Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
UNDER EXPOSED: Macro, Alt SZN and The Hype Trade
Recorded: May 27, 2025 Duration: 0:34:00Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion on the latest trends in the crypto market, Bitcoin's recent surge to an all-time high of $112K and significant institutional investments signal a bullish outlook. Key partnerships and fundraising efforts, including a $2.5 billion Bitcoin acquisition vehicle and a strategic Ethereum reserve, further underscore the growing interest and innovation within the cryptocurrency space.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. I gotta join this space and tweet it, my bad.
GM, everyone, we're going to start the show here in just a minute or so.
We're going to get our speakers up on stage.
Thank you all for joining us.
A couple shout-outs.
We got 5511, Harry Krishna, GM, Ampfex, Shift, Goku, Pinstripe, GM, GM.
We got Reed with us.
We got Googly with us.
Howard, all right.
Sergeant Stogie, Graves, thank you for joining us.
We got Deez in the house.
Get him up here.
All right.
We'll have the other folks join us shortly since whenever you're ready let's kick it Thank you. I'm going to go. gm everyone and welcome to episode 27 of underexposed our weekly macro show hitting all
of the biggest topics and trends impacting crypto and broader Web 3. Today is Tuesday, May 27.
Folks, last week we said the Bitcoin all-time high waiting room was open.
Indeed it was, as Bitcoin sent to a smashing new all-time high around $112K.
Since then it's been rejected, trading right around that key level of $110,000.
And the question is, are we on the easy road yet?
Are we still on the hard road?
We're going to break it all down on today's show.
I'm your host, Tyler D.
And I've got my co-host in the house chomping at the bit today to get after it.
First up, D's, art collector, coin stacker, trader.
Getting into nibbling some NFTs, I believe, lately as well.
D's GM, how you doing?
Doing well. I think any of my NFT bids have been hit, but we've been trying to get some.
Every time I bid, somebody outbids me by .01 ETH, and then I want to drive a bulldozer through their house.
So really good vibes.
indeed um well that market
Indeed.
That market...
jane's on with us as well founder of several companies our resident macro expert still finds
time to hang out with us peter gm how are you doing gm yeah this is one of my favorite hours
of the week uh excited to chat through a lot going on in markets and uh yeah crypto's definitely
been very exciting last couple weeks it. It's a big week.
Big week ahead.
We've also got Jeebs on with us to break it all down.
He's an early stage crypto VC, dabbles in the internet capital markets, wears a lot of hats.
Jeebs, GM, how are you doing?
GM, I agree with Peter.
One of my favorite times of the week.
You know, we always come together and everyone has something going on.
Deez is bidding NFTs, Tyler's bullposting NFTs.
What year is it?
Ready to break it down, guys.
Indeed.
Well, happy that you're on with us as well.
Folks, before we get started, quick disclosure,
the opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the speakers
and do not reflect the views or opinions of any organization
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, well, let's get into it.
Lots of time.
Let's create a share up and running for those in the stream.
We will get that stream published shortly.
It looks like we might be having a tech issue or two.
We'll look at those.
Resolved.
I'm going to run us through some of the headlines.
So overall, Bitcoin up 5% since last week's show.
We're hanging out at 110, 177.
Very nice number.
ETH outperforming up 7%.
2660.
So up 6.5% as well at 178.
In macro news, we had Trump say on Friday that he was going to do 50% tariffs on the European Union.
They haven't been good trade partners.
He didn't walk those back on Sunday to a degree. He pushed them out to
July. Other than that, it seems like
the headline from this past week is just more
and more spending
and printing. We've got China
set to have record fiscal
spend. Trump's tax bill, which looks like it's going to
pass, is going to add $4 trillion
to the deficit.
Stocks rallying
today ahead of what is a big week.
We've got Nvidia earnings coming tomorrow.
Yields coming down a bit.
Consumer confidence.
They come out.
It beat estimates by quite a bit. Consumers are more confident
than folks expected them to be. We've got NVIDIA again tomorrow, Q1 2025 GDP official data coming
Thursday, and then inflation data coming on Friday. So it is a big macro week. Also,
that Bitcoin Vegas conference kicking off here today as well. That is big on the crypto side. In the crypto side of
the house, the institutional bid, the ETFs still continue to be one of the biggest stories here.
Massive week for the ETFs, over 2 billion in net inflows over the past week. Today,
we've got some breaking headlines. Trump Media is spinning up a $2.5 billion Bitcoin acquisition vehicle.
So they're going to be betting big on Bitcoin.
We've got the Strive.
They're now going to raise another 700 to buy Bitcoin.
So this just continues.
And now we've got our first micro strategy of gaming, teaming up with Joe Lubin and ConsenSys
to raise $425 to build a strategic Ethereum reserve.
So this is the first really big ETH acquisition vehicle
we've seen here.
So more and more institutional,
but it feels pretty infinite right now.
And other headlines,
we got some more breaking news this morning. Circle is going to IPO. It looks like somewhere in the $5 to $6 billion range.
And interesting twist, Robinhood is apparently offering public IPO access. So if you are a
Robinhood user, you will have your chance to buy in on the Circle IPO.
The question is, should you want to?
We'll get to that here in a bit.
But Peter, I'll toss it to you.
It's a big macro week ahead.
What's jumping out to you?
How are you feeling late May 2025?
Huge week.
NVIDIA earnings certainly will have a big impact on the equity markets.
And historically, NVIDIA and crypto have been pretty correlated, just kind of in the high beta technology sector.
The other aspect I think is going to really drive things this week is the Bitcoin conference, specifically for the crypto markets.
specifically for the crypto markets.
I think that's going to be quite bullish in general.
I think that's going to be quite bullish in general.
We'll probably hear more of these copycats coming out,
mimicking MicroStrategy, which we're seeing all over the timeline.
I think you guys have hit on that pretty well on the phone.
We're all, you know,
that's something to kind of pay attention to,
but I think we'll short-term have some really positive things.
Definitely interested to hear what Sachs has to say, J.D. Vance,
just from the political aspect and the regulation aspect,
I think is really critical going forward.
So from a macro perspective, it's nice to see rates coming down a bit,
but I think what we've seen kind of in the last month or so,
that's different than what was
touted coming into this administration is that it's just going to be a lot more of the same in
terms of spending. M2 continues to go up. You know, this new bill is going to increase the
national deficit. And if that's the case, it's just more of the same. I mean, just kick the can,
increase the debt. The All In podcast, that's
really good conversations around the national debt. And they have a senator on who's opposing
this bill just because of the kind of financial or fiscal responsibility that we have continuing
to raise the debt. You know, the next 10 years, kind of conservative estimates that could be
higher are that we're at, you know, 60 trillion in national debt.
So it seems like that's just going to be more of the same.
Elon even put out a tweet that like, you know,
Doge they've made some good efforts,
but just not going to have a real impact.
That's not his words,
but kind of seems like reality is when you're talking about saving like 60
billion, 70 billion, that's, that doesn't move the needle.
It's like under 1% or around 1% of the national debt in the next 10 years.
So he's focused on growth and all in his companies.
And that really has always been kind of the overall answer to this is that we grow our
way out of it.
And we have, you know, disinflationary forces like technology, that could be AI, that could
be robotics.
There's a variety of things that could actually do that. But yeah, long story short, more of the same. Not only things are
just going to continue to go up because the only way out of this is to deflate the currencies and
governments and central banks around the world are just printing more money. So we didn't get
the austerity that I think was kind of promised by this administration, at least not yet. And
I just think we're going to see a lot more of the same.
So everything's going to go up in a nominal way.
And like Paul Titor Jones said, all paths lead to inflation.
And that's just kind of cemented more in my mind based on the actions that happened last month or so.
It feels to me that Trump, Elon tried to do austerity and everyone threw massive tantrums.
Agree.
It was just total outrage.
And clearly the public showed just no appetite for it.
Or at least that was the sense that I got.
People don't want short-term pain.
And the way we're doing it,
it's probably more than short-term pain.
It's probably real pain to get back on the austerity measures. And it's much more appetizing to be like, oh,
we'll just grow our way out of it. And the best way to basically make the debt worth less is to
inflate it away. And I think we're just, all signs are pointing to that. And it's one of the problems
that we have as a country with just the political terms for both presidents, senators, people in the House.
As a politician, you have an incentive to keep your people happy.
And the way to keep them happy is just continuing to spend.
So it's really it's not politically a good move broadly to tighten the belt and have austerity.
to tighten the belt and have austerity.
So that's kind of our problem that we're seeing.
And it's just kind of a never-ending doom loop of people, you know,
campaign on all these changes.
And broadly, most of those changes are spending more money.
And it's really hard to see a way out of that until it's a really, really bad spot.
And maybe that'll be the case.
Moody's did downgrade U.S. national debt.
A lot of people have made a big deal out of that.
I do think it's important, but I believe Fitch and the other agency that's, I'm forgetting the name now,
they had already downgraded us in the past.
So they just kind of came in line with where the other rating agencies are on the U.S. national debt,
or on the U.S. treasury and our credit rating.
So I don't think it's a huge, huge deal, but it is just another sign.
Um, and it's still, I mean, people are still relying on dollars and treasuries.
It's the most liquid biggest market in the world.
So it's not, you know, a huge thing in my eyes, but it's just kind of more of the same
in terms of, you know, the U S spending tons of money, printing more money, devaluing the
dollar from a nominal perspective.
It's a problem.
At the same time, I feel like it's now the right time.
We've been kicking this can down the road for so long, it feels like.
The problem is getting worse.
But if China is just saying, we're going to full-on print and we're going to try to do everything we can to ramp up powered power capabilities and to try to win AI and robotics.
Like, aren't we kind of, doesn't that force our hand a bit as well?
So is it even the responsible thing to do to try to have severe austerity
right now?
I think that's something I've been struggling with a bit just because it
feels like this next decade is so important just to get out. Do you guys buy the let's grow out of it argument
that the US can enter this golden age of growth and that maybe we can cut some stuff. We can't
cut all or cut maybe as much as we want to, but some cuts are good.
I think getting rid of a lot of the four barrels
and other stuff out there has its benefits.
But also, do you guys buy this whole idea?
Hey, let's just grow our way out of it.
We're going to provide tax incentives.
We're going to provide deregulation.
We're going to provide the right soil for us to be able to do this.
What do you guys think?
I do. I mean, I think versus some of the alternatives.
It's the only answer.
And that's what we've historically done as a species is just grow our way out
of these things. And technology is an amazing thing.
So I do think that there's some validity to it.
It's just we've kicked the can for so long.
And we're just continuing to kind of put more and more pressure on future generations.
So I think it's the right answer.
Austerity is going to be really, really tough.
And we're just, you know, it's just so much pain if you want to actually have legitimate austerity and balance the budget.
Because we're spending so much money just on
interest payments alone. And people are addicted to this capital. Yeah. The All In guys had a good
bid on this. I don't know if you guys listened to it over the weekend. They went into this idea that,
you know, will Trump become louder? Will he veto this? Will he push it back? And, you know,
he has been pushing doge and cuts for so long. Is this something that he just gives up on at this
point? Or does he start to really, you know, pound the drum, start to rally people and say,
hey, you know, look, we're pushing this back. We want more cuts. I think to your point, Peter,
this back. We want more cuts.
I think to your point, Peter,
it's hard. What politician
wants to accept that, knowing that
their incentives
are short-term aligned?
I think some
nominal cuts, they've already got
the tariff revenue starting to come in, perhaps
to offset some of the tax cuts he's
talking about.
It doesn't feel like it's going to be anything
significant, which is
at least my read.
And Besson, just to put a bow on this, Besson has said, and one thing that they pushed on
is basically loosening regulation in the private sector and basically putting us in a position
where the private sector can have more innovation, can spend more. I do think that that's the path.
Loose regulations in the private sector,
more spending, more robust economics versus what's happened in the last 10 years,
especially post-COVID.
Let's just go post-COVID.
We've really just increased the spending
within the government.
And we need to rein that in in some capacity.
So that would be the biggest bet
is that we make the right regulation moves
within the private sector, specifically in banking,
capital flows more freely, and we're in a good spot.
And just on the rating thing, 2011 is when the S&P Global Ratings
first downgraded U.S., doing so in 2011.
Fitch Ratings followed suit in 2023,
and then we recently had Moody's on on may 16th uh downgrade us to that
double a plus so a lot of people are pointing to just moody's and this has already been happening
and moody's just kind of fell in line with the other two rating agencies i think i think best
came out and said it's um it's like a lagging indicator right and that it's from the buy-in
administration i read that separately as well is that it was like backwards looking versus forwards looking well i want to bring us back to to crypto
here today and i think it's a good say because money printing has been one of
the core theses behind bitcoin and bitcoin
continuing to grind up and certainly we are seeing
that so last week we said we were in the
bitcoin all-time high waiting room.
We hit it and it was electric.
Saw 112K.
It looked like we were just going to continue to go straight up.
The Kobe slash what John Brown line now is that the hard road is to 110K.
The easy road is to 200, 250K.
Deez, I'm going to want to tag you in.
Where do you think we're at?
You think we're getting close to the easy road or are we on the hard road here for a bit longer?
Feels like we're closer to the easy road than the hard road.
Is consolidation hard?
I feel like the hard part was in April going through all of the tariff and other transitory
floods that we went through.
So I feel like the hard road's pretty much been behind for over a month.
This is like a yellow brick road to me.
I wouldn't even call this hard.
So I don't know.
If this is hard, what does easy look like?
You just wake up and Bitcoin's up 50k?
Is that the easy road?
I don't know,
but I feel like since the middle of April,
it's been smoother sailing
since literally 420
or around that time frame.
Yeah, I think the easy road
is we just wake up.
Show us the chart, Tyler.
Just break out consolidation,
break out consolidation,
and now we're consolidating again,
and hopefully we break out again.
I'm getting greedy.
I don't want to see us consolidate.
I'm just looking at the hype chart.
You want that to happen for Bitcoin.
Well, partially, and we'll get there,
but I'm really just looking at this.
I just keep looking at this chart.
I just print it out,
and I stare at it every day.
That yellow line looks like when i
joined in 2017 and then the very top of it is when i thought you know i was gonna be like uh retired
in a month and never have to work again yeah that's when i quit my day job uh to trade in
t's full-time right before the that bubble sorry 2017 sorry. Sorry. I say 21. I was thinking 2021.
December 2017 was a wild time.
I was such a sweet summer child
just thinking like,
we're so early. This is going to go up forever.
It is wild how close
these charts have mirrored each other.
There it is.
We're due for a run.
If you're following this.
I think once James Wynn
loses all of his money, we'll probably go
to 120K within 24 hours.
He's close. He's doing his best.
The haters will say this chart's
fake, Tyler. Here's my
concern.
It's following it so closely now
and I think that stuff can actually manifest
itself to some degree.
What happens if Global M2
starts to trend downward?
Let's say this takes a sharp spike
down to 130 or something.
Does the Bitcoin price actually follow
because so many people
are now believing in this chart?
I mean, look at this chart.
This is pretty close, man.
This is like a pretty good one-to-one here. Absolutely, Will.
Do people get ahead of it or does it end up just following it in a lagging manner still?
That's my biggest concern right now is like, is this thing, are these the tea leaves, right? The
tea leaves of Bitcoin right here? And we're at it it's following it and bitcoin continues to follow it but then if money supply starts to fall
off a cliff or goes down or what you know whatnot what happens then i don't see that happening either
right now it seems like we're at least at a global rate printing a of money, and we'll continue to. But what happens in that situation?
We've got such a strong setup right now. So you have
this in the background, right? Which is just global
monetary supply, ongoing
printing, and we've got
Z in China saying they're going to continue.
It doesn't seem like it's going to slow down.
And the U.S. is kind of following
suit, right? At the same time,
you've got a growing laundry list of companies piling billions into Bitcoin. So you've got, you've got the M two, and then you've got this,
this other new driver and the list is getting longer every single week.
There are now dozens of companies doing this at a different scale.
And it feels like they're all kind of pooling capital to do it right now.
And it feels like they all haven't really started hitting the actual buy button just yet.
But it does feel like this perfect storm where you've got the VEC and you've got 21 capital and meta planet.
And then the next unknown that one of these days,
we're just going to see it just shoot to one 15 sailor to sailor.
Still buying like at least once a week,
I'm seeing them buy multi hundred million dollars of Bitcoin.
Is this a systemic risk to Bitcoin?
We had a little bit of that chat on FOMO Hour.
I think you have to look at each of the companies individually.
I still don't believe that Saylor and MicroStrategy are a risk.
They seem okay, for sure.
I think it's these other ones that are sprouting up and then
night up for eath jason yanowitz had a great tweet this morning on this i don't know if you
have that one yeah let me try to find that load it up but and he makes a great point right top
50 assets will all have this strategy laid out for them for For Bitcoin, for Dogecoin, Ethereum,
you're seeing more and more sprout up.
And he brings up the point, right?
It gets concerning once it's outside
of some of the really big ones
for you as a company to acquire this
and then effectively hope for a premium, et cetera.
So you have to wonder, do the premiums compress?
When the premiums compress, what happens?
I look at this and I'm just like, why don't I just buy Bitcoin?
I don't think I have any interest in buying any of these companies.
I'll just buy more Bitcoin.
Yeah, and I think that's where, when you think about how can retail get hurt
and that's the worst.
It's likely in buying these companies
versus the underlying assets, right?
Because the companies can potentially go bust
or I mean, maybe they'll just go,
it depends on if they become forced sellers
and how levered up they get.
But at least if you're holding Bitcoin ETH salon,
you can still survive a drawdown
if you aren't on leverage.
At the same time, I think the counter to Yano and to some of the FUD out there,
and I'm still trying to think through this myself,
is it's the smaller, further out, the risk curve companies that are higher risk.
But they're also dabbling in smaller size.
So, like, for instance, Sharplink.
If Sharplink raises 425 million
and ETH pumps and then ETH dumps
and they have to sell it,
a $400 million hit to ETH,
is that really going to
cause a systemic risk?
Right?
So like
there's a point where we should be worried,
but it doesn't feel like we're there yet.
I guess that's kind of my gut.
I agree.
The worry can be kicked down the road a little bit.
We're going to kick the can down.
We're going to keep kicking cans down multiple roads here
for the foreseeable future.
I think the other, so Bitcoin looks strong.
What jumped out to me, I was looking at the overall market cap.
Man, April wasn't that long ago. We were doing this show six weeks ago.
The overall crypto market cap had fallen to $2.4 trillion,
which is well below prior all-time highs just in April of this year.
It's back to 3.4, but we're still 10% off all-time highs
in overall crypto market cap.
So we've got Bitcoin sitting at new all-time highs and we're still 10% off overall, which
makes sense given how far ETH is below and solar below. And that leads to, there's growing
chatter on CT, on crypto Twitter, that alt season is here or around the corner.
Dees, maybe I'll toss this one to you.
Are you buying it?
Do you think we'll finally see Bitcoin dominance weaken?
Will we see Ethan and others start to lead?
What's your take?
I don't know.
We've already seen for the last month that select alts are outperforming Bitcoin.
It's just a lot more consolidated.
You're not able to just buy
25 things you see on Deck Screener
and all of them go.
But there have been a lot of
coins that have done very well
against Bitcoin already.
I don't want to say we're in alt season.
But you have some things to me
that are
alt season
like we've been talking about hype
we've been talking about rect
we talked about virtual
couple other coins not off the top of my head
that are also outpacing
bitcoin pretty heavily
to me I don't know
if we ever see the alt season
there is always a good time I don't know if we ever see the alties in our life.
But there is always a good time to buy alts that you believe in that actually get mindshare.
And we saw that over the last month and a half or so. They're going up more than Bitcoin.
If I knew this, I would have rather traded all my Bitcoin for Fartcoin hype, Rekt.
Even Mog is outpacing Bitcoin pretty heavily
since the bottom.
Virtual.
I don't know about
a sector-wide alt season, but I think
if you're dialed in and you pay attention
to what gets
mindshared, what
is...
I don't know, to me some of these were so obvious.
But mostly I think Hype and Fartcoin were the two obvious ones
because we talk about them every fucking week.
But even something like Rekt, when that went down from,
I don't even know, like 120 mil to 15 mil,
kind of like a screaming buy, and now it has teleported I don't even know, like 120 mil to 15 mil.
Kind of like a screaming buy.
And now it has teleported straight back up with barely any consolidation.
And some of these things, maybe just because
we're just a little more dialed in
and we talk about it every day that it seems obvious.
But I don't know, it was pretty obvious with a lot of these.
I think, to be fair, if you're here and showing up every day day that it seems obvious but like i don't know it was pretty obvious with a lot of these i think
to be fair if you're here and showing up every day and and following trends there are a few obvious traits i think if you're at arm's distance to crypto and you're casually following it
you probably didn't hit any of those yeah i mean if you're listening to this show i have the
assumption that you're like every day, right?
I don't really feel like the people listening
to this are people
who...
If you're
thinking about crypto an hour a day, and
you're thinking about what you see on the timeline
and what's getting attention, and then you're looking at
charts compared to the attention, then you can
kind of find the discrepancies
and try to bet on it.
And I'm not talking about attention in terms
of like Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
