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UNDER EXPOSED: Iran and AI Wars, Crypto Impact, CRCL’s Bull Setup
Recorded: March 3, 2026 Duration: 1:01:21Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Underexposed, our weekly macro crypto show
talking all the biggest topics and trends and back to crypto broader web three.
Today is Tuesday, March 3rd, and it has been quite the eventful week.
We had an AI war play out in public on Friday and then a real world real war start on Saturday.
And yet somehow our crypto prices are higher than they were this
time last week does that mean that the bottom is it we're going to talk about it on today's show
i'm your host tyler you've got my co-hosts in the house first up deece coin stacker trader
pokemon connoisseur collector deece jim how you doing gm had to uh go at the you know bitcoin puppet world
peace hat today because uh that feels like the most apt hat in the collection yes but
excited to be here excited to talk to you and peter we have as always uh no lack of meaningful
information to talk about indeed and happy to to have Peter on with us as well.
Founder of several companies.
Still find time to hang out with us every Tuesday.
Peter, Jim, how are you doing?
Still on mute.
Jim, I'm hanging in.
World's on fire.
Scary times.
So trying to think through the best moves and trying to protect the family.
So it's a crazy time, but I decided to be here with you guys.
Well, we will get into that on today's show.
Folks, what are we going to talk about?
We're going to talk macro.
We're going to talk the Iran war impact on markets, impact on crypto.
We're going to get into this anthropic versus the U.S. government and perhaps versus open AI story that played out at the end of last week.
I want to talk circle stock.
It's up massively.
I want to revisit that trade.
Is it time to go long?
What we've been trading on chain and a whole lot more.
A few housekeeping items before we dig in.
We are live on kick and X.
Make sure to follow us over on kick.
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underexposed every Tuesday.
And we are doing neat giveaways again today to giveaways at the end of
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So you will want to make sure you have entered Charlie.
Appreciate Charlie will be giving us the code here shortly.
Reminder,
you will need to be signed up on neat using the morning minute affiliate
code to be eligible to win NEET using the morning minute affiliate code to be
eligible to win today's code. Any news? So make sure to enter that and be eligible. We will spin
the wheel at the end of today's show. And as always, before we get started, a 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 your own research or with advice from a licensed professional.
All right.
Well, let's get into it.
Macro, certainly the big story of the weekend, Iran war is here and it is starting to impact markets.
Just a lot of volatility across the board.
So crypto red today, but up on the week.
So Bitcoin up 6% since we did the last week's show.
It's at 68K.
Got rejected off
70 yesterday. It's slightly outperforming on the week, up 6% in 1975. Solana is up 9% on the week.
So actually outperforming all of the majors. Yesterday, stock market opened deep, deep red.
I think as was expected, it came all the way back, though.
A lot of stocks closed green, but then today sold off again,
seemingly on the back of another huge jump in oil.
Oil prices up 6%, 7% concerns of Iran ordering. The Strait of Hormuz closed, and what that means is 15% to 20% of global oil supply
does go through those streets.
So what will increased oil prices mean for the rest of the market as this war is now expected to go on a bit longer than perhaps we thought this weekend?
So that's the backdrop.
I guess, Peter, tough times.
How are you thinking about navigating all this?
So I guess first question, just broader thoughts on the market.
Are we going to see just these knee-jerk reactions?
Do you think these are going to have longer staying power?
Are we talking days, weeks, months?
How are you thinking about this?
I think we'll see more volatility. I mean, I don't, I don't think
that this is just going to be like, you know, what we saw with Venezuela, where we just got
Maduro and then got out of there. I think there's been different perspectives on the war. And,
you know, Trump, when, you know, his, his, his kind of terminology has changed from like, oh, this will be quick to, you know, this will take four or five weeks to wars can go on forever.
So obviously there's a lot of nuance and different contexts within those statements.
He didn't just say those things blatantly, like one after another.
He can just say those things blatantly, like one after another.
They're within other statements and different talking points.
And they're, of course, trying to get leverage and try to figure this out.
But this is certainly going to have a lot of volatility.
And there's just massive implications across the board.
And it's coupled with the world changing at a rapid pace with AI and the disruption there.
So it's really hard to navigate.
There's a ton of cross currents and positioning yourself is very challenging.
And I think my broad view is to be defensive and cautious, given everything that's going on.
There's certainly going to be a lot of opportunity.
But as we're trying to digest all these moving pieces, to to me the prudent thing is to be defensive and cautious so that makes sense so
does that mean moving to cash okay have you seen have you made moves to cash or when you say
defensive how do you act on that well today's a tricky day because the whole board's getting
killed i mean generally when you're defensive yeah you're thinking about cash you're thinking about gold um maybe some
commodities specifically gold has gotten smoked today uh all precious metals have gotten smoked
today after a really long extended run so i don't know i think a lot of things are just getting
thrown out um this is a really interesting market because we also have mid-turns coming up and the promises
from the Trump admin that we're going to have this unbelievable market this year and a booming
economy. So there's just so many different cross currents to pay attention to but yeah i think the most offensive thing you can do
is still be in in cash um but it's it's tricky there's all there's a lot there's a lot going on
and the dollar uh seeing that up fairly substantially off local lows in the 96 range back to 99, basically back to June,
June,
2025 and effectively flat over the last eight months or so.
Now it definitely is one of those nowhere to hide near term setups.
I mean,
other than all other than oil,
which is up substantially gold,
as you mentioned down 4% Silver got smoked as well. It's down 7%. Seemingly trading a bit like levered gold,
kind of my read, or just perhaps levered risk to a degree. So metals are down. Crypto down, but rebounding.
And then stocks down as well.
So it is a red day.
I mean, this is typically, I didn't go deep into historic war patterns, but as I understand it, it's typically the first week, first few weeks are red.
And then markets start to rebound from there.
I think a lot of questions right now, just how long is this going to last?
I think that's the key question.
And unfortunately, it doesn't seem like we're going to get the answer, perhaps as soon as
we thought.
And there was times on Saturday where I thought, oh, this might already be over on the first
day.
But then it looks like more,
especially the regime change itself aspect,
is going to take much longer to play out.
Deezus Hall, you're not in your head.
I'm kind of curious for your broader thoughts on this.
Have you made any moves?
Are you making, how are you feeling in general?
Yeah, I haven't made any big moves.
I'm still kind of defensive from the cash position i i have from last year
um and i haven't deployed it so i'm just kind of chilling with it um i also like you thought it
was over like twice and it seems like every time um iran elects a new ayatollah or whatever they're
dead within about five seconds um or that's been my timeline
for the last two days it's like oh they elected this guy and he's dead it's like oh there was uh
88 people at this meeting and they're all dead you're like all right how is it how is it not over
um i think you know we were talking about a couple specific tokens or plays and group chats over the weekend that were interesting at certain prices that I didn't happen to buy.
Zero at like $1.50 was one of them.
But now I'm just kind of watching from the, I mean, I'm still holding a bunch of hype, Bitcoin, all the stuff I've been holding.
I just haven't made any new moves.
Yeah, I mean, I guess we can get into the crypto impact.
This is a crypto show.
Seeing oil trade on Hyperliquid over the weekend and stuff.
That was good.
Is oil trading on Hyperliquid?
Oh, there it is. Yeah, wow. Yeah, yeah yeah i don't think i even noticed that people that was like one of the first uh the volume is is gone down but when the
news was coming out over the weekend this got a little attention. Yeah, well, maybe we just go right there. Arguably the winner of the weekend,
I would say was Hyperliquid.
So on Saturday, as the Iran war was just getting started,
we had Bloomberg running headlines
that you can trade the war on Hyperliquid.
And I think I've seen Bloomberg maybe reference hype hyperliquid once or twice in the past,
but it's felt more like it's a niche crypto product.
Like this is what CT natives, this is their go-to for trading perps.
Hadn't maybe quite gotten there to really breaking out into retail,
but man, it feels like it's there
now. And seeing that Bloomberg headline over the weekend was pretty eye-opening. And it wasn't
just the headline. The technicals backed it up. Open interest on their HIP3 product hit all-time
highs. HIP3 is where effectively metals, where stocks stocks are traded for those who may not be
familiar um and there's real volumes there and clearly traders around the world are taking notice
if they haven't already and what was evolved a weekend hive i mean the chart kind of tells the
story as the bombs were dropping it fell to to 26, went all the way to 33,
30% jump.
And from a trading perspective, I'm not sure we're going to get that $20 entry again.
But D is curious for your thoughts as that was playing out.
Do you think this is a meaningful step change for hyper liquid adoption?
Are we reading too much into it and then i guess second
part is what does that mean for the trade yeah i don't know it feels a little bit meaningful it
feels like this was the first maybe it isn't maybe i'm just misremembering a whole bunch of other
minor conflicts but feels like this is the first bigger conflict where hype has gotten
a bit of recognition outside of crypto.
I could just be misremembering
previous conflicts and maybe there was
with the tariff stuff
last year. I don't know if that's
necessarily a conflict even though it's like a
market moving thing.
But I do think
with the, I mean we've been taught about it for like
three months now, if not more, with the hip I mean, we've been taught about it for like three months now,
if not more, but the hip three markets just getting more and more volume.
I think that is the most important thing here.
It's like, yeah, we're mentioned in Bloomberg.
That's cool.
But like seeing the volume numbers continually go up.
Every time I open it and see silver over like a billion dollars of volume within the last
a billion dollars of volume within the last 24 hours,
24 hours, it's still a mindfuck to me.
it's still a mindfuck to me.
Because it's always one of the top,
I don't know, five tokens or five things
on Hyperliquid in terms of volume.
Right now, it's three behind Bitcoin and ETH.
But I think this is part of the thesis
that we have Hyperliquid trade.
So seeing this type of stuff is good.
Also, we've seen the uh
i forget is it cc fit chicago or new york but they're talking about they want to do like the
24 7 uh stock stock exchange stuff anyway uh cme yeah cme but maybe i'm misremembering that they
didn't want to do weekends still. 24.
Five.
Yeah.
There's a lot of 24.
Five.
so even in that world,
it's like,
you know,
we still need that hyper liquid for the metals trade on Saturday war news.
But I think in just,
in terms of just seeing the volume go up like that,
that's what we want to see.
The whole market's down drastically.
So seeing that volume still go up is, is's what we want to see um the whole market's down drastically so
seeing that volume still go up is good hype looks good um yeah i didn't make any moves to like sell
it into this uh pump or anything it's tough like i'm sidelined i've been looking to try to get an
entry my my selfish entry is around 20 or lower i'm not so sure they're gonna come to pass 21 i know it's basically there and it jumped 51 50 from there right um but at the same
time like it's a little hard to chase here it just kind of depends on your macro read
um if bitcoin just chops in this zone for the next six months there's probably gonna be new
entries if the bottom is in perhaps not the other part of this weekend i think that was very notable If Bitcoin just chops in this zone for the next six months, there's probably going to be new entries.
If the bottom is in, perhaps not.
The other part of this weekend, I think that was very notable.
Peter, maybe I'll throw this one to you.
So early Saturday hours, we get news that the war has started. Bitcoin immediately sells off to 63 and then immediately rebounds back and then soared across
the day on Saturday as news that Kamani had been killed,
came out, sold off, and then pumps again huge on Monday.
That sold off.
We bounced off 70K for kind of the second time in the past week. Still hanging out at 68k. Are you taking any
meaningful takeaways from this price action? Did you expect lower? Did you expect this kind of
strength? I think it's fair to call it strength, at least compared to what we've seen
for the last five months.
Yeah, when have we seen a day where Bitcoin's performing well and gold's going down?
I can't remember a day like that.
I'm sure it's happened, but I don't remember a strong day like today.
I mean, I ran mines a lot of Bitcoin.
That's interesting.
I don't know what the implications are there, but certainly,
maybe they're not a seller. I'm sure they're mining and selling, leveraging their energy.
So maybe that has an impact. I saw sailor buying. I also saw a headline that, was it
BlackRock that was buying as well? I can't remember. I just, there's been some institutional buying, which is interesting.
And in theory, this is when Bitcoin should do really well, when there's chaos around the world and people are looking for a store of value, especially in the circumstance where people are having to move around, you know, leaving Dubai and all these things. So, again, there's so many cross currents,
but coins do look pretty strong on a relative basis,
especially given kind of how they've been trading in the bear market.
And I'm still super jazzed about hype and lighter and these DEXs.
I'm pretty active on the prediction markets
and get alerts when markets are moving.
And I was speculating on the Iran
war and saw some movement and was able to make real moves with crypto, oil, gold, etc.
There's not quite enough liquidity in oil to make substantial moves at this point in time, but
it is cool to see markets trade 24-7. And there's certainly a lot of opportunity there, both on a basis, a trade perspective, collecting funding, and then also just making moves.
So yeah, Leiter is not performing the same way that Hype is performing. There seems to
be quite a few motivated sellers. I think a lot of VCs are probably dumping their bags.
But you know what? It's something that I'm still impressed with the platform.
There's things I wish would change,
but I am very optimistic about DEXs and perps
being a huge part of how people speculate going forward.
So I like both these platforms.
The LiTARs are still optimistic.
You heard it here.
First, folks, even though...
One of the questions on my call sheet
is is lighter going to ride hyperliquids uh yeah hey i haven't sold it yet so it's probably going
on another 30 percent um and then when i sell it that'll be the generational bottom
yeah it's not the most inspiring chart perhaps if you squint it looks like it might be forming
me me every week coming back to this and being like it's like it looks bottom Tyler look at it
down to the right is not your favorite pattern it's coiling clearly there's a strong support
at a dollar 30. I mean you love it if you've got deep conviction on a long-term time frame because
you're getting a beautiful entry on this.
I haven't seen the technicals.
I don't really spend a whole lot of time thinking about LIDAR.
Like, have they seen influxes on volumes?
I don't know if either of you have been tracking that.
I mean, Dee, you kind of went there, but the hit volumes,
like this kind of tells the story.
Like, if you want to know bull case for for hyper liquid you just look at this chart right they
expanded it to new asset classes and their volumes are going parabolic and it's interesting too when
you look at like um i'll just bring up the will price dashboard because that's the best dashboard
for this stuff but like when you look at the amount that they're making in fees um hyper liquid in the last 24 hours only made like 86k in uh fees from rwas
and then the main dex has made 2.13 million um that being said lighter had only made 5k off rwa
fees in the last 24 hours uh and like 110k from their their crypto side so
hyperliquid's still at like 20x the uh amount what about the weekends the weekends i did well
is there a way on will's thing to go back and do like uh i need to figure that out not 24 hours
yeah because ideally we would have like a seven day um. Let me see. I can do it here.
14-day period, seven-day period.
Okay.
It's up at P&M.
So we had...
Yeah, I don't see it quite.
I'm sure it's on here and I'm just blind.
Linder did five and a half million. I'm looking just at De here and I'm just blind. Linder did $5.5 million.
I'm looking just at DeFi Lama's.
They did $5.5 million revenue on the month.
$60 million annualized.
The weekend wasn't great for HLP.
And it seemed like it was a little better for LLP.
So that's good for them.
LLP at a 10.5% APY
and HLP only at a 1.95%.
They had a couple losing days in a row this weekend.
Is it fair to say Leiter will catch
like the Delta neutral traders volume?
If you want to be long one asset but short to capture fees,
I don't do that trade, but you need to be on different protocols.
Am I understanding that correctly?
Yeah.
Funding is, right?
Yeah.
Ideally, you have a lot of tools in your tool chest and a lot of platforms that you can use because funding rates differ between them.
And there's often arbitrage between DEXs.
And that was a huge thing that blew out on October 10th.
And part of the reason I got pessimistic is there's a lot of trades like that that people realize with ADLs that you't just have these things set in perpetuity.
So that kind of changed the market,
but there's still a lot of options.
And then I think the safest thing you can do broadly
is the basic trade is long spot, short perps.
But yeah, the cross perp stuff is certainly interesting.
And LIDR is a good thing to have in your tool chest.
I mean, you can just click down there on L and then just, you know, look at what the
big funding rates are right now.
I'm very curious, actually.
So if you click on lighter and then you sort by funding.
Why see why other way?
So let's see what the other one is Hyundai.
Yeah, so all already RWA's right now.
It's interesting.
It's a very, very, very interesting time.
The other interesting asset class that you can trade now on Hyperliquid on others is pre-market.
So Anthropic, tradable on Hyperliquid via Ventuals.
You see the Ventuals tag there.
Notable because one of the biggest headlines
that this would have been
probably the main topic on the show
had the Iran war not broken out on Saturday,
but we saw the drama play out Thursday, Friday.
Effectively, U.S. government wanted to use Claude. They wanted,
uh, they were working through the contracting effectively. Dario and Anthropic said we have
two red line items. Can't do mass surveillance of Americans. We don't want the tech to be used
for autonomous drones. Couldn't reach agreement with the U.S. Ultimately, the deal fell through 5 p.m. on Friday. Immediately afterward,
Trump comes out against Anthropic, and then Hexet comes out, calls them supply chain risk,
call federal government agencies, needs to stop using CLAW. I think even as far as anyone who works with the government would need to stop.
I don't know if they've actually carried through with that.
But then also the next wrinkle, an hour later, Sam Altman and OpenAI sign was a very similar contract, though, with a few minor tweaks in the language.
Peter, I want to dig into this one.
I think it's kind of a big deal.
I guess first off, I mean, OpenAI is now inside.
Anthropic still kind of inside.
They're still being used as a six-month rollout,
but effectively kicked out for saying no.
Who do you think made the right call?
Oh, this is such a nuanced uh thing um i do think anthropica has really
stood by um their their uh mission of ushering an ai in a safe manner um but i think the cat's
out of the bag and you know given kind of the the AI race and just how scary, I mean, this is
why I'm kind of a somber mood is just thinking about AI and drones and autonomous weapons.
It certainly feels more like the Terminator, the Matrix, all these things are racing towards us,
which is really, really scary. So I don't know if they really had the choice to make and supporting the U.S. government
and the military seems like the right thing to do. Broadly, I obviously don't want to see
surveillance of U.S. citizens. But basically, Dario is saying, hey, China, like it's code red,
China's coming, they're going to be doing all these things.
So we need to be competing on that front.
So in that regard, if you're really scared about that, don't you want to be working with the military to try to win?
And then OpenAI, I mean, I think Sam Altman, I think broadly kind of the view is he's not to be trusted.
I think broadly kind of the view is he's not to be trusted.
And even, you know, he jumped on the opportunistic or the opportunity to partner with the government.
And then he came out, I think, either last night or today saying he moved too quickly and was opportunistic on this.
It was too hasty.
So it's a really challenging thing to figure out.
AI is moving so fast.
There's massive implications, both militarily and then for the economy.
So it's just a lot to digest.
And it's hard.
It's a really, really tricky thing.
And I don't know.
I see the tradeoffs that both companies made, you know, working with the government and the military specifically.
So we'll see.
It's a really, really tricky time to figure out what to do.
I don't know.
It's a tricky topic.
There's a lot of ways we can take the conversation.
Maybe focused more on the trading aspect for now and what it might mean.
Let's start with anthropic the business
um let's see i think when the news it's very clear on that pride i mean you
you want the one with the government contract so i think this is bullish open ai bearish
anthropic in the short term for sure well maybe but then i mean it seems at least on Twitter, if you ran a poll,
I would say the polls,
80 to 90% pro Claude.
You had the people making statements.
I'm,
I'm canceling chat GBT.
I'm opening my cause subscription.
Katy Perry leading that charge,
notably what,
well known for her AI prowess.
Early adopter,
Katie, but then like it did show up in the metrics. Claude was the number one app in the app store. for her AI prowess. Early adopter, Katie Fair.
But then it did show up in the metrics.
Claude was the number one app in the app store over the weekend.
So it is tricky.
Again, I don't know if it's...
I don't personally think it was the right decision
that Dario made.
And I think that the press tour kind of put – the press tour against Trump, if he's your counterparty, that's not the way to negotiate with them.
And it's never going to go well.
If you think they needed that contract, I don't think that was the right thing to do.
And perhaps their view is they don't.
And now you've also seen folks in the AI companies kind of coming out and signing petitions they want more controls
we need to get there um kind of going away from the the merit of this question but i guess i don't
know if it's bearish i feel like maybe it's neutral because i think the the positives could
kind of outweigh or counter than the negatives at least but i think
for open ai probably is bullish and i don't know something happened today this is this was trading
at 700 billion over the weekend and or i guess this happened on the government contract well
okay that's the government contract wow yeah oh okay. That's the government contract. Wow. Oh, okay. Well, yeah, there's no question.
It jumped 50%.
Anyone who was in that trade had a nice weekend.
And just to caveat, there's not a whole – there's $3 million in open interest, not a ton, half a million in daily volumes.
Take all this with a grain of salt.
But I guess there it is.
Dee's curious if you had any other thoughts or reactions for,
for the market impact of these.
And I guess,
have you thought about trading either of these companies and has that
changed?
Yeah.
I haven't traded either of them.
Probably stupid to me.
Like Peter said,
it's just really hard to trust Sam from a pure like 60 IQ vibes
perspective. set it's just really hard to trust sam from a pure like 60 iq vibes perspective um but also
you know i don't know if i trust any of the leads of any of these ai researchers uh so like
dario reminds me a little bit of like spf yeah in terms of like posture and just like the way he looks when I look at him.
And I think of all that effective altruism cult shit.
I mean, not really a cult, but the way that that community tends to look at risk
and how they can take risk to benefit the world makes it hard to trust either of them.
I mean, just from a product standpoint, though, I'm not the type of person who stops using
a product because of something political or governmental.
I mean, if I stopped using products because of people who make the products, like I would
just drive my car into a wall or something because like you won't block me but I drive a Tesla like I don't I don't want to uh really change my user
behavior based off of the the actions and and whims of like CEOs and government unless it really
impacts me as a user I will say I did see the same thing you saw in the timeline where it felt
overwhelmingly positive um to the point where everybody came together just to tell Nick Carter he's a bootlicking idiot.
So that was interesting.
who Nick, from what I could tell,
was for the authoritarian use of AI
and thought anthropic was stupid.
And he wasn't alone, for the record.
Like, Paul Marlucky basically said the same thing.
Again, it all kind of comes down to nuance.
Nick didn't really have a lot of nuance in his ex-posts,
and I think people ran with that.
And I was thinking about the thought,
like the thought experiment over the weekend.
So like if you were,
if the NSA thought there was going to be the Austin mass shooting and
perhaps mass shootings in 10 different cities,
and if they hit a mass surveillance button,
they'd have 90% chance to stop those shootings.
Would you be okay with them hitting that button?
And I'm very curious what people would say about that.
And then take it,
take it further.
What if they promise to turn that button off once the threats were clear?
Right.
So there,
there's a lot of ways you can,
you can take this.
It's certainly not dry.
The thing with government power and any government,
not just the U.S.,
is when you give the government more power,
it's like power you're never really going to get back from them.
So you make all these little concessions over time,
and the next thing you know, you have 1984, and that's reality.
Because you made a couple of concessions here and there,
and you made those concessions for a long amount of time,
and then they stack on top of each other. I did think Palmer's long post about, you know, how do you tell who's an innocent civilian and not based off of the government might have classified information and the AI surveillance footage might not and AI surveillance footage might think, you know, hey, this person is an innocent civilian, but the classified government information
says, hey, that's like a violent criminal.
But it's not public knowledge.
I don't know.
Because his phrases with quotation marks, he was very, he used a lot of quotation marks
to show literal examples yeah i thought
that that was good um but yeah in general i think like i feel like i am anti-authoritarian
so just giving the government more and more power uh isn't something i i love but also the
rationalist part of me is
there's all these AI labs competing.
One of them is going to concede to the government
and give the government what they want anyway
because it's a competitive lever they can pull.
So it seems inevitable even if I don't like it.
And another interesting aspect of all this
was Mark Andreessen was doing a pod this weekend
and kind of related to the government relations with these AI shops.
He said he was basically told that AI startups are not investable.
Don't invest in AI startups.
It is going to become a game of two to three companies working with the government.
They're going to take over everything and that's it.
Which struck me.
And granted, he's not the only one talking about this and take his opinion with a grain of salt.
But could certainly see that scenario playing out.
And I don't know
necessarily what it means from an investing
angle. So it's tricky.
The other aspect of all this, and I was showing
SpaceX, but SpaceX,
I mean, it seems like Elon, there's three big
IPOs looming in the AI space.
It's Grok and SpaceX.
It's OpenAI and
Anthropic, all perhaps expected to IPO
this year. SpaceX is going to
go first. They're trying to go in the next month or so, it seems.
And they're going to have the highest price tag, like 1.7, I saw.
So what does that mean for the other AI companies?
Is there still going to be enough liquidity around to support these trillion-dollar IPOs?
So in the near term, it's exploding up to the right.
But is there enough money to go around?
Certainly a tricky one to navigate.
I want to keep going.
We need to revisit one of our original trades on the show,
one that Jeebs, our good friend, was deep in.
I think Peter was in as well.
Wow, so this is updated since I pulled up this chart.
Circle stock, folks, is on an absolute heater.
It's up 7% today, 102.
Off the February bottom, it bottomed around 54,
so almost up 100% off the February bottom. It bottomed around 54, so almost up 100% off the bottom.
And then the recent boom is stemming from Q4 earnings,
which came out last week.
I think last Wednesday, they released.
Stock was trading around 60.
It's now trading at 102.
They had tremendous growth.
Thinking of, is it
time to get in
this trade? Peter, I think you were
short at one point. I think you were no longer
short. Have you considered going long
this? Are you sidelined or are you looking
for more short entries?
A friend of mine actually shorted
this at like 49.
So kudos to that
friend who nailed the 100 gain
basically the bottom uh uh i would be i i'm more of a seller at the current prices but what a run
um i'm not actively short um i closed my short in december um kind of ahead of some of the i think
it was the cute one of the earnings calls.
I was worried they were going to pump it. It's pretty impressive price action, especially since
a lot of the shares unlocked too for investors and employees and whatnot. But yeah, stablecoins
are clearly here. It's definitely a big sector that is getting real adoption and creating value
for society. So this is a really impressive company.
It was just an easy short before if you're paying attention given it traded at such a
huge premium relative to the earning potential.
But now, you know, market's much more sane.
And yeah, I think it's a potential interesting one to have exposure to.
And I think people are still trying to get exposure to stable coins.
And this is the cleanest way to do it.
But the recent price action, I'm not sure it's a great time to hop in.
But yeah, basically I have no view.
Not long or short.
And kudos to my friend who had the courage to go long.
It's documented. I think it's like 49 something had the courage to go long. It's documented.
I think it's like 49-something that the person got in at.
So really, really impressive.
Incredible trade.
I agree.
These are some tough candles to chase.
Up 70% in a week.
Maybe look for an entry.
But a few things have played out.
So I do think the fundamental bull case is stronger now for stable coins.
And sometimes I get bored talking about stable coins,
but I actually think there's some interesting things to talk about.
So the big headline from last week is Facebook.
Meta is going to get back in the stable coin game,
but they're not going to develop their own.
They abandoned a prior, their Libra stable coin,
which later was renamed DM back in 2019.
They're not going to roll that out.
They're effectively just going to work with other existing stables.
And they're going to roll them out basically across Facebook,
Facebook WhatsApp, and Instagram,
Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, which I was looking at the numbers last week.
which I was looking at the numbers last week.
I wrote this up for the newsletter.
And, of course, it doesn't mean they're all going to be using stablecoins, but it's arguably like the biggest onboarding group that you could potentially go after.
And this also comes in the back of the agentic boom.
I think the verdict is still out,
whether or not AI agents are really going to adopt crypto rails.
If that's going to be Bitcoin,
if that's going to be stable coins,
they're going to create their own bot coin currency.
The verdict's still out,
but they're all pretty bullish scenarios, I think,
for stablecoins.
And then USDC specifically is the only Genius compliant stable in the US.
So for me, that is the bull case.
It's a pretty big bull case.
You've got Facebook.
You've got AI agents perhaps using them.
Circle is positioned the best for the existing stables that we have.
And then the FUD, or not the FUD, but the bear case historically has been, well, it's
going to be a bad year with interest rate cuts, which means they're going to earn less
revenue.
I thought I had the CME odds.
Yeah, here we are.
So the current outlook for December this year, favorite outcome, 50 bps.
And then we've got about a 30% chance of getting three cuts or more.
I was working with Claude to say, okay, if that's the base case, how much does Circle need to grow to outpace 50
bips and cuts? And the answer was like 15 million or 15%. I'll pull the exacts up here in a second.
But that didn't seem like that much of an outreach.
They need to grow 15% in circulating supply to outpace 50 bips and cuts from a revenue perspective.
They grew 70% last year.
And I outlined the bull case for how they could continue to grow.
So I think the growth case is certainly there.
I think the growth case is certainly there.
Arguably the other bear case is banks coming in with their own stables.
And are we going to see some real USDC competitors come on the market?
And the other bear cases, there are more unlocks.
So I thought the big unlocks were behind us.
I guess at the one-year mark, July 12th, this middle of the summer, there's another big are more unlocks so i thought the big unlocks were behind this i guess at the one year mark july 12th this middle of the summer there's another big round of unlocks so you need
to look at that a bit that's still pretty far out in the future um but i like to set up these
curious if you have any any takes on this one circles another tough one for me to uh buy back into i mean we never
i never owned it um but we fought it the out of it for a good three to six months
i still don't know what else to buy if you want stable coin exposure that's the part of the case
too that's like no one can answer that but i told myself that when i was buying plasma because
tether was raising at 500 million and tether you know invested in plasma and surely tether
would want to invest in like the stable chains they're going to use and then plasma went to
zero and we started pumping stable which which Tether maybe also invested in.
So maybe Circle is the stable coin bet.
But I can't buy it here after it doubled from the bottom.
The time to buy it maybe was in February after it put in the bottom and then consolidated.
But I don't want to buy it after the recent move
um even if i tell myself all these bullish things for stable coins just because a lot of the times
when i find myself in a trade because well this isn't really the thing i want to own but it is the
most uh beta or it is the most like it has the best name value when it comes to this like
theme I want to trade like it normally
doesn't go well for me
so I'll just watch it
watch it on hyper liquid a couple
neutral takes
I'm bullish I think I'm gonna try to find my
way into this I need to look for some entry
I hate trying to buy like
85 90 or
you just thinking
this is a new trend and we can top last it?
I think new all-time highs are possible on this.
If this trend is going to continue,
I don't think it's going to go back under like 90 or 85.
Yeah, I'm a momentum guy.
I don't wait for pullbacks or entries. If I decide to make the trade, I'm a momentum guy. I don't know. I don't wait for for pullbacks or entries.
I'll if I decide to make the trade, I'll jump in.
Again, hate missing.
Would you buy that on hyper liquid or would you buy that through a brokerage account?
Probably through a brokerage just because personally, if I if I've got money on hyper liquid, it's just like it's very liquid.
Then if I have another trade I want to make, I'll just get out of it. Like
I'll see I go
You can be like, I shit. Okay. Yeah. Versus something put it
elsewhere. Like, okay, I can hold this for five years. If it's
over in this account, if it's on hyper liquid, I struggle
holding it for five days.
Yeah. Meanwhile, if you just held it in your brokerage
account where you can't trade it over the weekend, you catch a
nice move.
So we'll see what to geteps back on again to to get to hear his if he's still bearish or not i think even even jeeps
is starting to come around on this one um i mean we were only bearish because it was like 200 plus
sure and that was the react and it was caught off an ipo where rob Robinhood was telling users in the app,
do not sell this or you're going to get punished
and not allowed to buy the next Rocket, Mooner.
And it was almost traded at a market cap of its total circulating supply,
which is insane.
Insane.
There was a ton of reasons to not like it.
And the part that's still a little confusing to
me that i need to do more research on and maybe tyler you have this answer but what is their
arrangement with coinbase now like what what is that deal is that is there a new deal
because a large percentage of their revenue would go to coinbase
i guess i could gemini that to see there's a new deal or revenue would go to Coinbase.
I guess I could Gemini that to see if there's a new deal or whatever AI I want to look at,
but a huge percentage of their revenue and profits went to Coinbase.
Yeah, I think that's a part of the bear case.
I don't think the terms are exactly public, but as circles, revenue grows, does their how much they have to pay Coinbase. So that's another thing to
consider. Certainly. And probably dig in a little bit
more on the words turning.
That's a huge thing.
I do think the growth case is still very
strong um but yeah what does that mean for its 26 26 billion market cap not small um okay i got i
got it this is this is relevant so the current agreement the 50 50 split on the terms of early
2026 the revenue is split based on where the usdc is held on platform coinbase keeps 100 of the
interest income from usdc held directly by its customers on the coinbase exchange off platform
for usd held anywhere else defy other exchanges private wallets etc the interest income is split
50 50 between circle and coinbase um so anywhere that this changes in 2020 stations are renegotiation
the 2026 renewal window.
The current commercial agreement is on a three-year renewal cycle
with a major review schedule for mid-2026.
Analysts expect intense negotiations to circle.
Now a public company faces pressure to improve its own profit margin
by reducing the amount of distribution fees pays to Coinbase.
Yeah, interesting.
So if I onboard to WhatsApp using MoonPay, and I hold $1,000 in USDC on there, Circle has to pay Coinbase 50% of that, even though they weren't in the transaction.
Yeah, so it'll be renegotiated, but this is all part of my original short thesis was we
got close to a market cap that was similar to the circulating supply, which is just a
huge premium for forward earnings.
And in addition, a big part of their revenue was going to Coinbase, this 50-50 split.
And at the time, a huge percentage of USDC was Coinbase itself, which based on this Gemini report, 100% of that revenue went to Coinbase.
So there's a lot to figure out here.
There's a lot of nuance.
Obviously, the earnings have been strong.
And clearly, people still want a way to express a few long stable coins.
It's not the euphoric market that we had in the summer of 25 when people were just doing stupid
stuff. And depending on when you decided to short it, you could have gotten smoked because it was
straight up into the right for a while. I certainly didn't top tick the short, but
it seemed pretty obvious to me that this was way overvalued.
And at some point in time, fundamentals would have to kick in.
And the key now is what do you believe the fundamentals to be?
And I think a key part of that is going to be this negotiation with Coinbase.
So if you're trying to express a view or have a position, I would wait for that information to come out.
position uh i would wait for that information to come out or if you believe you have intel
on where that that's going to go then you could express a view uh based on that information
and then i wonder if they're going to line you said summer i think or i'm curious today that's
what gemini says um mid-2026 if they line that up with the next round of unlocks and also the
clarity act which we haven't talked about um how that plays out
coinbase has been against it apparently circle has been more uh supportive of that um and then
yeah potentially some more mna things we'll see um which by the way 50 odds last friday up to 75
today wow so something's happening not a huge volume market, still a 300 K market.
But some positive movement for those looking for that one to,
to get past about five minutes left in the show.
Let's talk.
What else are we trading?
D's you've been making any trades that we've talked about VBV a little bit.
Thanks.
We were both mostly VBV lines on that one.
Yeah. Shout out a D farmer. He was the were both mostly BBV lined on that one. Yeah, shout out to D-Farmer.
He was the first person I saw start talking about this
sometime around like $2, $3 range in February.
So shout out to him.
He's the only person on my timeline
who I saw talk about it before it hit like $5.
But I did not buy any of this or DM.
Just kind of watching it while I hold Banker like a fucking idiot.
This is doing what I thought Banker's going to do.
Banker's just been chop solidating here.
But I haven't been too active in Michigan Street.
I feel like FOMO has been quieter this week.
Frank withdrew all his stuff off FOMO,
and a couple of the other, I think, big accounts
withdrew a bunch of stuff off FOMO.
So my phone is not blowing up as much as it was
when they were trading.
And I'm just chilling in the Pokemon streets.
That's what I'm trading.
I'm on Courtyard and Fidgetals and CollectCrip
and every other fucking crypto Pokemon platform.
And I'm just lowballing people who are selling things
like under market prices
because they don't check eBay or TCG player.
That's been my trading.
So Pokemon top's got to be in, man.
Every time I buy another card,
I'm like, this is gotta be the top.
You're single handedly supporting it. I feel like I see all your Pokemon.
I'm buying I'm not buying like the expensive cards, right? Like if somebody wanted to put the amount of money I put in the cards, like they could just buy like one or two cards and do nothing and just hold them. But not me, dude. I got gotta collect like 500 plus you know mid-range cards
uh just like with nfts you know i'm not buying alien punks or zombies or apes i'm i'm buying
mid-range that is going to be hard to sell if i ever need to sell it and it's not going to
appreciate as much as the floor or the the top range because it's just how i collect things
but i'm having a lot of fun i think that's all that really matters for me gotta do what you love a lot of these og poker players and some of the big poker whales are
collecting so i saw that rampage guy um the black star rayquaza like 300 some grand this week um
after he was posting some of the poncho pikachus and other cheaper stuff earlier on
poncho pikachus and other cheaper stuff earlier on i gotta quickly it does feel like the
collectible card market is like the uh nft market of 2021 right now like i feel a lot like i felt
the first half of 2021 where like a bunch of people don't really know what they're doing or
just coming in and buying shit um you have some cards going up like 50 percent in a week or two even
though the supply of the cards is like massive like 60 plus thousand supply cards um it's just
it's very fun time but it's also like i feel like it's got to be a top when when you see me
buying a whole bunch of cards like it's it's got to be a top sign.
It was in 2020, 2021 when I was buying them, so.
This was when Top Shot peaked about five years ago.
October 21.
Dude, would you rather have a John Morant Holo
or a Mega Charizard Poncho Pikachu?
You know, these are tough questions.
Hey, who wants the original
john moran top shot that's gotta have all-time generational fumble on that whole thing that's
gotta have some historical brand equity in that just the story behind it that that kick-started
a little mania i feel like it was a huge part yeah oh yeah it's a huge part uh i still collect some top shots here
and there i still think on a long time resident they made a shot um i think the nice thing they're
cool collectibles i really do you're gonna make me log in again. But before we, I got plug zero. I think you kind of brought it to my attention.
It was kind of off my radar.
I follow what the team does loosely.
They had their major update with the zero chain.
It's going to be arguably the biggest blockchain upgrade in a decade.
But we had Brian Pellegrino on FOMO hour last week and just talking to him
firsthand was basically enough of an investment thesis for me.
He's a powerhouse.
His team is a powerhouse.
If I'm going to back anyone in crypto, he's on the short list.
So coming out of that interview with him definitely made me want to try to find an entry on the Xero token.
And you have to know there's still a ton of unlocks coming across the next six months.
So you have to be aware of that.
And there's other,
there's macro market conditions to consider.
Not one that I'm rushing into,
but it feels like a really strong DCA and one that like,
if there is a bull market that runs till 20,
like if you're looking at 10X upside type plays,
that's on my short list.
So it's trading at less than a billion, right?
Even hype, like a 10X on hype is huge at this level, right?
Yeah, hard to imagine.
I mean, it's trading at 30 billion,
so you need 300 billion.
Zero needs to get to like 10.
Yeah, no, it's not at 30 billion so you need 300 billion zero needs to get to like 10. Yeah no it's not that it's not that crazy um we were talking about trying to get it between a
dollar 50 and a dollar it's like a golden range and we had under a dollar 50 um not long but I mean
we had it at least for like a couple days last week but it's definitely on my short list too i think peter might have even
been the person who made me aware of brian or it feels like related yeah we go way back
he was in the dfs industry he actually built a competitor to draft kings
yeah i don't remember if i remember him from like if he was on DFS streams with like you Levitan and Bales years ago or what,
but I definitely know him through the DFS guys.
One to look out for.
Well, with that, I think we went around the horn for today's show.
So it is time to do our giveaways.
We're going to do two $500 EAT giveaways here today.
A quick housekeeping item.
So the EAT team did change the rules.
So with how these prizes will work,
you will need to log in every day.
You'll claim $100 per day.
So if you win $500,
you'll need to log in five days in a row
to do your claims.
And with that,
producer Charlie,
let's pull up the wheel. Let's give it a couple spins.
All right, here we go. All right, so this is going to be our weighted. So
it looks like we'll do one weighted and perhaps one more open. So let's give it a run.
open. So let's give it a run.
All right. Master Ponzi has been lighting up the group chat
in front of Arsenic. Wow. Do you outpace Arsenic in volume this week? Well, it deserved
to win. So thank you for playing on the Morning Minute crew.
All right.
So you've won $500.
Again, you'll need to log in every day.
We'll work with the team
to get that all sorted out.
And then we're going to do one more
of these wheel spins.
Who we got?
Kayak.
All right. Hey, Kayak alright
hey Kayak
has won before
but I don't think
has won in the last month
I think both of you
are clear
the rules are
you can't win twice
in a month
certainly I don't think
either of those have
you both should be good
thank you both
for participating
and we thank all
our listeners
for tuning in
to today's show
I want to thank my co-host
as always
we'll be back
next Tuesday to talk all the biggest topics in crypto and Web3.
Until then, have a great week.
Goodbye.
Take care, everybody. This thing. Thank you.
