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CRYPTO 101
Ep. 681 Crypto’s Next Blowoff Top? Kyle Chassé Reveals What’s Coming for Bitcoin, DeFi & Altcoins
00:47:07
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Crypto 101 podcast presented by Gemini, your bridge to the future of money.
- [00:15]
B
All right, everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Crypto 101 podcast. And this is a special one. Man, I'm really, really excited. This is as real time as it gets. The market's above all time highs, things are pumping, altcoins are going crazy. But we're just feeling like we're at the beginning of this incredible Q4 rally. I was looking through some charts. You know, it feels like 2025 has just been a lot of consolidation, a lot of compression. Despite, you know, bitcoin being up big. The rest of the market hasn't really gone full bore yet. In Q4 is typically kind of when this stuff unfolds. We got a sweetheart sort of setup here, this Goldilocks, Windows, and I'm bringing on a legendary trader and investor who's been in crypto since, I mean, I, I'll ask him. I think since 2012, making some investments in Ripple folks like Coinbase early in, you know, Bitfinex, Kraken Circle, you like pretty much, you name it, everybody who's like all these different firms that are building the infrastructure of the space. Kyle Chasse has been an investor in, he's a founder of MD Global. Kyle, we are so pumped to have you join us. We're recording here Monday, October 6th. How the hell are you? And thanks for joining.
- [01:29]
C
Hey Bryce, thanks for having me first of all and feeling great. It's interesting after being in this space since 2012 like you said and you know, in the early days, well really it wasn't really until I started doing YouTube and initially for the first couple of years was, was part time and then the last two years has been full time. I just, you know, I had a lot of bitcoin back in 2013 when I, when I sold my company and bought bitcoin with it. And then from that point all the way until, you know, I never had any other revenue streams. Just as like an entrepreneur trying to figure out how to build in crypto and what to do and spent a lot of my bitcoin on, you know, startups and failures and startups and failures. And it wasn't until 2021 when we launched Paid when as a launchpad, which was the first time I started making some money again. But the point is that through that time, from 2012 until 2021, you know, Bitcoin has had its cycles and I never really, my mindset wasn't about making money at the time. I knew that eventually bitcoin would go up to a price to where like I was okay, but I still wanted to do something interesting in the world. And so, and then realizing how much bitcoin I used to have versus how much I have today, spending it, losing it over, leveraging all these kind of mistakes that were made, I better start paying attention on how to retain capital and grow that. And so really having the YouTube channel has helped me a lot in understanding markets and macro conditions and market cycles and these kind of things. And so yes, I've been in it for a long time. I've been paying attention to the macro cycles and macro conditions since about 2020, 2021 to try to learn what's going on and how to predict and pay attention to what's going on in the future a bit better. But the point that I was making about all time highs is that even after all this time, if you're in this full time and you have a lot of your net worth wrapped up in it, it's almost impossible to separate yourself emotionally from the market conditions. When you wake up and you see all time highs, you're just in a better mood, right? Totally bitcoin. And then when the markets are sideways for a whole year, like they have been that whole time, it's just like life to me at that point seems kind of just like the price, it just seems kind of boring and sideways, you know. So I guess those of us who are super deep into it live our life emotionally based on the charts a little bit. And I don't think that's, that's anything as much as you try to separate yourself emotionally from the prices. Like it just affects you one way or another, you know. So I think most people are in a good mood today. Yeah.
- [04:02]
B
And it's funny, you know, prices really are a chart or a graph of like human emotion over time. And so it is hard to extract yourself from that. But I found one of the successful trading adages has been to invert the chart sometimes, right? Because if you invert the chart you're like, oh well, the prices are up huge. Maybe I'm going to take a little profits off. Prices are down huge. Maybe I'm going to add a little bit. But it seems like right now I don't want to invert the chart. I want to keep buying even though we're high because it feels like we're just beginning this breakout, you know, again, once, you know, kind of crypto starts to trade above its all time high, like a total market Cap perspective, which we're just starting to do. There's very little price resistance above us. It seems like we're in this price discovery mode. But the one like kind of chip to fall, at least in my opinion, before we get really crazy, is Ethereum. Above all time highs. And I think we're close. In fact, by the time people are watching this, you know, first thing in the morning tomorrow we're going to edit it, we're going to get it out. Ethereum might be above 5k, but once we get that 5 handle on Ethereum, there's going to be that wealth effect. People are going to really be like, you know, I'm starting to get calls. People personally starting to reach out, like, hey, like, did I already miss out? Like, it feels like things are starting to come. So I, I feel that groundswell happening. But, you know, take us, take us back to 2012 and just in your mindset, what was standing out to you that allowed you to take such enormous risk on these early, early crypto companies? Was it something philosophical? Was it something in the fundamentals? How were you so prescient to get into some of these early rounds, early companies, early exposure, when a lot of people weren't even thinking that crypto was going to be a thing?
- [05:39]
C
Sure, I'll answer that. And then I guess you're probably going to want to go into market cycles and stuff like that. So just remind me to talk about a couple things, institutional fomo and then like you said, the new people who are texting you, because I have some insight on that, which I think is quite interesting.
- [05:53]
A
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- [07:37]
C
That's.
- [07:38]
A
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- [08:47]
D
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- [09:17]
C
Now going back to 2012 is when I first learned about bitcoin. And at that time I had a startup, it was called the Reverse Aging institute. The whole 10 years before that I was working in longevity and there wasn't a whole lot of value in the business itself because it was a basically a consulting company for these high net worth individuals, which was me being able to provide what I knew. So the guy bought the company just for the branding, which was cool. Like I did a 3x on the branding, you know, like 30, $40,000 in branding. I sold it for like 120k and I put that in Bitcoin in 2013 and I started bitcoin lottery called World Super Lotto. And the idea was like, you know, I'd heard on the radio a state local, a state lottery was like 300 something million dollars. I thought, wow, that's crazy. What if you put one lottery for every state of the United States together? That would be like the billions of dollars. But then there's like lotteries in every country in the world, right? And like, so what if you had this global lottery that could exist with this currency that wasn't regulated, that no one cared about. But like, I also thought adoption would come sooner than it actually did. So I just experimented and I did like, I just really copy pasta. Like the California State lottery website design, the way the numbers were picked. I bought this, you know, this lottery machine, the physical one from China, shipped it to my house in America and then twice a week ran livestreaming videos of a lottery. And I was pseudo anonymous at the time because I knew that people like, I thought bitcoin was very disruptive. And I know that anyone who's been very disruptive to anything in the United States before has been like met with a lot of force. And I knew that like bitcoin would maybe challenge US$1 day. And so I thought, well, I don't want to be publicly known for someone doing this stuff right now, so I'll be pseudonymous. But the conviction came really from, you know, one, I saw what was happening with Silk Road and how that was like that whole thing blew my mind. That was how I first learned about. It was learning about Silk Road. But it wasn't like the drug marketplace or the bitcoin or even I discovered the dark web at that time. It wasn't any of those one things together that was so specifically, aha. It was like, how is this ebay for drugs, like allowed to take place and people are paying for it with this bitcoin thing. But then, but then when I saw WikiLeaks using it to start accepting donations, that was the aha moment when I was like, okay, this is, this is someone, this is an organization who in my mind was doing a net positive for the world. And I saw, and before that, a bit of history. I was always a tinfoil hat guy, you know, the teenager who was watching all the documentaries about the Federal Reserve and this being a scam and that being a scam. And so when I saw WikiLeaks doing what it did and I saw that they weren't all the centralized powers were putting pressure on all the payment gateways to shut down their donations. And then bitcoin was the thing that they, that they had to default to to enable them to continue to operate. Like that was the big aha moment. So I just thought this was super interesting. I'd always felt also like at that point I wasn't interested in voting in the United States. I didn't think that that actually matter to much degree. Like in my life, in my parents life, like a president of the United States had never made a difference in the way that they lived their life or their circumstances. And I also felt that like, because, because lobbying was allowed to exist, that these mega corporations were always allowed to influence politicians and like, as long as lobbying.
- [12:33]
B
Citizens United.
- [12:34]
C
Yeah. And as long as lobbying could exist, like, I didn't think that there was actually really fair politics or politicians could get things done in a meaningful way. So I wanted to do something that was meaningful to the world. But I felt like there was no real call to action at that point before bitcoin because nothing was able to get around the centralized power control the military industrial complex, the pharmacy industrial complex, all these things. So bitcoin was the first thing that said, wow, this is able to circumvent these centralized powers of control. It's the first thing that made me feel like this aha moment where it could disrupt a lot of these things that were bothering me. And so I just wanted to be involved in it somehow. So, yes, I acquired quite a bit in 2013 and then I did the lottery for fun. It was just like, hey, let's see. Like, I wasn't. I didn't think this was going to make a ton of money, but it was like, how. How can I build something with bitcoin?
- [13:22]
B
It was experimental. Yeah, it was experimental. And, and it took off and it's. It's so interesting. I love your story because it. It really does. You know, we've got, you know, all sorts of different guests that come on the show and everybody gets into crypto at a different time for a different reason. But yours really rings true to kind of the cypherpunk ideals of, you know, almost this anarcho capitalist kind of viewpoint. Whereas, you know, back in 2012, it was this, you know, gray money in a sense. And the industry has evolved so much. And now you see it on. You got commercials on tv, you know, you got the. The most, you know, important people in finance like BlackRock and Fidelity and Morgan Stanley all talking about, yeah, now we're going to give you guys bitcoin exposure. Like, what do you think somebody who's seen it evolve from 2012 to 2025 kind of, what is your, you know, are you disillusioned? Do you think the industry's lost its way? Did you kind of always anticipate, like, of course this is going to happen. If you're going to go to global adoption, you need to have some global regulation. How do you pair the two in your mind?
- [14:28]
C
Well, it's interesting. So. So my mindset, you know, keep in mind, 13 years ago, when I took the only capital that I had from the sale of that business, because I had. I had zero in the bank, like, at that business, basically. But when I sold it, I had that 120 grand or whatever. And for me, it didn't feel like I was taking a huge risk. You know, I was young and like, my whole entrepreneurial path hadn't really taken off yet at that point. And so I didn't feel like I was like, being super risky putting this money. I didn't have that mindset of, like, I just thought that bitcoin was the place that I should store my money rather than fiat. And then what I did, I did have a strong feeling, a sense of conviction that there was always going to be a market for bitcoin, whether that means that it's only going to be used for illicit activities and people who want it to be. And also in 2013, we really thought that Bitcoin was more like anonymous than it actually is. Right. We come to find out later and you know that it's very traceable. The three letter agencies love it because they can always find who's doing stuff with Bitcoin, you know. But at the time though, it felt, we kind of all suspected that it was like this anonymous way to send money back and forth. So I thought that at the time it would definitely be used as a world currency for some sort of people and more than was using it in 2013. So I thought that even like at a smaller level of adoption, it would still be popular and used. And then I guess like every year, let's say that my. At that time, 2013, I did suspect that maybe it would be a world reserve currency one day. But I guess at that point my conviction was only maybe 40% or something like that. Right? But probably each passing year after that, that conviction maybe grew by 10% and then I guess by 2000, I guess maybe 2017 or 18 or something like that, I thought for sure this would eventually become a world reserve currency. Because you understand that the other ones that exist today, they're not programmed to work long term. The US dollar today, for example, it can't sustain the path that it's on right now as one path forward. And that is debased and devalued. And so, so then I knew it would become a world wizard currency. But you said the Blackrocks and Fidelities and don't forget too, we just had Vanguard finally bend the knee and say, okay, we're also going to start allowing our clients. And that was a big turning point too because if you put on your tinfoil hat and you look a little bit deeper, Vanguard is more of a privately managed fund who we don't really know. There's not much as transparency as who is the major money behind that. There's a lot of people that suspect that, you know, Vanguard was maybe more that old kind of elitist globalist money. The Rothschilds of, you know, The Vanderbilts, the J.P. morgan's, these kind of guys. And so, you know, seeing them eventually coming into it feels like this is the path of finally being accepted for sure. I made a really interesting video actually. Maybe I could share with you guys. You can link it in the description below. Yeah, that'd be great. It's kind of my take on the who is Satoshi thing.
- [17:46]
B
Okay.
- [17:47]
C
And it's more of a thought experiment than I have any idea this is true or not. But the TLDR of that. And if people want to watch the video to get more data of why I have this theory, they can. But the TLDR is that uh, what if Bitcoin was actually created by the same folks who have been controlling the US dollar for a century. It's the people who created the Federal Reserve, famous Rothschild, they're off ramp. Maybe the famous Rothschild's quote is like, give me the ability to control the money of a nation and I care not who makes the laws, right? And so think about this for a second. If you are these families who created the Federal Reserve and you control the banking, all the money in the dollar, and you've been doing that for a long time, you have unlimited resources and you have unlimited power. So it just seems to, and you're probably very smart as well. It seems to me that like if you're in that position, you're always playing offense and defense to make sure that you're never disrupted, right? And so like you're always going to be looking ahead and seeing who's trying to challenge us, who's trying to, you know, take away the power of the dollar and what could come next. After every free fiat currency that's ever existed or major currency that's ever ruled the world in the past, the great British pound and the ones before that, they all had this like 100 year lifespan. And so these guys who were controlling the dollar must have obviously known that, studied history and also studied, you know, modern monetary policy which is very inflationary and based on debt and not sustainable. That like when the dollar inevitably comes to an end, like are you still going to be in power for the next century or not? And so, so either they were looking for end of the video. I go into a lot of details about how the nsa, you know, create. There's a lot of similarities with the bitcoin code and the encryptions that they use and the patents. So CIA, nsa. So I think it's a fun thought experiment to think what if these guys actually created Bitcoin? And it was. And the thing is with brics currencies, brics trying to also maybe overthrow the dollar and create their own currency. The US is not going to let that happen without a war. There's no way the US just quietly observes while the BRICS nations gather and create a powerful currency. The thing about today though is these major superpowers have too much actual firepower to want to start a really major war. That's scary as shit. Like everyone knows that, you know, you start launching nukes and it's a mutually assured destruction and the whole planet goes to shit, right? So, so no longer is it a place where through military we can demand that you use our US dollar or demand to use our Chinese one. Like it has to feel like the next reserve currency is organic and it comes from apolitical space. And it had its challenges along the way and then blah, blah, and eventually it became accepted. Right? And if you had this plan from the beginning and you had the first million Bitcoin like Satoshi does, and as your plan started to become more successful and adopted and it seemed like it was becoming more and more feasible that this was going to work, you could have been acquiring it along the way to make sure that now you have instead of 1 million bitcoin, you have 2 or 3 or 4 million. And then again then when the dollar falls and Bitcoin does become the world's reserve currency, you still have the most control over it and the most of it. So that's a fun thought experiment. I don't know if it's true or not. Like Satoshi could be this benevolent superhero that we all hoped he was. But I guess the bottom line is like, it doesn't really matter which is true. The path forward for Bitcoin is. Bitcoin is inevitable. It's apolitical. Anyone in the world can have it and buy it easily. The infrastructure is being set up all over the world from all the major institutions. And at this point we've already reached the inflection point where there's no going back. Bitcoin is for sure going to be a world reserve currency. I mean, people won't say. A lot of people don't say that because especially politicians and leaders and Larry Fink and Howard Lutnick and stuff like that, they're not going to say that, even though they probably feel that it is going to be, because right now they have a responsibility to preserve the US dollar. But I think most people understand what's happening.
- [21:42]
B
No, it's a great kind of overview and it makes me think like, you know, in this world of, you know, being philosophically driven in a sense that, you know, this is the new form of money. It's the reserve currency of the world. Do you think that there's credence or like, right. To exist for altcoins, things like Ethereum, Solana and then so down the risk spectrum? Or are you what would be called a bitcoin maximalist?
- [22:06]
C
Yeah, I'm not a maximalist at all. Um, I think, I think Bitcoin. So like blockchain was this like, really cool invention that allowed us to have consensus in a decentralized way that's immutable and that that's very valuable. For many use cases. Money was just like Satoshi's, he thought was like the most important thing that we, we the people need to have sovereignty over. And so like, he created blockchain for the most important thing that he thought should be disrupted first. But then like, there's a lot of other great use cases for decentralized systems with transparency, transparent and immutable governance, or governance that at least is voted on by the people in consensus. And so when you think about, especially as we move forward with automation and AI, like, I believe that anything, any system, any organization, any application that can efficiently and effectively be governed without like a huge central corporation running things should and will be. When you, when you think about the economics of decentralized applications, let's say, like there's a, there's a good argument for both sides of the coin on Uber or Airbnb or something like that. Like, one, people will say it should always be centralized because a centralized team is what has allowed Uber to scale and grow to the scale that it is today and be so successful and blah, blah, blah. You know, maybe ride sharing doesn't need to have food delivery and, you know, robo taxis flying through the air and stuff like that. Like Uber's expanding to maybe like if you could just disrupt ride sharing on a decentralized application, meaning removing the middlemen and allowing that 30% profit that Uber takes to be shared by both the passenger and the driver to make the driver make more money on every trip and have the passenger pay less for every trip. Like if you open a ride sharing aggregator app that Uber Lyft grab all the other ones. But then there's this new decentralized Uber, let's call it Duber, right? And you open Duber and you want to get from your house to the airport. And like on uber it's at 100 bucks, but in Duber it's only 80 bucks, right? The driver makes more money, you pay less money. And like, which driver wouldn't want to use that application? Which passenger wouldn't want to? You get the exact same experience because no one ever calls 1-800-UBER to talk to customer service. It doesn't. It's not needed, right? Like, that's all able to govern itself. So now how big does this Duber get as far as going into the future of full autonomation? And it could, right, because the devs, the people who created it, they, the founders have 10 or 20% of the supply of the token. So if they continue to innovate and develop and ship, then the economic value of the ecosystem goes up. And so they're incentivized, just like any other founder to increase the enterprise value of that application. And so they do have incentive to continue to innovate and things like that. So but again, for the majority of people in the world, they're going to take the option that it costs less or the drivers are going to take the option that pays them more, so long as the experience is virtually the same. And so I think that these are good examples like Airbnb and Uber and others of these peer to peer services that currently have middlemen extracting value from that situation. So I love the idea of decentralized applications. I'm a little bit disappointed that we don't have more of that. Like we don't have any of these. None of them have really taken off on mainstream yet. But I think that has a lot to do with this experimentation that we've been doing since Ethereum existed of how do you get the tokenomics, right? How do you get the economics of the revenue and the value distribution? Most of the time these people have built these decentralized applications. They build them with a centralized mindset, meaning that, hey, we're going to raise money in equity. Hey, we're going to sell this token. Hey, we're going to earn revenue, but we're going to earn revenue and we're going to keep it into the equity side of the business. And the token has no, no real utility. Today people are starting to realize, you hear it more and more from the hyper liquids and asters. And we're going to take the revenue that we earn and we're going to put it back into the token so that the only economic value is in the token model. The equity side has no value in the business, right? It's just like so all the revenue, the real world adoption that's going back into buying the token, hopefully burning or redistributing through rewards or whatever, they're creating one token economy versus what people have been doing. The greedy founders who either were naive, committing fraud or stupid or whatever, but they were having one business that had two economic models, which means when you get revenue from doing sales or whatever, where does it go, right? And if you're diluting that by, by going 50, 50 or I hear a lot of people say, oh, we're going to do 10% revenue buybacks. Well, what the fuck did you sell? Like, why did you create two different paths for investors, one on equity side and one on token side? Never before crypto did we ever have a business model that had two different pools of people to take care of, right? It was only, it was very easy for a centralized company with equity to understand how that equity is valued. It's just what is the revenue and the profits of the company that goes back into the share price, right? But now you have people who are creating these economic models where they're now having two pools of people to take care of and they often ignore the token model. So the adoption has come, I think, from a lack of understanding how to build good economic models, lack of understanding of how to do governance, a lack of having nice UX and UI in crypto. Like for most people, transacting on Ethereum feels like slow and antiquated. But now we have Solana and Sui and these other things. And then blockchain is supposed to be just infrastructure, right? Like that's all it's supposed to be, right? People should be using these decentralized apps like Duber for example, and it should feel just like a Web2 application, right? They shouldn't have to connect their wallet and have to sign all these things that they don't understand what they're signing and have these 12 word password phrases that they lose it, your money's gone and you're out of, you're out of luck. Like these things are very intimidating for most people coming into the space and they don't feel like a nice user experience. And so as we're starting to build technology that abstracts away that complicated Web three part from the end user, then infrastructure can feel like infrastructure again. It's something that we just know is there. We trust that it works well and we don't have to interact with it. It's like a bridge, the roads, the foundation of a house, the structure of a skyscraper, whatever. We don't have to check the integrity of these things before we use them. We just trust that they're solid sound and that they give us the ability to build these things on top of. And so that's where I think that we're heading bull run this season. We're just starting to see again what the first thing of disruptive blockchain technology was for money. And so now we're seeing money technology being adopted into the application level. So this season feels like where last seasonality, last bull runs. We had all these Narratives of like, we're going to disrupt gaming, we're going to disrupt social, social media, we're going to disrupt whatever it was. But that was too far of a stretch of people's imaginations to come. At the time it was like, I don't understand why we need these things, like, whatever. But now it's going back to the roots of like, how do we build applications to disrupt money again? But this time it's the money infrastructure, it's the Rails, it's the banks. And so now we're seeing Defi, like with the most TVL we've ever seen, the most users we've ever seen on Defi. And when people use good Defi applications, they're thinking themselves. When they finally get it, they're like, why the hell would I ever go to a bank again to take out a loan when I could go to AAVE and get a loan in 12 seconds, right? Like with no questions asked, no KYC, no nothing. Phenomenal experience, right? You know, looking now, you see all of the major players like Swift and everyone else upgrading their antiquated infrastructure of three days to do a bank settlement and 100 bucks or whatever, and now they're going on chain because it's more efficient and faster and more, more transparent and it gives them all the tools that they need. So everyone's upgrading to essentially defi and blockchain Rails right now. And so I think that's the first kind of application that people, It's. It's easier for people to grasp and understand because again, it's, it's kind of just modernizing the traditional finance infrastructure, putting on chain, and a lot of it's not fully decentralized, Some of it is. But again, people will also eventually realize if they have somewhat like a centralized, like a bank that's building infrastructure and then a decentralized competitor of it. But the UX is very similar. People are going to start using the decentralized version. Why? Because it's got better fees, more yield, no kyc, you can use it from anywhere in the world. You don't have to trust a centralized entity. So eventually, as people start to get more comfortable using blockchain and the idea of it, they will start to use these things more in mass and then we'll start to see more adoption.
- [30:27]
B
No, you hit the nail on the head and I think that this is the defi bull run that we've all been waiting for. I mean, in the last bull run, it felt like Defi didn't really run as hard I mean, in 2020, you know, I should say the DeFi summer 2020. I mean, that was a really good time. 2021, a little bit, but really haven't seen DEFI catch a serious, serious bid. And I think you're right, like DEFI is built to meet this moment, like the institutional grade regulated sort of, you know, industry meeting, crypto. It's like DEFI is, is, is right there to meet the moment, the RWA stuff. So I'm super optimistic on it. And I think also what's driving a lot of interest and flows and you know, is the market structure is evolving. Right? And so we have these ETFs that are, that are coming online. Obviously the bitcoin ETF was like the most successful ETF to, was like, was ever launched by like several different metrics and AUM and it's the most profitable, profitable ETF for BlackRock. And so the fastest ETF to like 80 billion under management did it five times faster than the VO, which is like S&P 500. Like crazy, you know, success of these ETFs. But the thing that's on the horizon is these altcoin ETFs, which, you know, our community is really excited about because SEC kind of under Trump now has come out and said we're going to take a different view of the last sec 180 and going to bring the altcoin market to the public markets. And so we're going to basically give you generic listing standards for all these different altcoins. And I, I see you nodding along. I want to get your take on this. Is this big, is this a McGuffin? Is it, you know, going to fall flat on its face? Like, what is getting altcoins into these ETF wrappers do and how are you thinking about it?
- [32:09]
C
Yeah, so it's interesting because for someone like myself or you who've been in the industry for like, you know, at least a season or more, we've had enough time to kind of digest what these different use cases are for these different blockchains or these different tokens or whatever. But for the majority of the world and most money that comes into these ETFs, they don't understand anything past bitcoin and they barely understand bitcoin now. And some of them are still trying to learn from their financial advisors right now. You know, you got the sales guys at blackrock going and playing golf with their, their old money people and they've had 12 golf sessions and like just now they're starting to get uncomfortable with the idea of what is bitcoin, right? And like, and maybe they're going to start allocating 1% of their portfolio to it this year, right? And they're like, okay, well let's see how it goes this year. Next year, if it's doing well, we'll allocate another 1 or 2%, right?
- [32:57]
B
They move at a glacial pace, these old school guys.
- [32:59]
C
This old money is. They also have so much money that it's just not really interesting for them to take the risk anymore. Like they're just living great off their interest alone. That BlackRock's already making them of 6 or 8 or 10% a year, whatever it is, like, they see no need to be super risky. But the thing that I was asking you to remind me about later, the thing is that FOMO, even for people who don't get FOMO, like if you're old and you've got $100 million or a billion dollars, you don't really get FOMO much in the money world anymore. You're good and you're not worried about missing the next hundred x or something.
- [33:35]
B
I've already made it.
- [33:36]
C
You already made it. And your interest alone is keeping you. You're not spending $10 million a year on your interest. It's fine. There is something about just the interest of bitcoin and someone who's been watching it long enough, let's say they've been watching it since, you know, 29,000 or 50,000 and like they keep thinking about it and they've been watching it for a couple of years or even people who haven't, like, price is a real interesting thing. And so what I was alluding to earlier is now that we're coming into price discovery and all time highs, if bitcoin moves up and to the right like in a linear fashion, nice and slow like it has since 2022, it doesn't really give people that sense of urgency to like finally deploy, right? But when we go into what we're expecting to happen over the next few months right now, and this seasonality of Q4 after post halving year, Bitcoin doesn't do a linear progression, it starts to go parabolic. And so do altcoins, right? And that FOMO of not putting money into it, when these markets start moving at like total market cap starts increasing by like 5% a day or 10% a day, because Bitcoin's going up at 1 or 2 or 3% every single day for months on end. And ETH is doing like 4, 5, 6%. And then altcoins are doing 10, 20, 30% in a day for literally like a month or six weeks straight. That temptation that FOMO is such a, a contagious kind of feeling. One of the things, nobody can fight it. One of the things I've been battling with this, this season was like, is there enough money in the economy from 99% who have been struggling since COVID struggling with inflated prices, wages not keeping up, credit card debt is at all time highs right now. People are starting to default on car loans more than ever. The housing market's in big trouble. Interest rates have been high for a while. We're not in a very, we're not in a quantitative easing state yet. We haven't had massive injection of stimulus, although Trump just said he might do with like a $2,000 stimmy check, which would be amazing. That would remind us of the COVID stimulus which boosted our markets. When I start to think about it, what do we need for parabolic altcoin rally explosion? You need retail money to come in because, because institutions aren't going out and buying like 2 million dollar meme coins, right? Like they're just not going to do that, but retail will, right? And, and so I think that interesting thing about that FOMO factor is like, even if right now you're living paycheck to paycheck and times have been hard since COVID and you don't really have money to go to the movies or to take your family out to nice dinner or whatever, but you start to see like altcoin mania. And like on your timeline of whatever social media you're on, you just see like this guy put in, you know, a thousand bucks into something and now it's worth 3 million. Like it's the story of lottery winners happening every single day on social media. It's not like the lottery, like, like it seems like your average Joe is like making generational money on gambling on meme coins or some low cap altcoin or whatever. And so I think that temptation and that reputation is just too much for even people that can't afford to do it to go take out a line of credit, to go sell their car, mortgage their house. Like, and I think that sounds like.
- [36:52]
B
We'Re describing a casino in a sense.
- [36:53]
C
Yeah, I think, I feel like unfortunately that might be where we're headed. I mean, unfortunately for most people because it doesn't end well for those kind of people who FOMO and toward the top.
- [37:02]
E
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- [37:29]
C
And then think it's just gonna keep. It's a first cycle or they haven't learned from previous cycles. But that's what send that's what usually creates these blow off tops is like when everyone just goes all in mortgages, the house sells a kidney, whatever. That's when the markets are just exploding and ripping and that's your top signal, right. And so when I really think about it, I do feel like that's going to happen. For a while there I was just worried that we weren't going to have like a parabolic season. I thought that like it was just going to continue to go until it like slowly rolled over and then we ended the business cycle, liquidity dried up, tightening conditions started happening again and, and then we just got this like very like anticlimactic bull run. But I do think that we're going to see another big bull run and the question is how long will it last, right? And I don't have the answer to that. I've always thought, I've always like I've always hated technical analysis. I thought it was like just astrology for crypto Bros. But like the more that I see people who really study charts and patterns like they seem to be like fairly accurate with things maybe not on day trading so much but like more on just like general timelines and things. So I guess like that what we're doing is just we're kind of expecting that we're going to see very similar pattern to the previous cycles where this cycle ends at the end of this year and kind of planning for that you'll really know if you feel very rich and everyone that you know that's never done crypto starts asking again. Coinbase app is at number one, Phantom App is number two, whatever. That's probably a pretty good signal to start selling and taking out at least like half of whatever it is. So yeah, the thing I was gonna say too is that on the institute, so that's the retail side I think that the institution that the FOMO also exists for institutions and even Hideout with Individuals. Like when you have been exploring or dipping your toes into the crypto space for a while and you asked about the altcoin DATs, digitized treasury.
- [39:19]
B
That was gonna be my next question. Yeah, because the investment banks are starting to feel FOMO on this stuff, I think, for sure.
- [39:24]
C
And that's why Vanguard had to open up, because too many of their clients were like, what the fuck? If you're not going to let us do bitcoin, then we're going to go to blackrock. And so that FOMO affects everybody to some extent. And when bitcoin goes from 125 and then by the end of October, it's at 150, everyone's going to want to jump in at that point. And so the institutional, like these digital asset treasuries for altcoins and the altcoin ETFs. I guess when you ask a question, it was like, I told you that, like, people are only starting to understand Bitcoin. So I think the individual ETFs, a Cardano ETF or Solana one or Sui one. I don't know that they're going to be wildly successful. I just don't know that people are, like, are, like, going to be that comfortable up the risk curve. But I do think that they're going to want general altcoin exposure. And since they don't really understand altcoins, I think that these basket ETFs, and maybe a basket dash or something like that, they'll do really well. Because people want exposure to, like, the top altcoins. Right? But they don't really. That's why the S and P does well. The other indexes do well. Because they don't want to bet on a single horse. They just want the basket of things. Right? They're like, okay, like, I'll allocate 5% of my entire portfolio to Bitcoin and let's do another 2 or 3% to altcoins and just put it across the top 10 altcoins or whatever. Right. Top 20, whatever it is. And so I think these baskets will do well. And subsequently the assets that happen to be the baskets will do well. And then there's probably going to be like one or two major asset treasury companies in each country that actually can do well as, like, individual asset ETFs, like Solana or SUI or whatever. I don't think the smaller ones will actually be able to continue to raise and capture more value. So I think that any of the smaller ones that have launched will be consolidated Amongst the top one or two. Yeah. And that's how I see it playing out. And that maybe like next cycle, in five years from now, four years from now, we'll have a lot more interest in these altcoins as people start to understand them.
- [41:17]
B
I love that. I think that's super, super interesting. And I'm thinking that we're going to get a lot more of these products for public market investors who are going to see all this crypto stuff moving much higher and they're going to want to be able to play a part in it. And I love what you said there. And one of the things I wanted to kind of go back on and talk about real quick was now that we've got the ibit sort of BlackRock ETF, you're seeing a really deep liquid options market start to unfold there. It's something that bitcoin's never really had. And these options just kind of got approved earlier this year. And so we've got now some interesting data. And I was looking at the open interest by strike price and there's like a huge, huge, huge cluster of open interest at the hundred dollar strike price for this ibit which makes sense, it's like this round number. And so basically it's showing a lot of these investors have calls that they've bought at $100 per ibit and that would equal $175,000 per bitcoin. Because of the ratio of IBIT to bitcoin, I think each IBIT or there's about one Bitcoin is always fixed at like 1,755 Ibit shares or something like that. And so long story short, the market thinks again, that's just a 40% move from 125k, just a 40% move. And that could happen this year in bitcoin. But like if we get that sort of move again, I'm super optimistic that altcoins are going to really, really take a big rip. So I like your thesis as well, kind of about, you know, this could be the blow off top period. I saw Paul Tudor Jones on CNBC this morning talking about he thinks we're going to be getting some kind of blow off top here as well. He thinks, he said this could be 1999 where it's like it just gets crazier and crazier and crazier until you don't even believe it. And then all of a sudden things, you know, the rug gets pulled. So it could go either way and you know, we'll see Nobody's got the, nobody's got the crystal ball. But what's kind of, you know, outside of, you know, Bitcoin, Ethereum, those, those fundamentals. Are there any like altcoins that you think have that staying power that's going to last the next cycle? You know, and you could, you know, disclose if you have exposure or not, but you have like one or two hot picks that you think, you know, might change the world, might last through the next cycle.
- [43:34]
C
I think there's a lot of, you know, there's, there's, you know, because just think about like all of the successful major corporations around the world and even the ones that compete in the same space, you know, and like there's a ton of them and that's in each country because crypto and the infrastructure is a global product, you know, you have.
- [43:54]
B
So it's permissionless. Anybody could launch one too, right?
- [43:57]
C
Anyone can launch one. People are using Ethereum and Solana and Sui and everything else. They're using them in every country in the world. And so, you know, there's so much room for so many things to exist and be and be successful for, you know, like imagine you have, imagine that someone takes a, let's say a chain that didn't really have any adoption. Let's say that's it's, it's a, it's a Cardano or it's Polka dot or it's like, you know, Algorand or something like that. Like these chains that are like really good and capable but like just no one uses them because like ghost chains. Yeah, they didn't. Yeah. But all it would take for that chain to become economically valuable and have more economic value than any other chain is one major, let's say TikTok goes on Cardano and puts all transactions on chain. Now all of a sudden Cardano does more real transaction volume than every other chain in the world because one player decided to be more transparent, put everything on chain so you never know what's going to happen. So, you know, and then I think then things, things like cults like Cardano will probably exist forever because people believe in the cult. Because like no one's building on Cardano really, but it's still super valuable and people believe that it's going to be the, you know, the next Bitcoin or whatever. That's, that's interesting thing too about these public speculative markets is that people continue like the token will have value as long as people are willing to buy it and sell it at a price. But when you Ask about a few of them. Like, you know, anyone who watches my channel or follows me knows that I'm very, very bullish on sui.
- [45:30]
B
Okay.
- [45:31]
C
I, you know, like I've been following that story closely. You know, SUI was built by the former Meta team, the guys at Facebook and stuff with Zuckerberg. $2 billion of R& D went into creating Project Libra or dm, which is one that Facebook got shut down.
- [45:50]
B
Yeah, I remember that.
- [45:50]
C
So $2 billion of R& D went into building that to create and they were ready to launch and go live. Right. And if they were allowed to do that overnight, Facebook would have been the biggest bank and it's in the financial institution in the world, 8 like 4 billion customers, whatever, access to transactions on their chain. So if you're doing that and you're about to go live, you better be super confident that your technology is not going to have exploits or errors and it's going to be very easy to use. And so 2 billions of dollars went into building this infrastructure and building their own coding language and smart contract language and parallel processes processing and all this stuff. And so like when that DM got shut down, you had several teams that were splintered from that. But like Missing Labs, which built sui is the main team that built the main language, built missin infrastructure with the engineers. And so they are building like this like whole technology stack that allows anyone to build on SUI with on chain storage and more transactions per second than anyone would need. The lowest latency for any financial products to go on where you don't have to settlement happens basically instantly. It just so. And they have a really strong business development team, huge treasury, great technology, account abstraction. And so I think like there's going to be a lot of people who win in the application space. Right? And I think like Solana is like a really good one. I think Sui is a really good one. Those are like the bets. Something like BNB is going to be valuable because. Because CZ and Binance, they're buying back like a billion plus dollars of tokens every quarter and burning them. So you just have this crazy economic flywheel of a number go up forever as long as Binance is profitable and Binance will always be profitable in perpetuity. Right. Like, even if Dexs like Aster end up taking significant market share, Binance will always still have 50, 60, you know, 50% or more of the total trading volume that happens on anything. And they're expanding, expanding everything. They have unlimited resources and they continue to add value to the bnb token and network. So I don't see that slowing down anytime soon. So those are all be multi generational. They'll never, I don't think they'll ever go out of business. I don't think they'll ever shut down. I think that'll be, that's the future of the Internet as these, like these, these layer ones and I think those are good bets for now on the application layer. Who knows? Who knows. One of the things that we're working on though that I think is really interesting is so capital formation. You know, like how does the whole process of these companies getting funded, distributing tokens to retail investors, to institutional investors transparently in a regulated fashion and trying to get these new crypto startups to have tokens to be more transparent and more reliable. The same way that a company goes public on the New York Stock Exchange when they've got investment bankers and people that are supporting liquidity and market making and price and stability. That is probably going to happen with our markets too. So we're going to find really great, awesome companies who have existing revenue business models, killer teams, who want to put their business on chain, who want to switch their economic model to value creation of the token side of the business. And so right now one of the things that we're working on right now is doing that. So yeah, I can't say too much right now but like, you know when I told you in 2021 we started making money again, that's when we launched Paid Network, which was like one of the top two launch pads in the space. Since the bear market, we've been thinking about how does this industry evolve for like ICOs and IDOS and how do we, how do we. That's why I moved back to America was actually how do I bring the American markets into this capital formation segment. And so, so we've made some pretty good progress on that and, and hopefully by the end of the year you'll start to see some stuff from us. When it comes down to like institutions, Wall street, publicly listed companies doing these crowdfunding models and launching them to take them public.
- [49:45]
B
Gosh, that's going to be incredible. And hopefully we could have you back on the show sometime very soon to, to talk about that. As you guys kind of come out of stealth, we would love to, to kind of dig in on that. Kyle, where can folks follow along with your journey? We greatly appreciated your time today. I want to make sure everybody knows where to, where to kind of follow along.
- [50:04]
C
Yeah. So Kyle, C H A S SE Chasse. So you can find me on, on Twitter or X. That one, it's Kyle underscore Chasse. My YouTube is Kyle Chasse Crypto. Or if you just go to my name, Kyle Chasse.com, you've got all the links there and stuff like that. Beautiful. So I make daily videos on YouTube. YouTube, Monday through Friday, post relentlessly on X. And yeah, that's really where you can find me.
- [50:28]
B
Awesome. Well, thank you so much and cheers to Price Discovery Mode. Cheers to a good bull market. And we'll talk again soon. Everybody at home listening. Thank you so much for tuning in. That was the inside look of a long term crypto veteran crypto titan here painting a very optimistic picture for where we're going. So thank you everyone and tune back in next week for another great guest, Sam.