The Wolf Of All Streets - The Death Of VCs? | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: September 2, 2024

Crypto Town Hall is a daily X Spaces hosted by Scott Melker, Ran Neuner & Mario Nawfal. Every day we discuss the latest news in crypto and bring the biggest names in the space to share their insight. ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. USE CODE ‘2MONTHSOFF’ WHEN VISITING MY LINK.  👉 https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/    ►► OKX Sign up for an OKX Trading Account then deposit & trade to unlock mystery box rewards of up to $10,000!  👉  https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER ►►NGRAVE This is the coldest hardware wallet in the world and the only one that I personally use. 👉https://www.ngrave.io/?sca_ref=4531319.pgXuTYJlYd ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/   ►►NORD VPN  GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL  - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets    Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io   Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor.  Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

Mario is this space actually going to work today are we going to all get rugged in another 20 seconds what happened did it rug last time oh yeah it rugged like twice on friday i think the team just shut it down because scott wasn't doing a good job that's my guess but um could have rugged oh yeah yeah i i give the orders behind the scenes because it's actually my team that hosts the show using the Crypto Town Hall account. So when he gets out of line, I just shut the space down. You're going to be in Singapore? Yep, going for the full week.

There's so much going on that week. It's ridiculous. We're doing our first – let me just start promoting it. We're doing our first side event. We're going to have a full panel there with one of our partners. So it's going to be – I'm bringing my whole – not my whole team, but probably at least 10 people from my team. I was going to say my whole sales team, but we're going to have like 10 people flying in from my team. I have a big side event at I think the same hotel that the event is held in.

I forgot what it's called. Yeah, the Marina Bay. And I think it's all right next to, I don't know, a good hotel. I can't remember. I think it's Marina Bay or the one next to it. And I'd have a panel there,

get my co-hosts and get all the guests to come in and just kind of do interviews and stuff. So yes, it's going to be pretty exciting. I'll be obviously flying in as well. So yeah, it should be good. If anyone that wants to kind of meet up, definitely hit us up. Hit me up in the DMs and the team can organize it.

But yeah, let's kick it off. I think we've got a pretty good panel. Actually, Dan, I've got one of your tweets. I added it to my agenda. Let me see if it's yours. Dan, Dan. No, no, it's not yours. Sorry, Dan.

Bye-bye. Another Dan. Dan Crypto Trades. Sorry, Clark. Apologize. But I want to kick it off with just getting looking at the markets as well. I was going through the – as always, I'm always kind of out of touch with what's happening on crypto Twitter. But the level of fear is just very surprising to me. And I'm going to dig into – we know we were in greed uh territory uh i think two weeks ago and this week we were in our last over the last week we're now fear territory i

think we even broke the 50k mark as well which uh you know again i live in the bubble where everything looks fine and this is all expected and you know everyone's expecting the market to kind of kind of stagnate for a few months but it seems the rest of crypto Twitter is in a whole different mindset right now. I think a lot of people lost a lot of money trading the markets. I want to get the thoughts from the panel here. Just kind of general thoughts to kick it off. We've got here Douglas, Carlo, Alex, Dan.

Douglas, I'll go to you first. Get your general thoughts on the markets. I think people like you don't really care much about these monthly fluctuations. You've been in the market long enough. But I'll have to get your initial thoughts. Yeah, you know, it's sort of like the pause that refreshes. I think what this market is sort of dictating is sort of, I guess, how people are looking at the election in the United States as well. And I think that really

going into November, we're going to see this sort of sideways action. Because, you know, it's sort of like there's multiple polls that you can look at where one says Trump's going to win, others say Kamala's going to win. And I think that because there's so much uncertainty there over who, and because I think it's very binary, I think if Kamala gets in, that's not good for crypto. I think if Trump gets in, that's better for crypto. And so that uncertainty, I think, leaves people sitting there with their bags and not necessarily adding to them on dips. And I think that the ETFs continue to support Bitcoin specifically. But I think that it's really about waiting to see what happens in the election.

And we just have to sort of close our eyes and wait until then. But, you know, not really taken to. I don't really get anxious about the daily moves because I know where it's going. I've got a strong sense of that. But what this reminds me of is the 70s with townhouses in New York City when there was rioting in the streets in New York and people were selling townhouses for a song. But if you just held on to them, that $25,000 townhouse would now be worth $25 million. And so there's always going to be periods of uncertainty. That's a time to add to your bags.

And I think we all heard that by the dip. I mean, how many dips can you buy before you run out of money? But we're not really on a dip. You know, if you look at where we are, it's still in a great place. I think there's opportunity here. I still like Bitcoin here, obviously. And I like Ethereum as well. I think that's very undervalued. But you just got to close your eyes through the election and wait and see. Many people didn't notice that Grayscale now, BlackRock overtook Grayscale now. There's a fast Grayscale there sitting at 20, what is it now? Yeah, 21 billion, almost 22 billion.

Grayscale is like just under 21 billion dollars in assets. So it's kind of giving an audience an idea of kind of the fundamentals that we're seeing. Wells Fargo is apparently preparing wealth advisors to start pitching Bitcoin ETFs. This came in from Bitcoin Archives. AP Abascus, it'll be great to invite him as well to talk about this, maybe bring him in tomorrow. And Morgan Stanley is actively selling Bitcoin ETFs to their clients now. And Wells Fargo is coming in next month.

We've got two of the biggest USA banks, two of the biggest six that are already selling Bitcoin ETFs to their clients. So my question is, is that already being reflected in the price is that why the price isn't lower than what we um you know 58k seems like a very healthy level for me um and is it so is that kind of compensating for retail because retail is just you know barely any google searches um you know app rankings kind of reflect that retails very very uninterested in crypto right now um I would love to get your thoughts on these fundamentals Douglas can you hear me yeah yeah um you know just because

Morgan Stanley opens up Bitcoin to their brokers to pitch to the clients doesn't mean that the clients are ready to take the position and I think I think that as Morgan Stanley goes out there and the others, and they start pitching it, they're pitching to guys that are on vacation, at least have been through Labor Day today in the United States. So you don't really start pitching any new sort of ideas or products to folks over August. And I think that if you are pitching Bitcoin right now, that the average high net worth individual they're pitching to is probably looking at the election again, an election issue, and saying, you know what, let me see what I'll do after the election. And so, you know, it's very tough to buy into new products that have sort of near binary outcomes in terms of the support from the regulators. And I think that that's the lag we're looking at. Again, this

comes down to September right now, we've got to get through November. And then I think you're going to see that sort of charge of the Morgan Stanley and the larger institutions as they come in and start pitching to high net worth. I think it is very surprising that retail isn't really picking up on it, especially know especially given that you know bitcoin is pretty much mentioned daily now by folks running for office by the the news media it really is being mentioned a lot and maybe maybe that means that retail doesn't have to google search anymore because it's right there in the newspaper um around one thing you talked about on your show as well as our september is to be a bloody month. But you've also given examples of people, I think it was Benjamin and REC Capital, talking about other months, other times where September was not a red month.

Your thoughts on this, how do you expect September to play out? Considering that obviously retail is not in, I want to get your thoughts on the retail metrics as well with your subscribers and the engagement you're getting from retail versus the fundamentals of the etfs um and that is obviously supporting a pretty strong strong performance i must be honest it's been the hardest time to keep subscribers and to make content the subscriber count isn't really going up i'm managing to hold the my my base like my base is about 70 000 to 80 000 people per show and i'm managing to hold that base of like 70 000 to 80 000 views per show um in terms of september like to be honest you know i think people have been so battered and bruised for the last 187 days that like what's another 30 days you know like you do you it's like you've been here for 187 days what's another 180 what's another

what's another 30 days? So, like, to me, one thing I discussed today in my show is like, I think that we should be

looking at this slightly different. I think a lot of people are looking at crypto like, what can I trade? What can I trade? What can I trade?

I think the best returns are just going to be you buy a portfolio, you put 20 coins in a portfolio, you know, you hold that portfolio between now and the end of the year,

and the end of the cycle. And if you want to mess around, take 5% of your capital and, I don't know, mess around on the hottest meme coin, the hottest NFT and stuff like that. I think that's the best way to make money. And also that's the best way to be able to not look at the prices all the time. I don't know about you, but I'm so tired of switching on my trading view and just looking at the prices

and fucking it's 58.5, 58.7, 58.3, 58.2. Honestly, this whole weekend from Friday, I didn't look at my prices even once. I did not look at my prices even once since Friday.

And honestly, it was quite liberating, to be honest. How important is that 58k level for you as a support? I couldn't give a fuck, to be honest. I'm buying tokens between now and the end of the cycle. I couldn't give a shit whether it holds $58K or goes to $56K

or maybe gets to $57K too and breaks the key support. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I couldn't give a shit, honestly. But you talked about Bitcoin being very stagnant and uninteresting. But what about the rest of the markets? Obviously, we're not seeing much action with VC-backed tokens and alts. The meme coin world, other than Tron, seems to be pretty dead as well. On the 13th of August, I called the end of the meme coin cycle.

You can go and check it. I made a show on the 13th of August. The end? So you think it's completely ended? End. End of the meme coin cycle. I called and check it i made a show on the end so you think it's completely ended end end of the meme coin cycle i think that i called it the flapping fish theory i called the tron the tron meme coin run i called that you don't know you know like when you catch a fish and then you bring the fish onto the boat and then like the fish flaps and flaps and flaps and then

like it stops flapping for like like a minute or two minutes and you think okay the fish is dead and then it gives you like one last flap, and you think, Jesus, where did the fish get that flap from? For those people who are fishermen, you know exactly what I'm talking about. And then you never hear from the fish ever again. I think the Tron meme coin run is the last flash of the fish. And the reason why I say it's the last flash of the fish, Tron doesn't solve for any of the problems on Solana.

It's the same thing on Solana. It's copy-paste the same thing on Solana. Copy-paste. What is it? It's pump.fund, sun.pump. It's just low fees. Anybody can launch a token. They haven't fixed any of the problems with meme coins.

And so I don't understand why there should fundamentally be a reason why Tron meme coins succeed and Solana meme coins don't succeed. The meme coin market is dead. The reason why the meme coin market is dead is because memes are an attention market. Attention is a function of people times the amount of money they're willing to invest in meme coins. That's how you define attention, right? Now, when you have the same amount of attention, because no new people are coming in and you have an increasing number of coins, then by definition, you have the same amount of value spread around over 150 or 200 or 300,000 or 400,000 coins, right? And so by definition, your probability of success is getting closer and closer and closer to zero. Now, I don't know about you, but the last time that I went to a casino where the success was

very, very, very close to zero, I didn't enjoy my experience there. And so I left. And that's exactly what's happening in meme coins now. No one's making money. So no one's having fun. So no one's going to come back to the casino. That's pretty much how it's going to work. Yeah, I was going to ask though, but when retail does come back, when the market starts reaching new all-time highs, where is that money going to flow into if it's not being coined? Do you think when the market actually starts to run, and Bitcoin's running, and ETH is running, and Solana is running, and fucking all the good quality protocols are running,

do you think that retail is going to sit on pump.fan and go and look for every second word that we say on this chat and that has become a meme like do you really think that that's what's going to happen why not why not if they've already done that they've been doing that because it's not fun anymore it's not fun anymore it's finished making money is always fun what do you mean making money but you can't make money it's impossible to make money because they made it too easy to launch a coin and because there's too many no pump.fund pump.fund did an amazing service and an amazing disservice to to bump the fund and others but an amazing service and disservice to memes right the service they did was they allowed anyone to launch a social

currency and i think that we're going to learn in the future that that's a very very important part of crypto is to let anybody launch a social currency very, very, very quickly. Andreas Antonopoulos actually spoke about that in 2013 or 2012 or 2013. He spoke about people, actually kids being able to create a social currency very, very, very quickly. And I think that that's a fundamental part of crypto, right? How we use the social currency is something very different, right? Sorry, you're talking about Andreas Antonopoulos when he talked about doing it on Bitcoin, yeah? And that becoming a colored coin is becoming a social currency, yeah? I don't know if he said specifically Bitcoin. I think he just said crypto at the time,

if I remember correctly. I think he meant bitcoin because clearly he's a bitcoin he's a bitcoin uh maximalist one of the most but one of the just for the audience one of the most memorable speeches that got me when i got into crypto early one of the things one of the speeches i'd never forget one of the presentations i'd never forget but yeah continue sorry explain what he said and how that relates to today yeah so he said he said that that one day in future kids at school will be able to launch a social currency on the blockchain um and and i think that's what pump.fund does it allows anybody to launch a currency but the thing is right now the the for specifically when it comes to meme coins they've killed the meme coin game because the meme coin game ain't fun anymore and so you know launching a social currency is one

thing launching a token where you want someone where, where, where the game only works. If people land up making money and land up making money quickly, which is what the meme coin game is all about. That casino is finished. Now that casino has gone. It's history. And so pumped up fun killed it.

I'm not saying I'm not saying I'm not by any means saying it's the end of pumped up fun. In fact, I think V1 of pump.fun was amazing and i can't wait to see what they do with v2 and how people end up using v2 but i don't think it's going to be people launching uh this guy's dog this guy's dog's collar this guy's dog's collar's bell this guy's dog's collar's bells inside this guy i mean we don't need that so you think you'll see a meme coin mania but but it will be a different narrative or different –

could it be a different asset class? Could it be NFTs? Could we see a VC-backed token hype again? I think it's going to be two things. I think meme coins, as we know, meme coins are gone. Cheers. And I don't think, to be honest, I don't think there were ever meme coins. I think they were always influencer coins,

and they were disguised as meme coins because the influencers, the only way meme coins ever succeeded was if they had large influencer backings behind them. Everyone knows that. And what it was a game of, can you follow the influencer? And how did you get a clue as to where the influencers would go?

You'd find something really cool that the influencer could actually relate to. Right? So, so that was, that was what meme coins were. They were never about memes. And I'll tell you how I know they were never about memes, because in the last three months, probably the most effective meme that was launched in the world was Hoctwa in the last three months, right? And yet there's not one successful Hoctwa meme coin today. And that just shows that the meme coins aren't about memes at all. They're just influences and it's a game of hot potato can you get into a meme coin early

with the right influences in it and can you get out before the influences dump on your head that's pretty much the game of meme coins right that was always the game of meme coins uh pepe were all all of those were go look at the original distribution of Pepe coin. You'll see it was distributed to a whole lot of insiders. So they were never, ever, ever meme coins. It was a game that allowed us to make money by following the right influencers. And that's pretty much what... You want to call it meme coins?

Garbage meme coins. It was influencer coins. So now what happens next? so i think we've proven a couple of things we've proven that anyone can launch a social currency for free pretty much we've proven that influencers have a lot more power than people give credit to we've proven that what we can do is we can rally people to certain places financially in a very short period of time using an L1 blockchain and a protocol like pump.file.

And now what you're going to work out is what's the next iteration of it. So I'll give you, I don't know what the next iteration is because if I knew I'd be building it. But one of the iterations is a combination of prediction markets and a combination of prediction markets and mean points. So I'll give an example. Zara Zara Zara wants to determine whether it's going to be cooler to do brown or beige in the winter season. They launch a brown coin, and the people that love brown going go

to brown and they go and they launch a beige coin and the people that want brown go and go to brown and they go and they launch a beige coin and the people that want to fund the fabric to go beige fund the second coin and that way what you're doing is you're taking trends with trends plus attention and you're also giving it probability so it's a combination of like poly markets and and uh an attention economy and that, I believe that that's something along the lines of what the next meme coin craze will look like. And I also believe that what Andrea said

all those years ago is like, I think people will launch their own social currencies, but I think the social currencies will be based on much more than just a bunch of influencers shilling people so that they can dump on people's heads. So how do you think it will look like? I'm actually pretty curious in this. So we talked about, obviously, LFTs and Alcala.

I've got the question for you as well. We've talked about it before, which I don't think you're going to be bullish on, Ryan. We've got meme coins, which you think the structure of meme coins will change into more – you're saying it's going to be more like social tokens rather than a meme-based token, more based around a personality? Is it going to be similar to what Jason Gerulo and others tried to do? Yeah. Can I ask you a question? Which meme coin actually is about a meme-based token, more based around a personality? Is it going to be similar to what Jason Gerulo and others tried to do? Yeah, I can ask you a question. Which meme coin actually is about a meme?

Like, honestly, like a meme. And hold on, let me just define meme for you. So I'm trying to get a proper definition for you. An image, video, or piece of text, typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by users, often with slight variations. Which meme coin can you honestly say was... Pepe. Pepe.

Pepe, great, cool, amazing, that's great. What else? Just looking at the... Dog with a hat wouldn't really apply. Shiba Inu. Yeah, Shiba Inu would become one of those. But you realize that most of the ones you're talking about are actually last cycle tokens and this one

you've managed to name one out of like a million tokens that have been launched in the last week you managed to name one. Would you say something like oh what about what about my MAGA coin

it's based on the Trump meme but it's not really a meme it's a political meme. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What about Sandog they've created their own meme the dog but it's very early.

Sandog is a bunch of fucking influencers. Please tell me that you know that you know that sundog is just a bunch of fucking influencers there's no meme but every every but this applies to every single every that applies to every single coin like they they start they try to build them have you ever seen have you ever what is it that used have you ever seen the sundog used as a meme devoid of the crypto value that we've given to the meme? Because remember, it's an image, video, or piece of text, typically humorous nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users. Now, I've never seen sun dog outside of the people trading it.

I've never, ever seen sun dog. I bet you if I show my wife sun dog, she'll go, sorry, what the hell is this? What are you talking about it's a influence a cabal coin where there is a bunch of influencers that hold most of supply and they are bringing they're using all the influences to bring people into it uh so that they can dump their tokens i mean just call a spider's blade at least then everyone knows the rules and then you know that you just have to stick around for long enough okay so but going back to my question though is that okay where is that?

What's the new format of what I'm going to call it? Meme coins or the next kind of high-paced asset class? I've been waiting for social tokens to become that. You know, Big Cloud did really well. I think they've got a lot of legs. If you had to guess, I know you don't know, but if you had to make a guess, do you think NFTs could revive?

You know, we've seen a bit of action. Combination of prediction markets. So basically basically there's no real world outcomes or digital world outcomes other than buying or selling uh on these meme coins right so i think the next iteration is is is like something like prediction markets where there's where there's an outcome either in the real world or the digital world. So I think it's like, as I said, it's a combination of prediction markets and memes. And I don't know exactly what it looks like, unfortunately. I wish I did.

But I just... Go ahead. Yeah, it just seems logical that somehow the attention economy and the probability align to... So the attention economy and the probability need to align. And that's what I'm trying to find. I'm trying to find the alignment.

I'm going to ask you another question, Carlo. That question goes to you as well. And then two questions. One for you and Carlo, another one for you and Tom. So NFTs, we saw a bit of price action, a bit of liquidity kind of flowing in a week or two ago and everyone got excited even though it was a very small pump um fish okay um so carlo you think nfts are flapping fish or they could have their time in the limelight this cycle well first off i cannot disagree with

a lot of what rand is saying and if you haven't listened to his interview by the way with ral powell uh you should it's fascinating and compliments to you ran on your journey thank you on the on the subject of nfts no i don't think they're dead i think there will always be a core class of nft digital art that will always draw i know and i'm sorry to interrupt you but i'm sorry carlos you can't refrain my question is dead more as could we see another hype cycle for nft sorry to interrupt you, but sorry, Carlo, just kind of reframing my question. It's not like our NFT is dead. More as, could we see another hype cycle for NFTs? I think you can, but it will be a different hype cycle because just like- It's not going to be punks and apes.

No, no, I agree. And dogs and shit like that. I agree. That's gone, bro. I think- There will be a massive, Carlo, there will be a massive NFT run, but it's going to be a new kind of nft with an actual use case either in a game or something else like it's going to happen i just don't know

what it is i agree i agree because just as easy as it is to spin up a mean coin on pump.fun it is now just that easy to spin up an nft where i think we're going to see a resurgence in this is i think it's going to diametrically flip to a community token and a community NFT. One of the disturbing trends that I observed unfold this weekend was the shutdown of X in Brazil. And I've written about this, and Mario, I think I've even shared my thoughts with you, and you've been kind enough to rebroadcast it. But I've been pushing this narrative that if it's not your keys, it's not your community. And that's a painful lesson that a lot of businesses and influencers in Brazil are learning in real time, because when these Web2 social media protocols are shut down, you lose access

to your content and you lose access to your community and where i see nfts and mean coins potentially filling that gap is that they will be free and they will be a means to capture your community once you have those wallet addresses then you have a way to communicate on a tamper resistant blockchain with community, regardless of what nation states do, what social media apps do with your content. I give you a perfect example because this is my playbook, Mario, and I'm pretty transparent about it. These scales of justice memes that I put out all the time, they have no intrinsic value. They are out there because they build my brand identity and they unify my community around the cause of crypto law

and spreading and understanding knowledge about how important the law is to the growth of the sector. So when I mint a free NFT on base called the DeFi Defender, I have no intrinsic interest in profit margin or anything. What I have an interest in is unifying a community around a meme that I've created and around a culture that I think is significant. And I think you're going to see more people do that because they've become fungible. They've become so easy to spin up and so easy to put out and the pump and the dump effect, we're all largely moving on. But I think the social value of it is always going to survive. Carla, I agree with you.

But just remind me again, for these communities, why do I need a token? Why can't I just say, I love Carla's community and I am in the community. The same way I think when you're financially incentivized, if you monetize the community's value, people feel more involved. It's kind of a level up from paying for a membership at your community. It's not necessary, but okay. And Everyone can follow a different approach to it. You can certainly monetize and you can token gate it and you can give them incentives that you wouldn't give your regular subscribers. I mean, musicians leverage this type of technology all the time for that purpose. They give perks to their true fans. So there's a million iterations that you can do it,

but I don't think it's going to be an economy anymore the way we've understood it. I don't think it's going to have that trend of making quick money for people that we saw in the 2021-2022 bull run. It's going to evolve, and it frankly needs to evolve if we're going to be taken serious as a sector. Do you guys think, and Ran, I know your stance on VC on vc back tokens i'm betting the opposite unless you're kind of your position has changed but the tom i'll let you go next and obviously

i've got you've got a response to what ran and carlos said but i want to get your thoughts on vc back tokens we're betting on on just a you know significantly better performance kind of similar to what we saw in the first quarter of this year um and next year we see vc back tokens have one in my opinion vc back tokens have one one last thing that they can do to save the token um and i can literally stay for three more minutes but i'll quickly i'll quickly quickly quickly explain it to you so the reason why people buy tokens and why people get interested in tokens is is because people have made money in tokens if you look at all the tokens that are successful with huge communities people have made huge money in those tokens so you look at solana you look at ethereum you look at bitcoin every single one of those tokens has one thing in common and the one

thing in common is that people have made money people got in at a very low price and made money as the token went up. Right. That is why we all like Bitcoin. We don't like Bitcoin. Yeah, we love the tech, but we all like Bitcoin because Bitcoin has made the most millionaires. Right. That is why we all love Bitcoin. Now, same thing with Solana.

Solana came on at a dollar and went to, I don't know, $200. I mean, you know what I'm talking about. So the problem is that the VCs then, in 2017, they had this thing called an ICO. The ICO distributed tokens to a lot of people at a very low valuation. So $30 million valuation, everybody got in, VCs got in at the same price as retail,

and there was a good community of people that actually got in. VCs got in at the same price as retail. And there was a good community of people that actually got in. That's why a lot of the ICO tokens are still around and still successful. But then VCs made a bad mistake and they started bidding up the tokens off market and driving the value of tokens off market so that when the real community can get in, it was only on market. And when the real community can get in, the real community could only get in at crazy valuations. So let's just give it- And then they end up being exit liquidity. Well, so let's look at an example right now, right? So you look at Solana

and then you compare Solana to StockNet, okay? So let's look at StockNet. StockNet has a market capitalization today of $3.6 billion, okay? Just work with me for a second here. So the VCs bought this thing up at a billion and 2 billion off market and they let the retail get into 3 billion. At 3 billion, no one's making money on it. No one is making money on it. And therefore, nobody loves or nobody feels attached to these tokens. And so the reality is that all these new

tokens where nobody loves and nobody gets attached to them will never, ever, ever have community. Think about Google. Think about Microsoft. Think about Apple. The reason why people love those stocks is because those stocks have made the most people money. And so the most people are paying attention to them. And so they get the most liquidity, etc., etc. Now, all these tokens that came onto the market at a high valuation, I think they've got one Hail Mary that they could actually do now and they could actually fix the whole problem. And the answer is very simple. Unlock the fucking tokens. If you unlock the tokens, in the short term, the price will go down.

When the price goes down, it will give an opportunity for the retail investor to get in at a reasonable valuation, hopefully. Then you can take a whole lot of people on a ride, which equals your fundamentals. And if you do, then you may actually get a loyal community and you may a ride, which equals your fundamentals. And if you do, then you may actually get a loyal community and you may actually get people interested in your share. Here's why 90% of them, I thought on that rant, it's brilliant, but here's why 90% of them won't do it. Because 90% of them realize they don't have the traction and the network up adoption to pull that off. Because the moment they do, yeah, you're right, short term pain for the ones who are truly building something of value. But for the ones that have no intrinsic value or network

adoption, they're going to be depleting their token price, which hurts all their founders. Thought about this. Thought about this a lot. If one big protocol does it and another one follows, then the protocols that don't do it get even more fucked. And so they kind of put into a corner where if one or two of them actually do it, like if an Aptos does it or if, I don't know, Aptos or Wormhole or one of these cabal, disgusting, stinky, dirty VC tokens that never, ever let real retail in and is actually a pump and dump scheme for venture capitalists onto retail, which, by the way, isn't here yet. And that's why the market's at a freeze now because there's no retail coming to buy the VC bags. And so VCs are sitting there going, shit, we don't want to mark down our bags.

We don't want to mark down our bags. And I called a little part of you crazy. So they somehow supporting the price of the tokens with no buyers and no sellers. I think that the only, and I've thought about this long and hard, there's only one way to fix it. And the only one way to fix it is to let the price come down. Let retail get this thing at a bargain. At the same time, pushing the price down will be VCs who don't want to be there in the first place. Get them out, get the retail investor in, start getting real traction onto your projects, and then let's get this market cycle. Do you think getting better allocations

on these IDO launch pads and getting better lockups on VC investments could be one solution? No. And obviously the valuation. You're talking to me. You're trying to tailor make an old model. That model is dead.

That model, this whole IDO 10% of your token, that model is dead. Move on. Move on. It's time to move on to a different market to a different a different kind of of token cycle that's okay you're talking to me about like honestly like to me memes is like something of the past like it's zero interest for me these ideas and earlier locations in purpose memes memes are a thing of the past as your interest you're that adamant with

your with your with your kind of uh with you calling out the dead the death of meme meme coins or at least the current yeah i think i think the only memes that are going to survive now are the memes that are in existence and so basically what you got to think about is there were a whole lot of memes that launched in the time before the market got flooded and so people still know those memes right because they were launched before the market got flooded but people don't know the new memes that are launched because there were just too many of them, right? So if I say to you, Mario, name 20 memes for me from before Pump.Fun and name 20 memes for me

after Pump.Fun. Very hard for you to name the 20 memes after Pump.Fun, right? Yeah. Yeah, very easy for you to hear. So I love it. So, Ran, a lot of really good points. So I think what we're getting to is attention is the currency and meme coins are literally just tokenized attention. The problem is

we have fractured that attention so, so much that it's impossible to concentrate it into individual investments that you can actually realize a profit on. That happened with Bonk and with Dogecoin because there was only like three of them. There's thousands. It's impossible to actually make individual investments. Now, I will push back on the, hey, profile pictures are never coming back again. And that's a challenging argument to make. But when you did it yourself, when you just mentioned a few of the individual projects that you still talk about, right? Punks and apes and whatever, there's like five or six of them. So I think those 10 are still going to do pretty well because they're already in our heads. And it's just really an uphill battle to get new tokens, new coins, new memes, new NFTs in people's heads. But those

ones that are already there, they aren't leaving. So you can bet if the market goes up again, guess what? Those are catching a very strong bid. So you can bet if the market goes up again, guess what? Those are catching a very strong bid. And you saw it in the recent pump in NFTs last week or two. But you don't think – so my question is obviously the argument of like, hey, the top 1% that succeeded or top 0.whatever percent that succeeded will always be here. Whether it's VC-backed tokens that did well and built the product or whether it's meme coins like the top 10 top 10 meme coins or the top 5 top 10 nft projects but the question is when do you think we'll get to a level where we'll have that hype where we'll see a lot of retail money come into these vc back tokens um or a lot of money coming into meme coins as we've seen earlier this year but we'll still

i think that's still happening at least more than than vc back tokens and nfts for sure um or we'll see an nft bull market as we saw in the in the last cycle do you think that's still possible or the next bull market will be a completely different asset class or a different kind of format of existing asset classes like rand said meme coins being more like potentially social tokens which i think is really interesting nfts being in-game nfts rather than pf. I think these memes, just to throw this out there to debate, I think these memes offer an opportunity for crowdfunding. And if we get tokenized blockchains that can trade in equities and individuals can fractionalize ownership on chain,

then these meme coins could end up being a way of crowdfunding for startups, which takes the whole VC dynamic out of it to a degree. It sort of levels the playing field. Tommy, Tom, sorry. Tommy, I love it. No. So yeah, I think it's really challenging, right? For the challenge, again, is to get attention. So if you did what Rand said and you decided to unlock all these VCs and unlock all these investors, there's no one who's going to purchase this stuff right now. We're in ridiculously illiquid markets.

There's no new net buyers right now. All the people who are crypto curious are just buying funds. So right now people are just playing the time game. Now we're going to have an even bigger problem in Q4 when we have hundreds of protocols that have been delaying their token generation events since early this year and are actually launching. And then you have token unlocks from projects that actually did launch earlier this year. So right now, I think the game is attention, users, application, which is why you see things like Tunn actually getting some attention, even though the code is

shit, even though they have their founder getting put in jail, they actually have the users. They don't have to convince people to come there. They just got to build some cool stuff on top of it. So, you know, I think more broadly, these VC tokens, and as a VC myself, I hate to say this, but, you know, a lot of them are in trouble because there isn't enough capital to purchase hundreds or thousands of new individual protocols on top of what's already

out there right now. Go ahead, Alex. Yeah, i don't i mean i think i agree largely with a lot of what ran was saying and i think the idea like carlo to what you were talking about that you're going to get a substantial form of crowdfunding is just not going to happen. I think at best what you could see a lot of these meme coins being used for when it comes to crowdfunding is like one-off individual charity campaign type things or non-profit fundraising where the coin ends up being used almost as something like a challenge coin or just something that shows like hey I uh I helped this thing right um you could kind of do that with nfts too but I think the overall like more liquid capability of tokens is and just the fact that you don't have to deal with mints and things it's just a lot easier

to spin up and get going so I could see him getting used by that but like I think like I said I just I don't think people are gonna view meme coins as a durable equity type investment into projects very well. And even if you do, then, of course, you reintroduce a lot of other issues where while tokens themselves, I think everyone on this call is probably going to agree that tokens themselves shouldn't be considered securities. If you are explicitly saying, buy this thing as an investment in the project we're making, well, you've definitely crossed the line into offering a security at that point. Yeah, Dan, you agree with that statement? Yeah, I think, good to see you guys. I look forward to seeing you guys in Singapore this month. Yeah, it's unlicensed security effectively is um is what i was thumbs up thumbs up into um to add more value to this you're crossing the border into being an unlicensed security um so that's basically what i was just chiming into as you're going back tom back to the

discussion that we saw we saw ryan is very your thoughts on meme coins as well ryan is very bearish he's made the statement that beam coins are pretty much dead. He also thinks the VC model that we've seen earlier this year and in previous cycles is dead as well. Your thoughts on these two statements, these two positions. Rand seems to be adamant on both. I think they're, so the best performing fund on the hedge fund side of the past year has been a meme coin focused fund.

I think it was Asymmetrix that's done that. So it's hard to say completely these things are dead or written off. I don't understand it. I think they're very much a short term investment. I don't understand how you could justify that to institutional LPs. Even if you've done well in the short term. I think personally meme coins are dead because not only is institutional capital not interested, but then you have, you know, all these people that got smoked

on pumped out fund. I mean, the statistics are eye watering. I think 99% of people have lost money. Um, so if you're going to say that number again, 99% of people have lost money. There is a, yeah. So I think the statistics are um one percent have actually made it off of pumped up fun on projects projects have made it yeah yeah exactly i said people i thought traders 99 of them lost money which would be obviously crazy uh it's the same thing right because if the project doesn't survive and the traders don't make money so yeah but not enough but the but the trade% is pretty high. Out of every 100 people that

went into pumping that fund, 1% made money I think is pretty... It's not bad. Let me find this stat for you as we continue the show. I agree. I think the stat is referring to 1% of projects made it onto Ray Jim and got at least some traction or a certain market cap,

which makes sense. I'm sure the majority of people lost money. As always, these insiders or KOLs or early VCs that kind of make money in pretty much anything. But is it worse than you think? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, just to push back a bit, like, hey, VCs are making money because they're able to get into these private rounds of these awesome valuations. Like, that's not been true for at least a year. I mean, all the people who have bought, you know, these big token rounds that have launched have lost an absolute ton of money. You're able to purchase on open market right now for all these protocols without lockups.

No, this year, VCs got fucked already, and they got fucked in every bear market as well. But no, what I'm pointing out is that the people that come in early with meme coins some vcs are pretty active in the meme coin world and they know it's like what i found it's like the same group of people um that are behind most of the meme coins launching when i started digging into it a bit in the last few weeks i don't understand it better it's like it's just a handful of people that are involved one way or another with every single meme coin that launches and is successful. And they kind of use the same process for these coins as well to get them to a certain market cap. It's a very clean – it's like a very simple process.

It's easy to follow. You launch a coin. You come up with a certain narrative. You tweet certain things. You get the right people talking about it in a certain way. You launch it, create some amount of hype. You launch it. You work with X, Y, Z market maker.

So it's like the process is a copy paste for every meme coin. It's like a different picture for each one. And then those early people, the people that are inside those circles, obviously big influencers. And those circles, you know, VCs, you know vcs you know crypto still a relatively small community they all know these circles and a lot of them have kind of moved away from these uh vc back projects and and gotten involved in meme coins obviously i'm i'm part of that as well like we've got a whole meme coin team now and work a lot of these projects um they're getting really early it's very hard to lose money as those now the people that struggle to make money is retail. Obviously, some do make money. The people

that understand it really well is a lot of great success stories of people who make money, but the majority do lose money. But when I said VCs, I'm not talking about VCs investing in IDOs because they, that includes me as well, are very hurt right now. a lot of these projects including binance launchpad projects tom have just dropped you know 70 80 90 which is crazy mainly 70 80 for binance back project uh which is and we're not even in a bear market so it's pretty uh pretty scary yeah just um just to give you the correct stat so 97 97% of traders on Pump.Fund have made less than $1,000. So that is, I would consider most of them probably- How many lost money?

Because like less than 1,000, some people like maybe 500 could be a fair bit of money, a fair bit of money, good money for them. So how many, does it say how many lost money? I don't have that in front of me, but there's only 0.0001% have made over a million dollars. So there's some huge power law here. And who's actually making money in these things? Yeah, for the VC tokens, I think it's just a symptom of the broader market. Honestly, what I'm more interested in seeing is if these long tail tokens actually go up

with the broader market, when and if we get the market going up in the back half of the year into Q1, because right now, the liquidity is just so shit. And there's no marginal purchaser of these tokens more broadly right now. Yeah, I agree with you. By the way, I just got information here, and I'm just going to send it to the team to do a tweet on it, is that Sun.Pump overtook Pump.Fun in revenue, 24-hour revenue, which shows a lot of that money flowing into it. Again, it's the same people, same money. And I feel also, just to get another thing to add with the meme coins, Tom, it's like the same money cycling through.

It's the same people trading against each other. And it's good to see retail isn't there because they don't get screwed at the end of the day but um just going back to vc back tokens tom um you talked about how a lot of vcs lost money this year are you guys uh um you still work at master ventures yeah you guys still work it's still uh pretty active in investing or completely stopped our strategy is going to be clear on our strategy, Tom, is that we're still investing pretty much daily. That's how aggressive. But any project we invest in, they have to work with our marketing team.

So obviously we've been marketing for many years. That's our marketing and incubating. That's our bread and butter. But any project we invest in has to come on our shoulders, work with the marketing team, work with incubation, tokenomics and all that to make it worthwhile. We'll write a check, but you have to work with us, kind of mitigate our risk from an investment perspective.

Yeah. And that's really smart, right? Because it goes back to what we were saying before. This stuff is an attention economy. Attention is the currency and you need attention to have any sort of market traction in this environment. Now, for us, we're really focused on having projects that have a very tangible path to launch. So we made most of our investments much earlier this year at the end of Q4 of last year as well. And this year, really just focusing on projects that have those tail all around, kind of ripping up right before lunch. Because I'm sure you guys have seen this. We've had projects that have those tail all around kind of ramping up right before lunch, because, you know, and I'm sure you guys have seen this. We've had projects that have said, hey, we're going to be launching in March, April, May, and still haven't launched yet

because of quote unquote market dynamics. So, you know, you get a project that says they're going to launch next year at some point, you might as well count that as never. So you need to have a very clear path to launch to make an investable opportunity in this market, especially when you have so many projects actually coming to launch this year already. So our focus is really kind of things that we can see and touch and feel and have sort of a window of opportunity here. Yeah, I'm just trying to get some metrics as well in the background. Let me mention that to Ran actually, it's going to be an interesting point. Ran, can you hear me yet? Ran? Yeah, Ran one thing that um uh tom was talking about is that on pump.fund 97 of traders made less than a thousand dollars and 0.00 whatever percent made a million plus

which i i get that that that metric is not concerning to me because no no no 97 didn't make and you mean so 97 made less than a it did not make it did not made less than so 97% made less than it did not make it did not made less either zero either lost money or made less than a thousand yeah

I don't know what percentage lost money yeah that's I would say probably 95% lost money yeah that is yeah

in terms of I told them our strategy when it comes to VC back token so our rule was still very active but our rule any project we invest in, which I know you're mainly media.

I don't think you guys offer any incubation of marketing, but we say any project we invest in has to work with our marketing team, which we're scaling, or has to be incubated by us, and or... But you're just launching more of the virus. If you're launching more tokens with the same kind

of tokenomic lockups, you're just basically, you keep launching derivatives of the virus. The virus is that nobody can get... No token is going to succeed unless it launches at a low valuation or it's going to do something so fucking amazing that it's going to do 100x

from where it launches. Otherwise, no one's ever going to buy the token. So by launching more and more of these tokens, they're all going to land up going down because I've never seen a token succeed where people didn't get in and it didn't actually land up making people money. Just go and do your homework. Go and find me one token that is not an artificially inflated token with lockups that has a strong community and has liquidity and has succeeded where people haven't gotten early. At low market caps. It doesn't exist. Now, you're talking about, so I think

what you're talking about is nothing revolutionary. I think that applies in every single cycle. Even VC-backed tokens in previous cycles, nothing succeeds unless they build organic demand for their token, whether it's a meme coin, forget about meme coins, for every VC-backed token. I think we're going to see the same thing here. It's just a matter of will we see

tokens perform better at launch? So we're talking about the casino what will be what will be the next casino asset for this cycle that's like the question it's not about organic demand it's not about organic demand it's not about that at all it is about if you want to have people support your token and support means there will be buyers when they are memes i'm talking about when i say organic demand i'm talking about vc back tokens i'm talking about vc back coins i'm talking about vc back coins i'm, when I say organic demand, I'm talking about VC-backed tokens. I'm talking about VC-backed coins. I'm talking about VC-backed coins. I'm saying if you want people to buy your token, to be liquidity, you need to get people to love your token.

How you get people to love your token is you get people to make money on your token. All these VC coins that are coming into the market at high valuations, people are getting in. I think you're getting… What are you talking about? What do you mean? VC-backed dokers, all they care about is people making money with their token? That's not sustainable at all. The VC-backed dokers are meant to build tokenomics and a product where there's people buying the docker for utility. Can you name one VC-backed project for me that came onto the market and that actually just went up only. Or up reasonably.

Nothing went up. Yeah, not up only, but if you look at the top 200 coins on CoinMarketCap, the ones that did well. They weren't the new tokens. They weren't new tokens. Let's go through them.

Number one, Bitcoin. Launched at a market cap of close to zero. I would go down a bit further, you know, let's, let's look at Jupiter, Jupiter, for example. Let's go through all of them. Let's go through all of them. Bitcoin started very low, went high.

Ethereum started very low, went high. BNB started very low, went high. You can't look at the ad, but these, these won't count. If you look at point, if you start looking at page two, for example, or let's look at projects that launched this year. Let me just take it a step further. Make it even harder.

You don't even have to go that far, right? Like Athena is number 35 right now. That was very heavily viewed. Athena is not real price action. Athena has been down more than it's been up. Athena, as soon as they release a token, that thing is going to go down only. And I'm a hold on Athena.

And just to be clear, I think Athena is fucking amazing. But let's quickly look at their charts. Okay. Let me just quickly call up a chart for you. Okay. So I'm going to call up the one year chart, so to speak, the token came onto the market at a price of $1.46. The token is now trading at its low of 23 cents. Tell me how that is a successful launch and tell me right now, how many people actually really care about Athena, like Solana or Ethereum or whatever? How many people care?

No one. You know why? Because no one got in early and no one made money. The only people that are making money is the VCs that are exiting with every unlock. Next. Hold on, Two seconds. You said no one made money in – I haven't looked at the price action.

But you're talking about the projects that did well. Let's look at one, my first investment ever, Filecoin. You're saying that no one made – actually, I haven't looked at the price. Oh, different. Hold on. Different, different. Filecoin started their ICO at like $0.50, closed the ICO at $5, had huge distribution between $0.50 and $5,

and went up to $180 or $200, and people landed up making money. By the way, Filecoin landed up coming down. And I would say that Filecoin is actually quite a bad example because it doesn't really have a very good, loyal, strong community that pumps the price. Filecoin has been between $3 and $6 for as long as I can remember. Let me go to to so i'm just opening something that launched this year but tom i don't know yeah yeah i was gonna say oh there's another one um it's done pretty well i mean more broadly you're not going to find many things that have done well in a market that's been effectively down for the last two years without a small

problem right i mean you can look at it but at the market hasn't been down for the last year. The market Bitcoin has tripled in the last two years. Bitcoin has tripled since, since October, since, since August, two years ago, tripled. Okay. Let's look at, on the condo and say, I'll don't say it's done pretty well. Um, say come on, come on, please, please don't insult me. Say came onto the market at a billion dollar valuation from the VCs. Okay. No one's made money on Say.

No one likes Say. It doesn't have a very strong community. It went out. It got up to a $10 billion valuation. It's back at $2 billion. So Say launched at $0.17. It's trading at $0.30 right now. Okay.

It's trading at $0.26. It's trading at $0.26. The number of tokens in the market, it's fake because you and I both know Wow. Okay. It's trading at 26 cents. It's trading at 26 cents. The number of tokens in the market, it's fake because you and I both know that the majority of the say tokens are locked up and they're about to hit retail. And therefore this chart is going to be down only unless they sort out their problem.

And how many people in the community actually care about say, how many buyers are there for every set of nothing? Because the chart's showing you there's no one to buy it. There's no one to buy say tokens no one gives a shit they don't have a community why because they didn't start at a low valuation and let retail actually make money and as a result no one loves the token and therefore no one's going to buy it look at look at phantom look at phantom let's look at phantom why did phantom why does phantom

always have amazing bounces relative to say how come when the market goes up i know that phantom let's look at phantom why did phantom why does phantom always have amazing bounces relative to say how come when the market goes up i know that phantom is going to get to a dollar before say gets to 45 cents why because a lot of people have made money on phantom and as a result a lot of people feel connected to phantom and therefore and therefore they have a very strong community who has a stronger community? Say or Phantom? So you're getting at the broader kind of endemic problem though, but rather than just saying, okay, there are problems,

like what are the solutions here? I'm not sure what they are because the problem is, again, attention. I have a solution. How do you actually distribute these tokens to a number of people? Unlock the tokens.

Let the price go down for a short period of time. Let the price go down close, as low as the price wants to go. Let it go down as much as it can go down. And then let retail… Or just launch at lower market caps. Why go through the whole launch at a big market? Just talk about new projects launching.

Because, yeah, you have to change the rules of the game. If you don't let retail get some of the upside, people aren't going to change the rules of the game if you can't if you don't let retail get some of the upside you're not going people aren't going to love the tokens and if i don't love i think how about this do lower market caps less vc allocations and higher ideal allocations the public sale allocations yes at a better market that solves the problem it's not hard to fix so the model is not hard to fix. Exactly. But it requires the projects actually doing something.

And I'll tell you what I think is going to happen. They'll have, they'll have, sorry, one more thing. I'm sorry, but they'll have,

they'll have no choice. Like if they, if everyone just wakes up to the flawed model, look at the returns right now. The people will just start avoiding any project, and maybe exchanges will start forcing projects to change the model on the server. Exchanges won't do that because exchanges are in usually on the IDOs, on the earlier

rounds, right? So they're not going to force us to do it. What you have to do, the project basically has to say, look, I don't really care about my VCs. I care about building a strong community. And the only way that I'm going to go is if I let the VCs who want to say, look, I don't really care about my VCs. I care about building a strong community. And the only way that I'm going to go is if I let the VCs who want to dump, let them dump. And the community can have an opportunity to buy into this thing cheap. And it's a once-off.

And then people are going to buy. We're going to have a hit to the market cap for a short period of time. And then we can begin the cycle again afresh. But, Rand, you know who doesn't want to do that. So I totally agree. I think we all agree. That would be fantastic. But projects don't want to do that. Because they're just as busy as these are. There's two people don't do that. The first one is the projects because the projects unfortunately, have to do

grants, they have to have a runway, they have to have high TVL. So if a project does this, just think about it, if a project does this and their TVL goes down to one third of their TVL, that could be a death blow for some projects. It could be. I'm not saying it will be, I'm saying it could be. Second thing is why the project doesn't want to do it

is because projects need runway. They may use tokens to do grants, to do ecosystem development, et cetera. If you're one third the price of the token, then you're getting one-third of the value in terms of grants and stuff like that, which they're currently getting. The third ecosystem that doesn't like this is the VCs because, remember, the V a $1 billion FDV, and they're still up 3x. That's not a real valuation, but on paper, it looks amazing, right? And so they can go and raise the next fund and the next fund because their current fund seems to be doing a 3x. That's until they actually try and cash out.

What's a 3x? Can you explain that again? The VC, sorry, I missed that. How did he get the 3X on paper? So I'm using Say as an example. Say's trading at 27 cents, 2.7 billion, fully diluted the last round or the last round before it launched, if I'm not mistaken, was done at a billion dollars, right? I think that was the last round. Now, the VCs that bought in the last round before it came to market at a billion dollars, and they're currently holding the investment, they look amazing to their LPs and GPs because they're saying, look, we're up 2.7x on say, right? But they're not really up 2.7x

because they can't sell their tokens because there's no liquidity to buy them. So if they did try and sell their SAFs and whatever else, I reckon they'd probably get a billion dollars, maybe one and a half billion dollars, right? If they went and took a five-year vesting SAF on, say, 27 cents today, what would people pay for it? Half? Quarter? I don't know.

So the thing is the VCs don't want this because right now they are marking the tokens at the market price, which is deceptive because there's so few tokens in circulation that that's not a real valuation. Like if you were a VC and you wrote, say, a check in the last round, say you wrote them a $5 million check, and again, I'm using say as an example and I don't know the details of the round, but I do know it was around a billion dollars. So let's say you've got a $5 million theft that's worth $15 million and you're getting the tokens vested over five years.

What is that worth today? Actually, really? A lot of VCs just say, as you know, we're working on going public. Anamoka's going public as well. So me and Robbie, I think it was. I think it's Robbie, the CEO. I keep forgetting his name.

I feel ashamed. But me and Robbie. Yeah. Not yet. The CEO. CEO's not yet. I think it's Robbie. He's a regular on the show.

Anyway, so they're going public in a couple of years. And I was speaking to someone about our listing yesterday, kind of comparing it to Anamoka. And one thing that Anamoka does, and I think we do the same thing, is you discount soft. So you don't – when we talk about VCs, I don't think they use the – They use the market price. I'm invested in a lot of VCs.

I'll just – They use them as part of their returns. They don't implement any sort of discounts on that whatsoever it's so it's very implement discounts though it's still the core dynamics that raymond's talking about are a hundred percent on point like different vcs have different valuation um policies and how they actually do it and obviously the higher the quality of the VC, the more conservative they're going to be about that kind of thing. But even if you're a VC with core or a trader, whoever with, um, conservative valuation policies, the core dynamics still applies. You want the price higher. It makes you look better. That gives you your interim IRR and

TVPI numbers, which are what allow you to raise your next funds. Again, all different levels of sophistication, but the core dynamics he's talking about are 100% right on. Yeah, so then what would be, how would the future look like for VC-backed tokens, Tom, in your opinion? Two options. One option is we get a massive fucking dump, a market crash like 2001 in the tech space.

And then the market over time heals. Have you been looking at these coins, how they've been? No, no, no. I don't think I understand. Where the VCs go from being up 3x to being down 80%. The VCs. Because that's the majority. Isn't that a typical bear market?

Well, no, that would be a 2001 style crash. And actually, to be honest, I was around in 2001. I lost a lot of money in 2001. I was an equity trader at the time, first and only job I ever had. And in 2001, when the correction came, I remember how, like, again, I'm going to use today as an example. And I remember a lot of stocks that were like this, that were trading at like 3x what the VCs invested at. And we thought, like, how much lower can it go? Surely it can't go lower.

And then it still went fucking 90% down and most never recovered. That was in 2001. That's a 2001 type crash. The only the way I see this market resolving itself, there's three ways the market resolves itself. One, a 2001 start crash. When I say 2001 start crash, altcoins go down 95% from the option number one to we voluntarily fix the market structure, which means that we will get a correction in the market because tokens will like for like dominoes and release tokens into the market and the price will go down.

But it will be done in a more controlled manner than in a market-style crash. Three, we don't fix the market structure. And then we have to wait for the fundamentals to catch up with the true valuations. And when I say the fundamentals catch up with the true valuations, you would need sales fundamentals to catch up to $10 billion so that retail who buy in now at $2.7 billion land up making money. And that could take years. It could take years. At the same time, you've got token releases, which are exacerbating this whole thing. So it's a case of like, I see three fixes for this. One, a 2001 style market collapse. Two, we resolve the situation by getting some of the big protocols to take the first step. And Aptos, a wormhole, a stock net. As soon as one does it, the rest will follow. Short-term

pain. Or three, we'll just wait for the fundamentals to catch up to the VC valuations. I think, but the one, just kind of respond to this. So you talk about the token distributions suppressing the price further. One thing I want to point out is that a lot of these VCs that are getting unlocks right now on current valuations are not selling their tokens. Because we watched those very closely to see that. Of all the VCs dumped that we should sell as well. Otherwise, we're left holding the bags. I don't think you know what an unlock is these are not unlocks this is the beginning of

the unlocks this is the first 10 percent of the unlocks or the first 20 percent most of the tokens haven't started unlocking it it's just going to be like a lot of them a lot of them have linear unlocks and even projects from previous cycles what they're doing is even those unlocks that linear unlocks right now they're just not selling based on the current valuations. And you're talking about the 2001 like… It's going to be like a dam and a dam wall. We've seen that. But we've seen that.

Until eventually the dam wall breaks. But that's… And you're talking about an 01 type bear market, an 01 type collapse. But I don't… We've seen that. We see every bear market is an O1-like collapse for crypto. Every bear where all the projects we've invested in has got a zero. There's something fundamentally wrong with our market.

I don't know why you're trying to do this. No, no, no. I see it. I 100% agree with you. I've seen it in the last cycle as well. I've been waiting for that to be fixed, and we're still here. But my thing, I think what will happen is that we will be forced, pure capitalism, we'll be forced to fix it if we want projects to do well, if we want them to perform better.

We've seen that with Binance putting out that guidance a couple of months ago now. And I'll check with my team if we're seeing better valuations, but we are seeing projects kind of cut down their valuations or do some sort of deals with VCs

to mitigate that risk and list the lower valuations. I'm looking at Monad. I'm looking at Monad raising at a $600 million valuation off the market last round. Come on. There's nothing. The VCs are still bidding the project up.

Yeah, Dave. Mario, I got to leave in a second. We'll end anyway, but you go ahead. I have so much to say. We can do it in a different time. But I much to say we can do in a different time. But I basically just say you're trying to fight the last war. And Rand is telling you what the next war is likely to look like. And all I will say is this, we'll just

leave it as a tease. The pain that comes from a crash is one thing. The pain that comes from waiting and waiting and people giving up is something different. And that is the issue. So this think of all think of the most bullish thing that we've heard in this entire space was was people saying, Oh, I haven't looked at my prices this weekend. I have I've gone days without looking at crypto prices. That hasn't happened in five years. Now and I'm not a big investor. I don't I mean,

I'm not a big trader, I just hold and whatever place to look. My company still has plenty of people trading and trading is going is not going anywhere. But the pain that people get when they get ignored is one thing. Scott and I have said this, and you've made fun of Scott for many, many times, but he and I are on the same page that the crypto economy will take off to the next level. The next big rally is going to happen when people ignore all the foolishness, and they're investing in things that have legs. 2001, I can give you guys a history lesson, because I was basically running a trading P&L at the time. And that deserves a much longer conversation. But if you look at the ashes of 2001, 90 some odd percent of the companies people were trading no longer existed by 2005, when the next bull run really started for real, but those that did, did extraordinarily well because they had product market fit, they had some reason for people

to invest. Now you can invest in a token because of utility, you can invest in this community or you can invest because of participation profit. We all have the bugaboo of securities trading, I think the next bull run happens when that bugaboo is gone. and when you have investable ideas that whether it's participating in a profit stream participating in equity participating in a community when all of those are available and if you look at the vcs i mean come on if you haven't been following the cliff assness uh battles with various people about

how private you know companies companies staying private longer because they don't have to mark the market. You don't understand this is an entire market wide thing. And Rand is 100% right. It is the dynamic of the VC. So remember, 2001 proved to the world that VCs dumped on equity as retail is out of liquidity. So what happened in crypto crypto started by a wait a minute, we're egalitarian, everybody can participate. Oh, no, no, come on. 100%. Like that. Nothing. No one believes that he no one believes that the models not know that this is on a dumping on retail. I just want to put out this. Scott Scott is pretty explicit saying that he thinks the same the same shit will happen again. humans will always be human.

That's right. I agree, too. I don't think there's no value here. I mean, don't get me wrong. But what but having 1000s of coins we had, you don't understand in 2001. I don't think there's no value here. I mean, don't get me wrong. But what but having 1000s of coins we had, you don't understand in 2001, people don't know this, they were south, but there were there were 1000s of internet stocks, they traded what was called OTC. But you still could buy them through your brokers, we have 1000s of them, and most of them went kaboom. The ones that traded on that that a lot of them went kaboom, like pets.com, etc. But most of those survived in some sort of sense. But at the end of the day, the biggest thing we'll think people were watching was, oh my god,

look at how many there were. And it was like the Roadrunner, you know, with Wile E. Coyote, you know, they would chase out over the cliff, and the cloud dissipates, and they look down and all of a sudden, kaboom. I mean, you're gonna see that a lot of these coins that have there's no there there. I mean, but crypto has been notoriously stubborn remember bitfit bitconnect they can have traded at a billion dollars after the entire you know for months after the entire community was saying it was a scam it was even rated on coin market cap as a scam at the time and it was still trading at a billion and it took months for that

to resolve itself i mean a billion dollars is a lot for a scam that everyone knows i mean this is the sort of thing that goes on in this community. You just need to understand that. Yeah, I agree. Guys, I think we've I love this discussion. I want to have it more often. Try to have it whenever Scott is not here. So he doesn't ruin the party. But we'll see everyone tomorrow. I will continue continue this discussion. Appreciate you all. And hopefully, hopefully, ran is

wrong about VC back coins. and we'll continue seeing more liquidity flow out of other asset classes into VC-backed tokens because while I've got my own concerns in the model, I think we all agree on that, I still think they're a much better asset class to kind of get that retail hype than meme coins or NFTs or anything else. In my opinion, they're still the best asset class out there. I appreciate you everyone. Thank you so much. And I'll see you tomorrow. Bye everyone.