Unchained - Joe McCann on Why Bitcoin Is the King and Memecoins Are Over—For Now - Ep. 801

Episode Date: March 18, 2025

The memecoin trade might be over. And Joe McCann says that’s just the beginning. The founder of Asymmetric has been at the intersection of crypto, macro, and tech for years. He called the $BONK trade early, made moves before most saw the opportunity, and now? He’s shifting his focus. Meanwhile, the crypto markets are a bloodbath, with bitcoin, ether, and solana down 10%, 41%, and 35%, respectively, year-to-date. In this episode, Joe joins Unchained to discuss: Why memecoins won’t work the way they used to How institutions are approaching crypto in this cycle Why prices are down so much Why Bitcoin might be so hard to outperform Whether Solana is still the fastest horse Visit our website for breaking news, analysis, op-eds, articles to learn about crypto, and much more: unchainedcrypto.com Thank you to our sponsors! FalconX Bitwise Guest: Joe McCann, founder of Asymmetric Links Unchained:  Solana Rejected Inflation Reduction—Here’s Why Are Memecoins Collapsing? These 8 Charts May Be Signaling Yes Bitcoin Has Declined 20%. How Soon Could the BTC Price Revive? Timestamps: 👋 0:00 Intro 🚀 2:19 How Joe’s background shaped his crypto investing approach 🐶 10:25 Spotting the $BONK opportunity before the crowd 📉 17:38 Why the memecoin trade might be over 💰 21:51 Why Joe believes Pump.fun is NOT extractive 📊 33:11 Why crypto prices have struggled despite a pro-crypto shift in Washington 🎯 42:34 The moment Joe “finally” gives credit to Arthur Hayes ⏳ 45:15 Could having no catalyst actually BE the catalyst? 🔥 49:22 Why Joe wasn’t convinced by the SOL inflation proposal ⚡ 56:45 Wait—no altcoin season? ⚙️ 1:01:34 What still excites Joe about Solana 🏦 1:04:57 Why Asymmetric is betting on Bitcoin DeFi 🤖 1:07:29 How AI is helping Joe’s team optimize its strategy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm not stoked with February. Trust me, I was dead wrong. I thought we were going to rip to new all-time highs this quarter. Dead wrong. First one to admit it. But I still don't think fundamentally anything has really changed beyond this mechanistic unwinding of crowded positions and the way that the kind of inner workings of the equity markets and ultimately, you know, affecting things like crypto actually work. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained. You're no high resource for all things crypto. your host, Laura Shin. We are now featuring quotes from listeners on the show. Today we have one from Han P8 on YouTube, responding to the interviews with Tushar Jane about Salinas failed SIMD-228

proposal. Hand P.8 says, quote, inflation was part of the reason why ETH dumped hard to below 2000. After the Dengun upgrade, it went to lower gas fees, which meant less ether's burned, which meant inflation, since ETH stakers still get 2 to 3 percent of yield. It will be harder for Salon to appreciate and value with constant higher percent supply coming in from validators slash stake of rewards. To have your comment featured, write a review of the podcast overall or leave a comment on our video on YouTuber X. This is the March 18th, 2025 episode of Unchained. Imagine an AI that speaks crypto and does the work of a team of analysts. Introducing Focal by Falcon X, bringing clarity to a world of noise. Visit Ask Focal.

dot com. Crypto moves fast. It's why Bitwise launched the weekly CIO memo, a jargon-free summary of what's moving crypto markets written by one of the best in the business, CIO Matt Hogan. Get up to speed in five minutes or less. Check it out at bitwiseinvestments.com slash CIO memo. Carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before investing. Today's guest is Joe McCann, founder, CEO, and CIO of Asymmetric Financial.

Welcome, Joe. Thanks for having me, Laura. So listeners may know you as a co-host of our Crypto and Macro show, Bits and Bibs, but they may not be aware of your full background, how it is that you became so knowledgeable about both crypto and macro. So why don't you tell us that story and how you got into crypto? Yeah, sure. So, yeah, I actually studied philosophy in university a long time ago. So did I.

Oh, cool. And, you know, I was actually having this conversation with some friends the other day about, like, the university system currently and AI and the impact of it. And I'm like, I mean, maybe I'm biased, but really all you should study is philosophy anyway because it teaches you how to think. So, you know, I've been doing trading and a software developer technologist for 25 years, self-taught and both. And I've kind of my career is flop between the two. But I've always been kind of interested in what is coming next. So emerging technology, and then things that may be technologically driving financial markets, hence my introduction into crypto.

In 2016 is when I first really got into crypto. I had felt like it was sort of this almost like the open source software philosophy being applied to finance. Because when I worked on the street years ago, I left because I was like, all of this stuff is moving to machines and algorithms. It's all dominated by a handful of firms and investment banks. As a trader, you're just at a structural disadvantage. But crypto felt different. It felt like there aren't these kind of gatekeepers, these sort of sets of bureaucracy and policies just to be able to access financial markets. And as yes, it was

crazy, Wild West, right? There were really no rules. But that kind of inspired me to take a deeper look. I got much more active in 2017 and the crazy bull market run of that. But then I actually, you know, I started to move more to kind of like the professional or institutional side of crypto. I joined a firm in San Francisco called Passport Capital, which is a well-owned, kind of institutional hedge fund. The founder really wanted to, was into crypto and wanted to have kind of like a quant desk built out for trading crypto. So I built that and designed a much of the strategies, et cetera. But I left about a year later because it was basically impossible to trade crypto at a U.S. hedge fund. It wasn't a passport thing.

It was like the industry. I mean, even today, it's still not that easier straightforward to trade crypto out of U.S.-based hedge fund. So I left and kind of went did my own thing for a bit. I started to actually do a lot of R&D into Web3, specifically the Ethereum ecosystem in 2019. So as a software developer and as someone who's built an open source business, a venture back business. Yeah, I looked at Ethereum and the developer ecosystem. I was like, this is actually a fundamental shift to computer science, these permissionless network, smart contract programming. It was just a new thing that I was excited about.

And so I started to do a lot of R&D and research into it. it and thought to myself, like, I think people are sleeping on how big this could potentially be and started writing some solidity apps and tracking those developer ecosystems. And around that time, Microsoft had identified me as a free agent. And they recruited me to come join their cloud and artificial intelligence organization. And they were like, Joe, we want to hire you. We just don't know what to do with you. I was like, well, thank you. Well, how about I help you guys not missed the next big thing. And so a lot of that was work that I did on like corporate, excuse me, strategy, corporate development, M&A, work with Microsoft Ventures, et cetera. And that gave me a lot of

opportunity to actually, you know, sort of evaluate what was happening in Web3, what was happening at AI. How would blockchain technologies and use cases actually be applied to kind of the enterprise space, et cetera? And when I left Microsoft in 2021 to start a Symmetric in 2022, I had written effectively with some of the folks in the CorpStrat team, the kind of Web3 strategy for Sotia Della, the senior leadership team, but not just for Cloud AI across every line of business. So this was Xbox, this was Office, et cetera. And that was really an eye-opening experience because an organization like Microsoft is so large that they move at a glacial pace. But to have, you know, and there's a lot of resistance to change in organizations like that, there was an interesting,

you know, kind of small subset of people there that were actually trying to drive a lot of this stuff forward. And you're seeing this stuff play out today with things, you know, obviously on the AI front, it's super clear what Microsoft is doing. But even as it relates to some blockchain and web-free related technologies, the reason I actually left Microsoft was a very close friend of mine named Steve Jang, who's a, you know, successful entrepreneur turned extremely successful VC. You know, he was like first money into Coinbase and Uber and, you know, Tonal, Magic Eden, all these companies, might as list the past couple years.

He came to me and he was like, Joe, you're the only guy I know in crypto that understands the underlying technology, but also knows how to trade. He's like, you're not out of fund. Like, come run a fund at Kindred Ventures. And I was like, man, I'm flattered. Thank you.

But I'm an entrepreneur. So if I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it myself. And so he's like, yeah, I knew you were going to say that. I was like, what? He's like, you should run your own fund. Like, let me help you kind of spin up your own fund and we can I can make you some introduction to service providers and think about a structure that makes sense and oh by the way I've already pitched you to mark and drison and chrisen and

Chris dixon and they want to be the first money into your fund and i was like okay how do you pass that up so asymmetric was born effectively in like early 2020 we technically launched in june of 2022 took like six months of legal right and the way i kind of thought about running i mean i've never been a hedge fund manager, you know, D.C. I've been an angel investor or a trader, but I thought about it like, how would I, how would I run this type of business? Not like what is the kind of copy paste from previous VCs or previous hedge fund managers, like how would I think about it? And a lot of it was heavily focused on my technical background using technology to actually run the firm as well as benefiting from, you know, understanding the changes that are happening in

Web 3 and obviously things like Salana and being there earlier with that, et cetera. But then also having a deep understanding and passion for a global macro as that actually drives a lot of the directional decision making that we make as a firm. And so, you know, I've been super passionate about understanding the plumbing of the global financial system. It is, it's huge. But I think once you kind of get a grasp on it, you can really have a better probabilistic forecasting ability as to what's likely going to happen around the world as it relates to financial markets. And so my trading partner at the time had a lot of global macro experience, so I learned a lot from him. But frankly, this gets back to the philosophy background. I'm just interested in a lot of

different things. And so once I kind of dig my teeth into something, I just go down and further and further and further and further. And certainly now with things like Brock and chat GPT, it makes it even easier to get a better understanding of how this stuff actually works. So asymmetric as a whole, we have a couple of hedge funds, a few venture capital funds. We just launched our third VC fund, which is the first crypto VC fund ever to be a focus on consumer apps. And the macro side continues to drive a lot of this decision making. So, you know, as I kind of in 2022 as an example, we were actually pretty bearish, which worked out, you know, because we had a global tightening's regime across all the central banks. And then we flipped really bullish towards the end of that year.

And I still think we're actually in a structural bull market. There's some headwinds currently that we could probably dive into or save for bits and bips. But that general passion for learning and understanding and knowledge seeking just, you know, is part of who I am. And that's led me to things like global macro. That's led me to things like Web 3 and, you know, software development and then other things previously in my career. Yeah. I mean, this is, yeah, just such an interesting. way that you kind of pulled all the different strands together. And it's reflected in asymmetric where, you know, as you mentioned, so you have these two hedge funds, the liquid alpha fund, a high volatility fund. You have the different venture funds that you mentioned. However, you are also well known for

meme coins and the bong trade. That's right. And yeah. So I would be curious to kind of hear how you got into that and how you think about that section of the market. market. So my background, I mean, look at me. I'm like covered in tattoos. You know, like, I don't really look the part of a traditional kind of hedge fund guy, right? My background has been very much in a lot of emerging technologies as well as culture, right? So, you know, I'm a musician, you know, DJ. As some of you, some people actually know, I've DJ at a party in Singapore with one of my portfolio co-founders. I'll be co-founders. And, you know, like I have two brothers that are apparel designers. we've had clothing lines together.

Like I've been involved in culture for a very long time. And I think one of the benefits to having exposure to that is you can, you can kind of see things through a lens slightly differently than say traditionally trained MBAs or financial people because there really is no curriculum around pop culture in, you know, business school for the most part. And at least that's my understanding. So what does that do with Bond? Well, asymmetric uniquely sits at this intersection of technology, capital, and culture.

And by having a pulse on culture, you can identify things like meme points early on. And so the question is, well, Joe, how, like why bong or why, you know, meme points in general? And it, at least from my perspective, it didn't seem that difficult to ascertain. You had Dogecoin, which obviously was the first one. and that thing went to an $85 billion market cap in 2021, which is absolutely insane. And it's literally a joke, right? I mean, this is, the power of this is that if you look at something like the history of Dogecoin, you're going, this thing should not be worth this much money, yet it is.

And so it's like you really have to challenge your own thinking as to why that's the case. Well, if you learn about why Dogecoin became so popular, Elon Musk. and then the avenues to obtain Dogecoin, Robin Hood, coin base, etc. Right? Like that, you're like, okay, there's something there from a trading perspective, right? We can argue the fundamentals of a mean coin all day, but because they don't exist. That's not the point. This thing became worth $85 billion.

It's probably worth paying attention to. So then you had Shibino on Ethereum, which was arguably the dog coin for, you know, Ethereum. That thing went to like a $45 billion market cap. 2021 as well. Crazy huge community around it. Obviously, the Ethereum community and the D5 boom of the past cycle helped feed a lot of what was happening in Chibaino and there's the crazy lore behind giving half of it to Vitalik and it burned, all these things, right? Then I was looking at in October 2023, I was noticing a lot of stable coin flow into Solana from Ethereum and other

chains, but primarily Ethereum. And this was, the price of Solana was roughly around, you know, the level, or it was just below the level where it collapsed after the FTX implosion. And so I was looking at it going like, there's a lot of flow coming into Salana. Maybe some of this isirdrop farming, but maybe not. And the price is at a very key level. And so I looked at it and thought, if Solana breaks out of this price at this key level, you're going to have a lot of momentum traders pile into Salano, which will drive the price higher, which means existing Salana holders will see their net worth go up. And a lot of these crypto natives, DGens, as you may want to call them, tend to press their bets when they see their net worth increase based on the holdings of their crypto portfolio,

which implies that they're likely going to buy a meme coin. Well, what is the meme coin at the time that really was on, you know, had any sort of semblance of community or anything around and on Salana? And that was Bonk. Bonk has this kind of Netflix-esque quality story behind it where, you know, there's air dropped on this on Christmas Day is 2022. And, you know, the sentiment of the Salonah community post-FTX was like really on suicide watch at that point. And all of these wallets around the world, a lot of them were developers. And So they all of a sudden had this like bonus to help them keep building and be inspired. And so Bont kind of saved defi on Solana to some extent and certainly developer interest to some extent in the late 2022 timeframe.

I thought to myself like if people are going to buy a mean point, it's going to be bong. And then I went and looked at the chart. And I was like, this thing's at like a $28 million market cap. you know, if I'm correct in this path-dependent set of outcomes, this thing's probably some percentage of Shibina Inu and some percentage of Dogecoin, right? Turned out to be true. Solana broke out. A lot of people started to pile more into Solana, bridging over into Salana, and ultimately ended up buying Bonk, and it went to roughly like a $2 billion mark gap in a couple of months. The reason that I kind of point out the technology culture

finance intersection is that there isn't really a framework to identify this in traditional finance, let alone crypto to some extent. And so by having a pulse on understanding internet culture, understanding the viral nature of content and memes and how stuff information propagates around the internet, especially with memes, and having that be financialized through a meme coin coupled with all of the other kind of more empirical, you know, wadings that I put onto it, it just kind of made sense. And so, yes, I'm famously known for this trade, which is super ironic because I didn't really think it was that difficult to put on because I was just like, I'm triangulating all the points,

weighing the probabilities of the outcome. And if this thing, you know, does what I think it can do, it's worth of fortune. It turned out to be true. And so I saw that and tell me if I'm wrong. I don't know if Bonk was heard of that original technology master fund, which I saw ranked in third place for 12-month cumulative return in March 2024. Is that correct? Yeah. So it was one of the bigger performance drivers. But just to clarify, because, you know, we have some pretty rigorous risk management principles at asymmetric for the liquid alpha fund. That position was only 2% of the funds at U.S. And the reason is we have what's called a concentration risk policy where anything that's not in the top 20 by. market cap, we never spend more than 2% of the funds AUM on that particular position for hopefully obvious reasons. I would have loved to put more in, but you have to maintain those kind of stringent risk management principles. And it was absolutely a performance driver for the fund. So I am so curious because obviously we're in a quite different era at this moment for meme coins.

And I actually heard you say on a recent podcast, the meme coin trade is over. And so, and, you know, I asked on Twitter what I should ask you. And Travis Kling, who was recently on bits and bibs, he had a specific quote he wanted me to ask you about. He said, Pump Fund has magnified the worst parts of crypto and then metastasized the most degenerate, the most nihilistic, the most pointless, the most worthless. So, yeah, I'd be interested to hear, so your reaction to that. And then just generally where you think mean coins are going and if you feel like, is that trade literally over, as I heard you recently say? Yeah, so Travis is a good friend of mine. I saw him on Twitter respond to you. We were just hanging out in Austin last week. So good on you, Travis. So let's talk about the meme point trade and then I'll get to the pump one piece from that Travis raised. So the reason I say the main point trade is over is it's over in its current implementation. And so, you know, I've been on other interviews where I kind of look at these, call them technological innovations or narratives in critical.

as versions of software. So you can think of like Dogecoin was kind of like the beta version of a meme coin. And then you had Sheba Inu was kind of the 1.0 and then Blanc was the 2.0. And then the flurry of meme coins after that is like the 3.0, 3.1, 3.2. That's just kind of how I frame a thing in crypto. We could talk about the same thing with AI agents, right? We kind of had the 1.0 version of this in Q4. Crazy speculative bubble. It's crashed since then. There will be a 2.0 version. of something. I don't know when. I don't know what it'll look like. But that's just how these things kind of develop over time, especially as you have technologists writing code to try to create the next new big thing in this new kind of category. So the mean point trading over, I'm meaning that in the sense of how we've seen it play out over probably the past 18 months. I don't think that you're going to be able to consistently launch 30,000 tokens a day and think that there's going to be this kind of crazy community of people or new people onboarded because of that.

That is, there's way too much thrash and, you know, mental brain damage from trying to ascertain what is the next meme going to be a part of. There's going to be some new implementation or innovation or iteration of what meme coins actually look like. And so that trade opportunity is what you should be looking for. I mean, the reason I mentioned the meme coin trade is over is that it has less to do with meme coins and more to do with being a trader. When you're a trader, if you only can, if you're only say like a technical analyst and all you do is look at charts, you can have reasonable success with that. But you should probably factor in things like global liquidity or also, you know, like trade policy.

Like there's other things that I think are valuable to you as a trader to have in your toolkit, if you will. And so the meme coin trade, when I say it's over, I'm like, that was a moment in time where there was the opportunity to make a lot of money on this implementation or this iteration of meme coins. That is gone. That's the same thing for like the liquid staking trade that was, you know, early 2023 when you had the Chappelle or 2024, for the Chappelle upgrade, you know, you could basically just bought Lido's token, LDO, and made two, three X your money. That trade was over within a matter of months. It's the same thing. So I think as a trader, you should be constantly like reevaluating and resharpening your knife, so to speak, versus just like, this is the one thing that I'm good at as a trader. And I'm just

going to keep like, you know, cutting with it. And eventually that knife gets dull. And you're just not going to have the outcome that you're expecting. So that's what I'm I meant by the trade is over in its current kind of iteration. As it relates to, you know, pump that fun in Travis's thread, because I saw it, and of course I disagree with it. But I get the sentiment. I love Travis. He's a good friend and he's a sharp guy. I think there's a couple things to, you know, this is maybe as a fellow philosopher, you will appreciate this. You have to look at the context of A, the what is being said and when. So Travis's post was I think it was like a week or so ago.

And the markets have been decimated. You also have activity as it relates to me, quite specifically on pump fund plummeting. Those are usually bottom signals when you start to see these types of hosts that are, I would say objectively bearish or negative towards the content of what he's actually sharing. So I look at it and go, thank you, Travis. You're giving me more indications that were closer to a bottom. But more importantly, let's talk about the content, right?

So, you know, he said something to the effect of it's like brought out like the kind of, it's kind of like kicked the rock and all the roaches have come out and they've done. Like that's kind of the general sense of this. It's like the worst of crypto has kind of reared its ugly head and, you know, we got these people versus, you know, previous people, et cetera. I think clearly that's subjective. Let's just establish that. one of the things that's most fascinating to me about the pump that fun argument is how crypto is so uniquely unique in rewording things.

Let me just explain what I mean. So if a SaaS business, you know, provide some software as a service, I don't know, pick your SaaS service and they, you know, people pay for it. They use this product. They sign up to use this thing and they pay for it one way or the other, whether it's, you know, payment for order flow through Robin Hood or it's, you know, paying Dropbox a monthly subscription. You're paying for it in one way, shape, or form. That's called revenue. In crypto, it's called extraction. Now, we have this really, like I'm telling you, there's, I have never worked in an industry where we can re, like, just change the vernacular and everybody gets behind it.

Why did everybody get behind the term extractive or extracting? Because they're upset that they're losing money because the market's going down. I can assure you that no one was talking about extraction last year in late Q1, early Q2, when pump up fund launched and meme points were going insane. No one was talking about extraction. Now the market sentiment has changed and the prices have come down. And all of a sudden, it's extraction. Pump that fund.

I don't, I'm not an investor. I'm friends with folks that are investors in it. I don't know the founders. Like, I have no skin in the game as it relates to Pumpout Fund. Pumpfunk Fun is an amazing business, period. Like, if you can't look at what they've been able to pull off as a business on a permissionless network and generate that type of revenue, I mean, I don't know what to tell you.

Like, it's a ridiculously successful business. That's not extraction. That is their business model, right? Now, you can argue that the way that, like, the way that it's, has been utilized, can be extracted. And there's no doubt that there's bad nefarious actors that have used pump.combe or meme coins in general to extract value rug people, et cetera. There's no debate about that. That's been the case for basically any speculative industry in the history of humanity. It's nothing new. You're always going to end up with some subset of

people that are going to, if there's an opportunity to make money, they will exploit it and exploit people no matter what. It's not specific to meme points. It's not specific to pump that fun. It's just the way it is. I mean, the term snake oil salesman, right? I mean, these things have been around forever. You had countless amounts of people that got hoodwinked during the buildout of the railroads in the United States in the late 1800s when everybody was speculating on railroads. This is not a new thing. It just happens to be, you know, happening at like the speed of light with information propagating around the internet at, you know, breakneck pace that has never happened before and the ability for people to permissionlessly scam people, right? Like, you put all that together and you can

totally see how Travis makes the argument and it actually holds up. But that's the result, not necessarily of Pump.com or Solana or Meancoins is the result of, you know, human beings, being human beings, being bad human beings, in my opinion, and that's not going to ever change. Yeah, I think, like, if I look at his argument, I agree with you that there are elements of it that are similar to previous cycles in crypto like ICOs and NFTs and stuff like that. However, at least in those cycles, there was a semblance or at least the entrepreneurs or builders of those projects, you know, had plans to kind of make something beyond just the, the actual, you know, token that they were selling, whereas the meme coins didn't even pretend to try to build something longer lasting. So I feel like I get, I get like what he's saying. I get what you're saying. Because, of course, you know, a lot of people that invested in ICOs did lose a lot of money. Same with NFTs. It's just that, like I said, they didn't even pretend to try to

build something that was more serious or substantial. It's almost like utterly transparent scamming, right? Like the ice go boom, you had, I mean, I know you're around. I saw these deals and I was like, there's no way I'm investing in this stuff because this is a stamp. But they were coming across as if they were going to build something. Meme coins are like, we're literally launching this random frog meme and like there's nothing about it. Like there's like transparently, this is a speculative asset. Whereas in the ICU boom, you had people putting lipstick on a pig and selling this vision. and then clearly with clearly no intention of actually building it out.

So I agree with you. There at least was this story. Like the white papers. Yeah, but the intentions of those people were exactly the same. They're scamming, right? Or committing fraud or whatever you want to, you know, rug pulling, etc. They're just with mean points, they're just like, it's so easy. Press a button.

I can try to scam you. And I think the one thing I will also mention is it's, it's, there's this weird kind of conundrum, I think that like I struggle with this. I think the industry struggles with it where on the one hand, we're very much pro-libertarian values, my property, self-custody, permissionless networks, et cetera. But then also we're like, hey, this permissionless network scammed people. And it's like, well, that's kind of at odds with each other. Like no one actually put a gun to your head and said, go buy this token on pump.com.

Right? And so it's especially from a U.S. perspective, it's weird how, you know, folks, we value freedom. and self-sovereignty in these core beliefs and values as Americans, and I'm sure somewhat pernates around the world. But then like something bad happens. And all of a sudden we're like, where are the regulators? Why is this person in jail? And it's like, well, no one forced you to do this. So, like, are you going to take responsibility or are you going to complain on the internet and get engagement from it because you're upset that this thing, this random, like, bizarre meme coin rug pulled? Like, I'm not suggesting that rug pulling is okay.

I'm not suggesting that scamming is okay. I'm not. I'm just saying, like, what part are you leaning towards based on, like, what your bags look like? If you get rug pulled, you're probably going to be demanding the state come in and do something. If you made a fortune off of whiff, you probably don't want that. Right, right. But, yeah, I mean, I do think part of the point of laws is to go after scams. 100%.

Yeah, yeah. All right. So in a moment, we're going to switch to talking a little bit more about macro stuff. Like, obviously, that's quite the talk of the day. But first, a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. Picture this. The crypto market just got wrecked by billions in liquidations. You need to figure out what happened and what's next. But where do you even start? Meet Focal by Falcon X, your AI-powered crypto analyst. It's like having a legion of experts at your fingertips. ready to break down market-moving events, chart DeFi Protocol TVL, or explain why Solana Mindshare is rising. Get clarity in a world of noise with Focal. Learn more at askfocal.com. Hi, I'm Matt Hogan, CIO of Crypto Asset Manager Bitwise. Look, crypto can be confusing. There's so much noise and the space changes so quickly. That's why, every week, I write a five-minute memo on the biggest stories impacting crypto. in plain English.

Why is Bitcoin up or down? What are people missing? Where should investors look next? Get the lowdown every week. Sign up to get the weekly CIO memo delivered straight to your inbox. Go to bitwiseinvestments.com slash CIO memo. That's bitwiseinvestments.com slash CIO memo. Carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before investing.

We have another listener comment responding to the episode with Tushar Jane about SIMD2, on X, Zorro writes, quote, Salinas inflation vote shows caution. Even with 61% yes, the super majority wasn't reached. Validators might be playing it safe to keep the network stable. Again, if you want to hear a comment featured on the show, please write a review or leave a comment on an episode on YouTube or X. Back to my conversation with Joe. So after the election, you actually did not make it onto bits and bits for a long stretch.

It seemed like you were on a plane a lot of the time. I was so curious what you were doing. I imagine, I guess, the election kicked something off in a high gear. So can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, sure. So first and first and foremost, I moved to Miami, as you can probably see. I moved to Miami right before the election. So like, you know, for like four or five weeks before the election. And then prior to that, I was in Singapore for token 2049 and breakpoint and a bunch of stuff. And because bits and bits, I think we're doing it weekly now, but it was biweekly, and it's Monday. Every Monday for basically the next few months, I was on an airplane. I don't know why the schedule worked out that way. A lot of it had to do with

the move, as well as conferences I was speaking at, investors that I was meeting with. And Monday is like the worst day to travel. And I just kept getting hit with Monday. And it was always on during the Bits and Bips podcast. I think I was fortunate enough to go back on a couple weeks ago. and here we are on a Monday and I'm available. So that was primarily why I missed the majority of it was it's just literally the job and as well as relocating to Miami. What was happening, you know, I would say more broadly on the macro front. I mean, I think we look back on it now and it's pretty clear that, you know, markets were

certainly crypto, obviously, very favorable towards Trump administration. But there was still, you know, I think there was still a, a reason to be bullish heading into the end of the year in risk assets in general, mostly because I think this this 2.0 version of Trump's presidency, look, I mean, his first presidency, I think he was surprised that he won, you know, and he kind of like quickly assembled the team around him. This time, it just seems completely different. Now, you can disagree with his politics or the approach that he's taking, but like the people around him are just arguably more. season, more intelligent. I don't know how you would argue against that. And so I actually thought,

like, wow, this is actually going to be likely one of the most kind of pro innovation, pro-business, deregulatory or regulatory clarity across not just crypto, but, you know, all forms of innovation, including AI. And so as a technologist, as an emerging, you know, emerging technologists, these were all like very positive things to me. What I think we, We've seen since then, and it's ironic that his day of the presidency marks the top in a lot of risk assets. Tesla was actually the day of the Fed in mid-Dcember, and it's effectively gone straight down. If you look at the momentum stocks, high-tech stocks, and then look at things like Solana, Ethereum, and even Bitcoin to some extent, but I put Salon in Ethereum kind of like

high-tech. They're not so much the digital gold narrative, even though Ethereum really wants to be. The stocks are, the charts are basically the same, right? Like, they're just, they're all exactly the same. And that was very surprising to me because, you know, I think, you know, part of being a trader for 25 years, you have to be right like 51% of the time. And I always say that there's nothing wrong with being wrong. Staying wrong is a sin. And that will kill you as a trader.

So I actually, again, probabilistically kind of weighed the outcomes heading into Trump's inauguration saying like the headlines that are coming out before the inauguration for how they're thinking about this crypto cabinet and the policies they want to put forth, you know, and then the deregulatory nature of business in general, as well as like the dollars likely going to weaken under Trump, all of these things. I mean, just the headlines alone since his inauguration are, I don't think we, I don't think we in crypto could have dreamed for better headlines. It's just, it's unbelievable. I mean, take the SEC alone. How many cases have they dropped in the past few weeks? Like all of them? I mean, just that alone is enough to be like,

oh my God. Then you've got SAB 121 being repealed. You've got, you know, the investigation into Operation Chow Point 2.0. You've got the banks now actually providing custody services and crypto. All of these things are happening in like a very small amount of time. Yet the price is straight down. What? Doesn't make any sense. You would think, probabilistically, like, you've got all of this positive momentum, all these headlines, massive 180 in terms of the regulatory environment in the United States, these should be bullish tailwinds, right? Not bearish tailwinds or bullish headwits. And the price was straight down. And so you start to look at it and you go, wait a second.

This has nothing to do with crypto. And I've been talking with a lot of my friends in the kind of the hedge fund industry, crypto and Tradfai. And, you know, as we sit here today on March 17th, what has occurred since, you know, call it early February till even last week is a wholesale unwinding of crowded trades. The, there's these multi-platform hedge funds. So these are like, you know, and I'm not picking on it. There's like Citadel, Millennium, Ballyasni, 0.72. And they have these pods, these like, you know, groups of traders and PMS that. get a couple billion dollars. These funds have tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars under management. They get a couple billion dollars. They're like, okay, you're going to run this particular strategy, this is called factor-based investing, and you're going to focus on momentum, and you're

going to focus on realized volatility, and you're going to focus on industrials and cyclicals and whatever, right? So they kind of break them up into these various strategies. And the problem is that these funds, they represent about $400 billion of the hedge fund. industry, about 10%, but they represent about anywhere from two to three trillion dollars worth of the market because of leverage. And so when these funds start to de-risk, they all de-risk at the same time. And then when these funds reach certain thresholds, they get stopped out. They have to de-gross, which means de-risking is one thing. Degrossing means you're actually raising cash. And so this happened. It started at the beginning of February and the mid-February, and then it

accelerated in the past few weeks, there's nothing fundamentally different about the market right now. Yes, Trump has been talking about terrorists, but we've known this the entire time he's been on the campaign trail. This is not anything new. And yes, is he taking an aggressive approach? Sure. Is that why we had a structural unwind of all these risk assets at the same time? Like, if you actually look underneath the surface, you look at people saying, and this is why people should ignore these types of tweets where people are like, the S&P was already down 10%. it's like right, but look in under the covers there. If you go look at like, you know, the momentum stocks, the Mag 7s or other certain, you know, sectors within the SB 500, they've been destroyed.

The level of pain, I mean, how do you have Robin Hood drop 50% in a few weeks? Palantir 40, 50% in a few weeks. Tesla, I mean, Elon Musk is in the White House, 55% from his all-time high in a couple of months. These are not normal moves, especially when they happen in such a compressed amount of time. And from my perspective, this is a mechanical unwinding of these multi-platform shops that have to de-risk, that have to de-gross. But what you'll see is the doomers come out and say, see, I told you, like the stock market's overvalued or all these things.

And I'm not suggesting that the bottom is in and that we can't go lower. But what has occurred has nothing to really do with the fundamentals of the market. It has more to do with these massive shops that are being. forced to de-risk and de-gross. And when you do that, it creates kind of almost like this negative feedback loop. Because then the volatility index rises. People get afraid. They buy protection, which then means these things called vol control funds. They have to sell. Well, then you have CTAs, which are automated trading algorithms, if you will, or trend-following algorithms. They make up an enormous amount of the market. They're selling as the momentum is going lower. Now they're

actually short the market, which is not great. If this is actually the bottom, right? It becomes this mechanistic approach to the markets that I don't think is well understood across certainly retail investors. They're just looking at Tesla being down 50% and going, what the hell? This is a sort of programmatic approach to how these markets can operate and function when you have super crowded trades start to unwind. And you can also represent this by one last thing that I'll mention is the liquidity, not global liquidity, the liquidity in the futures markets. So there's this thing called top of book liquidity.

So if you have an order book, you've got bids and offers, right? And at the bid and the offer, if you add that up, you can see what the total liquidity is. Well, the S&P 500's E mini contract, this is futures contract, typically has about anywhere from like $18 to $22 million of liquidity at the top of the book. Last Friday it was $3 million. So what does that tell you? You, again, not only have these structural unwinds that are happening at these large, multi-platform shops, but you have market makers pulling liquidity.

So it creates an even more dramatic, volatile environment. When you start to see order book liquidity improve, when you start to see the VIX start to come down, they will actually start regrossing again. And so, you know, I'm not stoked with February. Trust me, I was dead wrong. I thought we were going to rip to new all-time highs this quarter, dead wrong. First one to admit it. But I still don't think fundamentally anything has really changed beyond this mechanistic

unwinding of crowded positions and the way that the kind of inner workings of the equity markets and ultimately, you know, affecting things like crypto actually work. Yeah, I mean, that all makes sense. The one part where I might quibble with is I think you said that for the tariffs, Trump has been talking about this, even on the campaign trail. do think that there was this moment where for a while, actually, people thought that it was more of a negotiation tactic. And then when reality set in, I do feel like that kind of triggered some movement. But I do want to actually ask you about a comment you made earlier. You said that you

said, currently it's structurally still a bull market. And maybe it's just those fundamentals that you just talked about. But you might have heard, screened a bit of controversy, Arthur Hayes recently, I think like a month ago, said that he expected that Bitcoin could possibly drop to 75K. And I wondered what you thought of his projection. Yeah. So, look, credit to Arthur for finally being right because all of his stuff prior to that, it's been dead wrong for like the previous two years. So you got it, man. Ironically, the 75K call, not to pat myself in the back, but at the beginning of the year, I was actually tactically bearish.

I posted this thing on Twitter, like the first few days of January and caught a lot of crap for it. Because people were like, dude, you're a bear on the sudden. What is going? I'm like, no, no, no. I think like the first couple of weeks or January are going to be a little dicey. I was right about that, but I should have just stayed that way for the rest of the quarter because my target was actually 75K. I thought that if we got a proper kind of pullback, Bitcoin was going to go to,

there's a technical level on the chart, which is roughly the 50-week moving average as well as where there was this giant gap in the CME futures, was right around 75K. I was like, you know, pick a spot. I think if we actually really puke, it's probably down to that level. In early January, we got down to 89K and immediately got bought. And so I was like, my target was wrong, direction was correct. Arsworth's been right so far, for sure. I will give him credit because I haven't given him any credit for the past couple of years on a lot of his writings and a lot of his calls. Do I think that it could go lower than 75K? Of course. Do I think it's likely? I mean, it's tough to say. One of the things that I tend to track, which I'm sure you do as well, Laura, is, you know, the actual institutional flows into these Bitcoin and even Ethereum related products or just the ETFs in ETPs in general.

basically had, I think, five straight weeks of outflows with a record notional volume last week. I mean, if you look at Michael Saylor and what he did last year, I saw a report saying he was effectively 28% of the buying of all Bitcoin last year, which is just an enormous number. And then if you add on, you know, extrapolate out, well, what's the other 72%? If you assume even half of that is ETFs and you just had a massive set of outflows, well, you're going to need a regrossing. as I was talking about earlier with these hedge funds of buying these ETFs again. Now, the reason that I don't think we're like, I say structurally in a bull market still, if you look at the set of potential outcomes in catalysts later this year, we've already heard about the Sturis of Bitcoin Reserve, we already got SAB 121, et cetera, et cetera.

What people always ask me like, well, Joe, there's no apparent catalyst on the horizon. Then I'm like, you're right. that's exactly the catalyst that you should be prepared for is the one that you don't think is coming. Like, let's be clear, in October of 2023, there was a fake tweet or an incorrect tweet from like one of the, you know, the crypto media companies saying the Bitcoin ETF been approved or whatever it was. And it actually, it started the bull market, which is just so crypto to do that. That's a catalyst. No one had in their model. No one had in their forecast that a fake, or an improper tweet or an incorrect tweet would actually kick off, you know, basically a gamma squeeze against these dealers.

And now all of a sudden people are like, oh, I'm buying and now it's gone. That's the same sort of thing that I think could potentially happen this year because if you look at the tailwinds, again, policy, regulation. You have Wobot, which is the second largest sovereign wealth fund. The UAE bought half a billion dollars worth of Ibit last quarter. I mean, it's the seventh largest holder of Ibit in one quarter. Like these, these aren't day traders. These are people accumulating. And I think that that race has started with a lot of the other sovereigns.

So there's, in my opinion, there's enough potential tailwinds. I mean, even Michael Saylor with the, what is he raising, like $42 billion or $21 billion or something. I mean, there's just an enormous amount of money to raise to 2027 to continue to buy Bitcoin. And if he's the only buyer, yeah, that's a problem. To be totally frank. But like, if I zoom out a bit and go, has something structurally, changed macroeconomically or structurally changed with, you know, Bitcoin in general. And currently, the answer is no. We have seen, I mean, the dollar continues to weaken. We do see a repatriation

trade happening in the opposite direction, right? So a lot of these companies, or excuse me, a lot of investors have poured an enormous amount of money into U.S. investment and U.S. risk assets. Those are coming home. And you can see this just in the flows. So, you can see this in Stock, Kong up 20% for the year. If you look at like the German Dax, the footsie, basically the rest of the world is actually doing better than the SP 500 this year. And a lot of that is people repatriating cash home to invest, I would say, locally or domestically. So what does that mean for crypto?

I mean, the global liquidity picture continues to look relatively sound. We saw an uptick so far this quarter. The dollar is weakening. You do have yields coming down. down across the curve. We'll see if that stays that way, to be totally frank. And like, there's nothing wrong with a steepen, steepen curve. It's a pretty healthy market when we actually get that. I do think we do, there's a, there's a problem with just the risk appetite. So like one of the things that I tend to track is kind of like, what is the actual appetite

for risk globally? And that is dropping as global liquidity is increasing. That's not good. Right. And so a lot of the way that Bitcoin can be affected, I know a lot of people look at the M2 chart. They try to fit it as like a six-week lag. And I just don't think that works because a lot of this is sentiment driven. And the sentiment right now is still pretty bad, but fundamentally the U.S. economy is not in a recession. We're not nose diving into recession. I just don't see that being the case. Certainly, as we see here today, we could see what happens after April 2nd and reevaluate that position.

but then globally, there is a continued demand and interest in crypto. You go to places like Dubai in Singapore, you can already see being integrated into society there. I met with a founder that's building an amazing kind of peer payments of business for all of Africa. This stuff is happening globally. And so as I'm triangulating or kind of synthesizing all these data points, I still don't think that up, the top is in and we're now in a bare market. It just doesn't seem that way to me today. Let's switch to talking about Solana because I know that that is something that you are very knowledgeable about. Yes.

Obviously, Solana, you know, just had this really interesting moment where, you know, there was this proposal to try to change the inflation rate and to make it more dynamic and responsive to actual activity on the network. And surprisingly, actually, despite the fact that at least to me, it felt like kind of sentiment. in the community was more toward adopting it. It failed. And I was curious for your take on why that was and how you think the proposal, you know, might be tweaked in the future to push it through. And by the way, for people who don't know, this is called SIMD-228. Yeah, SimD-228.

So I spent a pretty good amount of time internally debating this with myself. And I didn't actually take a side because I couldn't disdemeanor. side. Like I was chatting with some close friends of mine, some of those very close to the actual proposal. And it was like, I'm just, I usually can be convicted in one way or the other. And so I'll get to why I think it failed, but where my position is on it is is is is torn. Because on the technology side, I can I can appreciate the desire for folks to go down. this direction of like a market-based approach to the inflation rate. However, as a technologist and someone who's been an open source for a long time and seen how things can go awry, potentially

in open-source projects, I was concerned of saying like, wait a second, okay, hold on, time out, totally understand your position. Why are we introducing potentially a breaking change? And yes, a lot of developers, you can roast me on this if I'm incorrect on this. But I see it as like a fundamental change to a key part of the protocol. It may not actually affect the performance of the network or anything to that effect, because I'm not deep in the code these days, but it's still a technological change. Now, the technological change could be de minimis. It could be a totally, you know, moot point in terms of the implementation change for how this works. It's still a change. And so one of the things that I've seen in prior open source projects that have become very successful

is being boring and stable is like pretty attractive to people because you can count on it. I mean, this is one of the benefits to things like Bitcoin is like doesn't really change, right? Like, yes, and you know, you've got a bunch of stuff on top of it that people have hacked and tweaked and figured out how to do cool things on top of Bitcoin. But like, of course, the source code generally doesn't change for Bitcoin and that's good. We want it to be stable. And so Salata is not Bitcoin clearly. and the source code should change. The network should upgrade. There should be new features and capabilities. And like, I'm 100% on board with that. But the question was, if we're changing the

inflation rate for technical reasons, to me, it felt like we're introducing some risk. Okay, now let's talk about like the more kind of financial side of this, right? There was some potential tax benefits to U.S. people that were staking. There were, you know, the ability for all this locked up stake sole, locked up stakes, all I should say, could actually start to flow into defy, which is also a valid point. But the other thing is Solana, I mean, as we see here today, the CME futures are launching Solana today. And so we have how many Salana ETFs that have been filed? I don't know. Probably half a dozen, if not more at this point. We're starting to actually have institutions take a really close look at Solana. And by taking

such a close look, these institutions are now saying, hey, this is an asset we can get behind from an investment standpoint or we can recommend this to our clients through an ETF, et cetera. Now all of a sudden we're changing something that is stable to institutional allocators, which is the inflation rate or the yield generated from Stakesl. Again, I'm not suggesting it's right or wrong. It's just another thing that could potentially introduce risk to institutions actually being interested in Solana. And this is why I couldn't really get to a decision because I was like, I would love to have a markets-based approach to, you know, the inflation rate.

I would love for more, you know, Salana to flow into Defi protocols. I have a bunch of portfolio companies that are building D-Fi stuff on Solana. But then on the flip side, I could see the other argument, which is like, well, institutions, they kind of also favor stability. And all of a sudden, you're going to have this kind of dynamic approach to the interest rate or the yield generated from it, it's hard for them to wrap their heads around that or just as simple as introducing additional friction into the buying process because it's a non-deterministic yield, if you will. So that's my take on it. It's like I couldn't actually get to a decision.

And it was because I was kind of torn on both sides, the technological side and kind of the institutional or slash financial side. I do think that, you know, it pass, fail is kind of the way that you look at these things, right? But the failure of its passing to me is not failure. There's actually, I think it was one of the most, if not the most voted upon, you know, blockchain proposals in history across any chain. Yeah, 72% participation. Huge, right? And so to me, you know, the silver lining, if you will, for those that wanted it to pass and it didn't pass, the silver lining is we have an incredibly engaged community. It's on countless debates, and conversation, to me, that is a great litmus test to the health of an open source project

and ecosystem, is that when these types of conversations come up or these debates, you have a hive mind of people being actively involved and engaged and not just passively sitting back and letting things happen. To me, that was actually the best part of this failure was that you actually had massive success in the conversation and the community coming together to actually try to figure out what the best path was for Solana going forward. Yeah, I mean, the one thing, which I don't know if you heard, but Tushar had an argument about what you were saying about the institutions wanting to invest in Salana. He actually was saying that basically the real yield. So I guess like if you include staking in an ETP, then the real yield that you end up getting is

actually even negative because it's just like it has to do with technicalities about how the products are structured. But the point is that he was saying that he felt like those investigators, investors that are more sophisticated are going to understand that and not be as interested and that it's more like quote unquote dumb retail or he actually also objected to the word dumb, but that they would be kind of swayed by the sticker price. And he was saying, essentially that they were trying to attract more numerate investors. So that was just, you know, one thing when you were talking about the institutions being interested that he, that was sort of his rebuttal.

But I did want to also ask just generally about Salana because obviously this cycle, which either we might still be in or maybe it's ended unclear, but it was the first time that Solano was the center of the Cryptomania, right, with the whole meme coin thing. It also, for the first time, attracted the most new developers out of any of the crypto ecosystems. And that's, to me, a very, very strong signal. You know, you hear a lot about, like, the different usability advantages that Solana has, etc. However, you know, at the moment, it's down 36% year over year. Bitcoin is up.

Ethereum's down worse, of course. But, you know, as you yourself said, you think that meme coins potentially are over. So what do you think are the next catalyst for Solana? Yeah, so first and foremost, there's a reason it's called King Bitcoin. It should certainly with the institutional adoption, it should outperform. I've been saying this for I don't even know how long at this point that I don't think Bitcoin dominance has topped. I don't think it's close.

I think you have to have, you know, we do it asymmetric. The majority of our book is in Bitcoin. And it's, you know, structured beyond just buying spot Bitcoin. But there just isn't a case currently to suggest that all coins are. somehow miraculously going to outperform or that the ETH BTC chart, it's finally bottomed, but it hasn't. This is not changing. Like, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but like, I don't see an alt season anytime soon.

We may get some idiosyncratic spikes here and there from like, you know, the Salada ETF, the Ripple ETF, the Lyttef, the Lys ETF, whatever. But for the most part, we're not going to see that for quite some time because all of the tailwinds on the institutional side are behind Bitcoin. Okay, so let me just kind of establish that. Like, Bitcoin is going to be the king forever, in my opinion. Then if you remove Bitcoin from that and go, what's left, what's going to be, you know, out of what's left, what is going to be, what are going to be the market leaders? We're going to be the things that are actually, you know, potentially returning, outperforming each other.

Forget Bitcoin. Really, it's going to be difficult to outperform Bitcoin unless, of course, your Dogecoin, which did outperform Bitcoin last year by a mile. So if you look at Solana, excuse me, let me talk about Ethereum. And I've been a fan of Ethereum technology, not a fan of the asset for years. That has been a good trade. I think that there is a structural problem to the way Ethereum is currently designed, as well as the roadmap that they put forth and putting, frankly, a 2030 date on it, which to me is just, I don't even know how that's possible. That was wild to me.

This is not a dunk on Ethereum. It's a structural problem with the way the network is designed. And they have tried to solve the scaling solution, a scaling problem through layer twos. I have been saying this for three or four years now that the reason it's called an L2 is that you have two problems. Like there's more problems in that now because there's how many L2s are there. So my point is, it's not the dog on Ethereum.

It's to simply say that like the current approach. approach is not working. And I don't see that changing miraculously overnight. And then in the meantime, you know, Ethereum's market cap and even just the actual price of a unit of Ethereum is, I don't know, was trading roughly $2,200 or something, something around there today. Like, it's not going to decide a lot of retail for the most part. A lot of people made a lot of money in the DFI boom with Ethereum. And God bless up. Like, that was a great trade. and you probably were involved in all of the protocols that we're launching on a bit. But that trade is over.

Just like I was saying, the current implementation of meme coins over. Like, that trade is over. So then you say, well, then what is the next thing? It's like, what are the scalable L1s? Slana, sweet, Aptos, there's probably a handful of others say. Right? Like, those things, these things do exist. And we have monad and stuff coming right.

But like, those, that kind of approach to layer one blockchains is fundamentally different than the way Ethereum is designed. And so within that, of course, I've been a Salonable since 2019. I've been super vocal about this. I just think that the way that it's designed is correct currently. And by the way, it could get usurped by another new L1 or maybe Sway or Aptos or say or somebody does something so fundamentally different than it's better. But today, it's Salaana. And Salaan has also had, arguably the biggest test of the blockchain's network in history, which was the launch of Trump's mean coin. And it didn't go down. In fact, the wallet providers were having issues. It wasn't even the chain, right? Because if you were able to transact on chain, you were totally fine. So even with that

big of a test, what's next for Solana? I mean, all I do is look at exactly the things that you describe. Where are developers going? What are they building on? They're building on Solana. In addition to that, institutions are building on Solana. So, you know, I saw a couple months ago, Fidelity has job openings for Salada blockchain engineers, right? I wrote about this a while ago, sometime last year, I think, because I had an open source company years ago and sold it. And when an open source project starts to get adopted within enterprises, it's basically a wrap. You saw this Ethereum, right? This is why I don't think Ethereum's ever going away.

once you started to see enterprises start to post job openings for Ethereum and now subsequently at Solana, you create this flywheel effect where it's like these organizations now are relying on this open source technology and building actual products or services on top of it, which means they have to hire people

that know how to build it and support it, which then means a cottage industry of support agencies, customer service or whatever, like consultancies that are experts in Salana can now start to support these. enterprises. Well, if Fidelity hires a Slana blockchain engineer, I think the other asset managers might have to. And if Visa does it, I'm pretty sure MasterCard is going to do it. And if PayPal did it, well, I'm pretty sure, like it starts to create this flywheel. And so to me, the developer kind of

gravitation towards Salana on the kind of indie developer front, as well as the enterprise developer adoption is a very, very strong signal as to why Solana coupled with all the other like performance, benefits, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff. If you do, if you. just follow the path of developers, there's usually value there. And the developers within Web3 are primarily going to build on Solana. I do also think that some of the projects that are more structural to Solana are yet to even affect the chain. That's not entirely true. I should say affect the change in like a step function increase. Things like Firedance, which is coming out of a jump, we know about that. The ANSA team has a separate client. But there's also companies that are getting

funded right now that are building like specific aspects for the validators on Solana to actually make them faster, cheaper, more profitable, whatever it is. And then you've got a company like Double Zero, which is arguably one of the most ambitious projects, I think, in history, which is, you know, decentralized actual internet infrastructure. I like the actual wires and fibers themselves to be able to land transactions faster, et cetera. Those types of things are, again, when you start to see these types of investments in these types of projects and companies, that is not a bearish signal longer term on something like Solana or any protocol. So if you follow the investment dollars and you follow developers today,

it feels like Solana is going to continue to be the fastest horse. And we're still, even in the drop of activity over February across all chains, Solana is still 57% of all activity. So even in a drawdown overall of activity, they're still the most active. And so I struggle to see a scenario where, you know, you should be selling all your salon and buying, pick another token. All right. Well, last couple of questions. I did also want to ask you, mention that you are investing in Bitcoin Defi or BitFi.

And I was wondering what you were looking for in your investments there and where you think that space is going to go. Because there was kind of like a lot of buzz about it last year, but then there hasn't been much activity as far as I understand. Yeah. So we launched that fund earlier. last year. So Dan held, who's Bitcoin OG. I know you know Dan. He joined the firm. We've been friends for a while. We were kind of like, we both saw the potential with BitFi, Bitcoin DFi, whatever you want to call it. And we couldn't figure out how, like, what's the best way of going about it? And so he joined the firm. We started basically an early stage VC fund specifically focused on

Bitcoin D5, Bitcoin BitFi. We brought another guy recently called Lucas, who's been lights out, super smart guy. He's been in the space for a while. It's like boots on the ground. And though the products that we've invested in, you know, whether it's like, you know, layer twos, meta protocols, exchanges, it's very similar to what you have seen in other ecosystems, but with kind of a bend towards how are they actually using Bitcoin to their advantage, right? So you can run, you know, like if you wanted to run a swapping, a token swapping thing, you could have it actually route to Ethereum, base, Solana, whatever. So you're kind of chainingnostic.

And so one of the things that we look for is what is the unique quality or characteristics that they're using Bitcoin for in this potential project? Dan and Lucas have been, you know, we chat every week. We have a partner call every Monday. And you're right. There was a huge flurry of activity last year and it's kind of waned a bit. typically that's when I like to invest in companies. And so we are still, you know, we meaning asymmetric are still really active in this space. In fact, you know, Dan and Lucas were at Heath, Denver,

and there were countless BitFi, you know, panels and networking events, et cetera, which was just, you know, it's ironic to see, but also very, you know, inspiring. And there are tons of projects out there that are still actually building on Bitcoin. But this is the time where we can actually be a little bit more selective because when the market isn't so hot, this is when you can actually find really solid teams that are going to be building for the long term that aren't subject to these kind of inflated valuations because the market is up so much. All right. And last question. The other big trend from last year that got everybody buzzing for a bit was AI and crypto. And you mentioned that earlier. And I wondered where you thought that was

headed. Yeah, I mean, it's such a, it's such a tough question to answer because like, before AI agents were a thing in crypto, no one thought of it, right? I mean, it just became a thing from True Terminal and it kind of went crazy from there. So I had this, I had this conversation with someone I was actually at a fundraiser in Palm Beach this past weekend. I was chatting with this woman about AI in general. And she has no exposure of crypto. She can just talk, chatting about AI and she thought that there was, you know, the only things that you could really do were like a rapper around, you know, so like talk to a PDF. You're just wrapping it all. And then an LLM. She's like, those are the only two things that you're like investable or the things that are

are there. And I was like, I think that's a false dichotomy because I do think that there's a huge opportunity in orchestration. And this is not new in software development. Orchestration is massive in Webtoon cloud. Like might be the biggest thing in Webtoon cloud. orchestration. And orchestration in AI, I think we're starting to see a lot more of it, kind of products or platforms that are launching as customized orchestration frameworks under the hood. And even at asymmetric, so we have a lot of proprietary software that we build in house. We have built effectively an end-to-end orchestration system. So quite literally, the team gets on a call and there's an AI recording agent in the Google Meet,

and all the product detail requirements are then mapped out. That's then pushed into linear, which is our product management system, which then kicks off an agent to write the code for these, to then actually issue a pull request for the correct GitHub repository that is then approved by one of the teammates. We have seen this cost roughly $2, and the time to, you know, progress or completion, of a particular feature

went from like a week to, I think, less than four hours. It's crazy. Wow. And so this is all because of orchestration and utilizing various aspects of AI through that workflow specific to us building our software. That's where I see an enormous amount of opportunity in AI in the immediate term is we've got all these building blocks.

You've got all these LOMs and agents and, you know, images and videos and audio. how are you actually building a workflow that's orchestrating the thing that you need to actually output? That's where I think you're going to start to see a lot of this in crypto as well. And so, yes, an AI agent that like tweets, okay, it works. It's not really useful. There's a project that I'm an advisor and also, you know, I've been a token holder before I was an advisor called Moby, where they're actually using specific data sets for this AI agent, right? So they get access to Grafane.

They're getting access to like coin market cap and dude analytics. They're actually doing something meaningful as opposed to just like shit posting on Twitter. I think you're going to see a lot more of that type of stuff, especially as orchestration comes to crypto AI, which will be represented by what you see kind of like in the non-crypto world. as I mentioned, even with our software that we're building, that orchestration layer for us, I mean, I probably don't have to hire engineers anymore, which is a sad thing to say as an engineer or I could be much more selective about the types of engineers that I hire because having that workflow and it generate the code for us, that's pretty good. I mean, the cost savings in that

are enormous. What are we going to be able to do as we apply that to other verticals, especially things like crypto? Wow. Wow. Yeah, that is super fascinating. story. All right, Joe, this has been such a great conversation. I've really enjoyed chatting with you. Where can people learn more about you and asymmetric? Yeah, you can go to X.com slash Joe McCann or you can go to Asymmetric.com. Perfect. Well, it's been a pleasure having you on Unchained. Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Joe and Asymmetric, check out the showness for this episode. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, both up from Matt Peltred, Winer Ranovich, Megan Gapis, Pamma Jimdar, and Marka Curia. Thanks for

listening.