Unchained - Bits + Bips: 2026 Crypto Predictions: BTC & ETH Hit Record Highs, Stablecoins Go Big

Episode Date: December 31, 2025

Thank you to our sponsor, Mantle!Mantle is launching the Global Hackathon 2025 to accelerate the future of Real-World Assets. With a $150k prize pool, backing from a $4B treasury, and direct access to Bybit’s 7M+ users, this is the ultimate ecosystem for builders. Sign up here! In this year-end Bits + Bips roundtable, hosts Austin Campbell and Chris Perkins are joined by John D’Agostino, Head of Strategy at Coinbase Institutional, for a wide-ranging and often contentious look at what 2026 may hold for crypto. They debate whether a major global brand will launch its own stablecoin, whether altcoins are structurally doomed—or secretly set up for a Wall Street–driven resurgence—and whether a major crypto hack is coming. The conversation also explores how tokens accrue value and whether there will be a new M&A trend that’ll reshape the industry as we know it. Plus: don’t miss what they have to say about NFTs, financial nihilism, and whether we’ll see all-time highs for bitcoin in 2026. Hosts: Ram Ahluwalia, CFA, CEO and Founder of Lumida Austin Campbell, NYU Stern professor and Founder of Zero Knowledge Consulting Christopher Perkins, Managing Partner and President of CoinFund Guest: John D'Agostino, Head of Strategy for Coinbase Institutional Timestamps 🚀 3:38 Why John thinks a global Web2 giant will launch a stablecoin in 2026 💵 8:34 How big the stablecoin market can actually get and where tokenized deposits fit in 🚫 12:18 Whether stablecoins will face outright bans in parts of the world 🔓 16:18 Why a major crypto hack of more than $2 billion in 2026 seems likely 🏛️ 19:56 Why it looks like crypto market structure legislation won’t pass in 2026 — and maybe not after the midterms either 🧠 30:57 John’s three counter-consensus predictions involving quantum tech and AGI 📉 39:25 Whether altcoins are structurally set up to underperform again in 2026 ⚡ 44:02 Whether massive Solana adoption would or wouldn’t translate into token value 🌀 45:00 What “financial nihilism” explains about altcoin behavior 🤝 49:50 Why Chris believes 2026 could become a defining year for crypto M&A 🇺🇸 59:57 How U.S. political shifts now could ripple into the 2028 election cycle 🖼️ 1:02:39 What an NFT comeback would actually look like and why it won’t resemble JPEG mania 💣 1:07:05 Why John isn’t buying the idea that post-10/10 blowups are inevitable 📈 1:08:26 Whether all-time highs in 2026 are still on the table Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You think that crypto culture is powerful to aggregate capital. Wait until 100,000 Morgan Stanley Burgers are out there on the golf courses pushing these mean reversion trades for these baskets of altcoins. Here's my prediction. Altcoins will have a negative return as a space in 2026. I'm concerned that there's going to be the mother of all hacks next year. Is the Trump administration, I know the pro crypto, are they pro defy? I think AI is still crypto in 2022. You have people being like, All right. Welcome everyone to another episode of Bits and Bips. This will be our last one for the year of 2025. Today, I'm your host, Austin Campbell, the high scholar of zero knowledge consulting. I'm here with my usual co-conspirator, Chris Perkins, the Golden Hand of Coin Fund. And today we are joined by John DiAgostino of Coinbase. And I've got to stop here momentarily to say, I have

super happy to have John on, specifically because we have previously had a number of connections doing research in this space, presenting things in front of Congress. If you learn nothing else from this episode, John is one of the people that actually brings data and knows what he's talking about to this debate. So everybody should follow this guy. Now, on that note, disclaimers first. Nothing we say here is investment advice. And in general, don't take investment advice solely for podcasts.

check UnchangedCrypto.com bits and bips for more disclosures, and we'll get to predictions right after a word from some sponsors. The scorebed app here with trusted stats and real-time sports news. Yeah, hey, who should I take in the Boston game? Well, statistically speaking. Nah, no more statistically speaking. I want hot takes. I want knee-jerk reactions.

That's not really what I do. Is that because you don't have any knees? Or... The score bet. Trusted sports content, seamless sports betting. Download today. 19 plus, Ontario only. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or the gambling of someone close to you,

please go to Connixontario.ca. Mantel is launching the global hackathon 2025 to accelerate the future of real-world assets. With a $150,000 prize pool, backing from a $4 billion treasury, and direct access to buy bits 7 million plus users, this is the ultimate ecosystem for builders. All right. Welcome back, everybody. I promised you some predictions. So let's start with those and get moving off the ground.

Chris, myself, and John have not shared these with each other beforehand. So, one, there's a non-zero chance that we either predict the same thing or directly oppose things, which will be hilarious. But two, you will get our genuine reactions. We have not shared these as of yet. So, Chris, I'm going to give you the choice. Do you want to go first or do you want to pick one of us to go first? I think we should have the guest go first.

I mean, he's here. We have to give him the honors, right? Works for me. All right. I'm going to dive in with a juicy one for you, Austin. So a major global brand, its own economic system. So I think Disney, Amazon, something like that, which powers its own kind of tightly coiled, sticky economic system will announce a stable coin in 2026.

So you will not be able to, though it'll be option. You'll be you'll use Fiat, but you will be strongly encouraged to use either Amazon or Disney or Netflix or some other economic systems stable coin as value transfer within that system. And we'll see, A, how sticky their brand actually is. Might be Temu, I'm not sure. That's my first one. John, you didn't mention X.

Twitter. It's in there. It's in there. All right. I just don't know how my how to have is the way you engage with X value transfer? I think it has to be, it has to be a brand where value transfer is the core of its, of its economic model and versus data transfer. And then we'll see if people are willing to deal with the friction associated with moving into stables writ large, not not crypto-natives, to stay in that economic system or reap the benefits of it.

So is this a front to back, like building their own infrastructure, getting their own, you know, bank. No, they're going to get, no, they're going to. Seriously, is it like, they're going to outsource it? They're definitely not. Yeah, well, I was going to pile in to say, I think legally they have to outsource it, right? Like, if you read genius, these companies are technically prohibited from launching their own stable coins if you're not a financial services company.

But that doesn't say anything, John, to your point about, say, take Starbucks, for example, right? As somebody who's dabbled at crypto in the past, they could easily go to a Coinbase, like, at Circle or like a PayPal and simply adopt the stable coin that somebody else has, like maybe put their name and brand on the front of it. But if you're not legally running the thing, like you're not managing the reserves, you're not handling the payments, then it's probably kosher under Genius. because they have a very clear definition of what the issuer is. And I, like, so to unravel this a little bit, maybe for people who are not familiar with U.S. payments, when you currently go to somewhere like the deli and you tap a card to pay, there are like three to four different people taking a cut out of that thing,

depending on what you've done, right? Like you have the issuing bank, you have the acquiring bank, and you have the card network itself, all taking money out of that. And I say four because sometimes they're also paying rewards back to the consumer, depending upon the card. And those margins for retailers are significant. Those can be two to three percentage points easily. And look, for somebody who's selling like extremely high value legal services,

like that margin is kind of irrelevant. But for somebody who's an extremely high turnover business, like John, I believe you referenced Amazon, where their margins can be low single digit percentage points capturing any portion of that is transformative for the business. So if we're thinking about core economic drivers, I agree with you. Counterpoint, like I want to throw this back to the two of you, do you think that is actually a 2026 line item or is this the classic case of getting a UIUX people will adopt,

getting everything buttoned down, getting everything implemented, we'll push it into 27. So, John, I want to ask, before we get to that, you guys just made a huge announcement about people being able to brand their own stable coins using your kit. And is this what you're talking about, essentially, that business line taking off? I think, well, it's, you can argue that or you can argue that. We felt the need to announce it because we see this coming, right? I think, I think both are true, quite frankly. But, but also, to your point, you know, the safe bet is that, yeah, it'll believe. I guess I'll find it by saying the announcement will happen in 2026.

Whether implementation can occur in 26, I'm not sure. But I think you're right. I think that'll take a longer. So unless it's a Q1 announcement, I don't think we see it go live by Q4. But I'll stand by an announcement in 2020s. I totally agree with you, John. I think it's a no-brainer. I talked about it last week.

Stable coins are the new net interest income. You know, today you're not making money on those payments. And if someone's capturing that interest, if I imagine as you start issuing your stable coin, you're going to capture a share of net interest income, it makes sense for any business model you're in. So I totally agree. I guess to me this is just an obvious next step in the industry, like very, very linear. We all knew this was coming. So I think the question is timing. So like my question then is, it was my first prediction.

How big stable coin market by the end of the year next year? That's a question, not a prediction. I have my number. You can't offload your prediction. I want you. I guess my first. I just gave you my mind. Chris is in the eternal trader move of no, you make the market first.

I'll give you my number. My number, I think, is a little bit weak. But I'm going with $600 billion, which is about, I called $500 this year. I was wrong. We ended up around $3.10,000, correct me if I'm wrong, $310 billion. I think it doubles next year. I'm just going to just get around it and say $600 billion. I think years out.

After that, it goes vertical, but I'm being a little bit weak, I think, this year saying $600 billion by the end of next year. Thoughts? My number for the end of next year, what we would traditionally call stable coins today, is probably about $500 billion. But the lurking variable within that is we don't know what's going to happen with people potentially tokenizing their own balance sheets. And that number for some of these things can be exponentially big, right?

Like, good example. If one of the big four banks says, we're just moving to a 24-7 collateral system, it just tokenizes all the collateral in there. Stable coins, if we're defining that as like the money object, that being like T-bills, a tokenized deposit could easily be over a trillion, right, with one flip of a switch just because of how people essentially run their internal ledger. So to me, the problem there is a definitional one. Chris, of like, what do we mean when we say stable coins?

It's like are tokenized bills on onyx or Kinexis or whatever JP Morgan is now stable coins? Because if so, that number could be trillion. Well, I'll up you there. Is Athena a stable coin? I think we agree that it's not. It's a tokenized basis trade. So I would say fully backed, obviously genius compliant, which genius doesn't even go into

effect until January 27, you know, or just, I guess. But like I'm thinking about like truly back stable coins like the tethers, the circles, and similar folks, not just genius compliant. I don't think you include tokenized bank deposits in that number. That's a separate product. That's a, as our friend Oman Malikin says, it is a receipt on a fractional bank,

which is not a stable coin. So, yeah, I think it's... I might counter that genius says otherwise, given that bank deposits are one of the assets within genius. Like, so this is going out the rabbit hole of why I am.

Yeah, Seth. Let me agree with me on that. I think banks are stable. That would be token as bank's deposits would be stable coins. Do you think we're not? Well, they, so here's kind of the hilarious thing that I've been pointing out to some of the bag people who've been lobbying for an even harder guild ban is I'm like, you guys realize that tokenized bag deposits are stable coins under genius. So you're arguing to ban your own ability to pay your customers. Right.

And so, like, I didn't know the banking industry wanted to reg Q back that badly. That's news to me. But yeah, like, guys, tokenized bank deposits are a fully. permissible asset under genius, meaning I could have a stable coin filled with 100% tokenized bank deposits. So if I wrap my tokenized bank deposit, put it out of blockchain, in a literal sense, that is probably a genius stable coin. So like all you banks with tokenized deposits out there think very hard about what you're saying as you talk about these things, because if you break that and now you want to tokenize your derivatives collateral,

but you can't pay the interest on it anymore, you can't use your blockchains. All right. So we just got, we just really confused everybody. Yeah, that was my job. Let me, let me give a super stable coin hot take that is my first prediction. If everybody is right after that. U.S. dollar stable coins will be completely banned in at least one major foreign nation at 2026. Come on.

That's obvious as well. Is it? U.S. I think so. Like, I mean, I mean, this is one of the big challenges. is we're already hearing, you know, the BIS is concerned. How many, you know, senior regulators, particularly coming out of Europe, are very nervous about dollar supremacy.

Dollars are going to displace emerging markets. It's taking an avenue of control away from leaders that maybe shouldn't be leaders. I think this is a no-brainer. And I do think you're going to see dollar cable coins bad. Well, it's good. Let's take it further. So, Austin, would you refine it by saying, is this going to be a Eurozone country? I think it starts

through the developing world. I would say the Eurozone are the most likely sets of candidates because they seem super happy to get into a fight and attempt to be technology in all forms right now. So yeah, probably Eurozone.

My number two is China. Ooh. That's super. Yeah. And I also think across the developing world, like Africa, it's going to, you know, it's hard, but it's,

I'm not sure from a currency standpoint. I would classify anybody at Africa as a major player. Brazil would count. Fair enough. But my punchline is, I think somebody would call it the G-12-ish range is going to ban U.S. dollar stable coins. Because exactly, Chris, as you got to,

these things give their citizens a way to get out of the local system and hold dollars instead, which is not just important for the FX. That part matters. In fact, it matters even more in the developing world. But equally so, it gives people away. to get out from like legal norms and rule of law. Because let's say I'm in Europe and I say a bunch of things that people don't like and they want to hit me with a massive fine under some of their essentially anti-free speech laws.

Well, if all of my money is it a dollar stable coin, do you think a U.S. court is going to be responsive to that under speech grounds? Probably not. And that's sort of like challenge to sovereignty. I think people are going to essentially a little bit like what's going on with speech have a reckoning with how the internet actually works, which is to say, if I'm in, let's pick a country, Germany, do I get to tell the Americans how the internet works in America just because of Germany used it?

I think if the argument is protection against capital flight, I think there's a higher probability of China doing it than Eurozone. That's where in the China predicts your cover site, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's, that's, if China does that, then I think the probability of them either soft or hard moving on Taiwan goes up materially in sync with that. That's a total rejection of bilateral monetary relations. And then I think the probability of it, I was thinking about that being one of my predictions that China does a soft or hard move on Taiwan in 2026.

I backed off on it because I think they're going to wait until our chips manufacturing is at a point where us retaliating doesn't make economic sense. But I think I'll add to yours. If they do what you just said they'll do, I think they move on Taiwan and sync. I mean, certainly what's the right way to say? my prediction is premised upon decreasing global coordination across all major nations, which has now been a multi-year view. Basically, since COVID, that has been ongoing.

Yeah, de-globalization. Well, not just de-globalization, but also desynchronization, right? It's not just we're doing less with each other. It's also we disagree with each other more. And I think that is a point that has maybe been underpriced in markets generally. And dollar dominance is terrified to a lot of people who would like to do that exactly as Europe's economy is hollowing out. All right, Chris.

That's what disagree with each other. This is two, which you mentioned the same. Come on. This one is kind of related, actually, fellas. I'm concerned that there's going to be the mother of all hacks next year. It's going to be greater than $2 billion in size. It's probably going to be by our friends in North Korea. And it's going to lead to a material downturn, draw down.

and it's going to require a complete policy rethink. I give you some stats this year. We're going to look like we're closing out the year with $3.4 billion. It's a 51% increase. Remember the buy big hat kicked the year off at 1.5. So I don't like to say it, but it's something that keeps me awake at night. And I say it because I think we all need to be thinking about it.

It's the one thing that's going to derail. Like we have so many good things coming together except for price, but it's the one thing that keeps me awake at night. John, I know that you guys just, sorted through that $400 million issue you had. I don't know. I hate to start with bearish themes, but that's one thing that I'm worried about. Hack greater than $2 billion, forcing a major rethink.

So let me agree and disagree with you. So I agree with you that there's a high probability of a major hack occurring. People are really underestimating the importance of having a nation-state-backed group like the Lazarus group that is able to act with impunity. When I was reading about them recently, I called up my buddies in MIT, and I was like, hey, are they just smarter than everyone? And they were like, no. They're like, they just get to act with impunity. Like their nation state back, they don't have to worry about getting arrested.

Obviously, we have hackers in the NSA, but I don't think our hackers are trying to kill specific companies and rob bunny. So they have the only large-scale nation state-backed happy group that has the support of the government. So I'll agree with you there. High probability of a big value money hack. I disagree with you that a money hack will disrupt much. What I think disrupts more are hacks like the Panama Papers, where information about, so if the hack includes data and information about people using crypto in nefarious ways, not just loss of value, then I think we have a big structural problem. If it's just people lose their, if there's, if there's people lose money, we're not a sympathetic audience. Let's be honest.

Yeah. Nobody cares if crypto. But we also have trillions coming on chain. And that's the difference, you know, as you have the... So I agree. If it's moms and pops and dentists and doctors who are touching crypto for the first time, then it's a problem. If it's a hack that information of nefarious activity is revealed, then it's a problem.

If it's just a bunch of crypto natives having the Bitcoin stolen. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. But I think that's the problem. Yeah. It would have to be one of two kinds of hacks for this prediction to be true. One is, for instance, one of the big ETFs, right? Like if everything gets stolen from like high bit or FB.

BTC. That is an existential event. Dentis, I agree. And the other one would be somebody actually compromises the smart contract keys for one of the major stable point issuers. Because like if I hijack tether and could just mint three trillion of tether and go buy everything, right? Like you have a very big problem. In fact, back to Omead, he and I had this debate on bankless at one point where I was saying I do not think the current crypto market infrastructure works for tokenized real assets because we've created a huge single point of failure on issuer security.

Right. Because like I want to be clear. I think they have very good security. But if somebody compromises Tether's smart contract, he's now one. Yeah. Right. All right. That's my last bear.

That's my last bearish one of the day. Well, so I want to, what's the right way to say this? Take that in the opposite direction to throw one out. then we'll go back to John. Part of what many of these discussions reveal is that these issues are vastly more complex than people realize. And as you start, call it descending down the stairs, it's like, oh, I'm in the basement. And then basement level two, and that basement level three, that basement, how many basements are there? So one of my predictions for 2026 is clarity will not pass in the United States.

And I think it will not pass because as Congress continues to educate itself here, This stuff is just way too complicated. John? I think if it doesn't pass, it will not be, I'm trying to disagree, but Austin will seem better than me. But I do think that if it doesn't pass, it's not because it's too complex, because I think they pass things they don't understand all the time.

I think if I were to agree with Austin and not passing, about it not passing, I think it's because the Democrats have momentum right now. And I think serious momentum. And in fact, I was interviewed about two, three weeks ago and I was asked about the price action in crypto. And I said, the only thing I see that's different between now and two, three months ago is growing confidence in democratic momentum down in D.C.

So I'll say I tentatively, I won't disagree with Austin because I just don't know the political scene as well. I hope that's not true. But if it is true, I think it's going to be because. of shifting political momentum, not necessarily because for the first time ever, politicians have decided that need to be thoughtful and understand a policy before they enact. Yeah, I think that's becoming consensus, Austin, on clarity that it probably won't, like, pretty, we're pretty much assured it's not going to get passed before midterms. The question is, it doesn't get passed after midterms.

I don't know, man. I agree with you, having been in D.C., in and around D.C. long enough. It's just a super complex bill. John, not because of the, like, the policy's not complex. The power is complex because you're moving power from one, from ag to banking, banking to ag. It just makes it a lot harder. And we saw how hard genius was.

So I tend to agree. I think the question that I would come back to you with a professor would be modular, right? Instead of getting one big, beautiful clarity act, are you going to get pieces of it? Are we going to break it up? We asked Patrick on that, Patrick Witt at the White House. And you said, you know, we're not considering that yet. There's probably going to be a time when they pivot to modularity. Do you think that's possible?

And if so, there's a taxonomy that we focus on. Yeah, I would say one, I will remind everybody that the White House said that we're not separating market structure from genius until they realized, well, we could definitely get genius that if we attach it to market structure, it's not going anywhere, that that was when you make that deal. So I do think there's a chance to do that. I would tell you, I think the least controversial part of clarity is actually the taxonomy. I know a lot of people at crypto have views about it, but there's something in there that is good enough that Congress could get to that I think we don't have a problem with. I think the parts where there's going to be like really severe heartburn and the political dynamics get exceptionally gnarly are around how do we define defy? like what is that what is control where do we draw the boundaries and i would tell you i don't think there's consensus there and part of my complexity one is you know you had people propose some things

that facially were like oh we think this works that it's simple and then you get things coming in horizontally to the debate that you didn't even expect like what do you do when a web browser company suddenly shows up and goes wait why the fuck do you think we're a money transmitter and they're like well we didn't mean that at all and they're like that is what you wrote down And then the whole debate, the wheels just come off. So I think defy is going to be really hard because step one is what do you think you mean when you say defy is a very complicated process. Two, the AML KYC debate is broken, right? And I say that because you have the banking faction who wants everybody to have to KYC everything,

not because they think it's the right policy, but because that's the best way to protect their current Walts Guard, is force other people to like hammer into that shape so that you can't do new things that they are not intermediating. You have a bunch of, I'm going to call it crypto natives who don't want KYC at all and are strongly opposed to all of these things. And then I would say you have a bunch of like tech and intelligence people who are like actually we like blockchains for open source intelligence reasons and maybe we should KYC less things, but have more information transparency.

And all three of those groups disagree with each other. and none of them, I would say, have a majority opinion. Right. And so that makes it very hard to move that bill because we can't set an AML KYC standard for interacting with things on chain. Right. Like that just becomes an absolute blocker. So if you're thinking of modularity, the token standards, I think, are pretty doable.

And any requirements you're going to attract or like attach to call it centralized entities, like Coinbase the Exchange, for instance, or like crypto custodians, probably more in the realm of doable. Yeah, the MLKWC, I agree with you, it's becoming increasingly intractable. There's a wide disconnect I say. It's funny, I flew to Dubai a couple weeks ago, and for the first time ever,

I didn't take my passport out of my luggage, the entire trip. I did biometrics in the U.S. I've been doing it for years in the UAE, but the first time ever came through U.S., went through global entry, en route back, pure biometrics. So I was shocked at the market jump in modernization of TSA, AML, KYC, know your citizen at least.

And it seems like, and Austin, you're the first person to put it this way. I was wondering why the traditional financial sectors had stayed so analog, remained so analog around it. By the way, it's not just the U.S. I sit on Cayman boards. I have to go to notaries a couple times a month. It's an unbelievably arduous process. and you're the first person, Austin, to point that the obvious, which is that that's a feature, not a bug of protecting that moat.

So it seems like we're a long way off just philosophically from being comfortable with it. And then the technology has to catch up. So I tend to agree that we're not going to cross the AML KYC hurdle here in the U.S. for a very long time. I think, and Chris, I would be super curious about your opinion on this, but I'll say it this way. I actually think the divide that will eventually break that logjam is not between the crypto people in the banking industry. It is between the national security people and the banking industry, where enough Natsk people are going to get annoyed at how analog this is and how hard it is to see things while they see things like Lazarus happening. That it's one thing for you to be a bank executive in Washington arguing, well, those crypto people are untrustworthy, look at all those scammers, like why would you at them? set the standards fine. Very different argument to have like, oh, I don't know, senior folks from

the intelligence agencies on the other side of the table saying, actually, you guys are damaging U.S. national security by not doing a good job of this information. Those are two very different problems. Yeah, I tend to agree. I think defy is going to be really hard to get done. So they're going probably have to carve it out. You know, the other issue that we didn't talk about was two other issues that are stopping it from going. We talked about in the past. They just hate Trump and they don't want it to give him anything. And, you know, ethically, they want to address ethics, big problem, and then stable coin interest. So, yeah, I'm with you in that prediction. Is the Trump administration, I know the pro crypto, are they pro defy specifically? Is that, is that nuance teased out in your,

in your understanding? I don't think there's coherent, I guess, focus on defy. There's a lot of agendas that's, you know, in and around how that policy should work. I think if you talk to the, the executive office and the Patrick of the world, they get it. They want to make it work in a thoughtful way, but I think there's a lot of agendas both the Republican and Democrat. I would also say if I want to steal man the Democratic view on that

for the informed ones, their objection really is more graphics like World Liberty that specifically C-Fi or D-Fi. If you want to read into the Democratic thinking of the informed people, go read the text of what Representative Torres proposed for an anti-corruption amendment, which is basically essentially,

If you're a federal legislator, executive branch senior employee or anybody in the judiciary, you just can't be involved with this stuff, period, full stop. And then there's also an attachment to family members, which I'll be transparent. I've given that feedback that's way too overbroad. But you could definitely put a thing in there about, like, acting in concert or delivering benefit to. You can't just capture all family members because, like, if Senator has a brother who hates, that that guy gets elected to the Senate, you can't ban that guy's acting. It seems like we'll have kind of clarity around how we expect our politicians to engage with crypto faster than we'll have clarity around how we expect our politicians to engage with stock or credit markets.

That's kind of funny, right? I mean, because my understanding is there are there are not clear rules, right, which is why the Republicans accused the Democrats of front running markets, sends into Pelosi indicator and all this. And I know there's shenanigans that go on, but I'm sympathetic because it doesn't appear that as a society, we have codified rules around how we expect our government officials to engage with capital markets. So it's funny that we're going to lean with crypto. That's what we've been telling him. Yeah, you got an ethics issue, but it's not a crypto issue. It's an ethics issue. It's an ethics issue.

Address it across products. Another good reason to maybe modularize things. I mean, I'll tell you right now, I think it would be a hugely positive thing for the United States to just have a generic like federal and congressional sort of ethics bill around all of this stuff because it shouldn't be the case that somebody can launch the Nancy Pelosi ETF and massively beat the market. Right. Like something is wrong there with that. It is kind of weird. And every company I've ever worked for has pretty clear personal trading rules. Like it's not like there's not enormous precedent around this. Just, you know, go go grab whatever Goldman Sachs is doing. and just implement it for Congress and Senate. But, yeah, but crypto, so crypto will leave the way. That's wonderful.

That's very clarity for equity and credit vis-a-vis crypto. All right. John, let's do one more prediction of yours, and then we're going to have to do one more role of ads before we keep arguing. I have an anti-prediction, meaning I'm going against Twitter conspiracy consensus, and I will say none of these three things will occur in 2026. It's a prediction because everyone seems to think they will. None of these things will happen.

We will not achieve AI general intelligence. Quantum computing will not be a scalable, viable threat to crypto or any form of any form of substantive crypto cybersecurity. And alien life will not be confirmed. Those are my three countercultural predictions from, at least, the Twitter algorithm. I'm not you, but my algorithm is full of people claiming this is absolutely certain. None of it's going to happen. Deal with it.

All right. Well, I am on the record as being a pretty deep AGI skeptic saying, I think people are misunderstanding how these models work. So I have definitely on board with that one, right? Like the, I think the problem we have with the AI debate right now actually is a little bit like the problem we were having with the crypto debate in 2022, which is to say you have people making fantastical claims that this thing will reinvent every single thing in the world and replace everything forever always. And other people saying it's a flaming tire fire that will destroy humanity and with nobody in the middle or with a nuanced view other than like tens of people at the time. And I actually think a lot of that is washed out in crypto and we're starting to have more granular discussions, which is good. But it took us like fourish years to get there. I think AI is still crypto in 2022. You have people being like, AI will run everything. Agents will do everything. There will be no jobs.

Like it's all over. and then you have people on the other side being like essentially the Paul Krugman like I don't see how this is better than the fax machine type critique and the truth is somewhere in the middle which is like if you understand the functional process of an LLM there are certain kinds of brute force tasks that are not super accuracy demanding where they are incredibly powerful like incredibly powerful they will have transformative effects of those spaces they are very good at sub-levels of heuristics. They're very good at being approximately right.

And they're very good at doing that at scale and finding connections between data sets that might not have otherwise been found. But the idea that you can take that, which is essentially call it a scale sort of like super librarian, if you will, and generate totally new forms of intelligence from it. Like citation need it. That's the old math gag of like, first this happens, then a miracle happens, then this happens. It's like citation needed for this step, guys. Right.

And I'll just say, if people want to send it to be great, but I've seen no evidence so far that any of the LLMs are falsifying the prediction of, it gets harder to get gains as they get better. And while they're very good at finding links between datasets, they are not good at generating wholly new data or new ITs. And you need that for AGI. They're not creative. Yep.

I am excited about quantum. I'll be honest with you. I've been starting to dig into it a bit. And I think when you bring AI together with quantum, you're going to be able to accelerate. You know, people have been studying quantum for a long time. I think I was looking at Columbia the other day. They started in like 1909. They've had a Columbia program focused on quantum.

But I think we're now starting to see some acceleration. And I don't think that, you know, ubiquitous quantum capabilities are going to be online in the next year or so. But I think, you know, as we get towards, you know, a few years from now, five years out, It's good to start thinking about it now, like other technologies. It's not going to be good or bad. It's going to be unleash amazing compute, incredible iterative modeling. You're going to see a lot of diseases being cured that we didn't think we're curable. And there's going to be some bad parts to it too.

But I do think it's starting to accelerate. Not next year. I mean, I think the other question with quantum, you know, sort of back to John's maybe original point earlier about the hacks is like, is Bitcoin really the thing we're worried about? Right. Like if we can break encryption as we currently use, but there are much more valuable targets than Bitcoin.

Like this is sort of being like, I have created a device to become completely invisible and I'm going to use it to steal candy for part. And it's like, what are we doing? Yeah, the analogy I keep thinking is it would be, it would be the equivalent of teleportation. right right that would be that would be it so if tomorrow teleportation was a real scalable thing then locks doors all types of physical security everything goes away right an entire way of

thinking about physical security is is completely transformed um and uh the last thing we'll be worried about is um is i guess you worry about like theft but you worry about personal physical safety you know first and foremost um and so that that's that's kind of worry thing i just i think i what I look at, I'm lucky to, for AI, for AGI, I'm lucky to sit in this position where I'm a fellow at C-Sail at MIT, so I get to hear what they're saying. And it seems that for both, you know, qubit production on quantum and the way AI is growing, they're suffering from the same thing that I've seen every bad trader suffer from, which is just linear interpulation of recent terms. And it's like, I just, maybe it's just beaten into me, Chris. And also because I've seen it,

people fail in trading for so many years, just taking that short-term data trajectory and expanding it up. Like, if that's true, the human beings be running a sub one second 100-yard dash. Correct. But as we all know, it just gets increasingly harder to get that marginal unit of return. So I just see them falling into the same. And then also the marketing and the decree. And like also you mentioned before, like these two camps of it's going to change everything. It's going to kill us. I actually think those two extremes are towards the same marketing goal. Because what better way to get you to invest in my thing than to say, oh, my goodness, if we don't stop it, it's going to kill everyone. That's a very important thing that you absolutely need to invest in.

So I think the fearmongering and the hopium are kind of the same silliness. And the end result is like you said, which is massively transforming some industries, definitely transforming how we do certain things, freeing up time in some areas, increasing amount of time we have to devote to other areas. but I um and I'm not a I'm not a Paul Krigman on this at all but this notion that again massive unemployment in the near term in the next like let's say three years beyond that who the hell knows is is just kind of silly I mean it's kind of like as a as a final thought on that one before we flip to the ad the personal computer did not destroy the economy it may have transformed a lot of jobs that changed how to do things but like I can't

vanish because of the personal computer mathematicians are not gone because of the calculator, right? It will just change how jobs work. So, all right, on that note, let us go to our ad role here, and then we'll come back and argue about some more predictions. Mantel has entered a new phase as the distribution layer connecting Tradfai and on-chain liquidity. To accelerate this vision, the Mantle Global Hackathon, 2025, is inviting developers to build scalable RWA and DFI products. Why build on Mantle? It's an ecosystem. system built for builders. You get direct access to ByBIT's 7 million plus users for potential listing exposure, support from the $4 billion mantle treasury, and mentorship from top VCs,

like Spartan and Anamoca brands. With six tracks, prioritizing RWA's and RealFi, and a $150,000 prize pool plus grants, this is your chance to deploy on a high-performance modular L2. Register now. The link is in the show notes. All right. Welcome back. Chris, I'm going to counter your bearishness by hitting you with a prediction that is simultaneously bullish and bearish and will make a lot of our listeners bad. So here's my prediction. Altcoins, which I'm going to define as everything other than Bitcoin and Eath and stable coins before somebody yells at me about that, will have a negative return as a space in 2026. and that tradfi will capture way more of the value than many of the crypto data protocols. Depends to you define it, right? So I think everyone agrees that alts are having a rough go.

I think based on the index you used, they're down about 60% year over year, depending on your definitions of alts. We've always known that you can create tokens out of anything, and a lot of them have no worth. But I think you're right that there's going to be a return to fundamentals. I don't see like it's hard to group them into this huge monolithic group. You have to look at each project individually. You know, what is its utility? And I think that that discipline of looking at fundamentals

is going to drive dispersion in the price and the value of these all coins. So it's like easy to say alter this, alter that. I do think that you're going to see derivatives on shoring in 26. Remember, Gary Gens, we talked about this. He forced all derivatives offshore. Next year is going to be a battleground for derivatives in the United States. And one of my predictions correlated to this, Austin, is that U.S. will gain market share. CME will lose market share onshore.

Okay. Like right now, I'd say, you know, they're a very small part. I think they, you know, they're just a tiny amount of the global volumes. We can go through them if we want. but I think they're going to face very, very tough competition from our friends at Coinbase. You're going to see the Asians marching in. I think finance returns. I think OKX comes on strong.

So it's going to be the battleground. Why is this related to alts? Because the alts with functional futures will win. Why? Because again, as we're seeing institutions enter the space, they need to be able to hedge. They need to be able to trade basis. That basis is going to be ETF versus future. DAT versus future. Futures power. Alts. Alts with futures win. Bifurcation of value between the haves and the have-nots in the alt space.

I think part of the other problem, though, like as I'm looking at why I believe this is two things. One, back to thinking about fundamentals. A lot of the design of tokens and protocols was a counterreaction to the nonsense from the SEC over the past like four-ish years under the Biden administration. But now we're starting to have a reckoning with the compromises that were made there as people can start operating. So like look at the drama around AVE right now as an example, which is if we come to a place where it's like actually the token doesn't really give you any meaningful rights and the revenue can just be taken away, then the appropriate price for most of these tokens is way lower, right? Like way, way, way lower than it currently is. And the problem that you will run into is while crypto natives have had some sort of. call it community slash mythological slash ethos belief around tokens. Tradfied people don't share that.

And so they're not going to be coming into this space and saying, hey, the way to do things is buy a giant stack of Ave and introduce government. No, they're just going to build their own Bar-O-Wet protocol. And so I think we're going to hit the rubber meeting the road on what is a token, what rights does it have? And I think for a lot of these things to survive, they're going to have to transform into much more equity-like instruments that grant people actual legal rights, right? Because again, the days of like the call it valueless governance token are probably coming to an end now that,

like, and there's been a string of these, right? Like AVE is not the only one. Look at like the Axelar takeout, right? By circle. And you can see these things starting to emerge of the differential interests between the operating company and the token holders are really becoming an issue. Okay, so I'm going to hedge a little bit and say that I think everything but Bitcoin lumped into all coins is a challenging is a challenging heuristics. So as Solana, I'm assuming, so you equate Solana with sort of a meme coin, I'm assuming, right? Or are we thinking about it? I mean, I will tell you right now, the only thing I would confidently carve out there is like Heath and the major stable coins. I think even if you include Solana in the space, it's probably a negative source.

Okay. Okay. So I'll disagree with you on Salon. Because I think that Solana is going to be architecture for a major U.S. Equities Exchange to start experimenting with on-chain equities. I think they'll use Solana because ironically, mean coins proved the resiliency of that information. But hold on. I'm not disagreeing that that will happen. I'm asking, does the value then accrue to the token? I think it does. And not because you're not, I think you're right about the fundamental value. I think there's two other forces, I think, that are countering it with three. One is just mean reversion. People love mean reversion trades. I think that's one thing. But for me, reversing trades to work, you need capital flows. I think there's going to be a full series of ETFs and access vehicles. And so, and they'll be for the first time ever, there'll be an army of broken. selling them and shilling them. And if you think that crypto culture is powerful to aggregate capital, wait until 100,000 Morgan Stanley Burgers are out there on the golf courses pushing these meat reversion trades for these baskets of all coins. The last thing is, and this

is getting a little bit philosophical, but I've been spending a lot of time thinking about what Scott Galloway is going on about, about this growing nihilism amongst Gen X and Gen Z and Gen Alpha. And I'm seeing him. I do a lot of public speaking because this book that was written about me is really popular with college kids. So I spoke to my nephew's fraternity. I get 25, 30 college kids a month reach out to me because they still love this decade old book. I sense it from my conversations to that generation. So I think that this, this, and if you know, if you members don't know, Scott Galloway and Scaramucci, others are talking about this problem affecting not just young men, but mostly young men who summarized by financial nihilism, they believe that there's no,

that inflation beats interests. So this whole idea of saving and compounding, you cannot work your way out of a debasement. And therefore, there's no hope. Even if you, even if you get a decent job, there's no hope. So you might as well just ape into some shot. Might as well just gamble away some shot. And he ties it to the sort of gamblification and financialization of all assets. And I think that that's not going away in 2026. So I think you're going to see inflows into any beaten down asset class that's viewed as a potential 10x or 20x or mean reversion trade. And I think there'll be easier access vehicles for off points. I think you'll see more nihilistic Gen Z heading into these trades.

I think it's what's driving silver right now. I think I think the memeification of 10 potential 10xers. I think that zeitgeist is not going away. So, John, what's the next me, man? What's the next meification? Sober and thoughtful, you know, triple tax-free bonds in New York State. I thought it was going to be, I thought it was going to be coin-based equities. No?

All right. I'm sorry. So one quick thing on that. So I hope that the everything app, I hope it starts with high-quality assets and that Fultiers down. I think people should be allowed to buy whatever they want. But I think if you lead with idiosyncratic, you know, high volatility assets, you increase the probability of a micro or macro blow up in the building stages of that market. And then things get complicated.

So I'm hoping for, you know, onshane gold, on chain crude oil, onshade, large of U.S. equities, on chain Bitcoin. And then you get the benefit of that all at scale in one place. Yeah. So Austin's saying that securities, he cedes more. he cedes more value accrual to securities or security like properties, right? That's what you're saying. I don't agree with it. Part of it is that, but part of it is also like, all right, so it's important to understand

the natality of some of the people here. I was having a late night discussion with a friend about nihilism recently, amusingly. And the important thing to understand is there's not a central meaning there when you're thinking about that. if you look at the behavior of like the financial dialist sector, they just run around chasing the next hot thing looking for wins. And sort of part of my thesis here with the alt coins is that's old and dead and gone and I don't think it's coming back.

Like they're busy fucking around back again and like stocks or like prediction markets right now. And there's going to be something new that we can't predict. But it's not going to be, oh, we go back to that thing only like a year or two later. those come back around, it will be many years later. That's how retro things work. And so I think part of it is the hotball of money left alts and it's probably not coming back to alts because that's not how hotballs of money work. And so when you combine that with the fact that all the people who would normally come in is like, oh, that thing's incredibly beaten down. I'm a value investor.

Let me go, look into that, go, oh, like, is there any value here? Like, if you're a distressed person and you look at a lot of these tokens, you look at that go, no, that might be zero. that's interesting okay yeah so also so 2025 they're just not it's not forever though this stuff is cyclical and again and again like i don't agree with value just accrues to the securities and by the way like securities are no longer a death sentence right on the commodity side it depends how valuable that commodity is and what is its utility right so i do think that they're you know you got to be a little bit more discerning um but i hear you and i do think there and i do think there's could be a push into that security, the security-esque asset because we can now. We're not going to jail if we do it, right? All right. Yeah. And that's part of the prediction is now that you can actually do securities,

maybe you just want to do that sometimes. All right. So I got another one. All right. So we had 21 was defy summer. I'm going to say 26 is M&A summer. M&A is going to be freaking everywhere. So this year, I think there's about 8.6 billion in MNA activity.

John, you guys led the way with your acquisition of Deribut. Crack and did Ninja Trader. I think this M&A is going to be so dynamic. You have a lot of new public companies, public company CEOs, and want to go buy stuff. That's why they went public in the first place. You're going to have the DAT M&A, two different types of DADMNA. Dat against DAT, right?

You know, whether it's I'm buying a dad of the same token or a different token. and I'm going to dump it. Maybe that's one flavor. But I think a bigger flavor is buying or merging or acquiring foundations and labs. That's the other M&A trend. So obvious to me. You got the trad into crypto M&A. If you're a trad player, many of them, they've ignored crypto for years because the

regulators said don't touch it or I'm going to get you. Now they're like, uh-oh, I got to catch up. So trad into crypto. And you're going to have crypto into trad because people like, Austin are saying you need to have those securities capabilities. You need to have that equity infrastructure. So going both directions. And then the last flavor is I see offshore coming onshore to buy things.

Asian exchanges and players, you know, European perhaps coming onshore where you're going to hear some Siphyas debates. But like I think it's going to be M&A, M&A and MNA in 26. What do you think? I think you're right about the Dats. I think the Dats, I'll add, I think the Dats that are in a position where they have any sort of lifeline, where they have a year or more of run rate and they have any capital available, they have to go by cash flow. Their business models are non-sustainable, right?

They're burning for every, say, 100 million of assets. They're burning somewhere between $5 and $10 million a year to keep it up and running. Staking doesn't cover that. Staking, unless you get, you can't, you can't. can't go into the really risky stuff if you're a public debt. So the, they just, they're just non-economic. So I think you're right. They consolidate. I think the ones that can go out and get debt financing or have some capital left over from their despacking, or wherever it is, they listed, they have to go buy EBITDA. Like that's actually going by cash flow. So you may

see that's buying like oddly the normal analog businesses just to get just to get cash for the show, hey, I can be around over the next five years and become this thing. this access vehicle that you want me to become. Chris, real quick question back to you. All the other M&A stuff, is most of that distressed? Oh, no, not necessarily at all. I think that there are people that are looking for the best companies, the best capabilities.

I have buddies in traditional markets. They're like, come back to me when you know, when your company's making $100 million in revenue. I think the problem right now, frankly, is that there just aren't enough crypto companies that are capable of meeting the standard that need to be met. Like, that's the unfortunate truth.

But the ones that are, they're either racing to go public or someone's going to try to scoop them up as soon as possible. Well, so I think you hit out something important about M&A that a lot of trad-fi people are not understanding really well. So if you're one of those, if you're listening to this, pay close attention. There are really only like three profiles right now that are potentially emanateable and one of them you're just not going to get, which is crypto companies that,

have done quite well are going public. If you look at the IPO valuations of like a coinbase, a circle, right, like the people, even bullish as an example, the people who have been able to IPO have by and large done very well. And they don't need to do an M&A transaction. They're going to go public and then you're going to have to try to take them over in traditional capital markets. So if something's got, call it 200 million of revenue and it's a crypto company, it should not sell to you. itch an IPO. And so I think they face this problem of like actually the public capital markets are probably a better buyer. Two is companies that are specific types of strategic acquisitions. Like we have seen stable coin startups like the bridge and like, you know, sort of like BVNKs of

the world being scooped up or potentially scooped up. That makes sense to me because that's a strategic bolt on. But you're going to need to know what those are, which means you need to know what what you're doing in blockchain space and a lot of tradfai companies, quite frankly, are 10 years behind. Right. Like if you're any of the major financial or bank companies and you don't have a totally cracked team of people in this space already in the one or two of you who do know who you are, just you are very behind. Right.

And I don't know if you could evaluate this well. Three is there's a handful of like these mid-tier companies that are probably acquireable. But that's purely because it's. It's a business model that may not itself want to IPO. Like a good example of those, Chris, you and I are both familiar with them as like Inca Digital, right, which is an intelligence company. Like they literally do anti-financial crime and financial intelligence. I don't know how much public reporting they want to do. So that makes sense for a private acquisition.

But like, that's not most protocols, which either don't have revenue or have complicated user bases of tokens. That's not the IPO crowd. And so, like, my one pump the brakes on the M&A thing is there may be, like, at best, low tens of companies that are acquireable, like, functionally. I also think, also to your point about that big Tradfi making these acquisitions, I am, this is entirely anecdotal. And I will not name names, but I got into the partnership level of one of these companies recently. And I think we're still underestimating the degree of reticence amongst 30% or more of some of these senior. These are not like 80 year old guys, crumudgingly guys. These are like 50 year old guys who have put it on public record over the last seven, 10 years, that they think crypto is bullshit.

And it's incredibly embarrassing. So I was asked recently, like, what do you think about where's crypto skepticism going? I don't think there's crypto skepticism anymore. I think there's crypto resentment. So you're this guy. You're this incredibly powerful partner at XYZ. You are not just quietly shitting on crypto. You have been very, very, very public about it.

To turn around at this stage of your career and green light a major acquisition and power that team. By the way, Chris, the team you mentioned and I think it was awesome, they're there. They're at every day. They're just impotent. They're just stuck in a corner somewhere with no real power. To elevate that team to take over a P&L.

To green light and act, it's to admit that you are not just wrong. You are catastrophically wrong. And if I'm that guy and I'm a senior partner in one of these firms, 53 to 57 years old, you know what? I'm going to retire in three to five years. I'm going to just say this is bullshit for the next five years until I'm out and let that next generation deal with it because it's embarrassing to admit. I think we dramatically underestimate the degree of reticence that still exists.

And that's why I don't think we'll see a major bank acquisition. And by the way, the number of boards who are going to be willing to accurately, like, police that behavior and fire that person and replace them with somebody who will do the right thing is very well. Not maybe not zero. There probably will be, actually, here's a prediction that I didn't intend to make. There will probably be one or two big blowouts where management or a board gets forced out by activist investors over things like this over the day. next year. Because if you're somebody who's been at the forefront on the technological front, you're still out there shitting all over this as like Citadel and like NASDAQ and NISI and the CME are all going on chain. Like if I'm on the board, I'm asking a lot of questions and if I start

testing and taking board seats. The other thing is like, you know, when I was in Wall Street, also you remember, Black Rock says jump, you say how high. Yeah. If they're going on chain, they're like, hey, you're settling with you on chain. I'm settling with you on chain. You know, You pay me hundreds of millions of dollars every year to my to my bank. I do think what is consensus, what is consensus at this level, John, is going back to 2017 or whatever, blockchain, not Bitcoin. If you are saying I'm investing in infra, no problem. No problem. It's infra, right?

If you're saying I'm buying tokens, you know, maybe we got to pause a little bit. But like that blockchain, not Bitcoin concept is alive and well in these boards and at that. level, I believe. But it's against my point, we saw the rumor, but it's been a confirmed rumor that MasterCard's buying zero hash. And I think there'll be,

yeah, I think that's fair. I think I'm distinguishing some of these commercial companies from the investment banks. But, but, and the Dats, the DAS problem is going to be that a lot of them have very inexperienced boards.

And they're going to be panicked. And their lawyers are telling them you're going to get sued. And so they're going to, they're not going to want to sell at below at below stop price, which will have to do to get a deal done. And I think they're just going to lock up for the first six months of the year until, until activists has also said, come in and force, force them in a activity. Yeah, I want to go back to something you said around staking doesn't pay the bills. It does if you're Tom Lee. He came out today. He said, I'm making a million dollars a day on staking, right? So what does that mean? It means scale, right? And so if you

are able to achieve that scale, then, you know, it's the haves and have-nots, which is something I mean, see if market's mature, things scale. That's why, to me, it's a no-brainer that consolidation is going to happen in 26, particularly amongst the deaths. All right. So before we run out of time here, since we should do at least one prediction, I'll give a prediction that I think, again, will enrage everybody. I think the Democrats will win the House in 2026, and I think they will immediately regret it

because it will probably take that for the presidency in 2008. back to the financial nihilism components. The thermostatic effect in politics is getting stronger over time. That is to say, voters are pissed, and there's major intergenerational warfare, and you do not want to be the main character right now. The easiest way to win is to be an outsider. And so I think the Democrats taking the House, getting on the main stage, pushing a bunch of their priorities are only going to piss people off

and actually make people hate them, too. The reality is voters are not happy with either of the major political parties. And the best thing you can do to be popular right now is stay off the stage. I agree that there's no short-term political solution that can solve the problems that are raging most Americans, particularly around inflation, particularly around affordability. I do, it does appear that the short-term political actions will exacerbate those issues. And whereas before, I think you could spend your way into a good stock market and mollify people. I think those days are gone.

And so it's dant if you do, dant if you don't. So I agree that whoever's in power is going to have the target on their back. And I don't think because anyway, as Lidol then always says, there's no way to stop the train, I think both economically but also culturally, not to sound too pessimistic. But I do think we will be in a, I think the U.S. will be as a society, will be further fractured. at the end of 2026 and it is now. I'm hopeful eventually there's a turnaround, but I tend to agree,

and that kind of plays into my belief that all coins and other types of videos and credit assets will go up as people just make that, make that what the hell trade. But I tend to agree things are looking worse, not better on that front. That sounds to me like it's going to be

really good season for prediction markets. Yeah. Oh, I think prediction markets are going to step Tuple and I think all chain lending, on chain lending and prediction markets will both 5x to 10x. Amen. People want to take leverage to take risk and people are going to want to bet on absolutely everything.

It's not, I just think, gambling into that, but they're going to want to make a prediction on it almost like. Lending has to come back. Lending has to come back. What about NFTs? What about NFTs? Are they coming back next year? So I'm going to say something really outside the box on NFTs.

I actually think NFTs are going to turn out to be incredibly important, but not in the way they were originally designed. I think where they will be important is tracking ownership of things that are currently on either broken crappy ledgers or things that are not currently ledgered. Like if we could just create an NFT for all the cars in America and track those or like, you know, let's get into luxury good markets and things like that, there's a lot of value to be unlocked there with tokens that are unique. and only like transferable in the right circumstances. I just think the initial wave of, hey, we're going to produce programmatic digital art. It's like, guys, those are JPECs. That's very easy. That was silly.

Yeah. I think entertainers, sports teams, venues will start to figure out how to monetize the economic and data relationship with their fans via NFTs better. I think they experimented a bit before. I know like a buddy of mine and Imrod Ahmed who runs this company called The Business of Fashion. It's extremely influential fashion. company, you know, they're going to figure it out. There's ways of this, if you, it's provenance, which is important. It's data and communication with your fan base, which is important. And then

it's, um, that, that ephemeral, like, you know, I own this thing that Taylor Swift endorses thing, which my daughters love. So no one's kind of got it yet, but it's just so obviously there, it's a great way to engage with your fan base and extract information and provide value back in community. So I think, I think, um, whether it's a sports team or entertainment entertainer, I think someone will crack the NFT code and figure out how to make it really, I wouldn't say useful, but really desirable. But there's a whole different layer too to this, right? Which is like, God, who is it?

I think it's the state of California is putting like driver's license information on Avalanche as an NFT. Right. These are just some ways property records, guys. Like, let's stop over-complicating it. Yeah, I think there's some value in social graphing as well, right? So as certain people have certain types of assets in their wallets, it's going to be very valuable data for introducing other types of things

that are similar to people of that data set, right? Like punk holders, penguin holders. You know, that's what we're looking at today. In the future, it's like, oh, wow, this wallet has X, Y, and Z. I think they would like for me to sell them or air drop this. but it's privacy I have some conversations with a NFL team

with a sports team a long time ago and this idea they put in my head of okay you buy you get your ticket stub which is your NFT fine whatever it's maybe it's collectible but you can program in effectively a lottery mechanism and so let's use soccer for example

if you're if you're if you do certain things if you use that NFT in certain ways it stays active and it goes off and messy tweets out your name or calls your phone Who the hell knows? But some engagement component can be written into the contract. And that's extrader.

That takes entertainment, that takes entertainment customer fan dynamic from static to dynamic over time. And look, I don't give a shit about that stuff, but there's hundreds of millions of people who really do. And they will figure out a way to engage you in your off time with that brand. It also does the most valuable thing at crypto, which is compressing the intermediary stack, right? Like we're going to now live in a world where creator, team, company has a direct relationship to the customer on the other side of things without like three layers of intermediation. It's Pat and I, my favorite comedian is Pat and Oswald. I buy his tickets through his website now because he realized he was big enough to mark. I follow his Twitter account.

I'm going to be in Brooklyn. He was in Brooklyn a couple of months. ago and I bought the ticket directly from Pat and Oswald. It was demonstrably cheaper. I'm sure he's making a shitload more money and everybody wins. It feels like a business Coinbase can get into, John. I think, well, we're doing everything. We're updating the whole system. So it was all right. Well, I was going to say, let me throw this to you two. If you have one more prediction you want to throw out since we're slightly over time, but then we will end up calling it. So hacking aside, I don't think there's going to be another big blowup in 2026.

I don't think there'll be a big crypto bankruptcy insolvency. I have come to the point where I'm so annoyed. Every time there's a volatility move in price, Twitter goes nuts with like these nebulous, oh, some Asian hedge fund blew up or a big bank, make their silver margin calls. It's a great way to know if it's a non-serious person. Like in the immediate aftermath of a blow up, it's a possibility. But like a week later, if they're still saying there's some big unknown, that's not how these things work. The rumor mill starts immediately.

You know insolvencies happen right away. I think the probability of a major insolvency, non-hacking-related insolvency, has gone way down. I think October 10th scared the shit out of people. I think they've de-risked. I think there wasn't a blow-off because they weren't over-levered. They might have been a little too much levered and they took down a risk. And that's what you're seeing now with reduction in liquidity. But I think the major players that learn their lesson, and I don't think we're going to have an FTC style blow up in 2020s.

That's one of the reasons they're coming on shore, John. Right? As they come on shore, they're going to avoid all the ADLs and against. And that's why I think that's going to be rocket fuel this year with derivatives. Why would I go unregulated if I can go regulated now that I'm allowed to do it? That's where liquidity is going to move. My last one, Austin, Bitcoin, and Ethereum hit all-time highs in 26. I could totally see that.

I could totally see that. But I want to pile on with the point to John here. If there is a major failure of something in crypto in 2026, one, it's going to be a stable coin. And two, which people are really not expending, it will be because a bank failed where the stable coin held their money. That will be trad by blowing up something in crypto, not the other way around. People think the systemic risk goes from stablecore. You try to buy it goes from a bank to us. There's been 600 bank failures in the last five years and is a very high chance of

being more. And if there's ubiquitous stable coin creation, I think it's almost impossible. There won't be a bank failure, a stable coin failure. A bank failure caused stable coin failure. Yes. If anybody from House or Senate financial services are listening to this, remember, you have to protect stable coins from the banks. And crypto will dip,

Yes. This was corn guys. Invited. Yeah. You can grab back. And if I'm wrong, and aliens are confirmed, we can invite an alien.

I have my... I was going to say you can just blame the aliens for controlling you to make the prediction to disguise the fact that they were real. This was great, God. I appreciate you, my... Professors definitely not from Earth.

All right, guys. Good, a few. I see how it is. All right. Thank you, everybody. Thank you for us for this. episode of Bids of Bids, happy New Year. We'll be back in one week to discuss four about how the worlds of crypto and macro are colliding. Until then, stay safe at there.