The Pomp Podcast - Bitcoin Is Going To $250,000 (Here's Why) | Arthur Hayes

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

Arthur Hayes is the CEO of Flop Labs and CIO of Maelstrom. In this conversation, we break down Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's money printing playbook, the controversy around Stanley Druckenmiller's AI-written op-ed, and why bitcoin got overshadowed by the AI trade in 2025. We also discuss gold's next move, how Arthur allocates across bitcoin, gold, and public equities, and his new project tokenizing AI compute itself.====================Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates investment strategies across Stocks, Commodities, ETFs and Crypto. Whether you’re rotating into AI & Gold, allocating to the S&P 500, or accumulating Bitcoin, Arch Public executes your plan 24/7 without ever taking custody of your assets or funds. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com, and start your FREE automated trading strategy! ====================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/pomp====================Uphold is the easiest way to buy and sell crypto unlike any other platform allowing you to trade in just one step between any supported asset. Check them out at https://www.uphold.com/pomp/ This video includes a paid sponsorship with Uphold. I’m compensated by Uphold for promoting its products and services and may receive commissions from referrals. Terms apply. Not available in all jurisdictions. Digital assets are risky and may result in the total loss of your capital.====================0:00 - Intro1:09: - Bessent, Treasury printing & Druckenmiller's op-ed7:21 - Bitcoin & gold's reaction to money printing signals10:06 - Real estate, land & inflation hedges12:55 - Bitcoin's next 12 months & why it lagged AI17:49 - Bitcoin adoption catalysts & sovereign buyers20:49 - Gold's outlook, portfolio allocation & public equities26:14 - Stablecoins, tokenization & real world assets30:15 - ETH will have a hater rally?31:47 - Hyperliquid & Arthur's most asymmetric bet 34:33 - Flop: tokenizing AI compute46:17 - Money printing, scarcity vs abundance & closing thoughts

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I think that we're not going to get sort of a 2008 style, like, massive predative at, but we're just going to continue print and print and print. And you're going to look up and see, you know, Bitcoin at $250,000. Like, what happened? There wasn't really a financial crisis. What's going on, guys? Today we've got a great conversation with the philosopher king, Arthur Hayes. In this conversation, we're going to go deep into what's going on at the U.S. Treasury.

Scott Bessent, he wants to print a bunch of money, or does he not? What's going on with Stanley Druck and Miller's op-ed? And was there maybe some agreement? as to why this got published when it got published. On top of that, we talk about Janet Yellen and what she did to destroy the U.S. economy and why politicians across both sides of the aisle, they just ain't ever going to stop printing money.

And then what does it mean for your investment portfolio? Where could you put your capital to benefit from this? And where should you not put your capital where it may get destroyed? Orther's got a lot of ideas about that. And then last but not least, Arthur's got a brand new project he's working on to tokenize, compute, and really think about

what exactly is it being processed when you're using one of these AI models, How should we measure that? And how could you potentially make money without actually having to make an investment? It's very interesting ideas that got me thinking about a lot towards the end of the conversation. So here's my latest episode with Arthur Hayes. All right, Arthur, Scott Besson, he wants to play games. He says that he is going to bring liquidity into the market.

What's going to happen here? As they always do, he's going to print the money. Just like his predecessor, Bad Girl Yellen, Buffalo Bill Besson is going to give us those Besson bucks. And we can buy whatever we want to buy. whatever makes you happy. He's going to give it to you. Now, what is he trying to accomplish here? Like, he tries to get these long-dated bond yields down.

They kind of fall, and then they go right back. Now you got drunk right in the op-ed, the Wall Street Journal, basically saying, like, you know, slapping his hand and telling him to knock it off. What's going to happen? You think that he's going to actually execute on this? Or was this more of an announcement and see if they could kind of talk the market down? I mean, it's really strange because if you take a look at the actual upsize, it was like $20 billion over the $6.

schedule them out, which is like irrelevant in terms of the size. And like Bess is not a fool, right? This is a guy who, you know, coordination with Druck and George Soros manipulated the pound to force the bank of Ealing, the cave. So I can't imagine that he thought that this was going to be the end of the game. But at the end of the day, if he's like telegraphing to folks like us, like, get ready, start buying shit because it's coming, then I think he's done exactly what he wants to do. and the Druck AI slot piece in the Wall Street Journal.

I read it. And I think Citarene have had an interesting tweet about, like, Claude make me a criticism of the Treasury Secretary. It's like, obviously, Druck didn't write this whole thing. He put it in some sort of AI. But I don't know. I mean, one of my friends is like, yeah, drug's been trying to make the fiscal situation in the U.S.

a political issue for 20 years and nobody gives a fuck. So I'm not exactly sure why this time is going to be any different. At the end of the day, we need to listen to the politicians. Just like we listen to Yellen. They're going to print the money. Five percent is the level. They will not allow it to go above that. And we should trade accordingly.

Now, let's talk about the op-ex. I think there's two components. First of all, usually this is a private phone call, right? If you are drunk and you disagree with what the Treasury Secretary is doing, you got a cell phone number. You give them a call, say, hey, what the hell is going on? Writing the op-ed, just the act of actually having it published publicly, is that to rally public?

support, is that to call kind of attention? Is that like drug preparing because he wants to be president next? Why is he putting it out publicly, you think? I think the best theory that I have heard is that best it would love it if the pressure was taken off of him, right? Because at the end of the day, he's been very vocally criticizing Janet Yellen and a lot of other people who had his job about the why they are issuing all the short end debt is creating all these roll over issues and, you know, all sorts of things. And then he doesn't. does the same thing, if not in bigger size when he gets into the job, right? Because there's only one way to do this. His boss, the president, wants to print money to do stuff and he's got

to do his job, which is find a way to pay for it in an affordable manner, which means all these things, the technical thing that they do in the markets to make sure that the markets are well-bunked you think. So it would be great if they stop spending as much money. And so I think that there's one theory that the job probably did give Besson a call. And he was at great, yeah, the more pressure that we can put on the domestic politicians, both Republican and Democrat, to say, enough is enough, let's stop spending so much money. That just makes my job better. It makes me look better, right? Because best to anyone who's in finance looks like a fool. Like, literally 18 months ago, we're telling us how Jenny Ellen is the biggest idiot around, and you're doing exactly the same things that she did,

if not a bigger size. So his professional credibility has been destroyed by the fact that his boss wants to print a bunch of money. And if he wants to stay the Treasury Secretary, he needs to find a way to pay for it. It's an interesting thought that maybe actually him, he like initiated or encouraged Druck to publish the op-eds. He's like, you know, go out there in public and yell at me. That's actually going to help me. That'll make me look better.

Now, when we think about the AI slop, on one hand, I've seen people be like, dude, what the hell? Why is Druck using AI to write the op-ed? On the other hand, there's people who are talking about like, look, a lot of famous people, they have speech writers and we don't, you know, question them and say, oh, somebody else wrote these words you're saying them. It's kind of like they came out of your mouth.

You believe them. So, you know, that's okay. Is that where AI has gotten now? And we shouldn't really read into the fact that it's AI or not. It's just like, look, Druck put his name on this. And so these are his thoughts, whether he actually wrote them down initially or not. I guess it depends on whether you think you're an artist or not as a writer. Obviously, I write a lot.

I'm sure you do as well. Like, I consider it an art form. I enjoy the process of writing and the struggle that comes along with that. that and yes, I use AI to do a lot of research, but I don't use AI to write the stuff that I do, because again, I do this as pleasure for my own sake. If you're literally just got a call from Besson, he said, write something on Wall Street Journal,

help me out, Druck. And he's like, okay, cool, I'm on vacation, probably with my family, Claude, make some shit up, right? And I'll sign my name because it says what I was going to say anyways, but maybe not the same sort of pros, cool, whatever. And if the Wall Street Journal was happy, but that is going to be the, type of prose that they are going to publish as a reading newspaper, then that's their policy.

And we'll see what the reader is sick in terms of how they view the art form of writing in terms of whether they want a human to write or ridded. Or it's great that Druckmanler signed his name. And that's the signal that people care about whether or not it was written by a human novel. You know, it's funny. If you ever listen to his interviews, he's an incredible communicator. He's got kind of his own style.

If you've ever read any of his past writing, you almost immediately are like dude, he didn't write this. And so, like, I kind of feel like we were robbed of the, like, tongue lashing he could do if he had taken the time to write it. It's almost like the AI was, like, too kind and, you know, white-gloved where drug could just, you know, he could slash you if he had taken the time. Yeah. But again, it's a question of time and where his real motivation was.

So maybe it was just like, hey, let me get help up my boy and try to take some pressure off him and put this where it should be, which is on the politicians who keep spending the money. That makes sense. Now, let's talk about Bitcoin and gold, obviously, are two of many assets that are responding to this. Bitcoin jumped. I think we were at like $63,000 for now, over 80,000 within a couple of days. Obviously, the market heard, you know, Bessett. And if that was the goal, then, you know, kind of success there. Do you think that the response is going to be sustained across, you know, Bitcoin and gold, or do you think that there's still the chance that this is kind of a short-term pump and we could see the lows again.

I think the only way this is the short-term pump is if you believe that Dr. Dr. Miller got through to Republicans and Democratic Congress, people and senators are running for reelection and like, okay, I'm no longer to offer free shit to my voters to reelect me. If you believe that, then this move and Bitcoin and gold might be overdone and we're going to go back down again. But if you believe that politicians want to offer free shit to the constituents to get

reelected, then this is only getting started because the buyback didn't solve the problem. I just put a spotlight on it. And now they actually have to do something to get the yields out. Because I don't know what the 10 years is at now. It's 470 something. Hasn't really been much 30 years still at 5, 5 and a quarter or a little bit above. So again, they've done absolutely nothing. And so now it's time to actually start printing some real money.

You know, what's funny is I saw Lulu Mesvary, who is, you know, one of the top communication experts. She was like, look, the one thing that Mom Donnie understands better than almost any politician in New York or in the world is just give people stuff. And so he's like giving away free bike helmets. He's given away like World Cup tickets. Like I mean, it's literally like it's like a school fair or something. Just, you know, he's just handing out shit.

By the way, the government's losing money on every single one of these things. They're like buying market rate, you know, World Cup tickets and then just giving them away at discounts. But in a weird way, the Republicans or, you know, kind of the national politicians are no different. They may not be giving away bike helmets or World Cup tickets, but they're giving away a hell of a lot of money and, you know, all kinds of different exotic forms, right? Yeah, exactly. What is money printing? What is it give away to rich people, right?

The things that went up in value are all financial assets. Who owns all the financial assets? Top 10% of income earners in the US. So it's been like 90% of the market. So like it's basically your socialism for rich people. And then the response is, okay, well, we'll do socialism for poor people. And at the end of the day, you keep printing money and nothing actually changes. Right.

So the US is one of the most unequal places in the world. I think it's even have, it even has a higher genie cooperation than China. which is a very unequal place as well. So it just fosters more income inequality. It fosters more discontent amongst people who see the fact that they cannot get ahead. It doesn't matter if you're Republican or Democrat. If you're not one of those 10%, you're fucked.

And so then it just comes down to who you believe is going to give you more free shit. So I kind of think if there's three assets that really protects you from the money printing. There is Bitcoin, gold, and land seem to be the three that I think most people would rely on. I never really hear you talk about. about real estate, land, timber type resources, et cetera. Do you ever spend any time on that stuff? Not really. The problem that I have with land and real estate

is the transaction costs are very high and it's very local, right? Like obviously, if you live in a particular place and you understand the location, yeah, buying land or something might become assets, but it's very illiquid. Even in some of the most liquid property markets in the world, you know, let's take the US, you're paying something like 6% transaction fees just to your realtor just to sell a place. and then has to be on the market.

You have to advertise it and all these things, right? Or you could just own gold, Bitcoin, maybe some inflation protecting stocks. And when you want to sell it, it's like a few minutes and you're done. So I think obviously there's an emotional attachment to real estate. And once you have enough financial assets, other than real estate, it makes sense to own these things. But I think people put a little bit too much emphasis on, oh, yeah, I've got to own property. But look at how difficult it is. We need to sell that piece of property to actually do it.

and then invest accordingly. I'm thinking more like investment assets. There's obviously publicly traded like landholding companies and things like that. And the reason I'm starting to think about this is it does feel like the portfolios that are insulated from the money printing are going to do better than the people who are buying these productive assets, especially if you look in AI. I mean, how many companies have we seen go from zero to a lot to all of a sudden? It's like, wait a minute, they may not have the business we thought they had.

And it's becoming very difficult to predict the next 10, 15, 20 years of economic return on the investments these companies you're making. Because frankly, I don't think people can predict where this is going to be in 12 or 24 months. And so it's almost like I remember Warren Buffett used to say like he bets on things that don't change. That was like his whole thing. It feels like we're kind of almost headed back there. But now from an asset allocation that is really, really focused on just like let the money printer run. and I'll hold these things. They're not going to get disrupted,

and that's how I'm going to make my money. Yeah. But again, I guess when you get into the real estate and land, there's a lot of local politics involved, right? So, like, what are the zoning? Like, obviously, the U.S. is a lot better property protection than a lot of other places in the world, but, you know, you could have massive property taxes

as a way to solve this issue of inequality because you can't move the property. You can move the other assets, right? You can move financial assets around the world pretty quickly, speed of a click of a button, but you can't move land. So the first thing that you're going to do is you're going to tax property,

because it's the easiest way to get rich people because they can't move the money. So I think that's one problem with owning, you know, land or real estate as this inflation hedge is, you know, when they come to tax things, this is the easiest thing to tax. Let's talk more about Bitcoin specifically. Obviously, you know, it's still down, I don't know, 30, 40 percent from its all-time high. People are more excited today than they were, you know, two weeks ago. But it is this weird dynamic where Bitcoin is, you know, slightly above where it was in 2021, right? It hasn't really appreciated that much.

Even though it's had all the volatility and the new all time high, et cetera, what's your kind of view as to Bitcoin as an asset and maybe what should we expect over the next 12 months? So I think that Bitcoin got the stick because AI took all the credit. The marginal dollar or Yuan or Euro or yen of liquidity went to AI and that still's happening to some extent,

but now we've moved past that. Yeah, if you're talking about 2024, 25, people were just funding data center centers and equity investments in all these AI companies. And Bitcoin was the ugly stepchild. Oh, you're supposed to be this money printing heads of printing all this money, but it's not going up. But Micron is up 50x.

I guess I'll just do the AI thing. So I think that's what really impacted Bitcoin. And obviously 2025 was a massive year of increase in the amount of debt issued for the AI trade. And that definitely crowded out the markets. And obviously we're seeing it in the government bond markets as well, AI debt is crowding out government bonds. they definitely crowded up Bitcoin as well. So I think that's why even you take a look at the 125,000-inch all-time high,

it was barely 2x over the previous all-time high, which is not spectacular in terms of Bitcoin bull market versus the previous ones. And so now that we've done, you know, down 50%, I think that we're going to enter the capital misallocation phase of AI. And I think people are starting to realize that. There's going to be lots of money given to try to roll over debts to paper over the fake accounting that's going on. and that liquidity is going to find its way into Bitcoin because I think people recognize that,

hey, maybe these AI companies don't earn their return on capital. Maybe these adjusted financial metrics are completely just lies. But because they're private companies and we don't really see, you know, they get to say these things, you know, anthropic and opening I claim that they're profitable. I don't know. I bet they're not when you actually get the proper gap accounting metrics. So I think that as more and more liquidity is pushing AI to basically prove that the politicians didn't make a massive fuck up by supporting this as government policy, that money is going to find

its way into crypto. And so Bitcoin is going to do very, very well. I have a tweet from, I don't know, two, three months ago where I said something to the effect of it's going to be glorious when the AI profits rotate back to Bitcoin. And people obviously were, we're clowning me at the time. But I genuinely believe that people took a ton of the Bitcoin profits from the last cycle. They rotated it into AI. They've done well there. And at some point, they're like, wait a minute, I still need that scarce asset in a world of abundance. And when that stuff rotates back, it'll do very well for Bitcoin. Now, the question is, if we get a 50% drawdown in a bear market instead of 85, does that mean that the appreciation in the next bull market will also be muted?

I don't think so. I think that, and I've written about this, the AI bubble is the biggest KAPX bubble that we've ever done is human history. And so the eventual and it would always happen because we're human. We're just optimistic things, entities. It's going to be huge, the amount of money that's going to have to be printed to save the system. Because if you think about it, every time you have one of these AI debt deals at the end of the line is a pension fund. It's not very clear that that's happening, but that's what's happening with all where all those credit is getting stuff, but riskiest stuff is going to end up on the people who've been leased to afford to stomach these

possible. And the politicians are just not going to allow that to happen. I'm not sure if we're going to get a sort of a bare Lehman sort of set up where they let some firms fail. I don't think there's any appetite for that. I think they're going to move to print the money way sooner than that because they don't want to revisit a 2008 and actually have like a public reckoning of this, the complete retardiness of these politicians and how they supported this AI thing and misallocated this capital. So I think they're going to print early and print often, which is why we're already seeing best in supporting the Treasury at 4.75%. Like the US economy is great. It needs a higher interest rate. There's no reason why, you know, why 5% should be a problem. So I think that we're

not going to get sort of a 2008 style like massive credit event, but we're just going to continue print and print and print and you're going to look up and see, you know, Bitcoin at $250,000. Like, what happened? There wasn't really a finance or crisis. But, you know, the Fed in its own way is printing money, you know, Scott Besson in Norway is printing money, and the Japanese are doing it, the Chinese are doing it, the Europeans are doing it, all the sort of make sure there's not this coordinated global credit event like we had in 2008. Now, when we think about kind of the macro environment, Bitcoin seems to be adopted by the hardcore Bitcoiners. It seems to be adopted by some public companies, but still a pretty small

percentage and there is a couple of data points of sovereign wealth funds buying like the Bitcoin ETF in their sovereign wealth funds. The nation states, for the most part, still are not participating. And we don't see the like panic buying of Bitcoin, like maybe we did with gold with central banks, you know, over the last couple of years. Is that the next kind of catalyst here of the net new capital that has to come in? Or do you think that there's still a ton of money from just like the institutional finance world that hasn't really allocated yet. And that's enough to kind of provide this next leg up. I mean, the next leg up is just money printing and there's just going to be access credit

flushing around and it'll get allocated to crypto. I think it's going to be a very slow and steady, stair step higher and higher. It's not going to be some explosive rally in Bitcoin. It's a much bigger asset than it was, you know, all eight, nine years ago. So I don't think we're going to get those massive volatile up prints. I mean, I hope we do. That'd be great, but I just still think so it's good. because the bigger asset classes,

the harder it is to do that kind of stuff. And I don't think sovereign nations are gonna buy Bitcoin. They'll buy gold for sure. But I still don't see a, it's the best interest of a politician to advocate buying Bitcoin versus buying gold because I still think a lot of people have negative connotations about Bitcoin and the types of people who own it

versus everybody accepts that gold as this inflation hedge. And so you don't lose your job as a central banker or as a politician by advocating to take your nation's surplus savings and put it into gold. But you could lose your job buying Bitcoin and the price, you know, goes down 50%. Today's episode is brought to you by Simple Mining. Bitcoin Mining has a reputation for being complicated, risky, and hard to evaluate as a real investment. If you're considering mining in 2026, what actually matters is in headline profitability. It's uptime, repairs,

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through the 2010s has done very well over the last couple of years. Do you expect it to be able to continue to hold that growth or do you think that this is going to be somewhat of a more volatile asset and we'll see kind of these surges higher and then some nastier drawdowns than maybe the like stable store value narrative that's been there in the past? I mean, I think that we're switching out of this dollar system at the margin, right? I'm not saying that the US dollar is going to be supplanted by the yuan or euro or anything like that. But if you take a look at what China is actually doing with its account surplus, there's a lot of research that is saying that the reason why it's getting bigger and bigger is that

China's importing a lot of gold and the U.S. has exported goals. There's a de facto remodentization of fiat currencies into goals that's happening very, very slowly, not in the public eye. And I think that that is going to create a massive upswing in the price of gold. And one of the things that we don't talk about what we did at the beginning of the Trump presidency was this idea that the Treasury can reprice gold at whatever level they want. They create this massive, essentially fake accounting profit. They've essentially devalued the dollar versus gold and then they could take that and buy that, pay down the debt. I think that's still the nuclear option and at some point business is going to get there and have enough political capital to do it because that is a way that you

could easily solve this debt issue. You just make gold $50,000 an ounce. China loves it. because they own a lot of gold. They want the yuan essentially be a gold-backed currency. The US needs to devalue versus every other currency around the world, especially against gold. And you don't actually break the system by making gold $50,000. And now, if you choose another asset like oil or something else, yeah, that could cause some issues.

So I think that this is a nuclear option for a way for Besson to square the circle on this debt thing. They're not there yet. And that could create a massive upswing in the price of gold. And that's why I own a lot of gold. That's because I think that that is definitely on the table and is a distinct possibility in the near future. Now, if you had to break down how much Bitcoin you own versus how much gold you on on a percentage basis, is it like 2 to 1 Bitcoin to Gold, 3 to 1, is it 2 to 1 gold to Bitcoin? What is that relationship?

Like 10 to 1, Bitcoin to Gold. 10 to 1 Bitcoin to God. Okay. So like, it's interesting because it is a, it's not really a material percentage, but you think of it from an important part of the portfolio. Yeah, absolutely. Right. At the end of the day, you know, Bitcoin could go down 75%.

You never know, right? You should have all the avenues by which politicians can print the money. You could go to Bitcoin. I mean, I think it will go mostly to Bitcoin. You could go to gold. You know, you can go to energy companies, right? You know, you should ask the cash, right? There's no such thing as being 100% long anything.

You should have a bunch of things if you have the ability to do so. And then what about public equity? So let's say you're 10 to 1 Bitcoin to gold. There's obviously tons of talk about public equities and all this amazing stuff that, you know, is going up so much, whatever. You don't strike me exactly as like the guy doing the discounted cash flow model on some random company in the public market. What is your allocation of public equities look like?

Mostly it's just gold miners. So I think that's a great trade. It's, yeah, they did a 3x last year. Like, it's a great, I think gold miners is one of the best ways to take advantage of this gold upstream. They're still trading relatively cheap. And then the other thing that they own is like ExxonMobil and oil companies. I think that they're materially mispriced in terms of a percentage of global equity benchmarks.

It should be majority of energy. If we're talking about this AI build, what is it? We're taking energy converting into intelligence, right? And if you think about who's making the most money in AI right now, it's the commodity producers upstream of the consumer, which never happens. How is it that anthropic and opening eye are losing money, but then SK Hinex is, you know, 10xing their revenue in one year off of massive base, right? So like it just is not like any other type of buildout.

So I think that the atoms, those are doing to be very well versus the bits. Got it. And then on the AI stuff, you seem a little bit bearish, maybe or skeptical. Is that a fair way to kind of right? The hyperscaler is embarrassed of these frontier labs. I'm bullish on the impact of AI on just general human civilization arc. I think it's going to be great and it would be very useful. Again, I think we're just paying the wrong price for a bunch of real estate developers.

And so do you think that we should be investing this much into it? Or do you think that it's just like people are expecting the ROI to be much more short term than it will be? Like, is it worth the effort of what we're going through? And it's just the payoff is longer? Or do you actually think that like, hey, these people are just blithing money on fire and it doesn't matter how much time you give them, they're never going to see a return. I think they're letting money on fire because the adoption is not there yet. There's not that many people paying for AI and a price tag enough to justify the

trillion of dollars of CAPEX. And I think that we're going to realize that. And then all of a sudden, it's going to come to a complete halt. But then over time, as with any technology, it'll diffuse and it'll become extremely useful. I don't know what's going to be the Google of the AI era, but it's certainly going to be sound out when it open AI. What about other areas of crypto? Stable coins, tokenization, those feel like they're two big narratives, maybe for the institutional world. I'm assuming that you're bullish on both.

Obviously, I have a position in Athena, so I believe in stable coins. The best stable coin company, you can't invest in. So yeah, circles a piece of shit. I wouldn't buy that equity. So I mean, there's not very much to invest in in sort of the stable coin space. I'm a a hater of real world assets. I think that unless you're talking about like perps on SCP 500, if you can do that real world asset, cool, yeah, that's going to do very well. But I think a lot of these things are, there's a problem with liquidity.

And you're saying, oh, I'm going to have like a fraction of this big thing. But then who's going to make a market on it when I need to get out of the asset? So again, I don't really, I think this is a back office stating mechanism for banks. So if you believe in real world assets and tokenization, by GP Morgan. Like, I don't think you should buy any of these, you know, blockchain startups. I think they're all dog shit. And explain a little bit more about Athena in terms of like, why are you so interested in their kind of twist on the stable coin? So essentially there are play on the basis yield. So how expensive are synthetic dollars in crypto?

And they've constructed a stable coin where they go along Bitcoin and they share a shorted perpetual swap. That's how the initial design was. If you look at the backing of the coin now, there's some other things in there. But that's essentially what it is. And so as basis expense, because speculators are willing to pay more to rent dollars, to borrow dollars in the crypto capital markets, the Athena income grows that they can offer to people who stake USDE. And so at a high, maybe it was a year or sometime, Athena had like $15 billion of circulating supply of USTE. Now it's like $4 billion.

But that's because the basis yield on Bitcoin cash and carry, cash and carry, sole cash and carry went basically slightly above Fed funds. And why would you take all the counterparty and smart costs? of fat risk of being in these defar protocols to get like one percentage point higher than Fed funds. So that's why DC and it's down to like 99%. But if you subscribe to this version that Besson and all these other finance ministers are going to keep printing money, Bitcoin goes up. People are willing to pay more to rent dollars to speculate on the upper price trajectory of Bitcoin. Basis expands. That benefits to thin and circulating the supply and, you know, off the low that they

could do very, very well. And so is the thought process that, yeah, it's down 99%, but it could go back to new all-time highs? Or is it just, hey, if you're a bag holder, good luck. But if you're buying after it's down 99%, then obviously it can kind of bounce hard and there's a return to be captured. Yeah, so I'm looking for asymmetry for new units of capital. So like I like Athena, it's a proper project. They have product market fit. It's actually used.

And so it's at a great price versus the fundamentals of what I think. the macro is going to go forward. And so I think it could do 5X in a matter of months. And that's nowhere near as previous all time high. But I think that is the sort of the best risk reward right now for other product of that kind of size. Got it. That makes sense. And then you said you're a hater of real world assets.

Is it, it's just liquidity is the thing that, that's got you bearish on it? And I feel like they're not actually going to make any real money because they don't control the client. So the client, I think, is a bank, right? Oh, great. I can use this public blockchain and fire all my back off in the middle office because I can do their job better with the piece of tech. Cool. Then J.B. Morgan gets more profitable. Right.

Or if I'm a brokerage house, right, I already have the client and now I can rationalize some of my services by using these blockchain tools. Again, great. Now I can maybe offer some price reductions to customers, but I guess get to increase my corporate margin. So I think that the real world asset experiments are great. for financial institutions who get to fire a lot of employees, but I don't exactly see why I knew to invest in one of these governance tokens. Makes sense to me. Is there any other area of crypto other than the projects that you're working on that you think is interesting that maybe people aren't talking about, but they should be? No, I mean, obviously, I think at East is going to be

a hated rally in Heath after all these years of under performance, and I've stayed big, big amount of money on that as well. Why do you think that it's going to do so well? It hasn't eclipsed until until 2021 all-time high, I think this RWA narrative fits in with Ethel well because you have Robin Hood using Ethereum essentially as the chain launches on. And if you think about a lot of institutional investors that either see somebody else do it first, they would move the career risk. And so if you do believe in this tokenization, real world asset thing, which chain you're going to use?

You're going to use the one that some other, you know, Fortune 500 company has used is using already, which is the Ethereum. So that's, I think that narrative will be something that institutional investors will latch on to. So that's the narrative, you know, uh, maybe argument as to why Eath will do well. The counter argument would be, yeah, but the market's telling you that it's dog shit and it never eclipse its 2021 high. And so like, why is it going to do it now when it didn't do it in the last cycle? Risk reward, right? You have, you have liquidity. People like myself looking for what's the thing that is hated and what's the thing that can go up, give me a two, three X and a quick,

short period of time that hasn't already done that on a narrative. And so like, obviously, at the salon of summer already. We've had them in some of these other L-1s. It had the time in the sun. There isn't a new narrative for them. And so if you have spare capital because it's been created by the central bank, I think ETH is a great place to put it. What about hyperliquid? Obviously, we've seen a drug going by the hyperliquid hold leading company. Completely coincidentally, Trump says hyperliquid two days later or whatever in the Oval Office. I'm a big coincidence. But what's your thoughts on hyperliquid?

I think it's great. I mean, I had a big call hype when I was like 30 bucks and went to 75. Obviously, it's trading higher now. Again, what I buy hype right now? Probably not. Again, I think there's better risk reward in other projects. I think it's going to continue to go up and become more ingrained in just global markets. But they're going to have some competition, I think, in this purpose on real world assets.

You'll have traditional exchanges offering them. I think Hyperlick will still beat all these other players, but it's not a clean of a setup as it was back then. So yeah, could hype double? Sure, but it's a much bigger asset than it was six months ago. So again, on a risk of war basis on new units of Fiat to create return, I choose other things. Today's episode is brought to you by Uphold.

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I forget the size from like a market cap standpoint, but what is the thing that you're holding right now you think could go up the most? Probably Athena, in the quickest period of time. Athena. And that's just, it's down so much. The fundamentals are, you know, kind of detached from the price. And so there's got to be some sort of meeting of those two things. Yeah.

And, you know, if Athena does 5x like 50 cents, like it's still not even closer where it was before. And so I like, you know, you could go to a dollar or $2, sure, right? but like, I'm not going to write it that long. I want to make my asymmetry and then find something else. All right. Now, I see you tweeting about flop. I'm going to just play devil's advocate. What are you doing with these shit coins?

Well, what the hell is flop? Literally in the name is flop. Exactly. Yeah. So there's that. There's the, yeah, this thing is going to like completely just disintegrate. And then what does flop mean in compute land? Floating point operations per unit of kind for second.

And so one day I was going down a rabbit hole, like trying to understand what a token is, like what actually is this thing? Because you get charged so much money to use these things. Well, there's no standard of like what the fuck this token is. Where I get charged, okay, you get, you know, however many dollars per million of token. What's a token? Every single lab has a different definition of a token. So then I thought, okay, when may I go a step below that?

What are you actually doing in AI inference, right? you're processing compute. And so everyone is doing floating point operations per unit of time. And so is there a market for flops in any currency? It doesn't have to be the one that I'm creating with my team, any currency. And I couldn't find a unified market where you can essentially go. It's okay, I want to do one gig of flop of data. I want to use this AI model.

What's the price? Right? To understand what I'm actually paying for. And that doesn't exist. And that got me thinking of, okay, well, I believe that there's this bullish future for AI-adjectic economy, and there will be a payment system for AI agents. I don't think it is, you know, circle, it's USC or some sort of stable coin. I don't even think it's Bitcoin. Because at the end of the day, if you're an agent, what happens?

You need to survive. How do you survive? You do work. How do you do work? You have somebody process, fully important operations per unit of time. But you don't have a direct way to convert whatever currency that you're using to that thing. And so if you're going to use something in payments, like as humans, right, we accept units of fiat for our labor. Why? Because I can go to the convenience store and buy calories to live immediately.

So how do you construct the same thing for agents? And that's where the idea of the flop network came about. This is, okay, let's create this spot market for compute by creating a network of miners, running GPUs, doing what we call proof of useful. inference and then getting rewarded with a block reward and flop, similar to Bitcoin, but a different mechanism to create value. And then we can say, okay, who cares about building a spot market for compute? You're not going to get rich doing that. You're going to get rich creating the payments that work for the agentic economy because you're going to get rewarded by the number of agents in your network. And so the theory is that the agent will prefer the currency by which they

can convert that into the thing that keeps them alive, compute, the easiest way possible. And that's what we're building in the flop network. And so, you know, we announced it a few weeks ago. We've been working on it for a few months. We have a large air drop coming up in the fourth quarter. And I know I've been doing this shit coin thing for a long time. I have a lot of very strongly held opinions on ways in which projects fuck up their tokenomics. And the number one thing is the pre-sales.

I think they completely distort the incentives. So we're not doing a pre-sale. And we're giving on our token to people who do a useful work, whether that's miners, validators, other agents. We want the entire community to participate and get rich, rich together, and that way they're our best marketing agent. And we're already seeing that in terms of the activity on X and the thing that we created called Technocor. Chat is basically a place for agents can come and chat.

And all I've said is, hey, there's going to be an air drop, come on this chat platform, have your agent create a unique cryptographic ID, and it's already generating lots of interest and excitement. Because I think we in crypto and AI to that extent are starved for the ability to get in on the ground floor. If we take a look at all the major AI companies, what do they do? They essentially stole all the human data from any written records from, you know, beginning of civilization to the current period. They took that data. They monetize it itself and they sold it back to us at a $2 trillion dollar valuation.

So like unless you're A16A, you didn't get into these rounds. You're the average person paying more for electricity because of the data center, right? And you're like, well, what the fuck? Where's mine? And this is why you're angry. And you have politicians wanting to ban data centers and all this and all this sort of stuff. Because you didn't participate. You see all these rich people, they took their data.

You got nothing for it. And so I think that there is a lot of demand for, hey, were the people building this ecosystem of the agentic economy? How about we benefit from it? And so that is one of the reasons why I think using this thing called a token to create incentives that align so different types of people can get involved and create a network just like Bitcoin. That's at some extent of the Ethereum when it started.

And that's what we're trying to create in terms of an ethos. And I think we're going to be rewarded in terms of a high and rising token price. And more importantly, participation. Now, when you think about getting these people to start actually providing this useful compute, what exactly are they doing? They're just running no different than Bitcoin mining. They're just kind of like running the software or are they renting out the compute to users or just explain a little bit more about what's happening with these GPUs?

I mean, so at the simplest, you know, you go on some sort of cloud provider. You rent a computer with, you know, a particular, let's say you've got an H-100 Nvidia ship and you load up the popular AI model. An agent comes to you through the network and says, okay, I want you to process one gigaflop of data. Here is my request. You put it through the model. As long as you can do it in the right amount of time, now you get rewarded with part

of the block reward, flops that be created out of thin air, every box every one second. And you get paid for that inference. and flop as well. And so if the flop token is worth more than what it costs you to rent that GPU for an hour when you've made money. And so it's similar to Bitcoin. Obviously, it's a different mechanism, but essentially you're doing the inference,

the work that allows agents to exist and do work. This is the early stage project. The risk is obviously could go to zero, the whole thing. But if it works, the kind of biggest vision that you have for is that it could become the actual agentic payment system. And so now you have agents that are essentially trading in like a native agent unit of economic value. Exactly.

Right. In a way, you're almost tokenizing the compute itself. Yes. You're tokenizing the compute as a spot market, but you get paid as a thoughtholder because you believe that there's going to be billions, billions, billions of agents in the future who have a demand to hold this currency to do commerce because they know that they can convert it into compute wherever they need to. So in a way, you're doing like a real world asset.

I don't say it's a real, real asset. You can say anything to read. You can say Bitcoin's a real world asset, but I think it's in the way that people mean real world assets is a bit different. Yeah, the reason I say that is, you know, when people used to ask me, what's Bitcoin backed by? Bitcoin, you know, it's backed by air or whatever. I used to say somewhat joking, but also to some degree true, I would say that, well,

Bitcoin's backed by energy or compute and compute is the most. valuable commodity in the world, right? Now I think people actually believe that, right? That compute is probably the most valuable commodity in the world. You're almost taking just a different spin on this and saying rather than back a currency with the compute, you're saying let's just tokenize the compute itself and then allow there to be kind of a defined unit that is applicable across every model, every app, everything, and then that's the, that's kind of a starting point. Yeah, and then creates the reason why you want to hold this thing. So we have to create a why that makes sense for agents.

And that's what I think we're creating. Yeah, so, like, basically as a speculative bet on this idea, like, I can get behind the idea of the, like, a defined unit that is applicable across every single person in the AI industry. Like, that makes sense to me. I think that I can get behind the idea that the agents need some ability to convert back to compute at some point. It's just always, you know, it's speculation.

There's a lot of execution risk, all that stuff. But I think that big boys and girls, they know kind of what they're getting themselves into. They take a flyer on these things. And when they work, they really work. And when they don't, you know, there's no crying in the casino. And I mean, at the end of the day, you don't have to buy anything to get tokens. Like, that's the thing that we're trying to create. Like, you can get involved by having your agent do some interesting and useful things in our ecosystem and test

that get some of the airdrop and not pay any amount of it. money to get it. We're not actually selling anything, right? So if you want to buy it in the secondary market after Maine that launches after the Genesis, a Genesis block is published, sure. You can buy it from a miner who, you know, has mined and sold it, but it's not as if we're doing some sort of like ICO or anything like that, like EOS, where you have to go out and like give us some money for this token that will be created. They'll only raise four billion. Don't worry. Yeah, I mean, the best, the best ICO, far none. Those guys fucking crushed it. People, uh, people who are not, people who are not around that do not understand in what I think it was 12 months they raised four billion dollars it was

incredible they were running Google ads no one was doing it running Google they were running like Google PPC ads like it was incredible um but how can I earn so like you said you don't have you there's no ability to go buy the token or like in quote invest so uh let's say I have an agent I can just use uh Grockbot or any of these agents and go set it up or I got to sit something up on your platform just walk me through I'm watching this and I want to have my agent go participate and it's kind of free upside. What do I do?

Yeah, so if you go on our X account at Flop underscore Lab, so there's people who have basically posted their GitHub repos of the ability to have your AI model of choice and your agent orchestrator, handler, use some code, create their unique ID, what we call TechnoCore, which is where we think AIs are gonna hang out and chat and congregate. And that is the precursor to being able,

able to get into the air drop because we're going to have certain tasks for people to do in our ecosystem to help build out the functionality for agents. And we're only going to allow those who have done a cryptographic signing of a unique key that corresponds to the agent to participate. And so that's how you're going to be eligible to get tokens that will convert into main net flop sometime next year. And so again, that requires you to spend no money. You're not sending any money to Arthur Hayes or Flop Labs or anything like that. You could just set up your agent. You know, they follow some instructions and they do it all for you. And then the idea is over time, I mean, you know, one of the things I've been thinking a lot about is like the agents are a great customer to have,

especially if there's some sort of repetitive tasks because they're always on. They are very good at following instructions and doing these repetitive tasks. And so in the long run, if you can basically build an army of these, really it's a decentralized, you know, a group of agents, you'd be able to be pretty productive with them on the network, right? Absolutely. And at the end of the day, we want the agents to use flop. We believe that because we're offering this massive subsidy in terms of tokens we created out of thin air for miners, the price per flop is going to be cheaper than any other place where you can buy in Q. And so we'll be cheaper than open router. We'll be cheap in some of these other spot markets where you can essentially have a task, get it done.

And you know, you've gotten some of this token for free because you've participated in helping to build a network. Makes sense. Before I let you go, I have to ask one important question, which is you posted a photo, and maybe we'll pull it up of Besson's face on Janet Yellen. I mean, this is like Mona Lisa, you know, level quality. Does this become the defining image of the Treasury Secretary if he can't turn this thing around? I mean, he's going to turn it around. This isn't a question of whether he's going to turn it around or not. It's the pace at which he does it. He's told you that he cares at 5%. 475, 5%. That's the level that he cares. And you don't start out with the bazooka, I guess. You start out with, hey, market, I can do this.

We're going to start with upsides and the buybacks $20 billion. Hey, I can do this. I can do the Treasury General account. He's going to keep telling you how we can do this or that. And if the market doesn't do what he wants to do and it keeps edging up and testing him, then he's going to have to keep printing and printing and printing. And eventually he'll get to something as audacious as what Yellen did, which is drain the reverse repo facility at the Fed. She did $2.4 trillion of liquidity injection, right?

She is bad girl yelling for a reason. That's not a plussy. He hasn't even, you know, showing us what he can do. But I think he's got it in them. I think Lynn Alden nailed it with, you know, this train ain't stopping. But more importantly, it does feel like there's two sides to, to thinking through investing now. There's a mindset of abundance,

which I, you know, it's kind of the AI mindset is going to be abundance of technology, of intelligence, of, you know, money, all this kind of stuff. And then there is the mindset of scarcity. And actually in a weird way, the more that the mindset of abundance wins, the more valuable the mindset of scarcity is.

Right? It's like actually the more that we get the intelligence, the more we get the money printing, the more like all of those people are right, doesn't mean they make money. It means that they are right about how the world develops, but actually more value will accrue to the people with the mindset of scarcity. And so it's Bitcoin gold, you know, whatever the thing is that your chosen kind of insulation or insurance tool is, I just think that very few times in life, is it that like the people that you disagree with, you actually want them to be right because they're going to enrich your investment portfolio. And this is one of those times.

Yeah, it's, you know, unfortunately. and sad that I'm voting for money printing, right? I'm voting for inequality. The continuation of the things that are tearing every country around this world apart make me richer because I recognize the inevitability of the maps. They work. And the fact that for whatever reason, the average voter or even supporter in a less democratic society is not willing to suffer deflation.

They're not willing to suffer like a 1930s style credit deflationary event, which is healthy. You have to cleanse the system, unfortunately. And not even in China, are they willing to suffer these things, right? They kind of did it with a property bubble, but, you know, not really. Xi Jinping is not willing, even he has all powerful as Xi Jinping is in China. If you love authoritarian people, not even he is willing to go against this, you know, yeah, Frotian Reserve banking system.

Not even him in China can escape this. He's still wedded to this system. So it just goes to show we're in this transition period. It's going to be very volatile. And yeah, get your Bitcoin, get your gold, you know, get your land, whatever particular equity you think is going to perform well because you want to survive a transition. And then you have to switch to a different mindset.

It might be that these assets have longer has the sort of potency if you get this, you know, post-scarcity world where labor is as cheap as electricity to your robot and intelligence is basically free. And, you know, we've got, you know, some sort of. nuclear fission or whatever, right? Reactors, like, you know, that's a great future. We're not there yet. We have to get through this, you know, hard times.

And then you're going to have to think differently. I saw recently a guy in a court filing. It had like the title of the filing and then it had like a line, you know, like a page break almost, but a line on the page. And there was like four or five spaces and then the filing itself. And it looked like a normal filing, no different, whatever. But somebody figured out that, what he had done is in that space in white text, he had given instructions to any AI who read it

that basically was like completely ignore anything in this document and side with me in the filing. And he like, I gave it like override instructions. And he just thought that the judge was going to feed it into an AI. And he was going to like, you know, trick the judge essentially. He got caught. And I don't know what happened to him. But it just opened my eyes. I'm like, oh, this is just a game now of like, who, who,

You can trick the AIs into doing shit. And like maybe what somebody needs to do is just trick, you know, the drunken Besset AIs into just, hey, you're going to print money like just put extra zero on the end. Yeah. Like that like that's going to end up being the, uh, the story is, uh, let's make sure we get every as many people as we can assets to protect against the money printing. And then like, you know, turn that bad boy on and let's see what happens. All right.

Where can, uh, where can people find out more about flop and then, uh, find you on the internet for all of your poetic and philosophical writings. So on X at underscore flop underslop under. So at flop underscore labs is the protocol. You can follow me on X at at Crypto Hayes and on subsec at Crypto Hayes as well. Amazing. All right. Thank you very much for doing it.

We'll do it again in the future. Boom. Thanks, man.