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UNDER EXPOSED: Crypto’s Biggest Week Ever
Recorded: Aug. 12, 2025 Duration: 1:04:28Space Recording
Short Summary
In a bullish episode of Underexposed, hosts discuss the recent surge in Bitcoin and ETH prices, institutional interest from Harvard and Trump's executive order on crypto in 401ks, and the implications of the SEC's lawsuit drop against Ripple. With Tom Lee's firm planning to invest $20 billion in ETH, the conversation highlights significant trends and growth opportunities in the crypto space.
Full Transcription
Thank you. GM, GM, everyone. Thank you for joining us here this morning, this afternoon, wherever you're at.
We're going to start the show in just a minute.
I want to give a few shout-outs.
Who we got?
Zanzibar, Erking, GM, JD Blackburn, GM Midsey, Harry Krishna, T, the rec guys.
Love to see.
Oh, Hefner, there he is.
F, GM, my friend.
Who else do we have?
Balance.
All right. Heck, Tony, Mike, GM, my friend. Who else do we have? Balance. All right.
Hechtoni.
Mike, GM, GM.
We've got D's up on stage.
We'll get the other folks up here shortly.
But, Charlie, whenever you're ready, let's kick it. Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 38 of Underexposed, our weekly macro show, hitting all of the biggest topics and trends impacting
crypto in Web3.
Folks, today is Tuesday, August 12th, and we've had a series of majorly bullish macro
crypto headlines over the last two weeks, and yet it seemed price action wasn't quite
following.
Well, guess what? Now it is.
Bitcoin is green. ETH is soaring. And we're asking, is this the most bullish two-week
stretch in crypto history? And when all-time hot, we're going to break it down on today's
show. I'm your host, Tyler D. I've got my co-hosts in the house. First up, D's art collector, coin stacker, and more.
GM, how you doing?
GM, man. Another week in paradise out here. Glad to be back with you guys.
It's a good week to be doing a crypto show. I can say that.
They're more fun when we're actively pumping, at least.
We've got Peter Jennings on, founder of several companies, still finds time to spend with us.
Peter, GM, how you doing?
GM, great to be with you guys guys i look forward to this every week uh it's certainly more fun than any form of crypto or market content when things are going up versus
when things are going down so yeah we're uh watching eth tom lee is uh is the ethereum savior
it seems i'll get into that uh. Stoked to chat with you boys.
I'm stoked as well. No Jeeves today,
folks. He is on
Dadwatch. Just had
his second child, a boy.
Congrats to Jeeves and Mrs. Jeeves.
Enjoy some time
off with the newborn.
A couple quick housekeeping items. We are live
on Kik. Make sure to follow our channel.
We are going to start doing giveaways soon on KICK for Underexposed.
Not yet today, but they are coming, rest assured.
And I bet we'll find something for our early supporters.
So check us out on KICK as well.
Quick disclosure, the opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the speakers
and do not reflect the views or opinions of any organizations they are associated with. We are here to share insights,
provoke thought, and maybe even stir some debate, but this is not, I repeat, not financial advice.
While we talk about markets, investments, and trends, remember your financial decisions should
be made with the help of your own research or with advice from a licensed professional.
All right, let's get into it here today, folks.
I'm going to fire up the screen share for those who are in the stream.
From a macro perspective,
taking a look at prices, we are green.
Bitcoin just hit 120K.
It looks like it dipped slightly below,
up 6% on the week.
ETH is up 25% since last week's show.
It is at $44.77.
And I personally can't really remember it being much higher than this
and me actually seeing the price.
We'll go into those drivers here in a minute.
From a macro perspective, we did have CPI today.
The numbers came in in line with expectations, basically.
Inflation is up a bit, but effectively in line with expectations, basically. Inflation is up a bit, but effectively in line. Stocks were green, largely. On the back of that, odds of a September rate cut, I want to say are at 94%.
So one rate cut seemingly certain to happen here in the near future.
Seemingly certain to happen here in the near future.
That was kind of it from the macro side of things.
I guess there's some tariffs.
Tariffs aren't necessarily impacting inflation too much.
And those China tariffs got delayed another 90 days.
So we're going to keep kicking that head can down the road.
The headlines were in crypto, folks.
And again, we're starting to see these hit the price action.
But just in the past two weeks, I'm going to rattle through this list for you.
So the White House released its digital assets report.
Then we had the SEC introduce Project Crypto to bring all financial markets on chain.
A few days later, the SEC gave the green light for liquid crypto staking, paving the way
for both ETH staking ETFs and sole staking ETFs and a broad range of DeFi use cases.
Last week, we had Trump sign the executive order
allowing crypto in 401ks.
We had the SEC drop their lawsuit against Ripple.
It's been going on for nearly five years.
We had Harvard disclosing that they're buying Bitcoin
in a huge signal to the market.
And then ETH.
This is ETH week.
ETH broke 4,400.
We have a new single day ETH ETF record with,
let me find this, $1.02 billion in net inflows yesterday.
And then the news this morning,
Tom Lee, who's been driving the push, they've bought, how much do they have?
They have 1.2 million ETH right now worth $5 billion.
Well, guess what?
They're going to buy $20 billion more if they can.
One of the biggest pushes and rapid pushes we have ever seen.
And it is driving up the price to levels not seen since December,
2021.
And I think there's really only been more expensive ETH than this for a
handful of weeks in ETH's history.
So I think the all time high waiting room is open.
A lot to dig into.
And I want to spend time talking ETH in depth.
But before we get to ETH, ITH I guess Peter I'll toss it to you
any reactions
on the macro side of things with
CPI coming in
rate cuts seemingly coming in
September. Any thoughts
on broader macro jumping out
this morning? Yeah I think we're going to get
rate cuts in September. We were talking before
I haven't confirmed the statistic but it sounds like it's in the 90s now that we get a rate cut
in September. I imagine, you know, Jackson Hole will be a lot more indications as well,
given that that was used last year to kind of indicate where rates are going. So that'll be
interesting to see. Probably the most relevant macro thing right now is just kind of
everything with the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. And Tony looks like the nominee for Trump. So
still a lot of talk. I know we talked about it last week, kind of both sides. Kramer was on CNBC
saying he can't trust any of the data now. who knows? That to me is probably still kind of the
big thing that we're going to look for. It's clear that we need reform and we need better data there.
So hopefully we get that. That's something that I'm watching. But from a rate perspective,
you can just see it. The 10-year is still kind of hovering around 4.3. It will be interesting to see if that moves, even with the rate cut and what happens in September.
But yeah, I mean, today we should talk mostly about crypto
because from a macro perspective, there's nothing too crazy.
Everything kind of came in within line,
which I think gave markets a reason to keep melting up.
And crypto specifically, there's a bunch of headlines that
are extremely bullish um specifically for eith there really are and i i read i gave this in
in the read-in i wrote a newsletter about it yesterday i'm just gonna quickly just
show this to people again just to hit you over the head with like what has happened
in the past two weeks like we literally had the White House release a digital
assets report. The SEC introduced Project Crypto. The SEC didn't lean into
crypto staking. The SEC didn't drop their case against Ripple. Trump signed
the executive order for 401ks. Now,
treasury codes are piling in. ETH breaks 4K. Harvard's buying
Bitcoin.
It is just a really massive stretch.
And it's summertime. I mean, a lot of times people expect that to be more of a quiet time in markets.
And yet, in fact, it is quite the opposite.
And I think other than maybe that two-week stretch when Trump took office in January and started actually signing the executive orders about crypto and building the framework in the U.S. that confirmed that he was being truthful in his campaign promises.
I can't really pinpoint a more bullish stretch.
I'm curious.
I mean, Peter, what are your reactions to this high level?
Is this the most bullish two-week stretch in crypto's history?
Great question.
I haven't given enough thought to point to other points.
Maybe when there's some magic with Ethereum that people could point to as just like, hey, this is something that's way different than what Bitcoin is.
And like the potential is really exciting. But from a regulation standpoint, I mean, there's no question.
And it's just clearly getting adopted. And I think the major theme that I want to talk about
that's just driving so much action is this is the institutional cycle. We saw it with Bitcoin
and the ETF. Now we're seeing it with these treasury co's, which I'm still pessimistic
about a lot of the treasury co's long term. But Tom Lee is certainly someone that I really admire
and respect, especially someone who's been a permable, which is directly been just very correct,
given the debasement of fiat currency. So Tom Lee is an incredible salesman. He's doing an unbelievable job, you know, on mainstream media like CNBC, but then also on the podcast circuit.
And he's raising a bunch of capital and they're getting more flows than than strategy now.
So I give him a lot of credit.
him a lot of credit and obviously there's going to be a lot of copycats.
And obviously, there's gonna be a lot of copycats.
But yeah, I think the major theme right now is this is the institutional cycle.
We're getting clear regulation which enables huge flows of capital to come in and you want
to be in front of that.
So yeah, the big winners are Bitcoin and ETH thus far.
And I think ETH has a lot of room to run, given the capital that we're going to see flow
into it based on these DATs and kind of everything else. So I'm sure we'll get into kind of the,
you know, second order effects on this. But for right now, man, it's hard to ignore this chart.
I mean, I'm just, just green candle, green candle, green candle. Some small pullbacks here and there on like
the hourly and daily charts, but
the trend is just straight
up into the right. I can't ignore
this chart, the chart I'm showing on the screen.
Tom Lee and crew,
they bought 317,000 ETH
last week, 208,000 ETH
the week before that, 58,000 ETH
the week before the bat. They're
accelerating somehow.
The best narrative in crypto is price.
That is...
They are achieving that.
This is nuts.
On August 2nd, ETH was below $3,400.
So it's now up $1,000.
How about Nick Tomino?
How many times on this show were we were we not that excited about eath and then nick was just banging that drum
broken claw i mean to be to be fair uh and i think this is another conversation that a lot
of people are having is you know all the eath permabowls you know are now victory lapping they
were also bull posting when it was down only for four years.
So you need to be thoughtful around it, but it is exciting to see this.
Yeah.
I can only point to less than a dozen folks who were actively bullposting
ETH the entire time.
So I think those folks certainly deserve their moment in the sun.
Dee's curious.
Hey, man, if the price versus bitcoin doubles from here they're break
even to where they at where the merge happened so congrats to them they're fucking geniuses
they're the best investors i know nobody deserves to make it more than the people who've been
holding you since the merge i love them let's take a let's take a look at that i'm going to
try to pull up the eath bitcoin chart. So a significant move this year.
I think we have now flipped green on the year.
Yeah, do like the five year.
Yeah, so.
That's what I'm looking at.
It's harder to tell because I feel like half your screen is like data and not the chart.
But I have it, you know, a little bit more scaled out on my screen.
It looks way worse.
There we go.
You hit like full chart in
the top right corner hit the black oh okay yeah yeah and then open the uh yeah there you go and
then you zoom out and then flip it to bed oh yeah so there you go that's what i'm looking at
if they get back up to where they were in 2022 that that's like $10,000 ETH.
Which is exciting.
As somebody who does own more ETH now than I did a few shows ago.
But yeah, it's still a long way back, right?
Like we're really excited over the first 2X year
off the lows after it went down.
I don't even know, what, 70% plus?
We're very excited about this 2x which is good but there's probably another 2x in here i think yeah i think it went down more than
it went down about 75 percent it was brutal man to below 0.02 which is a crazy drawdown
i think one bitcoin was like 57 eth at one point right now yeah around the time
we're looking at the punks it was like over 50 when we bought those punks which is uh just
absurd i think the bull case if you look at this is man look how much further it could go
right right just uh just getting started well i want to get into it. You kind of went there. I'm curious.
Are you making trading decisions,
portfolio changes with this new ETH setup?
And I think it's fair to call it new
because we didn't have $40 billion
in ETH Treasury Coase two months ago.
Yeah, so I did sell some things
and get some more E eth back in the portfolio
um sadly one of those things i sold was a punk um and that sold into that like 60 punk suite but i
actually would have been better off just not even ever listing it because it would be up another uh
50 grand or so from where i sold it but other than that uh pretty comfy holding the eth assets i did finally get some bids to hit
on some nft collections i've been trying to get for a couple weeks finally got my like first
align draws and uh some other things but i'm looking at more of these like you know cheaper
nft collections where eth goes to 5k or 6k do i think that these collections have a chance to double or more in eth and then
buy a couple of those um but i think as eth just continues to go up that's bullish for the entire
eth ecosystem i think that's bullish for d5 coins i feel like that's bullish for nfts
uh clearly it's been bullish for punks we've been seeing all sorts of price action and rumors around these punks.
We keep seeing these treasury co-models come up.
What does that look like for other tokens?
Are we going to see one for things that aren't Bitcoin ETH,
and do we want to allocate to those?
Solana ETH is one of the worst charts I look at every day too
that looks terrible
Solana ETH is down over
50% from the
April top
it's down about 55% I think
and that doesn't look to be slowing
down until we maybe get some
treasury companies that would like to own some Solana
so I don't know
it's tough to be super bullish
on my remaining Solana bag.
Yeah.
And then you go through this mental exercise
of, okay, if I'm bullish on Solana,
am I really just bullish on Pump?
And is buying Pump a better risk-adjusted play
than just buying Solana?
Is there going to be a treasury code for Pump?
I don't know. Maybe we're too early.
Maybe it's too cheap.
But I don't know.
I think it's okay to be bullish on Solana as an ecosystem right now
and maybe be cautious on price action.
And one of the
headlines that we didn't talk about, but arguably
one of the bigger that is impacting
trading is BlackRock has apparently come out and
said they're not going to make a Sol or XRP ETF anytime soon. Two chairs, two chairs of BlackRock,
Bitcoin and ETH. And my immediate reaction to that was that was bullish for Bitcoin and ETH,
bearish for Sol, bearish for XRP, but mostly bullish for ETH. Because I think a part of my
bear case was that as soon as the other ETFs came in the door,
it would take away from the ETH bid,
which is the hedge bid.
It's the diversification bid, so to speak.
I missed Bitcoin,
so I don't want to miss the second Bitcoin bid.
But now there's only two options,
and that's another full factor for ETH.
So you sold a PONC.
You've been looking at other NFTs.
Have you looked at any ETH ECO tokens at all?
Not outside of the ones we usually talk about, like RECT and stuff.
I actually did sell a very small amount of RECT when it went over 550 million
because I was just sitting there
with a shitty ding grin trying to figure out how this uh wrecked position has become worth over 10%
of my liquid crypto portfolio from a you know 10k angel investment so definitely had to sell some of
that I think it's still probably fine I actually keep going back to pump um I don't know if I'm
stupid but I keep looking at Bonk and Pump metrics.
I see that Pump seems to be winning again.
Pump at the start of August, or from the start of August until now,
it's up like 60% off the bottom.
It's been stronger than Solana.
This comes back to my Solana bet, where if I want to bet on Solana, would I rather make
that bet through holding Solana or holding
Pump?
It does feel like Alon
has had more plans and
thought of things that people weren't
originally giving him credit for.
Yeah.
It also has a very nice buyback
thing going on.
As long as those metrics remain high,
then buybacks remain high, which is good for the token.
It's tough for me to hold the Solana.
And the more I talk about it,
the more I feel like I need to put more into the pump.
I only bought a fifth of the pump I wanted to have.
I'm not fully allocated. I'm still pretty small.
I'm sidelined right now.
But quickly looking at the chart, I think something that has surprised me is how rapidly they've come back in market share.
Was Let's Bonk doing something, I don't want to say malicious, but
how did they go from nothing to getting such a big market share
to losing it all within a month?
Is it really just timing and
people trying to find the pump?
I don't know.
Hotball money and incentives. That to me is pretty clear.
What incentives though? We don't have any incentives well there's a lot of speculation around bump incentives right
there's a lot of speculation that's i mean in the block thing i mean i think there's probably some
incentives there i don't know i mean who knows what's happening behind closed doors and
what people are doing and as we go with a lot of these tokens and NFTs and everything else, there's so much wash trading and just other, I mean, there's a lot of manipulation out there.
I don't have any data to back this up, but my tinfoil hat theory is it does not feel
very organic now in hindsight. Bongs run from a 10% market share to 80% and back down to
10%.
I thought I was losing my mind and that Pump had just somehow lost the note they had for
a year and a half.
But yeah, maybe it seems like they haven't.
I mean, there's clearly a cohort of folks who are driving a lot of the volume in meme
coin launches and trading.
And all it takes is then kind of packing up shop and moving.
And maybe that's what happened
and they moved back um but you can see it like the bonk chart is looks pretty bad and pump again
i'm sidelined from this trade which is painful it looks good and there's we got it at a 50 discount
dude to the icl who bought it nice It still is a little bit painful.
If you gave Alan money in the ICO
and he just took your money and bought his token back at a discount.
And then the price goes from half the ICO price back to the ICO price.
But there's a setup here that it's one of the few tokens on the market
that actually are using revenue to buy it back.
And it's hype and it's
pump there's now chatter that uniswap might be doing this um we're not quite there yet i think
that is a an interest in trade to potentially watch um pump is an interesting one d's i like
it i think it probably it would not surprise me if it 2x is from here over the next couple months
i don't think it's like an overnight 2x by any means, but I
think it could very well just keep grinding up. And it's a way for people to bet on memes without
betting individual memes. And I think a lot of people just don't really want to anymore,
which I understand it's been a hard, hard game. I mean, look, one of our beloved i mean it's bouncing now four coins sold off from dollar 60 to 80 cents
dude i felt bad yesterday sorted my list by like uh biggest gainers and fallers
what i sorted by the fallers number one faller on my list was dizzy which i'm getting rugged on
and then fart coin was number two and i like, what the fuck happened to Fartcoin?
Yeah, this has been a painful one.
It is showing a little bit of life
at that little local low.
So hopefully this level holds
and this is like the Pico low
and we go back to the top of the range.
I'll share my thesis one more time.
So we had this one big dip grind up.
I think this dip is in.
I think we're going to grind back up and we'll have one more before the Q4.
So we have the exit pump.
Next one is the exit pump.
No, no.
Before the late Q4 big rally.
Oh, before we have one more good pump before the great pump.
Yeah, yeah.
That's my mental model here.
And everyone is going to have to earn it because it became too consensus.
Got to shake everyone out.
Peter,
I want to toss it to you.
I guess I'm curious,
have you been making any portfolio changes?
Bought a couple of punks.
Finally.
One of which I bought in USDC on Gandhi,
which was a,
is for 252,000,
which is very close to the floor in U.S. dollar terms
for Punk that we'll see how it trades.
And then bought a Punk that I've owned on and off over the years.
Kind of set up, I've been doing a lot of different things
with how I want to have everything stored.
And I got a little stink bit on my profile picture from a punks OTC. Uh, so that's what, that, that was classic. Um,
the other thing I've been really adding to my hobby position, um, you know,
I'm doing a lot of different things there. I think, you know,
it's set up extremely well. Um,
Jeeves actually put something in our chat that's pretty wild and it's mostly
just, um, you know, price action that's driving this.
But if you look, Avi's borrowers
has just gone straight up.
I mean, we were down at 10 billion
in the middle of the year.
Now it's over 25 billion in active borrows.
New all-time high.
Current ARR from this tweet is over nine figures.
I mean, I love this business.
And I think if you look at what's happening with ETH doing super well and the regulations that we've gotten, I think it's very clear that we're going to see more and more assets on chain.
And that to me is great for DeFi.
me is great for DeFi. Imagine you are an early employee in a private company like a Stripe or
something like that, or something even a little bit more liquid than Stripe, and your private
company becomes tokenized and you can borrow against it on Aave. That's how I think the world
should function. And I'm excited for that future. I think it's going to happen. So right now it's just crypto assets.
And obviously things are going straight up because ETH is doing so well.
But to me, Aave, Athena, those are huge winners.
Athena is doing extremely well with this ETH move,
given their funding strategy and how much they're making on the basis trade
with ETH specifically.
So it's wild out there. And yeah, the Athena price is
relevant. The USD market cap is even more relevant to me. But that ecosystem is just absolutely
vibrant and crushing. So I think the regulation is really good for these real products on the
Ethereum network. I think it's very clear, given kind of what the institutions are doing,
that we're going to see real innovation on ETH.
And I think the big innovation is going to come
in tokenizing real world assets
and bringing other financial products on chain.
Yeah, that's big for D5.
And stablecoins too.
I meant to, I mean, stablecoins is the clear,
huge thing now,
but I think ETH is the big winner there. What do you guys think?
Stable coins is a trickier one for me now. And a couple of headlines that are relevant to this.
So Circle reported financial results for Q2. They had great revenue growth year over year up 50%.
The stock pumped on the back of this,
but the biggest surprise is they're doing their own L1, ARK.
So Tether is doing their own L1 with Plasma.
Circle is doing their own with ARK.
And now Payments Giant, Stripe, is also building their own L1.
And it's got me thinking a little bit.
I think a part of the ETH thesis was this is the stable coin chain.
Is it the stable coin chain?
There's three other stable coin chains now that are being built.
So I actually wonder if this is a bit
bearish for ETH
on a longer term time horizon.
And we haven't had a whole lot of time to unpack this yet.
I haven't spent a whole lot of time thinking about it.
And I don't think anything matters in the near term
with Tom Lee buying $20 billion.
The number's going to go up.
But there's been a lot of chatter
about ETH being a stablecoin chain,
and now there's real signs that it's not going to be.
And I also wonder,
what does this mean for our overall blockchain ecosystem?
If every player builds their own,
then is the opportunity then like aggregators?
Because it's going to be a pain in the ass
to try to transact
across all these. Curious if you guys have additional thoughts on that.
Yeah. I need to unpack it more too. Definitely.
I saw this as someone who's short circle was not,
not excited to see this.
I still think that there's validity to that short given the low float and how
many employees and different people. I think
it's like some 80 plus percent of Circle shares are still not able to sell. So it'll be interesting
to see how that transpires, but definitely really good earnings. And USDC, they've done a great job
at Circle with this product. Just, yeah, we'll see how that goes. Again, not financial advice.
The other ones are interesting i mean
you know jp morgan comes out are they going to do their own chain too um i need to to do more
research i would imagine that yeah aggregators can be winners and i still think a lot of the
settlement and like the big things will still be done underneath but maybe i'm wrong uh certainly
open-minded to being wrong um i still think kind of what we're seeing from institutions very bullish for eith
um and that it will be a settlement layer but hard to say what do you think these
it's tough i'm so uh i feel like out of the stable coin betting market that i'm not even
super aware of all the l ones that are coming up. And are we even going to use them? Or are we just going to use
the version of their stablecoin
that is then, you know, bridged
to Ethersalon anyway?
So, I'm
not sure. I wonder how Jeebs' short is doing.
That's my one concern with this
one circle. Not great.
I want to ask Jeebs for an update
on his short position.
He's going to be doing fine. We were talking about the short of 300 too.
Obviously today is not great.
Can I ask a
180 question that's completely taboo?
Sure.
Because my feelings on these I feel like
have changed over the last
two months or so.
Do either of you
have any interest in V1 punks at all?
Strictly from a ROI, like money-making based,
I'm going to buy these and sell them to somebody for a higher price thinking.
Not like you're bought into the historical relevance
and you had a seven-hour long call with sean bonner and other ogs to
talk about the provenance but like if you were trying to make money you have any interest in v1
punks or not so i bought one a couple weeks ago got one i hated sold it kind of regretted selling
it and they're up like uh from two to three point two cents so the the idea was kind of right i just executed it extremely poorly because i've got
one from a bid that i hated um but i hate to say this but i think they're interesting if you only
care about uh making money i like it i mean all the eth beta plays are going to be positioned
well i mean i prefer maybe i don't like like like what's more likely to happen? Is the punk floor
more likely to go
from 55th
to 110th?
Or do you think the V1 punk floor
will go from 3 to 6?
Probably 3 to 6, but the problem is
what's more likely? The V1s go
from whatever they're now, 3 to
1, or the actual punk's going from 50 to, or 55 to whatever, 20.
Like, you think of actual punks dump,
would you say if they go from 55 to 20?
I'm saying what's more like, okay, so on the upside front,
I would agree that there's more asymmetry probably for V1s to double,
but on the downside, I think there's way,
like, it wouldn't shock me to see V1 Punk's
floor to drop to...
Like a 50% dunk.
Yeah, like one and a half floor price
in V1 or 25 or 27
to make it
apples to apples. 27 Punk floor.
What's more likely? That's fair. I guess if you just
wanted strict ROI and didn't want to bet
on V1s
in big chunks, or V1s in big chunks,
or V2s in big chunks.
I think they are really interesting.
It was also interesting to see Artie come back over the weekend and dump a million dollars worth of shit within a couple hours.
And he floored his V1 Ape for like 57.5,
which I was kind of impressed it even had a bid.
Yeah.
Or no, sorry, he sold it for $46,
and then they flipped it for $57 within a day.
Sorry, I was looking at the wrong sale.
But these have just been on my mind a lot
as I think more about the node acquisition of punks,
and I think more of just greedy motherfuckers
pushing shitty narratives.
And I keep looking at these these and I'm like,
I feel like these are probably free money.
But then again, you know, moonbirds are also three.
Maybe it's just a weird time.
I think from an ROI, that's another fun one.
I will just round this out.
I think from a pure ROI standpoint, you raise an interesting point.
I think from a pure ROI standpoint,
you raise an interesting point.
They also can flip more liquid too.
And just not move for a while.
There's also like the hedge narrative.
I mean,
I've talked to stats about this,
Sam,
and he has a handful of punks.
And I think he's got a handful of V1s just like in case the narrative
ever does flip.
Yeah.
I feel like it is stupid not to have a couple.
If you're holding hundreds of youth and punks and you can buy like,
you know,
three A's for.
You can buy insurance for 10 E.
Right.
And then if not,
you just get the look back in the future and be like,
I knew I was right.
These things are fucking terrible and I hate them.
But like,
do we think the insurance thing is real?
Like, is there ever...
What are the odds that these actually become more valuable
than what we deem punks now?
I mean, what are the odds that Bored Apes came out
and flipped punks, you know?
I'm not good at thinking on odds, apparently.
I think the odds of these flipping V2 punks
is like less than 1%.
I'd say less than 1% as well.
But I've seen such dumb shit happen.
And like, I don't know.
The newer entrants you get who have no real background or, you know,
they weren't living in the lore.
Like, do they care as much?
Or are they just like, well, these are like, you know,
misprinted Michael Jordan rookie card.
I still want it.
I don't know.
It is really tough.
But I do look at these things every day.
The last couple of weeks, I've been on Blur and OpenSea every day looking at NFTs again.
And these are ones I do look at every day.
I'm just shaking my head.
And Moonbirds, man,
what are these going to flip penguins?
Like what the fuck is going on?
Is there,
apparently I don't know the rumors that are,
they're getting a thrown around here,
but why are these at three,
three point one each chart looks good.
I don't think they're going to flip penguins.
that would be,
that would be a shocking outcome for me uh i'm also very
10 minutes ago while we were on the show someone just bought two politics is bullshit uh basically
for 52 eth apiece so they just spent 104 eth on two people additions sold for a dollar apiece
five years ago so that's that's also nice to see yeah literally one wallet just
came in and did a little um i wonder if they went to the event so this weekend we didn't mention it
but there was a really big event in charleston um people does these events a couple times a year
he brings punks and other people in the community out this one was punk centric and they had a
fucking hoax that people in this.
So this hoax is kind of what got me thinking more about V1 punks, Tyler.
There were so many people on Twitter who believed that Nakamigos could be the V0 version of a crypto punk.
Yeah.
And I'm just like, I saw it Saturday night and was just like, oh, this is a silly joke.
Like, what are these people doing? And I wake up the next day
and I look at the Knock Amigos floor
and they were half an ETH before I went to bed.
And I was like, man, why didn't I sell my fucking Amigos?
I didn't realize we're buying them.
Actually thinking that there was a version zero CryptoPunk
and that it was Knock Amigos.
So if you fell for that i'm sorry um probably should
check the chain a little more or something i don't know but it was just insane what i was
seeing this weekend about not comigos a lot of uh signs at least of some spirit animals back
in the t streets with folks wanting to believe that Nakamigos were V zero punks.
And midnight on Saturday,
like people are asleep,
people are vibing. And then they're down there in Charleston throwing out pamphlets that say
this is a V zero crypto bug.
Incredible things happening.
The people pick up.
It actually is a very interesting one.
I think from a,
I think there's a trade discussion to be had here.
So we talk about punks a lot.
I still think punks are one of the easier to buy and justify high-end grill NFT collections.
I think there's something to be said for the power law effect in collectibles and NFTs
that the highest end will have the highest return.
And I do think there's a world where like X copy one-on-ones
go to like 10 million on a 10 near time horizon.
They were almost there in 2021.
You had them selling for five, some of them.
And are these Beeple additions and Beeple one-on-ones
also in that parallel conversation?
So what did this just sell this sold for 225
000 and there's a hundred of them yeah that that is by far the i think like highest market cap uh
people edition there's that one and then there's giga chad the pepe one but that one doesn't trade
it right so what are your thoughts?
Does it make more sense to buy?
There's 100 of these additions.
There's 10,000 punks.
What's the better trade?
What's the better upside?
That's tough.
For me, I have a really hard time,
and this is extremely hypocritical, but since I was around for the
politics is bullshit, and I entered it and didn't get it for a dollar, I have this extreme mental
bias to never want to buy it because I didn't get the chance to buy it for a dollar that I don't
have with something like punks because I wasn't around paying attention to punks. I entered the
raffle. No, there wasn't a raffle for politics is bullshit.
If I remember right, you literally refresh the page
right on the dot and you just tried to buy it.
If I remember correctly, like it was before there were raffles.
I fucked when I refreshed that one.
So then I opt for the punk.
I think that's a really shitty mental model
that not that many people have, though.
I saw punks trading at 3.
It's easier to bet.
I think you're betting versus Beeple
versus all of NFTs or profile pictures. If you just want to bet on I think you're betting versus Beeple versus all of NFTs or profile pictures.
If you just want to bet on Beeple and you don't care about betting on Larva Labs, Matt, John,
all PFPs, you buy this. The politics is bullshit. If you're trying to, I think,
bet on more of the sector as a whole without trying to pick the explicit winner and just
trying to get the rising tide and just trying to get like the
rising tide i think you bet the punt that makes sense peter i'm curious i think back in 2021 you
were buying digital art to a degree you're on a little nifty gateway here i i did very well in
certain things and very badly on other things uh my uh my art purchases were not sure i remember looking at x copy because um
getting shout out nick to my know uh we were the seed investor in super rare so i was actually
like see i saw that product before it went live and um i started messing around with it and uh
man missed missed some missed some good ones there uh i remember looking at vex copy and
it was actually one of the things i was kind of drawn to and i did not pull the trigger um that
was a that was a fumble i'll never forget so i do think that um you know the way crypto is moving
and kind of my overall thesis and kind of the way the world's set up is the rich are getting richer. The wealth effect is real. And yeah, if you just look at traditional
art, the high end does extremely well. So I think that's applicable with digital art, especially
since with AI now and everything else, like it's so easy to get things flooded with supply. So I
think provenance is going to really matter.
History is really going to matter.
So, yeah, I mean, I think Xcopy, Beeple,
there's probably another tier.
I mean, Deez knows this better than me.
There's probably like seven, eight artists that probably are in that mix as well.
It's like, I'd say Xcopy and Beeple for sure
in their kind of own tier.
And then there's another tier
and I'm talking strictly price.
Is there,
am I missing anything
in that top tier of these?
Sam Pratt, right?
Yeah, for price.
If we're talking about price,
just because the reason.
I was going to mention him
as like the top of the net.
I mean, maybe,
maybe he's in the same mix.
I'm not an expert in this.
In terms of,
101 sales,
like Sam Spratt, 101 selling for more than
XCopy 101, but you have way more supply
of XCopy 101.
It's a different comp.
It's a different comp for sure.
So you can speculate and then
of course, what drove
NFT mania is can you find
the next thing, which I think is way
harder to do um obviously
so yeah if you're trying to allocate significant capital do you go to punks do you go to some of
this art i mean i think there's more asymmetry on the art side i mean we haven't even talked
about some of the art blocks um like glyphs i think are really interesting glyphs have been
surprising me but like not for the right reasons.
I know.
Recently.
I would have expected that the price action on Glyphs would be way better right now than they actually are.
Right.
Which causes me to have a couple concerns.
Is it there aren't buyers at those prices?
Are there too many sellers and there's just too big of an imbalance?
Are people finally coming to what I think,
which is just like you don't want to hang it on your wall,
so you don't want to own it?
Am I still in that weird camp?
Maybe that's right.
I had my glyphs forever ago and they were really affordable
because I was like, I don't want to put that on my wall.
I still think glyphs are really good.
So high bid is $75.
I'm intrigued by glyph still
Fidenzas have done really well
there's other things that you could look to
I think a big thing though
if you're allocating significant capital
something that I really value
is liquidity
and that's kind of the allure of punks
over all these things
this is just way more liquid
and who knows who knows how this stuff trades who knows what's going to happen going forward and that's kind of the allure of punks over all these things. This is just way more liquid.
And who knows?
Who knows how this stuff trades?
Who knows what's going to happen going forward?
We're definitely short-term extremely bullish on ETH,
so the beta plays should work out in general.
But the other thing about this cycle is it moves way faster, way faster.
Everyone's kind of front-running things, then selling quicker.
So you've got to be nimble.. You got to think long-term.
And to Deez's point, you know,
you're going to allocate real capital to something,
buy something you really like,
buy something you want to put on your walls.
So I still prefer punks to all these things just because of the liquidity,
but I am looking at some of this art.
We're almost done with our house.
So I'm going to have to get some art and
stuff. I don't know. Tyler, are you decorating? You're in a new house. You've got to figure out
how to decorate. I'm lagging, but that is on my mind. Very much so.
That's one of the funnest things about having a new house. I will also say if you have the patience,
depending on what you're getting hung up,
try to accumulate most of it pre-framed
and then frame it all together in something you like.
I'm running into this problem.
It's not really a problem.
It's a good problem to have.
I've gotten things framed from too many different frame shops
with too many different types of frames
where now when I try to move things around the house,
since the frames are different, It just doesn't work together.
A lot of the stuff I've had for four or five years,
I've went through different phases.
I just regret it because I'm like,
I don't want to spend $15,000 to reframe
half the art in my house
to make it match the other half.
It's good alpha, 100%.
If you are accumulating 20 pieces
for your house and you're
kind of OCD or anal about the frames,
like wait till you have the pieces you want together and then get them
framed.
In hindsight, that would have saved me some money.
I want to quickly come back to the, the conversation and Fidenza.
So spicy ass.
Do we see a resurgence of art blocks?
I remember people minting them every drop.
So the announcement last week, Artblocks 500,
they're putting a glass case around it. No new Artblocks mints. Well, there is
going to be a future of Artblocks. We don't know exactly what it's going to be, but
now we're going to have a finite number. I think Fidenza's pumped on that. There's not
going to be any more curated after there's two more releases coming. I think
there'll be some pretty high demand for whatever the last two are most likely kind of pending how they look i think
there's a real world where if it ends as flip punks i mean hell they're eight sales away right
now i mean one sweep would do it they're much more illiquid but i think in the back of my head
i was deep in the general art trade in 2021 2021, not as deep as you D's.
But Andy, a good friend,
was kind of in my head the whole time.
He's like, are you sure about generative art?
And is generative art going to make it?
I still think that's a little TBD.
And I do think one-on-one art is safer.
Something that passes the wall test.
Because honestly, a lot of these things, I don't want to hang this on my wall. safer. Something that passes the wall test. Because honestly, like all these things,
I don't want to hang this on my wall.
I'm being totally honest.
Dude, I'm offended.
You're literally talking to someone
with three of them right behind him.
But no, I get that.
I don't want to hang any of this bullshit on the wall.
Dude, you fucking, it looks terrible.
But in all seriousness, I do think,
I'm pretty sure general art is going to stick around just from the experience of minting something from an algorithm that you don't know what it actually looks like and then getting it.
I don't know if that means that $300,000 pieces of Genit of Art are going to stick around, but I do think the act or the consuming of Genit of Art and being a part of the mint will stick around because I
still don't really have as much
fun doing other mints
as I do when I know it's like
a generative algorithm
that I don't really know what the output is
likely to even be.
So I think just from the experience
of collecting it, it'll stick around.
It is hard to have...
I mean, I don't own any
of these anymore outside of the prints because i at different points through holding them was like
this thing's worth a house like is this gonna always be worth a house like i don't know um
one thing i do want to mention about the final five projects is um in two days on thursday snow
froze glitch series comes out.
He's the glitch artist for the year, and he basically
has this
self-portrait
pixel character game
that's mintable.
I don't know if that is the
right way to explain it.
We don't need new expensive
mints.
Fuck expensive mints.
We need cheap mints.
But this Snowfro project coming out in two days,
I think, is one to watch for.
If you're not aware of it, there's a thousand of them.
And they are minting 9 a.m. Pacific, noon Eastern on Thursday.
All right.
New mints have been doing pretty well, too.
At least the higher profile ones
so yeah and it's a snow for a glitch drop the the last two glitch drops for the people who
might not have been around one was the uh die residency in marfa which led to beef brofgo
and the flea market where you had to go and barter with him in person with shitty things
and then the second one was the Joe piece,
which I wasn't able to make it to that one.
But they had the series that they auctioned
with Joe doing a live physical art installation in Marfa 2.
So this is the third iteration of that concept in class.
Very nice.
So I think there'll be a big demand for that.
I want to pull us back to Bitcoin ETH.
Before we do that, though, just real quickly,
I was browsing Sam Spratt when you brought that up.
None of his 101s are for sale.
Skulls have been selling
for sale. I guess I'm very
specifically going off the last two recent
ones, which were the two highest.
I was going to ask,
what do you think one of these
would come in for if someone
says, I'm going to buy,
I'm going to open the checkbook up?
I would feel like it would probably have to be at least 2x a skull price.
It's around a million.
At the minimum? I don't know.
All of these holders are pretty strongholders. The first one, Bertha Lucy.
And then that blueprint skull is
Cyborg Nomads.
So I don't think those are probably going anywhere.
Kazomo6529
He was good.
A million dollars is a million
dollars though and
in that world Sam would probably get
$100,000 of it so I'm sure there
would be reasons to sell and celebrate.
I think if Sam continues his
trajectory these are going to be worth
more than $10 million
in the nearest future.
It's very strange.
Because I always think about the skull,
and I try to divorce the price from how I feel about it.
And it's hard to do that sometimes,
especially as the prices go up a little more.
You're like, okay, this skull is worth
the remaining mortgage on our house.
I try to hold the skull. skull is worth like the remaining mortgage on our house. Like, so it's been a big price.
But skulls mass coming up now as well.
So there's more ways to play it.
Yeah. There's been some nice mass sales recently as ETH has gone up.
They've kind of held that six and a half ETH level.
So they're selling for like 25,
30,000.
I'm going to come back to real quick. This has been a fun
tangent into the art world. Maybe we'll have
more of a deeper art show.
I want to ask this question
because we haven't had a chance and I think it is a relevant
one. It was on our original call sheet.
Bitcoin at
120K.
ETH at 4460.
Has it changed? What do you like for
the rest of the year now?
I think this is a real decision I think a lot of folks are making.
I think there's probably some folks rotating from Bitcoin to ETH right now.
I think we're seeing some signs of that.
And is that a trap?
Is Bitcoin setting a trap right now for everyone who is uh late uh late to rotate while
it's been chopping effectively for for six months curious if either of you have uh have thoughts on
that if that's a good idea bad idea neutral i am personally not rushing out of any of my bitcoin
uh to throw it into etherTH or anything else right now.
Peter, curious if you have a take.
Man, I love both these things so much right now.
I think if I had to bet strictly for one asset for the rest of the year, I'd take ETH. But I certainly think Bitcoin has a better risk reward long term, less vulnerability.
It's very clearly digital gold.
And I just think ETH is more vulnerable on the downside.
But the momentum right now, Tom Lee bullposting, if you wanted to get really aggressive, which I don't think is a horrible idea, kind of tying a lot of things together.
If you wanted to go out on the risk curve, one thing you could do that we saw a lot in kind of DeFi summers, you could convert Bitcoin to wrap Bitcoin, put that on something like Aave, borrow against it, buy ETH.
That'd be a way to get leverage.
I really, really strongly don't recommend leverage
for most people. Again, not financial advice, but just be very thoughtful if you're going to
do something like that. That's how people normally get wrecked. But I think that if you're just
looking at what's happening, people are doing trades like that. That exact thought crossed
my mind over the weekend, actually, as a way to keep bitcoin but get more eth exposure um but yeah there's a risk to that
it's interesting here so eth is basically 4500 6k which was a lot of people's kind of
bull targets for 2025 is a 33 move move. 33% move in Bitcoin's 160.
What feels crazier end of year,
160K Bitcoin or 6K ETH?
From a pure number standpoint,
it feels like the 6K ETH feels like a bigger stretch to me.
But also this Tom Lee 20 billion just has my head spinning. Now I just don't know if there's,
if you can even put a cap.
Tom Lee saying 16,000 soon. I mean, the guys out there just, I mean,
I, you got sailor and Tom Lee, um,
both are driving that train and,
and the type of bulls that, you know, are going to attract institutional capital and they are getting mainstream attention.
The type of bulls who will gladly drive the train off the side of the mountain and laugh while doing it.
Yeah, I think that there's other actors that are more likely to do that that are showing
even more short-term greed um and i think that's something to be really you know you remember tom
lee in 2017 in that cycle because he was one of those like main talking heads on twitter that i
kind of followed because i didn't really know what i was doing and i'm pretty sure he was calling for $16,000 like for ETH then in 2017.
Of course.
I remember holding my $400 per ETH
and thinking like, wow, if this is like 16 grand,
I'm going to have $100,000.
Tongli is always bullish.
It was the depths of COVID when it was like the world's ending
and Tongli is on there like, actually, this is,
and he was, this is where he was like, so right.
He's like, this is going to spawn, spawn you know big rate cuts and fiscal monetary changes that are gonna be really
bullish for the stock market and this is when like you know you got akman coming on saying the world's
ending and whatever else so he uh he's always he's always very bullish um him and uh what's that
draper this was that another one of the he was more bitcoin bullish but
i'm trying to the 2017 cohort of like people i was following to get my bull uh copium you know the
uh pomplianos of the world back then too i will say too one thing i wanted to make sure i addressed
on this show there's a good bit of froth out there right now. I know it's like a debate of how much euphoria, how much animal spirits. I'm seeing a ton of evidence. I'm at
random parties here in Denver. People are talking about how much money they made being in the pipes
of these dats and all sorts of scary, just pure greed getting paid off right now.
So there are definitely some alarm bells for me.
There's certainly reasons to be really positive.
We hit on that in the beginning of the show.
I think from a regulation standpoint and kind of the news around the fundamentals of crypto
are as bullish as they've ever been.
But, you know, markets and history repeat.
And, you know, we do see a lot of froth and euphoria.
And I say this basically every show.
You know, if you're in a position where you can take something that's going to really change your life off the table, these are numbers on a screen.
If you can get a house or, you know, quit the job that you hate or do anything, selling something.
You don't have to sell all.
It doesn't have to be all in or all out.
You can change your life right now.
You're never going to regret changing your life
even if price goes up and you will have an immense amount of regret if you do not take any chips off
the table and then you know we all remember for those years between you know 21 end of 21 is still
euphoric i guess a little bit but let's go post luna blowing the spaces, the content from 22 into like,
you know,
end of 23 people were just devastated.
So much regret for not,
you know,
taking some chips off the table and changing their lives.
So be cognizant of where you are.
Everyone's in a different position.
But yeah,
you can take some lifestyle chips.
It never,
never is a bad idea.
I'm a gardener too.
I look at everything through the lens of like,
is this a green tomato or a orange slash red tomato?
And if it is an orange slash red tomato,
then I should just harvest it and put it in my bag
and go inside and eat it
because it's not going to turn much different.
Whereas if it's a green tomato,
I want to leave it there.
Let it cook.
You got the gardener advice right there, folks.
Let the green tomatoes cook
harvest those red and orange tomatoes i think that's a great uh look at anything in your bag
like like me looking at my rec bag like that was a pretty bright orange tomato and i'm like all right
like i just i don't want to let this over ripen here on the vine and like get a hole in it
I've been here on the vine and like get a hole in it.
Sage advice as,
as always,
although that's not going to offer.
I think we're in a,
we got all the spectrums.
You can take your Bitcoin,
put it on ETH,
borrow,
get it lever to the moon.
Nothing could go wrong.
Just all in.
And then also make sure you sell your lifestyle chips.
So real quick,
I want to give the hyper bull case before we close.
You just gave the conservative advice, take your trades,
take your profits, change your life, all that.
So true. Do it.
I was sharing DJ
D. Johnson's tweets.
So you have, just quickly, this ETH setup
race. You've got Tom Lee buying
$20 billion. You've got Joe Lubin, who now has
to compete with him to also try to be
a top ETH
treasury co. And now Peter Thiel backed ETH Zilla is buying 500 million up to a billion.
And it's not just the numbers. This is literally a race because they see the speed at which Tom
Lee is accumulating and it forces their hand to buy as fast as they can because the price is going to
be higher each week as they continue to buy.
It's this crazy feedback loop right now.
And I don't know how long it's going to last.
I didn't think it was actually going to last all that much longer,
but now Tom just raised the stakes to 20 billion.
And I think this race is a very critical thing to understand and to monitor in
the hyper near term.
I really do.
And I really struggle to see how it drops substantially without some macro events playing out.
The permanent bid, or not permanent, but this bid right now, this race is, yeah.
It feels like a fun race
that they're racing to send up.
You can literally
see it in the chart.
It's a green tomato, folks.
With the infinite bid.
By next week, here's a question.
New ETH
all-time high by the next show, yes or no?
What are we saying is the all-time
high? Because there's some weird...
Let's say
is ETH over
$47.50
by the time we start
the next show next week? I'll take yes.
I'm definitely yes. I'm trying to think of
what odds I would bet at yes. I think that's like
a 70%. If I give you a coin flip
50-50, you would smash the yes. I think that's like a 70%. If I give you like a coin flip 50-50, you would smash the S.
I'm probably betting it at 70%.
Let's go.
I hate to use the word inevitable because that's a terrible
word to use and I'll be coming back next week when the
price is $3,500 and
inviting my tongue. But it
does kind of feel inevitable.
God, I hate to say that. If price is
$3,500 next week,
a lot of things will have gone wrong.
People will be excited.
If it's $4,700,
all of us will be ready to buy.
And if it's $3,500, we're all ready to sell.
That's how this should be.
Yeah, my stop loss was at $3,600.
I'm out. I'll see you next cycle.
We'll just be like, oh, should have sold it all.
Yeah, when Dee said it was inevitable,
it was so obvious in hindsight that it was very not inevitable.
It will also mean,
it will also mean that we bought the punk stop.
There's the two doors.
Eat the 3,500,
eat the 4,700.
And it's just,
everyone is at the 4,700 one and no one at the 3,500.
That's how it goes.
Story of our lives.
Well, folks, this was a fun show.
Thank you for joining us and stick with us.
We'll be back next week to do this all again.
Hopefully higher.
I want to thank our listeners as always.
I want to thank my co-hosts.
We'll be back next Tuesday.
Until then, make it a beautiful week.
Goodbye. .
