The Wolf Of All Streets - Why Bitcoin Is “Preeminent” In The Biggest Macro Trade Ever - Dan Tapiero

Episode Date: June 7, 2026

Dan Tapiero has deployed over half a billion dollars into crypto's biggest private companies - Kraken, Ledger, Animoca, and the Deribit deal that became the largest M&A transaction in crypto history. In this conversation, he explains why we're at the integration moment between traditional finance and the onchain world, why his team is now exclusively looking at AI-adjacent deals, and why he believes thousands of trillions of dollars in agent-powered transactions are coming within the decade. We also get into why Coinbase could become the Amazon of finance, how prediction markets are creating truth machines, and why the digitization of money is bigger than the internet itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dan Tapiero says we're witnessing the biggest financial transformation in history and almost nobody realizes how early we still are. In this interview, Dan explains why stable coins, tokenized assets, and AI-powered agents are about to create thousands of trillions in on-chain transactions. I would call this the integration moment of the old world and this new world. We think that they're going to be thousands of trillions, not tens or hundreds, thousands of trillions of transactions. done by autonomous agents. Why Coinbase could become the Amazon of finance. Coinbase really has established itself as the preeminent company in the space now.

It could be like an Amazon or a Microsoft. And why prediction markets may completely reshape how the world price is true. If there are enough people wagering on how many tractors they're going to produce, there's a likelihood that wherever that market ends up is pretty close to the reality. So they have to have.

So they have an ability to produce a truth. And I think that's fascinating. He also reveals where institutional money is actually flowing, why crypto VCs are still overpaying despite the bare market, and why the convergence of AI and blockchain is happening much faster than most investors understand. Let's go. We talked about three months ago?

Yes. I talked to you more than I talked to my mom. Well, I would say the same too, but I, I Then I'd have to apologize to my mother. Okay. I think I just did already. But so listen, it's been a sideways to slow market, but behind the scenes, it seems like there's more happening than we've ever seen before. I mean, I just get these insane announcements on the day-to-day basbest that blow my mind.

Yeah, I would call this the integration moment of the old world and this new world. And I think that's what we're seeing explosion in stable coins, RWA is the concept of token. organization, people finally coming to realize all value is eventually moving on chain. And so the pipes, the rails, the digital asset infrastructure that we've been talking about for five years is actually happening. And it's still very early days. So, I mean, this conference is, it looks like gangbusters here. Yeah. You know, on the other hand, you've got like the defy world, you know, more hacks than ever in the last, you know, month or so.

And that, I don't know, that old, that old sort of crypto broe, I don't know, the more speculative component of our world has continued to get hit. And some of those alt coins as they used to be called, I don't know we call them still alts, just have continued going down. And some were down 80, 90 percent in the last, you know, six to nine months. And so, you know, crypto Twitter were a whole bunch of our world lives or used to live, you know, the feeling there I think is quite negative still and there's a bit of a toxicity. But then outside of that, in terms of institutional adoption, real companies looking at, you know, the infrastructure, but also payments like credit cards have exploded. You know, Gemini's credit card has been phenomenal. All of the

The payment rails behind the scenes. It's just never ending. And now agentic as well. So that's gotten very exciting, you know, agentic payments, agentic finance. Yeah, I mean, agents aren't going to transact with wire transfers. No. Right? Like, it's obvious.

Yeah, but we're already seeing it. I read a stat that said already half of stable coin payments were agents or something, which I thought was exceptionally high. Yeah. I think half that would be really high. I know that we've had tens of billions of transactions and of dollars values of transactions. And there are lots of smaller transactions, you know, small scale. But I, you know, I think all of our companies in our portfolio, we've got now 22 companies

that's outside of the six realizations we had last year, you know, with circle and figure. we talked about this last time. They're all pivoting towards enabling agents to transact independently. In one way or another, they're building out the digital asset infrastructure for autonomous agents. And so I said last time, you know, blockchain is the money of the agentic future. It's the money. And I think that's a completely new concept.

It's not priced. It's, you know, the first inning of that. So I'm hearing that also here. Yeah, that seems to be one of the prevailing narratives. This conference just started, but I've already heard it four or five times. Yeah, yeah. Do you think that they're going to strictly use stable coins? Or do you think that there's some token of the future that we don't know about that could be the...

Well, there's always a token in the future. There is. That's going to likely go to zero. Yes. I think there was a study done a few months ago that showed that the agents were asked, a thousand agents were asked, what's your favorite currency? And I think 51% said Bitcoin. And then I think 30% said some stable coin and then Eats was the other tournament or something like that.

It's interesting because maybe the question wasn't worded exactly right. Like maybe their favorite asset to own and hold is Bitcoin. Just like us. Right. But potentially maybe their favorite asset to transact in those potentially stable coin, less volatility and actually quite a lot of volume and now developed infrastructure. But Bitcoin, of course, is the core asset of the whole ecosystem. And I think as a sailor calls it the savings technology, I think it's still,

still preeminent. So maybe the agents also from all of their scraping of everything on the web, they've come to that conclusion. You hold it, you know, your assets of Bitcoin and then when you need to transact a pay for compute or whatever it is. Savings account and checking account. Correct. It's pretty straightforward. That's exactly right. Save his account and checking account. Yeah, it's the easiest way, I think, to explain it to anyone. So did you have any major exposure to all the defy nonsense that's been happening of

I mean, it's been pretty ugly out there. No, no, we don't own any tokens. And so, you know, we're 50T is a growth equity fund. We're, as far as I know, the only growth equity fund in the world exclusively focused on crypto blockchain, web three digital assets. I don't know. Well, no, there are crossovers. We have venture funds like A16C will do, you know, the seed, the A, you know, the B. There are a few funds that crossover.

I'm sorry, that we'll do the, you know, the full scale. You know, sometimes, what's that fund? A dragonfly sometimes will filter over into the growth. We don't do venture at all. All of those funds own tokens. As you recall, look in 21, many of the traditional growth equity funds like Toma Bravo and Silver Lake and Tamasik and Tiger Co2, they were very active in the same. space and now they're not. And so there are companies now that are looking for, you know,

$200, $200 million, you know, B, C, and later rounds. I mean, we're doing diligence right now. We had our first close for our fifth fund and we've already passed on 40 deals. And so what's, I know. And what's really interesting is that are the growth, some of these larger growth deals the valuations have not come in as much as you'd think, despite the drop in Bitcoin, despite the drop in, despite the drop in the tokens in in VC, because there are several strategic investors like Binance, like PayPal, who are paying high valuations. And so, you know, we tend to not want to pay more than five to ten times revenue.

And our investors, I need to be able to pencil out a five to eight X return over 10-year life. And some of these founders and some of the strategics just are not. They don't care. And so, you know, you'd think there'd be a huge number of deals. There are some pretty interesting deals right now that we're looking at. But we're also in a bare phase. And I know parts of our world are exploding and Circle was up 20% yesterday. You know, that was a company we, you know, bought years ago and our investor's own. But in the private space, it's, you know, some more hand-to-hand combat. You really have to dig.

You have to find those opportunities. And then when you find something, you can't pay 60 times reps, right? It's not venture. Right. But when you say you passed on 40, are these things that if the valuations were right, you would actually be interested in? Like, good businesses that are valued poorly? Probably, you know, of the 40, I would say, you know, 20 were probably not.

not right. Ten were we we liked and probably were too expensive. And then the other 10, I don't know, other is how I would, you know, how I would characterize it. Like I mean, one out of four that you would have been interested in is a pretty high number actually. Yeah, if the, if the valuations had been, you know, more reasonable. So I mean, yes. I'm just kind of shock that we still have, you know, funds that are willing to pay more of a multiple than you just described for actual business. Strategics. You know, Binance and PayPal and other companies that just say, well, why are they still

paying me? They don't care. They're making a lot of money. Tether also, you know, making a lot of money need to allocate. They want to build sort of these conglomerates in the space. For a while, Ripple acted that. way as well. And I think a lot of those investments that they did in 21 are still underwater. So these are, you know, these are companies that raised a B or C in 21 and don't

want to do a down round also because their revenue, you know, maybe hasn't gotten back or maybe the revenues improved from 21, 22, but, you know, they haven't grown into that valuation. And so there's a bit of an overhang, you know, as a result of that as well. Are you seeing anything you do like? Yeah, yeah. We have five things that we're looking at right now. My whole team is here.

We have all 20. My analysts, everybody, we've got, you know, we're sitting down with five of five companies that we think are actionable today that hopefully we think we'll, you know, be okay with reasonable evaluations. I obviously can't give specifics. But are they just general bucket? What's interesting to you right now?

Well, each of these five, so we do blockchain finance, consumer, and infrastructure. So our funds are broken down into those three buckets, right? So there are several companies. And the five companies that we're looking at now all are ahead of the game in terms of integrating agentic finance into their business, existing business. models. So, like, I'll just give you an example. You know, let's say one is a wallet a business. They are building out wallets for agents, right? Right. So that's just as a simple, you know, example without, you know, saying too much. That's not the only driver, but the companies

who are investing in Now for Fund Five, they have to be deaumstrably different in my mind. Not completely, but then our first four funds. I mean, we already have 22 investments existing still in the first four funds. We have, you know, our existing LPs, they don't need more of the same exposure. We have a very large position in Cracken, in Ledger. You know, we invested $180 million in Ledger, $150 million in Cracken. I mean, I don't need more. I love Crackin.

They're wonderful, but I don't need more than I have. Anamoka, Evan was just speaking now. we have a $150 million investment. Like, we have enough. Anamoka's an interesting company that's really pivoted. Good, you can prep me because I'm talking to Yat later. Oh, I'm not going to. Yeah, yeah, you don't need to, yeah, yet.

You just ask him a question. And let him and just take a master class for the next hour for life. He's brilliant. He told me about a violin for 40 minutes one time. Well, that's true. But ask him about what he's doing with Anamoka Mines. Okay, see, that's what you, this is the. Anamoca mines is fascinating.

Tell me why Anamoka is... Well, no, it's just they've pivoted not only do they have, you know, their 600 existing investments from, you know, they have their blockchain gaming, metaverse, NFT from portfolio. And of course, that hasn't really done much. But they've also now, and this happened just very recently, finalized their contract with the HKMA, Hong Kong Monetary Authority and Standard Chartered. And they have the, they're the stable coin producers for, I think, hopefully all Asian currencies. So think about this.

I know he's been working on that for two and a half years, though. But ask him about the stable coins and then also on the act. Interestingly, look, as you know, 99% of all stable coins are dollar based. So you talk about like what's another area we're investing in? we're interested in. I come from the markets world from trading currencies. That's what I did in my old life. And I can pretty much guarantee you, I bet you just about anything that five years from now, 99% of stable coins will not be dollar base. You're going to have yen. You're going to have Indonesian rupee. You're going to have euro. You're going to have all the

currencies around the world will have their digital equivalent. We haven't even started that. And yet in the last five years, we've gone from zero stable coin trading volume to 33 trillion last year. So I think we're heading into a world where all of that currency movement. Now, the old world trades $7 trillion of currency a day. So today, our world, the stable coin world, is four days. Annual volume of stable coins is equivalent to four days. Okay. It's very early days. And that's just one trend, right? One, you're like, like if you say, what are the exciting trends, what's going on? Like, that to me is very excited.

Do you think that the stable coins denominated in other currencies will actually be successful? Because people have taken their shot and it seems it hasn't caught fire yet. Yeah, but you're seeing a lot of actually, I mean, I think it was this week, the Brazilian Central Bank banned cross-border payments with dollar-backed. because they need to. Literally, like, you know, how can the Rial be the currency for their cross-border payments if everybody wants to use a stable point on a dollar? Well, I mean, maybe they should innovate a little and this should be a useful Brazilian real estate with point.

Or a useful Brazilian Rial. I'm sorry, or what? I said, or just have the currency be used for itself. You know, that currency is actually... Not bad. Yeah, no, that's not, that's not a crazy... No, or Turkey. So I think that whole world is coming.

I mean, security. Also with all these defy-axis, another massive thematic, agentic security identity, which is something ledger is working on. I think extremely important. You know, we're going to have to know the difference, you know, proof of human, you know, proof of agent.

There's going to have to be some mechanism. You know, for identity, security. I mean, like the space, you know, we have genius that passed. We have clarity now that seems like it's on the verge of passing. And we were just talking before how the entire focus of our crypto blockchain world is pivoted now to the U.S. You know, we said not a lot of reason to go to Singapore or Dubai or places outside. because three, four, five years ago when we were talking, you know, we had such huge headwinds in the U.S. It's all gone.

I wouldn't go to conference here. Back then, I was like, I got to go to token 2049 in Singapore now. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And so this consensus conference, I feel today has been great. But New York in Miami, and I think to a lesser degree, Silicon Valley, they're more obsessed,

I think now with pure AI. But we here and my funds are really focused on markets and money. and the money of our future is definitely now, I think, without a death, stable coins, I mean, is blockchain, whether it's stable coins, whether it's Bitcoin to store a value, whether it's ETH for programmability, Solana for Speed. I don't know about all of these other various alt coins. Again, we'll leave that for the Silicon Valley technologists to decide what they think is cool and what's going to win or whatever it is. But in terms of how finance and money and payments integrate with blockchains, that's us right here. And that's 50T. That's what we invest in the more developed companies that are building out that universe. Yeah, I think that obvious is what I'm coming.

But what I find interesting is you said, you know, your investors don't need the same thing they've had from these previous funds. But then everything is AI adjacent if you're going to choose something in the future. It's very hard to even consider something that's not at the crossroads of AI because that's where the Pucks movie. Yeah, that's sort of right. And all of our existing companies are, you know. They have their AI angle, of course. Yeah, and they're, and they're moving in that direction.

It's sort of interesting. One of the reasons that I launched these funds had the idea for the funds in 2019 was that I saw how much complexity there was, even understanding how, let's say, Ethereum works, the functioning or reading the eight-page white paper was tremendously complex. And I mean, when you get down to the bolts of it, the nuts and bolts of it. And I thought to myself, over the next 10 years, 15 years, there's no way that I'm going to be able to understand. Like, there's going to be all this growth.

And I'm never going to be able to understand it or invest in it unless I go all in. And I want to invest in the companies that I think are budding conglomerates that are going to be able to pivot to an unknown future. I was not a venture capitalist, so I wanted, and we don't own any tokens, because I figured I didn't have the skill set to make those extremely micro-decision. And also, I didn't want to invest in something that had the potential to go away in three years because there would be a new innovation. And so what we found is that these larger companies that we own ledger and crackin and, you know, Derbett was one that got bought by Coinbase. That was a very large, largest MNA transaction in the history of our markets.

And some of the companies we're looking at now are the companies that have the intellectual capability. They have the skill set, the people, the network effect, proper balance sheet, a board and income statement, a balance sheet. These guys are. 10x smarter than any fund manager, any investor could be. And they, we leave it to them to pivot to this unknown on future. And so we have companies also that used to be exchanges primarily that are pivoting to prediction markets. And now also prediction markets that they're building specifically for autonomous agents.

Now, come on. like three years ago, five years ago, there is no person in the world who thought, okay, I'm going to invest in this venture project because, I mean, we think that agentic prediction markets are going. I mean, maybe maybe someone got that. Congratulations. I don't know who or what or when, but this pivot is from a larger company. And they're, I think, I think coin base probably, which we love, I think Coinbase really has established itself as the preeminent

company in the space now. And I wouldn't have said that five years ago. I mean, the joke used to be, you know, markets going up, 5% is frozen. Yeah, Coinbase is frozen. And the reality is that they have become a juggernaut in the space. I think

that they, and our investors, of course, own it in significant size as a result of the Deribit purchase. But I think it's a generational type of company. It could be like an Amazon or a Microsoft, and people look at me like, oh, that's crazy, right? They're doing everything. People have no idea.

You look under the hood. They have 12 business lines that produced over $100 million of revenue. You remember when they IPOed 98% of the revenue, is from retail trading, right? And now they've done a fantastic job. Brian, even today, huge announcement, letting go 50% of the workforce because AI has changed the face of...

Yeah, my reaction was only 15%. As sad as that is, in this world, it's going to be more. It's going to be more. And we're seeing at our private companies as well. So, yeah. Yeah. Are you interested in... prediction markets beyond like being invested in the companies that are adding it as a vertical

to their business? Are there any sort of pure prediction market plays that are crossing over for you? Not really. I mean, it's still early. You know, obviously, Pauli Mark and Calshare out there as leaders. I don't really know about like, you know, like what they look like in terms of valuation. I think that they're probably a look, you know, they're high. Rich. High. And I'm thrilled that they are because I think Polly Market certainly is a brilliant innovation. It's fantastic. It's very early. But, you know, we're, you know, I don't really know how to answer that question.

Yeah. I understand. Yeah. I mean, going back to the. But I think it's real. It is definitely. There's no question. It's real.

And it's fascinating. It's going to be in the Supreme Court in a year. It's real. Yeah. Yeah. It's also fascinating because it's, it's licensing. what do they say? Not slicing the apple. Slicing the it's appealing the lemon or whatever it is in a

the slice the apple in a different way. In traditional markets are bets on price. You know, okay, I think the Fed is going to cut interest rates. I'm going to be long to your notes. Prediction markets allow you to make very specific bets about very important financial things. As an example, That, you know, let's say you want to bet on how many tractors, Caterpillar is going to produce this quarter. Okay? That's phenomenal. You can have a bet on how many tractors that they're going to produce.

And there's utility there. You're not just betting on, oh, is Caterpillar going to beat earnings? Is Caterpillar, are they going to beat earnings and then the price collapse? Are they going to beat earnings and then the price explode? Yeah. The prediction markets allow you to make specific and eventually like real financial bets. I didn't think about that way because if you're the traditional way, like you said, is I'm betting on the Fed rate cutting, on the Fed cutting.

But there's a secondary thing is you have to make a financial bet. And you can be right about the outcome and wrong about what the market does to respond to it. Correct. I just need to be right about the outcome. Right. You can just bet the Fed will cut. Correct. You don't have to wonder what the two-year note will do.

if the Fed cuts. Well, that's true. I think that's the most basic, you know, application. But I think the more interesting ones are these iterations of things where they become markets, they become like truth receptacles. So all of a sudden, let's say we go back to the caterpillar example, just I throw that out randomly. But if there are enough people wagering on how many tractors they're going to produce,

you know, there's a likelihood that wherever that market ends up is pretty close to the reality. So they have an ability to produce a truth. And I think that's fascinating. It's going to be so interesting to watch how it shows out because that's the obvious side where it's so powerful. And then the other side is that if I work at Caterpillar, I'm going to bet on how many tractors we're going to make this year and make a ton of money. So the insider trading aspect is. That's a whole other thing. I think that's not fantastic.

That's not great, you know, to have that be the case. And my guess is if that were to be the case, Caterpillar would have their employees, you know, sign some sort of a, you know. Yes. I mean, the senators just banned themselves in advance creatively, which I found interesting. Yeah.

Yeah, and I think that's the right thing. However, as, you know, I go back to one of my initial thoughts from 2018 as truth machine, I think the blockchain and the finality and permanence, the decentralization, all of these things allow humans to get to the truth in an easier way. And it's not always right, but it's a lot better than what we have now, which is nothing.

You can't bet on that specific outcome, right, in terms of, you know, the Caterpillar example. I know we got to run a second. Okay. And just interestingly, you know, 10 T to 50 T, we always joke. Yeah. It's a 100 T. No, no, no, no. We're just 50 T.

The agents are going to bring us to that. Oh, yeah, but I, you know, that's a trillion T. Yeah, that's a, that's, we think that they're going to be thousands of trillions, not tens or hundreds, thousands of trillions of transactions within the next five to 10 years, done by autonomous agents, thousands of trillions. So, you know, when I hear some of the traditional Tradt Five Banks talk about, you know, some of the things they're doing, they're years away from even acknowledging that fact. They're here now. Five years ago, they weren't here.

There was no JP Morgan and Citibank here five years ago. I think they're, which is fine. I think they'll eventually get it. But it's good confirmation for us in the space that we're not late. lots of opportunity. I still think, as I said, you probably the first time we ever spoke, this is the single biggest macro opportunity, macro investment of all time, that the digitization of money and finance is much, much bigger than the digitization of ideas and information.

So I think our world is actually bigger than the internet, the adoption of the internet world. I got nothing left. That's all I got, man. I've said the same thing to you. It's not the same, but that's the one premise, by the way, that, like, no matter how bearish people get, they can't argue with it, and you've said it for the beginning. And that's what's so interesting about it. Correct.

Well, I'm great to see you. Thanks, Dan. On to your next meeting. Yes. Sure. This podcast is sponsored by Weeks and was recorded live at Consensus 2026. You can find out more about what they have to offer by clicking on the link down below in the description. Thanks to Weeks for sponsoring.