Bits + Bips: How Wall Street Could Make a Killing off the Next Crypto Winter - Ep. 908

Summary

Unchained, Ep. 908: Bits + Bips: How Wall Street Could Make a Killing off the Next Crypto Winter

Date: September 23, 2025
Host: Laura Shin (with regular "Bits and Bips" panel: Steve Ehrlich, Ram Alawalia, Austin Campbell, and guest Vinny Lingam)
Theme: Examining the intersection of crypto markets, macro shifts, and the emerging world of Digital Asset Trusts (DATs)—especially how Wall Street may profit in the next crypto contraction.

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Episode Overview

This episode gathers crypto industry veterans and analysts to dissect macroeconomic signals, the transformation of reporting standards, the burgeoning Digital Asset Trust (DAT) sector, arbitrage opportunities, liquidation risks, and the looming specter of another major crypto downturn. With Wall Street circling DATs for profit opportunities, the conversation pivots between market fundamentals, structural concerns in new crypto investment vehicles, and wider macro dangers.

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Key Topics & Insights

1. Macro Backdrop, Rate Cuts, & Market Sentiment

• [06:51] Discussion begins with the fallout from the Fed’s recent 25bps rate cut and its lukewarm market response.
• Ram Alawalia: “There’s been a spike in liquidations, including Ethereum… We haven’t seen this level… in quite a long time. Liquidations are usually viable.” (08:07)
• Market is in a weak seasonal window post-options expiry, with absence of buybacks or earnings catalysts.
• Ram: “The best economist in the world is called Mr. Markets—the S&P 500—and it’s the companies within and how they report.” (10:39)

2. Transparency & Corporate Reporting Evolution

• Quarterly vs. Semiannual Reporting Debate:
  [11:07 – 14:34]
  • Steve Ehrlich raises the pros and cons: transparency vs. operational burden.
  • Austin Campbell:

    “If…ConAgra…or Archer Daniels Midland went from quarterly to semiannually, does it really damage…the information granularity? Probably not really. On the other hand, should banks be moving from quarterly to semiannually? Perhaps not.” (12:48)

  • Potential for real-time, blockchain-enabled corporate data-streaming is discussed, with both promise and practical/data quality challenges.

3. Tokenized Stocks, Insider Trading & Globalization Risks

• [14:34 – 21:47]
  • Vinny Lingam:

    “Once you start tokenizing stocks, trade them globally…you can’t really have enforcement actions against people in foreign countries for insider trading.” (15:20)

  • Austin Campbell: Skeptical of truly “permissionless” tokenized stock trading: “There is a reason stocks are not permissionless. They come with control rights.” (19:47)
  • Discussion highlights difficulties in balancing transparency, privacy, and regulation.

4. Market Outlook: Defensive Sentiment, Gold, & Crypto

• [22:27 – 26:51]
  • Vinny Lingam expresses bearishness: “I’ve got a bunch of put positions… I don’t think [the Fed] should have cut… I think we’re going to see a lot of liquidity unwind.” (22:27)
  • Gold as a Defensive Asset:
    “Gold is, I’d say, a primary position for me right now just because I think it’s all about protecting purchasing power.” (24:53)
  • Macro Risks: Massive US deficits, and skepticism about productivity (AI) as a panacea.
  • Notable Quote:

    “Tell me how we get out of this mess… I’m not buying the tariffs story.”
    – Vinny Lingam (25:03)

  • Ram Alawalia: “Buying gold is what you’re really doing is just front running China, because China has shifted from buying U.S. treasuries to buying gold. They are the bid.” (25:51)

5. Digital Asset Trusts (DATs): Boom, Arbitrage, and Unwinding Risks

• [28:58 – 54:22]
  • Austin Campbell:

    “The eternal problem of the DAT is that they don’t have an internal price stabilization mechanism like the ETFs have…” (30:05)

  • DAT Arbitrage & M&A: Hedge funds are likely to profit by acquiring DATs trading at a discount to their net asset value (NAV), then harvesting the gap.
  • Vinny Lingam:

    “It’s going to happen in a downturn. The M NAV multiple is going to compress… you’re going to have one, maybe two big plays in each space.” (31:37)

  • DAT Survival:
    Austin predicts only DATs with genuine operating models or cash flows—or those exploiting regulatory/tax arbitrage—will survive.
  • DAT Bubble Narrative:

    “Welcome to crypto. That’s what it is… you don’t need that many DATs. A lot of this is liquidity seeking.”
    – Ram Alawalia (33:49)

  • Potential for Nuclear Winter:

    “…the next crypto winter will be a nuclear winter, because what will happen is these DATs will trade at discounts. Hedge funds come in… will buy up the company, short before, then dump it…”
    – Vinny Lingam (38:29)

  • Wall Street Arbitrage Play:

    “Wall Street is going to make so much money on the way down.”
    – Vinny Lingam (41:53)

  • DATs as Minsky Machines:
    Austin: “For anybody who’s in the asset part that’s trading at a premium, you’re in the final phase of Minsky already. And we all know how [that ends].” (48:00)

6. ETFs, Regulation, & the Future of Crypto Investment Vehicles

• SEC’s Accelerated ETF Listings:

  “With ETF listing standards we’re going to have staking inside of the ETFs now… for DATs that are not going to be buying real, cash-flowing businesses, what the hell is it doing existing?”
  – Austin Campbell (52:21)

  • Only DATs that “buy operating companies” (as in, those adding value beyond just holding tokens) are likely to survive.
  • Ram Alawalia: “Stick to quality.” (54:20)

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Memorable Quotes & Timestamps

• Vinny Lingam: “The next crypto winter will be a nuclear winter… DATs will trade at discounts.” (00:00, 38:29)
• Austin Campbell: “If you listen to most people trying to explain why their DAT should trade at an M nav premium, it’s a version of the joke: part one, a miracle happens, part two…” (46:58)
• Ram Alawalia: “Wall street says, when the ducks are quacking, feed the ducks…when you see a proliferation of new issuance, that is a contra signal.” (34:17)
• Steve Ehrlich: “I’m just waiting for somebody to put…an ongoing quarterly report on a blockchain where it runs autonomously…” (14:07)
• Austin Campbell: “There are a handful of DATs with operating cash flow—okay, maybe you’re going to work. But for anybody in the asset part trading at a premium, you’re in the final phase of Minsky already…” (48:00)
• Vinny Lingam: “If someone can explain to me how this magically comes together and we don’t have a sovereign debt crisis in the next couple of years…” (59:41)

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Contrarian & Closing Thoughts

[54:42 – end]

• Ram Alawalia: S&P’s total return “crushes” gold, and bets on Norwegian Cruise Lines and the aging US demographic.
• Austin Campbell: Predicts the next economic breakdown in the US will look more like Japan’s “aging population” problem, not a traditional crash. Services for the elderly will outperform; beware intergenerational “warfare.”
• Vinny Lingam: As wealth increases, focus shifts from making money to protecting purchasing power. Current state and government deficits make gold and defensive positions attractive, as AI productivity may not save the system:

  “As much as we can over index in productivity, I think for some people…protecting purchasing power is the most important.” (59:47)

• Macro-Finance Debate:

  “None of this matters when Elon's automated robots kill us all anyway.”
  – Austin Campbell (60:37)

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Notable Segments & Timestamps

• Vinny’s background & Civic ICO history: (02:15 – 06:51)
• Macro market state, liquidations, and seasonal rundown: (08:07 – 11:07)
• Quarterly vs. Semiannual reporting debate: (11:07 – 14:34)
• Tokenized stocks, KYC, and insider trading risks: (14:34 – 21:47)
• Gold, treasuries, and US macro risk discussion: (22:27 – 27:13)
• Digital Asset Trusts (DATs), arbitrage, and market structure: (28:58 – 54:22)
• Final contrarian and closing thoughts: (54:42 – end)

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Tone & Style

The episode is energetic, skeptical, and deeply technical, favoring hard-won wisdom over hype. Panelists spar on details but share a wariness of crypto’s new Wall Street vehicles. The tone slants toward macro caution with darkly humorous asides (e.g., “nuclear winter,” “Elon’s robots will kill us all”), all underpinned by industry experience and an eye for the next structural shakeout.

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In Summary

The panel scrutinizes the risks in the current crypto market structure, warning of how Wall Street may profit by arbitraging, acquiring, and liquidating DATs during the next downturn. Despite hopes for regulatory and technological advancement (ETFs, tokenization), the experts remain wary—favoring defensive assets and stressing the importance of true operational quality in crypto companies. The episode is a cautionary tale for anyone eyeing quick profits in the wild new world of institutional crypto vehicles.

Transcript

[Vinny Lingam]

The next crypto winter will be a nuclear winter, because what will happen is these dats will trade at discounts.

[Ram Alawalia]

I think it's quite phenomenal that we had the first DAO, which was MSTR, and then we had a proliferation of DATs for the last three months combined with the SPAC craze. And now we're talking about nav compression and the, you know, the collapse of these deaths. I mean, that was. That came quick. The left, quick. Welcome to crypto. That's what it is.

[Vinny Lingam]

The US is running a twin deficit. The federal deficit is going to keep rising. I mean, we're going to be 2 point X this year by the looks of things, getting closer to three by next year. Tell me how we get out of this mess.

[Austin Campbell]

I'll just hop in to say this is a long time debate between economists, but I'll just say none of this matters when Elon's automated robots kill us all.

[Steve Ehrlich]

At hi everyone. Welcome to Bits and Bips, the show that explores how crypto and macro collide one basis point at a time. I'm your host, Steve Ehrlich, high scribe of the Unchained Kingdom. And I'm here as always with Ram Alawalia, the Maester of wealth leader of Lumina.

[Vinny Lingam]

Welcome.

[Steve Ehrlich]

And we're here with two very special guests. First, a returning guest, Austin Campbell, the high scholar of Zero Knowledge Consulting. So welcome Austin.

[Austin Campbell]

Thanks for having me.

[Steve Ehrlich]

A lot of requests to have you back. And then again, a very special guest, a true crypto OG Vinny Lingam, the eternal watcher of Praxis Holdings. So welcome Vinny.

[Vinny Lingam]

Hi Steven.

[Ram Alawalia]

Thanks for having me.

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[Steve Ehrlich]

A lot of our audience probably knows who you are, Vinny, but just in case we have some people that aren't familiar with you, can you just give us a minute or two? Background?

[Vinny Lingam]

Sure. Thanks. Thanks Anderson. I'm just a long term entrepreneur who's been in crypto and bitcoin since about 2013 I started gift, the mobile gift card company which was one of the first big sites to offer Bitcoin back in the days. And yeah, I sold that company to First Data and one of the earliest bitcoin exits, so to speak. And then I'd just been building crypto companies. I was a GP at Multicoin. I laid the seed round for Solana famously and Multiple is obviously one of the biggest investors in Solana and I was an advisor to Solana early days as well. I built Civic, I did one of the first big ICOs. Civic still around. We have a big announcement and launch tomorrow. And so yeah, I just been doing a whole bunch of things and I got into setting up a new hedge fund earlier this year, well actually two years ago, but we launched to the public, which is Praxis Capital, in April. It's just a delta neutral, it's a delta neutral crypto hedge fund. So we focus on taking the cream off the top and just delivering really good, healthy returns without taking on all the up and down risk of crypto. So I've just been an entrepreneur building in crypto and investing as the first investor in filecoin. Very early invest in Render and a.

[Ram Alawalia]

Whole bunch of others.

[Vinny Lingam]

Probably like, I mean probably like 50 to 100 investments in crypto and crypto funds and whatnot. So we're on the block for a while. I, I get, I get a lot of hate for my saucy takes on, on X sometimes, sometimes right, sometimes wrong, as we all are. But I take it in stride. And I'm always happy to debate my point of view, but a lot of it stems from just being born in South Africa, living through apartheid, building companies along the way. And I just, I'm just a big, big believer in utility over narratives. And I think there's just way too many narratives in crypto. And so I always try and debunk them as much as possible, but not everybody likes a good debunking.

[Steve Ehrlich]

So I have to say, when I first got involved in crypto, I mean I would say 2013, 2014 actually digital identity and sort of data sovereignty was sort of my entryway in and I always had a soft spot for Civic. I think your ICO was what, like $30 million in three minutes or so? It was something, something crazy that you guys raised.

[Vinny Lingam]

Yeah, it was, it was, it wasn't that we actually extended it. We, we, we were one of those crypto companies that we didn't actually need to do an ico. We, we had sold all the crypto Privately to funds and high net worth individuals. And I just felt that at the time, like, we wanted more people to have ownership in the community. We wound up refunding about $11 million to funds and invest, you know, high net worth individuals and, and making that $11 million available to the public in, in the ICO, which was very strange at the time. Most people would have just taken more money. And we, we just, we just capped it. We said, no, we don't want to take more money. And the other thing is Civic's still around today. And I, I get a lot of hate. People think Vinnie made all his money out of Civic and ran away with $33 million. And it's like, absolutely not true. I've made zero money out of Civic. I worked like a basic salary for a few years. People be surprised. Like, I've never sold or traded Civic tokens. It's all, it's all held by the company. You know, we've had venture capital and board members and a whole lot, and the company's still around and functioning and building because we just kept a very low burn for a long period of time trying to find product, market fit in crypto. And quite frankly, we lost four years during the Biden administration. I mean, the amount of hate that we got and the industry got for doing, you know, KYC and verification and ID verification location was. It was impossible to operate in those four years. And I voted for Biden. So it was like, it was a really crazy time for us. And I think that, you know, now we're past that. I think things are changing quickly as we were noticing in, you know, the regulatory front and. But, you know, I don't want to, you know, steal the Civic team's thunder, but they've been building something really cool, which we're launching tomorrow. So it's been, it's been great that people like you participated early on. And we haven't forgotten about the people who've been there supporting Civic and sort of cheerleading for us. But equally, the message really has been it's been hard to be an operator in crypto over the past decade and to still be around and functioning as a, as a company, as a team is actually, I think pretty, pretty great for us. And hopefully we crack identity and we crack it in a way which is unexpected.

[Steve Ehrlich]

Yeah. So let's get on with the show. We have a lot to talk about today. I mean, there's, there's new. I guess there's a new chapter in the ETF versus that debate. The Fed lowered rates 25 bips last week and the market did not seem.

[Austin Campbell]

To react very well.

[Steve Ehrlich]

So we'll probably get into that first. And, yeah, and gold is shooting its way towards $4,000 an ounce, which I know we have some strong takes about. But before we do that, I mean, just a very quick reminder, nothing that we say on the show here is meant as investment or financial advice. For additional disclosures, please check out unchained.com backslash bitsandbeps. And with that ram, why don't we come to you to just kind of get a sense of what's going on in the market today? I mean, Bitcoin briefly touched, I think, 112,000. It's up a little bit since then. All of the alts are down probably somewhere. All the major alts at least are down somewhere 5 to 7%. And from what I can tell, I mean, there was some big, long liquidations, but that was all sort of prefaced by maybe just some bullish exhaustion, slash, maybe a little bit of selling the news when the Fed didn't cut 50 instead of 25. What are you seeing right now?

[Ram Alawalia]

Yeah, no, you're right. There's been a spike in liquidations, including in Ethereum. We haven't seen this level of liquidations in quite a long time. I'll share my screen here so you can take a look at what I'm looking at here. By the way, liquidations are usually viable, so keep that in mind. Now, this is a prototype of a tool that we're building out here at Lumita. It's not financial advice, entertainment only, but if I click here and go to Ethereum, you can see that we have a spike in this green bar here. That's a spike in, in liquidations. So, you know, this is one of the, you know, one of several other considerations, I would say. You know, this week in markets, you have the beginning of the worst two weeks of seasonality for the year. You're also in the week after options expiration. It's usually the second week after options expiration, which is not the best week. And you also don't have any substantial buybacks from corporates. You're also on the other side of the Fed announcement, you're not in earnings season, so it's hard to find catalysts. So those are all just considerations to see. Obviously you can see here with Ethereum, for those that are watching the screen, there was a bearish engulfing candle here. So I think what you're seeing is just markets have been cooling off. You See that with the dats also if you look at the like MSTR for example relative to Coinbase, it's, you know that that ratio chart shows that it's pulled back to the lows. I'm actually more constructive things like microstrategy here. I think it's, you know, could be another lows and be poised for a year and run up. You just gotta navigate probably the next one or two weeks or so and maybe even sooner in terms of which asset class you're talking about in terms of getting long. Notably, you know we had three months of bad non farm payrolls like we saw last year and also the year before and then we saw a drop in initial claims. So there was a, like a fraudulent initial claims in Texas. So now we're no longer in a recession. It's just, it's like up only. Right. But I've been saying for a while there's no recession. You can see in the company earnings, company earnings are solid. So that's something to consider as well. This debate about are we in recession or not continues in the background even as the S and P hits all time highs. So the best economist in the world is called Mr. Markets the S&P 500 and it's the companies within that and how they report and what they're seeing. And what we're seeing is continued backlog growth, continued spending, Nvidia's buying, making an investment in intel. There's still earnings growth and still productivity growth. So big picture, you should still be constructive.

[Steve Ehrlich]

I actually have a question for Dr. Nothing Burger or Mr. Nothingburger if you, if you would allow.

[Ram Alawalia]

Sure, yeah. That should be my new title, Mr. Nothing Burger.

[Steve Ehrlich]

Yeah.

[Ram Alawalia]

Yeah, he should.

[Steve Ehrlich]

I'm, I'm curious that you mentioned corporate earnings. I mean there's talk now about reducing the quarterly earnings to, to just I guess on a semiannual basis similar.

[Ram Alawalia]

That's a really interesting question.

[Vinny Lingam]

I'm.

[Steve Ehrlich]

Yeah, I'd love to just kind of hear what you think and maybe, I mean Austin and Vinnie too before we get into the other stuff because like there I can see pros and cons for each approach. I mean you don't want, you don't want directors just trying to goose the books to juice quarterly earnings. But at the same point they provide really great transparency into the health of a company. So what do you guys think about that?

[Ram Alawalia]

I'll be brief on this. I think there are a couple different stakeholders. There's management of the companies, there's shareholders, probably the primary constituents. Right. So if you're managing running a publicly traded company, the burdens of being public and the reporting obligations are significant and they do distract with the day to day operations of a company. That's the case for reporting semiannually. From a shareholder perspective, you want as much transparency as possible. And as an investor I get more opportunities during quarterly reporting because you have a greater probability of overreactions to the upside and to the downside. So as a shareholder I prefer that. I appreciate the point on having management more focused though with the less distraction of a quarterly process.

[Austin Campbell]

Yeah, I'll hop in to say, having been on both sides of this previously that I also think there's some call it interplay between various factors here. I agree with Ram. The frequency of reporting definitely generates headaches and to be totally honest, having the same frequency of reporting for all companies kind of feels great crazy to me. And what I mean by that is if something like let's try to pick a really boring company if like Con Agra, right. Or like Archer Daniels Midland went from quarterly to semiannually, does it really damage like the information granularity we're getting? Probably not really. On the other hand, should like banks be moving from quarterly to semiannually? Perhaps not right where the balance sheet is of significantly more value to see frequency there. So one query what kind of company is it? Two for some of these people, how informative are like their quarterly and you know, semiannual reports to begin with. Like I mean obviously the worst of this problem ever was probably like Enron and to a lesser extent WorldCom. Right. Caused us to have Sarbanes, Oxley and a bunch of reforms in that space. But you could probably get to a much better place with less frequent reporting. That also requires more accuracy and granularity from managements as opposed to what we currently have.

[Steve Ehrlich]

I'm just waiting for somebody to put somehow put like an ongoing quarterly report on a blockchain where it just runs autonomously every day we get updated P and L numbers and all sorts of stuff. Vinny, want to come to you any thoughts on, on the reporting issue but also love to just go back to the markets. I mean what are, what are you seeing? I know you want to talk about gold and how it's doing and, and, and what does a delta neutral type approach look like a market like this?

[Vinny Lingam]

Sure. A lot of questions. I mean I'll just add to your, your, your point there. I think that I'd love, and I always thought about this, I'd love to get a point where you can trade real Time financial data from companies figure out some way to smooth things out. Whether it's just sales or whatever numbers. I'd love to see a public company that says hey, we're going to give a live stream of, maybe it's, maybe it's daily sales, maybe it's weekly sales but you know, more often than, you know, quarterly reporting. And I knew that that'd be very healthy for markets because right now you wouldn't have to, you, you know, the, the time lag between information creates this asymmetry and I actually think that it's going to become commonplace when we have tokenized trading of stocks because one of the issues of tokenized trading of stocks is insider trading now because I think the KYC systems that are going to be put in place to facilitate tokenized token trading is going to be very, very lax and there'll be less SEC enforcement because part of the argument is that you can take a stock like Tesla, you can tokenize it and now you're opening up to global markets because some, somebody in Germany could buy it, someone in Russia could buy it wherever. And yeah, yeah, there'll be some, there'll be some, you know, KYC or some sort of gating system that prevents people from certain jurisdictions from owning this stock. But those are going to be very, very easy to get by and bypass. So you'll have people buying and trading stocks from all over the world and there'll be no enforcement for insider trading and protection. So if someone who works at, at a foreign subsidiary of Tesla has word of a big contract or I'm using Tesla, but it could be any or the Mag 7 stocks or any stock really that's been traded. If someone has insider information, they can pass it on to a friend the way they do right now. They can make these weird trades. The ACC picks up on these right now at least you know, some, some amount of them, right. Once you start tokenizing stock, you trade them globally and now you have a problem because you, you can't really have enforcement actions against people in foreign countries for insider trading. And so I think that's where people want to go to where you can have this sort of decentralized global financial system. But the cheaters are going to come out of nowhere. And so I think that's a big concern risk that I, I'm happy to like point out. And how would it work?

[Ram Alawalia]

I think it's interesting idea. You're saying, hey look, get some oracles that validate data. You go from a month end close to a weekly Close or to a daily close. Some businesses can do that, maybe retailers for example. But like suppose you're Nvidia. It's a big deal. If you have an announcement that there's $100 billion spend announcement with the open AI that was announced this morning, for example, that's the press release. Behind the press release there's a commercial agreement. Behind the commercial agreement there's a letter of intent. And by the way, behind the letter of intent there's a sales pipeline that someone's running and attaching probabilities to deal by deal. Behind that there's like salespeople just doing stuff. It's like what's the standard of transparency along that spectrum? Obviously the further upstream you go, there's more noise, there's more volatility. On the other hand, Nvidia would like to control the reception together with their customer OpenAI and have a shared press release, which is what they did today. And it's a simultaneous disclosure to the public market.

[Vinny Lingam]

You can anonymize the data. You could create a pipeline that doesn't disclose who the deal is happening with and you could say we have a $500 billion pipeline over three years and you can assign percentages to individual ones, you know, and you know it wouldn't be publicly disclosed, but you could predict, you could predict without knowing who it is. And then as things come to fruition, I mean, Austin's shaking his head, probably disagrees. I don't know what the answer is but, and maybe it doesn't work for these big, big announcements. But the point is like even a simple point of sale system where, you know, if you're just an E commerce business and you're publicly listed, you know, being able to stream at least on a seven day rolling basis or 30 year older basis, your daily sales as opposed to, you know, 90 days afterwards, doing a release is interesting. All of the only thing I'm pointing out by the way, is that people with inside information are going to make a lot of money when stocks become tokenized. That's the, that's the statement I'm willing to make.

[Austin Campbell]

All right, so I'll say a couple of things here. One, please be careful about making forward looking predictive statements. As a public company officer, there's a lot of rules around those things. You should probably not be publishing that data except at a like official forums that have been vetted because if anybody plays games with that, that's a go to jail party foul for everybody involved. It's really bad. Two, as an aside, I Don't think this works in the current world. And the reason I say that is there are a lot of like data lead lag, like accuracy type issues that have nothing to do with putting stuff on chain. It just has to do with actually having accurate data. So there's a lot of industries where this is not doable. There's actually some where it's just like legally not doable. If you look at things like health care because of hipaa, like a real time like feed for health care where I can start geolocating that against people's information and like triangulating health events and.

[Vinny Lingam]

Things like that, it's going to end.

[Austin Campbell]

A disaster right now Obviously the whole defense complex can't disclose shit. So I think this is actually a very difficult thing to do. The other thing I will say I don't think tokenized stocks are going to be a thing thing in the way that people in crypto hope eg we're not going to have permissionless trading of stocks like yeah, the 33, the 34 act like these things. Our securities legislation exists for a reason and we have a lot of experience with things like insider trading. Honestly the insider trading is the thing I'm less worried about. If people understand the history of like non disclosed stock ownership and then self dealing that's even worse. Worse than insider trading. Because now I'm voting as a director to pay a company of myself outsized money at the expense of the other shareholders type problems. And so I don't think anybody is going to say share registries can have like essentially voting stock that is tokenized. Now could you have a small percentage of the float that is non voting that gets tokenized that is intended for like rest of world investors? Probably yes. But then you may not have the same rights and I'm not sure that insider trading works as well if you don't have rights. But my point is just in the current regime like I know crypto people don't like this because they want everything to be permissionless. But like there is a reason stocks are not permissionless. They come with control rights.

[Vinny Lingam]

I agree, I fully agree. Like Ron brought out the point about the articles, I just, I can surmise how it could be done. I don't think it's going to happen. I think that just it's too much of a leaky bucket.

[Ram Alawalia]

We should shift topics. But there's one concluding thought on this is you can pay for data like real time retail spend on Visa, MasterCard Networks and hedge funds like Two Sigma pay for that to get an early read on which retailers are going to perform or underperform. You think about like what stablecoins mean and being able to maybe tag that to different merchant IDs. Things start to get pretty interesting in terms of democratizing access to that information compliantly. There's more sort out there.

[Steve Ehrlich]

I was just going to say before we move on and I have to take a quick break for ads. I just want to tie Bill on this discussion because we were talking about markets maybe for Rahman and Vinnie. Just quickly, what do you think the next week looks like this bitcoin and market continue to go down? Are we're going to see a slight bump? Like what are, what are you seeing? Especially given that this is a bit of a holiday week for.

[Vinny Lingam]

I've got a bunch of put positions in place, Bitcoin, Ethereum in particular. I'm a bit bearish right now. I mean I was bearish basically going into the FOMC because I don't think they should have cut and I think that cutting has signaled weakness and I think it causes problems with, with Japan in particular. And we're seeing, you know, we saw immediately what happened afterwards within the K and I think, I mean this is again the macro situation is, is a very complex one. So trying to discuss it in a short session like this doesn't make any sense. But I think that we're, we're, we're going to see a lot of liquidity unwind from the system and I think that even though we're seeing stocks go up right now. Yeah, I have virtually zero stocks in my portfolio of public stocks. Like I'm basically in treasury short term and some gold positions.

[Ram Alawalia]

You're always in treasuries and gold, but come on. Sorry, you're always in treasuries and gold, right?

[Vinny Lingam]

No, no, no. Recently. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean I'm not a big fan of stocks. I think stocks are really overbetted. I think the Buffett indicators, you know.

[Ram Alawalia]

No, no, I'll take the other side of that all day long.

[Steve Ehrlich]

I just want to point out I recently invested in some gold too. For people that can't see, this is an Eagles championship super bow.

[Ram Alawalia]

Nice.

[Steve Ehrlich]

Just to be clear, it is not actually a real one made of gold. My wife would divorce me.

[Ram Alawalia]

But I think on bitcoin I think if it ever gets to 107 the next week or two you're supposed to be a buyer. If at 110 you get to be a buyer too. Somewhere around those levels right now it's Kind of in a lukewarm position. I go back to some of those negative seasonal issues we've talked about a few minutes ago, but I wouldn't be as bearish. I think you should have a run up through November. But you got to be day to day on this. If you're timing the entry at that level, you got to be day to day on it. You got to sit on it. I can't tell you now what's going to happen Thursday, but if you tell me what happens on Wednesday, I'll give you a view, if that makes sense.

[Austin Campbell]

Yeah. I would also hop in here and say, I think for people who are more concerned about real returns, which is probably where Vinnie is as opposed to purely nominal. Or maybe you're not dollar denominated as well. I think one of the few assets in the current market that you could buy and just fire yet for a while probably is gold. Right. Rom to your point of like I don't think you need to tactically trade gold because that's one where if we continue spending this amount of money on a long enough time frame, that thing is definitely going up.

[Vinny Lingam]

I agree. Gold is. Is, I'd say a primary position for me right now just because I think it's all about protecting purchasing power. And I think that the.

[Ram Alawalia]

The.

[Vinny Lingam]

The US is running a twin deficit. The. The federal deficit is going to keep rising. I mean we're going to be 2 point X this year by the looks of things. Getting closer to three by next year. Tell me how we get out of this mess. Like if someone can give me a coherent explanation as to how the US gets out of the current mess. And I'm not buying the tariff story. I'm just not buying the tariffs and plug the hole.

[Ram Alawalia]

I agree tariffs won't plug the hole and has its own cost. But getting out of the debt trap is all about productivity. That's. That's it. It's about productivity growth. AI we're seeing it. Haven't seen this productivity growth since the late 90s. Humanoids to come in five years. By the way. The story on gold. Gold is like the D trade on China. Buying gold is what you're really doing is just front running China because China has shifted from buying U.S. treasuries.

[Vinny Lingam]

Yeah.

[Ram Alawalia]

To buying gold. That they are the bid.

[Vinny Lingam]

India as well. India as well. So. So. And they settling. They're going to start settling international trading cold.

[Steve Ehrlich]

What I take away from this is that I have to buy more of these since they're. Since they're made of gold.

[Ram Alawalia]

I think these things rotate like gold leads and then bitcoin leads and then equities lead.

[Vinny Lingam]

I don't think so. I think this time might be different, Ron. I think this time gold actually just shoots up to like number 8,000, 10,000, whatever. I think gold just basically starts capturing purchasing power which it had, you know, like one of my favorite, one of my favorite gold sort of analogies or phrases would be that the one ounce of gold today still buys what one ounce of gold bought 100 years ago, which is a finely tailored suit. So a hundred years ago you go and buy a nice suit, it's going to cost you exactly the same as one ounce of gold today. Isn't that incredible?

[Steve Ehrlich]

It is and it's a great way to lead us into a brief commercial break.

[Ram Alawalia]

You would have been better by now stocks then, but let's go ahead.

[Vinny Lingam]

Yeah, sorry.

[Ram Alawalia]

You would have been better at buying real assets that compound and have earnings growth.

[Vinny Lingam]

But well, if you look at the S and P versus gold over the past, I think they show it. But 40, 50 years gold has outperformed it.

[Ram Alawalia]

I don't think that's right. Not if you include dividends.

[Vinny Lingam]

I, I, I'll find I, I'll let.

[Steve Ehrlich]

You guys try to figure this out while we take a brief break to hear from the sponsors who make the show part possible.

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[Steve Ehrlich]

Yeah, really good discussion. Let's move on. We have a couple more topics, not a lot of time to do it. Some DAT news, I mean there was a bunch of DAT news, a couple more, a couple new Solana dats and then in particular I think we had our first debt M and a Strive buying Semler sort. I don't know if beleaguered is the right word but it had been trading, the healthcare company had been trading below nav for I think a little while now. So like to just kind of hear what you guys have to say about that. I mean Solana dats kind of interesting. They got out of the gate right away after the bitcoin once, well before Ethereum. But I don't see as much excitement, I don't see as much trading volume. So I'm curious to see what's going to happen with these couple of big boys that have really come out to play and, and blown up the rest of the industry and then, and then two, I mean Strive buying, buying Semler. I don't think it's too big of a hazard to guess that we're going to see more of this maybe. I think even Taylor was talking about how he might look to be opportunistic in buying some, some bitcoin treasury companies. So Austin, why don't you lead us off?

[Austin Campbell]

Yeah, so a couple of things here. One, like the eternal problem of the DAT is that they don't have an internal, call it price stabilization Mechanism like the ETFs have with the create destroy mechanism for shares. So if I'm like, think about your average like canonical debt which is basically I'm a public equity vehicle, I'm going to go buy some assets and what I'm going to do with those assets is like throw them in the room behind rom with the money books and just leave them there. And what that means is that the resting price of that thing should be the assets inside of that less the future cash flows that they're going to be paying out to like management custodians, expenses et cetera eg they should trade at a discount. And your view of how big the scalping is going to be and how well, they're going to do. Accumulating those assets should influence what that is. The problem that creates is that a lot of people who can do those things themselves are then in a position where they can make money by consuming these things in M and A. Right. Which is why you're going to start seeing this happen. Because if I'm not trading at a discount and I'm another DAT and I can buy one that's trading at a discount, I'm essentially just monetizing that gap. That I think is the benign version. The less benign version is that I am somebody like Coinbase with my own institutional custodian or I am like a hedge fund and I look at that thing with a large gap and go, ah, I could just take that thing, wipe it out, sell the assets and make the money. And so that's going to happen.

[Vinny Lingam]

It's going to happen. It's going to happen in a downturn. The M nav multiple is going to compress for a lot of them and you're going to have one, maybe two big plays in each, in each, in each space, each.

[Austin Campbell]

Caveat on that. I wrote one of my newsletters on this a while ago. I think there's two types of DATs that will survive. One is there are a few places in the world where DATS are a form of regulatory or tax arbitrage that's not the United States, but it can be elsewhere. Totally get it there. Like tax optimization is a very real thing. You should probably do it generically speaking.

[Steve Ehrlich]

One big example that's Metaplant in January in Japan. Correct for listeners.

[Austin Campbell]

And so number two is dats. I think this is kind of where Vinnie's going that have an operating model and cash flow and can consume other things, be it DATs or other cash flowing business, those are likely to be the one big one that remains. So if any of these stats survive, I will jokingly say over time they start looking more like an accumulation company. Right. The most familiar of which is Berkshire Hathaway. But there are others that exist in the world like you know, that do M and A serially to bring things in and create value or quite frankly just have an etf.

[Ram Alawalia]

Yeah, like I think it's, it's quite phenomenal that we had the first DA which was mstr and then we had a proliferation of deaths over the last three months combined with this back craze and now we're talking about nav compression and the, you know, the collapse of these deaths. I mean that was, they came quick Left quick. Welcome to crypto. That's what it is. Yeah. Look, I agree with your observations. You know, you don't need that many debts. Like I think a lot of this is liquidity seeking. You know, you, you have insiders that can wrap these and put them into public markets. And I think the liquidity that's offered by US public markets, which is significant. No, that's not all of them. I don't think the intentions are nefarious. I think there are a handful of very high quality DATs with great opera like Andrew Keys I think is like a very high quality, high integrity individual who's thinking about staking yield, how do you maximize that? And he's invested alongside that with his personal reputation. But I think in other cases you really have to question what are the motivations, what are people really trying to do? Is there a back end transaction somewhere where there's liquidity? You have to keep your wits about you.

[Steve Ehrlich]

I gotta say the best business to be in right now is I guess investment banking because you can make money selling all the placements and then you can make money. Well, the flip side, speed dating and putting these companies together.

[Ram Alawalia]

You're right. The flip side to that though is the quote, be careful of Wall street sells the other. You know, that's what you're saying. You know like Wall street says when the ducks are quacking, feed the ducks. Right. That's so a lot of ducks are quacking, they're getting fed. And you know we've talked about before that when you see a proliferation of new issuance that is a contra signal. So you have to make sure that you don't top tick the market on a stupid deal. That's what happens around this time of this is the kind of stuff that happens.

[Steve Ehrlich]

Right Vinny, are you guys invested in DATs? Is that part of or even just individually?

[Vinny Lingam]

Well, so we, it's a practice capital. We don't invest in dats. Not yet. We're Delta New Draw ARB Fund. I think dats offer some interesting arbitrage opportunities but you have, it's hard to unwind them. Right. So you can, you can bet one way on the, on the multiple and you could say the compression will happen but doesn't mean it unwinds and you can get hold of the. Like you could, you could short a debt that's sitting at 1.3 times multiple and it could start trading at a discount eventually. Which is fine, you'll make, you'll make money on the spread but you know, it's it's, you have to, you know, I guess it's just. You guys get it. Like, unless there's distributions, unless you can actually redeem the shares for the underlying, it's very hard to just. That as a, as a, as an op fund, run them.

[Ram Alawalia]

You have to buy spot. You know, they're going to buy spot. Just measure who's going to buy what spot. Look at it.

[Vinny Lingam]

Yeah, but, but there's this, there's some. I've got some liquidity concerns with what I'm seeing in the dad space. And I think that what, what Saylor is doing is over leveraging MicroStrategy by bringing out all these additional instruments on top of mstr. Right. And so everyone, like, while there's liquidity in the market, everyone's kind of going along with it, like, but like no one, no one who's actually sane. And maybe there are people speaking out about it, but like everyone's just going running with it right now. And everyone's kind of, you know, like MSTR is trading. I think I last saw 1.6, maybe 1.5, 1.6 times assets, which is kind of crazy. And he stacked up all these debt instruments on top of that. If bitcoin, like this is like this, this is the, the spicy take which nobody wants to talk about. You know, Rom's saying, like, hey, you know, Bitcoin 107 is a buy, 110 is a buy, whatever. What happens if bitcoin drops to 50 or 60? Oh, that'll never happen. Okay, I, I've been around, I've been on the block a long time. If bitcoin goes down to 50 or 60, you know, micro shredder, he starts to look extremely vulnerable. And, you know, like, I think at some point it could blow up. But like, yes, it's, it's dependent on Bitcoin.

[Ram Alawalia]

If Bitcoin breaks like 99, you're supposed to sell, you're supposed to get out. No one's saying buy at 107, then hold on you know, until 6.

[Vinny Lingam]

No, but, but, no, no, but that's not how it gets, gets communicated. That's not the narrative in the market. You know, everyone is like, cost average into Bitcoin. Buy Bitcoin no matter what.

[Austin Campbell]

No, I, but I, I was going to say, Rob, you don't say that, but a lot of people do say buy Bitcoin at price. Have literally ever sell. With that said, there are plenty of people who will be unwinding ds. It's not trivial, but the thing to understand is they will not be retail investors. And it may not be good for the retail investors when they get involved with unwinding these things. I guess I would put it people this way, unless you yourself are one of them, you might not want to be in a trade with an activist hedge fund trying to unwind it. That because they've probably done a lot of stuff behind the scenes, like, oh, I don't know, short ordered all the tokens already when they bought the thing to lock in a discount and then they're gonna go wage war on that company. And like, people think I'm joking, but I used to work at CPM and I've seen like, I'm gonna remind people that they will do stuff like we're just gonna sue you until your insurance company drops your DNO insurance and then go after your board members personally just to exhaust everybody to force you out. Or you have maniacs who have done things like, and this is not an exaggeration, stolen military vessels from sovereign nations to collect on debts coming after these things. Like, they will get it done.

[Vinny Lingam]

It's just the next, the next crypto winter will be a nuclear winter. Because what will happen is these DATs will trade at discounts. And I'm not saying all DATs are bad, but there'll be a lot of DAX that would acquire a lot of coins for a certain, for a certain project. They will trade at a massive discount. Now the hedge funds come in, they go, okay, we can just go raise 2, 3, 4, 5 billion, whatever it is, we'll buy up the company, but we're going to short before we buy it up. And then we're going to dump it on the market and get extra leverage. We're going to shank the price down 90%. And interesting point.

[Ram Alawalia]

So I had a chat with a person who's perhaps the most active in D, by the way. You make money in the D strategy is by making decisions on to participate in the pipe or not.

[Steve Ehrlich]

No, no, no, no.

[Vinny Lingam]

We're talking about pasta.

[Ram Alawalia]

That was a quick start. Here's the, here's the alternative in me. So look, suppose you're trading at a discount to nav discount. So this person is a very prolific investor in dads. And I actually made the point you guys are making. This is what he said. He said, I disagree with his response because I know you guys are probably going to be on my side as well. Share his thought process. He said, look, if you're training at discount nav, then what you do is you sell the spot asset that you've been accumulating and buy back your shares because that's a value creating mechanism.

[Vinny Lingam]

But Saylor specifically said he won't do that, by the way.

[Ram Alawalia]

Saylor won't. But the argument is that these other.

[Vinny Lingam]

Here's the problem. When you've got a couple of percentage points of the float the moment you start selling and people are watching those wallets, the market front rises.

[Ram Alawalia]

So that's why I disagree with the response. You're right, because like if you're the dad's accumulate.

[Vinny Lingam]

Let me just give you the, Let me give you the mechanism here, okay? And I haven't announced the details yet, but I am working on a couple of decks. So these are things that I'm thinking about very, very carefully.

[Steve Ehrlich]

Just you, me, Vinnie and maybe like 10 or 20,000 other friends.

[Ram Alawalia]

So it's between us 5,000 people.

[Vinny Lingam]

No, no, no, no. I, I get it. Like, I mean it'll come out very soon, but like, I wouldn't say which ones or what I'm doing exactly. But here's an example of a risk factor in a debt. I come to you, Rahm, you're running your whatever, XYZ debt and you're trading at a discount because the market's really weak right now. I get you to sign a an LOI by the dad because you're trading a discount and you can't offload at the same time. I'm busy basically selling the coin shorting. I'm sharing the coin so I have more negotiating leverage with you because your M multiple is now negative and getting bigger and bigger. So you then like, you know what the price you offered me yesterday, it's actually good because it's 20 or 10% more than what it is today. I'll take it. You sell it. Meanwhile. So that happens. Now I've acquired those coins, but I've actually. But now I'm unwind the deck and sell them into the market more and layer on my short deeper. And by the way, the way they do this is they use a combination of puts and, and spot shorting. Right? So with deep out the money puts, you basically delta hedge it down. So, so you, you don't need all those coins. You say, okay, give me. So you know, go to an OTC desk, sell me a 30% out the money put and then negotiate the contract with you. And then those puts basically go deep in the money once you start offloading the debt. These guys are going to make a killing unwinding these debts.

[Ram Alawalia]

Who are these guys?

[Vinny Lingam]

What's the profund institution? Hedge funds. Wall Street. Wall street is going to make so much money on the way down.

[Austin Campbell]

The.

[Vinny Lingam]

Next crypto meltdown will be a nuclear crypto.

[Ram Alawalia]

Streets of the world, to be specific here. Like what?

[Vinny Lingam]

I'm not going to, I'm not going to point out specific hedge funds, but there are guys out there who will basically short the, out of the crypto market the moment that, the moment the damn burst 99k, whatever number you want to use, it's going to cascade.

[Ram Alawalia]

I don't, I don't disagree with that by the way. I, there's. Look, so my response was individual who's not on the showing to get him back but is that these, these are pro cyclical markets. So there's reflexivity on the way up and reflexivity on the way down. So the, the person's argument is like look, if you're trying to discount Nav, then you sell spot, buy back your shares, you close the gap. But the point is if you bet.

[Vinny Lingam]

Against, you can't, you can't.

[Ram Alawalia]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then the spot market comes undone and then your dad starts to go to 02. It's like trying to bail water on a boat and the boat's taking on more water. It's just not gonna. So I, I agree that's the risk and I think you, you could get, you know, things like the next gbtc, the next ethe, it's gonna happen.

[Vinny Lingam]

My prediction is there'll be one max, two DAT winners per, per major token and then that's it. You're gonna have a very few, I.

[Ram Alawalia]

Would say like the long tail of DATs with limited sponsorship and limited adoption. Most of those won't even have a great debt behind them. I think the major as well, like 4 Solana, Bitcoin, Ethereum, hyper liquid, that's about it. Good luck.

[Steve Ehrlich]

Although I am interested in the long tail now, I mean especially since some of the bigger ones are getting saturated and I mean it's almost like at that point you almost like bet on all the horses where like at some point you just try to launch as many of these little Dows and as possible corner a decent part of the market cap. And if you get the next hype, you get the next something you're going to make, you're going to make a killing and hopefully it'll also.

[Vinny Lingam]

But there is some, there is, there are some unique and again I'm looking at some of these, there are some unique opportunities for certain tokens. So, so thinking about what is a Debt, it's a regulatory, it's an arbitrage, Right. It's a bridge between capital markets that exists in 401k funds in, you know, the money is not sitting in crypto, it's sitting in sort of in the financial markets and getting into a crypto that's only listed on crypto exchanges. And so if you can find one where it's very undervalued, widely distributed, maybe it's at all time lows, that's probably a better one than something that's an all time highs. And everyone has already got it right, has access to it. So there are these arbitrage opportunities. But, but MicroStrategy and Bitcoin is the bellwether for our industry. And so until the, until the bow breaks, everything's fine.

[Ram Alawalia]

Like, I think we're in a good defense of MicroStrategy. Look, they're using non recourse debt and they've been selling bonds with converts at a 0% interest rate. So I don't, I don't think that debt capital stack is.

[Vinny Lingam]

How does MicroStrategy pay the interest on the debt?

[Ram Alawalia]

Look at the interest rate on the bonds. I mean they have zero percent converts out there.

[Vinny Lingam]

Oh no, no, not all of them. They've got some 1112 as well now.

[Ram Alawalia]

Yeah.

[Steve Ehrlich]

Did they sell more common shares to do that?

[Ram Alawalia]

Well, that, that, that's not great. We, we should, you know, bring on someone that's looked at the entire MSTR debt stack and take a look.

[Vinny Lingam]

Now the argument is it's in five years from now or three years from now. So it doesn't matter right now I'm like, no, I don't think so. We go through a financial crash or crisis.

[Ram Alawalia]

Your general idea is correct. Like there's this concept called the Minsky hypothesis developed by Minsky. It's an extraordinary framework. I see heads nodding, Austin and Vinnie there. But I'll lay it out briefly. So the concept is that at the beginning of a market run, you underwrite assets to free cash flow. The unlevered free cash flow is enough to motivate a purchase. Maybe that's 8%, 12%, 14%. Then as the market gets going that assets priced higher, yield is lower to get to your target return. Use a, use some leverage. Okay, so now you say, oh, I can get to my 8% bogey, 12 or 14%, but I've added leverage to the system and obviously we've seen a levering of assets including MicroStrategy. And then what happens in phase three? It's comparable based analysis. That means you say, oh, you should buy it because the public comp is 60 times earnings, therefore it's a bargain because this is at 42 earnings. So that's actually a form of greater fool theory. You're betting that there's some marginal buyer who's a sucker that's going to buy. And so Vinnie's point is that some of these assets are transitioning from phase two to phase three because they're kicking out the can to the future and there's going to be some buyer in the future. The problem is that it's all reflexive. There is a buyer in the future if it keeps going up. But if it doesn't keep going up, then there's no buyer in the future. You can't presume that.

[Austin Campbell]

Well, I was going to say you've kind of hit on the problem with DATs trading at an M nav premium, right? Like this is the sort of tale of the Minsky theory is like, if you list without being overly like, mean here, if you listen to most people like trying to explain why their dad should trade at an M nav premium. It's a version of the old joke in mathematics of part one, a miracle happens, part two, right? It's like, guys, that's, you know, it's like, explain to me how using leverage causes your underlying asset to become more valuable over time, right? Like you could buy more of it. I get that. That's how leverage works. Cool, totally good. But like, say more and they just can't. So to me, part of why I've been skeptical of most of the dats. And again, there are subset, like there are a handful of DATs with things like operating cash flow. Okay, maybe you're going to work. But for anybody who's in the asset part that's trading at a premium, you're in the final phase of Minsky already. And we all know how.

[Ram Alawalia]

I agree. It reminds me of the old joke about the economists on an island with a can of soup. And someone asked the economist, how are you going to get off the island? Well, assume. Assume a can opener. That's what you're saying.

[Vinny Lingam]

Assume 10x.

[Ram Alawalia]

If we get the 10x, we're going to 20x and aren't we going to 10x? Well, look at MSTR here.

[Steve Ehrlich]

I like it. I just want to ask because I know we're going to get some questions. The new listing standards from the SEC to sort of standardize, cut down the, the timeline from I think down to as little as 75 days to. To list new spot ETFs. How does that impact the calculus for all of this? Especially. Especially for some of the longer tail assets that. That maybe don't have DATs. And I know in some cases DATs were formed strictly because of that regulatory arbitrage that I think, Austin, you were talking about before. So Austin, maybe just come to you. What are your thoughts?

[Austin Campbell]

Well, my thoughts are that I'm on mute. You're causing me pain.

[Steve Ehrlich]

Should I go to Rom or Vinny?

[Austin Campbell]

Yeah, go to rom. I want to think about how I'm going to.

[Steve Ehrlich]

I stomped Austin. That doesn't happen very often and I like it.

[Austin Campbell]

I'm trying not to be rude.

[Ram Alawalia]

I. I have no views on this. All right, fast forward.

[Steve Ehrlich]

Okay. Well, I. Austin seems like he has something that he wants to say. So I, I mean ju. Just for me, I mean, I mean I. I think it just for like, just about us a little bit of time, it. It kind of closes off the window to some of these. I mean I've seen some DATs like, like, I think one was for. For fed the artificial intelligence company at like a company called Interactive Strength through a held Marin and tried to convert themselves into one of those. And I don't see any interest in like, like real liquidity for any of those types of tokens. And I don't see much hope of any of these tokens reemerging from the dead, which is what I think a lot of those are doing. So unless you catch one of these shooting stars right on the way up at the perfect time, being an ETF or debt, I don't see a lot of hope.

[Austin Campbell]

But Austin, let me, let me actually go one step like further to explain why I paused there. The DAT thing fundamentally is like a funding complex trade in general, right? Because the whole idea is like I'm going to start with some initial amount of money either in a shell company through a spac, something like that. I'm going to layer on additional money usually in the form of a pipe or something like that. And a lot of that is sometimes in kind contributions from people who are doing it for tax reasons and then to be able to borrow against stuff for these. So is there an ability to get certain things rolling purely on a tax arm basis that will inevit decay back down to zero? Like yeah, that can totally keep happening. Like, I think you kind of endlessly throw like ice cubes into the boiling water on increasingly dumb and weird stuff in that regard. The separate question is, do you have any staying power with any of these, I will jokingly give the answer that I was contemplating how to wrap my head around, which is actually the thing we should be launching is a DAT that unwinds other DATs.

[Vinny Lingam]

Well, no, I actually think, I think, I think what actually winds up happening is the dats with the highest MNOV multiple will be able to gobble up the smaller ones, right? So it's basically Pacman for dats. And so, but, but, but that only happens with the DATs that are highly, very capital efficient. You know, it's. For example, let's take Solana, right? If you're running a Solana debt and you can manage the amount of capital you have cash on hand, amount of soul that you have this, you stake the soul appropriately, you use the solar in the way that within defi that makes sense and you can generate an above market return on that. And then you have a sold debt that has no idea what they're doing and they're just, maybe they're just staking bluntly and they're, they're highly leveraged and they borrowed soul against it or whatever else and the market shanks all of a sudden that one's heavily undervalued and the one that's responsibly managed isn't. And because they're more efficient with their capital, they can gobble up the smaller one. So I don't think, I mean I think if we look at the capital markets within crypto for the highly liquid stuff, the solanas, Ethereum, Bitcoin, etc. As long as the capital is managed correctly, I think you do get this arbitrage opportunity. However, however, I will say that the stuff is still priced in dollars, right? Everything trades to the dollar and so any downdraft in the prices will create pressure on these assets.

[Austin Campbell]

I feel like that's still the Minsky problem though, right? Like assume a DAP that trades at an M Nav premium and I'm just like, again, I remain skeptical that in the long run any of the dads traded at M Nav premium, you should only be trading at a premium to your assets if you have cash flow generation above and beyond, right? What would be expected? And I will also remind everybody, in fact I'm working on a paper about this, that with the ETF listing standards we're going to have staking inside of the ETFs now. So this whole problem of all my ETF is a melting ice cube in the DAT is not. Is also about to go away. And in fact I think you're going to start seeing things like liquid staking tokens inside ETFs to get the best of both worlds. And it suddenly becomes very hard for me to figure out how if a dat's not going to be buying real cash flowing businesses, what the hell it's doing existing.

[Ram Alawalia]

It's a great question. Well, so I would, I would say this, I would disagree here. I would say I think you can have DATs that are higher beta to the underlying spot and if you're in a bull market then they'll have an MNAV ratio greater than one. If you're in a bear market would be less than 1. Because to Vinnie's point, they've got some debt outstanding. But I don't think there's anything saying that they can't have a premium nav yet if you've got cheap debt.

[Vinny Lingam]

I actually, I mean, I agree with Austin. Yeah. I think that some of these debts will have to buy operating companies like, like, you know, if you're doing a Solana debt, you want to maybe want to buy a, you know, a validator or set one up or you know, that sort of thing. So there's, there's businesses that these dads can all own to help juice the returns. It just depends on how vibrant and how stable the ecosystem is for that, for that particular crypto. So that's why I'm pretty bearish on the long, on the long tail of cryptos out there because most of them are very illiquid, very small. Market cap don't have established sort of economies that have been function. They're functioning there. But it's very clear Bitcoin, ethereum, Solana has it.

[Ram Alawalia]

Yeah. Stick to quality. I agree with that. Yeah.

[Steve Ehrlich]

So we have about a little less than five minutes. Ram, as you know, and Austin Vinny, new to you, I'd like to end by just asking everyone to share just one kind of contrarian thought or just something from the discussion that was left on the cutting board. So, so final thoughts. Rob, why don't we go to you first?

[Ram Alawalia]

Yeah. So like the total return on the S and P crushes gold. That's one. So I fact check that with grock. If you do equal weight, it's different. But why are you doing equal weight? You got to do market cap weight. That's one number.

[Steve Ehrlich]

All right.

[Vinny Lingam]

Equal weight is, you know, equal weight.

[Ram Alawalia]

Is not a market basket. Right. But you know, you're adding to winners, trimming losers. And market weight 2 is. By the way, my last call on the show, I Think it was last week and I also reiterated six weeks ago is better mortgage. That's up 57 today, up 300 over the last few months. But that's been phenomenal. Not financial advice, entertainment only. I think Norwegian Cruise Lines is quite interesting here. It's got strong EPS growth, the return on equity is 90% plus they've got debt. But the bulk of that is customer advances. Those are customers saying here's my money. That's called a negative cash conversion cycle by like here's my money so I can pay, can I use your cruise in the future? That's what you want. So I like, I like that concept. Betting on boomers, betting on travel, travel and leisure, betting on consumer discretionary. Boomers want to stretch more and more retiring past peak employment and it comps favorably to their peer group in terms of valuation like Royal Caribbean and Carnival. Carnival Cruise Line. So it's my Norwegian Cruise Lines.

[Vinny Lingam]

Nice.

[Austin Campbell]

I'll, I'll hop in here. Because mine actually piles on in a different direction from what Rama is saying, which is I would tell you if we are going to have a breakdown in the economy, I don't think it's going to be driven in the traditional way that people in the United States are used to. And what I mean by that is the US experience. If you look at financial data in this country over the past, I don't know, 50 years more, what we've had is a growing young population relative to the elderly population or at least stable with a growing working age population as more and more people piled into the workforce and we are now on the reversal of the trend of that. So if we're going to start seeing sort of unwinds in these sorts of things, it's going to look more like the experience in Asia of the past few decades. Not as extreme, but go look at somewhere like Japan because as your economy essentially becomes over older and older and older over time, you start to have a total reallocation of where efforts go. And one, you would expect things like cruise lines, nursing homes, like funeral homes to outperform because essentially you're going to be delivering more services to a greater population share. But two, you start to have in a place like the US intergenerational warfare. And to me, if we're going to have a breakdown, my point to people is it's not going to look the way you think. So also please, please, please stop overfitting with past models from the United States.

[Ram Alawalia]

Intergenerational warfare, I mean that's more metaphorical than, than Literal people are still taking care of grandma and grandpa in the nursing home. And so did you guys see the TikTok video? The guy who's like waiting for their grandparents to pass away. That's not warfare. It is passive aggressive holidays, but it's not warfare. Anyway, I like your thesis. The overall demographic thesis, I think is good one.

[Steve Ehrlich]

Vinnie, how about you?

[Vinny Lingam]

Final? Yeah, I'll just. I'll just share the. You know, Luke Roman published this one. The S and P total total return over the past, you know, 25 years. And gold is clearly 839% versus 547%.

[Steve Ehrlich]

So there it is.

[Vinny Lingam]

Yeah.

[Steve Ehrlich]

Schedule a separate debate for you and Rom to go in and.

[Vinny Lingam]

No, it's fine. I mean, look, so someone made a comment on. On X to me last week or this. Yeah, last week. And I actually thought, you know, you're right. And he was like, vinny, you're rich enough that you want to protect your wealth, not you don't care about making it as much. And that. That's probably true. You know, I spent a long time, you know, creating wealth for myself. And now I look at purchasing power, I look at protecting assets, I look at protecting wealth, and I realize that I don't need to take the risks that other people are taking to create the wealth of, because I already took those risks earlier in my career and my sort of life arc. And so now I look at things like gold, silver, precious metals. And I think to myself, that is probably a better place for me to take, you know, to at least hedge against the uncertainty I think we have in the next couple of years with massive federal budgets overspending by the governments. And I know there's this big productivity miracle hope that's happening with AI, I think it could backfire in ways which we may not have thought about right now. And you look at the unemployment that's about to happen, you look at the, you know, all these driverless cars, like, what are these people going to do? How are people going to make money? How are they going to survive it? And by the way, with all this productivity growth that we're forecasting and seeing, there is zero will for the government to cut spending. So they're spending more and more money. As productive as we get. We can't product, you know, we can't get the productivity cycle up so high that, that we don't have to worry about not increasing spending and they're doing it. So if someone can explain to me how this magically comes together and we don't have a sovereign debt crisis in the next couple of years.

[Ram Alawalia]

We have time to go back and forth. Stephen or not.

[Steve Ehrlich]

No, no, unfortunately.

[Vinny Lingam]

My thought is that as much as we can over index and productivity, I think for some people, myself being one of those, I think protecting, protecting the sort of purchasing power of our wealth.

[Ram Alawalia]

Is the most important brief. Federal deficits correspond to corporate earnings, federal.

[Vinny Lingam]

Cost cutting, federal correspond to the stock market as well. So if the stock market collapses, there's less taxes to pay because people aren't recognizing their gains. So when one stock market collapse or away from a much bigger why are.

[Ram Alawalia]

We going to get a collapse? Why are we in Federal deficits are bullish. I mean, I don't like them. I'd rather have a more moderate, constrained, restrained federal government spending that's sustainable. I'd prefer that. But if you're going to goose it, you know, markets keep going up until the second derivative on spending turns.

[Austin Campbell]

I'll, I'll just hop in to say this is a long time debate between economists and we're not going to settle it in the next 30 seconds. So we'll spare Steve and I'll just say none of this matters when Elon's automated robots kill us all anyway.

[Steve Ehrlich]

Thank you for that often. And Vinnie, thanks for joining Rahm as always. Vinny will have to have you back.

[Vinny Lingam]

That was great.

[Steve Ehrlich]

Thank everybody for watching and listening. And we'll be back next week with another episode of Bits and Bests.

[Ram Alawalia]

See you guys.