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UNDER EXPOSED with @andy8052 - Memes, Macro and More
Recorded: Aug. 19, 2025 Duration: 1:02:04Space Recording
Short Summary
In the latest episode of Underexposed, the hosts dive into the current trends shaping the crypto landscape, including Bitcoin's recent all-time highs, Ethereum's market decline, and the strategic partnerships emerging in the DeFi space. They also discuss the evolving behavior of traders and the potential for future growth in various crypto projects.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. GM, GM, everyone.
Thank you for joining us this morning, this afternoon, wherever you're at.
We're going to start the show here in just a minute.
A couple shout-outs while we get folks up on stage.
Fungi, GM, Erking Castro, GM, GM, Augustus, Ampfex.
It's Brian, GM, GM, Googly.
See you down there.
Quizzle, blind guy, blind gray. All right. GM, GM, thank you. See you down there. Quizzle, blind guy, blind gray.
All right.
GM, GM, thank you for joining us.
All right, we've got the folks in the studio.
Charlie, whenever you are ready, let's kick it. Thank you. GM everyone and welcome to episode 39 of Underexposed, our weekly macro show,
hitting all the biggest topics and trends impacting crypto and Web3.
Today is Tuesday, August 19th, and we were so back, and then it was so over.
We had smashing new all-time highs on Bitcoin last week.
It looked like ETH was going to all-time high, and now we're dumping.
We're big red on the week, and we're asking when new all time high, will we ever hit
a new all time high or is it over? We're going to break it all down on today's show. I'm your host,
Tyler D. I've got my co-host in the house plus a special guest going around the horn here,
D's GM. How are you doing? Doing great, man. Doing great. Glad to be here
with our first ever special guest on Underexposed. Yeah, super stoked. Andy, Andy8052 on X. Folks,
you may know him, a legend in Crypto Web 3. I was introduced to Andy, I think, via Club Top Shot.
He wears many hats, has built many apps, one of the single best traders I know in crypto. Andy,
GM, how are you doing?
Good. Happy to be here. Should be fun. Yeah, excited to have you on with us. Folks,
we've got Peter Jennings on with us as well, founder of several companies,
our macro expert, still finds time to spend with us. Peter, GM, how are you doing?
GM, great to be back with Andy, reminiscent of the Club Top Shot days.
There was some euphoria back in those days as well,
but yeah,
it should be a fun conversation,
a lot going on.
I'd love to watch a clip show.
Some of the highlights from club top shot back in 2021 peak euphoria.
Oh man.
I'm sure some of the,
like some of the things we said were just so absurd.
There was also some really funny guests. Like I'll never forget having jaw rule on club top shot.
That was incredible.
I mean, that was absolute mania,
but still one of the wilder runs that we've really ever seen.
Yeah, shout out to Peter Overzet too, who led Club Top Shot.
Good friend, has done so much in kind of the fantasy sports
and underdog space.
He's live today or sometime soon for a football game.
I saw him tweet out.
It's like all these NFL players, Rich Eisen and Overset.
I'll pull up the tweet, but got to give a big shout out to Overset.
Yeah, he's killed up.
20,000 subs too on YouTube.
So congrats, Pete.
You're grinding for Tennessee sports and you don't follow Peter.
You're missing out on a lot of good fun.
Yeah, it's Kay Adams, Cam Newton, Brandon Marshall, Derek Carr, Tyrone Matthew, and Peter Oversight.
It's actually a game?
Yeah, it's a legit game.
It's like flag football?
No, YouTube, Chiefs and Chargers, September 5th, 8 p.m. Eastern.
Oh, oh, oh my God.
Okay.
I thought they were literally playing a game.
I did not realize that he was analyzing a game.
I thought there was like a pros versus Joes,
Brandon Marshall and Cam Newton versus Peter Overzet
that I was about to watch.
I completely misunderstood, but I got it up.
Man, analyzing an NFL game.
About as big as it gets.
Shout out to Pete.
Folks, this is what can happen when you create content
around NBA Top Shot.
It's just a bridge to anywhere, anywhere you want to go.
Folks, what are we going to talk about on today's show?
As you know, if you're one of our annual listeners, we typically talk macro.
We hit three or four big topics along with what are we trading.
It's been a slower week for macro.
We invited Andy on, so I think we're going to dig maybe a little further down the risk curve, talk a little bit
more about what we're trading, what he is looking at from both an apps and a trading perspective
as well. So it should be a fun conversation. A couple quick housekeeping items before we get
started. We are live on Kik. Make sure to go check us out there. Follow our channel. We will
be streaming here every Tuesday for all of our shows going forward. Also, 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, 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, let's get into it.
I'm going to pull up the screen share for those who are in the stream. Go around the horn a quick,
a few quick macro topics here from the week. So we had CPI last Wednesday, came in flat. We pumped on the back of that. Bitcoin hit a new all-time high
around 124K. We had ETH run up to 48, 48.70, I think, at peak. Since then,
stocks have kind of continued to rally. I think the Dow hit a fresh all-time high today. We had
Trump meeting Putin over the weekend.
He met with Zelensky on Monday.
Some hopes of peace deal getting done, but not quite happening here in the very short and near term.
On the crypto front, a pretty quiet week at a high level.
We had Bo Hines leave the White House.
He's now going to be taking a position at Tether, fairly notable.
Now I'm going to be taking a position at Tether, fairly notable.
We've got Shamath now launching a SPAC with a DeFi component
in your potential top sign of the week.
And then it just seems like Tom Lee is buying all the ETH as rapidly as he possibly can.
Another 1.7 billion baht in the past week.
They are now the second largest crypto holder of any company in the world behind JustStrategy.
And yet, even with Tom Lee buying 1.7 billion, ETH is down 6% of the week.
At 4,200, Bitcoin hit all-time high, 124, bounced hard off of it back to 113.8.
Peter, I'll toss it to you, and then we can kind of ground the horn a little bit.
We don't need to go super deep into macro, but just kind of thoughts,
high-level reactions to Bitcoin, any kind of getting to all-time highs
and then getting rejected off, what might be driving it.
This is just summer volatility.
And what's top of mind for you here?
Yeah, I mean, this week I think the big thing is what happens from Jackson Hole
and how hawks are dovish. How is, I mean, big thing is what happens from Jackson Hole and how hawkish or dovish Powell is.
I mean, based on market action today, suggests that there might be more of a hawkish tone from Powell at Jackson Hole.
We had some inflation data coming a bit hotter last week, which kind of started the reversal.
On the manufacturing side, things are a bit more expensive.
manufacturing side, things are a bit more expensive. So we'll see what happens there.
So we'll see what happens there.
You know, we have this whole Putin, Russia, Ukraine thing that I think is certainly priced
into markets after Putin going to Alaska. Today, I think on Fox and Friends, Trump said that Putin
might not take the deal. So who knows? It's kind of an interesting week. There's not a ton going on,
but there's a couple of things. And then we had so much euphoria. It's not of an interesting week. There's not a ton going on, but there's a couple things. And then we had so much euphoria.
It's not surprising to see kind of markets chop back down.
Obviously, today they're moving down somewhat violently.
But, yeah, excited to talk more with Andy and get his perspective on more of the crypto-specific things.
There's not too much to dig into on the macro side.
Yeah, this take from Tom Lee was somewhat interesting.
He just posted it in the conversations he's having.
He thinks Powell's going to lean hawkish at Jackson hole on Friday,
but because this is the base case,
if he comes out like this,
it will be perceived as dovish stocks will rally coming out of Jackson
hall.
So somewhat interesting take there from Tom,
but he is a permable as we,
as we well know.
Andy,
maybe I'll toss it to you.
Kind of curious for your reactions.
Were you surprised that Bitcoin hit the new all time high,
bounced right off of it?
Thoughts on ETH on a macro perspective?
Yeah.
I mean,
like to be honest
there's probably about a million people whose macro perspectives are more useful than mine
i'm definitely not like super educated on a lot of that stuff my like my general base case kind
of like timely is i'm pretty much a permable uh and that's like how i've had a good time trading crypto for forever.
But I think the biggest thing that I've noticed around this, less specifically around any individual price, is it really feels like currently, even over the last year or so, everyone has been so reactionary to the current price in a way that feels even more extreme than previous cycles where it's like bitcoin's up 10 and it's like oh my god it's never going to go down again this is
incredible bitcoin's down five percent and that was it hope you sold hope you had a good time
time to invest in robotics like it's over uh and it just feels like it's getting like more and more
extreme over time this like whiplash of sentiment, which is interesting.
I don't really know what to make of it.
I'd be curious what your guys' thoughts are.
But it just feels really, really pronounced,
way more so than 2017 or 2021,
different cycles that I've been a part of.
I feel the same.
Maybe I'll toss it to you.
In 2021, we had the euphoria we
didn't have folks calling top in november like it was actually a surprise and yet here we are
anytime there's a two percent dip half the timeline's racing to to call top and seemingly
literally overreacting on a week-by-week basis and we're not also like we're not getting that
many consistent sustained runs.
So I think, you know,
coming out of the April tariff dip, right,
we ran 50%.
But other than that,
we just kind of grind up,
we chop, we consolidate.
No smashing moves.
At least in the Bitcoin trade,
ETH is a bit of a different story.
But the timeline feels a lot different than it did.
Deez, you've been around longer than me.
Kind of curious for your thoughts on that.
So the average holding time of people on Twitter
has decreased over the last two years
to the point where people hold things for so little
that they are so driven by the price
because they don't really know the value of anything they have.
They just know the price of it.
When the price starts going up or down they're just like you know at the whims of the market so i don't i've noticed that a little bit too but also i think um just trading
a little less myself makes it easier to not do that um but it doesn't shock me I feel like just as a society
our attention spans get shorter and shorter
every year and
it would make sense that our
trading slash like holding
time and preferences would
rise of liquid even if folks are long
which forces you to have more of a time constraint on the trade and also introduces a lot of risk
so i think that's perhaps a factor i mean i don't know that perps aren't new on a new product compared
to prior cycles but perhaps it feels like they're more, it's permeated more through the average trader base maybe.
Yeah, I definitely think so.
And I think a big part of that is generally perps have been not super
available to us people because they were typically something that,
you know, how you had to be offshore and, you know,
obviously hyperliquid is not available to U.S. people.
But people in the U.S.,
if you want to use hyperliquid
or have access to other decentralized perps exchanges,
it is pretty trivial.
Whereas previously, it was like,
you have to find a way to make a fake account
on, you know, Binance or buy someone's KYC or something.
It was a more complicated process.
So I do think that that probably has a big part in
that where it's just like more widely accessible to the average person instead of having to have
like a set up institutional trading account or something that makes a lot of sense um as i'm
trying to think about where we go from here i already pulled up one of the Tom Lee tweets, but he had another one from this morning where he's quoting one of his quants,
Mark Newton, and basically saying he thinks pullback to 4075 or 4150 here
midweek calls pullbacks healthy.
I think the last time he did this, he was saying dips are shallow,
and then we had the ETH pullback,
and it ran straight to close to new all time highs.
So I think we like the guy who's plowing $1.5 billion a week into ETH saying that pullbacks
are healthy. So we will see if he's right. I think there's going to be, if we hit these numbers,
I think it's going to be very interesting. I think a lot of folks are going to try to
flip long there if they're not already, they're perhaps sidelined could be a nice
nice little entry andy have you been following the the treasury codes the dats in general have
you gotten into that trade at all anything with bitminer s bed or just broader thoughts
i've definitely been following it um i i don't even have a way
to own stocks um i that is not available to me i'd have to make an account somewhere that i don't
currently have um so no i have not i have not made that trade uh but i i mean i think it's
pretty interesting i think that like it's kind of funny that so many of these funds that trade,
they have to basically buy these DAS in order to get access to some of these markets
just because of the way that they're set up regulatory-wise.
I'm curious to see what the somewhat eventual unwind of some of these looks like.
I saw someone compare it to Olympus DAO yesterday.
And I don't think it's quite Olympus DAO, but I understand the comparison.
But at the same time, when you call it that, Olympus DAO is still worth a good amount of money.
If you ask the average person who was around and watched ohm run and then you ask them what they think the
market cap is now it's actually not as low as you would have guessed um but yeah i've been following
it kind of loosely uh i think it'll be interesting to see like the trickle down as we continue down
the risk curve of dats and like what that looks like and when it starts to get competitive with each other where like i feel like the bitcoin and eth ones weren't i have a feeling like a solana one won't
even really have like a ton of competition but then as you get to like the suey and you know
avalanche and all these different uh chains and tokens like companies it feels like it's not just
going to be a rotation from one to the other but
it'll be slightly more like uh there's only so much pie to share of people who want to invest
in these things i think we're definitely going to see it all and my lukewarm take i don't know
if it's a hot take i think we're going to see some big soul ones coming up soon i actually think
soul could be an interesting trade here is it here. It feels a little contrarian.
Folks have been piling into the ETH narrative
on the back of the price action.
A lot of folks think Seoul has no shot at an all-time high.
You bring enough Treasury Coast to the table
with enough buying power, and it absolutely could.
You know the Solana bottom is near, too, Tyler,
because I legit this weekend
almost one-stacked all my Solana for pump
um so you know the the bottom is near for specifically the Solana youth chart that's
the one I keep going back to I think it's down like 55 percent from where we were in April
did you guys see the good Alexander tweet about um Solana dats and like what he thought they
should be done about it no i haven't seen it
yeah where he was basically making the case that like he thinks the next evolution of
that's in general and like specifically speaking about solana is going to be
uh companies going public that have some other you know source of revenue or you know that aren't just a dat uh but
that are extremely tightly coupled to a particular token and he gave the example of helios with murt
and basically like they make money they want to see solana go up and so you can you can see this
case where it's like he can be the figurehead murtert, in this case, of Helios Labs becoming a Solana DAT while also maintaining everything else, where it's not just this, what do you do when you run out of selling your equity to buy more Solana?
Because they have revenue, they have all these other things tied into it.
I thought it was an interesting case.
I'm not really smart enough to know or educated enough on this subject to like have super strong feelings but naively it sounds interesting i mean it makes more sense than a company whose pure way of
driving revenue is by trying to capture yield off of their underlying assets and are just kind of
stuck if they're unable to to do that or the prices start going down so i could absolutely
see that being the next leg.
It's an interesting, interesting theory.
And I do, again, think Sol could be next.
D's, can we maybe just quickly talk about the pump trade?
And then we'll get into Andy's world.
Maybe, Andy, this is your world. I'm not 100% sure if you are in this trade or not.
Pumped looked like...
I took out my pump long the other day.
Fortunately, before it went below
three, but I
definitely ate some losses there.
It hit the good token Meridian and you were like,
I'm out.
It's back to a bad token.
Now it's back.
How painful of a trade.
It opened up at five
on the back of the ICO.
My first buy was at 4.8.
I was like, it's not a bad dip. It probably won't go below the ICO. My first buy was at 4.8. I was like, it's not a bad dip.
It probably won't go below the ICO price.
It goes all the way down to 2.1
and then just runs straight in a straight line
back to four ICO price.
And it's like, yeah, they shook all the paper hands out.
Everyone got liquidated now.
They're just going to march up forever on the,
have you seen their daily revenue? They're putting it all back into
the token.
And then, wow.
A full 30% correction.
I guess.
So, yeah. So, what are you thinking
here? Are you going to stick with it?
I'm going to buy more. I don't know if I'm retired.
I think it's a good trade.
I think if you're just buying spot.
I was trading on leverage, so I didn't want to hold it. But I think if you're just buying spot, I was trading on leverage,
and so I didn't want to hold it.
But I think if you're just buying spot,
it's a good trade.
I feel like PumpFun is moving kind of slow
with what they're doing in general,
which isn't great.
But I still think that they have
a lot of tricks up their sleeve.
We saw at the beginning of the month,
they published some new code that's on the testnet or something
for liquidity incentives.
I think there will at some point be incentives
to get people to trade higher volume
and increase pump fund revenue
and use that revenue to buy back the pump token.
And that will have a nice flywheel effect for a while.
And people will get really horny about the pump fund revenue flywheel.
But at least right now it isn't happening.
I think a lot of this is just time-based capitulation.
It's silly, but Alon tweeted two Fridays ago
that there was big stuff coming in deployments for last week
and it never came.
And I think that's happened multiple times now
where it kind of feels like you're being dragged along
for something that isn't actually coming.
And I don't believe that nothing is actually coming.
I just think they're moving slower
than probably they want to be or anyone wants them to be.
And there's a lot of just time-based people bailing out.
Why do you think that might be?
I think you're spot on.
But I think it's also a rightful reason for folks to get upset and cut the
trade, right? Like we're,
we are now more than a month past when this token came out.
Still no airdrop news. We've got teases of an incentive program,
no details here. They've done some buybacks.
We still don't know the firm details of that.
Are they just trying to shake folks out?
Like,
are they trying to force time capitulation?
I guess,
are you surprised they haven't given these announcements more?
I am a little bit surprised.
I thought that it was like two weeks ago where they kind of came out
swinging and the price started to rebound.
And I thought that was like,
all right,
you know,
they,
they messed up a little bit at TGE or it was intentional and they just wanted to like, you know, get out all the paper hands.
Now it feels less clear what's going on.
But I still just like generally think that they being first mover and having as much money as they do.
And I don't think they're a team of idiots who just got lucky.
I like just have to believe that something else is coming at some point.
And so I think that if you can weather and deal with the,
the price fluctuate fluctuations,
it'll probably be a good trade at least in like the medium term.
Yeah.
I think that makes sense.
The revenue is just too strong. And this is also kind of
periodically one of the weaker times of the year for meme coin trading. There was a huge summer
low last year. I think actually it was the weakest in mid-September. And then we had the massive Q4.
So it could be painful for another month as well. And that wouldn't be a huge surprise.
Well, we're almost halfway through the show already.
Andy, I want to talk to you.
What are you excited about?
What ecosystems are you focused in the most right now in summer 2025?
I mean, talking about Pump, it would be strange to not mention Heaven and the light token that came out uh i guess five
days ago i don't own any light i've definitely messed up that trade um but i do own some of the
ecosystem tokens uh light is interesting i very much so faded it like i said i don't own any never
did uh but it's done very well and kind of for those who are not familiar,
essentially it is another token launchpad.
They built the decks from scratch.
They said it took like seven or eight months to make.
The big thing is that 100% of the revenue of the platform
goes back to buying and burning light, the platform token.
And so even over just the last couple of days,
they've burned,
they've invested over $2 million in buying back and burning light and burned
over 2% of the supply.
And so I think you're seeing what happens when you have like a real flywheel
effect from meme coin trading,
which has over the last couple of years proven to be one of the two
stickiest sources of revenue, which is that or perps trading. And yeah, I think it's really
interesting. I still don't know. I'm still a pump fund bull and I struggle to see them capturing
significant mindshare from pump fund long-term. But I think it's totally possible that we see them grow significantly more
in the short-term,
kind of in the same way that Bonk did.
If you scroll up, I think they include Light now.
Yeah, the black on there is Light token,
or Light trading, I believe.
Great color choice there.
Yeah.
But yeah, so I think it's really interesting.
I don't really know what to
expect i haven't played it perfectly by any means but you can look at the at the revenue numbers i
think with them writing their own decks from scratch uh the way that kind of the trading fees
and system fees work uh they're very different from if you just built on top of Radium or even the way that pump funds fees work.
The main thing, I believe, is that the liquidity does not auto compound.
There's no trading fees that go back into the LP pool.
And so it just allows them to capture a ton of fees that are going straight to token buybacks. And so when you look here and you look at the revenue,
like heaven's already at a quarter of the revenue of pump in the last 24 hours.
But if you look at like token volume and trading volume,
it is not at a quarter.
And so I think it lets you kind of theorize and extrapolate what that would
mean and get really excited about what it could mean.
Whether or not they're able to maintain that, we'll see.
Are you surprised?
So they basically did the flywheel that we all wanted,
believe, have to have.
Are you surprised they never pulled that off?
Or that they still haven't pulled that out?
I know you were in that trade.
Yeah.
A good trade.
I believe.
Yeah, it was a good trade.
It could have been a better trade.
If only...
Just believed a little less.
Yeah, if I believed a little less,
it would have been a much better trade.
I remember sitting, when it hit its all-time high,
I was out at a bar watching a Knicks-Celtics playoff game.
I was like, oh my God.
If only I had just sold everything right then.
I'm like in my group chat begging you to sell some.
I'm like, I don't want to be the guy,
but please sell something.
That's why I appreciate you, Dias.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting.
The dev Peaceful Decay, he's talked a lot,
kind of theorized a lot about this idea
that when the idea of a launchpad
kind of becomes a commodity,
other people can launch another launchpad,
a lot of it actually is just the aura of the product
that makes you win.
And this idea that just being cool
and having 100% of the fees go back to a flywheel
things like that uh are actually significantly more important than anything else um so i am
surprised that like believe hasn't done it i don't really i don't really know what they're doing i
think that this is just a good example of how hard it is for non-crypto-native teams to come in and make serious headway for really, really meaningfully crypto-native parts of the stack, like trading meme coins or trading tokens.
Just many times throughout the timeline of Believe, it felt like they didn't really understand the ecosystem as well as competitors.
And this team is very crypto native, it seems,
from my conversations with people who know them better.
So I think it just kind of shows how important that is.
It's crazy to look back at this chart and to see the different teams
who have come in and briefly ran up some pretty significant market share
and then just how fleeting it's been.
So the green here is the Believe app run
where they got to
50% effectively
of Pump's market share.
Then
Moonshot had a handful
of days. Then Bonk had a
meaningful run.
Still surprised at how quickly that's
flipped over.
Are you still looking at the Bonk ecosystem at all, Andy?
Or is that one kind of like a flash in the pan that isn't as exciting anymore?
Because there is a period of time for like two weeks or three weeks
where we just thought Bonk was going to flip pump forever.
Yeah.
It was kind of crazy.
I still am a useless bull.
I like useless coin.
I talked to BonkGuy a good bit,
and he's definitely pilled me.
And so outside of that,
there's not that much in the Bonk ecosystem
that I've been following along.
I think if they were to start picking up volume again,
GP probably would be a good play again.
But there was some weird stuff around token emissions that seemed not super real or i don't know there was some
some fud around that token uh the the chart for gp is just brutal go if you go to like the daily
chart it's just it is bad um yeah i don't know there's have you guys heard the rumors about bonk fun for this week
i saw the point system that came out um but no i haven't heard any rumors
uh i saw something on twitter and i have no inside information here uh it's just stuff that
i've seen on twitter um that everyone on the bonk Fun Team followed the founders of Kik yesterday.
And there's some rumors that it could potentially be that they're doing some sort of partnership with Kik around tokens.
What that means, who knows.
The chatter that I'm seeing on Twitter and in my Telegram chats, is that potentially something this week we could learn about
a Bonk-Kick partnership?
Very interesting.
Trying to think through, yeah, what would be the play in this scenario?
Is it Bonk?
Just Bonk?
Is it the Bonk eco tokens?
Yeah, I have no idea. How would you express this trade?
Bonk is, phew.
That's been a rough one as well.
Yeah, it's not quite GP levels.
But, I mean, if it does regain some momentum here,
it actually doesn't look that, you know,
go back and retest some previous resistances and then try to run it back.
But who knows?
Do you play any of the big major, mean majors or are you typically more downstream?
From time to time, I will only Only if I feel really high conviction.
This was months ago at this point.
I felt pretty high conviction that SPX was going to flip Fartcoin.
And so I was pretty long SPX for that trade.
That worked out pretty well.
There's times if I've longed Bonk at different points or things like that, but I try not to.
I'm an okay leverage trader.
I'm a good leverage trader when things are going well
because I'm delusionally bullish,
but I'm bad at securing profits.
And so I generally think I'm better at playing on-chain stuff
and specifically trying to play the 5 to 10 million
to 50 to 100 million range than anything else.
Yeah, so how do you approach on-chain?
What's your system?
How do you think about entering trades, sizing?
Yeah, what I kind of try to think about generally is and this is definitely not always
true and i don't hold myself to this because i also just like i like trading on chain and i
think it's kind of fun i you know i think it kind of is like a video game in some ways uh i enjoy
the pvp aspects but like as far as what i when i'm making my best trades, I typically try to find coins that I can buy a meaningful amount of, a meaningful percentage of, and tell myself a realistic story as to why they'd get to, say, a $100 million market cap or something like that.
Is there an actual argument that isn't just totally idiotic or isn't just like, what if
Elon tweets about it all the time, where this token could run up to $100 million?
And if that's the case and it's relatively reasonable, and I think that there's actual
some confluence with people who I like and think are smart.
Those are typically my favorite trades.
That's like with LaunchCoin or things like that.
That was a pretty obvious one.
I had a pretty decent trade with Annie.
I mentioned not wanting to care about Elon tweeting about things,
but that was a little bit different.
And different things like that. But that's kind of...'s it's pretty loose very vibes based i don't track wallets i
don't like i don't do any of that stuff there's definitely people who are way better at some of
the more like on-chain sleuth technical stuff than i am but mostly i just try to find things
where it's like i've been around in crypto long enough that i think i'm pretty good at sniffing
out like a narrative or a vibe for something and if i can be like oh yeah i could
see this growing 10x from here uh then i'll try to buy a good chunk to where i have like meaningful
exposure and i try to not be in too many things at once because then i just get bored and i like
don't pay enough attention do you systemically like chip clip out on the way up do you have like numbers where you'll take
profits at or multiples or is it just more vibes based on that particular coin each one kind of
unique i would i would say i mostly sell after the top i'm i'm very much a believer in all parts
of my trade crypto uh i typically sell after the top um and so a lot of that is just like trying to figure out
after it starts going down is it is it done or is it just like pulling back a bit and there's still
more more meat to it um but no i don't i try sometimes to be good about like oh let me take
profit at some level or something at my initials out.
But I think like for a lot of people,
they like taking out their initials so they can not care or whatever.
But I'm pretty degenerate and I don't,
I don't feel that need.
Like if I'm buying something,
I'm I've already decided that I'm okay.
It goes to zero.
And so I don't,
I don't really gain any like mental fortitude to hold for longer by
taking out my initials or anything like that and so i don't think it's really super valuable for me
while i'm over here selling uh half of my launch coin bag on a forex because i'm stoked because i
haven't seen anything move in months and then uh two weeks later it's up 10x from where i sold it
oh yeah i i see why Andy believes in things.
Yeah, well, I feel like part of it is because I had trades where I did that,
where it's like I sold my goat at $10 million market cap
because I just made a 10X because I bought it at a million,
things like that.
And it was just I had a few too many of those
where I'm just not doing this anymore.
It hurts so much more to have that happen than to round-trip.
I'd rather round-trip.
Absolutely.
I agree with that 100%.
Every time I round-trip something,
it feels like I deserved it.
Whereas when I sell it too early,
it's like, oh, that's the one that got away.
That could have been the one
if I just believed a little more.
Yeah. Very real. You mentioned that mentioned that yeah go ahead i was gonna ask about these this launchpad war meta do you think
this is gonna last for a while are you looking for new ones or do you think it is um gonna die
down and oscillate into another sector shortly it kind of feels like we're getting to the end of it
i think like in a lot of ways
most of the time when we have these different like wars it kind of is like a race to zero
but not necessarily in fees but instead in like token incentives and so like in this case i kind
of feel as though heaven with light token is like the race to zero token where there's no platform fees that are not going back and buying this coin.
And so I don't know how does the next platform undercut that?
You can't really.
And so I think that it kind of expedites that process where you have a first mover in pump and then light's going to try and capture
mindshare maybe someone else will try to come along and copy them and with some different spin
or something but it just gets significantly harder to generate like an interesting narrative as to
why yours is better at this point unless we end up seeing something on a different chain or or things like that um so
i was even i was skeptical of light even being able to make a meaningful dent in things because
i kind of felt like we'd already gotten to that point um but now i feel that way even more that's
where i was when i was shitposting about the launch and the issues i was like oh this is super bullish
um and then obviously i guess it was super bullish it's up over 10x you mentioned other L1s and stuff
outside of Bitcoin, ETH, Solana
are there any other ecosystems
on other chains that you think are interesting at all
or are you mostly just focused on the big three?
I'm trying to farm some hyperliquid stuff
there's a couple
different mobile perps UIs for hyperliquid stuff uh there's like a couple different uh like mobile perps uis for
hyperliquid i was farming a lot of lighter which is not like a hyperliquid competitor um but their
points are getting harder and harder to earn it's just getting more competitive their volume and
interest is pretty high now um and so i'm trying to i'm starting to like move on from that try to
find greener pastures
somewhere else that are a little less competitive
so there's Dexari
and Liquid are the two
mobile
platforms that are built on Hyperliquid
so I'm
starting to dabble in those a little bit
I don't really like trading on mobile though
so that's a bit of a hard one for me
but I don't really like trading on mobile though. So that's a bit of a hard one for me.
But not that much.
Other strategies just around the farming, because I know that there's all the perps trading.
There's obviously staking hype.
There's the chain,
which I think is really tricky to kind of mess around with,
but obviously there's incentives.
Are you thinking about it?
Is there anything public about how season three is going to work?
Not that I'm aware of. If there is i i don't know i'm looking for that i think like i think that unit is a really really and i'm not breaking any news here i think that'll be a really big airdrop
whenever it happens um and so i think that if you're able to farm whatever Hyperliquid Season 3 could possibly be, and Unit at the same time, and whatever other on-chain stuff, that to me feels like a pretty solid thing.
If you're just holding Bitcoin or ETH right now, or Pump, or a lot of these things, or SPX, probably you're just better off holding it on Hyper EVM with Unit.
I don't really think there's a good case to be made not to
unless you're just really worried about the chain security.
In which case, my argument to you would be
if HyperLiquid's chain security is so compromised
that you lose your money,
you're probably pretty fucked regardless
because that would be pretty detrimental to all of crypto
for a pretty meaningful time.
But yeah, so I think that unit is a good farm.
I think there's probably some DeFi stuff that's pretty good
and like liquid staking.
I know there's like Kinetic for liquid staking and a few others.
And then there's like HyperFi and a few other platforms, Felix.
HyperFi just added a credit card, which is kind of cool.
I haven't used it personally,
but you can like basically set added a credit card which is kind of cool i haven't used it personally um but you can
like basically set up a credit card to your like hyperfi account and when you pay it just like
increases your usdt loan on the platform which is like i think pretty cool um and so i think there's
some cool innovative defy stuff happening there there There's not a ton of consumer or anything like that.
And I think in general, I'm just trying to focus on stuff that in some way takes advantage of the HyperCore platform.
I've kind of convinced myself up to this point that anything that's not taking advantage of HyperCore is just going to kind of get like eaten alive because hyper core is so good like the perps experience there is so good that
nothing that isn't in some way taking advantage of that can really thrive anytime soon
i'm curious maybe digging into like hyper evm a bit more just the overall hype trade do you feel
like the hype trade is dependent on hyper evm succeeding? Do you think EVM is going to be successful?
I guess part of the reason I'm asking you,
you're much more technical than I am.
There are some speed constraints.
I believe it in hyper EVM compared to others.
So yeah,
I'm struggling to see what it is,
what you consider successful.
I think that you will see a bunch of apps
that use like HIP3 and Core Writer and things
to interact with the core perp decks
that do really well and are successful.
And some of those will be deployed on the Hyper-EVM
and leverage certain
parts of the of the stack uh i am not convinced that we're going to see a base or solana style
just like explosion of apps that has you know tons of different use cases and nft marketplaces
and things like that i'm not convinced that that will ever gain meaningful traction, mostly because for that to succeed,
generally it requires, and historically it has required,
the team who runs the chain heavily working
to either incubate or help promote
or build up this ecosystem of apps and things.
And that's just not going to happen, seemingly, on Hyperliquid.
Up until this point,
they've shown no interest in doing that,
which I think is fine.
What they're doing is working totally fine.
And I think that the hype rate is totally independent of the EVM.
I think the EVM is kind of just nice to have.
Some people can build some kind of cool stuff on top of Hyperliquid.
I think that the PerpDex and that stuff is going to always be the
core,
the core product and core like valuation model for it.
That makes sense.
I mean,
it feels like the,
the revenue and the buybacks are the,
the foundation of the trade and revenue is going up into the right.
And that's because they have a great purpose,
purpose platform and product and more folks are using it.
And the more volatility we get around new all time highs seems like it is a
bonus for,
for the hype trade as well.
And yeah,
and I think that you're just,
we're going to see some other cool stuff built on top of it.
Like what,
well,
I don't know.
I've seen people post about like,
you know,
prediction markets,
perps and things.
I'm not sure I totally buy all of those then that they'll exist and that they'll work but like
it's kind of gonna be a bit of a net new thing that people can experiment with and generally
having like open protocols that people can experiment with and try to build net new things
has like been where you can find pretty asymmetric returns in crypto um because you
get something that no one's previously built before or like really thought about um so i think that
stuff is interesting there's like i think it's volantis or i don't remember the name of the
there's like some pre-ipo market things and i don't know i think we'll see some cool stuff
and i think it'll be worth it to experiment and try with those things.
I just, I'm solely focused on stuff that is explicitly using the HyperCore product in some way.
Got it.
Well, that certainly makes sense.
Well, you mentioned asymmetric returns.
So perhaps a seg to another area.
The NFT trade.
You were deep in the NFT trade, starting from Top Shot.
You were in the punk trade.
I think you were pretty just deep in general in 2021.
I think I was watching your wallet at one point.
It was a good time.
But how are you thinking about NFTs in 2025?
Are you spending any time or attention in that niche?
Very minimal.
I have a couple of random NFTs.
I have some little chillers.
Anyone see my new Twitter PFP, my Takabu Chill House PFP?
I think those are funny.
I love Chill House.
I think the little chillers are funny.
I mostly am just buying stuff that I think is are funny. I love Chill House. I think the little chillers are funny. I mostly am just buying stuff
that I think is funny or interesting.
I think probably if you're relatively risk-off,
owning punks is going to be a good trade long-term.
I've had some arguments with people about V1 punks,
and I think that stuff is an interesting conversation,
but I'm not really doing anything about it. I the trading meme coins i prefer trading nfts um but i think really
more money is to be made in trading meme coins and i just buy nfts now because i like them or
think they're funny why can't we see i feel like none of these solana meme NFT products have had any success over
more than like a two day time horizon.
Is it because of just the general lack of liquidity and it's,
this easier to trade the meme?
Like,
are you surprised?
Like I'll be honest.
Like I thought little chillers would have a little bit more of a run than
just a brief spike to six and straight to zero.
I definitely hope they would. And I think there's still a chance. I think, I think they're just really tightly tied to the price straight to zero. You too. I definitely hope they would.
And I think there's still a chance.
I think they're just really tightly tied
to the price of Chill House as well.
Like if Chill House goes up,
I think Little Chillers probably goes up.
Dude, launch coin.
No, I...
Holy shit.
Anyway, sorry.
Chill House.
No, it's...
See, I don't know.
I feel like the Solana culture and ecosystem just isn't really...
Like, the people who are there in trading are not there to hold things long-term.
And NFTs really worked because it kind of psyopsed everyone into believing in something really well.
And people on Solana generally don't believe in things.
I think it's as simple as that.
And that's why NFTs on Solana just don't work.
So we've got our answer here after years.
Just kind of maybe like rapid fire.
I'm curious, do you think top shot high end top shot market?
This has ever come back to new all time highs.
Do you still hold any of your grail top shots?
Just curious for your perspective on that.
I don't own any top shot moments anymore.
Wow.
Yeah.
I'm all zeroed out.
I think it could. I mean,
I don't think basketball is going to get less popular
and I don't
think that like collectibles
will get less popular I think the hard thing
with those is
like until
there is just a proven track record
of people wanting to collect these things
and they've existed for long enough
I think it's just hard
to convince people that
it's better to buy if that's what you want than to buy a trading card and that's why people really
wanted you know utility from their moments and things like that and i actually i think that like
kind of going down that path was a bit of a waste of time and like basically you just need to stick
around long enough and survive long enough that
people decide that these are cool and interesting um so i think there's definitely a chance that
they could come back over time i think it'll probably take a while um but you know when
lebron james is retired and in 20 years if they're still around and you know the images are still
pinned on ipfs or wherever they are like and
that's still kicking i could see them being valuable uh it's just it's not nearly as clear
a trade as like just buying the you know trading card or something sure and i mean it's a
five to ten year plus time horizon probably yeah i think anything that's like non-crypto native ip
that's you know an nft or a collectible or whatever you just have to have a longer time
horizon that like this ip will continue to be valuable and digitally native things will
overtake physical things as collectibles in general. And then the, you know, original digitally native IP collectibles become valuable because society has
shifted in a way where, you know,
think about the kids who are playing Roblox right now,
who they probably value the digital collectibles more than physical.
At some point in the future,
there will be a group of them who are buying NBA collectibles.
And you can convince yourself why they would want the NFT
as opposed to the trading card.
That's just far away.
Versus a lot of people our age and older,
they can think the NFTs are cool and like that,
but it's still like, it is really cool to have
the physical PSA graded cards of whatever you have like
that that's definitely something that's still just in the people who have disposable income
they value i'm with you i can build that bull case in my head and i have um so i i don't have a big
top shot by any means but it could yeah like i don't have a big portfolio by any means but i've i dabble i buy a few moments every year just in the i still have moments actually i just haven't
logged in to sell them but uh i definitely still have the uh cool cats lamello and that that was
right around where i got clocked out of top shot was what i was like was i holding on to an expensive
luca moment to get this lamello
moment and then i held it and then you know they all went to zero alex from awesome or something
he bought like all the supply of the luca cool pass just that ah man what a time 2021 incredible things
in 2021
I thought holding
anything for five
to ten years
would be impossible
and here we are
four years later
I mean you
you all have
punks that you've
held for four years
at this point
yeah
right so holding
for ten isn't
really that
January will be
my fifth year
anniversary with
the heavy pine
kind of wild
holding NT for
five years
and guess what it's up yeah yeah 18 grand to whatever it is now with the heavy pine. Kind of wild. Pulling NT for five years.
And guess what?
It's up.
Yeah, yeah.
18 grand to whatever it is now.
Andy, I'm curious.
Fractional, what, three years out now?
Have you spent much time reflecting on that?
Was fractional right but too early?
I spend time thinking about this.
As I think about what are the bull cases for punks to go to a million for me one of them is some version of like tokenized punks
people buying effectively fractions i'm curious if you've spent more time thinking about that
yeah i think part of it is like right but early i think if you had a if you said i have to relaunch fractional right now um i would it would probably
be a punks only platform for a long time i think that would be like the right way to do it i think
a big challenge was just there weren't that many expensive nfts that people wanted to own a piece
of because i think generally people who wanted to buy fidenzas or punks or whatever during that time
they had the money to buy one.
And if they didn't,
people wanted to just like go down the risk curve and try to flip things to be able to buy a punk or a Fidenza.
And I think it kind of goes back to a lot of the same stuff as we were just
talking about the top shot where you just need that prolonged period of time
where like,
just,
I think time just hardens those collectibles and those assets to where they start to really separate and become more things someone wants to invest in or put smaller amounts of money into.
But realistically, I really liked the idea very early on, a fractional, of not ever having there be a buyout for things and just burning it.
And that's kind of happened with like,
you know,
some of the Doge NFTs that were on there and stuff.
I think,
I think there's kind of like two separate paths of where fractional could have
gone.
Or like if I had to do it again and one would be just kind of revisiting the,
how do you do this collectible,
you know,
pieces of a collectible where it's only like really investable assets
basically probably only punks right now and then other stuff as it comes along or it would just be
like fractionally owning ip and saying like hey you know like kind of like what bureau of internet
culture is doing like what path is doing and things where it's like finding things that aren't
necessarily a pre-existing nft but then just like turning them into a mean coin and kind of like fractionalizing that ip uh basically to in the way that like the doge nft
and things have done it um i think both are like super viable paths and will be
you know large industries in the future um but just very different
it's interesting yeah andy obviously you've had a lot of success trading in terms of like your overall
crypto portfolio.
Do you have anything that is just like a,
when I buy and hold this,
especially with like the tax consequences of certain things like Bitcoin or
ETH or whatever,
and then you have a trading bucket or how do you,
how do you think about your portfolio as a whole?
Yeah.
I like,
I mostly kind of just have, know don't touch it cold storage of like
bitcoin and a little bit of eth uh that's just like but it's mostly just bitcoin honestly uh
and then i have a degenerate wallet and a degenerate by bit account. And I like anything that's in those.
I really don't think about portfolio allocation or anything like that.
I kind of am,
you know,
I accept that they could go to zero at any given time and sometimes we'll go
to zero at any given time.
And that's just like part of the game.
And I try and I'm trying to be better about just actively, even daily, just
DCAing from my DGEN account into my Bitcoin holdings.
But I think, at least up until now,
I tend to do decently.
Ebbs and flows. But I've outperformed Bitcoin
this cycle so far.
And so it's like hard to convince me
that I should continue to do that
until it feels like that is getting harder and harder.
And it kind of feels like that
is getting that way a little bit.
But yeah, as far as long-term stuff,
it's like I have my crypto junk and I have Bitcoin.
And otherwise, everything else is kind of just like
very much up up in the air for a trade at any given time i also like it's a bit of a funny
one but basically like i booked so much capital loss from all the ftx and everything that i like
just finally got back to not having not having having to really think about capital gains
because I was carrying over so much capital loss.
And so I need to start being a little bit smarter about some of that stuff.
But for the last couple of years, I've kind of just been like,
I can kind of just not worry too much about what cap gains I bring in
because I had so much loss to carry over.
So wait, are you telling me that
Allie doesn't send you a spreadsheet every quarter
and you don't discuss where your gains are?
She does not.
She does it for other people, but not for me.
Highly recommend Allie if you need a crypto tax accountant.
Just wrapping this up,
the strategy makes sense. Your coming on outperforming bitcoin
and getting harder it it feels that way and i had just a terrible run over the last two or three
months and then i was late to light trade but like once again once a quarter here's the here's
what feels like kind of an easy 5 10x trade and effectively fairly large size like the ICO was capped at what like 70k or something
so not like a seven figure trade necessarily but it'll be at some point another just another
opportunity if you do stick around yeah someone smarter than me had a post on Twitter once and
it was like you know the majority of discretional trading is just like doing nothing and a few times a year there's free money on the floor and you have to pick it up
and that's something i'm pretty bad at honestly i like i try to pick up a lot of money that's not
free um but you know you see that with launch coin or light and it it happens relatively regularly
um and i think like that's something that i'm always trying to get better at is just
and and this kind of goes back to the idea of trying to tell myself a narrative as to how this thing
can go up 10x 50x 100x whatever i'm buying is just like finding more and more positions where
you're there's like theoretically free money on the floor and you know downside is relatively
limited and upside is really high um and just trying to continue to find more and more of those asymmetric trades.
And then just the hard part is just being really, really patient in between those moments.
And that's where you typically lose it is because you lose your patience and try to trade on leverage to make that money or degen shit coins and lose all your money to, to rugs and scams and stuff.
Patience to find them.
And then also patience to hold them and let the trade resolve.
Yeah.
I had to hold launch coin for like a month and a half.
I didn't even,
I sold some of it too.
Cause I was just like losing my mind.
I was like,
what's happening.
but that,
that is also a hard part of it,
but really good advice and a great way to think about things.
So this has been a fun combo.
Andy,
anything you want to plug or,
or how folks can,
can find you if you want,
before we close things out,
find me on Twitter,
Andy is zero five two.
I tweet a lot of random nonsense,
but I'll also tweet about crypto and tokens that I like and stuff,
but no,
nothing to plug.
Just happy to be here.
Well,
thanks for joining us.
Happy to have you.
And you can grass.
You're on a
hell of a run i think one of the the top traders that uh that i talked to and i'm following so
uh good game to you sir um and again thanks for joining us folks this was it this was our show
for today we will be back next tuesday i want to thank all of our listeners i want to thank
my co-host want to thank andy uh listeners. I want to thank my co-host. I want to thank Andy. Until next Tuesday, have a beautiful week.
Goodbye. Thank you.
