The Pomp Podcast - #1372 Pranav Kanade | Billions Coming To Bitcoin and Stablecoins

Episode Date: August 9, 2024

Pranav Kanade is the Portfolio Manager for VanEck’s Digital Assets Alpha Disclosure. He is deep in the weeds of crypto. In this conversation, we talk about bitcoin, ethereum, altcoins, memecoins, re...gulation, the future of stablecoins, and much more.  ======================= CrossFi is the Apple Pay for Crypto. For the first time in history, anyone with a web 3 wallet like Metamask can spend crypto through a physical or virtual visa cards anywhere in the world where Visa is accepted. Be one of the first to get your hands on a CrossFi card and a prize pool of $3 Million Dollars by joining and participating in their testnet today: ⁠⁠https://xfi.foundation/users⁠⁠ ======================= BetOnline.ag is a proud sponsor of the the Pomp Podcast. Use crypto to bet on sports, play poker and enjoy casino games at BetOnline. Visit https://promotions.betonline.ag/pomp and use promo code POMP100 to receive a 100% matching bonus on any crypto deposit. BetOnline boasts no crypto transaction fees, and processing is anonymous, instantaneous and secure. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

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Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. All right, guys, I've got a really special episode for you today. We have Pranav Kanade. He is the portfolio manager for VanEck's digital assets outfair strategy. He is deep in the weeds of crypto. He's thinking about Bitcoin,
Starting point is 00:00:43 Ethereum, all the altcoins. He's got some thoughts on meme coins, regulation, what are going to happen with stable coins, and much, much more. I really enjoyed this conversation because it is very rare that I get to talk to someone who's thought deeply about so many different topics across the industry. Pranav and I spent a ton of time talking behind closed doors. So I'm excited to get him on the podcast and have you all listen to some of his thoughts. Go check him out on Twitter at VanEckPK or let us know after this episode what you thought. Here is my episode with Pranav. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments.
Starting point is 00:01:22 You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guest as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Today's episode is brought to you by CrossFi. CrossFi is the Apple pay for crypto. For the first time in history, anyone with a Web3 wallet like Metamask can spend crypto through a physical or virtual Visa card anywhere in the world where Visa is accepted. No more exchanges or middlemen. Just link your wallet, get your card, and start spending today. CrossFide card transactions have already been successfully processed in New York, Los Angeles, London, Dubai, China, Japan,
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Starting point is 00:03:05 BetOnline.ag, go check them out today. I thought a great place to start this conversation is there is trouble in the water in crypto. uh one of the things you and i have talked about is there's a bunch of these low float very high fdv tokens that are out there maybe even high hype uh as well um the bitcoin maximalist would be like you know it's bitcoin and nothing else the crypto people are like you guys are absolutely insane look at all this other great stuff that's going on are all coins all going to crash is this all going to be zeros i don't think so i think that's like a you know there's
Starting point is 00:03:37 a lot of nuance in all of that um the way i articulate it to people is bitcoin's probably the only asset in crypto that's achieved like true product market fit you know it's like 300 to 400 million people in the world on bitcoin whether on some centralized exchange or self-custody wallet there's five billion people with an internet connection so you're saying you know you're kind of getting to like eight nine percent of internet penetration there which is the point where you can say yeah like this is a true product market fit everything else is just a broad experiment right it's kind of an extension of this idea that you can build applications on these public ledgers and um ultimately uh that's supposed to enhance the user experience but also create
Starting point is 00:04:12 a better, faster, cheaper version of what already exists in the traditional world. So it's kind of recreating a lot of those things. And that's still broadly an experiment in my view. So the right way to measure that in my view is look at the number of on-chain unique wallets interacting with these blockchains. That number is probably like
Starting point is 00:04:29 30 million monthly active wallets. Again, relative to like 5 billion people in an internet connection. So the entire asset class outside of Bitcoin is purely a venture asset class. And I started following this space outside of Bitcoin in 2017. And if you were to ask me, what are the odds that this thing becomes mainstream one day? I would have said 5% because it was all just a bunch of white papers then.
Starting point is 00:04:52 If you asked me that same question in 2020, 2021, I would have said 25, 30%. And you could have said, yeah, it's maybe DeFi, NFTs, gaming. Something's there and something unique will come out of it. Today, if you ask me, I think we're close to 50% that this thing goes mainstream. So the odds are kind of interesting. The question is, what is the next domino to fall in terms of product market fit and adoption? My opinion is it's stablecoins. Now, it could be Deepin, it could be SocialFi, it could be some of these other things that
Starting point is 00:05:21 are kind of interesting, but I think it's really stablecoins, because it essentially has the buy-in from all the constituents you need to get something to go mass market. To be specific, it's more like US dollar stablecoins. So my general view is, for variety factors, that's the thing that's going to take us from, let's just say 30 million monthly active wallets to hundreds of millions and any project that is somewhat adjacent to the stablecoin adoption story will do extremely well so if you're looking at the altcoin universe you want to focus in and around that theme and you know then everything else becomes kind of it is it isn't quite in bets around sort of what they're trying to build
Starting point is 00:05:56 so let's talk about stablecoins first which um i was blown away i looked at the tether transparency report you know they have on their website yeah um the u.s dollar stablecoin is like 100 billion or 110 billion or some massive number 160 i think the euro i think i think 160 is all of them combined and so just the tether us dollar oh tether uh was you know call it 100 120 billion something like that yeah the next biggest one that tether has according to this website the euro stablecoin is 30 million it's the difference between like 100 plus billion yeah and 30 million yeah and i was like wait a minute is this a sign that like the free market has spoken and people globally when given the frictionless experience that i
Starting point is 00:06:41 can switch between any currency in the world they all want dollars yep right and so um obviously that's great business like you know tether's printing cash usdc uh encircle our printing cash um but man it does not seem like there's a lot of demand outside of a u.s dollar stable coin and so all of these other ones are they just they're cute you got to kind of be doing something else other than this dollar stable coin but really it's the dollar stable coin or nothing i think so You know, I grew up in India, in Bangalore, and, you know, my parents are doctors, so, you know, kind of grew up around, let's just say, upper middle class. And everyone aspired to have dollars or have some amount of their net worth stored in dollars because, you know, it was a diversification away from the rupee. And I, you know, I try to go back to India every couple of years.
Starting point is 00:07:26 I went back in December and I was hoping to run around and see folks say we want some Bitcoin because the Indian rupee to the dollar has kind of gone from like 50 something to 80 something. i haven't looked at it recently but so it has devalued against the dollar and you would think that people want bitcoin uh no people just want dollars right people feel like it's been um this bright and shining star uh out there for a long time people feel safe in it it's just very hard for the average user even in like a country like india that has a pretty high internet penetration to get their hands around dollars um and i would imagine it's very similar across the globe um um and so u.s dollar stable coins is is one that i think has product market fit for a broader audience than even the number of people that have bitcoin
Starting point is 00:08:14 and you know in variety these countries a bunch of these countries what's interesting to me is uh if that is true right which all the data is suggesting u.s dollar stable coins are going to continue to uh proliferate um the dollar is going to strengthen and bitcoin is going to strengthen so this whole like bitcoin is going to succeed and the dollar is going to fall at its feet appears to be wrong. Actually, it looks like the dollar is going to be stronger. Bitcoin's going to be stronger. And it's every other currency is going to kind of be the ones that fall because the people who want fiat are going to go to the dollar. It's great for medium of exchange, all this stuff. Bitcoin obviously is great long-term store of value. And so then it
Starting point is 00:08:52 starts to open up this question of like, okay, well, if the dollar is going to continue to get stronger, we can talk about China and Japan used to buy 22% of all the debt. Now they're buying 7%. Paul Ryan came out with this recent op-ed and he's like, wait a second, guys. There's a net new buyer of the treasuries, which is these dollar stable coins. But what I found even more interesting than just like they're buying a lot is Circle and Tether are not interest rate sensitive. They are going to hold the treasuries, whether interest rates are at 5% or at 1%. That's what central banks do. They don't care what the interest rate is. They're not doing it for just the yield. Whereas a lot of the institutional investors who have been buying a lot of this
Starting point is 00:09:33 debt specifically from China as they're offloading it, et cetera, they are super interest rate sensitive. And so in a weird way, the stablecoin issuers are not just great because they're showing up with new demand, but they're going to show up with new demand and they're going to hold the treasuries regardless of where interest rates go, right? Yep. 100%. And what's most interesting about it is if you look at world GDP, 60% of it is driven by consumer. And if you look at another dissection of it, you know, the U.S. is 25% of world GDP. So like 75% of world GDP is like all these countries outside. And a lot of that is consumer. That consumer around the world has not had an easy way to buy dollars. And essentially, if you're able to distribute to
Starting point is 00:10:12 those people, those people are not interest rate sensitive buyers, as you put it. So which is like fantastic for the U.S. government to want this product to succeed because, you know, actually the Federal Reserve put out a report yesterday or two days ago that I was reading, which is basically around this topic of um the fed's been reducing its balance sheet um who's been the kind of the marginal buyer and it's like basically like households broker dealers um you know to smaller extent hedge funds um and you know pensions and those types of entities now all those guys ultimately are interest rate sensitive right of all sudden the fed cuts the households that have been buying t-bills are going to rotate out those tables into equities or something that can give
Starting point is 00:10:50 a better return um to your point the stable coin issuers are not interest rate sensitive they have to park it somewhere and so and they can't go buy stocks with that capital they have to buy it by short-term government bonds or government uh bills so yeah so i think it's like a really good thing for the united states um which goes back to kind of that original point which is um you know the US regulators slash politicians slash government should like this. Merchants should like this because it gives you a way to reduce your costs. You don't have to use the credit card rails, banking rails anymore. Stablecoin rails are cheaper. And consumers outside the United States also should like it. So it's kind of got this win-win-win sort of
Starting point is 00:11:35 construct. I think the reason stablecoins haven't taken off, and when I say taken off, that 160 billion of total dollar stable coins hasn't gone to like tens of trillions already is because there's been this hesitance by merchants from accepting stable coins to some extent so like if you just you know talk to the big e-commerce players in the united states e-commerce is like a trillion of like seven trillion of us gdp you ask them like like why aren't you taking stable coins for payments or why aren't you trying to figure out a way to make this super user-friendly so that people pay you in stable coins? The answer often is like, well, we don't know how the US regulators feel about this. We don't want to get caught. Like our core
Starting point is 00:12:18 business is like, you know, e-commerce. We don't want to get caught up in this crypto regulatory crosshairs. So if you can change that through like what's happening in DC these days, then I think you can see this kind of big hockey stick adoption curve. Yeah. Now, what becomes more interesting is can the stable coin issuers collectively become the single largest holder of treasuries? They're, I think, 15th or 16th on the list right now. Paul Ryan, the former House Speaker in this op-ed, he said, if they were a country, they'd be the 10th largest country. But man, the trend seems to be going in their favor. And so if this stuff becomes a trillion, $2 trillion market cap, they probably are going to be top five.
Starting point is 00:12:59 But there's a world where Circle and Tether are the largest collective holders of treasuries in the world. Yep. Definitely possible, right? And it's also probable. What's more interesting to me is then extending that question a little further and say, okay, let's say stablecoin market cap, again, dollar stablecoin market cap is a couple of trillion dollars. That would imply that we have tons of on-chain users, you know, that 30 million is 100, 200, 300 million. All those people have a bunch of stablecoins in a wallet somewhere. and at some point those people will want access to financial products the only real available financial products for someone at stablecoin today is either money market funds with you know blackrock and ando and a couple of these other issuers or the other extreme end of the spectrum which is like altcoins and meme coins right uh you need some assets right down the middle which to me is tokenized equities so like i could see a world in the next couple years where um you know someone in an emerging market or a developing country has a self-custody wallet with the US
Starting point is 00:14:04 dollar stable coin, and then is now choosing to asset allocate and is asset allocating to, you know, US credit and also like US public equities, right? I would think that if you were to tell people in, you know, Turkey, Argentina, India, you know, Vietnam, that they can all of a sudden very easily own Apple stock, like I think they'd want to. now do you think that they want that over dollars though like one of the things that i keep coming back to is um in u.s equity markets today uh and people get really upset when i say this but i don't think that the historical valuation metrics really matter as much as they used to right and so why is that well there's a lot of people who are saying you know this inflation thing is a big
Starting point is 00:14:45 problem yeah i'm gonna actually buy stocks because they seem to go up when inflation is high and so now i am not just buying it on the pure fundamentals of like what is this business worth there's this like monetary premium that starts to get assigned and so when you look backwards over the last 50 or 100 years you're like oh my god the stocks are so much higher than the historical valuation i'm not saying that valuation doesn't matter right it definitely matters but what i am saying is like maybe there's like a 10 or 20 percent lift in terms of yes it is actually still valued at the same plus a 10 20 monetary premium yeah and so it looks elevated but the holder base is shifting and so like that is like the quote-unquote new way to value um these
Starting point is 00:15:25 businesses but i don't know how do you think about it so i think it all depends on the marginal flows of capital so so um i think stats are that 70 to 80 percent of uh shareholders in any public companies institutional and the rest is kind of retail and obviously there's extremes right gamestop is probably largely retail um you know i think if you can look at the tesla vote from last week it tells you how much of tesla shareholders is retail versus institutional i think it was like a 45 retail 55 institutional like mix but also there's a shift going on underneath which is the boomers have all the money and over the past decade or two uh the boomers have chosen to allocate via passive like etfs but as that wealth transitions from the boomers to the
Starting point is 00:16:10 millennials and the gen xers i think that's that's the generation after us right how they choose to allocate might be different they might say i don't know if i want to buy a whole bunch of etfs like you know i'd rather just own elon companies because you know elon creates a ton of value and they built they might be indifferent to the s p or sorry the the earnings multiple of that stock um you know this whole like framework around um free cash flow based valuing assets is something that i think is something that that is trained or that the existing set of folks that drive capital markets are trained with, but the next generation might not think about the same, these assets the same way. They might sort of think about it very differently.
Starting point is 00:16:53 And if we then take equities, we have stable coins, we have kind of the Bitcoin story, this idea of mix between retail and institutional, when the ETF got approved for Bitcoin, I think everyone thought it was institutions. Now there's some data coming out that suggests maybe it was actually majority retail yeah um you know we saw recently uh commentary from someone at blackrock actually i think it was the uh cio of the etf and indexing business there was like no it's 80 retail investors 20 institutions that number blew my mind right um the estimates are self-directed brokerage people go to their 16 billion dollars has flowed into these products 13 billion of it they were saying um is you know uh depending on each estimate some people say 80
Starting point is 00:17:40 some say 13 uh billion some people say uh you know another way they're measuring it is like on-chain bitcoin that is actually moving into uh the etfs um and really just the idea is like way more retail is buying the etf than institutions or than what people were thinking yeah is that a positive or should we be concerned like actually are the institutions not coming I think our view was that it will take time for the institutions to come, right? These channels need to, you know, they have their own internal processes to then approve these products and then try to think about, you know, how does it fit within like sort of an asset allocation framework and then ultimately then recommend these things. If you just think about like the incentive structures at these wealth manager, RIA channels or whatnot, the job is to not get fired, right? So like the way you get fired is you buy some asset for your client at some high price and it draws down.
Starting point is 00:18:35 And then, you know, the client is like, why did you buy this from me? So I think that channel takes time. What's interesting about the quantity of inflows and where it's come from being retail, I think there was like an interesting reflexive trade that got set up, which was, you know, you had a whole bunch of like things that kickstarted the ETF inflows. you know call it people like larger crypto funds that own bitcoin that said you know what we'll swap our bitcoin for the etf that created some inflows at the same time you had a bunch of like model portfolios that that said you know what for our model portfolio one percent allocation makes sense and then that created sort of this uh buyer that is not as price sensitive so like model portfolios you know when they decide they want to have a one percent allocation they don't care if
Starting point is 00:19:19 they're buying at 43k or 44k they just need to get their allocation so those are like the first movers um and then as those inflows were coming in retail was like well there's this nice tailwind right now like there's a whole new buyer base coming in and all of retail or a big chunk of retail came in right to chase that flow and that created this reflexive feedback loop so inflect you know uh new flow new retail flows that tracked essentially model flows and that kind of like fed itself um is that a good thing a bad thing you know i think it's net good the question is all the retail flows that came in is it replacement flows like did people sell spot bitcoin and then go buy the etf or is it in addition uh we don't know that you know price action would tell you
Starting point is 00:20:06 it's probably an additional uh flow rather than a cannibalizing flow but that's kind of my guess What do you think? You're a Bitcoin guy. I'm curious. I think that retail definitely was buying. I think that there is net inflows for sure. I think that I was surprised by how much was retail versus institutional. I agree that it will take a while for the institutions to start allocating. I also think that institutions chase even more than retail does. Retail is very undisciplined. And so price starts to run. They're like, oh, I can't miss this. And they go in and it further perpetuates it.
Starting point is 00:20:42 But I think institutions are not immune to that either. They may be worse. And so if we go through the summer and Q3 maybe and prices are flat, and then all of a sudden we get a Q4 and in Q4 prices start to run. I mean, there's a world where all the institutions start piling in, which is what we saw in end of 2020, end of 2021. People were just using the grayscale GBTC ARB trade. And so right now there's a lot of people piling in. but when I look at the net inflows, one of the other things that's interesting is there's a lot of basis trade going on. And so you've got, you know, one side, if you just look at the net inflows
Starting point is 00:21:18 of the ETF, but you're not looking at the short interest. And so I think some of that's happening as well. So it's fascinating to me, right? It's like they approved a product that everyone wanted $16 billion floated into this thing. Bitcoin's up about 50% or so since then. And people are looking at the data now and they're like, oh, none of the people that we really thought were showing up are here yet yeah and so the question is like are they going to come if they come then that'll be good uh if they don't you know maybe that's a bad thing right maybe actually we wanted them here and we should be concerned yeah the other thing that i found relatively interesting was um you know so so we have our global business i traveled to asia for a bit uh i was in singapore
Starting point is 00:22:01 hong kong meeting family offices private banks those types of entities in september of last year So before this really happened and I went back in January and the biggest change I noticed was the first time I went talking about crypto is very hard. You know, it was kind of like nobody was like that interested in talking about it. You know, any given like asset manager, whether small family office or multifamily office, it's always one of these things where like you have like three or four decision makers. One person loves crypto and then two kind of like, I don't really care about this. And one person hates it. So for the one person who loves crypto, talking about crypto is very hard. And convincing the rest of the team for an allocation into the space was also very hard.
Starting point is 00:22:42 When I went back in January, what I could see, and this was with a different set of allocators, was that the one person that loves crypto had like this ammo. Like, look, the Bitcoin ETF has been approved. The US has given you a green light. Like, we got to do something. And it was not only that. It was like the person that hates crypto and the two people that don't care, they were also like caught off guard. like it was almost like this unexpected positive um the details of how we got here didn't matter which is like oh we had to litigate to get here kind of thing but it was just the fact so i imagine
Starting point is 00:23:12 there's been a ton of flows that comes that has come out of different parts of the world beyond just the us let's talk about um ethereum obviously uh with ether i think there's been two things one um it looks like and they're now talking about the fact that they're going to approve an e3 etf at some point um it looks like it'll happen sometimes later this summer kind of july august timeframe. And then ConsenSys recently came out and said, hey, we filed this lawsuit against the SEC. We've asked for clarification. They have let us know that this investigation around Ethereum 2.0 is finalized. And it looks like Ether is going to be classified as a commodity, not a security. This feels like a way bigger deal than people even making it. People are making a kind of a
Starting point is 00:23:53 big deal, but this feels like, oh, wait a second. There's a lot of worldviews, a lot of frameworks that people had that just got shattered because ETH is not going to end up being a security. And so talk a little bit as to, you know, was this an expected thing? And then what do you think those ramifications are? Yep. So I know everyone is excited
Starting point is 00:24:10 about potentially spot ETF and all these things, but I think there's something bigger happening here, right? Like the entire world that assumed that this ETF might not happen. And at this, like, while like this ETF approval process and this consensus thing is happening, something else happening in DC,
Starting point is 00:24:24 which is obviously Trump came out in kind of full support for this asset class, which uh during his administration they weren't as friendly to the space um and then that had a bunch of uh democrats in the house kind of re-evaluate their own positions on this thing uh especially the ones that um have to um potentially get re-elected in november so you know so what was interesting to me is like the accounting bill sab 121 uh had basically I think like 21 Democrats in the House vote in favor. And, you know, some folks in the Senate,
Starting point is 00:24:57 which obviously Biden ultimately vetoed. And that was like kind of an interesting, whatever, nice bill, but it wasn't as important as the FIT21 bill that passed the following week, which had, I think, 71 Democrats in the House. Like there was an exponential growth in the number of Democrats
Starting point is 00:25:12 supporting a more impactful bill, which is, I guess, like a crypto market structure bill, right? So I think there's like a wholesale shift happening here where crypto went from sort of this, you know, three months ago, we were like this kind of like abandoned asset class that we had no idea who really supported us. And our assumption was, we're going to have to fight through the courts to get any amount of clarity. And all of a sudden, we became this sort of like, or we're becoming this like asset class that has some bipartisan
Starting point is 00:25:40 support to allow us to exist and allow the good projects in the space to thrive. So that's what's, I think, really happening. And, you know, the ETH ETF is potentially one manifestation of that, but it's not the main thing. So I think it's interesting to kind of look beyond it, right? So if ETH is not a security, it's a commodity, what does it say about all the other L1s? I don't know. Because theoretically, I could make the case that there's some L1s that you and I have talked about that are better technical solutions to solving this problem of how do you onboard hundreds of millions of people to use these blockchains and ultimately have these things scale. And we can make a case both ways that Solana is potentially a better solution than Ethereum and these L2s in some ways.
Starting point is 00:26:29 So I think people need to kind of maybe zoom out beyond the ETF and look at what's shifting, what's changing. People have been upset that are in the hardcore Bitcoin community because I've said, listen, when the facts change, you got to change your mind. It's a sign of intelligence. They're not going to be securities. They are going to be commodities as we're seeing. There's going to be ETFs. Altcoins are going to come to Wall Street. Again, whether you like it or don't like it, you agree they should or not, that is all the data we have right now is that is going to happen. And then also if you are in those investor kind of capital allocator seats, You better get up to speed because there's a lot of people who I've known for a long time who said, oh, it's going to be Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:27:09 And now I've got to decide, do I put on Bitcoin exposure or not? All of a sudden, it looks like, wait a second, there's this very large investable universe that I know nothing about. And so I can choose to sit it out just like I might sit out certain sectors or kind of verticals in public equities or whatever. But if I want to find risk, because ultimately that's really what Wall Street's looking for is where can I take a lot of risk? and hopefully get a larger term for taking that risk, you're going to have to figure this out and you're going to have to get up to speed, not just now on Bitcoin and ETH.
Starting point is 00:27:44 I don't know how far it goes down kind of the coin market cap list, right? But it's not the first two. And maybe it's not the first hundred, but if it's 25, that's a pretty big investable universe that people got to start. And if you look at how much work they had to do
Starting point is 00:27:59 to get comfortable investing in Bitcoin, I mean, this is years, right? of work ahead of these people to get up to speed on everything else. The only kind of quote-unquote counterpoint to that is that
Starting point is 00:28:08 a lot of these people have done the work. You think so? I've met a lot of them. I mean, so I think the big pools of capital really are the endowments,
Starting point is 00:28:16 foundations, pensions, sovereigns. And, you know, I've met a lot of these folks and there are always like groups
Starting point is 00:28:24 within these larger organizations that have done the work that have made the internal case but have been derailed, you know, let's just say
Starting point is 00:28:31 because of FTX and all these things. So what have they made the case? They're making the case for Bitcoin. They're making the case for Ethereum. Are they making the case for number 10 or 12 on the list? So they've made the case for digital assets and they've been allocated to venture funds in this space
Starting point is 00:28:45 because they're terrified of the mark to market of this stuff, right? Because again, it all goes back to like incentives. So like, if you think about these large organizations, the people who like crypto, they don't have an incentive-based compensation structure. They make X no matter what. Their job is to sustain that job for like, I don't know,
Starting point is 00:29:02 30 years and sort of collect that check. So it's only downside. So like, you know, crypto is just like this controversial topic. So if you have an investment committee of 10 people in your XYZ pension, there is no real economic upside for you to go in there and say, you know, allocate to this right now because there's great returns to be had. Because what's going to happen is you allocate to a liquid token strategy of some sort. And all of a sudden that strategy goes up and down 25%, this person has to now sit in front of that group of people
Starting point is 00:29:33 and explain why that is happening. And that's too much work. So they've all kind of chosen to allocate to venture because you don't have to deal with the quote-unquote mark-to-market and you don't have to explain to someone what a token is, right?
Starting point is 00:29:42 It's like, you kind of just say, well, it's like Andreessen or whatever's venture fund. It's easy. So that's all they've all done. And it actually shows up in the market structure of crypto, right? How many times have you heard
Starting point is 00:29:53 of a project that's a copycat of what already exists in the token market that is raising around at a premium to where it's comp trades i've seen that so many times and you're like why does that happen and it's because the venture community that raises these locked up vehicles has too much capital and the liquid token market which is kind of your exit market is all retail there's no real institutional capital there because like the allocators aren't allocating yet that will have
Starting point is 00:30:19 to change at some point why um otherwise you'll have what's happening in the altcoin market today which is projects launch you know the same issue of like low float high fdv and the venture guys that wrote the seed check which again is the downstream capital of some pension fund um you know has you know vested tokens 12 months out and there is no buyer like who's the buyer because you have to just look at the supply demand imbalance between you know um the size of the altcoin market and the amount of supply that's coming as a result of all these new tokens launching that are venture-backed tokens so that imbalance has to change right i mean you kind of have this you know you have like like to draw a comparison um to the traditional market the
Starting point is 00:31:09 venture capital market and tradfi is much much smaller than the size of the public equity markets right that's your like you need that type of market structure in the token market as well Is, if you believe markets tell the truth, is the lack of public market crypto, like liquid hedge funds, et cetera, capital telling you that outside of some small subset of the coins, most of them are not worth anything. Yes. And so basically the venture capitalists are able to generate from zero to one. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:31:41 But nobody is willing to say, I'm going to stake enough money on one to 10 as an opportunity. And so that's why there's the lack of capital there. That could be it. And the other thing I will also say is like, pull up all the venture funds in crypto that have been deploying capital, let's just say since 2017, and compare their TVPI to DPI.
Starting point is 00:32:05 How much have they actually distributed, right? There's some that have distributed a lot, right? That, you know, I'm sure you and I are LPs in. But a lot of them have like all these great paper, like returns, and none of them have really distributed because they can't actually exit these things. Like either there's no token yet
Starting point is 00:32:20 for the project they invested in, or there is a token. And even though the quote unquote market cap of that token is higher than where they deploy that capital, if and when they try to exit that position at that market cap, they're going to like crush the price because the order books are super thin.
Starting point is 00:32:35 Like we look at these order books all day. Like most of the altcoins, you know, there's not that much liquidity. So- What do you think is the average liquidity on kind of a average- altcoin so in top 50 altcoin um if you try to sell five to ten million or something you will move the price probably 10 20 i would say like that's to say token number 30 to token number
Starting point is 00:32:57 15 coin market cap if you try to sell tens of millions or something you will meaningfully move the price and so like a lot of these venture funds that even have a liquid token on their investment portfolio that has come as a result of an exit or as a result of a token launch those things to me are like not you know great reflections on uh how these venture funds are performed because they actually cannot dpi that basically it's uh it doesn't count till you sell it yeah it doesn't count you can't yeah you can't exactly and what are you seeing now with a lot of these um high fdv but low float the low float part i think is actually one of the most interesting things that you've told me recently which is um if i have something that is a billion dollar market
Starting point is 00:33:43 cap, but the FDV is actually, I don't know, 5 billion or 10 billion, right? There's still 80 to 90% of the tokens have not entered the market. How do you see those tokens entering the market if they ever do? And then what is the impact? Do you just need 5 or $10 billion of capital? Or how do you think about a way where those tokens can enter, you can get a higher float percentage and these things not get destroyed? Yeah. So as the current market structure holds there's only one way to support all that all those tokens hitting the market which is bitcoin whales have to tell their bitcoin to go buy that right to support that price or money has to come in from the outside so again the pools of capital we're talking about they have to decide
Starting point is 00:34:26 they want to allocate to token strategies and those token strategies have to then buy those tokens at a substantially different price right um neither of those things seem to be happening So, you know, just taking a step back, most tokens draw down 90% after they launch. Like, it's just a matter of when. Because, you know, most of these tokens launch with some airdrop campaign, give some tokens away for free. And then they have a six-month lock. And at the end of six months, or six or 12-month lock, depending on the project. And at the end of the time, the original venture investors that wrote that seed check and the team and founding founders that worked on this project start to vest.
Starting point is 00:35:09 And on paper, they've all had this massive wealth creation event. And, you know, then it's like they're all kind of looking around and saying, you know, who's going to sell first, right? And someone's going to start selling. And this thing goes out 90%. So in our view, the sweet spot to invest in token projects is like 18-ish months after they launch. because that's when you've kind of had this boom and bust. And then you can look at it and say, okay, is the original team and founder
Starting point is 00:35:35 still focused on building this shipping products that people want to use? And is the thing gaining traction? Or is it kind of just going to fizzle away to zero over time? 99 point, I don't know, 5% of these token projects will kind of fizzle away to zero because what happens is most of these founders in crypto are generally low quality
Starting point is 00:35:54 and they're all in it for like sort of this get rich quick scheme which is what a lot of these things are and they will um you know vest some of their tokens and even if they've only invested 10 of their tokens that's like a couple million bucks for the founder of the team and like they'll cash out and they'll go do something else right like why like live through this like brain damage of like having to ship products when like your retail holder base that is in the token is now like really angry at you because it's drawing down 90 all this stuff so most like most of these projects will go through this like hype cycle, like this boom and bust, and then we'll sort of slowly fade away to
Starting point is 00:36:28 irrelevance, there'll be some small cohort of projects that continue to ship through that painful time and make it on the other side and have become like a great project. Obviously, ETH was one of those. I think Solana was one of those, right? Solana went through its boom and bust. And there are going to be several others that go through that. So one of the ways we approach it is we're excited about all the crazy things that are launching, right? In the last six months. We're going to meet those founders, meet those teams and understand what the roadmap is and what their kind of vision is. And then we'll evaluate it 12 months from now when they've drawn down 90%. What about the meme coins? Like it feels like on one hand, it's insane,
Starting point is 00:37:04 like completely say everyone's time, almost entertainment to some degree or like gambling or something. On the other hand, this idea of like a fair launch, a token that plays into, you know some theme or or uh some trend on the internet um some of these are starting to get like real market caps and because 100 of it's out there yeah uh it tends to be fairly real yeah um so how do you guys think about that or how do you evaluate them yeah it's actually one i want to pick your brain a little bit but when bonk and with and all these other meme coins were kind of playing out in the second half last year first half of this year my view is look like this out like the younger folks like to gamble they don't want to go to vegas they don't go to like
Starting point is 00:37:48 casino and then play blackjack or whatever uh they would rather just engage with their friends and the social like guess the next meme type thing and then gamble on that what's been interesting to me recently has been observing what some of the quote-unquote influencers slash like celebrities are doing um it's only interesting because on the one hand you have this other one theme here which is how products are discovered has changed from like people watch ads on TV to then like search based ads to then social media based ads to now like this creator economy based way to product or discover product. And a lot of creators realize, look, my flywheel is I build a core audience that trusts me and trust what I'm saying. And, you know, I'll either partner
Starting point is 00:38:37 with an existing brand or launch my own brand and launch my product and then i will monetize that product by selling it to my current audience and then i will reinvest all those profits into uh making more content like mr beast is like the great example right he's got this like chocolate bar company or um what's that energy drink that prime prime yeah and if you look at like sort of the growth curves of those like influencer launch brands it's way faster than like what pepsi and Coca-Cola can launch or Hershey's can launch, right? That's kind of interesting to me. And then I think about these creator tokens and I say, can you kind of pair the two? Can you also let your audience in some way participate in the success of the products
Starting point is 00:39:19 you're launching? Again, you need a regulatory framework to allow this, but could you have a token that accrues its value from the products that creator is launching and really not only buy the product from an influencer you trust, but also participate in the financial success? so the first experiment we saw this was um so iggy zalia's like mother meme coin i believe can be used as a token to pay for the cell phone plan that she launched last week right obviously like you know people would rather just pay with fiat if there's no benefit of paying with a meme coin but you can start to see how that experiment goes further right if like that token has some value that comes from the cell phone plan itself describe a little bit about what she did i think
Starting point is 00:39:58 there's a lot of people who don't even know this this happened to probably watching this so so i'm not deeply deeply in the weeds of like what iggy zilly is doing but from me either yeah my basic understanding is like she's got like seven and a half million followers on twitter people think she's like this authentic artist um she launched a meme coin called mother which clearly has no value but uh it seemed like she did it in a pretty authentic way like she was hosting twitter spaces and speaking about crypto and and engaging the solana community in a very native way where she was demonstrating people she understands what the stuff is about she's not just here for some grift and that sort of garnered this massive audience and um i think a week later or so she launched a
Starting point is 00:40:42 essentially what looks like a cell phone business so i don't know if you remember a couple months back like ryan reynolds sold mint mobile for like a billion something dollars that business model is pretty simple like ryan reynolds has an audience he can sell cell phone plans probably cheaper than some of the big telco but he's like leasing everything from the telcos right it's called an mbno so he doesn't own any spectrum or cell phone towers or anything he's just a customer acquisition rapper around like it's like a white label thing for a cell phone plan i think he launched something similarly but the nuance be you can pay for your cell phone plan with the meme coin which on the surface you're like why would anyone want to play with the meme coin
Starting point is 00:41:16 and that's true but you can kind of use your imagination and say well what if that meme coin got some of the profits from the mobile business probably becomes a security that point again i think our securities laws would allow this but you could see how this evolves if the regulatory regime changes then is isn't mr beast better off monetizing his quote-unquote equity through a token rather than you know trying you know trying to ipo his business one day right it's a better way to like connect with your direct audience is that where the world's going you think that it's all going to be tokenized equities yeah i think tokenized equities are better than regular equities like tokens a crass way to put it is tokens ultimately well-designed tokens are equities
Starting point is 00:41:59 on steroids like equities are just ownership on some ledger if you can ultimately give that instrument superpowers which is programmability then you can do a lot more with it that you can't do today yeah and part of it um is right now we use the dollar as like the common unit of account So if I have Amazon stock and I want to buy a house, I go from Amazon stock to dollars to the house. There's probably a world where I just go from Amazon stock to the house, right? And although that's a very simplistic example, you can imagine I can go instead of from mother token to dollars to cell phone plan, I can just go mother token to cell phone plan. Yeah. And so I do think it becomes pretty interesting because it's almost like merging these equities with currencies, but also almost like airline miles or something. Right. Yeah. And so in a weird way, like airline miles do serve this purpose today is you can buy things. Although I didn't know this, I have held on to almost all of my airline miles and I was like, you know, I'll look at my airline miles. I can't wait to go get more. And so I was like, you know that that's like one of the most inflationary things is no matter how many airline miles you have, you basically have $1,200, right?
Starting point is 00:43:16 Like you can have 100,000 miles or a million miles. Somehow it's always like $1,200, right? It's just enough to maybe take a domestic flight, but not like a really far flight. And so there are elements of this that we've already been experiencing. I think what's new here is now you can go and take the equivalent of those airline miles and there's a ticker. Right. there's a price there's a deep transparent market yeah and you can sell yeah yeah you can sell right and um uh i do think that there is something really powerful about the fair launches
Starting point is 00:43:46 um it takes away a lot of the critiques from the bitcoin community yeah uh because now you're saying well wait a second here if somebody launches it and it's available for anyone yeah and everyone is putting the same money in sure the people who launch it know about it right other people don't um but that does feel fairer right maybe it's not the perfect thing but it's fair yeah um it definitely seems like that helps in terms of it not being a security and being able to be used for these other things what's i actually have a different take on this which is a lot of like the crypto world has optimized not only their product roadmap but also how they run their quote-unquote business and how they uh use a token for this idea of not being a security
Starting point is 00:44:37 right and i think then it's like this convoluted like thing that like most of the world doesn't understand like you know i'll give you an example so like i always find the file coin project interesting like i spent a lot of time trying to understand file coins tokenomics and it's like gives me a headache like good luck trying to explain like a tradfi person how file coin works right and you're like well like why is it so convoluted you know like the business model of falco is simple which is you have a set of data centers that are plugged into a storage network and those data centers can be used for essentially what looks like a decentralized storage network money should come in money should go out right and what's probably this convoluted because they're
Starting point is 00:45:12 trying to you know avoid being a security trying to be a commodity i get it um but i think the world's kind of heading this other direction which is at least fit21 which passed the house establishes that there's only two types of assets. There's obviously crypto commodities and there's essentially, I think they called it restricted digital asset securities. And everything is probably a restricted digital asset security outside of maybe a handful of tokens.
Starting point is 00:45:38 But it's not a bad thing. It just means that you have a set of reporting requirements as a project. And you have the ability to then decentralize and become a commodity one day. But you don't have to. Because for certain businesses, running it as a centralized organization
Starting point is 00:45:53 makes a lot of sense. Like, imagine if like Elon had to decentralize SpaceX. It just makes no sense. The entire point of Amazon is efficiency. Yeah. Right? If all of a sudden it was a decentralized Amazon,
Starting point is 00:46:03 it wouldn't be effective. Yeah, it just wouldn't work. Nobody would use it. The product experiences suck. So some projects might choose to, you know, remain somewhat centralized and be this restricted digital asset security. And obviously like in this bill,
Starting point is 00:46:14 all the exchanges that list these tokens also have to register with both the SEC and CFTC. And projects that list on their platform has to fall within one of those two buckets so like an ambiguous weird project that tries to like straddle some you know gray lines won't get any listings market makers won't provide liquidity for it and will not exist right so i think where the world is going is sort of this sandbox or commodity world and um and so that that will then allow folks to really play around with the creativity around um how to grow their businesses faster than normally would um let's talk about uh
Starting point is 00:46:50 trump and biden they seem to be in a uh chess match maybe it's checkers i don't know um but there's a little bit of like trump makes a move biden makes a move trump makes a move biden makes a move um i think trump seems to be all in on supporting crypto at this point i mean every rally it seems like he's talking about you know i will protect you against the biden you know war against crypto or whatever yeah um biden seems to be becoming you know uh more sympathetic the administration seems to be kind of loosening up a little bit. Do they end up in the same place? Is it just like now all politicians are going to be pro-Bitcoin and crypto? Or do you still think that we may get kind of one side of the political aisle being anti-crypto and they seed
Starting point is 00:47:35 the point to the other? I don't know. But I do think a good outcome would be if this was bipartisan and i think that's where congress generally is that's where the house definitely is and that's where the senate seems to be going right like the the version of the fit21 bill that's in the senate is the lomas gillibrand bill that's a bipartisan bill um so if congress kind of ends up there then i don't see why the white house should have a very different opinion uh so so i could you know the the tinfoil hat speculative guess is like this is kind of like this elizabeth warren far left type view uh to the extent the biden administration can get away from that then i could see how this was just a bipartisan thing and that in the long run is
Starting point is 00:48:22 probably a good thing um rather than having to like be like politically on one side of the party i mean just like not to bring this into politics but someone's shared this uh financial times news article with me recently which basically shows that young men are moving far like further and further to the right in their political views and same demographic but younger women or young women are going further and further to the left and i generally notice in my own marriage like you know i'm personally i'm generally center right and i couldn't continue to hold those views and my wife is you know center left and she and we both are like kind of unintentionally drifting apart in some of our views and then it's happening across the country in many ways and um and crypto is one
Starting point is 00:49:05 of those issues right like many of us in crypto are single issue voters and it shouldn't be that that way why not i think that's always been the case i think people are full shit when when people walk into the ballot box yeah i think for decades if not centuries people have voted for their wallet even though when they walk out of the ballot box they say something else right yeah not everybody yeah but a bigger percentage of people than we probably would be comfortable with yeah They ultimately are saying, who's best for me and my family's economic security? Who's going to help me make the most money from an economic policy standpoint, a tax standpoint, all this stuff?
Starting point is 00:49:46 Yeah. And then who is going to allow me to use that money to grow my wealth, my financial security, et cetera? Yeah. And if you think some of the other issues are tied into that, even though they don't appear to be, like crypto is a good example of like crypto is that, right? But we just call it crypto. So I don't know.
Starting point is 00:50:04 i i just think that uh human nature is to be self-absorbed yeah right and to say i'm voting not because of who i think is best to run the country yeah but who is going to be best for me yeah um and it's pretty selfless like it's commendable to walk in and say like hey actually i'm going to vote for somebody who's going to do something that's going to hurt me but it's good for the country yeah i just don't think that you know we're like joking ourselves but i do think there's several variables in that question of what's good for my family and and my kids or future kids that that question right uh which is on the one hand there's like a very clear financial angle and then there's like things like social issues and and you know climate and whatever
Starting point is 00:50:48 else right everyone's got like all these issues and you have to like make like this priority checklist um and and we ultimately prioritize and say this is the one issue i care about the most and I'll vote based on that. That's what I'm saying. I think people say that that's what they do. Yeah. But in my experience, what we have seen are the people
Starting point is 00:51:09 who tend to check a lot of the boxes on the social side actually end up hurting, especially the upper kind of income folks on the economic side. Yeah. And so there are people who do it, but I think it's a smaller percentage
Starting point is 00:51:25 than the people who say they do it because what they're ultimately doing is they're voting for someone who is going to hurt them financially for some other non-economic reason. And that essentially would just argue that like market economics don't exist. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:51:40 Right? Well, let me reframe it for a second then. Okay, so let's just say you've accumulated a certain amount of like wealth. And at which point you'll say, is there a point where someone says, I'm willing to give up X percentage of my future earnings power
Starting point is 00:51:55 if it means that I improve like the odds that if a nuclear war is a little less, right? Like I think some people would make that choice. For sure. Yeah. It's just as many people, you know, let's say a hundred people say they do that. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:52:10 I think it's 70, right? And like 30% are just, you know, they're morally like grandizing or they're trying to like virtue signal or whatever. Yeah. And so what I think is really interesting about the upcoming election is like, I think it was David Sachs.
Starting point is 00:52:23 I had a great point. He goes, we had an AB test. Yeah. Right. We had like one president, then we had the second one. And now they're both on the ballot. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:52:30 And I do think that there's a lot of people who are like, well, wait a second here. Either candidate is better for me and my financial situation, regardless of which candidate and who you are. And it's fascinating to me because if you actually extrapolate it out to crypto, it's what people do on a daily basis. Right. They're allocating their capital based on what they think is best for them financially. Yeah. um and now you're almost getting this like weaponization where you know the trump token and the uh boden token or whatever have become a critical prediction market to a degree yeah right
Starting point is 00:53:03 and so again it's this merging like as technology usage and penetration goes up as the friction between all these things goes down um what's more accurate the individual coins the polling or the prediction markets? And I don't know if we know the answer. We don't know the answer, yeah. But there are now like three different data points suggesting readings on who is going to be the next president.
Starting point is 00:53:32 Yeah. And we won't know until hindsight, but like you'll be able to look back and somebody should go do this who's smarter than me and say, okay, in the two years leading up to it, here's what each one of these metrics said, which one ended up being more accurate? Well, they're all three kind of saying
Starting point is 00:53:44 the same thing at this point, right? Now. Yeah. But... For example, polling in 2016 did not predict with any degree of accuracy what ended up happening, right? 2020, I probably don't know enough of the details as to whether it was accurate or not. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:54:04 The prediction markets, the coins is the first time we're going to have it, right? Yeah. Like, as you see this stuff play out, you're like, okay, well, what would it tell us if all three of them say Trump's going to win and Biden wins? Yeah. Right? Like, all three are wrong. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:54:18 And what if the odds change between now and November and the coins say that Biden's going to win and the other two say Trump's going to win? There's still so much room to go. So I'm just very interested in this idea of in a digital world, there's now more optionality for an individual, both in terms of data points, right, in this example. But you and I have also talked about there's now mirrored coins for equities. So Reddit goes public. There's a Reddit coin. Yeah. But again, the coin should not be valuable, right?
Starting point is 00:54:52 You don't have cash flow. You don't have assets. You don't have shareholder rights. Like all the things that make equity valuable. Yeah. The coin went up more. Yeah. GameStop saw the same thing, right?
Starting point is 00:55:01 Yeah. I'm sure there's a Tesla coin out there somewhere, right? Yeah. You just go through this and you're like, okay, in a world where historically value investors have said, what's the downside? Yeah. If you remove risk from the market because they're always going to step in and print money and save the market. They're always going to bail out the banks and kind of do all this
Starting point is 00:55:22 stuff. Is the question now like, how high can the thing go? Right? That violates every timeless investing principle in the world. But again, we now have choice. And so when you add choice, you go one of two directions. Either choice equals like, no, there's one choice in a bunch of stupid stuff. Or we actually do end up in a world where there's multiple ways to play you know these developments um and i don't have answers right i i just like i'm watching this play out and i'm fascinated by the fact that now if i want to bet on tesla's next earnings call and i say i think they're going to beat on deliveries i can buy a coin i can do a prediction market on just deliveries i can buy the equity right like i have multiple options now i think
Starting point is 00:56:07 prediction markets are the end state okay explain i think most people want to make these very isolated bets on very specific things isolated meaning uh i don't want to buy tesla stock going into the earnings because i think the they're going to beat on production i want to bet specifically just on production yeah even simpler like last week for example um if you wanted to bet that elon's shareholder um compensation plan was going to go through you want to make a bet on that single prediction rather than not trying to guess what the stock does the next day right it has so many different variables it's just that prediction markets at scale hasn't been necessarily feasible until very recently because the biggest problem is like everyone wants to create a
Starting point is 00:56:49 prediction market that who's going to provide the liquidity for it but if you can then have this global ledger where liquidity can be provided by like your average joe because until until you know recently uh until defy um liquidity providers were the banks right like the market maker or you know liquidity provider for any stock or bond or whatever are the big banks so that market making function has been kind of consolidated to these large institutions but if you can democratize that where you can you and i can take our small little pas and start providing liquidity and whatever we want to provide liquidity on because we can earn fees because we think there's people that want to trade it then we can be experts or domain knowledge experts in that one thing and
Starting point is 00:57:29 provide liquidity in an intelligent way so this market making function kind of extends it becomes this like open source thing. And so that allows a global prediction market to exist. And I think that's where we could theoretically end up at some point. I do think that the prediction markets are drastically underestimated at the moment. And it is a story as true as time where you continue to get more accurate outcomes, leads to liquidity, leads to participation, does all this. And so if you're able to say to someone you don't have to bet on all the variables of the stock price you can just bet on this one specific data point yeah specialization yeah it becomes much broader uh but also too i do think that a lot of liquidity flows there and it doesn't have to be uh cannibalizing
Starting point is 00:58:17 you know public equities it can just be net news very different yeah because here's interesting like i i started my career on a trading desk um at ubs and you know there were like eight traders they all had big balance sheets and the things they provide liquidity on it was my job to have a fundamental view on it so because because when you're providing liquidity for especially in bonds which is where i was uh you might get stuck with the inventory right so you need to you need to know what you're essentially providing liquidity on that little function is not scalable across random prediction markets otherwise you have to grow headcount massively so banks and institutions cannot do that. But you, Pomp, can be an expert on very specific things because you're interested
Starting point is 00:59:00 in that topic. And it might be that there are other people in the world that also want to make bets on those things. And so you might be specialized enough with some balance sheet to provide liquidity on something. And you might be able to aggregate liquidity from other people to expand your balance sheet to provide liquidity on that one specific thing. So that's, again, all of this is only possible because of public blockchains. And if someone's like, why do you need to care about things beyond bitcoin it's for something like this to exist one day talk about uh fundraising you've been fundraising for a couple years now you've kind of gone talk to all these different institutions etc what are some of the lessons that you've learned in those
Starting point is 00:59:34 conversations hmm that's a great question um i think the biggest lesson i've learned is is don't sell you know um because because if you're trying to sell to someone there's in their brain at some point they're like what am i missing here right uh i think generally i've learned to be authentic and be truthful and be transparent so with all my uh meetings i generally tell folks whether or not they have exposure to crypto uh i generally start by telling them that i think there's a good 50 chance none of this amounts to anything so they could lose a lot of money because that's the truth and then i also talk about all the potential negatives in the space which is i think when it comes from the traditional markets when you compare founders
Starting point is 01:00:25 and let's just say outside of the crypto world the quality and caliber is probably higher than the quality and caliber of founders in crypto um and so so i generally try to give people the objective view and because that's kind of what i do you know i'm a i'm personally a pretty big investor in the space including my own strategy so i try to be as objective as possible as an an outsider looking in and i give all the people i meet those facts and then i try to build a relationship with them over a long time and eventually if they think they want this exposure then they can come talk to me that has seemed to generally be the thing that works for me um has there ever been any any negative surprises in the way people think about
Starting point is 01:01:06 the asset class or or what they're worried about well i think what i um maybe didn't didn't fully grasp before starting this thing was was like just how you have cold start problems in all all networks you have a very similar problem in this space um which is you know if you want to get like let's just say the world of endowments university endowments to deploy capital into token strategies uh they're all kind of looking around and saying is that guy doing this is the other guy doing this like they're looking at their competitors saying which of my competitors are doing this and if none of them are doing it there's no like real incentive to move and do something but the moment one or two of those guys
Starting point is 01:01:52 you know deploys capital into the space and does really well as a result of that then that really triggers like this huge wall of money needing to come in because they can't continue to underperform their competitor in some ways so just the way you have i think cold star problems and you know social networks you have a similar ish thing in um the fundraising side of things yeah that makes sense um where are we in the cycle of uh crypto you know there's this kind of having bull markets bear markets are we in a bull market are bull markets and bear marks going to go away how do you think about it um i always wish that these kind of cycles of boom and booms and busts go away but i i don't i don't think it's going to go away because you have such a large
Starting point is 01:02:38 um retail base in the space and and retail often often behaves very differently than um than than institutions do right institutions never want to like buy the new all-time high they always want to pick find value quote unquote and value is often like how much cheaper is it than the last you know a couple years ago whatever uh retail is like hey this thing's going up like you know it's my chance to hit my 100x and i'll chase and i think that psychological behavior is what creates these boom and busts in crypto markets the bust often happens when you oversupply the market right so like if you look at um you know the nft market for example it was great when it was just like the board apes and crypto punks and some of these high quality like nft launches
Starting point is 01:03:21 And then we just, every week you had this new 10,000 K PFP project that launched. And at some point you just saturated the market, like the supply of stuff far exceeded the demand and the market collapsed. And then the demand even went further away because people were like, well, these things aren't going up anymore. I don't need this. Same thing happened in the ICO mania, right? So I think the cycle ends when like the market gets oversupplied with stuff. Where are we in the cycle? I personally think we're still relatively in the early innings.
Starting point is 01:03:53 You know, again, retail hasn't come back to the same extent it has come back in the previous cycle, right? So the retail trading volumes at last cycle highs were multiples of the prior cycle highs. And we haven't hit last cycle highs. You know, just as a proxy, you can look at Coinbase consumer trading volumes and compare those two and see where we are. And you would think that, you know, like you would expect this cycle to be far greater than last cycle. Now, I do think you need use cases and something new and exciting for people. And we haven't seen that yet. Like there hasn't been anything new and exciting.
Starting point is 01:04:27 Like last cycle, you had DeFi and NFTs and this prospect for gaming and play to earn. This time around, it's sort of been meme coins and social pie stuff, which is interesting, but not as like big and exciting. I do think stablecoin market cap going from, let's say, $160 billion to a few trillion will then get more people to come in and want to build things for that stablecoin market cap. And there'll be, again, all these beneficiaries around it. And I think that's what's going to drive this new cycle. Got it. Where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about what you're doing at VanEck? You can find me at VanEckPK.
Starting point is 01:05:05 It's probably the easiest place to look me up. On Twitter? on twitter yeah all right and then um anywhere on the vanek website yeah yeah i don't know look at the website really all right i will definitely do it again in the future yeah that's That was good.

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