The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin $100K, Ethereum $8K, Solana $400: Bullish Predictions For 2024 With Tom Dunleavy

Starting point is 00:00:00 Want some bold predictions for 2024? How about Bitcoin to $100,000, Ethereum to $8,000, and Solana to $400, even knowing that Solana is literally experiencing an outage as we speak. I've got Tom Dunleavy, who is here to share some of his bold predictions for 2024. Some maybe not that bold, but what he thinks we're going to see this year. One of my favorite guests and analysts joining to talk about the market and what to look forward to. Let's go. What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of Wall Street. Before we Let's go. spontaneously bring it back. But I'm not sure that one hit, that one kind of missed in my own mind. Guys, I've got some bold predictions today, which we need because the market is doing absolutely nothing. Even with a Solana outage, which we're going to talk about, the price of Solana is down like 1%. I literally don't understand it. You would think that when an

Starting point is 00:01:17 entire blockchain goes down, maybe the price would be affected. But it seems maybe a lot of people are so bullish that the price remains up or so few people are doing anything in this market that none of it matters at all. Let's talk about it with today's guest, Tom. How are you, man? Scott, how's it going, brother? Doing well. How are you doing? Going good. It's funny. I still am used to seeing Tom Dunleavy, you know, like parentheses, Masari in my mind, you know? And so it's interesting to see Master Ventures Capital here, but I love what you guys are doing over

Starting point is 00:01:50 there. But I'm assuming you're still pretty heavily on top of the research based on the threads that you're doing here. For sure. Yeah, you got to be right. It's almost like going one step down in the research. Instead of being in the liquid public markets, you know, for folks in the audience, we do private investments. So that's hopefully where the trends are going. So you got to figure them out early, got to get in early. And just by chatting with startups, you kind of naturally see that, which is fantastic. The velocity of behind the scenes private deal flow right now feels like peak 2021 and prices aren't even up. Do you agree with that? That wasn't supposed to be the topic today, but from all the VCs I hear about, random DMs and telegram messages. I don't know how you even got

Starting point is 00:02:29 my name type people who are presenting me with allocations for pre-sale. I mean, it's endless. Yeah. Let's touch on this real quick because I think it's really important. So I saw a tweet the other day from a popular personality and they were like, wow, what's going on with crypto VCs? Is the environment dead? And you basically saw the amount raised and amount of deal closed in Q4 was very, very low compared to history. And that's because there's a huge lag in this data. It's like six to nine months. If you talk to anyone on the private side and the deals that we've seen, you've seen record number of deal volume, record number of aggregate capital deployed and very much in line with 2021. Deals are closing faster at higher valuations.

Starting point is 00:03:15 I just got off a call with a portfolio company who's trying to raise a new round and they showed me the deck and I was like, these valuations would have been great two or three months ago, but you have to double them now. And it's not only because the market's moving, but people who have been waiting on the VC side need to deploy capital now. So if you raised a fund for $100 million and you deployed 20% of your capital, you have 80% left or something like that. And these are actual numbers from the biggest VCs. You have to deploy that before you actually start. I mean, there were multi-billion dollar funds from the likes of Andreessen that were raised a couple of years ago. And people don't realize, but you can't wait 20 years until the moment is right. You have to deploy. Yeah. And the valuations make it so you can only deploy so much, right? If you see a company that raised 10 to 20,

Starting point is 00:04:06 $30 million, you're like, whoa, that's crazy. But most of these are only raising, you know, five at most. You can get like 50 grand in, right? And you've got millions and millions and millions to deploy and you can get like 50 grand. Yeah. So I just have been surprised at how fast it's coming in. It's extremely like overwhelming. I'm sure there's a lot of opportunity being missed, but nobody can bet all this stuff. It's impossible, right? So for us and I think for the listeners out there, the things you want to do is have conviction on what broad themes you really like. And then if you're going to allocate, and there is opportunities to allocate on the private side more than I think folks realize, right? You can go to a launchpad,

Starting point is 00:04:43 like a coin list or like we have on paid or others, right? And you can say, hey, I want one, $2,000 worth allocation and just know your lane, right? You can't just be spraying and praying and everything. Like know that I really like Bitcoin L2s or something. I think there's going to be something there, like find one or two that you like and deploy. Cool. Let's dig into some of these narratives. We got to start with the headline first. This is, so Tom did a long thread here. It's 24 crypto predictions for 2024. I'm struggling so hard today. I said 25. Bitcoin 100K, ETH 8K, but both lose market share to Solana as the rally continues. Solana rises above $400. She's record high active addresses exceeding 1 million some days, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. So let's dig into this. Where do you get in general the numbers? Then we'll dig

Starting point is 00:05:28 into Solana a little deeper. So where's Bitcoin 100K come from for you? Yeah, that's probably even a bit light, right? If you look at post halving numbers, I think 4X is generally what we've seen. But the sample size is I think four. So that's not really super predictive. And then you get to include 2025, right? So maybe that happens six months into 2025 and not in 2024. Exactly. And everyone knows the themes. We've beaten them to death here.

Starting point is 00:05:55 Sort of having ETF, soft landing on the macro side, rate cuts, blah, blah, blah. I think roughly 2x for Bitcoin is a solid base case. And then beta off that. So Ethereum has lagged Bitcoin precipitously, roughly a 3x there. Seems somewhat reasonable. And then, again, 4x on Solana, which it's out today, but that really hasn't affected the price. And it's because I think a lot of people actually haven't really used Solana. So I have a Solana Saga mobile phone, which is the biggest moneymaker. Nice.

Starting point is 00:06:24 I don't know, hitting the mobile phone, which is like the biggest moneymaker. Nice. Like, I don't know, like hitting the lotto, which is fantastic. Catching airdrops right now as we speak, just they're flying in. Every day. But like, regardless, it's so freaking easy to use this thing. Like I just go on there and I can trade like I even, it's easier to trade on my Solana mobile than it is to do in my Merrill Lynch account. And it's just like, if you use Solana, you're like, what the hell is going on with Ethereum? And it's only going to get better, right? Mobile is the biggest on top use case in crypto. And they just sold out 60,000 new Solana Saga 2 phones, right? So I'm so bullish

Starting point is 00:06:55 on Solana right now, despite some of these outages. So I think that's a solid price target for the year. We'll see though. Yeah. I mean, it's like you even just mentioned right now, doesn't it? The price I said at the beginning, like I think price like 94 bucks or something. Let me look at this a lot. Yeah. We're at 93, 95. I mean, started the day at 96, 59. A couple percentage move at worst with a major outage, right? I mean, it's a lot of years to deploy fix as network suffers major outage. And what's crazy is like, it's been years since this happened. They had finally killed this narrative. Guys, it's been years since we've had an outage, right? We fixed it. Fire dancer's coming. This is a big outage. Do you know why? I haven't dug in. Do we know why this is happening? I don't. Up and above, they're just pushing

Starting point is 00:07:39 technology to the limits right now and something finally broke. If you're trying to get 200 millisecond synchronous transactions, stuff's going to happen. But in terms of just the broader narrative too, I think a really simple mental model for this is all of these airdrops are happening on Solana for Jupiter and others. And Jupiter is only one fourth the way done with airdrop. By the way, they still 30% airdrop. You have this huge wealth effect. if i just got a shit ton of like jupiter bonk or something like that like i'm probably going to keep it in the solana ecosystem i'm probably going to spend it so there's going to be a ton more of those and you're just going to see that money slosh around in solana and once people use it like i did it's just like night and day of ethereum you're just kind of like what am i doing here what you know yeah i think my question there is is isn't that just, I'm playing devil's advocate. I'm not a

Starting point is 00:08:27 salon hater by any stretch. I'm actually a fan, but I mean, isn't that just fake liquidity, gambling, speculation, not real use, give people a bunch of free money and the money will stick around the ecosystem. I mean, it's, I know I've had the argument. I say it's helicopter money. I'm sorry. I don't care what anyone says. Other people says they're distributing value. It's helicopter money, in my mind. You're just literally giving people money to keep it in the ecosystem. But how can we judge the real usage of any blockchain if primarily it's because people are coming in for free money and to gamble? Come for the free money, stay for the actual use cases. I think this is like...

Starting point is 00:09:05 So the same things that happen on Ethereum through Eigenlayer and others when they do a ton of airdrops this year, but people are going to have a fractured user experience like we've all had, and they just don't understand how to use the stuff because it's hard. You come to Solana, you're like, okay, I kind of get it. I got some free money, but oh, what's this other stuff over here? Decentralized physical infrastructure. Like, oh, what's this Helium or what's this other stuff over here like decentralized physical infrastructure like oh what's this you know helium or you know what's you know xyz deep end protocol that's actually launching that i can sort of actually utilize um in my day-to-day you know life and and sort of build on top of that but it also brings in folks who are actually going to build potential useful applications in the future um and the user experience just lends to actually... It's incredible. They are there-ish with UX, UI,

Starting point is 00:09:48 which has obviously been the major problem for Ethereum. I almost have a coronary every time I need to bridge an asset or try to figure out one of these things that's going to go wrong. It is much better, objectively. Agreed. And I think the narrative with Ethereum will certainly circle back. Not generally bearish on Ethereum because I think if nothing else, it's been beaten down this cycle. I just think the path to actual strong user experience is much longer. You've kind of

Starting point is 00:10:16 heard the Ethereum researchers come out recently because there's been this whole like FUD of, oh no, the liquidity is fractured. Like who needs another L2? Like we can't even get in between the major ones today. And they're like, oh no, no, no fractured. Who needs another L2? We can't even get in between the major ones today. And they're like, oh no, no, no. It's all going to be fixed in two or three years once we have shared sequencers and all this stuff they're still developing. It's like, well, people don't want to wait two or three years when we've already waited four or five years to get to the point we are today. People just want to use this stuff and developers want to be able to build useful applications. So I think Solana is the closest. And there's others, right?

Starting point is 00:10:46 Like Aptosui and others. On the private market side, we're seeing a ton of protocols that are building there as well. So I think Ethereum is either going to hurry up or some of these other ones are really going to steal a lot of market share quickly. Right. But at least Ethereum, I guess, would benefit from those L2s if they get any sort of market share or end up being particularly successful. But I totally agree with you. Do you think though these people coming into Solana for airdrops and using the phone, do you think that's any new people? That's my question. Is this just the same people that used to gamble in the Ethereum casino going to find a way to

Starting point is 00:11:20 gamble in the Solana casino? Because I don't think your average person on the street bought a Saga phone because they heard there were going to be airdrops. Totally agree. Still waiting for the killer use case. Still waiting for it. Right. So like, what, what is that? So I, you know, I just use, I just think of these other applications that you could download on your phone. And that's why one of the reasons I bullish on Solana because they're actually tapping into that mobile landscape. These applications that, like Sweatcoin or something, right? I just download the application,

Starting point is 00:11:48 I get free tokens and great. I don't even know I'm using it in the background. There's other ones that track your location data or track your noise data. And all you do is just earn money in the background while your phone's running. And that stuff is like, okay, great. Mom and dad could download the app if I tell them to.

Starting point is 00:12:04 They don't have to worry about bridging to any chains and stuff. And right now they're getting tokens, but in the future, a lot of these applications can provide you USDC or whatever, dollars. And I think that's the direction we're going. And that kind of moves into one of the next predictions I had here is really just like chain abstraction. You're going to be moving to a world where you don't see things behind the scenes, right? You just interact with whatever application you would like, you fulfill whatever use case that is, and great, you probably get some tokens today, but in the future, it's probably you just get some level of dollars. And you're able to seamlessly transact on chain, whether that's doing finance or kind of

Starting point is 00:12:41 otherwise. But I think we're going to move quickly away from this world where we're siloed in individual chains, which again, goes against kind of the L2-centric thesis that Ethereum is pushing forward with. Yeah. There's another one I liked. Privacy protocols are front and center. At least one wallet integrates direct privacy features for sending transactions like elusive privacy. I'm not particularly aware of that specific one. There's some actually that I've looked at like DOP, which is really interesting, where you are basically able to send from one wallet to another and only share the information and address that you want.

Starting point is 00:13:14 So basically somebody can't dig into your entire history every time you send them a transaction, which is a huge problem with crypto. The debate then rages on for ZK, FHE, and MPC, and which cases are best for each. I found it interesting also, like we had kind of the Solana prediction crypto. The debate then rages on for ZK, FHE, and MPC, and which cases are best for each. I found it interesting also, we had kind of the Solana prediction, and Solana is offline, and we have your privacy protocol prediction, which I agree with, and then Monero is getting delisted from Binance, right? So on the centralized side, the privacy thing is dying,

Starting point is 00:13:39 right? Which I think makes your prediction even more sort of obvious, I guess, that we're going to need to see the privacy protocols come to the centralized side. Yeah. And this is for... It would be great if Scott Melker could send transactions without folks looking at it, but it's really about financial institutions. And Solana actually built this in their new SPL rollout without with their token frameworks, that you could send anonymized dollar amounts to people. So it's like, if you want to pay your employees in USDC,

Starting point is 00:14:11 you don't have to see like, you know, Tom's getting $5 for blabbing about crypto all day. So that's great for that protocol. But protocols like Elusive and others are making it so I can send a transaction, you won't see my wallet, you won't see the end user's wallet, and then you won't see the amount at all. And they're building directly into wallets like SoulFlare and potentially a bunch of others. And if you could go in your wallet and say, today, I want to send money to somebody and just click 0.1% more, I'll pay to have that transaction anonymized. I think a lot of people would do that. So it's great for you and me, but it's

Starting point is 00:14:51 even better for institutions who need to actually have this anonymity. And if folks aren't familiar, they have this already today in traditional finance through what's called dark pools. So you send your money into, this is run by a big broker channel like JP Morgan or something, and they match your transaction with somebody on the other end who wants a similar size transaction on whatever shares you're looking to trade. So being able to do that on-chain, anonymized, decentralized, it's just like a natural next evolution of finance that we're seeing here. And there are a number of protocols that are doing it.

Starting point is 00:15:21 In terms of the underlying technology that actually makes that happen, it's all moon math to me, but you're going to hear ZK proofs, you're going to hear fully homomorphic encryption, you're going to hear MPC. And in terms of which one is going to win, my very layman's person perspective and from what I hear from smarter people than me is that ZK proofs are really, really good, but they're expensive to do on chain and they're probably a bit further away than being fast enough for everyday users. So these other two technologies are going to kind of maybe bridge the gap. And you're going to hear these acronyms all year and a number of protocols that are kind of coming through. But the broader theme is that like privacy is coming back on chain, which is something I think is important, especially in the

Starting point is 00:16:02 broader sort of regulatory regime of kind of CRS also. I was 10 years old when I heard FHE for the first time. So you can tell how out of the loop I am on that. And if I've never even heard of it, I would imagine it's a pretty distant reality, but that's really true. Yeah, there's a few protocols there that are actually integrating directly with like CCIP because CCIP obviously is going to transact a ton of value for institutions from the hundreds now I think they've integrated with. And they're encrypting a lot of that data through FHE. So yeah, another grab bag one to watch for in terms of acronyms for this year. Yeah. I mean, what do you make of XMR? I mean, there's a few coins here, but what do you make of XMR being delisted by Binance? I mean, Monero is one of the largest tokens of all previous cycles, allows people to transact privately. Do you think this is just centralized actors are going to have

Starting point is 00:16:56 to get in line and just delist anything that doesn't, I guess, get through the regulatory microscope? I think the SEC is now directly part of Binance's compliance team for the next few years. So I think anything that... I think they're going to be uber conservative going forward just because they don't want to hit any more fines. They're ready the market leader. So there's not really... So their initial ethos was to push the envelope in all of these jurisdictions, don't ask for permission, lay the groundwork and get their foot in the market and get volumes. And that's what they did. Now that they're at the top of the EAP and they have all of this scrutiny, I don't think they need to mess around with... Monero is fantastic, but

Starting point is 00:17:38 realistically, it's not the mindshare of the market. It doesn't have a ton of volume. I'm assuming they just didn't want to take the risk there. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Okay, here's a good one. Bitcoin ETF did it. ETH ETF, agree, it's coming. And one other altcoin ETF, Likely Soul, are launched by the end of 2024. We're drastically underestimating the flows, not only from non-crypto holders, 10% increase as noted below, but from institutional investors and 401k accounts. Wow. A Solana ETF, I'm going to push back and say there's literally, I would give that a 0.00 negative million percent

Starting point is 00:18:11 chance. Only because of our arguments about securities and because every time I've talked to the ETF experts of late, they say that the biggest argument for anything, for something, even an XRP one, not coming to market is because there's no futures market for them, for something, even an XRP one not coming to market is because there's no futures market for them. So therefore there's no regulated substantial market that they can track. So just the logistics of it. My prediction here is incumbent on, I think, two things. One, there will be a Solana futures market, and I think there'll be more futures markets launched throughout the year because simply, you know, these are money making entities. And if crypto is increasing in price and the third biggest token is, you know, in excess of, you know, billions of dollars, I think they're going to want to list that and try to list that.

Starting point is 00:18:56 And then Gary Gensler probably exiting at some point this year. He's already overstayed his the average SEC chair chair term, I think is like 2.7 years and he's already well over that. If there's more criticisms of him, I don't think the Biden administration really needs to have the headache on their hands. So I think at some point he either exits, we get Solana Futures listed on the CME, and then that has the same path that we have for Ethan kind of BTC that we're going down. But there also could be others here. There's wild cards, right?

Starting point is 00:19:27 Like think about like Polkadot or something that wasn't listed there. That's a quote unquote commodity. Yeah. There could be others that could be listed. Maybe not Solana, but I think Solana because the market cap. There's a lot of people who think it'll be XRP just simply because, you know, they have the court case that effectively has cleared them of the security designation in the minds of many people. But again, there's no futures market for XRP. So it's just not, I don't think that's going to happen. Here's one that's sort of pushing

Starting point is 00:19:53 against the grain, I think. RWAs are still too early. That's real world assets, guys, obviously, outside of treasuries. RWAs TVL is flat. I agree with you. My view is that all the things that were too early the last two cycles, we start to really see come to fruition this cycle. And RWA will be one of those things that was too early this cycle that we'll see come to really fruition next cycle. Even though it's the big narrative, it reeks to me of DeFi summer of years ago and metaverse fall and all these things where the idea was so great, but the plumbing wasn't there at all yet. This is DeFi summer for boomers. This is the most vanilla, milquetoast, boring. RWAs are bear market products, right? Why do I want to take the bridging risk,

Starting point is 00:20:45 the smart contract risk to come on chain and earn 5%, 6% in treasuries, right? My long-term mental model for this stuff is you can do everything on chain. You could off-chain and build that portfolio, equities, bonds, real estate, private credit, whatever. But that's a long-term vision. In the interim, money is not going to flow to those asset classes where you're going to be able to earn a very boring incremental yield. And on the private side, you're seeing folks still try to push on the string, much less so in treasuries, because I think there are a number of protocols that are already way down the line there. So Ondo Finance, Mzero is another one, really big protocols that have

Starting point is 00:21:22 raised a ton of money and are coming to market. But private credit protocols, there aren't many of them. And that's like bank lending up and above a certain amount that you couldn't do with your local bank. And because of regulations, there's this market in traditional finance where you have these kind of like five to a hundred million dollar loans called private credit alongside private equity. And you could do that in institutional portfolio. So they're trying to bring that on chain and say like, Hey, let's lend in this market to all these, you know, small and medium sized businesses. And you can earn, you know, 10 to 15% yield, which is like, if you're in crypto, like 10 to 15% yield, you're like, okay, what are we doing here? Like, this is not, this is not sexy. So you're seeing a ton of protocols on the private side trying to raise in private credit. And I'm

Starting point is 00:22:08 just like, not, I just don't see it yet. So pass on that, pass on real estate again, just like so many protocols. I think it's all coming. I just think it's not, it had to have already been built in the bear market for it to actually work or matter as bull market kicks in and people are just obsessed with prices. We've just seen it over and over and over again. And I think this is like the killer use case. You've got Larry Fink on TV talking about tokenizing everything that's going to happen. I just don't see it happening in any meaningful way this year. I mean, I totally agree with you. It's really easy to tokenize stuff. It's really hard to generate marketplaces and liquidity for that stuff. That's the challenge.

Starting point is 00:22:50 Yeah. Here's one that's going to just piss somebody off. I don't know if they're here, but man, you're going to... This is bold to say it out loud, even if you thought it, to be honest. Cardano, oh God, finally fades to irrelevance and a new UTXO EVM interoperable chain takes its place. For Cardano, project stopped launching, active addresses dropped below 30K. Don't even know what they are right now. Daily transactions below 50K. I guess I could probably go in here. So it's about 50K addresses and about 80, 70 to 80-ish K transactions right now.

Starting point is 00:23:22 Ben, you said it out loud, quiet part. So when I started working at Masari, I actually came in the room and I was like, hey, I want to write about Cardano because no one's written about Cardano. I wanted to write the bull bear case and met with a lot of smart folks

Starting point is 00:23:36 in the ecosystem, still keep in touch with them. And this is a bit, I know folks are launching protocols here that are helping bridge the gap and the issues with Cardano today. So what are the issues with the Cardano today? No stable coin, DeFi basically not existed because of the... And you can see that just through TVL, because of the mechanisms of the protocol and they haven't changed that. And then you have what I'll call megalomaniac at the helm,

Starting point is 00:23:58 who's unwilling to change or adapt to the ecosystem. So projects are immensely frustrated and they're migrating off and trying to find new avenues. So I know this from being behind the scenes. So this is a bit of an inside baseball prediction. So these other protocols that are going to be launching are going to say, okay, we love a lot of the interesting things that Cardano's on the tech side, but we're going to actually make DeFi and other things work on it. And then we're going to integrate with EVM to sort of bridge the gap and bridge the ecosystem to bring in all those users who love Cardano, but can't do anything with it today. So, you know, Cardano people might hate me there, but I think in the long run, it's going to be better off because they can actually do

Starting point is 00:24:35 things with their ADA that they couldn't do today. Makes sense. Just, man, you know, this community has been diehard, passionate, arguing against what seemed like facts for a very long time. I feel like maybe they've got some more gas in their tank to keep the narrative pushing. It's astounding when you look back at how high Ada flew last cycle, just on community and narrative. But I have no inside baseball. I'm not a builder. I tend to take things at face value. I just don't hear about it that much right now.

Starting point is 00:25:13 It's just the other narratives have taken over. Yeah. And I would say they've intentionally said like we don't, they basically have not taken in any VC capital. And no VCs are interested in investing in the ecosystem because of that for the past, whatever, five years or so. And VC capital for all of its flaws, the things that VCs do bring, right, are recognition to your project. They bring a network and they generally bring users directly through their capital. So if you

Starting point is 00:25:40 just like write off that whole ecosystem of capital funding, that's been well-worn in traditional markets, you're just handicapping yourself. And that's essentially what they've done in the Cardano ecosystem. So I don't know. I'm hopeful for all the people there that these new approaches can bring them up the curve, but it doesn't mean the token doesn't cooperate. We know it doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter. It's a beta to Bitcoin still, right? And that's how it's traded. Yeah, most things are. Speaking of Bitcoin, Bitcoin DeFi takes off and DeFi transactions exceed a billion. Ordinals die a slow death as real use case emerge. Built on top of stacks, Bitcoin DeFi takes off post the Nakamoto upgrade. LRBC is one to watch. I obviously don't know that

Starting point is 00:26:21 specific platform, but I just had a conversation late last week, which we put up on Sunday, if you guys missed it, with Adon Yago from Sovereign, who's one of my favorite sort of builders or thinkers, especially in the Bitcoin ecosystem. And I agree with you. I'm somewhat convinced that a lot of the things we've seen on other chains have effectively been a test net for things that will be built on Bitcoin. Yeah. Bitcoin is the largest settlement layer by economic weight. So naturally, if we can get block times and sort of the technology there, so you can actually do DeFi on it, sort of makes sense, right? Especially the mindshare that Bitcoin operates, not only in sort of our minds, but for traditional finance as well. The challenge here for investors is

Starting point is 00:27:10 everyone sees that. And now there are dozens to hundreds of protocols that are trying to go down the same path. I'm sure you're- I'm very shocked. We talked about that VC flow at the beginning. It's all this. And I'm like, dude, I wouldn't even know how to sell it. Make the token. I'm so outside of trying any of this myself yet i i believe in it but i don't know how to invest in that or choose a winner like it's nearly impossible to me it just seems we talked about the satoshi vm uh on spaces a little while ago right that's just one of them so this is all going to be a ton of ponzi nomics in my mind until you actually find one that accrues value in tbl there will will be one of them, but I have no idea how to bet on which one it is because there's just so much shit being thrown at the wall right now because everyone's like, oh, Bitcoin

Starting point is 00:27:52 L2s, the narrative's coming. Let me spin up my own ordinal-related deck. If I see another ordinal-related deck, I'm going to shoot myself. It's just like the biggest money grabs are just out there right now. Right. Are these actual Bitcoin people that are building these things? Or is it a bunch of Ethereum people who are just following the hype and money? I think it's the latter personally,

Starting point is 00:28:13 but I'm curious for what you've seen there, because it seems like obviously there's this bifurcation of the Bitcoin community as to whether there's even good or not at the most basic level. The ones that I've seen have technology folks from Ethereum or other ecosystems, and they have like one token, quote unquote, Bitcoin OG on the board or advisors or something to give them some credibility.

Starting point is 00:28:33 That's basically how it's going so far. I'm not surprised at all. So you said ordinals will see sort of a death as we see more use cases come. Does that align? Do you think that that's true of NFTs and other ecosystems or is that pretty specific to ordinals? I actually think NFTs more broadly see a resurgence on ETH and others. People like collectibles, people are going to circle back

Starting point is 00:28:58 to the narratives of board apes and other things. And you've seen, I think Pudgy Penguins has probably done this the best, actually building Actually building sort of a brand around it. So the power laws are going to be that 99% suck, but I think 1% is actually somewhat feasible. So you have Pudgy Penguins going Walmart now, they're doing games, they're making YouTube shows. Like, okay, yeah, a lot of this stuff is not going to happen for 99% of the protocols, but I think a subset of NFTs will continue to

Starting point is 00:29:25 have value in the profile picture space. Actual NFT value is more likely to accrue in my mind to things that are actually useful, like useful, depending on who you're talking about, but like in-game assets are easily NFTs today for players who spend tens of thousands of hours accumulating these things. If I want a movie ticket to a hot show, why shouldn't I be able to trade that or theater ticket or whatever with someone else who's bought it earlier than me, right? Without going through Ticketmaster or something. Everything that can be tradable in the future and has a set value in my mind is going to be some form of NFT. Whether that value accrues to the PFP section,

Starting point is 00:30:05 I think it's probably not going to, but eventually we'll get to a place where things are going to be in that NFT wrapper and be freely tradable. But again, it comes back to liquidity, marketplaces, all that stuff. You mentioned it being in games. I wasn't even going to talk about this one, but you do have gaming explosion. Below are all launching in Q1, all tokens and same partnerships and all are AAA quality. So yeah, I've long said that gaming wasn't going to happen last cycle. This is another one that we were just too early on because crypto didn't have a AAA native game and no existing AAA game was incorporating crypto, right? But now to your point, there's a lot of games that are, at least are being pitched as AAA that are launching in crypto definitely in this cycle

Starting point is 00:30:46 yeah so i was pretty bearish on this previously i always like you thought like hey it's eventually gonna get here because if you're playing like call of duty or whatever today like you earn points okay those are tokens you know you get guns or whatever you're getting or skins those are nfts like very easy to see the transition You just have to abstract it away, which I think we've all gotten. It's just taking a long time to actually build the fun shit. So there's a number of them that I've played that are coming out very quickly. So Shrapnel is... And a lot of them are actually being built on AX. So that's like a sort of... I played Shrapnel at Consensus. Yeah, it was cool.

Starting point is 00:31:20 Yeah. So Shrapnel is cool. This one off the grid, which are investors in Godzilla games is going to be awesome. The guy, Neil Blomkamp, who did District 9 and a bunch of others is making a series out of it, not only in the game side, but the video side. And there's a number of other ones that you can list off that are all launching within the next, call it three months. So it's finally here. Now, whether gamers actually like any of these, I don't know. But you think one of them, now that they're actually released, they're going to have some traction. Especially every single one of these games we talk to is like, we don't say the words crypto. We don't want to talk about crypto. We're just concentrating on being super fun. And then people realize that, okay, you could trade this stuff behind the

Starting point is 00:32:02 scenes and then whatever. They're never going to go back to the other way. Yeah. I know I kept you over time, but I had another one I wanted to talk about. Massive growth in Stables, 3X to close to $1 trillion a month in aggregate transfer volumes. Growth in Solana Stables leads the way. So this is still the killer app for crypto, right? You said there's no killer app, but to me, stablecoins remain the killer app. I was in line in Walmart the other day, and there was 10 people trying to send Western Union transactions back home to, and you can tell there were different ethnicities that were trying to send money back home to Africa, South America, whatever. And I'm just like, I wanted to scream.

Starting point is 00:32:34 I was like, just let's do crypto guys, remittances. You don't have to pay 10%. Let's just do this. It's so much easier, but we just need to get people there. So stable coins are going to grow once it's easier to use. And once people find out about them, it's going to easier. But we just need to get people there. So like stable coins are going to grow once it's easier to use and once people find out about them, right? It's going to take a while. And again, just keep going back to Solana. Just like ease of use is really important for a lot of people.

Starting point is 00:32:54 So I think we're going to get there this year. And this is a big theme for Nick Carter and a lot of other smarter people than me. So I feel comfortable in this one. Yeah, I think that this is the killer app. So those are the ones I wanted to go through. Is there anything we missed before I let you go? Anything you really want to highlight for 2024?

Starting point is 00:33:11 The boring one that I think is actually going to move the needle a bit is a well-developed market in secondaries and fund of funds on the crypto side. Like right now, if you're an investor, you just haven't been able to monetize or liquidate any of your positions up and above just like speculative training. The more we can institutionalize these markets, the more capital that's going to come in and the bigger we're going to get on the private side. And private leads public. So it's good for everybody. So I think there's going to be some stuff there as well.

Starting point is 00:33:38 But yeah, man, appreciate you having me. It's always fun. Yeah, man. Thank you so much, guys. You can follow Tom. It's Dunleavy with some numbers. What is it? It the description but what's the uh twitter eight nine dunleavy 89 89 don't leave me 89 all right guys thank you so much i love the predictions i tend to agree i the one i'm going to push back on is the solana uh etf but we'll we'll see what happens

Starting point is 00:34:02 you're the etf guy now we're doing spaces i'm an etf specialist now um so i would know you know basically all right man thank you i don't i'm not actually etf specialist but i play one on youtube later tom see you later awesome guys so wick is uh got the flu i think or something so we got uh no trading sentence here section here at the end. But I do obviously have to tell you guys about our sponsor. I've been telling you about them every single week. Debbie, I think they're actually launching pretty soon, although we don't talk. We don't talk about tokens. No, no, no.

Starting point is 00:34:36 But you can see their site here introducing Debbie, the next generation cryptocurrency trading on the top exchanges very soon. I've told you guys all about it, obviously, that it's cheaper, faster, more environmentally friendly, built for nation states and for institutions that have to or want to comply in ESG. So investing in ESG companies and projects, like I've told you before, I'll remind you, this is being built by the former head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, the inventor of the Kindle, former CIO of Starbucks, the former president of Universal Pictures. You're going to be hearing about this thing endlessly over the next few months. There's no affiliate link. I don't get anything. Just if you're interested in it, you check it out. It's awesome. It's scrolling right there at the bottom. Guys, that's all I've got for you today.

Starting point is 00:35:22 Going to head over and get ready for X Spaces. Of course, 10.15 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. It's been wonderful. Sorry I missed yesterday. It was interesting seeing. I didn't watch it yet. I just saw the beginning, Mike, Dave, and James. Without me, that was a lot of fun.

Starting point is 00:35:39 I actually found it quite entertaining. I hope they held it down. I heard it was great. Maybe I'll actually go back and watch it thank you guys i will see you all tomorrow morning

The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin $100K, Ethereum $8K, Solana $400: Bullish Predictions For 2024 With Tom Dunleavy

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