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- [00:00]
Thread Guy
In a way, you get to cut the. For the social part because you cut the noise, you get exactly what you want. I'm just here to trade. I'm not here to discuss decentralization. I'm not here to discuss crypto ideals. I just want raw P and L. This is where I'm going. And so I think that social. I think the social graph is very sticky. I really do.
- [00:17]
Robert
I think you just indirectly called us hunks, not a dividend.
- [00:21]
Haseeb
It's a tale of two Kwan.
- [00:22]
Rune
Now your losses are on someone else's balance sheet.
- [00:25]
Haseeb
Generally speaking, airdrops are kind of pointless anyways.
- [00:27]
Rune
I named trading firms who were very involved.
- [00:30]
Haseeb
Alec Eth is the ultimate on defi.
- [00:33]
Robert
Protocols are the antidote to this problem.
- [00:36]
Rune
Hello, everybody. Welcome to Chopping Block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insiders perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intro is first. You got to Rune the giga brain and grand poo bah at gauntlet, yo. Next we got Robert, the crypto connoisseur and czar of Superstate.
- [00:51]
Robert
Good afternoon, everybody.
- [00:53]
Rune
Joining us today we've got special guest Thread Guy, titan of the trenches.
- [00:58]
Thread Guy
I was looking forward to that, man. Excited to be here.
- [01:00]
Rune
Okay, I'm glad to have you. And I'm Aseev, the head hype man at Dragonfly. We're early stage investors in crypto. I want to convey that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see chopping blocks at XYZ for more disclosures. So, Thread Guy, you are in a new era. It feels like you're in your purple era. You've got a suit on. Tell us about this new look that you've got going on and like the kind of new era of the Thread Guy media empire.
- [01:26]
Thread Guy
I mean, we're doing market open streams now. I'll tell you what, after 10:10, I looked around and thought to myself, what am I going to do with my life? I'm looking at open interest. There's none of it. I'm looking at volume. There's none of it. I'm looking at pump fund revenue, it's down 90%. And then I look over my shoulder and I see gold and I see silver trading, like memes. I see the AI trade going crazy and I'm just like, man, what if we start trading some of these assets over here? And so since 1010, basically it was like a crypto only portfolio, crypto only stream, and obviously the AI trade and the stock Trade has been nuts and so I'm doing market open now. It's like crypto only to we just trade. And the thing that I've learned. Go ahead.
- [02:15]
Haseeb
You're doing collared shirts now also.
- [02:17]
Thread Guy
Well, like, if you get your market open, we're playing with the big boys. You. I want to feel inclusive to our new stock traders turned crypto curious stream viewers.
- [02:29]
Rune
So that's what you wear every day. Because I've seen a lot of your clips and you're always wearing, you're always kind of suited up.
- [02:38]
Thread Guy
Well, I usually have a jacket on too, but I figured I go casual for like when.
- [02:41]
Rune
Yeah, I appreciate that. Yes. We, I mean, the only person wears college shirt on here is Robert. So you, you are, you are hitting the vibe of our stream. So for, for those of you who don't know, because I, I should preface. We have a lot of regulators and lawyers and people like that who listen to our show. So Thread guy is, he's like, he's like the Gen Z whisperer. He has one of the largest streams. He has a huge following. He's a big trading and markets influencer within crypto. And as he mentioned, obviously his, the, the purview of his stream has expanded where the crypto kids are now trading a lot more than just crypto. You know, you went viral very recently for a clip that I think was just maybe yesterday or the day before. Just two days ago where you said two days ago. Yes. Where you said that crypto OGs wouldn't last today because back in the day they were, you know, everything went up. There were altcoin seasons where alts just went up for no reason. You could make money buying just all sorts of garbage. And you were basically, the way you put it, you were day trading against plumbers. And today it ain't like that. Streets are a lot meaner. You know, talk about this take because I think a lot of people were incensed at your description of how easy it was back in the day. Because of course, there I was around back in the day. There were a lot of people who lost money back in the day too.
- [03:59]
Robert
Yeah. Also, is Khasib an og? Am I an og? Is Tarun an og? Like, what is it?
- [04:04]
Rune
Or are we plumbers?
- [04:05]
Robert
Or are we plumbers?
- [04:07]
Thread Guy
Okay, I'll give you two takes. The first thing I'll say to round out the intro is that I think this is going to be the rite of passage for most crypto traders with things like hyper liquid and equity perps and starting to happen where you realize, wow, I'm just good at this game. Nebius can move 25% in a day. We can trade other things as well. And so I think it's actually a really cool full circle moment that's happening with Crypto right now. And shout out to Hyper liquid on that. And shout out to my stream on that. Okay, second take. So I look, I made this take and I'll tell you what triggered it. And to preface on my experience as well, I showed up in 2020 for top shot. So my first cycle was like the end of defi summer, which I basically missed. And then I was NFT Mania, FTX Collapse, Bear Market, Meme Coin Mania, AI Coinmania, then now, wherever we are right now. And so it's not.
- [05:02]
Rune
And so real quick, before you got into top shots, what were you doing before that?
- [05:05]
Thread Guy
Weird Internet hustles. So I was flipping sports cards, I was botting sneakers, I was flipping supreme. Like I kind of missed the drop shipping era, but the whole reselling like 15 year old kids making money on the Internet, I was like in those groups there was this interaction that you guys might have missed. I don't know how on chain you are with some of these memes, but there was this guy, not a call out, but he just sparked this clip the flow horse, okay? And he's this like OG 2015 Bitcoin Chad type of character. And he made a FOMO account and somebody airdropped him 70% of a meme coin called like the Fro Horse. And he was on Twitter and he was sort of just like, what does this mean? What if I burn it? I'll never sell. And he's just getting in this interaction. The meme is like ripping. It's going crazy. He's up, you know, all this money on fees. He has like $2 million in his wallet. And then finally he's like, I've gone too far. This, I'm never going to talk about it again. Deleted the tweets. And then that was the end of the story. And I was just looking at how trading in crypto used to be and that if you were to join some meme coin trading live stream in 2026 and you were to watch how these low cap meme traders operate. I don't know if you've ever really seen what this looks like, but you have memes scope on one frame of your screen and there's like a hundred tokens a minute and on the other side you have like the Twitter tracker and that's just going every Elon tweet, every Sam Altman tweet every CZ tweet, every Brian Armstrong tweet. That's going crazy. Then you have the wallet trackers, and there's like a million pings every second. And it's turned into this, like, insanely sophisticated process to trade on Chain. It looks like Fortnite. It looks like if you see a pro Fortnite player and they're building and they're quick scoping and they're. They're far. It's like this crazy sort of. It's a video game. And the take that I made, it's like a classic NBA take. But I said 2017, there was like, I don't know, 100 things to buy max, 50 things to buy and eat. ICO was up 50,000%. Bitcoin went up only. All these assets went up only. And I was basically. I said it was much easier to trade in 2017. Now, people were fairly outraged by that. And I want to get your guys's takes on this, because you were there and I wasn't. But the thing that I've come around to is I think that every era is just going to say the past era was easier with, like, hindsight experience and new tooling. I look at 2024, knowing what I know now, and I was like, yeah, that was the easiest meme coin cycle ever. 2024. You looked at what NFTs were in 2021, and it's like, all right, bored apes were worth $500,000 a pop after an $80 mint in, like, six months. Those were plumbers. And I think there will be this sort of incremental hindsight look back, but that was the take. That's how I got there. And I think the game, especially at the lowest level on Chain, has taken on a life of its own. I'm sure we're going to talk about the social trading stuff where it is uber competitive, but you really have an opportunity to, like, make a name for yourself and blow up as a trader.
- [08:17]
Rune
So, Robert, what do you. What do you say the. Back in the day, was it. Was it easier? Was it the same? How's the game changed?
- [08:25]
Robert
I think to me, back in the day, I watched people starting in 2011, 2012, 2013 in crypto, I watched all the people lose everything on Mount Gox. I watched people lose everything on Bitmex when it was early. There's always been a wild mania to crypto. I don't think it's really changed. I just think the tools have Changed. People had to jump through crazy hoops early on to get, you know, stuff that seemed to only go up. But when I entered Crypto in like 2017 full time, we'd already been through a cycle where the entire coin market cap top 100 list was basically dead. Like, I remember like looking at like the feather coins and the peer coins and the name coins and the all of these things. By the time I get there in 2017, we'd already been through this. Like, some people make a ton of money. A lot of people get wrecked on all sorts of nonsense. Like thick. I've never seen it as like OG versus Plumber. I've always seen it as it's a fast moving, highly dynamic ecosystem of new assets, growing assets, dying assets, and everything in between. Yeah, certain assets you could have just done nothing with and enjoyed the ride and been like, oh, bitcoin goes up from like $10 to $60,000. How hard is that? But for the most part, people have always had to navigate new tools, new platforms, new coins, new chains, new wallets, all types of surface areas of risk. Back in the day, people were getting all their money stolen from paper wallets that had exploits. It's been a NonStop challenge from 2011 to present. I've never seen it as like, oh, the game has gotten easier, the game has gotten harder. It's just evolved.
- [10:09]
Haseeb
I think that's true. I think Robert's saying it's true, but I think I have a more simple answer, which is there were no stablecoins before. So like, yeah, on paper you're sitting on this thing that had like a huge gain, but there was literally zero liquidity. Every centralized exchange existed to rug you where they're like, our daily limit is withdraw $10,000. And then when you hit withdraw 9999, our daily limit is $1,000. Please try again. It was like there were true. Like, I think you had more counterparty risk from scammer getting scammed by the venue than anywhere near what you do now. And you also have way less USD risk in the sense that your stablecoin works. You don't get rugged on your stablecoin,
- [10:51]
Rune
which is obviously was the stable coin back then.
- [10:55]
Thread Guy
No, stablecoin is insane.
- [10:57]
Haseeb
Right? You're getting rugged on that. You had to do quanto perps. Like you didn't put up USDC to do the perp. You put up bitcoin and then you're trusting the oracle. And most of these exchanges, oracle in the beginning was themselves. There was lots of, I mean you were probably like very young when the Arthur Hayes is liquidating me memes existed. But like there was a, there was a time where everyone would just like be like Bitmex exists just to liquidate its users and like they're front running all their users purposely. Like the counterparty risk was the thing people were really upset about. And I think the weird thing is that 20 on the centralized exchange side, I guess like the FTX stuff really kind of definitely clear that up a little bit. But the stablecoin liquidity I think is the main thing, right? You don't have to worry about exiting and you have off ramps. You didn't need your off ramp to be Chinese Tether Trader 25 that only let you message them on Skype between 0 and 100 GMT. Just saying those are kind of, I think there was a lot more risk in the IRL world risk versus on chain risk. Whereas now you're taking way more like counter trading risk versus counterparty risk. That's like how it.
- [12:10]
Thread Guy
By the way, the first time I ever experienced something like this was NBA top shot. And it's like I'm up a hundred thousand dollars.
- [12:16]
Haseeb
Oh yeah. First time in my life flow stopped letting people withdraw.
- [12:19]
Thread Guy
The withdrawal limit is like a thousand dollars a day.
- [12:22]
Haseeb
I'm like guys, yeah, yeah, yeah. It used to all be like that because there were no stablecoins and the exchanges themselves didn't really have on ramps. They had like a couple random bank accounts like the shit that FTX turned out FTX had at the end where it was like, oh, we just have this one master account. Some of these exchanges were that for much longer than you expect if you look at their history. And like survival boils down to like stablecoins grew. If they didn't grow as the trading pair I think it would have been, it would have been very tough. Like so, so you're taking all this FX risk, whereas now I feel like you're just taking like social media risk. Which is very valid thing, right? It's like if you don't understand the game then. But I think it's just different. It's just different.
- [13:05]
Rune
I think that's a, that's very well stated because you remember the, you know, the infamous FTX Korean one trade, right? And like people always wonder like okay, why, why is this the quote unquote kimchi trade? Why can that make money? And the answer is because it's impossible to close the ARP because like actually that money is sitting there and nobody can pick it up because Nobody has the bank accounts, nobody's willing to take the risk of, like, one leg gets closed and your money's locked up in Korea for the next, like, year and a half as you sue them to try to get it back. That's why it looks so easy, is that you can't see all of the, like, you know, the traps, the booby traps that are around every single corner that, like, killed a bunch of people that you never hear about. And so now is. Has the game gotten harder in the sense of, like, have markets gotten more efficient? Yes, absolutely. There's way smarter people trading today. There's way more bots, there's LLMs now, you know, like, so there's an obvious sense in which, like, you know, I think about. I. I've never been much of a trader, but I think about this for poker. I used to play poker professionally. Poker is way harder now than it was at the time that I was playing because I was playing against plumbers. You know, I was playing against, like, doctors and lawyers. Exactly. I want to play some cards on the Internet. I'm pretty sure.
- [14:17]
Haseeb
I'm pretty sure you were mainly playing against rich Chinese people who love playing poker at high.
- [14:23]
Rune
Eventually, eventually, eventually you. You work your way up to the rich Chinese people. But, yeah, today it's just not. It's just not like that. And like, the markets have. Markets always become more efficient.
- [14:34]
Haseeb
Today the only plumber is Drake. You just have to hope that you get matched with Drake.
- [14:39]
Rune
I guess so, yeah.
- [14:40]
Haseeb
Because I feel like Drake. Drake's live streams. That guy loses money playing poker and, like, just loves losing money. I mean, he's obviously being paid by stake to do it. So I'm sure he's like, really positive
- [14:49]
Rune
if you include the someone else's money,
- [14:51]
Haseeb
but he just loses, like, horribly. He's the plumber.
- [14:54]
Thread Guy
In reference to poker getting solved, is that something that can ever reverse. Reverse itself? Like, does the pendulum ever shift on that or do you just need a new game?
- [15:03]
Haseeb
New game.
- [15:03]
Rune
You need a new game.
- [15:04]
Thread Guy
Like hold'. Em. Just Hold' em is just online. Hold' Em is just fried for the next online.
- [15:08]
Rune
Hold' Em is fried. I think the reality is that it moves to private games, and so the private games can be online where it's like, okay, trusted people who, you know, we coordinate through some kind of thing and we go into a private poker room. But the way it used to be of, like, there's just this global commons that we all play together like now, you know, I quit poker before Libertas, which was the first neural net based bot that beat the best humans in Heads Up Poker. At the time that I quit poker, people used to say that AI would never be as good as humans. Like people thought, oh, it's a game of imperfect information. Chess and Go and all these things are so much easier. Poker's just like fundamentally got this human something or other, you know, it's got this je ne sais quoi. And the answer is like, nope, totally wrong. LMS can do that too. Or not lms, but, you know, neural nets.
- [15:52]
Haseeb
The thing, the thing though is the venues still make money, which is interesting.
- [15:56]
Rune
Oh, for sure, for sure. Yeah, yeah.
- [15:58]
Haseeb
If anything, the venues make more money than they did before.
- [16:02]
Rune
Is that true?
- [16:04]
Haseeb
I don't know. The inflation adjustment.
- [16:05]
Robert
Surprising.
- [16:06]
Rune
That would be surpr. I. That doesn't sound right to me. That's. This is why I'm long.
- [16:08]
Thread Guy
Pump Fun, by the way.
- [16:11]
Rune
Yeah, well, okay, well, let's, let's, let's bring it back to entre trading. That's a good, that's a good segue. So one of the big stories lately has been this resurgence in meme coin trading, driven in large, large part by fomo. So fomo, for those who don't know, it's a social trading app, lives, you know, lives on the App Store, primarily mobile users, and it allows you to follow other traders. It's a super social experience. But most of what people are trading on FOMO is Meme Coins, largely on Solana and on Robinhood, where a lot of the meme coin activity is congregating. Now, one of their biggest competitors is Pump Fun. Pump Fund, of course, the OG you can trade. Pump Fun launched Meme Coins on fomo, but Pump has their own mobile app and they're now starting to fight back to try to get some of that mobile market share back from fomo. So this has led to a little bit of a ground war between FOMO and Pump Fun. In that Pump Fund is now starting to sign traders and influencers in exclusive deals. And I think what you can see is that there's some negative sentiment against the way that Pump is doing this. Because a lot of the people that Pump isn't treating and saying, hey, we'd love to sign you to trade exclusively on our platform. And you know, talk about social trading on Pump. A lot of these people are like posting that they're getting, you know, Pump is offering me, you know, 20k or whatever to go and trade exclusively on their platform. This is bullshit. This sucks, you know, can't believe they're doing this. Maybe a little bit of engagement farming, but also a little bit of a, you know, we're now starting to see them like sponsorships or like signing teams or exclusive deals that are. That are getting formed in these trench wars. And it seems to be a resurgence at a time when otherwise markets are pretty weak. It feels like there's not. We're definitely not in the 2025 or 2024 type meme coin energy. And yet also perp volume trenches are
- [17:57]
Haseeb
coming back to life hype. Volume has been going down too, right at around the same time. This flipped
- [18:04]
Rune
retail activity is pretty low, but we see that the trenches seem to be pulling ahead for some reason that seems otherwise inexplicable. So, Thread guy, tell us how you see the current conflict and the war going on between FOMO and Pumped Out. Fun.
- [18:17]
Thread Guy
I mean, I basically think every exchange is going to go really hard at this social trading platform app, if you will like it. You know, it's really not that different from what base tried to do with Jesse Paul like that. I think when it's all said done, we're going to look back and say, damn, they were so close. Wrong time, maybe wrong people.
- [18:34]
Haseeb
They were two millennial.
- [18:36]
Thread Guy
They were. So we talked about this month. Yeah, it's going to look very similar to what they tried to do, but FOMO has been very dominant. Pump's making a big run at it. I think Phantom has ton of money in the platform. I think everyone's going to go at this really hard.
- [18:50]
Haseeb
And I mean even Uniswap, right? I was actually surprised. They used to be like, we'll never do this.
- [18:57]
Thread Guy
Uniswap's mobile app, Uniswap, they're endorsing meme coins.
- [19:00]
Haseeb
They launched a launch pad and binance
- [19:03]
Thread Guy
teasing, I think a social trading app. And I think if you're not trading on chain daily, you don't realize pump funds making $2 million a day right now. Like today, they made $2 million yesterday. Right. And so I think that there is just this meta shift happening where I've been saying this take for a long time. And it was kind of a joke in 2023. And it's really played out that like traders are the new celebrities, right? Like, cycle's not over till Anom is married to a Kardashian. And like, you know, traders are the biggest things in the world, right?
- [19:35]
Haseeb
Wait, wait, sorry.
- [19:38]
Thread Guy
What we're starting to see, I think is that like, at least in my time in crypto, the influencers and the People that dominated the discourse on Twitter were the founders and they were like the technical thinkers, right? Like, if you, if you had a technical take on block space debate or, you know, L2 scaling or something like this, you dominated the discussion. I think post circa 2024, at least in my bubble, it's really shifted towards the traders dominate a lot of the discussion. You look at the influence of someone like Anom, I'll mention him again. And so I think that these social apps proliferate that on 100x scale, right? Because you go on a FOMO and you're a complete nobody. You have no followers on Twitter. It's really hard to break into the zeitgeist. In 2026, you go on FOMO and you turn $1,000 into $500,000. And in a day, in a week, in a month, however long that trade takes, you'll have 50,000 followers on FOMO, right? And you can see these 50,000 wallets. How much money do they have? What do they hold? What do they buy? And so you could, I mean, literally put together some form of calculation of how much financial capital do you have behind you? And so I had this. There's this example, there was this famous trade in maybe November, December of 2025, there's this guy, Remus, and Remus bought this coin called White Whale. And this is some real.
- [21:03]
Haseeb
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [21:04]
Thread Guy
Remember the white whale?
- [21:05]
Robert
Yeah, yeah.
- [21:05]
Thread Guy
And White Whale goes to. Goes to 100 mil or something like this. Remus buys $500 worth of this coin at like 20, 30k, like real trenches shit, $500 worth, this coin at top unrealized P and l, it's worth $1.2 million in public for the world to see. No fake P and L, no fake screenshot. And in an instant, remus has like 60,000 followers on one of these social trading apps, right? And so I think that this concept is only going to get bigger and I think we're going to enter the death of like soft power amongst the influencers, right? Because as we go further down this line of these cycles, I think people really want to know who's making money. And if you could prove that you're verifiably making money, you dominate more of the discourse, the discussion, and you therefore take over more influence. And so the last thing I'll say on this rant is this progression quietly happened in 2024. Late 23, early 24, where everyone started trading on telegram bots. It was like Unibot, it was early Bonkbot, it was Like Banana Gun, all these early telegram trading bots, it unlocked a lot of liquidity into memes. And what happened is a lot of that trading discussion moved off of Twitter and it moved into these telegram groups, these FNFs, right? You, you and your basically your homies. Trading chat, some of them took it very seriously, some of them more casual. And there was all these traders that would spawn with million dollar PNLs. And these guys have like a couple thousand followers on Twitter. Who is this? It's like, well, he, he's a trader. He's only on Telegram. Of course, he's only on Telegram. And so I think that was like a test pump of crypto influence and trading influence happening off Twitter. And I think potentially as we go further down this evolution, this cycle, it's going to be the real pump of like the traders that move money and move markets are just not the OG crypto influencer crowd. That's funny. Or that shit post. It's like, who makes real money? Who has the biggest PNLs? And you could verify it on chain. And so I think there's by the way, really by the way progression.
- [23:09]
Haseeb
You know, you were talking about the OGs. This used to be a big thing of the OGs of like the leaderboard on Bitmex and then it was the leaderboard on ftx. It's weird actually. Binance was not like a leaderboard driven growth story. But everyone was constantly posting their screenshot of I'm number three on BitMEX. I'm number three on Binance. You remember this, right Haseeb? There was this era of three arrows. Entire growth story was purely based on the fact that they were number one on FTX and BitMEX for two or three years.
- [23:40]
Thread Guy
That's awesome.
- [23:41]
Rune
Right?
- [23:41]
Haseeb
So it's actually very similar. It's just kind of a different form factor.
- [23:46]
Robert
Right. There have been leaderboards that led to major crypto celebrity in ways that were much more provable than influencers who are like, I just talk a good Twitter game.
- [23:56]
Rune
I mean the other part of it of course is that if you are running any kind of complicated strategy, which people used to not really run very complicated strategies. If you're running complicated strategies, then your P and L on any one venue is just not reflective of your overall book. Right? Because you might be short on one exchange, long on the other one. And like, okay, like what, what, what exactly? Like how much money did you make? You really can' anymore. Just because like the, the funds that are operating today are, are doing complex, you know, Long, short books and they're doing carry trades and so on. Whereas if you're trading meme coins, you can just look at the P and L. You know, like, if there's no complicated strategies in meme coins, it's like you buy the right thing, you make the 100x or you don't. So there's a. There's a simplicity that's much more like what it was like in early crypto.
- [24:37]
Thread Guy
I think other markets, tradfi is sort of converging on this as well. I look around it, like, maybe this is too niche, but like the bubble boys of the world, rgc, some of these guys that have nailed this AI trade. And I think the classic example was like Michael Burry, who every day stock market goes up and we're tweeting Michael buried stock market goes down. And it's like Michael Burry is a legend. And you look at the Michael Burry story and I think it's a tale of the glory for one of these monster trades is that 20 years later and arguably not a single correct call since, and he has like 350,000 subscribers on the substack, right? Michael Burry is a finance legend forever. You look at a flood and the type of outcome he had on Hyper Liquid and he could never make a correct call for the rest of his time. And he will have unbelievable amounts of financial capital that follow behind him. And so I think for a lot of these, these guys that are, you know, this younger generation that's coming up, what's the easiest, what is the easiest way for me to make $100,000 trading? It's maybe zero day options, the way these AI stocks are moving right now. Or it's trading on chain, right? And if you show up on chain, on one of these apps and you flip a couple thousand dollars into a hundred, all of a sudden you're like a somebody now. And so I think on chain has solidified itself as a venue for like a nobody to become a somebody and pump Fund's ability to continuously make a million dollars a day post 1010 is like mesmerizing to me. If there was ever a time for us to say, the meme coin experiment has failed, we are done. It was October 11, 2025.
- [26:22]
Haseeb
Right?
- [26:22]
Thread Guy
I mean, that was the day to be like, okay, guys, pack this up, it's done. And so one of the things I've been saying for a while is that I think the right tail of meme coins just having a foundational niche in finance is super underpriced them just existing and just. Maybe it's small, maybe it'll get bigger as liquidity flows through the system. But I think that their long standing is something that not a lot of people have taken seriously enough. And it's starting to manifest itself again. Like FOMO revenue, they're making four or five hundred thousand dollars a day, pump funds making two million dollars a day. These are. I mean, they're up there with the prediction markets, right? These are crazy numbers some of these trading platforms are putting up. You see what Robinhood is doing with Robinhood Social. They're trying to do the same thing, right? Traders can post a thesis what they're in P and L cards. We're definitely moving towards a. This isn't a new phenomena, but everybody posts a P and L card for everything because the upside is so glorious.
- [27:20]
Rune
Well, it's interesting because the idea of social trading, extremely old idea. A kajillion founders are taking a shot at this and the answer was always in the past that like, well, the social trading platform is like the thing you're trading on plus Twitter. It's not the app. You're not living in the app. You trade in the app and you talk about it on Twitter or your telegram, chat or wherever it is. Right? The social thing happens somewhere else. What seems to be unique is that FOMO has kind of nailed this of actually getting people in the app and having the app be this closed loop and this unique follower graph that got big enough, got to scale, that it's really held onto something. I'm curious how you take two questions I have for you, guy. One, what do you think explains the fact that as far as I know, the Meme Coin market cap, like the entire Meme Coin complex has not rebounded that much. Right? The overall growth in Meme Coin value hasn't increased very much, but the amount of trading has actually inflected dramatically over the last few weeks. What do you think explains that? And do you think like, that's a regime change or is that just like Robinhood got everybody riled up? And then second is how do you think about what FOMO's doing versus what Pump Fund is doing in this rivalry?
- [28:29]
Thread Guy
I'll answer the second part. First is, I think that it's ultimately going to come down to who can win the social graph. You know, I think the reason, like, I was a huge Farcaster fan back in the day. I loved Farcaster. I thought it was an awesome idea. I thought Dan Robert was a genius, and I loved what they were trying to do. And ultimately the reason for Lost. There's a plethora of reasons, but I think if you could distill it down to one reason, it's that when something crazy happens in crypto, Kobe's first post is on Twitter, not Farcaster. So how could you win? Everyone goes there first. Farcaster is an afterthought. And you only have Vitalik. It's sort of. You need 51%, right? We've seen a mixer bought Ninja when he was at the peak of his Fortnite career and you know, he brought over a massive audience, but 51% was still on Twitch and they just tipped the boat over. I think this was like the forecaster problem. And so I think ultimately it's going to come down to there's going to be. There's a finite number of really good traders. You want to know what they're trading, exactly when they're trading it, and you want to follow it. That will be your first click. And so I think this is going to be a forever battle of signing traders who can get who it's going to be NBA free agency, probably in perpetuity now that this is a thing. I mean, you saw Kalshipoli market. Probably the best example is the online casinos. What's the difference between stake and rain, bet and Rubat and Rollbit? Well, one of them has Drake, one of them has Aiden Ross, and whoever has a bigger audience kind of tips it. The tech is the same, the games are the same, the EV is the exact same. And so I think there's going to be this like forever battle for who can win the social graph game, which I think is going to be. I think it's going to be really sticky.
- [30:07]
Rune
And you think the edge is that you see the trade in real time on fomo. People are talking about it afterwards on Twitter. So that's like the Farcaster graph. You hear it second on Twitter, first on fomo.
- [30:17]
Thread Guy
I think very much like this, like whichever mobile trading app wins that, that's what they're winning. Twitter is late, super late to the on chain stuff now. The philosophical discussions and you know what, the bigger sort of broader meta topics discussions, they still happen on Twitter, of course, But I think 2024 was the first time where it was like, if there is a new coin and I'm thinking to myself, what is, what is goat? My first app is Telegram. 100% first app is Telegram. You go in there first, checking the chats, what are they saying? Then you go over to Twitter and you Know, get into the unk sort of discussion. And so I think it definitely is going to rival Twitter because in a way you get to cut the. For the social part because you cut the noise. You get exactly what you want. I'm just here to trade. I'm not here to discuss decentralization. I'm not here to discuss crypto ideals. I just raw P and L. This is where I'm going. And so I think that social. I think the social graph is very sticky. I really do.
- [31:13]
Robert
I think you just indirectly called us unks.
- [31:16]
Thread Guy
I was going to say I was
- [31:17]
Rune
going to go direct, but I didn't do it. Yeah, it's all good. It's all good.
- [31:22]
Haseeb
Robert did it for I'm an unk.
- [31:24]
Robert
Yeah.
- [31:24]
Rune
Yeah.
- [31:25]
Robert
It's all good.
- [31:25]
Haseeb
Yeah.
- [31:26]
Rune
Okay. So talk to me about the meme coin market cap. Right? Like why do you think trading volume is inflecting while market caps are. Are actually pretty stagnant?
- [31:35]
Thread Guy
I would kind of like to hear your take on this. The answer is I don't know exactly. I think that we maybe sort of found a how bad can it get in terms of volume floor and sat there for a couple months. I think what got me back on. I'll tell you what got me back on chain was in the same week, I think the first week of July Robinhood launches and there's the Cash Cat thing goes to, I don't know, 200 mil in a couple days. And Vlad endorsement. I'm like, okay, this is interesting, right? There's some friction here. Vlad's staking some reputation. This isn't super easily vampable. This is interesting enough to click. And then the second one was ansem right after goes to 400 mil. Couple days later another one where it's like, okay, say what you want about creator tokens and how this has played out. Zora friend tech, things like this.
- [32:23]
Rune
But you've been on record as being very anti creator coins.
- [32:28]
Thread Guy
I have. But the ansem one is a unique one. I could get into this. I call it like, I guess a quick take on why the answer one is unique.
- [32:34]
Haseeb
You actually should because I have no clue what the difference personally.
- [32:37]
Thread Guy
Here's what I'll say about why I think Cash Cat is interesting. Why answer is interesting is like we live in an era post pump fun where what it takes to deploy is 000 time. Like, I mean you defi legends here no better than me. But even in 2021 to launch a meme coin, it's like you got to get the smart contract out, you got to see liquidity. It was like it wasn't a thing where you could just snap your fingers.
- [33:01]
Haseeb
It's true, it's true. I remember the yam deployment contract. Spent 10. There you go.
- [33:06]
Thread Guy
And so what this creates is this environment of vamp culture, right? Vamping, liquidity. And so if you know, Elon makes a tweet about a dog, in one second, there's like 30 coins, right? One of them wins. And it's at 1 mil, it's at 2 mil, it's at 5 miles. If an Elon dog coin goes to 5 mil and somebody sees this and they're like, you know what? I'm going to relaunch this exact coin, but I have a kol who will tweet about it. I have a capital D instead of a lowercase d, and my picture is better. And we can get this thing to 500k, 1/10 of the market cap. I'm going to make like $15,000 and it costs me nothing. If it goes to zero, it goes to zero. I don't care. I'm going to bundle it. I can make $15,000 in a snap. And so it's created this culture where it costs nothing to deploy. So everybody deploys. And then the rhetoric on Twitter is, we need to start holding again. The hold times on these coins are too low. That's why the trenches on chain is dead. And it's like blaming the player, not the game. It's wrong. And so where I think this transitions is like, okay, in a world where there's zero friction to deploy, maybe the tokens that have friction do really well that you can't just vamp. Like, for example, let's take hyper liquid. Obviously it's not a meme coin, but you could copy paste. Why didn't. Why isn't. Why isn't Phoenix on Solana as big as hyper Liquid? Well, all the biggest traders are on hyper liquid. They have the volume, they have the open interest, they have liquidity, they have. They have the network effect. Hyperliquid is sticky. What they have underlying is sticky. Hyperliquid, therefore, can't just be vamped by like somebody deploying a copy paste fork of the code. I look at the ansem coin, right? It's a creator token. Da, da, da. But if ansem coin goes to $50 million market cap, you can't just deploy a second ansem and vamp it. It's like, no, no, no. He staked his reputation, his trust, he's earned within the Community over like I don't know, 10 years to build this token, put his likeness behind it. You can't vamp it with other Ansem Token and you also can't really vamp it with Thread Guy Token because ANSEM is bigger than. And so there's some friction to deploy this coin. You could even look at, I look at FWA, I think it's kind of an interesting asset on ETH. It's one of these gotcha platforms. You could deposit NFTs, you could back them with ETH. It's like a two way gotcha sort of gambling NFT mechanism. It's very interesting. You could copy paste the code. I don't really think it's that complicated. But you can't copy paste the like 50,000 NFTs and I don't know, $10 million of value within this ecosystem. And so where I think on Chain is going to head is people just got so sick of playing the vamp, no friction to deploy that I don't know if it's the timing, if it's AI getting really good, if it's Robinhood. But there just started to be a little flurry of experimentation again with little DeFi experiments like FWA or someone like Ansem or Vlad back in cash. Cat and I have some level of optimism that this will proliferate with traders realizing how much they can make and how popular they can get with developers realizing, okay, If I build FWA, Adam, they've made like $10 million, right? I have an insane economic outcome. The traders get really popular and Defi is relatively hardened at this point. And Fable is really fucking good. And so I don't know, I'm optimistic that there can be some sort of compounding effect here where we see a little mini on chain renaissance that doesn't look like what 2024 Pump Fund Casino look like because like we talked about with Plumbers, the new game just can't be the old game again. And so I would be curious what you think why people are still trading this stuff. And if I sound like a lunatic,
- [36:58]
Rune
well, I'll give my take. I don't know. I don't know if I have a more pessimistic take than Tarun's going to have. I think the answer, I mean, so clearly the proximate cause is Robinhood. This happened after Robinhood came to town and all of a sudden, what do you know, FOMO's pumping and pump fund is pumping and suddenly the trenches are alive again. Even though it doesn't really seem like there's new money. And that's, I think the clearest signal of what's going on is that I think this is actually us, or I should say the trenches, trying to front run. The signal of new demand that they think is coming in is like, basically, okay, the Robinhood crew is going to come in and they're going to buy our bags, they're going to come in, they're going to buy meme coins, they're going to buy cash cat, they're going to buy all this stuff. And I think actually what's happening is that very little of that is taking place. I think there's actually very little new money that has come in through rubber.
- [37:49]
Thread Guy
Almost zero, probably zero.
- [37:50]
Rune
Yeah. I think it's almost all crypto native money, but I think it's people pulling some of the money they had off market, into the market. So they were chasing the eye tray, they were in metals or oil or whatever and they were like, oh, shit, all these normies are going to come in on Robinhood and they're going to buy a bunch of stuff. Let's get back in and buy whatever the new asset is. And so I think a lot of the money that's chasing now cash cat, a lot of the money that's chasing ansem. It's almost like front running the demand that people think is going to come because, oh, Vlad's a big dude, Robinhood's got big distribution. And I think if that demand doesn't materialize over the next three to six months, I think you're going to see this pancake again. Because at the end of the day, like, you know the meme coin game, a lot of people get paid along the way, right? The guys, the vamps are getting paid along the way. And so for the vamps to get paid along the way and for other people to also be making money, you need new capital to be coming in top of funnel. And if there is no new capital coming in, eventually the merry go round stops and everybody gets a little bit sick of just going in circles.
- [38:53]
Haseeb
Yeah, I only have two. I agree with that. Mainly, I think the AI parts of the AI trade that blew up in Korea, probably a lot of people had capital that they pulled out from that. And the timing of when you saw the meme coin volumes go up and the end of the Cosby blow up was quite.
- [39:14]
Rune
You think it's Koreans depositing on.
- [39:17]
Haseeb
I think it's like people who are in that trade wrote it up, maybe wrote it down a little bit, but got out and Then they're like, am I going to go back into those equities? Am I going to take this thing? Because like, they may have got down, got out at like 20% down. It went down like 50%. So it's like they're like, okay, I'm going to go chase something new. And I think the second thing is I do buy this like AI thing of like there was a while at the end of the last meme coin trade where like one of the reasons, I think all these like AI bot tokens, which were basically meme coins, because they have nothing to do with the strategy that the AI like AI XBT type stuff was that most people were like, there are too many meme coins. I don't know how to invest in them, I don't know how to buy them. I just would rather invest in a single thing that buys the meme coins for me. And I think now agents.
- [40:04]
Rune
Wait, hold on. Do you think people want to do that?
- [40:06]
Haseeb
I mean, I think that was the narrative those things were selling. I'm not saying that the AIXBT era, that was like the. You read the docs. That's what they were doing.
- [40:15]
Rune
Well, no, but it's not. You wouldn't give money to axbt, right? AXBT would make trading calls and you would like, no, no, but there were some of that.
- [40:22]
Haseeb
There were some of them that were going.
- [40:24]
Rune
There were definitely some like, yeah, that we will trade meme coins for you. But I feel like, I think the
- [40:27]
Haseeb
Eliza thing, but when it was AI16Z, that was what they said they were going to do. Right? So my point is there was this thing of the complexity of managing this token portfolio got too high, but now it's like, especially if it's low value tokens, doing it agentically is totally reasonable and you don't need to think about the 500 shitcoins you have. And I think that that actually does change how easy it is to manage these things. I think that explains your thing of like, why there's not one kind of liquidity sink. But actually it's just like people competing on all of them because now they don't have to think as much about all the management, but they just write a couple.
- [41:06]
Rune
Are you claiming that people are using AI agents to manage their meme coin trading portfolios?
- [41:12]
Haseeb
Thread guy, tell me, is that people.
- [41:15]
Rune
There's no way that's happening.
- [41:16]
Robert
People dabble. People experiment here and there.
- [41:19]
Haseeb
People are experimenting.
- [41:20]
Thread Guy
There's probably about a couple thousand dollars put behind that, but I don't think much okay, not now.
- [41:26]
Rune
People are clicking buttons.
- [41:27]
Thread Guy
Are you giving it to trade your stocks? No way.
- [41:31]
Haseeb
Yeah, but the point is the Meme coin feels valueless fundamentally.
- [41:37]
Rune
No, no, no. Okay, this is totally, this is totally not happening. And I think a big part of the reason why this is not happening is like, look, there are some people in Meme coins who have alpha and are actually making money. We know by looking at the stats that like 90% of people in Meme coins are losing money on average. Right? They are the people going to the casino pulling the slot machine. Nobody pays an AI agent to pull the slot machine for them. Right. You go there to do it yourself. You don't be like, hey buddy, go to the casino for me and play slots all day. Nobody would do that.
- [42:08]
Haseeb
Okay, Ankh.
- [42:09]
Robert
Yeah. I mean, maybe, maybe, maybe they're just not able to be exploited by humans and only an AI can find a way to profitably make money in a meme coin.
- [42:23]
Thread Guy
Here's one more thing I'll say with a question. One more thing I'll say with a question. I'm curious. Your guys take on this is like I'm not really as excited about pure Meme Coin as I am this idea that we get some sort of on chain experimentation resurgence. Maybe it's a little bit of defi and it's super gimmicky, but people are trying new stuff again. And there's all of these memes paired with tokenized stocks. And I'm curious what you think about that. It's gimmicky. Coins have been paired with bitcoin and other assets forever. But for whatever reason, there are new things being attempted on chain. And I think we basically went through a year where there was not a single. Nobody tried a single new thing. There was no friend tech, there was no anything for like 12 months. And so there are a from zero to a few things you realize like, oh shit, this is still a really exciting place to trade when there are. But yeah. What do you think about the. The Meme stock maybe, Robert? I'm kind of curious what you think.
- [43:28]
Robert
I think it's early. I mean, I think there's a lot of potential there, right? Like if I'm making a call it a defi protocol or some new meme coin token that's valueless or whatever. Having it reference external value like from outside of the crypto bubble is interesting, right? Whether it's like paired as an LP position or whether you use the non zero sum growth of some company outside of our space to drive some on Chain behavior is interesting. We've seen tons of experimentation of people making, I mean, all sorts of stuff around the preferred stock of strategy. Right. And hacking that into new coin.
- [44:14]
Haseeb
Not sure any of those are exactly standing.
- [44:18]
Robert
No, I'm not saying they are. But it goes to the point of interesting experimentation. How can we take the cash flows of a company outside of the ecosystem and bring it in and repackage it in some way? And how can we try some experiments there? Super fascinating, right? I think there'll be more and more and more of this. Right. Coins, however you want to define them, are simply a way of reframing financial exposure. And it can be from something off chain. It could be from things on chain, it could be governance, it could be crypto native, it could be like inflation, it could be all of these different things. But being able to slice and dice the rest of the real world on chain in new ways is awesome. Right? And whether you think it's going to come from the equity space or from the commodity space, see you guys did Athena years ago. That's in some ways taking something sort of off chain like basis has always been around off chain too. There's a million ways to take the value that flows through our world and put it somehow into a coin. A coin is just a product wrapper around anything you want it to be around. It can be valueless or it can be full of off chain value and anything between. So I love it. I think the more experimentation the better. I think we're going to see a lot more of it happening over the next two years because people are now like light bulbing, like, oh, I can take financial products off chain and bring them on in new ways. I think they're going to interact with perps in crazy ways. I think perps are going to interact with off chain in crazy ways. I think all of the above. And so I think we're still really early and it's going to be great.
- [45:49]
Rune
Okay, here's, here's my take is I think you always see people trying to take A and B and mash them together and see what happens. So I remember people used to be really excited that you could take Uniswap LP positions and make them into NFTs and borrow against them. And of course you technically can, but that was not a meaningful market. That was not like a big. It's never that simple of just like mash two things together and hope you create a new interesting baby. Most of the time it takes some fundamental new capability to create something that really Starts a new cycle or gets people really animated because something new is happening now that wasn't possible before. I suspect that very likely, whatever is that on Chain Renaissance, that's going to happen. The stuff that already exists, I think, is going to continue growing. Stablecoins are going to keep growing. Defi is going to keep growing. On chain trading and hyper liquid and derivatives and tokenized stocks, all that stuff is going to keep growing. And it's going to keep growing in a way that maybe feels almost pedestrian to us. Is that like, okay, the numbers go up on a chart. It's not explosive. Nobody's confused about what's happening. It's not like, oh my God, I can't believe tokenized stocks grew again. And so it is going to feel a little bit boring relative to the kind of inflections that we've seen in the past within crypto. I suspect that the big inflection that we're going to see that is going to reanimate on chain markets is a capabilities jump that will probably come from AI. And I think that capabilities jump probably looks like AIs are doing things. If you remember, the first time we saw AIs doing things was kind of AI XPT, where like, oh, an AI is now playing the role of a crypto analyst. And that was so exciting to people. People lost their fucking minds that there was a chatbot doing what humans used to do on Twitter. But right now there is really. AI is not doing like we just talked about. Are they trading meme coins? No. Largely, no. They're not very interesting. There will come a point when AIs are making the meme coins and trading the meme coins. There will come a time when AIs are making DeFi protocols and governing them. And that is going to be really weird and it's going to get people really excited. Something fundamentally new is happening that we have never seen before. We don't know how to think about it. What is the TAM for AI agents that are making protocols and using the blockchain for what it was intended to be used for in a way that humans, either one never thought to, never wanted to, or just at a scale that humans never did. That will eventually happen. And I think, like right now, it's sort of hard to imagine how people react to that right now. But I think you will see people lose their fucking minds when they see something like that happen. In the same way. You know, if you remember what was Conway Conway was this thing on Chain. Uh, it was. It was announced. It must have been. Must have been like six months ago, nine months ago of this guy who was creating a protocol that was going to allow you to pay for AI agents that owned themselves and could use USDC to buy their own compute and to keep themselves alive. And it was such a crazy idea. You know, the entire Internet got lit up with this idea that like AI agents without owners that are just self replicating droids that exist in cyberspace. That's going to be a thing.
- [48:59]
Robert
Olaf has been shilling that exact idea for 10 years. 10 years? 10 years.
- [49:03]
Rune
Totally, totally.
- [49:06]
Haseeb
I think to AI people what you'd be saying is, I want RSI for money, not just RSI for intelligence.
- [49:12]
Rune
Right, right. To be clear to the AI safety people, this is horrifying. This is like the OpenAI escape on steroids. Permanently. It's like swarms that exist on chain that are just self replicating and never go away, but that will happen with probability one, with enough time. Blockchain was designed that whoever is there cannot get uprooted or pushed away or deleted from the blockchain.
- [49:38]
Robert
You can't turn off the bitcoin wallet of an agent. You could turn off its Visa credit card acceptance capabilities.
- [49:46]
Rune
Right, right. And that's the thing. We're going to watch this. We're going to be kind of powerless to do anything about it. It'll be like, okay, what do we do? There's a new DEFI protocol. It's bigger than all the human ones. It's bigger than aave. There's a trading protocol that's bigger than hyper liquid and agents use it. And there's no UI or Agents made it.
- [50:05]
Robert
Agents made it.
- [50:06]
Rune
Agents made it. That's the thing. Agents made it and agents are using it. There's no UI because they don't give a shit about humans. And it's just out there. And you can buy their token if you want that. Like that. I think that's going to happen. I don't know if it's two years from now, three years from now, who knows? But that's going to happen. And that's going to be like one of these things that people start rethinking what crypto is. In the same way your imagination about crypto opened up in 2021, 2022, you're just like, maybe Covid has changed the whole world and everything is never going to be the same. And crypto's a big part of that story. And now people are kind of like, is that really true? It's kind of a wrapper for Existing assets, blah, blah, blah. I think you will have another mental shift when that happens.
- [50:46]
Robert
You know what? I love it. I think it's going to happen. The question is, VCs on this call, do you think the AIs are going to, without any capital, bootstrap a new system, or do you think at some point, way down the line, you're going to get like an email from an AI agent that says, I will absolutely
- [51:07]
Rune
fund an AI agent. I'm so ready to do that.
- [51:10]
Robert
I am autonomous.
- [51:11]
Haseeb
I need to. I think I want proof of not human from them though, because I've definitely gotten emails that are like, like, I'm an AI agent looking to raise funding for my bullshit.
- [51:23]
Rune
It's because they have their like Hermes agent pinging you.
- [51:25]
Haseeb
Right, but exactly, exactly.
- [51:28]
Rune
I mean, there probably will be some proof of inference thing where, like, look, I ship. I ship you like my, you know, my, my Nvidia activations.
- [51:36]
Haseeb
Yeah, exactly. Like improve your laugh.
- [51:38]
Rune
Exactly.
- [51:38]
Haseeb
Prove random lunches. Yeah, I think that that's definitely going to happen.
- [51:42]
Thread Guy
I mean, you know what the quickest way is for an agent to bootstrap capital is?
- [51:47]
Haseeb
Meme coins.
- [51:48]
Thread Guy
Something on chain.
- [51:49]
Rune
I didn't say.
- [51:50]
Haseeb
I think it. I think it. I.
- [51:52]
Thread Guy
This is how much money Goat had in the wallet.
- [51:54]
Haseeb
This is why I'm saying.
- [51:57]
Thread Guy
Yeah, well, I didn't say it was good. I said the mechanism to raise was interesting.
- [52:01]
Rune
Yeah.
- [52:02]
Haseeb
I do kind of agree that the meme coin stuff is actually going to be the first place that you see a lot of like, agents farming humans out of their stable coins. And then like that. That is their capital base.
- [52:13]
Rune
Right.
- [52:13]
Haseeb
I'm probably going to listen to a transcript of this podcast.
- [52:16]
Robert
Listen.
- [52:17]
Haseeb
And that will make it into the next pre training. And then, you know, I don't even
- [52:21]
Rune
think they're gonna scam.
- [52:25]
Haseeb
Yeah, yeah, it's gonna be accepting.
- [52:26]
Robert
It's gonna be so much worse. They're gonna scam grandmas out of their, like, retirement money. They're not gonna.
- [52:31]
Haseeb
They already do that. That's kind of boring. That's gonna be. That's gonna be lower value than the meme coin stuff. I think the meme coin stuff is gonna be higher.
- [52:38]
Rune
That's true. To that guy's point, it's like 15k a pop. If you can get all the things
- [52:42]
Haseeb
to take off, take the FOMO plus pump revenue, we're like annualizing like 300, 400 mil.
- [52:48]
Rune
Imagine that, like GPUs. They rent pretty. It's a lot cheaper than a human rent. So that's like years. You can get 15k.
- [52:56]
Haseeb
Yeah, but the difference is you getting guaranteed non scarcity is the hard part with the GPU.
- [53:03]
Rune
Right. Well, they're going to be living on Akash GPUs or bouncing around from Ionet.
- [53:14]
Haseeb
Yeah, I think we got a long way for that. That part actually is the hard part.
- [53:18]
Rune
To me, we do.
- [53:21]
Haseeb
I don't know, Thread guy, what's your dystopian AI future? Maybe utopian?
- [53:28]
Rune
Are you utopian?
- [53:32]
Thread Guy
I've sort of just accepted I'm gonna trade it and then however it plays out, hopefully I'm upper K. You know,
- [53:39]
Haseeb
I'm kind of gunning for Upper K.
- [53:43]
Rune
Wow, I've never heard that.
- [53:44]
Haseeb
Hilarious.
- [53:46]
Thread Guy
I mean, you guys got your eyes on it too, you know, I mean that, that's where we're headed.
- [53:50]
Haseeb
I know, I know, but, but I love that the upper K is like the inverse of the, the. What's the, what's the lower K?
- [53:58]
Rune
For those who are missing the reference, it's like the K shaped economy. Right. Where some people are doing well, some people are doing poorly.
- [54:03]
Haseeb
No, no, but upper K is permanent underclass. Is the lower K. What's the upper K? Is there like a aristocracy?
- [54:11]
Robert
I don't know.
- [54:12]
Haseeb
Yeah, it's got, it's got to have
- [54:14]
Rune
some new name Upper east. So. Okay, sorry guys, we're coming up on time, but I want to ask because, you know, a lot of times on the show we talk about Gen Z, we talk about, you know, what the new generation of crypto is like. Obviously we're, we're anks. We don't really follow exactly what's going on in that world. One of the things that's very clear is that for the newer generation, there is this ethos of, you know, people call it like hyper gambling or just much, much higher rates of gambling, degeneracy, risk taking than we ever saw for millennials. How do you think about this and how does it, how does it fit into what you see among your peers and your worldview about how you think the world is going to change, how finance is going to change over the next 10, 20 years?
- [54:58]
Thread Guy
You know, I think my broadest view, like my most confident view is just going to be the rise, proliferation of active investing where a lot of people do not feel comfortable, especially the, you know, more sophisticated ones do not feel comfortable. I'm not really trying to push this, but they don't feel comfortable of their outcome on by the S and P and chill. And a lot of people, I think we're Going to, you already see it with Robinhood. Number of accounts funded, percentage of options that are like zero day. Percentage of trading volume that is like individual stocks. Like I think this is going to be a trend, meta trend that goes up and to the right where people sort of take their finances into their own hands and try to actively create throw an outcome. And then I think the second order affects that are gonna like trickle down and it's gonna lead to perp volume and it's gonna lead to on chain volume and it's gonna lead to like you know, these crazy moves in like a sandisk or a micron. You know it's like it was always like crypto is gonna be tradfi but then now everything's just crypto. It's like the crypto, you know, the cosmification of the world or the cryptofication of the world. It's like SK Hynix is up Cosby as a verb.
- [56:12]
Haseeb
Wow, I didn't expect SK Hynix is
- [56:14]
Thread Guy
up a thousand percent in the year, then it's down 50% in, in a couple days. Like I think, I think this is a trend that I don't know if
- [56:21]
Rune
it's starting but Gen Alpha is coming, right? Do you think this is a pendulum and like okay, maybe the next generation, they're doing a little bit better, they have better economic prospects and they will be more risk averse than Gen Z or do you think like permanent change, there's just something about the world or something about like the social contract that's just not going back to the way it was regardless of material conditions.
- [56:45]
Thread Guy
I think it's a permanent change and I think one of the underlying is the increase in tooling and your ability to get online and start trading. Like when I was 16, you couldn't really get online and start trading. You would like flip sneakers, right? You'd flip sneakers. You would do whatever Internet hustle you could do. I think the upper stakes for the Internet hustles that are now accessible are it's just the biggest game in the world. You could just get on chain, you could get on hyper liquid, you can, you can get a phantom wallet and you can get on poly marketing, you can just play. I think I don't look at it doomer, I look at it pretty optimistically. But I think that every generation that comes after mine is just going to be comfortable with risk, comfortable with these assets. Everyone you see on the Internet either has a gambling deal or a trading deal or is posting a P and L. It's Just, it's just where you know, Trump is selling a paid group and he's tweeting, buy ticker, plt.
- [57:36]
Haseeb
Right.
- [57:36]
Thread Guy
It sort of integrated itself into culture, like trading. It's like, you know, the, the, the S P price president. It sort of integrated itself into culture.
- [57:45]
Haseeb
Although I, I will tell you one thing.
- [57:47]
Thread Guy
Go ahead.
- [57:47]
Haseeb
Which is the 90s to 2006 was all about the, the same thing, right. Of like everyone was active investing and then financial crisis happened and then everyone shifted.
- [57:57]
Thread Guy
Do you think that this one was where we're at now was like bigger than 2006, the rise social media?
- [58:03]
Haseeb
Yeah, yeah. I mean I, I think it's definitely bigger, but I don't think it's like dollar wise relative to income bigger. So there's sort of like you have to normalize either by income market cap concentration. It's not one of those, but. And so like that's where it's not one to one, but it's definitely bigger in some ways now. But it's also just because like they're more. There's so many passive vehicles that it's like the difference between active and passive has also been blurred by the fact that there's 5 million ETFs for similar exposures and stuff like that. Right. Also the Cosby. Actually another really funny version of this story for where the meme coin volume's coming from. And this is a joke, but it would be hilarious if this had any truth. But yeah, this is fiction, but the Korean government is mandating that you take a class now to buy 2x or higher levered ETFs.
- [58:56]
Robert
This is like the Matt Levine joke about.
- [58:59]
Haseeb
No, no, it was a joke, but it's now real, apparently. Like it is actually. See, it's like you can't, you can't buy 2x levered ETFs or 2x or higher without taking this gang some certification.
- [59:10]
Robert
It's like Levine joke.
- [59:12]
Haseeb
This is why. This is why Crypto. They're getting back to crypto.
- [59:18]
Thread Guy
And I also say, Haseeb, I'm curious your take. I, I recognize I live in a little bit of a bubble, right. My brain has been sort of perma fried over five years of doing this all the time. But I do observe the behavior. And you know, my, my, my little cousins and they're, you know, what is Frank de God's trading on chain? And maybe this is because they're one level removed from me and that's just, they're in, they're in the game, right? Like if your Dad's a sports better. You're probably sweating some sports bets. But I think there's a activist investing societal trend. And I think as you see more and more influence on the Internet be directed by the people that have really big P. Ls. It is sort of an aspirational objective to hit a big trade in public for the world to see. It's easier rise than doing dances on TikTok.
- [60:09]
Rune
I don't know if it's easier, but it's certainly accessible for more direct. A lot more people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd say. I think you. I agree with you that there's a kind of. I'd put it less like normal celebrity is more like an athlete in that. Like, okay, you're getting measured on, do you win games, do you score points? And if you do, you get on the scoreboard as opposed to like, are you funny? Do you have that, you know, just something that people find appealing to watch. I think you're definitely right that. Look, this is really deep in the water supply now. And it doesn't feel like it's just Gen Z. It also feels like Gen Alpha that is turned onto this. That said, I also agree with Tarun that these things I think are cyclical, but the cycles are long. And you know, really, this. You just need a financial crisis.
- [60:56]
Haseeb
You need like a real crash and then it flips. Like, I think that's, I mean, Covid
- [61:00]
Rune
was a crash, you know. Well, I think like, clearly the retail phenomenon in the US Started after Covid.
- [61:05]
Haseeb
That's true, that's true. But the COVID again, again, I think that the active versus passive statistic has been manipulated by the number of ETFs. Now those people are kind of active. They're not really. It's not like the, the traditional, like, I just bought spy type etf.
- [61:21]
Rune
Right, right, right. And it's very clear. I mean, you hear this from, from traditional managers. They're like, oh, fundamentals don't matter anymore. And it's all momentum. And another way of saying that, like, we started.
- [61:29]
Haseeb
We started by talking about burry. We started burry.
- [61:32]
Rune
Right, exactly, exactly. And so like the, it does feel like this stuff is. Yeah, it feels like it's pretty deep inside that. That also said, like, it is also very male. And so if you're, if you're thinking about, okay, what, what is this doing to this generation? I think it's largely a male phenomena. I hear this from all the young dudes who, I know that all of their friends are also doing this
- [61:57]
Haseeb
is a gender ignorant gambling phenomenon.
- [62:00]
Rune
That is true. Yeah. There are gotcha mechanics I think are becoming broader.
- [62:04]
Thread Guy
I have a John Wang article to show you about the female gambling future epidemic. And it's about the boo boo mystery boxes. It's pretty good.
- [62:12]
Rune
Okay, okay, I will check that out. That's an interesting note to end on, but I think we gotta call it. We're on time. Thread guy. Thanks for coming on. Where can people find you?
- [62:22]
Thread Guy
Twitter at? Not thread guy with two T's, but I am actually thread guy. Twitch TV thread guy, YouTube thread guy, everywhere.
- [62:28]
Haseeb
You're. You should have started with FOMO. You told us that's where everyone is.
- [62:31]
Thread Guy
I'm everywhere. You could find me everywhere.
- [62:32]
Robert
What's your FOMO link?
- [62:33]
Thread Guy
Phantom. Username at Thread guy as well. Shout out to Phantom. And I show you guys on the stream all the time. I think it's the best podcast in crypto. You guys are awesome.
- [62:42]
Rune
Thank you.
- [62:43]
Thread Guy
I mean it when I say I was really looking forward to my intro. I was practicing Haseeb, the head height mana Dragonfly. I'm running around the house screaming at head Dragonfly. So. You guys are awesome, man. I'm a pleasure. Thank you for having me on.
- [62:56]
Rune
Well, we love you. Thank you for coming on and sharing your wisdom. That's it for this week. Be back next time. See you everyone.