The Wolf Of All Streets - Crypto ETFs Inflows, Market Bounces, SOL/ETH hits ATH | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

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Morning, everyone. Welcome to Crypto Town Hall. Wednesday, August 7th, two days after the Black Monday, everybody gets a t-shirt, I survived Black Monday 2024. If you listen, market has bounced nicely, I think leaving people wondering what likely comes next. Thinking that we'll go back to doing something that we used to do actually every single show, which is give you a really, really quick recap on the news of the day as we get people filing into the room. Take a look at prices. Bitcoin currently trading around $56,373. It was up over $57,000 just a bit earlier. Actually, almost to 58 today. It was trading as high as 57,700. ETH obviously has been wildly underperforming. If you look back 7 days,

Bitcoin's down about 15%, ETH down 27%. But I think no huge surprises there, considering all the selling pressure we've seen and the ETH unlocks. But just the very, very quick news is that we saw obviously outflows of 149 million yesterday from the Bitcoin spot ETFs. Not a huge number when you consider how much money has been moving over the past few days in legacy markets. I think the surprise story, though, was that yesterday, the Ethereum spot ETFs had a total net inflow of about $100 million. People asking what's going on with ETH in general. We saw that some of the plus token wallets in China were moving Ethereum about $789,533 ETH, $2 billion worth being moved.

Those are Chinese wallets. And of course, still conjecture about what's going on with Jump Trading, who has been unstaking a ton of Ethereum and likely selling it. Really not that much other big news. I think Morgan Stanley coming online today with 15,000 RIAs who can now potentially sell Bitcoin ETFs solicit to their clients, clients with over $1.5 million in their accounts who have chosen more high-risk plans. And of course, BlackRock filing for trading options. We still don't have those options on the ETFs, which is a bit surprising.

So listen, we got Matthew here, rare treat, Matthew Siegel from VanEck. What do you make of all this Ethereum movement? Have you been able to dig into it at all? Hey, what's up, everyone? Yeah, ETH continues to limp along. I think it's just the grayscale selling is an overhang and this is the high beta asset. I mean, you can see Solana ETH pair broke out to fresh all-time highs today. I was talking with some Ethereum layer two projects over the last couple of days that were complaining, frankly, that they can't onboard new users and the B2B opportunities just very crowded, tough to differentiate. So I think the scaling narrative for ETH needs to change before the token is going to outperform bigly.

I guess what I'm watching most carefully right now is the Bitcoin miners. As measured by our ETF gap, they fell 42% peak to trough in like six days. A lot of the valuation, the ai valuation that had gotten into the stocks over the last month is now gone and yet if you look at the fundamentals the ai is accelerating uh core scientific yesterday uh doubling down accelerating their plans with CoreWeave. Northern Data reported yesterday strong GPU numbers, and that pivot is ongoing. So I think that's where, for me, the risk-reward looks very attractive. Bitcoin miners are flat on the year. Bitcoin's up 30%.

It's not a new year-to-date relative low, but it's kind of a higher low. And I think we're going to see more news from the miners that have capacity to pivot. And I think that's going to make the economics better for the miners that remain. So that's kind of what I'm focused on the last couple of days. Are they sort of, you're implying it's sort of a baby with the bathwater, right? They're getting thrown out because the AI narrative has been selling off. But fundamentally, you're saying if we view Bitcoin miners as data centers, that their ability to pivot or onboard some of that compute for AI is still fundamentally more of a narrative and strong than ever. I mean, is that somewhat accurate?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that like, you know, big tech bore the brunt of the sell-off on Monday. If you look at it in standard deviation terms, it was bigger than the sell-off in crypto. And the valuation of these miners on a per megawatt basis, they're trading at like $3 million per megawatt. That's the market cap. And some of the data center companies like, you know, Equinix, Digital Realty, NTT Data, they're 30x, 30 times. It's a 10 times valuation difference. Now, it's not immediate. There's CapEx that has to be invented in order to repurpose some of these facilities. But the companies that are being more aggressive in doing so, like Core Z, have outperformed dramatically. That stock's up

130% since they first announced their pivot. Bitcoin miners are down. So I think it's just extremely tempting with the hash rate at an all-time low for Bitcoin miners to pivot. And that story still exists. Power is still scarce. I think they will accelerate those plans given the hash rate and the stock market will reward it because of that huge valuation arbitrage. Yeah. Tom, you had your hand up. I want to hear your comments. And then I want to talk more deeply, Matthew, what you said about sort of the L2s and the Solana, because I think there's a lot there. Go ahead. Yeah, I just wanted to add a brief data point. Good morning, everybody. Good morning, everyone.

So most miners, only a handful are profitable under 52K BTC. So that's sort of the line in the sand. Now that we're at 54, 55, these guys are mining profitable blocks daily. So it's important that that may be a key selling point. But as Matthew mentioned, a lot of these guys have accumulated a ton of cash over the past year or so. And this is the time to reinvest and deploy as this industry consolidates a ton. Yeah, I agree. I want to dig in, Matthew, with Robbie as well, everybody here. But I had Haseeb Qureshi from Dragonfly on my YouTube show this morning. Just one of my favorite people in the industry to talk to. The guy is just absolutely brilliant, has incredible perspective. And Matthew, he said something very similar to what you're saying. And you sort of anecdotally confirmed it from your conversations. He said, because I asked him basically, if we get an alt season

and the cycle repeats and we go into the end of 2024 and everything starts to catch a bid, how are all of the previous L1s and L2s going to catch a bid when there's newer tokens or more promising technology? Will we see an alt season like the ones of the past? And he said the same thing as you, Matthew. He said there's ETH and then there's Solana. And anything now that is going to be built or sort of catch attention is going to have to have at least the UX and UI capabilities of Solana. And those are the ones that you should be focused on moving forward. So that gave me the impression that a lot of these layer ones and certainly layer twos on Ethereum are not going to really perform and maybe actually theoretically somewhat die,

right? I mean, I don't think they'll be dead, but how can they compete? So I would love other people's thoughts on this if we get this sort of everything move or if we really have to pay attention this cycle to the higher quality and find the ones that are going to get real adoption. Anyway. Yeah, I mean, I'm in print saying that I think the majors will continue to outperform until there is real evidence of mass adoption on these L2s in a way that is not hugely inflationary. And so for me, the hurdle is quite high to take large positions in these. But we have a legend here with Robbie. So I'd really love to hear his thoughts on this topic as well.

Same. Hey, guys. Can you hear me? Yeah. So, yeah, I think, I mean, we're just continuing to see adoption particularly in the game industry across lots of different um lots of different ecosystems i've actually spent a lot of time over the last month or so here in the uk with the solana community um which has been growing leaps and bounds um and it's interesting because i, you know, when you just spend time with the people

who are building and less time with the people who are focused on market activity, I find that people are thinking about different time horizons because the market activity doesn't seem to have dissuaded the builders from building. And at least here in the UK, the Solana community seems to be the strongest of all the various communities. All of that having been said, I was also in Brussels and obviously the Ethereum community remains hugely robust. So I think, you know, there's a lot of great stuff being built, particularly in the gaming and entertainment space. And people are looking at time horizons that are a little bit longer. So unless people were having TGEs planned for right now, I think there's less concern about market instability.

You mentioned sort of the TGEs here, Robbie, and then I'll go to Jed who has his hand up after you. But there's been one of these concerns, sort of back to my point, that so many people are delaying and there's so many unlocks still from past cycles and so many tokens will come on the market at the same time that there could never possibly be enough demand to buy all of this supply. How do you? I mean, honestly, it's a good point.

I think, you know, at least from what I can sense in the markets, I'm pretty sure that, you know, once the summertime is behind us, and everybody gets excited about having a great experience at Token 2049 in September, I think the markets will be back in very good stead. That's just my personal view, not investment advice. And so I think we're going to see a lot of the backlog of TGEs pushed into fourth quarter. As far as what that means for the wider market of unlocks, I think that's honestly difficult for me to comment on. I mean, I think every project has to concentrate on continuing to deliver functionality and utility for their holders to make sure that people stay on board.

Right. In previous cycles, they didn't need to do that, though. You just caught a bid by being new. So I think that alludes to, I think you answered my question. Yeah, of course. Although from our perspective, we've always built stuff like that. We've always assumed that utility is the purpose, and that's what will keep people here for the long term. So I think we've always taken that view, and that comes from the fact that making games takes time. Yeah, of course.

I really do think that this could be the time for gaming after all these years and cycles that at least the early iterations of it tom i saw you lifted your mic go ahead and then i'll let you take it that was an accident go ahead go ahead jed uh no worries tom No worries, Tom. Yeah, I think your question about getting new L1s to par with Solana is pretty apt, but an L2 is kind of neat and catch up. I use this stuff every day, and L2s on Ethereum are not too far in terms of from user experience. Obviously, from throughput, it's much slower and not crazy more expensive.

It's pretty on par with the user experience, at least through utilizing wallets and liquidity and all that kind of stuff. So like, ultimately, like, like, I think the infrastructure is, is pretty close across, you know, the current, like major L2s and, and, and, you know, the major L1s. So ultimately, like what, like, what's gonna, and we always talk about it. You know, we just need, we need use cases cases that's going to bring new new people to to crypto speculation, DeFi. We have a core core core community that uses that across the world. You know, we us as a VC, we are investing in some really interesting consumer applications that are coming out. You know, Lionstow is actually doing a great job on incubating a lot of these really interesting companies.

And then, yeah. And then in terms of future launches. Yeah, I think the L1 trade is kind of, you know, beyond the new ones that are coming out. You know, Monad, BearChain, there are some L2s that actually are really high throughput. Like MegaEth, I think, is at 100k. And then another one called Turbo is at 400k TPS. I don't think there's going to be another large L1 in 2025. I think all the ones that we're kind of anticipating are going to come out.

They're going to be equal or faster than Solana. And it's just really bringing new use cases and new developers that are going to build interesting things that we want to use. So I think that that's kind of how we're looking at the space in terms of infra. I think we're pretty much done, um, in terms of, of, of getting there, um, in terms of like a high throughput type of thing. But, um,

yeah, we, we have more throughput and speed than, uh, we have applications and demand for, which we know that's blockchain, right? I mean, we, we used to have the, it was, you know, a couple of cycles ago, it was like, where are we going to get the block space for all of it? Now, it's where are we going to get the adoption to actually use it? Right? So... We got the block space. That problem. Yeah. We do. Go ahead, Tom. Yeah. I think right now it's business development and marketing and user adoption over TPS. I think we have the TPS we need across all of these chains

for the next few years. Yes, we're going to get to finance by the speed of light like Anatoly dreams, but are we going to put NASDAQ order book speeds on chain in the next two, three years? Probably not. We need smaller incremental use case adoptions, which is why we love, and I think a lot of people here love Deepin because you're actually seeing the ability to decentralize large incumbent systems that take a ton of money to spin up, whether that be wireless systems or 5G or IoT or whatever, and ability to hyperlocalize and actually use token incentives to spin up networks using token incentives to spin up networks using token incentives.

It's all exciting. But then you have, we all know the names, DEMO, HiveMapper, Helium that have done this. And what they're really looking for right now, despite all the supply side capacity, still the demand capacity. And it's not that these systems aren't inherently interesting because they're inherently cheaper for consumers or users and they provide all of the permissionless and trustless things that crypto bring. The problem is that they don't have the, you know, marketing business development capabilities to not only onboard sort of B2C users, but B2B users more broadly. So, you know,

what's that next step? And where's like, the killer sort of jump point for crypto? I think it's really finding... And this is someone who always thought marketing was fugazi. We need really good marketers, really good business development people, and get that hand-to-hand combat of actually getting a message out of, hey, all this really interesting tech is here, but you just got to come use it. You have to try it out. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And like some of the conversations that I've had with some of these L2s, it almost feels like the end game is some fortune 1000, just buying an L2 with no users in order to facilitate stable coin

relationships, you know, and just to talk our own book a little bit, we now have the, one of the fastest growing stablecoins in the world right now, Agora USD, founded by Jan Son. There's 40 million on chain on ETH, should launch on Avalanche today. And our model is going to go to the exchanges, both centralized and DeFi, as well as corporate distributors who want a share of the interest because Tether's not sharing any of that interest. And Circle USDC is compromised. They have to pay 50% away to Coinbase. So we think we can be more nimble and start this price war and hopefully ignite more stablecoin adoption that gives a use case to some of these L2s. So stablecoins remain our killer app

basically right yeah uh i'm i'm an investor in dora love it awesome project um one quick aside on what you just said i think the um the deal with circle and coinbase um giving rev share uh to coinbase is over i think uh coinbase took a large equity position in circle in exchange for um for that so um i don't know the internals but i think that's generally what what i see in the news yeah i'm not aware it's matthew can you i mean jet i'm assuming he's accurate but uh i haven't looked into that at all. But so speaking of the killer app, right, we, I think established that we have enough L1s and L2s to scale for mass adoption, but it's kind of, I don't want to say discouraging,

but things take a long time. And we've been talking about what's going to be the killer app for as long as I've literally been here. I mean i mean ran glad you're here today uh i know you're you kind of just stopped investing in new things to some degree right i mean i know a lot of that is more about tokenomics than adoption but i mean you're pretty bearish on the idea of building thousands of things here and seeing what no i'm very bullish on building thousands of things i'm seeing what... No, I'm very bullish on building thousands of things. I'm just very bearish on locking up money through tokenomics when you can get such amazing deals on the open market

without locking up money. So, no, I'm very bullish. I'm very bullish on innovation in this industry. I'm just not very bullish on locking up money and getting 10% unlock on TGE and then waiting for a cliff and stuff like that. If I invest, like when I invest in an equity investment, give me my fucking equity,

give me my tokens, and let's play ball. Don't lock me up and hold my money ransom because you don't want to dilute the market. That game's finished, and that's not a game that I want to play anymore. Do you think that they should unlock everything at first and just let the

sell off happen? Well, it's not really a sell off. How about for Bitcoin too? No, I think proof of work is different. I think if the concept of your token is proof of work, that's different. You know, when your whole coin relies on proof of work as a concept. But most of these altcoins don't need, let's say, barring token emissions that are required for validation,

give me my tokens. Because if you think that in market conditions like this, I'm going to take a chance by locking up free money so that I can be part of your chance and by locking up free money so that I can be part of your token and lock up my money for three years so that you can decide when to unleash my token schedules. That market's finished. There's no chance I'm going to be putting any money into that shit.

So then where is the opportunity? The opportunities on the open market to buy tokens like RUNE for $2.50 or, I mean, you can get such amazing deals on the market right now. Kujira at 50 cents. If you can pick up those kinds of tokens, which have a track record, you know the devs, you know what they can deliver. You're not locking up your money. It's fully liquid.

You can get out whenever you want, providing there's enough liquidity. Why would I lock up money for three years? I think that game is finished. Yeah. So you're saying that every person listening to this has the same opportunity that everyone on stage does? Right now in the open market, yes. And if projects want investors' money to innovate, then I think the game has to change. Because as I say, I don't think, I don't see how any investor has appetite to lock up money for three to four years now with all the uncertainty.

Why? What for? Rather just buy cheap shit on the open market. Really interesting. Dave, you had your hand up first, I think. Yeah, I mean, generally, I understand where Rand is is coming from but i have a slightly different uh thought process my thought process is if we're lucky enough to get an administration to uh two of the three candidates who want to earlier their administration craft a

set of rules for crypto one of the most important things they will do is come up with a disclosure regime for issuers and put teeth into it. So I would say that, you know, I understand Rand's point of not wanting to be locked up. There are lots of people who fight to put money into private equity funds that have lockups that are longer than the ones that Rand is complaining about. The difference is they know what that's being invested in, and they're comfortable with that. The problem we have is- Fans, yes. No, wait. Fans, yes. Projects, no.

Fans, yes. Projects, no. Fans is part of the game. Right. I personally agree with what you're saying, Rand. But my point is, if every issuer were forced by law to disclose exactly what the lockup situation is, exactly what the issue and schedule it is, whether it's from proof of work or it's something contractual with when tokens will be distributed, whatever it is, I don't care about the mechanism because smarter people are going to come up with new mechanisms. The first thing you know in financial regulations, and I've been told that I was good at this in my life. I was actually complimented by Rick Ketchum when he was running FINRA saying I would be a great thief because once I see a law, I figure out how to try to get around it. I am hardly unique. That's what the law does. But the fact is if the full token issuance schedule was by law available and clear, and any token project that deviated from that, you would know you're committing fraud, I think that would go a long way toward confidence.

And if that lockup schedule is free for all in the beginning, that's cool. If the lockup schedule is, okay, we're going to stagger the initial investors and be able to get out 20% at three months or whatever it is. I don't care. The point is then people like you can make rational decisions. And frankly, a lot of projects, there will be a lot of people like you because I tend to agree with you. The biggest reason people like crypto, one of them is because of immediate liquidity, right? And so, you know, it really is that. But the point is, it's a classic example where a clear, simple, principle based regulatory regime that punishes fraud would be helpful because you wouldn't have this problem. Right now, you have a situation where people buy tokens half the time based off of a telegram group or whatever. They have no idea what's coming down the pike. And I'm going to give you credit because at least a dozen times on this

particular spaces, you've yelled about that and said people are being screwed and you can't stand it anymore. And that's the point. Jed and Marshall. Hey, yeah, I think going after liquid is Liquid is really an interesting strategy. So we're a VC, and so the way that it works is typically these rounds are structured as a safe, which is like the YC, future equity deal, and then a token warrant that goes along with the safe.

And typically the token warrant is, as a VC, we assume that most of the value is going to accrue with the safe. And typically the token warrant is, you know, as we assume that most of the value is going to accrue to the token. So that's really kind of the valuation that we kind of give these companies. And I totally agree with the unclear regulatory regime that we have, the way that these companies are,

you know, they're forced basically for SEC rules to lock investors typically for a year. And then after that, the investing schedules is, you know, different. Sometimes it's three years, sometimes it's another three years, sometimes another two years. So as a VC, it's kind of like what we deal with. On the liquid side, though, like I'm kind of like what we deal with on the liquid side though like i i'm friends with like a lot of people who run liquid funds and typically they're fundamental

based so like hey this this this this project um is doing you know it actually has a lot of revenue and users but the token's down hey i should buy and go up and like, they just keep getting burned. There's just a graveyard of projects that launched last cycle, that were super hot, have good usage, and that's the token is just like down only. And, you know, in most cases, there's there's two reasons. One, obviously emissions, team selling investor selling, but two is just attention. People like like, like Rand and others that are buying Liquid, the new shiny thing, unfortunately, is kind of what gets a lot of attention.

If a project's two or three years old, it's hard for it to get back to thought leadership and to get in front of a lot of people. So it's a challenging strategy on both ends, locking up money for three to four years. Being a 10-year fund is what we are. And a lot of these funds are five-year, four-year. So I think long-term, it's really just taking a bet on the founders

and having a thesis on where you think the industry is going. Personally, on my PA, obviously, like doing liquid is, you know, more high risk and more, I guess, more exciting because it's like, you know, quick returns or quick losses. But that's kind of how- You think liquid is higher risk than pre-sale and lockup for years? Um, you know, I think from, from a fund perspective, basically every single quarter or sorry,

every single quarter you're reporting to your investors on what your results are. Right. And so like we have this huge correction of 25% last week and now every liquid fund is going to their Lps and being like hey um yeah we're down 25 net of fees with fees we're down 35 and unfortunately as open-ended funds uh they have redemption periods that are much shorter so as a as an investor and you can just take your money out and so that that is a quite a bit riskier as a fund manager on the liquid side

because people pull out their money and a closed-ended fund like a VC fund typically. Yeah, it's a 10-year fund, so it's a much longer time period. I think you've hit on one of the market structure issues in the space. So we are also, in addition to running a couple of liquid token strategies, we're LPs in a handful of venture funds. And sometimes you look at these statements and it's like the VC fund has 30% in liquid tokens. Are they really trading those positions? Is that an appropriate holding? We would guess no. Ideally, the VC should exit those positions as they become liquid and sell them to liquid token funds. But as an asset class, there's been little demand on the institutional side for purely liquid, partially because of the issue that you highlighted, which

is quarterly liquidity and monthly statements. But just one point of clarification is when a fund has a high watermark and charges two and 20, it can be down less than the market, including fees. So that's one thing that helps you in a down market. Marshall, then Tom. Yeah, I'm going to be the bad guy here. Look, anybody saying, complaining that they got scammed or whatever, if you want to sit here and call yourself an investor, that's the game. It happens in private equity, happens in equities. And anybody saying that we need more regulatory oversight, fraud is fraud is fraud. It'll always be fraud and no regulation is going to stop the

amount of fraud. If you're getting into a telegram group because you think you're going to get rich, what did you think was going to happen? You're joining a casino. If you want to actually be a long-term visionary holder, whatever, like a very big, big coin like Bitcoin, now's the time. When there's blood in the streets, you need to stack like a freak. That's the reality. There's very few projects that even have any real reason to exist. Most of these, almost all of these have no utility. They're unregistered securities. That's why they have to do all this janky shit with investor lockups and all this stuff. Listen, I've run private equity. I've run venture funds. All this, most of this stuff is shit. Doesn't need an excuse to even have a token. They can

just run perfectly fine on a database. There are very few projects that you should even be looking at. And if you're thinking that you're getting screwed, welcome to investing. That's just how it works. You're not going to win everything. You're not going to lose everything. You might get lucky here and there, but it's really going to be hard to rinse and repeat. You can name me any big fund that has lasted over a decade buying shit coins left and right with the exception of people who dump on retail that number is going to be less than you can count on two hands i think marshall ran i think marshall just channeled our conversation from uh consensus

a year and a half ago okay let me respond quickly i just want to be clear. I will never sit down at a poker table or enter a casino if I think the dealer, if there's even the slightest chance that they wouldn't go to prison or get% of all the rules on the SEC's books are bullshit and are counterproductive. That I believe. But there's that 2% where I want to know that the cards are being dealt fair. I want to know that if someone says X and they make that representation to me, that they have a consequence for lying. That's what I want. And you can say that fraud is fraud is fraud, but most fraud and crypto has gone unpunished because most of it can't even be proven because there is no place for people. A lot of the error of omission is really hard to prove. Error of commission is a lot easier to prove. And that's my only point. So I am far from the

regulatory state being expanded. I think that, you know, as I said, 98% of most of the rules are bullshit. But that 2% where if someone says something to me and put something in writing that I know that they have enough of a penalty that it's probably unlikely that they're lying about it is a good thing. And that's really the kind of principle when people talk about principles based regulation, that's what they mean. And that would inspire confidence in markets. As far as everything else you said about most projects. I mean, Scott knows very full well, I think most projects don't need their own token. I've said that for forever. But had that, I would say that I had that epiphany in person about a year and a half ago. And listening to Marshall really echoed my thoughts largely on that. Go ahead, Todd. Yeah, a lot there to dig into. I got to hop off in a minute, so I'll try to be really quick. So I think I generally agree, spray and pray is not going to work this cycle like it has in past

cycles, just because there's so many more tokens. And like everyone here said, we don't need tokens for 90% of this stuff. What I do think is interesting, though, is that even if we get a regulatory clarification in the US, it's likely to continue to have that one-year cliff period. And you've seen from numerous studies on currently available tokens that cliffs either happen for investors at one year or around zero to three months. So that just means more tokens are going to be pushed offshore in my view, because there's no reason for investors to want to adhere to a one-year cliff, a three-year vest for a highly speculative pre-revenue project, when they could be launching it in BVI or elsewhere and have a much clearer path to

liquidity and potentially a higher valuation for the project. So it's accretive to both sides. On the liquid token discussion, I was looking at the data the other day. In 2024, if we consider Binance and Coinbase the gold standard for token launches and liquid side, you've had, I think there was over 50 launches across both of those this year. And I think three are profitable yet. And most of those are meme coins. So it's like Book of Meme, Dog with Hat, Bone, like a few other ones. And then the only outlier, I think, was Jupiter.

So the valuation and in terms of looking at things and fundamentals is certainly not there. I think the only example you could probably point to to date is ton. People saw, but you can even argue that I'm looking at the price appreciation. It was actually after that price went up that the active addresses started to follow. So I think the space is highly speculative. There are positives and negatives on both the VC and the fundamental hedge fund side, but a lot of this action, regardless of regulation, is going to be pushed out of the US in my mind. Yeah, I think that that's highly likely, but Dave's point is a good one that there's a certain amount of regulation that's probably needed. Andrew? Oh, sorry. I think over a three- to five-year period, and I got here a little bit late,

so I'm not sure the genesis of this conversation and tokenization and securities law, all of those things in the regulatory environment. But I think over a three to five year period, there is going to be the bringing together of old securities law and new securities law and the larger tokenization idea and then implementation of it in traditional markets is going to happen by force. And when I say by force, what I mean by that is, is, you know, all of us have probably forgotten, but shouldn't, that BlackRock, Citadel, and others are in the process of opening up an entirely new stock exchange in Texas. That stock exchange will compete directly with the NYSE, the NASDAQ, and others. Also, as a reminder, that the NASDAQ is an entity into and of itself, but almost all the other exchanges across the globe, including the NYSE, is owned by ICE, Intercontinental Exchange Company. So BlackRock and Citadel are going to compete directly with ICE.

And we already know that BlackRock has designs on tokenizing real world assets. So if you fill in the blanks a little bit there, the idea of tokenization, the idea of maturing this particular market over a period of time is going to happen. Without question, it's going to happen. So it's an interesting conversation, but BlackRock and Citadel, even though we may not be constantly aware of it, have already entered the chat, so to speak. So you can bet that what they're going to do in Texas is going to be sort of next generation type stuff. And I think that it will force regulators because behind the curtain at regulatory agencies are the likes of BlackRock and Citadel sitting in smoky rooms and having conversations. And so I think by force, there's going to be significant adjustments to token law, securities law. There's going to be an evolution of those things that come to bear in the market. Sorry, having some mic issues.

I want to pivot slightly back to what we were talking about before, which is Solana hitting an all-time high versus Ethereum. Obviously, Solana sort of leading the charge, I think, on this bounce. It was the first token, I think, that I saw of the majors that was, it was as if the drop never happened, was trading back above where the Monday started. Robbie, how do you view this sort of Solana-Eath framing right now? We talked about it a little bit earlier, obviously, but do you think that Solana can continue to just outperform throughout this cycle? So I think in my view, one of the things that I've been thinking about lately is that it's interesting. I kind of view meme coins generally as another aspect of the game industry at this point, because it feels like obviously Solana has been buoyed primarily by the you know feverish interest in

meme coins over the last several months and i'm not sure i think one of the interesting things will be um you know how solana performs long term based on other applications that are sort of emergent um that take advantage of their tps and some of the differentiation that they have as an L1. But definitely, I think if we think about, you know, the attention economy, so to speak, Solana and the meme coins have been getting all the attention because they basically, you know, own the meme coin industry. Meme coins bounce harder than anything else. It's crazy. Yes. Well, and because as we all all know everybody loves memes because they're simple

and straightforward right um and there's you in in a market where it's hard to do in-depth research then why not just put money on something that you don't need to do any research because there's nothing to research right yeah i'm not sure if that's a positive or negative for the industry i'm not saying i'm not saying it's a positive or negative for the industry. I'm not saying it's a positive. You're not encouraging it, not financial advice, right? We always have to prep this. But I was going to say that definitely it's, I think it's one of the explanations for why Solana has had so much activity in general, because it's the ecosystem in which all of

this attention is being focused for right now. But I do think that Ethereum, you know, we all like to, Ethereum is the thing that we always like to make fun of, you know, that Ethereum prices always lag the prices of every other thing, except for the fact that Ethereum is often where most people are building stuff. So I think the same thing we've seen with the with the eth etfs there's maybe been less inflows than people had hoped um but it doesn't mean that ethereum is not going to continue to be the backbone of web3 um so i i think you

know time will tell how these things pan out but i I'm looking forward to seeing new applications on Solana outside of meme coins. Robbie, have your portfolio companies made moves to acknowledge Solana's faster growth in DeFi and other areas? Yes. Although we have, on Solana, basically we've invested in some fundamental stuff like Magic Eden or Phantom, but also we've invested in lots of games. And I think from our perspective, as most people know,

we always tend to look at things through the lens of user acquisition because that betrays our gaming background. And so I think Solana is very exciting as a place to build games because of the ability to onboard so many users who are already in that ecosystem to whom you can appeal by doing cross promotions with meme coins and other things in the same way that you know we did historically with pfp projects you know last cycle and things like that

matthew before before we go what's the updated thinking on salami utf uh oh boy i'm glad i'm not looking you in the eyes right now, Scott, because you know, my poker face is terrible on this topic. You're just going to have to wait a little bit longer for some news. Not again. Come on, man. For context, everybody, I asked him that question dismissively a few weeks ago on YouTube. I literally said, did you see me file for a salon in Canada?

Yeah. And then he was like, you might be surprised when I said I don't think those are coming to us anytime soon and then Bannock filed the next day. Here's what I would I'd say is that I haven't seen any evidence that Kamala Harris at the top of the Democrat Party is having any influence on how the SEC sees additional crypto ETFs. So cryptic. So beautiful. Love it. Thank you.

All right. Well, guys, I think we've covered it all for today. You're going to run it back tomorrow, 10.15 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Robbie, Dave, Matthew, Jonathan, thank you guys, all the other panelists that were here earlier. It's going to be interesting to see how the market shakes out, I think, over the next few days. I think there's a lot of holding breath and watching and waiting. So, you know, will it continue further down, or was that just a very quick bottom remains to be seen?

And as always, we'll unpack it here. Thanks, guys. See you tomorrow.