You are not bullish enough, with rasmr
- rasmr’s highest-conviction framework is to front-run the next meta-rotation rather than trade isolated opportunities. If a position cannot plausibly generate seven-figure P&L, it interests him less; the larger opportunity is identifying the game everyone will eventually play, then owning its infrastructure and leading assets early.
- Tokenized equities could become crypto’s next major vertical because they give anyone with a wallet access to assets previously gated by geography, banks, and brokerage accounts. rasmr calls the combination of meme coins and tokenized stocks “one of the end goals” for crypto. The trade extends beyond individual stocks to launchpads, exchanges, DeFi protocols, and social applications capturing the resulting volume.
- The STONK-versus-PUMP contest will be decided by ecosystem alignment, visible winners, and product design—not feature parity alone. STONK’s use of Raydium, Backpack, and other Solana-native protocols may attract ecosystem support, while PUMP retains superior liquidity and a deeply entrenched sub-$100,000-cap trading culture. “Social capital” matters because retail buyers follow leaderboards, public P&Ls, and owners they recognize.
- rasmr thinks this cycle could be more bullish than prior cycles precisely because its early price action broke the old four-year template. He cites a roughly 53% decline rather than the customary 75%-80%, an unusually early bottom, and muted 2023-2024 altcoin performance; if the bottom holds, he argues the remaining upside may be larger, not smaller. His deliberately extreme conditional markers are Zcash at $10,000 or a $100 billion-plus valuation, HYPE at $1,000, and PUMP at $20 billion.
- L1 tokens should be valued as money and long-duration platforms for onchain activity, not merely as claims on today’s fee income. Buyers of SOL and ETH are underwriting an onchain economy that might eventually host hundreds or thousands of successful applications; rasrm explicitly stops short of claiming Solana itself must survive 100 years. The investable question is which networks capture a decade of growing onchain assets and activity, not how many billions their applications earn today.
- For smaller portfolios, the edge is rapid rotation plus disciplined profit extraction—not repeatedly going all-in. Turning $5,000 into $500,000 does not justify putting the entire $500,000 into the next $10 million-cap token; rasrm recommends preserving profits while sizing aggressively only at high conviction. “Realized P&L is much more important” than a leaderboard screenshot because holding and exiting life-changing size are separate skills.
- NFTs may return as sticky ownership instruments tied to businesses, revenue, and community privileges rather than simply as illiquid pictures. Their earlier strength came partly from holders identifying with a Bored Ape, CryptoPunk, or a penguin and refusing to sell; future versions could represent a scarce ownership tier alongside a liquid fungible token. Failed experiments such as ERC-404 do not invalidate the broader idea that buybacks, coins, and NFTs with ownership or income rights can coexist.
- The episode’s unifying claim is that attention and social consensus move before financial statements or institutional allocation. Crypto-native traders can recognize shifts in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and consumer technology before slower capital arrives; Meta is offered as the public-equity analogue, using distribution and execution to capitalize once a product category proves demand.
1. Meta-rotations matter more than isolated token trades
rasrm opens with a blunt filter: “If I can’t get to seven figures P&L from something, it makes me much less interested.” His goal is to identify the next dominant rotation before it becomes the game everyone is playing, because that is where capital and attention compound.
Unipcs is his example of the dynamic: he was early to Robinhood-linked rotations, which brought in rotation capital. The broader point is to identify the rotation before it becomes consensus, not simply to trade one token after everyone else arrives.
The host accepts the sequencing but adds an important market-structure point: base equities often move first when risk appetite returns, whereas scarce onchain coins reprice much faster once capital arrives. The host cites Cash Cat’s move from roughly zero to more than $200 million, followed by a flurry of other successful coins, as an example of the rotation.
2. Tokenized equities extend the stablecoin logic to productive assets
rasrm’s core premise is that crypto exists to give “anyone in the world access to any asset they want to trade,” regardless of birthplace, bank account, or brokerage access. Tokenized equities fit that ethos because an internet connection and wallet can provide access to shares previously unavailable to many people.
He compares the opportunity with the performance of stablecoins and expects tokenized shares to develop similarly. The attraction is access to what he calls some of the most valuable assets in the world, not merely another speculative token.
The investor opportunity is wider than the shares themselves. Launchpads, Solana DeFi, exchanges, liquidity venues, and discovery products can all benefit from the resulting activity; rasrm therefore views meme coins plus tokenized stocks as “one of the end goals,” not a passing narrative.
3. STONK and PUMP are competing for different forms of liquidity
rasrm’s STONK thesis begins with ecosystem alignment. Unlike PUMP’s vertically integrated stack, STONK works with Raydium, Backpack, and other Solana-native infrastructure, creating more reasons for ecosystem participants to support its success.
The host’s speculative flywheel runs through the FOMO leaderboard: if Pump.fun rose to the top and helped STONK displace competing PvP markets, consensus and volume could shift rapidly. The host compares this with BONK and PUMP, where BONK briefly appeared to hold roughly 80%-90% of the volume before PUMP took it back.
The host’s pushback is the right one: no challenger has yet held market share against PUMP, whose capital and engineering resources allow it to copy successful features. rasrm concedes that the contest will remain PvP; his answer is that social allegiance and ecosystem alignment are harder to reproduce than product features.
Product segmentation also matters. PUMP is optimized for frenetic sub-$100,000-cap trading, deep liquidity at tiny valuations, multi-wallet activity, and fast exits. rasrm argues that community-oriented projects may fit a BONK-style launch better, while different launchpad styles and tax or token mechanics could create distinct markets rather than one launchpad serving every scenario.
4. Solana DeFi may finally capture value beyond SOL itself
Earlier Solana cycles rewarded SOL but rarely its application layer. rasrm recalls MAPS, OXY, and other early DeFi tokens as failed or venture-capital-backed experiments, while the following cycle again left many buyers preferring the base asset over ecosystem tokens.
The setup is different now because Jito, Jupiter, Kamino, and other core protocols completed their TGEs in this cycle and have had time to demonstrate continued activity. Solana offers low fees, near-instant transactions, strong retail ergonomics, and—by rasrm’s account—spot volume that has already surpassed many major centralized exchanges.
Tokenized equities could deepen that activity and finally make the application layer investable. The question becomes: “How do you get access to the main Solana infrastructure, and which teams do you want to support?” That is a broader opportunity than simply owning SOL.
The host presents airdrops as an underused catalyst. He names Axiom, GMGN, PUMP, and other trading terminals as platforms whose rewards could stimulate early activity in new tokens. He compares this with the Jito and Jupiter airdrops; rasrm’s example is Hyperliquid, where users were active from roughly early 2023 before the late-2024 distribution—about two years, not instant gratification.
5. Social trading is a contest between focused discovery and X distribution
The host argues that if X enabled one-click trading whenever someone posted a ticker, he could earn “an infinite amount of cash” from the resulting volume. X already owns the audience and the conversation around stocks and crypto, giving it an obvious wedge into transaction flow.
rasrm’s answer is that this would not necessarily kill standalone social-trading applications. Users visit X for many different purposes, while they enter dedicated trading applications specifically to discover assets and trade. Filtering the full X firehose into actionable financial information is itself a scarce skill.
Current apps still have an unresolved discovery problem. Leaderboards show who is rich and what is viral, but a clean timeline often does not contain enough information to judge why a token should succeed. The durable product must combine identity, social proof, research, execution, and incentives—not merely display the loudest P&L.
6. This cycle’s early bottom supports much larger conditional targets
rasrm rejects a one-to-one comparison with 2020, 2021, 2023, or 2024, though the closest analogue is the first DeFi expansion. Stablecoins and tokenized equities represent new verticals capable of attracting institutions, retail, and developers simultaneously, leaving no established ceiling for valuation.
The price structure itself is his evidence: the market bottomed earlier than the usual fourth quarter, declined roughly 53% rather than 75%-80%, and—if the recovery persists—produced “the shortest bear market in crypto history” and its smallest major drawdown.
He also characterizes 2023-2024 as muted beneath Bitcoin: BTC roughly doubled its prior high, while ETH and SOL moved only around 1%-5% above theirs, with most standout returns concentrated in PEPE, WIF, and other memes. An early, shallow bottom plus underperformance elsewhere becomes the argument for a more aggressive next leg.
The explicit conditional outputs are intentionally startling: Zcash at $10,000 or above $100 billion, HYPE at $1,000, and PUMP at $20 billion. rasrm compares Zcash’s setup to Bitcoin’s 2017 move from roughly $1,000 to $19,500—not as certainty, but as an example of how rapidly a simple monetary narrative can reprice.
7. SOL and ETH carry monetary premiums, not earnings multiples
rasrm disagrees with the claim that major L1s deserve lower valuations because their current revenues are insufficient. “They were never valued on revenue”; holders buy SOL and ETH partly because they treat them as money and partly because they expect these networks to host a much larger onchain economy.
Today, perhaps only PUMP and a small group of trading applications have produced exceptional revenue on Solana. If hundreds or thousands eventually do so, the future SOL economy bears little resemblance to the present one; fee schedules, inflation, and value capture can also change as the network matures.
The host presses him on whether Solana will exist in 100 years. rasrm’s correction matters: he is not claiming that particular survivor with certainty; he is saying that if Bitcoin can endure as digital money and capital continues moving onchain, investors should consider the long-duration value of whichever L1s ultimately win.
8. NFTs could return as scarce ownership layers around liquid tokens
rasrm admits he was “terrible in NFTs.” He passed on CryptoPunks below roughly $5,000-$10,000, had 8 ETH but chose to pursue lower-capitalization opportunities instead of Bored Apes, and missed Moonbirds, Azuki, and major Solana collections despite correctly expecting NFTs to flourish on Solana.
That experience eventually clarified their advantage: illiquidity can strengthen community commitment. Owners became attached to “my damn Bored Ape,” CryptoPunk, or penguin and did not want to sell; that shared reluctance produced a stronger holder culture than highly liquid coins often sustain.
His new thesis separates a broad fungible token from a scarce NFT ownership tier. The coin supplies liquidity and open participation, while NFTs could confer direct monetary compensation, special rewards, property rights, or partial business ownership. Buybacks would remain useful; the two models need not replace one another.
ERC-404’s failed hybrid experiment is evidence of immature implementation, not a final verdict. As tokenized equities, RWAs, stablecoins, and onchain businesses proliferate, rasrm expects “a lot of creativity” around NFTs—including art—although he is candid that he does not yet know which assets to buy.
9. Small accounts possess a rotation advantage if they bank profits
rasrm says he is focused on trading CEXs and the blockchain. He calls this the highest-risk, highest-reward approach: a smaller portfolio can exit quickly, jump between narratives, and remain concentrated in the market’s most productive asset without the constraints of a larger position.
The apparent sequence—Ansem, Cash Cat, PONKE, and later trades—can look like repeated 100x wins, but rasrm emphasizes that these rotations happened successively. A trader did not need every position simultaneously; the real advantage was moving from one emerging consensus to the next.
His sizing example is load-bearing: after turning $5,000 into $500,000, putting the entire $500,000 into another $10 million-cap token is irrational. Preserve life-changing gains, then continue playing low caps with four- or six-figure allocations only where conviction and liquidity justify them.
Crypto can reward obsessive participation because tiny market capitalizations and social-consensus loops can turn small sums into millions quickly. rasrm still calls the process “very difficult” and stressful; time in the market is an edge only when paired with risk control.
10. Community coins need an external narrative to reach escape velocity
There are now too many tokens for every community to sustain the old promise: “I don’t care if it goes to zero; I’ll keep buying and posting.” A committed holder base remains necessary, but it is no longer sufficient when many groups compete for the same attention.
WIF is rasrm’s best specimen. Early holders accumulated below roughly $100,000, tolerated enormous unrealized gains, and pushed the meme beyond X through actions such as putting the hat on a dog. Bloomberg, TradFi traders, and unrelated communities could then understand and remix it.
The larger lesson is that a token needs an external story—Robinhood users, a founder promoting a product, another recognizable use case, or a meme adaptable to current events. Retail traders often spot these attention shifts before venture funds because they are inside the culture rather than waiting for quarterly reports.
11. Meta shows why distribution and narrative can outrun current models
The host’s Meta thesis is based on its enormous installed distribution across consumer platforms. If open-source AI approaches closed-model quality, he argues, the final gap may matter less than the ability to place a capable product instantly in front of billions of existing users.
The market had evaluated Meta incorrectly as a company spending heavily on AI without owning the best model, yet the host says that spending also improved advertising and net income. As Meta AI gained traction and reached the top of the App Store, the stock moved from roughly $660 to $777 in a week—his example of a narrative regime changing before every result is visible.
The host calls Meta’s keynote almost an Apple copy. rasrm’s defense of Zuckerberg is pragmatic: Meta may not originate every successful format, but it repeatedly executes once demand is proven—Instagram, Stories, Reels, a TikTok-like feed, and now an AI assistant positioned against Siri.
This is the same trading model crypto rewards: identify a shift in social consensus before it reaches financial statements. The host’s Chris Camillo comparison makes the point explicitly, while rasrm adds that assets such as SpaceX are valued partly for what collective belief says they may earn in the future, not merely for current income.
12. Bitcoin and HYPE are the long-duration institutional trades
Asked for one position capable of tripling wealth by the end of 2028, the host debates HYPE and Zcash; rasrm offers Bitcoin as the safer candidate. He still thinks BTC’s move may be slower, while Zcash could reach $20,000 and then fall back to $4,000 within that horizon.
His comparison is gold: rasrm says the asset rose from about $2,000 to $5,500, while the host adds that gold’s market value rose from roughly $15 trillion to $30 trillion within a year. Bitcoin near $55,000-$60,000 represented about $1 trillion, leaving traditional buyers a simple catch-up thesis against digital gold.
HYPE offers a different institutionalization path. rasrm describes early airdrop recipients and crypto-native holders distributing life-changing eight-figure positions while TradFi accumulated gradually; through much of 2026, he says, the chart looked like an uneven but persistent rise rather than one parabolic event.
USDC’s presence on Hyperliquid, Coinbase’s custodial partnership, regulated-platform integrations, and Trade.xyz’s stock and commodity activity all broaden the valuation beyond crypto perps. rasrm personally bought roughly $200,000 around $20 in January 2025, endured repeated collapses, and sold his last pieces near $58—proof that being right was neither obvious nor easy.
13. New protocols monetize leverage, useful compute, funding, and compliance
An unnamed venue offering up to 1,000x leverage appeals to the same psychology as a $10,000-cap coin: a small stake gains a tiny probability of a transformative payout. The discussion describes a token earned through losing trades, with treasury revenue potentially returning to stakers—an incentive tied to the observation that most leveraged traders lose.
Pearl is described, deliberately crudely, as “AI Bitcoin.” Instead of proof-of-work computation merely consuming electricity, its “proof of useful work” would direct compute toward AI tasks. rasrm believes inference is likelier than decentralized training, but repeatedly hedges that he may be wrong and wants to speak with the team.
Ethena monetizes another structural imbalance. During bull markets, aggressive demand for leveraged longs pushes funding toward shorts; Ethena takes the offsetting short exposure, captures that funding, and returns the income to USDe. rasrm expects tokenized-equity perpetuals to expand the same opportunity.
Backpack represents the regulated-first counterpoint to Hyperliquid. It pursued licenses, KYC, exchange infrastructure, and institutional connections before moving further onchain; rasrm invested and says it is one of the few protocols where users can currently exchange tokenized real-world stock shares, with cash settlement. He sees it as a potential beneficiary if the Solana-equities thesis works.
14. Survival depends on realized P&L, cold custody, and exit liquidity
When a reported Bitget hot-wallet incident surfaced mid-recording, figures between $251 million and $350 million were mentioned, with rasrm also recalling roughly $300 million. The episode’s useful distinction is structural: hot wallets enable rapid access but remain internet-connected; cold wallets keep private keys offline and reduce the accessible attack surface.
rasrm’s preferred long-term setup is a device that has never touched the internet, stored away from the owner’s residence. Even hardware-wallet customers have suffered personal-information leaks, so operational security includes both key isolation and preventing an attacker from linking identity, address, and assets.
On the leaderboard debate, the host contrasts unipcs’s roughly $12 million unrealized gain with Frank DeGods’s $3.3 million realized result. rasrm gives the “aura” decisively to realized P&L: unipcs might extract perhaps $4 million-$6 million from the BONK position, but would need to cut aggressively because of limited liquidity. Displayed value and executable value are “not remotely similar.”
The final exchange points toward a coming test of how large onchain positions can be exited if tokens again reach multibillion-dollar valuations and later gain major listings. The transcript ends while the host is beginning to discuss the possible volume and derivatives that could follow, so the consequences are left unresolved.
Full transcript
Yo, yo, yo. How is everyone? I hope everyone had a good week. We’re back for another episode of “Market Bubble.” We’ll speak about a lot of things happening on markets today: cryptocurrency, technologies, stocks, all sorts of [bleep]. With me today is rasrm, a young legend in the flesh. Not so young—you are quite young. How old are you?
26.
26. Yes, you’re young, bro. You are young.
I hope everything is fine. I feel like the markets are moving, so we have a lot to talk about. I feel like everyone must have done well over the last few weeks or so; the shares have been doing pretty well. So, where should we begin? What have you been looking at, bro? What have you been doing?
I’m just completely obsessed with stocks. I’m not interested in trading anything else. Maybe I have grown too much, you know? Maybe I’ve grown a little too much, but for me, if I can’t get to a 7-figure P&L from something, then it makes me much less interested.
I think that’s exactly how I am. I know I’ve grown a little too much, but I think that if you can get ahead of the meta-rotation strategies, that’s how you print. If you can identify the meta-strategies before they become the main rotation that everyone is playing, that’s the best way to become rich. Everyone is obsessed with playing these meme coins, but how have all these people earned so much money? How did unipcs become number 1?
That’s from BONK, right?
He was early. He joined the Robinhood rotations, and it brought rotation capital. That’s the kind of bet I’m on. I still do it now, but specifically with stocks.
Yes, that’s good. I agree that in the early stages of a bull market, when capital is starting to take risk again, it first starts moving basic stocks and then starts moving on-chain coins. But when on-chain coins start moving, they move so fast and become overvalued because the supply of coins that are actually worth buying is limited.
When a lot of money is looking for new opportunities, these things become very aggressively overvalued. We saw this in the early stages, I think, with Robinhood. After Ansem, I think it was Cash Cat [?], which rose very rapidly from $0 to more than $200 million. Then we saw a flurry of different coins that performed well.
BONK, I think, made it much easier for people to trade because they think, “Oh, I was sad about Cash Cat. I missed you, Ansem. I missed BONK.” I know that meme coins and launchpads will continue to sell well. I also know that these things print money.
I don’t think people who said Solana wouldn’t have an answer to Robinhood had the full picture. Solana has already been dominating blockchain activity for several years. I also think STONK has been able to use the meta of tokenized stocks and meta-meme coins.
I feel like an underestimated reason why STONK is flourishing is that they’re buying shares of many major Solana DeFi protocols. It’s not just this new launchpad; they collaborate with Raydium and Backpack. For example, Solana helps all these projects continue to evolve. The Solana Foundation realizes that the thesis about tokenized stocks is extremely important for the future of cryptocurrency.
I like what Nathan said: that this is the end goal in cryptocurrency—meme coins and tokenized stocks together. I think this is definitely one of the end goals. If you look at how stablecoins themselves have performed over the last few years, I think we’ll see something similar with tokenized stocks.
The whole spirit of cryptocurrency is to give anyone in the world access to any asset they want to trade, regardless of their origin or whether they have access to a brokerage account or a bank account. All you need is an internet connection and a wallet.
The thesis about tokenized stocks obviously agrees with this, because people who aren’t in the United States or abroad and don’t have access to these shares can easily buy them. If you can buy tokenized shares that represent assets on-chain, then you get access to things you’ve never had access to before—and these are the most valuable assets in the world.
This is definitely a trend in which cryptocurrency is very unique and beneficial for global trade. It’s also a great trend for retail traders who trade on-chain or are trying to find opportunities with new protocols that contribute to this transition.
Yes, I think this is truly a wonderful position, to be honest. Is there any reason why you’re so optimistic specifically about them? There are many different platforms for tokenized shares. They’re kind of like launchpads.
I know they do some cool things, like taxes, fees, and so on.
Right, 100%. The other day, late in the evening, I almost went crazy because I looked at the FOMO leaderboards, and unipcs was on top of the world. He was number 1 on the FOMO leaderboard.
I just couldn’t get this thought out of my head. I thought, “Dude, the day will come when unipcs loses $5 million, and he won’t be number 1 on the FOMO leaderboards anymore.” I thought, “Okay, if this is the new unipcs, then a new person will appear with a dynamic narrative, get rich, and everyone will follow them in a broader sense. That will be the largest goal.”
So I looked at Pump.fun and Solstice. They seemed to be rising, and I just thought, “Okay, I think this is it. This will be it.” The reason is that a large part of the trenches on-chain occurs at the boundary of these low market caps.
For example, if a ticker starts on Pump.fun and is paired with SOL, but then another one starts pumping and is also paired with SOL, which one of them will win? The PvP market for these coins continues until it finds consensus, and then the winner gets the entire volume.
I thought, “Okay, if Pump.fun becomes number 1 on the FOMO rankings and helps STONK displace these PvP markets, then it will be like a slingshot, and STONK will receive a huge fraction of the volume.”
You saw it first with BONK and PUMP, where one day BONK happened to have all the volume. You could see the graph: it looked like 80%, then 90%, 90%, 90%. Then one day PUMP just took it back, and it became PUMP again.
When it comes to STONK on Solana, I think that at the end of the day, if you’re in a low-market-cap asset—if you’re going to buy PUMP or STONK and you can at least somewhat believe that STONK has an advantage and will win—then, if the market reaches that consensus, Solana just wins.
I just think this isn’t priced in, and I don’t know how anyone else can take this from Solana. I think Robinhood has its own really good narrative, but now that STONK has a narrative on Solana, it has all these whales who are ready to buy meme coins, hold them, and receive dividends.
There are especially big names such as, you know, Pump.fun. I don’t want to start glazing people, but there are some other people who are truly rooted in this culture and believe in it. They aren’t going to buy shares of another launchpad. That consensus matters, especially in low-market-cap companies.
Yes, I think the social-capital component in this battle for chains is exactly what people don’t calculate properly. If STONK has all these people, these new KOLs, receiving lots of attention for their P&Ls, that adds a momentum effect to many of these trades.
I see this in many things throughout this cycle, where people publicly have these positions. Because they have those positions, new retail traders say, “Oh, I should buy that coin—the person who owns it made millions and millions of dollars.”
I think this is an advantage that some of these new low-market-cap assets will have when they reach escape velocity. If you’re a new retail trader coming into cryptocurrency and you’ve never traded any of these coins, then you either start building positions or you develop FOMO.
The leaderboards have the best performers and ultra-high profit-and-loss figures. If you don’t know the difference between any of these coins, the first coins people are going to buy are the ones where they can easily see who is making money on them.
I think that happened with DOGE around 2020 and 2021. It became so viral on Robinhood that everyone just bought $1, $10, or $100 worth. I think something similar is happening with social consensus in cryptocurrency. It’s an intangible thing that adds market value to many of these assets because of how viral they can become.
So I definitely don’t disagree with this. That makes sense. My concerns and opinions about the various launchpads are that there hasn’t been a launchpad that has been able to take down Pump.fun; it’s still dominating.
I was thinking about whether a new launchpad will be able to do this sustainably. As you said, BONK flipped PUMP a week or so ago—something like that—but as far as we know, they aren’t doing it now. There’s no volume.
These new launchpads don’t seem to have gained market share. So I wonder how STONK plans to differentiate itself, because the Pump team obviously has a lot of capital and might add many of the same functions that the guys from BONK can add and build.
I think the social consensus around which coins people want to support will be the most important factor, certainly. Honestly, I think the main difference between the guys from BONK and Pump now, as I already said, is that STONK uses Raydium. They use some of these other native Solana protocols, whereas Pump is the whole stack.
That is obviously much better for their business, but I think it is also harder for them to get support from other people in the ecosystem. So this becomes, in a way, a PvP situation. I think we saw PvP back-and-forth between Pump and BONK, and we will continue to see it with upcoming launchpads because of how competitive they are relative to their income.
But I find that Pump’s product is actually something different from BONK’s in terms of how users interact with tokens. On Pump.fun, you get a place in the queue, you will be sniped, and you are tracked by everyone. These guys like to trade below $100,000, they like to use multiple wallets, and they like to trade in large volumes. They don’t like it when they are sniped.
That is why Pump.fun is really good: these low-capitalization coins have really good liquidity for low-capitalization assets. You are not getting rugged, and you are not taxed. This is a separate game, right? It’s like if Elon tweets about an animal or if something like that happens.
But when it comes down to actually creating a community, for example, if you are talking about an altcoin community such as Zcash—the Zcash community is Zcat—then it is much more logical for it to be a Bonk launch than a Pump launch. This is what I have been waiting for for a long time: different launchpad styles and token platforms that actually change the way users interact with them.
There has been so little of all this until now. Am I wrong? I like it. I think the anomaly consisted more in the fact that we only traded Pump coins.
Because now that you implement various mechanics, it is like, okay, different types of coins for different types of scenarios. So I just think that new opportunities will appear here in just a few months, and the market is clearly not considering this possibility.
Yes, definitely not. I mean, they are now earning, for example, $1 million or $1.5 million per day. They burn a bunch of tokens. We’ll see. I mean, tax tokens—I like it.
Messi, this is a comment on the Solana ecosystem. Do you know Messi, Chad’s agent?
Yes, I talked to him. He is a GOAT. He is a super-smart guy, but he lost a lot on Solana in the past cycle.
I tried to get him to buy Solana and buy coins in the Solana ecosystem nonstop. I was like, “Bro, this makes much more sense. They are much better positioned than Ethereum this cycle.” Both he and many other OGs missed it very badly.
I think what we see now is that some of the people who resisted meme coins last cycle are now open to them. We have a whole group—I think most of the capital on the blockchain—that simply did not buy meme coins. Many people called me a fraud, and now they write long theses about memes. Many people said that Solana was a fraud, and now they are very optimistic about Solana, Solana DeFi, and the Solana ecosystem.
I think that bringing more people into crypto during this cycle will also attract much more capital into these games. If you think about Solana in general, Solana has always only done well with SOL. SOL outperformed many other L1s in 2020 and 2021, and also in 2023 and 2024. But you never saw any Solana DeFi or Solana infrastructure projects do well.
It has been like this since the creation of Solana. If you remember the early days of the Solana ecosystem, there were projects like MAPS and OXY—what else? No, no, no, there were a lot of Solana DeFi projects that were not successful at all. They were, in fact, venture-capital-backed scams.
Then, in the second cycle, when Solana had acquired a certain level of popularity, there was a lot of attention around these coins, also because of the incentives, so many people just bought SOL. The Solana DeFi coins also did not succeed in that cycle.
I think the last cycle was similar to the meme-coin cycle. Meme coins stimulated a significant part of the activity, and teams that were basically the main infrastructure for SOL did their TGEs in this cycle. Jito did its TGE at the end of 2023. Jupiter did its TGE at the end of 2023, and Kamino also did its TGE in this cycle.
Now we have had some time in the market where you can see that Solana DeFi protocols, I think, will still be around for a long time and will contribute to a lot of activity in the ecosystem. This is the dynamic that many people, in my opinion, ignored during this Solana DeFi cycle.
For example, Solana is a much better place for retail trading and a much better place for institutional trading. You get low fees and almost-instant transactions, and Solana already surpasses many major centralized exchanges in spot trading volume, which is quite crazy. You will see this trend continue to grow, and it will be on an upward trajectory with all these tokenized stocks.
That is why I think this will happen. Then the question is: how do you access the main Solana infrastructure, and which teams do you want to support? Last cycle, I remember that at the beginning there was something in the cycle like airdrops.
Yes, yes, they stimulated a significant part of the activity. What happened to that? We don’t do airdrops anymore?
I do so many every day. Brother, I think all the trading terminals—and Pump, too—were the ones that made a lot of money last cycle and did not do airdrops.
I mean, if Axiom, GMGN, and some of the most popular platforms did an airdrop, that would stimulate very early activity in new tokens, because that is where all these traders use these terminals. If the terminals did an airdrop, that would be a huge incentive for traders, just like the Jito and Jupiter airdrops stimulated a lot of activity last cycle.
I think it will happen. I think the teams are trying to be strategic about it, but we will definitely see competition that stimulates a lot of this activity. When people want to acquire users and want them to remain on their platforms, that is when you see these airdrops happening and early supporters being rewarded.
I think Hyperliquid is definitely the best example of this. They did a huge airdrop for people who had traded on it for about 2 years, but people somehow forget that it took a long time for them to do the airdrop. Hyperliquid’s airdrop was at the end of 2024, and I think the users had been active since about the beginning of 2023. So, actually, 2 years had passed before they did their airdrop.
That can definitely be a wonderful catalyst in the future.
Do you think this is the cycle when it will work? You saw this social-trading X-type product that allows people to trade from other exchanges and things like that?
Yes, I saw it. I think it is something like a springboard to a larger product. I think it is pretty cool, but I am not really sure why this is useful if you have to use another application.
I agree. I said the same thing. I’m like, brother, if they earned so much money, they would build the same kind of thing. As soon as someone publishes a ticker on X, you could immediately trade that ticker with 1 click straight from the timeline.
Think about how many more users X has compared with these social-trading applications, such as Pump.fun. There are apparently infinitely more people on the internet, and I think the product is already on X.
I think the reason X has not gone deeper into this is that they know a lot of discussion around stocks and cryptocurrency takes place on their timeline. People are talking about these financial matters there, but it is very difficult for people to sort through all the information on X and go directly to financial content.
I think that is exactly why, even if X allowed social trading directly from the timeline, the social-trading applications would continue to do well. People come to X for a bunch of different things. People come to these social-trading applications exclusively to trade and study which coins and stocks to buy.
I think the ability to sort through all this information on X, where there is so much information, is a skill that not many people possess. So even if they engage in trading on the timeline, I think the social-trading applications would still perform well.
But, as I said the other day, this stuff with challenges, which FOMO and Pump currently have—for example, imagine that you got a share of the commissions from trading volume through tickers posted on X—brother, I would print an infinite amount of cash. An infinite amount of cash.
I am already receiving an allocation of advertising revenue on X right now, just for—
Is this a FOMO show? Is this something on social media? You say it is simple, that this is what will happen in social apps. But isn’t this a thesis for them to seize power?
I think X has a wedge that it can use. As I already said, if I could get some reward from trading volume through X, I would make much more from this than Pump.
My audience is specific to trading, but I really think the thesis around social trading will continue to spread. This is hugely meaningful. I think it’s a real thing that these platforms haven’t fully opened up or figured out yet: discovery.
Many of the timelines in these apps simply don’t contain enough information for people to make reasonable decisions. It becomes a simple question of who earns the most money and who goes viral: “I’m going to buy this coin because this person is going viral.” But I think the part around creation and discovery—figuring out which coins will actually be successful—requires access to the right groups of people. To some extent, that still hasn’t been figured out.
Which stage of the cycle do you think we’re in?
Everyone wants to compare this cycle with a previous one, but it seems to me that this is 2023. I don’t know whether that’s overly optimistic. Some people think it’s 2024.
To be honest, I don’t think it’s possible to make a clear comparison with any previous cycle. For me, the closest comparison would be the explosion of DeFi that we had in 2020 and 2021, when it was the first time billions of dollars moved on-chain through ETH and the other L1s.
You’re going to see something similar now with stablecoins and tokenized shares. Tokenized shares are a completely new vertical in cryptocurrency, and whenever you have a completely new vertical in cryptocurrency, that’s when you see the most speculative price action. There’s no reason for there to be a ceiling, because nothing like this has ever happened in crypto before. It attracts institutional capital, retail capital, and developers who are going to create different things.
I would say that this is closer to 2020, but I don’t think a one-to-one comparison with any previous cycle is particularly meaningful, especially because of where we reached the bottom. There has never been a 4-year cycle in cryptocurrency where we hit bottom this early.
The reason all the original developers and crypto natives were caught so off guard is that we still thought we would reach approximately $50,000, or something like $38,000, because we usually reach the bottom in the 4th quarter. In every cycle before this, we reached the bottom in the 4th quarter. We fell much less than approximately 50%—a lot less than the approximately 53% decline we saw here, compared with the 75% or 80% declines we usually experienced.
This was the shortest bear market in the history of cryptocurrency, if we continue to grow from here, and the smallest drop in the history of cryptocurrency if we continue to grow from here. I think that says it all about why you shouldn’t look at this cycle the same way you looked at previous cycles. If that’s the case, the price action is literally different. The fundamentals are literally different. The structure of how people participate in the blockchain—as institutions and as retail investors—is completely different.
If this is the thesis, you shouldn’t try to compare it one-to-one with any previous cycle in cryptocurrency. You should think, “Okay, if we reached the bottom earlier and fell less, do we have to grow more than in previous cycles?”
That’s where I am now. I think this cycle will actually be more bullish than previous cycles, especially because 2023 and 2024 were so muted. During 2023 and 2024, the only coin—or the main currency—that clearly overcame its historical high was Bitcoin. Bitcoin approximately doubled its previous all-time high from 2021, but ETH was about 1–5% higher. Solana was about 1–5% higher.
Most of the profitability was in meme coins, such as Pepe and WIF, and in many things on Solana’s blockchain. But there weren’t any altcoins that really performed well. Even the major currencies didn’t perform particularly well.
If you think this cycle is less aggressive, that we reached the bottom of the cycle earlier, and that more capital will come into cryptocurrency, then there’s a clear thesis for why this cycle has to be more bullish than previous cycles.
So, if that happens, isn’t it Zcash to $10,000, HYPE to $1,000, and PUMP to a $20 billion market cap? Isn’t that what you have in mind?
Yes, that’s exactly what I have in mind. I think I said this a few weeks ago: when I first started engaging with cryptocurrency in 2017, Bitcoin traded at approximately $3,000. When I first bought cryptocurrency at the beginning of that same year, Bitcoin traded at $1,000. By the end of 2017, Bitcoin traded at $19,500.
Zcash is in a very similar situation. I think it can aggressively run up into this territory—approximately $100 billion or more. The best trades in cryptocurrency have always involved the outperformance of a select few assets that were able to approach the $100 billion mark, like ETH after Bitcoin.
The thesis around Zcash is simply very easy for people to understand. It makes sense to both retail traders and institutions. I think that’s a key factor for the assets that will perform best in this cycle.
If that happens with Zcash, it will already look like madness. People will see that cryptocurrency can come back and that Zcash can flourish. When that happens, you’ll see more people become interested in these other assets.
I also think PUMP is one of the best trading opportunities of this cycle, because I believe it’s one of the best sources of income in cryptocurrency for many years. We know that meme-coin trading isn’t going anywhere. We know that social-commerce trading isn’t going anywhere. PUMP covers several different verticals now, and it’s still not that popular a trade.
For example, a revaluation from $3–4 billion to around $5.5 billion isn’t much. I don’t think many people understand this. Honestly, many people are trying to catch up to the trading platform, along with many other players such as bonds and stocks. But now it’s clear that people understand the income is real and isn’t going to disappear.
If you want to take a long position in things in cryptocurrency that generate money, you can see that HYPE is doing very well.
What other things can you take long positions in with this thesis?
I think PUMP is one of them. But yes, I’m extremely optimistic. Can you hear me?
Yes, yes, I can hear you. Have you seen Tulip King talk about base-layer blockchains that aren’t money being valued lower? So, SOL and ETH—I disagree. Do you agree with this?
I understand why he says that, and this is partly why my thesis last cycle was ETH versus Solana. I thought ETH was a much less efficient L1 than Solana, and it made sense for Solana to catch up with Ethereum in relative value.
But the reason I think he’s mistaken about his thesis on the decline of ETH and SOL is that they aren’t valued based on the amount of income they generate. They’re never valued by income volume. People who buy ETH and SOL don’t buy them because Solana generates a certain amount of income. They buy these L1s because they think they’re money, which is the same reason people buy Zcash: they think it’s money.
They also think the cryptocurrency market will grow so much during the next decade, or however long, that you want to own the L1s where all this activity will happen. For example, if you look at how cryptocurrency developed as an industry—Bitcoin since 2009 and ETH since 2014—and you think it will still be around in 100 years, then you need to expand your time horizon.
So Solana will exist for 100 years?
I never said that. I thought that was madness. I mean, if you’re extremely optimistic about cryptocurrency and you think Bitcoin will exist in 100 years, just as gold has existed for thousands of years, then you must also believe that whatever L1—or whichever L1 wins this—based on the crypto thesis of moving capital and assets on-chain, you should think the same thing about these L1s.
These assets will exist for a long time, just as the most successful companies will continue to exist for a long time. When you think about how they’re going to acquire this value, you can’t look only at what’s happening today.
Look at Solana today. How many programs on Solana have generated $1 billion in revenue? Maybe one—PUMP. Maybe if you take into account all the trading terminals, Jupiter has generated good revenue. But it seems that not many companies have achieved extraordinary success on the blockchain.
If you think there will be hundreds or thousands of these companies that achieve extraordinary success on the blockchain, then the SOL economy can have much more meaning in the future than it does today. These L1s can always change how many fees they charge, how activity affects the base L1, and how much inflation there is. All of these things can be changed.
But I think you can't predict what the future will look like for activity on the blockchain. And that's exactly why these things require such a high premium. This is not because they receive X amount of income today. It's as if we think there will be a lot of blockchain activity, and these platforms on which it takes place will benefit.
This is amazing. You're so optimistic, and I still haven't heard anyone who was optimistic in a long time. It seems to me that the 2024 cycle was really interesting, but it was very nihilistic compared to 2021. Everyone was like, “It's all meme coins. Why not just trade a dog, you know?”
You're bringing back some of the reasons for a bullish mood toward real blockchain. This is interesting. We need people who are extremely bullish on cryptocurrency to make it all make sense, brother. If people aren't seriously bullish on cryptocurrencies as a technology and aren't taking a long-term perspective, none of these coins will grow, brother. They'll all simply trade at $10 billion market caps, which is normal. I don't think so.
I don't think this is the part of the market that will disappear, but I think you need to see how everything may look. So, yes, I'm very optimistic, bro.
Do you have any NFTs? Have you already bought some NFTs?
No. When I joined cryptocurrency, it was 2021. When I started getting involved in blockchain, I liked the Bored Apes. I saw them somewhere around 1 ETH, and I thought, “I only have 8 ETH. I'll try to play low capitalizations,” and I just missed all the best NFT plays.
I didn't get into BAYC, I didn't get into Moonbirds, and I didn't get into Azuki. So I just wasn't rich. I played those stupid whitelists.
That's why I don't really like it. It reminds me of the time when I lost—the time when I saw everyone else on Twitter earning so much money, and I just couldn't get in. So no, I don't like it. I think it's funny, but I was terrible at NFTs, doggy.
I was told to buy CryptoPunks when they cost less than $10,000. Maybe they even cost less than $5,000. A lot of people in crypto advised me to buy them, and I was like, “Brother, why should I buy this ugly picture, this damn CryptoPunk? I don't want to have it.”
I missed a lot of NFT pieces. When NFTs appeared and were being sold—I think that was in 2020–2021, whenever it was—I thought, “Oh, me too. I think NFTs are going to do well on Solana.”
Even with that thesis, people said, “There's no chance NFTs will do well on Solana.” But they definitely would. If you think DeFi will take place on Solana, and you think on-chain activity will take place on Solana, NFTs will also take place on Solana. Everyone said, “No, that definitely won't happen.” And even with that thesis, I missed everything anyway.
I was buying them, damn it. I tried to create Degen Ape Academy. I tried to become a monkey. It was one of the first things I tried to create, and I messed it all up.
Then Solana Monkey Business—I missed it. I missed the biggest NFT drop on Solana because I tried to create one first. And then I think SMB was second. They finally showed up.
I had something crazy called Kreechures. They were one of the first NFTs on Solana. I can't remember the name, but I had something in my mind like, “I had it, and then I sold it.” They were called Solarians, I think. Yes, Solarians. They were these ugly works, but they were one of the first NFTs on Solana, and I liked them.
At the time when Solana exploded for the first time, I started very early to use all these DeFi things and all these on-chain applications. I was one of the first users of many of these platforms. The damn Solarians were one of the very first collections. Kreechures and Solarians were two of the NFTs on Solana, but they never achieved anything. They never reached success.
There were also Avrias. But at the moment, NFTs are the shit I'm interested in. I understand that now, but I missed how much NFT creation is about communities of people who are extremely passionate about something.
NFTs have much more difficulty with sales than coins. I think part of the reason NFTs were priced so highly in 2020 and 2021 is that there was much more difficulty with selling, and people felt that there was a community around them that also didn't want to sell.
It's the same with these leading applications for social consensus: they make people not want to sell because there are all these other people who also became rich on a million dollars, and they don't want to sell either. They know that if someone sells, it can cause a cascade. If everyone holds together, the floor could be much higher.
NFTs were like this, although not in the same way as coins on a market-cap table. I think a lot of these NFT projects were able to achieve such high valuations because everyone thought, “I'm attached to my damn Bored Ape,” or “I'm attached to my damn CryptoPunk,” or “I'm attached to my own damn penguin, and I don't want to sell.”
I think we're now in a period when the pendulum has shifted completely in the other direction. People are like, “NFTs are shit. They all went to zero. They're useless. We'll just trade coins because they're much more liquid, and at least I can sell them when they fall.” So the pendulum has shifted in that direction.
I think what will happen with NFTs in this cycle will be similar to what happens when tokenized equity shares appear on blockchains and people build new protocols around them, such as tokenized shares, RWAs, and stablecoins. I think it will increase the number of interesting projects that have a speculative aspect, as well as the number of businesses that appear on blockchains and are able to capture this activity.
I think NFTs can actually provide people with partial ownership of these different businesses. I think you'll be able to exchange them back and forth with coins. In the past cycle, we saw the nonsense with ERC-404, which was something like a hybrid NFT-token standard. It didn't work.
But I think the thesis that NFTs are like a special class of ownership for these coins, this community, or this business—that you have tokens that everyone can hold and exchange between them, while holding the NFT gives you certain special rewards—is interesting. So what do you think? Does this replace buybacks?
No, I don't think this replaces buybacks. I think they can both exist simultaneously. I think an NFT could be another way in which you can split the income of a business. Essentially, what buybacks are trying to do is convince people who hold the token that some part of the income from this business benefits the token owners.
But you've seen this with Pump.fun. There were so many people who traded on the Pump.fun platform who didn't care about keeping the token, even if they traded in the app all day. Pump.fun earns, what, $1,000,000-plus per day, and half of that goes to buybacks, but it doesn't benefit many users of the Pump application because they don't actually own the PUMP coin.
I think this speaks to the different types of users of all these platforms. There's a smaller segment of users who actually care about benefiting from the underlying business they trade or use, or whatever. If you have an NFT where part of the income goes to them—something like direct monetary compensation—then you have a way to create multi-level communities.
There are people who own the coin and simply care about its growth, and there are people who own NFTs related to the business who really want to benefit from it and have property rights and partial ownership. That's what's interesting, in my opinion.
I don't know why no one has done this yet, or maybe people just didn't understand how. But I think people are going to do a lot of creative things with NFTs this cycle. I think even art NFTs will return.
We saw that thing with Jack Butcher do pretty well. He launched something for about $88 through X Money, and that was good. I'm optimistic about NFTs, but I don't know what to buy.
I bought some I and Identity MD [?]. I bought a few of them. Surf, a CryptoPunk dude, is building something like a startup playground, something like a swarm of agents. But I think there will be a lot of experiments during this cycle.
Yes, they did FWA. We just need more experiments. FWA doesn't seem to have worked, but, you know, what kind of app is this? I'm holding it in my hands now. I don't think so. What is it? It's something like 60 emails [?]. Yes, I'm fine. I got up a little, but—
Yes, I agree. I think FWA is still a cool option. It's also very early. How long has it been since FWA was launched? How long has it been?
Something like 3 or 4 months from the bottom of the crypto market. We're still very, very early. We're just starting this whole thing with blockchain. There are people who don't even know that cryptocurrency is growing. For example, if you ask a random person on the street, they probably don't know what price Bitcoin is currently trading at.
Dude, honestly, I know everyone talks about Solana, about Zcash, and about pumping Bitcoin. I would say that social apps will develop, so I'm focused mainly on blockchain. I think there will be more inflow of funds into blockchain itself thanks to apps.
I mean, it's a lot easier to trade on these applications than anything else from the last cycle, by a mile. So, I agree. That's why I think I'm just trading on CEXs and then on the blockchain. That's all.
That's really amazing. Damn, this is madness, but it's fire. I like it.
I think a lot of people underestimate how, if you trade exclusively on CEXs and on the blockchain, you can do this if you're plugged into the market 24/7. You can do this if you come in very quickly and get out of a position, or if something changes, you can sell and exit because another narrative appears.
If you're going to be completely on-chain, which, in my opinion, is the biggest positive moment, by the way, you can be in the most productive asset all the time and rotate your capital very aggressively. That's how you outperform all the other retail traders.
It's actually an advantage of having a smaller portfolio, because you can be very flexible with your positioning. You can switch between different narratives. I like that, but it takes a lot of mental effort to do it well, and so many people can't do this.
Okay, but I definitely agree that this way of trading is the highest risk, but it's also the highest reward.
You can benefit from that. For example, there are people who are now up 100x on Ansem, up 100x on Cash Cat, up 100x on PONKE, and up 100x on other things. Obviously, you can't get each of them to 300x all at once, but people could play all these trades. They didn't happen simultaneously; they happened successively, one after another.
I also watch how you trade. I think you're good at setting aside part of the profit. What people get wrong in on-chain trading is that they try to put everything into their new position and do everything again with a new one.
For example, if you turn $5,000 into $500,000, you don't have to invest all $500,000 into some low-capitalization coin with, for example, a $10 million market cap. That doesn't make sense. But when you can determine your position size based on your highest conviction, while working with low capitalizations and continuing to take four-figure and six-figure positions, that's how you win on-chain.
It's hard. That's a lot. It's very difficult. It's stressful, but I know it's a great situation if you have the time for it. That's why I'm very optimistic about cryptocurrency in this cycle, because there are people who realize, “If I literally spend more time trading these coins than anyone else, I'll outperform everyone else who's doing this. I can literally earn more than $1 million in a very short period of time.”
That happens, or I think it will only happen in cryptocurrency. With options, I think it's more difficult, simply because you don't have the benefit of using social-consensus formations and various rotation games.
With options, I think it takes much more skill to turn small sums into large sums pretty quickly. But because the market capitalizations of these coins are so low, you seem to be able to connect a lot of rotation games very well.
What do you think about meme coins on-chain? I know that the last cycle was a really big thing. People believed in these memes, such as Smoking Chicken Fish or WIF. Do you think that's all still relevant in this form? Because personally, I'm not very optimistic about it.
A lot of people like it, but it's just not new to me anymore. That's why it's hard for me to see something of that size.
Yes. I think the reason why this worked before is that all these people were so passionate that they didn't want to sell. We have many more coins now than we had at that time, when coin communities had very strong demand, and it's hard for people to have that same mentality.
People used to think, “I don't care whether the price of this coin falls to zero. I will buy X amount of it and write about it continuously. If it falls to zero, I don't care, because I correctly sized the position. But if it goes up, I know that I will benefit from everyone else who bought it and writes about it with me.” Then the community flourishes.
But I think there are so many memecoins in this cycle that it complicates the situation. I think the thesis is that any meme coin, attention coin, or brand coin can achieve success. I think that also concerns a lot of new technological plays.
When you have coins launched at a market capitalization of $4,000 or something like $10,000, you will see some of them transform into billions when you have a degenerate group of holders or people in the community who simply refuse to sell for the first small profit. That will always be true.
It's just a lot harder now to get people to have that kind of collective faith, because there are so many coins. A lot of people were angry with me at the beginning of this cycle. They were like, “You should have remembered the XYZ community,” or, “You should have mentioned this community, which has been around for X amount of time, instead of remembering what you decided to remember.”
I think people underestimate the fact that, for each separate on-chain coin that attracts attention, you need more than just an existing group of holders who constantly talk about it and publish posts. You need some external way for the coin to attract more attention—something that promotes it.
An external narrative, right? That's what the Robinhood Chain is. The external narrative is that Vlad is going to promote this product, and Robinhood users will join it. What kind of narrative is there for a community-only coin?
Yes, that's 100% true. I think that's what happened with many previous coin communities. WIF is a very good example. The community of early WIF holders—the OGs—was probably one of the best meme-coin communities in the early stages. I think PEPE was very good too.
The guys from WIF were crazy. They were starting from a market capitalization of less than $100,000, and they sent me private messages showing their unrealized PNL. They just held through ever-higher prices. It was absurd.
But the reason WIF worked is that this community was so aggressive. They didn't just post messages on X; they also did things personally and did things outside X and in all these other places. They did things like putting a hat on a dog. It was some kind of trick they used.
It became so viral on X and outside X that Bloomberg picked it up, and the guys from TradFi picked it up. All these people who trade stocks were asking, “Oh, what the hell is this?” They picked it up and asked, “What is this?”
One of the reasons why it worked so well is that the coin could be plugged into other communities and existing narratives. What the guys from WIF did really well was make the hat into a meme for other things. Anything that happens on X or on social networks can use that hat. We can put hats on things, or we can somehow tie other things to the meme, and people will laugh at it.
I think that's why it was able to achieve a certain escape velocity. It's definitely interesting. I think there is no real method of attracting attention outside the main group of people, but that's how all these coins on the blockchain do well.
It's so funny that last cycle we were so naive. It seemed like everything we needed—the only thesis you really needed to make a lot of money in the past cycle—was that Solana was better than Ethereum and that people liked meme coins.
Now I think this cycle will be more complicated. For me, the last one was so free. This cycle could also be easy if it finally turns into just HYPE and Zcash. Right?
Maybe it's the same thing. Brother, I think this is very easy when narratives reach consensus at a very early stage, the price action aligns, and they are easily understood by people outside cryptocurrency.
There is a reason why, as you said, HYPE, Zcash, and VVV are aggressively outperforming the whole market. It’s because they’re very easy to understand. They’re real. First, Zcash is very strong and retains value. HYPE is a great business. VVV solves a huge problem for AI, and it seems very easy to understand these things. You don’t need to complicate it.
I think the last thing I said was as if I was beating the table about Solana. For months, I was like, “Dude, this shit literally can’t not go up.” That was madness. People weren’t aware of it. It was extremely unpopular and countercultural to say that Solana was better than Ethereum. For some time, it was like being the enemy number 1. It was madness. They hated me. It was absolute madness.
The funniest thing is that cryptocurrency actually applies to many different things. For example, retail trading in cryptocurrency makes a lot of sense. Retail traders are individual traders who earned their own money in the market, and they’re indifferent to the opinions of other people, venture capitalists, or anyone else. They see these things and see how these trends are occurring before anyone else does.
People who were optimistic about Bitcoin in 2009, 2010, and 2011 were called 99% morons. People who were optimistic about Ethereum and thought that DeFi—decentralized finance—would actually work, that billions of dollars would appear on the blockchain, and that protocols would emerge that were better for managing finances than existing traditional platforms were called backward. People said, “This makes no sense.”
It was the same with Solana. People who were optimistic about Solana, a blockchain that could process 1000 times more transactions, at 100 times lower cost, and scale much better than Ethereum, were also called backward. It’s crazy, but I think retail trading was what led many of these trends.
This wasn’t like venture capitalists saying, “Yes, we got into Solana at $8. We got into Solana at $20.” The reason this is beneficial for us in cryptocurrency is that if you can outpace venture capitalists and get ahead of institutions—and you’re right, they have much more money than we have, billions and billions of dollars—you have a real advantage.
With Bitcoin, we preceded them. It’s like digital gold, a digital form of money. Now you have ETFs buying everything at the same time. You have high-income people buying it at the same time and allocating 1% to 2% of their portfolios to Bitcoin. That’s why it’s above $100,000 when 2 decades ago it was almost zero.
That also applies to memecoins. It applies to new businesses that are formed on the blockchain. You’ll see much more capital going into retail trading. That’s not where you were when there wasn’t consensus. When everything in cryptocurrency becomes consensus, only a few assets flourish, and no one owns them. That’s why you see price dynamics like Zcash. That’s why it reached $1500 in a few weeks.
Yes, interesting. I wonder if we’ll see the emergence of new alternatives at this level, or if that will ever happen.
Yes, in the new cycle, this will definitely happen. Let me think. Probably VVV is like that now, because VVV was below $100 million at the beginning of this cycle, it seems.
Have you ever looked at the LEND chart? Do you know LEND? Before Aave became Aave, Aave was LEND. That’s exactly what it was called before the name change. If you look at the AAVE chart around the middle of 2019, you’ll be able to see how low it was before everything went crazy. I think it was still called LEND at that point.
What do you think about launching coins on Pump.fun? It seems like they don’t hold on for very long. Do you think the launchpad is more optimized for volume among low-cap memecoins because it receives higher commissions from larger volume, or does it want bigger players?
I think it’s a balance. I see 2 different communities, brother. I think the reason Pump.fun has this negative perception among many people on CT is that many of those people trade high-market-cap coins. They say, “Brother, we can’t make money on these coins that stay below $100 million.”
But then there are buyers who trade these new coins, and they’re annoyed by developers who make money creating them. They say, “Brother, we don’t care if the coin goes to $10 million.”
I think the difference is that for a breakout success, you need to have both things. You need revenue from low-cap coins, and you also need runners that go higher, so people actually want to deploy them on your platform.
For now, you have serial launchers who don’t care whether the coins go high. But if you want long-term success and want people to tokenize their long-term bets on your platform, I think you need both things.
That’s a good answer. Yes, this is interesting. But every launchpad is optimized for volume. You can see Pump.fun’s revenue figures; they’re quite crazy. Many of them come, for example, from low-capitalization coins.
I’ve still never launched a coin. There’s a whole other world.
There’s a whole other world. It’s also funny, brother. I haven’t either. The thing is, even when we talk about on-chain coins, you’re always accused of these kinds of actions because someone does something with the coins you’re talking about.
Regardless of whether it was you or someone else, the person who actually accumulated the coin and launched it doesn’t publish messages about the coin on social media. They’re not the ones talking loudly about the coin. It’s people like me and others. They say, “Oh, I bought this shit for $1 million. I bought this shit for $10 million.”
Then I’m writing about it, and when people who bought in for $4000 sell to you, they’re selling you their bags, as if you were the one being accused of this shit.
Well, that’s really terrible, yes.
This is terrible, brother. The terrible part about talking about on-chain coins is that I still do it. I do it because I’m honest. I think it’s one of the ways to make a lot of money in retail trading, as it exists only in cryptocurrency.
I really like what this network does. I don’t know—do you know the guy from the network? The founder of this protocol essentially said that the origins of cryptocurrency were like this: if you created something really cool on the blockchain, you could get a certain amount of support, achieve success in the early stages, and have a community with you at ultra-low market capitalizations.
When you launched a protocol and tokenized it, you could create generational wealth for everyone who participated in its creation and also contributed to the protocol. I think that’s the basic ethos of cryptocurrency. It seems like this is one of the basic reasons why tokenization makes sense at all—because you can create things publicly and don’t have to rely on venture capitalists to support your startup idea.
Take Anthropic and OpenAI, which will go public at valuations exceeding $1 trillion. Retail traders don’t have access to them or any way to benefit from the value creation, even though they use these products all the time. I think cryptocurrency turns that upside down. That’s one of the reasons I’m so optimistic.
Crazy. Crazy. You could tokenize Anthropic on Solana.
You can. You can now.
Who the hell is that for? Why is it necessary? Just take a couple of meme shares, you know? Take the coin shares.
Exactly.
I looked at a couple of meme coins, brother—meme coins before the stocks. I don’t know which ones will be good to sell, but I think it’s an interesting area.
You know what’s interesting about stocks? The best alternatives are cryptocurrencies, not shares.
Do you mean coins like Nearcat [?] and Zcash?
Oh, on the stock market, yes. Yes, that’s right. That’s interesting. It’s not even gold, which RuneScape paired with gold. I like it.
I don’t even like stocks, you understand? I mean, I think it’s something like the biggest meme coins on Robinhood. Obviously, AI16Z has done well. What’s the other one? I think Bonk isn’t badly managed. There’s more—SPX. Moo Deng—I’m not sure about Moo Deng; it’s still quite low.
But I agree. It’s simple and new for people. The reason why these coins paired with major currencies get these rates is because they’re a new thing on a starting platform for people.
As if they were obviously already paired with coins. They’ve always been paired with other L1s. Earlier, they were just on their own L1 chains and not with Solana. It just doesn’t seem right.
Oh, you disconnected? Can you hear me? Can you still hear me?
Yes, it seems like he may have lost connection.
Have I lost touch?
We lost Raz, bro. We lost Raz. Well, what else did we talk about last week? We were talking about Meta, bro. Meta, by the way, is great.
Did you guys watch the keynote speech at Meta? The keynote speech at Meta was hell of a lot of fun. Damn, this is [bleep]. Meta last week was crazy—crazy decisions.
Since you talk a lot about Meta’s advantages over the other Magnificent 7 companies, the chart is great now. It’s about to peak at all-time highs. One of Meta’s advantages over the other companies is distribution and users. They have so many basic users on their platforms.
They didn’t get as much interest in AI because they weren’t leading with the best models, like Anthropic and OpenAI. They’re working on many things from open source, oriented toward consumers. But I think that if you bet that open-source AI models will eventually catch up with closed-source models, or at least approach them, then if the difference isn’t that large, most of those companies will win because they have the widest distribution.
It’s something like Meta AI. You see, the news is going very well. I think it’s now number 1 in the App Store. This is their agent for consumers. It can connect to your computer and to your various programs, and all that other stuff. I like it.
They’re one of the companies that spent a lot of money on AI as CapEx, and this added significantly to their net-income indicators. People are now earning more from advertising. The business works a lot better.
I think they didn’t receive the benefits of this growth as a business because people evaluated them incorrectly—not as one of the top models. They just thought Meta was wasting a lot of money on AI without having the best model. I think this is a kind of change in mood in real time.
It’s one of the reasons why I think Meta is going to outperform. But the chart is strange. It grew from 660 to 777 in a week. Amazingly.
What else? What else are we talking about? What do you want to hear from me? I have a lot of takeaways today. By the way, answer my question.
Yes, I have. I mean, brother, I have two things—that’s what I spend 99% of my time on. The first iteration, I think the general idea was correct, but the implementation wasn’t quite at the level I wanted.
Therefore, we’re now working on V2 for this. I just want to make sure everything is in the right place before I rush off to something else.
It’s taking up more of your time.
Yes, but I want to put out information—put out anything useful—as soon as possible, from the first day, so that we can trade this new technology.
Now all these companies are actually doing OpenClaw. You have [something] coming out. I was the first of all my friends to get OpenClaw and everything like this because I tried to trade this damn thing.
I think that’s just another W for crypto bros. People don’t realize that we’re actually at the forefront of all technologies, not just cryptocurrencies.
I agree, bro. It seems to me that the thesis is that people who earn money in cryptocurrency are actually the people who are best at making money on the internet. They seem to be good at seeing these trends at an early stage and using the latest technologies at an early stage.
They’re good at seeing changes in attention. Cryptocurrency is really good at finding where changes in attention are happening.
I think Chris Camillo is something like our stock-market version. He says, “Crypto bros trade cryptocurrency just like I trade shares. I’m looking for these changes in social consensus before they actually become consensus, and I make money from them through options or, for example, through stocks, before they appear in quarterly reports.”
With a large number of people trading, there was a feeling that they had to wait for quarterly reports to understand how a company was doing and how the business was performing. But in cryptocurrency, you need to be faster—down to the millisecond.
That’s why I think the same mental model for trading works very well for all assets, not only cryptocurrencies. I think a16z often comments on this. They say something like—what the hell was their last tweet? They tweeted about it a few days ago.
In essence, they said that previously, you rated companies based on how much money they earned, their X, Y, and Z, and their main indicators. Now it’s narrative, right? This is a narrative.
I think it has always been a narrative. It has always been a narrative, so the narrative shift that occurs before you see changes in these net-income indicators is actually what moves the bottom line and determines which of these different companies is best.
Obviously, you’ll see many people use this in their next quarterly reports, where they lay out all the information. But now you see social consensus forming around this new product before you see it in the actual income indicators.
Social consensus, shifts in attention, and how consumers perceive these products occur before they appear in the income indicators. So I think it was always like that. People just don’t want to talk about it that way.
I also think that the narrative adds value to all of these companies. SpaceX isn’t valued at $1 trillion because of the income it receives. It’s valued at $1 trillion because of the income people think it will receive in the future, because Elon did X, Y, and Z, because of its position in the market, and because of what they’re trying to achieve.
It’s more of a collective belief and attention than pure income figures. I think that applies to every asset, honestly.
Right. Yes. What else do we have? You’re still holding on to your Meta forecast?
Yes.
Yes. Dude, this is crazy. Watch the presentation, because for me it’s something like copying Apple. It’s a little crazy because it seems like they’re copying, but then you think, “Wait, what are they talking about?” They say it’s madness.
It’s as if Meta AI is better than Siri. Do you understand? It’s madness. It’s as if that’s all he does. It’s madness. I’m with him. Zuckerberg is very angry. He’s a beast, bro. He’s a beast.
I like it. It seems that people are always angry at him because he wasn’t the first to generate lots of ideas, but then he implements them so well as soon as he sees that a new idea is gaining support.
I don’t think people realize how very, very, very hard it is to come up with a new idea that hasn’t been tested in the market. You don’t know how well it will work or how poorly it will work.
Then, as soon as you see a consensus forming around a new idea or product, if you’re a huge company with good capital, you can adapt and move toward it when it gains momentum.
I think Nvidia has honestly done this very well, for example, with how it positioned itself in the artificial-intelligence supply chain. It cooperates with all the necessary companies and bought a lot of the right companies.
The same concerns Zuckerberg and Meta. He was able to take advantage of Instagram gaining momentum. He was able to use Stories when Snapchat was gaining momentum. He was able to take advantage of that with Reels.
Now there’s a page for it on Instagram, which is really a copy of the TikTok page that’s gaining momentum. He does the same thing with Apple. Meta AI is their Siri version now.
I think they’re very good at acting after the fact and correcting their mistakes when something doesn’t work. For example, they changed the name of their entire company to Meta for the metaverse. It all works out well for them.
People say, “You’re a fucking idiot,” but he stuck to a course that, in my opinion, reflects the direction in which consumer interactions with technology and all these products are moving forward.
Yes, exactly. That’s what I always thought. Will these guys ever come into our world? AI is a new arena. Will they someday come into the crypto world and say, “We’re going to create crypto things. This is a new race”? Will that happen?
I think so. I’m not sure what it will look like, but I think the first iterations of technologies entering the crypto world are already here. You can see Robinhood doing it directly now.
Robinhood has its own L2 blockchain. They’re working with Arbitrum to create it, and tokenized shares are a huge thesis for their company this year. They’re implementing it very well, but they’ve also already built some crypto products into the Robinhood app.
For example, Morpho, a lending and borrowing protocol, is built into the Robinhood Earn product. They can offer 7% to people who deposit their money there.
I think you’re also starting to see X exploring social commerce. This is happening because people share their theses about stocks as well as about cryptocurrency. They see how people socially interact and trade online now.
I think X is moving in this direction, and what happens with X Money is also similar to an involvement in cryptocurrencies. But I don’t know how it will look for Meta and other large technology companies.
I think the closest thing we have to the metaverse now is probably Roblox. But I think ownership of these various assets—stablecoins are becoming a lot more popular. Certainly, there will be ways in which large technology companies will benefit from these things.
Well, that's a good question. I'm curious what this overlap will look like in the future. By the way, did you see that Bitget got hacked?
No. Where? When? Today? I think this happened just when we started.
Really?
Yes. Damn it, Bitget. I used them earlier. It was $300 million or something like that.
Oh, damn. Do you want to see?
Yes, let's see. Did this just happen?
$350 million.
No. Damn. A hot-wallet incident.
What does that mean, a hot-wallet incident? Are you reading this?
These exchanges definitely have different ways of handling funds.
How the hell did they take it? They're saying $251 million. What the hell?
I mean, exchanges have hot wallets, and they also have cold wallets. Cold wallets are hardware wallets that aren't connected to the internet—something like your Ledger and all these other hardware wallets that have nothing connected to them.
Then you have hot wallets, which are usually in your browser, where you store funds and can quickly access them. That's why they're called hot wallets: you need to access them faster.
It seems one of their hot wallets somehow broke, which means that although they kept the private keys for these hot wallets, they were probably compromised somehow. Someone got access to the private keys and just started sending the funds.
This is madness.
Yes, this is madness.
I say keep your money on CEXs because you don't trust yourself, right? This is madness. Oh my God, this is terrible.
It is terrible. This is actually terrible. It's terrible because not only have exchanges been hacked so many times in cryptocurrency, but even hardware wallets have had leaks of personal information.
That's terrible.
It is terrible, brother. Extremely terrible.
The safest thing in cryptocurrency is a device that has never been connected to the internet, to which only you have private access, where you simply store your money.
That's the purest cold-storage, off-chain refuge. It's the cleanest way to hold long-term funds. Put them somewhere far away, so even if someone finds out where you actually live, they won't have access to your wallet. There's nothing they can do.
Right.
Right. Yes, facts.
Yes, that sucks, bro. This is annoying. This damn thing is operational security—fuck.
Yes.
What else do we have? One trade from now until the end of 2028 to triple your fortune?
All in one trade from now until the end of 2028 to triple my fortune? You know, dude.
You know, I asked this question because I didn't have an answer. I wanted to see what a crypto trader would say. That's why I hesitate between HYPE and Zcash. Those are my leaders. But I also thought Bitcoin could help you achieve your goal, brother.
Perhaps. If that happens, we'll be paid, dude. Please. Bitcoin is Bitcoin.
I really thought the safest choice—I think Bitcoin can help you get there. I think the people who accumulated Bitcoin around $55,000 to $60,000 at this summer's lows weren't crypto natives from the traditional world. I think they were traditional investors who saw value in Bitcoin as a form of digital gold.
I think they were just looking at how small Bitcoin is compared with gold. In 2024, Bitcoin actually lagged behind gold because gold flew so high. Gold had gone sideways from 2011 through, in fact, 2024. It hadn't reached a new all-time high.
And then in 2024, it flew up extraordinarily strongly and surpassed Bitcoin in a way we'd never seen before. Gold going from $2,000 to $5,500 is fucking madness. I don't think people realize how crazy that is for the largest asset in the world.
That's it, brother. Gold is now worth $30 trillion.
Wow.
Gold is worth $30 trillion. Gold going from $15 trillion to $30 trillion in a year is fucking madness.
Brother, this is madness. We stopped comparing Bitcoin with gold. We did that in 2024, and Bitcoin was so far behind. We said, “Damn, this is bullshit. This doesn't work.”
But it's only been 2 decades from the moment Bitcoin was created. I expected it to have periods when it performed badly. But if you look at $30 trillion in gold, I think Bitcoin reached the bottom before people expected it to because the TradFi guys simply said, “Dude, this is the shit. What is this? What the fuck is this?”
It was around $1 trillion this summer.
Yes. A $1 trillion market cap is approximately $55,555, something like that. I really like it. I really like how Bitcoin is catching up to gold this way.
Well, then it needs to catch up. Why do you say it's 3 times?
Why? I can't tell you that Bitcoin will be at $400,000. You see what I mean? Around 2028.
That's right, but if it catches up, Bitcoin could get there. Why shouldn't we reach $1 million? That's what I thought.
Fair enough. I would have thought Bitcoin would reach $1 million by 2026 if you had asked me 5 years ago. I would've said, “It will grow to $1 million. It will grow to $500,000.” Where the hell is that?
I think it's approaching. I know it's approaching. I'm just thinking about what it will look like. I think it will be slower. But I said this cycle would be more aggressive than previous cycles.
Yes, the end of 2028 is a very long time. They can take it all the way to the end of 2028. Zcash could climb to $20,000 and then return to $4,000. Who knows what could happen to it in that time?
But Bitcoin, I think, is less volatile—or it has to be less volatile.
Yes. HYPE looks good.
Jesus Christ. What's up?
HYPE—that's what I'm in. There's no one else in this. That's what inspires me.
Wait, Kraken is going to implement Hyperliquid perps, and everyone is going to integrate Hyperliquid perps. They'll simply become legitimate. And then a16z sold all of its holdings.
Oh my God. It's like a dream come true.
I don't know. I'm just saying that all these people on Twitter who held eight-figure amounts seem to have capitulated. They're saying, “Oh, fuck. Okay, now nobody is in this anymore.” It burns.
That's true, brother. There was a distribution from crypto-native OGs to TradFi. I don't know—did you see the same thing happening with Bitcoin, with that kind of distribution?
I understand why. A lot of Hyperliquid people who received airdrops participated in eight-figure trades, and they gradually reduced their risk. I mean, this is life-changing money for many of the people who received it.
But TradFi just slowly, slowly, slowly accumulated this thing. You can see it in HYPE's price dynamics. I think that even through most of 2026, it was just a steady upward trend. There was nothing parabolic; it was just very slow, steady accumulation.
Then you had USDC, which is huge—massive. All the USDC on Hyperliquid directly generates this income for them, and Coinbase partners with them as a custodian to hold it. That's huge.
I think I said even then that this was a step toward greater Hyperliquid integration with large regulated players in the United States. Then there was another catalyst: Trump and Kraken. Both of them helped make Hyperliquid a regulated platform in the United States this year.
Its valuation is increasing not only in the cryptocurrency segment. TradeXYZ also crushed the volume of stocks and commodities. Just crazy, crazy dominance this year. For me, it was one of the most brutal attacks in history.
I was like, “Ras, you hit HYPE.”
Dude, I invested around $200,000 in January 2025. After that, I bought it for about $20. The price dropped to $12, then went back to $40, dropped to $17, then went to $55, and then all the way back down to $21.
It was insidious, bro. That's what people do. Then people look back and say, “Oh, Ras, you hit HYPE.”
“Yeah, he just hit HYPE, bro. Everyone hit it.” It was just a cold exchange. It was obvious. HYPE, bro—it wasn't obvious. It wasn't easy either. It was so bad.
I sold everything, and I know I sold my last pieces somewhere around $58, the day before Trump said it. But I don't really regret it because I feel like I caught the essence of what you wanted to do. Do you understand?
Yes. And it was just right. It's fucking hard to hit something over such a long period. That's extremely rare.
Extremely rare. It's hard to do.
Yes. Thank you. You looked at the exchange records?
Not yet, honestly. I know how it works. I understand the concept. It's cool.
Yes, I have to try. I think it will be very good. It's something like Rollbit 1,000×. It looks like this.
These are people who want to trade with 1,000× leverage, but the token mechanism is just crazy. And there have never—I don't want to say never—but there have never been many protocols based on Hyperliquid that had tokens that proved themselves well.
Jazz is obviously very respected in this community. I think he’ll get a large volume, honestly. I think this will be very good for proving itself.
Right. So what? I’m not one of those who feels the demand, as if he feels the desire to trade 1,000x BTC. Is the attraction the same as, you know, putting money on the Eagles? What really stands behind the logic of using 1,000x leverage on something?
This is literally the same logic as people buying coins with $10,000 market caps. You have a very low chance that it will work out and bring success. But if I have only $1,000 and I want to trade $100,000, 1,000x leverage is how I do it.
Okay. By the way, I don’t do any of these things. I don’t trade coins with $10,000 market caps, and I don’t use high leverage. But I think it’s an interesting thing to play with and farm.
Do you think the token will be farmed?
I really think so. The token will be farmed well, especially because of the way it was developed. The only way to get the token is to lose trades on the platform. If you think the platform will work well over the long term, then I think a large part of the income, after reaching a certain amount in the treasury, will go back to the people who stake the tokens.
It’s literally the same as on every damn exchange with leverage. On most of them, there are losers, not winners. Especially with high leverage, all these things work exactly the same.
Wow. So if you’re betting on continuation, then it makes sense to own this token.
That’s what I have in mind. I think it will be printed heavily.
Yes, I think it will be printed. What is Pearl?
I don’t know. What is Pearl?
Pearl is essentially Bitcoin AI.
Yes, Pearl is essentially AI Bitcoin. That’s such a funny sentence.
It is. That’s basically how it’s defined.
Bitcoin has proof of work. You know proof of work?
Yes.
The nodes support the Bitcoin network, and to mine Bitcoin, you need to solve computationally complex problems. It requires a lot of calculations. If you are one of the winners who solves these problems, you get a few coins. But nothing happens with the calculations used for Bitcoin mining. They’re just burning electricity.
Over the last few years, training artificial intelligence has been extremely profitable for miners who switched from mining Bitcoin to providing calculations for training these AI models and for providing inference calculations. The reason is that everyone wants to use these AI models. They’re very popular in retail, but they need a huge number of calculations—one set for training and another for inference.
That’s why there’s such a strong demand for these calculations. I see the numbers of graphics processors going crazy, so I see Nvidia reaching a $5 trillion market cap. All these companies are succeeding because of the need for calculations to train these AI models.
Pearl essentially combines these 2 things. You have the calculations required for proof of work, but instead of performing calculations that aren’t used for anything, they’re used for the same kind of matrix multiplication involved in training AI models. Therefore, it’s like Bitcoin AI.
It’s proof of useful work, I think. It’s not proof of work where the work you perform to support the consensus of these chains is useless. It’s useful for something that a lot of people are spending a lot of capital on.
I think it’s only traded over the counter right now.
Yes, but it makes sense. When you provide calculations, you get a token?
Do you provide the calculations?
Yes.
How has this not been invented before?
I have the feeling that—
No, it’s just—
Is this the first time, or is it the same as a chip like that or something else?
A chip is a little different. Are you talking about USD.AI?
I don’t even know what I’m talking about. But is that decentralized? Isn’t decentralized AI difficult to make useful because you need centralized calculations for it to be effective?
Do you mean when you train the model, or in general?
I think if you run the model.
The reason decentralized training has been difficult is that usually all the graphics processors used to train these models need to be in the same place. Decentralized training usually tries to use calculations from many different regions.
I’m sure I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure Pearl is more for inference than for training new language models.
I think so, too. We need to contact that damn Pearl guy. That’s what I’m talking about. We need to speak with him.
Yes. Or with a girl, you know.
Or with her.
Pearl is a wonderful name. I like it very much. It’s a cool name.
What do you think: Is college necessary in a new era of artificial intelligence?
Honestly, I think it’s more necessary now. People who have social skills, when intelligence is practically free and everyone can use a writing model to write articles, a research model to research something, an action model to execute certain tasks, or a coding model—those people’s social skills and their ability to have high emotional intelligence, not just a high IQ, will matter.
IQ is basically solved. People who are able to have a high EQ will be able to navigate society much better than everyone else. There’s also a recession in social skills happening now. People are becoming less social and less skilled at interacting with others.
I think that’s because so many people spend so much time on the internet. Dude, honestly, in college I literally sat at my desk the whole time with my laptop in class. I was on NFT Discords the whole time. I swear to God, that’s all I did in college.
That’s it?
That’s all. I didn’t listen at all. I just did the bare minimum necessary to pass every subject.
You were indoctrinated into the system. That’s damn funny.
I mean, I didn’t spend that much time in college on this money crap. I studied at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I studied computer science, and my minor was in business.
I was definitely very sociable. I did well in school. I was getting, what, a 3.5 GPA or whatever. But I didn’t do any additional work outside the classroom. Many of the smartest people in my class at Georgia Tech were doing things like working on startups. They were learning how to create things outside the classroom.
I didn’t do that in school. It’s a pity that I didn’t spend more time on it. Apparently, I heard about Bitcoin in 2016. I had one of those classes on new technologies where I first learned about Bitcoin. I actually started trading after college, in 2017.
Yes. I also studied at a good educational institution, which is strange. Almost everyone I was around was well educated and modest. Then I became an influencer, so I finally stood out. That’s strange in a way.
Yes. All I did was what I wanted to do. I liked it. But it turned into an addiction to attention. So strange.
Very strange. It’s damn funny. Do your friends pick on you? Do they say, “Brother, what the hell is happening? Where did all this come from?”
Yes. They ask who has the time for it. Or it’s some random girl from high school. I’m scrolling through my story viewers, and I see someone who watched the story where I gave my ex $20,000. It’s some random girl from high school, bro.
That’s right. It’s amazing. That’s the strangest thing.
Yes, it’s pretty funny. It’s like, “No, I can explain.” I’m trying to get views so I can get more shares in the companies I’m building. That’s why I invested $20,000 so my ex could go to Dior and Louis Vuitton to buy herself a sports bag. It all has a return on investment.
I think it was good. I think it was a good exchange.
Yes, it was a good exchange. I like it. Thank you.
Okay, cool. I don’t think I have anything else, bro. I don’t know if there’s anything else you want to chat about. What chat were we in? What were we thinking about? What else do you want to talk about?
Someone said, “Influential person, okay, friend.” I really don’t understand your point of contention, brother. I’m not going to lie. I have the feeling that he’s being very one-dimensional about this. Maybe it’s a little controversial.
Okay. Ethena—someone is spamming Ethena in every stream.
Yes. Ethena’s chart is simply crazy, actually.
Yes, I think so. Ethena is a USDe platform. They receive benefits from people who want to buy long positions in cryptocurrencies.
If you know how perpetual futures work, there’s something called the funding rate, which balances the interest between long and short positions. If there are more aggressive long positions than shorts, then the short positions are rewarded for maintaining their positions.
If short positions are more aggressive than long positions, then long positions pay to maintain their positions. Essentially, Ethena uses what exists during bull markets: huge, aggressive interest in long positions in cryptocurrency. That shifts the funding rate toward paying short positions much more.
What they do is take the capital on one side of the equation and then take short positions on the other side of that capital. I think they do it with ETH, but also with other major currencies. In fact, they take income from what they are paid for maintaining these short positions and return it to USDe. Therefore, when there is much more interest in the long side of the cryptocurrency market, Ethena wins as a mainstream DeFi protocol in this regard.
I think many others will do something similar with tokenized shares and interest in perpetual futures on them. That's what Ethena does at a high level.
Ethena looks great, honestly. It's a stablecoin, right?
Yes, this is also a stablecoin and an income coin. The founders are cracked. Dude, he's one of the best founders, I think. He's a really good operator.
Evan had really crazy timing on this coin, because he bought call options on ETH when it reached the bottom, and the IV was almost zero. He ran it up so fast. I think he made several million on this deal.
Whoa. Yes, he was. He should be considered one of the best traders, right?
Evan is really good. I think his main win, it seems, was ETH. But he's been doing this in crypto for a long time. I think he played poker. I think he was a professional poker player, and he started trading after that.
Right. Are you going to Korea or Singapore?
Yes, I'm doing both. And you?
I'm only going to Korea.
Oh, just Korea? I can't do that, man. Singapore—3 years consecutively. This is madness, brother. It's madness.
Yes, I understand you. This shit will take away a lot of my energy, I won't lie. I'm speaking at both.
Who are you representing in Korea? What company?
I think I'm under Bullpen, I want to say.
Do you guys have your own booth, or...?
It's not a booth, it's a panel. I'm on the panel.
I think in Korea I'm actually on one of them. I run the Ondo panel, and then I also participate in a Solana trading competition.
How are the memes?
As if I'm going to change this. These are criminals.
Oh, damn. This is educational. Who is this with?
I think they still haven't finished deciding with whom yet. This is insane. It's fire.
Ondo and Backpack were supposed to be on stage, right?
Yes. Super bullish, bro. I mean, I really like Backpack. I invested in them some time ago.
Backpack went the opposite way from Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid just went straight ahead, doing everything on the blockchain, directing all the income to the token, creating the best product, and not worrying about regulatory issues until they reached product-market fit.
Backpack went the opposite way. They said, “No, we're going to get all the licenses. We're going to set up all this KYC shit. We have a real stock exchange. We have all the necessary connections with the right people.” Then, after they did all that, they seem to have switched to the blockchain and launched their token.
But that's why I think Backpack is actually one of the few protocols where, at the moment, you can exchange tokenized real-world stock shares. Unlike everyone else, they settle in cash. So, I have a Backpack position. I really like it.
I think that if tokenized shares continue to sell well on Solana, Backpack seems to be one of the main beneficiaries of this thesis.
What do you think about the aura of unrealized profit and loss compared to the aura of realized profit and loss? On the one hand, Yunipcs has $12 million in unrealized profit. On the other hand, Frank DeGods has $3.3 million realized. So who really has the bigger aura?
Realized, definitely. Realized P&L is much more important than unrealized P&L—seemingly infinitely more important.
I have the feeling that unrealized P&L is more important for the average person, who thinks they earned a trillion dollars or something like that. But your ability to actually hold capital—that is, to hold your own profit—that's what actually has value.
But how much could Yunipcs realistically realize, in your opinion?
I'll take a look at his leaderboard now.
How much does he have?
$12 million.
How much is in BONK?
Dude, you can't see this. $6.7 million.
$6.7 million in BONK?
It's about 1.1%, and this is a market cap of $600 million.
So how much do you think he could realistically realize?
Probably $4 million to $6 million.
Wow. About $3 million?
Wow. There isn't enough liquidity in this coin. I mean, he would have to cut quite aggressively.
I'm not saying that he can't realize a profit. I'm just saying that realized profit is absolutely a different game from sitting on unrealized profits and losses. This isn't even remotely similar.
Profit realization and profit retention are very, very different from sitting on unrealized profits and losses. Many people can sit on big unrealized profits and losses. Not many people can actually realize life-changing amounts of money.
This is madness.
Yes. This is interesting. I like it, brother. I like it when people start selling this cycle on these platforms. It will be so aggressive. I feel that...
Imagine that it will be something crazy, because I think on-chain activity will go crazy in this cycle. I really think so. I think we'll see crazy amounts of profits and losses.
You don't think we're still there? I mean, damn.
I don't think so. No, I don't think so. I think what you'll see is on-chain coins in this cycle in the multibillions, just like we saw on-chain coins in the past cycle in the multibillions.
If you own something—what the hell—1% of it, or you're one of the largest owners of these shares, what do their profits and losses look like?
Yes, I think it will be pretty crazy. I wonder if people will try to put money into these coins, because for many of them, if they eventually get listed on major platforms, obviously there will be perps, and there will be a huge amount...