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UNDER EXPOSED: Vanguard Embraces Crypto (at the bottom?)
Recorded: Dec. 2, 2025 Duration: 0:55:39Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent episode of Underexposed, the hosts discussed the bullish momentum in the crypto market, driven by Vanguard's entry into crypto ETFs and Bank of America's allocation recommendations. They explored the implications of increased liquidity and institutional interest, while also addressing concerns about market volatility and potential declines.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Hello everyone and welcome to episode 53 of Underexposed, our weekly macro show,
hitting all the biggest topics and trends across crypto and Web3.
Today is Tuesday, December 2nd.
Folks, yesterday seemed like it was over.
Today, we're so, so back.
And this time, with actual bullish news to back up the bounce in prices,
is the bottom actually in this time, or will this rally fail like the others?
We're going to break it down on today's show.
I'm your host, Tyler D.
I've got my co-host in the house.
First up, Deese.
Deese, Jim, how you doing?
Jim, man, doing a lot better than I was doing yesterday.
Was ready to crash out and apply for jobs.
And then we saw the prices today and promptly deleted the resume
and that we're not applying for anything.
But no, I actually wasn't applying for jobs yesterday.
But it felt like I was going to have to start thinking about it
the way things were going.
Glad to be back.
Typically a bottom sign.
Or historically a bottom sign when you're thinking about dusting off
the resume there's been a handful of times where i've been forced to think about like what would
a post crypto career look like uh and usually they've been around pico bottoms so i uh i feel
you there folks we've also got peter jennings on with us founder of several companies still
finds time to hang with us peter jim how you doing gm yeah better that we're recording today than uh recording yesterday or sunday it feels like
it's kind of the same market every time it's like markets rally towards the end of the week they're
kind of calm during the weekend then there's a sunday sell-off monday's really ugly and then
we get to the show and it's like we have a little bit of relief, but it's not
the raging bull markets that we had earlier in the year.
But yeah, excited to chat with you guys.
There's a lot going on as always.
And yeah, just thankful for you guys.
I'm excited to have you.
Plus, we've also got Jeebs on with us here this week after a week off.
Early stage crypto VC.
Dabbles across internet capital markets. Wears a lot ofeps jim how you doing good man thankful to be back it was a
nice thanksgiving weeks and time off got pretty cold out here it's been a roller coaster ride
the past two weeks so still don't know how i feel but trying to digest it all. It has been Thanksgiving break for those in the U S and I was pretty
unplugged. Oh, I gotta be honest.
Like I was kind of checking prices a few times a day.
We were kind of flat.
Like we rallied into Thanksgiving around like 90, 91 K whatever.
I think maybe hit 92, but like nothing was happening.
And like you compare that to November, 2024, right?
Like that's when the AI boom, the on-chain AI boom was,
was really just starting to come to fruition. So, so things are slower.
For sure. But perhaps some signs of optimism.
We'll get into that here in a few couple of housekeeping items as always
live on kick. make sure to follow our
channel we'll be streaming here going forward
all of our content along with X
as well giveaways
couple giveaways at the end of today's show
we're going to do two $250
yeet giveaways
to lucky
morning minute affiliates so make sure you're signed
up and you have
played a bit on yeet to be eligible for today's raffle.
And there will also be a code, I think, that will air here.
So follow along.
Producer Charlie will help facilitate that.
And as always, before we get started, quick disclosure, the opinions expressed on this podcast for those of the speakers do not reflect the views or opinions of any organizations they are associated with. We are here to share insights, provoke thought, and maybe even start
some debate, but this is not, I repeat, not financial advice. While we talk about markets,
investments, and trends, remember your financial decisions should be made with the help of your
own research or with advice from a licensed professional. All right, well, let's get into it.
I'm going to fire up a screen here for those who are in the stream,
either on X or kick.
And it's a beautiful rally from yesterday.
So since Monday, so folks have been under a rock.
Sunday night we had a huge sell-off after what had been a pretty quiet
and nice Thanksgiving break.
And then it hit even further into Monday.
We're since up 7% to 10% across the board for crypto majors.
Some alts and memes are up anywhere from 20% to 30%.
From a seven-day perspective, zoomed out a bit,
we're up about 3% to 4%.
So we are higher than we were when we did this show last Tuesday.
Bitcoin hanging out right under $91K, ETH right at 3K, Solana right at 140.
A couple big headlines have come through in the last day.
One, Vanguard entering crypto ETFs finally.
Then this morning, Bank of America saying they recommend 1% to 4% crypto allo.
This is the first time I think we've seen that out of them.
One of the biggest banks in the U.S.
Not sure if that's specifically driving the rally that we're seeing or not.
Certainly lines up timing-wise.
But, Peter, you kind of shared some thoughts in your intro there.
Kind of the same price action playing out week over week.
I am curious how you're feeling.
I think maybe a direct question.
What percent chance would you put on the Bitcoin bottom being in at 81K
where we hit a couple weeks back?
Over what time frame?
Local bottom, so into 2026 i would say
70 chance we hit a bottom all right somewhere in that range uh i think there's a kind of the main
theme right now is uh quantitative tightening is is coming to an end. I need to double-click on this
to make sure I have the right number,
but I read that $13 billion
was already flushed into the system through repos.
We have a new Fed share.
If you look at Polymarketing and Calci,
HACET is over 80%.
I'm feeling good about that one.
I have some bets in the $0.38 range,
which I'm excited about.
So we have new monetary policy, and we're going to have a new Fed.
And I think what we're going to see is just a huge injection of liquidity going forward.
So to me, that's a reason to be optimistic about crypto.
That's the main driver in general is just liquidity.
There are certainly other reasons why we could have bearish movement.
There's still a lot of smoke around the end carry trade.
A little bit of relief on that today.
There's still all the quantum stuff that people are sharing around that are getting people scared.
One thing I have questions around, have you guys been paying attention to some of the Bitcoin issues that,
like these podcasts are talking about some of the legal issues,
this like soft fork and that's something I need to know more.
Yeah.
You're talking about like the article,
I think that Nick Carter wrote as well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's pretty wild.
Like I was actually just reading that before the show,
because I wanted to just get a little more educated on it. And it seems okay right now.
You know, there's been like a lot of quantum FUD, it seems like in the past two weeks. And
I think he settles it a bit where he says, even if it's a low probability chance that this is,
you know, a huge issue, we should be addressing it now because the reality is
the concerns between 2028 and 2035, not 2040 and beyond. And the real issue is just like public
keys. If Quantum knows your public key, it can go generate your private key and steal your Bitcoin. And the big concern is around wallets like Satoshi's wallet, for example.
So I don't know.
Where's your concern at with that?
His article kind of settled me, I would say, a bit.
But it seems like we need to start rallying the troops around this.
I'm certainly a little concerned. I mean, all these, I think if you're going to be heavily allocated towards crypto, you're always concerned about some of the tail risks.
So it's certainly something I'm trying to do more research on.
But I think broadly, just to kind of finish what's going on, from my view, is we should have a lot of liquidity in the system.
We should have a new Fed chair. We'll have
lower short-term rates. We'll see how that impacts the long end of the curve. Broadly,
the long end of the curve has been really resilient and just kind of ticking up a little
bit, honestly. But given those changes, we have some real positive news out of Vanguard that I
know you'll get to, Tyler. We have an administration that's still going to be very pro-crypto. There's a lot of headlines around that. So there's reasons to
be optimistic. And I hope that we had the local bottom. There certainly was enough fear on the
timeline to suggest that maybe we had the bottom. But again, it's all a range of outcomes. You
should have a probabilistic view on kind of where things are going. It shouldn't be black and white.
You should have a range of outcomes and then you should position accordingly,
given your life situation.
70% higher than I was expecting to hear.
And I think even higher than the percent I had in my head,
I was probably closer to 30 to 40%.
So 70% is nice.
I've got a few more thoughts on it, but Jeeps, I'll let you weigh in.
What are your odds that local bottom is in?
I think I'm aligned with Peter on this one.
It feels like we just had a few scam wicks recently.
I think people getting shaken out. The general
theme has been risk off. As Peter has always told us, piercing volatility has existed over
the past couple of months. And look, there's people that want to readjust their portfolios.
We're getting toward the end of the year. There's tax planning. There's different opportunities in the market.
If you're running some type of a fund and you're up 20%, 30% for the year, you probably want to capitalize on that to some extent.
Show LPs that you've been able to return some form of capital or at least lock in some form.
And so as we're nearing year end, I'm not shocked to see Bitcoin take this little bit
of a tumble.
There's a lot of OGs, obviously, that wanted to cash out and good for them.
They've held this long.
They've had the diamond hands and they deserve their winnings.
And now it's time for it to fall into the hands of others.
So look, I've been generally a buyer over the past few weeks, I would say.
I've been slowly buying things that I really like, holding on to things I really like. I haven't made any big portfolio
changes. I thought about selling some stuff at a loss and then trying to get some tax
harvesting but I haven't pulled the trigger on that yet.
So anyway, to answer your question Tyler, I do think that we've reached a local bottom. And I expect us to bump into year-end
for some of the reasons Peter mentioned.
QE is huge.
All this liquidity coming into the system.
Banks are going to be flush.
Lending is going to continue.
Rates are coming down.
Pretty optimistic.
All right.
Jeebs is bullish.
Deez was looking at polishing off a resume yesterday
yesterday i was at probably 10 percent
i don't know today i'm probably still under 50 though like if i had to put a number on it
i think uh vibrationally i'm still under 50 so that's good that you want me to be bearish
because that that normally means we're closer to a bottom.
Higher than yesterday.
Oh, way higher than yesterday.
Yeah, yesterday was like 10%.
Like, oh, fuck, is it over?
Like doing what Jeeves was talking about.
Should I sell a bunch of these high cost basis bags
and just reallocate it and take the tax loss?
Which I still think now is like,
if you're in bags from October that are down a lot and you want to take the loss and reallocate it and take the tax loss, which I still think now is like, if you're in bags from October that are down a lot and you want to take the
loss and reallocate it, like, I still think that's a sharp move.
It is. And maybe we'll talk about that a bit more.
It's like you're in trading strategies here.
I shared some thoughts over the weekend just because I felt like the
timeline is so, so bearish.
But there's some actual metrics backing this up now.
So the whales who are holding more than a thousand Bitcoin finally flipped to net buyers.
So they were, you could argue that they were the ones pretty much single-handedly driving the sell-off.
They just had more sell pressure than there was buy pressure in the market.
So they flipped from sellers to buyers.
The cohort below them, 100 to 1,000, has been aggressively buying.
And then retail, those who hold less than one,
have seen their strongest accumulation rates since July.
So that was all pretty bullish.
If you take a look at the ETFs, those finally flipped positive last week as well.
And Grant, small sample size, but some decent indicators and signals, at least ones to monitor.
And then, yeah, yesterday we got two big pieces of news.
One, Vanguard finally opening their doors to ETFs as of today.
So they're live.
401k and brokerage account users are able to now start buying crypto ETFs.
And then Bank of America on the back of that,
now recommending 1% to 4% crypto allo.
So to me, the bull case is stronger than the bear case.
I was still like, what?
Price is down.
We're down 35% or more.
35%, 30% from all-time high like what is the what is the fundamental bear case from here like at this point is that like risk assets and uh blowing up to some
extent which i think bears love you know if you if you just like go on your timeline there's so
much bear porn around ai blowing up risk assets up. There's so many people that can't believe that we continue
to rally. That's my bear case at this point. But Tyler, you know, you want to go check the
receipts. We talked about this earlier this year. There's been a number of things that have
manifested, which was our Bitcoin bull case early on. And some of these are financial
advisors will begin recommending certain allocations to Bitcoin. Vanguard now allowing
crypto ETFs. These are all incredibly bullish things when we start to accept institutional
liquidity into this asset class. And people can do it with ease. And so I have trouble painting the bear case,
but I think there's a lot of bears
that would love to, you know,
just not want to believe that this can keep going.
I guess.
So that trade is something we haven't discussed.
I think it's a big part.
Yesterday, we were recording,
we'd all, I think we'd be talking about strategy and some of these dads having to unwind and how that can be a vicious cycle on the way down.
Obviously, the strategy aspect is much different than some of these other dads.
But I would say that that's certainly something to pay attention to.
Have any of them had to unwind yet?
Or are looking to have to unwind,
like legally have to unwind?
Some have sold crypto to buy shares.
Yeah, some of the smaller ones I saw.
But I'm trying to paint the picture.
I'm trying to understand,
because I haven't looked into this a ton,
how the blow-up ends up
happening with them like why they become forced sellers outside of like a board takeover or
outside of like selling some to potentially buy shares back yeah i mean i think it's i struggle
as well to see exactly how it plays out other than MNAV just keeps dropping.
People keep selling shares.
Companies are just forced to sell crypto tokens and just kind of comes a
spiral, I guess,
for some of the smaller players that aren't as well backed.
But then, so we have a new situation with,
I don't know if folks been following with CEA.
So this is one of the BNB treasuries and logan put this on my radar this
morning um so this is a b&b debt that's down 90 from all-time high and now cz and yzi labs
are looking to effectively do a a takeover so they own 5% and they're trying to install some YZI Labs folks on the
board.
So just an example of how,
you know,
maybe folks will step in when things are going south.
And I don't,
I'm not meaning here to stand up in defense of dads or telling anyone to,
to buy dads.
Like they're certainly their,
their,
their price action speaks for itself it's been
a terrible trade i have down money on the debt trade this year um but
i don't i don't know that it causes some major blacks on blow up i guess it's kind of where i'm
at right now like when you say the word like forced seller, that's where I don't connect the dots on this.
Because my understanding is like, not many of them have issued debt, right? It's all equity.
And I'm struggling to understand when or how or why they become forced sellers.
I think there's the optional selling that we're seeing to buy back shares to increase the MNAV. But these companies are less than a year old in most cases. And
the management team is still getting paid, regardless of performance on Bitcoin itself.
The people can continue to sell shares, of course, but it doesn't force them to liquidate outside of any debt scenarios.
So that's why I'm just trying to connect the dots here.
Yeah, I'm with you.
I think on the sailor and microstrategy front, I think the FUD came to a head.
But his $1.44 billion cash reserve seems seems to alleviate that at least for the near term
um right because he could pay the debt or he could pay the interest or sorry he can pay the dividends
on the debt i think is how it works so like he's he's not a poor seller to have to uh cover any
of those costs he's like basically good for a period of time.
He's got 21 months of their debt payments in cash now.
They did sell.
We get close to like six months.
Objective.
They sold MicroStrategy stock to fund that reserve.
Right.
So you're selling stock at the market to raise cash,
to pay off dividends from your other financial products.
So I can see what that picture looks like.
They have pretty sophisticated debt options.
One of my friends is a partner to hedge fund
and does basically credit on software
and was tasked with looking really heavily into strategy for both his firm and for some of the wealthiest individuals in California.
And he came away really impressed with kind of how the whole thing was structured.
There's a variety of ways you can kind of speculate on Bitcoin and strategy.
There's really conservative debt instruments
that he used the analogy of,
you go to a Thai restaurant,
how spicy do you want to get all the way up to Thai hot?
And so you could go one spicy,
which is really conservative,
or you could go way out on the risk curve
with some of these debt instruments up to Thai hot
and everything in between.
So his view coming away from it
was that they've been very tactical
and he was, you know, very impressed with how things were structured.
He did say, though, you have to believe in Bitcoin long term
to participate in any of this.
If Bitcoin completely crashes, it's all, you know,
you're going to get in a lot of trouble.
But you can price it with it.
If you wanted to go one spicy, I mean, I'm not, I'm making up numbers here,
but I assume it could go down to, you know, 20, 30,000 or something like that.
And you'd still be broadly fine. If you want really spicy,
obviously that'd be a big problem, but I'm going to do a little bit more work
on that.
I'm actually interested in some of those, those,
those dead options and as a way to diversify the portfolio,
if you still want to say, Hey, I'm bullish on Bitcoin surviving, maybe not as bullish
on the asymmetry as I once was, there's a lot of ways that you can play that with strategy,
which I think a lot of participants in this ecosystem are using as hedges.
Very interesting.
Well, we're curious to hear more on what you learned digging into that.
Like maybe going down one step further now.
So we've went around the horn macro folks are somewhat bull or so.
Is anyone buying anything or selling anything or,
or trading anything or just net flat Peter?
Maybe I'll maybe toss it to you first.
So have you actually looked at making any moves over the last week or two?
I was looking at Pump.
That was the one that I was looking at pretty heavily.
I have a small position there.
I have a pretty conservative bag in general right now.
I've been really focused on kind of the Delta neutral stuff.
Got really interested in the stocks, which I think is a really cool thing with the trade xyz and those being more prominent it's fun to see uh the ability
to go lever long or short on on a lot of these stocks so um i haven't really made any portfolio
moves i certainly am not going to make anything today other than um maybe maybe take a little
bit of risk off to just focus more on yield.
But I'm broadly bullish.
I don't anticipate making many moves.
Hype is still an interesting one.
I'm curious to see how kind of the perp wars play out.
I'm hoping lighter does well, just given kind of the work that I've done there.
But yeah, no strong moves in general at all right now.
The one thing I did do maybe three weeks ago
was go long JLP with a more significant short of Solana,
which has kind of played out well thus far.
That's kind of just betting that
the yield on JLP will
outperform Solana
and also kind of giving you a hedge to the
downside. Broadly, that trade does better
when Sol's going down,
which is obviously correlated with JLP, but
that's one of their...
That's a semi-delta neutral type strategy
that I put on
that I think is... i think if you wanted to
look for yield i think the jlp some combination of you know a basis trade with jlp makes a lot
of sense um but from a just straight bullish perspective i was to buy something probably
be pump right now that would be the main project that i'd be interested in buying curious what everyone else is looking at i've been in and out of pump several times um actually closed around this level on sunday and
dipped yesterday i haven't re-entered i'm actually i went flat just in portfolio cleanup
over this weekend we actually had a fairly timely uh so i was not too emotionally impacted by the, the, the Monday sell-off. Um,
and a lot of these are still somewhat lower than they were on Sunday, certainly Zeke. Um,
so Dees, maybe, maybe we just dig into this and we can, we can go around more things, but
we were, we were both deep into the Z cash tree. I think it may be others here as well.
The final support, I was told, was 420.
Lost that on Sunday, and the bottom fell out.
Went all the way to 315, 320.
Now back up about 10%. It's at 350.
How are you viewing this from a trading perspective?
I am now a community member that it's not a trade now i'm a community member um i swapped a lot of solana into z cash
um like two weeks ago and that is aging like milk um but yeah i don't I think the bottom is gonna be
between here and 300 so
I'm not selling it but I don't know
it's not great
I haven't bought
or really sold anything that isn't shit coins
like I've been taking small positions
in FOMO on shit
like sub 5 mil
shit coins
some of those have been doing okay like even though the
broader market has been asked there is still some hope in these uh shit coins so we'll see how they
do i'm not going to show any of them um the only other thing i was looking at uh hate to even say
this um was punks because they're under a bitcoin And I always have that rule of if they're under a Bitcoin,
I need to be looking at them.
I do think the Palo Alto opening in January isn't bearish on them.
Maybe if we can get a couple of Silicon Valley tech billionaires
in there to do a little Reid Hoffman and buy expensive funks.
That can be nice.
So I was kind of looking at them.
I think like if they're like 75 and under, I would be more likely to buy.
But they are interesting to me now for the first time in a while.
Is Punkster interesting at all?
If you think Punkks are going to rally
yeah a little bit um today the token strategy for everybody went live so i think there's going to be
a decent uh i mean whatever demand is is left there it's going to be tapped today and if any
of those new strategies do well i mean that's gonna be good for punk strategy um but yeah i
don't know like if i'm buying a punk like should i just buy punk strategy probably uh does that
mean i'll do that probably not um but yeah i do think it's really interesting here it's hard to
paint like some glowing bull picture for punk strategy right it's down 80 it's still trading
well over its assets.
But where it gets interesting,
it's like this is its first Punk available for sell.
This still had it at 34.9.
So if that sells,
you're going to get a nice little pump into the chart.
And is that going to be enough to bring some folks back in?
I think they have another one. Unfortunately, they did so much, they're buying so much higher that we're still very far away from yeah that's the point turning a lot of um but punksters won where like yeah so we've got
the project news today with them to lower the prices though to pump the punk strategy price?
I think they can vote to lower
the multiple for future listings.
Yeah, I'm not sure exactly what governance
they can do to change current prices.
That would basically be what we were saying earlier
where some of these dApps are not for sellers,
but optional sellers to buy back the token
to increase the MNAV at lower prices, if needed,
to appeal to token holders in this instance
or stockholders in the DAT instance.
I personally think it gets a little messy
if they can just kind of take over
and start relisting the punks lower just because the floor drops
because now it's kind of like, all right, so this is just a controlled experiment.
I guess maybe it's not the right word, but it's not as much of an automated machine.
There's going to be a lot more human intervention.
I think it muddies it a little bit.
Like,
of course,
like I want the other punks to sell as a poster token holder.
And I do still have some,
but I do think it gets messy.
I think it would be interesting to change their algo though.
Like,
I think it'd be interesting to have like a random listing anywhere from
like 1.01 all the way to like 1.5 or 1.8 or something,
or even,
yeah,
you don't think you want to go under,
but like some variability where,
okay,
maybe it will list just a little bit above four versus unattainable.
So we'll,
we'll see where it goes.
Geez.
I'm curious. Like, what curious, what are you looking at?
I think you've been in the MetaDow streets.
We were talking a little bit before the show.
What have you been doing?
So definitely looking at, you know,
I've been a long-term holder of MetaDow.
I just like the platform.
like the platform. I like where they're at. I've been holding some Salomon, participated.
I like where they're at.
I've been holding some Salomon, you know, participated.
It's up pretty nicely since the... I think ICO was around 80 cents, sitting at about a 64%
gain at this point. Look, I think it's interesting, right? They're trying to create
like an Athena on Solana. And there's products that already exist in the space, just none
of them have tokens. So that's one huge advantage for them. So I'm excited about that. Probably
be holding for a bit.
Outside of that, also excited about Pump. I bought a little bit of Pump on some of these
dips. I'm concerned about Pump to some extent. They're still somehow buying back a million dollars or plenty per day.
So they've been able to really shed some of the downside risk with that.
But at the same time, I think they need to innovate.
And they have the cash to be able to innovate.
What was that thing they came out with?
It was like degen mode or something like that?
You guys remember that?
Maybe like two, three weeks ago.
Yeah, the chaos.
Just like, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
That's not the thing.
Like that is not the direction they need to go into.
And I think they just need something that's new, fresh, innovative.
And the writing's on the wall.
And they have the money to innovate. And so I'm led to believe
that there's something that we don't know
just based off of Dudas posts, right?
So Dudas at Six Man Ventures,
he led that round.
He keeps hinting that there's something
going on with Pump.
He's indicating that there's
some type of a bright future,
not saying exactly what.
So I'm optimistic and I actually like holding it here. I like Pump. I like the cash they have.
I think they're continually cited as a company that has consistent revenue with buybacks,
which is a popular model right now. I just think their main product
is hard to sell in incredible risk-off environments.
But if we go back to risk-on, I think you see people back in the streets again.
And on top of that, I've maintained most of my core positions and haven't really changed.
I still don't really hold much ETH. I have ETH beta and punks. I don't have any interest in going there.
I do hold some Solana.
And I've increased my Solana position over time.
Part of that is from the soldats.
I think that with a number of these soldats, they weren't buying market and a lot of them
were buying locked up sold or sold that was staked. And I think over time, especially in a bullish
environment, that's going to be really positive catalyst because that reduces a lot of existing
cell pressure on Solana since they're holding it, staking it, and then naturally increasing
their MNav. So just excited about that right now.
Yeah.
I forgot to mention I did buy some Tibber
too. Oh, wow.
But not a lot.
Just added a little bit.
At prices...
Discounts to local
high, so we're back at
200 million.
This chart kind of almost looks like Zcash,
which isn't great, but...
I nibbled a little bit more on that one, too.
Privacy doesn't matter.
Privacy still matters, Deez.
You think privacy still matters?
Yeah, it's not going to matter if Zcash is under $300.
Privacy, no one's going to see me tax loss harvesting it,
which will be nice.
So I sold my perps position,
which it was just a reminder that it's such a bad way to hold.
I did well with the Zcash perps.
And then when I rolled the profit in my head into zcash
spot that's where it started to go wrong if i had just been comfortable closing out the perp and
then not deciding to buy the dip with spot i would have been fine uh it was when i got into my head
that oh there's another leg the the next leg thesis that we talk about, you know, one more leg, um, that, that's where it went poorly.
Peter curious for you to elaborate. Yeah.
Yeah. 99.9% of the time, I think it's just best on spot. Uh,
I think the best play with herps in general is if you're going to use the
basis trade or you're going to use it to arbitrage or hedge. Um,
but the,
the examples where I actually think it makes sense to express a long or short view
is if funding's in your favor
and Zcash across different DEXs
depending on what you're using
actually paid you to be long
for good stretches of time
so that's what right now
obviously it's kind of in that flat spot
where you're getting paid like 11% or so
this is kind of the standard funding
rate for a lot of assets um but i think the one of the more interesting ways that you could have
expressed a view on zcash is through perps because the funding was kind of all over the place
depending on what decks you're using so i don't think it was a horrible idea um if you were
getting paid to be um expressing the view that you wanted.
And I think that you had that opportunity quite often with Zcash.
That's fair.
I think in general, when I'm holding tokens, I like to hold on multi-month, multi-year
timeframes.
And that's just, with the liquidation risk, it just gets messy.
And I had, like my Zcash liquidation was like $150.
But still, it's out there and you never know how these wicks can go.
But I think to round up my, my thought, I think it's interesting. If you're looking,
if you were interested in holding Zeke on a multi-cycle time horizon,
I think it's interesting to start adding spot here. If you haven't,
like if you missed the pump 700, you're waiting for a cool off.
I mean, I think this is a pretty interesting area.
I wouldn't go, I would DCA.
I wouldn't like slam the whole bag in here.
Cause yeah, if it loses 300, maybe it, it falls all the way back down.
I don't know.
I don't have the crystal ball, it's 50% off all-time high
if you think the fundamental case was real that we've all been talking about for the last month
six weeks then it's still real now um yeah the hard part is that there's just additional
competition in the privacy space that exists or that's coming but hey look like Mert is still defending it on uh on X I see
him out there replying and being a soldier so you know hopefully it still has those I think
the reality is like it pumped based on a lot of narrative and some of that's cooling off
people but people are big winners on this one it pumps because of Kols and it was clearly the most manipulated coin uh in the
ecosystem for a while and i still like naval some big names starting to pump it privacy it's
important we need privacy we haven't needed privacy this whole time but if you watch just
the way it moves it's very clear that uh there's some players yeah big i think it was an easy trade
because anytime there's heavy narrative and
you can get in with pretty decent size and get out with pretty decent size there's always just
huge opportunity jeez i'd love to unpack your salamence right a bit as i think you're you're
fairly contrarian i think most of the takes i see out there are very bearish soul.
High timeframe breakdowns.
The quants, the TA folks hate it.
Meanwhile, I think from a fundamental case,
it's still as strong as ever.
Now you've got full call sheet prediction market integration.
That's the headline of the week alongside everything else.
I'm curious like what you see,
or is it just the discount for you?
Or you mentioned that the lock tokens and less sell pressure,
but anything else?
I think that is part of it is let's sell pressure on the actual token.
I also just still look at Solana and think it's the fastest winning horse at this point.
I think you have folks like Saks who are aligned to Solana.
I think you have a lot of internet capital markets
being built on Solana still.
And look, there's other chains coming in to compete.
And I think that is an issue,
but also I think it's a nothing burger.
You know, if Monad, MegaEath. I think
the reality is they still have to prove themselves. Solana is pretty proven. I think when you
look at just dApp development in general, a lot of what I see on the builder side, still
looking to build on Solana. And so it could be contrarian. I think it's obviously gotten
hammered. Like you said, the chart doesn't look all that great. But I think on days like today, Salon is up about 10%.
12%, yeah.
Fastest horse of the majors.
When I look at that, it's pretty proven.
Monad's up pretty good.
That's great.
I'm still not a buyer here.
That is not a great chart.
You were in the chat a bit over Thanksgiving, right?
Asking about where's the buy level on Monad.
Got a little cup and handle there.
It seems to be.
If you can get below ICO, so far, that's been a good price.
So anywhere below two and a half cents.
Yeah, I just have very little interest in Monad.
Talking about that and just like the general layer one debate going on.
So tomorrow, this has been pretty fun to watch.
Like CT and then specifically CT within the venture space has been at each other's throats for like the past week.
It's been really bizarre to watch a lot of this unfold.
I think like low, you know, crappy price action brings out the worst in people.
And there's been this interesting debate.
So there's Santiago, Santi, you know, regular on the scene, founder of Inversion Capital,
really early to crypto.
And then Hasib, who is one of the partners at Dragonfly.
Both of them are really, really bright and have interesting perspectives on crypto and what's going on.
So they're going to be doing this layer one debate.
I also think that this image is hilarious.
But, you know, basically, Sanji made a lot of his wealth via crypto, right?
He was an early investor, angeled into a lot of things.
And now he's been changing the narrative to around a lot of like crypto is a scam.
I shouldn't say crypto is a scam, but he's been sort of anti-capital appreciation in
crypto, anti-degen.
And a lot of that is because inversion capital, what he's building, which is really interesting
and I think will be really successful, is effectively like private equity.
We buy a company, we overhaul the existing backend with stable coins and sort of the
real components of blockchain and crypto.
And he's buttoned up a bit, right? He wears a jacket now, white collared shirt often.
I think he's seen as a bit more on the TradFi side.
Asib, who's at Dragonfly. Dragonfly has led and participated in a lot of rounds in crypto.
And a lot of those end up being on the more innovative and speculative side of the house.
They like to back founders and projects that have really high potential or using this technology in an innovative way.
And they've been going back and forth on Twitter just around the layer one debate.
Is there a need for it?
So I'm excited to watch this and see.
Both of them are really sharp.
I wouldn't want to debate either of them on my best day.
And so this should be some really good entertainment
for those interested in seeing how and why value accrues.
So shout out to ThreadGuy for landing this one
and another dub for ThreadGuy.
Interesting indeed.
So Hasib is positing L1 blockchain still have value.
Yeah, it's like over the valuation of layer ones, basically.
And Hasib's defending the long-term potential, exponential adoption.
Santi argues they're overvalued due to weak network effects compared to undervalued applications.
And he kind of got into this on Blockworks last week with Rob, who's another partner at Dragonfly.
And I think Santi values it
in a more traditional valuation methodology,
whereas I think Hasib and Rob view it
as more of a network effect type of value.
So this one should be fun.
Get your popcorn out.
1.30 Pacific tomorrow, 4.30 Eastern.
Thread guy's probably going to host it on his channel.
So good luck to everyone involved.
Yeah, sure.
It'll be a good one.
I think a part of what's driving this new, maybe not new, but the L1s are overvalued argument.
I think having tokenized equities on chain,
and now you had the chance to buy Tesla, NVIDIA, Google, Amazon,
you can buy some of these companies that had the same valuations or close to
Ethereum, some of these other L1s.
And now folks are looking at it from that lens, right?
Where it's more true opportunity costs and you can actually pick one.
And is that bearish for existing crypto tokens?
So I certainly understand that case and how it could be.
I think we'll need a larger sample size
to come to any real conclusions on that one.
It looks like we lost you for a second.
I was actually curious if he saw Hasib's other comment
posting about the Anthropic and their AI agents
finding $4.6 million in exploits
in their first big simulated test on chain
and how they found some zero day exploits as well.
that hadn't been found before and concern level over that.
We talked about it a bit on FOMO hour.
not sure if anyone has any additional thoughts or takes on the AI agent
exploit risk or flood headed our way for the near future.
Um, risk or FUD headed our way for the near future.
It's definitely something I think about in terms of just holding a bunch of valuable stuff on chain and wanting to have things split up or in multi-sigs
or whatnot, because just the further, you know,
chance of getting exploited,
no matter how small is annoying and something we need to constantly think
about.
Like it's not something I'm rushing to make changes for, but it does change in my head, like the risk model of ways I can lose a bunch of money really quick over something stupid.
It's a lot of black swans.
What we're seeing, too, is a lot of it's being done by white hats, thankfully.
Yeah.
But it's not good, right?
Like, if the black swan is that
they find some type of an exploit
like Aave or one of the really big protocols,
that's where it gets really concerning.
And so, you know,
hopefully they're pretty well battle tested, right?
They have been at least to this point,
but I don't know.
Well, that's where my head was.
But the incentives to
exploit Aave are massive.
You don't think
that existing hacking
groups would have
been able to find this
by now if it was possible?
I don't think so.
Balancer just got hacked the other day.
Like two weeks ago.
I think that hackers are now finally understanding
how to use AI properly
to create enough like testing and environments
to go after these protocols
and really try to find vulnerabilities in them.
And I think it's a net positive for our industry.
Like Brad Gershner was on CNBC talking about this this morning. And Brad,
right, he's the GP at Altimeter Ventures. He's one of the most infamous VCs in the world. And
he brought up some pretty big concerns around this. But also, I think it's very optimistic. Like if we have the White Hats going after this and there's bounties,
and maybe they notify the team early on,
then there's incentives for the good guys here.
The problem is if there's bad guys that go after it, then what happens?
And I don't know.
No protocol feels really safe.
Like, are you guys concerned about...
I'm not concerned about it
i should say this like i'm not changing my mind about it because i think it's a black swan and
i'm just like not changing my risk profile for a black swan here but are you guys concerned with
this or is it changing your thoughts around things i will say just like the combination of Combination of AI risk, quantum risk, kidnapping, wrench attacks is becoming a heavier overhang when thinking about large percentage of wealth allocation to crypto over a long time frame.
It is.
Not everybody made any actions on that, but, but it does feel heavier.
Maybe that's because we're in these bear market vibes right now and
everyone,
the prices are down and everyone's talking about that and the risks and
the FUD,
but it is out there and it's,
it is heavy versus a safer,
safer assets.
Right.
but of course this is also the year where Bitcoin's underperformed.
Uh, and in years when it outperforms you're more comfortable taking on the risks right i think that's part of the game so it's just it's harder to stomach the risks in the
years where you're not getting the returns i guess it's kind of a maybe where my head is but
curious for other slots yeah i echo everything you just said tylen i think
again a lot of it comes down to just where you are in life i think there's a segment of um you
know the crypto community that's grown up now as families uh you know has more wealth in general
and you know the the asymmetry of you know the bet on cryptos has changed as well.
So I think a lot of people are feeling that and, you know,
just want a more simple setup and they want to mitigate the black swan stuff
because to me, it's like, what game are you playing?
And I think it's really important for people to define what game they're
playing. And then if you've won the game, you know,
preservation becomes much more important.
So I think that's something to be cognizant of.
And then, of course, on the other side,
if you're young and this is,
you haven't been into crypto as long or if you have,
but you haven't gotten to where you want to get,
you're in a situation where you can
take on a lot more risk,
then that's great.
Take risks when you can't. I think that's a huge thing in general is like if you're, especially if you're in a situation where you can take on a lot more risk, then that's great. You know, take risks when you can't.
I think that's a huge thing in general is like if you're, especially if you're young,
you have no kids, no one else relying on you, like taking a lot of risk and failing is okay.
Versus when, you know, you're supporting a family or others are relying on you or you don't have income.
I mean, there's just so many different life situations that merit a different approach.
So I'm thinking about that stuff a lot, Tyler.
I do think that there's a slew of black swans
that are risky.
But I do think right now at this moment,
and something we talked about last month or so,
is that there is this kind of just bullish setup overall.
So I'm trying to think through how to balance uh doing the right
thing uh for our family and then also visiting um for kind of what i'm what i'm seeing in the future
so and for the grinders right there's still like even in what has been a pretty brutal month
there's still been some big opportunities like this wojack meme just ran to 60 million this pokemon meme just ran to 10
in a couple days like i'm seeing folks hit big 20 30 x's still in a in a brutal market so
um there's how to approach it you know if you've made it in protecting wealth there's also like if
you haven't made it yet and you know you still are grinding at the lower bankroll, there's still plenty of opportunities to stick around for.
That's why you can't give up on Tom Tyler.
That's why I just cannot do it.
You know, your point that you just made, for those that know this line, you know, there's always money in the banana stand.
It's true. Like, there's always going to be money to be made.
Stocks and crypto and anything that's risky, there's going to be winners and losers.
And I think it's all about determining, you know, how you want to go about it.
What type of risk tolerance do you have?
Because as we saw, like people can lose it all in an instant. So I think Peter brings up some really great points around preserving, ensuring that you've
locked in what you need to lock in.
But at the same time, there's a lot of people that I think see...
They really see this as like, they have to make it.
This is their opportunity.
They have to make it in crypto.
And I think the reality is like, go bet on yourself.
Go, you know, there's other ways to make money,
but have something stable, have something risky,
have something in the middle.
I think it's all about diversification, but it's hard.
Like, but financial nihilism is very real.
And I think some people see that as their only option.
I don't agree with it, but I think it exists.
Indeed.
Well, I think this is a good wrap on our conversation here today.
Before we close, we're going to give a little bit of money away.
So we are going to do two yeet giveaways.
I'm doing my best to ignore all the comments,
half of our comments during the show uh just complaining about our giveaways if i do continue to see that i'm probably going to
pivot to something else um but for today we already promised these so we're going to run them out
as is um what do we say two 250 ones charlie uh so let, I think one we're doing is for bronze and one is more open.
I think that's how we're doing it.
So let's spin the wheel.
I'm gigantic lucky.
All right.
He's won one of the giveaways um and let's do the other one
so this is the bigger one all right duke of rugs i think i'm reading that right uh yep duke of rugs all right so i think both of these folks have one before we'll go back through i think it's been a few weeks um
so producer charlie and the team will work through these offline congrats to both of you, $250 each in some Yeet Cash.
So congrats on that.
I want to thank everyone for tuning in.
As always, I want to thank my co-hosts.
We'll be back next Tuesday for another episode of Underexposed.
Until then, have a great week.
Goodbye. Thank you.
