Cobie - The Future of Crypto, Capitalism & Society
Cobie sees a K-shaped crypto market in which the rails are succeeding while many investable crypto assets are not. Stablecoins, Polymarket, Hyperliquid, TradeXYZ, HIP-3 and tokenized real-world markets are producing genuine adoption, but investors cannot easily own Tempo, private Stripe equity or Polymarket. That disconnect makes crypto feel dead even as it delivers on its promises; more capital moving onchain should eventually create another cycle of “euphoria and fun and, best described as stupidity.”
The next mass onboarding wave will arrive when ordinary people can make meaningful money quickly, not merely because infrastructure improves. The recurring pattern runs from the 2013 altcoin cycle through 2017 ICOs, 2021 DeFi and NFTs, and the memecoin period from 2023 onward: accessible upside brings capital and talent, then chasers follow. Cobie cannot identify the next product in advance, but his operating rule is to isolate risk and try genuinely novel things because people instinctively dismiss new ideas before they work.
Tokenized stocks and perpetuals matter less as the final destination than as a way to accumulate new capital and behavior onchain. Hyperliquid and TradeXYZ introduce users to blockchains through equities, commodities and other familiar assets; Cobie cited TradeXYZ markets predicting the Monday open within roughly 50 basis points. Once volatility in traditional assets fades, onchain capital may fund the next yield farm, NFT or other invention nobody currently expects.
Thread Guy argued that crypto’s political and institutional victories may paradoxically have created an exit point rather than an immediate bull market. He cited Trump’s support for Bitcoin, the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, Gensler’s departure, ETFs, institutional demand, the GENIUS Act and a hoped-for CLARITY Act. Cobie’s counterintuitive observation was that long-time holders may ask, “How can it get better from here?” Crypto has often rallied hardest when conditions look irredeemable and believers feel they are buying opportunity.
AI could simultaneously democratize company-building and accelerate wealth concentration. Cobie said one person or a very small team can now build what previously required 10–20 people, improving the economics for founders and early employees; he expects an exceptional wave of AI-enabled unicorns. Thread Guy argued that companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX have created enormous private wealth without ordinary investors sharing in it, while Cobie agreed that this private-market dynamic could produce social instability.
Airdrop-style ownership could become capitalism’s answer to the value users create but currently surrender to platforms. Early Facebook users, for example, supplied network growth, feedback and distribution without sharing in the resulting equity; crypto could return some of that value globally when a company goes public. Thread Guy called Hyperliquid the flagship example, while Cobie said its airdrop created evangelists and may have changed the outcome even if the product was already excellent.
The traders who make and keep fortunes are self-directed, update their models and avoid excessive comparison. Cobie described exceptional traders as curious, first-principles thinkers who record thesis versus outcome and recursively improve. Thread Guy emphasized that survivors are satisfied with what they have and avoid taking excessive risk to catch up. Cobie’s closing prescription was simple: if something in crypto might matter in five or 10 years, allocate according to that belief; if the only motive is chasing an old high while hating every day, “go pick up another hobby.”
1. Crypto’s rails are winning while its liquid assets lose attention
Cobie’s K-shaped framing separates industry adoption from token-holder returns. Polymarket and prediction markets are thriving, stablecoins increasingly look “real and important,” and products such as Hyperliquid, TradeXYZ and HIP-3 are moving non-crypto assets onto crypto rails—even as crypto assets broadly suffer reduced demand and investor interest.
The investor frustration is exposure: “Do I buy Stripe equities? They’re still private. I can’t buy Tempo. I can’t buy Polymarket.” Crypto may be fulfilling its original promises, but the most successful businesses are often private or non-tokenized, leaving public participants unable to capture the upside.
TradeXYZ was Cobie’s sharpest example of utility crossing into real markets: its markets reportedly forecast the Monday open within roughly 50 basis points while supporting trading in commodities and other assets. Thread Guy’s move into oil therefore also illustrates crypto rails being used to trade assets beyond crypto.
More wealth onchain still creates a societal bull case for crypto-native speculation. Cobie expects that if capital keeps arriving for useful products, another season of “euphoria and fun and, best described as stupidity” becomes increasingly inevitable—even if nobody can yet name its winning asset.
2. DeFi 2.0 may emerge from the same AI that threatens today’s protocols
Cobie called an Anthropic Claude model, or whatever the exact model was, one of the most worrying developments for present-day DeFi because capable models could turn protocols into “financial bounties,” systematically identifying vulnerabilities.
His hedge matters: this is not simply a terminal bear case. Once such models become more widely distributed, the people creating systems may use them alongside the people attacking systems, producing a possible turn toward what he called “DeFi 2.0.”
Current sentiment remains low because little outside Hyperliquid and TradeXYZ feels compelling to him. The optimism is forward-looking: more real capital onchain and better participation in system design could make a future DeFi cycle structurally different from today’s self-referential leverage sandbox.
3. Saylor became an overhang when Bitcoin escaped crypto Twitter
MicroStrategy first felt genuinely concerning to Cobie when his dentist, a man in his 70s, disclosed an 80% MicroStrategy and 20% Palantir portfolio. The anecdote showed that the trade had “broke containment” beyond laser-eye profiles and crypto Twitter into an ordinary portfolio.
He nevertheless resisted making Michael Saylor a permanent black pill. In a falling market, holders see Strategy’s position as an overhang; once price rises, the same crowd returns to “Fuck yeah, Saylor.” The narrative follows price more than it predicts it.
Thread Guy contrasted Bitcoin’s performance since February 28 with gold and other assets, noting that discussion focused instead on Saylor and Strategy’s ownership of the supply. Cobie’s answer was temporal humility: roughly six months after the approximately 126 all-time high mentioned in the conversation, sentiment had already changed dramatically.
That emotional amnesia explains Cobie’s shift toward “really, really, really long term” thinking. He joked that more pessimism might have kept him from FTX or from holding 2021 NFTs, but he believes constantly inhabiting the current mood has served him worse than patiently staying optimistic.
4. Up Only belonged to a euphoric market that cannot simply be recreated
Cobie described his reluctance to restart Up Only as “second album syndrome.” The original show coincided with Bitcoin rising from about $4,000, Ethereum moving from roughly $80 to $4,000, DeFi summer and the NFT boom; viewers remember the program through the wealth and euphoria surrounding it.
Thread Guy’s pushback was that the show supplied a social institution, not merely entertainment. When FTX collapsed, people looked to Cobie for a plainspoken read—“this is really bad”—and the retreat of figures such as Cobie and GCR left crypto Twitter without obvious representatives during stressful markets.
Cobie conceded the pressure has changed. A half-joking market tweet can now provoke threatening messages when it fails, even though he estimates perhaps “5%” of his own tweets ever came true; harder trading conditions, divergent outcomes and desperation make audiences over-index every remark.
The guest problem carries its own scar: Cobie said several past guests later went to jail, creating trouble for having interviewed them before their crimes. Between that retrospective liability and a grim, combative market, he would rather wait until “the good times roll.”
5. Every durable onboarding wave begins with fast, democratic upside
Cobie’s history of crypto adoption starts with 2013 altcoins, when centralized exchanges used Bitcoin base pairs; 2017 ICOs, which required Ethereum; 2021 DeFi and NFTs; and the memecoin period from 2023 onward. He was unsure whether that period was still going, but said Melania represented a ceiling and described Believe as a possible final “kiss of death.”
AI now holds the same psychological position. People imagine buying a Mac Mini, installing OpenClaw and building a $100 million business in their spare time; the underlying desire for a “financial hobby” that can change one’s life is intensifying rather than disappearing.
Thread Guy emphasized the supply side: NFTs brought entirely new artists, traders and deployers, while a short AI-token period briefly attracted developers who thought launching on Solana could fund their startups. Trumpcoin then drew roughly 1,500 viewers who did not know Phantom Wallet or the established crypto personalities—they came because a new opportunity had appeared.
Cobie cannot say whether crypto’s brand recovers in five years, 10 years or sooner. His reason for optimism is human inventiveness: friends who had sworn off crypto after failed or disappointing 2017 ICOs quickly recategorized NFTs as “collecting art,” showing how a fresh wrapper can erase old disgust when prices rise.
6. Tokenized markets are staging grounds, not necessarily the next mania itself
Cobie likes equities, commodities and perpetuals onchain because they introduce novel capital and users who otherwise might never touch a blockchain. They also connect the system to the real economy, reducing its dependence on purely reflexive leverage.
He doubts the people who invented DeFi, NFTs, Wonderland, TIME and similar experiments will remain satisfied merely buying equities. The strategic value is that when volatility in familiar assets subsides, their capital is already onchain and available for whatever strange crypto-native experiment comes next.
His rule is not to predict that experiment. Yield farms in 2019, ape pictures in 2020 and Friend.tech all would have sounded implausible beforehand; the better question is, “What if this worked? Would that be cool?” Small, bounded participation in novel products produced asymmetric outcomes such as the Hyperliquid airdrop, Friend.tech and buying pictures of apes.
7. Perfect policy conditions can invite selling rather than fresh conviction
Thread Guy laid out what once looked like crypto’s complete bull case: Trump’s support, a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, Gensler gone, ETFs, institutional demand, the GENIUS Act and possible CLARITY legislation, plus major companies discussing tokenization. Yet the speculative angle remained weak.
Cobie accepted the risk that traditional firms appropriate a decade of crypto-native experimentation, privatize the value and leave early builders holding degraded assets. He said crypto-native projects endured difficult years, chased revenue and sometimes increased risk just as established companies became free to enter.
The counterintuitive holder reaction is, “How can it get better from here?” Someone sitting on $10 billion of Bitcoin may treat the long-awaited political victory as the cleanest exit, while new entrants see themselves as late.
Cobie’s historical intuition is that crypto rallies hardest when conditions appear irredeemable. He noted that the earlier anti-crypto environment coincided with strong crypto sentiment; people were more bullish in the face of doom and despair, while full acceptance can remove the conflict that sustained conviction.
8. AI gives young builders leverage while potentially steepening the social K
For a young person, Cobie’s preferred paths are concrete: build with one person or a couple of friends what once required 10–20 employees, or identify “the smartest guy” available and do almost anything useful to join early. AI has lowered barriers around teams, geography and fundraising enough to act as a “great equalizer.”
Early employment also becomes less exploitative when companies require fewer people, raise less money, dilute less and reveal their outcome faster. A founding engineer can still take founder-like risk, but the risk-reward may be much better because the company’s outcome arrives sooner.
Cobie expects more unicorns to be created over the next few years than ever before in a comparable period, though he hedged the exact timeframe. AI could deliver abundance broadly, or it could widen the K into an elite class and an underclass; he believes both arguments remain plausible.
Thread Guy argued that the wealth-concentration dynamic could accelerate social unrest. Cobie described the prospect of social revolution as a real concern around private-market inequality, while the exact timing and outcome remained uncertain.
9. Private markets have broken capitalism’s public bargain
Cobie avoids violently moving traditional markets because he feels like “the guy that’s buying LIBRA, confused about what’s happening.” He understands Bitcoin’s “personality” well enough to finish its sentences; unfamiliar markets invite him to become dumb money, so he either abstains or opens a deliberately tiny position to prevent a large FOMO trade.
Thread Guy argued that companies such as SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI went from zero toward roughly $1 trillion each—perhaps several trillion collectively—without normal people sharing the wealth creation. He said public markets increasingly function as “liquidity of last resort” after insiders capture the early compounding.
Thread Guy compared this with crypto, where venture funding at low valuations could be followed by token launches around $16 billion. Gains remained private, while liquid buyers received late, expensive inventory; supposed democratization reproduced the same clubby allocation structure it promised to replace.
The old social promise was that wages could be invested in companies one understood, allowing a perceptive saver to participate in their growth. Being offered questionable private-company derivatives or leveraged exposure only near a $1.5 trillion valuation is, in Thread Guy’s framing, “a complete betrayal of the capitalist system.”
10. User ownership could be capitalism’s answer to universal basic income
Cobie proposed extending crypto airdrops beyond protocols. Early users of a consumer company provide feedback, distribution, network effects and the initial K-factor; when that company goes public, some equity or tokenized value could return to those users globally.
That would make economic participation itself remunerative: power users receive part of what they helped create rather than watching founders and private investors capture everything. He called it “capitalism’s answer to universal basic income,” though the first traditional company attempting it would need unusual courage.
Thread Guy called Hyperliquid the strongest current example because its airdrop created shared ownership, loyalty and support. Cobie said the airdrop created evangelists who were also strong traders and may have changed the outcome, while acknowledging that the product itself was phenomenal.
Cobie considered a related structure for his own company, including an onchain IPO or equity airdrop, but the revenue model was too spiky, the crypto investor dynamics too strange and the business too immature before acquisition. If he founded again, he might design ownership distribution from day one—more likely for a non-crypto consumer product than a native token.
11. Conviction matters, but survival comes from luck, restraint and enoughness
The buy-wall story was less cinematic than crypto lore. Awakened around 1 a.m. by crash alarms, Cobie saw a red candle running off the screen, placed nearly all his stablecoin balance roughly 2–3% below a market around $4,600, tweeted, and went back to sleep; the order was only partly filled before price rebounded sharply.
His conviction came from market mechanics: a 50–60% single-candle fall is not thousands of people calmly choosing to sell, but forced selling. “You get to buy something from someone who does not want to sell it,” which energized him enough to act—but hitting the approximate bottom tick was still “effectively just luck,” not a heroic wall that saved the market.
The common trait among exceptional traders such as GCR, Light, Actual Advice BTC and others was not consuming more commentary. They were self-directed, curious first-principles thinkers who recorded thesis versus outcome and recursively improved their mental model—the human equivalent of adding better training data.
The separation between making money and keeping it is risk. Cobie has been fully risk-on only four or five times and has avoided leverage for roughly half a decade; watching Three Arrows rapidly lap his net worth taught Thread Guy how envy can poison even one’s best year. Thread Guy’s conclusion was that survivors accept 20% annually as exceptional and stop chasing the imaginary self who made every perfect trade.
12. The durable strategy is a long horizon and an honest reason to stay
Cobie does not regret becoming Cobie because the account shaped his life, though he sometimes regrets the podcast and random things he wrote or tweeted. His broader ethic remains optimistic: helping people without an immediate payoff makes life richer, even after betrayals exposed the downside of assuming good intent.
His prescription for exhausted crypto participants is binary. If an asset or technology might matter in five or 10 years, allocate capital proportionate to that belief and accept that wealth takes longer than the imagined three-month sprint; if everything seems worthless and only nostalgia remains, leave rather than spend four years doubting yourself daily.
Financial media may develop its own K-shape. A mass audience might be worth roughly $3 per viewer through generic advertising, while a small, highly targeted finance audience could contribute something closer to $10,000 per user because it contains unusually valuable early adopters and decision-makers.
Cobie expects a finance-native media star within three to five years: part public trader, part lifestyle figure, exceptionally talented like “a Magnus Carlsen of financial markets,” and willing to show positions, wins and losses. Whether a media company discovers that person or the individual becomes the content remains open—but the desire to make money independently through unique online paths appears to be growing.
Full transcript
Yo, yo.
Hey, mate. How are you doing?
Wow. What a mythical pull. How are you, man?
All right. How are you doing? I did that, if I'm right. Actually, I was on Twitter, and I'm in the middle of moving around on Twitter when I saw it. I thought you were doing a Space because I'm old, so I tried to join.
I was like, “I'll join this Space.” And then there was a whole stream happening. I didn't even know that was a thing you could do on Twitter. I was like, “Dude, I'm pushing 40, watching a Thread Guy stream.”
Many pushing-40-year-old rich guys are also watching the Thread Guy stream. But dude, how are you, man? You've been kind of quiet on—
I'm not 40, okay?
Yeah, dude. I'm all right. I'm good. Everyone wants to know when Up Only is back, when you're going to be back. What have you been doing the last month? The last couple of months?
A job, dude?
I've been at work. What do you mean?
Like, you're clocking into work at Coinbase?
I'm actually doing more work than I've done in the last few years—longer.
Wow.
I tried to join Coinbase a few years ago for a salary of zero. It didn't really work out. I tried to join a while ago, and they effectively said no.
From my perspective, there are a few high-leverage things you can do that materially impact the trajectory of the industry, and making Coinbase really good is one of those things. I'll give it a go. I mean, look, dude, I sat on Twitter for like 10 years. Doing anything that's mentally stimulating, anything that's more difficult than trying to write a stupid joke—
Okay. There's a million things I want to ask you, but I think it's most important that we talk about crypto—the state of crypto, which is not the most exciting topic right now. We just had the Arbitrum and LayerZero situation that happened, I don't know, a couple of weeks after the DeFi—the Drift situation—that happened at sentiment-cycle lows for crypto.
What do you make of the state of crypto right now, and the state of DeFi? Where do we go from here?
I think we're on the verge of DeFi 2.0. The most worrying thing for DeFi, for me, is this Anthropic Claude model or whatever, apparently, because I don't know—
You're scared of it.
It sort of makes DeFi a little bit into these financial bounties, almost. Eventually, when these models become more widely distributed, you have the people creating the systems rather than just the people attacking the systems, right?
I think there's a corner to turn and a version of DeFi in the future that's pretty exciting. It's low sentiment for current DeFi, I think. It just hasn't been that interesting outside of Hyperliquid and TradeXYZ, which is phenomenally cool. It's really, really, really cool.
So, you're an oil trader now. What do you think about that?
What, you're trading oil?
Yeah.
Look, dude, if you're making money, then I'm happy for you.
Thanks, man. You like—see the barrel in the background? What do you think?
That you literally got some decorations.
It's American crude.
Yeah, it was a perp. You didn't get delivery. I mean, look, dude, you moved to New York and became an oil trader. That's kind of a path.
So, when you talk about the DeFi 2.0 thing, I think the Claude thing—by the way, no one in the chat thinks you're real. But I do know that—
I'm AI me.
A lot of people think it's AI, Cobie. I'm not going to lie—
No, it's ChatGPT. It's not. I have the Telegram conversations with them from a long time.
You set this up, and you've pretended that you've set up this voice. On the crypto topic broadly, you talk about the Claude stuff, which is scary. We talk about DeFi 2.0, which is an interesting one. I'll ask you some more questions about it, but why are you still excited to work at Coinbase? Have you not gotten deeply cynical about the future of crypto and what the industry has become?
I imagine a lot of people that got here a lot later than you—I even feel it a little bit, dude. I'm trading oil. We're looking at Hims. I'm trading Hims. I'm trading dick pills on the New York Stock Exchange.
Pause. Also on Hyperliquid, right? I think you're trading a lot of stuff that is not crypto assets, but you're using crypto rails to do them.
I think there's this weird K-shaped thing happening in crypto where crypto seems to be having phenomenal success stories—more than in any previous year—but it's just not represented in asset prices that people can buy, with the exception of HYPE, obviously.
Polymarket is doing phenomenally well. Prediction markets, with this sort of crypto-native thing, have become a whole Kalshi–Polymarket duopoly. Stablecoins seem like they're actually real and important in the world. People are using them for more and more stuff, and this Tempo announcement—DoorDash is paying drivers on Tempo now, or whatever.
It just feels depressing to crypto investors because it's like, “What do I do? Do I buy Stripe equities?” They're still private. I can't buy Tempo. I can't buy Polymarket. These things are doing really well, and I get no benefit from any of those things.
Meanwhile, crypto assets themselves have significantly dropped in demand and investor interest. It's an interesting moment where crypto is doing a lot of the things that it promised, and Hyperliquid, TradeXYZ, and HIP-3 are incredibly cool.
I saw something that said the TradeXYZ markets predict the Monday open within a 50-bps error margin or something. That's quite cool. There's a real market happening on all these commodities and other types of assets, and it's all on crypto rails. It's very cool.
I think you have to detach what is going well in crypto from whether the memecoins are going up or the governance tokens are going up. It feels depressing because you just can't get exposure to the things that are good. I can't get exposure to the things that are good.
I do think there's a societal bull case for crypto enabling a lot of stuff. If crypto does enable a lot of this stuff and more and more capital comes on-chain, it's inevitable that we have another season of euphoria and fun, best described as stupidity. The more capital is on-chain, the more inevitable that appears to me.
What do you think about this? Damn, you're oddly optimistic right now, which is insane. I don't know. Am I crazy?
I've been optimistic for the last—I mean, there isn't a time when I haven't been. I've been pessimistic about several things throughout my life, but I've never really gotten a huge benefit from being pessimistic about anything.
Maybe I should have been more pessimistic about FTX, and then I wouldn't have had FTX or whatever. Maybe I should have been more pessimistic about the NFTs that I bag-held from 2021 to today.
They're going to come back, though. Don't worry.
I just never really got served well. I do. I still got a bag.
Okay, let me run through all of the crypto fears before we get to some of the fun stuff.
You look at Bitcoin right now. You look at how it's performed since February 28, when the war started, relative to gold and some of these other assets, and it feels like an environment where people could, should, and maybe would be singing the praises of Bitcoin, bringing the relative-strength conversations back, bringing the value-proposition discussions of Bitcoin to light.
Instead, the only thing anyone can talk about is Michael Saylor's strategy, Strategy, and what percentage of the supply he owns. Is that a legitimate black pill for crypto? Is Michael Saylor and how the Strategy experiment plays out something you're worried about? How worried are you about Michael Saylor?
I wasn't worried about it at all until I went to the dentist, and my dentist was like, “Own any stocks?” I was like, “Really, dude? I don't know very much about investing.” He was like, “Have you heard about MicroStrategy?”
I was like, “Fuck, dude.” This dude is in his 70s. He's like, “I own 2 stocks. 80% of my portfolio is in MicroStrategy and 20% of it is in Palantir.”
I've got to change dentists now, dude. I can't go to the very strange judgment.
You got a fucked-up dentist, you know?
That was the first time I was like, “Okay, this broke containment in a way.” I thought the only people who cared about MicroStrategy were people on Crypto Twitter and people who used to have laser-eye profile pictures or something. I was like, “This is a person in the real world.”
Sometimes I think crypto doesn't actually exist in the real world. Maybe I'm completely delusional and I've made all this stuff up. I go home and sit at home, completely psychotic, and crypto is just an entirely fantastical, hallucinogenic trip I'm having. I go into the real world, and it might not be real.
So then I was confronted by, like, “Ah, no, yeah, Bitcoin is a real thing that other people know about.”
Unless I’m also hallucinating the dentist, which is possible.
It’s possible. Okay. And so then you become legitimately concerned about MicroStrategy?
I don’t know. Look, I think it started to feel like an overhang to many people. Instead of people feeling like Saylor is going to buy, they’re like, “This feels like a thing to be cautious of now.” It just changes a lot when the price goes up, right? The price goes down and everyone’s like, “Ooh, Saylor.” Then the price goes up and everyone’s like, “Fuck yeah, Saylor.”
So, I think it’s just—you know, if you go back, what was the all-time high? It was like—
126. It—
—was October.
Yeah. Yeah.
October, November.
Yeah. October. Right before 10/10.
So, it was like six months ago or so. You just think about the sentiment then, and then you think about the sentiment now and how quickly it changes.
This is the thing I’ve always been surprised by in crypto: how much you feel the moment, how much it feels extremely real, and how you can’t imagine feeling any different. Then it’s like, “Oh, three months ago, this felt completely the opposite.”
I’ve never found that pessimism has served me very well. Instead, I’ve increasingly tried to think really, really, really long term and just plot along, be happy about it, and be optimistic. Maybe I’m wrong. Fuck it.
Have you ever hung out with Saylor before?
I only had a podcast, dude. We did a two-and-a-half-hour podcast with Saylor. Before the podcast started, Ledger messaged me and was like, “Dude, what are we going to talk about?” I was like, “We just say, ‘Is Bitcoin good?’” Then Saylor will talk for the next three hours. Genuinely, I don’t think we said anything on this podcast. Saylor just monologued for hours. It was awesome.
I’m trying.
He invited me to his New Year’s party, but I didn’t go.
Oh, really?
I don’t leave the house.
Huh?
Leave the house. Yeah, I think if I left the house, I would have gone. I think that would have been fun. But—
Is that true? You really don’t? When you’re at the house, are you just terminally online, or what are you doing?
I don’t really know. Sometimes I go for a walk, but that’s in the garden.
Yeah, it’s worrying if you come across other human beings. I think you want to try and avoid that.
Is this why UpOnly hasn’t come back? They want to know, man. They really want to know. At a certain point, I have to just ask it directly. They want to know. I’m just an arbiter. I’m a vessel for the chat. They want to know. What am I supposed to do?
You know this concept where an artist puts out an album and it’s really well received, like MGMT or something? They did that. Oh, you know who they were? They were when you were five. I know MGMT.
I know MGMT. Hell yeah.
Then their second album was just complete garbage. It’s a really common thing that people get second-album syndrome, and the expectation is so high that they completely flop it.
I think I’ve got that, dude. Every time I think about doing UpOnly again, I’m like, “I don’t know how to be funny. I don’t know what to talk about. I don’t know what’s going on. Who should the guest be?” I can’t—I’m second-guessing the guest because all of our other guests went to jail, and then you get in trouble for having them on before they did a crime.
I did the podcast during the pandemic, and everyone was locked inside, paying attention to their screen. Bitcoin went from $4,000 to whatever it was at the top. Ethereum went from $80 to $4,000 during that time when I did the podcast. Everyone was phenomenally happy. Everyone was making tons of money. Summer happened, then NFT season happened, and so on and so on. Everyone was just completely euphoric.
They remember UpOnly as being a good podcast only because it was their best-performing time in the market ever. They couldn’t do anything wrong, and we just happened to be the thing that you would tune into on a Thursday or whatever. We happened to be there, adding to them through this weird period of time.
Now it’s a little bit grim out there. Everyone’s really angry all the time, and everyone’s always at each other’s throats about stuff. I think it’s better to do it when the good times roll, you know.
Yeah. But you know what?
Dude, I’m too old. I’m too old.
Fully. Okay, first of all, I hear you on the album thing. It’s like the Frank Ocean dilemma, right? You put out Blonde, and there’s no way people aren’t nostalgic about it now. There’s no way a new Pokémon game could feel as good as LeafGreen did when you first played it.
But I think, outside of price, you not doing UpOnly sort of left a hole again. Everyone in CT has daddy issues with price down, because you sort of leave a hole in the social side of where to look when something bad happens.
What is Cobie like, bro? I’ll never forget the day FTX collapsed. I was on Twitter Spaces, and you joined the Twitter Space. I had absolutely no idea what was happening—and I still don’t—but everybody was like, “Cobie, Cobie, Cobie, what do you think?” You basically speak for CT at large. You get out of the space and you’re like, “Guys, I’m going to be honest. This is really fucking bad.”
Then everybody starts sweating and getting nervous, and you sort of tell them what to do. It’s less about the actual performance of UpOnly and more this era of knowing where to look for representatives of the space. You don’t post as much. GCR doesn’t post. Haka is doing whatever. I don’t know—maybe aura farming. It’s sort of just a new era, if you will.
I think we’re just all too old, right? I’m old now. I did this—I don’t want to be doing podcasts like Gary Vee. Then Gary Vee saw it, and I feel really bad. Gary’s not that old. I think he’s only, like, 90 or something. I wasn’t being mean to the guy. I actually think he’s a cool guy.
He’s just been worked, man. They just work him over there.
But I think this thing that you said—people want to hear from Cobie—and I’m like, dude, at the time I don’t really know what to say. This happened a bit later in real time. People didn’t care as much in 2021 or whatever. The character outgrew itself, and now it feels like there’s a lot of pressure. People over-index on random things you say, and it makes you not want to post too much.
I posted a meme version of what that John Brown guy said about the easy road and the hard road. People got really upset by this tweet—
I just read that tweet out before you came on, by the way. My bad.
People got really upset by this tweet. They sent really threatening, angry messages about this random tweet that I posted when the price of Bitcoin was $70,000. It’s legitimate anger that this random, half-joking tweet didn’t come true.
If you go through all of my tweets, about 5% of them will ever have come true. It’s like 95% wrong. But you never really got as much negativity over it as you do now. I think it’s just a sign of the times. Things haven’t been doing well. It’s been much harder to trade. People have been struggling a lot more, and there’s a divergence of outcomes, I think. People are generally less happy and a little bit more desperate or something.
All these things just make you not want to do it, apparently, though.
By the way, I totally agree. You should just rip the Jeff episode, the Shane Copeland episode, and call it a fucking day.
But tell me: I think there are a couple of black pills for crypto that I want to ask you about. One of them is that, in 2020 and 2021, when I started trading NBA Top Shot and NFTs, it felt like the natural migration from the internet dropshipping and sneaker-reselling crowd was into crypto. That’s where all the talent was. That’s where all the excitement was. It was the hottest, freshest, newest game in town.
I wonder what it would take for the new young talent crowd to get crypto-pilled again in 2026, because it feels like we’ve completely lost that cohort coming into crypto. We’re sort of playing for scraps on the founder-deployer side, when it feels like a lot of the smartest and brightest people are going into AI, building fintech platforms, working on fucking other platforms that aren’t directly crypto. It feels like that used to be the case in 2021 and 2022.
Do you think that changes? Do you think something happens to crypto to make that come back? What brings new talent back into the space?
I think basically you look at major onboarding events through history. You had 2013, which was this major altcoin cycle—at least the first one that I participated in.
Jesus.
Around when Rasmus was born. You got the first wave of altcoins. It was about 100 coins. At least the first alt season that I remember brought on a wave of capital and got people interested in these things.
You had to own Bitcoin in order to own the altcoins because there were no stablecoins, and all the centralized exchanges had Bitcoin as a base pair. In 2017, you had the ICO season, where you needed to own Ethereum because Ethereum was the base pair. In 2021, you had DeFi summer and the NFT thing happen, and then you had the memecoin version from 2023 to now. Is it still going? I don't know.
No, brother. Did it end with Milady?
That was the kiss. I guess you could argue it ended with Ben Todar and Nick[?], but it ended with Melania. How could you ever get a memecoin bigger than Trump? That's obviously the target you could never surpass.
Ben who?
The Believe thing. That was the final kiss of death, I would argue.
Remember that?
Sometimes I see people who were fundamentally all-in on Believe, so bullish on Believe that I saw their tweets all the time. They were really bullish on Believe, and now they do market commentary and other things. All I can think about is, are you really being serious? Are you just yapping? You know what I mean?
I was a little excited for a couple of weeks.
Yeah. If you look back at all those onboarding moments, the unifying thing is that a lot of people made money in a very short period of time, and normal people could join in.
Yes.
If you look at current AI, that's how people feel. People feel like they're going to buy their Mac Mini, set up OpenClaw, and then make $100 million running a business because the machine is just going to make them a business or something.
This financial hobby—making money in my spare time—is only increasing now. Whether crypto has another thing in it, whether its brand has been beaten down too much, whether it's in 5 years or 10 years or whatever, I don't really know the answer to any of those things. I prefer to be optimistic and say history repeats. There's no reason for it not to repeat.
People are incredibly inventive. People came up with these DeFi yield farms. People came up with all sorts of shit, and I'm sure someone can come up with something new. If someone comes up with something new and people make a bunch of money on that thing, is it inevitable that there's a wave of chasers that follow along?
Brand, sentiment, and positioning can change really quickly. They can go from being this cringy thing that the general public hates or associates with scams to being some new, slightly different thing. I really feel like NFTs were like that. A lot of my normie friends who bought an ICO in 2017 mentally categorized all crypto as a scam because the flying-car coin they bought didn't deliver a flying car.
As soon as NFTs came around, they were like, “No, this is different. I'm collecting art.”
100%. This is not the same thing.
I think it was somehow different to them, and all of these “never buy crypto again” grumblings were completely erased by buying Art Blocks and whatever. Chat goes up, everyone is happy, people come back, and crypto is cool again.
You know what it was about with the NFTs? It was the first time—or, I wasn't here for 2017—but there was a wave of net-new deployers that were excited. I use “deployer” as a general term for artists, buyers, traders, or whatever you want to call them.
Net-new deployers came into crypto for NFTs throughout all of 2021. The only other time I feel like that happened was briefly during AI season in 2024. It was a disaster, it didn't end very well, and it didn't last very long, but there was a 3-month period where these AI devs thought to themselves, “I could probably make way more money on my startup if I go launch on Solana.”
That went on for 3 months, and it felt like that through the blowoff of Trump. I remember showing up on stream the day after Trumpcoin. How many people are watching right now on Twitch? There are about 600 people watching right now. There were 1,500 people watching after Trumpcoin. They didn't even know what Phantom Wallet was. They were like, “What is that? I just got here because I saw Trumpcoin launch.”
They didn't know who you were. They didn't know who I was. They didn't know what any of this was. They just got there because they saw Trumpcoin launch. It feels like every 3 years or so, we get a moment like that.
I don't know. Do you think on-chain stocks or tokenized stocks can do that? Do you think Hyperliquid perps can do that? Do you think Hyperliquid, with leveraged perps on all platforms—Trade XYZ, that kind of thing—can do that? Is there a new game being set up or on the horizon for crypto that could do something like that?
I think the reason I really like Trade XYZ and Hyperliquid is because they're bringing a lot of novel capital on-chain. It's this group of people getting used to using blockchains when they might never have used them before.
If you have a large concentration of capital and volatility dies off in traditional assets, you have this money on-chain that you want to put into something. That's when people start inventing yield farms, DeFi, or whatever else.
I don't think the people who invented DeFi, NFTs, Wonderland, TIME, and all these crazy things are going to be happy buying equities. But I think tokenized equities are still very cool for the reason I mentioned: they bring a bunch of people on-chain.
There's more wealth on-chain. People use blockchains for things that are slightly more attached to the real economy rather than being a self-referential leverage sandbox.
I've never known what the next thing is going to be. If you told me it would be pictures of apes in 2020, I would have said, “That doesn't sound right.” If you told me it was going to be yield farms in 2019, I would have said, “That doesn't sound right.” If you told me friend.tech was going to take off, I would have said, “That doesn't sound right.”
I've never really known what it is. My own mental model on this stuff is that you isolate your risk and try every novel thing. You don't try everything—if you try everything, you're chasing a bunch of forks and end up in bad projects—but if there's something novel, instead of trying to figure out why it won't work, you may as well give it a go.
If you did that with Hyperliquid, you ended up a millionaire from the Hyperliquid airdrop. Same with friend.tech, and the same with buying pictures of apes or whatever. When there's a new thing happening, people's instinct is to say, “This is stupid, this is dumb, and this won't work for these reasons.”
You just need to invert that and go, “What if this worked? Would that be cool?” Maybe I'll buy some of this stuff and see how it works, or maybe I'll try this product out. That's what I'm doing. Every time I see something weird, I'm giving it a go and trying to figure out if it's a new thing that's going to be important.
I don't know, dude. The AI season was—
Yeah, dude. To say “devs” is like stolen valor or something.
There were a couple.
Come on, dude. At the time, Truth Terminal was very interesting. Can you say that?
No.
You won't say that? GOAT was cool.
Oh, man.
Okay, I have one more crypto black pill. I'll stop using that word because I have some other stuff I want to ask you about. But there's another crypto black pill: if you got here in 2020 or 2021, basically every bull case you could have ever conceived for crypto has largely played out.
Trump is on the podium screaming, “Mine the rest of the Bitcoin in America.” We have the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, Gensler is out, we have the GENIUS Act, and hopefully we have the CLARITY Act get through soon. We have ETFs, the institutional bid, and the retail bid.
It feels like you have every major TradFi company in the world talking about on-chain stocks and tokenizing assets. You basically have every ingredient you could ever have conceived to be bullish at the same time, except for the speculation angle, which is kind of ironic for crypto.
And you sort of get left with this case of what if crypto, the whole time, was just a vehicle for TradFi to tokenize their assets, and Bitcoin matters, and everything else that we created—the altcoins, all of the memes, the NFTs, DeFi, everything in between—was just a complete wasted experiment and will now move forward without us? Is that something that you think about? You get things like Tempo and these other walled gardens; they come on-chain on their own terms, and we're left with whatever we're left with. Is that something that you think about?
It's kind of the K-shaped thing I was mentioning, right? We'll build out all these technologies, and you build a self-referential leverage sandbox that regulators tried to kill for a decade. Then suddenly this stuff is cool and okay, and the big companies swoop in and take all the value and privatize it, basically.
I think that's a real risk, and that's happening in part. The crypto-native stuff had a few difficult years where they've chased revenue and increased risk in doing so a little bit as well. Counterintuitively, when all the conditions are right, it's a good exit, right? If you think about—let's say you own $10 billion of Bitcoin.
Whoa.
Let's say you've owned it for a long time, and you get the crypto president. You get all these conditions that you just described as being bullish effects for the asset. The counterintuitive thought is, how can it get better from here? Maybe I should sell now.
Fair. It seems to me that crypto has always done the best when people can say, “How can it get worse than this?”
How can this get—how can it get any worse?
Yeah.
In the hard times, crypto does the best because people, deep down, are believers, and they think, “Oh, it's hard times. I'm getting a good opportunity here.” Then people try and front-run the good times. When the good times come, I think there's an expectation that the price just goes up in a straight line, but new entrants feel like they're late, and old holders feel like, “Can things get better than this? Did we get everything we wanted here?”
There was this anti-crypto-army thing, and crypto seemed to really rally. People were more bullish in the face of doom and despair. I don't really know. Again, I think people expect there's some really high-level analysis that goes into coming to a position on the world, when the reality is, I think it's cool, I'm feeling good, and I'm feeling optimistic. I'm not going to say I'm feeling happy and optimistic about the future, but I feel like I'll remain bullish. I'm bullish. I've been bullish since 2012.
So, to your point about the K-shaped thing—and, I don't know, just young talent—what do you do?
The coolest thing about the world right now is that you can start a business with one person and get a phenomenal outcome within 6 months. You're seeing that quite a lot. Obviously, the OpenClaw one is the big one, where he got billions of dollars or whatever in the space of literally a month, and he was just one guy.
For creative people, for builders who have previously been constrained by having to put a team together and not knowing the right people, or needing access to capital to pay those people but not growing up in Silicon Valley or whatever, there's been a great equalizer. There's opportunity for everyone to do things that previously were just not possible.
I think there is going to be a real wave of young people building AI-enabled companies that add a ton of value. I think in the next few years there'll be more unicorns created than ever in history, in the period of a year or whatever.
It's also kind of changed the economics of being an early-stage employee. Previously, being an early-stage employee was kind of a scam because you took founder-level risk but got a 20th or a 150th of the reward. Whereas now, because companies need fewer people and less money, dilute less, and exit more quickly, the risk-reward for being a founding engineer or an early employee is incredibly good because you figure out the outcome of the company much more quickly.
If I were 19—
Stop.
If I were your age—
24.
Same thing. If I were your age today, I would probably be doing one of those 2 things. I'd be building something by myself or with a couple of friends that previously would have needed 10 to 20 people to do, and now you can do it with 3.
Or I would find the smartest guy I knew and do anything to join in any role. I'd be like, “Let me be a—” I said fluffer, dude. I meant fixer. I don't want to be a fluffer. I'd be a fixer and do whatever to make the company work. I think I would be doing one of those things.
Financial markets—I always thought crypto would become more like markets, and traditional markets feel increasingly more like crypto markets. It's just crazy now. I think there are highly inefficient markets and a lot of opportunity for people who use their brains.
Okay, I want to direct you on this one, because one of my favorite topics of all time is how everything trades like crypto, and you're sort of seeing it, right? We saw how oil moved during this war, but we really saw how silver and gold traded a couple of months ago. You're also seeing the way Trump is wielding the Midas touch and whipsawing markets up and down: bad news after Friday's close, good news 2 minutes before open, bad news right after the market closes. There’s this car that’s up 700% in a short squeeze over the last couple of days.
It seems like everything is starting to trade like crypto. How are you evaluating the evolution of markets from when you started trading to where we are right now?
I effectively try and stay out of those markets as much as possible. I feel like I'm effectively a fish, right? I'm the dumb money at the table. Unless it's a long-term thing—I've bought a lot of gold a long time ago. Someone asked me my top 5 bags outside of crypto a couple of years ago, and it was gold, Palantir. I don't remember exactly, but for long-term stuff, I feel relatively confident in asset allocation. When these things start trading like crazy, I just stay out of them as much as possible.
When Trump Coin happened—oh, actually, you were an insider, weren't you? So maybe, dude, in front of 1,000 people, that's the take you're going to give?
Sorry. It was LIBRA. My bad. My bad.
I'm joking, dude. I'm joking. But imagine being a random guy on Twitter, seeing LIBRA and being like, “Wow, LIBRA is going up. I should buy LIBRA.” Then it goes down and you're like, “What happened?” That's how I feel with the traditional markets. I'm the guy who's buying LIBRA, confused about what's happening.
I stay out of them for trading purposes. I feel like markets have a personality, and I know Bitcoin's personality. I know what it's going to say. I can finish its sentence. It sounds a little bit—
Depends what it was.
I don't want to say a slur. I feel like when you look at a new market, you just don't know its personality at all, and it does really weird stuff. You're like, “Oh, okay. Maybe I don't think I'll get on with this one.”
I really stick to the things I know more than anything. If I really want to FOMO into something else, I restrict risk very, very heavily. I'm effectively taking a small position so that I don't take a big position, basically.
I think for people who are really locked in and trading full-time, the conditions are—people that you know better than me, or at least are locked in like I was 10 years ago.
I think the conditions are probably highly fruitful. The main thing I think about markets is that there’s this betrayal in private markets, where companies like SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI have gone from zero to a trillion dollars each—and maybe multiple trillions—without any single normal person having any upside from those wealth-creation events.
There’s this sort of nepotism or cronyism where gains are privatized to Silicon Valley. If you’re in the club, you get to invest in these things, and if you’re not in the club, you don’t. The losses are socialized onto everyone else, and public markets have become the liquidity of last resort. Crypto had this same thing, right? Increasing VC funding happened, and tokens would just launch at $16 billion or whatever when they’d raised at $100 million two days earlier.
So it feels a little bit like this social promise has been broken. It was like, if you work hard, you’ll earn money at your job, and then you can invest in the wealth creation of companies that you like. That’s no longer true.
If you were in the 1970s and thought there was a cool company—I don’t know when Apple was founded. Let’s say it was founded in the 1960s.
Who knows?
But if you thought Apple was cool, you could just buy Apple shares. If you were right and you were a smart person, then you got to share in the upside of Apple’s wealth creation.
Whereas now, you go to Pre-IPO Stocks and buy an Anthropic derivative position that might not be real, or you take a perp position on Virtuals or something. It’s really, really difficult for normal people to get access to the wealth that’s being created.
You have these three generational companies. There was effectively a privatization of, I guess, $5 trillion. I think this is the kind of thing that leads to social revolution. Every epoch has a period of peace, then a period of elites diverging from the general public, then a period of social instability, and then they overthrow the elites and eat them or behead them or whatever.
I think about that quite a lot with this private-market stuff.
Okay.
That seems like a complete betrayal of the capitalist system, effectively. It’s like capitalism is friends with these people in Silicon Valley.
So if you’re—
You are one of those people in Silicon Valley. I would like to be your friend, so don’t take this in a bad way. I’m not going to eat you or kill you. I would like to be your friend.
If you hook me up with a deal, I’ll stop talking about this stuff. We’re a package deal. How do you—if you were a normal person trading liquid markets—
You mean if I was a normal person?
No, no. I mean you as the people who are listening and are like, “Oh, please help me.” For the vast majority of people who don’t have Anthropic Series A and are trying to trade these liquid markets, knowing that you’re in an environment where all of the best stuff stays private for as long as possible, and you’ll maybe get a chance to put on some leverage at $1.5 trillion, how do you navigate those markets on the liquid side?
Do you just not play? Do you trade other stuff? What do you do?
I’m not going to play. I didn’t get to buy the Anthropic Series A or whatever, so I’ll probably just not play.
It’s difficult because, especially with Anthropic, they’re just executing so well. It’s inspiring, almost. They’ve created a new way of working that’s completely divergent from how companies work today.
In 50 years, people might look back and say, “They sold it for $1 trillion and you didn’t buy? What’s wrong with you? You didn’t buy God for $1 trillion? What were you thinking?”
And I was like, “Oh yeah, I was buying Truth Terminal token. I thought Dogwifhat was coming back, dude.” That’s how I allocated my capital.
I think Anthropic is one where I’m not going to play in any of them. That’s what I’m going to do. But Anthropic is the one where I’m like, “Fuck, dude. Maybe—”
Maybe I’ll take a small position so I don’t take a big position.
What about the social side? Are we going to have a societal revolution about this? That was kind of a crazy intro you just threw in there on the question before the last one.
It just seems to happen repeatedly through history, right? There’s a period of peace, then a period of social unrest driven by wealth inequality, and then the elites get overthrown. It happens over and over again.
It happening again seems guaranteed. How far in the future it is is unknown, but it seems accelerated to me by the emergence of AI rather than decelerated. You could argue either way. You could argue that AI ushers in an era of equality for all, or that AI just makes the angle of the K wider, with an elite class and an underclass.
Is it interesting that there’s actually a weird bull case for crypto here, in that—
Do you know how we do airdrops?
Yeah.
Airdrops today are a little bit silly, right? You pretend to use a product that you don’t want to use so they’ll give you some percentage of the tokens—
You can sell.
Because you weren’t bullish on the thing and didn’t want to use it, but everyone pretends to be bullish on it.
Then occasionally you get one like Hyperliquid, where people are actually bullish on it and don’t want to sell when they get their tokens.
You extend this model to real startups and imagine a world where the value created by the population comes around. You’re an early user on Facebook, and you’re providing a lot of value to Facebook by bootstrapping their product, giving them product feedback, and providing the initial K-factor that comes from growing your network.
You’re highly valuable to Facebook, apart from the fact that you got to use Facebook.
Crypto airdrops happen today, but applied to companies, consumer businesses, and so on, where the value created by the user is rewarded back to the user when the company goes public.
It’s sort of capitalism’s answer to universal basic income.
If you use products and you’re a power user, you get some of that value returned. Participating in the economy returns value back to participants.
It’s a fun bull case for crypto. Crypto enables this quite nicely, globally. It would take a very brave company to be the first one to do this.
The tipping point to make that happen.
Yeah. The way I imagine it is: do you think the Hyperliquid outcome existed if they didn’t do the airdrop? Maybe, because it’s such a superior product, but I think that by doing the airdrop, you get a bunch of evangelists who are also the best traders, move the most money, and stamp your product.
Arguably, no, it doesn’t exist in the same way.
I don’t think you can give a definitive answer, obviously, because the product is really phenomenal. They did a really good job. But at the same time, a lot of the populism, support, and loyalty is because of this shared ownership and shared upside.
Hyperliquid is, in my mind, the real flagship success case for airdrops. Previously, I couldn’t even name a really successful one.
No, I can’t.
You think about what the next business is that could do the same thing—where the outcome doesn’t exist unless they do an airdrop or some equity distribution, if it’s a traditional company—in the same way. I don’t know. It’s fun to think about.
Why didn’t you do it?
A lot of reasons. We obviously thought that the token revenue model is really spiky and strange, so it doesn’t suit a token very well.
Did you want to be a token founder at all?
I had all these questions for myself. We considered whether you could do an on-chain IPO, where you effectively take this model and do an airdrop, but for actual equity, and have that happen on-chain.
We considered all these kinds of things. The business probably needed to be much more mature before we would have actually done any of them. Then the acquisition came much sooner. It was a good outcome for where the business was at.
I do wonder: if I do a startup again, would I do this? I’m probably too old to do a startup again, but—
You’re like 30.
I don’t know if I have one in me. I don’t know if I have the “start from nothing” fire. I think it dies out and then comes back.
But if I were to do it, I do wonder if I would deeply consider this as a plan from day one.
If I were to do another startup, what would it need to be for it to make sense? I don’t think it would make sense as a crypto thing because the crypto investor dynamics are so strange.
Yeah. Yeah.
I think it would work much better as a non-crypto consumer thing. But at the same time, you’re running a business and trying to make your business win. All these things just feel like really big distractions, and you just want to make your revenues go up, your costs go down, make your users happy, and stuff.
Okay, this is completely off topic, but I have you here. I’ve always wanted to know the story, as much as you could tell it. This is before my era. Can you tell me the story behind the buy wall tweet, please? The buy wall?
Yes. Please tell me the story. Set it up. Give me the full story—the rough net worth, what you were doing, the whole thing. Please. I’m dying for this. I’ve always wanted to know. I ask everyone I meet in crypto that question. Everyone tells me a different version.
Negative aura. It’s better to leave the version you have. I’ll tell you the story, but the version you have is cooler.
Okay. Do it. Do it. Please, please, please.
I was just at my house in London. I think the market started crashing a lot, and I had a bunch of alarms at the time because I was actively trading; that was sort of my full-time thing. I had a bunch of alarms that would effectively wake me up if stuff was going down. I think it woke me up at around 1:00 a.m. or something. I went downstairs, made a cup of tea, and got back in bed and looked at the market. It was down—just this big red line that went off the screen. I was like, “That looks like a fucking bottom to me.” So I smashed an order in, I think maybe 2% or 3% below the current price, which was around $4,600 or something.
How big was the order?
It was my entire stablecoin balance, basically. It was basically my entire net worth. It wasn't my entire net worth; it was everything I had in crypto, which was just in dollars. I put it in a buy wall in a single order, and then I went back to bed. I woke up the next day and it was like 5% filled, and the market never went anywhere near that price again. I was like, “Okay. Missed the whole thing.”
I put an order in and went to sleep. I woke up the next day, and it was up 50% two days later, or 60% or something. The wall didn’t even get filled, dude. I got maybe an 80% fill or something. I had to chase the rest and just market-buy the remainder. It didn’t really matter.
At what point did you tweet?
I put the order in, tweeted, and went to bed. It filled basically 2 minutes after my tweet, but I just wasn’t looking anymore. I tweeted and then went to sleep. I think I maybe lay in bed and every now and again looked at my phone and wrote another tweet, but I was half-asleep and shitposting, basically.
When the market crashes 50% or 60% in a single candle, I feel really excited. I get highly energized. You know that’s not real. It’s not people sitting there clicking, “Sell.” It’s people not actively choosing to make the sale. You get a phenomenal opportunity: you get to buy something from someone who does not want to sell it. They’re being forced to sell it to you.
So I get really energized and excited, which is why I think it was in all caps. I had relatively high conviction that it was the macro cycle, and that this was a fine price to get filled at, even if it went lower. But yeah, I basically tweeted within the same 5 minutes of the exact bottom tick, and I didn’t get fully filled. I think my order was also at the exact bottom tick.
People fixate on this a lot, but it was effectively just luck, right? I didn’t have that much money. My net worth was not that high, so I didn’t have that much money. It wasn’t a buy wall that saved the market, as everyone likes to pretend it was. It was just all the money I had on-chain, and I didn’t even fucking fully get filled. So yeah, it’s a little bit negative aura, in my opinion.
By the way, the word “aura” is out, I think.
It’s people I know who are saying the word “aura.”
Like your 40-year-old friends?
The word “aura,” yeah. When I’m comfortable saying “aura,” that means it’s done. It means, “Oh, I now know how to use this word properly. I’ve checked it on Urban Dictionary. I’m not going to make a fool of myself by saying ‘aura.’” But that means it’s over, so we can’t say that anymore.
Okay, I’ll come up with some new ones for you.
Or memecoin is going down as we speak, I guess.
I always wonder if a lot of the OG Crypto Twitter is gone now, right? A lot of you guys don’t post, but you’re still here. GCR doesn’t post. A lot of these guys, like Light, don’t post anymore, disappeared, got outed for scamming, or whatever it is. A lot of the OG stuff is just gone, and I feel like it’s not written in the history books, which is a weird feeling.
I know I’m kind of late, but I don’t know. I showed up in 2020. I was 19. I feel like Crypto Twitter gave me an education, so I do have some sentimental feeling toward it. Who do you think is the greatest crypto trader of all time? A CT-native trader who isn’t yourself—or give me 5 people you think are the greatest crypto traders to ever come through.
I think it’s like this album thing that I was saying, where people had their seasons, right? Like a TV show comes out, and season 3 was fucking awesome, but then season 4 sucks.
I reckon Su Zhu in 2021 is top 5. Su Zhu’s hero run in 2021. He even fucking sold the top, dude. He sold the top and then, for some reason, bought back way too early with loads of leverage and got liquidated on the way down.
Whoa.
Like—GCR is obviously maybe an intelligent asset or something. He plays a lot of psychological games. He says stuff that isn’t true, but he wants that rumor to spread about him that he can find something else out. It turned out that he was like the CIA or something, ex-CIA, and he’s just shitposting or something. I wouldn’t be surprised. There are a lot of rumors about GCR. He basically spread deleterious rumors about himself so people would leave him alone and think he wasn’t cool anymore.
He’s a super weird dude.
What, any specific one or no?
He spread a rumor about himself that he was using Binance insiders.
Because at the time there were these Tree Terminal bros, the Tree of Alpha guys, and they would use whatever exchanges leaked information about listings, right?
If you had information, you didn’t want anyone else to get it because then you were competing on orders.
If an API was exposed and you knew about it, once people knew that you knew about it, they would go looking for the same leak. Then they would find it, and you would get competition, so the alpha would be compressed.
He would always say that he had insiders so that competitors wouldn’t go looking for the pathways he was using, which was effectively some page on the exchange. Say the number goes up and another asset is going to get listed; then he polls the API to figure out what it is or whatever.
He spread that about himself to defend his alpha, and now everyone just says that he used Binance insiders. But yeah, he doesn’t really care. I would say GCR in 2021 and 2022; the guy called Actual Advice BTC, who would get super wealthy and then blow up. He died in 2020.
Oh man, rest in peace.
Actual Advice BTC. He was kind of like Su Zhu. I think all the people I’m saying are people who go so risk-on. They do the things that I didn’t do, so I respect it, but then they always blow up. Then I’m always like, “Oh, maybe I’m cool just being lame.”
I think Light is actually more active in crypto than he’s ever been, and I think 2025 was probably his best-performing year ever, based on what I know.
Whoa.
So I would say Light is heavily up there. I don’t know who else. There are a lot of people who don’t have a persona or whatever. Having a persona is sort of adverse selection, I think.
What about some of the guys who are—
Degen Spartan is a pretty well-regarded one.
Everyone thinks that’s me, so I didn’t want to say Degen Spartan. Once, I took a picture of my hat and sent it to him so he could post it because everyone was joking that he was—
He came out of retirement to shill Stable.
Like, I don't think that was you.
Oh, yeah. I never really crossed over much with Degen Spartan. I only came to know he existed in 2021, and I don't really know how. I wasn't really in the synthetics space that he was in, I guess.
That he was in, I guess.
Yeah, I don't really know what he did. There are people like CL who sometimes seem really smart, and then sometimes I'm like, “Is this guy the biggest [__] on planet Earth?” I just can't tell. Is he doing this on purpose, or is he just an idiot? He does the smartest thing you've ever seen in your life.
And, yeah, I think Shoku from Trade XYZ is also a multigenerational talent. He's super successful at several different things all at the same time. I actually get very annoyed by people who are polymathic.
I don't even know what that means.
Polymathic. If you're a polymath, you can speak multiple languages and do multiple things to a really high degree of proficiency.
Got it.
I'm like, dude, I can barely do three things at a human level of proficiency. Shoku annoys me quite a lot because he's just better than me at everything. It's annoying.
What is the common thread between all of these people? All these people that have really done it trading—I guess we'll use crypto, because we're talking about crypto. What is the common thread between all of them, if there is one? Maybe not the ones that have blown up, but the ones that have kept it. How do you make $100 million in crypto?
I think the common thread amongst all of them is that they're highly self-directed. They read Crypto Twitter and then go, “What trade am I going to make based on what other people have written on the internet?” They're all highly opinionated and self-directed, and they think through these things themselves from first principles: What impact do I think this thing will have on the markets, and why?
Then they record what they thought and what the outcome was, and they try to think analytically. You want to increase the training data for yourself so that you can learn what you did right, what you did wrong, and why, and then improve next time. All of these people have that. They're curious, creative, first-principles thinkers, and they have this recursive loop of upgrading their mental model of the world with training data.
I think the people who have made it and kept it have been people who are satisfied with what they have. The people who have blown up just take so much risk, and the people who have kept it are kind of [__]. I feel like I'm in this second category. I'm a little bit of a scaredy-cat, dude. I've been fully risk-on four or five times ever in my life, fully maxed out, and I haven't used leverage in probably half a decade, maybe even longer.
In financial markets, in crypto, it's really easy to be a millionaire or a multimillionaire, or have six figures, and be like, “I'm doing badly. I'm broke,” because that guy over there has more. I felt this quite a lot in 2021, actually. Three Arrows started in, what, 2019 or 2020, and came out of nowhere. I'd been doing crypto stuff since 2012, and within one year they double-lapped me on net worth. Then, for the rest of the year, they were 15x ahead of me, or 100x, or whatever. I don't know what it was.
I had this thought like, “Wow, am I an idiot? I've been doing this for so long. I wasn't risky enough. Maybe I wasn't smart enough. Maybe I wasn't tactical enough.” I started to feel this envy and jealousy—the comparison-is-the-thief-of-joy thing.
Yeah.
I had my best year ever in financial markets, and all I could think about was, “All these other guys just had a better year. What the fuck?”
I think that mindset is really poisonous. I was glad that I could get out of it quickly, because being thankful for what you have and not trying to take excessive risk to catch up with where you think other people are, or where you think you should be, or the perfect version of you that made all the correct decisions—that guy doesn't exist.
Don't benchmark yourself to your mental net-worth all-time high. If I can make 20% this year, that's one of the best returns you can make. You can make 20% every year and be one of the best-performing investors ever. Doing a 50x year and then being sad about it just seems very silly. Most of the people I know who have kept it have just been happy with what they have and pleased that they get to have that kind of life, I guess.
Do you reflect much on becoming Cobie on the internet? Do you regret becoming Cobie at this level? I get recognized on the street, so I imagine that if you walked down the street in New York City, you'd be very recognizable. You said, “I don't really want to tweet my thoughts because it has these second- and third-order effects that change people's opinions and their financial decisions,” even though that wasn't intended when you made a joke or shared your opinions on the internet. Do you regret becoming Cobie?
Not really, dude. A lot of the way my life is is because I started this stupid Twitter account, so it would be ungracious and ungrateful of me to regret it. I occasionally regret doing the podcast.
Fair.
I was bored, sat at home all the time, and had nothing to do. There was no good podcast. Everyone was listening to Bankless and shit.
Shout out to Bankless. Shout out to Bankless. Shout out to David.
You're probably more recognizable than I am because you've got such a weird face and hair. You asked me to be on camera on the Discord. I don't know why you did that. I think you wanted to look at me.
Yeah. You know, have you seen Shrek when he turns into a human?
Yeah, you look a bit like that. So that's maybe what people are saying. They're like, “Dude, I recognize him from somewhere.” I was like, “Oh, he's—where's his donkey?”
I don't know. I've basically been recognized in real life maybe three or four times ever. I don't go out very much, and I spend a lot of my time in countries where no one would recognize me. I also cut all my hair off, so you just wouldn't know who I was.
Really?
I got—dude, it's all gone.
Wow. Congrats. That's a big life decision. That's not easy to do.
It was time to grow up. It was time to get rid of it all. Ever since then, my luck has gone, though. Every time I flip a coin, it goes the wrong way, and every time I trade, it immediately goes against me. There's something I've lost now.
Damn. That's the end of an era, man. I don't blame you for being camera-off.
Now no one knows what I look like. I got a little bit of facial surgery, a bit of looksmaxing.
Is that part of the Coinbase criteria, like the Yankees no-facial-hair look, like Brian?
You basically have to become a clone of Brian, so if Brian wants to rotate off, there's a new Brian ready to plug in. No, I know. I'm just kidding.
I don't regret becoming Cobie. I occasionally regret random things I wrote or tweeted, but what can you do? I was your age, maybe you'll regret a lot of things. You seem a lot more put together than I was when I was 24 or 25.
Yeah, dude.
What were you doing when you were 24?
Drugs. I don't know. A lot of them.
I was relatively aimless, I think. It was 11 or 12 years ago, so I was just getting into crypto. Maybe it was even a bit sooner—maybe I was getting into crypto when I was 22 or something. I was a little bit aimless, doing random startups and random things, but I didn't really know what I wanted to do or why I wanted to do it.
That's why crypto was so exciting to me. It was this fun financial hobby where it felt like a video game, and I could learn how to do it really well. It took a lot of my directionless energy toward this fun thing that I'd found. But I certainly didn't have Polymarket and Phantom sponsorships, with a barrel of oil in my professional camera setup in my New York apartment, wearing a shirt.
This is new, by the way. I’ve got—I don’t have cufflinks yet, so I’m trying to figure out how this works.
What is a dinner lady? Was that a thing in American schools, like a dinner lady?
Like in the cafeteria?
Yeah, yeah. What do you call those people?
I don’t know. A lunch lady?
And that’s what I call them. I call them a lunch lady. Yeah, yeah.
You look a little bit like that with—
Come on, man. Hey, tell me this. Tell me this.
Like a lunch lady.
What was the first big-boy purchase? What was the first expensive purchase you made?
I don’t know. I don’t really buy a lot of stuff. I joined the Mac mini hype. I got some Mac minis for my OpenClaw. I don’t do anything anymore.
Did you build anything? Was that tweet real? That tweet wasn’t real, was it?
No, of course not.
Good. That was composed. You did.
I don’t really know. Oh, I’ll tell you what: my monitors flickered the other day, so I bought 2 of the Pro Display XDRs—$10,000 each or whatever they are. I don’t know how much they cost—for no reason. They’re exactly the same as my previous monitor; it made no difference at all. But one of them did a little weird flicker, so I was like, “Fuck it. I need 2 new monitors, clearly.”
Otherwise, I’m relatively boring. I don’t really buy very much stuff.
Congrats.
Okay, give me this. No, don’t do it yet. Don’t do it yet. A sign-off for the crowd and a sign-off for me, and I’ll let you go.
First of all, thank you for this. I won’t glaze you yet, but thanks for coming on.
It makes it sound like I’m going to die, or crypto is going to die, if I’m doing that. It’s like you’re basically asking me to do the obituary.
I think that, for some reason, over the last few years since FTX—and I think the reason is probably a lack of sustained, trending, easy investments—people have increasingly become short-term, desperate, and panicked. Every time the market goes down, they think this means it’s over forever, and every time the market’s going up, they can’t enjoy it because they’re constantly trying to sell the top.
This probably serves some people quite well. My position is that I think it’s much better to look 5 and 10 years in the future. If you think there is something in the industry that in 5 or 10 years has a chance of being important, then you should allocate some capital according to your own beliefs.
If you are fundamentally bearish on everything, and the only reason you’re here is to chase the dragon of some old times, then you should go pick up another hobby. People like Pokémon cards now, or sports cards, or One Piece cards. Go learn—get your agent harness working.
If you’re fundamentally truly bearish on everything that’s happening in the industry, and it’s just making you mad every day and you’re not enjoying yourself, then you should quit. What are you doing here? If you think this stuff is not going to be important in the future, but you’re still trying to buy it and sell it, go do something else with your time. If you think these things are important in the future, allocate accordingly.
And, yeah, it’s easy. It’s a marathon. In crypto, I was like, “I’m going to get rich so quick, dude. This stuff’s so easy. I’m going to be a multimillionaire in the next 3 months.” It’s a good way to build wealth, but it doesn’t happen as quickly as you think it will happen. Suddenly you’ve been here 4 years, and you’re like, “I’m making some progress, finally.”
It’s a bad way to spend 4 or 5 years if you just don’t believe in what you’re doing, because you’ll doubt yourself every single day. So, just for your own brain, instead of listening to what people on the internet say—especially people who pretend to be cats, have broccoli for hair, or pretend to be cokeheads—
Beautiful. Okay, last question, then I’ll let you go. It’s a selfish one—I have to ask. I hate to glaze you. I didn’t glaze you in the intro because you didn’t give me any time, but I don’t know. You’re kind of one of my GOATs, if I’m being completely honest, man.
There are very few people in crypto who have done it, done it well, kept it, done it with integrity, hit the climax, and stuck the landing. I don’t—I mean, you could—
Say that, dude.
Say it again.
I appreciate that, dude. Thank you.
Yeah, yeah. No, you’re welcome. People who spend too much time here get really cynical, where they just see scammer after scammer after scammer win, and there really aren’t that many happy endings on it. People can say what they want, but you’ve done it with integrity, and then you’ve just been helpful, man.
Even in my own journey on CT, 2025 got a little bit crazy, and you’ve just been very helpful on what I’m doing, how I’m doing it, the best way to do it, and what the future looks like. I’ve never talked about it on stream because I know it’s weird to talk about private conversations, but I am grateful for that. I do appreciate that.
Can you give me some personal advice on what I’m doing, and also on the sphere of financial media—the stream, where this whole thing goes from here, trading your own book, whatever it is? Where do you think this whole thing goes? Then I’ll let you leave us.
2 things. One, I think it’s nice to be helpful to people. I think this has actually been one of my main flaws in life. I’m a little bit like a golden retriever: I see people and just assume that they have the same intents that I do. I assume that everyone is trying to do the right thing and do good, and that someone wants to be my friend just because they think I’m nice. I’ve had several betrayals and bad outcomes from taking this approach to life.
But I just feel like often there are people, and I would have been in certain situations where I would have loved some help from someone who had done something similar before. So I think reaching out and being generally positive and helpful to people that you don’t know only makes your life richer and more enjoyable. I think it’s just a nice way to live life: be optimistic and hopeful, and connect with other human beings and stuff.
On the on-stream financial media—what does the future hold? I think it’s pretty interesting because you probably saw the acquisition of the—
Yeah. Oh, yeah. The AI podcast thingy, dude. AI-pivot startups, dude.
I think the interesting thing is there’s another K-shape. You have these podcasts, like Call Her Daddy, or whatever—I think that’s the one that Kamala went on during the election—so you have that, where they have millions of viewers. It’s one of the biggest podcasts, but the incremental value of a user is very low, because what are you going to sell them? I don’t know, a new fragrance or something. Even Joe Rogan’s audience—what does he sell, creatine or whatever? He has tons and tons of users, but let’s say each user is worth $3 or something.
Then if you look at these more niche financial media companies, the startup that got acquired by OpenAI is kind of an example. It’s hyper-targeted on a really high-value population. You can have fewer viewers, but the unit economic contribution for every single one of those users might be $10,000 instead of $3. I think that’s pretty interesting.
It’s also interesting at scale, right? This high-value user is typically the user that’s early to something, so they’re a good cohort to grow with. I reckon that in the next 3 to 5 years, there will be a finance-native Clavicular-type person, you know what I mean? He’ll be the face of looksmaxxing or whatever.
Often, there’s a person attached to a trend, like Andrew Tate was for whatever sort of genre it was. I reckon there will be one for someone who takes a bunch of positions in public and shows their life and the ups and downs of things. I guess you lived it, I lived it, and a lot of people on the stream listening live have lived it. It will be sort of glamorizing that, because my version is just me in my pants at home doing nothing, or eating fucking Nando’s or something.
There’ll be a young person who does it in a cool way. I think they’ll also be very talented in the markets—sort of like a Magnus Carlsen of financial markets, you know what I mean? A cool personality, but phenomenally talented. I’ve started to suspect it could be this Leopold guy. Do you know who I mean, with that generational run?
Yeah.
But he’s not really doing the media stuff so much. He’s clearly phenomenally talented, at least from what I’ve seen. Maybe I just see bad information or something. I think it’s not clear to me if the media company will be a media company that captures these people in a sort of journalistic format, interviewing the interesting people, or if it will be like a Clavicular-type format where—
The interesting person is the content.
The desire for people to make money on their own in unique ways just seems to be going up, and those people tend to congregate around content creators. Does anyone know where BitBoy is, by the way? He seems to be completely off the radar. He went to jail for a little while, but you think about BitBoy in 2021, right? He went from having zero on YouTube to having millions of followers on YouTube in 1 year, with relatively mediocre content as well. Not like, if the stars align and someone has good content in a good year, with a Roaring Kitty-type phenomenon. I think there’s going to be a 10x version of that, where there might be some market destabilization that’s relatively serious or something, but this person eventually goes to jail. Who knows? I can see that happening.
I can see that happening.
Yeah. Just if you interview them on your podcast, make sure you put a disclaimer that you’re not platforming or endorsing them. So if I go do some scam tomorrow, dude, you’re in trouble somehow. I don’t know how that works, but that’s what happened to me.
I’ll call Brian if anything happens. Cobie, dude, thank you. This was incredible. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get the Cobie interview, but it always comes at the right time.
Yeah. You’re the GOAT, bro. Thanks for coming on. Is there anything else you want to say? Sign off. Chill—
Dude, love you. Love you. Love you. Bye. Love you too, buddy. Love you. Bye.
Have a good one, man. Peace, man. Man, shout out to Cobie. I’m telling you that. By the way, he’s so right. He’s so right. He’s so right. Everybody wants to trade. Everybody wants to make money. Everybody wants to speculate. That’s what we’re doing here. That’s what we’re doing here. We’re the hub for speculation, man. This is what everybody wants to do. Everybody will trade. Everybody’s interested. Everybody’s trying to find alternative ways to make it on the internet. That’s what we do here.