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From Telegram to Toncoin: Manuel Stotz on TONX’s Big Opportunity
Recorded: Sept. 29, 2025 Duration: 1:22:45Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion, crypto enthusiasts explored the impressive growth potential of projects like TonX, the impact of government initiatives on market trends, and the strategic partnerships shaping the future of blockchain technology. With insights into yield opportunities and the significance of upcoming token launches, the conversation underscored the vibrant landscape of the crypto market.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Good afternoon, I guess it is. I almost said good morning. Good afternoon.
Depending where you are, it's morning for me. It's afternoon for my East Coast friends and
Central Time Zone friends. Hope everyone's doing all right on this Monday, September the 29th.
And it's time for the Small Caps show here.
Let me get my co-host and friend, Ben, up here on stage.
Go ahead and get that started.
We'll dive into it a little bit.
I'll do a quick market update while Ben connects here.
We gapped up this morning and we've tailed back down just a little bit, still green on the day.
IWM, though, is right back at the close on Friday, basically break even over in small cap land.
A lot of things going on, little government shutdown fears, I think, creeping in as the VIX is about big today.
But overall, still doing well in the market.
Some interesting stuff.
I'm excited to hear everyone's updated thoughts and then dive into some stuff. Ben, I'll go ahead and bring you in because I know we've got a great
conversation interview coming up in the back half today. So I want to go ahead and let you start us
off here. Yeah. All right. Good. How are you doing? Look, my long-term accounts are great.
Look, my long-term accounts are great. Everything's exploding. It's just nonstop all year. But that's not where I focus. As I've told people in the past and on social media, it's easy to do well long-term. Very easy. Just pick the right themes, follow the right few people on X and pick 10, 20 stocks. And it's easy. It's not
a big deal. What's hard is trading in the short term and trying to crush markets, which we've
done great at. I'm up 500% year to date. But something's changed, man, that doesn't really
match my style. I don't know what's going on for at least two weeks. To be honest with you,
it's been since August. I've had a harder time with my style of timing markets with catalysts,
sentiment, fundamentals, and technicals. And it's really pronounced here in the last couple weeks.
This market is wild, man. I'll get to the macro in a second. But the individual stock behavior,
I guess it would be best described as maybe like a momentum market where it's just the crowd. It's like wherever the crowd goes. And there's just crazy, crazy moves in stocks that aren't necessarily well timed with catalysts or aren't necessarily well reasoned with fundamentals. And it's just a whole bunch of people piling into names.
And maybe if you're a pure technical trader, you can capture those better than me. But I've
been having a hard time getting alpha in what I do, story trading. It's been great all year.
It's been superb, up 500%, over 500%. But something's changed a little bit in the market, which doesn't really
fit my process too well. So I've been struggling the last two or three weeks finding alpha and
pretty much break even for like two weeks. And today's been a pretty rough day. Most of my large
swings not working today. It's been difficult because there's been just crazy alpha, and especially a lot of the popular names,
and they look at Robinhood just exploding today, things like that, and Oclo.
So I'm benefiting in my long-term account.
I have a big Robinhood position in my long-term account.
But again, that's easy.
There's nothing to it.
There's nothing to buying these leading companies and just holding on to them.
to buying these leading companies and just holding on to them.
You know, Hood, ASTS, LEU, Centris Energy, Air, you know, just killing it in my long
term.
But short term has been a little challenge for me.
So I don't know if that's something with the macro.
It's just a strange, strange dynamic for me.
I'm not sure what to make of it.
But in any case, this week, we have tons of economic data, pretty much no earnings.
We have lots of sectors just exploding related to Trump administration initiatives going on,
whether it's defense names with the missile stuff or cannabis exploded, went back down.
There's crazy stuff going on in cannabis and crypto with eric trump jr pushing it and rare earths uh with um the administration saying they want to take uh
reports that they want to take stakes more stakes than rare earth companies and you got the
humanoid robotics uh with with tesla and you got these domestic semiconductor manufacturing so i'm
trying to play those areas uh with some success and some not. It's hard because
this news comes out and everything gaps up huge when the news comes out. So it's been a little
bit challenging. But again, I don't know. It's just been easier. The long-term account's been
much easier for me for the last two to five weeks. And finding alpha short-term, a little bit harder
for me. But in any case, look at PayPal.
PayPal is like one of the only things working for me today.
I don't know.
It's not a small cap.
But anyway.
Anyway, that's my – I don't know what that is.
That's just me complaining.
Em, over to you.
Yeah, appreciate that.
Great rundown.
It's been a little tricky at times.
I know somebody is going to make a counterargument and say, well, you just buy every dip and stuff. I hear that, but just the risk reward side of
things or the individual catalyst things, it's been, I think it has been tricky. I'm more in
your camp, Ben. I've been a lot less active, I guess, overall the last probably few weeks,
probably a few weeks, to be honest. But we'll see how it plays out. Money Mark,
to be honest. But we'll see how it plays out. Money Mark, what are your thoughts?
what are your thoughts? Yeah, I mean, this is indicative of a market that is trying to figure
out where it needs to go next. And I actually have known Ben for a long time, and he does
extremely well. Most of the time, these are the times when he'll tend to struggle a little bit
is when the market doesn't know which way it wants to go. Right. So you lose momentum and then it becomes a little more tricky. So that's where, you know,
we've talked about this yellow alert for several months now. So I'm not going to keep beating the
drum on that. But at the same time, I've also said, let's just keep picking winning stocks. A yellow alert is not an orange alert, is not a red alert, right? So it's be cautious. Don't be afraid. If you're afraid, short the market as a hedge against your long positions. up the opportunities that are out there because we have some major themes making us major money.
One of my names just hit 500% gains this year. My portfolio, I'm not up quite as much as Ben.
I don't know what our portfolio sizes are, but through 250 plus percent, I'm up.
50 plus percent, I'm up. And that continues. I'm not really having a problem. And the trick
that I'm kind of using, it actually straddles the line between what you're doing and what
Ben is doing, which is I'm not doing much of anything, but I'm keeping an eye, not on the intraday charts, but on the daily charts. And when a stock that I love pulls back
a bit, I'm jumping in. When it gets overextended, I'm jumping out a little bit. And so in between
the lines, that's how I'm being successful with the trading. But at the same time, I'm just focusing on those tens. My portfolio has less names in it now than it has in a couple of years. And it's because we're being picky, picky, picky, and it's working like a charm. We continue to make. I'm at another all-time high today, as a matter of fact. So we keep doing that and it works. So as far as what does that mean
from a macro perspective, it's the same story as last week from a macro perspective. Everything's
okay. In fact, we're coming to the end of September, right? Pretty soon we're going to
walk into the strongest part of the year, that end of year push. And it's been a strong year.
So a lot of these institutions are either going to be chasing to make the same market returns, right, against their comps or putting their foot on the
accelerator to get their year-end returns and bonuses up as high as humanly possible.
So we should continue to play the market. I stay focused on three intersecting themes and that's AI, where I come from, my
technology and background going back 30 years. And then increasingly defense, which is increasingly
technology driven and a bit of the commodities that go into both. So stay focused on the main themes that are probably not going to slow down,
even if there's a recession, and focus on the names in those spaces where the valuations are
attractive. Don't chase, don't change your game, stay disciplined, and just keep hitting those
all-time highs. And we'll be back with individual names in that segment of the show. Hey, Mark,
you said you're up 250% this year? At least't i don't count it i don't count it on a day-to-day basis
that is pretty amazing because just to compare apples to apples like in my long-term account
where i don't do much trading i think it's probably more comparable to your style i'm up maybe i have
like three four long-term accounts pretty big money money. It's like 80, I'm at like 80, 90% in long-term accounts.
That 500%, that's really active trading.
That's me like on top of the news feed, getting overweight positions and pre-market for like
the news of the day, stuff like that.
It's also pretty big money, but it's a lot of active management and pivoting pretty hard
on news and being on top of everything every day.
So that's how you get 500% plus.
But as far as your style, that's pretty freaking amazing, 250%. I'm like 80%, 90% of my long-term
account. So good job. Yeah, I appreciate it. Yeah, no, and part of it's a little difficult
because when you're dealing with eight figures, it is a little bit hindering at some point because
some of these names, if we find a
Synestec, for example, right? Like for me to put in a large position there, I have to report to the
SEC, which I don't want to do, right? So I got to keep my position sizes modest. But hey, it really
just comes down to the discipline, man. Like you know yourself, you've been doing this for a long
time. And over the years, you've learned what works, what doesn't work. And you say, you know what, let me not even try the stuff that doesn't work.
And let me focus 100% on the stuff that works best. And boom, right? After 30 years of doing
that, you almost can't lose. And that's why my official portfolio has no losers going back to
May of last year. Nice streak. It'll come to an end at some point,
but this is the kind of results you get
when you stay just really super picky
on just finding those tens.
Godfather, let's go over to you next
and get your thoughts.
Appreciate that, Money Mark.
Yes, sir.
Yeah, hey, everybody.
So a couple of things, key themes
that Money Mark just pointed out I want to touch on. One times that at the index level.
So underneath the surface, the market is somewhat unsettled. That's not surprising,
given that every week we seem to be making new highs. And I think that this is where the
conversation needs to talk a bit about positioning. So, look, we are closing off September and, you know, the NASDAQ 100, the NDX is up 5% in the month.
You know, this is the best September in 10 years.
You got names like Google, not a small company, up 40%.
Names like Micron, up 37%.
You know, App, Lovin, sure, they got included in the index,
but this thing is up, you know, 90%.
These are not small cap companies.
So, you know, every day the pundits, again, you know,
call for this, you know, momentum reset.
And all we've seen are shallow dips.
You know, is it the scenario where the stock clock is right twice a day?
So far, it's been that way.
Look, positioning actually isn't overly bearish right now for the markets.
And by that, I mean, it's not overly bullish.
We've seen a fair amount of degrossing going into the end of the September
quarter, despite what we've seen in terms of index and leading tech returns that I just mentioned.
There is positioning, let's just say conservatism creeping into the three big players in the market,
those being pensions, fundamental long short funds, and hedge funds.
There is another sort of $20 billion or so in pension rebalancing going into quarter end,
and that will flip as soon as the calendar changes.
So again, seasonally, as Moneymark pointed out,
starting in October, it starts to become a positive time again for the market. And part
of this is driven by these positionings. You know, you look at the hedge funds, for example,
they cut positioning last week for the first time in four weeks, and they did it in size.
They did it in size. They did it, you know, the largest amount we've seen in five years, frankly.
Long short funds, same thing.
This is the largest sort of degrossing that we've seen from this group of players in the market since the Liberation Day.
So it's meaningful.
And I think it's meaningful from a positive standpoint
in so much as I think it points again to this environment
where it should be relatively solid backdrop
for gains going into year end.
And I'm firmly in this camp
that we'll probably see the S&P touch 7,000.
And look, I know this is a small cap show,
but the primary themes in the market
are beneficial to small caps here.
And again, there's three key things going on right now.
There's a rate cutting cycle.
And again, I know every day,
there's this wrestling about the cadence
of that rate cut cycle.
There's AI, which you can see weighing on software and other things.
And then of course, there's policy tailwinds. And this is the part of the market that I think has the biggest potential benefit for small cap companies. And this is the part of the market
that I think is the most underappreciated right now.
Like you saw it today.
You see it in the Pentagon announcing they want to double missile production.
And, you know, all these new tech defense stocks are exploding.
You saw the Trump administration focus on coal today.
You know, the DOE is carving out 625 million, opening up 13 million acres of federal
lands, like three times what was in the one big budget, or one big beautiful bill, I should say.
Lowering royalty rates, streamlining approvals in coal states. Coal was over 50 percent of power generation in the U.S. 25 years ago. It's now at 15, 1.5 percent.
So this is what happens when the administration sets policy that benefits certain sectors.
And, you know, I've been pounding the table on housing and I know everyone is just, you know, blindly focused on the 10 year.
And I know it's still above four and I know it's risen since the Fed cut rates and all the rest of it.
But again, here's a sector.
They've already told you they're going to focus their guns on this from a policy standpoint, right?
You've heard Bessett talk about housing emergency.
There's so many levers they can pull with these, you know, government agencies guaranteeing mortgages, potentially buying back MBS, all these kinds
of things. So I know this is just the macro portion of the show, but this sets up fine.
There's also the Sel Rosh Hashanah by Yom Kippur, and we're coming into that at the end of this
week. So as far as I'm concerned, everything is still fine. We're above the nine 21-day EMAs and major indices.
And we're getting into a seasonally favorable period that expresses itself more so in small caps than any other segment in the market.
So the key themes are working, right?
Robotics, new tech defense, rare earth, nuclear, I mean, even quantum.
So there's plenty of names to pick from.
That's where I stand.
Hey, Godfather. And I don't know if you've mentioned this, but like there's once again,
the most underrated influencer of market movement. It's not getting much love, liquidity.
Yeah. And liquidity starts to come back into the market at this time of year.
Bingo.
And you combine that with what I just talked about in terms of positioning.
You combine that about the three key themes in the market.
You combine that with Trump administration, which is extremely focused on level of markets, whether they admit it or not.
And, you know, you're seeing it.
You know, trade is basically dealt with. Now, what are they going to do? They're going to focus
their efforts on things that are going to ensure that they look golden going into, you know,
November of 2026, right, midterms. So, you know, housing is probably the touchpoint that hits more voters than any other thing.
Obviously, voters in Wyoming and Tennessee and these other coal-related states are going to be super happy with the Trump administration.
They already are for a number of reasons.
So anyway, you've heard enough from me.
Appreciate those thoughts and the nice back and forth there dougie fresh anything to add from
your end on the uh general market side so yeah the spy is up today it looks like it might be
pulling back a little bit our iwm's just kind of hanging out obviously it was up now it's down a
little bit it's down like 40 cents and that's in a bullish channel it just could be pulling back a
little and i think the main thing right now for this week is our government shutdown looming by midnight tomorrow. So looking at the poly market yesterday,
it looked like it was coming downstairs, stepping down. And then today it took a big jump up to 72
percent that we're having a shutdown unless it's set enough to jump off a cliff. And that's what
I kind of assumed it would happen because it always goes through at 11 57 PM the night before it's about to hit midnight. So we have that happening
on Tuesday. And the only thing I want to say about that is, uh, if they do go into a government
shutdown, you can expect rate cuts coming up for like the next few months going across. There's no
way they're not going to be able to cut rates. If they have a government shutdown, it's going to be
a wrap. And I think that might really catapult Trump and what his administration
has been looking at. So I'm not sure that they mind it going into a government shutdown right
now. And I don't hear them threatening them guys not to do it. Let's put it that way.
And I think looking at the charts and how I call everything, I'm telling you guys,
they have a shutdown. Rates are coming way down. And that's exactly what
the Trump administration wants. So that's what's looking like on our government shutdown. And then,
yeah, our holiday season's coming up right now. So this is when we get into our strong part of
the year is right about now we start rolling into the holidays at the end of the year. And that's
like you guys were saying, Dave, these companies have been making some crazy profits this year and these ceos know this is the year that they get their huge bonuses
if they could just keep catapulting them up a little bit they'll get bonuses like they'd never
seen before because of the way that the market's been and the companies are running up to all-time
high so you're gonna absolutely see these companies trying to pump it up in the last three months. No doubt in my
mind. And the market looks like it wants to rip. Crypto is just getting ready to go berserk, guys.
So I know Eric Trump said buy the dip. Anytime any of them say buy the dip, you know, within the
next week or so, it starts rolling. And they do it all the time. I mean, the last time Trump said
buy the dip, the thing went up like crazy the very next
day or not even like a couple hours later, it was insane.
So, yeah, that's what we're looking at right now.
And I just think it's a little bit flat today.
Obviously, spies up.
But I just think we're looming on this government shutdown to see what's going on.
And I don't think they're going to make it last very long, to be honest with you.
And I'm not exactly sure you guys may know better than me. I think the big holdup is like health care for immigration. And I think that's what the big holdup does. And I can't see that being the reason why we go into a government shutdown. But hey, it's crazier things happen. But I'm telling you what, they shut it down. We're getting rates cut big time. So that's what it looks like to me at now and i'll kick it
back to you i know we have our interview coming up soon one thing i do think last time that eric
trump said to buy there was a don jr one of the two said buy the dip on ethereum and it went down
another 50 but outside of that yes i agree with you overall there ben i did forget about that actually well
thanks for him thanks for reminding me i totally forgot that one there yeah just sort of right now
obviously it came way back that was don jr said by the don jr okay yeah just just just that one
piece just to throw in there but i agree with the rest of everything you said of course uh
ben want to uh toss it back over to
you and see if there's any picks anything on your radar yeah you know i'm just gonna listen to the
other folks today short on time so let's uh let's take it over to money mark quickly though we got
like six seven minutes before the interview yeah we'll keep it real quick. I'll just give you a recap of my Friday YouTube show.
That's Money Mark Stocks on YouTube. We removed Amplitude from our, it was not an official
selection. Seeing some signs there of some things that we should be a little concerned about in a
market where we're looking for tens. This doesn't look like a 10 right now, so I'm out of AMPL for now.
Got some new news on Intermap, ITMSF, and there was a delay. They moved out the deadline for the
gigantic Indonesian deal, which is 10 times bigger than the deal that made the stock go up four or 500% on our watch, which remains on our official pick list. The reasoning is they wanted
to make sure that they put additional language in there that ensure that whoever wins these deals
has sufficient capital to pull it off. And concurrent with that, what you found was InterMAP did a raise where they didn't seem to need any cash. Well, guess what? They probably wanted or needed a little more cash to satisfy those country requirements. hundreds of pages of what Indonesia is looking for. And we can't find anybody that meets the
requirements as much as InterMap. And the fact of the matter is they're the incumbent. I think
they're going to win this. And Indonesia just wanted to make sure they had more cash in their
balance sheet. Let's see. On the flip side, we had actually on the large cap side, we talked
about CrowdStrike, CRWD as a possible, the next Palantir, because we're seeing an increase in
threat detection.
We're looking for small cap names because this is a small cap show. But for those of you who like
the larger names, they are absolutely dominant in terms of threat prevention. And AI is sending
threats through the absolute roof. So the trend is really big there. Other than that, I've got maybe a new, I've got a
bead on a new official pick and whether it goes out this week or next week, stay tuned. It's rare
that I put one out, but I think we found a 10. So stay tuned for that. And oh, SMCI, be careful.
I've been cautious on SMCI the whole ride back when it was 70 or so. I told you
guys it was a short. It was. We got out of that short around 20. There are some vulnerability
issues there. This is a company that's just not buttoned up. They just don't do things 100% by
the book. This is not a Dell. right? You can be safe with Dell.
You can be safe doing business with Dell.
You can be safe owning Dell stock.
SMCI just doesn't do that.
They don't seem to care or know how to do things in a way that's going to keep their customers happy.
So just be careful with that one.
In this market, SMCI will maybe never be a 10.
All right.
That's it for now.
We'll catch you on Friday's show and next week.
Oh, also RZLV.
RZLV on Friday's show.
I said, stay away from it.
It looked like there were some red flags all over the place.
And today, Fuzzy Panda out with a short report just by coincidence.
Stay away from that.
I don't see anything there.
It's a pump.
It's a giant pump.
And you see those pumps get bigger in this market.
That's it for me.
Appreciate that money, Mark.
And everyone should go check out that Friday show that he does.
Definitely a lot of alpha and great thoughts shared over there.
Godfather, let's go over to you here.
Yeah, and since the time, I'll just throw out some tickers that are associated with some of the key themes that continue to work in this market.
So I touched on coal today.
That's specifically thermal coal.
Don't get confused by a lot of these tickers that are matte coal, which is, of course, for cooking, for steel manufacturing.
But look, the big daddy on thermal is BTU, ticker BTU, pardon me.
But if you want a small cap name in that segment, that's Pure Play Thermal.
HNRG would be where I go.
New Tech Defense, you know, you saw this report of the Wall Street Journal that
Pete Hexith and, you know, in conjunction with this administration are alarmed by the low
weapons stockpile levels.
And, you know, they want a double missile production.
There are a bunch of small cap names that end up having their tech incorporated into these primes
that are the end manufacturers, the General Dynamics and Lockheed Martins and the RTXs
and the Northrop governments of the world that actually have their name on these missiles.
Small cap name that's been mentioned by MoneyMarket a number of times.
Again, you know, probably an acquisition candidate by Andro at some point is Kraken.
PNG is the ticker in Canada.
KRKNF is the USOTC ticker.
Just pull up a chart of this thing.
You know, it's bottom left to upper right on a consistent basis, continues to perform.
Why? Because there's a massive tailwind to their marketplace.
So there's a small cap name to play New Tech Defense.
I really like this Carmen, KRMN, and KTOS and AVAV.
But, you know, these are all multi-billion dollar names that don't fall into a small cap show.
But I would own some of those for positioning in the market if you're not set on small caps. It's a little bit difficult to find really small cap
names that see their products filter all the way through. IMRX as a name, just a biotech that's
completely oversold here. And I know that there's two sides to the coin here with respect to the
most recently reported data.
But I'm with Oppenheimer that I've increased their target from 21 to 30.
This 86% nine month survival for first line pancreatic cancer patients, not to mention that they've previously seen some full remissions,
Full remissions suggest to me that this 923 that was paid by the strategic as part of this financing is not bad money.
In other words, this thing will trade back up and through this Sanofi investment and the public market investment in this is named, in my opinion.
Nuclear ASPI would be a name that I would add along with larger cap names like LEU.
These guys are doing some shareholder value creation activities that involve spinning off their nuclear enrichment side into a public standalone company, QLE, Quantum Leap Energy.
beneficiaries will be existing shareholders in ASPI and they also get the exposure to
silicon enrichment, new age silicon enrichment, as well as nuclear medicine, which is an area that
really has few ways to play publicly. In terms of rare earth, look, there are a number of names, USAR, UAMY,
you know, triple U, all these names have moved dramatically. The one I really like for a low
float way to play this is METC. So there you go. There's four or five tickers. I'll leave it there
in essence of time. Hey, real quick with IMRX, correct me if I'm wrong. I think I went through
the filing. I don't even think there are any warrants with that deal. It looks like a clean
equity deal at $9.23. Is that also your understanding? Yeah, 100%. And I've seen this a million times.
I think, is $7 finally the level? It's looking that way on the chart, but there's nothing to say it couldn't go lower again
tomorrow, but dramatically oversold here.
I wasn't on the conference call this morning, but I reviewed some notes of folks that were,
and I just don't see where these red flags are.
I know that there was some relative disappointment in some pockets of commentators focused on
you know commentators focused on this most recent data but look that's
this most recent data, but look, that's nitpicking.
nitpicking by all accounts I mean pancreatic cancer is the number one most
deadly cancer in the world show me another company that's actually had
patients in a trial that are effectively cured I mean it's crazy yes
it's small and they've consistently shown good data for probably nine months
down every one of their data updates.
Right. So fully funded. You got, you know, strategic that's validated them.
You know, Oppenheimer on biotech. You know, this is an HG Wainwright or Aegis Securities or, you know, some bucket shop we're talking about.
So, look, I would be the first to say, and I'm not a biotech expert, and I tread very carefully when I do in that sector.
And it's only with affirmation from people that I trust that are much smarter than I am in this group.
And there's a lot of noise surrounding IMRX right now.
But if you focus on voices that have a good track record, I think you'll see that this is,
I think right now it sets up as both a great investment possibility for a long-term account as well as a near-term trade.
Yeah, and as far as the technicals go,
it filled the gap today from the day before the news.
And it exceeded a little bit,
but it's back right above that gap till.
And we have, I know Dougie Fresh saw us to go, but I invited Manny, I invited you up here.
I don't need to accept the thing while you figure out how to get on stage, Manny.
Dougie, why don't you go ahead real quick?
Cool, no problem.
Yeah, IMRX looking real good right there.
I would say wait till tomorrow, see if that's the bottom.
I'll look at it and post it out in the note in the Discord. I discord i'll definitely look at it but that is going to be a good setup right there
and real quick keep your eyes on amc guys that thing could get things rolling i've been saying
these uh meme coins or memes coins meme stock type ones could get the market really rocking
and rolling we've seen it happen before they're setting up like amc game stop them things and
bull weebles is looking real
good and now you guys know why i told you not the mess would open look how far it came back it's
like 842 right now and we'll kick it back to you guys so we can have manny come on and tell us about
tonx and i real quick before we even have let me go over that chart that's going to be a great
opportunity guys i've been tracking this thing down we got to the bottom here and we're getting curled up and like i said crypto is about to get ripping and i can see this one going to be a great opportunity, guys. I've been tracking this thing down. We got to the bottom here and we're getting curled up.
And like I said, crypto is about to get ripping and I can see this one going to get ripping.
I've been actually picking some small batches up as it dips and I'll be buying some more because it is getting ready to roll.
So there you go.
And thank you, everybody.
Thanks, Doug.
Thanks, everyone.
This is Manny.
I'm the executive chairman of TonX.
We are the largest and effectively only digital asset strategy company related to Ton.
You might not have heard of Ton, but you will have heard of Telegram. And Telegram has,
of course, over a billion monthly active users, and Ton is the exclusive blockchain partner
to Telegram. So this is something that's, I think, very big
and deserves everyone's attention.
Telegram, just to maybe give you some highlights here,
not only is it large, a billion monthly active users,
it's growing.
The first billion is the hardest, in my experience.
So I fully expect Telegram to grow from 1 billion
to 2 billion to 3 billion monthly active users.
Of course, that will take some time.
But it is an N of 1 asset run arguably by an N of 1 founder, Pavel Durov.
Pavel is the only living human being who's not only built an app that a billion people
use every month.
There's arguably a handful of others of those.
But the only one of those who owns 100% of that company.
He is a freedom fighter.
He's gotten into trouble in France.
You can all read it on X and, of course, on Telegram.
But he is relentless and probably the GOAT, the greatest of all time in his domain.
And so Pavel isn't stopping.
He and his brother developed originally the technology behind Ton, and it's live and it's
brother developed originally the technology behind Ton and it's live and it's deployed.
deployed.
Not only is Telegram, of course, the main reason why Ton is special, but the other one
is that Ton has not yet been available in the US until basically earlier this year.
So this is really brand new in the US.
So as of July, the Telegram wallet is now live in the United States.
Telegram has around 87 million users in the US.
And so I've done this before in spaces,
but if anyone DMs me their Telegram handle,
I can basically send them TonCoin
or of course Stablecoins living on Ton
or any other digital asset living on Ton
directly into their Telegram wallet.
And even if you don't have it yet,
you can basically receive the coins
and just activate it by a couple of clicks.
So this is really, I think,
what is maybe arguably the biggest thing
that exists in crypto
that people haven't ever heard about, actually.
And Ton is our biggest position originally
when my first company,
which is called Kingsway Capital.
So I built a multi-billion dollar
asset management business from zero
coming out of Goldman Sachs
over the last decade or so.
And we got into crypto roughly five years ago and we're big on BTC and other aspects of the global digital asset ecosystem, stablecoins, lending investments, gaming investments.
But also our single biggest investment by far has been Ton for the last four years.
And then I basically created this digital asset treasury company, TonX, over the summer,
which is, of course, not necessarily a new idea, but let me explain why it's exciting.
I mean, number one, of course, we're super bullish on Ton.
And of course, you can play that by just owning the token, which, of course, we would highly recommend
because of Telegram, because of the fact that it's not in the US, which of course we would highly recommend.
Because of Telegram, because the fact that it's not in the US, the fact it's super small and cheap, relatively speaking. Ton is like 60 times smaller than Ethereum and maybe 16 times smaller than
Solana and arguably might end up with more users than both of them eventually, thanks to Telegram's
distribution. And of course Ton is coming to the US, as I mentioned. But you can't buy it yet on
Coinbase. And of course, that's upside in my mind. You also can't buy it on the largest South Korean
exchange, Upbit, which is bigger than Coinbase. That's also coming. And of course, apart from
playing it for the token, you can play it for the equity. Because Telegram is a private company,
and will likely stay private for some time,
this is the only way to get equity exposure
to Ton and by extension Telegram.
And again, this was a launch in August.
So what we did is we raised,
we basically followed the BitMine model,
if you know BMNR.
And maybe just by way of background,
I've known Michael Saylor personally
for some like five years.
I just went to his 100K party in Miami for this last New Year's.
And of course, we've studied him and his followers intensely.
And I think it goes without saying that he really pioneered this space.
And I take my hat and this has been an incredible achievement.
I mean, the returns were roughly, what, Bitcoin up 10x in the last five
years since Saylor's been at it. But the stock has been up something like 27x. So nearly three times
the return of the underlying BTC. And the interesting part for me was that, you know,
quote, unquote, only one third of the returns have come from the underlying, but actually two thirds
have come from intelligent capital allocation. You know, I'll talk a little bit about that and how we're doing this at TonX as well.
Now, the other thing, of course, which maybe is obvious to most of you,
is that the seller has basically figured out that this is a permanent capital vehicle.
This is not an ETF, right?
And what that means is that if you sell the ETF, the ETF sells the coins,
but if you sell MicroStrategy stock or our stock,
the stock can go down, but the coin stays, the coin doesn't move.
And what this means, of course, you can trade at a premium order discount, but you can do
something about that.
You can issue stock, you can buy back stock, intelligent capital allocation.
In our case, you can also stake, which actually is a huge advantage over the Bitcoin treasury
companies.
And you can also be included in the index, ultimately, which of course the ETF can't
do none of these things. And then it goes without saying that there's probably still 100 times more capital in the
world that can buy equities compared to be able to buy coins. And that seems to be true for Bitcoin
or Ethereum or Solana. But for Ton of course you can probably add another zero or some order of
magnitude there because of the fact that the US is half the world's capital and it's not available
in the US properly yet, not yet on Coinbase.
And of course, we are now orientating ourselves more to the, let's say, leading Ethereum treasury companies.
Bitmine, I think, has done a wonderful job. The pipe was done, I think, at $4.50 on, I think it was 30th of June, just about 4th of July weekend, well, in that week.
And so that's now, what, three, four months ago.
And the stock's been a 10x for early investors.
And so they've arguably outdone Sailor at being Sailor.
And we are following their model.
What does that mean?
We did a $558 million common equity pipe on the 4th of August.
of August, so that's now not even three months ago. And we then pivoted the business that we
So that's now not even three months ago.
invested into to this fund treasury company as strategy. And the pie price was a 951. It was
a clean equity deal. There was no warrants. There's no strange promote, nothing spurring merged in.
And we had a pretty good start. In August, of course, it was quite summer month in terms of volumes, but the stock was trading
up between 20 to 25 bucks a share and our $1 billion ATM was active.
And then, maybe not unlike other companies in our space, as the share registration of
the pipe came due, and this was around Labor labor day and of course the market sold off entirely then we moved from sort of a one and a half to two x premium to nav to
like a 40 discount to nav where the stock's kind of now we just did a press release this morning
you can look it up all online but the head the upshot is we've basically been buying back stock
um and we keep doing that um if you buy back stock at a 40% discount, of course, it's simple math, it's very creative. We also started to stake most of our coins. So we are over two-thirds done,
give it a week or two, we should be done entirely with staking. And all the incremental, basically,
cash flows from staking, where the company is not profitable, will be used to buy back
stock, as long as the stock is at a pretty big discount, which it is today. Now, we don't know how much pipe selling is done, but we probably think two
thirds or so. And there's also some insider buying. And yeah, we think this is a really
unique combination where the stars are lining. So you've got this very, very attractive underlying
with Telegram, N of one asset run by an N of one founder, Ton being the exclusive blockchain partner to Telegram.
It's small.
It's arguably also been underperforming.
I mean, Ton is not at the all-time high
where Ethereum and Bitcoin basically are,
but it's roughly 70% below its all-time high,
which was sort of 14, 15 months ago.
And there's reasons for this.
Number one, the Telegram founder got into trouble in France.
You know, I'm on Team Freedom.
I think that's upside risk from here.
There will be some sort of settlement eventually.
Number two, you know, Ton is not in the US yet.
And of course, much of the incremental capital
in the last sort of year into cryptos come from the US.
That's changing.
You know, Ton just listed on Robinhood.
We listed on Gemini.
And the Coinbase listing is yet to come.
And then thirdly, of course, like other altcoin ecosystems until recently, Ton did not have the institutional bid.
And I think this is really important, I think, really to understand in retrospect in terms of this crypto cycle.
You know, of course, Bitcoin tends to lead always, but only Bitcoin had the institutional bid.
Last year, the ETF, which was, of course, humongous, but also the treasury companies. I mean, sale has been added for five years, and there's
God knows how many, you know, over well over 100 Bitcoin treasury companies out there right now.
And of course, we've seen what, you know, the arrival of the treasury companies in Ethereum
has done to Ethereum, what's happening in Solana, and we have all the reason to expect that this
will be a massive positive for Ton as well.
We, of course, just started, but what I would point out is that this is a winner-takes-most game.
In any ecosystem, I think you want to be in the leader.
Of course, if you have a massive ecosystem like Bitcoin, you have a couple of winners,
and maybe that's true for Ethereum as well.
But ultimately, I think Saylor figured out that this is a race. A winner takes most race.
And there's just massive scale economies and raising capital,
especially at the cost of the capital, of course,
also the speed and the scale.
And, you know, Saylor's 30 times bigger,
so they're the next guys, right?
And in Ethereum, there's a race.
And in Solana, there's a race.
In Ton, there is no second best Ton Treasury Company.
You know, I would even go further.
We are more dominant in our ecosystem than Saylor is in Bitcoin.
So we own more percentage of the underlying supply already
than Saylor owns of the underlying supply in Bitcoin.
And so when we really get going here and get our ATM active,
which of course would only really happen if we're trading above book again,
then I think there's going to be a massive flywheel. and I think this is a huge opportunity and a wonderful entry point.
So let me pause here and maybe I'll take some questions.
Great, Manny. You too, I'm sure we're going to have a few questions, but first I just want to note
the in the press release this morning, the net asset value $10.37, so about a 40% discount.
And, you know, any time I see a discount that big, I do more, I dig deeper to say, what's the reason for that discount?
Is there a yellow flag here? Is there a skeleton in the closet?
And I did some research, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but, you know, I looked at, you know, the cap structure, and we reviewed it with you as well to see if there's any kind of you know shorting that may
be going on because of warrant coverage or something like that uh also then i thought
about the core business the legacy business before you got the pipe um maybe that's burning big cash
and that needs a discount but actually uh apparently that's slightly cash flow positive
and not an issue you even have some nols that have a lot of value in the company.
The only thing I found that could be impacting why this big discount is it's not available to buy on Fidelity yet is one.
The biggest retail broker is like $13 trillion or some crazy number at Fidelity, number one brokerage for retail.
some crazy number at Fidelity, number one brokerage for retail.
But then also you talk about these pipe investors that they're selling.
I wonder if we can speak to those two items.
Why are these pipe investors with their cost basis at $9.23?
Not $9.23, I'm sorry.
Was that the price?
$9.51?
$9.51, yeah, $9.51.
$9.51.
Yeah, why do you think they're selling?
And, you know, basically just quickly summarize
why this discount exists right now.
Yeah, look, you hit a number of good points there.
So, again, there are no dilutive warrants
or any sort of, I think, strange,
there isn't really strange shorting going on.
The legacy business is, let's call it EBITDA positive,
but still mightily cash-burning, but it's literally a rounding error.
And yes, there are $130 million of NOLs
that hopefully means we never have to pay tax for a long, long time.
I mean, of course, you could say we should hopefully pay tax soon
because we're going to make so much money from staking,
but we would need to make a lot of profits to get to that point
to use $130 million of NOL.
So this is a $400 million market cap company, right?
Staking revenues alone should be $25 million.
And, of course, it's super high margin.
And so, yeah, I think the reality is it's really just a classic dislocation.
You know, this is, of course, a small to micro cap.
There are lots of folks in the pipe who got, you know, a tiny position only.
You know, we were well oversubscribed when we did the deal.
We had to cut back.
A lot of folks, the insiders took well over a third of the round.
They locked themselves up for over 12 months.
And I think a lot of folks also maybe try to, you know,
look at this as a trade, right?
Like, you know, I can't blame people, right?
And, you know, they thought probably in late July, early August,
they can buy something at $9.51 and sell it at, you know,
I don't know, $20 in 30 days.
And that looked like to be the case for the first three weeks.
And then the stock swung from $20, $25
to teens, and now it's at $7.
And so I think people looking at this
and say, well, I tried to do a trade.
I have a small position.
Just get me out of this.
And look, I'm a capitalist,
so I'm unemotional about it.
Of course, you know, part of me is also disappointed
that some pipe investors thought they're going to do a trade
and they're there, but I'm buying back stock, right?
I mean, like, our buyback is active, right?
And, of course, we still have a lot of cash
and we've got the stake in cash flow,
so we're going to buy back as much as we can at this price.
And this, of course, grows book value per share
because my job here is really growing book value per share, which, of course, apart from
the underlying, hopefully moving the right direction, you basically do by issuing stock at a premium
to book and buy more coins at book. And if the stock is not at a premium
but at a discount, you buy back your stock. And it's just math.
So really, I think there isn't really any good reason other than
that we're new. And look, to be fair, probably people haven't heard of Ton,
which, of course, is the alpha here, right?
I mean, look, there's not many people on this call,
and I think you guys are all aware of Telegram,
how big a company that is.
Telegram is the number six, basically, app in the entire world, right?
So yes, there's five apps in the world which are bigger.
Let's go through the list and ask the question,
which of them are integrating blockchain, right?
You got WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, basically.
And so far, they haven't been allowed.
I'm sure Zuckerberg will go back into stable coins,
but that would only validate our thesis.
And then you've got two Chinese ones,
Tencent, WeChat, ByteDance, TikTok, also not allowed.
And then number six is Telegram,
but by virtue of excluding the other five,
it's live with blockchain, with TAN.
And so it is the biggest
that does it.
And so I think
this story hasn't really
been sunk in yet,
basically, especially in the U.S.,
even in the crypto community in the U.S.,
let alone in the equity stock-picking
community where people have
heard of Telegram, they haven't heard of TAN, and they might know, of course, now and have been
investing in some of the treasury companies.
And then look, yeah, I mean, there's issues like Fidelity, so just for everyone's benefit.
So you cannot buy the stock online with Fidelity.
You have to call up and do it over the phone.
And this is what I would call teething issues.
But it's also upside risk, right?
I mean, clearly, by the time it's plugged in everywhere,
TAN is on Coinbase, TAN X is on Fidelity,
we've tokenized the stock,
like the early bird catches the worm, I guess, right?
So that's what I would say.
Great, thank you.
I had a question, Godfather, go ahead.
Yeah, not so much a question,
just a couple of comments.
And people know me as a fundamental investor,
so I spent some time looking at the utility of Ton. But then, you know, adjusted cost basis that sit concentrated in the sort of 280 level.
And we're at 260 on time now.
And we're right at this sort of support going back to the beginning of 2025, right?
So that looks very interesting to me from a technical standpoint.
But, you know, I think, Manny, the audience here is U.S., right, on this call.
And Telegram has far more adoption in Europe than it does in the U.S., you know, partly because of structural, you know, what you guys pay versus what we pay over here for a lot of these services.
But I think it's worth putting this into perspective.
You know, the number two payment app in China is WeChat.
You know, 900 million users,
and it's just barely below Alipay as number one.
So, I mean, peer-to-peer payments
is just one of the potential
utilities of Telegram. It's already happening, right? We're already seeing it for microtransactions,
et cetera. And, you know, you're getting the early adopter stuff, right? The mini apps,
the games, the marketplaces, the bots, you know, all this, you know, hamster combat, all these,
you know, akin to what we saw in NFT, which is sort of the early stage things here.
But what really stood out to me is I saw that there was a partnership with Tether, like to integrate.
And so this really opens up the DeFi side of things.
And this is, you know, where my question lies to you, Manny.
I know you guys are making a great yield here at around 4% on staking.
But, you know, there are other things that here at around 4% on staking, but there are
other things that come along with expansion into DeFi, right?
Lending, yield farming.
You guys could own your own staking infrastructure and do delegator staking.
There are a lot of things that you guys can do in addition to already trading at a premium
to net asset value, or sorry, a premium to net asset value,
or sorry, a discount to net asset value,
to actually increase the value.
So maybe you can talk a little bit about, you know,
what you're thinking about from a corporate standpoint
with respect to, you know, DeFi expansion or other things,
you know, over and above, you know, straight staking as you're doing now?
Yeah, thank you, Godfather.
Great questions.
I'll try to riff on that a little bit and then go straight into the heart of the question
with DeFi and staking.
So you're absolutely right in the sense that Telegram is not yet as ubiquitous in the US
as it is outside of the US, although Asia is Tom' largest market, unsurprisingly, given Asia
as being the by far most populous continent.
India will have 250 million Telegram users a month.
It's massive in Southeast Asia.
It's banned in China, unsurprisingly,
because it's arguably freedom tech.
But it's big in the Middle East,
it's big in Africa,
it's, of course, big in Europe and so forth.
And again, I wouldn't underestimate the growth, though. Telegram in the Middle East, it's big in Africa, it's, of course, big in Europe and so forth. And again, I wouldn't underestimate the growth, though.
Telegram, in the US, is its largest market in terms of iOS growth.
It's been topping the download charts.
No single messenger has won the US yet, by the way.
Just taking the perspective for the US, because it was a large, homogenous country, effectively,
where there was no roaming fees
sending SMS and text messages
across state lines.
It wasn't the case in Europe,
in, of course, emerging markets.
You send a text 15 years ago
from France to Germany,
you pay roaming fees.
So WhatsApp and other messenger apps
have become much more ubiquitous
outside the US and inside the US.
No one really uses iMessage
in any great deal outside of the US.
And of course, there's WhatsApp, there's Signal, there's iMessage, there's text,
but there's also Telegram, right?
And 87 million users in the US and growing.
And yeah, you're right, the on-chain metrics are actually pretty strong,
although we're roughly number five blockchain in number of users
in terms of usage and on-chain transactions,
but it's like 2025 by market cap, so there's a big gap,
which again I think will be closed.
And the other thing I would say is that because of Telegram's
development and exclusive partnership with Ton,
there's a lot of off-chain usage that Telegram is building
before putting it on-chain.
Last year, these tapping games like Notcoin and then others were first built off-chain
and put on-chain. And you see this spike in on-chain data. And the same thing
is happening right now with Telegram gifts where Snoop Dogg and other, especially
US celebrities, actually are launching gifts on Telegram, which are
becoming NFTs on the Tom blockchain. You can also buy your username, by the way.
You can own at Godfather on Telegram
and actually own it as an NFT
on the Tom blockchain. You can't do that with X.
Elon could just take it away
from you, as you know.
So there's, how many Peters
and Marias are there, right?
These at Peter and Telegram are
pretty valuable real
estate. You can also own at Bank and at Casino
and at Crypto and whatnot. And now coming also own EdBank and EdCasino and EdCrypto and whatnot.
And now, coming to DeFi,
so you're absolutely right.
So basically, there is, of course,
a massive case for stablecoins becoming huge on TAN.
Tether launched, I think it was the fastest launch
from zero to a billion of any launch
of any stablecoin ever,
back in the time, at least.
It was early last year.
And, of course, other stablecoins are coming, right?
So we've got, apart from USDT, now FD, USD, and Athena came early this year,
and USDC, I'm told, is not far off.
And that's, of course, relevant for the Coinbase listing.
And then beyond that,
there's a case for basically the own Telegram Tons stablecoin,
which I think will be a real contender given the distribution.
I'll come back to that.
But, you know, the stablecoin is, of course, at the heart of DeFi.
And, of course, the sort of plain vanilla basically yield option here
is what we're already doing.
We're just taking on coins, right?
And the math is pretty straightforward.
You know, we own, what, 217.5 million coins.
You're getting, call it something like a 4.5% yield.
And that alone should be at current token prices,
roughly 25 million bucks of basically staking revenues.
And as you know, we have to, of course,
if you use a third-party provider, pay staking fees, right?
So the rough math is if you're small,
and I'm just using 5% to make the math simple here.
Let's say you've got a 5% gross yield.
If you're small, you pay 20% of that,
so one point away to a third-party staking provider.
If you're big like us, you maybe pay 10%,
so it goes from 5% to 4.5%, right?
as that is a big number,
you want to ideally do that in-house
and save that.
And so you can expect us planning
to own our own staking infrastructure,
whether we build it or we buy it, right?
And that would hopefully
grow at steady prices,
top line by at least 10%.
Now, beyond that, what we want to do,
we want to do third-party staking, right?
Once we own our own staking infrastructure,
we can also stake for third parties, right?
My first company, Kingsway,
which is also the biggest shareholder here,
has over 100 million coins outside
of TonX, right? And then the
second biggest holder in TonX, which
also is one of the biggest backers of Elon,
they have maybe half of that. And then there's Ribbit,
who's also got a chunk. So all the long-term
big anchor investors in TonX
are also
some of the largest holders of Ton.
And they've got to custody their coins somewhere.
You can choose to wherever you want to custody them.
And you've got to stake them somewhere.
Why don't all the staking profits accrue in the list code TonX
where ultimately you want to build real cash flows?
So then eventually you end up not only with a balance sheet
of coins with hopefully a multiple that is greater than one,
but also in addition a P&L or cash flow statement
that would get a multiple, so double that.
And then the real big prize here, guys,
will be the stablecoin.
I mean, it's been discussed.
And just don't underestimate the power of a billion users.
If you think about like $1,000, the price of an iPhone,
if a billion users have $1,000 in the Telegram
Tons stablecoin, that would be a trillion dollar AUM business. And even at a 3% net interest margin,
that would be $30 billion of cash flow a year. And if you paid half of that to Telegram,
distribution agreement, Coinbase Circle, you would still have $15 billion of cash flow.
Now, even if that takes a decade, and even if you cut these numbers in half, whatever,
there's a massive business here. And so, look, I can't promise that it happens.
I can't promise that if it happens, that Tonex will have a massive piece of it. But I can promise
that I will work for the common stockholder. Greed is good. So, of course, we're going to do the
staking. Of course, we're going to try to do the stablecoin. And of course, we're going to buy back
our stock as long as it's as cheap as it is today. And ultimately, that will also rectify the dislocation in the market.
It's just supply and demand.
And shares are basically moving from weak hands to strong hands.
And frankly, that's a good thing.
I mean, look, part of me wants the stock to go to a dollar for a minute.
I buy everything back for nothing.
And because I'm such a large holder of it, we don't take any promote, we put up 20% of the capital.
And yeah, and so that's what I would say
on the question Godfather.
Amp, turn to you for a minute.
Yeah, I'm just taking all of this in.
Some really good stuff. Manny, I appreciate you coming on today. Godfather, the hand up. So before I throw any questions in here, I'd love to go to that hand.
I think the other thing that I think is worth focusing on here is the jurisdictions outside of the U.S.
Again, this is a U.S. audience and people are just focused on the fact that this thing isn't listed on Coinbase yet.
And I know, Manny, you mentioned Gemini and Robinhood.
I think we had Robinhood in August and Gemini just recently, right?
Yeah, Gemini September, Robin Hood last week of August.
So this is all brand new.
But it's also happening.
There's this Mika in the EU, which you'd be familiar with,
but people over here probably aren't.
And it's really lowered the barriers
for institutional crypto participation.
And this is supporting tons of adoption across the EU, right?
And you're seeing it in some of the other markets
that are sort of leading edge when it comes to crypto.
The Abu Dhabi global market, for example, they approved the equivalent to their FINRA, if you will, approved custody for Toncoin.
This was a huge regulatory milestone.
But Torrey Mazda, right? And these are sort of leading jurisdictions. And then there, of course,
And these are sort of leading jurisdictions.
are others that, you know, have also had their financial regulators approving Toncoin for
institutional trade. So, you know, that part of it, combined with the, you know, a Toncoin
valuation that looks washed out relative to where cost bases are for most of the holders,
to where cost bases are for most of the holders combined with what I see to be a pretty nascent
but growing utility for the coin.
I mean, it only takes one use case, like peer-to-peer payments.
I mean, look exactly what's happened with WeChat pay, you know, for this thing to potentially blow up.
And the other thing I think that people don't really focus on is the fact that, you know, this is layer one blockchain, right?
So you've got Elon, you know, trying to bring aspects of X onto a blockchain, whereas you've already got the backbone here.
So you can start building things
on-chain onto that. Maybe you can talk a little bit about how important that is in terms of where
you're seeing the puck go to, right? You want to skate to where the puck is.
For sure.
These things are being built on-chain. Elon wants to build features on-chain for a reason.
You're already providing those
reasons.
Absolutely.
As I said, Telegram is ahead of
Meta, ahead of X,
ahead of WeChat in many ways
that it's the only one that has true blockchain
integration already. It is live.
Again, part of me
really would like to demo the product, but, you know, again, maybe after, if you DM me, drop me a Telegram handle,
and I'll drop you guys some TonCoin into your wallet, and so you can see it, and, you know,
really, there's, you know, sometimes, like, it requires that sort of a product, and it's like,
wow, I didn't know this. Like, inside Telegram, you can send coins already. And look, I think this is exactly right.
I think the app chains, right?
So clearly, Elon's working on it with X and XAI,
but it's not launched yet, and it was supposed to be.
But I think it is coming.
And ultimately, if you think about also
the Asian examples
this is actually quite topical
last week we had a part of our team
in Korea sponsoring
and keynoting Korea Blockchain Week
this week it's all token 24-9 in Singapore
and in Asia
what's really important to understand is the concept
of the super app
how did Tencent become a trillion dollar market cap at its peak, Asia's most available corporation?
You had WeChat in the middle, the Messenger, but it's so much more than what WhatsApp is
or in the West.
You only have your Messenger with over a billion users like Telegram, but you also have all
the financial applications.
So of course, your bank account, then your bank account with the yield,
so your savings account,
and then peer-to-peer payments,
as mentioned, absolutely huge.
Mobile payments in China are like 200% of GDP
or something like that,
and that came out of nothing.
It literally is much bigger
than Visa or MasterCard's payment volume.
It's absolutely crazy.
Then you have all the e-commerce all inside one app, right?
And then also all the gaming, right?
So basically, we don't have super apps in the West yet.
You know, Elon's working on it with X.
And Telegram has 50% more users than X.
It is the world's biggest free speech, basically, social platform.
Of course, also a different product and slightly different,
so geographic footprint.
But it is ahead.
It is the leader in this space.
And the reason you want to put stuff on chain
is quite obvious, right?
That you want to have, basically, self-custody.
You want to be able to move funds.
And Telegram is very popular in countries
where you have pretty bad fiat currencies
and authoritarian regimes, right?
And sadly, the future is already here.
It's just not even the distributor, right?
That seems to be coming to the West at large and sadly also to the US.
And so you can own your Bitcoin in the Telegram wallet.
You can own basically all that stuff.
You don't need a bank account anymore, effectively.
You can truly live on chain if you really wanted to.
And so I think that's hugely exciting.
And I think, you know, I mean, maybe I'm too bullish on this,
but let me give you my perspective.
You know, I've been diagnosed with tunnel vision.
You know, I think it's not a crazy idea to think that this could play out
a little bit like the Mac 7.
And, you know, I mean two things by that.
Number one is that, you know, what's surprising in hindsight to even like Peter Thiel and all these guys about the Max 7 is who did not invest in like the whatever Series B of Facebook or were hesitant to buy more like, you know, 10 years ago.
It's like, it wasn't like, you know, Facebook ate Google's lunch and Google ate Apple's lunch and Apple ate Amazon's lunch and so forth.
Everything got bigger, right?
Unimaginably bigger than people could have imagined, right?
And so my point is there's probably a handful.
Look, I can't tell you whether it's, you know, five or seven, right?
But probably a handful or so, you know, crypto protocols,
which are clear candidate status for the trillion dollar club, right?
I mean, Bitcoin's a two trillion and going higher.
But if Bitcoin goes to four trillion, it's a two X, right?
Ethereum scratching, right? Ethereum scratching
right half a trillion. So I think Ethereum clearly is on path to go to a trillion. It should be there
by now. But Vitalik forgot what capitalism looks like for a minute. It won't happen here. And that
would be a 2x if Ethereum goes to a trillion. Solana, maybe more interesting, is that 100 billion,
right? And that would be a 10x if it goes to a trillion. But if you believe, like I do, that Ton is
in that club, right, which is like 7 billion,
fully diluted, if you
want to look at it that way, maybe 14,
that would still be like a 70x to a
trillion, right? And for me, it's
the more obvious one because of the
Telegram integration, the fact that we're not
in the US yet.
So I think that's why
this is so big.
And then again, the Tonex equity again,
being such a dislocated price
where hopefully we've got very capable management,
fully aligned, buying back stock,
doing all the right things,
and no one knows about it,
is exciting.
And this is the only way to get equity exposure
to the theme basically, full stop.
Happy to take next question.
Well, Manny, I had about three questions going into this space.
They all got asked and you answered them fantastically.
So I'll give the panel here a last moment
to see if anybody else has any questions to jump in or forever hold your peace.
I saw down in the audience, we've had a lot of people.
I saw one of the ton accounts come in here and several other people that are very interested in this jumping in, trying to figure out what's going on over here and following along the story.
So it seems to be a lot of enthusiasm.
So it seems to be a lot of enthusiasm.
Yeah, I just wanted to add something.
Yeah, I just wanted to add something.
I think it's going to be huge, and you guys touched on this already, but listening and just knowing the crypto space,
the fact that it's not on Coinbase yet, once it gets added to that, you're going to see it jumping up pretty big.
Everybody knows what it's going to be at that point.
So it's going to get big.
Telegram's obviously huge. So when people see it get added to the big, big, you know, Coinbase ones and the other one out, what did you say the other one was in Asia?
It just got added.
Up it in South Korea would even be bigger than Coinbase into the trading volume.
Yeah, I mean, you can just see it starting to get set up.
It just had that and it ran up like we had talked about before when you guys were getting everything set up.
I think crypto just kind of had a little lull and it's going to get fired up right now.
And I do.
I believe in your tone, your T-O-N-X.
The chart looks beautiful for the chart or for the stock.
And then the coin makes a lot of sense.
Again, not on Coinbase yet.
You can use it inside a telegram.
I mean, that's huge, guys.
The Telegram is used everywhere in the world.
And as these things start getting used more, it's just going to be getting bought up, bought up, bought up.
And it'll drive up the price.
It'll be supply and demand.
So I see it as a great opportunity.
I've been watching this chart, Manny, and keeping an eye on it.
So I just wanted to chime in with that because I think it will be huge once it hits Coinbase.
It's going to really catapult it into another level.
Hey, Manny, you got any ETA or thoughts
on when that'll come on Coinbase?
I mean, I can't speak for Coinbase.
And these things, sadly,
always take a little longer than you would like.
I'm not surprised that Coinbase is the last one to list,
given the massive compliance department there.
In fact, it's a public company.
Look, I used to run the Ton Foundation as president
up until becoming executive chairman of this company,
where I just thought running this company
will have actually a much greater impact than running Ton Foundation,
which was also a non-exec capacity,
and the foundation is in great hands.
And so, look, I met Brian Armstrong in March,
and, you know, he was, of course, very positive, right?
I mean, like, you know, Telegram is, you know, the biggest,
it's a default messenger in crypto period, right?
So, and a lot of lesser coins are already listed on Coinbase.
You know, the way they operate, I can't blame them,
is to do kind of compliance first and then tech integration second.
And, you know, it takes a while.
But, you know, they want, of course, USDC on 20 to be listed and like launched.
And, of course, why not, right?
I touched on that earlier.
And so, look, I think, you know, I would be very, very disappointed if that's not a Q4 event.
Right.
Q4 could frankly be massive here.
Right.
I mean, again, we're going through a quiet period tomorrow night, so I can speak a lot more freely today than I can speak in 48 hours.
Right.
But, you know, what I would like to see in Q4 is the Coinbase listing, is the upbit listing for the underlying, right?
Really filling in the blanks.
And especially for the institutional buyer,
like, you know, Coinbase is sadly a must
in terms of like the, you know,
custody and Coinbase Prime and all that stuff, right?
But I think that will be, will that be huge?
Now, I would like to see, of course,
also USDC and other stable coins coming.
I'd like to see executing us on the staking and buyback.
And we announced that this morning, so that's well on track.
I would also like to see the Telegram founder throwing more of his weight behind it.
And I think there's a lot of interesting stuff potentially cooking.
Again, I can't tell you what I don't know,
but he was just seen with Lex Friedman in both France and the UAE.
And so I wouldn't be shocked if there are some big podcasts coming out and some really big innovations.
But you should just look at Telegram founder Pavl Durov's X account and, of course, his Telegram channel.
And he's been posting about a ton a lot.
He's the biggest holder of it.
There's a huge ambition there.
He is constantly adding value to it in so many different ways.
And ultimately, it's very seamlessly integrated already.
You can pay for your Telegram premium subscription in TonCoin.
You can buy your username in TonCoin, and so forth.
But the best is yet to come.
And frankly, what I really want us to execute on here is really making a first proper introduction to the US retail investor, which we haven't really done yet.
So this is one of my first spaces, and I'm very excited to be with you guys.
And I think this is just super early and the price is so compelling. first basis and you know I'm you know very excited to be with you guys and I
think this is like just super early and the prices are so compelling so again I
wouldn't be shocked if there's some insider buying happening as well here
because you know what why not if you're you know certainly if you're like a
long-term believer in this like why would not what do you not add to your
position and then lastly I also want to see us to tokenize the stock
on the Ton blockchain, of course.
So hopefully that's quite imminent.
You know, there are certain investors who, you know,
as I said earlier, kind of live on chain.
They know Ton, own Ton.
They, you know, wouldn't want to buy this equity
through like the traditional finance system.
But I would like to buy it on chain and keep it in their wallet, right?
And so why not provide that?
And I think that also will create another leg of demand.
And ultimately, I think the selling will be exhausted.
The company is going to be staking, will be profitable, will be buying back.
And I think really the stats could align for us already in Q4.
But especially over the sort of medium term, like in 12 months' time, I think we'll look back at this and say this was really like, you know, in hindsight,
it was obvious, I guess, Elon would say.
But yeah, thanks so much for the audience.
Happy to take more questions and really excited to do this more regularly, sharing our thoughts
and updates here.
And do we have a quick minute for Godfather?
Go ahead, Elon, really quick.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. So, look, I can't think of another precedent, but if people don't, you know, recognize, you know, how important it is to have a crypto that's natively accessible within a mainstream app, like in terms of onboarding friction and use and all the rest of that. And I know Manny isn't exactly saying it,
but if you actually look at, you know,
what founders of Ton and so on have been doing,
Ton has matured a lot, right?
There is focus here on regulatory compliance.
There is, you know,
there are certain boxes that you need to have ticked before Brian Armstrong
and others will put you on the platform.
It comes down to things like fraud protection and transparent infrastructure, you know, all these kinds of things that are necessary for long term viability.
And this has kind of been being put in place.
And then, of course, you know, you've got this native accessibility through the mainstream map.
native accessibility through the mainstream map.
And I guess, you know, the last part that I would love
to have a little bit more clarity on is
what does the developer community look like?
And, you know, from your previous purchase
that, you know, at the top of, you know,
the-
Confoundation, yeah.
Yeah.
What's being done in terms of, you know,
promoting development and, you know,
innovation and adoption within this user
community.
Yeah, on the developer side, it's hugely important.
On a high level, the thesis is, which I think is correct, that the developers will go where
the users are, right?
And frankly, that's not a blockchain or crypto thing at all.
Think about if you and I, Godfather, had the brilliant idea to start our own new
operating system for mobile, competing with iOS and Android. And we go to the developer community
and say, hey, build some apps for our new OS. And the first question we're going to get is how many
users you got. And if the answer is zero, then they're going to say, see you later. And so
ultimately, no one wants to build an app for an audience that doesn't exist, right? And Telegram is, of course, the largest audience, frankly, in crypto, right?
And so now the reality, though, is that's theory that has only played out so far in the developer ecosystem, let's call it east of Berlin.
And so very strong in the CIS community, also actually very strong in the CIS community also actually very strong in the sort of Asian developer community
a lot of ex-WeChat developers have come over to Telegram
building on Ton
because the Chinese have a habit of changing the rules
they turned off mobile gaming monetization
what was it, two, three years ago
it was just government policy
they didn't want the youth to be addicted to their mobile games years ago, you know, it was just government policy.
They didn't want the youth to kind of be addicted to their mobile games and turned off monetization.
As you know, in China, basically by now, the tech giants are kind of married to the, you know, CCP.
And so where do the developers go, right?
They're not going to, you know, become dishwashers tomorrow morning.
They're going to look around and find Telegram.
Oh, mini apps, you know, sounds very familiar to WeChat.
Oh, there's a ton inside it.
You can monetize.
Let's go, right?
And so that's been kind of happening.
So now there's a huge effort to also attract the world's best, you know,
Web3 developers who are in the U.S.
And that's basically a concerted effort, you know, the U.S. market entry.
And just to give people, you know, the U.S. market entry. And just to give people perspective, so it was a self-imposed, basically, restriction that under Biden-Harris,
Ton would not enter the U.S.
Maybe overly conservative, but maybe also the right call.
But now, of course, you know, over the last year, there's been a kind of a decisive market entry that really started this year.
So the wallet went live in July.
TonX went live in August.
Gemini listed in September, Robinhood in August.
So this has really started since June, really, June, July.
And the developer push is part of that.
So very much open for attracting the right developers. It's already a pretty
vibrant community with over 10,000 active devs and a lot of COID deployed, but the best is yet
to come there as well. Well, it's been a pleasure having Manny on here. Manny, as we follow along with the story here,
what's the best way for the audience to keep in touch here?
I don't know if you guys have a Telegram channel as well
or any other methods that people can...
Obviously, I know you guys put out public releases and stuff as well.
I saw that update that came out a few weeks ago.
But I was just curious if somebody's trying to follow along really with this story that develops.
What's the best way to stay involved with the community?
Sure.
Follow me on X right here.
And the handle is atmanualstarts.
And the company's handle is attonstrat.
And exactly the same spelling, atmanualstarts and attonstratrat is also the official Telegram channels, unsurprisingly.
So Telegram and X are the apps.
And then please, if you want to try it and are curious, just DM me on X and I'll need your Telegram handle.
And then I'll basically ping you some Toncoin over so you can play with it.
And if you like it, hopefully buy some more and then hopefully buy a stock.
So really excited to be with you guys.
Thanks for giving me such a distinguished audience
and look forward to this again.
Yeah, absolutely.
Ben, any final thoughts, comments, questions from your end
before I close this up here?
No, that's great.
We're actively trading this in our Discord investing
and this is not much trading, just
buying up that float, but
there are some strategies
that we're interested in that we've been talking about
in our Discord, so
yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunity down here
at a 40% discount to
NAV. I'm personally
invested in this and I've been increasing my position,
so yeah, let's
see that go up soon, I hope.
Boom, there you have it.
Manny, any last comments from you
to leave with the audience today before I close this up?
Content is king, but distribution is the queen
and she's wearing the pants, at least in my household.
The point is you want the distribution,
which Telegram has, Anton. Thank you guys so much.
Really appreciate it. What an amazing quote to end the space on today. Manny, appreciate you
coming on. Big shout out to the whole small cap crew, MoneyMark, Dougie Fresh, The Godfather,
and of course, my co-host Ben over at Story Trading. Make sure you're following everyone
up here. And of course, if you want to stay in the know with everything going on over there,
make sure you follow Manuel's account right there. Manny, appreciate you. Appreciate everyone.
And if you missed any part of this space, of course, it is recorded as always. You can go
back and hear some of those market thoughts at the beginning. And then, of course, this great
time we've had spent here on the back half interviewing Manny. Appreciate everyone. Take
care. We'll see you guys on the next space.
Thanks everyone. Thank you.
