost them a lot, that marginally is cheaper.
And every analysis that doesn't start with that as a foundational premise is problematic.
That doesn't mean the tokens can't have enormous value, but it does mean that the Wall Street firms won't need to spend or create or invest in that enormous value.
They'll simply use it.
And I really think that people's mental models when it comes to crypto are wrong because
they don't start with the premise of how you can monetize. And so if you own a token like my
hypothetical Linux token, and let's say it was even by the right people, but it doesn't give
you any particular rights or ability to use Linux better, then it's not going to achieve real
value. And we're seeing that in the market. So when you ask me the question, why is there a new
demand driver for Ether? I'm going to answer, well, Ether's trading over 2,600 and it was
bottoming below 2,000 before a lot of this stuff started. So the answer is, it already has risen.
It's just risen in a way, you know, compared to where it would have been.
And the same thing is true with Bitcoin treasuries.
I mean, Bitcoin would have fallen far more if it wasn't for new sources demand.
Supply and demand is what drives price.
And so you just have to look at it through that lens.
OK, I've ranted for a while.
Sorry about that, Noah.
No, I think it's an important perspective.
And you can make the argument for ETH being used and burnt by L2s posting back onto ETH.
You can make the argument for ETH being removed from the ecosystem.
I want to be clear. I am not. Look, I own ETH, right?
You know, I'm not saying.
No, no, no. Dave, I like you coming on and being, like, I want want to be clear. I am not – look, I own ETH, right? I'm not saying – No, no, no.
Dave, I like you coming on and being – I want this perspective though.
I want – because I think you make some really good points.
This is really important for us to have this conversation and for you to poke holes because I think a lot of what you say makes sense.
And I'm trying to play devil's advocate.
And I am biased because I do hold a lot of ETH.
I'm very biased. And in hindsight, I wish I had just had play devil's advocate. And I am biased because I do hold a lot of ease. I'm very biased. And I, in hindsight, I wish I just had it all in Bitcoin.
Sorry, Dave, were you, were you trying to, I didn't mean to cut you off there.
No, no, I just want to be clear. I mean, I get a lot of, a lot of hate mail from people when I,
when I say some of these things, but it's not against anything. I just, my working thesis was for, and has been for this
year, and it's playing out in spades, is that tokens that drive real economic value to token
holders will ultimately win. I don't know which tokens those will be. I value listening to
Justin's perspective to try to understand what that would be. Whether I agree or disagree is
immaterial. If you don't listen to other perspectives, you fail. And I think that
that's the key here. So I'm not saying ETH won't drive it. I'm merely stating that there's a
perception that at $200 billion, it might already be, you know, what an actual utility. In Wall
Street, when they use the word utility, what they mean is something
that can't charge economic rent, something that is a public good that will make its costs
and nothing more.
And if that's what ETH becomes, the curious part of it is, is that kind of Vitalik's vision,
it may not be his economic vision, but it certainly is his vision for ETH to be the
world computer.
It more or less has to be the low-cost provider.
The low-cost provider does not make a great investment.
That's just the way it is, unless you're the first one, unless you're in early.
And so you just have to understand what you're buying or what you're selling.
And I'm not saying that it's bad.
I'm saying you need to understand what you think it will be because it's not clear right now what it will be. That's all. I agree. It's steady. Let's welcome you to the panel and
then we can go to Orion and then swing back to Andrew. Hey, so the reason why I raised my hand
is you asked the question, you know, basically like why does ETH go sideways a lot? Ultimately, what it comes down to is the market cap is somewhat divorced from the supply.
Because the supply is inflationary and deflationary, the market cap is not directly related to the amount of supply.
What that does is it makes it less valuable as a store of value.
Then things were exasperated that they
became proof of stake. Whereas a lot of the value is how much money you put into it, you know,
not the proof of work through the mining system and so forth. So now what ETH has become is it's
become a token standard. It's a utility chain. And if you look at the price of ETH, when it was
the highest, when it was in the 4,000s ors or 5000s, and that was during the NFT bull run.
Because at that particular moment in time, the token standard narrative on what the utility could be was the highest it's been, you know, in the history of ETH's markets.
So for ETH to go up, it's not going to be simple, you know, money in compared to supply.
For example, money in compared to supply, it's going to be how much does the market value the token standards and the utilities of the layer twos and then the mother chain's ability to basically consort it all as the mother chain and the master chain of all the transactions.
So ETH at this time is utility play.
When people see real world value
on these token standards, it'll go up. But until the average person can comprehend, you know,
what is the utilitarian benefit of these token standards on products that they use every single
day, it just sounds like a fancy technology play that's beyond the grasp of the average person.
And I'm complete.
Ciety. technology play that's beyond the grasp of the average person and I'm complete. C-Eddie.
Yo, what's up everybody? Yeah, I've just been sitting back listening to everybody talk back
and forth about a lot of really deep stuff. The first thing I just wanted to say, I think
my homeboy Saunders there was trying to say about BlackRock and those guys.
I don't think he was trying to say they could successfully build.
I mean, they could.
I think what he was stressing was more that they have the money to, right?
I mean, they do.
They have enough money.
They could buy the world, literally buy the world.
So I just want to stick up for Andrew on that point.
I think that's where he was trying to go with that.
But my point about ETH is, look, I got in in 2020.
I'm a small fish.
I'm not a big guy.
We have a podcast called The Crypto Remora.
We do TA every Thursday on 7th.
Shameless plug.
We're having Hunter on from Offchain Labs and Pat Andrew Saunders on from Arbitrum.
I've been Arbitrum nuts since day one.
I bought Ethereum at $75 in 2020 during the
crash before I really understood what it was, but I saw that ETH was going to be the winner.
And I said, this thing's still going to be the winner. And everyone talks smack and Lark Davis.
I love them to death. I watch them every day. But the price action beats your spirit down.
And I think what people need to understand about this, we're having three different conversations.
One conversation is the treasury companies buying. One conversation is the price action.
One conversation is the blockchain and what it's capable of doing and what it's going to be in the
future. So I think for this conversation, where the host is going, he wants to know,
are the treasury, the treasury companies are buying
and why is the price not moving so i want to address the main focus of the conversation
the reason the price is not moving is not bad it's not negative what it is is sideways
east was 75 in 2020 you guys it's worth 2600 If I would have had a little pile of money back then,
I would be buying this all once right now.
Now, because I made shit money back then,
I was only able to invest in dollars at a time,
$2 here, $3 there.
So I was buying small amounts,
but I knew that my $75 each,
I knew in 2020 it was going to be worth thousands of dollars.
I'm going to tell you right now.
I've been making a prediction of $275,000 Bitcoin.
My prediction for ETH is cycle top is between $8,000 and $12,000.
Now, is it going to stay there forever?
Probably not.
But are all other Layer 2s going to bend the knee with Ethereum?
Are they going to use it?
Yeah.
I've been using Solana since 2020.
I hear a lot of people talking about Solana and Ripple.
The real deal is BlackRock and these guys are not going to build on Solana.
There's no DeFi.
And I know people say, oh, DeFi is not important to the retail.
But here's the thing.
It is, though.
Because anyone that's well well versed in studying and
trying to make money you know defy is important to me that was the first thing i realized about
ethan i was like holy shit i don't have to go through the banks i don't have to go through all
these rich people i don't have to have a lawyer to invest i can do it on my own on this are you
crazy yes i think people are getting smarter i think eth're in the one Solana is not Solana be five sucks, dude
I know everyone loves Solana because the shit coins that their deep eyes horrible
I it's garbage like Arbitrum has got grail. It's got some things to work out
But I mean as far as earning money defiant shit like if the real
Dominates that I mean base. Yeah, but base is ultimately on Ethereum.
So anyone that argues that Layer 2 is not using much Ethereum,
here's my final closing point.
My final closing point is if you still want to buy certain tokens,
you have to go on ETH.
You can't buy every token you want on time on Layer 2.
You still have to bend the knee and go over.
If you really want that coin, like if there's that one or two coins, and I know people say, well, it's only a couple.
But the deal is you'll spend that 30 bucks. You'll spend that 50 bucks. You'll spend that
100 bucks to get that fucking coin you want. That's only available on ETH. And other people
will do that too. And if you think that that's not a big deal, it is. You've got all the Layer 2s paying ETH,
and then you've got deflationary stuff on ETH,
and then you've got the coins you've still got to get on ETH
that you've still got to buy ETH with.
I'm sorry, ETH goes nowhere.
It's not going anywhere.
It will be here.
People will bend the knee to it.
And I will defend ETH as long as I live.
That being said, Bitcoin is still daddy.
I know nobody wants to hear that shit.
But you guys, tune in to Crypto or More.
Last shameless plug, Thursdays, 7 o'clock.
Yeah, I'd like to check you guys out.
Thanks for sharing your stream of thought there.
The only thing I'll say is that
if Bitcoin goes to 200 and something thousand
and ETH tops out at, let's say, let's give it the benefit of the doubt in your scenario and say 10K, I will still have seen ETH as, for this cycle, a failure of an investment.
Because it means that ETH still underperformed Bitcoin and it means that I could have taken less risk by being allocated to the...
So if Bitcoin is daddy, as you guys like to say, Bitcoin is king, then that's what I want
to accumulate the most of.
And to me, everything else in crypto is about allowing me to accumulate more sats.
But if I'm going to accumulate less sats over a four-year period than if I just bought Bitcoin itself, then I see that investment as a failure.
I do.
I'm curious to know what your thoughts are there, and then I'll pass it over to Justin because you insulted his baby Solana, and he is not going to take that lightly.
I'm just playing.
Yeah, C-Eddie, let me know what you think about that.
Is he gone?
I think you might have bounced.
No, I'm still here.
I agree, man.
Look, again, that's another conversation, right?
If we're going to change
gears, I'm good with it. But the conversation that I was saying addresses certain points. Now,
if you say there's a better investment than ETH right now, Hyperliquid's $39 right now.
But am I going to hold Hyperliquid going into the bear market? Probably not, because I think
the crash value on that is going to be devastating.
Now, but if you're talking about just strictly gains, I choose hyperliquid over ETH.
I mean, let's get real.
Even Solana is going to make you profit. But at the end of this cycle, and we're watching our cycle top indicators on our show, we have our own custom top indicator that we keep an eye on.
Because me and Wes, we held all the way up and down from the last bull run.
We held from the top down.
We didn't sell.
And when I say we didn't sell, we didn't sell shit.
We held everything.
And it was very painful because that could have been life-changing game.
That could have been life-changing game.
So on my channel, on our channel, we're teaching people not to do that.
We're so passionate on our show the crypto
more that that's what we do but what i was going to say is uh i agree with you dude like look if
eth only goes to 12 grand and then it fucking crashes back down to four grand or three grand
yeah that's gonna fucking hurt your feelings but you need to be prepared for that as an investor
like you need to know that that very well if Bitcoin goes to 275 and then crashes back down to 100K,
you need to be just as prepared for ETH to say, go past 12, rip up in a two-week period to maybe $16,500 for like three or four days.
And people are like, this is it. ETH runs the world.
And then all of a sudden from 16 grand down to fucking 8 grand fucking $8,000 back down to $4,500 into the bear market.
That shit can happen.
And I always try to tell people, be prepared for that, bro, because that is the way these prices move.
Like, shit is going to get insane.
And then how long we've been going sideways, yes, there's much better investments.
I mean, but i would say this
long-term eath is is like a dca coin for me like do i hold any of it right now no most of my shit's
in low cap shitters because i want to time this thing up but you know i got hype i'm holding hype
but i don't know if i'm gonna hold it forever i going to hold it at the top and I'm getting out.
Like I'm not going through what I went through the last four years with this shit.
And over the last four years, I've realized, yes, roll it in.
I know it's boring.
No one wants to hear it.
Roll it into Bitcoin, man.
Roll it into fucking Bitcoin.
Stop bullshitting because it's a better money.
So if your goal is to get money, yes, take your shit and get it, and get it out and roll it into Bitcoin. But,
you know, as far as what you're saying, I don't disagree at all, brother. I think you're head on. I think it's damn right. You know, it's just, I think long term though, ETH still
is going to be the winner of, it just has the biggest moat. It has its first mover advantage
with shit. Like, I don't think it goes anywhere. I think it's solid.
But as an investment, you're right.
It's going to be risky.
So you might be better off if you're trying to make moves going into something like Hyperliquid
or, you know, hell, even Pudgy Penguins, as corny as that sounds.
I mean, it's on Robinhood.
The noobs are going to buy it, dude.
I mean, that's what Dogecoin did, too.
So that's just investment strategies, though.
But I agree with everything you're saying about price action.
Be careful out there, for real.
Well, I mean, when it comes to investment strategies, right,
I think it's important because you're asking the question of,
was that a failed investment, right?
And I think that depends on your investment strategy.
That depends on your thesis.
So, for example, I think a lot of what Siri is describing is like a type of –
I mean, correct me if I'm wrong here, so I don't want to put words in your mouth.
But you're like chasing the hype.
You're what's called momentum trading.
That's one of the names for that, right?
You're trying to catch the next new thing.
And it doesn't really matter if it's a shit coin or not, basically, to your own admission.
And that's one style and way of doing things.
And some people are very successful in doing that.
And you have people that are, say, traders.
And they're doing technical analysis, right?
And you have people that are, they just want to do an index of like what you were describing.
They could do like top two or top five or top 10 or whatever.
And then you have like fundamental investors as well and excess.
So I'm a value and value investor.
So for me, being, you know for for an investment to fail right it's it's especially
over like these relatively short time periods i'm not sure who said this but i really appreciate
whoever was reminding you of the price of ethereum just a few years ago so first of all you have to
like zoom out as an investor and like gain a bit of perspective right and also ask yourself like
what do you believe in, right?
Like, so if you're trying to look into the fundamentals,
if you're trying to invest what you understand
and through understanding predict the future,
beyond just saying, oh, BTC is the big daddy,
so I'm going to put a bunch of money in it.
Like that to me is not like an actual investment thesis.
Like, right, that's just just that's maybe momentum trading right or
something but that's but that's not actually trying to understand a thing or like like if you say oh
bitcoin is supported by blackrock and the u.s government and that's why it's going to win and
and just dominate the market and that's why it's a good investment i might not agree with that but
that's at least like an investment thesis somewhat, right?
That's part of one at least,
where you're trying to identify like a story and narrative
and basically just trying to predict the future, right?
So as an example, like for me,
I don't believe in like the long-term future of Bitcoin
because it doesn't have utility,
it doesn't have long-term security,
it's not as scarce, et cetera, if you really study and, like, understand these things, right?
Now, because the subject is on Ethereum, I'll focus on that.
In the case of Ethereum, I don't, you know, I really don't have a lot of faith in Ethereum left anymore because of the fundamentals, right?
And I was a big Ethereum supporter back from even from when it was launched.
And then around, I think it was 22, 23-ish.
That's when we really started selling the position down.
And now we don't really hold any Ethereum because we don't really agree with where it's going.
Look, Ethereum is a blockchain that chose to go this layer two route.
And I heard what you're saying, Noah.
Like, well, what if, like,
all these companies build on it?
And what if, like, that just strikes me as, like, it's wishful thinking.
It's not like you're not taking it from first principles, right?
Like, I think what's far more productive is, like, yeah, well,
like, what if all these companies all choose to build on this platform, which is technically an inferior product, right?
What's out there?
Like if you build on an L2, well, you're paying a tax to the L2 owners.
You're paying a tax to Ethereum.
And people that said they'll just build their own system if they want something centralized, they're 100% correct about that, by the way.
They will just build their own system.
And it's going to be an extreme, right?
Either fully decentralized or fully centralized.
So I think that's a really important uh distinction i've gone on for a
while now so i'm gonna i'm gonna cut myself off um but yeah i i think there's real real real quick
just to counter that um on the bitcoin thing um i agree with you but i i agree with what you're
saying but i disagree with how it fits in the conversation only because, and this is, I'm trying to be respectful.
Bitcoin doesn't need to do the apps, you know?
Money, does your cash in your pocket fucking have apps?
What do you use your money for?
It's important to say my critique of Bitcoin.
So the Bitcoin narrative is not relevant, in my opinion.
Just because there's no apps on it, it's a different beast.
So that's a whole other conversation.
I might agree with you, except for that I also think that the security model is unsustainable. So I predict somewhat of a major collapse in terms of the security model and a bunch
of roll off consequences to that in about seven to 11 years from now.
So that to me does not make it a good store of value or a good anything really from my
perspective.
So that's why I'm quite critical.
Yeah, I can't comment on that.
I can't.
Yeah, that's like trying to predict the black swan. I can't comment on that i can't yeah that's like trying to predict the
black swan i can't comment on that whether you're right or wrong it's in the code you can verify
it yourself if you really want to know it's all there it's all out in the open i i wrote it well
that's very interesting if no well let me i'll pick up in the article but we need to go back
to ethereum we need to stay on subject man yeah yeah so the ethereum if you guys want to
go back and forth on this and a little skirmish uh and then i'll after that i'll pass it to
i'll close it out uh yeah no i think the theorem subject is is interesting right and i think in
particular for me i'm very skeptical of constructing kind of a value thesis around Ethereum. Look, my perspective is that I actually think that like the usage, the utility of crypto is going to be far more valuable than speculation alone.
And especially because utility provides the foundation for fees and revenue for security, for decentralization and for scarcity, actually.
So that's what I see like the ultimate long term play to be.
That's why I don't buy this whole store of value only narrative.
I find it to be a circular argument.
And I find that Ethereum is very much moving in that same direction as well.
And I think honestly, like to Bitcoin's credit, Bitcoin does a much better job of trying to be a store of value in its current case compared to Ethereum.
I think that also is another narrative that's working against it.
Yeah, I think the take is bad.
And I really don't see a future in Ethereum.
And I think people are going to have to factor that in.
Wait, so Bitcoin's going to die and Ethereum's going to die and the Bitcoin liquidity is
not going to die.
Okay, so what's the future then?
I didn't say that.
I'm just trying to, like, Bitcoin.
I mean, look, look, I'm not here to tell people what to buy, right?
Oh, yeah.
No, no, no.
And I wouldn't listen to you anyways.
God love you.
This is the two-gen space.
But I'm just saying, I'm trying to figure out.
Yeah, Empress, hey, given a long enough time frame, everything dies, right?
At right?
Eventually there's the heat death of the universe. So Justin's not wrong. Justin is definitely not wrong. I can appreciate the subtlety you're trying to communicate as well, though, Justin, not being overly glib here.
Hey, Noah, I've got just a brief moment before, like a minute before I have to jump off. And I wanted to just briefly also take a crack at answering your primary through line question. I love that Siri really attempted to stay on point as well. And Justin also tried to corral us back to the main question.
Yeah, there is a bit of a fundamental problem. And I think that Dave summed it up so nicely when talking about markets and how markets respect certain things and markets value certain things and they don't tend to value other things.
Justin has also talked about it. So I don't know that I can add very much to what they've said. Let me just put in my two cents and say that in a live stream where all of the crypto mining influencers from North America, we banded together across the United States and Canada.
And we cornered Tim Baco from the Ethereum Foundation prior to EIP-1559 rolling out.
And we pushed back against the foundation and we caused them to delay its rollout by a number of months.
Yes, we did that.
Felt really good. But we essentially predicted
before the merge that value would continue to hemorrhage from Ethereum. And the narrative of
not just air quotes sound money, but trying to compete with Bitcoin. This is typical of the
Ethereum Core Developers Group and sort of the Ethereum Foundation being, it's a little bit
childish. But rather than try to compete
and call it some type of sound money, they had to engage in one-upsmanship.
And if you recall, they even had the website ultrasound.money.
It's kind of silly, right?
With everyone using little bat and the speaker next to it, echolocating, right?
As though it was using ultrasound waves to locate it.
So it was kind of strange.
The whole thing was just very, very juvenile.
But they pushed so hard.
And I think that should have been one of our biggest indications
that in terms of the culture, they weren't serious about this thing.
This was a joke to them.
And if the internet has hemorrhaged value since that point,
it's been irrecoverable damage caused to the ecosystem in terms of
value lost in the core asset.
Now, as far as total value locked in the protocols and in the ecosystem, it's also true that
it's almost like despite the Ethereum core developers and the Ethereum Foundation's best
efforts, they can't kill their own project.
It's like they want to. If you look at their behavior, it's almost like they're trying to kill their own strangle of golden goose and they can't kill it despite all these missteps that they make.
So it's kind of this weird situation that we find ourselves in where there's so much of DeFi that is synonymous with Ethereum and it's never going away. As Siri put it earlier, DeFi on Solana is so painful and nobody wants to deal with it.
The major protocols that have innovated anything of any real substance have all been innovated
on top of Ethereum to the point that now Bitcoin developers, even some people who were previously
core developers, are seriously tempted by the architecture of the Ethereum virtual machine and trying to re-implement it on top of Bitcoin as some type of a native additional protocol.
That should say something.
The Cardano people, look, I know we haven't had enough bad language in this conversation,
but yeah, I'm going to bring up Cardano also.
It's only a degree of separation away, right?
But even the Cardano people attempted to create a second layer on top of Cardano, ultimately admitting defeat to Ethereum, where they created an EVM architecture on top of Cardano.
Everybody does bend the knee to the Ethereum virtual machine, not to Ethereum proper, but to the Ethereum virtual machine and the simplicity of the account-based system, rather than using UTXOs.
UTXOs are phenomenal for what they're good for. They're not great for settling accounts easily
and simply, and then being able to architect DeFi or financial instruments using simple accounts and accounting. So yeah, Ethereum, it's this weird undead chain,
which I think, I suspect we're going to see that
regardless of the number of treasuries buying,
it's not going to, there will be no,
there'll be no Michael Saylor of Ethereum, air quotes.
That's just not going to happen.
Michael Saylor created the mold,
very likely with the blessing of a bunch of parties that we'll never get to see or understand or know.
But he broke the mold after making it in being able to commit the ultimate business Ponzi.
And I don't say that in a harsh or judgmental way.
I think all of us here would trade any number of problems in our life for Michael Saylor's problems, right? In exchange
for his business model. It's phenomenal, right? We're all in awe of what Michael Saylor has been
able to do. But I don't foresee that being a playbook that runs on Ethereum. I just don't
see it happening in the same way. And your main question of like, why isn't the price moving?
What gives? I think what gives is that, as mentioned before,
I won't rehash everybody else's arguments. The playbook just doesn't translate so easily
from Bitcoin to Ethereum and having a proto-Michael Saylor figure step in, acquire massive amounts
with essentially 0%, what everybody seems to consider non-toxic debt, business debt, and then just run functionally
a Ponzi of their own stock versus 0% loans for infinite acquisition of the asset.
I don't think the market is going to give that hall pass to anybody playing that with
Ethereum versus Bitcoin. So yeah,
I think that's why it isn't moving. And I think that's why this particular play is not going to
be the thing that makes Ethereum price move. But hey, man, thanks for inviting me over. No,
I don't have a lot of time for rebuttal, but I'd love to just handle a volley with anybody if they
disagree. I wish I could disagree with anything you said
just real quick. I just want to say, man, you need to come on Crypto
or more because I agree with everything you just said, brother.
You're welcome to come on our podcast anytime.
I want to disagree. I'd love to disagree
with you, but I'm not going to. I agree this time.
Well, Empress, it's okay.
You may honorarily disagree with me
and just know that I honorarily destroy
every one of your counter arguments in advance.
We just had a lot of time.
It's nice hearing you again.
Dave, I'll pass it over to you.
Thank you, Seth.
I always appreciate you, man.
Yeah, I actually agree with that.
I was good.
I rose my hand up because of one of my big pet peeves where people start talking about use the words BlackRock and building or BlackRock and investing in the same sentence. I mean, they build technologies that they need to use for their clients, but they're
not building any layer ones, layer twos.
They don't give a shit.
And in fact, when people keep saying, well, BlackRock is buying Bitcoin, BlackRock is
not buying Bitcoin.
BlackRock's clients are buying Bitcoin.
They are using their scale to make an easy wrapper for people to be able to buy Bitcoin, which I'm fairly
confident is custody at Coinbase, and that's that. BlackRock does this as an Ethereum ETF as well,
and if their clients wanted to buy Ethereum, they would be happy as campers, very happy campers.
It's not a bad product for them, but it's not in the same weight class as the Bitcoin product.
That's really all I was reacting to from one of the earlier diatribes.
I mean, this notion about people understanding institutions, I think that the broader point
really is a Wall Street versus Silicon Valley versus cypherpunk kind of ideal and what you
consider to be an investment.
So I built a company,
right? You know, so, you know, I co-founded a company, you know, with my son, Ian is running
the company, it's called Coin Routes, we save our clients an absolute fortune in terms of investing,
because you we know how to trade better. And so our algorithms do a better job trading.
They're the same kinds of things that the OTC market makers use and anybody who's an active trader can use them. And if you're
interested, you know, coin routes.com or DM me or whatever, but I'm not really saying it for the
plug. What I'm saying is I have heard more people in the crypto world saying, I don't care. And
someone on this space said it as well. I don't care if I pay more to buy what I want to buy,
because it's going to go
up a thousand times. I've heard that so many times. It is the literal dumbest thing I've ever heard.
Because in fact, if you think something's going to go up a thousand times, then every penny is
actually worth 10 bucks. Right. So it's you have to understand that that the entire way that the
crypto world looks at things is somewhat flawed. Now,
there are some very good reasons for using DeFi, mostly because if you're US, you can't buy it any
other way. And so it's what we will call a regulatory arbitrage. And the other thing that
you can do with DeFi is if you're really brave, you cannot declare your taxable gains and let the IRS come after you.
You can substitute stupid for brave if you'd like. It depends on your size.
And so there are reasons why certain things exist. Now, DeFi has an incredibly bright future,
in my opinion, like massively important. But what we're doing now in DeFi and crypto is mostly
tinker toys, proof of concept.
I mean, Aave to me is one of the best proof of concepts out there. But the real use case is
going to be in securities financing type things, whether it's stock loan or repos or other things,
which are very, very large businesses that we'll get to. And so when you start valuing DeFi,
value it based on the proof of concept, value it based on the addressable market, and then you can start doing investments.
And it really is the same thing with regard to the topic here in terms of Ethereum.
If Ethereum is going to be the rails for DeFi and you're going to need to own the token
to do it and it's going to make things cheaper, well, then it's a great investment.
But those are the ifs.
Agreed. Orion, I'll give it to you and go to Landy.
Thank you very much. A lot of good points made here. And if I was to take the things that we
heard today and distill it to explain it to me like I'm a five-year-old, I basically came up
with four lines in the aggregate of what we heard. With Bitcoin, the product is the market
cap. With Ethereum, the utility is the price. With Bitcoin, it's sound money. With Ethereum,
it's ultrasound programmable value backed by money. And that's my, if you're a five-year-old,
And that's my, if you're a five-year-old, that's what you can learn from today.
that's what you can learn from today.
Short and sweet.
Landy.
I think, oh, sorry, go ahead.
I'll pass it to you, Justin, before we wrap.
That was good takes.
You know, I kind of look at things from a market fundamentals point of view and just kind of reading the title, you know, very simply, it's Bitcoin season, baby. Like, why isn't price going up? And this is,
you know, all of the points have been made about the networks and that kind of, it's still Bitcoin
season, right? And at the end of the day, if we're going to evaluate treasury companies,
the top 10, which there's about 160 Bitcoin treasury companies that are officially
known that have declared their reserves and all that kind of stuff. Out of the top 10, I mean,
they're holding $84.5 billion or more. And then you have just the beginning of the ETH treasury
company narrative. And they're maybe seven to nine, although two, it's a little wishy-washy on their actual holdings
at this point. And that's around just over 1.2 billion. And from a market perspective,
we haven't seen an alt season yet, right? Because Bitcoin dominance is dominating.
And just from a kind of market TA. Damn it, Land no market i didn't talk to you about this i don't
care about your bitcoin maxing nonsense we're trying to understand no one needs to understand
all this money is flowing in supposedly but number doesn't go up and the prognosis it seems like
eth is like go fuck yourselves i'm'm just never going to do anything.
I'm lame.
Because the money that's flowing into Bitcoin far outweighs what's flowing into Ethereum right now.
And Ethereum's got a lot more competition.
It's got it.
All the points have been made about the L2s and the fees.
And like, I have nothing to add to that.
I mean, there's incredibly smart people that have been up here talking about it.
You're 100% quick.
I mean, that's ultimately, I mean, like even me as an ardent Bitcoin critic, you're 100% correct.
It is BTC season.
And if you try to construct a portfolio of liquid tokens, like unless you take insane risks, even in retrospective, you can't outperform BTC.
I'm betting that eventually the market's going to turn around because of utility,
because of great use cases and a future that I can believe in, right? Sorry, I didn't mean to
catch you off, Landy. You're making some really good points.
Well, I mean, I look at it this way, from even just a fundamentals point of view. If you look
at the circulating supply of Bitcoin, the amount of companies that are getting in a lot of the
institutional investment that's getting into Bitcoin, both publicly and privately, states and nation
states and so on and so forth.
It's just there's fundamentally more demand for Bitcoin right now.
It's keeping Bitcoin dominance on the highs.
We haven't seen an alt season.
And I still maintain that Ethereum will kick off alt season.
And when it does, you're probably going to see a lot more Ethereum treasury companies, right?
It is, you know, the second highest market cap in this space.
It's going to happen at some point.
It's consolidating.
It's going to break out at some point.
I highly doubt it's going to break out to the downside.
We're moving forward in the crypto industry, making inroads into TradFi.
And the liquidity right now prefers to get into Bitcoin for the longer term and evaluate the rest.
You're going to see more competition in the spot ETF market across the board for various tokens.
And Ethereum is not going anywhere. It doesn't matter what people think about it.
It doesn't matter what's happening to L2 and L3. It's not going anywhere. But it does matter what people think about it, right what we matter what's happening to l2 and l3 it's not going anywhere but
it does it does matter what people think about it right like that's called sentiment and like and i
think if you answer the question well why has a ethereum underperformed and also underperformed a
lot of other alts right and i think the reason i mean the the really simple another simplistic
answer is sentiment and if you listen to the room today, the vast majority of people here had a very negative sentiment towards Ethereum for a number of different reasons, but it was mostly negative.
And I think this does tie into the fundamentals and it does tie into a whole range of different from like from like cultural to economic to blockchain design issues that people are having.
Right.
That is significant.
Justin. Yeah, go ahead. to blockchain design issues that people are having. That is significant in terms of... Justin, I'm a Bitcoin guy.
I'm going to push back on you just a little bit there.
There's more people building on Ethereum
than I've seen in a very long time.
Now, you can argue numbers of devs
and all this kind of stuff.
When you look at the amount of money that's coming in
and the amount of capital that's going to come in just to build on ethereum from uh from the big
institutional side that want to deploy stables it's all about where it goes from there right
like where does that just don't see the point if you can't build competitive products right like i
don't care how many days you have if you don't have scalability. You don't get a company like JP Morgan launching an institutional-based stablecoin ahead of the Genius Act to court institutional investors through Coinbase and Base if there was an interest in building on the network.
Base barely scales itself relative to modern blockchain design.
And then only a fraction of that goes back to Ethereum,
like a tiny fraction, right?
Like that to me is not a bullish story at all.
That's a failure.
I'm not arguing that.
I'm not arguing that.
My point is, is that it's not going anywhere
because we're going to have more institutional investors,
more asset under managers, more banks coming on to the ethereum side and
we're going to get different players doing different things with stable coins but that's
the next big institutional push right and and we've already seen them show their hand right
there's going to be companies that care about hype and want a virtue signal and whatever launch a
product that but do you understand like do you know what kinetic is do you understand
like do you do you know what kinetic is like do you understand okay yeah so what what landy's
talking about what i was trying to talk about because you you you had said everybody was
negative up here i am frustrated with the business model and how ETH has not scaled to be selfish for themselves, the foundational layer.
But as it stands, and as Dave had talked about, if they can cut corners and they don't have to build their own, they're not going to build their own.
There is an intersectionality of TradFi that is here.
Like, it's not even coming.
It's not even whatever.
Like, everyone has had this myth of it's going to be retail. But no, it's TradFi that is here. Like, it's not even coming. It's not even whatever. Like, everyone has had this myth of it's going to be retail.
But no, it's TradFi.
So Kinetic is a protocol that they're, what, Landy, 17 validators now, where actual, and
you got to forgive me, I'm a degen, and I can't believe I make money in this space at
all.
But roughly, there are real corporations that are flipping into fake corporations, buying massive amounts of crypto and putting them into validators.
And somehow that's making people a whole bunch of money. Like that's the type of stuff we're
seeing that's happening over on Hyperliquid. And then you've got World Liberty Finance on Arbitrum.
And all of these things are layer twos that are off of ETH. So the foundational layer,
as Landy is saying, is what is going to persevere because that's where this money is going.
These giant players are going on layer twos on ETH.
But you didn't actually argue against my point.
My point is you can't build competitive products there.
That's an objective fact.
No, you were arguing Landy's point because Landy said ETH isn't going anywhere.
And you said, how can you say that when the majority of the states have been negative?
I'm not arguing against that.
I'm just pointing out that the sentiment is bad and that could have a lot to do with the price performance, right?
That's the point.
I think that, well, I mean, I don't know if sentiment, I mean, sentiment inside of the crypto space seems to be pretty down on it, right?
As has been explained here um but that feeds institutional investors right like i'm i'm
in the business of talking to a lot of institutional investors and they're not
same here but what are they what are they and you know exactly what i know then and that is that
they're going for the major player and that's bitcoin Bitcoin. Whether it's the spot ETF and getting their clients into it,
or you have the Bitcoin treasury company.
I think it entirely depends on who they trust as their advisor,
and I think that's going to shift over time.
And these things just take time to play out as well.
It's malleable.
I think there's a lot of BS.
You agree that it's Bitcoin season, right?
Of course it's Bitcoin season. I'm not deny current reality that would be insane yeah so if it's
bitcoin season and and we're you only we only have like i'm going based off what the title is right
if if we're to look at this and say like hey you know eth really didn't have too many treasury
companies before it it hit its high this past year at just shy of 4K or whatever it was, or just over 4K. start to play out as Ethereum treasury companies. And we see all these major potential stablecoin
issuers and large banks and corporations and institutions that are looking at Ethereum and
saying, hey, we're going to launch our stable on this because it's just an easy route to get there.
That just means that it's not going to go anywhere because there's too much
money on the table for it to go anywhere. That's my only point.
That's my only point.
I think I agree with you entirely entirely and i think it's also about how we think in terms of timelines i'm thinking very long term
and like what what makes sense and i suppose i'm just arguing against short-term value extraction
i'm not arguing against that obviously that will continue to happen and and these blockchains
unless there's some sort of major systemic flaw they they fade out of irrelevance. After a very, very long time, the network effects are pretty sticky.
Yeah, so I do agree with you.
I think, right?
I think you're very smart, Justin.
I'm just a very abrasive, awful, terrible person.
Ask my new business.
No, you seem very nice.
We didn't have it any other way. Yeah, we seem very nice in any other way yes yeah
yeah siri dude thank thank you i'll take you up on that on that offer from before what i love
about justin is that and and this is a measure of high intelligence he's someone who can debate
both sides this is very important in crypto you can't survive otherwise right i suppose maybe a
difference as
well is that i just don't i just don't want to go along with bullshit either it's just too much
bullshit and i suppose i see a lot of bullshit and um yeah i'm just like i don't really want to
invest in bullshit either you know i'm just like you know i think over the long run investing in
things that make sense instead of investing in nonsense and bullshit because you can say oh look
i'm investing in this bullshit but look the price has gone up so therefore it's good let me just
have some investment basics no and also i don't want you to feel too bad about your investment
choices either look everything's underperform bitcoin for you to have an old position not not
terrible condescending but i totally agree with you i didn't mean to be i'm sorry um no i didn't
mean to be no but i could sense like no you're struggling with that and also like uh you're like oh well i needed to go up like this
this sunk cost fallacy right like like don't like if you don't believe it anymore sell it
right simple yeah justin justin brings up a really good point here also there's there's a bit of an
issue in the crypto ecosystem where uh and you know if you've been around more than one cycle
uh you you learn not to marry your bags there's only there's only only things in life worth putting
a ring on and blockchains usually aren't one of them uh tokens even less so and nfts good god no
nope i simply won't do that i'm builtism is the enemy of being a good investor, really. The moment you become a
maximalist is the moment you lose
all objectivity
and the ability to make
non-biased investment decisions.
So that's something I
would call for as well.
I would say emotions
are more dangerous than being
maximal.
Maximalism is an expression of like extreme emotion, right?
It's fundamentalism.
It's extremism and just.
I mean, but it can also be hyper-focused,
especially if you're neurodivergent.
Yeah, but I would not think of that as maximalism, right?
Like you're hyper-focused on something,
but you don't like say, oh, well, there's only one.
There is no second best.
That's another leap from that,
just being focused.
Do you know what I mean?
But it's damn good marketing.
It's damn good marketing.
I think it's stupid as hell.
And community is market manipulation
for the masses,
and we need that.
I just wish we could focus that energy
on things that actually make sense
so that our cypherpunk dream
can become
a reality instead of us piddling bs that's the thing that yeah so the logic i think the logical
extension of what you're saying there justin is uh is that yes the same out of the same lips
that said uh there is no second best we also heard maybe you need a monero and he's right
hey man like uh i said cypherpunk you say monero i can he's right. Hey, man.
I said Cypherpunk.
You say Monero.
I can't fault you on that one, man.
Well done.
Who doesn't love Monero?
Apart from governments.
Okay.
I think this is a good stopping point.
Yusuf, you just joined us, my friend.
It's been a while.
We are wrapping up. But I certainly want to have you on next week if you are available
i came in too late i was like listening and i was like oh there isn't too many argumentative
points i guess we're uh concluding usually this kind of like uh like world war three in here but
i was like everyone's on the same page i was like oh okay i guess i'm approaching the end of this
well give us give us your shake real quick honestly i've only been here for five minutes so i can't really give too
much of my opinions i mean i've heard like one take which is don't be a maximalist and i honestly
i mean i want to be contrarian but i can't that's just like no that's just a no-brainer right there's
a lot of maxis in the space they're like my project is the best oh my gosh and then after
one cycle their their project is dead and then you just catch them after like three years holding this project i mean granted i was the same with zilka
i just had i had bag hold of that till it was down like 90 so i can't really hate on maxis but
i think you just have to look at on like a per cycle view because the crypto space is very new
and ever evolving in the sense that you might have a project that might be you know prominent
in one regard or another. You might be really impressed
with the technical side of it, but then after a year of innovation, there are so many other
projects which are superior and they beat their whole use case. Or maybe even that project doesn't
get good adoption because it is product and it is marketing. So you could have a bunch of marketing
prowess behind it, but if the project itself becomes irrelevant, then no matter how much
marketing you have, you just won't have people actually utilizing the platform.
But then again, 90% of coins in crypto don't generally actually have a use case.
I mean, Bitcoin was like the OG
and it's really fulfilled the main value of crypto,
which is just decentralized secure payments.
Everything else is really hard to fill in Bitcoin.
Sure, Bitcoin is slow, but I mean, it's safe
in that sense that everyone trusts it because it has that history. And yeah, but I mean, that's just my take.
I think there are a lot of great projects out there, but to be a maxi, to be like, oh yeah,
there's no other project better than this. I mean, no, you have to be very like open to new
opinions and open to other projects. And you have to like be emotionally detached. If you have a
project that's just like has really stupid like decisions behind it you just got to be able to just dump it all and just like completely
disconnect from it you can't treat it like a relationship you know
yeah sure empress i just want to give you your flowers the one thing i think we can all agree
on up here is that noah curates his stage he doesn't let any of the scammy grifty pump and dump whatever creepers up in here even when we are fighting so uh shout out to noah
i appreciate you yeah we do our best i can't say they haven't found their way up here before but
definitely make my effort to to keep things clean clean and keep the discourse focused on the topic.
Although when Justin is up here, we almost always go on a Bitcoin tangent or a Solana tangent.
But I love Justin. That's why I invite him every week.
Thank you everyone for joining and be safe out there.
We'll see you all next week. Take care.
