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Trends with Friends
Meme Coins, Solana's Rise, and the Future of Crypto | Joe McCann (Asymmetric), Ryan Rasmussen (Bitwise)
00:56:47
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign in from New York, Trent's with friends. Very special group of people here joining us today talking meme coins. Solana, I know people tune into Harrod and say, Howard, can we talk about your prostate? Can we talk about Taylor Swift? Your daughter went to Taylor Swift. You know what I said? Prosta. Now I have to pee. So I'm going to disappear for a second. But we have very special guest. He's here to gloat that I'm not an LP in his fund. He's offered to me. He calls me every day, goes, do you want in now? And I go, no, Joe, I can't invest with people that look like Larry David. I'm Larry David. Joe McCann joining us from space Miami.
- [00:53]
B
Miami, not club space, but definitely in Miami.
- [00:56]
A
Joe's long time, long time friend from just an entrepreneur slash trader slot. A perfect storm of people. You look good to Joe. You're lean and fit. Last time I saw you, Sam was getting carried off in in handcuffs in the Bahamas, was it not? What a funny day that was. And peak crypto, FTX cycle Bahamas. Phil Pearlman of course is going to take over here. The AI whisperer. Michael Perek joining us from Houston. JC also in New York making omakasa reservations as we speak tonight at some secret sushi place. And Ryan Rasmussen, a rookie, very clean cut.
- [01:50]
C
Thank you.
- [01:50]
A
Nervous to see someone this clean. Clean cut from Bitwise joining us to talk about crypto markets. And of course we're going to just cover crypto and AI today and a little bit with JC of what's going on in markets. Phil, take it away.
- [02:07]
D
Hey, what's up everybody? So we're just going to go right to the dessert. Ryan, it's great to have you. Joe, it's great to have you, Howard. Okay, we're just gonna go right to the dessert. We're gonna get right into meme coins right out of the gate because who needs the serious stuff when meme co. Meme coins are going crazy. Here's a quote from Joe McCann. Retail will trade them. Traditional finance will buy the blow off top in them which I fucking love that line. Before we get going though, I just want to give a short term caveat. This is a chart that you posted the other day Joe, of the sort of the popularity, sort of the shorter term popularity of meme coins mentioned interest over time. You want to just speak to that.
- [03:01]
B
The kind of use cases of crypto have historically been speculation and now a lot of obviously stablecoin, you know, money transmission speculation leads to new Use cases. And ultimately meme coins are, you know, they're like buying lottery tickets or scratch off tickets. And with a chain like Solana, where it's super fast, it's very cheap to, you know, buy and sell these types of meme coins and more importantly create meme coins, you're seeing an explosive interest in meme coins and that's what you're seeing in the Google trends chart there. Mostly because frankly, it's traditional media that loves to put out these headlines that are like, you know, 17 year old kids puts $20 in mu dang and makes 3 million bucks, right? Like, what website isn't running that headline to drive traffic to their site? And then surely enough, more and more people think, oh, that can be me, right? And they download Coinbase or a phantom wallet, they buy a little bit of soul and off they go. This is the same type of headlines that you see from like the school bus driver who put 50 bucks into Powerball and now is a multimillionaire. People think that can be me. I think the difference is, you know, since COVID we basically had this explosive move, especially in the United States with the deregulation around sports gambling and sports betting. I think 34 states including D.C. have now legalized it. The CAGR on the past four years of sports gambling is up triple digits year over year. This is not slowing down. And by the way, this is definitely a generational thing, right? If you look at zoomers and millennials, they love to bet on a five team parlay, even though the OD are a sucker's bet. It's the same sort of thing with meme coins. And so the interest in meme coins is, is this kind of like, it's almost this viral feedback loop. You've got media pumping it, you've got people, you know, showcasing it on Twitter and then the ease of access and frankly, how cheap it is to actually get involved, to potentially hit, you know, a thousand, 10,000x return is driving this type of interest. And by the way, this is not slowing down. I've seen a lot of folks in the industry, certainly on the crypto side, suggest that, oh, you know, meme coins topped back in Q1, it's over. Could not be further from the truth. In fact, there's about 20 to 30,000 tokens created per day. Now, 99% of these are zeros. But the ones that are on the right tail of this distribution, these are going to be monster winners like Dogecoin, like Doji.
- [05:32]
A
So Joe, let me interrupt and just tell Me if we're right here. Because JC definitely gets us. Michael and I are always going to be this. The skeptics. Here's my take as CEO Stock Twitch. Because I've seen it all. NFTs didn't do anything for me. Too complicated to play. I'm not an art collector. I'm not saying it was an art. I'm not. I'm not against art. I think it's fun. I can't believe I don't know more cryptopunks, even though I don't care about the art of it. But what made meme coins different for me is that it's the Internet. It's not like I gotta be on discord or Telegram. I can be. I don't think I needed to be. I hated that whole idea of it. This is the Internet. I can sign up with an email. I can. It's like. It's like going to the 711 without having to go to the 7 11. Doing scratch and play. I can. I can watch the game. I can watch the people watching the game and participate so I don't even have to know what's going on. I can do go participate in a 0 and 20 meme coin fund, not pay fees and just pay performance. I can watch people do it. I. It's culture and it's truly no rules. And by no rules, I mean yes, it's Rick. You better be careful in that you don't get rug pulled.
- [06:46]
E
Meaning there is nothing to be careful about. This is tulips of every color. There is nothing to be careful.
- [06:52]
A
You're going with tulips if everybody knows it's tulips.
- [06:58]
F
Because tulips. Tulips had one cycle. This has multiple cycles. So by definition it's not tulips.
- [07:03]
E
Those are details. I'm just saying that's historical. It's like we had a wheel and now we have a Ferrari. Okay? That's the difference.
- [07:10]
F
Joe. Yeah.
- [07:12]
E
Underlying technology is the same school these.
- [07:14]
F
Folks that the tulip bubble was one cycle. And now how many cycles have we had? Come on.
- [07:18]
E
Those are details, jc.
- [07:20]
D
Those are.
- [07:21]
E
Those are irrelevant details.
- [07:23]
B
There's a couple of things that you brought up that. That I think are worth addressing. One, let's talk about NFTs quickly. So the N in NFT stands for non fungible token. And what's ironic is by restricting the supply, you limit distribution and it forces you to create these discord communities and, you know, people basically buying the next guy's bag, so to speak. Whereas meme coins are the complete opposite and in fact unit bias, which is, you know, this, this concept in kind of economic, or I should say psychological theory of economics, where you have a very tiny price that actually factors into why people play and trade meme coins.
- [08:04]
A
Like, for example, look at the uk, everything's in pence.
- [08:07]
B
Yes. So if you look at bonk, for example, right now it's 0.000055, right. So you can be a bonk millionaire for a few hundred bucks. That trick psychologically is very, very important for the rise of things like meme coins. And so NFTs restrict supply. You know, meme coins a trillion tokens easily right off the bat, and so your distribution becomes much bigger. I think the other thing though, and this is the key to point out, is that, you know, frankly, business school has no curricula focused on how to monetize culture, because culture is like this intangible thing, especially on the Internet. I like to use the analogy of the Supreme Court justice in the 1960s describing pornography. It's like, I don't know how to describe it. I just know it when I see it. And if you look at communities like Reddit, there's an infinite number of sub communities on, on Reddit, they are not monetizable unless you're Reddit. Now you can have infinite numbers of, you know, these kind of Internet communities or sub communities that rally around a meme coin for whatever reason. Why on earth does a photo of a baby hippie. Excuse me, baby hippie, Baby hippo, worth billions of dollars on market cap? Explain to me the textbook and the Chicago business. Not that are teaching so, but this is like older guys that have been in the space a long time will look at this and scoff at it. And this is why I suggest that they're going to be the ones buying the top, because today people actually want to speculate and trade these things. The idea of applying like a discounted cash flow model or price to earnings or price to book, or any of these metrics that are ultimately memes made up by the financial industry and applying them to culture makes absolutely no sense. You have to actually have a pulse on culture to understand why these things are actually valuable. And it's because of the speculative nature and gambling associated with.
- [10:04]
A
Can we tie this to compute? So Michael doesn't hang up on me. Can we tie this to energy compute? AI Joe, I know you're thinking about that, so let's tie it to all three. No, you can go ahead, Joe, quickly.
- [10:17]
B
So let's let's talk about that.
- [10:18]
D
Right?
- [10:18]
B
Right now, I would say much to his chagrin, there's an explosion of decentralized AI tokens and agents. Right? So the agentic AI movement into crypto is huge right now. There's actually a project called AI16Z where its token is worth half a billion dollars right now. And it's spinning up myriad agents to do whatever it wants on the Internet as well as trade and issue tokens. This is unstoppable from like a regulatory or government perspective and people are speculating on this stuff like crazy. Now. Is this going to drive some, you know, massive amount of additional compute requirements or capacity tbd? Probably not. I think, you know, if you look at Capex investments for this year, next year and 2026, it's almost a trillion dollars by the hyperscalers that's not being affected by crypto. The difference is the application of agentic AI into crypto is happening right now.
- [11:13]
A
Michael, please. Most of the crypto.
- [11:19]
E
The one thing I will say in terms of data centric compute, it is a zero sum game. Crypto needs compute just like AI needs compute. Right now it's going to AI. I've got a meeting in San Francisco. They're building a $15 billion data center. I'm going to be right in my, up to my eyeballs in it. Three years ago that stuff was doing crypto generation at much smaller scales. And what I'm trying to say is that on the manufacturing side, how the sausage is made, and this is speculative sausage and the culture here is the same as it was 2000 years ago when one caveman was betting against the other caveman that which tiger is going to kill his wife and eat it. I mean people have always wanted to bet and there always will bet. We're just doing it, you know, in with trillions of compute cycles. That's the only difference. And it works until it doesn't. And that's, that's, that's all. All it is. And yes, J.C. this is. No, it's. It's one cycle versus millions of cycles and trillions of cycles just because we have the compute to do it. But that doesn't mean that it's not similar. That's all.
- [12:31]
A
But, but Michael, back then you couldn't pay the tiger to kill the other guy's wife.
- [12:38]
C
The.
- [12:38]
D
This is such a beautiful conversation.
- [12:40]
A
It is Ryan.
- [12:41]
C
We have.
- [12:41]
A
Let Ryan speak up. Phil. So should we let Ryan chime in here?
- [12:44]
D
Well, he has, he's got the next little thing. But go, go right ahead, Ryan. You got to take on this meme coins speculative investment trading.
- [12:53]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think, I think what Joe is saying is exactly right. There's this huge parallel to NFTs last cycle. So when we talk about there only being one cycle for meme coins or whatever, what have you, you know, I, I really believe that meme coins are kind of everything that NFTs wanted to be last cycle. To Joe's point, there's no limited supply, so now anyone can join in these communities. But when you had these NFT collections last cycle, you immediately started pricing out the people that wanted to get into the community. And that's when you saw collections rip from a price perspective. But you restricted your audience to a thousand, two thousand, ten thousand people. Now you can have a million or a billion holders of these different tokens. And it's the same concept of tokenizing this cultural moment, but it's expanding it out to anybody with literally 50 or $100 and a smartphone. So I do think that, that meme coins are kind of this iterative cycle of speculation that's happening and AI agents are tokenizing them, and we're really seeing this convergence happen in a way that we no one would have thought possible a year ago.
- [13:52]
E
But the one thing, another thing that's very similar here across, yes, we can have thousands of speculative meme coins, but remember, each one of these has a house. And generally the odds are for the house you mentioned, AI 16Z. Just the 16Z means the house is probably in recent in there and they've got it, whoever it is. I'm just saying, if it's not them, it's someone similar. There is a house, and the odds are a favor to the house. They've generated this. They put out 2, 3% of this. Go trade it. Go nuts on Reddit. And people go nuts on Reddit because that's our human brains. We're lizard brains. We need endorphins. We love punching buttons on our thing and just putting 30, 40, 50 bucks and hope that our life is going to be transformed tomorrow. That is fine. It works until it doesn't. That's the end of it.
- [14:45]
B
Respectfully, I firmly disagree with all of that. The reason is that all of this is on a permissionless transparent blockchain. You can actually see who the house is, and the house doesn't exist. And if you have sophisticated enough tooling like we do at Asymmetric, you can actually see what are the odds or the probability that something is going to be like a developer that's Just rug pulling a Meme coin. It's trivial to find these things. And in fact, it's more transparent than you could ever see on anything inside of a casino, let alone the best casino of the stock exchange. And so the permissionless nature of these networks is exactly the type of financial industry that we actually want to bring forward, not something that's opaque and occluded like the ones that currently exist. I mean, for example, I saw yesterday that the banks are now trying to work with BlackRock to bring more transparency to the bond market pricing. Like it's 2024 and we still don't have electronic trading for corporate bonds. Like, get the fuck out of here. This is ridiculous.
- [15:43]
F
Joe, Joe, can you. Can you explain? Because I feel like I've said this a thousand times and nobody listens to me. Tradfi is watching as an OG Tradfi, bro. That's been in stocks, ETFs, options, bonds, the whole thing. Commodities. There is next to no transparency. These 13 Fs are 45 days old. I mean, it's a joke. It's a fucking joke. And what's happening on the blockchain is literally showing Tradfi how this should be done. And I've said it on this podcast a thousand times, and they look at me like I'm crazy. Can you please tell these folks that this is what's happening?
- [16:19]
A
Hang on, I'm giving you the other angle and then we'll let Phil chime in and move us. I agree with that. I hate earnings calls. I hate the fact that someone tries to guess it to the penny, which means it's corrupted. If everybody's guessing right, that means someone had the information right. There's no way these companies can get to their quarterly number this often within a range. Um, what I love about Meme Coins. And again, this is me as someone who not going to be changes life with it, but has seen twice. Again, this is. This is not inside information. This is data that no one has. Joe, Nvidia is a $3 trillion company. Crypto is a $3 trillion industry. Stock twitch is 12% and growing of its traffic is crypto. So either everybody on Stock Twitch is wrong. They're not. A lot of people are always wrong. But there are certain moments in time when something jumps the shark and the stock twits data. Has it happened with Bitcoin over Spy. It happened with stablecoins decoupling after the FTX when stablecoins trending. And it's happening this time with Meme Coins. It's not just doji, it's the thousand dojis after it. Whether we like it or not is not for us to debate. The question is what does it mean? What is it telling us? And I think it's telling us that a generation of discorders and gamers have realized that it's the ultimate Game. I was just talking to Fred Wilson about the ultimate Game is saying, oh my God, am I the last guy in? Because I know these are 99% are going to zero. How long do I hold it? The story about that Nikki Montana was just telling me about the, the, the peanut guy getting nervous after three days and selling his whole steak because he didn't know if it was going to catch on. And then it goes to like, those are stories that can be told on ESPN or on any network for a hundred years. What did that feel like to not even believe in your own syndication and someone reaped all the benefits of your syndication. That is more fascinating to me than most stock stories.
- [18:23]
F
Can I finish with one more thing before we go? Let's move on.
- [18:27]
D
We want to look at some charts.
- [18:28]
F
Joe, can you finish with that? Am I right? Is, Is, is this not setting the infrastructure for the future of tradfi? Am I wrong?
- [18:36]
B
Yeah, just really quick Phil, and then we'll move on.
- [18:38]
D
Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead.
- [18:39]
B
To answer your question, absolutely yes. Right. 45 days, 13 fs earnings calls. You know, all of these things are incredibly archaic and outdated. We live in a real time speed of light world. I mean the fact that we've had high frequency trading for 20 years and you know, we're talking about the speed of light of the bottleneck, yet we're getting 13s 45 days later. It makes no sense Right now. Let's, let's quickly talk about Vlad at Robinhood, about what he said the other day. It's an order of magnitude cheaper to run digital assets based infrastructure than it is anything related to the stock market. All this is, is the natural progression of digital transformation of finance. Right? So until you actually understand that, look, the music industry went through this in the 90s. They got disrupted by Napster. The entire music industry is streaming now. What do you think is happening to finance right now? And it's a lot of the incumbency sitting that's been, you know, in tradified for a long time that's refusing to adopt this. But the, there's an alternative financial system that's being created whether they like it or not and they're going to adopt It.
- [19:43]
C
Yeah.
- [19:43]
D
Okay, let's talk quickly about some. Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead, Ryan.
- [19:46]
C
I was gonna say, I think what Joe said, they're like, if you zoom out really makes a lot of sense. There's always these kind of once in a decade technological breakthroughs that happen. It happened with E commerce, it happened with video streaming and then in hindsight it seems obvious, but it's never really happened in tradfi. Like sure, we've had, we have fintech, but that's just taking a fancy front end, stapling it on the same back end. And the crazy thing to, to me around, whether it's video streaming or email or E commerce, finance is one of the largest industries in the world and it has not yet been disrupted. And I think it's exactly right. We're finally going to see that catch up happening and it's going to be the biggest upgrade to finance in the past 50 years from a technology perspective. And this is a chance for retail and anyone who really is Internet savvy or tech savvy or in tune with the culture to front run that.
- [20:34]
A
It's the first time that I'm not Internet savvy, but I'm Internet savvier than a lot of people. And NFTs. There was no way I was going to get involved in NFTs because I was in the 99th percentile of Internet savvy. Now I'm in the 40th percentile of Internet savvy, which means I can try it. And you know what happens when you try stuff? You learn.
- [20:52]
B
That's right.
- [20:53]
A
Will you. Will some people vape? Fuck yeah. My. It's very disappointing that my son vaped. Can you turn it off? Fuck no. So this is a parental thing. This is an educational thing. This is a fucking giant. I've seen it. Everything that I've seen. I was just Michael talking to Fred about it over breakfast. This is a tidal wave of knowledge and speculation. You can't turn it off. And this is the reverse of institutions. Finally. This is finally where retail battles retail and institutions. Watch. This is eventually leads to Netflix buying something like stock twits because the new Squawk Box is born. Netflix will be 24 7, 365 best DJ wins. Sponsored by Robin Hood. The bidding for Netflix's live Squawk box would be massive. Watching Mike Tyson in a diaper fight. His mother was funny. There's a prelude to what's coming. That is what's coming, Joe. And you were right. Research will matter. Crashes will happen.
- [22:07]
D
Often.
- [22:08]
A
But that does not mean the next wave will not come behind it, like any financial market.
- [22:13]
D
Okay. We're way behind. It's awesome discussion, though. I will say this. I was talking with a bank CTO friend of mine recently. He was telling me half the banks are still run on cobalt. So, like, to your point, Joe and Ryan, you know, the next technological wave that is way more efficient has to come soon enough. Go ahead, Michael. We're going to get to charts, guys. You're watching. We will go ahead, Michael.
- [22:42]
E
I know we will. But just so you mentioned, Cobols, I got to jump in. You know, 99% of this stuff runs on legal structures that were done in the 1930s, 30s. Act of 33. Legal structures don't change regardless of which administration. Whether you have Gary Gensler or not. I totally believe that technology does do good things. NASA, I was in all of these cycles. Napster, everything. This is different. There's a speculative thing here that is talking to lizard brains. That is taking 99% of the oxygen and the conversation under culture, which is horse crap. Internet was wonderful. I ran Internet at Goldman for seven years. Everyone and his uncle around the world wanted to do Internet in 2001. From 2002, no one wanted Internet. It was done. It was toasted. For five years, no one talked about it. Okay? That's when I made the most money I've ever made in my life. That is the time to invest. Voting machines versus weighing machines. Today we just gotta sit back and enjoy the show. Howard's right. It's a wonderful show. It's Tyson fighting his grandma, et cetera. And people will pay for it because we have very liquid, frictionless viewing mechanisms like Netflix and so on that can monetize it. That's wonderful. Eight billion people, five billion have phones. So of course they're going to watch and pay that. Don't confuse money with merit of what is going on here.
- [24:14]
B
The derogatory snubbing of the youth. It absolutely makes me so much more bullish on meme coins. So please keep it.
- [24:21]
E
Okay?
- [24:22]
F
Yeah.
- [24:23]
E
I'm not snubbing anyone. Can I remember? I am not snubbing anyone. I love you. I might. I. No, this has nothing to do with you. We were all in our 30s doing the exact same thing. My point is human nature and youth, old, we all make the same mistakes. This is not snubbing. So please do not call it that. No, but there is. Give me the right shit, okay? I love the youth.
- [24:46]
A
Youth. And that's our new tagline. Give me the right shit.
- [24:50]
B
When you talk about.
- [24:50]
C
When you talk about human nature, like, I feel like you're discounting the element that people love to gamble. Like to the point earlier, sports games have never been more popular than it is today. I know so many people that in the past two, three years have gone from not betting on sports because it wasn't legal in their jurisdiction or they had to go to some casino on an Indian reservation to go do that. Now they can do it on their phone from anywhere in the country. In most instances. People love it.
- [25:16]
E
I'm not fighting it. I'm saying that's human nature, is that too much of everything is bad. Everything in moderation is good. When you have. If I eat chocolate cake all day 24, seven, I'm going to die in two years. Moderation. So human nature. Yeah, we love to gamble. That's how our lizard brains are constructed. Our rational brains barely come in on anything. That's why we most of the time make stupid decisions. Regardless of what age we are. We're investors in our personal lives and our professional lives. You're totally right. I agree with you. It's just that when technology helps accelerate it, we should be watching for that and see, you know, see and make sure we don't just go rah, rah on the. On the. On the curves up into the right because at some point they go down into the.
- [26:05]
A
I think, Mike, it is funny because I know you're just being. You respect this game more than anybody. But Joe has seen the other side of this, trust me. So is Ryan. What's funny is Joe. Is there a salon at 10 bucks too. So he. It's not like he's. He's new to this game. 8.
- [26:21]
E
No, there are billions to be made. I have full respect.
- [26:23]
A
Oh, I know that is. We're trying to educate here. And I. Here's. I'm the trade over on this one. And Mike. And it's. I'm not. I think I'm glad you got the Netflix thing because that's what I see out of this. This is about the people watching the people. And I'll give you the other thing because Nikki was explaining this is 2 and 20 is the fucking dumbest idea of all time. Some people deserve it. I'm all for paying it. No, but with meme coins come 0 and fives and 0 and tens and. And. And more people on board. The whole point of a game is to get more people playing. Whether it was Risk or Scrabble or whether it was NFTs or whether it's trading fucking Tesla, right? And the more people, the more liquidity, the less barriers, tension. The less cheating. Or the more cheating. As long as everybody's cheating and everybody knows everybody's cheating, I'm. I'm in for that game. Right? So anyways, felt next. Sorry, guys.
- [27:21]
D
Okay, so, J.C. how does fart coins. How does fart coin look to you, bro?
- [27:27]
F
Well, I mean, at the end of the day, when we're talking about this asset class, it's $3 trillion. I mean, that's. That's one stock in the S P 500.
- [27:36]
A
Say asset class or ass class? Both.
- [27:40]
F
It depends on who's asking. But $3 trillion is literally one company in the S P 500. So if you think that this is late in the game, you know, I don't think you've put the rest of the world into context. I mean, it's. It's literally a. A fart in the wind is what crypto is right now relative to the bond market or the global stock market or the forex markets. So, I mean, just mathematically, it's hard to say that it's late in the game. And then far coin, I mean, what is it, half a billion dollars in market capitalization or what was the. Last I checked. Thing is, mu dang, was. Was half a billion. I mean, these things. These things are going.
- [28:17]
A
So how do you explain this, Ryan? How do you explain this? I mean, obviously we've just explained it, but how do you explain how something catches on versus not just quickly, like, what. What are supposed. What are some of the basic rules of, like, understanding this?
- [28:30]
B
Yeah, so, I mean, mudang is. Let me back up. So. So Southeast Asia is actually about 80% of all crypto trading flow today. And if we're here in the United States, very different culture than Southeast Asia. Why did a baby hippo, mudang become worth billions of dollars market cap? Well, you also have huge amounts of buyers. That something is relatively, I guess, culturally significant to them. That's capturing their attention. And so this is. There's two ways of meme coins becoming blue chips. And a blue chip, in my opinion, is billion dollar mark cap sustained for at least like, you know, 30 days or something like that.
- [29:04]
C
Like that.
- [29:05]
B
You have to either capture engagement and retain it, which we all know is. Is an impossible thing to do on the Internet because people have the attention spans of fruit flies, or you end up in integrating some level of utility. Bonk has done this. Iggy Aelia's mother Token has done this. That's the Only way they actually get sustainable staying power and generating, you know, frankly, protocol revenue. So Bonk, for example, has generated tons of protocol revenue, like hundreds of millions of dollars of protocol revenue. It's a meme coin. But wait a second, that kind of looks like a business or a startup. That is one of the reasons why Bonk hit new all time highs over this past weekend and in fact had more trading volume than Bitcoin did on Coinbase. Why? Because it's capturing attention and it's got the unit bias and it's got actual utility associated with it.
- [29:52]
A
So does, does the value investor book get written later? No, I mean, not that. You know what I mean? Like, how do we write the research that. You know what I'm saying?
- [30:03]
B
Yeah. I mean, this is, this is the, I guess the trillion dollar question. How do you fundamentally value something that's not tangible, like culture? And there's a lot of topically relevant things associated with this, right? So there was a Mike Tyson and a Jake Paul token during the fight. Those are worthless now. Right. These things either have these idios, excuse me, these contemporaneous events, like the presidential election is one thing. There were meme coins way before there were prediction markets. Or you have things that have staying power, right? So you're again, either capturing attention on the Internet or you're, you're integrating some sort of utility. And a lot of people in the meme coin space will say, you know, a meme coin shouldn't have utility. I'm like, no, I don't think so. There's a, there's a meme coin called FOMO3D which is going to be an open source competitor to Pump Fund. Pump Fun's done hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. They've been around for seven months. That's the most successful Web3 project in history. You know what you can do? You can launch meme coins. Well, FOMO 3D is actually going to distribute 95% of that revenue to token holders. Right? These are the types of things where the utility of the actual project can be issued as a meme coin. Because the meme coin is the furthest thing from the Howie test. There's no way it can be actually labeled a security because it just was invented out of thin air.
- [31:21]
C
How long, Joe, till we see one of these AI agents launching a mean coin? Get a Wells notice from the sec. What do you think?
- [31:28]
B
Well, this is exactly. I had a discussion, frankly with one of the former chairs of the SEC when I was at this conference in Miami, a Couple weeks ago and I had ran this idea by him of saying like, hey, what if we just DDoS the SEC with security filings, right? I mean there's only 30,000 tokens created today. We could programmatically print them out and send them to the SEC. And now they'd have, I don't know, 1,000 years of backlog. And he was just, he laughed. He said, I don't want to mention his name. But he laughed because that is actually how archaic this type of stuff is. And so if an agentic AI is actually creating a meme coin, creating a liquidity pool and pumping it, who does the sec go after? OpenAI's API endpoint. I mean sure, they could shut that kind of stuff down and get disable access for these, for these agentic AIs to utilize things like Claude and ChatGPT, etc. But there's also open source decentralized versions of this. We backed a company called Drea that does exactly this. So there's really no stopping this. I mean this is reminds me of the story of like in, in Vancouver, British Columbia, I was 1999, I went into a coffee shop where you could smoke weed and there was a hoodie up there that said, outgrow the government. Guess what British Columbia did? They did exactly that. That's effectively what's happening with tokens. There's literally no way you can actually keep up with the amount of tokens that's going to be created and approved by the SEC or going through some archaic filing process. So add agentic AIs to that. Who do they come after? Nobody.
- [32:52]
C
Right?
- [32:53]
A
Very cool. You guys are fucking blowing my mind. Michael will catch up on shaking his head. No, he's not.
- [33:01]
F
When we look at these things, the beauty of the on chain stuff is that you can see which wallets are buying these tokens, right? And if those wallets have a good track record or not, like, you know, the Stevie Cohen of crypto, who knows, it could be some young girl in her basement just, you know, who's good at computers and just is really good at this. We don't know who that person is. In some cases we do because they're publicly, you know, sharing who they are. But the track record is on chain so you can see the people. So Mudang is a great example. Saw a lot of, you know, very, very profitable wallets stepping into Mudang well before the pump. Joe, can you speak to that at all to Mudang? Well, just in general, Mudang just an example of one of the Ones that caught our attention because of the, you know, the smart wallets that were participating, but just in general, the on chain analytics and the ability to see who's participating in real time.
- [33:59]
E
The key phrase that JC used well before the pump. So just thank you.
- [34:04]
B
Yeah, but I mean, stocks pump too. Look at, look at mscr. I mean there's no difference between pumping.
- [34:08]
F
It's the same thing. It's, it's no different.
- [34:11]
E
Yeah, that's not true.
- [34:13]
B
Because a guy has a suit and a tie, he's on CNBC talking about his book, doesn't mean that it's any less so than some girl in her basement pumping. A meme.
- [34:20]
E
Different degree of pump.
- [34:21]
F
I respect the little girl much more.
- [34:23]
B
Wallet forensics and analytics are a huge part of just crypto in general. Right? So for example, Arkham Intelligence tracks the US government's wallet, right. They want to see what's happening with their wallet. These types of wallet forensics have been around for quite some time and it is test. It's testament to the transparency associated with crypto and blockchain. Right. You can actually verify these things, these types of things. I mean, it's one of the reasons why, you know, I've heard tether fud forever, like, oh, the Department of Justice is going to come after them. It's like, no, they're not. They're working with them because they can actually see the illicit transfers from terrorists and drug cartels to point blank. Right. Whereas instead the banks like HSBC and et cetera, oh, they have to go through all these, you know, legal loop loopholes and processes to actually prosecute them. And then what do they get? A slap on the wrist for helping drug cartels and terrorists launder their money. The transparency of the blockchain enables smart traders and most importantly, algorithms to determine what are the smart wallets. How are these things actually moving? And you see it all the time. So for example, I'm an advisor to a company called Asset Dash here out of of Miami. They have a great mobile app, they have a whale tracking service now where you can just get notified of, hey, you know, whiff whale just bought Mudang for this amount, right. And it happens in real time. Now the retail trader has to act on that quickly. But this can all be done programmatically, right? So I used to run a quant desk at a hedge fund a while ago. Done algorithmic trading for a while. This is utterly teed up for this type of stuff. And you're going to see a lot of kind of wild opportunity as more and more wallet forensics become not necessarily, you know, proprietary ip, we have some stuff at Asymmetric, but more importantly, people are tuning their strategies based on wallet forensics and analytics.
- [36:12]
D
This is great. Hey, let's move on to talk about some of the larger coins. And to my mind, you know, the, the, the sort of the dialectic or the nexus. The difference between the point Michael's making and the point Joe and JC and Ryan are making is this idea of what survives the next crash, you know, like the Lindy effect or whatever you call it. And so, you know, who would have thought Doge would have survived? Right? I mean, that's just incredible. Like, this is like a lit. Like we're looking at possibly a Lindy asset that's going to be around. And so now let's talk a little bit about. About bitcoin. Ryan, you had a quote last week where you said the bitcoin, and this is after the election, and you were talking about Poland, too. The bitcoin arms race has begun. I mean, that's like, wild. Can you just expand on that a little bit? What are you talking about there?
- [37:10]
C
Yeah, happy to. I mean, it is just wild. It's a great point. Who would have thought a year ago, two years ago, if you zoom back to 15 years ago, when Satoshi launched bitcoin, who would have thought that In a short 15 years, you would have nations around the world racing to acquire bitcoin as a strategic reserve? I mean, it's actually mind blowing to think about, but that's exactly what we're seeing happen. And it, it's, you know, all kind of started with Trump on the. On the campaign trail talking about converting the US Bitcoin holdings that they've acquired through different law enforcement actions, converting that into a strategic reserve. And sure, that doesn't create any more buying pressure on bitcoin, but what it does do is create this same kind of FOMO we're talking about with meme coins, but now at a government level, which is just massive on bitcoin itself. And so what this. What this tweet's talking about is it's not just here in the U.S. like, we're all in this kind of bubble in the US Talking about a bitcoin strategic reserve. But whether the US does it first or another country beats them to it. I mean, Donald Trump's not someone who wants to be second in anything. So you think that if a country out there in Europe or Asia starts acquiring bitcoin publicly, that Donald Trump's Going to sit back on his laurels and not be the biggest in the room. I don't think that's possible. So this is huge, massive news.
- [38:25]
E
Again, the irony of this call. On the one hand, we're criticizing the government for 50, 70, 80 years regulating moving so slow. Molasses. They don't get it. They're fudgy duddies. And then on the other end, we're like, oh, my God, they're going to be doing bitcoin reserves, everyone. So it's all awesome and to the right. I mean, come on, let's just, you know, let's just put it in context.
- [38:45]
B
You're actually, like, upending your prior point that, like, legal things don't actually change. And, like, there's actually going to be a. If there's going to be a strategic bitcoin reserve, guess what, there's a legal change there. We have this for oil, We've had this for gold. There's no reason we can't have this for digital gold. And furthermore, bitcoin is not gold.
- [39:02]
E
I'm sorry, Bitcoin is digital gold.
- [39:05]
B
It's not gold. You're right. It's literally zeros and ones. That's exactly the point. It's the digital transformation of gold as a.
- [39:11]
E
No, it is not. We can talk about it separately, but yeah, yeah.
- [39:17]
B
Then you should be max short bitcoin here. Please be max short bitcoin here.
- [39:21]
E
No, I'm not trading it. I'm not staying. This is just human nature. Nope, I'm not.
- [39:28]
A
This is.
- [39:28]
E
I'd rather buy more. Nvidia.
- [39:32]
C
There is an interesting element of this bitcoin reserve, though. And Joe, you mentioned it. Like the US and other countries have gold reserves, they have oil reserves, all these different assets. But really that's intended to be a kind of a backup plan in case there's a disruption in international trade. Now, obviously that's not really the same approach with bitcoin. So to that legal change or that, that step function change that we're seeing from governments, this is a great example of that. We're not talking about acquiring oil or gold or silver or, you know, commodity xyz in case there's a disruption in global trade, we're talking about acquiring this asset because it's likely to go up in value and because there's a limited supply and because other countries around the world might start doing it, meaning there's less for the US or other big governments to consume. If one of the G7 countries starts acquiring bitcoin, we are Completely in a moon landing race moment. And that's what I meant by the strategic arms or the bitcoin arms race here has begun. And if it doesn't happen, I think the market's probably over its skis a little bit. But if it does happen anywhere, then it's off to the races.
- [40:39]
D
Ecuador led the way.
- [40:42]
G
El Salvador.
- [40:42]
D
Ecuador. El Salvador. Salvador led the way. So there's only 21 million.
- [40:48]
C
They're not maybe the best example. But if you have a country, you know, from a, from a reputation perspective, but if you have a country like the US do it, you know, all bets are off.
- [41:00]
D
Okay, so let's look at Bitcoin relative to some of the other surviving coins or you know, like blue chips. We got Solana, Ethereum and Bitcoin and they are performing. There's a differential in their performance that I think is just really significant. There's Solana is making all time highs. Ethereum has been underperforming. Jc, why don't you just start us off here in terms of talking about price behavior?
- [41:27]
F
Yeah, I mean for me it's, it's very simple. You know, when we look at bitcoin dominance, it really is just another way to look at the underperformance in Ethereum. And that's not always going to be the case, but that's a big factor. Currently, based on the market capitalizations of these tokens, Solana is about what, a third of the market cap of Ethereum, roughly. So you know, Solana is currently making new all time highs relative to Ethereum. A lot of things are Ethereum as the denominator makes line go up. So the bitcoin dominance is really a function of that. I think ultimately that will change. I think there'll be other tokens that are eating into that, but it's just very easy for Bitcoin to go up a little bit and eat into that dominance. But generally speaking, Bitcoin remains an underperformer in the crypto space despite new multi year highs and bitcoin dominance. Right, Joe? I mean, that's the funny irony in it all.
- [42:28]
B
Yeah, I mean JC brings up a really great point here. So first, Ethereum historically has been your beta play to Bitcoin. Well, unfortunately it's got a beta of less than 1 this year. So where do you go get beta? You go to the fastest horse and that's Solana. And Solana is flipping Ethereum on every meaningful metric out there by a mile. It's not even close. And it's worth one third of Ethereum seems like it's cheap to me. The second is bitcoin dominance. We've had this view since the beginning of the year. You can go to read Asymmetric Financial to read about it. We think bitcoin dominance is nowhere near done. A lot of people have been calling the top here around 60%. We just don't see that being the case largely because of the institutional flow coupled with the red sweep and the Trump presidency. To the point earlier about a potential G7 country starting to acquire bitcoin on their balance sheet. The type of price discovery that's coming to Bitcoin is not fathomable at this point. Our view really is. We think bitcoin dominance continues probably into sometime in the early parts of Q1 next year. We see it up near potentially a 70 handle. Our options adjusted delta in our book right now is about 75% bitcoin for that reason. And we don't really see a true alt season per se happening until we reach some sort of 70 handle in. In dominance. We would need dominance to actually, frankly pull back pretty dramatically to see a rotation into alts that will happen. And I think that's when fortunes get made, when you actually start to see this rotation. If you look at something like the ETH BTC chart, it consistently is making new lows seemingly every week throughout the. Through the entire year.
- [44:04]
F
Joe.
- [44:05]
B
Yeah, exactly. And so what I'm getting to is that one folks that have thought, you know, Ethereum was the actual beta to Bitcoin and then when there's a rotation out of Bitcoin, they should, they should plow into Ethereum. It's no longer the case. And in fact, a lot of folks in Tradfi missed Ethereum in the last cycle and don't want to miss the next one. Well, what's the next one? It's Solana and myself, Raoul Paul, lots of folks have been talking about this for quite some time. Solana is by far the fastest horse. It's going to actually flip Ethereum at some point. We're already seeing it in the metrics and if you're using any form of fundamental analysis, you can just look at what's happening on Solana, look at what's happening on Ethereum's L1 and Go. This thing is radically mispriced.
- [44:44]
D
Ryan, take care.
- [44:47]
C
Yeah, no, I think, look, Solana clearly has been the high beta play to Bitcoin for the past year plus, and I don't necessarily see that changing when you have new folks coming into the market. Are they going to, to the unit bias point? Are they going to buy something that costs $3,000 token or something that, that costs 250 or whatever? It's trading at upper token. They're not even necessarily looking at market, they're not paying attention to the fact that it's 100 billion, 300 billion 400 billion market cap. They're looking at the pricing. I can own 10 Solana or less than one ether. And they're going to continue to buy Solana not just for that reason, but because it's what everyone's talking about. All the mean coin headlines that are being, that are being shared out there and pushed out there and peddled by the mainstream media are talking about meme coins on Solana and then you have this wealth effect being made from meme coin traders. And what are they going to do? They're going to dump a lot of that back into more meme coins, but they're going to buy Solana. And now with the new SEC regime, if we have new ETPs available for institutional investors, it's going to be easy for the, that advisor who missed Bitcoin, who missed Ethereum, it's going to be easy for them to start allocating to Solana if you have an index fund that trades or that has a basket of crypto assets. So Solana's going to be in that basket of assets. So there's all of this pent up kind of buying pressure that's yet to come into the market. And I think that a lot of that does end up going into Solana for a number of reasons, whether it's retail or institutional. And it's been a great play and it has a great story. Two years ago, I mean we're talking about sbf. Two years ago Solana was down in the settlement, the dust was settling around FTX and here we are two years later, SPF's in prison. Salon is hitting new all time highs. Like it's a beautiful story that movies will be made.
- [46:25]
B
One other thing really quickly Phil, I know you're going to chime in to get back to like the wallet forensics and analytics piece. So last year at Asymmetric we identified through some, some of our proprietary tech, I mean you can find this stuff on the Internet, it's easy. Stablecoin flows from Ethereum into Solana were huge. And you know, we had this view that if people are going to be moving dollars over there, they're going to be buying Solana if it gets through some certain technical levels Basically, the FTX implosion level, Solana is going much higher. That turned out to be the case. We are literally seeing the exact same setup with Solana right now. Near all time highs, Net stablecoin inflows last week were enormous. And they're all leaving Ethereum for the most part. Now some of those flows are going to the Ethereum L2s, but the Solana inflows dwarf that. So you're seeing more and more actual cash coming into the Solana network. And what do you think they're going to be buying? They're going to be buying Meme Coins, but they're going to be buying SOL because you need SOL to actually trade Meme coins.
- [47:23]
D
I have so many questions for you guys. This is incredible conversation. Here's one for you. From a technological point of view, like what Solana can do and what Ethereum can do. Does it matter? Is there a difference? And is Solana like suddenly much better technologically?
- [47:42]
B
Yeah. So let me take this one quickly as probably the token technologist on the call, so we all can remember Research in motion in 2005, 2006 time frame, right? Everybody had a BlackBerry. I know. Even Howard was telling me, you can rip it from my cold dead hands. Right? That was the first kind of smartphone. Right? But their approach was to take a QWERTY keyboard and jam it into a little phone. And they weren't thinking about it from a first principles perspective. Then what happened? Well, we know what happened. The iPhone launched. And what happened to Research in Motion's market share? It plummeted to next to nothing. Stock cratered. The rest is history. That is effectively the same analogy that we're seeing right now. Because the iPhone provided a 10x improvement in the user experience of a smartphone. Ethereum, nothing but respect. For Vitalika and the team for inventing smart contract programming, that was a huge leap in computer science. They should deserve a lot of credit for that. However, the approach that they took was effectively a fork of Bitcoin, where you have a single threaded state machine means you can't do things in parallel. That's against the past 40 years of compute, where things started to move in parallel. Solana is parallel by design. Its first principles approach is fundamentally different than Ethereum's and enables this 10x improvement in user experience, which is the same thing as the iPhone. This is another reason why, you know, you'll see a lot of the folks in the Ethereum community talk about, you know, changing the future of finance through this hardcore decentralized sort of network. And it's like, right, but users don't give a shit about that. What actually they care about is hey, I want this experience to be fluid and seamless. Solana provides that. And by the way, Solana has one of the highest, what's called the Nakamoto coefficient for proof of stake network. So that it is decentralized. It's actually in more data centers than Ethereum is right now. So the decentralization argument is nonsense. If you just look at it from a first principles perspective. Why is Solana so much better? It's because it provides that 10x improvement in user experience, just like the iPhone did to the BlackBerry.
- [49:45]
D
Okay, one more question. So your structure, so you have right now and you're describing it as we talk, a structural slash informational advantage over the market to some degree. And this is an inefficiency in the market and we see all types of inefficiencies in all types of markets forever going back hundreds of years and even more. Are you observing that getting squeezed at all from your perspective, are you finding that these advantages that you have, especially the way you're able to see what's going on, what you just described, which was awesome, are you seeing those getting squeezed out of the market yet and what is the velocity of that squeeze if it's happening?
- [50:34]
B
Yeah, this is a great question. So, so number one, I think what you're describing is what I would describe as competition to Solana with other what are called high throughput chains. And there are a few of them. One of them comes to mind is swe. Another one is aptos. The, the, the challenge that a lot of these like high throughput chains that are newer face is what I call a developer go to market. And so the, one of the reasons Solana, yes it was first in terms of like the parallelization of transaction processing, etc. And it's super fast and cheap. Sui and Aptos can do the exact same thing. And there's a handful of other chains. There's one called sei, which we invested in at the private level as well, that can also do these very fast cheap transactions. The difference is the way that they go and attract developers is a challenge. It is extremely difficult to get attention on the Internet. It's even harder to gain the mind share of developers. Solana from day one has had an incredibly robust developer go to market and furthermore they're using a programming language that has been around for 15 years called Rust. This is a huge differentiator for them. So are they getting squeezed today no. Will people trade Sue? Yes. Because they think that it will actually be a competitor to Solana. And by the way, I need and want a competitor to Solana because that creates a market when you have competition and it forces Solana to get even better.
- [51:51]
D
Riley Trends with no friends. You got a great pick for the week.
- [51:54]
G
Yep.
- [51:55]
D
Everybody, you know, nobody's paying attention. You know, for. For Joe and Ryan, these are stocks that nobody pays attention to. The one we have today has less than a thousand followers on Stock twits and it's outperforming like crazy. It's such a great sort of arbitrage play from an attentional point of view. We were talking about. We really had a conversation about human attention today, the attention economy. And so this is really the same concept. Riley, what's up, buddy? Good to see you. Thanks for your patience.
- [52:28]
G
Good to see you.
- [52:29]
B
Phil.
- [52:29]
E
What.
- [52:30]
D
What do you got for us today?
- [52:31]
G
Yeah, so, I mean, I know you guys are talking about degeneracy and speculation and gambling and Flutter Entertainment falls into this category. They're the online gaming conglomerate that owns FanDuel. So people here, DraftKings and FanDuel, those are the two sports books that they think of. You could see Flutter gapped up to an all time high last week and it is just trading sideways. It looks like it wants to hit that next leg higher. And kind of going back to your point, Phil, regarding attention, we can look at with performance if we want to go to that next chart. That's a little six month performance chart between DraftKings and Flutter. So DraftKings is about a $20 billion market cap and they have 117,000 followers on Stocktwits. Whereas as we said, Flutter has about a thousand followers with a nearly $50 billion market cap and it's absolutely outperforming. So it's a really unique story. This is painting a good picture. These are the names that we're looking.
- [53:27]
B
For on Trends with no Friends.
- [53:29]
D
Does this only have a thousand followers because of the name? Like, if they change their name to fanduel, I bet you so tomorrow would all of a sudden it have, you know, 30,000 followers, probably so.
- [53:38]
G
I mean, the first time I stumbled upon this name, I had to look it up and be like, who? Who do they own? What do they do? How. How come I've never heard of them? So that's definitely part of it.
- [53:50]
D
Fascinating. Okay, thanks, Riley. Okay, listen, we're going to wrap it up. Ryan, last word from you.
- [53:59]
C
I mean, thanks for having us. Love the conversation here. Look I think that everything kind of has a really bullish narrative right now. So I think if you just, you know, find strong conviction, whether it's Solana or Sui or Aptos or Meme coins, just, you know, keep your pulse on the market and don't. Don't trade yourself out of this opportunity.
- [54:19]
D
Killer Joe, last word, pal. We're going higher. Love it. Okay, I have a last word, too. So there's this. There's a seasonality. Just like there's a seasonality of the stock market, there's a seasonality to weight gain, right? And if you look at the most bullish time of the year for people getting fat, it starts coming right now. Like, Thanksgiving's late. Look at this chart. This seasonality, weight gain. There's that Thanksgiving in United States line. And then we get people. Adults in the United States gain more weight than they gain. Every year, we gain more. One to two. Adults in the US Gain one to two pounds a year. We gain three to four pounds from Thanksgiving through New Year. So you got Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, everybody's partying, second piece of pecan pie, the whole nine yards. So what you want to do right now is you want to become you. You just want to be cognizant, first of all, that that's happening. You don't want to get fatter. If you could just maintain equal weight during this bullish period of the year for weight, you will actually lose weight over the course of the year instead of gaining weight. This is my. This is my shtick for today, Joe. I mean, it's great, right? So this is. So what you want to do is you want to. Starting next week, starting today, starting this weekend, whenever you want to begin eating lots and lots of high protein, low carbohydrate foods early in the day. I call it the right foot rule. You want to get off to the. On the right foot and start the day eggs, fish, beef, chicken, pork. Bacon's okay. Just don't go crazy on it. Dairy's okay. Greek yogurt's fantastic. Start with that. So that's your base for the day. And then also get outside, right? I mean, if you're in the Northeast, listen, global warming's awesome, right? I mean, it's fricking 60 degrees right now. 62 degrees, and I'm north of New York City. Get outside, take a walk in the morning, and make sure you get lots of protein. Avoid the seasonality of weight gain. Okay, guys, adios. Have a great afternoon. Thank you, both of you guys, for joining us.
- [56:38]
C
Thanks, guys.
- [56:39]
D
Later, Rylan.