The Breakdown - Bell Curve: Beyond the Hype: Crypto’s Next Phase | Roundup

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

In this episode, we’re joined by Santi from Empire! We discuss today’s crypto market conditions, stablecoin proliferation, and how long-term allocators are accumulating Bitcoin. We also touch on c...rypto’s data and transparency issues, and the valuation of L1s before wrapping with speculation on alien life. Sponsored by: Crypto Tax Calculator Accurate Crypto Taxes. No Guesswork. Say goodbye to tax season headaches with Crypto Tax Calculator: Generate accurate, CPA-endorsed tax reports fully compliant with IRS rules. Seamlessly integrate with 3000+ wallets, exchanges, and on-chain platforms. Import reports directly into TurboTax or H&R Block, or securely share them with your accountant. Exclusive Offer: Use the code BW2025 to enjoy 30% off all paid plans. Don’t miss out - offer expires 15 April 2025! Ledger Ledger, the world leader in digital asset security, proudly sponsors The Breakdown podcast. Celebrating 10 years of protecting over 20% of the world’s crypto, Ledger ensures the security of your assets. For the best self-custody solution in the space, buy a LEDGER™ device and secure your crypto today. Buy now on Ledger.com. Enjoying this content? SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast: https://pod.link/1438693620 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/nathanielwhittemorecrypto Subscribe to the newsletter: https://breakdown.beehiiv.com/ Join the discussion: https://discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8 Follow on Twitter: NLW: https://twitter.com/nlw Breakdown: https://twitter.com/BreakdownNLW

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Spring Break Week, and that means we are checking out a new Blockworks podcast. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it. Give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. All right, friends, as you know, this is spring break week here. We are down in Florida.
Starting point is 00:00:42 Bringing the kids to Disney for the first time. It's a grand old time, but it means that I am not sitting at my computer, change to the tariff and crypto madness. And so what we're going to do instead this week is preview some other great Blockworks podcasts. Today, we are checking out Bell Curve. The whole idea of Bell Curve is to be able to introduce you in an in-depth way to topics that might be outside of your zone of familiarity.
Starting point is 00:01:04 The premise of the show is basically that there is so much going on in crypto that it's very hard for anyone to have a full basis for understanding everything. And so Bell Curve really tries to help people who may not have experience with the topic that they're covered on get up to speed. It's a super interesting approach and is hosted by another one of Blockworks co-founders, Mikey Bolito, and I really highly recommend checking it out. So let's listen into an episode. And if you like what you hear, go listen to the Bell Curve wherever you get your podcasts. And this is something that I think about inversion a lot, which is okay, like, Solana, right now, every chain is pure speculation, so to speak. But like, over time, what you want to see is, as a percentage of the pie, speculation going down.
Starting point is 00:01:44 Like meme connectivity, important growing as a whole, but percentage-wise decreasing. You want to have other types of activity. Maybe it's tokenized stocks. Again, speculation, but a different type of user, different type of company. Because, I mean, the unity economics of the user in crypto suck. You onboard 100 million people or a million people to buy Trump, and then how many of those have stuck around? Hey, everyone, quick disclaimer before we get into today's episode. Nothing said on Bell Curve is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens.
Starting point is 00:02:13 This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Our guests and I may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed. All right, everyone, welcome back to actually a special edition. We got a Bell Empire, Empire Curve. I don't know what the correct mishmash here is, but we got Michaels 1 and 2, Vance, and Sonti from Empire joining today. Fellas, how are we all doing? You know, typically we're adding speed and velocity to the shows by cutting people,
Starting point is 00:02:46 but I guess we're adding speed and velocity by adding this week. Two gracious, too gracious, Michael. Before we started recording, Michael was describing his Herculaean triathlon, which my immediate response was bear markets are when you get in shape and you start doing this type of things. And he said, no, we're not a bear market. And he said, no, we're on the bear market. Sorry to blow the cover guys.
Starting point is 00:03:10 But I don't know. It's a good question. We should probably get into it. But yeah, no, just try to keep your time filled while not watch the charts these days. Waiting for the chart to go out. Refreshing coin gecko. What do you guys think, though? This is a little bit of an odd spot.
Starting point is 00:03:31 It doesn't feel. Usually in crypto, you know if things are good or bad, right? It's clearly a bull market or clearly a bare market. Maybe there's some confusion around the inflection points, but this feels like a bit of an odd spot. I'm curious, what are you guys, how are you guys situating yourselves at the moment? How do you contextualize this within the history of crypto markets? I think there's a handful of assets that are basically having their float cornered, and these are going to squeeze in like three months, it feels like maybe two or three months.
Starting point is 00:03:58 And then there's the other 95% of crypto assets, which just have no marginal buyers and are slowly bleeding out. And then there's all sorts of like shenanigans in the middle with like Jesse from from Coinbase like fighting everyone on the timeline and, you know, everyone else just kind of beating each other like Rushi getting, you know, the heave ho for movement. Like there's there's movement in the pack and it feels like people are going to emerge and others are going to kind of get left behind. But at the end of the day, I think, you know, the real trends of this industry right now are the lending markets, stable coins, you know, Bitcoin is money. Eath is figuring itself out, albeit pretty messily. And yeah, I don't know. I don't think there's as much of a clear demarcation between bull and bear market. Like over 90K, it feels like it's probably back on.
Starting point is 00:04:46 Under 90K, it feels like we're off. But Nvidia got sacked for like 10% yesterday and crypto kind of just hung in there. And that's the first time that's like basically ever happened. Yeah, I would generally agree with everything. And I think the only things I would add are we're kind of in this range right now. It feels like where I would say if we're back above 90, it feels like it's game on. But I think if we're back below 80, it feels like it's game over. And we've just kind of been like in this range for the last couple weeks, which makes total sense.
Starting point is 00:05:21 It's one tweet from Trump or one tweet from someone who hears some information about, you know, the president of China says whatever. And it is one tweet away from breaking through in one way, way, shape, or form. But I think ultimately this stuff gets figured out probably in the next like 30 to 60 days. And I don't think we have to wait the full 90. I think they're going to start having, you know, in terms of the tariffs and the trade deals that they're working on, they're going to start having, we have agreed to a deal of principle type notifications and announcements. And then it'll be, okay, here's the details.
Starting point is 00:05:58 But once we move past this and we will move past this, I think it's only going to be exciting for the rest of the year. It's just the uncertainty right now, makes people wait on the sidelines. What will also be really interesting coming up in the next couple of weeks is basically all of the Mac 7 are reporting Q1 earnings in the next two weeks, which means that, and Q1, I'm sure, is going to be fine generally. But what everybody will be looking for is guidance for the next quarter, Q2, but all. also for the rest of the year. And whether it's, you know, CAP-X numbers that people are tracking, um,
Starting point is 00:06:33 forecast of revenue if they're seeing, you know, tariffs or trade policies actually hit the revenue, uh, figures and forecasts. Um, so much of these businesses are basically the entirety of what people own, uh,
Starting point is 00:06:48 especially over the last five years. You had this huge allocation towards U.S. equities over the last five years, but within that in even deeper allocation into these seven companies, thinking that this is the trade of, you know, the decade. And they're potentially, you know, the ones that are hit hardest if growth does not keep up with the already insane expectations. So those are things that I'm looking for in the next couple of weeks. But yeah, excited to move past this probably in the next couple of months.
Starting point is 00:07:17 So, Tantam, I'm curious to get your perspective here. And, you know, I want to maybe make some of this crypto-specific. And you guys all have a lot of portfolio companies. And I'm curious how you're advising your poor co-founders at the moment because, well, Sonti, you are, you can speak from the founder perspective now with inversion. But I'm curious how you're thinking about this, right? Because it's not like crypto isn't capex heavy or manufacturing-based industry. But if asset prices go down 50%, it definitely impacts your growth for the year. And so much of this is uncertain at the moment.
Starting point is 00:07:45 So how are you guys thinking about just business planning for the next 12 to 18 months? It's business as usual, really. I mean, again, if you move past the six. 12-month timeline, this happens in every cycle. Like, there are some pockets of crypto that are getting more attention, like hype and, you know, real world assets, lending markets are back on the many. Fundamentals are back in order. This is like very, I'm not like, I don't think this cycle is different other than perhaps
Starting point is 00:08:12 there's been like a few like outlier assets that have really like shined. But again, like for me, it's business as usual. You've always got to keep at least 24 months of runway, always got to control cost. Don't do dumb shit and invest in things or sponsor crazy stuff, like focus on building a product and constantly be. Conferences you can sponsor though. Yeah, true. But you don't mean like there is always some reckless spending that goes on.
Starting point is 00:08:40 There is for sure. There's like always, in all my conversations with founders, they always say, look, there's one 10x engineer that we'll just pay that guy more and we can let go of others. Maybe just focus on hiring more 10x people. But listen, we've never. the backdrop for crypto, if you extend your view towards like multiple years has never been better. All the major roadblocks have gone away.
Starting point is 00:09:03 Like we have a very pro crypto administration. We likely will get stable coin bill in the next, I don't know, six months. That's huge. Less than that. You go to DAS. You have the sentiment among like non-crypto natives is probably stronger than within crypto natives, like the Black Rocks, Robin Hoods, New Banks of the world. Like those guys appreciate the potential.
Starting point is 00:09:24 So again, for me, it's to survive and always keep, you know, healthy amount of runway. And, you know, I think that the only thing that is probably like now this cycle is just understand your position in the stack. Like, how are you going to actually monetize your user or your product? And, you know, it's sort of simple stuff that I think it's kind of punted. It's like, yeah, we'll figure out monetization later. And I get it. Look, like Facebook in the early days did not have a monetization plan. it just said, we're going to build a killer product that people love, and we'll then figure out how to monetize.
Starting point is 00:10:00 And what it did its IPO, people forget, but everyone in Wall Street was discounting that stock like crazy. It went down. It had a crazy swings because it was at a time where most people didn't appreciate social media. And at the end of the day, oh, if you have attention of the user, you can monetize the shit out of it. And I think crypto's kind of going through that evolution now. Like we still, we have some breakout apps, but we still have 36 million active users on chain. Like, it's still not where we want it to be. But I do think that, like, stuff that I'm excited about, like tokenized stocks, front ends, protocols that can capture that flow is sort of interesting.
Starting point is 00:10:35 And so, yeah, I'm very much, like, not bothered by crypto prices right now. We've never been buyers of alts in a larger size than we are today. Yeah. I mean, maybe one in our mouth is, I do think that could be volatile, but. But if you're waiting for like the VIX to spike to 50, it already happened. And just as like investor psychology, you're never going to be able to time the bottom. So don't spend your time waiting around for it because it has probably already passed in a lot of ways. And maybe you'll get another shot at something lower.
Starting point is 00:11:17 But the best time to be buying something is frankly when it's like 20 to 40 percent off of its low. And it has made a clear turn. And that's the best time to be loading up. Also keeping dry powder ready to go in case, you know, it's a fake top and you get another shot at something lower. But I mean, that, that I think is kind of where the market is broadly right now. You know, a lot of people who are thinking it could be a fake top and maybe there's another drop depending on what happens. And maybe people will get that shot. Or maybe we've already passed the drop. and this is the slow build towards, you know, a new resolution. The one thing that I was going to add just as commentary from this week,
Starting point is 00:11:59 we obviously maintain relationships with a lot of venture fund allocators, our investors, and some interesting perspectives that we got in multiple cases, actually over the last few weeks, but kind of capstone this week, was the things that they are, really aligned with and the thing that is really hitting with them in terms of why crypto is being able to showcase a side-by-side comparison of a technology company with a number of people, product, revenue, cost, and then net income relative to a protocol where you've got probably similar levels of revenue, maybe even less revenue, effectively one-twentieth the cost in terms
Starting point is 00:12:47 of headcount and the people that are at the protocol are working on the protocol and a massive difference in net attributable value either to the token holders or the equity holders. And being able to showcase that is something that is working really well for them. And it's just the most efficient way of putting dollars to work. Now, how does this translate? Kind of going back to what Sonsi was saying, we have to be efficient with the money that we're using as an industry. There is generally going to be less money than people expect every year.
Starting point is 00:13:17 year over the last five years, we have less money than the previous year. From just like a venture allocation perspective, don't expect that that trend doesn't stop. It will be more and more concentrated in fewer funds. And the funds will continue to raise new funds, but you're not going to see very many super large growth rounds, frankly for a while. So you got to be prepared to do more with less. And you also got to be prepared to put your own startup company protocol, whatever you want to call it on that comparison of who is your centralized business comparable and how much more efficient are you because you have a blockchain. And if you can do that and you have a path to showcasing that, like it'll work. And we just have been talking with LPs about that. And that's
Starting point is 00:14:07 what gets them most excited right now. On the LPs stuff, like one of the things I think about a lot to your point, Michael, around. There's now more vehicles and ways to express a long crypto view. You have ETFs. You have, you know, Coinbase, New Bank, the latest Salana micro strategy, like, you know, is that, does that compute? Do you think that will affect, like, LP allocation into funds? Because, look, 10 years ago, like 2017 Vintage Funds, there was very much no, it was more
Starting point is 00:14:36 so like the capture of, I want to go long crypto, I don't want to deal with custody. And look, the gray scale premium was there. for a reason, right? Do you think that really changes the composition of venture? And if so, like early stage, very much not unchanged, but like the growth stages. And if you're, if you're like a company to raise 100 million and haven't shipped product or haven't shown metrics to raise another round, like, what do you do? We can't go public. You need to totally recap that business. I think, look, the reason why growth equity exists in the first place is because of this thing called, say, Barnes-Oxley, which pushed all these companies to have just these insane
Starting point is 00:15:10 levels to be able to go public, which require them to be at, like, I mean, Coethe said this in their last presentation. It's like a $10 billion revenue run rate is like the minimum to go public now. Or maybe it's a billion dollars of revenue and a $10 billion market gap is like the minimum to go public, which is like, you know, the number of companies that reach Dekegorn status is like one every few years. It's not every single year. And so that pushed this growth, this growth equity paradigm within traditional venture investing. Now, Crypto Venture has also done similar things. It's like, well, if Founders Fund can go raise $4 billion, then we should go off and go raise $2 billion. It makes absolutely no sense, especially when we're talking about the thing that is working best is being
Starting point is 00:15:54 able to talk about the capital efficiency that we have as an industry. And to your point, though, I think what you're describing will ultimately affect the amount of dollars that venture funds raise because in many cases over the last five, six, seven years, you had many venture funds who were fund of ones. And what I mean by that is they've got a liquid strategy, they've got liquid venture, they're doing seed rounds, they're doing series A's, but it's all within one fund. And it's just like the venture, or it's the crypto allocation that some endowment or some pension fund is looking at, and that's why they want to invest in that fund. Now, I think we're going to get product diversity. And you already started to see.
Starting point is 00:16:37 see that obviously with an ETF. You can get Bitcoin exposure through a brokerage. Great. Endowments will go for that. There's no reason why a fund should be holding Bitcoin, unless it's a trading strategy or a hedge fund in a liquid strategy. But I think you're starting to really get LP base is really starting to understand the difference between who is a core venture investor, who is a hedge fund investor,
Starting point is 00:17:04 and what are the other financial products that I? I can use to get crypto exposure, whether ETF or structured products. One thing that I'm curious about is how do you think the like a potential bubble in especially privates might impact the adoption of tokenization, especially from the allocator perspective? So, you know, one thing that I've got like you hear quite a bit is allocators running into privates to hide from volatility, right? Because they don't have to mark to market every single day. But I could also imagine in case there was an exodus or.
Starting point is 00:17:37 right, there needed to be an, like, it's much more illiquid, right? That's like the shitty part if you ever wanted to get out. There's really no easy way to do that. And so I was listening to a more traditional, I listened to a bunch of like capital allocators and more traditional private equity pods. And they're all, they're all, the thing that all the privates are talking about now is how do I, okay, these, if I had to sum up the consensus view of everything on the tariffs and the Trump side of things, is that we've probably seen a bottom, right? Like markets tend to look through even pretty horrific quarters of data if there's a light, at the end of the tunnel on the other side. But if we're headed towards a more stagnationary
Starting point is 00:18:11 or whatever environment long term, it impacts the private guys now. And I'm curious how allocators might think of, I think some of them actually see value in not having to mark to market on a daily basis, right? But I also could imagine a scenario where they're not able to get out. And suddenly they're like, guys, this is ridiculous. I need these things to be liquid. There's no reason why they shouldn't be liquid. These should all just be tokens. Fun story before advanced can share more perspectives on this, but we were talking with a large U.S. endowment who said their first crypto exposure was buying Bitcoin, and they worked with Coinbase to do this in like 2018 or 2017. And the person who was managing it literally told Coinbase, I will pay you extra to not
Starting point is 00:18:50 send us accounting statements so that nobody knows how much this is worth. Don't tell us. That's awesome. For three years, don't tell us. But that, yeah, it's kind of a question. Is it a feature of a bug to have private marks that don't change with the vicissitudes of the market. In a lot of cases, it's a feature. Your average, like, two or three-year-old crypto venture fund is not going to have these questions asked to it. It's just like it's going to be liquid at some point in the future. And I think that's it for now. Older traditional venture funds are getting this question and it's causing the questioning of the venture asset class more broadly, or at least, you know, the composition of it and how many firms should exist within traditional
Starting point is 00:19:31 venture. The area of the market that's gotten to pass so far is just like, AI-related stuff where, you know, we were just on a call with someone who's raising $250 million for a startup that won't have a product for five years intentionally. And I think the question with a lot of these things is, like, how much interrelated, you know, party transactions are there? You know, the revenue from SoftBank goes to OpenAI, which is spent on CoreWeave, which is spent on cursor, which is like, you know, it's like kind of like this round-tripping of revenue. And then how much implicit leverage. is embedded in that system where if open AI doesn't work or if AGI is not in two years,
Starting point is 00:20:12 does that blow up everyone downstream of them? And there's all sorts of other platformist questions, but I think that is kind of the allocators are getting a lot smarter. I think it's kind of like how I would wrap it up where there's now enough dispersion, enough different types of funds, enough time horizon where people can really start to ask the tough questions. And it's good for the industry. It's good for crypto. And crypto should come out of this looking a lot better than the alternatives. It's more liquid. More liquidity events in general. Generally, the valuations are higher. I think that the capital is going to come, but what we've noticed from our peer said, at least in crypto ventures, that they're upping their ownership
Starting point is 00:20:52 percentage requests. So some firms now want 10% of tokens. And, you know, giving 50% of the community, that's also in question now. A lot of the kind of classically held wisdom of Crypto Venture is being relitigated and re-questioned. Same with air drops. That's awesome. As it should. As it should. It's ridiculous that, yeah, that's great.
Starting point is 00:21:18 Sondi sent me a couple of trials. I actually want to maybe return to this question of bear-versible market, Santi. These are some good charts here. How do I? We like the charts. All right. Can you guys see, does it look full screen on my? Yep.
Starting point is 00:21:31 Okay. We're going to see all your DMs, but. All right. All right. You're going to go out of the hell here. Oh, God. All right. So this is long-term holders of BTC are back to accumulation mode.
Starting point is 00:21:43 For some reason, it's full screen on my screen. Along with this chart, I did see a stat of the number of 1,000 to 10,000 VTC wallets is now the highest. Yeah, and buying. Like, if you look at the distribution of who's actually buying, it's the guys that have really large, like the duration of a bit. I think there's another chart. that's not here is like you look at like the duration of wallets that have held bitcoin after x like
Starting point is 00:22:09 over a year or multiple years are buying right now and that to me has always been the strongest signal like it's not so much to guys that are short term trading this thing it's like no like the guys are really know and where the real wealth is and the flows are they're they're right now buying now a question is like i haven't seen i would love to see that chart of like like within crypto because I do think right now, based on like that last episode with Quinn and some of the macro guys, it's very much like Bitcoin centric and dominated and Bitcoin needs to lead for the rest of the market to feel comfortable like allocating into other stuff. But of course, you just heard Van say that they're buying alt.
Starting point is 00:22:46 So yeah. We also just said that it's pretty hard to get LPs to agree to allow you to buy Bitcoin and charge fees. So not part of our core strategy. But I think even if it was, I still, you know, like to us, the meat of the next move in the market is probably like the midtail coins. You know, anything between, I mean, there's things that are 100 to 200 million, which are kind of like cigarette butts sitting on the ground. Like, it's just like there's not much meat in them for like a huge fun. But anything from 500 to kind of like 1.5 is the strike zone. And then there's even bigger ones that are kind of like the mid majors, you know, 10 to,
Starting point is 00:23:28 20 billion. But in just as context, like our view is that Bitcoin has to move first. But you can see this in the charts too. When Bitcoin moves, things that we're talking about in these strikes zones, in these different strike zones have higher betas to Bitcoin. So if Bitcoin's up 1%, they're up two and a half. Yeah. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:23:47 Yeah, I think we have a positive skew. Like, hey, listen, maybe it continues to be choppy for the rest of the year, trade war, all these like idiosyncratic things are like, no, it's hard to like predict. We are in that kind of administer. where one tweet away from like markets nuking or ripping. So if you're not using leverage and you have the possibility to allocate, you sort of say, okay,
Starting point is 00:24:07 how much more downside do we have on some like Bitcoin? Certainly you could go to 50 and I wouldn't flinch. But there is more, I think over a long term view, you probably say there's higher probability that Bitcoin is at. Maybe that's the question. Over in two years time, do you think there's a greater probability of Bitcoin being at 150K or 50K?
Starting point is 00:24:27 or 50K? Well, it's not evenly distributed. Correct. But even still, I would still say 150. And the breakdown of probabilities is probably like 7525. I have a question for you guys on what do you think about this idea? Okay, so here's one thing that people ask all the time is, okay, I know that stablecores are going to be big. What if there was a trillion of stable coins in market cap in the next three years?
Starting point is 00:24:57 How could I play that? right. Borrow Lend actually doesn't seem like a terrible way to play that, right? Like a lot of these borrow lend companies are leaning into stables. Like that kind of seems like a category of liquid coin that you can buy that directly benefits from that trend. Well, Lord, um, borrow lend has been as a category, um, one of the most beaten down categories within crypto over the last four years, namely because the three out of the five biggest blowups were centralized providers of borrowlend. And it just like destroyed, you know, Genesis, block five Celsius, basically just like ate up
Starting point is 00:25:35 that entire market. And people have been barely dipping their toes to get back in. One of our portfolio companies, Maple, now syrup is, I mean, Vance was on spaces with them today. And I think Vance tweeted this, but like they've just been chewing glass for the last four years. and they just hit over a billion in TVL this week. So you're starting to see this stuff happen on chain and doing it in defy-native ways, which is really interesting. In particular, it was actually Sky that allocated over $100 million of the last few weeks
Starting point is 00:26:11 to Maple to then lend out. So you're starting to see all of these things piece together in a way that is much more powerful than even what you had with Genesis, where rehab authentication, centralized, do you trust in them to, you know, manage everything in liquidity properly? But I think on-chain lending is going to be one of the, one of the massive winners in this cycle. Actually, I take that back. No more cycle talk.
Starting point is 00:26:38 We're done with the cycle. Yeah, I agree. So, well, Michael, to build on your point here, this is some really great data, which was gathered by Galaxy and Alex's Thorne team there, Alex Thorne's team there. So, you know, this is, you're looking at, this was really difficult data to get. So they, I think, parsed through public filings, bankruptcy docs, et cetera, back in the day. And they actually came up with the amount of C-Fi or the amount of lending market exposure that you had going back all the way through 2018. You can see, you know, these or if you're following along on my screen here, these sort of orange blocks are the centralized lenders.
Starting point is 00:27:17 So Genesis and BlockFi. But you are starting to see a slow rebuilding of credit, the market driven primarily by default. actually he's got a chart here explaining reviewing this which is today you actually have a larger market for defy lending than cfi lending which is pretty cool to see great great to follow up all of my points with perfect data I do think this is missing like the market maker borrow that happens on centralized exchanges which I imagine is quite significant but anyway you put it lending is still down 75% from the peak and there's a lot of new category players that are eating of that pie and most of the profits associated with it.
Starting point is 00:27:57 On the, I think your initial assessment was like, okay, we want to go along stable coins. Because everyone categorically, I think is like from Stripe to investors, I'm sure LPs are like, hey, this is a room temperature semiconductors, you know, like, and everyone is trying to, like, I've talked to every other day, there's like a new company that wants to launch your own stable coin or wants to use stable coins in some way, shape, or form, which, look, is really bullish for the category, like it just, it's the Trojan horse. How do you express that view? I mean, you know, I'd actually be curious because you guys, did you invest in a lot?
Starting point is 00:28:29 Have the stable coin go to $1.50. Or go down to $70. But I think there's like multiple ways you can express that. Like there's now like stablecoin specific chains. I mean, like Tron has been that for USDT for such a long time. But now there's like tether specific chains that have cropped up that I think you guys are investors in. I'm too. Then you can play the Newbanks of the world and Robin Hoods of the world that you could take the view that as something like New Bank, you know, they can monetize that user more effectively, can acquire users more effectively.
Starting point is 00:29:07 Their activity rate is the KPI that they disclose is basically like active mouse was gone up. Most of their users are buying USDC, not Bitcoin Salana, Ethereum or meme coins. It's, you know, having dollars in a bank account is a killer use case. they're using USC but you know you can envision a world where they might use another stable coin or launch their own i don't actually know if they're going to if it makes sense for them to be an issuer i think an issuer is kind of a tough business model but if you own the user relationship i think i that's how i would express the view of long stable coins like think of who's going to who owns a customer relationship and can you cut costs in meaningful way or monetize that user
Starting point is 00:29:45 basically running tetherist business model where interest income shoots up because you acquire more users and you have like all this depositor base growing. I mean, being an issuer, well, there's effectively, so I think it's also helpful to maybe separate out what is a payment stable coin versus what is a different type of stable coin. And I don't know if you want to call it like some people say Athena like USTE is more of a structured product. But I think that there are different flavors of stable coins within like broadly stable coins. So that's one thing. But being an issuer of a stable coin, you know, maybe less so the case with Circle, as we talked about a few pods ago, but much more so the case with Tether in the fact that they make
Starting point is 00:30:35 $13 billion in net income every year is a very, very successful business model if you can get there. But it's also the hardest thing to displace. It's like we describe it as, you know, stare at. social media squared, where the network effects are twice as strong as what you have with social media. And I think broadly, you know, how we look at it is there's basically infrastructure, there's issuers, and then there's, like you said, enable businesses. Infrastructure, plasma is a great example. You know, staple coin specific chains, you know, affiliated with Tether and is going to
Starting point is 00:31:14 be, you know, very low cost, high throughput chain. Issurers, now this is tougher. Tether equity, circle equity, tougher. But things like Athena or Sky or other issuers that are doing differentiated things could be attractive places to look at the issuing category where they're making real revenues and they have real incomes that are flowing back to a token. And then the businesses, I mean, we just announced an investment in an insurance company and they are definitely focused on Bitcoin for now. They're regulated to be able to do so.
Starting point is 00:31:46 But you can imagine a world where they are also regulated for stablecoin. and being able to provide USD access for insurance products to people who don't have access to USD. This was your largest investment to date, is it? Largest equity investment to date. Equity investment. That's great. But at some point we'll get Zach on the pod.
Starting point is 00:32:07 He's a second time founder, really talented. But yeah, I think broadly about businesses that are enabled by stable coins is one of the best places to be investing in stable coins. It's just, it's an indirect route, but it is, to your point, Santi, it's the owning the customer relationship. And we kind of describe it as like, there's a ton of business models and it's like business plus AI equals better business. And in a lot of ways, we think of FinTech as FinTech plus Stables equals better FinTech.
Starting point is 00:32:39 Today's episode is brought to you by Crypto Tax Calculator. If you're looking for accurate crypto taxes with no guesswork, check out Crypto Tax Calculator. Get accurate CPA endorsed tax reports with full support for IRS rules. For those who have fallen down the on-chain rabbit hole, CTC has you covered with more than 3,000 integrations. They have full support for defy staking in NFTs. Import directly to TurboTax or H&R block or share securely with your accountant. Create an account, import your sources, and review. It's that easy. Hello, friends. I am thrilled to share that Ledger is once again partnering and sponsoring with The Breakdown. Many of you know, but for those of you who don't,
Starting point is 00:33:17 ledger is the most secure hardware wallet for your crypto and logins. It's trusted by 7 million users and secures 20% of the world's digital assets. What's more, Ledger is a lot more than wallets. Over the recent years, they've built a comprehensive ecosystem of products and services, all of which are designed to make digital ownership more secure and accessible. You can buy your Bitcoin with Ledger and Ledger Live and so much more. Basically, not only did they want to keep your assets secure, they want you to be able to do more with them. Ledger's newest devices, the Ledger Stacks, and Ledger Flex introduced the world's first touchscreens, making it easier and safer to manage your transactions and assets.
Starting point is 00:33:52 Alongside Ledger Stacks and Ledger Flex, the company also launched the Ledger Security Key app, offering a safer alternative to traditional passwords and enhancing your digital security. If you are in this space, you owe it to yourself to at least check out Ledger and their ecosystem what they have available to you. So thanks, once again, to Ledger for sponsoring the show. I've got a question for all of you, maybe a little bit relevant for Plasma here, but how sticky do you think that stable coins are to their chain, that they're issues? shoot on. And I'm looking at a headline from a standard chartered, which they're estimating $2 trillion of stables on chain. And they called out Salana stable coins being, quote,
Starting point is 00:34:30 stickier than expected. And we're looking at here a chart of the Salana stable coin supply. This massive peak here was the Trump token launch. So you saw a flood of stables on chain. And here I can find the Dex activity after that. But you see the, It's basically remained, and actually you're continuing to see a sustained inflows of stable coins, but it's not like it just dropped off versus the decks activity post the token launch obviously fell off a cliff. So I'm kind of curious how you guys think about how sticky stable coins are to their underlying chains in general. I think Tron has this business model of like almost like Uber, where it went city by city, retailer by retailer and built out those mercantile connections that way.
Starting point is 00:35:19 way. So I think that that is fairly sticky. A lot of the USDT that is on Toronto today is exchange reserves. So I mean, exchanges are kind of the arbiter of where money goes and market maker capital as well, which again is just like looking for a fast and cheap chain. And that's honestly, same thing with Ethereum. A lot of the, you know, whatever 50, 60, 70, 80 billion dollars of stable coins that are on Ethereum are basically just reserves. That being said, there is probably 20 to 40 percent of those, you know, TVL on ETH that is highly mobile and highly active and is embedded in lending markets. And like, I think Ethereum's strength right now is that it just has deeper capital markets than any other chain. It's kind of similar to the U.S.'s strength,
Starting point is 00:36:09 where it's just like the capital markets are so deep that you can finance different types of things. So like Ethereum, I think, is fairly sticky as a result of that. Tron has the retail angle, but, you know, the retail payment vendors, like, they are not loyal to one chain or the other. So that has a pretty low switching cost. And then Salana, I feel like, is an entirely different ecosystem where it's more cyclical as it relates to meme coins. And the stickiness of the stables are related to the stickiness of the meme coins. I do know there have been a lot of outflows of stables from Salana post-Trump, Trump coin. is. And I think that has a risk of continuing if the meme point cycle does not, I guess, restart. I'm not sure if it's still fully kicking or alive, but it seems less alive than it has been in the past.
Starting point is 00:36:58 The meme coin cycle is down quite a bit. I'll go find these statistics for you and pull it up on the dashboard. If that chart's correct, then I think, you know, in assuming meme coins are down whatever percent, like it does seem like the stable coins have stuck around or new has flowed in. They've stuck around. The statistic here, just in terms of revenue being generated by chain here, is Beamcoin activity and Rev generated by that is down to 80%, but Salinas still has 70% of the overall volume by chain. So even though Beamcoin activity is down, their market share relative to all chains is still quite high.
Starting point is 00:37:37 Are you looking at your REV chart? Yeah, here, let me pull it up. I was looking at that, actually, because it is down dramatically, like, Gito tips, priority fees. Like, I mean, basically you saw a spike in what I'm looking at, your literally your network RV chart, which is so nice on Solana. I just, I can send it to you if you want. Yeah, here. I got it.
Starting point is 00:38:01 I'm actually just going to show the tweet of Ryan here. And also, I will say, you know, people were, I remember there was a, I tried to go back and find it in the bell curve. It was actually in the bell curve telegram chat where we were we were debating, we were debating whether or not the spike in REV. There was an analogy to Ethereum's fees that it was generating in 2021, 2022. And to me, it looked a lot like that, right, like some sort of local maximum. And the argument against it at the time was that the fee per transaction was much lower than Ethereum at the time. But I mean, I think.
Starting point is 00:38:39 Well, the, I agree with fee might be lower, but the composition of that fee is very unsustainable because it's a very toxic movie. So that's a point like a Ryan, what is it, Ikegai, Travis Kling says, which is the Salonica Casino is a casino, but it serves you meth and drips meth in your drinks. Like, you would die, which was like a very crude like, which is like the point around toxic and maybe I think is a correct one, which is you, like if you pull up that chart that I sent you on the end, it's like. got you. That to me is something that I think about a lot, which is, yeah, like still, everything's down. Solana still has, and this cycle, Salinas has just captured the attention. It's the most retail-friendly chain. It's not to say that it can't be displaced. I do think that there is a version of this world where, like, it's unsustainable to extract that amount of value per user. And so you think about the organic sustainability of the fee stream
Starting point is 00:39:35 of that REV. And I think you, I, I think you, I, I do wonder, like, where that goes. And, and, yeah, there you go. Yeah. That's a, that's a meme coin chart. Yeah. Quite literally. One question, I mean, this is like, calling into question a lot of strongly held dogma
Starting point is 00:39:58 within the industry, but like, why are these L1s valued in the way that they are? Like, in what case? Do you think everyone agrees that of how these L1s are valued? Well, No, and this is kind of my question. It's like, the other thing that we hear, you know, from LPs is like, how do you value these things and, like, you know, how do you think about, you know, fundamentals and like what's going to be the network driving value, value drivers going forward? And it's like, it's really simple. It's revenue and income.
Starting point is 00:40:28 Like, that's what really matters. Totally. And that definitely resonates. But it's, it's a lot harder to justify that from like $175 billion base versus like, a $1.5 billion base. And, yeah, it's just, it's been interesting to, like, compare and contrast things and calling to question some of the valuation models or if there are any models. But, you know, in thinking about it, you know, and people have tried to do this so many
Starting point is 00:40:55 different ways, is it issuance as a cost? Is it issuance as, like, a, you know, share multiplier? Like, there's an issuance question. There's a revenue question. There's a net income question. And what happens if something like Ethereum becomes net inflationary for a period of time like it has over the last few months? Like there are questions around that. And then the whole question of like the monetary premium.
Starting point is 00:41:17 And if you use Seoul as the trading asset for meme coins, you also use ETH as a trading asset for defy, like how do you put that into the valuation? I mean, like if you look at the top 10, I think to me, even top 20, it's clear that similar to Trondon, you just have had first mover advantage. in these assets that have it's an attention game top 20 you can't i would have predicted 2017 then 2020 then 2023 then now that the composition of the top 10 and 20 20 is going to change dramatically it hasn't really xrp cardano um a lot of these a lot of these chains have just been really good at generating community you know they made a lot of money for some people uh they have the i mean brad is cut in its own cloth like he is just a phenomenal promoter, you know, brand. I, you know, wasn't really expecting XRP to move. I mean,
Starting point is 00:42:13 heck, there's a version with XRP becomes the number two asset. Because they just bought that acquisition, right, that is going to now, like, they're going to will into existence, which is what every protocol kind of candidly should be doing. Like, if you have a war chest of currency, go swap it and buy a real business and, like, grow into the valuation, which I'll give them credit. Look, I won't laugh out. Like, they're just very smart in that way. And, I mean, Chainlink and the way they went about growing and positioning themselves as leading Oracle. Like, you can laugh at Tron all you want, but they've been the single-handedly deploying in boots on the ground, USDT. There's a reason why Tether's market cap of stable coins has and probably will continue to stay at 75%.
Starting point is 00:42:54 And so I think like, I do think that it's like in five, ten years time, we'll definitely look at cash flow and fees. And more importantly, the composition of the fees. Yeah. As you have. And this is something that I think about inversion alone, which is, okay, like, Solana right now, every chain is pure speculation, so to speak. But like, over time, what you want to see is as a percentage of the pie, speculation going down, like meme connectivity, important growing as a whole,
Starting point is 00:43:23 but percentage-wise decreasing. You want to have other types of activity. Maybe it's tokenized stocks. Again, speculation, but a different type of user, different type of company. Because, I mean, the unit economics of the user, in crypto suck. You onboard 100 million people or a million people to buy Trump and then how many of those have stuck around? Not many. The other thing too that we just haven't had that long in crypto yet to debate some of the nuance of yeah, the composition of where these fees are
Starting point is 00:43:54 coming from, Santi. And I don't know, you guys are probably listened to like if you listen to kind of like the way a hedge fund, a traditional hedge fund or big money manager presents to its LPs, they're very very sophisticated way that they like to slice and dice the financials of different sectors and companies, et cetera, right? In crypto, we're just way more immature in terms of thinking about this stuff. And I noticed this around the debates around REV, like REV on crypto Twitter, where people immediately jump to if you're trying to maximize REV, that means you're value extractive and you shouldn't be extracting on day one. It's like, well, no. I think there is a miss, you're missing a durability component in REV. Like, I think it's very fair to look at that income stream and say, if this is
Starting point is 00:44:34 coming from the mean coin casino and I don't think it's sustainable to have people pay 10% slippage to ape into FARC coin, then yeah, you should assign a discount to that, right? But it doesn't necessarily mean that you're max extracting from day one. It just means you have to optimize for something in the long term, right? So we just haven't had that long to chew over all of this stuff, whereas finances had centuries to- I agree. I also think, and this may be like a too simplistic a view doesn't solve everything, but look, there's no gap accounting in crypto. And if we had that, if we had definitions of like, no, that's revenue, this is cost, here's what token issuance looks like.
Starting point is 00:45:15 If we had that and people could see it in real time, I bet these would trade off of fundamentals a lot better. There's another issue with this as well, which is kind of ironic for a space, which is open source, which is we have a massive data and transparency problem in the space. like teams, I'm sure you guys find this when you're doing your due diligence, but it's, it's crazy. I mean, people just, the circulating supply that teams state and what's actually on chain often differ. It's really difficult to track, you know, when you look at that nice pie chart, right, of this is where the tokens go, well, teams mix and match where there's tokens sit in different wallets. So you can't possibly verify any of that on chain, right? There's all of this stuff that sounds so nice to say it's all on chain and transparent, but so difficult, man.
Starting point is 00:46:01 It's just you got to remove the paywall on your dashboards there. You actually want to fix this problem. As a block works investor, we said. I think like, you know, like even like things like REV. Yeah. Like, Normies don't know what that is. Like we need to get to a priced earnings based industry. I mean, Vance, Vance can share this, but Vance found a bug in a dashboard recently.
Starting point is 00:46:32 Yeah, I found a bug in a dashboard, and I was like, hey, like, this doesn't seem right. Is this right? And they were like, no, that's not right. I was like, so you're understating revenue by about $50 million a year? They're like, yeah, I guess we are. And look, like, this is all public information. It's literally on a public ledger. So we just, like, bought more.
Starting point is 00:46:52 well it's i've can't tell how many times of experiences where i'm like you constantly monitoring certain dashboards you're like okay this definitely feels off and then you ping the team and they're like oh yeah i guess you're right like we like yeah capture the next year for the week and he can't come back and we're going to get to like everything is on chain but somehow we can't like have standardized information and like the total versus circulating it's like guys, come like, let's just someone please build it. Edgar SEC, now thank you, please. 10Ks, 10 Q's. Can I ask you guys? What would you like that to look like? Because companies wouldn't fill that out either unless they were, they had to buy. Okay. So token terminal has a good version of this
Starting point is 00:47:41 where it's like lowest to highest fees, you know, net of inflation expenses. I think that's the key thing. Do you think they categorize apples to apples for every protocol? And so this is the problem. There needs to be gap, generally accepted accounting principles for what defines revenue, what defines these things. Like the definitions of the accounting standards is just as important as just like putting them out. But the other thing that's really important is getting into a cadence.
Starting point is 00:48:11 And I don't think you need companies to file these Edgar equivalent documents. These are protocols, right? They should be on chain. They're also startups too, right? Like, they're not, that's just too much onus for even a two-year-old. Yeah, but like, I mean. They're $10 billion startups with like teams of 150. Like, shit, task two interns to do this shit.
Starting point is 00:48:28 Yeah. Let's keep in mind before, before Sabarns actually, Amazon went public with $300 million market cap. Like, they can, they can handle, you know, IPO level disclosures if they really wanted to. But I think what the reason why save Arns is such an important element in, in the process of companies selling public now is there's, there's. literally criminal liability if you get those things wrong. And so that's the reason why it is such a higher standard and such a higher bar. And so look, it's just you standardize this. You have,
Starting point is 00:48:59 you know, a methodology for accounting for things. You put them out. And maybe you're required to file a report every year or every quarter of just like, hey, here's what we've got. And that's it. I would also argue that even outside of financials, there might even be a more basic set of disclosures and requirements that needs to be had here, which is what is the relationship between the labs entity and the foundation, right? What agreements do you have in place with market makers? Like, these are just basic, these are just basic things to make it even investable, right? Before you even know the financials. Like, there's, I don't know. We won't say who, and, but we have literally multiple portfolio companies who haven't launched yet who are literally going to be doing
Starting point is 00:49:39 this when they launch. Yeah. And I think there's a, sorry, doing what, like disclosure? They're going to be putting out disclosures. They're going to be putting out quarterly They're going to be putting out basically like all of their best practices on how they evaluate their protocol and the success and the growth metrics. They're going to be putting out disclosures around the team accounts and which ones are the team wallets. Maker hasn't done that to that extent, but I think as a protocol, they were pretty far along the curve of being pretty buttoned up in their disclosures. I mean, certainly, I mean, it's a low bar, but the Ethereum Foundation being like probably the worst in sense of most capitalized and yet like, terrible reporting and accounting and just like no accountability as far as where a hundred million dollars are being spent each year and you're like here's a little like here's a little inside
Starting point is 00:50:29 baseball as well guess what the liquid buyers of assets will buy your token the more information you disclose and so if you are a protocol founder and you're like how do I get in front of people who will buy my token share more information and absolutely you will have you will have a lot more people who are interested in buying your token. I think this is true for like the protocols that are just going to launch. There is the Cardano effect, which is you never want to share any information because. Well, yeah. And then it's a process where if you're not hearing, there's something going on.
Starting point is 00:51:06 And if there's something going on, it's probably not worth it. I agree. Let me ask you guys this. One thing that I feel like exists in crypto, for lack of a better term, it's kind of like the token industrial supply. chain where there are a lot of people, there's a lot of incentives, right, to not surface some of this stuff. And we've talked about this before.
Starting point is 00:51:26 You know, everyone was yelling at VC coins, quote unquote, for a little bit. And I just think I was so misdirected, right, where it's really, honestly, not a lot of shade got put towards market makers and also the exchanges. Not every exchange, but some have some egregious, egregious policymaking or like policies for listing tokens. And I don't know that I say it's bad. It's really bad. And they've got everyone locked up under NDAs.
Starting point is 00:51:52 No one can talk about it. Everyone's incentivized to not talk about it because investors need to launch tokens. If you're going to launch a token, you've got to maintain good relationships. Until things break through. And once they break through, what are they going to do? Lock everybody up? It's kind of like the, you know, what's the exchange? If everybody who's launching a successful protocol says, hey, here are all the deals that I got from all the exchanges.
Starting point is 00:52:15 are those exchanges really not going to list something that's doing really well? If they shared what those details were? No, of course not. It should be transparent. It should be open. But it will take a first mover. I would love if Dex is benefited from this. I think they already are.
Starting point is 00:52:30 There's a sort of a structural trend of Dex's to benefit here in the long tail because the listing process is so much easier. And if the big centralized guys keep taking 10% slugs out of the token supply, then that's only going to accelerate. So maybe this should just keep doing it. An informed listener might say, wait a minute, like insert Leo DeCaprio. I mean, like, Misari tried to do this, but hasn't been able to, and it's a coordination problem. Look, obviously exchanges do require this information. Like, Binance listing requirements and the colonoscopy that a team has to go through is very stringent. They don't share that with folks, because, to Michael's point, you know, the, look, guys, like, there's an standard IPO.
Starting point is 00:53:12 Like, look at IPOs. if you're a lead left or right underwriter, like you're, you take, like, there's fees that you disclose. I think, like, you normalize that and, you know, I think it should be fine. But, you know, the incentives haven't been there. I do think to Michael's point, like, if we get all, if all the new projects like coordinating say, listen, we're just going to share this type of information and we're going to make it transparent in public and, you know, just be that as a may, like, I think we're going to be in a better position as an industry to be taken seriously by TradFi and just new flows coming in.
Starting point is 00:53:39 We all know this. We all know this, but there's this entity called FINRA for the funny financial industry, which is it's not a regulator. It's literally something that was created by all of the financial institutions to be a self-regulatory organization. And everybody has to apply, like, comply with FINRA guidelines and standards and you have to like register with them when you're managing money or your financial institution. Like, I'm not saying that we need to do FINRA, but there are mechanisms that you can do that are self-regulatory. The other reason why this is in everyone's best interest to do something that looks like SRO is if you, if the industry can prove that it's regulating somewhat, right, to an extent and you can pass something somewhat favorable off to a regulator,
Starting point is 00:54:19 they're more willing to listen than if you haven't done anything and then they're just going to regulate you how they want to regulate you, right? It's a way to at least have a seat at the table, right? And one thing I'd be curious, I think this is something we've thought about as well. It's interesting you guys are getting to new protocols might have an advantage here. One thing I'd be really sympathetic to is the setup of some of the OG protocols. it was just done at a different time, right? Maybe for ideological purposes, maybe for regulatory purposes. And yeah, like, how do you reckon some of the older protocols that are, you know,
Starting point is 00:54:50 blue chip and really well intentioned, but maybe have a sort of bizarre structures because they got set up in a different time? As soon as the top 10, 20, composition starts changing because new flows going and the protocols are actually buttoned up, yeah, they're going to do it. Don't expect them to do it now. They have no incentive to do it. they will as the industry grows up. Just like also like let's standardize a repository where if people are going to issue
Starting point is 00:55:15 disclosures. So let's go back to I think it was Liberty Finance. What is it? Liberty Financial and Suey or say announced like something, right? But it was like. It was Sue. The timeline was like like oh, this is crime season. I'm like, is it like if there was proper disclosures and proper like announcement
Starting point is 00:55:38 that are made. I don't think there's anything wrong with having a partnership between two companies. It's just, you know, standardize how the communication happens, how the disclosure of conflicts of interest happen, and also, you know, have 10B5 plans for the team. If they're selling, make sure they're not selling around that disclosure. All this stuff is like very normalized in finance. Like you have 10B51 plans for executives, normalized like selling. Coinbase went through hot water and everyone tried to poke calls and like, oh, why are the executive selling a dude? agreed on these.
Starting point is 00:56:10 10B5. 1. Just to clear. Yeah, just to describe what those are if people don't know. Yeah. 10B51 say, so you're an executive of a company, right? And you say, I want to, Jeff Bayser's done, every major executive of public company has to go through this, which says, I want to take chips off the table.
Starting point is 00:56:25 I want to sell my stock, or in this case, token. You say, I'm going to sell programmatically in this cadence. And there's, you could either do it every, every Monday or a certain amount of stock. But it's a very, an over like six-month period, 12-month period, you know, usually it's like 12 months or whatever. And so that kind of insulates you because no matter what happens, say there's an M&A acquisition, like an M&A transaction or a lot of news coming out, you're sort of like tied your hands to selling programmatically.
Starting point is 00:56:56 And so that's the way that this should be done. And I think it's something that I would encourage every founder of a protocol that, look, nothing wrong taking chips off the table, enter into, and it just can be an email to yourself, says, I'm going to, or you deliver tokens to like a smart contract or a market maker and says, hey, sell these tokens programmatically. And that I think is the best way to address, like, you know, insider seller selling and whatnot. In the case of Suey or this announcement, it would have imagined there's two paths forward. If the team sold any tokens and you didn't have a 10b5 plan or like some sort of,
Starting point is 00:57:37 to schedule, you're in hot water. Because then everyone's going to say, you sold these tokens when the market pumped. You could have said, listen, I agreed to selling this. You know, it's normal. Here's those, you know, programmed, whatever. And these are the type of things that are very common in finance that should be standardized in crypto. Like, honestly, if you're a protocol and you've raised decent amount of money and you're
Starting point is 00:58:00 going to have a TG and you're going to have a token, have an investor relations person on your team. not only to talk to liquid tokens, but also just, you know, to make sure that your comms are in place, your investors are in place, like connectivity with investors. It's just such a standard thing that every fund has, every major company, public company has. And, you know, for better or for worse, crypto is that environment where companies go public earlier. But that doesn't mean or give you any reason or excuse not to be buttoned up on comms.
Starting point is 00:58:34 I completely agree with that. I mean, it matters so much, right, when public companies, when you have the CFO or the CEO get up there. There's a lot of training that goes in there. There it is. How you sell it to Mark. Jeff Bezos is one of the all-time goats, right? I mean, he got everyone very comfortable with Amazon generating no profits for a long time because he was reinvesting. And that was a huge bugaboo that Wall Street had with him forever.
Starting point is 00:58:56 But he was just a really good comp. I think Reed Hastings, right? Netflix was also quite good at this. Yeah, go let's go read. I mean, obviously, go read Jeff Bezos investor letters. There are other than the Berkshire letters, it's like, it's up there. It's really good. Absolutely good.
Starting point is 00:59:12 All right, fellas, I think we can call it here. This was a really fun one. Sonti, thank you. We got extraterrestrials. Oh, sorry, Michael. End us with aliens, dude. Yeah, end us for the aliens. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:59:24 This is my totally out of left field interest, but it was pretty interesting. Yes, we found a planet 124 light years away that we've just. discovered in 2015 have been basically sending signals out to assess what is on this planet or in this planet. There have been previous signals that have come back that signify the presence of water, the presence of nitrogen and carbon dioxide. And what is most interesting is there are two different molecules or compounds that were identified in this, I believe it was officially identified last week, that can only. come from organic material, biological organic material.
Starting point is 01:00:09 And if both of these compounds are truly identified, that suggests that there is biological organic material 124 light years away from us. On a planet that is eight times the size of Earth with a livable distance, as they said, from the star in that solar system. Granted. K218B.
Starting point is 01:00:37 Yeah, exactly. Someone's going to launch a meme coin with that. There we go. And I'm going to punt that to the moon. Oh, my God. Yeah, they're going to release the data next week and other scientists are going to confirm or deny it. But it is a 3 in 1,000 chance that the findings that they have so far are a fluke,
Starting point is 01:00:59 which is apparently a 3-sigma, validation, and for it to be a scientific community validation, they need 5 Sigma. So we're going to get it tested. Some of these quotes are pretty cool. I'm sharing an article here from the BDC. It's the DMS and the DMS are the two molecules that I was referencing. Yeah. Some of these quotes here are really interesting from this BBC article.
Starting point is 01:01:27 If this association with life is real, then this planet will be teeming with life. there's the amount of gas that we estimate in the atmosphere here is thousands of times higher than what we have on Earth. And this last line here from this professor, Madhuistan, if we confirm that there's life on K-12-18B, it should basically confirm that life is very common in the galaxy. So it's 124 light years away. What is it? 800 trillion miles from here. Yep.
Starting point is 01:01:54 Still realize. Are we going to see my distant cousins anytime soon or what's going on? coincidentally, coincidentally, last week I started rereading before I found out about this,
Starting point is 01:02:04 Project Hail Mary. I read that. That's so good. There's a new movie coming out that's coming out, I think, in the fall. And it's Andy Weir
Starting point is 01:02:14 who wrote The Martian, a really, really good book. It's more like they're trying to solve a problem, less they're trying to go explore,
Starting point is 01:02:22 but it does talk about being a human at the far reaches of light years away from Earth that's pretty interesting if anybody wants to go back right you think they have tariffs in kb 1812b or something if they don't they're gonna assume baby we're on tariff will issue tariffs to k2 1 880s
Starting point is 01:02:42 mfs it's not rare earth minerals anymore it's now rare extraterrestrial gas is that what's incoming tweet from trammoth i have secured 25% exactly how many more gases than we have here do you guys track like asteroids mining and all that? I don't know. Should I be? I mean, if I have graciously invited to some other pod in this, you should look into it. It's like the amount of gold and rare earth minerals and on some of these asteroids that could
Starting point is 01:03:16 be potentially be mined is like astronomical. The problem is like, how do you bring it back to Earth? But yeah. How much Bitcoin are they finding on those asteroids? None. none that is that is very true sir very true all right guys um i think we can wrap it here santi appreciate you joining man michael thank you for the aliens all right everyone take care

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.