Steady Lads Live From TOKEN2049 in Singapore (2026)
Jordi AlexanderJustin BramTaiki MaedaDim Selk
- Zcash was the panel’s defining high-conviction, high-fragility trade: Taiki called it “the coin of the cycle” and argued it can compete with Bitcoin for narrative inflows. He is still “Texas hedging”—“hedge my longs with more longs”—partly because Project Tachyon should arrive within the next few months and address the quantum overhang. His mental stop is three-digit Zcash, selling probably begins above $2K and around $3K-$4K, while the long-range aspiration remains $20K-$30K.
- Crowding has concentrated crypto’s active risk into ZEC, HYPE, Lighter and NEAR, leaving valuations vulnerable if momentum stalls. Jordi warned that HYPE and Lighter buybacks now barely affect price because they are pricing in “100 years” of revenue; Zcash’s recent underperformance could similarly make momentum holders fall away “like flies.” His practical advice to Taiki: close the perps and retain spot rather than repeat the Fartcoin round trip.
- Justin’s post-10/10 portfolio reset captures the year’s rotation away from legacy majors. He sold 5%-10% of his ETH near $4,850 and the remaining roughly 90% near $3,850, later exiting Lighter around $4.21 while retaining Zcash. Against year-ago levels—BTC around $118K, ETH almost $4,400 and SOL roughly twice its current price—ZEC and HYPE have displaced assets such as DOGE as the cycle’s preferred speculative vehicles.
- Variational is betting that a scarce TGE calendar makes its Q4 launch unusually consequential. Justin cited more than $4 billion-plus of daily volume, mostly TradFi perps, and a 32% airdrop—“1% more than Hyperliquid’s 31%”—which it describes as the largest known crypto airdrop. The broader hesitation is rational: Coinbase/Base can attract farmers by merely promising a token, while Kraken’s Ink must prove that token utility will justify diverting cash flow from equity holders.
- Pearl offers a classic bull-market setup—strong narrative and terrible access—but its issuance burden makes the eventual listing a supply-demand test. Korean traders repeatedly pitched Justin the “AI Bitcoin,” currently purchasable only through a sketchy KYC-free exchange, yet Dim estimated roughly $1 million of daily inflation and Justin said supply may double within a year. Justin’s formulation was that Pearl is “a left-curve play with a right sprinkle of right curve.”
- “Crabification” was the episode’s framework for why crypto products converge on dopamine, gambling and personalities regardless of founders’ original ambitions. Taiki’s version is that compressed real returns create “long degeneracy,” leaving investors to “own the casino” or the best casino chips; Jordi mapped memecoins, TGEs and trader-following into different casino games for different gamblers. Even attempts to escape the game merely produce “a better crab,” with the rare transcendent personality becoming a “lobster.”
- The panel sees a bottom behind the market but expects dispersion, not an indiscriminate alt rally. Jordi said the bottom was at $60K and that Bitcoin needs the gold narrative to pick up for a sustainable move; another panelist worried BTC had only fallen about 50%, versus 75% previously, limiting the energy of the rebound. Jordi pointed to fear-and-greed recovering from 9-10 a few months earlier to about 70 and Robinhood buying $25 million of BTC as evidence that “speculation is back on the menu,” while still finding few assets genuinely cheap.
1. One year erased the old hierarchy
The anniversary board made the reset tangible: Bitcoin had been around $118K, XRP $3, ETH almost $4,400 and SOL roughly twice its current price. DOGE subsequently lost about two-thirds, while Zcash and Hyperliquid entered the top 10; Tether and USDC FDVs barely changed, and TRON moved only from $0.34 to $0.33.
Taiki challenged Justin over his supposedly “guaranteed” $7K-$10K ETH call, and Justin gave the actual exits: 5%-10% sold around $4,850, then roughly 90% around $3,850 after 10/10. What initially felt late became “the best thing I could’ve ever done”—a clean exit that let the cycle reset before he bought Lighter and Zcash.
His later execution was less dramatic but still solid: Justin exited Lighter around $4.21, “not quite the top,” while keeping Zcash. The portfolio shift mirrored the board itself—capital had migrated from familiar majors and DOGE toward a much narrower collection of new consensus trades.
2. Zcash’s upside case comes with an intentionally loose eject button
Taiki’s premise starts with Bitcoin’s quantum overhang: people he spoke with estimated BTC might be worth $120K-$150K, and “definitely above 100,” if that risk were addressed. With Project Tachyon expected in the next few months, alongside the privacy narrative, he sees Zcash challenging Bitcoin for flows just as SOL challenged ETH and ETH once challenged BTC.
Jordi’s pushback was crowding, not technology. At trading dinners across Asia and the US, Taiki repeatedly heard the same portfolio—HYPE, ZEC, Lighter and NEAR—and Jordi argued this herd behavior has already pushed HYPE and Lighter toward “100 years” of implied revenue, leaving buybacks too small to support price when sentiment turns.
Zcash’s recent weakness sharpened that concern: Jordi described momentum holders losing dopamine and dropping “like flies.” Justin therefore pressed Taiki for an actual stop; Taiki said getting past $1,000 matters, and contrary to traders expecting a “perfect retest,” losing it would be bearish. His stop remains mental, so he conceded he could wake up to $300 ZEC.
Taiki still floated $20K-$30K over several years if Zcash captures Bitcoin-like narrative inflows, but plans to sell incrementally above $2K and around $3K-$4K. Jordi heard echoes of Taiki’s $10 Fartcoin target and recommended closing perps while holding spot; Taiki’s complication was that leverage also farms Variational points.
3. Token launches must now justify themselves against equity
Variational intends to TGE in Q4, potentially as the year’s only substantial launch. Justin said the platform is processing $4 billion-plus in daily volume, largely from TradFi perps, and will distribute 32%: “the largest airdrop that we know of,” exceeding Hyperliquid’s 31% by one point.
The panel framed Q4 DEX launches as a recurring playbook—dYdX, Hyperliquid, Lighter and now Variational—but noted the broader drought: no new token had even reached a $1 billion TGE, much less threatened the top 10. Base, Ink and a possible Polymarket token remain promises rather than completed launches.
For Coinbase, issuing a Base token might hurt rather than help the stock: the possibility itself drives activity, whereas farmers can leave once distribution occurs. Polymarket has more flexibility because a token could raise capital and behave like “pseudo-equity,” but large companies with substantial equity valuations must decide whether another claim on economics damages existing shareholders.
Dim said Kraken had pitched Ink as an integrated wealth platform spanning asset management and trading, potentially resembling BNB. Jordi kept the tradeoff explicit: fee utility paid in tokens removes dollars from the equity business, perhaps sacrificing “20% or whatever” of cash flow, though a highly valued balance-sheet token might make that sacrifice worthwhile.
4. Pearl combines “AI Bitcoin” reflexivity with brutal inflation
Justin discovered Pearl by repeatedly asking Korean traders what was new; it was their most common answer. His immediate thesis was distribution: buying requires a cumbersome, “sketchiest KYC-free centralized exchange,” so a proper listing could release substantial demand. Taiki added that the access edge was the only reason he bought it: “It’s very hard to find.”
Dim supplied the bear case: the team still faces the economics of a network with about $1 million of inflation per day, an amount that cannot easily be sold safely into the market, though it might be sold OTC. Justin added that supply may double over the next year, meaning demand must exceed issuance “over a prolonged period,” not merely create an opening spike.
Jordi placed Pearl at the memetic end of a barbell: cash-flow assets such as HYPE work on one side, monetary assets such as ZEC and Pearl on the other, while ordinary L1s occupy the “mid-curve.” Pearl’s “proof of useful work” uses AI inference compute for mining; his hoped-for improvement is democratized on-chain mining rather than miners, often operating from low-electricity jurisdictions, rotating into hot coins and dumping them.
5. Every crypto product eventually becomes a casino game
Jordi borrowed “carcinization”—nature repeatedly evolving toward crabs—to explain why ambitious crypto hedging products collapse toward “quick dopamine variance distributions,” while media converges on attention-shortening clips. The question was whether trader personalities inevitably become the celebrities organizing those bets.
Justin rejected the conference slogan: “I don’t think anyone that’s not sponsored by FOMO has ever said that traders are going to be the new celebrities.” Taiki countered with Ansem’s million-plus following and “long degeneracy”: as real returns compress, people increasingly seek life-changing outcomes through financial speculation.
Jordi’s casino map reconciled them. Memecoin trench traders, TGE launch bettors, personality followers and studious blackjack players prefer different games, but “they’re different kinds of crabs, and they’re all crabs.” New listings always attract one constituency regardless of quality; human faces create another ride-up-and-down market around tokens.
Dim extended the metaphor to ETH veterans becoming better crabs, citing David Hoffman trading beyond ETH and Eric Conner buying Bonk coin. His speculation about Tom Lee involved a possible 5% threshold and roughly $400 million of balance-sheet cash: perhaps long BMNR/short ETH, or long ecosystem assets that could benefit as Lee redirects attention toward supporting his accumulated bag.
Dim’s punchline was that those who transcend the crab game become “lobsters,” while everyone else evolves into a better crab.
6. Perp platforms are converging on options as the next battlefield
Justin joked about reports of $500 million in Kalshi “coffee sales,” referring to allegedly inorganic perp volume alongside only a few million dollars of open interest. Variational’s planned Kalshi trading competition was canceled after Kalshi pulled out in Singapore amid the controversy, though Justin separated the products: Kalshi’s prediction market is “great”; its perps simply have not caught on.
Dim called HIP-3 structurally monopolistic and Hyperliquid’s core perp product exceptional, but said HIP-4 prediction markets lack the interface prediction-market users want and have gained little traction. HIP-5 may bring options, while Justin expects Q1 competition around options and favors Variational’s RFQ model for importing TradFi liquidity over rebuilding an on-chain order book.
The closing outlook stayed selective. Jordi expects dispersion between “incredible assets and the rest,” said the bottom was at $60K, and wants the gold narrative to strengthen before trusting Bitcoin’s next sustained leg. Another panelist thought many assets were fairly valued or overpriced and worried that a mere 50% BTC drawdown—versus 75% previously—may limit the energy of the rebound.
Taiki argued smarter markets may finally reward belief in the right assets, prompting Jordi’s objection that winners are always retrospectively called “right.” Jordi’s more concrete evidence was fear-and-greed near 70 versus 9-10 a few months earlier and Robinhood adding $25 million of BTC: the four-year script has accelerated, the bottom is likely in, and “speculation is back on the menu.”
Full transcript
It does start to worry me: are we getting near local highs, and what happens when things go sideways? I do feel like Zcash is one that, even if you look at the last 7 days, is the worst-performing asset. I don't know what your plan is. I don't want you to round-trip it all the way down.
It's inevitable. It's okay.
But that's why I asked if you're still kind of Texas hedging, as in, keep buying. When do you think you're selling this back? Is there a stop-loss on this trade? How are you thinking about it?
Yeah, the way I view it is, I think getting past the $1,000 level is very important. If we lose $1,000, I think a lot of people are looking to buy $1,000 and say, “Oh, this is the perfect retest,” but I think that would be bearish. Mentally, my stop-loss is 3-digit Zcash.
But you said “mentally,” so there's no stop-loss set. It's just—
Not yet, yeah.
…contemplating it.
So there's a chance I wake up to $300 Zcash, and I'll take my shirt off again.
GM, lads. I see Avi's fucking pumped.
Oh, there he is.
Avi.
Stand up, stand up. Yeah, you're in it. Thank you for showing up.
1. The New Crypto Top Ten
Good to be with you guys live. We always get excited when we're not in front of our TV screens, in our little offices. I think we wanted to start with a reminiscence of a year ago because it was just before 10/10. We were literally near the highs and the excitement of what was happening, 10/1, not 10/10. We wanted to do a quick look back at what prices were back then, and, man, that looks good. Look at those charts. Everything's green.
Bitcoin at $118,000, all the way to XRP at $3. What stands out? Solana was basically double.
I think it's got to be Ethereum at 40, almost $4,400. That seems almost unreachable now.
Well, I mean, we're not too far away: $2,700, $2,600. Even Dogecoin, I think, is down by probably 2/3. We want to look at how things have changed because there are quite a few lessons in just 1 year and in what has happened.
Yeah, so these are the prices now.
Quite a few changes there in the top. I think the most striking, of course, is Zcash and Hyperliquid entering the top 10. I guess Solana, BNB—everything else is in line. Taiki, what do you think about Zcash and Hype? You've been one of the GOAT traders.
Yeah. I've been averaging in on the way up, you know? Good old Texas hedge: hedge my longs with more longs. I think Zcash is the coin of the cycle.
Are you still doing it, by the way? Still Texas hedging both of them?
Wait, still what?
Are you still buying both of them?
Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah.
Of course.
Yeah.
No question. I'm just checking. You know, just checking.
Yeah, I set some limit orders 2 nights ago. I woke up and they were filled. I'm like, “All right.”
I do think Bitcoin— I think a good question is, we just had a quantum panel before us, but how much more would Bitcoin be worth if quantum was addressed? I talked to a few people, and they think that maybe Bitcoin would be $150,000, maybe $120,000. Definitely above $100,000.
I do think quantum is a huge overhang in Bitcoin, and I think Zcash is one of the things addressing that with Project Tachyon, which should come in the next few months. The privacy narrative is part of it, too.
I do think that every cycle, every bull market, there's 1 new coin that challenges an old coin. Last cycle was Solana over Ethereum; the previous cycle was ETH over Bitcoin. I think Zcash has the biggest chance of competing for flows against Bitcoin.
Let's switch back and forth a little more. I mean, Dogecoin literally hasn't recovered at all, and I think it kind of makes sense. There are some tokens that just had value because people wanted some alts to bet on at that level, and it looks like Zcash and Hype have taken over that.
When you look at Tether and USDC FDVs, now at $190 billion and $74 billion, it was $175 billion and $74 billion. Okay, so not too different. It feels like stablecoins have been rather stable.
Yeah, and if you look at Tron, you know, it has excelled. It was 34 cents a year ago, and now it's 33.
That's actually been the best-performing one out of those top assets. It's almost stayed—it's almost like someone has control of it or something.
Yeah. I want to ask you, Justin, because I think last year you were saying ETH to $7,000, $10,000 was guaranteed.
Is that true? Did I say—
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was begging you to sell, but you were like, “Nah, man, $7,000 guaranteed.” How have your views around Ethereum and other coins changed over the past year?
Okay, so last year I sold 5% to 10% of my Ethereum at about $4,850, and then we were talking continuously through the rest of the market. After 10/10, I sold 100% of the rest of my ETH—about 90%—at $3,850, which at the time I felt like I was late to sell. But after seeing what happened, it was really the best thing I could've ever done: get out of ETH once and for all, let the cycle reset, and then figure out what to buy next.
Since then, I was holding Lighter recently. I just exited the position at about $4.21, so not quite the top, but still pretty solid. I'm also holding Zcash.
2. Consensus Bags Become Dangerous
Taiki, you were saying you've been talking to the traders, and it feels to you that everyone is just saying the same few tickers. What are those tickers, and is it bullish or bearish that they're all holding the same tokens?
Yeah, I've been going to all these trading dinners, and I see fund managers from Asia and the US. I'd ask them, “What do you own?” They're like, “Oh, yeah, I own Hyperliquid, Zcash, Lighter, NEAR.” I go to the next guy: same bags.
I feel like everyone owns the same bag, so I kind of wanted to ask you this question. Maybe Dim or Jordi: is that problematic? Is it too consensus to own the same coins, or is it so early in the bull market that you just want to hold the most consensus bags? Do you have any thoughts on that?
I mean, we are mimetic herd animals in crypto, and it always happens that people have the same bags. It was like SOL, LUNA, AVAX, and people like to have a basket that everybody gravitates toward.
It's good and bad. The bad part is the P/E ratios start to get ridiculous because everyone's bidding up the future so hard. Hype has done tremendously well, and Lighter has done tremendously well. Their buybacks have started to become such a tiny impact on the price because we're pricing in 100 years of revenue at this point.
It does start to worry me: are we getting near local highs, and what happens when things go sideways? I do feel like Zcash is one that, even if you look at the last 7 days, is the worst-performing asset. Generally, assets like this are so reflexive. I've talked about Zcash on the way up, but once it starts to stabilize and people slowly fall off, it's like flies just dropping because, one by one, they don't get the dopamine they need to keep alive, attaching to the light bulb.
I don't know what your plan is. I don't want you to round-trip it all the way down.
It's inevitable. It's okay.
But that's why I asked if you're still kind of Texas hedging, as in, keep buying. When do you think you're selling this bag? If this thing goes to $800, are you going to keep buying more? Is there a stop-loss on this trade? How are you thinking about it?
Yeah, the way I view it is, I think getting past the $1,000 level is very important. If we lose $1,000, I think a lot of people are looking to buy $1,000 and say, “Oh, this is the perfect retest,” but I think that would be bearish. Mentally, my stop-loss is 3-digit Zcash.
But you said “mentally,” so there's no stop-loss set. It's just—
No. Yeah, yeah.
…contemplating it.
So there's a chance I wake up to $300 Zcash, and I'll take my shirt off again.
And where are you trying to get out? What is the— I know you just got married, but where is the wife-changing money for you?
Wife changing.
I don't know. Always marry your bags.
But I think people look at me crazy when I say $20,000, $30,000 Zcash, but I do think that over the next couple of years, Zcash will actually compete with Bitcoin in terms of narrative inflows. I'll definitely sell on the way up. I've mentioned before, like $3,000, $4,000. I mean, above $2,000, I'll probably start selling and stuff, but—
I do think this is a little reminiscent of Fartcoin—the target being $10. It was—
I'm getting flashbacks.
Yeah. I think you have to close the perps and hold the spot. I think that's the move.
Yeah, but I need to farm Variational points, you know?
Who here has held or is still holding Fartcoin? Are there any Fartcoin holders?
Oh, that guy.
Okay. Oh.
There’s someone who understands what you’ve gone through on that one, so hopefully it’s going to be different.
Yeah.
3. The Token Launch Drought
We were talking about how there are no new tokens. This year, we really haven’t had any—even a $1 billion TGE, let alone anything that’s going to make it into this top-10 chart. Justin, are you hoping to change that? What’s—
We are. So I’m—
Who’s boss?
… head of product at Variational. We have announced that we’re TGEing in Q4, and it’s very exciting because I do think we are the only substantial TGE of this year. We’re going to have that crown on our heads, and we’ll have that legacy to live by.
It’s super exciting. The process leading up to the TGE—we’ve been building toward it for months, actually years now. Growth has been pretty steady at about $4 billion-plus of daily volume, most of that from TradFi perps. So I think we’re really well-positioned for the TGE. We’re super excited to get the token out there, and we’re doing the largest airdrop that we know of in crypto history: 1% more than Hyperliquid’s 31%. We’re doing 32%, so that’s our claim to fame.
It feels like every year around this Q4 period is when we get the new DEX token launching. It’s been several years now where the biggest launch—Hyperliquid—
Yeah.
—Lighter, now Variational. Of course, in the past it was dYdX. That was a huge one at the time.
Yeah.
It launched around $15 billion. The playbook is written, so good luck with that. It does feel a bit sad, though. There’s been nothing huge coming out.
One of the other topics we want to talk about is why the huge companies aren’t doing tokens. We’ve had things like Base talk about potentially doing a token, but that hasn’t happened yet. Kraken is planning to do Ink. I think that one will happen for sure, although maybe in 3 to 6 months, so there’s still some time left on that one.
And then Polymarket—I think Shayne was onstage, but there was no announcement, even though he was hinting that there was going to be some kind of POLY token. So maybe these guys just IPO and don’t do a token. Dim, have you been talking to these big companies? Are they scared?
I think it’s a very, very tricky spot they’re in. For the ones that are already public companies, let’s say Coinbase, it’s not clear that launching a coin is conducive to the equity at all in any meaningful way. It might actually hurt the stock.
So I think the optimal strategy for them is just to keep promising a coin that potentially may come to drive flow to Base, because as soon as they get a token out, we’ve seen this story before: as soon as the token is out, farmers just go to another chain.
I think in the case of Polymarket, the options are a little bit broader. They’re not a public company, and they need to raise capital. They can deploy the coin first, then kind of have this sense that it’s a bit of a pseudo-equity play. I think they have more options there.
But for something like Coinbase and ARK, I think they’re in a very tricky spot, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how ARK performs into their launch.
The next big step is actually seeing what happens around the token launch.
There’s always a lot of optimism when someone plans a token. Even Hunter Biden had a lot of optimism about his token before they launched, and inevitably it feels like that optimism turns into something going wrong and just hurts the brand.
These companies are already in the decabillions in terms of their traditional equity valuations. Do they really want to take the risk? We’ve talked briefly about Kraken and what they’re doing. I do think they’re actually going to go through with it and try to pull another BNB, where they create enough utility for the token.
But generally, if you also have equity holders, there is an inherent battle over whether more cash is flowing to one or the other, and you can easily just switch the dial. How are you doing it? I love tokens, and I feel like they will make a comeback, but I can understand the hesitation these companies are having.
Yeah.
I actually wanted to ask you a question because I’ve been farming Ink over the past year, and at this point I have zero expectation. I kind of expect the token not to trade that well, to put it nicely. Do you think Ink can actually succeed if they TGE? I guess it kind of depends on what they do, but—
We were pitched the vision.
What’s the vision?
I don’t want to speak too much, but they have a really big vision for how they incorporate everything together, from asset management to trading, to making this a new wealth platform. It’s very interesting, and I think it’s going to be an interesting one. I feel better about this than other upcoming—
It will potentially be similar to BNB, where it’s being used across different parts of the ecosystem. But even with BNB, the fact that you can use BNB for fees, and people are paying with a token instead of dollars, does take away actual cash from the equity side of the business that is depending on those trading fees.
So you are making a sacrifice. Now, for a company like Kraken, will it be useful for them to have a big valuation token associated with them on their balance sheet? Is it worth it for them to sacrifice 20% or whatever of their cash flow? I think it might work out, and it’ll be exciting to see.
4. AI Coins Find Their Narrative
The other thing, of course, that people have been talking about is AI coins. Pearl is one that’s coming up in a lot of conversations. On the previous episodes, I’ve been shilling all the AI coins, and Grass has done well—it’s doubled since our last episode. Near, obviously, has multi-X’d. Even Worldcoin is starting to pick up the slack.
I think as we get into more OpenAI IPO time, it’ll continue to do well. Have you guys been hearing about Pearl? It seems like this—
Yes. Am I the only holder onstage of Pearl currently? Maybe we don’t want to say. I’ll tell my story.
I just came from Korea, and I was asking everyone I met, “What projects are you excited about? What’s hot? What’s new?” The most common response I got was Pearl. I’d never heard of it. I looked it up. It’s quote-unquote “AI Bitcoin.”
It’s not necessarily important what it is or what it does, but I started to research how you actually buy this thing. It’s only listed on the sketchiest KYC-free centralized exchange. I think it’s called Safe Exchange, something like that. You can only put small clips in and take them out, but it’s a real big process to buy it.
So my thinking is that the second it gets a listing, it could do quite well, just because there’s so much friction to purchase it right now.
Every trader dinner I go to, everyone’s shilling me Nock. I don’t know if I’m exit liquidity or if there’s something—
It’s still early. It’s still early.
It’s definitely very early in this network. We’ve done a decent amount of work, and we’ve talked to the team a lot, obviously. They are an exceptional team.
But they’re facing the class of issues that any proof of chain network can face, right? They have about $1 million of inflation a day, right? That amount of money cannot be sold safely into the market. Maybe it can be sold OTC.
So when the exchange happens, you’re betting that demand will exceed supply, and it has to do so over a prolonged period of time to give you a good move, right?
I think supply is doubling over the next year, so it’s very inflationary—
Right.
Very risky.
I think this category of monetary asset is coming into vogue. Obviously, Zcash is literally just a monetary asset. There are no cash flows associated with it.
So we’ve had, in essence, a barbell once again, where the pure cash-flow assets are doing very well—your Hyperliquid-type assets. On the other end, the mid-curve is the L1 tokens, which thankfully none of us are still holding—
I finally—
Well, let’s say—
Hopefully, I exited the mid-curve.
But on the other side of it, you have these pure memetic assets that are trying to create a distribution where the monetary premium itself is a large network effect. Zcash, now getting up to at least $22 billion of FDV, has taken a step up.
I think Pearl is another one that’s similar. You’re mining it, and for those who haven’t been following it, the idea is that instead of proof of work, it’s proof of useful work. They’re using actual AI inference compute to mine it on the side.
Hopefully, eventually, once all the chips are using it and mining it on the side as a freebie—because why not? You’re doing the other work anyway—it will become the most secure network. That in itself will be able to create enough memetic force.
So it's an interesting one. I do think that people are starved for AI economy assets, and this is one to keep an eye on. Hopefully, it'll become easier than buying it off some sketchy—
OTC, right?
That's the edge right now, though. That's the only reason why I bought it. It's very hard to find.
Yeah. No, I heard this argument that maybe Zcash is a left-curve play with sprinkles of right curve. And, like, Pearl is also—oh, Bitcoin AI, wow, the great narrative, maybe a great bull-market narrative. It's also a left-curve play with a right sprinkle of right curve, and maybe that is the perfect spot for a bull market.
Yeah.
It's a good recipe for bull-market coins. What did you say, Jordi? We gotta give you your salad and toss a little burger in as well. You gotta make it entertaining.
You gotta make it entertaining.
Yeah.
And I think what's gonna happen with these assets is there needs to be some improvement over the current proof-of-work type of things, where you have a bunch of miners, usually in China, that are just throwing their super-low-electricity miners at the coin of the day, and they just rotate to whatever coin is hot. They take those tokens and dump them on Justin, wherever they can find him. Like, all the—
Yeah.
—Justins of the world get dumped on, and that's an economy that kind of works. That's cool. I think the opportunity with something like Pearl that we're looking at is, how about instead of just those guys mining and dumping, why don't we democratize access to mining for everyone in DeFi, everyone on-chain who wants to participate around the world? That feels like a much better version of this, so hopefully that'll come together, and we'll create a way to mine it. So, yeah, watch this space.
Watch this space. Yeah.
Do you wanna go to one of the other topics we had?
Yeah, we can move on to the crabification that you wanted to talk about.
5. Crypto Keeps Turning Into Crabs
So our old Steady Lads friend, Mr. Thickie Thought, posted this, and it got us all thinking. Apparently, throughout nature, everything becomes a crab. And even though crabs look like these animals that don't make sense—how can this be the apex evolutionary animal?—somehow, throughout history, just everything seems to become a crab. It's something about the lateral movement, whatever it is.
So he's saying the same thing with this carcinization is potentially happening with short-form video and monetary variants of bets. We are starting to see that no matter what people try to build, especially in crypto, I'm seeing all these founders that have been trying to do, you know, let's hedge ETH gas, or let's hedge this thing, these interesting products. And then they realize that actually, the only fucking thing that works is just quick dopamine-variance distributions, and the only thing that works from a social media standpoint, or any kind of media, is clips that just shorten your attention span.
And I think, Justin, you and I might be wanting to debate a little bit, but is this sort of inevitable? Are we just ending up with a bunch of short-form video content creators, like the Razmers of the world, getting power and just being the trader celebrities?
There's this new question—I think it's the biggest question that's going around these conferences: are traders the new celebrities? We've got the Coinbase trading competition that Taiki's hosting. We hosted a Variational trading competition, but I just wanna point out, I don't think anyone that's not sponsored by FOMO has ever said that traders are going to be the new celebrities. It just hasn't happened yet. So I don't know. I'm gonna take another side on this one.
But I guess, people like Ansem, right? He has over 1 million followers. He's kind of transcended CT, and my friend Jez has this theory around long degeneracy, where, as real returns compress, people look for financial speculation to truly make it, and the only way to do so is via gambling. I feel like we always talk about this, right? In crypto, you either wanna own the casino, which is like BNB, Pipe, et cetera, or the best casino chips. And I fell into—
—the mid-curve trap of Ethereum-based DeFi—
Yeah.
But—
I think that casino analogy has served me so well in my career in crypto, and the reason that I always have a mental construct for what crazy shit is going on in the space is I just go back to my days in the casino. I'm walking around, and there's the roulette guys over there. They like to just bet the numbers. And you got the guys who like the dice, and the guys who like blackjack, a bit more studious. They wanna study the numbers. You got your Chinese—they wanna fold the fucking cards and—
The different kinds of crabs, actually, right?
Hit the nines. Huh?
The different kinds of crabs that you find.
They're different kinds of crabs, and they're all crabs. And I think, like—
Oh.
—what I've realized is that in crypto, you have a similar thing where people just gravitate to certain games, and that's the games they like to play. Some people like to be in the trenches where new coins are just being made up, and it's just a picture with a fucking catchphrase, and it's just attached to an influencer or not attached to an influencer. That's one game; they don't wanna play the other games. They just want—
But, Jordi—
—they just want that game.
I'm not one of those crabs. I'm not longing meme coins. I'm buying things like Pearl. It's very different.
You're a blackjack guy. Okay.
Yeah.
That's fine.
Counting cards.
You can be the blackjack guy.
Yeah.
But I think one of the games that I've always realized is the TGE game. Some people just love betting on those first few days of a TGE, and no matter what junk is TGE-ing, there will always be a market for a new listing. Inevitably, that'll get some people attracted. I think the memecoin game is another one where it's a segment there.
And insofar as we're talking about trader celebrities, there are a lot of people who like the game where there are real human personalities involved, and they wanna ride them up and ride them down. We saw this with Leopold in TradFi as well, where just the amount of attention and people trying to follow and read the tea leaves, and of course the inevitable downfall, which was very crypto-like in nature—
Yeah.
—came as well. What do you think, Tim?
Yeah, I think the more I'm thinking about this, celebrities actually are the ones that are transcending this crab game. And the ones that are still in this game are the crabs.
Yeah.
Everyone wants to evolve away from it, but the only way to evolve from it is to become a better crab. So I think that's kinda how it works. The ones that transcend this become the lobsters, and people are just focusing on the lobsters.
The lobsters. Oh, my God.
And that's kinda how it works.
Yeah. You're the lobster.
I'm the lobster.
You're the crab.
Jordi's a lobster.
I'm the wannabe lobster. So, in terms of people liking to follow these stories of not just the tokens but the personalities of the people making and shilling them, and more the personality—the face behind the token—obviously, we had Ben Pasternak as one example, where it was this ridiculous combination of the crypto founder and the influencer girlfriend filming every fucking private jet and every Birkin bag that he was buying her every time the price was falling.
And it feels like that's become a meme in people's heads now. And then your—is this your pasta, or am I already—
We'll get—
Okay. We'll get—
We'll get to it. We'll get to the pasta. Yeah.
We'll get to the pasta.
And I feel like the evolution of crabs, you can kinda see this with the pure ETH maxis. I think David Hoffman of Bankless was a solid ETH maxi, and now he's actually a fantastic trader, right? Even Eric Conner, a die-hard ETH maxi, said, “You know what? Screw this. I'm buying Bonk coin,” you know? And I feel like everyone just becomes a crab. You know—
What about Tom Lee?
Tom Lee—well, he did mention that after he gets to 5%, what is he gonna do? He might go out the risk curve, right? Well, there are some rumors about this, and, yeah. So, look, let's think about this. He's reaching 5%. He just needs a couple hundred million, I think, to get there. I think he has $400 million in cash already on the balance sheet that he can deploy somewhere else.
I think what he has in his head is how to increase ETH per share and how to make this bag that he has accumulated worth as much as it can. And the rumor in the street is that the idea now is, like, how do I use this power that I've kind of created for myself to kingmake projects in the ETH ecosystem and support my original bag? So, let's see where this goes, but—
I feel like this is the left-curve version of what Paradigm had.
If you guys remember last cycle, Paradigm was the big ETH holder. They had probably a similar amount of ETH, maybe 5%. I don't know how much they had. But in essence, what they were doing was, they secured the bag, same as Tom Lee has secured the ETH bag, and then they're just working to see how they can support this bag. So Paradigm was the right-curve version, where they were getting into Ref and rewriting the Ethereum code—
Yes.
You know, going into Uniswap and making v4, making sure it's good, and putting a bunch of LP liquidity into it. How else can we make Ethereum look good? And then you got Tom Lee, who's literally just trying to maybe blast a bunch of Aave and other coins, and maybe that's going to work better because Paradigm seems to have given up at some point. Maybe.
He's a supporter of Worldcoin, right? I think he bought the orbs for that—
Yeah.
Or was a co-sponsor of that, so maybe he does similar stuff for other coins. I don't know. But something interesting that's coming out of this is that ETH is losing the bid that it had from BMNR. As Tom Lee's starting to focus on BMNR itself, maybe there's an interesting kind of pair trade of long BMNR, short ETH, or something interesting like that. Or you short ETH and long ecosystem assets that are interesting in anticipation of him doing partnerships and stuff. I don't know, but that's something that I'm looking into right now.
We're going to be reading the tea leaves and trying to figure out where all this free money is coming from and where all the ATM money is going to go.
Yeah, it sounds like Tom Lee's also becoming a crab.
He's definitely a crab with the little hair on top.
Yeah. He's crabbing it up.
Do we have time for pastas? Let's do pastas.
Yeah. So I forget who's first. Oh, yeah, this is mine. It's crazy how a tiny sperm can turn into an unprofitable crypto trader. Thank you for laughing, by the way. I think it was funny.
One guy got it.
Yeah. I got one guy.
It's weak. Weak pasta.
It's weak? Dude, I don't know. I thought it was hilarious. It is pretty crazy how that one tiny thing can become us.
Why are you talking about unprofitable? You're the outperformer lately. I mean, I saw—
For now.
This tweet from Evan saying, “Who would've thought that Dave Hoffman and Japanese GCR would be the 2 top traders of this cycle?” I mean, kind of incredible.
All right, next one. Oh, this is yours, Justin.
6. Prediction Markets Enter Perps
Oh, yes. My colleague Han Soler posted, “I heard from the barista that Kalshi did $500 million of coffee sales today. Incredible stuff.” This is kind of alluding to Kalshi's perps scandal. I guess it turns out—I don't know if they admitted it or if it just became clear through some of the data—that a lot of the volume on Kalshi was, let's say, not organic. I think there was just a few million dollars of OI and a ton of wash trading. Fun fact: we were actually going to host a perpetuals competition with Kalshi, but they unfortunately pulled out at the last minute here in Singapore because of everything that's going on with their perps platform.
Prediction markets are still something that people seem to want to keep putting money into. It seems like the rounds are getting ever bigger.
Polym market closing
Well, their prediction market platform is great, but the perps, I don't think, have really caught on just yet.
Yeah.
Are you feeling the little competition, Justin? You want to make sure—
I don't really think we feel competitive. We're just kind of in a different league at this point, so we don't—
Oh, really? Okay.
Yeah.
Okay. All right.
Great prediction market platform.
Yeah. Actually, one thing I wanted to ask is, obviously, we have prediction markets trying to enter perps, and now Hyperliquid has HIP-4. I've met some builders trying to build for HIP-4. Do you think that will be a success and that could drive the next leg higher in HYPE? Because I think we all talked about the valuation, right? Maybe that's too mythical, but—
I've talked to some of the builders this week that are deep into the Hyperliquid ecosystem, and obviously HIP-3, even from personal experience, is clearly just a monopoly structurally. So HIP-4 is not much better. It feels like it hasn't gotten much traction yet because the user interface isn't really what the prediction market degens want. As a fit, it's nowhere near what the perpetuals fit has been. And then HIP-5 is going to be the options, maybe what's coming. But it seems like Hyperliquid has done one thing exceptionally well, which is this core perp product. These other things, like the EVM and all those other pieces, haven't really materialized, even on the stablecoin side.
I think definitely the trend we're going to see in Q1 is a lot of these perp platforms exploring options. I do think it's going to be very challenging for them if they're trying to recreate the order book on-chain, but it's something we're looking at—bringing our RFQ model to options and just porting that TradFi liquidity on-chain. I think the next market that we're all going to be competing over is really going to be options. So we'll see.
Yeah. All right. Next pasta with Dim.
Oh, okay. This was a funny one from the trenches. For the ones that don't know, Orbio was a coin that was deployed on Robinhood Chain. It actually did super well. It was a crypto and AI coin, and it got to $100 million. It was trading pretty well. Everyone was very happy about it—kumbaya. And then the founder goes and follows ProsperityTime, which I guess is a luxury watch concierge. The token—I think this was actually kind of in the middle of the move—dropped about 50% in a couple of hours.
Actually? Wow.
If you're believing in the founder and then you see that he's suddenly following—
We've seen this—
You kind of—We've seen this before many times in crypto, where founders just make a little bit of money. I don't know if this guy clearly just followed an account—this poor guy. But we've seen so many founders go and splash money as soon as their token goes up that I think it was an instant reflex for people to just think, “Oh, it's going to go from another Birkin for Evelyn to another Patek for Yash.”
Right.
That's the next evolution.
It reminds me of the DAO. DAO governance is really just, “Does the founder get a red Lambo or a yellow Lambo?”
Yeah. All right.
I saw this one, and those of us who have been watching the show for a long time know that we like to sometimes play with ADA and Charles Hoskinson. He's even come on the show gracefully, and we've had fun with him as well. But I couldn't believe this one. I saw this very recently. OpenAI and Anthropic are infamously in this discussion of whether they should slow down the progress of AI, and Charles totally just tweets, “I'm calling on all blockchains to slow down.” And Charles says, “What do you think I've been doing for the last 5 years?”
Good sport. He's a good sport.
Yeah.
I love that at least we can laugh at ourselves sometimes, and I think Charles has managed to become a multi-billionaire through just ADA and the community there. The fact that he can laugh about this is great.
Yeah. Turn magic internet money into real-world assets, right?
Real-world asset. For sure.
That's the real RWA meta.
Someone has to do the other side, right? We're bringing assets on-chain. Someone has to bring them off-chain afterward.
Yeah, you're right.
7. The Next Crypto Cycle
In the last 5 or so minutes, do you guys want to just go down the line and share what we're optimistic about for next year in crypto? Do we think the bull market's kicked off again? Are we good to go?
So maybe you can start, Darren.
Yeah, sure. I think we're going to keep having this kind of dispersion between incredible assets and the rest of the market. I think it's a natural maturity process of any market. I think Bitcoin will have its day. Last year, we were talking about why Bitcoin was—and this was before Tencent—underperforming gold so hard. Then Tencent happened, and obviously this kind of unraveled.
I think we need the gold narrative to be picking up for Bitcoin to have a sustainable move up, so that's what I'm looking for to identify the next leg of all this. But I'm broadly bullish. I think we've put in the bottom at $60K, and I'm just looking for interesting points to reenter. I don't see assets being super cheap right now for me to do that, but I'm looking for spots to be strategic and enter.
Yeah. I'm pretty selective. I think a lot of assets, to your point, are just very fairly valued, or even overpriced, or trading at very high multiples. Bitcoin, I'm a little concerned it didn't go down enough to really experience a really energetic bull run like what we had last cycle. We only went down about 50%, so I wouldn't be surprised—
Only down 50%, guys.
Well, before that, it was 75.
Oh, yeah.
So it's another 50% decline.
Yeah. It felt like a pretty big decline when it went from 110 to 60 in a month to me, but yeah.
Fair enough. But yeah, I think so. I think Bitcoin will do okay, but nothing too incredible. And I'm excited about assets like Zcash. I think Hyperliquid's expensive, but obviously a very good product there.
But I think there's going to be something new in the AI crypto realm. We've all been—
Yeah.
…saying that for a few years now, and I think this could be the year where something kicks off there. So I'm looking for the next thing.
Yeah. I guess my view is that the markets are getting smarter over time, and the things that are going up are going up for the right reasons. Perhaps in previous cycles, people got rewarded for not believing in things, for selling every pump, and for the whole financial nihilism thing. But maybe this cycle you will get rewarded for believing in the right assets. If you hold the wrong coins, you'll probably get wrecked, but I'm pretty optimistic. Perplexity is—
You can always say that the right assets will do well because, in retrospect, those are the right assets. But—
I think the coins that will go up will go up.
Exactly. That's my thesis.
I guess the way to make it more useful is just think about what are the crabs. What is the crab shape in which things will just keep naturally evolving to? And if we can predict that, Mr. Thicki will have blessed us with quite, quite a good thought.
Yeah. My own feeling is certainly that the bottom is in. I do feel like speculation is back on the menu. I like that Robinhood bought 25 million of BTC. It's not a lot, but just the fact that they're adding to their balance sheet—we haven't had those headlines in a while, so it does feel like things are frothing up.
I saw the Fear and Greed Index is at 70 now, which a few months ago was 9 or 10 out of 100. So I think we're in a better part of the cycle. There are some people who got sidelined thinking that we were going to perfectly match this four-year cycle that was going to hit the bottom. What was it supposed to be? Like—
Yesterday, I think, was the one-year bottom.
…supposed to be the bottom.
Yeah.
So obviously we've accelerated that, which I think is very expected. Things should evolve a little bit; otherwise, it becomes way too predictable. And yeah, staying long. So hope you guys enjoyed. Thanks for coming up to us. We get so many of you telling us you love the podcast. Keeps us going. We try to do it as often as we can, so we'll keep it going for you guys, and see you at the next one.
Thank you, guys.