← The Wolf Of All Streets
The Wolf Of All Streets
Bitcoin To $400K, Solana To $420, Ethereum Not Worth Owning | Joe McCann
01:05:56
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- [00:00]
Joe McCann
You're looking good, dude. How do you not age? Like, especially with all the stress from crypto stress.
- [00:07]
Scott Melker
One tweet that says I care about the market again and you're up 12%.
- [00:10]
Joe McCann
Which is not financial advice, obviously, but if you are, you're shorting a Trump headline. And so the obvious follow up question is, well, Joe, what's the killer app? And it's like, if I knew that, I'd be invested in it. This trade policy is completely self induced. Joe McCann predicts $1 million bitcoin price tomorrow.
- [00:31]
Scott Melker
It's become to anyone who follows crypto that the four year cycle is effectively dead. We would have expected that bitcoin would make a top and then all altcoins would go absolutely crazy. That has not happened this time. Bitcoin has gone crazy because there's new money coming in. And meme coins have gone crazy because that's where the degenerates are spending all of their time. But everything else in the middle is floating around, seeking a narrative when I want to understand what's happening in the market, why it's important, and how to view it and price it moving forward. I talked to Joe McCann, who is the CEO and founder of Asymmetric. Now they're a VC fund. They do liquid. But at the core, Joe is a trader who's been in markets for over 25 years. He understands what's happening and he has the balls to actually trade on it. You don't want to miss this amazing conversation. That's dope. Although honestly, I hope that that was just the podcast and they put that in there because I love talking about Miami and the real estate and doom and gloom and crashes and all these things. But maybe let's just start with where you stand generally on markets right now, because it's a crazy time. I know this will be a bit evergreen, so it doesn't have to be based on prices today, but we've obviously seen some hiccups in markets right now as a result of uncertainty. Trump's new policies, what's happening around the world. And we have to put bitcoin and crypto into context of that. So broad strokes.
- [02:12]
Joe McCann
I mean, stretch, dude, because I got a lot to cover.
- [02:15]
Scott Melker
Let's get it.
- [02:17]
Joe McCann
So let's, let's rewind the clock a little bit and then understand where we got. We'll quit and Tarantino this thing. We'll start at the ending and then work our go all the way to the beginning. So at the beginning of the year, I had a pretty firm view that the first couple of weeks of 2025 would be a little dicey, just maybe a little pullback, something to that effect. And then we rally because Trump's going to be inaugurated and all these incredibly positive headlines coming, et cetera. And so that was, right, bitcoin dipped to 89k and then V shaped out of there, which I was like, wow, this is impressive. There's a serious bid here. Then you couple that with probably, I mean, arguably you've been in crypto for a while. Like I have like the best headlines in the history of crypto. Like by far times you could not every day you're like, I can't even keep up with all of this. Right, yeah. So you have this kind of V shaped bounce. A lot of buyers coming from bitcoin and crypto. You've got these positive tailwinds from headlines and policy. You've got sovereigns buying the etf, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right. And what happened? Market went straight down. Everybody was wrong. And I was one of those people. I'll be the first to admit it. I really thought the positioning, the setup was just, it was too good. It was like, this is just. And in hindsight, of course, it was too good, too good to be.
- [03:41]
Scott Melker
And for crypto to add to that, obviously we had the four year cycle, right? This was supposed to be the perfect moment in context of the having and global liquidity and all those things. Altcoins should have gone absolutely bananas between January now and we saw it happen.
- [03:58]
Joe McCann
The complete opposite happen, right? I mean, the complete opposite happened. And you know, I've been a trader for 25 years now and it doesn't matter. The market just continues to humble me, right? And it'll humble anyone that thinks that they can outsmart it. But you know, again, if you give me that setup, 100 at times out of a hundred, I'm staying long. Right? Like it's just the setup. That being said, what was happening under the market internals, particularly as it related to equities, was, was definitely affecting crypto. And so you had, there's these large hedge funds called multi platform hedge funds. These are your millenniums, your citadels, baliosis of the world. They have tens of billions of dollars under management. They have what are called these pods. These are like individual, you know, kind of like mini hedge funds within the hedge fund that are specialized on specific either sectors or what we call factors, factor based investing. So this could be beta realized volatility, et cetera. All of these factors were getting Destroyed this in late January, early February, and it caused an amount of forced de risking. Excuse me, forced de grossing and then forced de risking that bled over into crypto because, well, guess who holds a bunch of Bitcoin, ETFs, Millennium, all of these funds as well. And so you couple that with some of the anxiety around Trump's trade policy and it kind of, you know, in hindsight, it makes sense. I think what's happened most recently, though, is the consensus was trade's Trump policy was going to be on average about a 15% increase, and it blew way past that. So the market was priced for 15% going into liberation Day and was wildly mispriced because of the tariff policy being as high as it was. So what happened?
- [05:38]
Scott Melker
Of course, by the way, I was dead wrong that day too, because that morning I was on my show saying, everybody knows tariffs are coming, so what could possibly be bad news? Okay, I guess everybody gets terrified.
- [05:49]
Joe McCann
Every economist on the planet being wrong.
- [05:51]
Scott Melker
And up to 200 and something percent on China was above expectations.
- [05:55]
Joe McCann
Right? So what we saw happen that day and the subsequent following days was a massive repricing of risk, and this included crypto. I've been a Solana bull for a long time. As you know, it broke below 100 bucks. ETH traded down to the 1300 handle, Bitcoin down to 74k, which isn't terrible, but like altcoins were just absolutely decimated, let alone meme coins and every other AI agent coin, and you name it. Right? Now, what I noticed on April 7, and I've got this pinned on my Twitter so I can farm the cloud later, is I basically called the bottom that basically called the bottom on equities on April 7, the day of the bottom. And it had a lot to do with a number of factors. One, there was supposed to be this Black Monday event. Didn't happen.
- [06:48]
Scott Melker
Thank you, Kramer saved us.
- [06:52]
Joe McCann
Two, the amount of liquidity available in the S&P 500 futures contracts called the E minis was at like record lows. Three, that that also implied that liquidity in individual stock names was likely at record lows. It's harder to track that, but likely at record lows. And you could see this in the bid offer spread in these, in these equities and then just an enormous amount of capitulative volume. I think that day Q. Q. Q. And SPY traded like a record amount of notional volume or something to that effect or close to that effect. And then certainly a couple days later we had Trump or a few Days later we had Trump kind of the 90 day thing and then stuff ripped. A lot of that ripping was the fact that there was no liquidity because these individual names are so that the stocks are so illiquid. Hedge funds, et cetera, are trading them less, which means market makers are holding less inventory or they're widening the spread. So in order for them to make money and furthermore, spy the S&P 500 ETF its net asset value. Remember the spy is a basket of the S&P 500. Right. So there's potentially an arbitrage there. If the spy isn't actually equal to all 500 members of that it traded one day at a 1% premium to nav. What does that imply? Hedge funds and fast money traders institutions are preferring a macro product over individual names because there's more liquidity and it even wasn't that much. Now as this was kind of unfolding, what was happening with crypto? Well, it was kind of trading in lockstep to some extent with the NASDAQ or the Russell 2000 depending on what you were looking at. But what was telling to me was the move in gold. I actually thought gold topped around 30, 50. It didn't. It may have topped today around 35.
- [08:47]
Scott Melker
I literally, they don't know what day we're recording, but I think I called it topping today big time. But I thought 3,100. You get just above the psychological level.
- [08:56]
Joe McCann
Exactly. That's the same thing. Right. And what is telling about the moving gold is that the digital gold narrative of bitcoin hasn't held up at least in terms of performance until today. Until this week. I don't know when this is going to go out, but this gold reaching this almost blow off top level, I'm not suggesting that the final, final top is in, but I think we pull back a little bit here. If you look at the bitcoin gold cross, right? So that like if you're long bitcoin, short gold, that trade has had a multi month downtrend and it's breaking out right now. And so does that imply that people that are buying gold are rotating to bitcoin? Maybe, but bitcoin is a fraction of the market cap of gold at this point. So I don't know if that's really the case secondarily. Historically bitcoin or crypto has led rallies in equity bottoms when there's been pullbacks in equities. Historically, bitcoin and crypto tend to lead a bit. And so you could just have a combination of Those two things affecting the price of Bitcoin now. But either way, the state of the market for me right now is how can you not be invested? And you say, Joe, you run a fund, you're supposed to say that, right? It's like, well, I short stuff too, right? So my, my point of saying this is if we assume that the, the local maxima in tariff policy is known, Trump came out guns blazing, blew every economist forecast away, market repriced. If we assume he's not going to come over the top again, well then we kind of know what the local maxima is. So in that scenario, if you're shorting here, which this is not financial advice obviously, but if you are, you're sorting a Trump headline and to me that is suicidal in markets because this guy can tweet one thing and rip the NASDAQ 10%, right? So I look at it probabilistically and say, okay, I was wrong in Q1, I was wrong on the forecast for tariffs. If I reevaluate and recalibrate where I'm sitting today, I might flat in cash, long or short. And my belief is you have to have some level of investment long because you want to be long. Trump headlines. This is a headline driven market. At this point, fundamentals are utterly irrelevant. Basically, investing is beta because you're just, you don't know what you're investing in. You're just long. Right? So I do think that there's a strong chance that if we start to see more deals, actual deals, specifically the one with Japan, come, you know, hit the tape, this should be bullish risk. We're not out of the woods yet because a lot of folks are using market internals and saying, hey, we haven't had these like monster capitulated volumes, this is just a dead cat bounce at a bear market, et cetera. The big difference, and I think it's very important for people to understand this, is that when you look back historically at 2022 and Covid and 2018 and global financial crisis, those largely were, I don't want to say black swans, but they were events. Even last August with the Japanese var shock when the banks were down 20%, this trade policy is completely self induced, which means the Trump administration has been directly or indirectly talking markets down. And so I think the heuristics that you would use historically don't necessarily apply, one for one, because this is self inflicted and it can also talk it up. Yeah, exactly. So in a blink it can pivot.
- [12:49]
Scott Melker
We've seen that, we've Seen that literally, it doesn't matter what he says. We go down 20% or whatever from the highs on the S and P, the Qs and below. And then one tweet that says I care about the market again and you're up 12%.
- [13:02]
Joe McCann
Exactly. And that is exactly my point is that we're kind of in this uncharted territory because the historical stuff that we tend to use to identify market bottoms or a continuation of the downside, they're not really in this framework where we're self inducing this volatility and drawdown in the markets. And so I do think the weakening dollar is certainly catalyzing some of the bitcoin movement because it's just mispriced if you price it in dollars. So if the dollar continues to weaken, we should in theory see Bitcoin's value continue increase.
- [13:41]
Scott Melker
Okay, so we've had these endless debates over whether Bitcoin is a correlated asset and if so, whether it's digital gold. Makes me puke to think that people think it should trade exactly like gold, even if it has the properties of gold. But that's a different conversation. Or whether it's just another risk asset and trades like tech and you know, throw it in there as Maggate. But I was taking a look at those charts recently. Obviously you mentioned the bitcoin bitcoin gold chart. It's been taking a beating since making a high not so many months ago. But if you look at a bitcoin denominated by NASDAQ chart, it's actually making new all time high after new all time high and is a steady, huge upslope to the right with higher highs and higher lows. That's not what it would look like if it was correlated to big tech. If Bitcoin was actually correlated to tech, it would be a straight flat line. Right. They would trade simultaneously. I've made the argument that bitcoin is Bitcoin, that both of those are kind of doing a disservice to Bitcoin by comparing them to either. There are times when they're correlated. But I would love your take because everybody has a different view on what bitcoin is. It certainly held a hell of a lot of strength through the tariff downturns.
- [14:53]
Joe McCann
Yeah, I mean there's, there's two things here. One is bitcoin is tiny relative to other asset classes. Like I can't underscore how important that it is tiny. Right. But two, on the correlation decoration argument, it's very context specific to like your, your trading or investing style, right? So for example, if you're a fast twitch trader, mean you're an active trader, day trader, swing trader, you're going to want to track day to day correlations to see like, hey, is Bitcoin trading in lockstep with the Nasdaq? Yes or no or is it not? Right. If you zoom out to your point about the Mag 7, it's clearly not correlated, right? And I think that this would imply if you're a fast twitch active trader, it makes more sense from that kind of short term timeframe. But if you're not, you look at something like Bitcoin and say, well, there is an argument to be made that it is high tech beta, right? It's even more beta than just like your Teslas and your Apples and Googles of the world. But on the other hand, the religion of Bitcoin around it being this, this asset that is protecting you against fiat debasement, I think has some legs to it. The difference will be when more sovereigns, more reserve banks, et cetera, actually start to put this on their balance sheet. We're seeing a lot of corporates do this. We're seeing a lot of corporates actually copy MicroStrategy's strategy, actually, in fact we're seeing this with Solana.
- [16:28]
Scott Melker
Strategy.
- [16:29]
Joe McCann
Yeah, strategy. Strategy, yeah. So I do think that if Bitcoin is to be a hedge against fiat debasement, is a digital gold or it's high tech momentum, if it's any of these things, great, because all of those are narratives and Bitcoin is the first Internet native currency, if you will. And frankly in my opinion it's the first meme coin because the information propagated around the Internet. And so as these narratives continue to take hold, you should see the price continue to decouple from pick an asset. Right? It's interesting to see the massive underperformance of Bitcoin relative to actual gold this year. To me this also implies that there's still a lot of room for whether it's institutions, it's reserve banks to actually start adopting Bitcoin because gold is non trivial to move around and like all the stuff we know, right? It's difficult, it's not a medium exchange, etc. Now one could argue Bitcoin isn't really a great medium of exchange either. That's fine, but it's way easier to transport, you can utilize it worldwide and it's censorship resistant, all that good stuff. I think that that tailwind of saying like the boomer version of Gold, which is gold, is going to jump into the digital world, is real and is coming. I'm not going to say the stupid adage of we're so early because I think that's nonsense at this point. It's just a matter of time as this stuff actually starts to cross the chasm over into, from the analog world into digital and people recognize that, hey, if China's reserve bank is buying gold hand over fist, it's likely because of some fiat related policy or currency war with the United States. Well, if the United States tries to hoard as much gold as they can, which we do have, the most gold of any country, they're going to have to find an alternative. Right. And I'm not suggesting China's going to immediately go buy bitcoin. I'm just saying that story isn't that far fetched.
- [18:35]
Scott Melker
It's also not that far fetched if the United States actually makes a single announcement that they're adding bitcoin to the strategic bitcoin reserve by buying any. Of course, we haven't even gotten an audit to prove that we have any. But if they indicate that they're buying some, the global, the game theory of that globally, with central banks around the world, China or otherwise, is indisputable. I mean, if the United States says this thing is a reserve asset and we're buying some, all bets are off.
- [19:04]
Joe McCann
I agree.
- [19:05]
Scott Melker
Yeah. Although I ought to be honest. I thought when he signed the executive order we would have gotten some price action around that and we did it. So it's funny that the things that we kind of posit will be these huge drivers seemingly aren't, you know, like at least the announcements. But I think that's just the velocity of announcements coming from Trump at any given time, 100%.
- [19:26]
Joe McCann
I mean, this is the, you know, it's always easy to look in the rearview mirror and say, oh, well, it was already priced in. Right. But the difference was before that executive order was signed, people were speculating on what the executive order was going to have in it. Thus, if you buy Bitcoin. Right. You know what I'm saying? And so I do think that there is something to be said about, you know, you can look at where we sit now. Okay, we have all this information, the executive order signed, we're going to be getting, you know, hopefully a market structure Bill, stablecoin bill, all these things by August, according to Tim Scott. But what happens when there's this kind of unknown catalyst, you know, for example, maybe they come over the top and Say we are actually going to buy whatever 5% of the Bitcoin supply like Senator Loomis is suggesting. No one is pricing that in right now because we were pricing it before and then it got repriced.
- [20:16]
Scott Melker
It's crazy that really markets only trade on reality versus expectation and not reality. It always happens. I mean that clearly happened here in the case of a strategic bitcoin reserve. But every time we get job numbers, even though we all know they'll be revised, but every time we get job numbers or we get a Fed announcement or we get cpi, it's never about is inflation bad or good, Is inflation better or worse slightly than what a bunch of economists have said they think it will be. Which just shows you how detached from reality all of our economic data are and then how further detached market reactions are to that.
- [20:51]
Joe McCann
Oh, I mean you're touching my philosophical nerve here because I remember I was on stage in Singapore at token 2049 last year and was explaining to the audience that hey, is everybody familiar with the price to earnings ratio? And they're like, yeah, I'm like, that's a meme. Like what was the metric that people used before that was invented? People don't know because now everybody uses this thing that somebody invented. Right. And it's the same to be said of almost all of this economic data. If you take the formula for gdp, the actual process for cpi, I'm not going to bore people with the details. You should look it up on grok. It's crazy, crazy archaic. Like it's kind of laughable, right? Current GDP doesn't factor in like, you know, things like tech and the, the AI productivity boom that's coming, et cetera, et cetera. These things are vestiges of a, of a financial system that will continue to exist. But the alternate financial system which is on chain digital, is going to continue to show better promise and ultimately better results because it's digital and it's of this age as opposed to, you know, 10, 20, 100 plus years ago.
- [22:01]
Scott Melker
Yeah, I mean the CPI, they talk about touching a philosophical nerve. I mean every, they just change the way it's calculated. You know, it's like it's not, not only can you like not trust the actual calculation, but they'll just change the way it's calculated to make the numbers look better, right?
- [22:18]
Joe McCann
That's right.
- [22:20]
Scott Melker
And we've had others over the years.
- [22:22]
Joe McCann
But it's the, the United States not alone in this. So, so China has done this repeatedly with their unemployment rates, the unemployment rates for Youth were horrifically bad. And they just said, oh, we'll just change the calculation. They did the same thing with M2 money supply at the beginning of this year. People thought there was a huge jump in M2 money supply expansion, and it was actually just. They just changed the calculation. Right?
- [22:45]
Scott Melker
Yeah. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when you knew how to define a recession.
- [22:49]
Joe McCann
Yes.
- [22:51]
Scott Melker
It's like, yeah, two quarters. But you also. Yeah, okay, whatever. Right. So we all know that they're cooking. Cooking the numbers or at least changing definitions to see how it looks. So what I want to talk to you about then, you're one of the first people who was, like, constantly beating in my feed Meme coins, you know? And I'm not talking about, like, when we were in the Dojan shib cycle, Solana, specifically Bonk. You were like, the bonk maxi of all bonk maxis. That was really, like, a little moment in time that preceded the true insanity. Like, basically meme coin degeneracy reaching its final form on Pump Fun and Celebrities and all those things. So I'm curious where you stand right now. Maybe you could the history of you with Meme Coins, very briefly, but, like, where you stand now on whether they're net positive still, as you obviously believed.
- [23:39]
Joe McCann
Yeah, sure. So you are correct. I've been labeled the Michael Sailor of Bonk. So. And yes, we at Asymmetric, my digital assets investment firm, we were the first hedge fund to buy Meme Coins in October of 2023.
- [24:00]
Scott Melker
Early.
- [24:01]
Joe McCann
Well, let me. Let me take a step back. So Asymmetric, we're a digital assets investment firm, but we sit at the intersection of capital, culture, and technology. And I think that most investment firms are either technical or very financial capital driven, but completely lack a pulse of culture. And like, you and I, Scott, have been DJs. Like, we've been involved in pop culture and music and fashion and the arts and the kind of creative space, if you will. And that is historically not something that they teach you at business school, if at all, because why would you put a financial value on culture? Enter Meme Coins. And so in, you know, call it Q4 of 2023, I sort of developed this hypothesis around the kind of tokenization of pop culture and specifically Internet culture. And then I looked at the history. I was like, okay, Doge, $85 billion market cap in the last bull run. Shiba Inu, $48 billion market cap. That was for Ethereum. Last bull run. Solana hasn't had one. I was like, bonk.
- [25:03]
Scott Melker
But this was also pre like Solana's massive run back. Right. So like you were, you were also taking a risk on Solana, which was supposed to be dead. It's not like you can't look at it through the lens of Solana became the replacement for Ethereum. You did this when it was like, Solana is Sam Coin. FTX crushed it. Maybe it's going to zero. Oh, by the way, let's trade memes on Solana. I'm trying to give you your extra credit here.
- [25:27]
Joe McCann
Yeah, thank you. So the other aspect of me, my background professionally is I've been a software developer for 25 years, a trader and a software developer. And so the thing that struck me about Solana was folks that are non technical or haven't worked in open source, I've been working at Open source for 17 years, don't understand the kind of the momentum that was behind Solana at the technical level. The price is one thing. I mean I bought Solana hand over fist at $8, but at this point in Q4, I was trading in the upper 20s, low 30s. I was looking at it going like, nothing has changed technologically except it's gotten better. It's actually improved like the reliability, the performance you have. Jump trading. Investing in Fire Dancer, there was all of these touch points where I'm like, if Solana did not have a token and it was just an open source project, I would say that this thing is thriving. So that was the technological bet on it. Then I started to do some basic wallet forensics and analytics to see, oh, a bunch of stablecoin flows were coming over into Solana. People were at the time from Ethereum were saying, oh, they're just farming airdrops. And it's like, well, it's staying here, it's not leaving. And so then I looked at the charts, I do a lot of technical analysis and I looked at it and thought, okay, Solana's trading just under the kind of support level that broke when FTX imploded. I was like, if it, if it gets back above that, you're going to have a short squeeze and momentum traders are going to start buying this thing and it could actually really explode. Well, if that's the case, people that hold Solana on chain are going to see their net worth increase and what do they typically do as degens? They buy a Meme Coin.
- [27:15]
Scott Melker
Yep.
- [27:16]
Joe McCann
Right. And I was like, there's only one real Meme coin to buy on Solana and that's Bonk, which has this Netflix quality Story behind it, a killer team. I mean, today they have a bunch of products that generates protocol revenue, et cetera, et cetera. I was like, this thing's trading a $28 million market cap. I'm like, should be a couple billion if this thing actually explodes.
- [27:37]
Scott Melker
It was 28 million at that time.
- [27:40]
Joe McCann
That's when I bought it.
- [27:42]
Scott Melker
I see why you got that. Nice view.
- [27:44]
Joe McCann
Yeah. So yes, that was 2023 and we were informed actually in Q1 of 2024 by Prequin, which is a kind of data provider for hedge fund performance, that we were the number one rated hedge fund in terms of net of fees of performance for 2023, which I was blown away by. And it wasn't just because of Bonk, it was Solana and Bonk and some other stuff that we had that we had traded. Because at Asymmetric we have what's called a concentration risk policy, where if a token is not in the top 20 by market cap, we can't buy more than 2% of it. The fund AUM, it's just smart, right? Well, you'd be surprised how many fundamentals.
- [28:18]
Scott Melker
You'Re an actual hedge fund. Wow. Weird.
- [28:22]
Joe McCann
So fast forward to where we are today. Right? Like, the way that I look at meme coins today is I really do look at it like software versions. So Doge was probably like the beta version then. Shiba inu is 1.0, bonk was 2.0, pump fund was 3.0 and then 3.1, 3.2. All these tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of meme coins have been created. Is that good or bad? I look at it from a very different lens. I love how crypto, the community of crypto, the industry of crypto, loves to rename things like revenue to extraction. Right? Like they're like pump fun. It's a startup, venture backed startup is extracting hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm like, that's revenue. Only in crypto when your bags are down, is it extraction.
- [29:12]
Scott Melker
And it's like it's revenue when it comes in, in Solana, but it's extraction when you actually cash out to have money.
- [29:19]
Joe McCann
Correct. And so like I'm not an investor in Pump Fund. I'm not an angel, an advisor, nothing. I have no dog in this race. That's a killer business. I'm sorry. Like you can, you know, pound the table all you want and complain and bitch and moan on the Internet about how extractive it is and farm engagement from that. The truth of the matter is, is that it's A phenomenal business, right? Like that's the, that's the truth. And I look at this again from a technological lens. Solana's chain has not suffered from this explosion in activity. And even over the past couple months when we've had a drop in activity across the board, Solana is still two thirds of all network activity. I mean, it's not even close. And the chain is super, super robust. There has been no reliability issue for well over a year now. And furthermore, I did not hypothesize this in 2023, but when the most popular person on the planet launches a Meme Coin on Solana, what does that tell you? And the chain did not suffer. It hummed right along. Now some of the wallet providers like Phantom, had issues. That's not the chain, right? That's a user interface on top of the chain. And for me, when I saw the Trump Meme Coin launch and I saw what was happening with all the activity on chain, I was like, this is it. Like we have infrastructure ready for mass adoption. Right. And it does not imply that Solana is not going to have issues going forward. They should, because as you pressure test a network, you're going to find out new bugs in the code, et cetera. But this is one of the reasons why we recently launched our Venture Fund 2, which is exclusively focused on consumer applications and web 3. The first, believe it or not, there's no crypto venture fund that's invested just purely in apps because they're all invested in infrastructure. And that trade is over, in my opinion. Our Venture Fund 1, our Bitcoin DeFi Venture Fund, we invested in infrastructure and that stuff. But going forward, look at what happened. And this chain is functioning. And by the way, yes, there's SUI and aptos and Monad and Bara and all these other things, base, et cetera, that can and probably will have some applications that are built on those chains that could be breakout applications. I'm all for that. Because if we now have our infrastructure that's strong enough, given the test of things like Pump Fund and Trump, we should start to see these consumer applications finally come to fruition. And so the obvious follow up question is, well, Joe, what's the killer app? And it's like, if I knew that I'd be invested in it. Stablecoins, no one knew. Artificial intelligence has been around 70, 80 years. No one was like in the 1990s, like a chat interface to talk to me about every. You know what I mean? Like, it just doesn't work that way when you're when you're innovating, like, if it's, if it was a new form of innovation that you could forecast, it's not innovative. Right. It's that simple.
- [32:19]
Scott Melker
Yeah, that all makes perfect sense. Listen, I'm not a huge fan of like the meme coin craze in its current iteration. You know, obviously Libra and Trump and all those things. But I 100% agree with your point on Pump Fun. Pump Fun is a platform. The extraction is from the people who use it in a predatory manner, not from the platform itself. It's a huge. It goes back to the same thing. Like bitcoin's only for drug dealers or you know, or for criminals on the Internet. Like drug dealers use iPhones. Nobody's bitching that iPhones are like making drug money. You know what I mean?
- [32:54]
Joe McCann
Like, and by the way, like, let's be clear. I mean, you bring up a really good point, right? If you give nefarious people incentive to scam or fraud or defraud people, they will. And let me remind you that the, one of the biggest frauds in US history was Bernie Madoff. A guy in a suit with an office in New York, well respected. And what did he do? He defrauded people. Right now it was, was more difficult to do it the way he did it than it would be, you know, scamming on pump that fund. My point is, is the entire investment industry a fraud or a scam because of Bernie Madoff? No, the individual actors, if you give them the ability to do certain things, they will. If they have nefarious intent. And that's not going to change for the rest of humanity, it'll always be that way.
- [33:45]
Scott Melker
Agree. But what has happened indisputably is that in my mind, we've had this barbell for this cycle. If we even want to talk about four year cycles or cycles, we've had obviously a massive flood of new money into Bitcoin through institutions, sovereigns and retail. Obviously with the availability of the etf. I don't think anyone disputes that there's new money coming into Bitcoin. I would argue that all of the degenerate speculative, even those who proclaimed that they cared about utility trading altcoins in past cycles, I think they've been proven to be speculators as well, have all gone down into the pump dot fund casino trenches. And that's the other side of the barbell for liquidity and volume. And there's been almost nothing in between. So all of the highly hyped utility products, all that infrastructure you talked about, even the few apps that were there, nothing has caught a bid. There's just no new money on that side. And this time ETF money is not trickling down into memes. So it's a bifurcated market.
- [34:48]
Joe McCann
Yeah, I mean you raise a great point. And I think one, it may not be popular, but I don't think the four year cycle is relevant anymore. And it has a lot to do with the institutional adoption of Bitcoin. Yeah, there's just like real money flows, meaning like asset, asset managers, institutions, pensions, reserve banks. These flows are nothing of the sort that you could imagine pre etf. It's just, it's hard for people to fathom how much money could flow into the space purely through ETFs. Bitcoin first spot ETF. And also a very easy thing to sell to baby boomers. Digital gold. Right. How the hell do you sell them? Ethereum, like what do you think?
- [35:35]
Scott Melker
Clearly we can't. Clearly we can't because they got an ETF and Ethereum. It's a Greek tragedy. Looking at that chart because I believed, to be honest, I was one of those, it's like, yeah, it'll bounce here. Oversold, bullish divergence. We're good to go.
- [35:50]
Joe McCann
Yeah, good luck anytime. Ethereum rips usually take profits across the board on everything. Yeah, yeah, but so, so that's, that's one aspect. I, I don't think the four year cycle applies anymore. I just think it's a different game we're playing now as institutions are adopting Bitcoin. But secondarily you make a good point on the liquidity side. Right. Like last cycle, retail bid up a bunch of, you know, shitcoins, utility tokens, governance tokens, because there weren't meme coins.
- [36:23]
Scott Melker
And if, and if you wanted to trade a meme coin, you had to sign up for a centralized exchange every. People forget that the whole cycle last time was Doge and NFTs. That's right, and some Bitcoin. But you had to get online for binance for like two months or Robinhood or Voyager because they couldn't onboard people just to be able to trade it. And that's the difference. Now it really is decentralized and we see the final form of that. I didn't mean to interrupt you, but it's important to note that now you don't need to be on an exchange to trade the meme coins.
- [36:54]
Joe McCann
That's right. And furthermore, Trump's meme coin launch was testament to normies that have no Crypto wallet, you can just use moonshot, right? Like you don't need all of this stuff. And this is again why I get back to the reason we're launching a consumer app focused web3 fund is the infrastructure, even wallet infrastructure is good enough where it's abstracted the painful process of a seed phrase all this stuff away from the end user. Right? So my view right now is a lot of people are saying retail hasn't come back in and it's like they kind of have their trading meme coins and it's not a lot of it is like, you know, you're seeing these exchanges trying to list stuff quickly and like they can't keep up. I mean the beauty of Trump launching on chain is that no exchange had it in time, right? It wasn't like a meme coin launched on Binance or Coinbase. It's like, no, it launched on chain and that's really telling, right? I, I so, so I think a lot of that liquidity, where historically that would come into utility tokens or governance tokens, shitcoins is going to struggle because retail, you know, they want the hundred x, right? They don't want some, they're not going to buy acre based on some fundamentals. But that raises a different question. Who does buy tokens based on fundamentals?
- [38:12]
Scott Melker
And that's the next question. And you asked it to yourself.
- [38:14]
Joe McCann
Yeah, it's typically, there you go. It's typically institutions right now these could be hedge funds, these could be asset issuers like ETF issuers. And I think it's way early for this, but excuse me, there is a case to be made that if you take some of these tokens like Athena or let's use Jito, a portfolio company at Asymmetric. JITO makes tons of money, like billions of dollars run rate. Right now, I think about 94, 95% of the validators on Solana's network run Jito and they make a ton of money. And there has been a proposal to put money basically like distribute that money to Geno token holders. Acting almost like a dividend, right? Like a stock would pay you a dividend. Well, who loves dividends? Boomers. They love them dividends, right? So imagine again, like I'm not suggesting this is going to happen overnight, but imagine a scenario where we get enough clarity on tokens, you know, from the sec, CFTC and otherwise, and assume that we can actually have protocol revenue going back these token holders as a dividend asset issuers can wrap Those up in ETFs and sell them to boomers really easily. Again, I'm not suggesting this is happening overnight, but asset issuers don't care. They just want to make money on fees. And if they feel like they can package something together and sell it to the market and make it easy for them to make fees on because there's a dividend associated with it to some extent, I think that is likely going to happen. So we've looked at a lot of the fundamentals in the space right now. So whether it's Jito, it's Radium, it's Jupiter, it's Athena, it's Maker, there's loads of these projects that are generating real revenue. But using the old metrics, I was making fun of price to earnings previously. Using these old metrics doesn't really apply because they're not businesses, they're protocols, they're networks. Right. And so I think the mental model is, is there going to be a shift away from like on the institutional side, away from meme coins and super high beta stuff, to hey, we're going to create a fundamental thesis and we want companies that are generating X amount of revenue, that own X percentage of this network or this market share or whatever it is, and then just long those things. Right, right. I think that is coming. Certainly given the pullback in Q1, you see a lot of people making this case now and I think that that's going to continue going forward.
- [40:52]
Scott Melker
So there's hope for some altcoins that are in the middle of that barbell. But what it sounds like to me is if we're talking about the four year cycle being dead, because let's remember, part of that cycle is altcoins going crazy whenever bitcoin tops and consolidates, which obviously has not happened. So it sounds like you do not have a belief in the throw a dart at the wall and everything eventually goes up.
- [41:14]
Joe McCann
Alt season I have been on record all year, much to the chagrin of crypto Twitter, saying that there's not going to be an alt season and I don't think there will be. And I could be dead wrong, but I have been saying since the Bitcoin ETF launched in January of 2024 that Bitcoin dominance has not topped and it in fact hit a new trend high last week. Right.
- [41:37]
Scott Melker
It never tops because there's new money coming into bitcoin and there's no new money coming into everything else.
- [41:43]
Joe McCann
Exactly. And so the product of the ETF is easily consumable by a massive audience of people. The product of some utility token or governance token is non trivial to access. It's really that simple. And so this is why I'm saying the proliferation of ETFs and then the future potential like dividend paying ETFs for crypto, this is going to actually, you know, I would say create bids in some of those tokens, right? So whether this is Solana, this is Ripple, I mean there's a Trump ETF that's been filed. These tokens likely benefit simply because the product is wrapped up in a very easy consumable form and the ones that aren't will struggle. Now the other thing is a lot of these asset issuers like there's a bonk ETF coming out, right? A lot of these asset issuers will look on chain to see like which one's getting a lot of trading volume distribution of wallets, all this kind of stuff as a, as a gauge to say should we go and ETF ify this thing, right? And that's why you see things like Solana and Ripple having their, even litecoin having their ETFs getting wrapped up, right. I think that like that's going to feed some of the middle. But you know, as a VC who's got investments in some of this stuff, like it's going to be tough to keep providing these tokens unless they actually drive, you know, protocol revenue or something beyond governance, I don't, I think that like that experiment is over and there has to be fundamentals applied to the tokens that are being issued. One thing I do want to point out though is a lot of, you know, I see this all the time of like there's going to be so much supply hitting the market, there's not enough dollars bidding it, et cetera, et cetera. That uses information as we sit here today for a future state that you do not know. So for example, out of all the money raised in crypto funds, VC and hedge funds, about 90% is in DC. We could see that normalize to 50, 50. All of a sudden you've got a lot more money in liquid hedge funds like a place like asymmetric. And if that happens, these hedge funds have to buy tokens. Well they're going to create a thesis or a set of theses around what tokens to buy and that new money or liquidity coming into the market could provide a bid to some of these assets. Most of them will ask them totally traded zero. You've been in enough cycles to know there's so many zombie coins that are out there, they're still out there or.
- [44:20]
Scott Melker
Some of them have hundreds of millions of dollars in market cap.
- [44:26]
Joe McCann
So, you know, the question really is like, I don't believe that there's this notion of all of this supply is coming to market and there's no demand because you're using this kind of fixed framing. As we sit here today, imagine there's new liquidity that comes in either on the institutional side, retail side, or both that can create a potential bid. Those are the things that I'm looking out for.
- [44:48]
Scott Melker
I just wonder if it'll be more selective this time. Right.
- [44:51]
Joe McCann
Because even like, well, selective because there's so much choice. Right.
- [44:55]
Scott Melker
Not only saying because how many tokens you're invested in or that you've been pitched, because you obviously don't say yes to everything, are waiting for market conditions to improve to launch.
- [45:08]
Joe McCann
All of them.
- [45:10]
Scott Melker
They're all going to decide market conditions are good.
- [45:12]
Joe McCann
At the same time, believe it or not, one of our portfolio companies, Hyperlane, actually did their token generation event today.
- [45:19]
Scott Melker
I think I saw Hyperlane. Yeah, that's good. Listen, I would like to. I thought that we had a few launches in the past few months that would be like great barometers for what was likely to come. Gunzilla being one of them. Because it's a legit AAA game, like trending on. Twitch has the biggest gamers in the world and I think it's currently trading under like the last round of funding.
- [45:44]
Joe McCann
Which I passed on. I was actually bummed that I passed on it, but now I'm like, actually that was okay.
- [45:50]
Scott Melker
Yeah, I mean, it was high. I think they were getting into like the half a billion or something, but so that they were pushing it. But my point being is it's a little disheartening when you see something that's absolutely legit.
- [46:02]
Joe McCann
Oh yeah.
- [46:03]
Scott Melker
That fulfilled every, you know, kind of criteria we had in the last cycle for what would be a real blockchain game or blockchain product. And the token, at least initially, I still believe in it, but falls flat.
- [46:18]
Joe McCann
Yep. I mean, look, the, the other thing is some of these, these are startups, right? And so historically startups are privately marked and you do a round of funding, it's at some valuation and it kind of like stays there until there's either an up round in another round of funding, the valuation goes up, a down round, the company shuts down, or the company gets acquired and goes public. That's it. We now have startups that have tokens like trading, or the valuation is trading in real time. Really before the breadth of the or the duration of the company's history is kind of behind them. And Godzilla is a great example of like AAA games like top trending on Twitch. It's got all these checkboxes, but yet somehow it's not being reflected in the price. Right. There's still a startup and the fact that there is a liquid asset associated with it. You are at the behest of the liquidity of these markets. Right. So if you can't garner the attention of people to buy your token because it's a AAA game, et cetera, too bad it doesn't actually matter. And just look at Meme coins, right? Fart Coin as an example. It's up like 4x in the past month or something to that effect. I mean people are like, I posted this chart yesterday on Twitter. I was like, it's the best looking chart in crypto. It's a cup and hit, massive cup and handle. I was like, this thing is going to explode. And somebody was like, this is why people don't take crypto seriously. And I'm like, this is why they should take crypto seriously because this is signal. Right? Like if people are buying this, what's.
- [47:59]
Scott Melker
That telling me what happens when there's something legitimate to buy that has something, a chart that looks exactly the same. Exactly. So then you guys obviously are positioning, as you already explained it, a VC2, another fund in VC. What else are you looking at in the market right now? What's interesting to you? If it goes 50, 50 liquid, what would you be looking at? What kind of things kind of fit your thesis for the coming year or two?
- [48:25]
Joe McCann
Hedge fund side, really quick. I mean we're bitcoin heavy, we trade a lot of derivatives options. So if you take the delta value across our broader portfolio, it's roughly 70% Bitcoin. And I'm a huge Solana. Right. But it's still the right call in my opinion to be overweight bitcoin and have some exposure to the things like Solana and Ripple that are having ETFs. I mean it's kind of obvious. The only short in our book is Ethereum. So that's the hedge fund side on more like aspirational venture related stuff. So yes, we're super interested in like the consumerization of web3 and the beauty of this is that the web3 piece is abstracted away. So I'm an investor and advisor to this company called Golphin. Kind of like step in, but I'm in there, dude.
- [49:09]
Scott Melker
I got any of those guys, I've known them forever. That was, like, the quickest sell ever.
- [49:13]
Joe McCann
Oh, yeah. Okay, great. I didn't know you were on the table.
- [49:16]
Scott Melker
I was like, I don't even care if you guys, like, if this does anything like a golf app that's gonna attract me. It's sweet. Yeah.
- [49:22]
Joe McCann
But it's. It's legit, right. And. And they've done a great job of kind of abstracting away as much as you want within.
- [49:29]
Scott Melker
It doesn't look that crypto. Ish.
- [49:30]
Joe McCann
Yeah, exactly. And it's targeting golfers. Like, it's not targeting crypto people or finance people. It's targeting golf. And so that's a. That's a type of. Of product. That is the, you know, upcoming consumerization of Web3. Because they're. They're using Web3 as a technology, not as, like, you know, we're on Ethereum or we're on Solana. Like, that's the dumbest marketing ever, because no normie gives a shit or even knows what that actually means. Right?
- [49:58]
Scott Melker
Yeah. I don't want to know how my iPhone works, man.
- [50:01]
Joe McCann
Well, exactly.
- [50:02]
Scott Melker
Like, just give it to me.
- [50:02]
Joe McCann
People are like, how many people log into, like, you know, chase.com and go, what database are you using? You know what I mean? Like, no one gives a shit. So now the consumerization piece bleeds over. We have to talk about AI, because that is of massive interest to me. It should be to anybody, frankly, that is an investor, let alone kind of on the bleeding edge of tech. Yes. People understand ChatGPT and Grok and Gemini, et cetera, and how they can help you do things and learn stuff and this and that. What I don't think people understand is, you know, ChatGPT was like the first breakout app. It's just like one component. Right now you've got generative AI associated with it. It can interpret images. It can. You know, there's. There's. You can prompt. I forget the name of the company. There's a bunch of them, actually. We can prompt an entire movie script, and it just creates the film. Right. I don't think people are really grokking how transformational this is not at the individual application level, but when you tie it all together. Right. And so, you know, I was mentioning to you before we started recording at Asymmetric, we have an internal software product. We build a lot of stuff internally for our own kind of risk portfolio management, et cetera. And we've been building LLM and AI tech into it for probably almost close to two years now. And one of the things that we've done is we've created this kind of AI orchestration workflow. So instead of just using ChatGPT, we're using multiple AI related tools to accomplish a set of tasks that radically increases our productivity, quite literally. Having agents write code for our software itself as an example. That orchestration piece is super, super interesting to me as an investor because there's precedence here. If you go to AWS in 2006 when they launched, they launched with one service, S3 Simple Storage Solution. Then they added Elastic Compute, EC2 and then they added however many other services they have. One individual service doesn't make AWS all the money. It's the orchestration of all the services or a handful of services that somebody stitches together that is worth trillions of dollars. And so with AI, we're now at that point where we are at the orchestration layer of components being pulled in to accomplish a task or set of tasks that could be replacing an entire function of a business. Marketing, for example, like social media marketing. No reason that that shouldn't. You frankly don't need to hire anybody else anymore. You just need to have it be done with AI agents and using the appropriate tools in a, in a workflow that enables, you know, your marketing department to basically be replaced. Now you say, joe, this is an existential threat to human beings. I argue the other side of that.
- [53:00]
Scott Melker
And say it opens so much practice.
- [53:02]
Joe McCann
We are no longer specialists. You know, being a specialist in one aspect of marketing like social media marketing, that's commodity now you need to be a conductor. I think of AI almost like a symphony. You are conducting this symphony of tools within AI to accomplish specific tasks. And when these tasks involve financial transactions, guess what they're going to be using. They're not going to be connecting with plaid to your bank account. Like they're not going. There's too many security risk. And also like the tradfi system is just busted. It's way easier to just send stablecoins or send crypto back and forth for payments with agents involved than it is, you know, using the traditional Rails. It does not imply that agents won't be using credit cards and Stripe and PayPal and these types of things. It just means that the intersection of the AI orchestration workflow coupled with the kind of financial primitives of defi and crypto is like a perfect blend in my opinion.
- [53:59]
Scott Melker
People keep wondering where the cross between AI and crypto is going to be. And I think that it's going to be everything Literally everything in crypto.
- [54:07]
Joe McCann
Take any function of any business and look at it and go, what could be replaced with AI? And the answer is a lot of it, right? And so if a lot of it in any function of any business can be replaced with AI, or let's just say augmented with AI, then crypto naturally flows into a lot of that because AI is conducive to utilizing things like blockchain versus these kind of archaic traditional financial rails.
- [54:34]
Scott Melker
AI really is the big one, and I think people are missing it. At first it was just sort of like, oh, bots are going to transact with crypto because it's digital native money. But I think that that's just the most basic, limited view of what's possible there.
- [54:50]
Joe McCann
When, remember I talked about, I think of meme coins and like, versions of software, I see the same thing with like the AI blockchain thing or whatever, right? Like Q4 of last year, you had the AI agent explosion with True Terminal and all the, the, the, the copycats and, and the AI 16Zs and et cetera. And then I saw that, I was like, this is a ridiculously speculative bubble. Good for people that got rich off of it. I'm not hating, but I'm looking at it going like, these things are. They're not even, like, it's not even AI. They're just tweeting like they're not doing.
- [55:22]
Scott Melker
Anything and they're destroying Twitter in the process.
- [55:26]
Joe McCann
But yes, yeah, they're like, it's defi Defai. And I'm like, no, it's not. This is absolutely not it. Because there's nothing groundbreaking here. You can write an app, not AI today, to just tweet like, it's not that hard. And that's what these things were basically doing. That being said, I do think the 2.0 version of AI agents is coming. Do I know what it is? Of course not. However, just like any form of software, through iteration, you get innovation, and that's going to likely happen in the AI agent space. I'm keeping a pulse on some of the assets in that space, but also trying to track something that could be potentially net new. There is one project, full disclosure. I'm an advisor, but I was in. I bought the token before I became an advisor called Mobi, which is associated with Asset Dash. These guys, I feel like, are doing something meaningful because they're pulling in unique data sets and partnering with, you know, interesting companies in crypto to provide more insight than just like some random agent that's going to like, Buy and sell for you. Like there's no value in that. These guys are doing something marginally different, if not significantly different and they keep shipping and iterating. I'm not suggesting mobi is going to be the thing, but that's what I look for. It's like who are the teams that are continuing to iterate on what they're doing in the AI agent space such that they have a chance of being a breakout, you know, play in the AI agent space.
- [56:55]
Scott Melker
So let's have some fun with price predictions that nobody can possibly hold us to. But let's say that we are in some sort of cycle here. I don't know when. First of all, maybe we can frame it. When do you think we peak for prices for a while? If you had to guess. Nobody can hold us to these. By the way, guys, crystal ball is the dumbest thing, but it's fun for clickbait titles and it's good to Talk.
- [57:16]
Joe McCann
About that is Joe McCann predicts $1 million Bitcoin price tomorrow. Tomorrow, Tomorrow.
- [57:23]
Scott Melker
What a loser.
- [57:28]
Joe McCann
Look, I look at it this way. So there is on the one hand there's this narrative that the world is de dollarizing and the dollar is going to lose its reserve status and the US dollar hegemony is going away. I call complete bullshit on this. And part of the reason I suggest this is around the world, every reserve bank for each country has U.S. treasuries and dollars. And with those U.S. treasuries they use those as collateral to be able to borrow against. Well, if that collateral, let's assume people say oh the US government's going to default on their debt, well then all of that U.S. treasury that's sitting in reserve banks, that you're using that as collateral for loans, guess what? It's mispriced. Can't happen. Guys, literally everything is mispriced around the world. If the US defaults on their debt, can't happen. And in fact we saw the latest tick data that came out from the Treasury. Other countries are buying our debt still in the latest treasury auctions. It's not like oh no one's buying it and everybody's dumping it. I'm sure some folks there's speculation that that China has started to reduce some of their reserves. I don't think it's actually true. They may be reducing some of their dollar reserves. Buy more gold. That's besides the point. This notion that dollar henchmen is going away, I don't buy it. Now that narrative is palpable and if that narrative takes shape form Bitcoin, be at a million tomorrow literally because everything's mispriced. And so you're going to be pricing something in Bitcoin. People are now pricing things in gold. And you can see what happened with this parabolic move in gold. I mean a 40% year to date move in gold is crazy. It hasn't happened I think since the 1980s or something, maybe literally 1980. So on the one hand, dollar hedge mini narrative could have Bitcoin's price really accelerate. I see that very low probability. On the other hand, the institutional bid behind Bitcoin is where I see potential price target of, you know, call it 200k, 250k, it almost doesn't matter. Pick a number because it's purely flows driven. So right now we have uncertainty indexes across the board at all time highs. Never, never had uncertainty indices this high ever. Bitcoin is still under 100k. So if we actually get some clarity on the uncertainty, maybe Trump pivots, maybe sovereigns start buying, maybe corporates continue to start adding Bitcoin to their balance sheet. Let's be clear, this is a hoarded asset just like gold. But there's way fewer bitcoin than there's gold in the ground, right? And so from my perspective, it's less about like pick a number, 500,000, 250, doesn't matter. When you start to see flows come in, the reflexivity of the market coupled with the lack of liquidity and frankly the lack of supply, this thing could be way beyond what people are targeting as a price target because of the flows. And so the last thing I'll mention is that if these flows start to come in in any capacity, the chance that bitcoin makes new all time highs like this year I think is high. The chance that bitcoin goes absolutely parabolic this year, based on where we sit today, it's difficult to say. Now if Trump does deregulation, if he does the tax cuts and he chills the fuck out on tariff policy, you could see Bitcoin actually rip 2, 3, $400,000. It really is just a number. It's more about the flows from my perspective.
- [61:18]
Scott Melker
So what about Ethereum? Well, I give you a spread, zero to 5,000.
- [61:27]
Joe McCann
Yeah, I mean, so look, I mean I've been pounding the table on this for years. I think Ethereum's technology is innovative and it kicked off smart contract programming like kudos. The asset is not worth owning, it's just not. And the difference is as bitcoin rises. You do get some sort of correlation trading with Ethereum, but fundamentally there's no reason to own it. And the things that you should own have better fundamentals. Just look at Solana, right? I think Ethereum's cost, gas cost per transaction yesterday was one penny. They can't generate real revenue with that and it's being cannibalized by the L2s, which is something I've been saying for three years. And people are like, oh, you're such an eth hater. I'm like, no, it's just logical, right? You're abstracting away the thing that makes the fucking chain money. Like it's that simple. So price target, I mean look, I thought there for a second when it dipped below $1,419 which was the 2017 all time high, when it dipped below that, I was like this thing could be 500 bucks on a real nasty liquidation cascade. And there was a lot of stuff on chain that was going to get liquidated. When there is a rally, it's never sustained. So it's just, in my opinion it's another way to either hedge your book by getting shorted or sell calls against your underlying to capitalize some carry. But I think Ethereum, if Bitcoin does not really rally to all time highs this year. Bitcoin sub 1, excuse me, Ethereum is sub 1000.
- [63:07]
Scott Melker
Solana.
- [63:08]
Joe McCann
Solana. I think given the fundamentals coupled with the ETF flows that are likely going to be coming. Actually we saw this last week in Canada. They had their first spot ETF for Solana and you saw an institutional bid come in. Talk to our broker dealers about it. They're like, yeah, institutions are actually buying it the same day that the spot ETF launched. Now is Solana going to be as successful as the Bitcoin ETF Spot launched? No. However, this is the fastest horse, right? The President launched his meme coin on Solana. Like there's a lot of potential narrative tailwinds behind it. But the fundamentals in addition to that are suggesting that developers are using Solana and building on it, that speculators, traders, et cetera are using Solana for better or worse, right? We could debate the meme coin thing again. Ultimately I think Solana trades well above its all time high. If Bitcoin is going to say 150k, I think Solana's got to be at.
- [64:02]
Scott Melker
Least 420, 420, he says $69,420. 69,420.
- [64:09]
Joe McCann
Well we couldn't make that up. And it actually happened. And you know that.
- [64:13]
Scott Melker
420.69. Yeah, it did. It did happen, because we have some hilarious whales out there who are like, pass the bong, bro.
- [64:20]
Joe McCann
The top 10.
- [64:22]
Scott Melker
Watch this.
- [64:25]
Joe McCann
Exactly.
- [64:25]
Scott Melker
Had to be Sam. I think it was probably Sam. Joe, man, that was awesome. Now, I know we actually do need to go. Where can people follow you? Check out everything you're doing.
- [64:35]
Joe McCann
Yeah, you can follow me on X Twitter. You go to twitter.com Joe McCann. And from there, you can find a link to my telegram. And you can always go to Asymmetric Financial to find out more about my fund.
- [64:46]
Scott Melker
Telegram is fucking epic.
- [64:48]
Joe McCann
Thanks, dude.
- [64:49]
Scott Melker
I've told you this before, but, like, you definitely. For traders who simply just want the quick hits, you have the best telegram.
- [64:54]
Joe McCann
It's crazy. There's, like, 13,000 people that subscribe to the channel now, too, and I barely promoted it. It's pretty nice.
- [64:59]
Scott Melker
And you're like, who the hell are these people? Well, I remember, literally, like, I. When I first. A friend of mine who's like, a VC years ago, was like, I love this channel. It's this Joe guy. Like, you should go follow. And I went and followed. I'm in there, and I'm like. Then I realized it was you. I was like, no, Joe, man.
- [65:15]
Joe McCann
I was like.
- [65:15]
Scott Melker
I met him at, like, World Crypto Con in Vegas in 2019. You know, that was. I met you. That was, like, one of the best and worst times of my life because that's also when I met the guys from fucking Voyager.
- [65:28]
Joe McCann
Oh, bummer.
- [65:30]
Scott Melker
Charlie. Charlie Schrepp introduced me. Yeah, they were sponsoring that whole stage we were at. They were, like, brand new. I don't know if you remember that.
- [65:37]
Joe McCann
Yeah, yeah. No, Pete Najarian was there.
- [65:39]
Scott Melker
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was awesome. Yeah. What a good time, man. Well, thank you so much. We got to do this more often, man. I really love the market perspective, which we don't really, like, always, like, double click on so deeply, but it really helps.
- [65:51]
Joe McCann
Yeah, man. Happy to. And let's do it in person when you come back to Miami.
- [65:55]
Scott Melker
Let's do it, man. Done.