Thank you for joining us here this morning, this afternoon, wherever you're at.
We're going to start the show in just a minute or two.
We've got to get our speakers up on stage while we wait.
Zane, my man, rocking the the Good Vibes Club, GM.
Interouts, GM, D, CFOs, Tony.
All right, so we got D's up here.
We've got Rug Radio account.
We're going to get Jeebs up up here sims whenever you're ready i
All right, GM everyone, and welcome to episode 19 of Underexposed,
our weekly macro show hitting all the biggest topics and trends in crypto and web three.
Today, folks, today is Tuesday, April 1st.
It is April Fool's Day, the single worst day of the year to be on X with a timeline full
of bad jokes, full of fake news.
But maybe it's timely as tomorrow is Liber liberation day and we will find out if Trump's
master plan is going to liberate us from all of our capital gains or not. We're going to get into
it on today's show. I'm your host, Tyler D. I've got my co-host in the house. First up, D's art
collector, coin stacker, and trader, mask connoisseur, April Fool's not an enjoyer. Dee's GM.
Staying off the timeline after reading a dozen stupid tweets and trying to stay positive.
The best part of my day was my morning
because people hadn't really gotten into the April Fool's Day thing yet.
There was actual real content.
And then around 7 a.m. Central, it all started and it
has not stopped. And people just said, they really do this every single year. It is a very rough day
to be on X or Crypto X. But thank you for joining us despite the April Fool's Day pain. Folks,
we've also got Peter James on with us, a plus-eve expert, founder of several companies. Peter, Jim, how you doing?
Just hanging in, watching the markets, a bunch of different stuff going on in the sports world.
So it's an exciting time of the year, and we've had some good weather.
Not anymore here in Colorado, but I've got some good golf in last week.
And, yeah, stoked to be with you boys.
How's March Madness been going for you?
Did you predict the 401 seats? seats march madness has gone broadly well uh i didn't do any brackets or calcutta's this year but we've been betting it and um started off pretty hot uh then then
cooled down and then recently has gone decently well so i think uh a positive return thus far but
nothing crazy nice to hear in hindsight it feels like it was obvious this was the year
that the top dogs would carry it forward,
Folks, we've got Jeeves on with us as well.
He's an early stage crypto VC,
dabbles in internet capital markets,
just pinned a nice new essay that we're going to get into
Jeeves, GM, how are you doing?
GM, GM, I'm doing great. I'm in the same boat as these, avoiding X today, no bird app, just trying to focus
on tomorrow, figure out what's going to happen, the uncertainty
around it all. Are we going to have more or less
certainty tomorrow? That is the billion dollar question. We we going to have more or less certainty tomorrow? That is the
billion dollar question. We're going to get into it on today's show, folks, plus a lot more. Before
we do, today's show is powered by Wallet Connect. Wallet Connect is the connectivity network shaping
the future of on-chain UX. If you've connected to a Web3 app, you've seen Wallet Connect.
That blue logo, it's everywhere. An icon of trust in crypto, as recognizable as Visa at the checkout.
If you want to learn more, follow at Wallet Connect on X and Telegram
to stay ahead of what's next.
And folks, more big news out of Wallet Connect in the past week.
Last week, we talked about that vote.
Transferability is coming to that Wallet Connect WCT token.
Over 12,000 wallets voted. Final tally was 99.65% yes votes versus a very tiny percent of folks
voting no on that. So in April, the WCT transferability unlocks a new chapter for the Wallet Connect network, eco, and on-chain economy.
It's effectively their TGE.
And this month has seen some pretty great TGEs.
Highlighted by that Walrus token drop last week.
Godzilla yesterday was pretty solid.
So perhaps a nice market backdrop for that.
So we will be on the lookout.
Shout out to Wallet Connect as always.
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 stir some debate,
but this is not, and 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, now let's get into our topics for today. I'm going to fire up the screen share
for those in the stream. We'll get that stream link pushed out here in just a second as well.
here in just a second as well. Starting with macro, a lot of big macro headlines from the week.
The biggest one, Liberation Day, the tariffs, we're going to finally get hopefully some clarity
around that tomorrow. Trump is going to be delivering remarks in the Rose Garden at 4 p.m.
Eastern. I think the Trump administration has built this up to be such a big day. So expectations are high for this one. And we've seen markets start to rally here today ahead of what
will be likely a very volatile day. This comes after a volatile weekend. We had Trump talking
about a third term, bombing Iran, angry at Putin, talking about more tariffs. So it was quite the
Sunday. Led to a sell-off. We've had
a bit of a recovery. Effectively, just ongoing chop. This also comes after what was the worst
quarter for U.S. stocks compared to the rest of the world in 23 years. So it may have felt bad
in the moment. I don't know if we knew it was quite that bad.
So hopefully we can rebound here.
During that gold hitting new all-time highs,
outperforming Bitcoin, that digital gold thesis,
is it still valid? We had OpenAI, huge news yesterday.
We had open AI huge news yesterday,
biggest private fundraise ever for a tech company,
$40 billion at a $300 billion valuation.
So that was a huge headline that comes just a few days after chat or the
O4 model was widely released.
People may know it for Ghibli and the image generator,
but it can do quite a bit more. And it was a very strong model update there. So that's the macro
backdrop in crypto. A few different headlines. We have Strategy, Mara, and GameStop all announcing
big Bitcoin buys. We've got a stablecoin bill moving through Congress. Fidelity is testing
their own stablecoin. Circle looks like it's going to IPO. That might be one of the biggest stories
of this month. The FDIC giving banks the green light to start conducting transactions in crypto
without prior approval. And then the Trump's getting deeper and deeper into crypto. This is
news that came out Monday. They have effectively formed, invested and formed a new Bitcoin mining company called
American Bitcoin. They look to make crypto great again in the United States, but we've already
started to see some pushback in Congress as Trump and family continues to get deeper. And it's making all the pro-crypto policy
get a little murkier. So that's the backdrop. There's a lot of headlines. Bitcoin, 85,300.
It's up about 4% from Sunday lows. It's down 3% of the week. ETH at 19.20, down 7%. Solana,
127, down 13% of the week. Dang, I guess it was around 140 or so
when we were doing the show just last week.
Last week, people were leaning bullish,
then everyone got extremely bearish.
Maybe we'll find out tomorrow.
Peter, I'll toss it to you.
There's a lot of directions we could take the conversation.
I think starting more pure macro,
kind of like, what's your outlook here?
Do you feel like we're going to be out of the woods tomorrow like what are you looking for from trump on on liberation day here
uh the theme of piercing volatility continues uh that's the the one thing i have conviction in and
i think we're gonna continue to have that um i do think the market is looking for more certainty
and and we'll see what transpires tomorrow.
But my guess is we're not going to get like it's not going to crystallize in terms of here's the tariffs and this is how it's going to be going forward.
This is the playing field. I think we'll continue to see impulsive decisions from Trump.
I think the administration will continue to try to maneuver. There's a lot of negotiation and just different hands being played
across the world. So the theme that I think will continue for this year is piercing volatility.
And that certainly is going to impact one of the more risk on asset classes, which is crypto,
which is what we're most focused on here on the show. So kind of the same themes,
and the show. So kind of the same themes, gold just marching up into the right. That is a trade
that I think broadly highlights just kind of the uncertainty and where capital wants to flow when
there's so much uncertainty. So that kind of continues. Happy to see Bitcoin broadly have
relative strength in some ways.
I think we're all really excited about the narrative around Bitcoin and just how it's performing relative to the rest of the crypto market.
I think yesterday it reached kind of a new all time high in terms of Bitcoin dominance.
I'm not sure exactly where we are at this exact moment in time.
I imagine that's kind of retraced a bit, but that's not that surprising to me. And I think from a risk reward perspective, we've talked about just how Bitcoin continues to
outperform. And then, you know, equities and everything else, it's super hard and there's
just so many cross currents and there's a lot of different perspectives. I don't have any
conviction broadly where things are going outside of expecting more
volatility in the short term. So it's a tricky time to be an investor. There's a lot of uncertainty
across the board and we'll see what happens tomorrow. So you're not expecting us to get
out of the woods tomorrow by any means? I'm expecting some clarity on certain things and then more
uncertainty. And I just like, we've been really excited, really scared.
I mean, just think about how many times in the timeline,
it's been some form of euphoria and some form of just peak fear and it's all
over. I mean, how many times has that happened this year?
It feels like it's every week.
Yeah. I don't expect that to change in a big way anytime soon without this administration's
Yeah, I think that's a fair take.
Jeeves, I'll toss it to you.
What are your expectations for tomorrow?
And maybe part two, what would be the bull case?
What would be an optimal outcome for us tomorrow?
So I think what I'm expecting is, right,
we started off in this threat phase where Trump's clearly been sort of threatening and beginning
negotiations over the past, where it's been like month to months with various countries.
I'm expecting tomorrow we enter into the negotiation phase. So what I'm expecting is
Trump to start is going to set baseline tariffs across the board.
I'm anticipating that he's going to highlight all of the countries that have come to the
negotiation table with the U.S. and have chosen to play ball with us. And he's going to use those
as primary examples of what he's expecting from other countries. From there, at least we'll have, I think, some level of certainty.
Right now, we know absolutely nothing, right?
Trump clearly has a plan.
He's even saying he's holding the cards close to him right now.
And markets just hate uncertainty.
That's why we're seeing gold other assets go up, like Peter mentioned.
I think over time, we're just going to at least get more certainty
or at least start to see what the Trump administration is thinking toward tariffs.
So anyway, long story short, I think that we enter this phase now where we begin negotiating
with countries over certain tariffs, whether they be reciprocal, or whether they be really
targeted at specific industries. The bull case, Tyler, is just certainty at this point. It's going from
like, if there's a scale of uncertainty to certainty, it's getting closer to understanding
what's the game plan here and how can companies, investors, and people plan ahead in this environment
right now? Because I think even if we get some certainty and it's negative, I think that's a general positive outcome.
Yeah, I think I would tend to agree. We were chatting a bit about it on FOMO this morning,
and Mando's perspective is, I think Trump's going to kind of come out with worst case scenario, like the highest the tariffs may ultimately be, and then perhaps use those
as a negotiation tactic, put them all on the
table and then effectively start to walk back from from there i thought that was an interesting
outcome i think that could line up with the potential negotiation strategy that we've seen
from him and i think i'm with you that any any level of certainty we get is going to be seen
And we also had Powell come out and say that basically they priced in the worst.
So if it's any outcome besides the worst, that seems like it would be a positive.
But maybe I'm being all night.
I don't know necessarily that he walks things back,
more that he tries to find common ground with folks.
He doesn't strike me as the kind of person that's going to,
to make open threats and then fully just retrace them.
I think it's still going to be open and persistent until there's some type of,
advantageous situation or at least slightly advantageous situation.
any thoughts on your side?
Are you ready to be liberated tomorrow?
What are your expectations?
I'm just tired of winning, Tyler.
I've done so much winning that I'm tired of it.
And I would like to stop winning.
So this is my plea to President Trump.
Yeah, I think many are in your boat.
I have very low expectations.
I feel like I would have had lower expectations for this day.
And then he's done such a job of building it up.
And as a talking head and someone who comes out and comes up with narratives
and talks about it on a daily basis,
I've built up these expectations for tomorrow
that are probably going to be let down to a degree.
And 4 p.m. Eastern tomorrow, live from the Rose Garden.
So it's going to be a very big day.
Hey, Peter, coming back to the-
Tyler, I thought it was actually 3 p.m. because there's a one-hour open market.
The last tweet I have from Bloomberg,
Trump to deliver remarks in Rose Garden
Okay, Bloomberg this morning was saying
it was at 3, basically saying like,
hey, there would be an hour of market activity
where this could all just be traded,
which I think would be hilarious.
I was actually disappointed with the 4 p.m. time
because we won't see the true
mark stock market reaction at least until the next day we'll have after the reaction right
it will have the crypto reaction so it'll be the first asset class to see how folks are are feeling
here um so expect volatility peter the other one of the other macro headlines from the week is this poor U.S. stock
performance against the rest of the world. I'm curious if you make anything of this. Is it a
cause for concern, just how you might be reading into this headline? It's absolutely a big cause
for concern. As an American citizen, generally, I think the most
attractive thing about the US is that we're the home for capitalism and entrepreneurship,
and we have market integrity, and that's super important. And so capital in general has felt
best kind of being within the US. And if you look at like kind of the last five to 10 years,
especially the last five, a ton of capital has just hung out kind of in this mag seven.
So we saw a big rotation out of those companies and into the rest of the world.
China is really trying to be stimulative.
They had meetings with a lot of the top entrepreneurs.
They're trying to say that, Hey, we are a place where people can build great businesses.
Obviously it's, it's tough to trust a
communistic country, but certainly they got people going back there to build and more capital
flowing into their markets. Same thing in Europe, which I don't know if I can be bullish on Europe
long term. There's certainly more qualified people than me to talk about kind of the overall macro around the world. But a lot of capital flu came out of, you know, the U.S. stock market into other markets.
And if you want to go really deep down the rabbit hole, you know, you can listen to like Ray Dalio and other people around the fourth turning.
There's a lot of concern and skepticism.
We even saw that yesterday that, you know, the U.S. is at risk of losing the world reserve currency. You just look at the GDP of BRICS versus the U.S. and our allies.
That trend is not going in our favor. So there's a lot of concerns. And, you know, Trump is really
trying to renegotiate and use tariffs against a lot of, you know, our adversaries. And one of the challenges is that those adversaries
So there's so many different things going on right now,
and that's why it's really tough to evaluate.
There's a ton of cross-currents, and we'll see.
The thing that gives me the most optimism
is that we have guys like Bessent as the treasury
who is as sharp as they come.
And there's still a ton of unbelievable
entrepreneurs and the best companies in the world are still here in the US, but there's definitely
more concerns than we've had in the past. And certainly, I think a lot of people are expecting
more of a Trump 1.0 administration than what we've had. And I do think that the intentions are good.
And I do think we need a are good. And I do think we
need a real shakeup given where our debt's at. It's not sustainable, especially when you look
at the interest payments. And I do think, you know, as much uncertainty as there's been and a
lot of like the challenges and just being in crypto and in markets watching the prices go down,
it's not fun. The one chart that does look good and what Besson has said is the number one chart is the 10-year treasury. Last I saw was like 4.16 or so. Maybe it's ticking up right now.
Yeah, that's been the marker that he wants to go down. And that makes sense when you're trying to
refinance your debt. So all this pain and this detox period, which he said was coming,
is in an effort to lower this number. And that has come down.
So that'd be another positive to point to, but again,
kind of rambled there, ton of different cross currents,
a ton of things to be concerned about.
And then there's some things to be optimistic about as well.
The 10 years, effectively it's lowest since we've been doing the show.
So it briefly wicked down, uh, on December 5th,
it hit this level, but then shot straight back up.
So it's down 15%, 17% from that peak
and basically right around when Trump got inaugurated.
So it's been pretty steadily coming down.
I mean, if you look at the pattern,
it looks like a head and shoulders,
So it looks like it is ripe to come down.
I appreciate your thoughts on the macro.
I think there's more and louder
kind of doomer takes out there.
exceptionalism, decline of America. I'm not in that camp,
but I think there is some very clear data about where the U.S.
is lagging in areas like manufacturing. And as
we get into like a robotics dominated world,
robotics plus AI, that feels like it's going to be very, very important.
So I am hoping that perhaps one of the outcomes of the tariffs is it brings back more onshore
manufacturing for the US.
And it seems like that's an area that we absolutely need to focus on.
So those are my global macro thoughts.
We can dial it back more into crypto here now that we've started kind of going down
But it is an important backdrop,
and everything is so tied together at this point.
I think Stats, good friend of the show,
just tweeted out that the price of Bitcoin trading
more correlated with Tesla stock than it is with gold
and more correlated with Tesla than even the S&P or the NASDAQ.
So it is important to cover how these things, these other macro assets are trading as we
look at our crypto bags here.
Maybe coming back to the Circle IPO, I feel like this is one of the biggest stories of April here.
So we got the news yesterday.
Circle has hired some bankers.
It looks like they're pushing forward with a potential IPO as soon as this
maybe I'll toss this one to you.
I think we've been talking about stable coins.
We've been talking about real world assets for weeks on this show.
Everyone wants to know, how do you bet on stablecoins?
Are we loading up for the Circle IPO?
If you have access to private markets, yeah.
I mean, obviously, when they go public, it'll be a bit different.
But I think the opportunity to buy this at a decent price has been over the past,
to buy this at a decent price has been over the past,
call it six to 12 months on private markets
when it was valued between $2.5 and $4 billion.
Is a stablecoin issuer worth $4 to $5 billion is the question.
I think there's going to be a lot of competition
It's clear that Circle has a lead as the institutional and sort of the gold standard for a stablecoin.
I think you can make the argument that USDC is sort of the trusted company, especially when it comes to money movement.
I've done this stat out before.
There's three times the amount of Tether than
there is USDC, but there's three times the amount of USDC movement than there is Tether.
So it punches way above its weight. I think that shows that USDC is a very desirable asset for
money transfer and movement. When I'm personally accepting stable coins, I only want USDC.
A lot of companies that we work with
oftentimes just want USDC. Tether is often used for trading pairs for a lot of folks.
With all that said, there's a lot of competition in the stablecoin market. And USDC and Tether
don't currently pass yield onto users. And I think we're seeing different folks come out and say, you're effectively going
to have to pass yield on to users to remain competitive in this space. And I've made this
call before. Initially, I said there'd be 50 stablecoins this year. I think there'll be 100
plus stablecoins this year. I think it's the year that we continually see more and more folks issue
them. Athena is clearly leading the way on how you take an off-chain,
sort of off-chain, on-chain strategy,
pass the yield back onto users.
We have some folks that are working on issuing stable coins.
And I think that large financial institutions
are going to start to issue stable coins as well this year.
So I think this is just going to become a very, very, very competitive space.
Interesting. So you're viewing that effectively as a bear case is what I'm reading into your tone.
I think it's going to be tough, right? It maybe gets dominated by like five to 10 different players.
But at the end of the day, you know, we'll circle be one of those probably. Right. But I think that there's just going to be a lot of competition in this space over the next year to two years um i think that'll hurt a chair price initially and i think they'll have to figure out how to innovate release more products and uh continue
to hold that king of the hill status we were trying to do some of the back of the napkin math
on fumble this morning do you have any line of sight so they've got so usdc 60 billion dollar
market cap token do we know and i don't on the top of my head any of like how they monetize that
i think mando was trying to do like four percent that they would be able to pull back on usdc
with 60 billion that's some pretty significant revenue right there.
when I was looking at it on paper, $4 to $5 billion
Just looking at this growth,
Their overall market cap, so yeah, USD is issuance right, right here. Their overall market cap.
USDC issuance on chain is up to 60 billion from 25.
But if we continue to move rates down,
which is the government's plan,
this business deteriorates over time,
especially if we get rates down and they stay low,
The 3% maybe goes down to maybe
2.5%. We're not going to see ZERP again, but
deteriorating slightly over time.
Then with increased competition,
they effectively would have to pull
I think the odds of that are under 1%.
Inflation is just not going to get...
I mean, I guess that's a bad comment.
If we get a massive deflationary force with AI,
And that is, I guess, more probable
than I'm giving it right now.
Yeah, it's not zero for sure.
But I think 3% is definitely within the wheelhouse.
It really comes down to what inflation is going to be, right?
If you have a 2% 10-year, 2.5% 10-year, you need inflation effectively at zero, or just under 1%.
I was thinking, yeah, that world's really hard to see right now.
It's hard to see right now, and I immediately regret saying that it's a super low
probability, because historically, the biggest deflationary
force is technology, and we could be in a golden age of
a new technology renaissance with AI. I retract that
statement, but either way.
Point is just as rates go down,
their business deteriorates.
that effectively is their spread on it.
So I think increased competition in that.
I wouldn't bet against circle by any means,
I don't know that I'm going to be a buyer day one.
I think I might be a buyer day one.
I feel like this could be a scenario
where the narrative play could be stronger
than some of the fundamentals.
I think you've outlined some real fundamental risks
to their forward-looking growth.
But the ability to bet on a stablecoin company,
one of the absolute leaders, top dogs, top two,
when that hasn't really been an option for most people,
I think that's pretty enticing.
And I could see that catching hold.
So this is tradable in the private secondary markets right now
jeebs have you taken a look at that like how is that something that someone like me has access to
or do you have to be part of a certain company you have to have certain credentials
yeah yeah so this gets traded with secondary brokers. So along with other private companies that are looking to, usually it's going to be done via folks that have a position in circle
and want to exit that position via these markets. So they would say, Hey, I want to sell a 500k
up to like $10 million tranche at this valuation. And they'll effectively go put that ask out.
this valuation and they'll effectively go put that ask out on the other side of it there's going to
be some bids maybe at four billion you know whatever it may be at so there's you're going
to see both sides of it this is all done via private brokers there are no public markets for
this and just with with our business you know i encounter these a lot so the latest I'd seen, I think was around 5 billion on second,
the coin desk article saying they're going to launch somewhere four to five,
it felt a little low to me,
What were the numbers Bando pointed out?
He was like saying 4% on the current total issuance yeah and he he was on the on the gun there so just like i'd say take
it all the grain of salt um just kind of spur the moment conversation but taking a look at four
percent on 60 billion with likely some expectations of of growth because it does look like it's
With likely some expectations of growth,
because it does look like it's on a pretty clear upward trajectory.
While he's doing that, Deez, I'm curious for your thoughts.
If you dabble much in individual stocks or IPOs,
is this something that would be on your radar or not?
I really only own index funds, but $5 billion does seem cheap,
all things considered, to me at least.
And I'm basing that probably more off of
crypto market caps than I am actual stock market cap
so that could be a bad comp
but 5 billion is cheaper than things like
DOT, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash
And I think Circle is a more integral part of this ecosystem than all this.
So I don't know if I'll dump index funds to buy it or transfer money in,
but $5 billion doesn't seem that outrageously priced at all.
I guess I should be looking here at stock stock market
caps and come up with some different comps there but um seems pretty pretty solid to me i feel like
you know they're gonna have more uh jeebs outlined a lot of things about competition but
for me when i um hold stables on chain they're about the only stable i ever really hold
um i've held tether here and there for a little bit
when yields are dramatically higher on a lending platform,
but it's normally not the case.
So I feel like they're kind of like
the more Lindy, trustworthy solution.
I guess some of the downsides I think of
when I think of Circle were more related to
how they act during times of um like hacks and
stuff like with north korea and like they they freeze funds very slowly or just fail to act
um which something that always is on the back of my mind is like not great um I would hope they would be a little more quick to act.
up to billion dollar hacks.
relatively fairly priced.
If I have to go to $5 billion
stocks, I got to go way down this list.
I haven't heard of that are worth like 50 plus
Some interesting comps for sure.
Uniswap is 6 billion FTV right now.
Peter, I'm curious if you have a point of view on, on circles IPO.
Yeah, I'm actually poking around.
So I'm pretty familiar with secondary markets.
And then I guess this can lead us into another conversation as well.
But having been a part of some big private companies early on, like DraftKings and Action Network and now Underdog,
I've seen transactions happen on the secondary market for these more mature private companies.
And I think there's been a lot of action.
There's also things like Figure.
And there's a variety of these companies, Stripe,
that are getting a lot of demand in the secondary market.
And broadly, it's employees or maybe early angel investors
And then there's, of course, buyers ahead of the IPO that are interested in buying broadly at a discount unless it's a super oversubscribed round.
So I'm going to poke around on Circle.
I imagine a lot of these secondary markets that I know people at probably have some access to it.
So I'm going to look into it. I do think one of the coolest
use cases for crypto, and Vlad actually talked about this on the most recent Bankless podcast,
is having tokenized, basically tokenizing these big private companies and then having a marketplace
for them. I think that could happen on chain or it could happen on a platform like Robinhood.
And to me, that's a really great use case for blockchain technology. And I would love to see that. And it's solving a big problem because right now you're paying these middle, you know, these platforms quite a bit, a healthy percentage to facilitate a transaction between an equity holder, whether it be an employee, an angel investor, or whoever owns stock in these
private companies and the buyer. And if there is an open marketplace for that, it'd be really
exciting. I'm sure some of you guys have used Carta in the past. I've done a lot of investing
and have things on Carta. And I initially thought Carta was in the lead in terms of being able to become that marketplace. Fortunately, they made some blunders and that's not going to be
the case. But now I'm hopeful and optimistic that we see this come on chain. And I do think it's one
of the best examples and would be a huge value creation for society if we had a buzzing marketplace
for these secondary transactions. And I know, Jeeps, you've looked into this, so I definitely want to kick it to you.
And I know you're also super bullish on Robinhood like I am.
And have you listened to that Bankless podcast yet?
I saw he was on Milk Row too, so it looks like he's doing the rounds.
Go back to Circle real quick.
So I'm seeing around mid to late January,
it looks like folks are selling at 4.5.
In February, mid to late February,
And then Tyler, maybe you've changed my mind a little bit here.
I'm doing some of the back of the napkin math,
trying to figure out some of the numbers here.
So it looks like their revenue is likely someplace in like between 1.25 billion
all the way up to $2.4 billion per year.
If so, right, most companies that fall into this general sector
end up getting someplace between, let's call it like a 8 and 12 X revenue.
So we could be looking at like a 12 to
18 billion dollar valuation so four to five day one you know we are seeing bullish ipos right now
tyler you're getting me bold up here two to three x play was my target at five billion
it felt like i wasn't like a 10 10x moonshot any means, but it feels like something that could 2 to 3x.
I think there was some flood around.
I mean, we were bullish on fart coin at 2.5 billion.
We probably should be bullish on circle at 5.
Something tells me that the valuation
CoinDesk is reporting is off though.
If I'm seeing bids at 5.5 and they're saying it's going to launch 4 to 5,
I think that those numbers just seem off.
I could see it coming out 8 to 10 easily if these numbers are all right.
Yeah, I think that's the problem with this.
So they are, I think they're looking at old numbers.
I think they're even kind of acknowledging that.
So it would be a gift if it comes out that low,
but it's probably going to come out eight to 10 there.
It's a little less interesting.
I think you still have the 50% to a hundred percent upside,
but a little bit riskier at 10.
let's play this out of our tokens you're like
i i'm not that jade i think like we saw newsweek have a very massively successful
ipo yesterday it's up 10x uh we had core weave is now up if private if tokenized private credit was on chain and you could readily invest in
would you be a buyer of open AI at,
maybe I'll toss it to you and happy to go around the horn on this.
so I wrote this piece about RWAs yesterday where I think like the whole
RWA sector is in its web 1.0 moment meaning
um there's a lot of web 2 companies that already exist that do this stuff even you know the journal
ran a spread yesterday and even had a podcast on this where if you're an accredited investor you
can get access to a lot of these private companies by going on these platforms, providing bids, and actually getting a piece of them. Crypto isn't needed here.
So when I say it's in its 1.0 moment, what I'm saying is, the first forms of the internet,
we were taking books, magazines, other forms of media, and just bringing it onto the internet.
Sure, there's efficiencies gained. I no longer have to go to the library.
I no longer have to go to the bookstore.
I can just go on the internet
and get access to this information.
It wasn't until we saw like the web 2.0 moment
where we moved to read-write,
you know, as Chris Dixon goes over in his book,
that we had this really major breakthrough.
So you saw examples like Encyclopedia Britannica
Wikipedia. And Wikipedia basically became that online version where everyone could contribute
to this information. I think RWAs are in a similar state where we're basically taking
things that already exist off chain, and we're just using crypto rails. So you gain some efficiencies, right?
There's basically three stages that I discuss here.
One is around capital formation for RWAs.
So this is, we have this deal,
we need to call capital from LPs to make the investments.
I think that can drastically become more efficient via smart contracts and stable coins.
Right now, the process is an absolute nightmare. It's wires, it's a lot of counterparties. Jennings and I have a friend who
works at one of the larger PE houses. He gave me these examples of just how much work it is.
It's a lot of it's manual right now to call the capital. The second component, which I think is
less experimented with right now,
but it's part of what we're talking about,
is the actual investment opportunity
So whether it be private equity,
I think we lost him. i thought it was me at first
i thought he was he's holding us on for that third that third big item but a very insightful
walkthrough here of how tokenized assets effectively all of web3 can evolve and how
early it is and right now basically to summarize thesis, we're starting to put these assets on chain.
We're effectively duplicating traditional finance.
But then once traditional finance,
the building blocks are in place,
that's where you can really start to create
And I am curious where he thinks that is going to go.
And of course, solving some of the web two issues is going to be probably low-hanging fruit, right?
Like lower fees, easier global payment remittances.
There's a lot of things that jump out.
And it's interesting that private credit has been one of the first sectors
to really catch fire in the rwa space i
don't know that i would have predicted that jeeps looks like we've got you back sorry about that
guys man you left us hanging you were just about to drop the the third big uh the third big item
where we're going the third big one yeah. So I think I was saying like capital formation, tokenizing the actual asset, which really could be good or bad.
I think if you're providing additional liquidity to what were traditionally private opaque assets, I think there's benefits and there's downsides.
Matt Levine talks about this all the time.
And then the third side of it would be the actual distribution.
So the investment has paid out there's
yield we need to then distribute that out to people and i think i mean there's huge efficiencies
there from smart contracts right hey i deposit these funds automatically go and sort of send
this out to folks provide them with statements etc so less manual components required there as well
so i think that's what i was getting out with all this is that is like the web sort of 1.0 moment.
But I think the true evolution of RWAs and the efficiencies that will really be gained are when you can start to use money Legos.
You can start to incorporate these products into DeFi, lever them up really easily, and then create a programmatic
portfolio of all these different asset classes. Mostly because you don't need blockchain to get
access to these deals. There's tons of private companies in the Web2 world trying to figure
this all out. But what they don't have is the DeFi component. That's a whole other topic because these folks really won't be able to go counteract on Aave or Uniswap.
We'll actually need institutional level products for these ones that have sort of KYC, AML.
They're going to have to know who their counterparty is, or at least generally know that their counterparty is not North Korea on the other side.
So I think there's a lot to it. I think it's in its really early days, I'm talking with a company who's tokenizing equity and professional sports teams, and then also debt for
stadiums. And I think it's really interesting, right? The debt on this will probably pay between
four and 6% for a stadium.
But let's say you're a fan of whoever, the Bulls, for example, and they want to build a new arena.
You have the opportunity to help finance that.
And then you'd receive 4% to 6% on that.
And you, as a Bulls fan, are inclined to want to keep that over time.
There will be tradable markets on it.
Likely Pendle would pick something like that up to have then yield trading markets on it. The other side of it is they're working with a
number of professional soccer clubs in Europe for just equity rounds. Hey, we want fans to be a part
ownership in our teams and they want to sell like 10% ownership to have a liquidity event for the
owners, but also to allow the fans to be part of the experience and ownership with them.
And what you're saying is even further, taking a step further, let's say I have $10,000
in Bulls Arena debt. I can just go throw that in Aave and maybe get 50% back.
Do whatever you want with it. Yeah, exactly. It's open and tradable at that point.
do whatever you want with it yeah exactly it's open and tradable at that point
it's a huge unlock uh i agree it feels like again we're probably monseers away from really starting
to see that come to fruition but it's definitely probably one of the broadly more important
storylines and sectors to watch so i I appreciate you being at RWA.
I'm less bullish on sort of the stocks,
and more bullish on niche,
niche private assets that,
that currently don't have a lot of liquidity associated to them.
Cause those ones are the ones where you can effectively leapfrog the existing financial infrastructure and create new markets and financial instruments via crypto.
So I want to thank you for sharing your essay, folks.
magicinternetmoney.beehive.com,
I think you shared it on X yesterday as well, Jeeb,
so you can find it on his Twitter.
We've got about 10 minutes left,
so I think we've hit the heavy macro topics really appreciate our discussion maybe we go a little left curve
for for a bit here and and diesel i'll tag you in to to start the the convo we've got the fart
coin chart pulled up is it the the best chart in crypto right now? Is it a leading indicator?
Company handle is awfully nice.
How are you feeling about this?
I feel like I don't have enough.
Talked about it a couple of weeks ago,
bought a little bit when it was 25 cents or whatever,
Just holding it and see what happens.
But I feel like if any of the tokens that came out in Q4 of last year have another run in it, it has to be Fartcoin.
It's just like the 20 IQ take of it.
If you just think about every token you've heard about that's three to six months old in that span,
are there any that have more mind share and uh better
distribution than fart coin and i'm not really sure if there is so i'm still holding what i have
gonna see what happens not selling here but um it's definitely the strongest meme bag i have
it has been a bit of a leading indicator so it it flipped green on sunday when the timeline was in
full depression mode and then crypto ended up doing a bit of a rally on so it it flipped green on sunday when the timeline was in full depression
mode and then crypto ended up doing a bit of a rally on monday and of course into today
i think tomorrow's gonna be telling i'm very curious how you think the hot air will be liberated
will hot air be liberated will it rise it's one of the top questions on my mind i can tell you that
so i'll be is fartcoin an American-made
cryptocurrency? Yes, 100% it is.
We'll be watching this closely. I'm curious,
have you been following the rest
of the meme coin market? I tweeted about it this morning.
I've been checking them every few days, but
list is just asked, there's not much
to get super excited about here.
Mog has been pretty down bad.
Some of my AI meme shit coins have been down bad.
Obviously, Goats at 50 million looks absolutely dead.
Scrolling through my list right now it's just not not inspiring
is your list a little different than mine it's less about the do you see what happened on finance
today with shit like act yeah i'll try to pull that up here you pull up kobe's tweet you go to
kobe's account he has the charts of uh all the the tokens that ate shit it just there's some tiny bit of like funny
irony here in the sense that um a week ago hype was getting um bullshit for jelly jelly markets
being exploited and there was a bunch of rumors of maybe Binance even trying to push the exploitation.
And then I wake up today and just see nine tokens on Binance all down 50%.
And I saw that Kobe tweet.
I actually thought for sure that was an April Fool's tweet.
It was like 98% sure until I read the post about what happened.
I had already started running the AI numbers
of the day. I'd seen that ACT was down.
Someone with ties to Wintermute,
I don't know if someone who has traded through Wintermute or actually then looks like they got started.
Some automated trading strategies that were meant to be profitable
look to be wildly unprofitable.
Deasy, the tin hatter in me believes that finance
is forcing Hyperliquid's hand.
competitive market and we're in the Wild West,
I mean, dude, he did it to FTX.
Do not underestimate that, man.
I think that he forced their hand
and here's my Tin Hat theory.
to effectively show its cards that it is actually a non-KYC, effectively centralized version of Binance,
that puts them into a position of high legal risk in my eyes.
So I have this little tin hat theory that like a lot of this was,
And you now can see effectively other parties go after hyper liquid.
how you're feeling about hype.
We've talked about hype quite a bit on this show.
We talked about it early when we were just getting started throughout the rally
through the downturn has your opinion on it changed much since the the jelly jelly exploit
and their response um not necessarily i'm normally not in the group of people that believe
you know code is law and that anything that's exploitable for profit is fair game.
So I didn't sell any hype during the sell-off or anything.
I guess I didn't buy more hype either.
I'm just holding the position I have.
So I would say I don't have a very changed opinion on it.
I mean, I do think it opens up a can of worms, but I'd rather them address it early
on in the life cycle than continuously get exploited. I also just don't really think or
believe that we need access to leverage trade absolute liquid dog shit. As much as people
seem to want that, I don't really feel like we need that. If you want to speculate on a liquid dog shit, it's there.
I don't really feel like you need to lever up on it. It's already
leveraged dog shit as it is.
I would rather them do what they did
than just get exploited and take on
bad debt over and over again so
well I am curious about like are they
starting to remove some of these other
shit coins to make sure this doesn't
I'm trying to scroll through
even if they don't remove it they just lower the
yeah like you can allow the
trading of it but like you really need to take a 10x levered position or more on that stuff like i
don't think so and so i think if they clean up a bit of their risk management
and some time passes i think they have shown that they're gonna do
what they have to do to protect HLP
I don't know if I think that's
necessarily the best move
or not because I read some
posts from people smarter than me that basically says
why would you market make on
hype if you can just basically give HLP the money
and get the downside protection?
If you're manually market making, you don't get the same downside protection
So that lowers the competition in market making on the site altogether.
Seems right from thinking about it through incentives but
that that was one thing i read on the timeline it felt a little insightful it was okay well if
they're gonna protect hlp at the cost of every other market maker then why would those market
makers you know be super active they don't get downside protection that hype gets or HLP gets.
Yeah. I think that's a real risk. So it's still early.
I am curious how they'll continue to respond.
I think it's holding this like 12 floor pretty well.
Even that day at dawn, I mean, it wicked down, got bought back up.
And then as the market went down, it went down with it.
And it seems to be at a local low here i think it
holds but who knows i mean i'm just i've kind of just holding it for the the longer term you know
i'm not super worried about what happens this month or so i'm more thinking like throughout
the cycle if this isn't the end of the bull run what products are going to continue to get more
usage and you know prices go up more than
solana or bitcoin i still think it has a really good shot to do that i would agree i do feel like
if and when things turn around and broader crypto i feel like this will likely be it's been a momentum
token it's got some momentum to the downside i think when that flips bullish it'll be a
you can completely argue if that's how you trade like why would you own any of this over a fart coin? But that
It's nice to have some diversity in the portfolio.
You know, something that has some level of fundamentals. You could tangibly attribute
some value to that isn't just pure memetics.
I think key to watch will be how does their volume continue to
Are they able to continue eating into
And if that continues to grind up,
then I think that's going to be hugely bullish.
We just had a really nice punk sale.
right before that. These 85.
Oh, did someone see both?
I wish I could be here for this punk shot.
Yeah, thanks for joining us, Jeeps.
We'll probably wrap up in a few minutes here.
A couple nice punk sales. I uh a couple of those very interesting that i mean the one at 85 to me is just objectively better um
so the fact that they paid another 40 for the one right after that is it because they're twins
uh i mean they're technically not twins.
They don't have the same lipstick or skin color.
This Walt just spent $400,000.
There's another one at $125,000.
Wait, they listed the one they just bought.
So if you go look at the listings on Pilots,
they just listed the one they bought
that is the light skin hot lipstick at $125.
I wonder if they meant to buy the other one.
That's some weird stuff going on here.
Very interesting to buy at $85.
Oh, it's not the same one.
there the the one that they bought has an invisible earring um you could tell by the left ear there's
two black pixels um yeah the one that's listed at 125 so yeah i'm curious why they want to
maybe they're valuing the the hidden earring a little bit. It's interesting. Two nice punk sales
That's what caught my attention.
Didn't mean to start immediately
You could definitely argue that the hidden
earring on the pilot looks a little nicer
because you got the outline goggles that are
black and it looks like a continuation of the
still an interesting choice to me.
Almost a quarter million dollars.
That's a hoodie, basically.
Yeah, the hoodie's been trading there.
Spot hoodie that's kind of ugly.
That's a big pay up for that.
And Punk's been holding up nicely.
getting one of the rarest females
on it. There's no mole or
That's nice. The one at 126 makes me
rare attribute there. and honestly i feel like
choker just kind of sucks ass like we're gonna be honest it's i think even the punk's founders said
they didn't hit how they wanted it to hit like to me pilot and tiaras are just significantly
better than chokers um so it's nice to see yeah totally agree pigtails actually a little
and you look like they're a little cheap here within 10 of the floor uh jeeves one or not
these one of your thoughts on the wizards so we had the oh yeah one of the biggest sales
i thought you're about to say forgotten reigns seven playing the game that's the fucking that i'm down money on
yeah um it reminds me a bit of art block summer when they just were doing dutch auctions and
things were going at high prices because all the money or the the value of the mint was accruing
to the artists or the the mentors you know or not the not the people minting, but the people providing
selling the one I bought for .2
when they got back to .2.
I originally only planned to buy the one at .1
and then I found out I was on that list
and I was like, fuck it, I'll buy two and see what happens.
Bitcoin whales coming to bail us out.
Everyone's a seller. No one's a buyer.
about where I thought they would go.
We talked last week, I think, about that.
selling nodes and puppets as well.
There's the whole token play with them, right?
You don't just own a JPEG, but you own maybe a future token.
I don't know if people don't care about that right now
or the valuation of that speculative token is too high or whatnot.
I should have only minted one, or I should have sold the one i minted when they got back to point two um looks
like another great tax loss harvesting opportunity for me i've been a little surprised i think udi
has come out they've been really not even just hinting kind of loudly talking about the token
in the past week i think we're probably people,
either don't know about that or because it's not confirmed yet.
They're not fully believing it or B,
but think it's far enough out because quantum cats meant it a year ago.
Tapper wizard just came out.
So a token's probably six to 12 months out.
if these came out a year ago,
these would be close to a Bitcoin.
we had fucking node monkeys at basically a Bitcoin.
So market timing is so tough with this stuff,
I'm not panicking the sell line at 0.14.
Tell you that I'll go down with the ship and see what happens before I sell it here.
I think they'll find a bottom.
I think there's a good chance they'll trade over mint price
at some point in the future.
Since I brought it up, I'll give a shout out to the Forgotten Rains Wizards
because that game came out.
I've been playing that a little bit.
hours into it over the last week.
It's been fun to pull that up while
I'm playing RuneScape and play both at once.
It's not super intensive,
it's nice to just have a game that
I can use some NFTs I've owned
see a lot of familiar faces it's also fun like
what like how do the nfts play a part in the game um so the wizards are just like reskins for your
character um but i'm like very clearly me in the game because i have a honorary wizard so it's like
you see 3d wizard d's it's like very clearly could only be me
so it's been fun to meet a couple
made some friends doing these like
group raids because some of the stuff
you have to have like a team of
three other people in yourself to clear it
kind of cool to meet people who
aware of who I was for years,
and I never knew them until joining a raid party with them to do some content in the game.
There's a whole other currency system in the game I haven't fully figured out.
I wasn't super paying attention to all the beta tests,
but there's land plots and currency to activate things on the land plots.
land plots and currency to activate things on the land plots.
And if you are beta testing some of the stuff in the process,
you got airdrops of these tokens,
which apparently I don't have any of,
but I'm not worried about it.
I'm just kind of just enjoying the game without all the complex economy
Nice to see one of the OG MT teams continue to build it for four years.
And now their game is here.
So it seems like it is a fun one.
I think we've gone around the horn.
We're going to wrap up here in a second,
but I got to share something.
Peter just dropped in our chat,
perhaps a sign of optimism for tomorrow.
White house says president Trump made up his mind on tariffs and wall street will be just fine.
So not sure if this is an April fool's joke. Trump made up his mind on tariffs and Wall Street will be just fine.
So not sure if this is an April Fool's joke.
What the fuck's that, man?
And Wall Street will be just fine.
We've got some words. He made up his mind and the numbers are going to go up, baby.
We're going to win again.
We're going to be so fucking tired of winning by next week.
Have the coins rallied on that?
No, we're down actually a bit.
He said Wall Street, not blockchain.
We'll see what it means for American Bitcoin tomorrow at 4 p.m. Eastern.
Yeah, we didn't even talk too much about that, but what a ridiculous thing.
Yeah, we'll have to save it for a longer conversation.
Like Trump's kids, Bitcoin mining thing,
calling it American Bitcoin.
They're really going deep into it.
Sometimes I wish they just won it.
I think that's the right reaction.
Sometimes I wish they just won it. Well. I think that's the right reaction. Sometimes I wish they just won it.
Well, we're seeing the pushback, right?
So last week it was Elizabeth Warren chirping Trump and Elon
about the stablecoin bill.
Now we've got more congressmen saying that the deeper that Trump goes,
the murkier all this crypto policy gets.
And I think they have a strong point.
And we applauded David Sachs for divesting his crypto assets.
And here we have the Trump family investing as much as they can every,
That's not a great look, man. Not what we want to see.
That's the downside. The upside is I think the line of sight to a Bitcoin mining
driving an American global bitcoin strategic reserve is
very non-zero yeah to me the tough part gets you know thinking a little longer ahead you
2028 election if you have the trump family spend the next four years ingraining themselves so
deep into the crypto culture with companies and tokens and other bullshit then you have such a polarizing
push against the way it was that like 2028 democrats win in that scenario they just go
the complete opposite way and say like hey like the fucking trump family love this shit we hate
this shit get out of here and we just kind of rotate back to where we were i mean i'm not saying that's likely to happen it's just possible uh downside thing i think about is
the frunk family tries to ingrain themselves more and more into crypto i think it's one of the single
biggest risks right now it's just such an easy i would rather they not, right? Like, I would rather they not. But that's not going to happen.
And Bitcoin, especially, it's been interesting to see that the Bitcoin mining shorts have been out.
And they're down quite a bit.
I wonder if this will be enough to start to flip some of the sentiment around that.
Especially if the mining becomes a path to the strategic reserve.
Maybe we'll save it for another show.
Folks, we are over the hour here.
So I think we'll go ahead and wrap it up there.
I want to thank our listeners.
As always, I want to thank my co-hosts.
I want to thank our partner, Wallet Connect.
We will be back next Tuesday to recap how the hell Liberation Day went,
if we are indeed liberated.
We'll find out here very soon until then.
Take care guys. Thank you.