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- [00:00]
A
Whatever your thing, it could be anything. Canva helps you make that thing a thing. Canva is a simple online tool thing. It's a way to design, with our magic AI tool, things you can social media your thing, generate images or videos of your thing, make decks or presentations to show your thing whatever needs to be done for your thing. Canva can make it an even better and bigger thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing.
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B
Bitcoin is going from $70,000 straight, $7 million, according to one Michael Saylor in his keynote address at Bitcoin. Probably. He says that it's inevitable. Strong words from one Michael Saylor. Meantime, though, we also have Kevin Warsh kicking off his first FOMC meeting today and getting the first speech from him tomorrow. And of course, SpaceX trading like a meme stock. Got a lot to talk about today. Of course, we got Andrew and tman, but we have special guest Haseeb Qureshi from Dragonfly joining as well. Let's go, let's go,
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A
Let's dope.
- [01:20]
B
What is up, everybody? Good morning and Happy Tuesday. Like, subscribe or do whatever you want to do with your fingers over there. It's not any of my business. We're going to bring on Tillman, we're going to bring on Andrew and we're going to bring on Haseeb now. Good morning, gentlemen. Yeah, I said before, yeah, for full transparency. I was like, hey, what should we talk about? Everyone's like, no, nothing's interesting. So we had to go with a massive Michael saylor Target here, $7 million. But, Hasid, maybe I should just get your framing right now on what you're thinking about strategy and STRC and everything surrounding Michael Saylor, because that's been a big topic here every single week.
- [01:59]
C
Yeah. Well, bitcoin showing some signs of life, which is obviously good. If bitcoin was continuing to trend downward, I think Saylor would have a tough time being able to continue justify the circus that's surrounding him. But it seems like Macro is in the driver's seat right, right now. Looking forward to the next FOMC meeting to see what the dot plot is going to look like. I think that's going to determine whether crypto is going to continue to have a challenging second half of the year. We've got some relief because of this resolution or tentative resolution of what's going on with Iran and that, and that's kind of wrapped up a little bit of the instability that we've seen this year. But it's kind of like okay, well what else do we have to look forward to macro wise? If the war is over, and that's what we were telling ourselves was the problem then what else is there macro wise besides okay, inflation and strong employment numbers, which doesn't really seem like it's obviously going to change, you know, already you strip energy out of core pce. So now I don't know, like unless WARSH is going to be super aggressive and saying, oh, we're still going to cut rates because I said so, I think we're in trouble with respect to what the macro is going to look like from here.
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B
So is it really all about the macro still? I mean, listen, we still have, you know, clarity act, which I've put at like 5% chance for the last six months while everybody screams about 75, I don't see it happening and honestly I don't even see it as a catalyst anymore. I think it's so over discussed at this point. So yeah, I'm wondering what else could be a catalyst besides higher prices, right? I mean if bitcoin just like 90 all of a sudden it'll be the most popular girl in town again.
- [03:37]
C
That's true. I mean, look, there's no universe in which clarity is going to help bitcoin. It doesn't even, it barely says anything about bitcoin. It's all about alts. So I think there's a story in which clarity is going to buoy alts. There's not really a story about why it's going to do something for bitcoin except maybe bringing more attention back to the space. But I'm with you. I don't think many people care that there's a law passed about crypto and say, oh great, I should go buy bitcoin instead of buying SpaceX or buying memory stocks or buying holding my money for OpenAI coming live or anthropic coming live. So I think it's probably not until we see this bevy of companies go public by the end of this year and the AI trade decrease in volatility to some extent before a retail bid really comes back into crypto.
- [04:21]
B
Yeah, there's been this and Tillman Andrew, like there's been this narrative that's been really pushed very hard in crypto that bitcoin was down or crypto were down because people were liquidating to buy SpaceX. Right. And with OpenAI coming behind it and anthropic, I think that actually did happen to some degree. And we even saw the NASDAQ sell off last week. Ahead of SpaceX going. But now SpaceX is up what, 20, 30% since IPO? I haven't seen. And everything else is going up too. So the question was, is there going to be enough liquidity in the market to support this? So I guess actually Hasi, the question is, if these things continue to do as well as SpaceX has, when people start to feel really rich, do we get a rotation back to the boring thing like, oh, IPOs have stopped going up. Let's go buy bitcoin.
- [05:06]
C
Yeah, I mean, look, I think there's a possibility. I don't want to. It's easy to get high in your own supply. This is one of these Hopium stories that, oh, all the AI people, once they get all this money, they actually love crypto. And so they're going to take the liquidity that they're given from institutions and from retail investors who are buying these assets once they go public and they're going to plow it into crypto. Is that what's gonna happen? Maybe. I mean, that does seem a little thin to me. And SpaceX, I don't think SpaceX is the same crowd as the AI crowd. Like, you know, these are ultimately hardware and aeronautics people who are, you know, the primary folks who are making money in the SpaceX IPO. Obviously there's some people from Xai, but remember, none of the employees have cash yet. The employees are locked up and it's not until the lockup period expires that those people are actually going to get their liquidity. And so if this story is true for SpaceX, we're not going to know it until, you know, usually six months after the ipo. So I'm skeptical of it. I think the argument is a little bit more defensible for OpenAI and for anthropic, because they are, I think they're more futurists in the. More the kind of people who might really be into crypto and say, hey, actually I'd like to rotate some of this cash into Bitcoin rather than into the rest of the s and P500, but I don't know. We'll see.
- [06:30]
B
All right, so let's talk catalyst then. I think we all can laugh at Saylor 70 to 7 million. Like, yeah, maybe it's inevitable, but come on. Right, so you know, Tailman Andrew, like, what do you think are potential catalysts here now? Having seen SpaceX absorbed by the market and bitcoin marginally up?
- [06:46]
C
Right.
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B
It's nice to see yourself 10,000 off the floor. But you're still 10% off the floor, but still 20 something percent down from just a few weeks ago.
- [06:56]
D
Yeah, I think that utility is going to be the driving narrative of this next bull market, especially in crypto. And I think that Wall street has started to look at Bitcoin as a very necessary collateral piece in the lending system. I think that's going to be the next boom for Bitcoin as it pertains to u. When you can put Bitcoin up as collateral at lower rates and have an advantage to any other collateral, that's going to drive adoption. And I think we're really close to that. So I'm looking at the utility behind each coin as the primary driver for total value locked at this point. And Bitcoin has proven to Wall street that it can operate as kind of that core value underlying asset layer at the, you know, base of Web3. And when AI agents start doing a lot of commerce between one another, I think ultimately you have to ask what, what, what do people want to settle in ultimately? Settle in? What do they want to hold? I think Bitcoin's the obvious answer there. So I think utility is going to drive it. I think we just have to wait for it. I do think there's going to be a lot of competing narratives until we get there. I think AI in particular is going to suck a lot of the oxygen out of the room for, for a long time. And I actually think it's the very narrative that, that will allow us to print more dollars with reckless abandon, honestly, because it's almost a war we can't lose. And it's all about 10 year, you know, horizons. And, and so we're gonna have to spend all the money now so that we're not behind ten years from now. And these data centers are something I've never seen before. I went and visited one and it's just unlike, it's, it's, it's like science fiction is the best way to explain it. And so if you just look at, you know, like the federal highway system and what it meant for domestic commerce, then the next infrastructure build out that's needed is, is really these data centers and what we're going to have to invest in that is going to be jaw dropping. I think it's going to be in the trillions of dollars in a very short period of time. And I think that it's justified. And you know, as long as we can make, make production or make value out of that, it will be able to inflate into it.
- [09:22]
E
Yeah, It's a, you know, there's a lot of talk about the K shaped economy. You know, on a macro level, I think we absolutely are in the midst of that when it comes to retail crypto versus retail traditional finance. It's K shaped in every way, shape and form you have over the last two and a half years. I think we're up to, I think 130 new highs on the S&P 500 over that time period. And we're definitely not that on the crypto side of things. And so two Haseeb's points about there not being meaningful catalysts from the macro standpoint in the crypto space, I agree. There we, we are finding ourselves very bereft of, of potential catalysts. Whereas some of the things that he mentions are meaningful catalysts when it comes to traditional assets. Right. The adjustments as it relates to rates and warsh. Again, a reminder that war was put there for a very specific reason. My guess is he'll play out that reason for the first six to 12 months of his tenure there. But again, that will have much to do with traditional assets, equities and the like. Will it trickle down to, you know, bitcoin and other crypto assets? Not entirely sure. I think the biggest macro issue associated with crypto is most of the folks that invest in it. Most of the folks that have spent, you know, some meaningful time adding it to their portfolio are frankly just pretty bored with it. And they're, they're just like, okay, I'm, I'm allocated. At this point, nothing's all that exciting anymore. It was a year and a half, two years ago when I, you know, first started to really get into it because, you know, blackrock was getting into it. So let me take a look. And at this point, and I'm moving on to other things.
- [11:23]
B
Yeah, I'm old enough to remember when we had our own narratives, we didn't just have to go around the horn talking about the Fed.
- [11:29]
E
Right.
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B
I mean, and meanwhile, by the way, in AI, just like as an example of how hot this AI trade is, I just, this blew my mind when I took a look at Sandisk this morning. I think I read, you know, 15 grand in Sandisk a year ago is like a million dollars now or something. But this is, I read this is the most oversold. You can barely see it here. It's at 99.99 on RSI, on the monthly chart. It's the most oversold stock in the history of the stock market.
- [11:54]
C
Overbought.
- [11:55]
B
Excuse me, stock in the History of the stock market.
- [11:57]
E
Well, that, that looks like a, a chart of Pepe coin from 2022. Right. So to my point about board, like if you're having sandisk and Micron have those types of moves, what in the world do you need to go searching for a, you know, 5 to 10x on, you know, googly eyeball coin or whatever? I mean, you just, you don't need to do it. Right? Googly eyeball. Right. So it's to again, when you, when you have those types of moves, when you've got that type of action in traditional markets with the structures, regulatory clarity, there's somebody to talk to about your account at Morgan Stanley, about Micron and sandisk with meaningful types of research and papers and yada yada, yada, that feels, feels very comfortable. As opposed to anonymous Twitter guy who thinks he's figured it out. Like, you see what I mean? They're just, there's such a big difference. And so the question is, what are the potential narratives that move people back to Haseeb's point, Very difficult to find that at this point.
- [13:11]
B
Okay, well then let me ask a more specific question. Haseeb, I think I've asked you this probably a number of times because you're one of the few people who's actively deploying capital. What are you actually investing in? Right. So we know that there may not be catalysts, but there's definitely still narratives and interesting things being built. So I mean, even just buckets, you know, ideas. What are you looking at?
- [13:29]
C
Yeah, so a lot of what we're deploying our capital to right now are things that are working but are not really tied to the bitcoin price. So there's a lot of stuff that's built on crypto rails that is not, you know, an exchange or not trading or not, you know, doesn't, doesn't accrue fees with respect to retail going in and playing these games, I think it's pretty clear that those businesses are struggling. Right. If you look at Robinhood, you look at Coinbase, you look at Etoro, all these businesses are not doing so hot because retail is just not here. Retailers, they're elsewhere. They're day trading the AI stocks. So now that said, you look at something like prediction markets, we're big investors in Polymarket. There's a lot more next generation prediction markets that are also launching, especially in different jurisdictions as well. And those things don't really care about the bitcoin price. They might be built on crypto rails. Polymarket International is built on top of Polygon. But crypto goes up, crypto goes down. It's kind of like, okay, well the trading volume is coming from the World cup, it's coming from the NBA Finals, coming from the Iran war, it's coming from, you know, the, the, the, the midterms. So those things are basically bitcoin resistant, more or less. Another element where we're spending a lot of time is the intersection of crypto and AI. I think actually the, the Fable five story that I'm sure everybody caught on Friday when the government shut down or basically put export controls on anthropic, saying that no non Americans could use these models. And Claude took it down for everybody because they had no way to actually enforce that at that time. That was kind of the shot around the world of like, oh, the US Government is now involving itself in consumer AI policy with respect to we are going to control this model and how you roll it out and who you roll it out to. I think that is a little bit, that might well be, you know, that Friday might well be what the great financial crisis was. Satoshi Nakamoto in the, the, the, the basically the, the motivating original event that made it obvious why you needed a decentralized version of money. In the same way, having a decentralized or at least a censorship resistant version of AI is theoretically interesting, but it only becomes palpably interesting when you see, oh, the government actually is getting involved directly in this and is telling you who can and who can't use these products. I think this is actually something that's going to accelerate over the next decade. And this is one of these places where crypto plays a role. Now it's not the substrate, it's not like, okay, we're going to put the weights on top of Ethereum or something that obviously doesn't work. But they're all already a bunch of projects that are working on how do you put control and power over these AI models back into the hands of users and individuals.
- [16:15]
B
Yeah, I mean, Eric Voorhees obviously as Venice, I haven't dug too deeply into it and I didn't see what happened with price because I just don't pay that much attention to crypto charts at this point. But I would imagine that things like anything with an AI adjacent narrative in crypto should have got caught a bid on that news. Did Venice go up? I, I, I, I actually have to check or like, you know, tau, obviously these kind of things. Right. Are, are, are the narrative you're sort
- [16:38]
C
of, yeah, over I. I believe over the weekend, all of them have done fairly well. I think actually Tao might be the highest performer of the bunch, but near also did well and, and Venture and I think it. Again, you know, I've been. I've been talking about this for like two years. This idea that, you know, until somebody starts actually censoring you, it's kind of like, who cares? You know, like, OpenAI and Anthropic is basically available to anyone. You know, they're all pretty cheap. There's a free tier, like, for the most part even, like, the concept of censorship feels pretty abstract within AI and the cognitive privacy feels like, you know, totally irrelevant. Like, who cares? You know, okay, OpenAI can see my chats. Okay. What? You know, they're not gonna do anything with that. They just want my money. But, you know, we're getting advertising coming into OpenAI right now. It's pretty bad. But, you know, it will eventually become more invasive over time because that has to be the business model when they go public. Second, you know, there are all these stories about how, you know, your intuition about your chatbots is that when you're talking to ChatGPT or you're talking to Claude, that this is kind of your closest confidant. Like, the way that we feel about our chats is that this is like this little genie sitting on your shoulder that you're whispering your deepest, darkest secrets to. But in reality, the legal reality is that, no, no, no, actually you're sharing this with a third party. And therefore, if you're asking it legal advice, it can show up in discovery. This is not attorney client privileged. It means that the government can subpoena it and they don't need a search warrant because you've shared it with a third party. Third party doctrine says this is not your personal effects. You've given this over willingly to just some company, therefore, we can go ask for it from that company without ever letting you know. All this stuff is extremely unintuitive to us. That's not how we feel like it should work. It feels like, no, no, no. This is like the deepest chamber of my heart and soul, my AI. Like, we feel like we're basically cyborgs at this point, and like, the AI is an extension of our brains, but that's not how the law works. And so I think, you know, this is one of the things that Venice does. It says, no, no, no, zero data retention. This is completely private. This is between you and God, what you say or do with your AI. And nobody else has the ability to read it unless you hand it over to them. And so I think in many ways, same underlying story as something like zcash, which is, you know, our thoughts and our money are the most fundamental things that we have as beings in the world. And this is a fight that is going to accelerate over the next decade. One more, one more thing I actually want to add. In New York Congress right now, in the state Congress, there's a bill and there's a bunch of these bills actually around the country. None of them have passed yet, but this bill says that it would make it illegal for a chatbot company to allow their chatbot to answer legal advice or medical advice. Yeah. Now, this bill, these bills are obviously very unpopular. There's no way they're going to pass right now. But there will come a time when lawyers start losing their jobs because of AI. They're not losing their jobs yet. Right. Obviously there's a lot of scaremongering about it, but we can't really attribute job loss right now to AI, but it's almost certainly coming. And you're going to see that for doctors as well. Doctors are going to lose their jobs because of AI. And in that world, lawyers are very good at getting laws passed. That's. That's a big part of why they are who they are. When you have these elite groups of people who are going to be disenfranchised by AI, they are going to strike back and they're going to win in some of these places. They're going to get some of these laws passed and people again are going to be like, what the. You know, no, keep your hands off my AI. And this is one of the most valuable things that AIs do is give people advice in professions that would otherwise be very expensive.
- [20:28]
B
And the funny thing, by the way, is that you would go Google search it, and you'd go to the same basic source of knowledge and that would be totally fine, but you'd get it from one article instead of a consolidated consortium of information. It's just so stupid. It's not like AI is thinking to you, it's using, you know.
- [20:43]
C
Yeah, that's right. That's right. You see it in other countries, you see it in China. The control that governments are going to exert over AI is at its lowest point that it's ever going to be. It's like the Internet, the early Internet. There was no regulation, there was nothing. People were just, you know, putting up websites and they never had to worry about, you know, collecting data or gdpr or you know, oh, you know, am I, am I an editor or am I a platform or what? Whatever, you just do whatever you're going to do and you know, there's no, there's no rules. That's kind of what AI has been up until about 10 minutes ago.
- [21:16]
B
Yeah. And I think, I think what Andrew said and then leading into you, it really, it's a narrative we've had constantly. But it's utility. Right. Like as you said, it's not Bitcoin adjacent. But like you see, zcash goes up because of privacy. You see that hyper liquid goes up because people can actually value it like they would value a tech stock or you know, earnings. And so I think that Andrew, you know, to your point, I think that's the direction that things are going to go. Random 37 that just like pumped on a narrative that doesn't do anything or show any earnings. It's just not going to happen anymore.
- [21:48]
E
Yeah. To Tillman's point about utility, like Venice Token is up almost 400% in the last year. Right. So there's not a whole lot of stuff that's up 400% over the last year in crypto period. So we're migrating towards the narratives that Haseeb is talking about that matter and cross reference against what we're dealing with when it comes to AI. And then is there a meaningful point to this? Is it, is it just an AI token for the purposes of, you know, having AI somehow connected to the token and its name? Or is there real utility associated with privacy that people find compelling? And so Tillman's point about utility, Haseeb's point about, you know, there being a connection that matters to people in the long term. You know, a company like Venice. And again, Eric, for he's, his bona fides are pretty difficult to, to, to, to, to chip at. Guy's been around. I mean he was a central figure in the first bitcoin film by Netflix, you know, like two years after Bitcoin existed. Like it's extraordinary work that he's done in the space. And so being able to see this and again, I, I, I can't, I'm not Eric. So I don't know if he saw this the way that it's now come to be seen. But being there in this privacy space very, very early, which he was two plus years ago, I personally saw that and I thought it was compelling, but I didn't put any money into it. And then like six months ago, I'm like, man, how is Venice doing because last time I looked at it was like a $30 or something, right? And I'm like, oh Damn it, it's $11 now. And then I'm like, all right, I need to get involved. And three weeks later it was at 20 and I'm like, oh no, what am I doing? But again, I think to, to the point here is their, their utility narratives associated with the broader economic narratives. I think could be, could really be something.
- [24:00]
D
Well, it boils down to what the, like I call the Bitcoin standard. Bitcoin proved to us that a decentralized network could be built, maintained on pure free economics and be amass such adoption that it becomes the largest network ever built in the history of mankind. That proved a lot of things that now are trickling into all of these expansion efforts. And you know, utility is driving those efforts. And hyper liquid was mentioned earlier and I, I think they're a great example of that. Like nobody cares about how they're using blockchain. They just want the offerings. They want to go there and ride the roller coasters. And I think that that's going to be the, the narrative moving forward is these interconnectivity of markets and being able to offer things that people want. And I think tokenized real world assets in the form of equities is going to be a huge, it's going to be a lot of fun for the retail space and I think it will be a catalyst back into, I think it will be a competition to bitcoin, but it will bring a lot of excitement back into the crypto space and specifically alts that are a part of those projects. But if you think about the bitcoin standard as being compute power and then you extrapolate, okay, the governments of the world are starting to recognize that compute power is a scarce resource.
- [25:31]
B
Why?
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D
Well, because the rare earth materials that you need to build the machines are scarce. This is going to be an arms race unlike anything we've seen. And to your point, Haseeb, it's like this has never been more available with less restrictions than it is right now. It's only going to become more and more a part of the national security fabric. And that's why I think there's going to be such an expansion of capital and investment into this space like we've never seen before. Trillions and trillions. Because the proof of work concept and why bitcoin, you just have to start with like how many people have tried to stop bitcoin and why have they all failed? Because it has more compute power than they can generate. That's the answer. And so governments now are realizing like AI is compute power. And if we have the factories that are generating compute power, we control the that universe. It's very rapidly approaching why we don't
- [26:33]
B
have bitcoin miners anymore. We just have AI infrastructure companies that mine bitcoin. So something I actually want to, I wrote my newsletter about it this morning, is like, we've all been sort of focusing on the Clarity act and everybody's been paying attention to what's happening with the legislation. But quietly, we've gotten a massive rollout of probably the most popular crypto product in the United States, which is perps. I don't know if you guys saw this, but Kraken launched yesterday. So obviously Kalshi, I think was about two weeks ago. They were already up to a billion a day. Kraken launched. The CFTC regulated Bitcoin and crypto perpetual futures for US customers. Coinbase obviously kind of got theirs through a strange exemption, no action letter, so they could do them in Bermuda through Deribit or something. But I mean, this is arguably the most crypto native thing that we've ever had that was never available to Americans. And quietly, it's just happening. And I guess maybe because volumes are down and prices aren't high, we're not talking about it as much, but pretty huge advancement here. And I think this is probably coming. I mean, I'd say this is probably coming to everything, right? I think maybe there's not that much excitement about it because Hyper Liquid got so big. Maybe that's really why. But I find this fascinating.
- [27:46]
C
So I'm actually a little bit more skeptical that the US Perps rollout is that big of a deal. I think for the most part the reason why retail is not biting is not because they don't have perps domestically. You know, the reality is that you can already get leverage in the U.S. i mean, you can trade on margin. You can also, you know, there's like, there's levered ETFs, there's, you know, there's. The reality is perps are not the only way to get leverage on these assets. And a big part of the reason why perps have been so successful in crypto market structure is because, I mean, one, they're simple for retail, which is obviously nice. But the second thing is that perps really emerged primarily on these offshore exchanges. And they emerged on the offshore exchanges not because it's just such a beautiful, perfect, ideal financial product. Your perps are great, they're excellent invention but they actually work particularly well in the environment of zero recourse. If you don't know who somebody is, somebody's in another country. Like these are, these are international exchanges that take money from people all over the world. You know, Hyperlink is a perfect example of this. If you go bust, I can't claw back money or send you a collections notice or anything. Like if you go bust, it's over, I can never get the money back. Right. So perps are really designed very elegantly in the system of I, you know, I basically cannot send you to collections and so therefore I better make sure that I can get, get all of the money back in the way that I do the liquidations and the way the funding rates kind of keep the, the, the, the prices in check. And of course in, in a world where there's no real access to the underlying because everything is synthetics and you know, whatever delivery is, is, is not an issue. That's really great. Right, Excellent creation for that. That's not why retail is not trading. It's not because we don't have perps domestically and of course the domestic perps, it's not like you can go 50x levered approved products. Right? Yeah, these are CFTC approved products which means that the leverage is like a very reasonable amount of non gambling shaped leverage. Okay. Like CFTC does not approve 20x50x100x leverage products because they're like no, that's obviously gambling. You know why, why do you need to do that on a 90 Vol asset go you know, 30x long.
- [30:02]
B
So by the way, betting on the outcome of a sports game is not betting according to the same CFTC system record. But yeah, go ahead.
- [30:09]
C
Yes. So yeah, so look, the reality is that like if, if you want to make, if you want to bet on randomness you can, if you want to basically just gamble, you can, there's a different regime for that. So I, I, so that's why I think there's a little bit of Hopium I think attached to these. Like if you look at the Kalshi perps which have been out for a while, there's a lot of volume, the open interest is tiny which tells you that this is, there's something weird going on. You know, they're probably just paying market makers to cross the spread and you know, market makers just handing money back and forth but there's no, there's no real demand there. Surprisingly the people on call she are not really interested in you know, holding bitcoin per positions because nobody's very interested in holding bitcoin per positions. So look, when the market does come back to that degree, that's great. Yeah. But like, this is not why people are not buying. They can already buy spot, they can already buy ETFs, they can already buy levered ETFs, they can already trade on margin. Great. There's one more shape of a product for Americans. Perps really matter internationally. I don't think they matter that much domestically.
- [31:11]
E
And it, it's also, it also comes back to the narrative associated with the quote unquote boredom of crypto. If you, if you release an additional product in crypto, you know, if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, I mean, can we prove that it fell? It's that kind of narrative. So you can make all the announcements you want, but if nobody's there to trade it because they're, you know, having fun on SanDisk and, and Micron and SpaceX, which is going to be up another, you know, probably 10 to whatever percent today, you, you there, there's no reason to, you know, to spend a whole lot of time talking about it, frankly. Again, it goes to the Haseeb's point about the value of let's call it crypto exchanges in the space. Right. I've been talking about this for a long time. Like crypto exchanges. You know, there's a reality with exchanges just across the board and those existed 20, 25, 30 years ago with online exchanges like E Trade and TD Ameritrade. And whatever the dollar value associated with what they can charge to do business on those exchanges quickly finds its way closer and closer and closer to zero. So what is it about those models that's compelling? You have to do other stuff and perps are just another version of a commission based thing that they're trying to make money on. And it's a, it's like a Coinbase thing. Coinbase is very, very focused on not commission dollar type products. They're trying to find everything and anything else that makes them look, sound and feel more like Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan than Gemini and you know, some other exchange of some sort. You know, three to five years from now it's going to cost you, you know, $0.05 to, to do any sort of commission trade on these exchanges. So what are their business models doing that makes them valuable? What, what is the value proposition long term?
- [33:17]
D
I just think it's a tip of the hat to the executive team. They're grabbing market share while it's available. The legislative landscape allows them to get these things done. Now they've been on the list to get done for a long time. When the bull market starts ripping again to Haseeb's point, these will catch volume and they will be in a unique position to catch volume because they, a lot of people won't have the same advantage. So I, you know it's, it's a good, it's a good land grab if you will and a way to grab some, some additional US activity. When the volume picks back up to Yalls point though, it's, it's a non mover right now. It doesn't mean anything.
- [33:56]
E
Well again if you look at. Go, go ahead.
- [34:00]
C
I was just gonna say I just pulled up the call. She perp, the number. Just to give you the numbers right now it's got 655 million of 24 hour volume which is not a lot for a domestic perp. Just to give you a sense hyper liquid, which is not the largest perp Exchange is doing 8 billion of volume a day. So they're doing 600 million as the first domestic perp and their open interest is $2 million. There's $2 million of open interest on this 650 million. So this is, this is a joke. This is like nothing right now. Just to give you a sense hyper liquid. 9 billion of open interest, 2 million of open interest is basically a failed product.
- [34:41]
E
Yeah, well what is the, what is the, you know, the graph look like of people that you know, three to four years ago would be using this product versus now. Right. Maybe you had guys that were 40 to 60 years old that have enormous amounts of capital that are dipping their toes into this, you know, like the Gary Cardone's of the world that find it interesting. And let me play around with this. And then you had 30 to 18 year olds that you know, don't have as much capital but they want to somehow maximize their opportunity with leverage and so they're playing with it. Well, both of those types of, you know, both of the folks on that graph have moved on to other things effectively. Right. So to Haseeb's point, like 2, 2 million of open interest is like Uncle Steve who's still there because nobody's told him that he should go do something else. Right. Like hey, here's $3 million.
- [35:34]
D
The only one here on tackle. I mean that's a very small number. That's a lot smaller than I thought it would be for sure.
- [35:43]
B
Yeah. I think the bigger story actually even beyond the fact that there's no open interest on these. Is that on hyper liquid or created crypto native rails where we used to trade all coins. People can just trade anything they want now anyways. So like crypto, perp in and of itself is not the only place to gamble. It's actually kind of like the shittiest casino on the strip. Right?
- [36:03]
E
This is again, this story has been told even in crypto, you know, over a six year period we went through an NFT deal where OpenSea had open, quote unquote, open interest of billions upon billions upon billions of dollars. Right? And then that went away and then we went to the next version of it which was meme coins and then that went away and now we're in this space that's hyper liquid and the like. And so the question then becomes at what point do they have pricing power? At what point do they keep customers? At what point do people stay there and quote unquote, invest or commit more? I don't know what the answer to that is. Given their model. I've seen those models shrink and then pricing power shrink very quickly on those types of models a bunch of times over the past 30 years because I'm older than most people on this show. So, you know, the question then becomes what do they offer that keeps those assets involved or there as opposed to hey, this is fun and cool and I'm doing some stuff on here like that that doesn't last. It just doesn't.
- [37:14]
B
Yeah, see, I realize it's 9:40. Any final thoughts before I allow you to get on with your day?
- [37:22]
C
No, I mean, look, I, I'll say very briefly that despite the, you know, the languorousness of crypto markets, it doesn't feel like there's a lot to get excited about. In the short term I remain very bullish on crypto. Longer term, I do think there's. We've got a bit of a stupor that we got to get through. The rest of the world is way more exciting. You know, SpaceX is gapping up another 10% despite being more valuable than almost anything in our. You more. It's, it's more than almost our entire industry combined. And that's a single stock,
- [37:56]
B
I think space, no, excuse me, Musk's personal wealth now is equal to Bitcoin market cap. Ish.
- [38:03]
C
Right, right, ish, yes. So like there's a, there's, there's, there's just a cold reality that crypto right now is not the most interesting thing happening in the world that's going to remain for some time. But eventually, look, the SpaceX volatility will die down. These stocks will go live. We'll get a better understanding of what the supply chains look like. There will be less snarls, there'll be less craziness. And when that happens, I do think you're going to see retail start to pay attention to crypto again because the underlying secular trends behind crypto have not changed that much. Right. Like the idea that okay, people are starting to, the world is starting to fracture. The world is going to be more multipolar and not unipolar. People are more and more nervous about the dollar, people are more and more nervous about government debt around the world. And that the, the stuff that's happening with respect to stablecoins and prediction markets, all this stuff, it's all happening. It's not that it's not happening, it's not that we sold you a false bill of goods, it's just that right now it's not the fastest moving thing. But eventually markets will price everything that's happening with respect to AI, with respect to bio, with respect to all the other things that are moving and crypto will start to move again. And when it does, that's when I suspect we'll see the retail bid return. Because the five, ten year outlook that I have for crypto hasn't really changed. If anything, AI changing the world as much as it does is good for crypto, not bad for crypto. Crypto is most valuable in a world that's changing, in a world where technology is accelerating. That's the world actually you want to live in if you're going to be owning crypto.
- [39:37]
B
Yeah, that's a great point man. Everybody give Haseeb a follow down the description man. Thank you. It's always a pleasure to have you, have you joining and I'll guys later. So smart. What's up guys? So want to talk about obviously the fact that we have this incredible volatility on SpaceX and incredible interest in AI. The fact that like you can dollar cost average into Bitcoin with Arch Republic you will now be able to do that. SpaceX.
- [40:06]
D
Yeah, I think the narrative of 247 markets, the narrative that the volatility I, I, I would make the argument that we, the, the investor profile has shifted considerably over the last 20 years and I think Covid was the final, you know, kind of nail in the coffin as it pertains to psychologically what we're looking for. And I think that the, the chasing of volatility is a real thing. And the more we accelerate this adoption of AI and the more that we accelerate the integration of markets, the more available all of these securities become. All of these equities, all of the commodities, all of the products, every leveraged product, unleveraged product, are now going to be a, you're going to be able to get access to them here in the United States from a very large number of providers. And when you have that type of a landscape, automation becomes the way in which you manage the volatility attached to it. And that's exactly what we're focused on. And what we're bringing to our customers is the same thing that we've done for all of our crypto customers, but on the equity side. So now you're going to be able to use the volatility to your advantage, both in equities and also in ETFs and pretty much anything that's offered on any of the major exchanges. So we're looking at integrations across the board right now, and we're starting with something that provides a large number of, of equities that you can trade, but specifically some of the ones that we've been talking about on the show today, the, the ones that are most volatile and most exciting. So we, we think that this is an exceptional time to be alive as it pertains to being a trader. And if you can have a prudent model that you can lay out and that you can manage with automation, you could take advantage of all of the volatility across all markets when, when they present themselves.
- [42:06]
E
Well, demand, sometimes demand is a really, really good thing. And, and for the past four to six months, every single day, we've had a number of, of customers and clients that say, hey, can, when, when can I use this stuff on, on my stocks? When can I use this stuff on equities? When can I use this stuff in my IRA with other positions that I have? And so we've done the work of, of making that happen. And it's, it's, it's close to being ready and available to folks. And, and by the way, there's going to be a free version of this, just like there's a free version of all of our, our crypto strategies and tools. So people are going to be able to try it out in the same way that, that you can try out everything else that, that we have. But also, you know, volatility associated with any asset is such a powerful thing that people don't even, don't even really think of themselves as Traders, when they're using our tools, they're just simply maximizing the asset that they, they have in their hands, that they have capital in. If you have capital in Tesla, and it's even a small meaningful amount, the volatility associated with Tesla, even though over time it's, it's, it's up and to the right, the moves to the downside and the upside offer you such extraordinary alpha that you have to, if you can, you have to take advantage of it. And you know, our tools allow you to do that without you having to sit at your computer all day. Right. You can do it when you're on the golf course, you can do it when you're at dinner in some way, shape or form. You can do it when you're having a meeting or when you're on a podcast with a strange guy named Scott Melker. Whatever, you can, you can do it at all times. So again, demand is something that we've been seeing and hearing at scale within our customer base. And so we're just responding to it and giving people what they want.
- [44:10]
D
Yep.
- [44:12]
B
Crypto is the hairy woman exhibit at the sideshow.
- [44:16]
E
Yeah, that's not in terms of the sentiment right now it is.
- [44:24]
B
Yeah, not even circus circus right now. It's way off the strip.
- [44:27]
D
Listen, the user adoption curve for crypto, when AI agents start doing business amongst themselves is going to go parabolic and it won't matter if we like it anymore. There'll be a whole know there'll be more AI agents born every day than humans by orders of magnitude. And they're all going to have crypto wallets. They're all going to be spending crypto on, on everything they do.
- [44:53]
E
So by the way, you know, another point that's really important in terms of what we do. You can use AI, you know, 24 hours a day, but right now most of what it's doing is just giving you feedback back after you're asking it a question. It's not executing really anything for you. And our, our strategies, our tools are the execution layer associated with quote unquote, agentic opportunities. That's what it is. Right. So you input into our tools and strategies what it is that you want to get accomplished and then it goes and executes it for you. Where we're headed now, where we're at now, where we're going to be in six months, where we'll be in 18 months with a couple again things that we're going to roll out, we're going to lean into that, you know, harder and harder and harder the execution layer for agentic strategies. Yeah, get involved with us. You really should be involved with us. So you're not only learning this thing, but getting comfortable with the truth of the execution part of what we do here.
- [46:03]
B
I'm not raising dollar cost average into SpaceX personally.
- [46:08]
D
Listen, volatility is, is present, so there should, there is, there are strategies that can be deployed.
- [46:14]
B
Oh, it would crush it.
- [46:16]
C
Yeah.
- [46:16]
B
I mean taking advantage of these like 10 updates, 10 down days, I would
- [46:23]
E
make the case that, you know, a lot of, let's call it high net worth households have a version of iRobot vacuum cleaners or mops or you know, a dual version of those. We've got two of them here, here in our house on the, the main floor and the, the basement area. So the reality is that there's a chance that your wife or your significant other or even your housekeeper is doing more with agentic execution than you are. When they get on their phone and they tell that robot, hey, go clean this area. Right, they're ahead of you, right? I don't know, I'm using a little bit of shame tactics here, but they're actually ahead of you when it comes to this stuff. So catch up. I'm serious. Catch up. They're, they're doing it from their phone, they're turning on their dishwasher from their phone. Like, you know, we're doing this stuff already and we're not even all that aware of it, but it is going to 1000x over the next 18 months.
- [47:29]
D
Well, I think the common thing, you know, going back to what I said about the Bitcoin standard being the shining light, you know, being in control of your destiny is something that I think speaks to all of us. And that's what this gives you absolute control. And it's not just control when you're sitting in front of your computer, it's controlled when you're not sitting in front of your computer. And that is a very empowering feeling. And there's no, there's no amount of words that we can use to describe what it means. Just you got to see it for yourself. That's why we have a free trial or free version of the software. So please come check it out. You'll love it and we'll love talking to you and you'll join a community of folks, over 25,000 people that are using it and finding value in it. So we, we, we love to hear feedback, we love to hear any comments as it pertains to how we can improve the software, but it really is something that's unique. And until you use it for the first time, you're going to have misconceptions as to what it really is.
- [48:32]
B
When are we going race, race. Race car driving?
- [48:35]
D
We're looking at the, we're looking at the F1 in Austin in October. That's the F1.
- [48:42]
B
Vegas is my 50th.
- [48:44]
D
Oh, is it?
- [48:45]
B
I might go. I might go, Michael.
- [48:48]
D
Well, I've, I've heard that there might be some crypto companies there representing maybe,
- [48:55]
B
maybe a few crypto companies on those F1 cars. Yeah, a couple of them. All right, well, check out. Let me bring the thing up. Archpublic.com yeah, I'm excited to start harvesting some tax losses. Trying to, yeah. And to obviously starting to. I would just personally, I mean, for me, I, you know, I've always dollar cost, cost average. It's like SPX and things like that and just to kind of do that. So it's not, hey, 9:30am on a Monday once a month, you know, after seeing what I can do with bitcoin will be extremely compelling. We do so much better.
- [49:28]
D
Yeah. And even dcaing, the term is, is grossly, you know, misrepresenting. It's. It's a very. Because dcaing is typically a random act. It's like I'm picking Tuesday at 9am to buy a little bit of money. You put a little bit of money spreading your eggs out across many baskets as it pertains to putting capital across a lot of different time points or pricing points is a great thing. But the next question is, is like, when are you scheduled to do those events? Are you scheduled to do them on giant green candle days where the price has gone parabolic and it's three standard deviations against the vwap. Probably not a good day to do that. The timing of the execution of that is where the inconvenience and where most of the mistakes are made because we' humans and we have other things to do. And you know, the convenience of waiting for volatility to present itself isn't something that is. We can't do it. So
- [50:26]
E
we talked about a, a setup on a webinar that we hosted with our concierge program folks last Thursday that showed since the beginning of February until today, a setup that was up more than 21 with Bitcoin coin, whereas Bitcoin was down like four and a half percent. So, so there is the difference, right? Like DCA is one thing, but when you're actually, you actually have tools and strategies that is managing the volatility to your good. That's a 25 delta in a, in even a tight period of time. The, the, the, the value to you as an investor is exceptional and extraordinary. And by the way, that was a cash yield type of strategy. So you end up with more cash. What can you then do with that cash? Well if bitcoin is down 5% in that period and you want to just put it back into bitcoin at a reduced price, I mean my goodness, more
- [51:20]
D
purchasing power, more compounding all of the stuff that makes bitcoin exceptional.
- [51:27]
B
Yeah. I mean I think everyone who's used it obviously loves it and excited to use it on literally anything else they can. Yeah. Yeah, that's me. All right guys. So Everybody check out archpublic.com. give Andrew and Tillman a follow and that is all that we have for this wonderful Tuesday. The three of us will see you next week.
- [51:49]
A
Let's do. That's dope.