C (2:48)

So are there. I want to switch gears a little bit. I know you just got off stage. I believe you were predicting Trump was going to take control of the Fed in the first half of 2026. I'm just interested in your take right now of what's happening in, on the US Side of crypto.

B (3:03)

I mean, at the end of the day, it's about making sure that the right people in tradfi make enough money on this bitcoin crypto boom, this bubble that they're going to blow by, you know, pumping up the credit, Right? So they want to make sure that people are paying their taxes, they're buying their real estate, they're going to the club, they're going to the restaurants. You know, the investment bankers are making 5% doing dat deals. The lawyers are charging $2,000 an hour to make opinions like everybody's making money in crypto because it's this bull market and it's going to help sort of revitalize the government finances. So that, I think, is the why Trump wants crypto to do well.

A (3:40)

And so what does that mean? I mean, what are you predicting? First half of 2026 that happens. Where does bitcoin go?

B (3:46)

I mean, I, my, I still believe that Bitcoin could be 250,000 by the end of the year. And my North Star is 2028. End of 2028, when Trump and his cronies leave office, that, you know, in their wake, bitcoin could be in the million dollar plus range because of all the money that they printed between now and the end of their term.

A (4:05)

We're at the end of September, the end of the year is coming really soon, and we're not close to 250,000. What has that happened?

B (4:10)

Come on.

C (4:14)

Arthur, I couldn't help but ask you about yesterday's conversation on Twitter about hype. Yeah, Hyperliquid. You and Maelstrom got out of, out of your position. You talked about all of these token unlocks being really deflationary on the opportunities for, I guess, retail. Can you just, like, break down your thesis about this?

B (4:33)

So, number one, I got on stage in Tokyo and I wrote a very, I think, very Good essay about stable coins and how hype has a potential to go 120x26x. Now the key point here is by 2028 we are in 2025 right now and a lot of things can happen between now and then. And as a chief investment officer of a hedge fund, I make, I go long, I go short, even though I might have a conviction on a long term state of play. And so right now in the short term we have an issue where Hyper Liquid is facing its chinesification moment where they're going to have competitors who've seen a successful business model and they're going to say, okay, great, now I'm going to take it, take your price down to zero and see how you survive. Right? And so we have lighter zero fee trading in some sort of air up. We have Aster maybe or maybe not. It's backed by cz, I have no idea. And they're doing low or no fee trading. And so when you have Hyper Liquidity, I think they charge like something three and a half or four basis points, whatever it is, and they have this massive potential cell pressure coming starting in November. We don't know how many of the developers are going to sell, if at all. But if I'm going to think about the model, I'm going to say, well, okay, do I believe that Hype has the moat in terms of revenues to make enough money so they buy back enough Hype tokens where this doesn't matter. And before, you know, this weekend when I pull up the Defi llama leaderboard and I saw that LiDAR was number two and Astro number three, you know, both doing, you know, two, three, four billion dollar ADV days and hype was only about 4.5 billion. I'm like, okay, well this isn't good. I didn't have to make money. Hype makes money, then they buy hype and then I don't care about the unlock. But if there are these people, they're going to say I'm going to go and pull the we care, we only care. We'll make it up in volume in the back end. I'm going to go Z0 fee trading, see if I can get all your users Vampire squid attack. You do an airdrop so that people can do another 1020 x on their airdrop that I'm worried that Hype might not have enough money to buy back enough tokens to offset this potential negative drag on the very publicly known unlock schedule. And I said, okay, cool, I'm going to exit if hype goes from 50 to 100 and I'm wrong, great. I think, still think it's going to 5,000 in two years if hype goes from 50 to 25. And I'm like, great, now I get to buy back at 25 and I get some extra use in my returns. And so that's why I'm thinking as a fund manager in terms of the probabilistic outcome and what's my best expected value decision. And that's why we sold.

A (6:54)

When you're thinking as a fund manager and, and I, I want to just get your perspective, perspective on digital asset treasuries. I mean there are digital asset treasuries being built around hype, but around so many other tokens. When you're thinking as a fund manager, how much is this digital asset narrative coming into your evaluations of assets?

B (7:15)

I obviously am an advisor of Upxi. We have done a maelstrom. I've done a few, a few pipes. We've also traded a few in the secondary market and it's a very tough market because obviously if you buy into the pipe, you take you about three months to get your shares. It's very public when the unlock happens and you know, the stock might pump, you know, whatever it does, it's, that's going to come back down to reality because everyone recognizes that the pipe investors are going to sell their shares, which we did as soon as we got them. And, and so it's a momentum based strategy that's very beta to crypto. So but as a fund manager, like, okay, if I believe that bitcoin and ETH are going up, the market's going up. What's the fastest horse I can ride and I can get off the easiest? Like these dad deals. Yes, they can pump real quick. But for whatever reason, if the sentiment changes while I'm asleep in New York, overnight this shit can be down 75% like NACA, some of these other, other deals and all of a sudden all this money that I saw on paper is evaporated while I'm sleeping. So I don't like trading these things because that's just not the type of thing that I want to trade. There's, it's a hot potato. There's a structural reason why they exist. There'll be, you know, a few winners, a few microstrategy in each different token category. I hope you PXI is one of them. But at the end of the day, from a trading perspective, they're very difficult to trade. It takes a different type of mentality and a different type of frequency trader that's not me or any other traders or fund managers at Maelstrom. And so we tend not to get too involved in putting a lot of money in these DAT deals on the secondary market. We've done a few pipes. We make 10, 20% on our money in a few months. Okay, that's, that's, that's fair. But again, I would, I'm not really enthusiastic because of the way our fund is set up and to trade these things.

A (9:00)

All right, we got to wrap it there, Arthur, but I got to end at this. A little birdie told me that you like to spend your February's on the ski hills in Japan. But that's also when consensus is. So wondering if you might give up skiing for consensus next year.

B (9:13)

Highly unlikely.

A (9:14)

Okay, well, I had to try. I had to try.

C (9:17)

We're going to keep asking.

A (9:19)

Arthur, thank you so much for joining us. It was a pleasure.

B (9:21)

Thanks for having me.