SpaceX’s $1.75T IPO, Strategy Sells Bitcoin & Crypto’s Hard Reset

All right, everyone. Welcome back to Empire. Very excited for this one. I've got home-court advantage: it's East Coast time, 5:20 p.m., and we're good. I've got 3 guys who are between 11 p.m. and midnight here, so I think I have the home-field advantage. Rob, Santi, welcome. We've got a special guest, a fan of the pod, Ryan Zurrer. Ryan, welcome to the show, too.

1. Takeaways From Money 2020 & All-In Summit

Thanks for having me, guys.

Santi, Rob, how's Europe? Wherever you are, whatever you guys are doing.

I'm in Amsterdam for Money20/20, which, for people who don't know, is pretty much the biggest fintech and payments conference in the world. They do one in Vegas in October and one in Amsterdam in June. The one here during June is basically a trade show: every big payments company and fintech company in the world comes.

Same as last year, literally the only things people want to talk about are stablecoins and AI, essentially agentic commerce. At the same time, we're having these conversations and everyone's talking about implementing stablecoins—the biggest tech companies in the world are talking about it—and Bitcoin is just nuking. Somebody, maybe Michael Saylor, is just selling and selling and selling. It is funny to see this dichotomy, because nobody I'm talking to has any idea what's going on, and I'm sitting over here thinking, "The world is melting."

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Guys, how stupid is it that we're evaluating the technology based on the price?

This is how bizarre crypto is as an industry. Companies don't decide whether to buy Anthropic, SpaceX, or Tesla because the stock is up or down. You assess the technology. To me, that's why crypto is so early. You can't have a conversation with people deploying M^0 or Deel and have them say, "You know what, guys? We're not going to do this because Bitcoin is back to $67,000 and Michael Saylor, the Ponzi that is MicroStrategy, is pump-dumping coins." It's like, who gives a shit?

We keep talking about price. You know where I stand on that. I'm sort of tired of it because I was beating the drum that I was deeply bearish since November of last year, but I don't care anymore. I'm talking about AI and other stuff. Ryan, I know you're a big investor in SpaceX, so I want to hear all about that stuff.

Yeah, I think we should recap 2 events. Rob gave us Money20/20, and Ryan and I were just hanging out at this All-In Summit, which is either cool or cringe, depending on who's listening.

Cringe.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's all right. I thought it was great.

Rob was on the waiting list, so maybe he gets in next year.

I just didn't get in. I just—

No, it was very well curated. Everyone you talked to was really thoughtful—CEOs or GPs of really significant funds. The onstage content wasn't overdone. A lot of the best lessons came out of the random conversations you were having, and you felt a need or desire to have lots of random conversations because there were so many smart people in the room. I thought it was great. I don't know, Jason, what did you think?

Yeah, I thought it was one of the better-curated events I've ever been to. There were very few speaker sessions, but the speaker sessions were incredible. It was Bill Ackman, Brad Gerstner, Gavin Baker, Thomas Laffont, co-founder of Coatue, and others. I thought Sarah Friar's conversation was probably the best—the CFO of OpenAI. I think she'll be the next CEO of OpenAI. She was fantastic.

So, a lot of learnings. Ryan, I want to bring you on because we are a crypto podcast, but we do need to talk about SpaceX. My biggest takeaway from the All-In conference was that crypto is like a dot on an elephant's ass right now for the real capital allocators.

I know Rob is at Money20/20 and it's very hot there, but from a capital-allocation perspective, every single panel at Money20/20, except maybe Nikesh from Palo Alto Networks, turned into a conversation about either OpenAI, Anthropic, or SpaceX. Every dinner conversation was about SpaceX, and every drinks conversation was about SpaceX.

For people who don't know, you're a very early crypto person who did very well, and you were one of the first employees at Polychain. Now you run a fund called Dialectic and have done very well in crypto. I think your biggest position may not be crypto anymore, and you've been accumulating a lot of SpaceX. I'd love for you to talk through how you view what's going on right now and, honestly, how historic this is.

For context, I've been accumulating positions in SpaceX since 2018. I'm very grateful to be good friends with Steve Jurvetson, which has been a big part of that position, but I've been buying it wherever I could get it for some time. I have been parlaying my crypto wins into SpaceX for 8 years now.

I was really surprised. In our office, it's such an echo chamber of Elon bulls, and people were super excited about SpaceX. I thought I was going to go to this All-In event because all the besties are exposed to SpaceX, and it was just going to be a pre-IPO party where everyone would be talking about how great this is going to do.

I was really surprised that on the other side of the table, there was a lot of bearishness in the market around this IPO. When I look at my model and the way that I value SpaceX, I'm calling it a probabilistic sum of the parts. You need to look at all the different business lines of SpaceX. There are 12 different business lines between launch and Starlink: Starlink direct-to-customer, the X platform, Grok, xAI, and then you've got Colossus. You'll have orbital data centers, and then you've got to at least have some kind of thought around the deep-space opportunities—off-planet resource extraction, Mars colonization, and, before that, lunar colonization.

You can put a really low probability on these things and discount them heavily, but you do have to think about this stuff. That's the really interesting thing about SpaceX for me: there are just so many possibilities, and if any one of these things goes right, it's a multitrillion-dollar company.

That's why I've been saying to people in crypto, whether they want to hear it or not, for a number of years that it's more important to own SpaceX than it is to own Bitcoin. This is a more fundamentally necessary asset to have in your portfolio because the upside is all of the infinite possibilities of space. Very clearly, this will be part of the inspiring future that we will live in.

2. The Bull vs Bear Case For SpaceX

I mean, there's a lot to unpack there, Ryan, but I love the thinking. I do think it's the combination of the company plus Elon. I've heard it somewhere: Elon has never lost money for investors, and that is something that resonates really well.

Let's talk about the bearish case. What were some of the conversations at the summit? Probabilistically, what do you think the outcome is here? What is the most extreme bear case?

The bearish case that you're hearing both from the armchair analysts and at the event is the fact that the company is unprofitable or that it's trading at 100 times 2025 revenue. That doesn't go deep enough, because guess what? They just doubled the revenue with 1 deal with Anthropic. Plus, they're adding another $4 billion contract with the U.S. Department of War. Revenue expansion is really significant.

In fact, one of the things that's been so frustrating about trying to get into SpaceX over the years is that it's been so profitable. They haven't done a round since the J round in 2019. It's only been tender bids. When they merged in xAI and X.com, that dipped them into a cash-flow-negative position on a temporary basis in a sum-of-the-parts analysis at that moment.

All of the things that are executing right now—not even including any revenue from direct-to-cell Starlink—mean we're still looking at close to $50 billion in revenue this year. It will be profitable again this year. It's been profitable since 2018. I don't think that's the right sort of bull or bear case.

The right bear case that you can reasonably draw is: do you get a blue sweep in November, and then do you get antitrust concerns? Do you just get regulators chipping away at them—death by a thousand paper cuts—because you've got Democrats controlling these various entities? I think that's a fairly reasonable one.

Competition out of China is increasing really quickly. They’ve got great manufacturing capabilities. Ultimately, this is a manufacturing game as much as it is anything else. Those are, I think, coherent arguments for the bear side: that it’s not going to continue to be a monopoly, and so on and so forth.

But that’s not the argument that we’re hearing today. The arguments that we’re hearing today are about a backward-looking profitability question, and that’s not how you value businesses. You value them based on the forward expectation of profits brought to present value. Right, Ryan?

There was a Goldman report that came out today that said they expect SpaceX to get to $320 billion of revenue 3 years from now.

Which obviously aligns a little bit with what you’re talking about, primarily—

$1.8 trillion in a decade.

Yeah, $1.8 trillion in a decade. I think the 2 big pieces are, 1, Starlink is going to continue to grow dramatically, and then there’s basically the data center business. The deal that they did with Anthropic is kind of the harbinger of things to come.

I think Brad Gerstner has actually talked a lot about this as part of the IPO, about how the Anthropic deal signals that there’s nobody better in the world at building hardware or physical assets than Elon. We have this energy problem and this data center problem, and Elon is probably the right person to fix it. That’s really what they’re going to lean into a lot during the roadshow.

I don’t know how deep you’ve really gotten into this, but can you talk about that a little and explain what you expect the business to look like? Is it Mars colonization, or is it really just going to be the single best data center business in the world?

Yeah, no. In order to try to keep ourselves grounded on this valuation, that probabilistic sum-of-the-parts approach, we look at a 5-year timeline, a 10-year timeline, and then a 20-year timeline, with the 20-year timeline really heavily discounted—an underweight on that.

In the 5- and 10-year timelines, it’s launch services, Starlink connectivity, and direct-to-cell. Then, frankly, the big growing revenue stream right now is Starshield, Golden Dome, and defense. People forget that SpaceX is also a neo-prime—a defense neo-prime. It’s really positioned to capture a lot of the increased spending, not only from America but from other countries, as defense spending explodes around the world.

Colossus 2 is, up to now, a million GPU equivalents. Colossus 3 and more are continuing to build out at the aggressive rate that, to your point, only Elon can build. That’s a really great cash-flow business.

I have it actually lower than Goldman predicted. I have 2035 revenues at $1.2 trillion, with all those things baked in. That’s only with $23 billion from Terafab. People forget that Terafab is going to be a whole other NVIDIA, right? Again, Elon and his team are uniquely positioned to execute on that. That’s going to be really exciting.

The way that I’ve taken it, to try to be as conservative as possible, is to take a conservative approach to each one of the 12 business lines. But the sum of those still makes a valuation of $1.75 trillion—or $135—really cheap. I think my current number is $185, and I think we’re probably at that this summer. I thought that going into this past week, until I heard all these bears and realized there is a lot of bearishness in the market.

I don’t know how much of that is just people who are butthurt because they missed it and how much is people actually thoughtfully dissecting where we’re overestimating. But it’s a pretty conservative approach to the revenues, and you do have to consolidate all 12 businesses at some point.

Hey, hey, Ryan. I’ve been noticing in the timeline that memory has run up quite a bit. There’s this guy in the UK who basically runs a research subscription, and he’s really questioning the ROI of AI spend. Whether you want to believe his arguments or not, I think it does pose the question. I think we’re going to continue to see this more and more.

Uber just really set a cap on token spend. Meta cut back. So we’re going from, “Spend all the tokens you want,” to, “Wait a minute, not so fast.” What’s the ROI on that?

There’s also a lot of negativity around AI. To your point about what’s really the bearish case for SpaceX and, candidly, the broader markets, there’s a lot of hostility toward AI and the socioeconomic impact that it’s having for the vast majority of people.

Have you guys done a lot of thinking around quantifying the ROI of AI spend? We talk a lot about, like Chamath said on the pod, “Follow the dollars and you’ll do well if you invest there”: energy, chips, and everything that goes into the chip. Not so much the Magnificent 7 that are now spending a ton of capex that may or may not pay off. There’s sort of a disconnect between where you spend and when you realize that return. What’s your view on that?

I’d love each of your viewpoints on this, but it is absolutely shocking, the turn toward profitability that Anthropic in particular has taken. I don’t think we’ve seen these types of revenue growth numbers from any large-scale company in the history of mankind. When an AI product hits product-market fit, clearly there’s demand, and clearly there are people willing to pay. That may normalize, but then we have this whole host of other things on the horizon.

At the All-In Summit, there was a lot of talk around the Jony Ive puck, or this AI-native device that will just drive a lot more inference. In any case, we’re going to see a ton more on-device and edge inference driving AI, and that could actually be more profitable for the foundation models. That could be really exciting.

I certainly wouldn’t want to be in Michael Burry’s shoes and shorting this stuff right now. That seems like a recipe for disaster. Obviously, there has to be some margin compression across the stack, whether it’s memory or foundation models building for coding. These margins will compress.

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But at the same time, what we see is something I wish we would have seen earlier or more often with crypto: real product-market fit. People loving the product and leaning into the use of it. It’s something we’ve waited for, for however many years in crypto, saying, “It’s just around the corner.” And lo and behold, we’ve never been able to get users for any kind of product this way.

4. Why This Bear Market Feels Worse Than Others

I mean, Yan, you and I were talking offline, but to me, this feels like the worst bear market because there’s not a single specific event like Terra or FTX. Putting MicroStrategy aside, which we can get to later, we just don’t have enough users. We’re sitting at probably fewer than 100,000 active users on-chain. Why even bother being in crypto in the first place?

It’s challenging when you have OpenAI hit a billion users, just to say something.

So, we were talking offline. That is not why I also think this is a tough bear market. I think this is a tough bear market because in 2023 or 2022, all that stuff blew up, but everything else was going down. SaaS had topped, the market had really peaked, and it all topped in 2021, right? SaaS and crypto—

Yeah, rates go up.

And then rates went up, and boom, everything came crashing. We were all crashing together. I think the reason this feels tough is because, again, Ryan and I are at this event, and there are other things that are going up an extraordinary amount. People are getting hilariously rich.

I felt FOMO in 2021 when we had friends who made ungodly amounts of money. I know you guys did quite well yourselves, and you’re looking around and it’s almost laughable. At this All-In event, I was sitting next to a guy at dinner. He got a bunch of retail investors together over the last several years, and he’s returning $7 billion to them when SpaceX IPOs.

The amount of wealth being generated here is historic and unprecedented. Crypto people, if they haven’t participated in that, are kind of feeling like they’ve been left out. This was the dream, right? That crypto would be the thing, and it hasn’t been.

I think that’s why there’s actually a psychological element that has made this cycle, this bear market, maybe tougher. But hold on, Ryan—

Wait, can I add one point to that, though? There’s that New York Times article that everyone looks at, where everybody’s getting rich, but you’re right.

I do think that one thing that’s different about crypto, which makes it very psychologically tough on people, is that a lot of people have gotten hilariously rich, and all of those people have left the space, basically, for the most part. They’ve either become evangelists and kind of turned into KOLs or whatever, and they do these things that maybe you like or you don’t.

There's obviously Arthur Hayes telling you that HYPE is going to go to $150 one day and then telling you the next day that he sold all of it, when nothing's changed. But a lot of crypto feels very zero-sum, and people feel like, for them to win, something else has to go badly, or they have to be against the rest of the market.

Everything that's happening with SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI feels very positive-sum to a lot of people. Everyone's getting rich because things are working and being used, so I think that mindset is a big part of it. It feels like people just aren't able to do this in a collaborative way. It's a PvP culture versus a let's-build-something-together culture.

That's really interesting. I also share your sentiment, but from a different perspective. This has been the most challenging bear market, and I went through 2014, 2018, and 2022. This one personally feels the hardest for some reason, even though financially it's been by far the easiest, because so many people who were such purists are leaving the space.

Psychographically, 93% of our fund has been crypto natives—high-net-worth people who want yield on their crypto. We've had real people who I never thought would sell a single Ether or Bitcoin picking up their stick and going home, saying, “I'm out.”

Ryan, why are they doing that? Why are they selling?

The purist feels like we've lost our way. The institutions did come, and that's what we always wanted. “The institutions are coming, the institutions are coming.” Then the institutions arrive, and the crypto-native ethos of privacy, self-sovereignty, and these crypto assets being the medium in which we transact hasn't played out.

This time around, instead of value accruing to the crypto assets, value is accruing to companies operating in crypto. That's obviously a higher Gini coefficient, less broad-based wealth distribution, and less permissionless wealth distribution. People feel left out in the cold in that regard.

That's been really disheartening to see: people who adored crypto and were in it for the right reasons picking up their stick and going home.

But what are the right reasons, Ryan? Crypto has sort of been a religion, but it's hard for me, at least. Coming into last year, I was like, “Okay, super.” I wrote an article about it; I don't need to rehash it, but it does feel like we've done a lot of things right.

Look, Rob, you were pounding the table on stablecoins at Money20/20. I don't think you'd get a single skeptic at this point.

Very few—largely very few, right? I mean—

At least every company feels like it needs to have a strategy. It's not as if there are just a couple of people at any given company working on it. I don't want to derail this, but I had a conversation with somebody recently where he was saying, “My board wants me to replace—or just basically start putting everything on-chain.”

5. Strategy Sells Bitcoin, Will BTC Hit $40k?

You're seeing this at the board level. Yet this is happening as Ryan's talking about. I was having this discussion with somebody else earlier today who was saying, to Ryan's point, the institutionalization happened. The boomers came, the ETFs worked, everybody was buying, and it's all the OGs who feel like they're leaving. This transition has been really tough for people.

Yeah. I mean, the other thing is, let's not forget: we've talked about how all of us would have agreed that we're sort of in the 1990s era. How many companies from the 1990s continue to exist today? Whether you think Ethereum is like Cisco is TBD, but there might be companies like Cardano whose founder just stepped out today. Those companies eventually—

Was that really just today? Do you think it was really just today that he stepped away?

He tweeted about it today. There's a natural selection and evolution process in capital markets and technology. I think it would be unreasonable of us to sit here and say that probably 99% of the projects that have existed from the 2017–2020 era are going to be the ones that really take us to the Amazons and Googles of the world.

That might not be Ethereum. It might not be Bitcoin. It might not be Solana. Maybe it's Hyperliquid. But there's still a lot of innovation happening, right? I think we should definitely talk about the stablecoin consortium here—Circle, Mastercard, someone else.

Maybe that's why it hurts. You see someone like David Hoffman, who's been a huge evangelist of Ethereum, say, “Hey, look, guys, I'm packing up my stuff. ETH, the crypto asset itself, isn't moving, but the network itself is probably going to continue.”

There's a lot there, but, yeah.

Yeah, a point of frustration that I would draw to is that stablecoins are capturing the zeitgeist and gaining popularity both within the space and beyond. But the original stablecoin, which I'm biased toward, was true to crypto-native values.

Decentralized cash flows were accruing to the token holders. MakerDAO is actually below its December 2017 price today. Over time, they've done a lot of things right; they've professionalized the DAO, but they have cash flows on-chain. It did everything that we set out in the original white paper to do.

Yet the thing that has captured popularity is taking people's money, putting it in a bank, and issuing a basically permissioned stablecoin. When I talk about the right reasons, or crypto-native values, that's the thing that feels frustrating. I would have thought that in a world of stablecoins, MakerDAO would have more traction because of those crypto-native values.

People ultimately don't really care about this, and that's why I think there's a lot of attrition with Vitalik's strategy. Myself included, I'm deeply frustrated that the things he lays out in the rollup strategy are just not the things that people want.

And that's why people are exiting: there is a disdain for the business side of running a layer 1 or a project, which ultimately is his Achilles' heel, in spite of him obviously being incredibly brilliant.

6. The Aftermath of SpaceX’s IPO

Ryan, let me bring MakerDAO back to SpaceX for a second, because I want to close the loop on SpaceX. For people who are wondering why we're talking about SpaceX here for 30 minutes on a crypto podcast, it's the biggest IPO in history and the—

It's also the biggest stablecoin transactor.

Oh, that's interesting. With Bridge, right?

It is the largest capital event, probably, in history. I mean, OpenAI raised $122 billion there. So, the SpaceX IPO is next week—I think it's June 12th. They're raising at a $1.77 trillion valuation.

To tie this back to MakerDAO, the reason I want to talk to you about SpaceX is that you can have things that will change the world, but you can also have irrational exuberance. Maybe MakerDAO will actually get it right, and you just had to have a massive run-up, irrational exuberance, then capitulation, and then a slow climb back up. Maybe MakerDAO is going to be huge one day.

Is this that moment for AI? The event felt very similar to Breakpoint in Lisbon, Portugal, when everyone was getting high on their own supply. It felt like, yes, this stuff is going to change the world, and yes, these valuations—

I was sitting next to a guy who got 3 texts in a 10-minute bus ride saying, “I got access to Anthropic for you. I got access to SpaceX for you. 3 and 30. I'm only charging 3 and 30.” It just felt—I don't know.

To turn this into a question, what do you think happens with the SpaceX IPO? From, I guess, up or down?

It's a little bit different from what I have historically loved about the permissionless nature of crypto and the fact that there aren't lockups. There's no sort of perversion around price discovery. Crypto has the purest price discovery.

What a lot of people are not factoring in right now is that the significant shareholders are actually locked up for 366 days, so until next June 13th. That almost certainly—and I don't know for sure, but when I look at it from the outside, I would say that—definitely includes the founders, definitely includes Valor, definitely includes Fidelity, and almost certainly includes GigaFund.

That's 30% of the float right there. Elon holds 42% of the float. So you're talking about 72% that isn't going anywhere.

Out of the remaining 28%, everyone's like, “Employees are going to have to sell to buy a house and things like that.” Well, first of all, most of those employees live in Boca Chica.

There are no $10 million mansions to buy, right? They’re pretty dialed in. Secondly, and most importantly, all of these employees have had a December liquidity opportunity every year since 2018. I mean, that’s how I’ve been participating—that’s how we’ve all been participating: the December tenders.

Most of the employees aren’t cash-strapped. They’re not starving entrepreneurs who need to buy their dream home next week. That has both a good and a bad part. The bad part is that we won’t see true price discovery for over a year, right?

You have your classical low-float, high-FDV situation—the highest FDV with, really, the lowest float—which obviously we saw a lot in 2021. We know how that plays out, but that generally buoys for longer. You can’t get a true washout until you have true price discovery. We’re not going to have true price discovery until at least 2027.

Well, if you had the opportunity to sell your shares, would you?

No. I’m personally of the mind that the merger is likely to go through.

The Tesla merger.

Yes, the Tesla merger, because it doesn’t trigger antitrust in this environment, with Google and Amazon basically doing all the same things. Antitrust is not a legitimate argument. I think the merger does go through. That’s accretive to SpaceX generally.

I want to see the business settle into its true CAGR, its true cash flow, and its true revenue structure before you can really rationally apply comps. I’ve done all the comps analysis, from Palantir to Google and everyone in between, and it’s just really difficult. You have to structure in this Elon premium, because the world pays about a 2x premium, on a comp basis, for Elon over everything else.

Incidentally, today at the valuation, it’s about the same revenue comp as Palantir. If you don’t think Palantir is overpriced, then it would be difficult to say that SpaceX is overpriced. It’s a more important defense prime to the U.S. government than Palantir is, and certainly more defensible.

Well, it also makes it hard to comp, right? I think it has the outlier kind of things. Elon was obviously talking about it, or he retweeted something, like when Tesla went public at a $1.7 billion valuation, which at the time felt pretty rich, and now it’s at, you know, $1 trillion-plus.

His point was, look, Tesla was 0.1% of its current market cap at the time of the IPO. You’ve got to read between the lines: I’m going to be extremely focused on making sure that we deliver on the promise, and we continue to explore the universe—to the universe and beyond.

I don’t know if there’s anything else on the SpaceX stuff. No, I was more just curious. You’re so deep in SpaceX, Ryan. What are you still doing in crypto? I don’t know if you’ve listened to Empire recently, but we’ve been talking about doing things on-chain. Dialectic is very big. I don’t know if you guys are taking long-short positions, but you guys are a big LP in DeFi, and DeFi has been getting hacked out of the wazoo.

I’d be curious to get your take on what you guys are doing there.

Yeah, so we continue to yield. We have put a lot of resources and mind space into risk management over the years. After 10/10, I made the quip to my team that it sort of felt like being in the Pacific Palisades fire, where we were the only ones who had invested in a sprinkler system. That was risk management.

However, it does not feel very good to preside over the ashes of our space—DeFi, that is, right? There are only a handful of DeFi shops like ourselves left standing. There is a very short-lived celebratory moment with that, and then it’s just really, really challenging.

DeFi yields are down. Santi has made the point very eloquently that the risk-adjusted reward for DeFi doesn’t make that much sense right now. We’re seeing a huge migration into RWA DeFi, and we’re doing that ourselves.

You can go and take both sides of a trade, say, like SpaceX, and lo and behold, the funding rate on the short is about 45%, depending on the platform, right now. You can get good yields in RWA yield strategies.

However, the big concern that you and I talked about is that, given the frequency and sophistication of the hacks, it feels to me like Lazarus probably got a hold of Mitosis. In fact, I’m convinced that Lazarus got a hold of Mitosis. These hacks that are coming are extremely sophisticated, and the moment feels a little bit like picking up pennies in front of a steamroller.

At the same time, I think we’ll continue to see maturation in the space. For those who survive, there will be another side to this. We’re going through it right now, certainly in the space, but I have definitely not given up on crypto. I’m not giving up on DeFi whatsoever. We continue to yield.

I’m really excited about what we’re doing, but you have to adjust in this space. There are moments where things die and new things come up. The open-minded, future-forward approach is the only one that has ever really made money consistently over the course of the history of the game.

You definitely have to survive. Even though you have a very small probability of a hack happening, there are social-engineering attacks that are very sophisticated, and the impairment risk is much, much higher in crypto.

Even though you can recover with law enforcement, and that has historically been a feature of crypto because it’s very transparent, there are entities that allow Lazarus to launder and take money out. That makes it hard. Circle isn’t awake on the weekend, or stuff like that.

How do you think about the RWA trades? It sounds like you’re just arbitraging between TradFi off-chain and what’s on-chain. Is that mostly Hyperliquid, or is there anything else that’s interesting to you?

A lot of it is Hyperliquid. It’s also the first time, historically, that we’ve been everything-only-on-chain, and we had to kill our golden calf. Again, that’s emblematic of the moment, where you have to reevaluate these crypto-native principles.

Hyperliquid is actually one of the great venues, and I think it will stand to win quite a bit in the RWA movement. They’re doing extremely well. The best yields come from the delta-neutral trade between on-chain and some exchange-backed short position, and the funding rate there, whether it’s Binance or Coinbase.

In fact, Coinbase just started offering SpaceX derivatives today to institutional clients, so that’s something that we’re into.

Can we go back to something you said earlier around 10/10? What do you mean by saying that we’re kind of the only ones who are in real risk management? We’ve talked about 10/10 to some extent. What actually happened? I think there are still doubts around that. What’s your diagnosis of it?

A big part of it, as far as I have heard, is that very large players—ones that I am very disappointed in because I would have expected them to have better risk management—got caught in some carry trades. It was a Hong Kong dollar-for-Bitcoin carry trade.

That started the Bitcoin liquidation, but then the other liquidations cascaded from there because, Jason, you made this point to somebody this week very thoughtfully: They’re all correlated assets, right? That step down in Bitcoin caused the correlated cascade in every other asset.

This is what feels really frustrating. I had a lot of OGs tell me this is why they’re picking up their ball and going home: In 2025, we can’t get risk management right as a space. We still have large, multibillion-dollar shops doing this level of irresponsible, highly leveraged, looped yield strategies.

It feels very frustrating. The rest of the world can’t take us seriously until we stop doing this irresponsible stuff. You have Lehman blow up and a couple of other shops blow up, but there’s Dodd-Frank. Rob, when is the Dodd-Frank of crypto coming out?

Are we going into another 10/10 here? I mean, obviously, we have—

You’re talking MicroStrategy.

Well, I was going to go there, but I do want to make a slight pause here to talk about the pump-and-dumps that I’ve seen on the timeline at a greater scale. I haven’t looked closely at this, but there are a couple of other projects where, on the timeline, there are claims of pump-and-dumps. I don’t know how substantiated that is, and I don’t know if you know for a fact, but it feels like there are certain market-maker entities and exchange coordination around some of these tokens that just cause a lot of damage and wreckage, especially for retail.

I’m talking about coins that are 99% held by the top 5 entities, with a super-low float, and then you see a huge wick.

It feels like a lot of market manipulation. It feels a lot like insider dealings that just betray what we talk about with retail coming into crypto. They’re deeply uninterested in this casino because it’s not fair or transparent. Even though the house technically always wins in Vegas, in prediction markets, and in crypto, it feels like crypto is just in a bad spot to inspire the next 100 million users to come and speculate in this stuff.

Well, it also burned the last 50 million, right? People who came in, say, late 2021 and since then—whether it was trends with meme coins, play-to-earn gaming, or otherwise—feel really burned today.

I actually sat down with a family office in Hong Kong in March, and the son of the family office happened to be involved with Axie Infinity. He said no one in the Philippines will get into crypto anymore because everyone feels so burned by Axie Infinity. I thought, man, because obviously we’re investors in Axie, that is really painful to hear—that an entire country has written off the space because they just feel burned.

That’s not particularly Sky Mavis’s fault, but there is this thing where every time we burn a bridge with a retail customer who gets into a coin that goes into a reverse hockey stick, or so on and so forth, we lose long-term participants. The cost of customer acquisition goes up each time, right? Because you can’t get them back. You have to get some new incremental entrants back. We’re kind of running out of time and running out of people to make that pitch to.

There’s a thing I’ve been saying to a number of people because I get asked this question all the time. I do a lot of these appearances and whatnot, and people are asking me why there are not more retail participants when Bitcoin is $120,000, et cetera.

One of the things that I think is underappreciated about last year is that it was by far and away the most value-destructive year that we’ve ever had in crypto, despite the fact that the GENIUS Act happened, there was all this retail excitement, and we had Bitcoin at all-time highs. When you think about what happened with the Trump memecoin, then the Melania memecoin, then the tariff tantrum, and then the 10/10, who are the people who really get caught offside on these things?

Yes, there are institutional people who get caught offside on these things, but it’s really the retail investors who get hurt the worst. When you take that into account and say, okay, there’s this thing happening where we talk about institutional adoption all the time—how exciting it is and how we’re getting what we wanted—everybody who invested in this space, the HODLers, the people who were excited about what was happening and what was coming, all of them lost money. Then who’s left?

Because at the end of the day, Broadridge doesn’t give a shit about the price of Ether, even if they’re using a blockchain to clear some repo transactions. I think that’s one of the biggest things.

I had a discussion with an investor recently, to your point, Ryan, about Axie. I was talking about a token—I won’t actually name it because I don’t want to—but this was for a new project. It’s one of those things where a bunch of insiders in Silicon Valley are like, “Oh, this is interesting, and we’re going to pump it,” et cetera.

Everyone I talk to actually believes there’s no way it can work. Everyone’s like, “I’ve just seen this movie before. It goes up, and then it comes down when everyone realizes it doesn’t work.” It gets back to my earlier point about how zero-sum the space feels. There are so many people taking that perspective around investment decisions: “This thing’s not going to work, but it’ll go up and come down.”

At least in traditional venture capital or traditional markets, people might make decisions based on, “This is a founder who’s good at raising new capital,” or, “This is something that I think can attract others.” But nobody says, “This thing sucks, but maybe I can dump it on somebody else first.”

On this point, before we go to MicroStrategy—and it’s a good segment of this—there are the DATs, which I think have also been super value-destructive. From BitMine to pretty much every DAT, it was SPACs all over again, but specifically more destructive for the reputation of crypto.

The armchair skeptics about crypto look at DATs now and say, “Yeah, again, we’re right. You can’t put a token on a corporate wrapper and expect it to perform well.” Will they recover? TBD. But certainly, if you look at the performance of particularly a company like BitMine, it’s incredibly value-destructive, and it doesn’t help.

You talk about Arthur Hayes kind of talking about it. I remember when he shilled his prediction for HYPE at like $185 using a discount rate.

He said $150 three days ago.

$150. I think it was a presentation in Tokyo about a year ago, and the discount rate was like 6% or something. I’m like, okay, well, clearly he worked at an investment bank.

Yeah. Terminal growth at 8%.

7. DeFi Opportunities In 2026

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Ludicrous, right? But again, what needs to happen for crypto to grow up? Rob, I don’t know if at Money20/20 people talk about DATs. Does that even compute?

No, no, nobody is talking about DATs.

Were they last year?

No, they were talking about DATs last year. I mean, last year it was actually the same things. It was the GENIUS Act, stablecoins, and AI.

I think last year there was a little bit more excitement because we were right around the week that the GENIUS Act had basically gotten passed, and there was real excitement about, okay, what does this unlock for stablecoins? This year there’s a little bit of, well, we haven’t seen as much growth as we thought would happen in the last year. It’s been a little bit slow-going.

I discount that a little bit on the stablecoin side because, let’s just be real: If you’re a Fortune 100 company, you waited until the GENIUS Act to get a stablecoin strategy. Then you waited 2 quarters to get a stablecoin strategy presented to the board, hired people, and now that thing’s happening.

We’re seeing some of that in my portfolio companies, and we’re seeing some of that more broadly. It just takes time because you’re moving the Titanic in a lot of these situations.

To the point about DATs, DATs were not a thing that ever really made its way to the non-crypto world. There were all of these people making presentations last year around, “You can create Bitcoin per share. You can create Ether per share.” Mathematically, they weren’t wrong in the right market conditions.

Maybe this is just human nature, but we talk about market conditions in a way that we’re prone to be positive. We’re prone to discount the downside, to Ryan’s point earlier about nobody having good risk management. We’re prone to discount the downside.

I heard people say to me a month ago, “Michael Saylor is going to take us to $120,000 Bitcoin again because he just keeps buying.” This happened for a while, right? Now all of a sudden, Strategy sells 32 bitcoin, and the market basically sees it as, well, he’s probably priming us for more sales.

STRC, which is his preferred stock that he’s issued, trades down under par. It looks like now he’s probably selling a bunch of bitcoin to cover those dividends, and it looks like a Ponzi all of a sudden.

Maybe you were right that, in the right market conditions, this thing would create Bitcoin per share. But in the same way, it can go up and come down—really reflexively, aggressively, and violently. The fact that we continue to put our hope for the industry in financial engineering and not real-world use cases is a big part of the reason that we’re in the situation we’re in.

Yeah. The question I always have with respect to MicroStrategy is: What is his number?

There is a number. It’s probably somewhere south of $30,000—probably now, due to buys last year, higher than the teens—where his creditors do liquidate it. Maybe it’s not a specific liquidation number, but there is a number underwater where things start to implode.

That would be the ultimate liquidation cascade for the space. Maybe that is the healthy washout: no bailouts. That is a manifestation of crypto-native values that the space needs to see.

With MicroStrategy being the defining DAT, a lot of these other DATs have numbers where the debt positions they’ve taken on to make these acquisitions do get liquidated. That’s my big question.

He's highly incentivized never to state the number and to obfuscate it as much as possible. We saw that in the FTX collapse, when Caroline tweeted, “This is where we’ll buy.” You knew that was their number, and it was all over after that.

You’re not going to get the number out of him, but where is that number? What happens if we hit it? I was talking to somebody I respect tremendously—one of the most successful traders in the space over the last decade—who was telling me today, and I think it was overly bearish because they like to do this, “I think it’s possible Bitcoin hits $40,000.”

It’s $63,000 today. It looks like we potentially hit the $50,000s for sure. There was another person in this chat who said, “At $40,000, I would just put all my cash back into Bitcoin. I’d feel really comfortable finally taking all my cash and putting it back into Bitcoin.”

One of the things I said, though, is that we’ve now built this business and industry around all these central counterparties—to your point, Ryan, that’s where all the value is accruing—to all these companies that exist around the space. It’s not entirely clear to me that we’re in a situation where, like in 2018, Bitcoin can have this crash and it doesn’t just kill the rest of the industry.

It’s no longer about, to your point on all the OGs, leaving around this hodler mentality and crypto ethos. It is now an industrial marketplace for all these large corporates who are building here. If that happens, and those companies blow up, and the venture dollars blow up, and we have the washout—not just on the retail side, which we’ve had before, but everything else that’s been built around the space over the last couple of years with Larry Fink, JPMorgan, and all these guys—it’s not entirely clear to me that you can bring the original ethos back, and you definitely won’t keep the institutional ethos.

That’s an interesting take. Yep.

The thing about Saylor, though, is that, like Luna and every other financial engineering scheme—Lord knows I’ve been here far too long to know how these things unwind. What I’ve always told people is, look, if you want to be bullish on Bitcoin, buy the goddamn thing. It’s easy to buy it. You don’t have to go through STRC and financial engineering. Eventually, arbitrage strategies blow up. They do. It’s just a ticking time bomb on a highly volatile asset.

I don’t know what was going through his mind when he launched STRC and then retired some of the debt. A lot of these things, from the outside in, look extremely fragile and unsound. I think MicroStrategy, relative to other DATs, was pretty clever because they were first and in a position to structure things in a way that many other DATs simply do not have the same level of structure and downside protection.

But again, a lot of these things are built on reflexive loops. As soon as you degrade trust—whether you sell 32 Bitcoin, 500 Bitcoin, or 1,000 Bitcoin—it doesn’t matter. You’ve basically gone from being the Bitcoin Jesus, which is very counter to the Bitcoin ethos—Satoshi was never out there—to being a very public figure who promised never to sell and now has sold. It’s game over. It will end. It’s a matter of when, not if.

To me, I think it goes way below $40,000. This could be going down to $10,000.

I mean, for sure.

It’s a number, for sure. It spirals out. I don’t think you hold $40,000.

No, clearly not. There’s so much that, if there’s a forced unwind where creditors are coming in—or because he’s got all these preferreds, they go and unseat him and unwind the business, so to speak—$10,000 could be high.

Right?

Yeah. Why stop there if that’s happening, right? He owns what, 6% or 7% of the supply? Is that high today?

Does he own 6%?

Maybe that’s a little high, actually.

Let’s end on a high note, guys. I mean, I think—

I don’t know if there’s any. We’re at the end of the world.

The end. There’s no fearmongering.

Look, to your point, I think I did feel crypto headwinds. Go ahead, Ryan.

The high note that we draw to in the office actually dovetails with your first point around products and assets that people are excited about, RWAs, and everything moving on-chain. We can sprinkle in the advantages of crypto by using crypto-native primitives, backed by assets that people have stronger confidence in, like Google, NVIDIA, Tesla, or SpaceX.

That feels like something that is really interesting to me. If you can produce a natively denominated yield in Google, that’s just a great asset to hold, right? It’s a dominant company, and then I can get a little bit of a boost. Crypto helps me get that boost through crypto-native primitives. That feels like a use case that we can stand on.

Very obviously, in this environment, the killer app, or the useful use case, of crypto is finance-related. This is financial technology at the end of the day. That’s why, Rob, you’re there at a fintech conference and people are ultimately talking about these things.

That’s because even if the underlying crypto assets are not interesting, the primitives of crypto do remain interesting. That’s exciting. I don’t think crypto is going to die. The primitives are there, and more innovation will continue to happen.

Although I am curious from both of your perspectives, because you’re much more active on the investing side: Is the talent really there? Over the last 10 years, you saw really great cryptographers and engineers—people who wanted to come and build in crypto. Now, I don’t know.

It’s 4% that I own. It’s not 60%.

Okay. I was actually typing it in to see.

Yeah. Might there be a state of the world where it’s not like this forever? I think eventually valuations do catch up. You can have a great service and technology, but that doesn’t mean it’s worth $200 billion.

Uber was a great service for the consumer for many years. Consumer surplus was phenomenal, but the price and the unit economics weren’t there. Ten years later, record-low interest rates allowed it to get to the point where it was, and then public markets followed. But it took a while to get there.

I think crypto has always been far, far ahead on valuation relative to fundamentals because it’s so nascent and exciting. It captured the zeitgeist. There probably is a healthy reset, and I think that’s what makes it most uncomfortable here.

To your point, Rob, no one is contesting the utility of stablecoins. But it is an uncomfortable truth that we have to face: If stablecoin volume grows 10x and an agent takes off, that doesn’t necessarily accrue value to the network. I think there’s a reset that probably needs to happen.

Maybe it’s a regulatory unlock that allows us to have clarity and design tokens to capture more value. Or maybe other players capture that value, whether it’s Tempo, Mastercard, or Visa. Is that a bad thing? No, I don’t think it’s a bad thing.

I also don’t think it’s a bad thing that Robinhood and some of these other financial institutions are adopting crypto primitives—to your point, Ryan, prediction markets and perps. There’s a lot of financial engineering that has come out of crypto that, in my mind, is a win.

As painful as it is, we shouldn’t sit here and say crypto is useless, that all this stuff is useless, or that all the venture dollars—over $100 billion invested, which all 3 of us have participated in—went to waste. There were a lot of experiments, but crypto isn’t going to die. The primitives are there, and more innovation will continue to happen.

I will say this. First, on both Ryan’s and Santi’s points about bringing assets on-chain, earlier today I recorded a podcast with the chair of the CFTC, Mike Selig. It will come out on Monday, and it will be the first interview he’s done since he launched the perpetuals guidance for U.S.-regulated perpetuals last Friday.

If you want to feel bullish about the future of regulated on-chain markets in the U.S., listen to that podcast on Monday. He is so bullish. He talks about how bullish the administration is, how they really want to push this innovation, and how they see it as true financial-markets innovation for the first time in decades. They have not changed. It’s almost mind-blowing to me that, if you had told me in 2023 that we’d have the sitting chair of the CFTC talking about bringing markets on-chain in the way he’s talking about them today, I wouldn’t have believed it.

So that's amazing. And, Santi, to your point around whether the talent is there, we're going to announce—we were slow to start the year, but we're going to announce probably at least 3 deals this month, maybe 4, that we've led. We picked up a lot, and if I think about the founders of those companies, they are some of the best founders we've ever backed while we've been here. But they're in specific categories where we're attracting those founders.

To your point, Santi, around the best cryptographers and the best deep engineers, it's not clear to me that we can compete with AI right now in terms of the best engineers in the world. But if you think about a lot of the best builders in fintech and payments, there are actually many, many of them here.

I went to a dinner we co-hosted with a portfolio company at the Van Gogh Museum a couple of nights ago. The founder of that business was, I believe, the youngest SVP in Worldpay history, and he brought basically the who's who of European payments to this dinner. I just showed up and put my logo on the door. That's nice, but I guess I get a little bit of credit for that.

The excitement around things like that is there, and so the talent's there. But it is very much a fragmenting market, and it's clearly breaking apart at the seams. There are certain things where there's really excited talent and really excited innovation happening, and there are a lot of things that we used to think about where people just aren't there anymore.

Yeah, I would echo this. I was just in San Francisco the last few days, and it does feel like AI—everything, everywhere, all at once. However, in March, I was in Washington, and the chairs of the SEC and CFTC spoke at the Milken Conference there. Washington was abuzz over crypto, and particularly stablecoins. The conversation was all stablecoins, all crypto.

I think you guys are probably seeing the same thing, where the founders and teams we're seeing in the space today are more mature in some ways. Is crypto getting the hot young dropout from Stanford? Less so than, say, the 2017–18 era. But at the same time, there are really talented executives who are taking a prudent approach to building a business on top of crypto.

It feels like that's where value is accruing right now, less to the crypto-native assets and the projects that get ahead of their skis on valuation. That has ultimately been an Achilles' heel for a lot of projects. You go from seed to public effectively in a few months, that thing gets ahead of its skis, and it causes a bunch of problems internally with these young teams.

Now we're having a slower roll with more mature executive teams in crypto, and that's okay. I like that. I'm not completely averse to that. Is it a little bit less sexy? Yeah, but it's also probably more sustainable and a little bit more stable in the end as well. Pun intended.

There's a lot of gray hair on this podcast.

Yeah, you go to events in suits. I went to Davos a few months ago, and I was like, "What?" I've never seen this number of suits in my entire career in the space.

Well, to your point, Ryan, I think this year, maybe spilling into next year, you'll see some of the hottest fintechs and some of the largest companies use stablecoins. I think that inspires the next crop of fintech founders to build in the space.

You mentioned earlier that you see SpaceX being the largest company using stablecoins, and that becomes talked about. Then Ramp raised a huge round this week. They're into it.

They're into stablecoins a lot, and they're close partners of Stripe.

Right.

I actually think it's very interesting. People outside of the space are more bullish on the space than many people inside the space at this point.

Yeah. Again, the networks and the technology work.

Lots of new entrants are really excited about the space, which is ultimately compensating for the jaded OGs who are exiting. That's okay. You have to have these refresher moments, whether it's a washout of a Saylor or a washout of OGs and the paradigms of that era. That's okay. That's part of the evolution and maturation of the technology, and we'll get more legitimate businesses building using crypto primitives as a result.

8. Content of The Week

Yeah, yeah. I think eventually we've got to wrap soon, guys, but the lines between crypto and non-crypto get blurred. It's just fintech, and fintech encompasses stablecoins, tokens, and tokenization at large. It becomes irrelevant to make that distinction.

Of course. Ryan reviews. He doesn't listen enough all the way to the end.

So, Ryan, we have a tradition on this show: content of the week—the best thing you've read or listened to this week or in the last couple of weeks.

Listen, the best thing that happened this week on any content was the New York Knicks coming back from down 14 to win game one of the NBA Finals. So, NBA Finals, that is the content of the week, and then the World Cup starts next week. So, that's the content I'm thinking about.

It is a great moment in sports over the next couple of weeks here.

For me, the content of the week is, if you watch any presentation from the All-In Summit, watch Thomas Laffont's presentation of Coatue. He makes this very compelling argument that, as you go up the scale from $1 billion in unicorn land—from $1 billion companies to $10 billion companies to $100 billion companies—you actually get a substantially higher probability of a 10x from there.

Companies that achieve $100 billion in value have a 31% chance at a 10x, whereas companies that are at $10 billion only have an 18% chance. That one slide explains this whole movement toward the excitement in the secondary market, all these nested SPVs, and everybody piling into the same 25 names.

When you take a probability-based return profile on that, it's easier in today's environment to just pile your money into a $100 billion unicorn, or a hectocorn, so to speak, than it is to take a probabilistic approach at the 13% chance that your unicorn can 10x from there. That really flies in the face of a lot of standard thought in venture, and I thought that was really interesting.

I love that. I wanted to dovetail on that. I heard Brad Gerstner on TBPN talk about this exact same point. He said the best venture returns have been in the public markets.

Yeah, and I think it runs counter to venture's asymmetric law of large numbers. You can't really compound much at that point, but he was making the point—Jensen Huang also, with Michael Dell, I think it was at a Bloomberg conference—like, look, we're going to see $10 trillion companies. Why couldn't we see that? I think you just have to shatter that ceiling. Of course, it's going to be irrational.

The best venture returns are just about to be in Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX. This is more a result of the fact that people used to go public earlier, and now you go public at a trillion dollars and get great—

Well, it's fair, but the IRR on being in Nvidia 5 years ago, or being in SanDisk or Micron, is phenomenal. Some of these things have had a phenomenal run. It depends on how you look at it—cash on cash, IRR, or risk-adjusted. It's all of these things.

Oh, yeah. Is Brad the Altimeter founder who was on TBPN talking about this exact same point? I think it was last week. He also talks about the initiative to give everyone in America—every kid in America, I think—an account starting them off with the S&P 500, with either $100 or $250. He was a huge part of getting it enacted into legislation. The Trump Accounts, I think that's what it's called.

Yep.

The Invest America Act.

The Invest America Act, and the concept of having everyone benefit from the compounding factor. As I think about raising kids, teaching them the value of money and how to invest, something like that isn't taught well enough in schools. But if you give someone an account they can monitor, I think it's an amazing initiative that every country should adopt.

Yeah. When do you think we see an Invest in Spain Act?

No, no, Ryan, come on, man. Probably better earlier in Switzerland. Europe's tough, man. Europe's tough, except Switzerland. Europe's tough.

That could be something that all 3 of us sitting in Europe could chat through next time: where does Europe go from here in this moment?

I will tell you, that has been a big part of the conversation here at Money20/20, which is just how overregulated Europe is. Usually, Europeans, in my experience, are very defensive when you say that. They don't want to agree with you, and now it feels like there's some capitulation. Even the Europeans are like, "Yeah, we need to figure something out."

The dilemma that I spend the most time thinking about here in Switzerland is: Switzerland's a very well-run country, but can a country stay healthy while everyone around it is sick? You and me, Ryan.

Topic for another podcast, for sure. But look, congrats, Ryan, on SpaceX. I had no idea, but amazing.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Yeah, that's great stuff. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insights.

I appreciate you guys and everything you do in this space. Thank you for having me.