Bitcoin to $49K? | Why Crypto Is Breaking Away From BTC

Welcome back to the Hive Mind podcast, show about markets, crypto, AI, unfiltered opinions. Today I got the usual suspects with me, Yan, Satoris, Jason, but we also have a special guest, Trevor, also known as Flip, our in-house research analyst, our in-house perp counter soar. How are you guys doing today? It's another good day to be doing this, but maybe for the wrong reasons. The top question I want to jump right into, because I think everyone's asking it: BTC has sold off quite considerably over the last 24 hours. We broke below $66K overnight. My question is: Is Bitcoin cooked here?

For now.

Yeah.

1. Saylor, Bitcoin Liquidity & Market Structure

Yeah. I think it depends on what you mean by “cooked,” but yeah. Permanently, no. You kind of need to ask, “Who’s the next buyer?” Without that, you go to the next rationale for buying it, which is the debasement stuff. Obviously, everyone knows about that.

2. Why Retail Left Crypto For AI & Stocks

At a certain point, it becomes a relative-value trade of sorts, where everything else has appreciated quite a bit. Then you look at positioning, and everyone's positioned in everything but Bitcoin. You get gradual buying, and then, all of a sudden, one day you wake up and it's legged up considerably, and everyone's back on the BTC momentum trade.

Saylor had a misstep—I’d say his first major one, really. It was basically paying back the debt a little early. That gave people no confidence in his ability to continue buying the dividend or paying the dividend, which means SCRC doesn't print, which means he can't continue being the buyer in the market, and then everyone else kind of slows down.

Not only that, his liquidity situation went from being able to pay about 1.5 years' worth of dividends to 7 months. Now there are concerns that he's going to sell BTC, and the question is: What should he be doing here?

If I'm him, I don't think there's any point in crying over spilled milk. That's been talked about enough in terms of what he should have done, which is basically just sell a bunch of Bitcoin, raise cash, and then use that cash to issue a bunch more SCRC—quite a bit more than he sold in terms of the BTC he sold—so he can actually sell to buy quite a bit more.

I still think he has to do that. He has to continue paying the dividend; otherwise, that'll have pretty negative long-term consequences for his ability to raise money via SCRC. I think he needs to continue doing that, and BTC will range around. You'll get a lot of overeager shorts. I think being bearish will become a bit too consensus at some point, and he just needs to wait for some periodic bounce and empty out a decent slug.

He needs to kind of do what he should have done early on, which was raise cash. I think he still has to do that in the end. Basically, his game now is waiting it out, in the sense that he needs to wait out BTC appreciation.

His situation is that the shorter of BTC appreciation or a liquidity crunch for him is what will decide how he progresses. If BTC takes years to pump and he can't raise cash and the debt starts coming due, he's in a tough pickle, where he's selling a lot of it. Or he sells some now and basically lengthens his runway considerably in terms of the liquidity crunch. That way, he gives himself time, and that also gives the Bitcoin market time, because nobody wants to step in front of BTC if there's a chance he blows up and has to sell a bunch.

I think there's also a bid that comes in just from knowing that he's not going to need to sell a material portion of his stack to fund the liabilities. Going forward, I think he needs to also sell—or, for every dollar of STRC he sells, set aside 15% or so of it as future dividend payments. That effectively means every dollar that comes in is knowingly going to get the dividend paid for the next 1.5 years.

You can get some additional yield from money markets, but ultimately I think the reflexivity of that would be really important for him, because that's what people are really concerned about. As the STRC pile grows each month, it's not necessarily just about the incremental stuff you raise, but the existing liability.

If you can cover that liability with each sale, then the whole thing becomes much more manageable. It'll eventually be a pretty big problem when the cash you set aside is gone, but he's just playing this kick-the-can-down-the-road game. I think this would be his best way to do it.

Yeah, you nailed it on the Bitcoin front, right? The chart just looks horrendous. There's clearly nobody left to buy, or nobody willing to buy. I think a lot of that is the overhang that Yan mentioned. Everybody's like, “Oh, priming the market with this 32 Bitcoin sell.”

It's something that we've been talking about internally in our chats. I'm pretty sure we brought it up on the podcast a bunch over the last couple of months. All of the things that drove Bitcoin to its highs over the last year or two—all of those tailwinds have effectively just reversed. All of the big buyers are now sellers.

There's a new kind of game in town with the whole AI trade and everything going on in stock land. The opportunity cost of waiting for something to happen in Bitcoin and crypto broadly is just weighing on a lot of people. People in crypto can speculate on those things without really having to leave crypto now, with things like Hyperliquid, Lighter, and others—Aussie and whatever.

It just makes the case really tough. When I look at Bitcoin, I think this will be a good price to look back on in several years. $60K, whatever, mid-$60Ks—I don't think it's a bad place to start buying for long-term stuff. But from just a market-participant perspective, when you look at everything else going on, I don't know.

Bitcoin hasn't been able to do well in a liquidity environment that's been generally constructive for the most part. Equities have done extremely well, at least the indices and anything related to the AI trade, which is a lot of stuff.

When you look forward, all of our internal models for the macro environment are pointing toward a bias for real rates to be higher in 6 months or so. When you look at what's going on, cuts are clearly off the table. Hikes are probably coming at some point toward the end of the year or the start of next year.

If Bitcoin can't really do well now, when things have been super constructive, I look at it 6 months down the line and think the environment's not going to be much better at all. It'll probably be worse for Bitcoin, in terms of the drivers of Bitcoin performance.

What would happen if inflation ticks up, though, and is all of a sudden kind of favorable for Bitcoin? I agree with everything you said; I'm just playing devil's advocate here a little bit. Is there a scenario where you do see an uptick in inflation and tighter monetary policy? Is that somehow favorable to Bitcoin relative to other risk assets, in your opinion? Maybe this is a question for Kevin, too.

I would say no.

Yeah, I'm trying to think, and I can't.

Because the inflation argument that's always been made—Bitcoin is similar to gold—is that it's an inflationary hedge. It's never really been a hedge on consumer inflation, like CPI inflation. It's always been a hedge on currency debasement, which are two sides of a similar coin, but they are quite different.

And to Jason's point, the liquidity environment, especially heading into the year, especially in Q4, was pretty favorable. We've definitely seen a plateauing or a pullback. There's a lot of splits between monetary policy globally. The PBOC, which was a huge driver, has actually pulled back in the last couple of months.

I'd say Bitcoin is behaving like it should this time, because a big part of this is some of the charts that we've shown. I love this one, which shows semiconductors and how exponential that trend has gone, and then looks at IBIT ETF outflows. It doesn't tell the whole picture, but it gets to this point: The attention and capital that the AI trade is commanding right now is kind of the be-all and end-all, at least for now.

The longer that Bitcoin underperforms, the bigger that opportunity cost gets. It becomes reflexive, in a sense, where people start to potentially bail out because you get that FOMO rotation trade where it's like, “How long can I wait for this thing to play?”

3. Why HYPE's Outperformance Matters

Right. Like yeah, like think of like SpaceX IPOs, like all of this capital that's going to rush into markets for all of these big IPOs down the line, right? Liquidity's going to come from somewhere for these things. I think watching how Bitcoin and things do around those market events can potentially be telling in terms of where appetite is, if flows are still leaving for that trade. I just look at Bitcoin this year as mainly being driven by specific market participants that exist in this market and don't exist elsewhere, and the flows from them dominate essentially everything else going on. If you didn't have the dot explosion and a big Saylor overhang, I think Bitcoin would probably—maybe it didn't go as high before, but maybe it's trading better today. It's obviously impossible to say, but clearly you have price-insensitive flows, to an extent, coming out of crypto and going into other places.

But interestingly, every other cycle we've had when Bitcoin has been this horrific, nothing has done well. Nothing. Maybe things have done well for a week or 2 at a time, but nothing has sustainably done well when Bitcoin has been this poor on a year-to-date basis, or just in general, at this point in a market downturn. And so it's kind of an interesting thing, right? You have—I wouldn't say you have a lot of names in crypto, but you do have a handful of interesting things that you could be invested in that have been doing well year-to-date and are continuing to do well when Bitcoin is trading the worst it's traded in forever. I find that actually super, super good for crypto, right?

I don't think crypto will be the market where Bitcoin has to dictate whether things can be positive on the year or not, which it has historically done. It's kind of acted as that floor or ceiling, to an extent. And so I find this to be a good development for crypto.

4. Why Crypto Is Finally Detaching From Bitcoin

I mean, on that point, though, what's interesting is that ETH and SOL seem tied to Bitcoin. It's not just a Bitcoin thing. If you were to just look at ETH and SOL, you would say it reminds you of the past, where Bitcoin's doing badly and alts are doing really badly. But you've had a decent amount of stuff that's been doing well—not just the 3 that everyone's talking about now, like HYPE, Zcash, and Venice, but a lot of other stuff, too.

There is.

How sustainable is this if Bitcoin keeps going lower? I know Ansem had that chart yesterday. I don't know if you saw it, where he was like, alt season happens as Bitcoin is chopping down, and then it's over when Bitcoin finally nukes.

I don't know. I guess the bullish angle to this would be if a lot of this recent Bitcoin dump was Saylor selling, and the bullish angle would be that he's maybe done offloading. He did that little test thing and then actually went ahead with selling 3 to 5 billion or whatever. If he hasn't sold anything yet, then, yeah. I don't know. It's a weird situation there.

And it's like, how high can these things—Zcash, Venice, HYPE—go? HYPE probably more so than the other 2, maybe, or is safer. I think it's a really interesting market now because it is detached, right? Previously, regardless of what was going on, you were following BTC. Even times when BTC was going up, alts were going down, right? That was because of a liquidity drain. So I think the interesting part is more so why we're not attached to BTC.

And I think it's because these things are independently compelling, right? If you think about which ones are going up, you have the HYPEs and Lighters of the world—the perp DEXs—because they are diversifying their volume outside of crypto. That was always the issue with a lot of DeFi: it was very reflexive. TVL, volume, all of that was tied together, so it would naturally go down regardless of the fees, because the market it was involved in was shrinking when BTC was coming down. And so, now that you have those moving out, there's a strong argument for them to be less reliant.

Obviously, if BTC goes up, that's great, but the lack of reliance, I think, is huge. The other—you kind of go coin by coin. Venice is a crypto asset, but its business is fundamentally detached from crypto and in a growing TAM. You can go project by project, but I think primarily the ones that are doing well, or at least the ones that were doing well early on, were doing so because their value was detached. Basically, those who were interested in investing were actually excited at the prospect of the price coming down if they had extra cash, because that was just compressing the multiple; the revenue wasn't really dependent on BTC going up.

And so I think as BTC goes down and alts stay flat or go down gradually, it makes participating in the market more attractive because, as it comes down, the realistic downside becomes limited. Going forward, sure, there's probably going to be more downward pressure on BTC, and that's fine. Alts will pull back, but if you watch, any time BTC stops going down is when they rally. I think that's a really indicative signal, and you also have the tailwind of when BTC does well; those alts should realistically do well.

5. Zcash, Value Investing & Crypto Fundamentals

I'm sure you'll have some rotation, but ultimately it's a headwind now and a future tailwind later. So I think it's really healthy to kind of see that. And, yeah, like you guys mentioned, we haven't really seen that before. Obviously, some, like Zcash and others, are pegged to a percentage of BTC, but I think what they lose in future TAM size, they gain in flows, right?

It's just that those who would be bidding BTC are not going to bid these, and I think that the flow from that is more than offset by BTC going down by 10%. Now 5% of something that's 90% is still less, but ultimately, I think the flows outweigh the TAM shrinkage. And so that's kind of where we've seen all the strength: things that are tapping into traditional assets, traditional markets, into AI, and use cases there, whether it's inference, training, or kind of tapping into GPU tokenization.

And, yeah, we can chat through a bunch, but I think it's been a very interesting market for that reason. And then the other stuff is kind of the regulatory side. All of that shifting is incrementally beneficial to alts and kind of indifferent for BTC. So I think you have quite a few of these aligning tailwinds that make the alt market really interesting now.

And then, yeah, it also helps to have just a few assets, right? You have the survivorship bias where everyone who is trading and memecoining kind of got washed out. Obviously, some survived, but it creates a scenario where people are reluctant to bid some of that stuff because the risk-return isn't there.

Do I think those will pump? Probably, and they probably make sense to accumulate a couple of them if they haven't moved yet because your downside is probably limited to the charts. But it's great to see a handful of these assets really rally, and it allows for concentration to work. It also lets people hold assets longer, right?

The issue is if a thousand things are rallying, then they all can't rally too far, so the rallies are short-lived and you have this kind of flipping mentality. Whereas now, because all the value is coalescing around a handful, it becomes easier to stay long because, yes, they're talked about, but they might be quote-unquote consensus; the size of them is still relatively small compared to a lot of other assets. And so I think the degree to which they're talked about on Twitter doesn't necessarily reflect the broader positioning in them.

I actually brought this up with that Tulip King guy, who seems to be pretty on the ball with a lot of stuff. But he was like, “I'm in the consensus trades,” sort of deal. Kevin, you put it in the chat, and we can bring it up on the screen.

Yeah, I feel like a lot of people are talking about Zcash, and a lot of people are talking about HYPE. Some people are talking about Venice, but honestly, not a ton. You still don't see Venice that much. And it's like everyone's saying, “Oh, this is the consensus portfolio now,” and I highly doubt that most people actually own these assets in big size in their portfolios.

And the reason you hear about them is because they're the only ones doing well, right? And I genuinely think that there's a lot of market cap. There's still a lot of money sitting in ETH and SOL, right? It's possible that the market can still chop around, but if more and more money starts to leak out of those 2 assets, that's still a lot of money.

HYPE is getting bigger now, so it's starting to become harder to move. Zcash has become bigger now; I'm pretty sure Zcash is over 10 billion now. But Venice is still small, along with a lot of other smaller-cap stuff. You could literally have a 1- or 2-year period where, for instance, ETH's market cap gets cut in half, which doesn't fully leave crypto and just starts going into more and more fundamental-type, cheaper plays, and those ones can move a lot, right? So there is that possibility with the market.

Yeah, and that's why it makes this such an interesting time. Maybe it's just fun for me right now because I'm finally not just bleeding to death for the first time in a year or two. I'm actually outperforming, which is nice. I feel like after the Trump meme coin, I was on fire from 2023 and 2024 through the beginning of 2025. Then last year was just rough.

I definitely sold my Solana too late, but it is what it is. I feel like Solana will still have its moment at some point. I'm still more interested in ETH and SOL. If those start moving, I'm more interested in SOL, but right now, I don't know. It seems tough.

There's an interesting proposal to change SOL's tokenomics that's going through, along with some other stuff. I'll keep an eye on that. But, yeah, this chart kind of shows it.

6. Bitcoin To $49K? Jason's Bear Case

Yeah, I was going to say, I think the timing is great because the team just released this State of Token Markets report. It's fantastic and loaded with data and charts. Anybody who's a builder, founder, or investor—this is super relevant right now.

It goes through, talks about, and shows with the data itself exactly what we're talking about. I love this chart because it looks at that revenue-weighted portfolio versus what's called the 3 majors: BTC, ETH, and SOL. It just goes to show that the market is maturing.

I also think HYPE and its outperformance are important. As an industry, it's really good for HYPE to be outperforming right now, and we need it to continue outperforming because it's arguably one of the most important potential catalysts for driving more capital into this market and showing that things can actually work and outperform.

7. The New Altcoin Market & Capital Rotation

Yeah, exactly. You need that, and in order for BTC, ETH, and SOL to actually rebound, you simultaneously need them to go down and these alts to go up, so capital flows in because there's actually money to be made in crypto again if you're deploying strategically.

The meme coin stuff was appealing to the wrong audience, right? That's very flighty retail capital, whereas if you see fundamental growth stories taking place, that brings actual fund capital. Then, at some point, the majors become interesting again if they've come down enough, the alts have run up enough, and there's enough capital bouncing around.

I'm sure there'll be a point where longing SOL makes sense compared to everything that's done well. I think another interesting slide in here is the buyback section. If you scroll down to that one—go down one more.

The thing is, you can't just do buybacks if you're also unlocking a lot of tokens. This is obvious, but it's worth saying: you have other protocols that bought back a lot of tokens, but they're unlocking so many at the same time.

This is the other thing that plagues tokens a bit: we still have the unlock problem, which is just a slow drag on anything. Definitely check this report out. It's really good all around, and there are a lot of clear learnings from the last few years and paths forward to make tokens better and more investable.

You're seeing most things being bid. It's like, “Okay, sure, Zcash.” Zcash is purely a store-of-value meme-type thing, but other than that, that's the only real no-revenue, fundamental-type token that's getting bid right now when it comes to bigger market caps. I don't know. It's so small.

I think I tweeted about this last week. I think the Zcash bid is coming from people capitulating on the idea that L1 tokens should be worth a lot. They're thinking, “We shouldn't be holding ETH and SOL at this big of a market cap. They're never going to justify these valuations. Privacy as a store of value kind of makes sense, so let's sell some and put it into this.” That's kind of why I bought Zcash.

Yeah, I think the tricky thing with—or not the tricky thing, but what makes plays like Zcash interesting—is this: if you're looking at, say, Venice or HYPE, where you have revenues and forward-looking expectations can vary, but not too far, and then multiples can vary, the range is pretty grounded.

The top is the highest multiple times the highest forward expectation, and the bottom is the lowest multiple and lowest forward expectation. Zcash, or something like that, is different. Should it be 1% of BTC, 5%, or 10%? It's one of those where you can have wildly different expectations.

I think that's probably what gets people excited about it. The investment angle becomes more compelling because conviction can be rewarded pretty heavily if you're able to hold through the turbulence and end up being right. Whereas something else potentially has less volatility and maybe less upside, but it's a more stomachable hold, so maybe you could size it more.

If you don't really believe Zcash is going to work out, it's one of those where borrowed conviction is easier to have in fundamental tokens because they do have some theoretical downside, and then it just looks really cheap.

But with Zcash, it's pumping again to 630 today. If it starts to nuke or goes back to 400, there's no fundamental basis for why it needs to test that level and go up again, and that becomes tougher.

Maybe this is a cynical take, but part of the Zcash thesis, too, is that it's a good, big, liquid asset that people who are still in crypto can realistically make some pretty good money on if they all get on board and you're early to the trade.

Since it's a store-of-value-type trade, it's mostly just about whether enough people believe in it. It's very compelling to be early to that repricing that will later become consensus within the industry.

On a quick note, when you mentioned the borrowed-conviction thing, I feel like—I don't do it often, but sometimes I do. Sometimes I see somebody I trust, or somebody who's good, and they have a thesis on something, and I'm like, “All right, you know what? I'll ape this and maybe think about it later. I'm not sure—why not?”

Yeah, maybe. Something I tend to do is, at the end of the day, all of these things are, in some form or another, momentum trades. Especially when it's not something I have huge conviction in—for HYPE, for example—I don't mind holding through big drawdowns and stuff.

But for other things, like Zcash, I'll often just throw a super-simple trend or moving average on it. When the trend and momentum snap for the first time on something that I don't have a huge amount of conviction in, or something where I aped off somebody else's thesis, or something that's strictly a momentum trade like Zcash due to the lack of fundamentals, that's usually my approach.

Do I always stick to this? No, and I usually eat bigger drawdowns, but for trades like that, that's something I usually do. As long as it's trending up and there's momentum, you stay long, and as soon as you see signs of it cracking, maybe get out of the way.

You can always buy back higher, right? Buying back higher and buying back all-time-high breaks aren't bad things. My best trades are always averaging up, not down. Crazy, right?

That's something I tend to do for those borrowed-conviction things that are more momentum or trend trades. As soon as I see signs of that, I don't really wait around to ask questions, because most people in that trade are like me: they don't have a huge amount of conviction in it.

I don't think I've ever done well on a borrowed-conviction trade. Not once. Maybe early on, just because memes got hot and it happened to be being bong, and it kind of did well. Well, that didn't quite get it, and I still ended up round-tripping all of it.

Trying to do it on any other assets is really tough. Sorry I'm late here and going back to Yan's point earlier regarding some of these assets really outperforming: you're seeing these tokens associated with real businesses and the diversification of revenues into equities, real-world assets, and things like that.

I think it's the first time we've gone through a bear market where we have real businesses in crypto that aren't incentive-driven. It's very refreshing to see, and you're starting to see capital allocators outside of crypto notice these assets.

It's very encouraging. Namely, you've got Venice, HYPE, and Lighter, which are all doing incredibly well.

It's very encouraging to see.

Yeah, I think the other thing is that they're also high-growth assets, right? They're real businesses, but high-growth assets, similar to the big AI trade right now. To Yan's earlier point about even Zcash, what is that potentially going to be worth? Do you want to mark that as a relative value, as a percentage of what BTC eventually will be worth?

The uncertainty is where a lot of the premium comes from, right? There's uncertainty, but uncertainty to the upside. No one's buying AI stocks because they think that they're going to be 5% to 10% year-over-year growers, very predictably, with consistent revenue streams. This is very much a let-your-imagination-run-wild type of trade: where the world's going, where this can be.

I think that's the other big part about Hyperliquid, Lighter, and Liquid Finance. The growth rates are a really important part of the story, too.

Yeah, I mean, I think about perps. I'd love to look at the data on this, but outside of AI, perps are probably one of the fastest-growing verticals in tech. They're the fastest-growing in crypto, maybe alongside stablecoins, but the economics are very different for these types of businesses.

You've seen 2 winners emerge with high-quality founders and high-quality teams that understand tokenomics and the need to create value for token holders. I think you just have to hold those tokens. I don't think you end up selling them down at some point. If you want to reduce exposure, I think you just hedge it via the perp, if you want.

8. Can Crypto Thrive While Bitcoin Stagnates?

I think they're really hard businesses to sell because we might have, for the first time since Bitcoin, an actual compounder. You've got businesses that are actually compounding at a high rate.

I mean, what's nice is that when I buy stocks, I mostly buy ETFs, but I just never think about selling them. I'm not a market timer. I let them grow over years and years and years.

But in crypto, there's always the question: When's the cycle going to top? When's everything going to go down 80%? That was always something that was quite annoying to me because I don't really want to sell stuff and try to time the top of the crypto market.

[Laughter.]

It's something I'm just not good at, and it's very hard for me to sit on the sidelines when stuff is going up. It's actually easier for me to bag-hold with everybody than to be on the sidelines when stuff is going up. But now, you're literally getting some things where that can probably start to be the case more and more.

You could have total crypto market cap remain flat over the next 2 years, but you could still make a lot of money. The market environment has had kind of 3 phases, right? You had 2017 and 2018, and then 2020–2021 was similar, where everything just went up. Then you had the bear market, where everything went down right after that cycle.

Then you had the first instance of this in a while, where Solana did really well, but ETH didn't do well and other L1s didn't do as well. You started to get more assets emerging near the end of that Solana cycle. Those were the first signs that the industry was actually starting to consolidate a little bit around certain assets.

Then, after SOL and the Trump meme coin, basically, the new market regime started. Everything just got sold down from there. HYPE still did better compared to everything else last year, but it also traded down a lot, especially with the TGE and everything.

Now we're fully in this totally new environment that we haven't had before. This environment is a lot healthier than last year's environment, and it's healthier than the everything-goes-up or everything-goes-down environment.

You could see Bitcoin trade sideways. Gold was flat for, what, 10 years? I think this is something people don't really want to talk about too much, but could Bitcoin trade between here and $125,000 for 5 years? It's something that you have to consider. But could other crypto assets do very well in the meantime? I think yes.

I think it's a very interesting time.

The tricky thing on the BTC side is that if AI and robotics really proliferate and become as deflationary as we all expect, and somehow we start paying down national debt, it's pretty bad for Bitcoin, but obviously good for the world in other ways.

Yeah, interestingly, if we reprice or revalue the gold that the US holds, similar to what other countries like China are trying to do right now, that becomes your point. It starts to at least take a chunk out of paying down that debt.

And that's another thing. I feel like the currency-debasement narrative, while it might still be the strongest narrative Bitcoin has and probably one of the only ones going for it, is just falling by the wayside because right now currency debasement isn't top of mind for anybody. It's AI and energy.

Yeah, and then they draw a lot of liquidity.

And they draw a ton of liquidity. That's the thing. The energy crisis is drawing liquidity not only from the real economy, but also away from people who are oil traders and margin traders.

When you see these massive volatile swings and the gap-up we saw in the last day or 2 with oil, people are having to sell whatever else is liquid. That's not necessarily what's driving Bitcoin, but Bitcoin has become one of the most liquid assets and markets on the planet.

If you're looking to sell something that's liquid and shore up cash, especially for margin, Bitcoin's a pretty good option—especially when its chart looks the way it does.

Just remember, guys: 1 Bitcoin equals 1 Bitcoin.

Always.

That's why we're here, right?

Well, I think the speculative fervor just never came back to crypto. Yes, Bitcoin went to $120,000 and there were some people trading memes, but go back to 2020 and 2021. All those friends and family members, none of them really started to reach out.

I had a few buddies who were at BlackRock and a few other hedge funds in traditional finance, and they were talking about Hyperliquid last year. That was largely just because they were traders and knew I'd gone full-time crypto. They were asking about Hyperliquid.

Outside of that, no one was interested in Bitcoin. No one asked me about Solana. It kind of just fell to the side. Now, in the last 6 months, I've started to see those friends talk about stocks again. It was SanDisk. It's Micron. Now it's BlackBerry.

You're seeing these crazy speculative flows that we used to see in some of our crypto names going into other assets, traditional assets. I just don't think we ever saw it come back to crypto in the same way we used to, which I think is a good thing. That's a net good thing. Let these businesses mature.

I think Peter Thiel talks about this. He's like, "I don't care about how fast your business grows. I want to know how durable your business is." Now there's a time for these businesses—Hyperliquid and Lighter, which are doing tons of revenue, and Venice as well—to show how defensible they are.

Your flows are going to be somewhat cyclical. Okay, you're diversifying them somewhat into RWAs and things like that. Great. Now let's see how defensible you are, with Kalshi coming to the market, the CFTC giving them the green light, and Coinbase doing the same. People are speculating that Robinhood will do the same on June 1st or July 1st.

There's real competition coming into the space. Let's see how durable these businesses are now. This is a great spot to be in. We've never had to question it. It was always, "Okay, we know it's not durable. How long does this go?" Now it's, "Let's see how you compete against the Robinhoods and Kalshis of the world." It's a great spot. I've never been more bullish on these assets.

9. BlackBerry, Equities & Staying In Your Circle Of Competence

I think I've sold more Bitcoin in the last 6 months than I ever have, though. Monday morning, I sold some Bitcoin for BlackBerry. BlackBerry was the first stock I ever bought as a good Canadian.

Doing your duty.

BlackBerry drew down an insane amount, right? I don't know, 90% or something like that. It was kind of symbolic. It was a nice little moment, I felt like. I owe a lot of my career and life to Bitcoin, and I was rebuying BlackBerry, the first stock I ever bought.

Hopefully it's not just a meme pump. I'm fully bought into the robotics thesis there, but it's definitely got a lot of meme pumping going on with it.

Like a game of hot potato.

Is that a borrowed-conviction trade? Is that a risk?

100% borrowed conviction, but it also just made me feel good inside.

I was like, “I want to own BlackBerry. I just want to own it. It means something to me.” Maybe I bought the top again.

Now that BlackBerry pumps another 30%, I’m going to see a Canadian flag on the wall behind him.

Yeah, hey, man. If BlackBerry was a US company, it’d be trading at $50 a share right now.

Yeah, easily.

I think you’ve got to be careful at this point in the cycle. All the Trump names, like Dell and Intel, did really well. Now you’re starting to throw out commodity names.

I’ve got some buddies who work at commodity shops, and with some of these names they’re referencing, I’m talking to my buddies like, “Yeah, these are horrible businesses. We know the management teams. We like them as humans, but they aren’t the best businesses in their vertical, and they’re just getting bid.”

You might see a pump, but I remember we talked about it on the Market Matters podcast maybe a month ago. It reminds me a lot of biotech in 2020–2021. You had all the super-unprofitable names in biotech going on crazy runs.

Now you might see the same thing happening in commodities. You might see some of these commodity-related businesses that don’t have good management teams or good cash flows really start to get bid. It feels very much like a game of hot potato late cycle, at least for equities.

It’s going to run through and just squeeze out every name because everyone’s been sitting comfortably in shorts, thinking these have been fundamentally bad businesses.

Okay, so I didn’t actually buy the BlackBerry top. I bought it in, I want to say, 2011 or 2012, around $60 or $70. That sounds about right. I bought it around there when it was like, “All right, it came off the high. Let’s go.”

For all those following at home, this is BlackBerry’s long-term chart.

I’m going to give you the log because it makes it feel better.

Yeah.

It is a big game of hot potato and a rotation of capital, especially right now. AI is obviously the most sustainable place you can put capital because there are real fundamentals behind it. But how long it lasts is a question everybody’s asking.

As a long-term investor, Kevin, okay? I’m willing to hold this one for the next 5 years. I fully believe in the robotics thesis of their QNX platform.

Oh.

Let’s come back to this in 5 years. That’s what I’m going with. Watch, it’s going to be up 40% next week, and I’m going to go, “Oh, I need to sell BlackBerry.”

BlackBerry was a good phone.

It was honestly an amazing phone. They messed up by not allowing BBM on other phones. If they let you download BBM on other phones, I’m fully convinced that BBM would still be the messenger everybody uses.

It’s like being green in an iPhone chat.

Yeah.

You just get kicked out.

BBM was awesome. I remember I got my first BlackBerry, and then you’d get added to the BBM chats. Your social status went up so much.

The little scroll wheel, too. That was their big thing. They were like, “People love the scroll wheel.”

People love the scroll wheel. They’re never going to go to a touchscreen phone.

Touch phones are a fad.

I think DeFi Monk said something pretty good last week on the Thug Guys podcast. It wasn’t word for word, but it was something along the lines of, “If you haven’t pivoted to equities, it’s probably pretty late to do that. Sure, if you want to go for it, go for it, but if your bread and butter is crypto, now is the time when you can really generate alpha,” which Synapse C obviously has with HYPE, and a lot of other funds have.

It’s kind of like, hey, stick to your bread and butter right now.

There are businesses being built.

I 100% agree with that. Don’t try to become an equity investor. I bought BlackBerry for fun and whatever. It’s not a real thesis for me.

It’s somewhat like I just wanted to do it, in a sense, okay?

I think I’ve been saying this all year. Think about Derive. Derive has had an incredible run this year. Kinetic has had an incredible run. Venice—there are so many crazy multiples that you could have gotten in crypto if you were paying attention and had expertise here, rather than trying to do too much at once by dabbling in equities as well.

I was talking to LTR over the weekend, and I thought he said it really well. He was like, “Similar to what you said, I just give my equities to a financial advisor, and I have no desire to play in that. I do all my degening, angel investing, and venture investing in crypto. That’s where I have expertise. Let me focus on that. Let someone else handle that.”

It’s easy to get distracted, especially with SanDisk’s run and Micron’s run. If you were early to those, you’ve crushed it, and that’s your bread and butter. Stick to it. Don’t try to pivot to trade Hyperliquid. Keep doing your thing.

It’s also tough when Micron and SanDisk sit right alongside SOL, ETH, and HYPE on Hyperliquid.

Yes.

It makes—

Oh, you actually have revenue.

Yeah, it makes the temptation—

You’ve got a big business.

—higher.

Cash flow, what’s that?

Does SanDisk even have a phone, though? Solana has a phone.

True. So did BlackBerry.

True. I wonder what’s happening with Solana Mobile, honestly, now that you bring that up. What they’ve been trying to do with it is a good thing, but it’s tough to start a new operating system and a new app store and all that.

Is Lighter outperforming Hyperliquid there? Over what time period?

Lighter’s up a lot, man. Wow.

It’s a cherry-picked chart for sure.

Yeah, I appreciate that. Thanks for doing that.

10. Lighter Deep Dive

This is basically Q2.

177 for Lighter, eh?

Yeah, it’s 177.

That happened pretty quickly.

Very quickly.

Flip, you’re the in-house Lighter bull. What’s the quick spiel for those who aren’t familiar? I feel like a lot of people are looking at this, or starting to wake up to it, as maybe simply a catch-up trade because HYPE has done so well. How do you view it?

I’d be careful viewing it as a catch-up trade or beta, and I don’t think we have to be tribal about it. It’s not Hyperliquid or Lighter—you can hold both. Crazy concept that people in crypto don’t quite understand: I can hold Nvidia and SanDisk, and I can hold Hyperliquid and Lighter. Crazy world.

Hyperliquid’s really interesting. It’s been a painful 6 months for anyone who’s been buying the token, myself included. My first buy was in round 2, and then I kept buying all the way down to 80 cents, so I do have a decent average, a little over $1 now.

Their distribution strategy is quite unique. I don’t necessarily care to talk too much about the tech. I’ll let other people, like Will Price, talk about that if they want. But from a distribution strategy, they have a fairly large engineering team, and they take a very much white-glove approach to distribution partners.

With Telegram Wallet, for example, they’re very hands-on with that team. They help them get things built out and integrated. That’s versus a team like Hyperliquid or the other competitors in the space. A lot of them don’t have the talent to take a white-glove approach with a bunch of different teams. That would take them a long time to do.

They just say, “Here’s our SDK. If you want to integrate, good. Here you go. Good luck. Have fun.” Lighter’s like, “Hey, let us help you build this. Let’s make sure this is right for you guys and set it up that way.” I think they’ll continue to do that, and I think their distribution strategy is really unique.

I think there’s a lot of speculation regarding other partnership integrations, but what’s more interesting to me is pricing power. It’s kind of crazy that we’re talking about pricing power on a new asset class and a new asset in general.

But I think they have a lot of pricing power because they’ve got the zero-fee model. Now that they’ve got Telegram flow, they have a lot of retail orders smashing market orders. What Lighter can do is charge market makers a little bit more because it’s so profitable for the market makers that they’re willing to pay for it.

And so, you could see their take rate, which is the amount of revenue they make per dollar transacted. I think you could see that increase 40% to 50% in a pretty short period of time if they want to. And I think that gets really interesting because then you can have a world where, let's say, growth stays flat, but revenues increase 50%. I think that's a pretty decent business. And I think they have the pricing power to do that.

I think over time they should even—I think they have to really thread the needle here, but you can start to charge fees to retail for ancillary products. And I think even order types—TWAPs, chasing TWAPs, trailing stops, things like that that are a little bit more automated. I think you can start to charge a basic order and execution management system fee of 1 bp on those. And I think you can get a take rate—I think if that happens, then I think you see a take rate increase over 100%. I think that business becomes really interesting.

But this isn't to say Hyperliquid is a bad business, or that you shouldn't hold it or HYPE. They're both great businesses. You should hold both. You shouldn't hold both—do your own research. But I hold both. I think they're both great businesses.

Go buy both right now.

Yeah, yeah. Not offering financial advice.

I think Lighter has—I think their token model is kind of interesting, right? They do all buybacks with all the revenue, but then the corporate entity, the Labs entity, owns a bunch of Lighter. And so that's kind of how they monetize their LIT tokens. I think that's a decent model.

Instead of just having the equity entity get all the money, you give the equity entity a bunch of tokens, which they get anyway. And then you just work on making the token valuable, and then you monetize that way. I think that's a pretty aligned token model that's not bad.

Yeah, I think they took a punch to the face the first 3 months, realizing, “Hey, we're a startup, and we're used to just heads-down grinding.” Now they've realized, “Oh, crap, we kind of have to be communicative with investors, with retail, with Crypto Twitter. We need to be in front of people.” I think they've made that change over the last 2 to 3 months. They've been crushing it, and I think that's starting to pay dividends for them.

They've also filed to get CFTC licensing so they can offer derivatives in the US, and as far as I know, they're the first DEX to do that. I know there are other centralized entities trying to do that as well. I think Kalshi getting the green light for Bitcoin perps in the US shows that this strategy of going after US licensing is probably going to pay at some point. I don't know if that pays in the next quarter or sometime early next year, but I think it's kind of like, “Hey, we're on the right track here.” Trying to get licensing here is good.

From my understanding, once you get the licensing, then you have to get approval per market. So it takes time, but I think they're going down that path. I think that makes them a really interesting long-term play, especially if they can get US distribution through brokerages, fintechs, and things like that.

11. Kalshi, Perpetual Futures & Regulatory Tailwinds

Yeah, I was going to ask what you guys' take was on the CFTC's Calshi BTC perp approval and how that plays into the thesis around this. Is it bullish—

Or bearish?

It's very bullish. It's very complementary to these businesses. This isn't a shot to the face for any other perp DEXs out there, whether you're based in the US or Asia—Lighter, Hyperliquid, it doesn't matter. I think it's—

Kyle Samani would like a word with you, Flip.

Have a conversation. Sounds good to me. But I think it's bullish overall. I mean, these products—yeah, it's bullish.

If you're US-based or Asia-based, this is bullish.

What you kind of lose in market share, if anything, you gain multiples and volume because of awareness of the product. And then it's got, “I can trade other stuff in this way.” I think that's the best way you can get US retail that wants to trade leverage on US stocks to move to Hyperliquid and Lighter. They're just playing options, probably getting cooked endlessly, and can now get cooked on perps.

12. Hyperliquid, Lighter & Crypto's First Compounders

Yeah. It's a super simple way to get leverage. I think a lot of people talk about perps versus options, but again, they're complementary. They're 2 different instruments, 2 different ways to express a bet, but perps are a very linear expression. It's easy for retail to understand. It's easier than going and getting margin at IBKR. So I think you'll see tons of traction.

13. Polymarket's UMA Problem

I think IBKR will have perps at some point. Who they use or if they build it in-house, I don't know, but I think you'll see more of it.

Seems like it was a good week for Kalshi and a bad week for Polymarket. I don't know if you guys—

So, I was saying there's not too much to belabor, but I feel like Polymarket really needs to fix this whole UMA thing.

What can you actually do, though? What's a fix?

You just get rid of UMA and have—I mean, Kalshi has a committee, some internal trusted committee.

Yeah, I know, but it's—

They are CFTC-approved and regulated, whatever the exact terminology is for their case. But Polymarket has gone about it a different way, and that's what allowed them to take this more decentralized approach, which has worse UX but more protections, because you kind of agree to this setup when you participate in their markets. So ultimately, they're not really liable at all.

Yeah, I get that, but Polymarket just raised at a $15 billion valuation recently. I think this is becoming a very big risk for their business model. It's happened a lot of times now. This isn't the first time this has happened.

This one was particularly egregious. This guy bet Yes that MicroStrategy would sell Bitcoin by May 31. Because the announcement was on Monday, which was June, UMA decided to resolve it to No. It's just ridiculous, right? The prediction market wasn't, “When MicroStrategy announced that they sold Bitcoin.” It was, “Will they sell it by May 31?” And they literally did.

And this guy is like, “What are you guys doing? What is going on here?” It's not a good look. I think they really need to fix it. They need to do something about it soon.

I think it's obviously good for Kalshi if people move from Polymarket to Kalshi, but I think it's also a good opportunity for other decentralized prediction markets that are coming to market. They can probably get a lot of these Polymarket users if they use a resolution method that's better than the UMA thing.

So, I don't know. It's one to keep an eye on. I think it's actually a big deal now. In the past, it was kind of a joke, and we made fun of it and everything, but now, in my opinion, it's becoming a serious flaw that they really need to fix somewhat soon.

Seems like a potential—I don't know who the UMA competitors are—but it seems like a gap in the market.

Yeah.

Someone wants to take a stab at a model that can't be co-opted to that degree.

Yeah.

If you're building this, let us know. Who is building this?

It's great marketing for Calshi and HIP-4 markets as well.

Yeah, I mean, could a lot of people move to Hyperliquid for a lot of prediction-market stuff? You could see that. It's a pretty natural switch. You have to use a VPN to use both.

Friction, yeah.

Yeah, which is going to be addressed at some point. I am curious how that all goes down, but we'll see. I don't think Hyperliquid has gone so big now, and there's so much industry interest in it, that there would be any sort of regulation that just sends Hyperliquid to zero, you know? That's more Kyle Samani's idea.

The craziest thing is, I was reading through his posts, right? He's obviously a huge troll with this stuff, just a DEX hater, but he doesn't even think that's going to happen when you actually read through his posts. He just thinks they're going to buy somebody in the next 1 or 2 years to get past the regulatory thing—buy the licenses, acquire somebody—which makes sense, right? That's probably something there.

He said that in one of his replies. Somebody was trying to make a bet with him, his favorite thing, right? And he's like, “No, actually, over 2 to 3 years, I think they acquire somebody and kind of get past all of these regulatory hurdles.” I'm like, “Well, all right, dude.”

That’s kind of—yeah, yeah, I don’t know.

Which makes sense, right? I think it’s probably the easiest way, and you have HYPE working, trying to feel things out. I don’t know.

It was a much bigger worry a year ago than it is now, at least for me.

Yeah. I’m excited for the next time we hop on. We’ll see. It seems like every time we do this, there’s some type of crazy price action and real fundamental stories to talk about.

It’s been good. I swear, there was a period, especially post-10/10, when every time we recorded, it was like—

[laughter]

“Man, what do we talk about? Everything is just down.” Every single pod was just like, “Well, Bitcoin…” We started the pod, and by the end, Bitcoin had lost a few thousand bucks every single time.

So it is a nice change, even though Bitcoin and some of the other majors look very bad. At least we’re having some fun in other areas, right?

I mean, they got Jake Chervinsky now. He’s one of the most well-known lawyers in D.C. in the cryptosphere. That was a really good hire for them. I’m sure they’ll be able to figure something out.

Yeah. It's funny all roads and conversations lead back to hyperliquid one way or another. Just the state of the market we're in. The best business in crypto right now.

HYPE’s up like 10% since we started recording.

Oh, Ceteris is back.

BlackBerry’s flat on the day, yeah. But it’s funny—well, it’s not funny—but I bought BlackBerry, and then I went on Twitter and looked at the cashtag. There are all these retail traders saying, “Man, you’ve got to sell this now,” and blah, blah, blah.

That’s definitely how people come to crypto after something has pumped so much, right? I actually had this talk with Jason. I remember when SOL was pumping at the end of 2023 and got up to around $70 or $80. I was thinking this was probably becoming late at that point, and Jason said, “No, man. You were just early.”

Everybody was just starting to catch on; the trade hadn’t even really started yet. And that was right. SOL ended up going well over $200, right?

I’m not saying that’s going to happen with BlackBerry, but when you’re super deep in a trade and you’re early to it, when it goes up a lot in a short period of time, you think that’s it—it’s over, and you have to sell. Maybe that’ll be right sometimes, but there are occasions where these things just keep going.

Venice, for instance. I looked at Venice when it was $8, and I thought, “This thing’s pumped so much.” Now it’s at what, $21 today, right?

Yeah, I faded Yan when he first brought it up, right? I ended up buying it at $15, roughly 2x higher.

But that is the thing, right? If you just stick around in crypto and you don’t leave—even if you get washed out and lose most of your money—as long as you stick around, it guarantees that you’ll at least see something early. Whether or not you actually buy it is a completely different question, but it guarantees you the opportunity to be very early to things.

The way Ceteris just mentioned the SOL trade is literally exactly how I’ve felt about the HYPE trade the whole time. It would not surprise me to see HYPE trading above $100 in the next month or two at all. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest.

People are like, “Oh, that’s a 2x from here,” or a little more. “That’s crazy. It’s already up 200%.” And I’m like, “Yeah, it’s already up.” There are so many people who can’t buy HYPE but want to buy HYPE. There are so many people who are starting to buy HYPE.

Sometimes you just have to let a famous, wise crypto participant’s words ring true: You have to welcome the pump into your life sometimes, right? Respect the pump.

To Yan’s earlier point, there aren’t many other things to buy, which makes it even easier. Just buy the good stuff and let the market tell you what it likes. It’ll always tell you what it likes.

I’m excited to see what their volumes and revenues look like if equities roll over.

I’m just curious how much volume they still see to the short side.

Oh, yeah. Let’s not think about that.

With volatility and stuff, I still think HYPE will do well, right? Most of their crypto volume—not most, but their crypto volumes—have obviously gone down a decent amount, but a lot of it has been made up on the HIP-3 side of things.

That’s the test of durability that you were talking about before. At some point, that’ll happen. How do things look when that happens?

I think that helps you rationalize multiple expansion. It’s more durable, so it can trade a bit richer.

It can command a higher multiple.

Honestly, to the point of Lighter, I think a lot of Lighter’s token-related issues are mostly a timing thing. It’s kind of like with IPOs. Most of an IPO’s post-IPO performance is about market timing, not really about the business.

If the market’s in a good spot, IPOs generally do well. If you IPO at a bad market time, it doesn’t really matter how good your business is—you’re going to get hit. Lighter obviously has a decent business and a decent roadmap. Maybe their comms and stuff at the beginning weren’t great, but they’re obviously getting better there.

They just happened to TGE a month or a month and a half after 10/10. What are you going to do? The way I was talking about it back then was that all these perp airdrops that were going to come out would get instantly sold because everybody who was farming these things had just gotten nuked. They had no money.

When they got free money, they needed to pay rent, so they were going to sell their airdrops. Obviously, that’s a humorous way of thinking about it, but it was generally the dynamic. Everybody got washed out, and everybody was going to get these airdrops for things they had gotten washed out farming.

It was going to be a really tough environment for those coins to do well, especially when you look at something like Hyperliquid, which had actual buy pressure from the airdrop farmers getting wrecked as well. How could you ever think any of those would do well in the immediate aftermath of that?

I look at Lighter’s chart, and it’s pretty much like a U now, or almost like a U. Most of that is due to market conditions, not the project or anything else.

I think a lot of people are looking back and not really thinking about it. If Lighter had TGE’d in early 2026, the chart would look infinitely different—infinitely different. That’s something to keep in mind when you’re looking at these things that have run up a bit.

14. Ethena x Coinbase Explained

Yeah, I very much agree. The last thing I want to hit on quickly is this Athena Coinbase news. I don’t know if you want to give a quick rundown of it or share your thoughts, but it’s interesting that it didn’t really move too much yesterday on the announcement, and now it’s running quite a bit.

I don’t know if it just took time for people to digest what this news could potentially mean, but I’m really curious to get your take on how you see this.

Yeah, it’s funny. We’ve seen this lagged reaction quite a bit on other things, too. I guess you can calibrate it based on the amount of time it takes to build conviction about whether the announcement is just a blip or something meaningful.

Even when the perps announcement got passed, the altcoins sat there for a couple of hours before they moved. Coinbase and Ethena were investors, so obviously there’s always a bullish bias here.

They announced that they will be partnering with Coinbase and working to support its savings product, right? Coinbase obviously has a boatload of users and a lot of USDC sitting there.

From Coinbase’s side, if you look at the revenue they make from USDC, they get paid directly by Circle. That’s, I think, around $160 million in Q1, and it’s basically almost pure margin. There are obviously costs associated with it, but they’re not that significant.

The money they pass through to stablecoin holders on their platform has around an 80% margin. They basically pass through most of the yield and take some for themselves.

Ultimately, they want more USDC on their platform because that means more trading volume. If you can create an attractive yield for users, you’re more likely to have them bring their stables on board, and then they’re more likely to trade when the assets are sitting there.

The idea is basically that if Athena can find interesting ways to generate higher yield, then they can pass some of that yield on to Coinbase users, because the USDC people are using on Coinbase can now be lent to Athena. If Ethena is able to generate higher yields, that can result in higher yields for USDC depositors.

So, you have this massive pool of capital sitting there at fairly low cost. You have this huge distribution channel to basically fuel Athena, if you think they're able to generate that yield. I'm certainly confident that they will be able to find a way. I think Guy is one of the best founders in crypto, and I think he's been able to deliver on quite a bit.

As a lot of RWAs and other debt assets continue to move on-chain, there will be compelling ways to loop some of these assets that generate a higher yield but would have very low drawdowns. You really don't need that big of a spread to make these situations pretty meaningful.

I think what this allows for is Ethena to potentially really grow its capital base, if it's able to find sources for higher yield and basically use lower-cost USDC from the platform to grow it. I think it's also just great branding, because Coinbase isn't really working with anyone else, and I think that brand is justified. They've basically partnered and integrated with everyone, have S-tier infrastructure solutions, and have sustained every massive drawdown—even the 10/10 situation that happened, which was more Binance's fault than anything.

I think they've proven their durability and resilience, and I'm confident in their ability to find these additional sources of yield. The second interesting component is how the CLARITY Act situation plays out. That's still TBD, but part of what's happening in that act—and why you're seeing pushback from the likes of Jamie Dimon—is this desire to make it difficult to pay yield on idle capital. The reason banks want to make that possible is because if you have idle capital and your options are checking account or Coinbase, then you're obviously going to opt for Coinbase because you're getting basis points in your checking account and 3 to 4% on Coinbase. From the bank's perspective they borrow cheap and lend at higher rates, so taking away cash from low fee checking accounts kind of takes away lifeblood and hurts their net interest margin business. So in a world where passive USDC rewards become more difficult to offer, I think Coinbase can leverage Athena in a way to basically create products where the yield is actually tied to specific lending activity, collateral, platform utility, and so there is kind of this backdoor solution where the potential for Athena to be their path to generating yield on these stables because they're no longer actually passively sitting there but they're actively being used. So I think combining that plus just the general trend of the token being kind of down only, I think it found a floor and then the ETH hack for the Kelp DAO situation hurt their supply because there's definitely some looping that was happening on that ETH and so for them I think USDC USDE should kind of continue grinding higher from here. He mentioned in the announcement that they will be announcing their upcoming integration with Coinbase next week in terms of the specifics of it, so definitely interested to see that and I think they're cooking outside of just this Coinbase arrangement as well.

I feel like Athena has been one of those projects a lot of teams follow and admire. I feel like unlocks have weighed on them quite a bit. I'm curious: do they still have unlocks coming? I think I should know that.

Yeah, I feel like they flushed their bags, but—

No, no, no. They do, but we're through the bulk of them.

No, I think it's one of those businesses that's super interesting and under-owned by probably most of the market.

And I think, as we see certain assets move higher, there's going to be the search for what's actually still building and hasn't repriced.

Yeah.

There's just value in crypto in building something and continuing to build something. There's so much attrition across failed projects that, if you're actually building something that has a lot of room for growth but hasn't really repriced, I think that's one way people are looking for returns right now. So, yeah, kind of just going through charts, setting 7-day and 30-day changes, and seeing what hasn't moved but what's actually still shipping.

This looks like a good chart for every software business over the last 2 weeks. It announces after earnings that it's up 30% because of some XYZ AI impact.

It's definitely one that I'd add to the list, though. For sure.

I mean, it's about to break through $66K.

Yeah, I think it was Mitch Green, one of the co-founders of Lead Edge Capital, who was on Invest Like the Best a few weeks ago. He was talking about software businesses. A lot of those businesses had fundamentals that just continued to get better, but they continued to get sold off. They're predominantly software investors, but he was like, “I've never been more excited about the investment opportunity than now,” just because the fundamentals of those businesses were continuing to compound, and a lot of them were leveraging AI to increase efficiencies.

There are some good debates. Someone's like, “No startup is going to be using software. It's just the big businesses.” But software's in an interesting spot. Good founders.

Yeah, it's going to wind up being similar to the point we've talked about this whole time, which is that not every SaaS business is created equal. They're extremely differentiated in terms of what their actual, genuine moats are.

We'll see a big rebound in a bunch of them after a big sell-off in a bunch of them, and eventually the market's going to wade through and figure out what's durable. It's a stock-pickers' market.

I'm going to end it by putting Jason on the spot here, because I always love asking him this question. It's a loaded question.

Yeah.

Where does Bitcoin bottom? $49K?

Are we at $49K? You think we're going to retrace back to—

Who's going to buy it over the next 6 months, bro?

Did you say $40K or $49K?

$49K, not $40K.

$49K, not $50K. We're breaking below $50K. It's $49K.

You're going to go to that yen carry-trade unwind. You're going to clear that wick. There are going to be a bunch of people who buy $55K or something, or the range low, and then they're going to get stopped out below that wick. Then we'll bottom. I don't know when, but—

I hate that price. I really don't.

Again, if you're a super-long-term buyer on a debasement-thesis trade, is there a huge difference? I mean, I guess there is—$66K and $49K are pretty far apart—but I don't know. Going back to the beginning of the call, I don't know who's going to buy Bitcoin to the tune of billions or tens of billions of dollars.

How much did ETFs, Saylor, and other dads buy from the 2025 tariff bottom in April through the top?

Tens of billions.

Tens of billions of dollars. So where are tens of billions of dollars in bids going to come from in the next couple of months, especially if the AI trade does well? I don't know. Saylor's clearly kind of screwed himself into a corner a little bit right now.

God, if he does sell—if he actually comes out, or maybe he sold this week. Maybe he sold a billion dollars' worth this week, and we'll find out next week or something. Then you get maybe more follow-through. But I don't know. Who's going to buy? I can't think of a compelling answer to that question right now.

I mean, has anyone on this call bought Bitcoin in the last 6 months?

No, not spot for trades, but no.

Yes, but I sold pretty shortly after.

Yeah, yeah.

If I'm being honest.

You're like, “Wait, why did I do that?”

I was like, “Ah, yeah.” Bitcoin's kind of—I feel like Bitcoin's like my BlackBerry for sure, in a sense. I just want to own more of it, but it's just—

And also, I think $50K, $49K, $48K, mid-$40Ks—I think it becomes a really compelling—

Oh, yeah. That's where I was going to go.

—really compelling trade again.

Like a 2x would still bring you below $100K.

Yeah, exactly. Like—

And some leverage on that?

Great day.

Always.

Great day. [Laughter]

15. Can HYPE Keep Going Higher?

In that world, though, it's hard to see Zcash—I mean, Zcash and HYPE. I feel like Venice is kind of operating on its own right now, but it's hard to see HYPE holding $70 if BTC is—

No, I've seen HYPE go higher while that happens.

Okay, so there’s no gravitational pull at all.

No, there will be, but I think HYPE will be higher when that happens. It could be a slow bleed. HYPE is clearly not super highly correlated with Bitcoin price action right now. I think, like I’ve said too many times, there are simply not that many coins being sold, and there are a lot of coins being bought—and there will be more coins being bought. So, I don’t know.

I think it stops when equities stop, when the game of life ends.

When equities top—yeah, when the game itself tops.

It stops in equities; that’s when you start to see the world. Yan is shaking his head on that one, though.

Yeah, that’s a dark day.

Yeah.

I don’t really like going super bullish into it. I like giga IPO season, USDC yield, buybacks taking—or going—into effect, like ETFs and perps. I’m pretty sure it has a big, big credit facility.

Yeah, you’ve talked about this a lot, like on our Monday calls. Yeah.

There are just so many things that are going right for HYPE right now that I can think of.

I think you say this really well. It’s like USDC, the buyback, and the revenue is probably priced in now, but the flows—the flows coming in for buybacks—have not. You can’t really—

Valuation-wise, I would agree. Exactly, but the buying hasn’t started yet. There’s valuation based on revenue, and then there are actual price dynamics in the market.

Well, we’re just going to have to wait and see.

Yeah. I think the best barometer for it is to look at the ETF flows on a market-cap-adjusted basis, compare them to Bitcoin ETF flows and what they would be if it were Bitcoin. It’s doing better than Bitcoin was doing. The amount of supply that they’re taking off the market—it’s just like, at some point, I think you’ll probably actually get a blow-off top on HYPE. Just massive speculation.

I don’t know what the whole gamma squeeze with the perps situation is, but some people who seem way better than me at the game, based on everything they’ve done in the last 6 months, are pretty bullish on that, right? There’s just a lot that can happen, and we’ve just forgotten how to believe, I think.

Higher for longer on HYPE and lower for longer on Bitcoin.

Yeah, I mean, I still own my Bitcoin. I’m never going to sell it. I’ll ride that to zero if I have to. But if we head down to 48, 49, I’m going to load up the truck again.

Selling that Bitcoin for cash and then buying 2 Bitcoin on leverage.

All right. Well, we’ve run—we could talk about this stuff for days. We’ve definitely run quite a bit over. Appreciate you guys hopping on and chatting. I’m sure there are going to be more fireworks to come over the next week or so. We’ll see what happens, but appreciate the time, fellas.

Sounds good. See you.

Thanks for having me.