Unchained - Landmark Regulation, ICOs, Downtober & Privacy: 2025 Crypto Year in Review (Part 2) - Ep. 991

Episode Date: December 30, 2025

Thank you to our sponsors! Uniswap Mantle 2025 was a year of mixed outcomes for crypto. The industry got landmark stablecoin regulations in the U.S. but with a major limitation. Bitcoin soared to new all-time highs but failed to surge to heights many expected and is set to end the year flat. In this final installment of Unchained's year in review show, Ambient Finance founder Doug Colkitt and Gwart take a look back at the passing of the GENIUS Act, Bitcoin's all-time high run and the “10/10” crash. Plus, did “threadguy's” tax woes trigger Zcash's run? And is Nic Carter overreacting about the quantum computing threat to Bitcoin? Guests: Doug Colkitt, Co-founder of Fogo and Ambient Finance Gwart, Host of The Gwart Show Links: Unchained: Who Are the Winners and Losers of the New Stablecoin Law in the U.S.? Pump.fun Becomes Third Largest ICO, Raises $600M in 12 Minutes Stripe and Paradigm Announce New Layer 1 Blockchain ’Tempo’ Stablecoin Issuers Enter Bidding War to Launch Hyperliquid’s USDH Coinbase Buys Cobie’s ‘Up Only’ NFT and Echo in $375 Million Deal Bitcoin Hits All-Time High Ahead of $125,500 Crypto Markets Recover After Record $19 Billion Liquidation Why the Black Friday Whale’s $192 Million Crypto Trade Was Legal Why the Privacy Coins Mania Is Much More Than Price Action How the x402 Standard Is Enabling AI Agents to Pay Each Other MegaETH Just Had Its Public Sale. Can It Succeed in Building a Web2-Like Experience? Can ‘Choose Rich’ Nick Create the Barstool Sports of Crypto? Do Kwon Sentenced to 15 Years in Prison Cracking Bitcoin Encryption Is Getting Much Easier, Google Says Timestamps: 🚀 00:00 Introduction  🫠 00:53 Why GENIUS Act blocking interest payments is problematic  🤔 4:31 Did PUMP launch buybacks too soon? 👀 10:56 Is Stripe fully committed to Tempo? ⁉️ 14:28 Was Hyperliquid's USDH partner “pre-ordained?” 😅 19:38 Is Cobie Coinbase’s best hire yet? 😵‍💫 27:16 Bitcoin's peak in downtober ❕️ 29:55 What “10/10” says about the crypto industry  🤣 41:13 Did “threadguy's” tax woes trigger Zcash's run? 👀 47:27 Is the AI agent meta a “charade?” 🤺 50:27 What is fueling the bitter rivalry between Kalshi and Polymarket 🤔 56:50 Did “ICOBeast” deserve to lose his MegaETH allocation? 💥 1:00:40 Is “Choose Rich” Nick now mainstream? 🫣 1:02:55 Was Do Kwon's 15 year sentence excessive? 🧐 1:08:54 Is Nic Carter overreacting about the quantum computing threat to Bitcoin? 🔮 1:13:42 Doug and Gwart lock in their 2026 predictions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So I think it was Kobe who said something, right? Like the road from like 100 to 125 will be the easy road, then 125 to like 250. Or that'll be the hard road. And then 125 to 250 will be the easy road. So I got liquidated on gold. And that was like the only position I had to open. It's hilarious.

Like I had, of course, naively had zero idea that I could get liquidated on 3X on gold. Yeah. But honestly, it's really not ideal. that Bitcoin can go down like that in 30 minutes. Thread guy was hit by a big tax bill and was like stressing about it on the timeline. And literally the next day, all of a sudden we like see, maybe it wasn't the next day, but like within, you know, 40 hours, we see this huge surge in Zcash. Like, am I wrong in thinking that there was a connection there or like was there or wasn't there?

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Today's topic is 2025 year in review part two. Here to finish the discussion are Gort, host of the Gord Show and Doug Colkitt co-founder of Fogo and Ambient Finance. Welcome, Doug and Gwart. Hey, thanks for having us back. Thank you for, yeah, round two. Happy to be here. Yeah, I'm excited to finish off the second half of the year because there was so much that happened. We're going to start with the Genius Act, which was the first Sablecoin, sorry, the first crypto law that we have seen in the U.S.

And there were, you know, a few, like, interesting surprises in there. I think probably the main one that, you know, has continued to cause controversy. And it's also, I think, a sticking point in the negotiations of the crypto market structure bill. is that there's a prohibition on stable coin issuers directly handing the interest off to users. Anyway, what are your thoughts on what happened with the stable coin law? Well, I mean, I guess it kind of kicked off stable coin season, which is somewhat unfortunate for alt markets because there aren't really many stable coin tokens, or at least like tokens to trade.

So, yeah, I mean, a great grade for crypto. option, but I think everyone kind of wanted, wanted something to pump. It really wasn't much besides Circle Equity. What? XFL didn't perform well for you? Oh, XPL. Yeah, that's actually, yeah, XPL was the stable point play through a while. I mean, I think that project could do well, but yeah, like, it's unfortunate.

I mean, really, it feels like only hype. I'm sure there's at least a few others, like privacy did well this year, but like, It just feels like every token was, yeah, just down only. I don't know. Bad year for tokens. Court, what are your thoughts? Well, I think this, well, I'm not still, like, tuned into what actually happened with the whole Genius Act thing. But I do know what you're talking about with regards to not being able to pass long yield.

But I think there's a lot of workarounds with this, right? So they're trying to, I don't know what, like rewards and depositing. a slightly different contract and being able to pay out in another or something. So it is kind of interesting how like there does seem to be with all of the regulation and everything that's going on. It definitely seems like there's some powerful people behind some of the decisions, which seems sort of, I don't know, like, you know, it doesn't seem intuitive why, you know, we shouldn't be able to just be directed yield. if like that is in many ways part of the appeal of stable coins, I think, is that we can sort of like pass along that T-bills or whatever it may be in the background.

And like, you know, immediately this was sort of, so yeah, I think like the community banks were behind this. And I think there's still a lot of work to do. It's sort of unfortunate. But that aspect was interesting. I mean, I guess maybe it's that the banks really feel like they need to pump the bags of circle and tether. And that's what it boils down to.

They're like those companies, they're not wealthy enough. So yeah, they need to keep that interest. Okay. It's also a good full employment act for lawyers. Like, there are always the people who make out the most in crypto. No, no, no, no. The lawyers are going to be decimated by AI. Everyone says that the, you know, we've been selling all the picks and shovels,

but it's really the lawyers who are truly the one selling the picks and shovels this whole time, right? Yeah, there's just. trying to make as much money as I can before AI comes and wipes them out. No offense to any lawyers listening to the show. But, you know, I have been reading about what's going to happen to legal profession. So anyway, okay, another big event around the same time was the pump ICU. This was so interesting because this happened at the same time that Let's Bonk was, you know, trending. And there was so much hype. And then afterward, there was so much disappointment. And anyway, I don't know. What did you think watching the whole thing?

It was interesting. There was like this narrative that like pump is like dead and like they're going to replace it with other launch pads. It was like about for six weeks. And I mean as far as I can die, I think like pumps kind of still dominant right now. Yeah, but the volume has fallen off precipitous. Yeah, not because of the competitions though, right? No, no, you're right. are dead. Like the whole bonged thing seem like quite fabricated, although I am friends with quite a lot of

those early bong investors as well. So I don't want to, I don't know the details. I think they definitely put on like kind of a PR campaign, you know, in conjunction with the pump ICA in order to, you know, compete right then and there. But the ICU was interesting. I don't think it was, I mean, it's kind of hilarious as this sounds. Like, I think it was pretty decently well done in so far as they sold it directly to the public or, you know, there were avenues through which you could buy it publicly. And there was sort of a uniform launch price. And they also launched an evaluation such that if you were a large liquid fund, right, you needed to deploy a sizable chunk at once. This was an opportunity to do so. Obviously, it's like since then, it's been up and down.

I mean, it went up quite a bit afterwards, right? Like the Red Guy was talking about how bullish he was, and I think he sold the pico top. Maybe he was the reason that was a lot of a lot of deranged tweeting for a little bit, and I was sending out. Yeah, I don't know exactly what's happening now, though, you know? I don't know where, I haven't heard about. Because, wait, didn't they sell it at 0.4 cents?

Because now it's at 0.19. So it's less than half. Yeah, I mean, I remember it? when Alon went on Thread Guy he said multiple times to Alon something like, you have so much money. You have an ungodly amount of money

or like whatever the comments were. And I remember the like second or third comment like that, Alon didn't even like just respond. And then Fred Guy, there was like a silence. And Fred Guy just. Like an indignify that with her response. Didn't mention that again.

I mean, it's interesting because like unlike an IPO or like, like a company raises equity. They had no legal obligation to do anything. They could take the money and just pay themselves and go home, right? It's just a token sale. As far as I can tell, I don't think they have. But, you know, people were kind of trusting them a lot.

Well, they did, he did, like, you know, so the team initiated some buybacks, right? But they were sort of arbitrarily designed. So I think he was just, I say he, I mean, they, the team, I suppose, were, you know, buying in in sort of sporadic amounts and at times. It wasn't sort of this algorithmic thing that, you know, we have with hype. And so, and also, again, it's not like so, there's two things. One, it's not so clear the value of launching a token and then making money and then buying back the token that you just issued, right? It's like a little bit of this circular thing where in the real world when there's like equity and there's, you know, proper revenue and then net income and then maybe you're doing share repurchases, like, you know,

Apple, like all these companies do this on a regular basis. But when you just kind of create something out like, you know, conjure or something. They do they do out of earnings though. They don't do. Right. Exactly. Well, that's what I'm saying. And then go buy back. Exactly. Well, and also like the immediacy of it's of it doesn't like necessarily lend itself well to like this sustainable flywheel where whereby you like raise four billion and then you're making, I don't know, not four billion. Nothing that, nothing that's even a reasonable multiple of four billion. Maybe at the pico top, but not when it was done. And then you're kind of like buying. back in brand of amounts. It's not, there's nothing that engenders like, oh, this is, you know, this is clearly the way to do financial engineering. But like to their defense or I don't know, defense, but like to kind of be fair, the trenches have completely died, right? Like the volume on, if you look at Solana, the volume is down over 90% from, you know, the Trump launch. And there was sort of that like euthanasia roller coaster. So I, they tried to strike. streaming thing. I don't know how that's going. They were talking about, you know, creators and stuff. Like, the whole market, I mean, we can talk about how Pump was this massive, you know, ICO and then adrift downwards. But like, the whole market's done that, right? So, like, I am somewhat sympathetic toward anybody right now. It's like, no one is really in a premier spot. Like, all these launches have been down only, right? So I don't know. And Pump does or did make money at at one point, right? Like, again, it's. Is that sustainable?

I don't know. I think they still do like a million a day. They do. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So. Yeah.

I don't know who's still trading like pump shitters, but like a lot of people are. I know, right? Well, like all the, like now if a token hits, I mean, a token hits like, you know, a million or $5 million market cap now, it's like, that's the runner of the day. Whereas like, you know, six months ago we had six to 12 months ago, we had coins, you know, running to 50, 100 million regularly. And, you know, at times. billion, you know what I mean? So it's clear that the trenches in aggregate have been, you know, like it's been a prescribed fire almost. Yeah, there was this funny tweet after the ICO where someone was like, wait, so we gave you money for the ICO, but then now you're using the money to

buy the, it was like this whole like circular thing. And yeah, it is it is basically a thing that they do in Tradfai, but it's just funny. It's like literally all we're doing is like, money from one, you know, entity to another and then back and forth and back and forth. So, okay. Well, the next big thing was that tempo caused quite a stir when it chose to become its own L1. And I shouldn't say it's like an entity. It's in itself. It's like Stripe chose to make tempo in L1. And obviously this became, I think, it caused a bit of consternation. I would say in Ethereum world. But what were your thoughts on that?

I mean, it's not clear. Like, obviously, paradigm is all in on tempo. It's not clear to me how much Stripe is all in on tempo, or this is just one of many, many bets. Stripe is taking. Like, if you talk to kind of random people at Stripe, some of them haven't even heard it. Like, not people work on tempo or blockchain,

but like, you know, random employees haven't really heard of tempo or at least happen, like, right after the announcement. So, like, I don't, I don't know if this is like Strugg's big bed in crypto or is just Strip is a giant company and Paradigm kind of showed up. And it's like, oh, all right, you sure. Well, we'll. Oh, interesting. I was not aware of it. I mean, Matt's on the border stripe.

Oh, is? Oh, okay. I'm pretty sure. Yeah. He is. I mean, there's a long, long time connection there. So I think that's. Yeah.

I mean, obviously, Stripe is involved in it. I just don't know if like this is like stripe is. I mean, they're doing stable coin payments on Solana and Ethereum too, right? Like my understanding. Well, it's like, okay, I'll be honest. It's like quite, it's not dissimilar from people saying, uh, Tether and Plasma, like Plasma is Tethers chain. It's like Tether yeats money at everything. I mean, Tether owns Rumble.

Tether has invested in a gazillion random AI startups. Like it's quite similar. You know, you find a big name. And then you sort of align in some capacity. I mean, I think this stripe to tempo connection seems more, I don't want to say legitimate. Let me think of another word. It seems more truly, you know, like, tethered.

Like, I just don't know how good class. Like, if tempo doesn't take off, like, a stripe going to put, like, all their resources into making work, and they're going to be like, oh, fine, we're doing, like, payments on Solana or Ethereum or wherever. Like, it's fine, like, tempo. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, interesting.

Wait. Okay. You like you because I mean they're trying to make it this sort of consortium thing like it's basically you know uh use I'm sure you saw the memes it's basically like Libra or DM all over again um but hopefully this time will actually happen but yeah so I I feel like yeah even if they aren't in control of it at a certain point like it would be that they they get it afloat and then they step away not that they like abandon it and it goes nowhere. I mean, who knows what will happen. Yeah, but I mean, like, there's, there's just stuff with, like, how much their fingers on the scale, right? Like, you know, how much, how much are they going to push, like, end users to go through Tether versus if they're supporting, you know, alternate channels outside, or not Tether, uh, tempo. Tempo. Versus, uh, you know, I'm saying, okay, it's just like one neutral option. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. By the way, you guys, like, Tether does

have so much money that they offer to buy the soccer club in. Yeah. You've been. Italian. Yeah. Which, yeah, I mean, good for them. All right. Speaking of stable coins, the next big controversy in crypto was the U.S.D.H competition, the hyperliquid stable coin. Yeah, a competition, which wasn't a competition. It was, I don't know. So I'm going to say something controversial, but I think most of us would probably agree

on the deal that it was preordained. who it would be. Hopefully nobody will come attack me for saying that. But yeah, what did you think watching that go down? It's kind of like the old meme of the Dow governance forum where it's, you know, what color Ferrari does the founder get? Yeah, vote red. And then the founder says no yellow.

And then everyone votes yellow. I mean, I think a lot of things on-chain governance are probably. Yeah, but I think it's fine. I mean, they... It's probably necessary, right? Yeah, yeah. And also, I don't know this for a fact, but I speculate that it was in some capacity preordained. I mean, like, I don't even think there's anything nefarious in saying preordained.

Like, they probably were just in close talks with hyperliquid and the team and Jeff. But my thing is, like, if it was preordained, then why not just say, hey, we're going to launch our own stable coin. We're going to partner with, you know, native markets, blah, blah, blah, like, why wouldn't, you know? Well, I think they, okay, so I don't know, again, this is just conversations I've had, which is that I think that was the initial idea. And then once it was, you know, I think it was sort of understood this was going to become the native sample coin. And then it got like everybody wanted to be involved. And so you got all these teams vine, all these teams submitting proposals. And none of that was expected. Like, I don't think there was any assumption there was going to be a tremendous amount of hype to begin with. So it was going to look more similar. They put an announcement in the discord saying like, there's, we're going to have this little comfort. So I think there's also, uh, maybe regulatory stuff around that. Like you can't, if the team like just picks one, right, then it's potentially right, too much control over the network versus if you have an open. There's also right, like the hype itself, I don't think voted, right? Like the other validators voted. So you have to kind of make it, you know, from a regulatory perspective, there's a risk if it doesn't look like a decentralized and open. So it was defy theater basically. Well, I mean, like, again, the lawyers make a lot of money and they tell you things

and then at the end of the day, like, who knows what the actual rules are? I don't think anybody knows, but your sound authority, if I'm going to tell you something. The largest hype holders voted for this to pass, right? Like, that's how it works. It's like the validators. I know the foundation abstained, right?

But they convinced hyper guys, whatever. Like, all the big validators, they convinced it is what it is. I mean, yeah, I suppose capitalism is not always fair, but like, I don't think it's the controversy. I think what happened was it really blew up because a lot of VCs had projects. But I wouldn't call that capitalism. I wouldn't call it like.

It's crony capitalism, but there's a lot of this. Okay, but real capitalism is competition, whereas that was like a fake competition. And then instead it was, yeah, more communists. They won. They won with the most people with the most wanting ultimately decided the vote. and that's capitalism. Like, I think this is just, I really think what happened

was that there was a lot of VCs who, and not just VCs, but founders, legitimate founders, like Guy, right, from Athena, who they all wanted to be involved. Like, they're like, oh, okay, we'll submit a proposal as well. And so it got a lot of hype, and then it appeared as though this had been preordained

after there was a lot of really good proposals that came in. But at the end of the day, the people with the most money voted for it. Like, I don't, I understand your point. So you feel like it actually was decentralized. But nothing is decentralized. I mean, come on. Who cares?

Like, all of this stuff is the... What are you arguing? American democracy. Are you saying some of that's preordained before? Yeah, but I'm just saying it doesn't matter. It's not even open source. It's a by the validators are sent a binary, right, that they run. And when they hard fork, they're just sent a new binary, right?

And they just start, like, it's, this is not, I think we're overthinking this. There's a lot of, like, steps along the way, prior to like, oh, no, the yield-bearing stable coin is, you know, preordained or chosen. It's like there's a lot of things prior to that where if you're engaged in this network, you realize that there is some top-down control. And Jeff likely ships whatever code he wants, Alex and Valdears. And people seem to like the product. So who cares, right?

So it is decentralization theater. Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay. Yeah. All right, good. For some reason I thought you were arguing that it wasn't. And I was like, wait, wait, wait, what are you saying? Okay.

It is, but it works. That's good enough. Yeah, I mean, if, so, okay, if has surperses, what's it called the safe harbor thing goes through, then, yeah, I think they're within, like, the time frame of when it could be centralized. So, you know, no big deal. And anyway, not like this SEC is going to go after them. Okay, okay. Next, next big news was the acquisition of Echo by Coinbase, along with. the revival of Up Only, which hasn't happened, but yeah, the purchase of Up Only for 25, or the purchase of a season of Up Only for $25 million. And then now, you know, Kopey is doing customer support for Coinbase, which is what you do. You acquire somebody for $400 million so that they can do customer support for you. And like that, that is like clearly the best aquire of the year. But yeah, what were your thoughts?

I thought that I think Kobe from what so I don't you know I don't know him like that well but I think what he was he was really trying to solve a problem in earnest and I think that I mean Fogo used

this is a good opportunity to show Doug Fogo used echo right so we did echo out of year yeah like I think he was trying to solve a real problem that a lot of us had screeched about for a long time and yeah it was like quite a large number. And wait, by that, you know, like a good platform for ICOs. Is that what you mean?

Yeah, well, I think great. Like you early investors are. Yeah. Ideally, you're like your early investors should be your users, like, very few. Like, I mean, I guess there are some VCs that will bring like liquidity or whatever, depending on the project. But like all things being equal, if you're going to sell, you know, X amount of tokens to fund some project development at a certain price,

You'd rather have them be users, right? Like people who invest are more likely to click on the network versus now if you go to whatever, multi-coin or whoever, they're not going to go do a bunch of chain activity. Gort, were you going to say more? No, no. I mean, I will say that I don't necessarily share the view that investors must be users. It's in the context of crypto. I think it's what we've done. and so we sort of take that as at face value.

I don't, there's some nuance to whether or not I agree with that. But I take Doug's point. But I think more, I guess my point was more just, right, for the past, I don't know, five years, you could probably extend it further than that. We see these tokens launching at like extremely high FDVs and most of the charts get murdered. And it doesn't seem that like this premise of retail having early access to these opportunities was really playing out because VCs were scoosures. up these rounds very, very early. And oftentimes they were getting bit up in private subsequently,

right? So it wasn't even just like one round. It was two or three rounds. And then all of a sudden you're at one to five billion dollar opening price. Right. And so the premise, obviously, being that retail could just get earlier access, maybe with some conditions, maybe you need to be a credit investor, maybe there's lockups, but, you know, more replicate what some VCs have been getting for some period of time now. So like I think he was, like I saw a lot of Kobe like when he would come on Twitter and respond to people like I had conversations with him. And mostly what I saw was I think he also agreed that this was a real problem.

And so he was trying to solve it. So it's a hard thing to solve, right? I think at a practical level. We've had Angel List and TradFi for quite some time that it works differently with with exits and tokens and dynamics. But I think what. I think it was a passion project because I think from what I can tell, again, I don't know him that well. But what I see him say, I think he genuinely believes in, you know, the idea that he kind of puts forth with Echo.

Yeah, it's definitely from, I mean, his perspective, right? Like Kobe Pearl has better deal flow than any angel or oyster in crypto. So, you know, it's very much a Robin Hood type story of the guy who has great deal flow is opening it up. so. Yeah. And now that's why he does customer support. That's like his other way. That's like a good Coinbase could use that. That's certainly, uh, I mean, I will be honest. Like, and I think people realize this, but I'll just say it directly. Like, what, what does it say about Coinbase that there have been problems that have not, that we've all dealt with for years. And it's taken one guy who was acquired for an entirely separate reason, right? Like his company had nothing to do with fixing, fixing locked accounts and he's like on he's now being able to rectify this stuff like I don't know

that's a little bit that doesn't imbue tremendous confidence and like coinbase or my perspective that it takes this guy to come in here and like he's fixing the problems that we've screeched about for years right my I gave up I'll be honest I only use cracking now like when I'm all more you up like I don't you my account got locked I have one of these back and you never will get it back Right. It was, I have screenshots of how hilarious the conversations were. Why don't you message Kobe? I did actually, ironic, it's funny you say that.

I talked to him last week. He was trying to help me because, so here's a good example. I had a friend who's not, not really crypto-native, but like I owed him some money. And I said, I have some stable coins on Solana. Can you send me your Solana address? and he sent me a Salana address unbeknownst to him. He didn't realize it was his coin-based address. And I had USDT, so I didn't think anything of it.

And I sent him USDT on Solana to his coin-based address. And of course, they don't support USDT. By the way, this is a completely like background infrastructure thing that is 100% solvable. Like those coins just sit there. And I don't, I mean, Doug is more tactical than I am. I don't think it's not that hard fix. No, it's not that hard. They have the keys, right? It's not like they're lost or anything like either address.

There is a recovery tool now. Apparently in Kobe's, we're in the process. The first time I tried it hasn't worked yet. But this kid now, like, we're friends. He's going to send me the money back because I ended up double paying him. Right? Because I was like, oh, dude, I'm sorry. But when we can unlock that, send that money back to me, right? And so now we're in that process. But like, that's a good example of like, come on, you know. But I am wondering why somebody has. USDT on Solana. That's a screen.

I have a bunch of different stable coin. I could probably like some incentives crap on like some lending thing. I don't know. Stable coin enjoyer. Yeah. Why is that so weird?

Like is you would think I'd have. People really use USDT that much on Solana. So it's like it was on Ethereum. Yeah. I can see that. Yeah. Well anyway, it is. Yeah, that is ridiculous. They can't do that.

It's annoying, right? Like, Tether, a major stable coin. Yeah. I mean, like, maybe they reason that their regular customer service can't do it is because they are so busy sending our PII to hackers. Laura, have you ever dealt with Coinbase customer support? Like, have you ever, you don't, you don't you?

No, I don't. Okay. I've been in it and out of it at different periods, but I'm now back in it, but like I have somebody managed that for me. Okay. So I am not like physically in control of my crypto. Just, you know, for whoever's listening, who maybe is like mad about something that I wrote about them or said about them or whatever, just so you know. Okay, okay.

Before the ad break, let's just discuss briefly. The Bitcoin all-time high of $126,000, which is far below what I think a lot of other people kind of thought it was going to end. of that the cycle. But yeah, what are your comments on this? And by the way, this is just a few days before the 10-10 liquidations. I mean, basically it had. It was Kobe. I think it was Kobe.

So we were just saying good things about him. So I think it was Kobe who said something, right? Like the road from like 0 to 125 will be the easy road. Then 125 to like 250. That will be the hard road. And then 125 to 250 will be the easy road. So. I know.

But wait. Like the other funny thing is this happened in October. And it was like 60s in, apparently is when we reached the all-time high. And then, yeah, then it was down toper, I guess. I don't know. Yeah. Well, okay. Yeah.

So what do you think about that all-time high? And then we can discuss 10-10. It's exciting. I think obviously everybody thought that we were just going to keep running for eternity. and the market tends to punish those who believe there's ever an easy road, I suppose. Yeah, I don't have much more than that. I mean, I was, I mean, I listened, I think Udi came on, was it your podcast? Yeah.

Yeah, so I talk with Udi a lot, right? And we were both like 400K by the end of the, well, he was saying 400K by the end of the year. And I was like, dude, I love it. Like, I'm in. I would love for that to be the case, right? And obviously, yeah, I think what, like, what most people who are smarter than I am on macro say is probably correct, right? We front ran, like Trump coming in, we front ran a lot of the Tradfai liquidity, and we were

just, you know, sort of earlier, the stock market, gold, everything is at all-time highs right now. And we kind of already ran that up. So, I mean, I suppose it was exciting. It hit that and it's less exciting now that it's not. you know, 30% down, but yeah, I don't have much more than that. All right. So in a moment, we're going to talk about the 10-10 liquidations and the rest of the year. But first, a quick word for the sponsors to make this show possible.

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this is your chance to deploy on a high-performance modular L2. register now. The link is in the show notes. Back to my conversation with Doug and Gort. So, yeah, we left on the high note of the Bitcoin all-time high. Well, I don't know if that was a high note because it was far below what a lot of people thought the all-time I was going to be. But anyway, we then come to the 10-10 liquidations, which, yeah, that was, that was, like you said, Gore, I'm not really in crypto, but like that was terrible. but like that was terrible even just for me like watching sitting on my computer and you know Friday afternoon and yeah huge shocker.

Interestingly, I feel like it's the first time that I've ever heard of finance like really fucking something up. You know, not and that wasn't like regulatory. Like this was like an actual failure on the part of the trading apparatus. And then we also have that element of the whale who made a shit ton of money. And it's seemingly, you know, somebody who's connected to the White House. So those elements together make for, you know, kind of a spicy story. So what's your take on what happened there? Dog is like our premier expert on 1010.

You know, he wrote this thread that was like one of the most popular threads in Twitter history. Doug, you became like a store. I'm actually surprised that got. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know. I feel like we still don't know exactly what happened on 1010. I don't know if we ever will know exactly what happened.

And people are like, oh, so-and-so got liquidated. I mean, look, like a lot of people like... Wait, wait, meaning do you disagree with the two elements that I talked about? Oh, no, no, no. I think they're true. But like, I don't... I mean, people are still not like, oh, somebody big got, you know, liquidated on 10-10. And they're like, the market's been broken since then or like...

Right. People had, like, conspiracies like, oh, finance was going to switch U.S. to like different collateral mode like three days later and so this was planned ahead of time like I don't know I don't I don't think we'll ever I don't think we'll ever really know exactly what happened but yeah I mean like everyone everyone was farming perps right like everyone was farming perp dexis everyone had like some leverage on some things and like all alts went to like zero at least like wick so even if you were on like 2x leverage and you probably thought it was like safe farming you know whatever the and florges perp decks you know i i i feel like everyone kind of got wiped out but

like everyone got to kind of like hit i got i got i got liquidated on gold and that was like the only position i had it open it's hilarious like i had of course naively had zero idea that i could get liquidated on three x on gold yeah but as such is the case honestly like again i don't have any insight into market structure and stuff it's really not to the extent that dog does so we should press him more on that. But one thing I would say is, honestly, it's really not ideal that Bitcoin can go down like that in 30 minutes. And it's also not ideal. And I'm saying, like, this is something we all know because we've dealt with insane amounts of volatility being in crypto for the past five, 10 years, whatever. Like, we've all seen this. But I've been

talking to people who are trying to, I wouldn't say bring mass adoption, but they, are trying to build products. They are trying to build useful services for people to use Bitcoin, use crypto. And we sit here and we were all very much sold on this, you know, non-sovereign store value. Like a lot of people apply that to Bitcoin and people apply that to other, you know, assets as well. But it's hard to like that this delay is adoption. This type of thing really does delay adoption in my mind. And I know we, that's fine. Like, I'm more, I'm as bullish

as I ever will be on Bitcoin, right? Like, so this is, in the long run, to me, it's like, okay, all of this stuff is ups and downs. Like, people know that I'm just, Bitcoin succeeds great. If it dies, like, I'm going to die with it. And I'm fine with that. And I know that, right? But like, so it doesn't change my, my conviction. But I really do think that this is not ideal.

And we're sitting here telling people, like, this is a store of value and it goes down, 15% in 30 minutes and then bleeds down 40% over the course of three months. Like that is a hard pitch to boomers. It's a hard pitch to people who would invest thinking that this, you know, can preserve their wealth. And then they're down 40%. Like, and we look, we see gold. We see the stock market, right?

These things aren't great. Like, you know, zooming out is it's really not ideal. And it's annoying, you know. And I guess it should have. been right like you would think that ETFs and like widespread exactly hold it right like it's like like the story in like 2013 there's just a bunch

of like online like crazy people trading us back and forth but like right at this point institutions own it like there should be stable right exactly like we that was the whole pitch was like the institutions are here we'll never see this you know extreme volatility again there's a constant bid right like there's

there's a perpetual bid on the books for massive size any whales that have held for 10, 15 years can easily get out now without, you know, moving the chart because there is a persistent bid. And then we have these events. And like, yeah, I mean, I talked to somebody, you know, building like a lending protocol. And it's like, it's hard to build financial products around these type of assets when, you know, you think you're taking out a very, you know, conservative loan and you're just wiped. Like, you know, put aside me getting liquidated on gold because I had no

idea. Of course, like, I'm just, you know, degenerately screwing around. But like, This is the stuff that I'm, you know, it's unfortunate. But like, okay, such as life, right? Such as markets, I guess. Yeah, it's kind of funny. It's like, yeah, crypto people who are true believers had their comeuppance because like gold reached all time highs this year. And okay, Bitcoin did too, but, you know, gold really outpaced Bitcoin. It is just like a lesson in, you know, the market for crypto is still so small.

and like adoption is still so little. And so, yeah, like, way more people in the world have faith in gold than they do in Bitcoin. It's painful. Silver. Silver keeps hitting all-time highs and Bitcoin is just, ooh. I'm not worried. It's probably, look, it's probably a good thing to, like, as a reminder that, you know, this is not, this easy road does not exist. and, you know, I obviously I don't think Bitcoin's going to zero, but like this stuff takes time and this idea that all of a sudden nation states are just gobbling this up in, you know, massive

size and will never let it, you know, experience volatility is probably pretty delusional. And this happens in a stock market as well. So like, let's not pretend that this is a uniquely crypto thing. But yeah, it's annoying. Like, it's super annoying, especially when I'm talking to people of, you know, someone's wedding and I'm saying yeah you know buy the Bitcoin ETF like you know now you can just get on your brokerage account like

no problem don't deal with this custody stuff then like three weeks later just nukes and I'm like you're pretending I didn't say that stuff it's never good at Thanksgiving you want Thanksgiving to be the oldest Thanksgiving is always a bad shoot time for crypto people exactly yeah yeah hopefully

people didn't have too terrible of Thanksgiving but we should we should as Doug one more thing So with regards to the whole 10-10 thing, because again, is the foremost expert, and almost everybody would say that. One thing I should ask you about, so like circuit breakers or something resembling circuit breakers, right? We have these in Tradfai where if a stock just nukes in a very short period of time, people, you know, they cut trading and they're like, okay, hang out, let's figure out what's going on. There's some proposed solutions where, like, perhaps not a pure play circuit breaker, but, you know, some short period of time where, where, you know, some short period of time where, Or your timeout?

Yeah. So what are your like sort of, what were your conclusions on this? I don't know if it's feasible with something like a decks, but like what are you kind of? I don't think it's a bad idea, like some of those wicks like to zero. You kind of right. You don't want to liquidate people. They were finding fair value. Adam found fair value.

Yeah. Maybe those are the fair value of some of those alts. But right, like, it's not a terrible. The challenges, I think like really what happened with 1010 is you have like market makers, and especially in crypto, right? Like, market makers have to, like, especially you're on some long-tail venue, you have to hedge other places. And, like, ADL kind of screwed everyone here because you're getting closed out on one side of your hedge and you weren't open on another. And I guess, like, my worry with circuit breakers is, like, if you're, you know, trading on hyperliquid and hedging at Binance and, like, one is shut down, like, that could actually, like, really, really screw you because you can't, you can't, like, hedge your positions. Yeah, that's what I was going to say.

Like, I feel like it would only make sense. or you, Doug, tell me if I'm thinking about this correctly, but, like, it would only make sense if they check that, like, the price dislocation is only on their venue, and they have a way to figure out that it's not anywhere else. Because otherwise, like, yeah, it can, it can really, like, there will be people who will be upset if there's, like, a policy at one place that isn't replicated at the others,

or if the circuit breaker kicks in when it, like, shouldn't have. So, yeah, I feel like it almost opens. like a can of worms. Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's, it's tough, it's tough to get, it's tough to get right, right? Like in TradFi, like, the nice thing is you can claw back like money afterwards, right? So if like something's messed up and there's errors, right? Like, you can always go to, you know, Citadel or whoever and you like, right, claw back money from, you can't, can't do that in crypto. It's really, it's bad.

If there's like so, if so few people know what's going on, if so few market makers know what's going on, they're just pulling all liquidity from the books. That's like not, that doesn't end up well. Like, when we saw this, when everyone's like, hang on, like, where is this coming from and what's going on? Like, yeah, that's really not ideal. That's when you see these, you know, wicks to zero. Yeah, I mean, I mean, the reality is like the technology at crypto exchanges is not great. Right? Like the API gateways, like, if there's something that's an easy fix, it's like make the API gateways more reliable.

like they just go offline, they give you, like, they give you your orders like 10 minutes later, right? And this is something, right, like crypto exchanges. They have a lot of money. They could invest. And maybe there's like a coin-based, like customer service thing. Like, why 10 years now do they not have like reliable gateways? Like go hire someone from NASDAQ and just build a reliable gateway.

Okay. Let's move on to the next big news event, at least that I've remembered, which was the surge in. Privacy coins, Zcash leading the pack, but a bunch of other privacy coins also in tow. What did you make of that? It kind of came out of nowhere and I want to float a theory by you, which is that in my mind, what happened is thread guy was hit by a big tax bill and was like stressing about it on the timeline. And literally the next day, all of a sudden we like see, maybe it wasn't the next day, but like within, you know, 40 hours, we see this. huge surge in Zcash.

Like, am I wrong in thinking that there was a connection there or, or like, was there or wasn't there? Thread guy realized that California is a high tax state. But is that related to the surge in Zcash or not? Was that? I actually...

The timing was coincidental, I think. Okay, so, like, why did Zcash suddenly surge overnight? I just never understood that. Well, okay, so in crypto, we have these things called narratives. All right. And every few months we cycle through a new one.

And one we had not cycled through in quite some time was this idea around privacy. And there was this, you know, collective, I guess, realization that everything on a blockchain is public. And so that was a narrative. It is perhaps still ongoing. Like, what caused that to happen at that moment? I guess 1010 actually. probably did play. I mean, honestly, you can't use Z-Cash.

No, no, no, no, because it was the end of September is when Zcash and the privacy points were, well, I mean, you know, James Wynn and like people were talking about, like, being hunted on perp-dex system. Yeah, but James Winn, that was like in May. Yeah, I don't know. I'm just trying. I mean, one thing is right, like privacy was kind of, you didn't want to touch it for, like, previous admin. So I think we hadn't done a privacy narrative for a while just because, like, if you're a dev and you're a privacy dev, like, okay, go to jail.

And so now is like kind of the first time in a while you don't go to jail. That's your privacy dev. I think, okay. Laura, I'll love with you. But one of them just went to prison. But anyway. I think you're overthinking the why. Like, you know, why did we have this AI agent narrative where these coins pumped to billions of dollars?

Like, it's just these things just happen. And there's not. So I think that we hadn't had a privacy narrative in a long. time. And I also think that I agree with Doug that this new administration seems, you know, more open to virtually everything. And if this gets us talking about privacy, which is something new to talk about, right, we like run through the same things over and over, then that's probably net good. So, but in terms of why, I mean, why does, you know, why does the sun rise? It's like, I think it's like, these things just happen within our space. And it, it was time.

You know what I mean? The energy was such that it was time. Interesting. Okay. I don't know. To me, it was such a spike. I was kind of like there has to be like a real reason. Okay.

So I have some theories about that, but I won't, you know. Don't, but say them, say them. I mean, it's nothing more than what people have said. Well, okay. So Z, liquidity is very, very thin on Zcash. There, that's a nice way to make it run. Yeah. There's also a lot of people who have held Zcash for a long time.

So, you know, there was a dad announced recently. I don't know. You can kind of, I really, I don't want to, like, truly I don't want to say anything because I'm purely speculating. But if you followed narratives in dads for the past, you know, six months, you can probably deduce what maybe going on may be happening. I don't want to like suggest anything tofarious. Like I, you know, like, Mert's one of our friends and I, I don't, I'm not suggesting anything like untured. I'm just, you can probably make some educated guesses. You could also probably look at who are the big supporters of Zcash in the past, who are the big holders. Like, none of this is like private

information. So I don't know. That's, that's my guess. Like, yeah, look at, look at a lot of the data. I just like Barry, Barry Silver was trying to pump Zcash for like years. I know. Right. It's just down-only chart and and Murr comes in and and poof. Yeah, I know, right? God's tiered, KOL.

But is he, he, he's not involved in the dad. Is he? No, I don't think so, but he is enthusiast. He's a privacy advocate now, yeah. Okay, so he's like

a whale who heard wind of the dad or something, maybe. No, I really, like, I know you want us to spew gossip and shit posts like we may do on Twitter, but I really don't have any, like, you know, enlightening information. I'm just, there's things where I agree with you. Do you see this, like, massive, you know, straight up on the chart. And it's like, what's going on?

Like Doug said, there's, there was a, you could go look at, like, all the exchanges. There's very, very little, like, yeah, I just don't think it would take. Like, the chart's very impressive, but it doesn't take much money to make it look that way. So it doesn't even have to be, like, most of this. It could be like one or two, like, Zcash. Right. And less we, let's we forget, like, you know, what, Farquain ran a well over a billion. Like, you know.

Yeah, the market cap's not super high, right? No, it's not insane. It's not, it's not. Yeah. And it's all deleted. It's not like, you know, low flow coin. Right. Yeah.

I mean, like, so I already made this joke on the show, but like, to me, just the fact that they named the debt Cypherpunk. Like, it's the least cyberpunk thing that you. you can do is make a dad. Anyway, whatever. It's a great name. I'm not criticizing the name. I just find it hysterical. Okay, okay.

Next thing. Well, yeah, so we actually didn't cover AI agents, but like that is like such a, you know, I mean, that's been of interest to a lot of people for like the last year. And obviously this X402 standard has, you know, peaked a lot of interest. So what are your thoughts on that? Doug,

you think of AI agents? Future, future of crypto. No, I actually, I, I've been following the AI agent stuff not very, I should follow it more. I guess I generally, I feel like there's a lot of hype for, I'm sure there's tech there. I'm sure there's tech underneath, but I think it's very, very easy when like open AIs at a trillion dollars to slap AI on anything crypto and, and have the valuation run up. Doug is our resident AI Dumer. AI bear. But, Yeah, yeah, but not Dumer. Like, he doesn't think it's going to decimate him humanity. He's just going to do nothing for him.

I do use it all the time, though. Like, I'm constantly. Every argument we have is... Every argument is just AI, but it's AI arguing against AI. I'm not using AI. Those are my real thoughts. No, I don't know. I mean, I haven't really been full.

I just think it's very low signal to noise. So I haven't taken the time really to see what is high signal in there. Okay. I don't really know. with the X4 or a two thing, apart from like payments, agents to agents. I mean, this whole, this whole thing is like a deep, in my opinion, like misunderstanding as to what AI is and like what agents are. It's not like there's this whole hype around autonomous agents interacting and stuff. Like it's just code. Like agents trading, you know, we've had code trading on NASDAQ in the New

York Stock Exchange for 20 years. It's called algorithmic trading, right? Like, nobody is hand smashing market orders, right? They have, like, a system. Like, all of this stuff has been intentionally anthropomorphized in order to sell, like, this narrative of an agent economy. And it's like, there's still humans directing people to do this. And I think the whole thing is like somewhat of a charade. I don't know what the, I saw the expert or two thing. There was like some meme coins that came of it, but I don't actually know what it does. Like, it's just another, it's literally just like a standard. So it just helps create a standard way for people to code AI agents.

I did an episode with one of the authors and then somebody who founded a company that, you know, also works in this area. And it was, I mean, it was really interesting. Yeah, I don't think it's something that you can directly make money from. It's more just like, you know, H.D. TP or you know, whatever. So, but yeah, you can build something that uses it. Okay.

So we don't have a lot of time left, but there's definitely a few other topics we should definitely hit. One is a Kalshi versus Polymarket. I mean, this is like, this is just, you know, like blood in the streets kind of rivalry, in my opinion, the way these two companies, yeah, just, I don't know, it's so interesting. Like how she, you know, trying to get all these different influencers and like, Polymercate doing the same thing. Calci, you know, raised a billion dollars at an $11 billion valuation.

Polymercate raised, you know, at $12 billion valuation. So I don't know. What do you guys think of this whole thing going down between the two of them? I think it so, okay. I agree with you. I actually think it's the most, it really is like the most acerbic sort of. I mean, I guess we've dealt with this in crypto for a while. Like, like the FBI, right?

Like the people are saying. Yeah. So like Cali. Cali called. Yeah. Acquisitions that they were. Yeah. I don't know.

I feel like if you call the FBI on somebody, that's hard to. Wait, that Cali called the FBI on Shane? Is that? They're right. This was right after the election. Shane was detained. His phones were searched. They had, they had Antonio, wasn't Antonio Brown, I think, tweet that's like this dialogue.

guilty or something. Okay, first of all this is alleged. Like, I don't want to get. Yeah, alleged. Yeah, a legend. So I don't know. But I will say there hasn't been like an extreme denial of that from what I can tell on on Kashi's part.

I don't, that's, that seems like sort of understood to have been true that they had people. I don't think they necessarily called the FBI on chain maybe. I don't know. But they did have. Someone from Kau Shui was like they were dunking on them though, at least after. Like, you know if they weren't like they were dunking on them on Twitter. Twitter. For sure.

Well, and then also, I think they did, like, reach out to influencers to, like, insinuate that. Right. That was guilty. Yeah. So that's really not a very good look. I don't think that's, like, very good. Again, if true, not a good look. And, you know, there was, like, I've heard Terek, is it Terek?

Terek. Anyways, I've heard him subsequently say, like, we've made some mistakes. So I, it is like, I don't know. know if that was an admission or what but yeah like that's really a not a great look from from calci but like the energy on uh like the back and forth is like very extreme right and i think it's because it's that you have like two sort of novel i say novel i mean you have two companies that are are or could eventually make a tremendous amount of money like these could potentially be extremely valuable and they already are to some capacity and it's like so the competition is fierce right i guess that's

maybe the most, you know, generous way to interpret it. Are either of them in a large compared to, like, Fandool or kind of the traditional buddy? That's a good question. What is Drafking's trading at? Yeah, like, um. Like trading volume? No, no, no.

Yeah, just like actual like volume, like profit to, um. Okay, so like traffic, well, so Pollymarket and Kalshi are almost valued market cap wise at the same market caps make believe right okay I'm just pointing out that yeah well it's all

yeah I see what you're yes I see what you're saying right so they're being they're like I mean they're being underwritten at like you know I suppose like you know a hundred billion dollar company

but no I think the vast majority of it is sports betting it seems for the time being I know Polymarket made this big deal of you know showing that they were a lot more

prediction market they had a lot more, you know, prediction market volume, whereas Kalshi maybe has a, is the vast majority of it is sports betting. So, but I don't know. I mean, there's, I think, what, 50, 60,000 daily active users on both, like, or one of the polymarket, like, we'll see. It does seem pretty, yeah. I mean, it just strikes. I don't know.

I don't know this way very well. It feels like you're kind of out of the head of the skis, right? like we're assuming that like one of them are going to one of them are going to win but like to me it seems just as likely like draft kings you know draft kings does election versus you know polymarket does sports i think um so i will like sort of disclose like i'm friends with people at polymarket like you know friendly with Shane i suppose and also people at calchie so i don't really have a dog in this fight but yes i do tend to agree that also from what i can tell the legal side of this is by no means worked out. And if there is anybody who is, you know, at, like,

if you want to talk about a lobby that is extremely protective of what they are granted by the federal government, it is states with gambling and Native American tribes. So there is going to be pushback on this and, you know, we'll see. But I don't think we're done in that capacity, right? Like we talk about this a lot with, you know, some of our friends, like they're, I don't think this whole fight is by any means, one, from prediction markets if they are perceived as gambling similarly to drabkeen, Fandul, you know, all the massive Las Vegas behemoths. Yeah. So I just did some quick Googling to try to figure this out. And it looks like the Gemini AI is telling me that CalChii. trading volume annualized has reached approximately $50 billion as of November. And it also tells me that Fanduel has, or in 2024, a Fanduel had $20, sorry, had $50 billion wagered.

So, you know, I don't know if that's exactly apples to apples, but it seems like, you know, at least there's something. That's pretty significant. Yeah. So polymarket is smaller, but, you know, they are only rolling out in the U.S. now. So I would imagine they're going to catch up at a certain point. Okay. So one other thing that I wanted to ask you about, I mean, I actually have a few, three more.

But one other one, because this just, you know, ICO beast is associated now with Kalshi. But I'm sure you saw what happened with him in Mege, where he basically was like, oh, I, you know, receive this allocation. and he was named as one of the, forget what they called them, but there was like kind of a tranche that received like more than normal because they had helped the mega-eathe team so much and he was in that tranche.

So I would imagine that he, his allocation was like pretty significant. And they took it away because he was trying to figure out how to hedge. So what do, because there was like a, you know, a lockup on that. So what do you make of that? Doug.

I mean, I don't know. It was a good spectacle. right like crypto crypto crypto is all about spectacle so i don't know i think it's honestly probably good for mega eve good for mr beast um okay even though he lost his significant allocation yeah yeah yeah but i mean it kind of right it puts him in the puts him in the spotlight right now it's like we're we're talking about him on a year end recap show on whether kowel's uh that treatment i don't know um i i guess it's it's it's kind of funny maybe it's controversial like if you say bad stuff about somebody.

I don't know. I don't have a real strong opinion. I thought it was entertaining. Would you yank someone's allocation if they were shit talking? Critical of my projects? Yeah, yeah.

No, I don't think. I don't think that, like, I was critical. It was that he tried to hedge it. That's what it was. Oh, he tried to hedge it. Yeah. I mean, everybody. He openly talked on, yeah, X about it.

Everybody does it. I guess people don't really talk about it. I know, but it was against the rules. Yeah, it's against the rules. Okay, so like, okay, then, yeah, I mean, he should have to deal with the repercussions. I will say that I only follow this loosely, but I did see it. And I don't think that, you know, you tweet something and you probably don't realize what the ramifications of that are.

So I, maybe one thing I would say is, like, I know. know, yeah, I would think maybe like Brother Bing would have reached out to him and been like, hey, like, this isn't cool, you know, first. But maybe to make a point, you need to bring down the hammer sometimes. But it wasn't that, like, that's not that egregious. So, yeah. What he did he mean or what they did? Yeah, I don't think it's what he did. And then on, I guess also what they, I mean, if it was against the rules, then, yeah, like, if it was lesson learned.

Yeah, it wasn't like allocation he held for like years and was like getting runned on the value. It was like you're getting a refund for something you did a couple days ago. Well, and also like what like given token launches this year, like we'll see if he ends up like losing a ton of money on that. Like maybe that was the greatest thing in the world, right? To be saved 100K or whatever it was. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, but the point is that whatever they allocated to him, especially like I said, he was in a special tranche where he had helped them the most.

So I think it was a very generous allocation. So, yeah, that reflects however many years he was helping them. And then now he got nothing for it. But okay. Well, he's a calcium like shill. He's getting paid, I'm sure, not even just shill. He's like a full time, like part of their PR team. Like he's doing fine, I'm sure.

So lesson learned. I don't think what he did was that bad. And I don't think that Yanking, it's that bad. But like, I mean, it was funny. It was funny. Okay, okay. Let's talk about something that is like intentionally funny, which is choose rich Nick has like really broken through to like even non-crypto people. You know, obviously we all saw the initial like girlfriend tweet. But then, you know, he went viral for may I meet you. Like now now it just feels like he's going viral generally for like a lot of stuff. I was curious for your thoughts on him and that whole saka.

I think he's actually really funny. It's like full caveat. Like we've actually worked with him for some stuff on Fogo. But I mean, look, it kind of reminds me like Sasha Barakowen, like Borat or like Brunner.

Like you really take, picks these characters and leans into them. Definitely takes like something. When everyone's yelling at you and mad at you, like to kind of lean in more to it, takes, uh, takes some special type of person.

But yeah, I think he's funny. He's definitely more cringe people on Twitter. I don't know if you listen. He came on the show and he was not in his persona and he was so thoughtful. And it was like actually, yeah, and it was a really, really interesting interview.

He, yeah, he like gave us a behind the scenes look at how they do some of their stuff. And like, I don't know if you remember the avalanche controversy, but there was some like avalanche event on a yacht. And then, yeah, like, so nobody knew what happened. That was only a troll, right? That was only what?

I thought that was like, all a troll, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah. So he revealed that. Like, basically what happened was he got kicked off, but nobody sort of knew what for. And then Kobe tweeted that what happened was that he had imitated Justin's son with the banana art, but instead he had painted his piece.

penis yellow and attached it to the wall. And so Kobe tweeted that. And like then suddenly that was like the narrative of what actually happened. But yeah, choose rich Nick came on the show and revealed actually what, what really happened, which wasn't that. But anyway, okay. So the last two things, these these two things are like a weird combo.

But I was just interested for your reaction to the do quons sentence. Doe Kwan sentence of 15 years. I'll be honest, it was like so something that seemed fairly obvious as to what case. First of all, the collapse of Luna was like the whole thing was very obvious, right? Like, and it was pretty clear what happened. There's no, yeah, I don't think, I think it's fairly straightforward what happened there. Now, I will say that all of the subsequent stuff that came out, like so much stuff. It was like information overload.

And everything that came out afterwards, it just became like, I wasn't going to follow every little detail as to what transpired both publicly and in the background and all the deals he had with market makers and all the stuff. Like, was you buying this Bitcoin? Like, all this stuff just got like so convoluted and so complex to me. There was this post the other day from somebody who was at Terraform, is that what was called? It was, I mean, this was like a novella. I mean, it was like, you know, 10 pages would have, so I didn't read that, but I did read the last sentence and or the last couple sentences and there was some sympathy, which, you know, I don't know, like at the end of the day, like how much was like, was it patently a Ponzi scheme or was it transparent what he was doing?

think that's one side of it. And then the other side of it was, was he doing illegal stuff in the background, which it ended up appearing, yes. But I don't know. I mean, it's one of these things where the whole thing was so obviously broken that you, I mean, it gets to the market cap it did. Like, there was going to be a fallout. And yeah, it's been, it's been pretty extreme.

So do you think he should be in prison for 15 years for that? I don't know. I really, like, again, I just, I feel like Luna itself, right? Like, everyone knew kind of the rules of it. I don't think he should be in prison for 15 years because, like, Luna was, like, a Ponzi scheme that was transparent. And it was kind of like, right, like, 2020 people or 2021 people are kind of nuts. Um, but like to Gord's point, like, I don't know all the things in court. Like, who, who, like, what was the one thing? Like, the Chai, like, payments thing he was lying about, like, how, how much of that was. was used like, right?

Like, yeah. You know, he, I'm sure he was doing so much stuff, like, where's their fraud? Like, where was he, like, lying to people about, which doesn't change, like, the insurance, like, how Luna works, right? Like, this is still, like, ultimately, right? Like, a silly thing, but, and maybe it doesn't, like, I don't know how many people were buying Luna based on, like, Chai would have, like, a lot of transaction volume. My guess is probably not many in 2021.

I think people are buying a lot of crypto. Those are just silly. But, like, I'm sure he'd get enough that there's probably actual, like, fraudulent He's not the most endearing character. Like, I mean, the way he interacted with people for two years was so boisterous. It was so arrogant. And, you know, it's kind of like an icarus type thing, right? Like, if anything, that type of attitude makes it more likely that when this does unravel,

when things do blow up, that people are very, very curious. as to what was going on in the background. And when you are making claims that are probably end up being patently untrue, like, I don't know. I mean, if he was sort of like a demure Jeff from hyperliquid type, who never really was public facing and wasn't really publicly saying what was going on in the background, right? But there may have been some, like, you know, kind of brief what you sow. And from what I can tell, I don't know, 15 years seems like a lot, but maybe it's not enough. I don't know. But he's not somebody who I'm like, wow, what a great guy.

You know, like, man, what a shame. He got screwed. Like, maybe he's in jail for 10 more years than he should be, right? Like, I don't know. But, yeah, I don't have like much. I wasn't really keyed into that after it fell apart. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was definitely.

Yeah, the fraudulent bits. The one sentiment that I saw on Twitter that made a lot of sense to me was that, yeah, people lost a lot of money in Luna, but they lost, like, paper gains. which is different from like FTCX and SPF where they, you know, although, no, I guess even some of that could be the same. But it's like they, yeah, I don't know. UST went to zero. And that wasn't really a paper game.

No gains on that. I guess how much interest you were stacking. But yeah, you were probably. I mean, dude, if you deposited 100K into USC to get 20% yield and it goes to zero, you lost 100K. So I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But also one other thing about that is like, like, hopefully people were educated to understand the risks.

Whereas like what's different with FTCS is like he literally took the actual funds. Whereas like dough, it was like a failed thing. Yeah, I do agree with that. Like FTX was straight up that money was stolen like there is. And there was no. And like the UST mechanism itself. Like I actually like people might be mad or whatever, but like people knew what they were getting into. And it's just like a question of what's fraudulent, you know, around what he was saying to telling different people.

But no one was deceived. Like, oh, there's actual dollars. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So last really quick thing I want to touch on is like, what do you think of this quantum threat that everybody's talking about? Like, are you following that? Like, I don't know.

Some people are saying that Nick Carter is like. over, you know, overreacting to this potential threat. Do you think this is something crypto people should worry about or not? Okay. I just did. Actually, I just did a podcast today on this. So I'm going to show my podcast. I was not going to show my podcast. But now I shall. I mean, this isn't coming out for like another week after we're recording anyway. Okay. Well, okay. So I just did a podcast on this. Go back and listen to it now with a guy who is a longtime Bitcoin developer,

not a core dev, but just somebody who's like, you know, independently hacking away on Bitcoin for a while. And he is not a quantum researcher, okay? He's not a physicist, but he is somebody who I think is quite bright and has, you know, is quite pragmatic. He is very, very skeptical. With that said, I don't think, so I think Nick is what he's doing is in earnest. Like, I've read, I read the first one. I'm not concerned about quantum. Yeah, that's like my take is that I have basically,

I think there's actually a lot of other concerns prior to quantum for crypto. One, like a use case, to getting people to utilize. Security budget. That was last cycle's fun. Yeah, exactly. Again, with Bitcoin, most of this stuff, at least to me, right? Like long time, like digging my heels, don't care both. is okay, like all this stuff doesn't really phase me

because I'm going to live by the store, die by the store, like whatever happens happens. So like I'm not, I am very unconvinced on quantum. I also am like the last person should ask about quantum. So I hope that helps. Doug, you're more of a computer scientist than I am. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I think it's hard to predict.

Like I feel like there's going to be like it's not all of a sudden there's going to be quantum computer tomorrow. So like I think what people are afraid of is like, Bitcoin core devs are like, it's so ossified at this point that, like, you can't even make a small change or take 10 years and, like, you know, they'll be able to develop this whole new type of technology before Bitcoin Core can even, like, make a three-line code change to the protocol. Yeah. I don't know. Like, it's small on my things to worry about. I think there's definitely other things to worry about.

But that being said, I do think, like, like, I would guess it's probably contributing to kind of the crappy performance of big. coin the past couple months. Like, you talked to boomers and they're like, oh, what about quantum? Yeah, I'm a little skeptical of that. Like, I'm a, I'm, you know what I'm personally? Well, I say I'm a little skeptical. Like, I don't doubt that's a thing, but we can always assign some valid reason for thought at any end up.

Like, for example, like I heard, you know, a few months ago that all this Bitcoin's ending up with Saylor in ETFs and, you know, long time holders are, are concerned that it's lost at cypherpunk ethos. And I'm like, you know, people just. sometimes have gains of 10,000 X from mining Bitcoin and they can now exit and buy their, you know, villa in Nice or, you know, in Majorca. Like, there are reasons that people sell and we try to ascribe like, you know, whatever is the current reason for the market being down. We're trying to like ascribe that to, you know, that that's the reason they're selling.

And like, in reality, I think people just sell stuff. And I don't, I would be very surprised if a lot of ETF selling and institutional selling is because of quantum fund, primarily because those people know exactly zero about quantum. So for them to just start yeeding and like, you know, nuking the chart would surprise me. As it, you don't have to know a lot about something to trade on the narrative. Yeah, but again, I'm just saying like there's all sorts of narratives at any given point. Yeah, I agree with you, right. There's chart. There's chart and then you come up with explanations. Exactly. So almost everything that people, you know, say is like, you know,

Bitcoin is nuking. The market's not doing well. It's like, okay, maybe sometimes people just sell and, you know, they want to go buy a new house. Like, it's not, like, we don't have to overthink it. And also, the market is derived from like trillion different individual preferences, right? Like, it's never one single thing at any given point. So, like, I don't know.

All right. Her point. Okay. You guys, well, this has been super fun. Before we, you know, say goodbye. This is going to be the last episode of 2025. Do you want to give a 2026 prediction? I think, I think 2026 will be better, but only because it feels like up only from here, right?

I do personally feel like we've likely bottomed. So I think 2026 will be better. Fed's about to inject a bunch of capital into the system. Yeah. You know, we always have to rely on these external narrative. Everything is just, everything is just liquidity. Somebody says QE. I'm like, all right, that's good enough for me.

Like, you know, we were just talking about quantum flood. We were just talking about the fault. I do the exact same thing for bullish reasons. I'm like, oh, QE, like, there we go. Like, I don't know what that means, but like I'll latch on to that narrative. No problem, you know. Yeah, I think, I think 2020, like, can't get, I mean, I guess it could get a lot worse, but it feels like, it feels like people are like max pessimism, like cynicism.

Like, I don't know, like you go on like crypto Twitter. It's like how cynical are people and that's, usually good counter signal. Like when people are kind of this max cynicism thing, that's actually when crypto tends to run. And then, you know, the opposite when they're like euphoric about stuff, then like buying in a narrative so don't make any sense, it's actually usually when you want to sell. So, you know, I think it's good from here. All right. Well, you guys, this was super fun. Thanks so much for chatting with me about all the events of 2025. Thanks for, thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you. Laura's fun. Appreciate it.

Yeah, and happy New Year, everyone. Catch all later.