The Pomp Podcast - #1548 Arthur Hayes | Bitcoin Will Hit $1 MILLION

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

Arthur Hayes is a crypto legend and the co-founder of the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX. In this conversation we discuss bitcoin, global liquidity, macro environment, tariffs, US, China, UK, tokenization, yield, and where he thinks value will be created in the crypto industry.=======================Simple Mining makes Bitcoin mining simple and accessible for everyone. We offer a premium white glove hosting service, helping you maximize the profitability of Bitcoin mining. For more information on Simple Mining or to get started mining Bitcoin, visit https://www.simplemining.io/=======================Bitwise is one of the largest and fastest-growing crypto asset managers. As of December 31, 2021, the company managed over $1.3 billion across an expanding suite of investment solutions, which include the world's largest crypto index fund and other innovative products spanning Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, and crypto equities. Whether you’re an individual, advisor, or institution, Bitwise provides intelligent access to crypto with your unique circumstances in mind. Visit www.bitwiseinvestments.com to learn more. Certain of the Bitwise investment products may be subject to the extreme risks associated with investing in crypto assets. Visit www.bitwiseinvestments.com/disclosures/ to learn more.=======================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/

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. What's going on, guys? Today, we've got an amazing episode with Arthur Hayes. He is a crypto legend. He has been around the game for a very long time. And so that's why it's interesting to hear his thoughts on Bitcoin,

global liquidity, the macro environment, tariffs, US, China, UK. And of course, he shows his shitcoin bags. He explains where he thinks value is going to get created in the crypto industry. We talk about exchanges. We talk about yield. We talk about interest rate trading. And of course, we talk about things like tokenization and where he is putting his money, including what's in his portfolio today. It's a great conversation. I always enjoy talking to Arthur. This is no different. Here's my latest conversation with Arthur Hayes. only. Are you looking for a simple way to earn Bitcoin rewards every single day? At Simple Mining, we help people mine Bitcoin, even if you're brand new. We're a vertically integrated

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of their ETFs profits to Bitcoin open source developers. Bitcoin developers are the unsung heroes working tirelessly to maintain, improve, and innovate the blockchain. Their efforts ensure that Bitcoin remains true to its promise as a decentralized system that is built to last. Go to bitwisepomp.com to learn more about their ETF and other services. Once again, that's bitwisepomp.com. Bitwise P-O-M-P dot com. As always, remember investing is risky and carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before you invest. All right, Arthur, you're the legend of Bitcoin and crypto. You also understand macro better than most people.

You recently tweeted Chimerica. It's time to buy everything. That seems like a pretty good directive to the market. Why is it time to buy everything? So, I mean, obviously we had, you know, Liberation Day and a week of financial essentially panic. and in the wake of that a capitulation not a capitulation but a pivot from a maximalist tariff position you know trump said okay 90 days and everybody except china besting came on tv and said he's got treasury buybacks i'm gonna make sure that the market's well functioning and that

was the bottom of the market and what's crypto bitcoin's up with like i don't know 35 since then east of 50 you know pick your you know you know shit coin meme coin alt crushing it nasdaq up in the year right it was down 20 percent into early april now it's you know up 30 percent since the day so this is the bottom is in and now we get this uh you know u.s and china are walking away from trying to impose tariffs on each other and so i think sort of the the meta that america is going to make itself great again using the tool of tariffs that's over i think it's going to come down to capital controls, but that's a longer burn issue. But as it portends to risk market, just buy everything, right? The bond market threw a bit of a fit. They pivoted and we know what

happens. The money gets printed. All right. So let's separate these two conversations. First, let's have the fun conversation, which is they're going to print money. Is this 2020, 2021 run back turbo? And literally we are just going to go into this massive economic boom. Asset prices go to the guy and anyone, as long as they just close their eyes and throw a dart, should be able to make money? I don't think if you close your eyes and throw a dart, you should be able to make money. I think, yes, they're going to print a lot of money because this is a global monetary transition. It's going to dwarf what we've seen so far, especially in the COVID era, which was a nutso period for financial markets. Trump and co are going to print more money than Biden did during

COVID. That's going to happen. That's my prediction. And that's how we get to Bitcoin, $1 million and S&P 10,000 and gold 15,000 and all these crazy price targets that you wouldn't otherwise expect. Why do you think that they're going to print more money? What's going to drive that? Is that just pure stimulation of the asset price and that's what they're going to be focused on? Or is there going to be some other reason that they have for the printing of money? So I go back to the way I characterize Trump 2.0. And this is a bipartisan thing in the United States is that they want to rectify these global imbalances that have built up since 1971, which is the U.S. runs, or more likely since 2002 when China was entering the WTO. They want to reduce

the trade deficit, which has a mirror effect of reducing the capital account surplus. This is math, right? If I earn dollars by exporting things, I take those dollars and I buy treasuries, stocks, and property. If I no longer have dollars, then I'm no longer buying treasuries stocks and property and so if you look at the marginal driver of u.s exceptionalism in the stock bond and property market since the early 2000s it is foreign capital buying stuff and so tariffs are not politically palatable situation to rectify this you know people don't want to have you know their toy doll costs double or when they go to the store there's nothing there because it's all was produced in china i know china but 100 tariff isn't going to send anything else to the

U.S., that is not politically palatable. People are not going to vote Republican in 2026. And I think that message got through to Trump, you know, through various cabinet members, through Republican folks who need to get reelected in a year and a half. Like, this isn't going to work. I'm going to lose if you keep up with this tariff thing. And so we saw a pivot. Now, I don't think Trump has sort of abandoned this idea that the demise of American manufacturing, military strength, substance abuse, all that sort of stuff, driven by the financial edition of America post gold standard. I don't think that he's stopped having that as a campaign promise to fix that. It's just that they're going to go about it in a different way. And so you can attack this deficit at the

deficit level, tariffs, trade, or you can attack it at the surplus level on capital controls. And so I believe capital controls are coming to the United States in the form of some sort of mild taxation of foreign stock bond and property holding and using that money well because foreigners will leave because they have to pay a tax or at least some of them then they have to print money to make up the difference because they're not going to allow the stock in the bond market to fall all right so uh let's talk about the capital controls what you're basically saying is uh they want capital in domestically inside the united states uh americans obviously have money here in america they buy american products they buy american stocks they buy

American real estate. They buy whatever asset. But also foreigners, you're claiming, have been a huge driver of those domestic assets as well, real estate stocks, et cetera. If all of a sudden Trump starts to do certain things that disincentivizes that foreign investment, then there could be a potential lack of buying power, which could lead to a lower price, which obviously he doesn't want. And so you're saying that there will be capital controls on the foreigners or capital controls on US citizens or both? On foreigners. On foreigners. Okay. So if a foreigner has a S&P right now and they want to sell and take their cash back to China or Finland or India or wherever, you think that they will put up some sort of barrier to allow them to do that? yeah there's some sort of tax or you could do a foreigner wealth tax right every year you pay

has two percent of the value of your whatever your for your own american stock bond and property is right in cash that's a tax right and so either you let you say you stay or you leave you choose one we don't care because either way either i get the tax revenue and i reduce taxes on americans or give some sort of government handout or the capital leaves and the currency the other currency at the start appreciates and I rectify my manufacturing deficit. So choose one. But it takes a bit longer. It's a little bit less direct, but you don't get the empty shelves. You don't get the goods inflation immediately, which loses you an election in two months. Let's talk about the tariff impact. You and I probably actually disagree. We agree on a lot of stuff. We'll

get to you shilling your bags and we'll see if I agree with you or not in a little bit. But when it comes to the tariffs, I think that I was standing alone on an island for a long time. I feel a little bit better now because I feel like a lot more people are starting to kind of come around to this idea, but I don't actually think the tariffs are inflationary. I agree that there are, if you put a tariff on a product coming from China to the US, two things happen. One, someone in the supply chain has to either eat the price or the price goes up, right? Now, I think both of those things happen.

And so I saw a study from 2018 when we put a 20% tariff on China, that prices in America went up 4%. And what they did is they broke down and they're like, you know, there's the producer, then there's somebody in logistics, then there's the distributor, then there's somebody on the American side, then there's the actual retailer. And like every single step along the way, everyone was eating a little piece of this price increase. So the end consumer actually saw 4% increase. 4% is not fun, but it's not 20% either. So I think there's like some nuance there that obviously in headlines people don't talk about. But the second thing is there's an overall economic

slowdown. And I think that's the part that people kind of miss, right? It's like from an academic standpoint, the individual price of a good should go up if you have a tariff that's coming from outside the United States. Obviously, they've increased it for a reason. But overall, people start to slow down. And I think that's why we saw inflation crash in America over the last couple of weeks and months. But also, it's like the spending patterns start to shift as well. Do you agree with that? Or do you think that maybe I am too rosy in my view of how this all works? Well, the 2008, 2018 US-China trade war, China basically did two things to keep their prices low they allowed the currency to depreciate and they did massive stimulus to exporters and they

said don't give away market share um i'm going to give you some money from the government to make subsidize or subsidize so the impact in the american consumer wasn't that great and i think this is what fed into the hardline maximalist tariff camp in the trump cabinet like look in 2018 we tariff china and they ate it right they ate it through a currency depreciation they ate it through fiscal stimulus so i thought you know so i think that they thought oh well that really didn't cosmetically change things we really didn't attack this trade deficit because china ran the largest trade surplus in human history of any country ever in 2024 right so what did this 2018 tariff thing do absolutely nothing so the the problem got worse so then

okay well if china's gonna eat it then they're gonna eat it now or if it's not china it's japan it's germany it's taiwan it's south korea whatever they're gonna eat it we're america blah blah blah right and i think that was the reason why and but this we got to get this we got to start solving this problem we were elected to solve this problem we're going to solve this problem we told the people that we're going to solve this problem and then they went hard right 30 40 50 tariffs on all these nations and people were like no no that's not you can't you can't subsidize your way or depreciate your currency enough to not have a massive impact either the price is spiking in in America, or we're just not going to send you any shit anymore, because it just doesn't make

any sense. So I think that's what's the difference between now and 2018, when sort of there was a tariff war, but it was a little bit different in sort of the intensity. And so I think the underlying assumptions as to what a country will do to not pay those tariffs. So I don't know what's going on in the White House in terms of what they're thinking. All I can look at is what the actions are, right? The UK trade deal, and I'll put deal in kind of quotes because it sounds like it's like a plan that hasn't been signed yet, but at least there's a structure in the UK and America will say that's our plan. What it looks like is that they've convinced the UK to take the tariff, average tariff rate from like 5.5% down to like, I don't

know, 1.82%, whatever it is. And the US basically is going reverse. We're going from like 2% to 10% against them. And then they also have negotiated to get some products made in America that previously couldn't get into the UK market to get market access. When I see that, I think two things one uh the tariff that they said they were going to levy is higher than what it actually looks like it's going to end up being so of course the critics are going to be like oh he's walking back you know it didn't work to negotiate whatever uh his uh maybe supporters will say like oh but there are still tariffs in place that are higher than they were before he got in office and so he's like increasing it on a net basis put aside all the politics nonsense like who cares uh what they

all say um is that better for america to end up in a world where we get the uk tariff down a little bit we increase the tariff on them and we get market access like how do you characterize like is that a good deal a bad deal or like does it not matter because they're just going to print money anyways i mean who gives a fuck about what the uk and america do it's not the underwritten underwriting of american assumption is not the united kingdom it's china japan germany taiwan south korea malaysia thailand those are the countries that matter not the fucking united kingdom but do you think the uk i think i think that is a framework for what the china deal will No, because there's not really a big pressure there. There's not really, you know, two countries, very good relationship between each other. There's not a big difference in capital flows or trade flows between the two. So I think it is purely for political consumption, because at the end of the day, whatever they could have chosen, 100% territory in the UK, it still wouldn't have made a bit of difference to an American.

Americans, I don't know, is there a Sheen or Timu equivalent company in the UK? No, that's in China, right? Young people are not buying $10 miniskirts from fucking London. It's from China, right? You're not buying your semiconductors from the United Kingdom. You're buying them from Taiwan and South Korea. So you're not buying your car from the United Kingdom either. You're buying it from China, South Korea, Taiwan, right?

So all these countries are the ones that matter. This UK deal is purely for political consumption to say, yes, we did a deal. it's better for us i'm sure in some terms than it was previously so therefore we are doing what we said we're gonna do but if it was such a good deal then why is there no deal with china or well i think china what about why why is there no deal with say vietnam or uh updated deal with a thailand or malaysia or one of these other countries that you know do run a much larger net surplus versus the united states are much more important in terms of manufacturing and would be much better in terms of signaling, yes, there's a united front against China to basically be us

against them. We're going to make sure that the Chinese can't evade these, you know, these terrorists by using other countries to produce. But the UK is none of those. It's literally just, it's an irrelevant country. So what would a winning deal look like between the US and China for the United States? And what would a losing deal look like for the US in that US-China negotiation, right? Like, I try to almost think of like, is there like a line? I don't know if it's a certain tariff rate. I don't know if it's a certain, maybe it's full free trade, both sides drop all tariffs, or maybe there's a market access thing. How do you think about if you're the sitting president for a day, you get to strike a deal with China, what does a winning

deal look like that you think is actually possible? I guess the question is winning for who, right? Because you have to say, okay, well, for my constituents, I want to have winning. So probably, if you want to cushion the pain, there's going to be pain. It doesn't matter what deal is right because again we're trying to rectify an an imbalance that's been sort of created over the last you know 30 years right you can't do that in a week this is going to be pain doesn't matter what so i think probably the best case situation like okay well we're not going to be able to re-industrialize quick enough for me not to feel some political pain as as a president so why don't i allow china to do inward foreign direct investment into the us and build stuff

because they can build stuff better than americans can um faster cheaper more efficient blah blah blah right and so now china can sell their things from a chinese-owned factory sitting in america is it an american-owned factory no but it's better than you know trying to come up with some deal that's not really going to work because either china's got to completely revamp their economic model which they don't want to do or america's going to pay a lot more for stuff that doesn't exist because even if you did strike a deal a manufacturer can't build a factory in a week So I think that's probably the easiest solution, but I don't think that's really where we're going to go. When you look at, um, the tariffs and, uh, I call it the like fear mongering, the, you know,

the people who, uh, I think at one point the S and P was down 4%. People are still talking about the great depression. I mean, it's just like comical. Um, and I look stocks to go down 20%. I get it. Right. Uh, you did call, uh, I think 74,500. You said that's the bottom pretty damn close, if not exactly, on it. How do you think Bitcoin plays into all of this? And I use Bitcoin as maybe a barometer for so much of global asset flows, liquidity, sentiment. It's just kind of like it is the macro asset now. So how does this play into the chaos in chief? That's part of the strategy is just create mass chaos all the time. But also, it seems like you have Besant, who is much more measured and like talking to the market simultaneous to Trump, who's maybe talking at the

negotiating table? I mean, Bitcoin is just a reflection of global liquidity flows. And at the margin, that's the US, right? So what do we know is true about financial policy in the US? Doesn't matter what party is in power, is if the bond market volatility gets to a level, and that level has been empirically seen to be 135 to 140 on the move index, the policy response is immediate like the same day what do we have in april 9th move was like i think 100 opened at 130 128 whatever it was got to 172 intraday jamie diamond goes on cnbc saying tariffs are dumb in his jamie diamond way and which is not to say which is not to say tariffs are dumb he just says every other word except for that yeah politically correct he says

tariffs are dumb and you know there's a 90-day pause everybody except china the best thing gets on television a few days later on bluebird it says i've got treasury buybacks i can you know don't don't fuck with me i've got treasury buybacks treasury market's sweet my guns are loaded yeah bottom market bottoms and then we rip right so and you know what happened in uh september of 2022 bond market is getting crushed s&p down 20 percent um move is at like 140 yellen or somebody in her staff says okay there's two and a half trillion dollars sitting at the Fed reverse repo. Let's change how we issue our bonds so that we draw that money out. And so she did more bills issuance than bonds issuance. And that sucked $2.5 trillion over two years

out of the reverse repo at the Fed into the gold financial markets. And everything ripped. Stocks, bonds, crypto, gold ripped, right? And so that is the number that we should be focusing on. That is volatility cannot be in the financial markets when you have so much leverage and everybody's running some sort of carry trade. And so that's why the authorities always step in when the volatility increases in the bond market. And because Bitcoin is literally just a reflection of how many units of fiat are out there in the world, it goes up the most in price. And that's it. It's just that simple. So Bitcoin went from 109 for a couple seconds, all the way down to 74, 75,000. It's ripped back to over 100. Where do we go during this cycle? Do you think we go

to a million? Do we think you go to 200k? What's kind of your thought process, given that you think there's a lot of money printing on the horizon? So I think Trump team is very serious about trying to do their part in rectifying these imbalances. I think capital controls are the way they're going to do it, which is a little bit slower burn. But foreigners are going to react by selling assets because now there's a tax and they don't want to pay it. And so that's going to require printed money to make to replace those dollars. So if the foreigners aren't going to supply the dollars to levitate treasury market and the stock market and the property market, the U.S. government will supply it via the Fed, the treasury, and sort of legislative actions that they can do, you know,

like Fannie and Freddie being on a conservatorship or stuff like that, right? So that's all coming and that money gets printed and Bitcoin benefits the most out of all the different risky assets that one could own out there. And that's how we get to a million, $1 million Bitcoin. I think that happens sometime between now and when Trump exits office in, in 2000 and 28. So that's sort of my goal. Northstar, you know, this year, I think we get to $250,000 in Bitcoin. Maybe this summer we run to something like $150,000 to $200,000 before we get some sort of like pullback, right? They set these 90-day targets. Obviously, now you have a, you know, you have a strike price, you know, a maturity, an expiry. There's going to be insane volatility around that. Will they or won't they? What's the deal going to look like? and obviously trump's going to posture that he's serious about really inflicting some pain on trade partners so you could see sort of um you know ditch the bride at the altar negotiating style where oh yeah i was going to do a deal but you know fuck you i'm going back to maximalist tariffs

really get whatever he thinks he needs to get out of um that negotiation and we could see some insane volatility around was it july 4th for everyone except china and then china's like august 10th something around there so i think now we have those dates in mind i wouldn't really want to be long. I wouldn't want to be overly long, any risky asset, especially around the Chinese X date, because we don't know what's going to happen. I mean, we know eventually they're going to print money and all that kind of stuff. But in the moment, if you're leveraged and you're out over your skis, that can be pretty painful for you. Altcoin season, you know, all your fanboys on X, I see them out there. They're telling you it's coming. Bitcoin has been crushing

uh most of the altcoins um i don't want to leave people in tears but uh what do you think you think altcoins are uh gonna have their day and bitcoin dominance kind of peaks at some point and you know these cycles follow what we've seen in the past or do you think uh bitcoin has just separated itself and uh has become something onto itself no i think bitcoin diamonds will peak and obviously that's really a function of eth and soul because of ripple the big assets although if those start outperforming like eth has in the last week then bitcoin dominance mathematically falls does that mean that the dog shit altcoin that you own in your portfolio is going to go up? Not necessarily. I think there's going to be a new narrative. I don't know what it's going to be. There'll be a

shiny thing that we all start trading. I'll be trading it for sure. It'll be fun. If it's a coin that's already launched, I think people are getting a lot more discerning, right? We don't want a VC back coin with high FDV, low float. That shit is not happening, right? We want to see if you're already launched, where are your clients? Are they paying you in money other than the token that you gave them for farming it. And then if you're making money as a protocol, where's my money as a token holder? I want buybacks. I want staked emissions, whatever it is. Give me that profit back. This is not fucking a go party at Bitcoin Vegas at the club with all my money situation. And so I think those coins, and there's very, very few of them, we really like EtherFi and

Pendle for that. In that narrative, we're going to go back to like fundamental season, all about cash flows all the time for anything that's not new but if you're new cool we'll let you get away with like all sorts of fugazi poncynomics bullshit damn we're only a couple minutes in you're already showing the bags we didn't even make it 20 minutes really all right uh go ahead what what is uh etherfi and pendel what the heck is that are those so pendel is basically the largest interest rate swaps trading market and crypto right This is actually, forget all the token nonsense and the trading, like explain the actual what's going on here, because I do think that the macro people and people who come from traditional

finance, they'll find it interesting. Maybe not the coin, but what they're trying to accomplish. Yeah. So essentially they want to trade interest rates embedded in crypto. How they really came into popularity was, okay, let's say that you have a token and this token has some sort of emissions or rewards program. So you have two risks here. You have the risk of the token price. And then you have how much of the rewards are you going to get? And so the thing that Pendle really popularized was separating those two risks. So somebody gets a fixed return token, somebody gets a variable rate return token, where the variable rate is based on the emissions and what the value of those emissions are by the maturity date. And you can trade these two distinct

products. And that's what really has powered Pendle. So something like, I think it's like 6 billion TVL, whatever the number is, it's high. It's one of the highest projects out there in the ecosystem. And so they're moving on to, they want to trade now like interest rates, curves, they want to trade sort of funding rates and all these different things to sort of help the fixed income side of the crypto markets mature. And I'm sure as a lot of your listeners know, that's the largest, you know, trading markets in the world, interest rate swaps and those sorts of things. So if really, if Pendle is able to really dial into that and create a product that us DJs can trade and hedge with, then the sky's the limit in terms of the value

they're going to create for for token holes and that's why i really love the product and i think the the team behind it they're really switched on to really going after this massive opportunity to bring fixed income markets uh on chain and defy and you know thankfully the tokens got pretty beat up over the last you know 12 months during this downturn and you know it was a very attractive entry price in the last downturn you know we've been accumulating it and then on the etherfi side um they've basically their goal has become the american express of crypto well so what's american express it's a charge card for rich people so what's ether 5 it's a crypto neobank for rich crypto people so they have a nice cool card where you can send stables you can use your staked eth

borrow against it um spend against it and it's using all visa pos systems and they're building a whole loan book and sort of just like a financial institution all on chain it's already profitable and they are distributing revenue direct to token holders so you know we're about you know we are advisors on both projects we're investors on both projects so kind of mixing in both sort of roles but if i had to say two products that epitomize this like return to cash flow is fundamental season it would be those two damn you sound like warren buffett you know you're just like uh all right uh when we were hanging in miami i don't think i ever asked you this uh you know you're on your little vacation um what what is your best investment ever like

what when you think of all the things you've invested in what's the best one best investment ever he's like damn i have so many 20 000 x's i gotta go through them all i mean i think the one of the best trades uh i ever did was you know back in this one of them 2000 and is it 2020 2019 whatever it was east at like 150 200 whatever it was and i think it was trading below the sum of all projects listed on e and so like as in terms of market cap uh and that was like that was a 20 bagger right um in terms of gonna put a serious amount of money into into that trade it's probably one of my better calls on on crypto and then i think in terms of like advisory situations like athena obviously is the best performing stable coin in terms of price

price from ever because you can't buy tether if you could buy a tether to work in that you know trade on this revenue then it would obviously be the number one but athena's just crushed it all right um bitcoin treasury companies in the public u.s markets that's like all the rage uh it seems like every day someone is uh turning one of two things either a shit company into a bitcoin treasury company and uh it's like uh you ever play video games you're like ncaa or madden and uh if you have a cheat code and you can just throw a hail mary every time and it works every time what do you do you throw the hail mary literally every play right that's basically this is the public company hail mary that's caught 100 of the time in the end zone if you buy bitcoin

your stock price skyrockets is this sustainable what do you think about these companies are you buying any of them uh so we participated in the uu pexi deal like the suwana treasury deal um we've done we've done them well on that uh i think it's very convoluted right because obviously MicroStrategy or strategy, whatever it's called now, that is the North Star beacon. And what Saylor was able to do because he was the first one to do it and, you know, he had the ability to tap a corporate bond market is you can issue convertible debt and sort of, you know, not immediately the non dilutive fashion.

But a lot of these companies now are just like a common stock game where, you know, you're buying a bunch of common stock at a discount and then you hope because they claim they're going to take this money by Bitcoin, the premium to the bitcoin nav you know goes up right that's really what you're trading and so obviously the effectiveness of the strategy declines the more and more people you do it so who do it so i think yes it's an effective strategy for now we're going to get to some point where people like okay i get it there's however many u.s listed companies that own some bitcoin they did some rights issue at a discount and then the premiums are going to start declining

because investors are saturated with this exposure because again if i can already buy the you know blackrock etf why don't why am i paying a premium to buy some like dog company uh who issues a bunch of common stock and dilutes their shareholders so i think it's it's a strategy that's going to work for now and then it'll stop working i don't know when that that um that'll be it's a great ride so you know good on good on you for all the sponsors who are just raking in fees doing this this sort of stuff but uh i think it's a it's a very tricky situation if you're somebody who's buying one of these on the open market because you're not really trading you're trading two things you're trading the premiums nav and you're trading bitcoin and so if you think you're trading

bitcoin and not realizing what you're really training is sort of this um dilutive issuance strategy whether or not that's going to be accretive or not to the stock price i think you could get wrecked on these things do you think that um take strategy just that's the biggest one um do you think that there's a world where it could unravel like it could actually lead to a huge Bitcoin bear market or there's all these concerns. There's some leverage, although it seems like they are managing their leverage better than some others. There's these new products like MSTY that are high yield, volatility on volatility on volatility, which degens love, but also obviously introduces risk. How do you just think of the downside or the risk here?

So usually, this is obviously a leveraged trade. It will blow up in some way, shape, or form. And And it might not be microstrategy that blows up, but some derivative, somebody copying them, whatever. It will blow up. I'm pretty confident in that. But it won't blow up when people think it's going to blow up. FTX blew up at the bottom of the bear market, right? So you don't blow up at the top. You don't blow up in the middle of the bear market.

You blow up at the bottom of the bear market. When the volatility collapses, the interest in the asset class collapses, and you have some sort of cash flow that you've got to make. And let's put in, let's just throw in some, maybe, you know, some effective interest rate rises, right? This is the classic scenario for how an over-leveraged company goes belly up. And so I think there will be players who play this strategy and we're going to probably see a raft of blowups at the bottom of whatever the next bear market is. And so if I'm thinking to myself, you know, with my crystal ball, it's very imperfect.

What's going to be the signal of the next bear market bottom? It's going to be a raft of these type of treasury companies going bankrupt because the volatility they collapsed and they're no longer able to issue stock accretively and they've got some sort of leverage some sort of debt they got to pay back the price of bitcoin is way below where they were buying it and you know they've got to liquidate bitcoin and do some other thing and then that the game the jig is up at that point but that to me marks the bottom of the next bear market and we won't get that anywhere in between so it's a great market it's a great signal i think uh for when it's going to be time to go really really long bitcoin again after the next 95 correction

after the next all-time high. Now that I know that you're like crypto Warren Buffett, you're worried about cash flows. You come from Wall Street. You really understand that world. One of the narratives that's out there is it's like the Bitcoin and crypto community versus the Wall Street crowd. I disagree. I think that Wall Street loves crypto because they are making fat fees. They are getting new clients. They are hand in hand with the crypto crowd. And they realize the shiny new toy that they can bring to their clients, their investors, whatever means more revenue for them is that how you see this as well and like this is just the classic wall street found a new toy and so they're going to like super fuel this thing as long as

they're making money along the way yeah for sure i think yeah most these banks don't care about all the things people think they care about they care about making money right do they care about compliance no they don't give a fuck about compliance right compliance is only cared about when they're not making enough money to care about it and so um now that's sort of removed as a risk then you know they're going into it right so i have there are some fundamental things that could discriminate banking like stable coins right and that's why the yield bearing stable coin thing has been hotly debated i think in the u.s because you know as some people have rightly pointed out if you know a tether is a better bank than every other bank more profitable um better

functioning less employees no bullshit right it's the best bank out there in the world so do you want to have do you want to allow that bank into your market absolutely not so don't allow them to compete on yield with you and so i think that's you'll see banks when you get to the fundamental function of what a cryptocurrency does or some devac product does and it really conflicts with what a bank is supposed to be then they're gonna fight but if it's you know listing in a ripple etf fuck it yeah let's go give me seven percent i'll fill out the docs for you let's go um with the stable coins it seems like uh maybe actually this crypto people aren't the threat but the facebook's adding stable coins you know those may be the threats to the visas or the

MasterCards. It's like people with distribution to billions of users now getting into the payment game with this new kind of rail. That seems like that's way more important for them to pay attention to as a threat than like, hey, somebody created a stablecoin that's being pushed in some foreign market that is still maybe a billion dollars or something. Is that a fair assessment? Yeah, but I think the big problem with stablecoin adoption is like POS systems, right? So how are you going to get the merchant? Are they going to use an NFC-enabled phone? I mean, is it going to work i don't know but you know are they going to have to get another device that they've put on their shelf to like help you pay with this stable coin how fast is the

experience and so i think that's the real issue and so maybe if facebook solves that with you know some sort of app or you know throw a few billion dollars into a big rollout but otherwise i don't really see stable coins as you know eating in onto you know visa master cards network payment model because they're not in the they don't have the physical devices from which to affect the payments. You've made a couple of pennies by simply thinking about ways to put on different opinions that you have as trades. If a view that you hold is that stable coins will be much bigger in the future than they are today, what would be your preferred way to invest along that thesis? If you think Bitcoin is going to be bigger, you just buy Bitcoin. What do you do in stable coins?

What do you do in stable coins? I mean, buy Athena, right? That's a token. come on man that was too easy come on that's you can't say the thing that you're doing go ahead next but i mean the problem is that like okay tether is the best the best example it's not a publicly traded thing i can't buy it there's no token can't buy it right um they keep 100 of an interest margin because they've built out this massive network so it's uninvestable it's great for you know the owners but you know for us other people cannot when you have circle right? Suppose they're going to do this IPO. That's a shitty business too, because their distribution arm is Brian Armstrong at Coinbase. And Brian Armstrong is not going to let Circle

make all the money. He's going to take all the money. And they already take, what, 50% to 75% of their net interest margin? Terrible business is what Circle has. So then you have all these other people who say, I'm going to list a stable coin. And it's usually a bunch of Americans who want to target America. And America's got, you know, it's not the best, but Americans have dollars natively so then they have zelle and cash app and you know they don't need a digital version they got it yeah they don't need yeah they'll use a digital version of cool but like is this going to be the next 10 billion dollar fintech company no so i think it's just table stakes for existing financial institutions who further entrench their moat but i'm not really sure that a lot of these

other startups who you know they're gonna have to spend so much money to acquire a client in a super saturated market where you're you're not 10x better versus venmo or zelle or paypal right maybe you're like one and a half x better this is not enough to get a client to switch for a price that you can afford with the capital that you have raised so i just don't see stable coins it's very investable in the ways in which i see people going to it which is a u.s company trying to bring stable coins to americans now it's different if you're saying i'm going to try to go after Tether. Again, I think that's a losing proposition, but at least you have a global client base who wants dollar banking, who is willing to pay for it.

Let's talk about exchanges. They're centralized and decentralized. You're one of the goats of the exchange game. Who would you not want to be competing against right now? And what do you think are maybe the big winners 10 years from now when it comes to exchanges? Is it kind of crypto native firms? Is it decentralized ones? Is it like NASDAQ wake up and just be like, we're getting in the game and you'd fear them. How do you kind of see this playing out? Yeah. I mean, the exchange game, I think is going to become very commoditized more so than it already is. So, I mean, probably Coinbase just got added to the S&P 500, right? So I haven't looked at a Coinbase earnings report because I'm not a shareholder. Maybe you told me, but I'm pretty sure the majority of their

revenue comes from, you know, fees on the spot book, I would imagine, right? Is the majority of their revenue. And so that's not a very hard product. Any exchange that's a limited order book who's already in the u.s can do that and now that they can they're gonna have a lot of competition on on those clients especially if like a vertically integrated bank decides okay well i have banking now i guess add this exchange portion i've got a high net worth i've got all these different things and i guess add this crypto thing it's not that much of a lift technologically and all of a sudden i get to you know undercut coinbase and whatever they charge i'm not sure they charge i've never traded there so i think that's a risk for the uh exchange space obviously

i'm super bullish on decentralized exchanges i think that is the uh the future because again the centralized exchange game it's a perfectly competitive market where you're only competing on price i mean we created the perpetual swap i haven't seen anyone else create any other product that has been differentiated from spot and perpetual swaps uh since 2016 that's literally all the only products that we have as centralized exchanges but the decentralized exchange is an access product right if you for whatever reason can't access the centralized exchange here's a decentralized exchange if it's a product or coin or trading strategy that the centralized exchange doesn't want you to do for whatever reason i'll let you do it over here on the decentralized

exchange if you can't own equity or meaningful upside in the centralized exchange i'll give that to you too in my token as the decentralized exchange so from a retail perspective the decentralized exchange is a better offering at some point. Now, a lot of the time, it's just still faster, more convenient to use a centralized exchange. But with Hyperliquid and some of these new platforms, you can debate whether or not they're decentralized or not. But to the end customer, it doesn't matter. I've got a token. I participate in the upside. I believe I'm early. It's fast. It's cheap or cheaper than a centralized option. Therefore, I will use it. I'm shocked to hear that you've never used Coinbase as your trading venue. I thought

you're one of the Coinbase whales. If you think about tokenized securities, that seems to be getting a huge lift. It was big 2017, 2018. Now it seems to be coming back. There's people who I would say have lots of crypto credibility, Robert Leishner and many others who are basically saying, look, we want to take these securities. We want to put them into this crypto format. We want to have them exchanged, whether it's on decentralized or decentralized exchanges, blah, blah, blah. legit not legit exciting not exciting how do you do it i mean it's great it's great let's this tokenize everything i mean the question for us is like how do you actually make money as an investor right so usually these people are saying yeah we're going to tokenize everything and guess what

here's this protocol or company or whatever and we're going to make a bunch of money in that i don't think there's going to be any any money in that because if you think about the where the world goes if every asset is tokenized and i'm one of the originators of this asset what am i i'm literally just a fuck boy for the legal and compliance situation. So whatever country I'm operating in, I got to fucking get rammed by these fees to issue these assets. But then they're all traded somewhere else and anyone can spin up another exchange to trade them.

How do I make money on this? It's perfectly competitive. And so I think the value moves up chain to whoever owns the client. You don't own the client as a securitized whatever, right? You're just a piece of technology and that profit margin will get competed out. And if you're like, you know, a distribution giant like BlackRock, are you going to allow some little startup to take all your money, right? When you are literally the originator, you own the client. So, yeah, they can tokenize and distribute to media at the NYSE and NASDAQ and CME.

Good for Larry Fink, but I'm not really sure how this really helps a lot of these guys out here peddling these protocols that are going to tokenize things. So, yeah, it'll happen. i don't think you're gonna make any money on it though if there's one thing that wall street loves it's yield if they find yield it's like you know they struck oil they just go all in on it um that seems like uh there's more people talking about yield on bitcoin there's all kinds of different ways some of them hey you like you know non-custodial uh staking of your bitcoin and then you get like some other token uh there's people who obviously are doing like rehypothecation or lending um but there's also yield in like every other coin uh whether it's like actual staking

revenue or some version. Is crypto just recreating Wall Street with maybe some innovations at the edge or improvements at the edge? But at the end of the day, people need that yield. And so the hardcore Bitcoiners who have been fighting yield are going to end up being washed out and it'll end up just being the people who are able to figure out where to find yield or how to create yield. That's going to be the winning strategy. I mean, most of the yield that you're talking about is this token emissions right like yield on bitcoin no one is doing uncollateralized lending in bitcoin or if you are you're gonna get your ass handed to you um so we've saw we've seen that we just lived through that in 2022 right so like are we really gonna do that again somebody is yeah

probably of course 100 somebody is somebody's gonna show up and it's like you know i'm from the government i'm here to help and they're gonna be like hey i'm here i'm gonna fix bitcoin look at this yield thing and they're absolutely gonna do that and they're gonna get so like by the way they're going to do it despite getting torched online while they do it 100 yeah uh yeah yield is always a thing we always want yield but where does yield come from it either comes from i'm going to lend money to somebody productive right that's hard to do origination and you know that's what a bank does that's what they should be doing that's not really what they do but yeah a loan officer evaluates a business or a person so here's some money and i believe you're going to pay me

back in the future okay that's not really what's going on in crypto yield it's either i've got this new token it's going up in price let me issue it to you you receive this token and then you sell it before it plummets and hopefully there's some sort of product or service that you're doing on my app that you continue doing after the token stops going up in price and 99 of the time that doesn't happen there's a handful of apps that are able to convert users into revenue paying clients outside of just taking their token emissions and then taking those you know that profit and yielding it back to the end uh holder right very few projects do that you know pendula etherfly that's what i talked about uniswap no they don't even do that so like again so there's very few

people who actually do that it's all about it took an emission game and so it's a game of hot potato and we're gonna play the hot potato game it'll be different narrative on why this particular token is going to let you hold the hot potato longer than it was before some people make some money and then most people get wrecked because they'll apply livers to the yield that they thought was endogenous when it comes from other factors uh sorry zoginess from this and really just endogenous to the token price and then they'll get wrecked and we'll just do those all over again just like you said so you're um you're pretty unique in that uh you and i could sit and have a very sophisticated conversation about interest rates and global liquidity and all that

and then you're just like a hardcore corner and everything in between out right and sometimes at the same time like you're talking about global liquidity and then you might throw out like some crazy coin i've never heard of before um what does your portfolio look like right now and right and just like on a percentage basis like how much of it is in bitcoin versus maybe i'll call it like top you know large alts versus shitcoin land where you've got a million bets and you hope they go up a thousand x so maelstrom you know probably about 60 bitcoin 20 eth and i'd say And then the rest are, you know, we do some liquid trading, so kind of Etherfire type stuff. And then we have a lot of allocations on term sheets, right?

So, you know, we were just receiving tokens periodically from either investments or advisory deals that we've done. And that's the last part of our portfolio. But the majority is Bitcoin. The goal is trade check coins and make Bitcoin, right? So at the end of the day, I take the profits, pay all the bonuses, and I buy more Bitcoin. And that's the goal of the fund. Um, ETH is 20%, not Solana. I think that, uh, maybe you should have been in Solana for the last year or so, but maybe you think that something different is going to happen in

the future. How do you look at Ethereum versus Solana today? And then also where they're both going? Yeah, of course, you know, everyone wants to be like, should have, would have, could have $7 Solana. You wish you would have sold everything and bought Solana. Right. But like, again, whenever you think about it like that, I'm not that kind of investor. I'm not trying to hit 100x trade if i had a you know a 2x trade or if i make 10 on the stash of my funds pays for my lifestyle i don't i'm not about capital preservation rather than capital appreciation because i have your capital already yeah we get it yeah you're rich so like but if you're like trying to hit 100x you know fucking homers every day then yeah you should have been in solana you should have been

hyperlipid hyperlipid at three dollars when it launched right you should have been all these different things but then you're gonna have to trade on the risk curve and be looking at your 24 7 and all that kind of stuff so yeah i made a good trade on eth i've been long eat for for many years i still think that eth is going to have have its run will it have performed better than if i had bought salon at seven dollars probably not but that's the trade i would never would have done anyways and then what about like um i think the last like major uh kind of theme that we saw you know obviously the nfts all stuff last cycle we saw uh ai coins had a run kind of end of last year maybe beginning of this year how do you look at something like that and then are there other

themes that you're paying attention to in crypto which i always say like a crypto theme could be two weeks right i mean like people get hot on something and it's gone it's gone very quickly but like what what else uh are you paying attention to right now yeah so i mean ai i think which is really early we don't know how we're gonna make money in llms or agi or whatever the fuck ai uh happens and so yeah i think this this the ao versus crypto we had a little bit of a you know spike in interest some things did well and then it's like oh well you know do we actually make money do people actually use these llms like we thought they would and then kind of like stuff crash so it's gonna happen but it there'll be a new meta this cycle some sort of ai crypto

intersection i don't know what that's gonna be we'll try to get on it early make some money and and get out um but i think it's tbd on how you're actually going to make money in an ai and then i think we were speaking before the show about like something that we're really interesting well we're doing it right now at maelstrom is you know a big theme that we see is sort of the vc model is broken and crypto from both sides so from the vc side they've raised a bunch of money right take your you know paradigms your panteras and these kind of guys have got what hundreds of millions billions of dollars and they can't deploy it you know my guys are in the trenches doing deals we don't see these guys right they can't they can't deploy a hundred thousand dollars check that

doesn't you just can't when you got a hard you know half a billion dollars of money that you gotta deploy but if you want to talk about how you're gonna make a hundred x on a token that's where you need to be playing so they just can't do it they have too much money it's too hard too many deals and so what do they end up doing they end up doing the bearer chains of the world and the monads right it's uh the high the big coins that can plunk 50 bucks and then one of those things uh but then because of the pressures from these you know vcs to get that the fdv up so they have someone to dump on the retail is like i don't want that shit anymore right and so we've seen these things go down only and you know it's a she looking char no one's really interested in it

then when they when these things unlock then it's just like how do you fucking make money because everyone's just dumping on you every single day. And so then people are like, oh, I want the hyperliquids. I want these real teams who build something, didn't raise any outside capital, and went for it. So the VCs got a lot of money. They got to do crypto, but there's nothing they can buy. On the other side, obviously, pre-Trump, we had the SPAC boom, and all these guys listed all these SPACs. And then the SEC shut the gates and said, we're not going to approve any more de-SPACs. Now, obviously that's changed. And so you have like billions of dollars of capital sitting there who need to find a company. As you said, sort of these, anything with crypto on is

doing really, really well in the public markets. The David Bailey's Nakamoto thing fucking crushed it. That's the most recent deal. And so I think that SPAC sponsors are going to want to find a crypto thing to really just like juice the market. And so where we, where we come in as Maelstrom And, you know, we've actually hired someone to help us build this out is, OK, can we go and find crypto companies that have no token, have cash flow, have profitability and, you know, don't really understand the public markets that much? Can we go to those companies, raise some money, buy them out, change management, clean up the books a bit, present it in a structure that makes sense for one of these SPAC sponsors, then offload it into the public markets and do it over and over again? and so we were evaluating a few companies right now and that's i think that's where we're going to make a lot of money over the next two years because even when we think about sort of the vc landscape uh oxford and the guys are very slow we haven't really done that many deals this year

everything's too expensive there's not really any new ideas but we have a new spigot of capital market funds that wants to do crypto so why does might as well you know as chuck prince said former cf city group if the music's playing i'm dancing and it's so that's what we're doing um It does feel like crypto generally is assaulting Wall Street, but to my point earlier, Wall Street's helping them do it. They opened the gates and they said, hey, come on in. It's like barbarians at the gate, except for we're not on opposite sides. Let's all run in together. and it probably ends poorly somewhere. Like nobody knows how, when, why, whatever, right? But like something will happen for sure. If there's one thing that we are great at,

it is like creating bubbles and then we are experts at popping them ourselves. And so I'm sure that will happen here. When you think about the president of the United States, the current administration, they are by far the most pro-Bitcoin politicians that we've seen, definitely in the United States. could that work against us like if the next administration comes in could they be like oh

that last guy he was you know pro so i'm going to be anti and like i could still become the president or a cabinet member or something like that or do you think we're like past that point we're now regardless of which political party which candidates in office like america will now be pro-bitcoin and because america's pro-bitcoin every other country will kind of get in line and follow no i don't think that's a it's a given and so i think a lot of people in crypto are being very short-sighted and the people that they support representing the industry um in these closed or meetings or expensive dinners or what have you and the types of policies that they as clients are implicitly supporting so again i've been on record saying this i've written a bunch

of essays about it and essentially my view is if you want to if your goal is to create america as the strongest place in crypto in the world again you can debate whether that's a good goal or not then there's historical precedence for how to do it how do you do it how did big tech do it 1996 communications bill they put in a writer that basically said what happens on the platform is not the responsibility of the platform operator so they allowed these ad tech platforms these social media platforms these search platforms to permissionlessly innovate and create the web2 infrastructure that we know today and obviously silicon valley has grossly benefited the financial position of, of the United States. So, and that's a Republican and a Democrat thing.

They're not going after Zuck and, you know, the Google eyes and Microsoft and all these guys, right? It doesn't matter which administration power America is wedded to the tech. So if you want to have something similar, then instead of, you know, talking about the stable coin bill or the market infrastructure bill or whatever other bill, and you send Brian Armstrong and Garlinghouse up to the white house to go basically make the best deal for their company. there's nothing to do about what's good for the ordinary crypto holder and what are you going to get more of the same a gobbledygook piece of legislation with all these rules and regulations that only benefit companies that have enough money to pay a lawyer to decipher them for you

and yes it's better than it was under another administration but those laws can be changed a lot easier than something simple that says okay bitcoin and crypto are untouchable as long as you don't steal or defraud people. There are no regulations. So if you're a developer and talented from Eastern Europe or wherever, and you're getting persecuted at home because you believe in freedom and privacy and all these things, come to America, build that app. We have great capital markets now that tokens are a thing. You can list your token, no issue on some sort of decentralized exchange. People can buy them. You can get rich. And what do you do? You buy a car, you buy a house, you go to the fancy restaurant, you pay the state taxes, you pay the

federal taxes. And that's how you create a real ecosystem that's unassailable from whichever political parties in power. But I can guarantee you that if all that we're doing is sending Brian Armstrong and Garlinghouse to the White House to negotiate the best deal for Coinbase and Ripple shareholders, then that will be reversed in an administration that doesn't view so favorably on crypto. And then it's really the fault of the American voters who supported these guys for not really pushing for things that actually are going to change things and just going for more of the same. So I think that's my view on, you know, regulation and, you know, how it fits in this sort of like, you know, pro-crypto American, whatever. And Trump doesn't care, right? At the

end of the day, he's about winning. So if going with, you know, the corporatist strategy for crypto wins him the election or, you know, re-election or midterms, whatever, gives a campaign donation, he'll do that. If supporting permissionless innovation gets into the same place, he'll support that as well. So really it's up to, you know, crypto holders in America to make their voice heard and not just rely on these people who just want to get their stock price to go up and again i'm not throwing shade on like garlinghouse or armstrong they're doing what they should do as stewards of capital of their corporations and and funds and whatnot yeah i think that they um i've talked to actually uh i think both of them about some similar things and

i think both of them would argue that they're doing what's good for their company but also what's good for their company is good for most companies in the industry and obviously there's debate as to whether you know people agree with that or not um but i think maybe the part where i will be sympathetic to them and other people who are going and engaging is like we tried to like let's not engage that did not go so well right so like we i'm not saying that i'm not i'm not saying don't engage i'm saying engage in a way that gets you the thing that correct creates a lasting yeah i think everyone i think everyone agrees that not engaging is a bad strategy because we saw how that played out now it's a question of if we are going to engage like what

are we ultimately optimizing for? And I think that there's like some degree of variation between individual companies, permissionless, decentralized things, and like, you know, some stuff in between. But I think maybe the only thing that is consensus in crypto is like, we got to engage, because it goes very poorly when we just let, you know, people who have no clue what they're doing start to legislate this stuff. Well, I mean, I don't think that people didn't engage. It's just they didn't have enough money behind them for them to be taken seriously, right well you know if we saw how that worked and you know all the political action committees in the u.s they raise a bunch of money and they got you know they got what they paid for yeah um what

do you think about the trump coin genius i think it's great all right i don't care they went down 95 of price like i i look at it in a long-term thing okay well if we have the most powerful politician in the world who has essentially done his own personal meme coin we could have other people do the same thing and you know other politicians can launch from a meme point and that's good because it's more transparent way to judge popularity than the current things that we have going on so right now the trump coin is trading at market cap of 2.76 billion fully diluted at like just below 14 billion um do you think that that is uh inspiration is a weird word but like people who have these big followers do we get a whole like celebrity coin

season again once uh once they sort of see these things going up yeah for sure uh i think the problem is a lot of celebrities align themselves with the wrong people and they end up rugging their followers like um the hawk tour girl and that's just something she disappeared but even she disappeared as fast as she showed up i mean that was crazy she was out i i saw somebody i saw somebody on uh x i think they said something like uh most people get 15 minutes of fame she only got nine like she was she was out so yeah it's tough right so i don't know i think uh the celebrity coins are tough because i think usually celebrities have a lot of the boys or the girls around them they might not be the most financially astute but

they're very loyal and you're going to get all sorts of you know bad individuals advise them how to do these things and then you get rugs and so yeah there'll be some celebrity coins do i think they're going to do well probably not just because i think that the incentives are not really there for these celebrities to do it the right way all right uh my last question for you is um there's a weird shift going on in the world all like in the traditional like finance world private equity is our whole pitch is like the boomers are going to pass trillions of dollars down to the young people. That means they're going to sell their businesses, whatever. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. But there's a lot of crypto people who are pretty young,

who made a lot of money. And a lot of money is all relative, right? I know people who made billions. I know people who made hundreds of millions. I know people who made tens of thousands and that's a lot for them, their families, whatever. How does that change the world though, right? If we got a bunch of, I don't know, people under the age of 50 running around with billions, hundreds of millions of dollars that maybe otherwise wouldn't have had it, uh if they didn't participate in crypto is that net positive net negative does not matter that's just how the world works i think it's it's a preference thing right so the boomers sell everything down to the next generations with money well if the next generations with money

don't have a lot of kids in general this is not just an american thing this is you know all over the developed world even in china right they don't have kids uh they're optimizing for experiences or other goods. Why do I want to own your house out in the fucking suburbs? Why do I want to own your portfolio of stocks or bonds? So I think there might be a preference shift or your boomer art that hangs on the wall. I want to doodle or whatever, a punk, crypto punk, whatever. You can debate whether it's art or not, it doesn't matter. So there's this whole wealthy cohort that has a different value set from their parents and has gone on a different life track where They're not just, you know, popping up three kids, have a family, and they only need a bigger house, right?

So, of course, they need to buy the one that the boomer is selling. Well, they're living in the city, you know, taking the metro, have no kids, going to Burning Man. That's their life. What, you know, do they want the same thing as the boomer? So, I think there might be this big dichotomy in terms of a value set of, you know, boomers who are wealthy trying to sell stuff that nobody wants who are younger than them. and that that could become very politically caustic because then you have this sort of generational warfare of oh well i've got to fund this retirement and the sick care that i've got to pay for but you know the people younger than me don't want any of this stuff and so then well

then what happens do we tax everybody more to pay for the health care of the boomers because they can't sell any assets well that's not really a winning strategy if everyone below you says fuck that i don't want to fund that so i think we're going to have some interesting generational conflict around the world because the value set of the younger generation is much more diametrically opposed to those older than than them than has ever been in human history where um where do we want uh us to send people uh either for this buyout machine you got going on uh your shit coin portfolio or or your views on a bitcoin and macro well you can come check us out on, on Twitter, uh, at crypto Hayes, uh, crypto Hayes on, on sub stack. And, uh, we'll let you

know if you're relevant for the, the bio fund, you know, where you are. Um, as, uh, as much as you screw around on the internet, uh, the writing is very good. Obviously, you know, this, I've told you before the, uh, the essays are, um, uh, not a hundred percent right, but more right than wrong, which is actually all you can ask for. Right. Uh, and they are a hundred percent entertaining, which if you're looking for entertainment, for sure, you got to read it. Um, and so I appreciate taking the time to do this and, uh, we'll do it again in the future. Awesome. Thanks, man. See you in Bitcoin Vegas. Hopefully.