The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Started the Move - These Altcoins Could Deliver the REAL Returns | Ran Neuner

Episode Date: August 29, 2026

Bitcoin’s breakout may be signaling the start of a new bull phase, with the setup looking similar to the 2023 move that followed the Silicon Valley Bank crisis. Ran Neuner argues that compressed volatility, Bitcoin’s bounce from long-term technical levels, renewed ETF inflows and improving macro conditions all support the idea that the bear market may be over. The conversation also covers potential tension between Kevin Warsh and Scott Bessent, why the Clarity Act may still fail, and what that could mean for crypto regulation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This Bitcoin cycle will be massive, but the opportunity in all coins could be even bigger. Today, I sat down with Rand Newner for an unfiltered conversation about where the market is headed. I think the bull's back. I think this is a repeat of 2023, which started the bull market. I have to be bullish than I've ever been. Why he believes altcoins could be approaching a massive opportunity. For the first time in nine years, the EFBTC chart is actually breaking out. I think that's telling your story. For nine years, the application of money on the blockchain was the only money that we had and nothing else worked. However, now we're actually getting things that work.

We're getting real-world assets on chain. We've got bonds on chain, commodities on chain, stocks on chain. I've seen some applications bringing currencies on chain. We've got stable coins on chain, which is a massive, massive, massive thing. And what investors may be getting wrong. What worries me is that when this run continues, the boomers are going to come back, and they're going to start investing. And the problem is where are they going to go?

They're going to go to Kodana, they're going to go to Hachgraph, they're going to go to Iota. Because that's what they remember from the last cycle, right? I'm so worried for that part of the pump because they literally walking in to get slaughtered. Rand never holds back. And whether you agree with him or not, he'll challenge the way you see this market. Watch until the end, subscribe if you haven't already,

and let us know in the comments. Are you bullish on all coins, or is Bitcoin still the only trade? Let's go. Today's video is brought to you by Kalshi. You probably know Kalshi for prediction markets, but now you can also trade crypto perps directly on the same platform. That means Bitcoin and other major crypto assets with leverage on a platform that's U.S. regular

by the CFTC. Cali has some of the lowest fees, and you don't need to be trading millions of dollars to get exclusive benefits. Trade just $100,000 in volume per month, and you unlock a bunch of VIP perks, like one basis point taker fees, private invites to Calci events, and more. You can sign up using my link in the description, and you'll get $25 when you trade your first $50. You and I may have been our best-owned bottom signal recently, because we got on WhatsApp and started chatting about how horrible everything was and how bored we were. Isn't that usually when you can tell that the bottom's getting there when guys like us were passionate about this start to get bored out of our minds?

Look, I'll be honest with you. This was one of the most testing periods that I've had, not because I lack conviction in the industry. In fact, my conviction in the industry has never ever been hired. But in our industry, we're reliant on people viewing content and people aren't going to view content when you have a chart that looks like the one on my screen, which is basically giving you on 77 days of Bitcoin trading at, you know, $64,000, 78 days of Bitcoin trading at $64,000. When that happens, ultimately, you know, I can try and make it exciting that Bitcoin is trading

in a range between $60 and $64 every single day for 77 days, but it's not exciting. The one thing that was happening in the background here, though, is this. So if you look at the Bollinger bandwidth, and for those people who are watching and don't know what the Bollinger bandwidth, it basically shows how much volatility there is on the asset, right? Now, what you could see is when there's no volatility in the asset, the Bollinger bands compress. And what the Bollinger bands did was they compressed to a point that actually we haven't been at for a long, long, long time. I mean, I don't want to say exactly how long because I may be wrong, but for a long time.

Now, what you know when the Bollinger bands compress is that there's a move that's about to happen. It can be a move up or it can be a move down, but ultimately, you know that there's a move that's about to happen. when I saw that, I tweeted that and I said, I think this market's about to trick us. Everyone's expecting one more leg down and the bottom in October. I think it'll either last much longer and early into mid next year or it'll spike very soon out of nowhere. And the reason why I said spike very soon out of nowhere is because the Bollinger bands were tight.

It got too boring for too long and there was going to be a move. That was on August 18th. And you can see that the move came a couple of days later. I think the first move came on August 19th. So like it was it was you know like the bollinger bands got very very condensed or very very tight. There was going to be a move and and the move actually came and thankfully the move was actually up not down. Yeah, I mean there was a lot of indicators I think that aligned with what you were saying. Obviously open interest was approaching historic highs with volatility at a historic low.

You're getting leverage, you know like piling up that heavily and that tight of a range when price isn't moving, somebody's going to take advantage of that, right? But I thought the way it happened was interesting. Of course, it's always in the chart, and you can see that it was coming, but I don't think most people expected it to be the Treasury that would be the spark. Right? I think the Treasury was the spark. The liquidations were the gasoline, but we've remained up, right?

So there's real interest to some degree. But, you know, I keep talking about the fact. I don't want to be too redundant, but this reminds me of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023. Yeah, we got. You and I were on spaces every day covering that, by the way. Like very deeply covering that. And that was an unexpected catalyst that people weren't really thinking about. And Bitcoin went from 19 to 25 and kind of never looked back.

Like it was really. If you got on my screen, exactly, exactly the same. So if you look at 12th of March, 2023, we were 500 days into the bear market. We were a bit further along the bear market than this time. I'll actually take, I'll actually go there just so we can all over look at it. I actually never looked at the chart of this. It was just kind of on memory that I've been saying. Yeah, exactly.

I also did on a memory. And then I, and then the memory actually serves you very, very well here. So, you know, you had the chop, the sideways chop. Here's the sideways chop, right? Yeah, so you had the sideways chop here for a long time. Then in 2023, okay, so, 2023. Yeah, so that's FtX bottom. That's FtX collapse.

And you get to, you get to March, 2023, which is here. And the market's pretty depressed. The market's pretty compressed. We've been moving sideways for a long time. And we were, and Bitcoin was at 19,000. Then we get the announcement around SVB bank. And on March 10th, basically the Fed don't really do much other than say that they're willing to backstop the banking system for for the banks to remain solvent, et cetera, et cetera, implying that they're going to bring liquidity into the market. And then what happened immediately after that was a short squeeze. So that was a short squeeze. That was the consolidation of the short squeeze and then that was the continuation of the leg up.

And what you're saying there is kind of what I assume is going to happen, by the way, is that we just have kind of legged up into another range. I don't expect us to explode up from here. I think now we've kind of chopped the 70s for a while. I could be wrong, but that's kind of what that looks like when I'm looking at it. And I didn't remember it that way necessarily. So, yes, look, we'll get the euphoria. We'll probably get a correction, which will take us back down to here.

Now, this correction, I actually made a show about the correction earlier this week, but this correction is like an 18 to 20% correction. There it is, right? Which is not bad because, you know, if you've gone up from, you know, let's go to the bottom of the range here, and you go all the way up 86% and then you go down 18%. You left with a 50% net increase. And then you can carry on,

and then you carry on with the actual market. Now, what's interesting here is it did start off as a short squeeze, but you know how these things happen. As soon as the price goes up, specifically because of the AI trade being overtraded, the market's like, oh my goodness, we're under-exposed to this thing called Bitcoin. And you can kind of see it if you look at the ETF numbers, right? So that's the ETF flows.

I'll just refresh it to give us a cleaner look. But ever since that happened, remember the pump happened August 19th, August 18th, August 19th, every single day on Bitcoin has been a positive inflow day. We've taken in about $3 billion, $3.5 billion on Bitcoin. I think ETH is a pretty similar story. So I think Wall Street is pretty much realizing that they under-exposed, to this asset class that they haven't followed for so long, and that the AI trade is getting rather heated,

and there's been a slight move from one to the other. I don't have a chart here, but there was another chart that Eric Balkunas tweeted, and that chart showed the outflows, or the inflows from GLD and Bitcoin and Ibit, and the GLD and I, i.e, more money flowing and more trade happening in gold than Bitcoin, and less happening in the AI.

So the top one, the semiconductor one dropped, and the gold and the Ibit one, actually went up in the rankings, showing that money's flowing into the one and money's flowing out of the other. I am not sure if this is the tweet, but I just searched it real quick. Was this it? Yeah, that's the one. I'm trying to replace AIManias, store value frenemies, GLDI bidder back in the top

10 most traded ETFs. Yeah, I mean, this makes a lot of sense. It was really interesting for you to show me that chart and that you had that story brought up because I had no idea that you had those things prepared or were talking about that. So it's good to know that we were kind of a line because it just really reminding. me of that. This unexpected catalyst out of nowhere and it comes from either the Fed or the Treasury and reminds people of why you're supposed to own Bitcoin. Remember you and I? You and I were on spaces every day. And I don't know if you remember

that when Silicon Valley Bank went under, you know, the reason why Bitcoin sparked back then is because Circle was deepagging. Well, Circle was banking with SVB Bank. And I think at the time that $3.5 billion in SBB Bank. It was basically 10% of their, it was basically 10% of their their total assets were in cash and SVB. So people were like, is this going from $1 to $0.90? And everyone traded out of the, everyone traded out of the USDC, and they could either go into Bitcoin or into USDT. They went into Bitcoin, started the short squeeze.

And then once they got the short squeeze, that was the beginning of the bull market. But I also remember, I bought Bitcoin with USDC out of safety, not because I thought Bitcoin was going to go up. Actually, we had, I'm saying at the time it was such a bad bear market and sentiment was so poor that I was like, yeah, Bitcoin will probably go down when I buy it, but at least it's safe. And that actually ended up being the catalyst and we looked like geniuses. But at that time, if you zoom back to the mind frame, we were $4,000 over the dead bottom of the of the FTX collapse after six months, right?

I mean, we had gone up into the 20s, but I think we were at 19 when SVB happened or something. I mean, it was terrible. Well, it's not that different from now. I mean, now most people have been giving up on the assets. I mean, we've been a bit more resilient than that. others. But I mean, truth be told, I did get to a point where I was saying, look, I'm a, I'm a crypto investor, but I really need to work in crypto every single day on my life, where nothing

happens in this industry has become the most boring industry. And thank God, now we've got the bull back. We've got the green back. We've got the blood back. Right. Is the bull back? Yeah, is that the natural question. So for me, it's close enough. And when I say it's close enough, I think the bull's back. I think this is a repeat of 2020, 2020, which started the bull market. I want to show you just, I'll show you. I'll show you. I'll show you. I'll show you a few charts just because I think that they that they kind of strengthen the case for why the bull might be back. So if you look at this, that's a 200 week moving average. If you go back to 20, I'm not going to go as, okay, you can actually even go that far back.

So if you look at the first cycle, the 2012 cycle, we bounced off a 20 week moving average. That's what the end of the bull market. 2017, 2018, we also bounced off a fraternity week moving average, right? But 2021 was the only year where we went under, the only bear marketer went under the 200-week moving average and stayed there. I know you're going to say during COVID, we actually bounced there. No, I'm just laughing because you and I clearly are doing the same shows without watching because I've been, I literally did an entire episode on Yahoo about basically this and why for

the last months since February I've thought the bottom was in. And it was, you know, the fourth time in history oversold on the weekly RSI. this was the second bullish divergence in history, FTX. FTX was the only time we went under, but only for nine months. It's great to have confidence. And so we bounced off here again. We bounced off here after, you know, spending enough time in the RSI oversold territory, et cetera, et cetera.

So look, there is a, there is a plausibility that we are, that, that, that, that this could have been the end of the bear market. It gets a little bit more. And can you, it gets a little bit better when you, when you then put in the 50 week exponential moving average and you say, you know, we rejected. exactly off the 50-week exponential moving average. I think that's the same way average. Is that the MA too?

Because it's the simple movie average is there too. Yeah, that's the SMA. So that's the 50-week SMA. We again, we were rejected exactly at that point. Interesting to note that once we go through that point, we generally don't come back. So in a bull market. So once we actually break it, we don't usually come back.

Look at the- Take some time to break it. Now let's go back to, now let's go back to our market. 2023 example we touched we we we pumped yeah we touched it we just before this was just before march we touched it we went just under and then we eventually broke and once we broke that was that was valhalla and bitcoin would did a i don't know i went from 20,000 to 125 000 so that that kind of tells me that there are a few other charts that i looked at i mean you know these are not really charts that i rely on but charts that i just used to to vindicate things so for example the ism chart we know that

Bitcoin is an asset when the economy is expanding. The ISM did go to 53, 54. Bitcoin didn't move. Every other time that the ISMs cost between 50 and 55, Bitcoin starts moving and actually goes quite parabolic. So maybe slightly delayed, but the ISM is above 50 and the economies, the economy is very much, you can say the economy is very much in a bull cycle. Another one of those charts that actually does that is the gold copper rotation. So generally what happens is gold peaks, after gold peaks, copper starts running. And when copper starts, and when copper starts running, Bitcoin starts running. Gold peaked in February, which is a bit earlier than this time round.

Copper has just started running. If you go and look at the copper chart, copper is basically at all-time highs now, about to break out. I haven't looked at it today, but it was about to break out when I looked at it. Okay, so just about to break out and going into price discovery and Bitcoin is starting to run. So there are a lot of charts that are basically showing me that for me, it's a bull market. And again, I'm combining charts with fundamentals. Scott Bessent has gone to war with the bond vigilantes yet.

How do I know that? Because Scott Besson's come out and said, we're going to double our purchases from $2 billion to $4 billion in September. Nothing happened. The bond market corrected for, let me just get rid of that. The bond market for five minutes. Yeah, there it is. The bond market corrected for a whole, I mean, there it is.

And it bounced straight back up again. He then came out and said, okay, we're going to use the whole Treasury General account. The TGA account's got about a billion dollars in it. that didn't a trillion dollars and it's sorry that didn't really scare anybody and so Scott Besson doesn't strike me as a type of guy who's going to turn back on his policy which means that he's now going to go all in on defending the long end of the curve there's only one there's only one weapon that he has yes he has literally no other weapons other than putting money into circulation he does not have any other weapons and so you know

to me when the when the technicals and the fundamentals aligned like this I there was a quote from Ansem and he says if you're going to take risk at any point. You take risk early and remove the risk as time goes on. Deploying capital is in times of uncertainty at the beginning of rallies when general concesses is unsure, if the rally has legs or not yields the best returns if you're right. So, you know, with the correct risk management in place, I really love this tweet saying, if you have a conviction in your thesis, take the risk early and start removing risk as you go back up. I kept buying a lot in that 60 range personally. I agree with that. So I think it was

was, you know, as bored as we were and as much as we were wondering if this was going to last till September, October, I think we all had high confidence and eventually it was going to go back up. I want to talk about you just live streamed Warsh. You know, this will be out tomorrow, but we're recording this on Friday, obviously. They did not align as much as people thought he would with percent. So, yeah, not at all, actually. So one, he's, he's quite adamant around getting inflation down. And up until now, he said we don't trust the debt on inflation, but actually today he came out and said let there be no other thing other than it's it's pcee pcee is at 3.7 percent not even close to you yeah yeah pc's at 3.7 percent and you

reiterated multiple times that they're going this is the regime that is going to get the inflation down so that's the first thing the second thing is he went against besent and he said we we don't want to give you any forward guidance and we want to reiterate the fact that the market should price itself and that's the best mechanism for you mechanism for real price discovery. Besson is literally doing the opposite. He's intervening in the market. So I don't think the market has priced for the friction

between Kevin Warsh and Scott Bessent. However, I do think that Kevin Warsh is in that position because of Scott Besson. So the history is that they both worked, well, they both worked for Stey and Dr. Miller, right? And when they were looking for a fair chair, there were multiple fair chairs. And I believe that probably,

Scott Besson said to Trump, this is our man, Kevin Walsh, I've worked with him. I know exactly I think, so I can work with him. We worked together for many, many, many years, et cetera, et cetera, under George Soros, in the George Soros era with Stan Dracermiller. And then, you know, you had Scott Besson coming out, and then you had Standrakele publicly responding to him by saying, you're making the wrong move, him actually siding with Kevin Wash. So I think the one thing that the market's not pricing is a clash, not a clash,

but friction between the two, the Treasury and the Fed. And I think that's one of the things that we probably should watch out for in the next couple of weeks. Yeah, I mean, the best bailout for the Treasury would be if rates came down and they could refinance all that debt and, you know, remove some of that debt burden and the interest payments. It seems like it's, I don't think Warsh is going to raise it. rates personally. Also the market seems to think the market yeah. The market's not the

Carity Act had a 75% chance of passing. What do you think about the clarity act? Do you think it's coming or do you think it's not coming? I had it at 5% since December at five. I don't sound crazy by saying 1% because I just don't think it's a politically palatable at this point. There's no reason for Democrats to give Trump a win and they hadn't even discussed the ethics clause a month ago. I just don't see it happening. Maybe it will. Maybe I'm wrong. So why do you think they tabled it for September 15th?

Well, it's not a real vote. It's kind of a vote on whether to vote. You know, so it's, I think they just, he had a lot of political pressure to not remove it entirely from the calendar in August. So he punted it forward to September to give them a few weeks. But I haven't heard anything encouraging from anyone that there's been meaningful movement in the past few weeks. And when we left it, there were Republicans coming out saying they wouldn't vote for it.

So what do you think happens if it doesn't pass? Like if it's final. Do you think it's priced in at the moment? I think we got, yeah, I think it's priced in to fail. I think we got reg crypto from the SEC, which I think was Atkins saying, okay, we waited long enough. We're going to go ahead and write rules. And you saw Seelig at the CFDC literally come out last week and say, okay, let's start to move forward whether clarity passes or not, right? And so I think that they were in this awkward position where they wanted to write rules, but didn't want to preempt the Clarity Act.

So, so if it does pass, do you think we get some kind of like unexpected pump? I think it's, I think not passing is priced in. So I think if it doesn't pass in. Yeah, that's what I think. Yeah. Okay. I kind of agree with you, although I do think that this cycle is an old coin cycle. And I think that the Clarity Act is largely an old coin thing. I think Bitcoin doesn't really care about the Clarity Act because Bitcoin's already regulated. it. I think the cycle is going to be an old coin cycle. I have like multiple charts and a thesis.

It's like to be a select altcoin cycle, but I agree. Much more than a Bitcoin cycle. I think that the excitement, this cycle is definitely going to be an old coin excitement and not a Bitcoin excitement. Let me show you one or two charts, which will just, just for fun. We were both here for the last nine years or whatever. I was around for the ETH, I can't believe it was nine years ago, but for the ETH ETF launch. Sorry, the ETH, the ETH, the ETH. The ETH, the ETH, the ETH. ether ICO. Yeah, it spiked. Yeah.

E spiked. I mean, you kind of want to say that Bitcoin was, was money or transferable. I assume, right? ETH versus Bitcoin. This is ETH versus Bitcoin. It's the chart of ETH with Bitcoin. You kind of want to say that ETH, Bitcoin was the first use case of this technology. What is the first use of this technology?

Digital value and the ability to move digital value online. We then launched a protocol, which was the first real protocol which said you can actually contract digital value and transfer. without human intervention in this thing called the smart contract. And the world went crazy about all the potential use cases, right? Here it is. And then for nine years, we couldn't do anything with that technology. It was too slow.

It was too clunky. It didn't work. All the things that we promised us, this cycle was ICOs. We went all the way up and we crashed back down. The next cycle was IDOs and whatever else. And ultimately, there was no real use cases for ETH or for the smart contract technology. After a nine-year downtrend on the weekly, this. is now breaking out. For the first time, in nine years, the ETHBTC chart is actually breaking out.

I think that's telling your story. And I think the story that is telling us is, for nine years, the application of money on the blockchain was the only money that we had and nothing else worked. However, now we're actually getting things that work. We're getting real world assets on chain. We've got bonds on chain, commodities on chain, stocks on chain. I've seen some applications bringing currencies on chain. We've got stable coins on chain, which is a massive, massive, massive thing. not because of the stable coins themselves, but because the fact that there's an AI agent revolution. And the AI agent revolution are going to start,

the AI agents, I believe everybody's going to have multiple AI agents, hundreds. I've already probably got 10 AI agents. And they're going to meet in the internet, on the internet, agents are going to meet and they're going to need to transact. And because the agents don't know each other, and they don't know who the owners are, they're going to need to transact trustlessly and immediately.

And that's the only way that I know that can, that can be done is using smart contract blockchains and i think that that economy is a hundred times bigger than the current economy a thousand times bigger than the current economy and so i think what this chart is basically telling you is that for nine years we didn't have a use case and now the smart contract money or the smart contract applications for this money is actually breaking out not the only chart there's this chart over here which is the others versus others versus btc effectively that's the old's versus btc effectively And what you can see is it's been on an upward trend line for quite a while.

However, the old coins haven't really been able to deliver much. In the first cycle, in the first cycle, if you look at the peak at the bottom to top, so peak to trough or trough to peak, 7x, 741%. In the next cycle, we had a 7x. And now we are here and we're going into the cycle. We're on the trend line and we're going into the cycle. And if you extrapolate that channel going up, and you can kind of see that we've been missing. around it. But if you extrapolate that channel going up, you can actually that peaks around 12 or 13.

Depends, you know, how far up we go around on this line. But ultimately, I think what the charts are saying to you is the old coins didn't really perform very well against Bitcoin. They made a lot of promises that they couldn't fulfill. We got to the bottom of those promises. And now if we bounce here, ultimately, it's time for for this chart to align with this chart and basically for there to be an old coin super cycle. I mean, they missed the entire last cycle, right? Because there were no use cases. There was no one to use them. Now they're real use cases.

Again, I tweeted this today. And I think that it's again, coincidentally, an handsome tweet. But he said something, and I was like, wow, like this guy gets it. He said, listen, man, we built the best boomer casino in the world with hyperliquid. And we built the best zoomer casino in the world with pump fun. Okay. So like you almost have, if you think about like pump fun, pump fun, pump fun, pump fun, is basically the world's new casinos.

And there's a lot of them, pump fun, fomo, et cetera, et cetera. You've got hyperliquid, which is a very, very, very good use case. You've got real world assets on chain. You've got people trading these real world assets on chain soon to be 24-7. Blockchain has put pressure on the NASDAQ to be open 24-7. So ultimately, the new technology is disrupting the old technology now. And it's actually really, really, really being used. And all the metrics are going exponential.

Number of holders of real-world assets going exponential. Number of transactions around real-world assets going exponential. number of transactions on on chain assets, specifically around Solana being the biggest chain, going exponential. So ultimately, this technology is starting to work. And very soon the AI agents will start using it. And when they do, well, that makes an economy that's 100 times bigger. So kind of have to be bullish.

I have to be bullish more bullish than I've ever been. Okay. So more bullish than you've ever been, but I guess on what? Because I don't think you can just say all coins anymore. Okay. Can we bucket all all coins together at this point? Or is it I'm bullish on all coins with utility and then complete nonsense on the other side of the barbell, right? I mean, what works?

You know, like, is this good for coin number 37 on coin market? It hasn't moved in 10 years? No, absolutely not. So I'm bullish on Bitcoin because of money printing. I'm bullish on privacy coins. I'm bullish on Zcash. Why? Because I do believe it with all the support and all the backing behind it.

And now we have an ETF. I think that Zcash becomes private money. I think the upside on Zcash from here is 10x, maybe 100x. I mean, if it's just 10% of Bitcoin, it's 10x from here, right? If it's 100x, if it is Bitcoin, it's 100x from here. So I'm bullish on Zcash. And then I'm bullish on a class. I think then my thesis becomes that the L1 war is finished.

In other words, I think that the Solanhas won it. Salon and Ethereum have won it. When I say Solana and Ethereum won it, Solana's won it. and then Ethereum with base and Robin Hood has basically won it. So the two big onboarding vehicles in crypto, one in crypto, one in real world assets now playing this. I think Ethereum and Solano have won it. I think that, so I wouldn't really invest in any other L1s because I just don't think there's any upside in the L1s. Then it comes to, then that means that we've moved to the next part of the blockchain, right?

So L1s were the last battle. Now we're talking about the killer applications and the killer applications are like, businesses they need to be growing in users and and the best assets must have network effects with their growth they must be generating real revenue that is sustainable and thirdly they must have a way of passing that revenue onto their token holders I think that tokens are a V2 of equity so I think equity was good for companies and tokens are the next generation of value accrual tools for what we call public publicly own networks.

They are or they should be? Because most of them are not. They are. For now not. For now not. But we're now in that cycle. And so if you start thinking about that, then you start, you say, okay, hold on a second. What are the protocols that are actually going to succeed?

So number one, big daddy is hyperliquid, right? That's why the market's giving hyperliquid $81 billion valuation. Why? Because they buy back tokens and they burn them with fees every single day. Their fees in the last couple days have been $4 million, $5 million dollars, today and they literally take that and buy back tokens with a big a large percentage of that money pump fund same thing right massive use case growing it's a network definitely because the more users that join the network the more fun that network becomes right and they're buying back and

burning the tokens they tick all the boxes um venice venice the AI token for example right again they've got four million users they've got a hundred million dollars in annualized revenue they're growing extremely extremely fast and they've got a mechanism to give the value back to token holders, right? So I think that that's the formula. Do you, are you growing? Are you growing into a network? Do you have real sustainable revenues?

And do you have a mechanism to actually give that revenue back to your token holders? If the answer to all four of those is yes, invest. If the answer to the first is yes and the fourth one is no, also invest. So I'll give you another example. There's a protocol called collector crypto cards. That is a real world. asset protocol, which basically stores Pokemon cards. Cards. Yeah, I never heard of it.

It's a real world asset protocol, which basically stores Pokemon cards in a vault and gives you a token to represent the Pokemon cards. And you can then trade the token as a representation of the asset. It's real world assets. It's just the asset is Pokemon cards. Now, they've got massive, massive, massive revenues. I mean, I can't remember the numbers, but like hundreds of millions in revenues. The only thing is that they haven't yet switched on the switch to share the revenue with their users.

For me, it's a case of buy it now before they do, because when they do, everyone's going to pile into it because then it's going to be obvious. So if it ticks one, two, and three of the boxes, and it doesn't tick four, to me, it's probably very, very, very investable because you kind of know that they're going to switch on fee switching at some point in time. I think the case and point is Athena, Athena. So Athena kind of ticks box one, two, three, four. Yesterday, they switched on fee sharing, or they came out and said fee switching. And so Athena got a spike and basically doubled over the last couple of days. So I think that's the season that we're in. L1s, the race is one.

We're in the race of applications. This race is actually much easier because it's like simple. Do you have users? Is your user base growing? Is it growing exponentially? When you add another user to the user base, does it add value to your network exponentially? two, three, do you make revenue? Have you got a revenue model?

Is the revenue growing and real and sustainable? Yes, great. Will you or have you or will you switch on a mechanism to give the fees back to your users? Yes, no. That's it. That's literally the investment criteria. When you do that, you can run out in Claude. You can go to Claude and you can say, go through all the crypto tokens.

Let's put the four criteria in. Please, can you give me an artifact that tells me exactly which tokens, I've done that thing. I'm actually actually made a show on dropping it this weekend of going through each of the tokens with that artifact. And it's it becomes a pretty simple calculation. Yeah, it makes sense. So most things die. Previous I can find some map massive or let me rephrase that most things are dead. Yeah, most things are dead. They kill what's already dead. Right? What is dead may never die because they're saying.

Yeah. I think we should be smarter because we have asymmetric information because we spend our labs in crypto. So it gives us a great opportunity to say, well, which are the protocols that people actually using? Do they make money? You know, so it's like I think, I think, you know, what worries me is that when this run continues, I think the boomers are going to come back and they're going to start investing. And the problem is where are they going to go? They're going to go to Cardano.

They're going to go to Hashgraph. They're going to go to Iota because that's what they remember from the last cycle, right? And I'm so worried for that pump. I'm so worried for that part of the pump because they're literally walking into get slaughtered because none of those protocols are making any revenue. None of them not to share the revenue back where they use it, right? Yeah, we also have a problem with some of these older ones, not those specifically, so I don't want to point figures.

But Ravencoin, Harmony, we've been seeing these stories all over and over and over again. Now they're just ripe for exploit from AI, right? If there's no active dev team that's working on these things, even if they have some idea, they're going to get hacked. So like you can just go back and, you know, collect three, four million, five million on every one of these. old dead tokens and completely send them, you know, down to the floor. So if you come here and you're dumb enough to invest in those things, you probably deserve to lose your money.

That's the only way that I can say it. If you come here and you think that you're smart and you start investing in all these neglected protocols that were built before the AI age, right? But there's not people who are still holding them, you know, who just kind of like passively have them in their portfolios. You and I have talked about this before. You cleared out all the dust, bought Bitcoin in the hallway, right? I get it.

But you, I mean, you know, in an efficient market, in an efficient market, the people that make the money are the people that do the most research and have a thesis and stick to their thesis, right? And if their thesis is correct, they make the most money. If you come here and you sit in an old coin hoping that it's going to recover, well, I mean, that's a recipe not to make money, right? I learned that in the first cycle. In my first cycle in crypto, I held on to all my old coins until the very, very, very bottom on the market. I'll never forget this. I was sitting in Harvard, in a class. I was doing a course at Harvard.

It was the bottom of the bear market. I eventually got squeezed and I sold all my old coins at the bottom for Bitcoin. And then the market went up. And basically some of the old coins recovered and did a couple of Xs. But most of the old coins never, ever, ever came back. Right. And that's when I learned that you shouldn't hold onto these old coins because they're going to die. And so the next cycle, I was better.

Now, this is my, I think my third or fourth cycle, depending on how you count the cycle. And actually, again, this morning I tweeted something. because I just woke up and I was like, this is my, I think my fourth cycle, if you want to call it that. And I said, I woke up this morning. I said, if this is your third cycle in crypto, this is the one where you're actually going to make money and keep it. Because last cycle for me was the first time that I actually made money and kept some money in crypto because I was smarter because I put some profits into Bitcoin. I took some profits out the market. And so it takes you two cycles to learn those lessons.

And the third cycle, you play a much longer, much more conservative game. but you actually land up keeping your money, which is like, what a bonus. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. It's like going to the casino and coming back with money. It's like, it's unbelievable. Yeah, happens every once a while, apparently.

Yeah, so, I mean, I'm sure you talk about your portfolio quite often, but does that mean that you're focused on the ones that we've basically talked about? Because it's funny, I don't own, listen, I haven't done anything except for really buy Bitcoin, Samith and Salana. I don't own Zee Cash. I don't own hype. I'll show you my portfolio. I'll show you my portfolio in full confidence though.

It's got to be like in really, please don't show it to anybody. Sorry, I just need to open it. If you give me a second. So don't put it on the screen. Not yet. Not yet. I'll tell you when. I could do a thing right now.

Yes, you could, but you wouldn't. So here it is. Here's my portfolio in a nutshell. I mean, I do hold one or two others. You can show it. You can show it. So Bitcoin is eCash. I do hold Ethereum because I think Wall Street's going to come and attack Ethereum.

And as I said, I do think it's one of the winners. I hold Solana because I think it's a second winner. I hold Hyperliquid because it's the best use case that we have in crypto at the moment. It's got the best tokenomics. And it's an amazing place to exchange. You buy it in an all-time high here? No, I bought a Hyperliquid at. I would buy since.

I would buy now because I don't think it's an all-time high. Yeah, it is at an all-time high. I think it's going to go higher. I would buy it. You know, the one thing that people don't realize about hyperliquid, you'd say, wow, this thing's valued at $80 billion. But actually, if you think about crypto, there's an old valuation on companies, which is an FDV valuation, right?

And the FDV valuation is the number of stocks, the number of shares in circulation times the price, and that's the FDV. That's not a good measure for crypto. And the reason why that's not a good measure... When they're burning you, when they're burning you buy you back. But yeah, go ahead. So I'll explain to you, I'll explain to you why I think it's not a good measure for crypto. Crypto is a function of scarcity times pressure, right?

So it's not a function of number of shares in circulation times price. It is how scarce is it and what is the buying pressure? And ultimately, that's a measure of almost like pushing water up a tube. How tight the tube is and how high the pressure is how high the price is going to go. And actually has no, no function to FDV because the number of tokens in circulation, Then you've got in crypto this thing called staking, which makes them much more. Like, for example, to list a token on hyperliquid, you've got to put $55 million or $80 million in a staking contract, so to speak, right? That creates a lot of scarcity, a lot of scarcity, right?

So the thing with hyperliquid is even though it's face value, it looks like it has an $80 billion fully dilated valuation, the buying pressure plus the staking pressure plus the actual buying pressure divided by the number of tokens in circulation creates insane pressure on the way up. Much lower float than it implies. Yes, but it's also float times upward pressure. Again, just think of the water and the tube. The tighter the tube, the tight of the flow. And then the higher the pressure, the higher the water will basically shoot up. Then my second bet in the perpetual space is lighter. The reason why I've gone for lighter is I think hyperliquid will face some regulatory headwinds in the US,

even though Trump's basically shill them. And lighter is the most regulated perp sticks in the US. And the valuation is like, I mean, the ones valued it 25 times the size of the other ones. So I've got a big position in Laita. Then I've got a position in the AI play of crypto, which is Tau or Betenza. It's the prominent AI play in crypto. It's, I'm not going to talk about the design. I think it's quite complicated.

I've got a position in NIR because near is a place that you can swap your shielded Zcash without breaking your anonymity. So the one kind of holds hands with the other. Athena, because if we're going into a bullet, market, the revenues will come back and the leverage will come back, and that will be displayed in Athena Stablecoin. Venice AI, which is effectively almost like a chat GPT LLM, but it uses all the LMs, but ultimately it's a private, you chat with the LLM privately. The data is not stored by any of the big companies, right? Did it affect your valuation of that at all when they did an equity raise and there was the whole argument about whether their value would accrue to the token or to the

equity. I didn't think so deeply. I was. I was a little bit upset with him. The token was the $20 before that I went back down to $12 or whatever it is. I actually spoke to Eric on Telegram. I don't think it was the smartest move. I was quite surprised Eric did it, but they had no choice because they needed to raise a lot of money to actually keep this thing going. Yeah. Worldcoin, because I just think that Open AI will go to market. And I also think that Wilcoin is a very, very, very important coin when it comes to AI. Canton, which is the enterprise grade blockchain. And the reason is, I think enterprise blockchains, which is with privacy is, is, is, is,

is quite important. Pump fund because it meets all my criteria. And it's the it's the, it's the, the zoomer casino, Jito, because it captures most of the value on Solana. Telegram, because it has the biggest distribution on phones and they are very serious about their crypto. Cards, because it's the real world play, derive, which is an on-chain options play, and then aerodrome, because it's the only way that you can get any exposure to stuff on base. And the last time that I've got is Curve Finance. My thesis around Curve, Curve is an exchange

where you can trade one stable coin for another stable coin with very small leakage or slippage. And I think that we're going to be in a world where there's going to be so many stable coins. and you kind of need a place where you can just swap between USDT and USDAC and USDAC and USDAE and USDP and USDI without bleeding every single time. And you can't do that on an exchange or whatever else because the bleed's too big. Then I've got one other one which is on my list, but I've put it here because I just think that I'm not sure about it anymore.

And the reason why I'm not sure about it anymore is Sui was my contender, but as I said, I think the L1 race has already been won. And so I'm not sure if I want to be holding another L1 that basically is been around for almost two cycles doesn't really have a killer app yet. And so it's like it's almost like that thing where if there's another opportunity, that's the one that I'm selling. Yeah, that makes sense. I still hold some sui.

I got some near. I got Salani Ethereum and Bitcoin. That's pretty much it from that list. Feels bad. But I've never been the, you know, I haven't spent time on all coins for the past four years. But it seems like this is the time to start concentrating again. As Anselm said, if you're going into a risk on cycle, take the risk early, remove and remove the risk as time goes on that when i read that i'm like that's that's what i want to try

and be disciplined in this cycle to take money off the table as the market goes up but not to put more money in as the market goes up every other cycle i've made the mistake of not believing it not believing it not believing it and then doubling down when 50% of the rounds actually happened and you know that's the problem is i bought too late and i sold too late yeah i'm wondering are you i know we got to go in a minute, but are you spending any time on like the pre-seed early VC, you know, like starting to come back around a little bit. It is. Very fine things liquid. The liquid stuff has got so much upside. It was so depressed that locking up money in two and three year vestings with cliffs and without cliffs and just why.

The market's so cheap and it's so liquid. And I've realized that there's nothing better than being able to exit your cash when you need it for something else when there's a good opportunity. I've still got safts from two. It's funny because the sentiment is that like there's some early access to people and everyone I talk to, they're just buying stuff they believe in on the open market. You know, I've got, I'm looking at my list. Yeah, I've still got stuff that I, that I, that I, um, bought three cycles ago. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm, yeah. I've still got stuff that I bought three cycles ago. Yeah, it's not that. I'm just trying, yeah, I don't want to show the list because the values also. I don't want to show you how much I've invested. But I've got things that I have 99%.

I invested three cycles ago. I still haven't seen my cash. You know, I've got an investment that I made in 2020. It's called declimat. Declimate sells climate information to insurance brokers or something. I put in some cash in there. We've been waiting since 2020. Now we're going into 2027.

They haven't given me, they haven't listed the token. They're waiting for the right market conditions. Yeah. From the time they list the token, I've got a one-year cliff and I've got a, I don't know, one-year cliff, three-year vesting, you know, like, what's the logic in that shit, bro? Like, I can just go and buy cheap shit on the market. Yeah, but I think the moral here and the mentality a lot of people need to shift to is that the edge is just being early in conviction.

There's no edge for knowing more or, I mean, you're not getting, you're not getting like 50% discount you're just buying it you're doing anything else has to pay. And even if I'm offered it, even if I'm offered it today at seed rounds, I don't take it. I just don't take it. Thanks, thanks, but no thanks. Like why do I want to lock up, why do I want to take risk lock up money for six, five, six, seven years and wait to get my money back. It just sounds like such a dumb calculation now in hindsight. But as I said, you only make money in your third cycle because it took me cycle one and cycle two to learn that, right? Cycle one and cycle two, I thought I was a genius. I was buying all these things. I was being

given early access to rounds because I was a KOL and now I'm paying what I'm calling KOL tax and that KOL tax is because you know I got in I got in cheap but now I've got to wait seven years to get out if I'm lucky and they even get out most of those projects will never even see the light of day yeah that's bad news man anything I think that we got to go anything else on your mind before we uh before we exit that was a great conversation taught me a lot as usual and I'm glad to see we're aligned on a lot of things let's talk about I want to talk about I want to ask you so you've had a lot of conviction around STRC and around the Michael Strategy game.

I know that you told me you were buying it at like 74, 75. I don't know if you actually executed or you were going to execute. Yeah. My cost on STRC is like 84. Yeah. Okay. So you've made your 10%. Now, question is like, do you think this thing repegs?

And do you think if it does repeg, it becomes a sale instrument to really be buying this market? He spent about $2 billion trying to repeg it already. He sold Bitcoin and MSCR. I think it will repeg because I think, you know, we've seen SETA. re-peg and that's kind of the smaller, maybe we'll even call it better version at the moment of SDRC. The question is, you know, now it's this awkward situation for him where he's going to buy back Bitcoin that he sold much lower. Exactly. In order to break even, he'll do it again,

but I think that's like you can't look back and be like, wow, selling it 64 when you'll be buying at 85 or 90 does not look great. But I think it's great news that him being the only buyer has been proven false and you know him being the main character is out of the market i think the narrative not surrounding him anymore is good and i think if shtr floats anywhere near here we keep getting paid that amazing dividend indefinitely it's covered with 5.1 billion dollars it's a great i mean great bet i suppose for you you've got an effective rate you've got an effective yield of 13 and a half percent right that's right and they paid on the right and they paid on the 15 16 and that's before the tax benefit and it doesn't matter to me if it's at 100. I've bought. You bought.

The dividend. The dividend is based on $100, whether it's trading at 70, 50, 80, you know, if you believe that he will be able to make the dividend, then yeah, now he's at $5.1 billion in backing for that dividend. So I can exit in four years when he runs out of money if that happens and all, you know, 17% a year, fine. Yeah, as long as you don't get below your cost because if the instrument starts trading lower than your cost base, then you got a problem. Stop loss. Stop loss at entry. What is this?

How do you say in trading terms? Stop loss at entry. Yeah. Yeah. I've moved my stop loss, a bunch of it. The lie that everybody tells themselves, yes. Yes, yes, yes. Stop loss and profit.

That's exactly it. That's it. Scott, good to see you, my friend. It's been amazing to catch up. We've been threatening to do this for a while. I'm glad we did it. I'm glad we did it to start of the ball market. Now that it's a bowl market, we can just do it.

regular whenever you want sir i'm always available sir all right man i'm here for it thank you so much