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UNDER EXPOSED: Tariff Mania, A New Reserve Currency & Crypto VC Spend
Recorded: April 8, 2025 Duration: 1:09:31Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic crypto landscape, Wallet Connect prepares for its WCT token launch, while Ripple's $1.25 billion acquisition of Hidden Road highlights aggressive growth strategies. Amidst market volatility, retail investors are increasingly 'buying the dip,' and Kaido's remarkable revenue growth signals strong potential in the sector. The enduring popularity of meme coins further illustrates the diverse investment interests within the crypto community.
Full Transcription
Thank you. GM, GM, thank you for joining us here this morning, this afternoon, wherever you're at.
We're going to start the show here in just a minute.
We're getting all of our speakers up on stage while we wait.
A couple shout outs.
Who we got?
Carla, Felix, Goon, GM, GM, UGELD, JD Black, Monk, Harry Krishna, always here.
GM, GM, Ed Balloon, Mid-Z, David, Ranch.
All right.
Thank you all for joining us.
I've got D's up here, Jeebs up here, the Underexposed Account, Miriam Account.
Sims, I think whenever you're ready, let's kick it. Thank you. All right, GM, GM, everyone, and welcome to episode 20 of Underexposed.
Can you believe it? 20 episodes in to our weekly macro show, hitting
all the biggest topics and trends impacting crypto and Web3. Today is Tuesday, April 8th,
and another week has gone by that felt like a month, maybe a quarter. We had Liberation Day,
surprising amount of tariffs, a chat GPT scandal, no negotiations, then a quarter. We had Liberation Day, surprising amount of tariffs,
a chat GPT scandal, no negotiations,
then a lot of negotiations,
and escalating trade war with China is playing out in real time.
Now we're trying to figure out what the hell this means for crypto,
if we're closer to the end of pain or the beginning.
We're going to get into all of it on today's show.
I'm your host, Tyler D., and I've got my co-hosts in the house,
starting with D's, art collector, coin stacker, and trader, wearing the wrecked hat. D's,
GM, how are you doing? Doing well, man. Just enjoying this turbulent market and
doing a whole bunch of sitting and waiting. Turbulent is an understatement, but sitting
and waiting may be the right strategy folks we've
got peter jennings on with us founder of several companies but still finds time to spend with us
peter gm how are you doing doing great yeah the theme of piercing volatility uh seems to be playing
out throughout the year that's uh one thing uh good friend brandon adams uh got right that was
the main thing he talked about coming into the year.
And I've been preaching that.
And oh boy, the volatility has absolutely been piercing.
Maybe that should be the title of the show, actually.
I think it's been mentioned every time since episode one, is this piercing volatility.
And here we are experiencing it still week over week, every single week.
And it's not going to slow down anytime soon.
It doesn't seem like.
Jeeps, shout out to you.
Early stage crypto VC dabbling in internet capital markets wears a lot of hats,
including that slick fractional hat.
Jeeps, Jim, how are you doing today?
I'm great, man.
Just another day in paradise.
You know, times like these are, they're turbulent.
They're tough.
But hey, we, they're turbulent. They're tough, but Hey, we have,
we have dire wolves now.
I want to get into that with you later in the show.
We need to talk about the dire wolves and like,
are we actually going to have Jurassic park in 2035?
Like,
are we 10 years away from this?
Like,
this is,
seems like a very,
it's looking like we're closer than further away.
Now we're definitely closer than further away.
So we got to talk about that.
We'll talk about tariff again.
A lighter week of crypto headlines, but a couple big blockbuster pieces of news.
The White House coming out and talking about perhaps no longer wanting the U.S. dollar to be the global reserve.
And a whole lot more.
Before we get into
it, folks, 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, the big news this week out of Wallet Connect
is they're getting closer and closer to that token, WCT token,
being live for trading.
They just announced a huge new launch partner in OKX
with those WCT token deposits going live on April 15th at 10 a.m. UTC. So be on the lookout
for that. 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, now let's get into it. I'm going to fire
up the screen share here for those in the stream. We'll get that stream link tweeted out here in
just a minute. But rewinding this past week, the first headline, we'll get that stream link tweeted out here in just a minute.
But rewinding this past week, the first headline, we had Liberation Day on Wednesday.
It was tariff chaos.
Tariff rates came out way higher than anticipated.
It doesn't seem like they want to negotiate in the early days. It leads to what looked like the worst three-day stretch for equities in history. Sunday night looked like that we were going to have a Black Monday
event yesterday. But then we got a change in rhetoric, some talk of deals. We did get a bit of a market rebound on Monday. This came and missed several pro-Trump leaders out
there kind of speaking out against tariffs and trying to get them walked back to a degree.
So Bill Ackman was a big part of that. Let's see. We had the White House release a statement
yesterday. Pretty long.
This is from their Council of Economic Advisors,
but they basically said that there's a lot of downside
to the U.S. dollar being the global reserve,
that other countries have been riding the U.S.'s coattails for too long,
and everyone has to pay their own fair price.
We've had a market rebound since then.
We thought it was going to
be turnaround Tuesday. Stocks opened big green. Crypto is big green as well. It looks like crypto
is starting to sell off a bit here. Bitcoin basically even on the day. It's down 8% on the
week, 78,350. ETH down 20% on the week, 1530. That ETH Bitcoin ratio continues to find new lows.
Folks, I'm not sure if you saw this
at one point on Monday morning, it would have cost you 52 ETH for one Bitcoin. One of the largest
that I've seen, and I think it's the largest in about five years. So briefly went sub 100. It
looks like it's back to 109 here this morning. That's still down 17% on the week.
Ripple had one of the biggest stories in the crypto space on the week. So they just announced
an acquisition of Hidden Road for $1.25 billion, one of the largest crypto acquisitions of all time.
And this comes amidst Circle plans to IPO. Now there's talks that maybe they might delay it,
perhaps tied to that FUD related to the fees that Coinbase is charging them.
So those were some of the headlines from this past week.
There's a whole lot of directions to go, a lot to unpack.
Peter, I'll toss it to you first.
Maybe highest level reactions to Liber day and yeah i was pretty disappointed
with liberation day to be honest um i thought a lot of what this administration was talking about
made sense and then the execution of the the tariffs um with the big board and just the
calculations um don't seem to make sense a lot of of people are confused. They put tariffs on an island
populated by penguins, which has got a lot of news. But just clearly,
the competence around this didn't make a lot of sense to me. I think the main target here is China,
which Besson and others have talked about, Trump included extensively. So I just think the
strategy around this could have been executed a lot better. So
from that perspective, it was super disappointing given kind of the confidence that I've had in this
administration relative to Trump 1.0. I just thought there was a lot of smart people around
Trump to kind of execute some of these strategies. So we first saw the 10-year drop, which is the
main goal for Besant, which would be the big positive to take away from this, that plus energy prices going down.
But if you're going to do that with the stock market going down as dramatically as it has, that's concerning.
And then coming into this week, you have this volatility in equities, and the 10-year has done the opposite.
volatility and equities and the 10-year has done the opposite. Now, I'm not as concerned about the
10-year in the short term because my view on what's happening here is that the Chinese and
possibly even the Japanese, although we'll see if we can negotiate something there, those are the
two biggest holders of U.S. debt. And if they start unloading that debt into the market, it's
going to make yields rise. So I imagine that's a big part of this. I think we'll start to see basically trade war to currency war,
hopefully not a real war, World War III with China. But that's kind of what's transpiring
here in yield. So we'll see. There's a lot of cross currents. I think the big risk here is
we're walking a tightrope. I'm concerned about
a real recession. Once that genie's out of the bottle, it's really hard to kind of reverse things.
So that's my concern. And also just talking with a lot of my entrepreneur friends,
people who own businesses, they're kind of at a standstill not knowing what to do.
And that's the other hard part is that businesses need confidence. They're planning for
long periods of time. And especially if you're a company like, let's say Nike,
like, what do you do now? You were told to move to Vietnam. Now you have all this uncertainty.
They can't just like turn their supply chain around, you know, quickly. They've put a ton
of money and energy into this infrastructure. And there's plenty of other companies that are
the same way. So it's really difficult for these companies to plan and markets and companies hate uncertainty.
So there's a lot of encouraging things.
I think we've been broadly bullish on kind of how this administration's handled crypto.
They didn't give into like a lot of the short term gains.
Of course, you can point to some things like the Trump token, which probably I don't think we were that excited about.
But SACS and a lot of the policies that they've put into place have been, you know, long-term minded in my eyes. And I've been
really encouraged by a lot of the other policies that have been put into place. And then we have
Liberation Day, which felt like a debacle from my end. So certainly concerned. It's really hard
if you are, you know, sitting on a lot of risk on assets, what to do. Generally, we've been trained to kind of buy the dip and we've seen that.
I think Friday was like the largest trading day by retail, just buying the dip.
That works until it doesn't.
So I don't know.
It's really, really hard.
I don't have a ton of conviction on what to do.
I've kind of just been sitting on my hands with my portfolio.
The last thing I'll mention that I'm sure a lot of people are kicking themselves.
I am dealing with a ton of regret.
Jeeps and I went out to lunch.
I had a lot of conviction around sell the inauguration for crypto specifically.
I acted on that to a degree, but the Trump token really kind of, you know, put my mind
in a blender.
And boy, sell the inauguration across the board.
How good does that look?
Crypto, equities.
I mean, if you had the foresight to do that, you are sitting really pretty right now.
So I do think there's a lesson there that broadly you want to be, you know, basically buying some of the hype.
And then when the news actually comes to fruition, you want to be basically buying some of the hype and then when the news actually comes to fruition,
you want to be selling that.
So that's something we've seen play out a ton in crypto
and certainly has been the case thus far with this administration.
That was the PicoTOP, right?
Basically it was an inauguration day.
Then a day of Melania coming out,
all we had to do was sell it all and walk away.
Another just sign.
As soon as the Melania thing happened right like i don't know a
single person in crypto or markets that's you know somewhat rational that was like oh this is good
everyone just knew is a huge grift and yeah easy in hindsight to point out um the obvious signs but
that was a that was a big one and the main reason i brought that up is just you know a lot of people
are beating themselves up now and and it's really hard to time
these things. So even though I was telling my friends and family that I was
going to be selling the inauguration,
I still didn't execute as well as you know,
I wish I would have at this point in time. So it's,
it's hard for everyone out there.
Agree. And now everyone's wrestling with the decision. Okay.
You didn't sell the inauguration, but it's selling now the right time.
Right. And it's tricky because we're already so far off and you went into a
lot. I appreciate your update. Um, one initial question slash reaction.
So what's your take on these numbers on the chart?
Is this just starting negotiation tactic or was this actually Trump going rogue?
And then it really took Besant talking some sense into him on Sunday night to start these negotiations.
Do you have a read?
My read, which I don't have conviction around, but my read is that this is Trump and Lutnik that made kind of these decisions.
And Besson's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, guys, what the hell are we doing?
And now it's like, OK, let's get the real adult in the room to go negotiate.
And, you know, I love seeing that Besson's going to negotiate directly with Japan.
That's a military and, you know, economic ally.
They are the largest holder of our debt.
And we do not want any type of war with Japan. and economic ally. They are the largest holder of our debt.
And we do not want any type of war with Japan.
So I have the utmost confidence in Besson.
He's maybe my favorite person I've ever had in my lifetime that's been in politics.
So I have a ton of confidence
and would love for him to be negotiating and making deals.
That's what we want.
And that's the emphasis that he's had.
Lutnik is scaring me more day by day, personally, but we'll see what happens. And yeah, I don't
understand. I mean, there's tons of content out there. And regardless of what side you are on
the political aisle, I think kind of the consensus was that a lot of these numbers didn't make sense.
Do you think Lutnick gets fired?
I would be surprised just given the history that they have.
You know, what we're seeing now is Navarro.
It looks like maybe the scapegoat in all of this.
Elon is going after him relentlessly.
We'll see.
I'm not sure.
And again, you know, your questions sell now.
It's really hard to have conviction in what to do.
I've tried to consume as much content as I can.
I've listened to people I really respect.
And it's just really hard to have a lot of conviction on what to do at this moment in time.
So when you don't have conviction, I think the best course of action is just kind of turn things off and then come back as you get more certainty.
And obviously, it's dependent on the person and kind of your life situation.
But if you don't need to sell, probably it's been better just time in the market to kind of just sit in your hands.
But certainly hard with all the fear out there right now.
There's clearly a lot of fear.
Go ahead, Jason.
I always go back
to what you've been saying for years peter it's just like insulate your lifestyle and when things
are good constantly take money off the table when times are you know as they are right now
it's harder to take money off the table unless you absolutely need it to live over the next
year or so so i'm just um always thinking about that for like five years now or however long I've known you.
The lifestyle chips.
I love the lifestyle chips.
You got to take them off.
And it's hard.
It's really hard.
And that's the interesting thing too.
And I'd love to kick around the horn.
My instincts during or my emotion, I guess I would say, is when things are going good,
it's like, how can I go farther out on the risk curve?
Like, what other things can I find?
Like, you know, 3x or 4x or 5x.
You're not really thinking about selling any of your stuff.
You're like, oh, I can't imagine selling Bitcoin or Sol or anything like that.
Or coin at $2.50?
Yeah, I can't imagine.
Like, I want to keep finding wins.
And then when things are down, it's like, okay, what can I sell?
And that's the hard part. and everyone is going through that so um keep that
in mind and and you know the best thing that you can have right now is just stable income and the
the ability to dca and the stuff that you want to own for the long term and we haven't talked
about bitcoin yet i think bitcoin's set up as well as ever, have more conviction in Bitcoin than I ever have. So I feel really confident kind of long-term about that barring, you know, some of these black
swan events. But there's certainly things that you can point to if you're a long-term investor
that you'd want to be accumulating at these prices. Yeah. One of the nicest charts I was
just looking at is the monthly on the bitcoin dominance chart
it has just been up and to the right since november of 2022 i'll pull that up here but
jeebs while uh while we're chatting i'm trying to pull that up what was your reaction to
liberation day high level yeah i mean look like i agree with a lot of what peter was saying him
and i you know we got lunch the other day agree with a lot of what peter was saying him and i you know
we got lunch the other day we covered a bunch of different topics but like generally tariffs can be
used as as a tool and they're they're obviously doing that but the execution has just been
sort of disappointing so far so look i'm forward looking now like i'm optimistic at this point
that the administration will secure a handful of deals.
It's clear that they're announcing them. They had Benjamin Netanyahu there yesterday. They
clearly were trying to roadshow that we're here, we're open for business, we're looking to work
with countries. But the reality is that the biggest deal on the table right now is locking
in China. And there's some retaliation and some back and forth going on between the US and China right now.
I just saw Besson saying that China escalating things was a quote unquote big mistake.
Yeah, you have this one here.
And so he believes that China is playing a losing hand here.
You can make the argument too, China's not really in a great spot, right?
They've been issuing
stimulus lately. It's clear that there's been issues there with the real estate market.
Can they afford or do they want to have another major problem here? I think the reality though
is that it's almost like they're playing chicken a little bit. I think China's calling Trump's bluff
in a way and they're just going, hey, look, it's really clear what you're doing with tariffs to use them as a negotiation tool.
And you don't necessarily want to use these as a long-term viable revenue generation stream.
So I think it's important just to look at the countries that are saying, hey, look,
I don't believe what you're saying. I think you're using it for this. And we'll work with you, but you're not going to rake us over the coals.
So I think the China deal will come, but it will take a while.
So where do we land if we, over the next two months, we negotiate with 70 countries, but the China situation still continues to escalate?
but the China situation still continues to escalate.
We get better deals, lower tariff rates on Vietnam, Japan, South Korea,
the EU, but we're unable to de-escalate this.
Is that considered a win?
Materiality is the biggest thing I'm looking for there.
It's going to be 70 countries that we are not major trade partners with.
But if we're starting to hit a lot of the major trade partners
and it's material, I think that's when it's important.
From a game theory perspective, that's what makes sense, right?
Make deals quickly.
Sure up your alliances with your allies and have great trade deals.
And then continue to kind of work even with,
potentially if you can make some deals with China's allies,
that puts you in a pretty good spot.
And then you can try to choke off China to a degree.
It's just going to be hard.
And the more you force China into a corner,
one second order effect here is what's going to happen with Taiwan?
I mean, the more we push China,
don't you think that makes them more likely to pursue, you know, the acquisition of Taiwan, which that alone could be the start of an actual war.
So there's just so many things in the balance right now. And to your point, Tyler, and your
question, I do think there's a lot of validity if we can make these deals. It's just a matter of,
like, are we actually going to do it? And I just going back to like the art of the deal for trump and he just has an absolute desire to get in these spots um and yeah
another frustrate i'll just throw one other thing and i'll i'll shut up but uh trump golfing over
the weekend and shooting that 68th win the championship and making sure everyone knows like
i thought trump had matured in some ways um i absolutely hate seeing stuff like that
just like the ego's out of control when there's all these real problems like we don't no one cares
about your golf and your made-up score dude so um i'll get off my high horse but there's this
cohort who thinks he's a narcissistic authoritarian and he'll he will display signs of reason and logic. And then amidst the most important weekend after this,
as tariff again is playing out in markets,
he's out shooting a 68,
which is more Kim Jong-un than anything else.
So it's...
So bad, optically.
So bad.
I was like, I don't want to go too much into politics but like
i was not a trump guy before and then this kind of time around i'm like banging the drum having
all these debates with people and i'm like look we got all these good things and then i mean the
trump haters they are just getting extreme validation right now and that is another sad
thing like this is not great for the country we want want to be in a good spot. It's not fun when, you know, these people are gleeful about Trump falling on
his face. That's not what we need as a country. So yeah, you know, Trump's saying like, you know,
we have to take some medicine. I think now it's like, well, how long till this medicine
produces some results? Because the reality is like, if the markets really can't get back to
all time highs, if not better, as we start to near midterms,
it's going to be really concerning.
So what needs to happen?
And I think they know that.
I think they're aware of that.
They have to be.
That's pretty common sense.
I'm trying to figure out what's the path back to all-time highs.
What is the bull case here?
is the bull case here? And I think there could be multiple paths. One is if China wants to go
And I think there could be multiple paths.
the route of devaluing their currency and effectively printing, is that going to be a
stimulus that pumps markets or at least pumps Bitcoin? Some folks like Arthur Hayes calling
for that as a near-term bull case for Bitcoin, do we need to see the negotiations?
Is there a path on the table at an all-time high
in this new negotiated tariff world?
Is it for Bitcoin or S&P?
For both.
All of it?
And or.
Yeah, Bitcoin and or S&P.
Man, I mean, tariffs are front and center.
I think we need some type of reassurance
that things are settling there.
And then it almost goes back, Tyler, to that paper I'd written earlier this year on the bull cases for tariffs.
De-escalation, like Peter said, China, Taiwan, China could be looking at the US and seeing it
potentially really weak with allies and potential time to strike, which I think could be really
concerning. I don't think that's the base case, but, you know, you just never know.
But I think de-escalation in general is really bullish.
So de-escalation, Russia, Ukraine, de-escalation, Middle East, de-escalation, China, Taiwan
are really bullish signals that could come out.
And then, I don't know, some tax reform, like we've yet to see any tax reform
and then just rates in general coming down.
Those are some of the things that come top of mind.
I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of stuff.
I think it's really easy to see all-time highs.
I mean, what you just said plays out.
Some really strong deregulation comes into play.
Rates are lower.
Quantitative easing.
I mean, there's certainly a playbook of just like boom, boom, boom.
All these deals are done. The war in Russia and Ukraine's over, you know, de-escalation around
the world, peace, which one thing I really loved about what Trump said initially when he was
getting inaugurated was he wants to be known in his legacy as a peacemaker. And, you know,
we just are in a position where all this stuff happens quickly. And that's one thing you got
to give credit to this administration for.
Things are moving extremely fast.
So that would be the bull case, and we enter into this golden age,
and people are super stoked.
It's just a matter of what's the probability of that,
because it's also easy to paint some scenarios where we do go into a recession.
Imagine a real war actually breaks out between major players.
I mean, there's some really big downside risk as well. So it's just assigning probabilities
to all the different outcomes. Right. I actually missed that Trump said he wanted
the peacetime to be one of his legacies. So that is somewhat reassuring. I think I saw that they are,
they passed their $1 trillion defense spending bill today.
I'm actually in the camp that spending on defense makes a ton of sense.
And that's probably the easiest way to ensure peace.
But,
but that's a,
that's a longer conversation.
Deez,
I haven't had a chance to really check in with you.
Post liberation day.
How are you feeling?
Reactions slash anything
on the crypto front that's jumping out to you
here?
Just sick of winning, man.
Just sick and tired of winning. There's been so much
winning and it's just another
massive win that I'm sick and tired of.
So, no, I
had very low expectations going in
and I think those low expectations were met with lower prices.
And yeah, I don't really have any comment.
Like I've said it before, I'll say it again.
Like I didn't vote in the election.
I was pretty indifferent toward what happened.
And yeah, just no confidence really in the leadership in this country.
So we've got Bitcoin going back below $78K here, $77.9K.
Do you have a low-end target where you're pulling capital out of the bank and buying back in?
I would need to see a big liquidation cascade and some some type of major you know stock market dip it's
not really a level it's more like a percent move um you know say we had a crash down to
the mid 50s like that would be pretty enticing to to pull some capital out um But like 70k, 77k,
I don't really care enough to pull out capital for that.
Now, if we just see like 15, 20, 25% dump in one day,
that looks like it's people who are over levered
having to be forced sellers
and causing the price to go down more than it should.
That's what I would look to buy.
But if it's a slow bleed down the 60 K,
I'm less enticed.
I want to buy more of like the,
you know,
big liquidation cascade.
Then I want to buy a slow bleed.
Well,
one of our favorite tokens.
So pretty much a 20% down move in a single day.
I'm not,
I'm not buying it, sadly.
I'm so, you know, my exposure to ETH is all NFTs, right?
So if ETH does well, these fucking JPEGs will.
If ETH doesn't, JPEGs still can do well.
We're starting to see some of these JPEGs, like, go up in ETH
just because people are looking at the USD price
and being like, wow,
this is cheap. Or you have Punks, which are kind of holding steady at not mid-40s range,
which the bet where I sold a Bitcoin to buy a Punk isn't looking great right now. I think
there's like a $14,000 gap. Yeah. We're losing the Punk Bitcoin spread.
I'm just glad I didn't buy E eth with that bitcoin and i bought a pump instead
so i'd be losing more that is the upside uh that's about it but yeah i'm kind of just on my
my hands here and it's hard to to buy these slow grinds down unless your time horizon is truly like
multiple years right or at least a year, and I already have kind of a
long-term bag that I'm comfy holding and don't feel the need to add a ton to right now. Also,
I don't have a stable income, right? Like I have very little cashflow. So I have to look at
everything through a different lens than people who have their monthly expenses covered from,
from income. Sure. That makes total sense.
Jeebs, you brought up this Bitcoin dominance chart.
Is it ever going to stop?
Is this going to continue?
What is the...
It's one of the best charts in crypto, man.
I mean, are we going to see 75? This is the downfall of Ethereum in front of you.
We're going to see 75 ETH for one Bitcoin in 2025.
It's another 50% move from here in the ratio.
It's hit 52.
It's roughly 50 right now.
How does ETH get back to 3K plus at this point?
We're talking 2X from here.
What's the road?
Bitcoin to 200,000.
A couple of Eric Trump tweets away, Jeebs.
That was getting mean on the
basketball court the other day.
Now looks like a great time to put your
life savings into ETH
and then it's down 50%. I guess the only bull case that I have for ETH right now
is that another one of the things we had talked about prior, wealth managers are recommending a
split Bitcoin ETH, maybe something else in retirement accounts. There's a heavy bid coming
from that. That's the only bull case.
Otherwise, there's a lot more bear cases I could build in my head or just cases for it to be
priced appropriately around here. I'm with you. The institutional play is really the
biggest one out there. Yeah. And look, they can all build there. Like they can all build within the ecosystem.
But, you know, I'll have more info on this, this, this one next week, Tyler, but, you know,
as our little RWA round table discussion has it every week, I've been looking into how,
just how many big, you know, RWA layer ones or layer twos are there. And right now I've assembled
a list of 13.
And I think there's at least a few more,
but these are 13 major players.
And I think there's just so much dispersion going on
in the RWA space.
And some of these that are layer ones, right?
They're not going to be bringing a ton of economic value
to Ethereum, the chain.
They're going to be focused on bringing private credit on chain, bringing debt on chain, bringing assets on chain.
So that doesn't necessarily help ETH.
And even the layer twos that are doing this, because of how layer twos are now subsidized.
There's also not a really great base case for ETH to go up there as well.
So I'm having trouble even when people like the institutions are coming and RWAs are being built on ETH.
I still can't come up with a good base case for the actual value of Ethereum to go up other than, oh, I should own this asset because it's the network I'm using.
Because if you're interacting on a layer two,
oftentimes gas is just so cheap.
I think we had seen some reports recently
about how much economic value mainnet has lost
over the past year since they introduced blob storage.
And the demand required to get back
to where that would be is astronomical.
So I can't even use that as a narrative anymore.
You know what might have stronger narrative?
I can't believe I'm saying this.
Does Ripple have a stronger narrative?
Ripple's an interesting one.
April 2025?
Yeah, we have one of our friends that poops with us.
He is a big Ripple fan. And I've talked to a number of people who are big Ripple fans, and they have trouble explaining to me why they're big Ripple fans outside of it going up. I think that it's a distribution play for their RLUSD, which is their stablecoin that they've created.
And look, I think if they want to be relevant and be a major player in this space,
they're looking to their stablecoin as being a core component there.
And for them, they need to increase the distribution.
At the end of the day, stablecoin distribution is, in my eyes, probably the biggest metric.
So good for them.
I mean, major acquisition.
If we want to talk really quickly just about the year ahead, I think we're looking at a lot of potential crypto IPOs along with we're going to see a ton of mergers and acquisitions in the space.
I think it's really clear that the administration is pro merger and acquisition.
Yeah, let's get into it. So we wanted to talk about some VC activity. There's a couple of
different takes out there. I've seen some who are saying it's ripe for VC investment. And like the
last Dubai deal, I'm blanking on the team behind it. That $2 billion deal is kind of lighting the path up for VC investment along with the crypto-friendly Trump administration.
But Chow here is kind of saying the opposite.
Yeah, I asked him this morning on Twitter.
And Chow, he's on the nose with it.
Him and Imran Khan over at AllianceDAO, one of, if not the top accelerator in crypto.
They've built a number, incubated a number of households' crypto names. And these guys,
they also put out a podcast every month I'd recommend listening to. They're just kind of
on it because they're hands-on with builders all the time. And so in this thread, he had mentioned
that he saw sort of venture
things slowing down. I'd pointed out to him, you know, if you look at some of the crypto rank data,
venture investments have been pretty steady. And this is sort of numbering rounds and USD as well
over the past six months or so. So if we scroll down and put some of these on like a yearly chart,
like this one, number of funding rounds here. Or actually one more down, Tyler.
Sorry.
Yeah, this one here.
Right.
If we just put this to a one year time horizon up in the top left there.
Yeah.
We can see like the number of rounds has stayed relatively steady so far.
So we're seeing a fair amount across the board here.
And on the right
there, you can change it to USD. I think this is slightly down. So yeah, that right there.
There's one outlier month here, which is last month because of that $2 billion investment into
Binance. So you can see that color represents centralized finance. So pretty monster month for
that space. But if you look generally,
I wouldn't really say it's up or down. Things peaked in December because a ton of funds needed
to make investments. They wanted to close things out for the year. But if I'm looking at this,
I feel like it's been relatively steady as well over the past six months. And so
Chow points to some less like hard data things, right?
This is obviously a lagging indicator.
This is data for things that have happened.
These teams have been raising for,
let's call it like three to eight months maybe
to get those funds.
And so I think something to pay attention to here
is what Chow's saying,
where there's this sort of soft data
where teams are having trouble raising right now.
I think there's less money in the ecosystem.
And he's just talking to people
in general who are feeling
a little less likely to write that check.
And I think he might be right just from
general sentiment across the board.
So anyway,
yeah, I think there's just like a lot of things
like we're going through just a ton of change.
Um, and there's, there's also just dispersion going on as venture investors are wanting
to move into new categories or niche categories.
You're seeing a lot of the big funds come in early, though, basically lead and take
most of the round and a lot of these companies, and they're trying to take directional bets
in either new or emerging industries or sectors
within crypto. The other thing I think to look out for is that real business is becoming a key
thing within crypto venture. I think for a long time, the more pie in the sky or more theoretical
your idea was, the better your odds were to raise a monster round because sky's the limit.
People can use their imagination to see maybe where this entrepreneur's mind is. Maybe it's a
massive changing technology within the space or a different way of looking at things.
But I think now web three investing is starting to think more like web two investing on the venture
side where people are really laying down,
like,
what is this business?
You know,
what are the numbers you were doing?
What are the potential,
what's the potential for it?
And you're seeing this,
I think even at seed stages right now.
yeah,
I think it'll take time.
There's some funds that are still raising rounds right now.
We're seeing like a few announcements of venture funds,
closing rounds,
some of them small,
some of them a little bit bigger, but you'll start to see that capital find a home too soon.
So that's a long way to get through that. No, that was great. And I think your takeaway there,
we're starting to see more reliance on a real business, capital generating business,
is 100% a new trend that we're seeing.
And I still think there's a disconnect in the valuation.
So shout out to Yuhu, the founder of Kaido.
I think Kaido is one of the more exciting protocols.
Of course, they've had one of the most lucrative token launches.
Their token's still trading at $900 million FTV. They released their vision and shared a bit about their financials and effectively
said they're annualizing $33 million in revenue, which is up 100x over the last 12 months.
So 100x growth in 12 months is incredible.
$33 million in annualized revenue is very strong, but the token's trading at $900 million right now.
So, I mean, Jeeves, if you're wearing your VC hat,
if you see a company who is analyzing $33 million in revenue
and trading it, and they want $900 million valuation,
are you chomping at the bit to buy in?
I think it depends a little bit.
Oftentimes, if you're doing a venture deal,
sometimes you're just buying tokens if you're doing a SAFT.
Sometimes you're doing just equity
if you're doing a safe round or a fixed price round.
But oftentimes, the most common way that people are investing in crypto
companies right now is called a safe plus token warrant. And a lot of those are issued at one to
one. So at the end of the day, you're going to get exposure to the underlying company,
and then upside to the token as well. But I do think it's important for businesses to really think through how,
what they're offering with a token these days. And I'm ensuring that's a really important part
of it because I think a lot of people are looking at some of these tokens as investments in equity
in the company. No one's really sure oftentimes what they're buying with a token and what exactly it is and where the value should accrue
interesting well i guess in the in the crypto space specifically i would have thought
if you were investing you would be thinking as the token as your primary way to get liquidity
on that investment versus what's your alternative an ipo or being
able to i guess being able to say ipo or an acquisition yeah okay yeah and so sometimes
like we've made investments in just equity companies and the likely exit for those is
going to be uh an acquisition like we see them as a business that's has a high likelihood of
being acquired in the next,
call it three to six years at a multiple of the valuation they're raising at now.
Got it. Well, that certainly makes sense.
Yeah. A good example there, Tyler, just to be helpful here would be,
call it a payments company. Look at a company like Bridge that was acquired by Stripe.
They have no token. They have no plans for a
token. They are purely a company that offers an API suite for moving payments using crypto rails.
And they were acquired for a billion dollars. So that's a great sector of, hey, this is crypto,
but it's more of a tech company that's leveraging crypto. And those are the companies you look for
for an acquisition target. Got it. Yeah, that is helpful. Thanks for sharing that. I think, Jeep, someone in line,
we can go around the horn on this one here is Benji. I think this tweet's going somewhat viral
on crypto Twitter. This might be the most important chart in crypto right now. And it's this Artemis
developer activity chart, which on the surface paints a picture that crypto developer activity
effectively peaked between 2021 and 2023 and is now down 30 to 50%.
It looks like it's continuing to trend down.
Curious if you have a read on this.
Is this being talked about in BC circles?
Is this a cause for concern?
Are there other factors at play here? You know, Chow kind of pointed this out sort of, right? Just saying
that a little bit less interest in general. I think there's another way to look at this though,
right? This is just an aggregate of a large measure. I think the question is maybe someone
was a solidity developer on ETH,
and they've kind of given up on that ecosystem, and they've left, or developer activity has
concentrated elsewhere. When you start to look at the chains here, you can look down below here,
and this points out the ecosystems that have sort of changed a lot or changed a little bit.
sort of changed a lot or changed a little bit.
I need to honestly also dive into this specific metric a bit more and how
Artemis is gauging this metric.
I don't know enough about it to say that this is helpful or not helpful.
Cause I know some of their data, you know,
they're still kind of working on a little bit in flight,
but I'd have to figure out exactly how they're gathering that information to
make a, just have like a better thought on it.
Yeah. I think that's fair.
I've seen other data sources like this developer report,
which shows a decline, but it's not quite as significant.
I think there's a lot to unpack here.
There's also just, with the rise of ChatGPT,
it's easier to code, you need less coders.
I think there's also this somewhat consensus thought that a lot of the
core problems have been solved.
A lot has been built already.
So the need for additional infrastructure,
the need for all this started to decline a bit.
If you think about it from the perspective of a dev, which none of us are, what's the opportunity cost of working on Ethereum versus anything else in the world right now?
Are you more enticed by things going on in AI? Are you more enticed on building an actual business that makes money?
You kind of are losing airdrop incentives in a lot of the free money that people were getting last cycle um this guy tim dob.eth put out a really good quote tweet to bingy's tweet um it's
a long block of text but it's worth reading and basically you know the incentives just
aren't as good as they used to be and um opportunity cost wise there's probably better things to work on if you're a dev
which is you know a sad reality i think for where we're at you know actually these one thought on
that i'm i'm met up with a professor here at du to talk about crypto and whatnot so she teaches
a couple of blockchain courses here at the school. And I was asking her about the blockchain clubs on campus, what they're up to.
And she had said that a majority of them converted from blockchain clubs to AI clubs.
So I would be curious, Tyler, to see this sort of an overlay of crypto developer activity
with AI developer activity and just see if there's just a huge divergence in those two.
I'd beg to say that probably, especially if you look at the timing here. Yeah.
It's just become so much more accessible over the last few years. I feel like in 2021,
we kind of had rumblings of AI stuff, but it was much more like the hyper nerds who were super in the weeds with it.
And now it's so accessible.
You know, you got the rise of
vibe coding and people who
aren't traditionally devs
using like no code tools
to dev stuff now.
It just feels like 100x more accessible.
And I don't think crypto has gotten that much
more accessible
in the meantime.
That's actually a pretty good point to use.
I'm not a developer, but I like to write some Python scripts from time to time and build some code and projects and stuff.
And when I think about it, a lot of this is probably tracking GitHub repository activity.
So how often are people actually saving their code up into the cloud?
That's a good point. I wonder if people are skipping that step entirely having chat gpt help them build all their code and then they're just running it directly in whatever ide they're using
and just making edits and fixing it all there and a lot of them may not bother to even you know push
it up to github That could be a driver.
I feel like I might be on the opposite side of this.
I understand that AI sector might be more interesting and more enticing right now.
It also feels more competitive.
I feel like the opportunities,
like these tokens are still launching
at nine and 10 figure valuations
almost every week here.
I feel like the opportunities for a payday in crypto are still,
they still feel easier to me than I think in the rest of the world.
I feel like there's still lots of opportunities here.
So we'll continue to revisit that.
We've got about 10 minutes left in the show.
We haven't had a chance to talk about Fartcoin yet.
And this is a mandate of the show. We are contractually obligated to talk about this every yeah and this is a man this is a mandate of the show we are
contractually obligated to talk about this every week i'm joking here uh but man we didn't have to
be the ones talking about this week because everyone else was talking about it and that's
because the number one mover several days over the past week in the top 100 crypto tokens has
been fart coin it's been leading the way it is our global risk on leading indicator and it's retracing a little bit right now which is
maybe a sign of concern uh but peter curious for your thoughts on this one i know you you were
eyeing uh perhaps an entry how are you feeling is this the choice yeah really the only thing i
bought on the dip front everything was fartcoin
um i actually started dcaing and basically right after our show last week i was just talking
through it i'm like i cannot i mean even if i lose all my money on fartcoin i mean i just can't
emotionally not be involved it's just such a great token um not financial advice but uh
yeah it's it's pretty cool to see and you know all the content
creators and podcasts I really like are talking
about it we're kind of getting
what we wanted from a meme perspective
when you're you know you're seeing trad
five people say oh S&P
500 is down 5% but don't worry
Fartcoin is up 8%
stuff like that and then also
I think the really big benefit here is
the meme streets have somewhat died um on solana um you know you can look at different metrics i
mean people are still playing the game but in terms of you know the hot new token and then
just the kind of the streets in general um it certainly at least for you know
people who aren't like deep deep deep, deep in the streets,
they've kind of given up.
And, you know, the one way to play that still is fart coin.
Like that's basically like from my perspective anyways,
I'd be curious everyone else's perspective,
but it seems like a lot of that attention is just like, okay,
if I want to be playing a higher beta thing, something on salon,
I'm just going to do fart coin instead of trying to find the next,
whatever meme coin of the week. So that concentration of attention to me is a big
benefit for fart coin. And it's also just a much more authentic organic meme. And I really do think
it can be the meme of our cycle. So I'm super bullish. I DCA it in. I'm now providing, you
know, doing the pools with fart coincoin, getting back in that street.
The volume has been great.
So really the only thing I've done, I've sat on my hands for the most part, had a couple hedges in with traditional markets.
Crypto not really doing much other than kind of the stable coin yield farming and bought some Fartcoin.
So we'll see.
Who knows?
I certainly could have played this a lot better. I think my top sale on fart coin was like in the mid ones
and, uh, you know, you guys were touting it well before 10 cents. My first entries were
around that mark. And, uh, I certainly was thinking about buying more when it was going
up to like $2 versus, uh, selling. So mistakes have been made, but it's fun to see.
And I'm definitely curious
your guys' perspective,
just in terms of
kind of the Solana meme ecosystem.
Do you guys share the same sentiment?
Poke holes in kind of what I'm saying
in terms of this being
the way to play it now.
I've got some thoughts.
D's, maybe I'll toss it to you.
Are you back in the trenches
or reactions to Peter's thoughts?
I think Peter's generally right there.
I think there's some winners, but you have to be way more dialed in for them.
And I haven't been buying them.
I know we talk about it in another chat, Tyler, with some other friends.
But I missed out on such great trades such as the housing market and RFC.
And the only one I ever regret is fat just because i've been laughing at these videos for like a month now and i never bought the token but
it probably makes me just enjoy the videos more because i'm not checking the price of the token
i'm just like oh this is another fucking hilarious video um but yeah i'm i'm betting on fart coin
i think that's to like turn your brain. Maybe that's the wrong way to play it
because it's maybe common knowledge,
but I feel like if any meme from last year makes it,
it's got to be fart coin in my head.
I think what jumped out to me was when Peter's comment
that he'd rather go to zero effectively than,
I'm paraphrasing, than to miss the fart coin run. Yeah, I mean, I'd rather go to zero effectively than I'm paraphrasing than like to miss
the fart coin run.
Yeah.
I mean,
I'd rather tax loss harvest by fart coin position at zero than to watch it
go back to,
you know,
a billion plus and not have it.
That's exactly how I feel.
And like,
I'm not,
and I,
I round with my whole bag,
so I did not trade it well.
so her, her all about maybe the incredible trump sale sold the top and
then he piled into far coin also at the top which i thought was a funny one i think he's sticking
with it but i feel like that's pretty wide sentiment for holders is they'd rather just
hold it and it goes down and dismiss the next parabolic ground if it ever happens so So I think that's a strong case as for the broader mean market.
I think high level,
you're spot on Peter activities down.
No one has that,
that opportunity cost or FOMO from holding a position right now.
What I will say is there are some signs of life.
So we are starting to see some daily runners.
Tokens are going to 10 million again in a day.
We're starting to see a little higher upside.
Like this TIT coin hit 40 million.
This RFC coin is now over 50.
So we're starting to see them growing up.
Dude, what is going on with another TIT coin, man?
Can I just vent for a second?
We already had WeLoveTits go to 400 million three months ago.
And now instead of resending WeLoveTits,
it's like we gotta
make a new tit coin and as a you know multi-percent holder of we love ass who has roundtripped we love
ass i saw oh well now people made another ass coin it's like there's already an ass coin has a great
community around it why are we building another community of ask coin lovers anyway
it's just um goes to show you your thesis can be right and you can still lose money because they
can just make a new coin and send it what's it what's the old thing d is uh new coin good
yeah yeah old coin bad old coin horrible old coin bad man i coin horrible. Old coin bad.
And I'll say one thing, Tyler, which is, you know,
basically since a little bit before ETH Denver,
pretty much since things blew up with Libra, I would say,
there have been a lot of people that have been calling for just the death of meme coins,
for the death of Pump.Fun, for the death of this general space.
And just want to put it out there that I think those people are incredibly out of touch with the reality of the products and things that people want to do in crypto and on-chain.
And that there's a world where that ecosystem thrives and other ecosystems thrive.
Like it's not a one-for-one or something can and will exist,
which means something can or will not exist.
I think they all can exist out there.
But the reality is that meme coins will be around for a long time.
And when the markets turn, meme coins will once again
become a highly speculative playground for people to go play in.
I think that's spot on.
I think the calls of their death are over, overrated.
They're going to continue to be a part of the ecosystem.
And I think the most common response to that developer chart going down is
like, Oh, they all gave up because all the easy money is in meme coins.
If the fact that there is somewhere exists,
a casino is enough for you to give up developing in a space.
I would question your conviction.
Yeah.
And like developer activity goes down when the markets go down,
it's just kind of how it works.
But the whole idea is like,
are we net positive in developer activity and developers in the next full run?
Right. Are we constantly sort of moving up and i i think we'll have we'll have to look back at this metric in six months or 12 months
tyler and and see how it looks then see how it ages indeed i want to i want to reframe my point
because i i there's some holes in it i think but think the key message, and I know a lot of people,
or at least my friends and people I'm talking to
are in the same camp.
The meme coin game was exposed as an unfair game, right?
We all kind of knew we were,
maybe you guys a little different than me,
but you really needed to be in the cabal
to have like a big advantage, right?
And that was exposed through Libra.
There's some people like, I mean, I think the three of you played the game really well.
I was fortunate to chat with you guys.
We had some good wins.
But broadly, most people feel like they're playing an unfair game.
So because of that, now the people that are participating is smaller.
There's still interesting things.
But I think a lot of people that still want some
exposure to high beta want it to be a meme and they want something that they feel like they can
hold for a long time or hold for like, you know, long time being like weeks or a month or whatever.
So to your point, Tyler, I think that's where Fartcoin really fits in. Like you can say, okay,
I know that, you know, obviously depending on how markets trade, Fartcoin can go up or down, but at least it's not something
where I have to kind of chase my tail and play that game
that I learned was dramatically unfair to me.
And for that reason, I think we've seen the holders go up,
and I think there are a lot of people who just are like,
okay, I'll have Fartcoin be the part of my portfolio that's high beta.
At least that's how I'm thinking about it.
Yeah, I think that's what you want. If you want your meme coin to succeed over time and go up you want people to be able to hold
it and not track it every day because i had conversations with a friend who is in the real
estate business who bought the trump coin and he got wrecked on it because he's like i don't i don't
follow this stuff day to day so like i didn't know that I needed to sell it. Like when Melania
dropped and like when the Libra scandal got worse. Right. So I think that is a driver to,
to the, some of the stronger existing ones. So Park Coin will certainly be a winner there.
I think it's going to continue to outperform. I think the market's kind of, we're seeing that
signal right now. Dees, before we wrap up thoughts on the hype here? I want to keep coming back to this one
because I'm still trying to work through my thesis on it.
Jeff was on the SteadyLabs pod last week with Jordy and Taki and it was a good lesson. I didn't
sell any more hype. It was crazy to see it at like $9.50.
Maybe we're headed back there.
But the other night, Sunday night, I posted some of the prices
and it was like $98 Solana, $9.50 hype.
Some bad sites on the timeline.
But I'm more watching volume and some of the user metrics
more than the price here so still holding
it still pretty pretty comfy holding it for a while honestly um as long as it's getting adoption
and people are continuing to use it and seeing good volume and metrics like i a little less
concerned about the price in the grand scheme of things. It had a huge volume day the other day, right?
Yeah, when it was going under 10.
I think just like the whole platform,
I thought it had like one of its all-time high days in trading volume.
I think maybe Sunday when crypto was crashing.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Total volume, yeah.
I mean, the metrics as far as...
I check them like once a week, so I'm not super dialed in on it,
but still looked good as of like three days ago
when I was listening to the podcast that he was on.
Yeah, I don't really have any...
I think if you buy it under $10
or you get sub-$8 in the future
and you hold it for a good amount of time. I think it's a good
play all things considered.
That's the level I'm looking at. I think
$8 would be
pretty incredible. I don't know if it gets there.
I think $8 was my first buy
or $7 or $8.
I missed the first day
because I was home for
Thanksgiving and then the next day because I was home for Thanksgiving
and then the next day I think it went up to around
I think I got in like 7
but yeah if you can buy between 7 and 8 again
that's really, you believe in what they're doing
and you like the platform, it's a good buy
yeah it's basically day 2, day 3 prices
it came out at 3, went to 6, then was it 9
I feel like in a blink of an eye
so you moved fast to get at 8 I don't think my first buy was until two day three prices. It came out at three, went to six, then was it nine. I feel like in a blink of an eye.
So you moved fast to get at eight.
I don't think my first buy was till maybe 12.
I should have just sold more at 27 or 28.
That was my only problem.
Glad I sold some.
Ended up having to take all that money out
and put into taxes anyway.
But yeah,
I should have sold more.
But I'm not selling here.
It's closer to a bottom here than a, you know, I don't want to sell it. I have a working theory that if we see alt start to move in a crypto reversal,
Bitcoin starts grinding back up into the mid 80s maybe 90 that hype would be one
of the fastest horses yeah given there's no major like fud right like there's no no more exploits
there's no uh you know north korean hacker bullshit right or whatever other stuff I can't think of now.
But yeah, if all can change.
Yeah, Jeeves and I are on the other side of this now, I think.
I was a big hype bull.
What happened with Jelly Jelly really changed my perspective on hype.
I don't know.
Do you guys feel that's still common sentiment or do you think people are just like, oh, it's still a great casino?
I mean, I sold my whole position that day so my views haven't changed you guys you guys know how i
feel about it but i feel like my read is a lot of people are already forgetting it
i've forgotten about it and if people don't care at the end of the day, if the price starts going back up, if it gets back to, to the exploit level,
back to 13,
there's almost there this morning.
Yeah.
Well,
it's like 12 and a half.
I guess maybe elaborate on your,
on your concerns there.
I mean,
James has been pointing this out.
I don't want to be playing in a casino where the casino can change the rules of the game in their own self-interest.
I mean, that's a, and I get it.
I understand the methodology and the thought process around it.
And in some ways you'd say, oh, they're protecting their community, which they clearly were.
But, you know, I think the most important thing, what makes crypto beautiful in general, and the reason the casino is so successful is people know that they play within the rules, they can make money.
And if the rules can change, that is a very, very big concern to me.
Yeah. The way I view it is that people knew that they weren't truly decentralized, but then would point toward them having increased the amount of nodes to being a factor of them being a decentralized protocol.
And this basically showed that they're not.
This basically showed that, to Peter's point, they could change the rules when and how they want.
And obviously, they're not going to do that at any point in time, unless it's really a disastrous situation.
This really forced their hand, right? I'm sure in their head, this is not something that they
would have wanted to do. But they did. And I think it just exposes the credibility and nature of it
being a truly decentralized protocol. And so I think people need to price that in and determine how much they care about that
at the end of the day.
And that's what seems to be going on.
I think they could do a better job
responding to that event.
And they put out their initial response.
I think there's a bit more.
That's one of the first things Jeff said
on the pod too.
He was super aware that their comms were pretty shit and um that
that was literally one of the first things they addressed but i i didn't listen to that
what i said i didn't listen to that did they address the criticism too
yeah a bit um i i'm one of the people who just doesn't really care about decentralization. I think it's all kind of a lie anyway.
I don't really think code is law is a good way to run things.
I think we've seen with people like Avi Eisenberg and other not ideal folks that when you're exploiting things for profitable trading strategies, it's kind of just bullshit but I recognize that maybe
that's not the the view of most people but like I'm not buying hype because of decentralization
you know like that's not really what's interesting like to me what's interesting is it's a product
that people like with high volume and actual fees and a good token buyback system, which reminds me of Binance token.
Not really giving a shit about the decentralization.
I think that's a big part of the risk that you bring into it as well
is that effectively it's become a non-KYC centralized exchange,
which I think has just different levels of concerns associated to it.
It has increased risk, is what I should say,
on the regulatory side, potentially.
There's clearly bull case and bear case.
I think that the bull case is the Binance competitor,
good product that people love, and you've laid out some of the risks of the bear case. I think that the bull case is the Binance competitor. Good product that people love
and you've laid out some of the risks of the bear case.
So that's what makes this a tricky
trade.
I'm sure we'll continue to release it.
You don't have any of that risk of
Farcoin.
That's the easy alternative. Bitcoin and Farcoin.
American made farts.
Hot air rise.
Less risky than our punks, which are bleeding in US
dollar terms as ETH continues.
They're holding up really well, though, in ETH.
Our centralized punks.
Why does that matter?
Holding up in ETH is fantastic as ETH goes to zero.
The punk floor is 65K.
Our house price is holding up in ETH, too.
That's good.
We'll have a longer punk conversation
on another show. There's interest. We'll have a longer punk conversation on another show.
But there's interest.
There's some demand.
But man, that floor just keeps dipping in U.S. terms.
At least the clean ones keep getting scooped.
Yeah.
It's still hard to find ones.
The punk market's strong.
The punk market looks really good right now.
in sales and ETH terms.
In sales and ETH terms.
I was going to say, that's debatable.
I was going to say, that's debatable.
Folks, we're a full 10 minutes over,
but this was a great conversation.
I want to thank everyone for tuning in.
That's going to be it.
That will be our show.
We'll be back next Tuesday.
I want to thank our listeners.
I want to thank our partner.
I want to thank my co-hosts as always.
Until next Tuesday, have a great week.
See you soon.
Bye. . .
