Unchained - The Chopping Block: 2025 Predictions, AI's Crypto Play, and U.S. Legislation - Ep. 753

Episode Date: December 19, 2024

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest in crypto. In this special end-of-year episode, they recap 2024's key moments and forecast what's ahead in 2025. The team debates Bitcoin's potential to hit $180K, the impact of AI on crypto security, and upcoming U.S. crypto legislation. They also predict the rise of viral blockchain games. Join the crew as they unpack these predictions and more, offering unique insights into what the new year might bring for crypto enthusiasts. Show highlights 🔹 Bitcoin Hits New Highs: The crew debates Bitcoin's potential to reach $180K, with predictions of a significant rally and subsequent corrections. 🔹 AI Turns Crypto Scammer: A bold prediction that an AI system will become a crypto scammer makes waves, highlighting the intersection of artificial intelligence and blockchain security concerns. 🔹 Crypto Legislation Breakthroughs: Anticipation grows for groundbreaking crypto-specific legislation in 2025, reflecting a major shift in regulatory landscapes. 🔹 Consolidation in Crypto's Infrastructure: Predictions surface about mergers among AppChains and Layer 2 solutions due to economic pressures, signaling a major consolidation trend. 🔹 Viral Blockchain Games: The panel foresees blockchain-based games going viral, capturing mainstream attention and potentially becoming a cultural phenomenon. 🔹 DeFi's Continued Evolution: Discussions center around DeFi's comeback, its impact on the crypto market, and the evolving challenges it faces as it grows in popularity and complexity. 🔹 Surprising Crypto Predictions for 2025: The episode wraps up with each host sharing their most surprising predictions for the coming year, setting the stage for a dynamic and unpredictable future in crypto. Hosts ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly  ⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Robert Leshner, CEO & Co-founder of Superstate ⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures Disclosures Timestamps -  00:00 Intro 03:00 Biggest Winner 8:30 Biggest Loser 14:04 Biggest Surprise 20:50 Best New Mechanism 27:03 Best Meme 31:02 Best/Worst Pivot 38:57 Biggest Flop 44:08 Comeback Story of 2024 48:42 Favorite TCB Guest 51:18 Predictions for 2025 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I predict that an AI-based system will become a crypto-scammer. A crypto-scammer? Okay. I like that. Like, what level of scammer are we talking about? Are you talking about it? Yeah, how regular scam? How think does a scammer have to be?

No, there will be a news article in the block or Coin Desk or some other somewhat credible publication about how an AI is scamming people. That also seems like a very safe bet. That's like kind of a... How is that a safe bet? That's a fucking safe bet. Not a dividend. It's a tale of two.

Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. Unnamed trading firms who are very involved. I like that 8 of the ultimate pump. Defy protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together

and give the industry insider's respective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intros, first you got Tom, the Defy Maven and Master of Memes. Hello, everyone. Next, we got Robert, the Crypto Gondasurer and Tsar of Super State. Happy holidays. Because we've got Tarun, the Gigabrain, and Grand Puba at Gauntlet.

Yo. And finally, I'm Haseeb the Head Hyde Man at Dragonfly. We're at early stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Lecy Chopping Block, that XYZ, for more disclosures. The boys, we are getting into the holidays as well as to the end of the year. We're going to be off next week for the holidays. But given that we are so close to the end of the year, we thought it is time for us

to do our year-end recap. There's an annual chopping block tradition. We've been doing this now for a couple of years. And what we're wrong every year. We are so wrong. We absolutely are terrible at predicting the future, which is why we're such important investors in the space. So we're going to go through and name a bunch of categories that we are nominating.

So the categories for this year are biggest winner, biggest loser, biggest surprise, best new mechanism, best meme, best or worst pivot, biggest flop, biggest comeback story, favorite chopping block guest, and then finally we'll do predictions for 2024. That all sound good? I assume everybody already has their picks, right? We're not, nobody's making things up on the fly. I have like 90% of mine. Tarun.

You know, you're going to be getting some yellow. You're ruining Christmas. Hey, hey, hey, hey, but you know what? Today is the one day. I can be like, you showed up late to the show. I showed up like two minutes, like two minutes late. We're even. We're even.

We're even now. Is that a Christmas sweater? No, it is a pink panther sweater. Oh, that's cool. It's got the Grinch green though. And you have the green hair. It does. Yeah, yeah.

But it is like pink panther. That's like. Turun, I'm so touched that you dyed your hair green for Christmas. That's so, that's what I'm here for just to provide the yule tide and cheer. Thank you. It's great holiday cheer. Well, in the spirit of green and some green candles, let's talk about the biggest winner of this year. So we'll go around.

I'll start. My vote for biggest winner of this year was Hyperliquid. So this one, not a surprise. I don't know if I front-run anybody here, but Hyperliquid, of course, decentralized perp decks. It was the biggest air drop of the season. It is the fair launch. It's kind of the uni moment of this cycle. It feels like it is the one immaculate conception that everyone's excited about.

Hyperliquid itself, I don't know how decentralized it is in reality. Obviously, they have a lot of work to do to actually decentralize the entire protocol, but at least in terms of the way the token is distributed and the way that everybody feels about hyperliquid. It's kind of the underdog, you know, wonderkind winner that everybody is super excited to be a part of. So hyperliquid, very sad as a VC that we didn't really get a chance to participate in this one. For those you don't know, pretty much every single VC tried to get, try to, try to stuff some money into hyperliquid, and they said no to everybody. So, congrats to hyperliquid and congrats to everybody who participated in the lot.

You could have just bought on day one or traded on there. You could have. It's, I think it was Yano who tweeted this, is that, you know, I missed the beginning of getting into hyperliquid in the air drop. And so instead of now getting in, I'm just going to complain at how much it's running up. Yeah, yeah. That happens all the time. That was like what happened with Solana. Yeah. Like I remember like 2021, there was like the same group of, you know, kind of very similar group of people actually complaining. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, look, I'm not, I don't complain, but it is, it is very impressive to see how well they've executed. So it's just like the, just amazing product skills, execution, tech delivery. Obviously, one of the most well-executed

air drops that we've seen, period, with respect to just technical performance. So congrats to hyperliquid. And congrats to everybody who's a part of it. Robert, you're up next. Biggest winner. The biggest winner are all American crypto founders and American crypto companies. This is the year that we've gone from an extremely antagonistic and aggressive headwind against American entrepreneurship when it comes to crypto to signs of a wonderful tailwind. This is a huge transformation.

As an American crypto founder, I feel like I'm a huge winner. I feel like everyone else is as well. and I'm just really excited that it's no longer going to suck to be an American building in crypto. All right. God bless America. God bless America. Karoon. Who's your pick? My pick, even though my first pick was probably a Sieb's pick by a long shot.

My second pick is just Defi in general. I think Defi went from like being hated, you know, what was the D-Gen Spartan thing? We're on month four of the 36-month bear market type thing. It feels like it has been 36 months. But, like, Defi, I feel like was always kind of the flogged child in crypto. Like these L-1s that were vaporware would have 10 times the FDV and everyone made fun of Defi. And I feel like it made a big comeback. It's kind of correlated to Roberts point, though, because I kind of feel like once that opened up,

everyone was like, all right, let's go back to Defi. but as someone who was born in the defy trenches versus born in the meme coin trenches, it's always nice to see it come back, you know? Okay. It does feel like the defy recovery is really concentrated in like Uni Hyperliquid, Athena, and then Avae feels like the big four Defi winners this year.

Yeah, I think that sounds roughly right. I mean, there's always dispersion, right? I feel like a lot of the, being a winner in like a previous cycle doesn't guarantee you be a winner in like the next cycle. It's kind of like look at like the light coin chart, for example. But I think people who, you know, kept building and, you know, gaining, getting volume and getting AUM and, um, I think they're kind of being rewarded. And I think classically it's like when, when sentiment is just so unilaterally negative, I think that just

means, okay, it is due for a rally. It's due for redemption arc at some point. And I think that's a little bit of what's happening with D5. All right. Bob, who's your biggest winner? I might be boring and select my 0.23 winner, which is Tether. Because they just continue to have an incredible year. And they continue to be extremely profitable, arguably the most profitable company in the world per employee. They're making billions of dollars, even with, you know, rate cuts in the short term. Howard Lucknick now, Commerce Secretary of Kentor Fitzgerald. And so I feel like tether is also one of those things that people have been waiting to die or something bad to happen to it for years and years and years and years.

And it actually just gets more and more successful every single year and more legitimized. and continues to grow. And I think it's also just been a great champion story in case study for crypto. And I think the story of stable coin adoption and global dollarization has been all such very popular politically. So tether can use to be crushing it. There's no breaks on the train. It is a right of passage in crypto to short tether at least once in your life.

And to never do it again. Well, not never do it again. You can obviously short tether pretty easily. but yeah, nobody who's short to tether has ever gotten anything out of it. So unfortunately, okay, let's switch gears. Next is biggest loser. So Robert, you're up first. Who's the biggest loser of 2024? Well, this is an extension to my first answer. The biggest loser is the anti-crypto army and the members of the House and the Senate and sections of the executive branch, including members of the SEC and those who are implementing Operation Choke Point 2.0,

the anti-Crypto army is the biggest loser. They thought incorrectly that the persecution of the crypto industry was a winning platform to advance their political careers, and they were proven wrong. It has not been a winning strategy. It has been an absolute failure of a strategy. And hopefully this changes the concept of attacking critical. crypto as a political or partisan successful platform and will never be repeated again. That's a great answer.

Turin, what's yours? Biggest loser. I think I'm going to pick a category. But I would sort of say a lot of the like tail L2s, I think, you know, coming in from 2023 to 2024, there was this narrative of there'll be 5 million L2s. Every L2 stack is going to have a ton of special purpose app chains. And maybe I should actually make this broadly more the app chain thesis. Cosmos continues to flail and explode in ways that are even more embarrassing to all the participants

every week I open Twitter. But I would say that there was this view that like everyone to have app chain. It would have all this kind of things with people who had successful apps like Blur would be able to launch their own app chain like L2's like Blast and it would work. And clearly so far that has been proven to not be very true at all. I think there's been concentration in the top L2s. In fact, if you look at sort of the genie coefficient across L2s, it's like concentrated even more into the top one.

So I think the app chain thesis in general and app chain enjoyers are the biggest losers. You know, I remember when we did our show, right, when Blast first launched their bridge, their multisig bridge. And I think it was the only one in the show who was like, I don't think Blass is going to work. And all of you guys were like, A sieb, you're an idiot. Every single L2 is going to be farming their bridge. And what was it called when they were like doing the putting like Lido and maker?

What was it? Like really? Native field. Native field. Native field. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But one thing I'm going to say I call that. I'm going to say I call that.

One thing I will add is hyperliquid is sort of a weird exception to this rule, but it's sort of weirdly not an app chain yet. It's very clean. But it's not an app chain yet. right like i can't deploy anything yet we haven't seen if the hype bvm would work it will get adoption whatever so i'm i'm not counting it because it's like almost closer to a centralized thing right now than it is a full descent so it does it i'm i'm drawing the lines in my box of the biggest loser of like app chains but hyperlucid gets to stay out okay well it's not an app chain is well it's it is

it is an app chain right now but it's not a generalized yeah yeah exactly exactly so i want i'm just trying to make sure I, before, before I get yelled at, I'm giving them, they're not in this loser category. Sure. Okay, fair. So my pick for biggest loser was financial nihilism. I think financial nihilism had a real, just uproarious first half of the year, where it felt like the cool thing to do and the successful thing to do was to believe that nothing in crypto mattered, everything is a meme coin, all the tech shit is going to go down the drain, and it's all a big, gigantic scam. And basically what we've seen, especially in the last quarter or so, is just you know, meme coin trading as a percentage of what's happening in crypto has receded massively.

It went from like 20, 30 percent of total volumes in crypto down to like 10 percent or even less on any given day. And there's just more enthusiasm. There's more belief. And like if your, if your view is that all the tech stuff is useless and none of this matters and everything is pointless, I think you were a big loser this year. Although, I mean, maybe. Maybe. if you exited. If you exited before Trump got elected, then okay, maybe you did well. But I think the view of the right thing to do is to give up on the vision of crypto, I think that view has been a big loser for this year. Tom, what's your pick? Biggest loser. Robert took my anti-crypto army, but boom. An adjacent camp, I would say, is everyone who pivoted out of crypto in 2023. It's just sort of

the meme if you're in crypto Pivot AI. And I think it's just such a classic, you know, it's over, we're so back kind of thing where it's like, okay, asset prices go down. Investors leave, builders leave extremely negative market sentiment. And there's always some sort of comeback and always looks different. And it's different people. But, you know, we're back. And I think maybe for a lot of people, this is the first time kind of seeing that or learning that. But I know a lot of people personally who sold a much of their crypto or shut down their companies or you started working in a different space. And I think, I don't know, it's kind of sad to see that, you know, you really do need

conviction to make it in this space. And a lot of people kind of lack that. Tut tut. Pivoted to AI. That's what you get. That's what you get. Most hated rally. Okay.

Next prize is for biggest surprise to ruin. You go first. What was the biggest surprise of 2024? I think without a doubt for me, the top two, and I put them in a similar category, are PumpDuff Fund and BunkBot. So Pump.combe, you know, like a year ago basically had, I mean, it existed, but I think we talked about on the show in like January or February, like when it was just getting started. And it was sort of this new novel way for people to create assets without knowing that

they're creating assets and figuring. out having this whole mechanic around meme coins. And I would argue that the nihilism trend would not have been able to grow as fast as possible to pump off on the other thing that I'm putting in a similar category, but it's slightly different as Bonkbot, which is TelegramBot for buying meme coins predominantly like you can buy other things. And I think Bonkbot, if you look at its revenue secretly a silent killer, very similar to PumpDefund level revenue. Both companies that have existed for like a year that hit $100 million in revenue first year. So like another kind of big surprise from both of them. So yeah, I think the infrastructure around meme coins, to me,

that to me, that was a surprise. And then those two are the highlights in my mind. Nice. Tom, what's your biggest surprise of the year? I'll make a comment on Turin's surprise later. But my biggest surprise is maybe two. One is the launch of World Liberty. financial or the announcement of it. The fact that, like, the president, at the time, President of Canada was associated with a defy token and Baron Trump has a wallet and just like kind of insane clowning. Three wallets. Four wallets.

Very, very surreal. But then also, I think the fact that the sale has gone so poorly. I felt like if, you know, a meme coin or a random NFT can mint out in, you know, a very short amount of time, I would expect, you know, a defy token associated with the president also would have sold out. And yet, I think it's still only like 25% sold and really seems to be kind of tapering off. So I guess a surprise in both ways, was the fact that it happened and the fact that it was not very big. Okay. What's your comment on Turun's answer about? Oh, I was to say, this was my 2024 prediction was apps are going to make, you know, a bunch of the money.

And like, you know, if like a photon, banana gun, maybe like the Uniswifference run out. I mean, these things make hundreds of millions of dollars more than most defypike protocols. And so, um, maybe it didn't predict meme coin infrastructure specifically, but like apps are crushing it. And, you know, arguably, you know, more profitable and, uh, you know, better revenue generating than a lot of protocols. There you go. There are tokens don't do that well, though. That's like the no, no, no, it's all privatized. No one, no one gets it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, um, my biggest surprise one, I had two big surprises. One biggest surprise was, The rise of click to earn, or sorry, tap to earn, or say click to earn.

The rise of tap to earn. Like, I'm just like, why. And it seems like it's gone now. Like, it's already over. I don't hear anything about tap to earn games anymore. Yeah, hamster combat. Okay. Sorry, I didn't even know what it was.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So tap to earn. So those you don't know, tap to earn is literally a game where there's like a, basically just an image and you tap on the image as many times as you can per day until you run out of taps and then you tap more than next day. Did you dream this? I've never even heard of this. before. This may have been some sort of summer fever

dream that you had. I don't think any of us are familiar with this. I'm taking too many drugs lately. Yeah. I mean, I mainly only heard of these because like they would be listed on all the pre-launch markets and have insane volume and you'd be like, what the fuck is this point? We talked about, we talked about enhancement on the show. We talked to answer

combat and no, I know, I'm talking to Tarun. Tarun seems genuinely confused by hearing about this. Maybe I just like had amnesia about it. I was like, this is not worth scoring. The answer combat had hundreds of millions of users. and it was banned in Iran because, like, the Iranian military, so many people in the Iranian military were using hamster combat every single day.

And there was like an Iranian general who was quoted saying that he thought hamster combat was a sci-op by the American government to try to corrupt the minds of Iranians. This thing was insane. It was absolutely insane. I have a little weird theory about this something very related to this. But I was at this coffee shop in, in the, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, the East Village this weekend. And I heard these like 15 year olds talking about how they're like sitting in discords and GMing to try to earn tokens. And I was like, you guys are 15 and you

figured out that you need to go to the Monad Discord. And then one of them told the best story ever, which was that he was like, yeah, I got like detention because my school doesn't allow you to have phones during the day. But I like needed to GM in order to get my air drop. And I was like, Wow. Maybe like the world's 15 year olds who want like extra cash. Like they are the ones who are like really into this stuff in a way that like I would never. I saw the best minds of my generation crushed by GMing. Which is it's kind of similar to this tap to earn thing in my in my head.

This like whole go to discord to try to earn. Okay. So I had part two, which is a little bit totally orthogonal. But the other biggest surprise that I saw this year was that there was really no major crypto hacks. that were like at like either L1 or a default. That's true. Dude, there's going to be a hack in the next two weeks because of the seven.

Just before the year end. Yeah, yeah. But there was like no, you know, there was no layer one that was hacked. There was no like big defy hack. I mean,

there was like a few things like, you know, Gala lost some tokens and then, you know, there was some centralized exchanges that got hacked. And some multisics that got hacked, but those are all private key leaks. There was no big, you know,

$100 million plus smart contract hacks this year. That was very surprising. So it's, It kind of seems like we're getting better at this, which is good because TVL has recovered massively this year, but we have not seen the same level of losses that we saw in previous years. So, Robert, finish us off, bigger surprise for the year. All right, I'll go quickly because this one's boring. It extends on what Turun said about crypto meme coin infrastructure, but I'm looking one layer

deeper. I was surprised by the rise of Solana and Base as the meme coin infrastructure this year. Both of them really came out into poll position for meme coins and a lot of new user activity due to low trading fees and the easy ability to launch new tokens. And as platforms, both of them rose much more quickly and aggressively in terms of adoption than I would have expected. All right. Next is best new mechanism.

Tom, you're up first. What is your vote for best new mechanism? I'm bad I got to go first because I feel like this is. is going to be a popular one. I'm going to go the pump bonding curve and sort of LP lock. I mean, got him. Yeah. I mean, it's just a very novel situation of a very novel.

That's the most emotion you've ever shown on the show. That was like, whoa. I just love new mechanisms. I just wasn't ready for it. Tom's the mechanism guy. Tom's a mechanism guy. He gets excited. I just read you guys.

You know, I thought you would have some, well, now I'm curious to see whatever it else things. Yeah. Well, plays. Okay. Well, I also had pumped up on bonding curve, but I guess my backup for best mechanism, I'd say Athena and just the, you know, the sort of tokenized carry trade. Oh, I have a different answer on Athena, so good. Okay. All right, Robert.

I think the best mechanism, and you see it in Athena, you see it in usual, you're going to see it in like 14 other stable coin like things. is yield amplification by taking the yield from a thing, and it can be a carry trade, it could be T-bills, it could be literally anything, and passing it only to a subset of users. And when you do this, it amplifies the yield dramatically. And so if you're earning 5% in some underlying strategy, but only one quarter of your users are getting that yield, it multiplies it by four. And it winds up being a 20% yield for a smaller number of users. And this is, you know, a really interesting dynamic that I think has propelled the launch of Athena. And I think it's actually incredibly powerful. And we're going to see a lot of experimentation with this same mechanism in the coming months.

What should we call this? This doesn't have a name. Yeah. This is just yield discrimination. Like, realistically, it's discrimination. There you go. It's redlining. You know, you can pass the membrane. Yield redlining. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I actually feel like yield amplification is catchy. Not yield redlining. Yield amplification.

I think it's really discrimination. It's more like discrimination. Yield discrimination. That sounds like a bad thing, though. Yeah, it's not. But it is a bad thing for USDA holders, not S-U-S-S-D. Yeah, but they're opting it. I mean, they're opting out in order to get a more liquid asset, right?

So I'm opting out to get more. Opt-in native yield. I don't know. Opt-in native yield. Okay, we got to workshop this. We got to workshop this. Yeah, all right. Tarun, what's your best new mechanism? So I would say that clearly the top two things this year were like, A, yeah, the meme coin kind of, how do you go bootstraffinal liquidity?

And the second thing in general, which is kind of what you and Robert were talking about, was generally basis trading. But one of the pieces underlying a lot of basis trades that exists in Solana and in hyperliquid are the, market maker lending pools and I'm actually writing a paper on this. So I've been like really spending a lot of time reading the contract code for these. So this is like the hyper liquid HLP pool, the the Jupiter JLP pool on Solana and the GMX GLP pool on Arbitrum. Technically this was first invented by the GMX pool in late 21, early 22. But I think they sort of made a lot of the initial mechanism doesn't look like the stuff that everyone else uses now. But the idea here is that, you know, in centralized exchanges, one of the

main advantages that perpetuals exchanges have in centralized exchanges is that the exchange can give market makers loans, like under collateralized loans. So they can say, like, we'll give you some amount of some token, as long as you promised to market make at least a certain amount of volume in that token. Decentrized exchanges don't have that mechanism. There's not like an easy way for market makers to borrow assets to then use to trade. And what these pools is, do is they facilitate that. So users who want yield put assets into these pools. And then traders on the perpetuals exchange effectively borrow from these users, borrow from the people who put pooled assets and they pay them fees. And that has basically facilitated a lot of market maker loan like

behavior on decentralized perpetuals exchanges, which is why they're at all time highs in some ways. Obviously, hyperliquid growing is the main reason. But hyperliquid was able to bootstrap itself, a lot of its usage in the beginning by building these HLP pools. And same with Jupiter, right? Like, Jupiter has like $1.5 billion in JLP. So the reason I'm bringing this up is I think underlying all these basis trades, this is like the core defy kind of infrastructure that is making sure that the on-chain basis trades are doable.

What does the LP stand for? Is it just LP? I think they just say liquidity pool. But like, yeah, in my paper, I'm calling it perpetual demand loan pool because it's like a loan that you're lending to. Yeah. But each protocol, I mean, so for something like, GMX, the liquidity provision itself is programmatic.

There's a target weight. So the governance or multisig chooses a weight, and then it's programmatic, whereas HLP is purely done by third party. You don't know the strategy. But there's still fundamentally this point that like- Who's the third party for like JLP or for HLP? Well, for JLP or JLP, it's just arbitrageers. Like you can arbitrage the pool like an AMM.

There's like a way to do an arbitrage. But for Hyper Liquid, it's like the Hyper Liquid team does the... They are themselves running the strategy. Correct. Correct. So, but the main point is this idea that users who want yield, like users who want to be LPs and the AMM can give money to this pool and then people who want a market make and use it.

And I think that is enabled, you know, perpetuals exchanges in Defi will never be fully as capital efficient as pure centralized, but this has brought it a lot closer to parity. So I think that to me, that's why I think that's like the best mechanism. Okay, very good. Okay. Now, let's change gears a little bit. The next category is best meme. So Tom, why don't you kick it off with Best Meem?

What do you got for Best Meem? I think you're supposed to go first this time, aren't you? I want to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, all right, all right, all right. For my pick for Best Meem, I guess we'll have, we'll put them up and post on the screen. So if you're watching the video, you can see. the memes alongside us. My vote for best meme was Justin's son's birthday. I don't know if you guys

remember this, but so Justin Sun very famously loved in our industry, loved apparently by his own employees. He posted a birthday picture on his birthday that apparently was AI generated because he has 14 fingers. And it was probably one of the, one of the saddest moments for one of the most successful crypto entrepreneurs we've had in this industry. But I was just very tickled by it. It's one of the things I'm going to hold on to for a long time. All right, Robert, what's your pick for best meme? Well, it's not a meme per se, but it sort of is. I'm going to award the best meme in my mind to the pudgy penguins this year.

And maybe I'm biased because today Pengu launched starting at, I think, a $5 trillion FDV when it started trading. Yes. Okay. As one does. As one does. But pudgy penguins, and I'm not. a Pudgy Penguin holder and I don't have any Pango. So, you know, I just respect them.

Yeah, I know. Wait, how did you not get? You surely are like something, because they had like 500 categories. I checked and no. I'm like, for some reason, I'm not an OGF user, even though I am. I don't know. It's like, it's brutal. I know, totally brutal. But best meme goes to Pudgy Penguins for building through the bare market with kind of a mediocre meme, but just, you know, reinforcement. forcing it often enough and heavily enough, that it's become successful. Wait, how is it the best meme if it's a mediocre meme? Because of its real world. Most successful meme.

Success. Yeah, there's like pudgy penguin toys. And they now have a pudgy penguin meme coin. And the community has thrived. And so this silly meme of these fat penguins, I think, has been the most successful meme this year. Sure. Okay.

Fair enough. All right, Tarun. I think I am going to, going to continue with my choice of bonk. Mainly because I thought bonk bot was kind of like a genius way to grow Bonk itself. It's multi-billion dollar market cap meme over a year. It went to basically zero a year ago. I think it's like it's kind of, you know, if there were a blue chip Thelana meme, it's probably

bonk or whiff and whiff just never showed up on the sphere. despite promising, so I'm going to have to go with bunk. Okay. Fair enough. Tom, what's your pick? Best meme? It was really tough. There are a lot of choices.

I don't know if this is the optimal choice, but it's one that really stuck with me is Hugo Martingale, the Polymarket intern account on Twitter. It's just absolutely crushing it. Always very novel, engaging content, always in the replies, roasting people. Very, very good account. And obviously, the name Hugo Martin Gale, also great. So go check it out. Okay, very good.

Yeah, I'm actually, I'm glad that you didn't also pick a coin as your meme. Because with Robert and Turuit, I was like, okay, are we all picking meme coins instead of picking memes? Because I'm like as crypto falling. That when we think meme, we think in coins now. But okay, good. Well, we do. I feel vindicated.

Yeah. Colt was my backup, but, you know, we can't pick a coin. We had way too many episodes about meme coins this year. Like, let me say that very transparent. I hope next year we have way fewer meme coin episodes. I hope for Turun's sake that we have more regulatory episodes because I know he loves those. Okay. So please no.

Okay. All right. All right. Next up is best or worst pivot. Robert, why don't you start? Best or worst pivot? I am going to combine two categories for best pivot and biggest comeback story because at at least for this nomination, I think they should be combined.

And I think many of the best pivots are probably also the best comeback stories. So maybe we can have fewer categories. But I award micro strategy best pivot and biggest comeback story. They pivoted. Wait, what's the pivot? From mediocre business intelligence software to becoming a Bitcoin levered ETF. Wait, wasn't that like five years ago? I know.

What you're talking about? How is that 2020? Hold on, hold on. Hold on. 2024 is the year that, like, this success was really crystallized. And, yes, this pivot was not. Why was it crystallized this year just because the price went up? Yeah, the growth of micro strategy.

The comeback story is, you know, they previously had hit their high during the dot-com bubble. It crashed. And this year, they finally overcame that extremely historical valuation. And they've justified this evolution and pivot from mediocre business intelligence software to levered Bitcoin ETF. And it's an incredible pivot. It's an incredible pivot because they've stumbled upon a phenomenal business model, issuing, you know, convertible debt at a premium to underlying Bitcoin holdings and

using it to buy more Bitcoin and creating this perpetual money machine Bitcoin flywheel. It's incredible. Is this the Doe Kwan Honorary Award in in, in, in, in, yeah, this is this is not going to age well, Robert. We're going to have to clip this later. I'm a little worried about it. A year and a half from now, we're going to play this back. And, yeah.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for Michael Saylor and micro strategy. I think he's pulled off the best pivot and the best comeback story. All right. Beautiful. Beautiful. Brings a cheer to my eye. All right. Deroon, what do you have for best or worst pivot?

I think this is best pivot, but this one I would say is like the pivot kind of probably technically started in 2023, but I, I would say it like was actualized in 2024. So as long as we're fine with that. And I'm going to actually say Babylon, the restaking protocol, partially because Babylon started as a timestamping service for Cosmos chains on Bitcoin. And then they eventually figured out sort of a way of doing what they call remote staking, which is sort of like a way of kind of staking another chain, but using your Bitcoin collateral

and a certain kind of under a certain security model. And then they got to 6 billion TVL by now, right? And so like that huge change from just this timestamping service for Cosmos chains to kind of doing the Bitcoiners thing. So I think like to me that was one of the most successful like business model pivots I've seen in a while because like I don't think the timestamping stuff alone would have survived. and I think getting to the size they got to, yeah, you got to have a lot of respect for it.

Yeah. Wasn't David's Sri Ram's advisor or something like that? They worked together. True Ram's advisor's advisor. Advisor's advisor, okay. Yes. Yeah. So he sort of sucked up the idea of two layers deep, like a true advisor.

But it was a pivot, right? Like there's no doubt that that was. No, it was definitely. I remember the B1 of Babylon. It just kind of started last year. I'm not sure exactly when you can, like, but it, like, you could say it like the pivot was complete in 2024. Sure. You mean, if micro strategy is a pivot, I think Babylon also canceled the pivot in terms of the 2024.

Yeah, seriously. Yeah. My time is a pivot. Everything is a pivot. Great. I just. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. So my biggest pivot, Bitcoin pivoted massily this year. All right. Tom, go ahead. Turn day. That's a good. Jesus. Christ.

I mean, I thought Babylon was lazy. I'm kidding. That's a joke. That's a joke. It's a joke. Tom, go ahead. I had the Democratic Party. I don't remember there's a big time time line of like Trump, Marlago.

And then like Joe Biden put out like an executive statement like, oh, we need digital assets. And then like nothing really happened. And then Kamala kind of put up this like half ass thing about like, you need to protect black men's crypto investments. Everyone's like, like, what the fuck? Like it's, and Trump just followed like this very easy playbook of like saying the things people want to hear, doing the things, people want you to do. They're very easy layup kind of things. Nothing crazy. Free Ross. Free Ross. Like he said free Ross. And so I feel like this is just a, you know, you're two inches to the whole and they just whiffed it. And I'm just like, what. Yeah, incredibly bad.

And the whole time people were trying to tell the story around Democrats pivoting. They just was not happen. It didn't happen. All right. The worst pivot. I respect that. The not existing crypto. Yeah. Oh, wait. So there's a Bitcoin wasn't your real. We're going to get a real pivot. No, I was making fun of Robert's pick. My pick for best pivot was NFT communities pivoting into meme coins. So I thought you see this with the ladies launching cult token. You see this with Pudgy Penguins, launching Pengu. The meme coins somehow have a bigger market cap than the NFTs and they have somehow managed to like nail the landing. Nobody's calling them sellouts. Nobody's saying they abandoned NFTs, but they clearly, I mean, it's surprising that it

happened so late that it took them so long to launch the meme coins. But like now they basically just have these coins that do nothing. Or I don't know, as far as I can tell, they do nothing. And so maybe they're not meme coins. I would just argue it took a while because like I think a lot that NFTs that were worth all were on Ethereum and then a lot of meme coins stuff happened in Solana. and so it's just like there was like this natural friction right like if you look at the pengu thing they're launching l2 but they did the meme clan salon yeah yeah i i don't know how much the the chain or the timing obviously all these things had had some impact on it net net but i think the main the main takeaway is like if you remember um i think it was azuki launched uh anime or they're

going to do anime i don't know if they actually launched the token yet but like anime is like this very earnest serious thing to like try to create value super super per bearished, you know, not nowhere near going to have the reception of a pengu, which is just a vibe coin. You know, I don't even know if it's a meme coin. It's just a vibe coin. I think, I totally agree. I think people learn two lessons.

One is the ape chain thing, I think exact same problem, right? Ape coin, this big story, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then there were also, there was also Mad Ladds, if you remember, like, you could turn the mad lad into a coin. And I think the answer is people want more coins. They want two coins. They don't want one coin. So it's like, you don't have to do the conversion.

You can just make a new coin and give it to people. And so I think it's the coin can be a vibe and just issue a coin. Don't try to be cute with it. Yeah. No, it's weird because there is like some, there should be some like financial conservation of mass. But it, it's more than like you can't launch two meme coins. You can launch one meme coin and you don't need to like consume the NFT to launch the meme coin.

Financial conservation of mass. Wow. Well, it's like, it's like if you do the second meme coin, it's kind of like a Zuki in elementals, you know, like, people are like, what the fuck are you doing to like, you know, if you launch like Penguins 2, it's like, what, what happened to my pen? Why are you destroying my pengu? You know, leave, leave it alone. Like, you already did one. Leave it. Give me something now. This is Cresci's first law. It's, yeah. Conservation of financial mass. Yeah, exactly. There you go. Cool. All right. So, next is biggest flop to ruin. What is the biggest

flop for 2024? I feel like we're all going to say the same thing. I don't. I don't. think we're all going to say the same thing. I don't think we're all that same thing. Yeah, Tarun, what do you got? Biggest, biggest flop. I, Tarun did not do his homework. Nope. I will. We're going to skip Tarun. We're going to skip Tarun and we're going to come back to you. All right. Hopefully you'll be inspired by our answers of people who did the homework. Tom. I love to front run. I'm the fun categories. All right. I mean, we have a maker rebrand to Sky. I don't know if that's what you guys were thinking of, but I mean, even the fact they were

calling it Maker. Instead of Sky, I think is maybe good evidence of the fact that this was not a great rebrand. I think dye is still quite large versus USDA. People who call it die. I just, and others talk of them rolling it back. So it feels like there was really not a needed rebrand and not particularly good rebrand. So that was my big flop. That was a good nomination.

Yeah. My vote for biggest flop is Bitcoin L2s. So there was a big story. about Bitcoin L2 is the beginning of the year, and everyone's like, oh, they're going to have billions of dollars to TVL and everyone wants this. And Bitcoin loves Defi. And now we've had a bunch of these go live and they're just absolute ghost towns. I never hear anybody talking about them. I never hear any founders say they want to launch on a Bitcoin L2. And so that is my first pick for biggest flop. There's, of course, more that are coming to market, but it's just like, there's just no

demonstrated demand for any of these so far. The second biggest flop is celeb coins. So there was a hot moment where people thought celeccoins were meme coins, but better because there's a celebrity attached. Yeah. So, I mean, mother is definitely in that category. But just the general idea of, you know, basically these are social tokens, right? We had a name for these once upon a time. They're social tokens, but for celebrities, I think these have just not, they just aged absolutely terribly. And there was a point in the cycle was like, oh, my God, these are going to be enormous. And then Ansem kind of got, you know, crucified for associating himself with all these celeb coins, and now it feels like the lebecoins are pretty bearish. So that's my vote for second,

biggest flop. Robert, what do you got? I actually thought other people were going to say this one, so I have not been sniped, although Tivroon could just pretend that he had this idea, too. So we'll see what he says. I think the biggest flop was Frentek and the death of Socialify. So there was a moment earlier this year when Frentec was extremely hot. And then it cooled off. And then Frentek was like, we're launching V2 and we're launching a FrenToken. And all of this happened in a relatively short amount of time. And it really culminated with none of us having uttered the word Frentec ever since.

This was for a hot second considered one of the hottest startups in crypto. And it fast-forwarded through the entire lifecycle of a crypto project so unbelievably quickly, from idea to absolute, you know, adoration to, you know, a deadly silence. And, you know, the product is now total zero. The token is a total zero. Like, it's gone. Like, it's somehow, it's one of the few things to truly kill itself off. So congrats friend tech.

that was the biggest flaw. Do you put Farkaster in the same bucket or would you say Fentec stands alone? I don't know. I mean, I think Farkaster's still around. I think it still has a little bit of legs. I think the whole social thing, you know, with crypto is hard. It's a very hard problem. I think it's going to be a while before we see like a true like breakout success. But I'm optimistic that something is going to achieve critical mass. Yeah. Ironically, blue sky seems to have been the real success. So far. There's no crypto.

It's ostensibly decentralized or supposedly, but yeah, there's no, there's no crypto element. All right, Tarun, have you been inspired? Are you ready to turn in your homework? Where do we skip you? I'm trying not to copy my homework. Skip. Yeah. All right.

Were you like typing to Chad GBT while we were going around? Honestly, I was just thinking about all the things I could say, and I just felt like it was being too mean. So I was like, all right. All right. Give us the meanest thing you thought of. D.S.I. Is it D.S.I.

Well, D.Sai is just dead on arrival. No, D-Cai is blowing up. No, no, no. D-Sai is killing it. I'd say best new mechanism pumped-out science. I hope not for interesting. Embarrassing. I will have to commit Sipuku, as I said, somewhere on Twitter.

I think the biggest flop. You're making it up right now. You don't get one. You're just going. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I honestly. You know what?

Biggest flop is Tarun actually having an answer? I'm the flop. I'm the flop. I'm the flop. Yeah. Tarun is flop pretty much. All right. All right.

We're skipping you, Tarun. So next is biggest comeback story. Tom, kick us off. What's the biggest comeback story for 2024? I had two. One was pudgy, but we've discussed pudgy to a pretty good extent. Two is going to say Coinbase. Coinbase also, I think, fits this mole.

of just becoming like the whipping boy in crypto when prices go down. Everyone's like, this company is toast. They did, you know, thousands of layoffs in, in 2023. You know, people thought they were going to go to business and blah, blah, blah. And then ETFs launched, you know, Coinbase is custodian for the ETFs. They continue to get, you know, more and more momentum as the asset gets legitimized, launched offshore, which is not crushing it, but the village is growing. And so I think Coinbase feels like, again, one of those things when,

when it's most hated, that's when you know it's probably going to have some sort of comeback. And I also just think they're just such a force for good in this space. I think they also got with like a stay on their SEC lawsuit. And so it just feels like they've continued to rack up the dubs in 2024. But we did actually all say Coinbase last year, FYI. So they come back two years in a row, very impressive for Coinbase. Double a comeback. I don't know how you do a double comeback, but they did it. Wait, I know my biggest flop. I know my biggest flop. We skipped you through it. Okay.

PayPal USG. PayPal USD. Okay. Damn. All right. We're losing our sponsors as we speak. Thank you, turn. Thank you.

Thank you for making the show. At least you didn't save the table, you know. No, Red Bull's always winning. Yeah, biggest comeback story, Redfall. Thank you to our sponsors. No, no. All right. Yeah, yeah.

We don't have Red Bull police sponsors. My vote for biggest comeback. So I had, originally had dino coins, but I felt it was a little simple. So I went a little deeper and picked Magic Eden. So Magic Eden, you may remember once in a point of time, they were the kind of second fiddle to OpenC and then to blur as the, you know, kind of gen 1 of the NFT meta was carrying on. And then Magic Eden made a great move to get onto Bitcoin and get into BRC20s and Ordinals, and they have just crushed it, crazy amounts of volume.

I think they've also done pretty well in Solana too. So they've just done super well, launched token recently, and kind of indicated themselves. So congrats to Magic Eden, the Magic Eden team. Robert, what do you got for Vegas comeback? Well, I already named one, which is micro strategy. But the second, and it's a cousin of that, would be the Bitcoin ETF complex or crypto ETFs in general. So these launched at the very beginning because they were expected to be.

be not existing. Well, there's many years of denials, right? Years and years and years of denials and sandbagging and, you know, failure to launch. And this was the year of the Bitcoin ETFs, leading to the ether ETFs. And so, yeah, I feel like they made a rise from the grave thanks to, you know, Grayscale suing the SEC and going to court and them winning. But they rose from the debt. And the ETFs have been incredibly successful. And I think that the ETFs, And the crypto ETF complex in general is the biggest comeback story. It feels more like winner than comeback story. Winner, sure.

They'll allow it. I feel like Black Rock is a winner. Black Rock's a winner. Okay, but yeah, okay, fine. All right, Tarun, do you have a nomination for Biggest Comeback Story? Yes. So I already mentioned the-Turun, having answers, biggest comeback. I already mentioned the Defi as a winner.

So like, I also think there was a comeback there, but I think that I think that that since I already said that, I'm going to actually go with the move ecosystems. I mean, SWI at 50 billion movement launching to over 5 billion, you know, a lot of protocols launching in DFI on those chains. I kind of just feel like there is a rebound. Like in 2023, I feel like everyone kind of thought there was nothing happening there, especially because, you know, we had the like big in big Solana push towards Q3, Q4 of

2023, but sort of didn't feel, it's kind of felt like the moves were kind of the odd person out. And like they've clearly come back. I think, you know, some of the, they've added a bunch of UX features, a lot of other nice things have happened. So I give them big comeback.

Nice. That's a good answer. Okay. Next up is favorite chopping block guest. So who is your favorite chopping block guest this year? I'll go first. My favorite guest was actually, Novo. So Novograt, he was on the state. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, nice. So you hosted Robert a debate on the election, and it was Novogratz for Sean McGuire. And Novo doesn't do a lot of shows.

He doesn't do a lot of media, it feels like. And he's just such an interesting character. He was actually very, he was very measured, very thoughtful. But just like, yeah, just so, he was the pro-democratic side. And I expected him to give just kind of a pepid, lukewarm thing. But he just, I really liked him. I found, I found his views. to be incredibly thoughtful, somebody who doesn't speak his mind that often, candidly. And I just, yeah, found it to be super refreshing. Yeah, plus one, that was my favorite episode. If you have not yet watched the debate, it's a little bit no longer timely because the election

has happened. And it was a great, you know, moment to reflect ahead of the election, but loved having Novigrats and Sean McGuire on. Next year, in four years, we'll do another one of those. Maybe in two years, we'll do another, you know, election episode. Yeah. All right, we'll see. Thurun, who he got for favorite guest?

Gort, because we got him before his podcast became popular. And he took, you know, he was already taken off as a Twitter influencer, but he was on Chopping Book before the Gort show took off. So I think of that as our claim to fame. That's right. That's right. That's a claim to fame. Okay.

Wow. We're a launch pad. We're a podcast launch pad. Pause. Wow. Wow. Wow. Okay. Podcast. Fun.

Tom. Pod. That fun is a good idea. Pod. Dot fun. Okay. Nice. Launch a podcast.

Easier than launching a coin. Podcast with a coin. Podcast was a, don't do it. Don't do it. I had Arthur Hayes from the token 2049. Arthur is always just super high energy, very fun. I think very different than a lot of the guests that we normally get on the show. So I was enjoying it.

And also just frankly, I think it's interesting. insights on macro and Asia and crypto investing overall. Yeah, I did I did love his Jason Derulo story. Yeah, that's really good. If you, you haven't, you haven't listened to that episode, go back and just like look up the try to find the part we talk about Jason Dorillo. It's actually pretty, it's wonderful. Okay. So, wait, who's your last? Oh, you already said. Sorry, sorry. So, yeah, the two of you were the same. I forgot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Robert Coventry. Okay, so we're going to wrap up with predictions for 2024.

But before we do predictions, I want to go back and basically grade us on how our predictions for this year that we made at the end of last year went, which, spoiler alert, we did not do well. So let me just run through it real quick. So we'll start with myself. So my predictions were a major L2 hack will occur, which did not happen. No major L2s were hacked. That being said, no major L2s really cut off their training wheels, but fine. Second, a major L1 will perform a rollback.

Did not happen, not even close. Totally off on these. Third, finance will lose its position as the number one exchange by market share. Also not even close. Binance still crushing it. By bit is gaining on them. By bit is gaining on them, but Bin Laden still unequivocally the number one. So, yeah, big Ls for me.

Robert, here were your predictions for 2024. First, you predicted that a Bitcoin ETF will launch, very brave. Boom. Very brave prediction. Wasn't like the ETF already approved by December? No, no. There was expectation. Was it not?

Oh, it was January. It was January. It launched mid-gen. Yeah, yeah. We thought it was likely that it was coming, but there was no, like, you know, guarantees. Okay. All right, all right. So that was safe prediction, but that one was.

The market problem, if there was polymarked at the time, it was probably, like 60%. Sure, sure, sure. Wait, how did we not mention Polymarket? Graham, okay. Twain, we'll come back to that. All right.

A lot of wins. Biggest comeback. A lot of rounds. Biggest comeback. Yeah, that's a good one. Okay, Turun, I'm going to give that. I'm going to nominate your biggest comeback changes to polymarket. All right.

All right. All right. So whatever. Second, second thing for Robert, a proposal for USCBDC will emerge from a credible proposal. I don't think that has happened. Doesn't seem like that happened. Finally,

total stable coin market cap will decline due to a shift toward volatile crypto assets and other low risk assets absolutely not no tether and ustc still okay so robin you're one for three you're one for three um all right turun your predictions were dexas will momentarily reach 50 percent market share of spot trading volume relative to sexes i i think wow okay i'm gonna say that's too wrong that's that's so wrong that i'm going to give you two negatives for having a Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I don't think it was that bad. It was like it reached 15%.

It reached 15%. It reached 15%. How is that not? That, okay. I mean, I mean, it's like, it's, it's not like a decay. Yeah, that's true. 15 does sound like 50. 15.

If you say it fast, 15, I think, I think you get 1.5 incorrect answer. All right, all right. Okay. So, second is that a point to air drop conversion system will fail due to complexity or errors. I don't know what that means, but I don't think that happened. So I'm going to say 2.5 down.

And then lastly, defyed tokens will experience a resurgence in value. Very good. That is, you know what? I'm going to give you 1.5 for how right that was. So you're down to minus 1. So I'm going to say you got two right for that. So you're pretty good. Wait, no, that's too wrong.

You're just making this up as we go. No, no, there's a system. There's a system. No, don't worry about it. It doesn't apply. Steve is playing favorites here. To Root, you're doing well. You're doing well.

You're doing well. You're down to you, though. Tom, you are more emphasis on app-based monetization and decentralization. Teams will monetize front-ends more heavily and or shift toward decentralized or locally hosted front-ends. I got the modernization part. Yeah. Yeah, it seems like a two-parter. Okay.

So part one, app-based monetization, yeah, definitely. Plus one on that. Teams will decentralize their front ends. Yeah. Super minded. Yeah. I'll get myself on that one. Okay.

And then third is a resurgence of crypto lending, which, I mean, yes for AVE, but like no in like non-Defi lending. I would say that. I mean, I think what you were imagining was like Genesis coming back and like this kind of. I think that's what you were saying. Yeah. That did not happen. So I'll give you a point five for that because like defy lending did come back. But, you know, C-Fi lending, which I think was the spirit of what you were saying, like that absolutely did not come back.

So, yeah, credit is still pretty shit. So I think that means that Tom won with 1.5 correct predictions from last year. I think I do the worst. I'm zero for three and Tom one for three. So well, well, well, well, what? Cs get degrees. Cs get degrees. Wait, what does that mean?

You've never heard that before? No. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, like, as long as you get a C, you still get a degree. I thought it's like to get a degree. Oh, I see. I see. C's, okay, just like barely passing grades. Okay, fine. Yeah. Okay, well done. All right. So now let's go around and do predictions for 2025 and we will come back and grade ourselves at the end of 2025. So my prediction for 2025. First, BTC will hit 150K and then dump. Second prediction, D-Sy tokens will turbo pump. I hate you. And then third, third, third. Third is that AI coins will go bananas this year, but they will have very little adoption.

And not the adoption of the coins, but adoptions of the underlying protocols. Those are my three predictions. Robert, what are your three predictions for 2025? Well, I'll start with the Bitcoin price target one because mine is higher than Haseeb's. And so therefore, I get more points for credit next year, if this occurs. I think Bitcoin will hit $180,000. dollars. I don't think it's going to like immediately have a blow off top or dump like Haseeb does. I think, you know, it's going to be a wild year. I think Bitcoin to 180K.

To be clear, I'm not saying that BTC will dump like, like end the year below 150. But I think it will hit 150 and then go like significantly low, maybe like 120, 110 or I don't know, something like that. Big correction after 150. My second prediction is that we are going to for the first time see crypto-specific legislations signed into law. I think that'll be a major milestone in the U.S. Okay. And my third- That feels like a really safe prediction. It's not safe. If you made this prediction every other year, you would have lost. Yeah, okay. All right, fine. The Republicans have the House by like two seats.

This one's going to go for 0.5, just so you know. We'll see. We'll see. I think it's worth a full one point, but, you know, we can debate that next year. All right. We'll do it by majority rules. We'll do it by majority rules. We'll take a vote next year. And lastly, I predict that an AI-based system will become a crypto-scammer. A crypto-scammer? I like that. Like what level of scammer are we talking about?

Are you talking about it? How big does a scam have to be? No, there will be a news article in the block or CoinDesk or some other somewhat credible publication about how an AI is scamming people. Hmm. Okay. Nice. That also seems like a very safe bet. That's probably already happening. How is that a safe bet? That's a fucking safe bet. That's a bullshit. Like that already is happening. That's already, we were already there.

What are you talking about? I can literally make a virtual scam bot in five minutes of JavaScript, typescript right now. Like I don't, this is this, this is going to happen no matter what. Okay. Well, then it's a bold prediction. I like that. I think it's good. It has to be, it has to be like newsworthy, not. just like newsworthy. There's some background radiation of scammy, scammy AI, right? Of course that's going to be true. A newsworthy thing.

There's some newsworthy thing that happens around this. Okay, that's a good prediction. Tarun's bot goes crazy. I cannot believe you dare took the D-Sy one. Jesus. All right. You're up. Predictions.

I actually think the app chain L2 space, as I said, as biggest losers, I think their economics are going to continue to actually be quite unfavorable. and we're going to see mergers. So like either roll-ups figuring out mergers or app chains where they like, you know, they have to pool resources or it's like too expensive to run both of them and we start actually seeing consolidation.

You know, I think- There's the mergers in the plural. In the pluror. Yeah, probably. I'll say more than one. I'm fine with that. But basically, like, I, my reason for this is like, we had this huge expansion in roll-ups and then you're kind of seeing this like high.

concentration of transaction volume and like there's no all the dead roll-ups have you know roll-ups aren't just smart contracts where it's like it dies whatever like there are people running infrastructure there's all this other stuff and so there's carry costs and i think that will lead to this um the second which i think is a much more precise prediction than i think roberts sorry which is i think the a i i think the AI agent market cap will at least 5x so right now it's at around 10 billion if you go by coin gecko numbers. And I think, I think like 5X easy on that. And then finally, I think Solana's inflation will be decreased.

So, you know, everyone's like fighting over emission curves on Ethereum and Solana and whatever. And Solana has relatively high inflation, but actually I think like MEV is sufficiently high on Solana that like people will start. Decreased by how much? How much? At least 25%. At least 25% of the current emissions or by the current emissions? at least.

Okay, so it'll chop into a fourth of the current emissions. Okay. No, no, no. It'll be at most three-fourths of the current emissions. Sorry, that's what I mean. At most three-fourths. Okay, so a pretty modest decrease in the total. I think it's, yeah, but I'm giving you kind of a one-sided-old-

Okay, so there's a very safe. Yeah, that's a fairly safe. Yeah, Robert can make fun of me for that one. We both trade safe bets. We trade and save-thes. Okay, yeah, clearly, clearly. We'll make fun of each other next year. All right, all right.

All right, good. Okay, good. All right. Tom, what are your four predictions for 2025? All right. First up, we got some sort of, I'm putting this in a category of money games. So things like Frisa or the button or crypto the game. We'll go mainstream viral.

We'll have people making TikToks about it and we'll get super big and it'll be like, you know, national lottery level big. So I think we'll have something like that, maybe a FOMO3D, maybe a Wolf game. I don't know what's going to look like, but something like that. We are getting a new asset ETF, but it's not going to be Solana or like the ones that crypto people really want.

It's going to be like XRP or like Lightcoin or something really lame. I think that's my bet. And then we're going to have some sort of massive application level compromise. So you already see some tricklings of this. Like there is this Solana signing library that had a compromise that could be private keys,

like a couple weeks ago. There was like that random like Chinese supply chain attack and like some Python library. So there's already kind of these like cracks popping in. And I feel like you just need one of those to hit. And then suddenly someone's app is totally owned. And I feel like not enough attention gets placed on that. Do you think it will be supply chain in particular? Like it will be like a library that like people are importing and not checking.

Or do you think it will be like more complex like in the how it gets injected? I mean, I suspect it'll probably be more unintentional bug versus supply chain. But I guess that's it if that's kind of what you're asking. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, so related to your first question, your first prediction. It was a prediction, actually. Prediction, sorry, sorry, your first prediction about gaming, gang popular.

I have a question for you guys based on you watching the news and Twitter. Is the meme coin fart coin? Does it have mass adoption? Because, like, I swear that I see the most. And his gas adoption? My, like, my cousins and parents are like, hey, have you seen this fart coin thing? It's worth more than Applebee's? I'm like, why the fuck are you looking at them?

I think that there's a viral chart going around today stating this fact. And I think that is very easy to share. It has reached a level where I feel like if they made the game, Tom's predictions come true. Yeah. I did have a dinner with somebody who was not at all anywhere in crypto and they mentioned FarkCoin. So it does feel like it's poking through. It seems like it could be a FarkC, yeah. We don't know. Yeah. I think the name is so absurd that like it's just like the name itself is what's viral, but not necessarily people buying it. Like. But it's almost a billion market. It's almost in a billion market cap. Yeah. Yeah. But if it was really amazing, I mean, it would be like

Doge, right, if it was really mainstream. A billion market cap in crypto is like. You have to buy it in a sole on chain on Solana. It's not like you can go buy it. It's not even listed. It's not listed anywhere? I don't let someone look. And in FERCOS, it's like some AI thing, right? It's like some AI agent or something.

It's on BitGat and Radium. That's it. BitGet radium orca. Like it's not even like on big exchanges. I have no idea. I've not. Another embarrassment for the industry. A perfect note on which to end the year is,

guys, we don't have a real. job and this is a joke industry. But I'm very happy to be navigating all this with the three of you. We got a wrap, but it's been an awesome year. Thanks for joining us and we'll be doing it hopefully for a long time hence. We'll be off next week, but we will see you again around the new year. And happy holidays. Happy holidays. Happy holidays. Don't buy too much fart coin.