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UNDER EXPOSED: Macro Crypto, Crypto IPO Boom & Polymarket $1B
Recorded: June 24, 2025 Duration: 1:02:58Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion, crypto enthusiasts explored significant fundraising events, market trends, and the implications of geopolitical tensions on crypto prices. Notably, Anthony Pompliano's ProCap raised $750 million for Bitcoin acquisitions, while Polymarket secured $200 million, reflecting robust investor interest. Meanwhile, market expectations for rate cuts and the resilience of the S&P 500 signal potential growth opportunities, despite concerns surrounding Circle's valuation and investor sentiment leaning towards shorting.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. GM, GM, everyone.
We're going to start the show here in just a minute.
We're still getting our speakers up on stage.
A couple of shout-outs while we wait.
VGF, Mobius, Scrappy T, GM.
Thank you for joining us.
Zanzibar, Tommy, Diego, the homies, GM.
Appreciate you.
Who else we got?
Polly got.
Shambu, Edzu.
All right. I see you. thank you for being here as well all right we got mirrored up here we got dj's live we got d's sims think whenever you're
ready let's kick it Hello. Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 31 of Underexposed, our weekly macro show hitting all the biggest topics and trends
impacting crypto and broader web 3. Today is Tuesday, June 24th. Summer is in full swing.
This past week was a tough one for the nothing ever happens crowd. We had the U.S. enter the Iran war by surprise on Saturday.
Iran has responded.
Now there's a ceasefire, which may have already been broken.
It's leading to Trump dropping the F-bomb at reporters.
Meanwhile, crypto markets have gone through a roller coaster ride.
We're back up now, and the question on our minds,
with this conflict potentially behind us,
can we resume up only? We're going to break it down on today's show. I'm your host,
Tyler D. I've got my co-host in the house. First up, Peter Jaynes, founder of several companies,
still finds time to spend with us. Peter, Jim, how you doing?
Jim, stoked to be back. It's one of my favorite hours of the week. There's definitely no shortage
of things to talk about around the world from a macro standpoint and then, of course, within
crypto. So excited to dive in. Me too. I feel like we've got a lot to talk about here today.
Maybe before we dive in, you're also a sports expert curious uh if you have any takeaways reactions to the
pacers okc final perhaps the achilles injury and what seems to be a an escalating issue
in the nba yeah i am uh super uh i have a lot of empathy for Halliburton.
I ruptured my Achilles playing basketball back in 2016 right before I got married.
So that was brutal just as a human being.
It's such an awful injury.
And, of course, having it happen to Halliburton at that moment in time as he's cooking.
I mean, he made three threes, game seven,
just an unbelievable story for the Pacers all year.
They have a chance.
I mean, you're way live in a game seven
to bring the first championship to the Pacers.
So it's just brutal.
I think every basketball fan is super sad, you know,
that we didn't get to see that the teams play.
It's unfortunate, you know, it happened to Tatum, who apparently was dealing with some
sort of calf injury as well.
Obviously, it happened to Damian Lillard, who came back from a calf strain.
It happened on his opposite leg.
Halbert says he would have done it again, which that makes sense to me.
It is a devastating injury, but, you know, you play the game for a chance to win a championship.
And I thought he had one of the coolest messages on X and Instagram yesterday. injury, but you play the game for a chance to win a championship.
And I thought he had one of the coolest messages on X and Instagram yesterday.
I admire him so much as a person.
We have crossed paths with him a decent bit. He was actually really involved in NBA Top Shot when it first came out.
So Hal Burden is a very smart, savvy.
He's great in content, a magical player on the basketball court.
He was the engine for the Pacers,
and it's just so devastating to watch it happen live.
So, yeah, super sad.
Hope he comes back strong.
You know, the kind of implication going forward for the NBA,
the West is stacked, especially now with Kevin Durant going to the Rockets,
and the East is totally, totally open, given what's happened Durant going to the Rockets, and the East is totally,
totally open, given what's happened with Tatum and the Celtics, who look like they could rattle off multiple championships, and now this Pacers team, which was set up as well as a team going
into next year, now in a tricky spot without Hal Burton, who will inevitably miss the entire
season. So super sad, hate seeing the Achilles injuries um there's a lot of speculation on why
they're happening at a higher rate to younger players but that's uh too much to go into uh on
our on our podcast very fair we'll have to have a lot of conversation sometime i'm curious uh
for your thoughts on that especially as someone who's gone through it folks we've also got d's
on with us live today art collector coin stacker CoinStacker, and Trader Deez.
GM, how you doing?
GM, nothing ever happens.
What a week.
Nothing ever happens.
I was looking at the price of hype on our last show,
and it was $43.
Wow.
It feels like a lifetime again.
It is.
I always like to take a look at the the seven day numbers live during our show to
to get a feel for where things were the last week and uh yeah that's an interesting hype is down
four percent but it is up substantially from where it was which we will get into here in a bit a
couple housekeeping things folks we are live on kick Make sure to follow our channel, DGEN's Live.
We'll be streaming here going forward every week. And also, 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 organizations they are associated with. We are here to share insights, provoke
thought, and maybe even start 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, now let's get into it.
Our topics for today, and I will fire up the screen share.
We're going to dig into macro big time. I think that the biggest rocks,
Israel-Iran war escalates. The U.S. enters by surprise on Saturday night, or at least it caught
me by surprise. They have since exited yesterday. We got what was a telegraphed retaliation
from Iran. No real repercussions for that. It looks like the U.S. is done. And now it looks
like perhaps a ceasefire between Iran and Israel as well. We will see if that holds up tonight.
There was some breakage of that ceasefire earlier this morning. That's on the war front. Now it seems like folks are already starting to look towards
the Fed as perhaps the next catalyst here. Some dovish commentary out of Bowman made people think
that rate cuts in July might be possible or on the table. I've spiked 24%, 23% yesterday
on the CME board. They've since dropped today based on some new
commentary from Powell. So we'll dig into that as well. And then the other potential catalyst
upcoming deadline here, that 90-day tariff delay is coming to a head on July 9th. Now just a couple
weeks away. We haven't made tremendous progress in that time with respected trade deals.
So a lot of eyes on what will happen on that date. From a crypto perspective, we talked a
little bit about this. Prices absolutely nuked over the weekend. Saw Bitcoin in 98K. They've
since rallied back pretty fiercely. Bitcoin up 1% on the week at $105.3. ETH is still red on the week at $24.40.
So certainly lagging behind.
Solana down about 2% on the week as well at $144.
Hype, which had been the fastest horse, down 5% on the week at $37.
But that's also because it was at a new all-time high last week.
Memes and alts were down even more, but are also rebounding pretty quickly
to start the week. We've had Circle become just the stock rocket. This thing hit $300
per share briefly yesterday. It's back to 250. It's becoming a more popular short
music to Jeeves' ears, even though he's not here. We've got Anthony Pompliano
launching the latest crypto acquisition company. His ProCap has raised $750 million to buy Bitcoin
and breaking before the show, they've already bought half of that. They've already spent $386
million on Bitcoin, which I believe they must have bought yesterday around a $103.8
average. And we've got the Genius Act passed the Senate. Trump called on the House to put it on his
desk. ASAP. More breaking news before the show. Polymarket raised $200 million at evaluation above
$1 billion. So a lot of news, a lot of ways we can take this conversation today.
I want to start maybe just kind of highest level, taking a look at macro.
I mean, Peter, there's been a ton going on.
We had Israel-Iran.
We've got some comments out of the Fed.
What's top of mind for you?
What are your reactions to perhaps the end of this conflict?
Do you think we're near the end?
Or what are the pressing macro items folks should be aware of here?
I don't have an edge in geopolitics at all.
I think most people who think they do are fooling themselves.
But there are markets that you can watch to basically see what's happening.
Obviously, if you look at the polymarket, I think there's better markets to watch, specifically the price of oil and specifically the price of gold.
And just kind of watching those will give you a sense of how likely we are to have a resolution.
You know, with oil selling off and gold selling off, I think the market is basically telling you that they're expressing some form of peace
or less concerns kind of from a geopolitical standpoint,
specifically in the Middle East.
So I think it's foolish to try to become an expert in this stuff
or to think that you could become an expert,
watch the markets that are going to tell you
some form of peace or a less impactful geopolitical issue from a market standpoint.
So I'm watching those really closely.
On the crypto side, there's so much going on.
I really want to talk about the Circle Short and kind of all these different Bitcoin entities.
The Circle Short in particular is the most intriguing by a good bit to me.
And then, of course, we had Powell today basically saying they're going to be cautious and not necessarily act until they get more information on, you know, basically how tariffs are impacting inflation.
He seemed most concerned with inflation and the impact that tariffs could have.
So markets are digesting that.
It just seems like it's going to be more of the same from Powell.
So those are the main macro things.
You can check this.
It seems to me that we're getting less and less likely that we'll get these cuts.
I don't know how the markets move today on Powell's stuff.
Looks like 81.4% between 425 and 450.
So a big move suggesting that we're not going to get the cuts that were anticipated even a week ago.
And yeah, crypto, Bitcoin, not fully acting like gold, but kind of acting like gold in some ways.
Kind of acting like the NASDAQ.
So I don't know.
I want to dig into that here in a second, but I want,
let's talk rates a little bit. So I got a little,
I was in the camp that was probably September at the earliest.
And I think that's kind of what markets had been showing us,
especially coming out of the June fed meeting. But then yesterday,
so it's not just Powell that makes the decisions.
And one of the other Fed governors, Bowman, had made several dovish comments, including
basically that inflation was under control and that they had an appetite to cut perhaps
as soon as July.
So we actually saw the odds jump to about 23% for a July cut, which not high by any means, still an unfavored outcome,
but higher than where they were.
It was a 50% spike on the day.
But they're dropping again now after the Powell commentary.
So it seems like most are going to guess the earliest we're going to get it is
September.
September, 67% chance of one cut, 14% chance of two.
So 80% chance we're going to get something by September.
Now, end of year, looks like we've got, let's see.
Yeah, so only a 2% chance of no cuts.
So I'm hearing.
I would take that bet, by the way.
I like 51 on no cuts. I think that hearing, I would take that bet by the way. I like 50 to one on no cuts. I think
that's a sharp bet personally. I think at 50 to one, it is a sharp bet, but I'm seeing growing
consensus out there for no cuts in 2025. Um, and I just want to be very clear that that is a large
underdog, uh, at least with how markets are pricing this in right now. So I think rate cuts
are still expected. A part of this, so it's not just inflation, there are other drivers, and one
is employment. And I think there are perhaps some signs of weakness in the U.S. labor market.
I've been following this.
And Joe McCann, he has been kind of on a rant the last few days,
really rallying for rate cuts.
So take some of his commentary perhaps with a grain of salt.
But he's highlighting the stat that the U.S. labor market is weaker
than it was before COVID in 2019.
And will that be perhaps a driver for the rate cuts?
I think we have, we've had the layoffs in the D.C. area as some of the Trump administration changes to government and oversight.
government and oversight. Then now I think some increasing rhetoric around AI and AI taking jobs,
big tech companies not needing as much headcount. They're already starting to kind of come out
and say that. So is this the other kind of wild card here and how we might get a path to a rate
cut? Have you been following this any thoughts
reactions on the the labor market front here bier yeah i think it really matters and pal touched on
that a lot um i think the biggest thing is is how is ai going to kind of be placed into this long
term um in the short term it just feels like the labor market is still very strong. So to me,
I don't have like a super strong short term view. Long term, though, it's gonna be very
interesting to see what the world looks like. If a lot of these kind of just to me, it just seems
obvious that we're going to see a lot of disruption with some of these jobs
through AI, through robots. I mean, I was in an Uber, or not an Uber, but I had a black car from
the airport. And the guy just talked about how Uber completely disrupted his business,
and he's struggling to get by. I'm like, well, here comes robo taxis and everything else. And
you know, people working at Amazon, they're doing a lot of the shipments, robots are going to take
those jobs. There's a ton of customer shipments. Robots are going to take those jobs.
There's a ton of customer service and like middle management jobs, I think, are ripe for disruption with AI.
So the labor market is going to change dramatically.
And it's just a matter of how quickly that comes to fruition in the short term.
I think that the market is still broadly strong.
And what's been remarkable is how just resilient the whole American economy has been through all this geopolitical issues, rates, etc. And I think
a lot of that is kind of fiscal policy, which seems like fiscal policy is going to continue
with, you know, Besson issuing a lot of short term T-bills. There's that. And I is the other Fed pivot.
Pivot might not be the exact correct word here,
but there is talk of how they are going to change these SLR,
supplementary leverage ratio requirements,
effectively setting limits on the type of holdings,
percentages that U.S. banks are allowed to hold in treasuries and other risky assets.
And I don't have the specific details up in front of me.
I think these were put in place around the 2008 financial crisis.
And the impact of some of these changes is banks will have more capital put into treasuries.
They also have more ability to extend credit, which is,
as I understand it, short-term bullish, but it also does put a little bit more systemic risk
into the banking system if things do, you know, if you have black swan events or big downturns.
So that's going to be another one to watch. I think what's still to me is I've just been kind
of taking a step back and thinking about this macro picture, everything that's happened from tariffs, Liberation Day, this war.
The S&P is within like 1% of all-time high. It's been a full V-shaped recovery.
And just kind of trying to think through like, so what are, like, what's going to stop,
what's going to stop this trade
from continuing to grind up?
And other than, you know, black swan events,
I think the big one perhaps is tariffs.
And I think we do have a key date on July 9th coming up
to see how the Trump administration will handle that.
The trade deals aren't going to be done by July 9th.
Will we just get another extension,
another cook the can down the road another 90 days?
Curious if you have a read on that, Peter,
or that's something that you're watching much at all,
or just any other reactions to the S&P effectively trading at all time high
amidst all this volatility?
To me, it's just one main story, and it's the fiscal policies that we have and liquidity going
up. And just on a nominal rate, a lot of these things are just continuing to trade up. I mean,
if you overlay this chart in gold, obviously, Bitcoin's outperformed in such a huge way. It's
kind of hard to do that. But to me, it's just a nominal story. And it's just super simple. And that's, there's certainly so
many other factors. There's people way smarter than me that are experts on a variety of things
that can paint a different picture. And, you know, there's reasons that certain things have
done well, certain things haven't done well. But if you just look at the U.S. equity market as a whole,
I think the overwhelming story is how we're behaving fiscally.
And we're still the strongest economy, most robust economy in the world.
And we have loose fiscal policy that is going to make things go up in a nominal way. And that's just the way I'm viewing it and why we're here for crypto.
Yeah, it is certainly a part of the Bitcoin bull case
as well as others.
Deez, I'll tag you into the convo here.
I talked about this on FOMO Hour yesterday.
I think I was in a cab downtown with a good buddy.
He's a sharp guy.
He's not deep in the crypto streets.
And I was talking about how Bitcoin had sold off He's not deep in the crypto streets. And I was talking about how
Bitcoin had sold off during the US entering the Iran conflict. It was like 99k at the time.
And he said he couldn't put together two sentences to explain why Bitcoin would sell off
during an event like that. And it kind of rattled me a little bit because it does kind of violate
some of the narratives, you know, because gold should
pump in a scenario like that. Crypto doesn't. And then there's the narrative that crypto still
kind of trades like levered tech stocks, but yet stocks were green on Monday. They never really
showed that volatility. I'm curious, I guess, are you surprised at this type of price action?
Surprised to see Bitcoin and crypto majors
selling off so hard during geopolitical conflict?
Any thoughts on why?
Yeah, I'm not super surprised
given, I feel like on the weekends especially,
it's just like the only thing people can sell
to hedge against shit like markets are
closed people look at their crypto they're like i can sell this um i don't know if like that's a
main reason why but i feel like a lot of times we have these sell-offs and this is just anecdotal
it feels like it's on the weekends like we get some news friday or after markets close and then crypto sells off.
I've been memeing about Sunday sell-offs for what feels like two years now.
And I never have any good rhyme or reason why.
Other than it's a liquid and it's the weekend and you can't move money into crypto to buy dips on the weekend but
you can sell crypto to take money out of your bank account on the weekend so it's like this one-way
street um but i i don't know like i i'm a big fan of just buying any type of geopolitical fund and
doing nothing for like a week or a month and just seeing how it resolves because a lot of times nothing does happen.
Or maybe that's not the right thing to say
because things do happen, bonds are dropped.
But in the grand scheme of the market,
it resolves itself and price continues to go up after.
So it's generally a good buying opportunity
if you can have cash available
and just kind of go with the flow.
I'm never surprised at any sell-off.
You could have a fake news headline from the DB account
and I could move Bitcoin down 5%.
Not saying that there's been fake news coming out or anything,
but it's just such a fickle market that nothing ever surprises me.
Right.
We basically pumped 5% on the ceasefire headline yesterday.
And it was unclear for several hours that that was even real or agreed
upon by the Iranian social being reposted to Twitter.
And we're like, yep, looks good.
Like it's kind of a joke, but I think the nothing ever happens.
I think it is also a commentary on price action.
And like, if you look at this Bitcoin chart, if someone checked the price last Tuesday, went camping in remote parts of the world and were disconnected for a week and came back today, like, oh, everybody said the same price, we're up 1%.
If they're looking at the chart, they might say, oh, why did we fall 7%?
Maybe ask that question.
But broadly speaking, nothing did happen to the price.
And then if you look back even further,
nothing's really happened since December.
It's sideways with one large dip in recovery.
We're kind of back in this range, still on the hard road to 110 which we haven't
been able to meaningfully break yet i just keep going back to the s&p chart too like it's
correlation between that and bitcoin still feels really high like we talked about earlier s&p is
flirting with all-time highs again i think all-time high is like, I don't know, 6.130, something like that.
And we're at 6.06.
So it's close.
And in that scenario, is Bitcoin start outperforming or does it still stay in line with it?
I don't know.
But I keep seeing all these fucking companies pop up from people who are like,
companies pop up from people who are like,
yeah, we're just buying crypto on our balance sheet.
And that feels...
I think the more that those are coming up,
the more hesitant I get.
Just from a Vibes perspective, nothing else.
It does feel like...
It's all pomp.
It's all pomp on the timeline.
Rocket ship, 750 million raised,
and they deployed close to 400 million of it already.
If they deployed close to 400 million of it already? If they deployed close to 400 million of it,
the market barely moved.
I guess it wasn't really too much.
Yeah, I mean, this is a part of the infinite bid,
it seems like,
is these companies spinning up.
But then on the flip side,
is all their buys are largely getting absorbed.
Right?
So it does seem like on a macro standpoint,
it's perhaps a transfer from the large whales,
ancient whales holding and selling to new buyers.
I think there's also perhaps from a negative lens,
and I'm still an optimist, but I see the critique.
I mean, how long has Pump been thinking about this SPAC and executing on it, right?
Like, I feel like this was put together fairly quickly and was able to raise $750 million.
It was announced on Monday, and then within a few hours, he already deployed half of his capital.
And I always wonder how you do go about
buying this. I think Saylor's gotten a lot
of criticism for just top blasting, but
he buys so frequently that
criticism has kind of faded a little
bit.
But Pomp, here he got $750
million in capital, and he's already put
half to work. So
if he buys any more this week or next week, he's
going to be running low in the
coffers. I did think, so we, on FOMWR, we interviewed the investor relations lead from
DFDB, DeFi Development Corp., which is the Solana acquisition company. I think they announced they
were going to raise up to $5 billion to buy Solana. They're going to use financial engineering tactics like running validators, capturing yield within the Solana ecosystem to earn a yield on the Solana that they've held and drive profits and drive their shares up.
And he brought up an interesting analogy. We were talking about why would an investor buy one of these companies' stocks
versus just buy the ETFs? And he made the comparison that the ETF is like the river
current. You're going to float along with the current driving the price action. Whereas if
you buy into one of these companies, the company is a speedboat that can perhaps accelerate beyond just the current. And it
becomes a little bit more of a bet on the captain of that speedboat. So I did think that was
interesting. Right. You know, I've never seen a river crash and I have seen speedboats crash. That does make sense.
Which is a
great response to that.
I just watched a video
on Twitter the other day of a speedboat that went
too fast and flipped and disintegrated
in the middle of a lake.
It's a great
analogy.
But I don't know
if I agree with that that they're basically just saying
it's like reflexive and if the current's going fast and the speedboat's going faster but uh
be interesting to see man i i'm not personally buying or shorting any of these um i have been
looking more at coinbase and robinhood i feel like a little late to even thinking about buying them. But just as things that
could outperform Bitcoin or the S&P, those are both. I mean, Robinhood's been on a rocket ship
since April from like 30 to 80 bucks. And there's talks of perps and shit being more favorable and
maybe Robinhood eventually getting some type of per her platform. And Coinbase is kind of knocking on all-time highs again after going up more than double
from the April lows too.
So both of those have been outperforming Bitcoin.
And I think as Circle gets more and more attention and looks less and less enticing,
some of these other businesses that could benefit from crypto
tailwinds look a lot more enticing.
Do you buy the growing rallying cry that if you're in crypto, all it's pivot to stocks?
I mean, as a broad roll of thumb, no. But I do think as just being an investor in crypto you should be
open to every vehicle possible and not just dial in on you know bitcoin eith solana hype whatever
like it's good to be aware of all the different bets you could make and um you know unless you're
full porting one idea it's good good to just take some other bets.
So I don't really think you should sell your crypto
and buy crypto stocks.
But I do think if you're spending a lot of time
in the crypto ecosystem and thinking about ways it can grow
and ways to allocate money,
that you probably are doing yourself a disservice
if you write off anything that you can't buy on chain.
Especially if you're thinking more about Boomer
or TradFi flows and where they would go.
They're probably not taking a boat
or a virtual airplane to Mexico
and depositing on a L2
or another alternative L1 to buy your bags.
I agree. I do think there is an impact from these new IPOs and then some outperformance in some of these stocks that it will take away some of the capital that perhaps was going to flow in.
I do. I feel like I do have that read. Maybe we're a little too early to have definitive data behind that.
I mean, certainly Circle was just grinding up for a full month,
largely while crypto was flat or even selling off.
And now Coinbase is starting, CoinStock is starting to kind of catch some of that.
So CoinStock is up 9% today.
It's outperforming all the crypto majors,
basically trading like an alt.
And now you've got more of these SPACs,
these treasury companies spinning up
that are also alternative investments,
ways to get access to crypto.
And we know that there's going to be an IPO boom coming.
So I could definitely see there being impacts and it just there are more options and
peter i'm curious for your thoughts you are i feel like you kind of invest you are an open-minded
investor you look across sectors and niches like are you looking at crypto stocks or any top of
mind for you how are you thinking about this yeah i mean i i think i've talked about on the show i
love robin hood um i'm really interested in them.
They're also playing in the betting space.
So I'm paying quite a bit of attention to them as a company.
I still see a lot of asymmetry in the stock.
Of course, not financial advice, but this has been something I'm really interested in.
Coinbase, I know a lot of people there.
There's been a lot of smoke around Coinbase.
I had the view that I'd rather own HUD than Coinbase.
So basically converted a lot of the Coinbase into HUD.
And then the thing that's most interesting, and I've not had much success doing this,
it's certainly the most risky, but there is a ton of analysis and people that are looking to short circle.
Jeebs being kind of the leader within our, our crew preaching that I have
started to add some, some options contracts to that.
To me, this is absolutely insane what's happening here.
And I think a large part of the price action is a short squeeze.
Of course you had a great headline with the genius act as well.
And I think people, you know,
one thing we've talked about in our chat
and here on the show is, you know,
how can we go long stable coins?
Because we feel so confident
that that's going to be a big sector.
And I think a lot of people are doing it the same way.
And it's like, okay, the one way I bet on it
is on Circle.
So I think they've garnered a lot of attention,
benefited from a short squeeze,
and then obviously some great headlines.
But this is a wildly, wildly overvalued business at the current market cap relative to the current earnings,
especially. But even if you go out and look at forward earnings, at one point we were getting
close to circle trading at the same value as the market cap of USDC, which makes no sense because it's basically making a yield off that, you know.
And obviously, the integrations with Coinbase, they do have some optionality going forward.
But it's been a very well run company.
I mean, they've done a great job to get here.
So I'm not totally trying to crap on them. There's reasons to be optimistic about this long term. But at this price, it's just, I mean, it's crazy. Just looking at the earnings ratio. I mean, if you look at just like the PE, current P's and the thousands, forward P's, like still thousand plus X. So this is one of the more crazy bubbles that I've seen. And I think the bigger
thing that will impact this equity long term is just the immense amount of competition that we're
going to see. I mean, even MasterCard had an announcement today, Amazon, Facebook, every bank.
It just feels like there's going to be a huge amount of competition in the stablecoin space.
And we've seen that already on chain. And I think it's going to be a huge amount of competition in the stablecoin space. And we've seen that already on chain.
And I think it's going to be something that we see more and more of, you know, with these
public companies.
So yeah, not financial advice.
Thousand X guys talked a lot about this being a clear short.
You can make it a pair trade.
It's pretty, pretty nuts with what's happening here with Circle.
But yeah.
I'm conflicted.
I wanted to share a bull case.
I do think that the short side is becoming more consensus, certainly at these levels,
even from folks who were bullish at the IPO.
I'm in the unique position of being bearish at the IPO at 31.
I thought this thing was going to be worth more like $3 billion
based on some of their earnings and fundamentals.
But what stuck out to me immediately,
I thought TradFi looked at these things more strictly,
and cruelly they don't.
Money poured into this.
I do feel like there must be just this pure circle
equals stablecoins narrative message that's driving this.
And it feels like that might be strong enough to me that I would be too nervous to be on the other side of this.
And then I saw Darren, who is a sharp investor, someone I've been following for quite some time now,
following for quite some time now, basically says, stop talking about PE.
We need to value this on the net asset value, the MNAV, of their issuance and how high they can go.
So I think there is a cohort of folks who are thinking about it this way.
That is how you can get to the higher potential valuations.
So we'll see.
For sure.
I don't have a position.
Extremely well.
I'm not trying to paint a bear case on them.
I just think there's going to be more and more competition.
And Ethan, I listened to the Tether CEO on Bankless.
They're going to have some sort of US product at some point in time.
I think a lot of these crypto companies are looking at the success of the Circle IPO.
And, you know, people are calling for an XRP IPO, a Tron IPO, other stable coins launching with this
big companies getting into this space. I just think that, you know, the mindshare of like,
really the main way to bet on stable coins right now and TradFi is through this. And I think a huge
part of the most recent
move because you can look at this just on the premiums i mean it is wild uh what you have to
pay on premiums for puts and also selling calls i mean this the the premiums in these option
markets for this name are off the charts so uh could could easily be wrong um jeeps if he was here would be making a lot of cases i just
to me i like being so close to crypto when it's starting to trade near the price of the market
cap of usdc alarm bells are going off in my mind yeah i think that's very fair uh and shout to jeeps
for being boots on the ground and permissionless trying to pitch his short case to as many people as he can.
Somewhat related to this, so Tron is going to IPO.
We got that news last week.
I don't know that we have specific details.
I think it's going to be one of those reverse mergers or SPACs.
Now we've got Justin Sun touting the amount of tether USDT that they have on Tron.
It's up $20 billion this year. It's at over $80 billion. So there's more tether on Tron
than there is USDC in circulation. So that's going to be an interesting part of their potential pitch here as
well ahead of an IPO.
And I think that's going to be one certainly to watch as well,
pending the,
whatever come out valuation it comes out.
I'm still in the camp.
Like this next crypto IPO,
do you just blind my fire at it?
Is there going to be enough demand for the,
for this next one?
Like we're just throw fundamentals
out the window just based on the circle i mean circle basically 10x it hit 300
these are you loading up to fire on the next one or are you gonna you know the fact that i
don't want to do it probably means it's great because I didn't want to do it with Circle.
Also, I feel like I'm a countersignal. I'm not loading up. Is Tron the next one? Is that what
we're saying? I think it will be one of the next. There's only a handful that we know that we know about okay x gemini it shouldn't load up on that but
like it's justin son yeah never someone i want to bet on but also someone i don't really ever bet
again so i don't know man i'm not it's okay to be on the side hanging out the fidelity account
getting ready to blast but uh what if what if that's the play we need? Tron was one of the first tokens I
ever hit a substantial multiple on back in
2017. You would think I would be more
partial to get back in there.
But I'm not.
I will say this. I've never wanted
access to tokenized stocks
more than I do
in summer 2025.
It's because I don't
have a ton of capital sitting in investment accounts.
I actually have more free reign on chain.
And I would be able to make more potential plays, perhaps lower scale.
But I'd love to have access to some of these on chain.
And I do wonder if we will here maybe this time next year or perhaps even
sooner.
I know DFTV is working with Kraken to get their stock on chain here pretty
soon.
So maybe that will be a viable option for us.
The other, well,
perhaps a stock to buy or have on our radar, Polymarket.
So just before today's show,
they've raised $200 million so far in evaluation over $1 billion.
They have not publicly commented on an IPO or a token launch.
Certainly there's a lot of airdrop farmers out there who hope they do a token.
Given the success circle and others, it seems like IPO may be the more likely path.
Peter, I'll toss it to you.
I know we've talked about prediction markets a lot on this show,
but I feel like it's been a little while since we've gone deeper on Polymarket.
but I feel like it's been a little while since we've gone deeper on Polymarket.
So I'm curious if you have thoughts on, A,
what Polymarket has to buy at $1 billion here,
or perhaps it's broader commentary on how they've managed to continue to find
success post-election.
Yeah, it's been remarkable. What a great story.
Obviously a bit biased in the chain really well.
We've talked a lot about Nick Tomino,
and I'm an LP in one of the first One Confirmation Fund, and they've been the lead investor in this.
So I'm biased, but it's been a remarkable journey. They've really captured a ton of mindshare,
traction, traffic off the election, and they have some really big tailwinds at this point in time,
just given Trump being in office
is great for headlines
and things for people to speculate on.
And then from a sports perspective,
prediction markets have a lot of tailwinds.
We've seen what's happened with CalSheet.
That's been great for Polymarket as well.
So the valuation,
there's obviously sophisticated investors that are putting money
into this at really steep valuations. And I certainly think given the success of Circle,
I think a lot of crypto companies are looking at IPOing. So that would not surprise me with this
name. They certainly could have a token as well. There's a lot of ways that they can monetize
kind of the enterprise value that they've created.
And we'll see if we get more and more competition,
which obviously, you know, we're close with Myriad.
Calci's got a lot of momentum right now.
So it'll be interesting to kind of see
how the whole space plays out.
But Polymarket's certainly kind of leading the charge
and in a great place, it seems.
Yeah, they are helping to raise the tides for the entire prediction market space
and i'll admit like i'm happy to say that i was wrong i got i was kind of on the camp that post
election volumes would crash for polymarket you know just like every prior election cycle
for polymarket you know just like every prior election cycle and my hat is off to them they've
been able to keep it up i mean this is wild like they basically are coming in at 750 million a
month 900 million a month close to a billion and they my read is they bridge the gap with sports
which was a smart pivot for them to do. And now they're emerging in this geopolitical sector.
And it does seem like whether or not you morally agree with betting on countries bombing each
other or not, there's been real markets for it.
And there's probably been $100 million wagered on this Israel-Iran conflict in the past few weeks.
And I think we're seeing their markets more and more integrated with media,
which I think is one of their primary goals here as well.
So they've been doing an extremely good job.
Do you find yourself, Peter or Deez,
do you find yourself checking these lines?
When you see news breaking, when you see a headline on X,
do you find yourself pulling up the Polymarket line
to see if it's real or not?
How are you using it, or if, on a day-weekly basis?
I'm not using it too much, honestly.
I feel like I see it more when the Polymarket account tweets it
rather than me going to their site to check the odds.
And it's kind of a little dystopian
with all the geopolitical conflict stuff.
And then it definitely seemed like there was some minor front running
on some of these strikes over the last week, or at least that's what it seems like from what I read on Twitter.
But I'm not on there super often checking many of the lines, honestly.
Peter, curious if you're using it or checking lines on a frequent or infrequent basis.
Yeah, I like it. I mean, this has always been one of my bold cases
that we've talked a lot about, Tyler,
and I think one of the flywheels we're hoping
with Myriad as well is that I think
the coolest thing about prediction markets
is it's just great content.
You get data-driven information on these big events,
and then there's all this content that go around it.
So, of course, seeing it on X,
it's in a lot of chats.
You know, it's being mentioned by Goldman Sachs. People are using this data all over the place,
which to me is really exciting. This has kind of always been my vision for how content's going to
evolve and like why there's so much value in prediction markets. I'm following the sports
stuff really closely. There's definitely been some arbitrage available across prediction markets. I'm following the sports stuff really closely. There's definitely been
some arbitrage available across prediction markets relative to other futures. So people
are taking advantage of that. I think over time, that'll get more efficient. But yeah,
watching sports, now it's slowed down. But in general, the big thing that's taken off is
futures markets are very liquid and prevalent on these prediction markets,
specifically in polymarket and Cal sheet.
So that to me is, is very intriguing and obviously right up my alley.
The geopolitical stuff seems like there's quite a bit of noise,
especially since it's hard to kind of grade some of these things.
That to me is maybe one of the challenges that hopefully we get better over time. But yeah, it's definitely something to monitor. And if you're really
plugged in, I do think it's hard to be a geopolitical expert, but there's probably
a pretty big market out there for people who are relatively savvy to make money
on these prediction markets with these geopolitical events.
And your reason? Yeah events in an efficient market. And the reason it is, is they've done a great job of bringing
liquidity to these markets, right? To be able to attract... So I'm just looking at the Ford
out nuclear facility destroyed before July has got nearly $5 billion bet on it. So you can actually
throw some capital at this if you think you've got a read.
This is also interesting that this has actually been proposed as yes and is disputed.
And I actually looked at this line.
What's interesting here is their primary resolution is official confirmation from Iran or the International Atomic Energy Agency,
though they also have this caveat a wide consensus of
credible reporting may also be used so i do think this is where they they sometimes they have to be
careful with how they march forward on some of these geopolitical bets or at least betters need
to be very careful i feel like the intent of this line was very much like will the us or israel
attack fordow and it happened i think for a lot of people that was yes
that should have been a yes outcome but that's not necessarily the fine print we also don't
even know if the u.s wanted to destroy the facility or if just like destroying the tunnels
or destroying certain parts were enough for that mission and then you've got the other part of the
fine print
where official confirmation from Iran,
well, even if it was destroyed,
Iran may never come out and say that, right?
Which makes some of this a little trickier or murky.
So I found that interesting.
I'll be curious how some of these markets
will resolve and trend over time.
But it is good content, to say the least.
Folks, we've got about 10 minutes left in the show.
I feel like we haven't really talked kind of downstream,
down the risk curve much at all.
Peter, I'll tell you to you first.
I'm curious, are you still having the weekly poker games?
What are the hot tokens?
What are the guys talking about perhaps buying or are they are they buying anything like is there
chatter about any of this so to speak for coin still the most popular thing to just talk about
just because it's so absurd i don't know if anyone's making any moves but that's that's that's the
you know the country club guy
is always intrigued by what's
happening with PartCoin. I do know
a couple of the holders that claimed
they were thinking about buying when it was dipping here.
Who knows if they actually did, but
I'd say that's garnered the most
attention. Within the crypto
gambling ecosystem, I think hype
is probably still the token
that's talked about most.
I believe I mentioned on some of the previous shows that some of these TradFi sophisticated options traders are really intrigued by hype.
This to me is a really compelling one to watch.
Obviously, so much success with the platform.
I'm very curious to see what competition arises
I'm very curious to see what competition arises.
I mean obviously there's a lot of competition now
but we referenced Robinhood potentially having perps
and how that could impact a platform like Hype
so yeah I always wanted Deez's perspective
because he's been very very sharp with Hype in general
so I don't know
this name is the one that I'm kind of paying attention to the most I would say outside of Bitcoin very, very sharp with hype in general. So I don't know.
This name is the one that I'm kind of paying attention to the most,
I would say, outside of Bitcoin.
Yeah.
I want to hear from Deez on this one as well.
I think what jumped out to me is in the sell-off this weekend,
hype did go down to like 30, near 30.
But my God, is it rebounded fast.
30% up to 30%. So there was very little time to come in and buy that dip.
People were ready.
And that seems like a pretty big sign of strength.
And man, since Liberation Day, this chart looks fantastic.
Yeah, I don't see any news in the cell here um especially when the price is going down
because of not even like hype centric fud it seems like a good time to buy like some of the
previous hype dips were more around uh you know north korean potentially exploiting it
jelly jelly uh conflict resolution like it was around something
that happened on hype itself but when you're getting just like a broad market
sell-off and they're giving you an opportunity to buy it that feels I don't
want to say like free money but it feels substantially better than when you're
having to buy into like hype specific FUD scenario.
So I don't see any reason to sell it right now.
I think
just as a meme, but kind of not really.
Anytime Clemente's bullposting
with a fucking gritty
just sell a little bit and you'll be happy.
Or at least I've been happy
with the sales I've gotten when that happens.
It still feels like the strongest horse.
And I saw Andy message on Twitter that he's farming five different perp dexes now.
And it's like we're seeing a new...
The perp dexes are the new token launch pads,
which are like the new fucking NFT minting platforms.
And you see it in the market where, oh, something does well, we got to copy
it and try to do our own version of it.
And I think things like that
are just bullish
for hype in general because you're not going to be able
to recreate what they've done.
I don't think at least.
I would be shocked.
Yeah.
Wait for any geopolitical
conflict to get
a nice entry and
start selling on Clemente Gritty's.
You can't really go wrong there.
In bathtub videos.
Yeah.
Exploring the protocol.
That was funny. She'll get
a good laugh out of it when Hype's back over
$45 by next week's show.
For sure.
I have to bring up SPX.
Love Fartcoin.
It's been a huge rebounder, but man.
Stronger than Fartcoin.
SPX is the fastest horse off the bottom
basically for all major tokens.
It hit $1.
It went sub $1.
During the sell-off over the weekend,
it's already back to $140.
It's going to flip the stock market, man.
It's going to flip the stock market.
It's got a leader,
a fearless leader in Murad,
who is taking his towns to TikTok.
Still dabbles on crypto Twitter
from time to time.
And for whatever it's worth, people love to keep piling into this thing.
So this gets very interesting.
I think it's back to all-time high here.
I think people will be calling for it to move much faster higher.
But it does have violent, violent moves.
I think it feels more like the supply control type play.
I feel like when Farcoin is grinding up so slow
these days, we're not
seeing these 20
to 40% candles
anymore, at least in summer 2025
on Farcoin.
Hopefully
we do again soon.
I don't know if that's the nature
of how many people are owning at this point,
how public or consensus of a play it has become maybe there aren't as many marginal
new buyers at this time but we haven't seen the violent upswings so that just stood out
stock market is a really strong meme and it's a really high number to anchor expectations to
yeah um don't know that Fartcoin has a
liquid
market it's trying to flip.
So I can see
that being
a little bit of a difference when it comes
to holder delusion
in particular.
I don't know, man.
It's definitely the strongest meme coin
on my list that I'm seeing.
I was talking last week. I was looking at
Mog, and Mog's kind of on pace
with Barcoin today. It's up 17.5.
Barcoin's up 18.2.
SPX is up 33%.
Hard to compete with that.
Still strong holder growth.
2,200 new holders.
Still like Mog. we got the level I
talked about last show. Yeah I was pulled out.
Looking for like sub
300 but it's
definitely a weaker looking chart than
SPX but I think if SPX
you know if SPX keeps outperforming
people are going to look for beta plays
to SPX and I
could I mean I'm just extremely biased based
on my feed but I do think
Mogg would be a top three beta play that comes to mind
when I think of beta plays for SPX.
I don't know if that's correct on your guys' front when you think about it, but
definitely something comes to mind for me.
Yeah, I think it's up there. I think Pepe is still number one.
But it's just so high.
Pepe, I don't feel like it's beta at SPX.
Oh, sorry, it's an ETH, rather.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Maybe. I haven't actually been paying
too much attention to the Pepe chart.
Just because something's worth
5 billion or so, I'm not super enticed by it.
It looks a lot like the MOG chart.
Yeah, yeah, it does does i got it up now
mog might kind of trade his pepe beta i'd rather just have mog at that point yeah it feels like
there's more upside on that uh quick shout out to our friend osf who sold out three days of events
for rec drinks at la 7-Elevens.
They're at NYC for permissionless here.
I think they're doing some store events maybe.
We're doing some parties.
We'll check in on them.
They've had a hell of a run as well.
In the conversation for ETH beta plays,
because there's not really that many leading ETH memes
with communities active still in 2025 to choose from maybe a dozen I
don't know that I can name more than a dozen active meme coins and granted Brecht is a little
more than that it's a brand coin but that one is at the top of my list as as well. Other than that,
I think that was
most of my list.
Have you been trading much, Dees?
Or are you still kind of touching
grass this summer?
No, not much trading.
Actually, I don't think I've made any
trades over the span of the
last week.
Just kind of hanging out. i got a couple bids on
nfts that aren't being hit uh getting ready to go to new york for a week where you know i'm not
gonna have my shit on me so i don't want to take any like short-term positions really yeah and um
it's kind of like whenever there's geopolitical stuff the best things to do are either buy the
dip or do nothing uh and with
the money i have on the sidelines i'm not really looking to immediately redeploy it so i just
chose to do nothing um but i i really feel like every time we have some type of conflict it just
you know blows over eventually and anytime you sell during it you just feel like an idiot in
hindsight so it's you know thing um
that's how it's gone forever it's gonna work until the president in the world's gonna be
in nature it's we get very um you know scared and fearful when there's uncertainty and when
we're scared and unfearful we want to you know pad our you know lifestyle cushion um when in
reality when people are scared and fearful,
you should just be buying.
And then when everyone's gritting on the timeline,
that's when you should pad your lifestyle cushion.
But it's easier said than done.
I understand why people sold.
I'm not talking shit if you sold or anything.
It's just as you spend more and more time trading markets
and having to rely on your decision making for income you uh start to
realize that it's a pretty exploitable thing every time it happens the more you're in markets the
easier it is to buy the fear i still feel like the more you're in markets the harder it is to
sell the euphoria i think that's the hardest the hardest thing by far um and i just want to end
with this and they talked a lot about this in a variety of pods, including the 1000X that I mentioned. To me, the most interesting opportunity right now,
especially if this conflict dies down, you know, summers are normally kind of quiet times in
markets. I do think a lot of these pair trades are pretty interesting. So the Delta neutral
strategies, which we've discussed, one of the pair trades that I see a lot of right now is long Coinbase short circle.
You could replace Coinbase with hood,
long hood, short circle.
Again, coming back to that,
you could be long circle, short something else.
It seems like more contrarian of a trade,
but there's a variety of things out there
that I think will yield.
One other interesting strategy that I'm seeing some people do,
especially if you were early on buying circles, selling these calls.
The premium on these calls are just remarkable.
So there's always opportunity even when there's less going on.
We certainly have had a lot of headlines,
but in the event that we get the of the calmer summers that we historically
get something to think about,
go touch grass,
be in these positions where you don't feel like you're overly stressed.
Always take the lifestyle chips.
Good advice as always in a good way to end the show.
Well,
Dees have fun in New York.
It'll be good to hear from you how that,
how that goes.
And then Jeeps will be back next week with his report on permissionless.
And, folks, that's going to be it.
That is our show.
I want to thank our listeners on Spaces and Kick.
As always, I want to thank my co-hosts.
And we will be back next Tuesday at noon Eastern.
Until then, have a great day.
Have a great week.
We'll talk to you soon.
Goodbye. have a great day have a great week we'll talk to you soon goodbye Thank you.
Host
Speaker
Degenz Live
from
Degenz
