山寨季已经到来

But all the action is really underneath the surface, with a bunch of alts running.

Bitcoin's been flat. Alts have flown. Bitcoin leads, then it cools off for a bit, and altcoins take pole position and move higher.

So I do think it's an alt-pickers' environment, as it already has been.

Maybe you're starting to think about taking profits on some things that have run up a ton.

Drop some tickers for the alt-pickers' market—some that you think have good fundamentals and haven't run yet.

1. Bitcoin Flat, Alts Ripping

Okay, okay, okay. Another week, another high. Crazy time to be recording once again. Equities are a little bit off; they've had a bit of a cooldown, and all the hype—pun intended—has been around crypto lately.

I think last time we were chatting, we were in the early stages of what we thought was potentially a crypto bull market. Bitcoin's been roughly flat, I think, since the last time we recorded, if I recall correctly. You're seeing some definite indications that this thing—the behemoth in the room—has some bullish catalysts behind it, from a technical perspective and from a currency-debasement narrative perspective. But all the action is really underneath the surface, with a bunch of alts running.

Let's start off, per usual. I want to go around the horn and get everyone's take on the state of the market right now: how we're feeling, what we're looking at, and what's catching our eyes. Jason, I'll start with you.

Yeah, the market has been fantastic since the last time we recorded. All of the things that we said you'd want to see on Bitcoin for it to be a sustained rally or pump, rather than something that just Barts or fades back down, have played out.

Most of the move has been Saylor-agnostic. Obviously, he did top-tick a week ago at, I don't know, $81,000 or something, but the market barely reacted to that. Maybe it sold off for a day or 2, but we've seen consistent spot ETF flows. We haven't really seen open interest and leverage build up too much. We've had a few little leverage wicks on alts and things.

Things are starting to get a little bit more heated up, but all of the things that we wanted to see on the back of the original Treasury announcement, which set everything in motion with Bitcoin and then crypto, have played out perfectly. Bitcoin's been flat, and alts have flown, which is something else you would want to see. Bitcoin leads, then it cools off for a bit, and altcoins take pole position and move higher.

All of the things that you're seeing on-chain with Robinhood and Solana, with Stock.fun, which I'm sure we'll get into later, are good signs of initial risk appetite returning. You're not seeing things immediately nuke to zero after reaching $5 million, $10 million, $20 million, or $30 million market caps. You're starting to see things run a bit more, so everything is pointing in the right direction.

Crypto trading volumes have skyrocketed again with the volatility on Hyperliquid. Crypto volumes are back above HIP-3 volumes and are doing most of the heavy lifting there. Everything I've wanted to see over the last couple of weeks has played out, and I'm just trying not to overcomplicate it. I'm keeping it simple and holding on to all the leverage and trades I put on back then, letting them play out.

I don't think there's too much to do if you realized that pivot with the Treasury announcement and then stacked on a bunch of risk. Maybe you're starting to think about taking profits on some things that have run up a ton, but other than that, I'm in a good mood.

Yeah, it's kind of like the majors that have been doing well are continuing to do well. Zcash is kind of ridiculous at this point. It's at $1,300 right now. HYPE hit—did HYPE hit $100? No, it hit like $90, right?

Soon.

Lighter's at like $5. Venice had an insane day yesterday. You're seeing a lot of the coins that have been doing well continue to do well, and on-chain has gone insane, both on Robinhood and then on Solana more recently.

But you're still not seeing Bitcoin, ETH, and SOL, right? So you still have this market where the good majors that were the good majors are continuing to be the good majors, and then on-chain is going crazy. Those are the 2 sides of the barbell right now.

FOMO has been a rocket catalyst for trading. I saw something where FOMO did half a billion dollars in 1 day recently, which is more than all the trading terminals combined were doing 1 or 2 months ago. They've completely overtaken trading. It's been kind of insane to see.

The macro looks pretty good, right, Jason? If the debasement stuff is going to continue to be the story for this cycle, then you have this mix of debasement trades, the big money-makers like HYPE, Lighter, and Pump, which have done well, and then the on-chain pure-speculative stuff doing well too. Those are the 3 main buckets right now.

2. Is New Money Entering Crypto?

I'm just holding on to the same stuff I've been holding the whole cycle. Crypto is now a minority of my overall liquid stuff. As you guys know, I did a lot of stock things this year, and my stocks performed pretty well, but my crypto is outperforming by a lot, even though it's a minority of my holdings.

It just goes to show that I have way more alpha, I think, in crypto than I do in stocks, even if I'm more secularly bullish on stuff outside of crypto. I'm just holding on to the Zcash, ENA, HYPE, and Lighter bags that we all spoke about a few months ago, along with the other things we were holding.

It's a weird one because it was kind of obvious, right? It was a weird cycle where what to hold was really obvious, and I think everyone who was following crypto—and anyone who was still long, which I think was not many people—was holding those things.

But from speaking to people, I'm curious what you guys think. I think most people were sidelined for this and are just buying back in—people who were sidelined but had crypto at some point, versus new money. That's my main concern. I still don't see a new narrative, and I just don't think memes with a better UI are going to be enough of a new narrative to bring a bunch of outside cash and excitement into this, with AI doing what it's doing right now.

I get that the Treasury announcement is a big deal, but I don't see a fundamental reason that you'll get new flows into crypto over the other asset classes, which seem much more exciting right now. Gold hasn't moved that much in percentage terms, although it has obviously moved a few Bitcoin market caps at this point.

Most of the on-chain retail flow is new money. FOMO is onboarding an insane number of people who have never been on CT or even heard about CT. That's where a lot of the on-chain capital is coming from.

There's apparently this whole other subculture of “trenchers” that nobody on CT really knows about, but it's a massive thing with a younger demographic. I saw Tulip Guy tweet about it. He works with Counterparty, which is Thread Guy's thing, and they said there's this whole other subculture of trenchers.

You're kind of seeing that with FOMO as far as money entering the overall new space. As far as new money in the broader market, we probably haven't seen that yet. I would agree that the concentration in Zcash and HYPE makes it feel like you need to see Bitcoin, ETH, and SOL really break out before concluding that there's a lot of new money coming in.

3. VVV, OpenAI & Private Inference

Otherwise, it is probably mostly a rotation. I don't know how much capital that wasn't in crypto is saying, “Yeah, I want to own Zcash as a debasement privacy trade,” right? I would be surprised if it were a big number.

I would also say that, with Zcash, it was maybe obvious to some of us, but Zcash has been a pretty hated trade this year, and that's allowed it to do very well. There was the whole “Naval in the Cabal” thing, and then there was the bug incident that got a lot of people out.

I don't know where it goes from here. It's been pretty insane, but it is kind of just sucking up appetite. I think there's a lot of appetite to get back into the market. What are you going to buy? You're going to buy something that is maybe this speculative store of value, has done really well, and has a lot of theoretical upside because of the nature of what it is.

Yeah, I don't think you necessarily need a lot of money moving into this stuff for it to do well. I don't really view this whole thing as binary, where you need the capital to flow in for it to make sense for you to be in the market.

I think BTC probably goes to the $80,000s or $90,000s. I don't really see a massive reason for it to break out unless we continue to get some form of stimulus or monetary easing.

I think with just the current setup, you could still see it continue to run based on momentum positioning, Saylor not buying, and all these reasons for people to continue to get involved in the market. In that scenario, I think alts can do very well, so I still think it makes sense to be long specific alts.

I do think you'll end up seeing some rotations as certain ones run to the higher end of their multiples, and you look for different opportunities where fundamentally valuable coins that haven't run as much get very interesting. So I do think it's an alt-pickers' environment, as it already has been, and it's definitely fairly PvP.

You kind of have this bifurcation of trenchers with 30-second hold times versus people in larger tokens who are more so the existing players in the space, along with some funds. Just asking around, yes, there aren't nearly as many liquid funds as there used to be, but there still are quite a few that most people aren't really aware of that are trading pretty decent size. I think those are the ones that are kind of moving the market and the ones you basically want to do some of these trades with that you can actually size into.

What are those?

What are those? What funds?

Drop some tickers for the alt-pickers market—some that you think have good fundamentals and haven't run yet.

I think AERO is a good one for September and beyond if they can continue to rack up TVL. I think it's a pretty strong setup. It ran up on a lot of nonsense, but I don't really think that's going to be what drives it higher.

I think you get a move to ETH, you probably get a move to Robinhood, and you also have a change in emissions. If all else is held constant, you have positive flows into the name without any new money coming in, just based on historical trends. So it shifts from being supply-dominant to demand-dominant.

If you sprinkle in additional TVL and fees on top, and in particular add new business lines that don't have an emission-offsetting component, I do think you can see a nice, unique catch-up trade for those who missed it.

Yeah, one of my questions was: if you're going to take profit or rotate, where would you rotate to? I know we were talking yesterday about AERO—as Yan just mentioned—versus UNI. I think that's a good debate.

4. Tokenized Stocks & the New On-Chain Meta

I think what would be helpful, too, for people, because there's been so much that's gone on in the tokenized-stock world, or market, over the last literally 1 or 2 weeks, is to level-set what the differences are, where this activity is happening, and therefore who the biggest downstream beneficiaries of it are.

Maybe, Jose, this is a good one for you because you can help us level-set. You've got Robinhood Chain, then you've got Stonks on Solana, which is becoming more and more part of the meta, especially over the last couple of days. You've got Coinbase Base stock tokens. Just give us a level-set of what it is we're even looking at right now and where this activity is flowing.

On-chain stocks started doing really well a few months ago with, I would say, Backpack on Solana. You started to get—I have this tweet from a few months ago—it was like, you could swap $100,000 on-chain and buy Micron and SanDisk with very little slippage, like 10 bips or something. It was pretty crazy.

But then Robinhood took this to a whole other level. In great crypto fashion, the degens came up with something very novel: pairing memecoins with stocks. This is what has been driving the whole Robinhood Chain explosion.

The top coin on Robinhood, the top memecoin, is one called Artificial Inu, and it's paired with NVIDIA. When NVIDIA goes up, that should naturally pull Artificial Inu up, and vice versa. This is what has been going on in Robinhood Chain.

The first weekend that this exploded, none of the market makers had prepared for the weekend. The stock prices on Robinhood Chain got so out of whack because there was no other side. So many people were buying these memecoins that AMC was trading at around $25 on Robinhood Chain versus around $2 on the stock market.

Who made a lot of money here? It was the early buyers of this, and then the market makers like Citadel that were coming in on Monday morning, along with the authorized participants who were slamming that back down to the appropriate price. That's what has been going on with Robinhood.

You saw the AMC CEO get really upset about this because they see market manipulation and stuff. On Solana, you have Stonks. Full disclosure: I own Stonks, and I'm pretty exposed to that ecosystem.

The difference with Stonks is that they take a 3% fee on every transfer of the token and pay it out as yield. If you hold a token paired with a memecoin paired with a stock, and then you hold the memecoin, you're getting dividends in the stock every hour or something. Stonks is also burning a lot of the supply with that.

The difference between Robinhood and Solana is that on Robinhood, all the main pairs are paired with stocks. On Solana, even though this is StockFi, all the biggest market-cap ones are actually paired with crypto-native coins. You hold a memecoin and get paid in Bitcoin or anything else. Those are the ones that are doing the best, and that's where the two diverge.

I think what's interesting with the difference here, too, is that all the stuff on Robinhood you can list on centralized exchanges with no problem, and it doesn't really have any effect on the underlying Robinhood market. But with the Stonks one, since it pays yield out to people who hold the coin and there's a 3% transfer fee on everything, once you get exchange listings, that fee gets passed on.

Perps also pass the fee. So if you get perps on some of these, is that how people are going to take profit? Maybe by shorting the perps. I don't know.

There are some weird dynamics here. When these get listed on centralized exchanges, will all the yield go to the centralized exchange, and will the centralized exchange distribute it? All the trading on the exchange doesn't generate any activity for Stonks or for the tokens themselves.

So there's a bit of a mismatch there. I'm not sure these guys really planned for this when they made it, because it kind of just exploded out of nowhere. It's something they're going to have to think about, whether this will be a flash in the pan or something more.

Pump.fun has obviously been on the sidelines for both of these metas. FOMO, with the social trading, has totally taken over as the main social-trading app. Then you have Pawns, a launchpad on Robinhood, and on Solana, Stonks has been doing well.

It'll be interesting to see what Pump is going to do here. They're obviously going to do something, and they have a ton of money to go after this market.

One of the top stock tokens on Stonks, if you go to the Tokens tab, will list them all by market cap. That one, CTO—number 10, though it used to be number 2—the CEO of this company, Vita Global, is actually super into this coin and is trying to get it to go higher.

You have these dynamics now where things that happen on-chain are trying to affect the traditional finance markets. There are definitely some weird legal and regulatory things. I think regulators are kind of okay with crypto markets being on their own as long as they're not touching anything. But if they start actually affecting stock prices, that's when things are going to get better.

This is all memecoin stuff right now. But if you want to look at the positive side effect of this, lots more stocks are coming on-chain now. You can see that this is going to be the big meta of this cycle: people building things around on-chain stocks.

It won't look too different from things we've seen in the past, but it'll be a different kind of asset that you're building liquidity around—assets that have real fundamental value. Everything in crypto has been so self-referential, and now we're going to build all these apps around it.

5. Can the On-Chain Mania Last?

There are going to be a lot of games and gambling-type games, but most of it is going to be built around stocks. That's the main meta right now. I have no idea how long this particular meta is going to last. It's really hard to tell, especially given how quickly it got crazy, but I think the on-chain-stocks theme will be a big thing over the next 1 or 2 years.

Yeah, it is a little unsettling that we went straight to M forks and all that equivalent stuff.

Yeah, although I don't think that fork has been—

No, no, the thing is—

I actually bought some at the top—

Just in case it became the next one.

Just in case.

Yeah, of course. We mentioned this before, but you have the issue of survivorship bias making the longevity of these games much shorter without a big wave of fresh capital coming in. You also don't need to have been around previously to be informed on CT as to why these things didn't work. Especially now, with AI, you can just plug in, “Why did it fail?”

You think you needed to be informed on CT to know that OHM wasn't going to work? I feel like everyone knew it was a Ponzi back then.

Well, not the length of it—the idea of the length of it. I mean—

Like a massive, massive, massive size. I don't think that's ever going to happen, because people have seen where and when it unwinds and what to look for. And so you get the euthanasia roller coaster on these—

And so, yeah, I just don't think we can get to big size, like you're saying, without a new thing that people haven't seen that can really get the imagination going. I just don't see how this kind of stuff—

Maybe, though. Pawns went to basically $1 billion in a week.

Yeah, but what was the liquidity on Pawns?

It's still not great.

Yeah.

I think there's $8 million in the liquidity pool now.

That's the one thing with these apps: UPNL—the UPNL—is the marketing of these apps, right? But—

For sure.

Yeah. When you put those two side by side, all the liquidity—yeah, that's pretty low if that's all the liquidity.

Yeah.

But now it's trading on other venues. Yeah, it's got volume otherwise, so this isn't an appropriate view of the—

Not anymore.

But, yeah, the whole UPNL relative to PNL side-by-side table is a fun one to look at for the FOMO stuff. It's just—

The ratio is 10%. Some of these FOMO guys literally bought at—like that Crayon Eater guy, at less than $100,000 market cap—and literally haven't sold anything, and it's at $10 million. It's like—

You've got to assume they have side wallets.

Maybe.

And the last thing they sell is the public one. It's just—

You've got to assume that.

Yeah.

I don't know how that's not the assumption, right? How long have we all been in this industry that we're like, “Oh, yeah, this dude's sitting on $60 million PNL and not—what?”

Like, come on. What are we talking about?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, granted, I don't—I think the Bonk guy, I'm not sure.

Bonk guy did—yeah, he did kind of round-trip his 8-figure position that he held for, what, a year?

Yeah.

On Bonk. So, you know—

He's number 1 on FOMO now.

Maybe, maybe he is. I would assume he had other bags, too.

I think the round trip is real, but I don't think that PNL—that UPNL—was ever truly realizable.

And it's an advertisement to realize it elsewhere. I'm not saying he's a bad actor; I just think—

No approach to doing this.

It's why it's kind of like I said this on Market Matters. When I went through the top 20 wallets, the realized PNL versus unrealized was such a small ratio, and then when you look at the actual liquidity, it's even smaller. But this is what I was talking about.

There's no way this is right.

This chart—there's no way that the top realized PNL is $253,000.

No, that's probably about right, dude. Go look. Go look at the top 20 wallets on FOMO and look at all of the cash—

Trades, though.

Because you just do it off-chain, basically. You can buy this stuff in a different wallet; you don't have to buy it through FOMO.

Yeah, but a lot of people on FOMO aren't doing it the way that some of these guys are—like that Crayon Eater guy. I don't even think he has a Twitter account. I think he just made the account and it just went up a lot. I don't know.

6. What Could Kill the Rally?

Again, I don't know. I think it's naive to think that you're not getting extracted here in multiple ways that we've seen done in the past. What I view this as is the exact same thing that we saw happen with Solana, except it's a lot easier to do now. We saw everything start with Pump.fun. We saw all these tools come up. We saw people start trading with Axiom and Photon. We saw bundles. We saw side wallets. We saw all of it. Why wouldn't it happen here? That's what the incentive is.

100%.

Oh, it's definitely happening. It's definitely happening.

Also, that PNL number is net, and I haven't looked at whether or not those guys have losses, too. So—

7. The Alt-Picker’s Market

So, yeah, just know the game that's being played, is all I'm saying. It's fine; it's going to be played regardless. But don't go on and assume that these guys are next-generation, god-tier traders. There's a lot of other stuff going on behind the scenes. They're not all sitting on $50 million unrealized PNLs. Just realize that the best—it's effectively a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? You have 100,000 people following you on social media. You go and buy a $100,000 market-cap coin with $30,000 or $40,000 of liquidity—what do you think is going to happen? We can be honest about it, right? Be aware of the games that are being played. It's not like everybody here on these leaderboards is somehow the next unknown Market Wizards trader. That's my take.

I think the app is honestly kind of fun, and it's a nice UX and stuff. But if you're going on there and just following a bunch of the richest people, and your strategy is directly copying what they're doing, I don't know. That doesn't seem like—

The thing is, it worked in the beginning, right? But now it's gotten so big that—

Yeah. And also, just because somebody—you've got to realize, too, that people, especially the people sitting on positions up 10,000x, are still just dumb apes. Even though they have a lot of money, it doesn't mean that they have alpha. A lot of times, they're just throwing money into whatever.

Yeah. If a casino had a leaderboard, there would also be a Crayon Eater. I think the odds here are worse than a dumb—worse than a casino.

Dumb Crayon Eater, yeah.

Yeah. See that top comment there? Jose has sold more than 7 figures of Pawns. So how is—

I do think that the data on realized PNL is wrong. I've seen a lot of people complain about the PNL not being correct.

So what's the—

There's something going on with their data. Obviously, it's still skewed toward UPNL, for sure, but I don't think there are people sitting with millions of profit while the top realized is $200,000. I just don't believe that's correct.

If only FOMO made it easier to see it, right?

They do this thing where you can see how much you fumbled, which is a pretty terrible feature that makes you FOMO some more. There are people who click on Pawns that they sold at, like, $1 million market cap, and it's like, “You fumbled 3—”

The peanut thing.

But, yeah, social crypto is definitely the other main meta of this cycle. It's kind of hitting escape velocity, I feel like. Pump tried it with the streaming thing. I feel like streaming could work again for something at some point, maybe just done in a different way.

But I don't know, man. If we were all in high school or something, 100% you and all your friends would be trading on FOMO. You'd have a clan, 100%.

I mean, probably, but I don't know.

I didn't really care much about this stuff in high school. I've got to imagine most people are getting cleaned out. You show up with your week's worth of lunch money or whatever.

Yeah. I mean, don't get me wrong, the app is more fun when you're up.

As are most things. Yeah.

Proper insight.

When you're making money.

But, yeah, I don't know. We'll see how this all shakes out. I think the market overall—I think a lot of people were scared about that Hunter Biden memecoin, and it was a total non-event. So, yeah, we'll see. It definitely feels like Robinhood is really crushing the EVM ecosystem right now. I think the one thing is that all the Robinhood stocks on-chain don't give you ownership rights in the stocks.

A lot of these games that people are playing with the Boards meme—I don't know if you guys have seen this—but basically getting the memecoin to own so much of the stock on-chain that they actually get a board seat. Obviously, with the way the Robinhood stocks are structured today, they're not the actual stock, right? It's kind of like a debt security from Robinhood that's issued. But if you did this with the Backpack model or other potential models, I guess you could maybe do this. I also think that if it actually happened, as I said to the earlier point, regulators would come down really hard. I think your best bet is to try to force squeezes on some of these rather than board seats.

Is there anything on Robinhood Chain? We've talked about FOMO potentially being a source of new capital flows, right? I think that's a viable argument. Is there anything on Robinhood Chain that you've seen that truly struck you as novel and something you could see as sustainable?

Yes. There was this thing that ended up being a rug: Crumbs. Apparently, it's copied after this other protocol, Receipt, but it's a really cool idea.

Wherever you go and buy something—say, at Starbucks—you get Starbucks stock on-chain. You buy something from Apple, and you get Apple stock on-chain. Instead of having cash back on your credit card, you're getting cash back in the form of stock. You're accumulating all these different stocks from the companies you buy things from.

I think that's cool. I get a few matchas every week from Starbucks, and I'd way rather get some Starbucks stock than the points thing they have. I think you'll see more and more things like that. Once you get more stocks on-chain, people will keep building these kinds of things.

There'll be a big casino aspect, sure, but you will get some of these things. That's a genuine passive wealth-creation application: you're doing your normal spending and getting ownership in these companies. It's small dollars each time, but over time—

Where does the funding come from to go and buy the underlying, to then give out or distribute to people who upload receipts?

Yeah, the receipts and spending. Maybe they partner with a credit card or something, and then use the cash back that the credit card directs to them to buy the stock. I'm not entirely sure of the actual underlying.

Yeah, we sell our own token to go and buy the underlying, to then distribute to people who upload receipts. But I don't know—how does a normal credit card cash back work?

Well, they do it through subscriptions, point-of-sale fees, all that crap.

So maybe something in that respect, but I'm sure you'll see more of that.

Another neobank?

Yeah. I don't know if that's considered a neobank. I'm sure all the neobanks are going to do this, though.

For me, there are a couple of things kind of like what Ceteris said, but largely no is my answer to that question. What was the original question again?

It was: Is there anything actually new and innovative happening?

Yeah. Right now, there are a couple of things, but I think the answer for me is, by and large, no. Everything we're seeing is just a dressed-up version of something we've already done, right? Pairing memes with majors or stocks is just one step past what we've already done. It's all the same shit.

Pawns has done well, but when you look at it, it's the exact same thing as Pump. It might have better tokenomics, better structure in terms of VC unlocks, and a better percentage of revenues going to buybacks. But at the end of the day, it's the exact same thing.

In terms of getting excited about sustainability, I look at something like Pawns and think the revenue chart will probably look exactly like the revenue chart on Pump over its lifetime. It has a big period where it does really well, then that type of activity cools off, like we always see. The revenues contract a ton, and then everybody starts asking questions around whether the revenue is sustainable, sticky, and so on.

These Stonks things are kind of cool, I guess, but it's largely no for me right now. There will be some things, but my opinion on everything that's going on is that there's obviously a lot of opportunity to be had on-chain over the last couple of weeks and probably for a little while longer.

Most people will probably end up burning more money chasing random shit on-chain, trying to play catch-up or trying to buy one of these new launches at a $200,000 market cap because their favorite influencer bought it. When you fast-forward 6 months, I think most people who chase and do a lot of things on-chain without a clear thesis and focus will probably end up in a much worse position than if they had just held a core bag of things that have done well and are continuing to do well.

It's a trap I've fallen into many times in the past. I'd always look back and think, “Damn, if I had just held the things I was highly convicted in for the entirety of this cycle, I would have done even better.”

I think the positive side of all this is that it goes back to why having multiple chains was a good idea: You have more shots on net. Right now, these shots on net are attempting to do what crypto has attempted to do before and not done successfully—these consumer social apps, as we mentioned earlier.

It's kind of the ideal demographic to do it with, where you get to bridge stocks in as well. It becomes more attractive for people who aren't purely in crypto, ideally, and you widen the top of the funnel to get more users in. You experiment and try various apps, apps learn from previous ones and iterate on them, and you create competition.

I think all of that should hopefully breed innovation and lead to the next major app. Pump is a winner, and there have obviously been a bunch that have failed alongside it, but you do have these periodic winners that bring in users and are valuable to the space.

I do think it's a good setup for a very viral social app to come out of it. FOMO is certainly doing really well. The question of sustainability is generally the concern with crypto social apps. There's always a very high monetary component, which is both a feature and a bug.

The bug is that you potentially churn through your audience quite a bit, create incentives for bad actors, and raise the general questions we were discussing earlier: How much of this is real? What's actually happening behind the scenes? Are gains being realized elsewhere?

To some degree, I think it's going to be impossible to escape that because of the ability to spin up wallets and do all these things. But if you can continue improving the apps themselves, I think it is helpful to bring in users. Ideally, that trickles into other pockets of the space and makes other products more viable with the additional users.

Yeah, I agree with all that. You're not going to get people building stuff on-chain when it's the February-to-May type of market we had. Now is the time when people might be thinking, “Maybe I'll build a crypto app,” when half a year ago they were thinking, “I'm not going to do that.”

Going back to Jason's point, one of the most dangerous things you can do now is this: If you've done well—maybe you've held Zcash, HYPE, or Venice, or you've just crushed it on the majors—and then you see all this stuff going wild on-chain, you start getting greedy or feeling like you're missing out even more.

One of the things in a bull market is seeing people make money even faster than you. You can fall into the trap of trying to chase them. I always feel like the flow needs to be that you buy the speculative stuff cheap and then cycle it into good long-term stuff.

If you fall into the trap of going the other way—you're up so much on your main core positions that you're thinking, “I can spend a little here, spend a little there”—you start eating into those positions. Then the entire market nukes, your main bags are down 50% from the highs, and you've also gotten rid of a quarter of them because you were doing this other stuff.

That's something I'm definitely correcting this cycle. The flow is mostly one way. It's always fun when stuff is really cheap and you think it could become something to take some shots on those opportunities. In a bull market, crypto does give you opportunities where things genuinely go 100x.

Throwing little darts into different on-chain things and seeing what happens is how I've always played it.

What are your darts? The Stonks thing and—

Just the Stonks ecosystem.

Okay.

Honestly, one of the reasons I was early there is that I was too lazy to use Robinhood, and I was hoping something on Solana would come back.

So I just kept paying attention to Solana when everybody wanted to pay attention to Robinhood. So, yeah, we'll see. I'm not sure I want to shill Stonks because I really don't know where this thing is going to go. It's super speculative and super reflexive, and the yield and everything is a great meme.

But it also requires a lot of trading and a lot of trading fees, right? It incentivizes holding in that sense, in that you don't want to be trading in and out of spot because you're just getting taxed 3% every time. But it also requires constant trading because that's what pays the yield, right? So we'll see if there's anything else they do to the model, too. For now, the model is working, and a lot of people are talking about it now. So we'll see.

And then, yeah, obviously whatever Pump does here will be pretty big, because Solana has always been the place where Pump is home and Pump is dominant. So they have the money to ramp completely, right?

8. ETH, HYPE & the Tokenization Trade

Do you put any merit behind the thesis or idea that this entire tokenization wave and RWA wave, which we're starting to see really pick up, will actually drive value and even some outperformance in the large majors again? Your L1s—there's been a resurgence in, let's say, ETH optimism for the first time I've seen in at least a couple of years. I'm curious how you guys think about that. Has that even crossed your minds? Is that something you're interested in, or is that a trade or investment you're making?

I have thought that if this really is a debasement cycle, ETH might actually do okay. But I can't get myself to buy it. So, what do I do with my money versus what do I think could happen, right? I still don't want to put money into ETH.

I could see that scenario where, if the Robinhood chain really does keep crushing it and doing well, even though it pays no money to Ethereum, it could just get people excited about ETH being money and everything. But I'm not personally making any big bet on ETH. To be honest, I hold the least amount of majors that I've ever held. It just doesn't seem like they have good upside, and the downside is not that different from other stuff.

Yes, yes and no. I mean, I hear you. I'm in a similar position. The risk is always that you think the downside isn't as bad, but then you wake up and the alts are down 50%.

Sure. I mean, the on-chain stuff can go down 95% in a day. Even the prominent alts that have done well—

—can easily just nuke 50% in a week.

But I hear you. I'm bullish here. For me, it's one of those situations where, if ETH does well, I think some of the other assets I'm in can capture that beta to a better degree. This is a classic argument, but the way it falls apart is always on the downside. So you're kind of making 2 bets, and I'm generally constructive on the market here.

I think BTC probably chops around a bit, which is honestly pretty helpful. As long as BTC doesn't fall off a cliff, alts are looking to run because we're broadly risk-on. In this environment, BTC chop is actually pretty helpful for the market. Then you kind of have this situation where the 2 take turns: BTC runs, then alts. So, yeah, I think it makes sense to sit in higher-quality alts right now.

Yeah, I think BTC has been sitting where it is. As mentioned at the onset, there's a bunch of indicators, both on-chain and from a technical perspective. Not to say every cycle is the same, but there are some very basic strategies you can run on momentum where all roads point to, one, the bottom already being in and behind us, and two, the next month or 2 could be choppy.

The outlook for the next 6 to really 12 months is pretty much always positive for BTC when it sits at these types of levels. Again, anything can happen. But, yeah, I agree with the point that you don't necessarily need BTC to run to $120,000 for everything else to do well.

On the L1, like ETH, narrative, one thing that I've continued to think through is that all the things everybody thinks would be beneficial for ETH are even more bullish for something like HYPE than they are for ETH. Lighter is another example. When you think about that relative value, I'd rather be positioned there because that's just going to be a higher-beta returner on the same underlying thesis.

Do you think HYPE has a lot of upside from here?

Yes.

Okay. How much?

I think it'll be a couple hundred dollars a token over the next couple of years.

Okay, interesting. It's trading at— even on the circulating market cap, right? The P/E is higher than Robinhood and all that kind of thing, at least the last time I checked, at 86.

I think there's reflexivity to the USDC fees being paid there and the durability of those revenues, the buyback that comes from it, and the fact that it brings more money on-chain. So those TWAPs, I think, begin at the start of October.

Yeah, first week. So they'll do 30 days.

Yeah.

30 days' worth in the first 7 days.

Yeah. You have that. I think HIP-4 markets will get bigger; they won't get smaller, obviously. HIP-3 will continue to get bigger. Trading volumes in crypto, I would imagine, are pretty cyclical, but over time they're generally up.

When you look at Hyperliquid today, the business is valued 100% around HyperCore, and HyperEVM is kind of just there, not doing anything. There's a world in which that changes pretty drastically if Kinetiq does well with their Elysium HyperEVM L2 thing that actually allows people to do speculative on-chain things.

That's the whole point of crypto, for the most part: speculating. Trading activity is the vast majority of it. Having a HyperEVM that can integrate with HyperCore's liquidity in a bunch of ways, I think, has a ton of unlocks. It seems to me that there's a decent amount of upside left.

It's clearly not going to 10 or 15x like it has over the last 18 months, or 20x, but for a major—or a pseudo-major, I guess—the upside is still pretty compelling over time.

I mean, Multicoin's target was— their base case is, what, $360 in 2028?

Yeah, something like that.

So, I mean, they did some level of analysis there. Not to say that they're right, but—

Yeah, I think it's just like the BNB trade again from 2018 to 2023 or whatever. I don't think—

Yeah, that's kind of the way I look at it. Do you think Hyperliquid will fully expand into centralized services, too, and go the opposite Robinhood way?

Well, are they partnering with Kraken on that front? I think they'll probably—

Yeah.

—use a blend.

Yeah, that's for the front end, for US trading, right? But do you think they would actually try to become a fully regulated US institution?

I don't think that seems like their ethos or their plan. It seems like they're very comfortable just being that neutral liquidity layer for everything and letting people build shit on top of it.

But I don't know. Maybe HPC, the Hyperliquid Policy Center, has something around that. Maybe they'll do something like spin off an entity—a more centralized entity—to do things. I don't know. I have no idea. I haven't seen anything, so I haven't even thought about that, to be honest.

9. Taking Profits & Managing the Bull Market

You mentioned that crypto's a minority part of your liquid PA, but now, obviously, with runners like Zcash, HYPE, and LIT, that's become a larger minority. How are you feeling about that? Are you comfortable with that amount of exposure to crypto, or are you looking to rotate some of those gains back into the stock side? If so, are there any new names you've been adding, or is it the neoclouds and some of the basic AI infrastructure you've been holding for a while?

Yeah, I mean, Zcash has become my biggest single position by quite a lot.

Across everything, just because I hold way more stocks than I do crypto. I hold 4 crypto coins, basically.

It's probably 35% or so of my liquid portfolio, maybe closer to 40% at this point. So, yeah, I think I'm going to de-risk some. I'm trying to run this stuff more programmatically—just have target allocations for things and then, when something diverges by 5% or whatever above that, rebalance.

I do think it's better to make decisions ad hoc if you have the mental space for it. But that's what I've done my whole life, and it's become very tiring to have to manage stocks and liquid assets and then do your day job, investing. So I decided to make it more programmatic.

I will be rebalancing a bit. I've already sold a bit of Zcash and HYPE today, which are my biggest positions, just by virtue of how much they've run. I'll try to keep crypto to 30–35%.

I think my target is 30%. I'm curious: are you guys all in crypto, or what's your allocation?

I don't know.

Probably like 50/50. So it was below 50/50 before the run-up, right?

But I don't trade, you know. I just—

I've said this a million times: I just buy ETFs, right? So, like—

Yeah.

But I definitely—that's how I view the flow, though. That's how I view the flow, though. The thing with crypto is that, like you said, it's become such a big portion now, and it was smaller. You don't need to start with a large amount of money in crypto because when the opportunities come, the upside is so much that you just don't need to start with so much, right?

And then, constantly buying—you know, there can be things that I'm bullish on in crypto, but I'm not naive to the fact that it always comes down a lot, right? Versus, if I'm holding some coin that went up 10x, I'd rather just sell, pay the tax, and put it into SPY. The worst-case scenario for the stock market is like 20% or 50% if it's really bad, but you can have a crypto coin go down 80% in a week, right?

So, yeah, I do somewhat systematic things like you, I guess. Whenever I feel truly euphoric, it's more of a gut-feel thing. It's like, okay, move stuff into safer things that I genuinely don't—

Oh, sorry. I hold Bitcoin as well, obviously. Yeah, yeah, I missed that.

Yeah.

I think that's a good way to do it. I backtested it, and I definitely would have done better doing this than whatever the fuck I was doing. It's not even—it's just that it individually forces discipline. As long as you're not—

It's just, I guess, the tough thing for me is that I've always had a hard time with rules generally, across life, but also in investing, because all the best things that ever happened to me were from breaking the rules somehow. Including in investing, right? Obviously, some of the positions in the fund that brought us all here—we held them to very irresponsible levels.

So it's hard to then adopt a rule-based mindset, but I just think that, at a certain point—right now, where I am in life and everything—the drawdowns and managing a lot of positions take a lot out of me. That prevents me from doing my job as well, which isn't actually liquid trading. That's how I've ended up with this more cucked approach to my liquid book. Let's see how it goes.

I mean, I think it's a good way to do it. Managing a liquid book, especially as you—

Grow it over years and years and years, and it compounds, right? It becomes super, super difficult and super time-consuming. It's effectively a full-time job, right?

100%.

And so, unless you're willing to dedicate that time to managing it properly in a discretionary way from top to bottom, like—

It is better for you to just come up with some guardrails—just some small guardrails—and, when it happens, just do it.

I've always had problems with selling. Selling is a muscle. You have to work it out and figure it out. It's hard to sell your first big winner because you're like, “Oh, fuck, what if this keeps going? I'm going to be a billionaire. I'm going to be a millionaire. If you annualize this trade's return, I'm fucking Warren Buffett, right?”

But selling is hard, and the more you do it, the less hard it gets. Selling is super, super important. The only people who last from cycle to cycle to cycle are people who sell.

Yeah, I was going to say, on that topic, I 100% agree with you. When you're in something that's doing really well, you don't want to sell it, but then you sell, and it feels kind of good, right?

It's a—

Like—oh, this is dollars. This is USD. And then you're like, maybe I should sell a little more, right?

And because you start to think about it more like, okay, this is actually real money now, instead of this unrealized P&L that's sitting on a screen, right? I do think it's—Agent Chud had a whole video about this a couple of years ago, about getting addicted to selling or something. You should, and you shouldn't feel bad about selling stuff, either.

No. On CT, people are like, “Oh, you have to retire your bloodline in one cycle.” No, you don't.

The way I look at it—and the reason why I'm such a passive-investing stan—is that when you're passively investing, you're just letting other people work for you. Other people's labor is working for you, and you're doing literally fucking nothing. You're just putting your money there.

When you start managing actively and trading, you're consuming your own labor, and you're no longer benefiting from other people's labor. I manage my crypto because I have to. You cannot passively manage crypto, so I have to do that. But if I were to start actively managing my stocks, it would honestly be way too overwhelming, and I think I would underperform. I do not think I would outperform.

I think it's more about where you have an edge, honestly. You just don't have an edge in stocks. That's what it is. It's not—I don't think it's like—

And I think it feels more daunting if you don't have an edge because you're just kind of lost constantly.

I think the other issue with selling is that part of it is always wanting to max out the win. So it's like, I sold some—well, now I need to sell everything because this needs to be the top, and I need to max out the win. That is probably a good side effect of that element, or rather, the better half of the coin, versus thinking, “I need to max out the win, so I'm going to max hold.”

I don't journal, but when I repeat mistakes, I'm like, this is when journaling would have been good. I think an easy rule is that when you buy it, you think of the levels where you're going to sell it, put the order in, and just don't remove it.

Calculating the P&L—

Yeah, or just like, all right, now it's a bullish environment. The copium way you can rationalize it is, “I would sell it at these levels based on the current environment, which is Bitcoin at 70,000. But now Bitcoin's at 80,000 and it's going to 95,000, so I should hold.” Maybe you're right.

For peace of mind, it's good because you're most lucid when you're first getting into the position and not as enamored by what could be.

Oh, I've done that. I had a bunch of perp trades on before the Treasury announcement, and obviously, when I put those trades on, I was like, “I'm probably just going to take profit up here, at the retest of the highs, and then if it breaks out, maybe I'll buy higher.”

Then the Treasury announcement came out, and I was like, “Oh, no. Raise the take-profit level by 400%.” There are certain times when you kind of have to, but the majority of the time, you almost always screw yourself.

Um—

Yeah.

And set yourself up for 10 years of easy, easy compounding.

Also, be super careful at the end of the year. I always tweet about this—

Especially, do not carry tax due into the next year.

I do think that the “don't sell” thing is really important. When you sell, don't then get back into some other bullshit. That's why—

That's why I think the rebalancing aspect is useful. You have a long-term bag of either passive stuff or Bitcoin—either ETFs, Bitcoin, or gold, whatever combination of those you see as the asset you want to stack for the long term and compound into. Take enough out and put it into that.

And I think one thing that's important is that CT sometimes loses the plot. Hundreds of thousands of dollars is life-changing money if you're 100%—

For anyone, you know. Millions of dollars is clearly life-changing money.

Yeah, this whole thing where you need $10 million to retire—$15 million, $20 million, or $25 million—it's like, you don't have to make it all this cycle.

There will always be opportunities, and the only way to be someone who can actually capitalize on them is to sell, especially in crypto. None of the diamond hands have survived, other than Bitcoiners from very early on. All the ones from past cycles are dead. It’s just very unforgiving.

Yeah. One of the reasons I’ve talked about how I’ve never really held stables is that it’s not like I’m just a total degen and always taking risk. I’d rather take it completely out of the system and put it into other stuff, because I know, 100%, man, I would have lost so much money buying the first 30% dip before everything went so much lower.

Sometimes it’s helpful to make rules that you literally can’t break. You just need to be honest with yourself and know what your own flaws and emotional tendencies are, because everyone is different.

Do the math on what happens if your portfolio goes down 80% and what kind of gain you need to get back to where you were. It’s not a fun thing to do, but it helps put things in context.

I think 10/10 was a radicalizing moment for me. Even though I was sort of lucky with what happened to me, just knowing that if it had happened at different times, I would have been hurt very badly.

That shit can happen in crypto. Don’t get carried away.

I do think it’s helpful—at least it’s been helpful for me—to have a rough number that you can anchor to. It’s not saying you’ve made it or anything like that, but it’s more like, “Okay, now my core needs are met. I’m able to take care of my family.” It’s all about personal circumstances, right?

It’s about understanding that and not trying to chase, because there’s always going to be somebody out there doing better or landing multiple 10xers or a couple of hundred-xers, for example. Not trying to chase is something that I wasn’t great at last cycle.

The other thing is concentration. Last cycle, I played a lot more spray and pray, putting chunks into random things on-chain—random experiments. Now I’m a lot more concentrated and have real core theses around those things. When you go through a dip, you don’t freak out, panic, or panic-sell, which is the worst-case scenario, because you can ride that volatility when you’ve got confidence in it.

For me, the concentration aspect has been liberating because it’s also way less exhausting. I think that goes to Jason’s earlier point about trying to manage a much larger book.

I will say selling definitely feels better when you can sell in hindsight, with 20/20 vision, near a top, versus selling and then watching something double again over the next month or 2. But I’m going through this right now. I pulled up the Zcash chart because my levels initially, when I got into it, were $1,000. I said I was going to start trimming, but I didn’t and kind of held. Then $1,200 was my next level, and now we’re overnight breaching through there.

I’m literally going through this in real time, and I can feel myself mentally raising my targets.

Because of exactly the type of phenomenon we’re talking about here.

Yeah.

I think Zcash is—I don’t know. I’m trimming some today, along with some other stuff, but I do think Zcash is very high. It can go higher. It’s just hard because it doesn’t have cash flows, right? It’s the whole Bitcoin thing. There’s nothing to anchor to.

It’s less than 2% of Bitcoin’s market cap, so you’re like—

“Yeah, it’s just BTC.”

And look at the 10-year chart, man. It literally broke out of a 10-year range. That’s the thing—it’s crazy. And that’s not even a 10-year range. That’s more like 5 years.

My last question for you guys is: Obviously, it’s exciting when things are running well. Is there anything you’re looking for that would give you pause or cause you to either trim more or sell out of most of your positions? What’s the big lurking risk that you’re thinking through that could derail some of this? Is there anything, or would higher highs make you even more skeptical?

For me, I’ve never really been good at predicting when some big nuke is going to come. It’s just that the higher we go, the more I feel like I should sell stuff and take risk off, because that’s just the way the math works in crypto, especially. Things that go up a lot eventually have to come down.

Yeah, it’s tough because right now so much of this is policy-driven, with the debasement trade, with Bessent and everything. That’s kind of what ignited it. It’s not what’s driving Robinhood speculation—nobody buying Robinhood memes cares about what Scott Bessent says—but it does create the background conditions conducive to everything doing well.

I’ve generally thought that bullish and bearish market environments tend to get cut short, or generally end, because of a shift in policy that catches people off guard. Generally speaking, we’ve been risk-on for equities and risk-on for risk assets all year. We were pretty neutral to bearish on Bitcoin for a long time because of flows and all that stuff, but I think the environment has now become conducive for crypto to do well alongside equities.

I’m not looking for a big market-ending catalyst over the next several weeks or months. Maybe if inflation and shit starts persistently printing higher, and it forces Powell to stop jawboning and start actually doing something ahead of time, that could catch people off guard. But I’m kind of in the mode of dips being for buying, as opposed to pumps being for selling.

Some pumps on certain things are definitely for selling right now, especially things that have run a lot. But I’m still relatively bullish through the next 3 months, at least, and into the end of the year. I’m pretty bullish on risk.

Yeah. For me, it’s a policy change, or a lack of further accommodation alongside higher BTC. If policy doesn’t become that much more accommodative but BTC keeps running higher, then I get skeptical, because I think you start to lose the incremental buyer.

You have less of an argument for there to be one and more downside potential for a shock from a higher inflation print and what the ramifications of that would be. Obviously, there are massive tail events that no one can really predict, so I’m not going to put up any of those. The ones I’m looking for are basically just oriented around policy and what Jason mentioned with inflation.

The higher BTC goes without the expectation of further accommodation, the more skeptical I get about the legs it can have. I do think you need something serious to break through all-time highs. I don’t think you can just dribble up there. As you get closer to them—we’re still far away—that’s why I think it’s a lot easier to be bullish here in the midterm. But as we get closer, Saylor bought quite a lot of BTC.

You can argue that we moved from weaker hands—not weaker, but if you looked at the selling, it was from whales that had been holding forever. They used them as exit liquidity, which, credit to them, was a great trade. You could argue that his appetite to sell is not going to be nearly as high as theirs was as we go higher.

At the same time, I do think you still need buyers. If you don’t have a reason—namely, debasement—then it gets harder to be bullish that we’re really going to approach all-time highs.

Yeah. The U.S. getting its house in order is kind of the bear case for crypto, if you like.

But that’s never going to happen.

I don’t know. At the beginning of the Trump presidency, I briefly believed it. When there was DOGE, Bessent, and this all-star cast, I thought, “Holy shit, it’s actually going to happen.”

There are just too many incentives and too much entrenchment.

Yeah.

It’s political suicide to do the things that are necessary to actually get the house in order, because the house is in such disarray.

Yeah. And it’s not even suicide from Trump, because I don’t think it really matters for him that much, right? It’s his last term. It’s more so from everyone else who wants to have a future in politics.

It’s all the members of Congress. They’re not going to do it, right?

They’re the ones who are there for 50 years.

And they’re all asset holders.

So, good luck.

Yeah. Good luck pushing against that incentive.

Yeah, the drawbacks of democracy, for sure.

Awesome stuff, guys. Really appreciate you. I thought this was a fun conversation. I'm going to give a few really quick shout-outs in 30 seconds or less. If anybody hasn't tuned in to Zay's new emerging manager series, it is absolutely fantastic. I think, Z, your latest interview with Michael Dempsey from Compound was one of my favorites I've had in the last maybe year to date, honestly. Ton of great alpha, ton of great insights. So definitely check that out on the Delphi Digital YouTube page. We had our AI researcher, Excel XR, put out a banger report a couple weeks ago on Chinese AI labs and how much of their advancement and development has been distillation versus innovation. I thought some of the takeaways from that were actually very surprising to me, so I won't spoil it.

That was an excellent report. Everyone should definitely go check that out and listen to Tommy Seaney—he had him on the Delphi podcast to go through it all. Another really good conversation. And then on the research front, the team just put out a new report on MetaDAO. This is Ceteris and the research team. Again, I won't go into too many details. I think people should absolutely read it, but it ties into a lot of what we talked about here today in terms of launchpads, on-chain activity and volumes, and new, innovative ways to bring tokens to market.

Yeah, I think MetaDAO, just before we end it, has kind of taken a back seat right now to the crazy launchpad stuff—the more degen stuff. But they're more legitimate, real businesses. You want the tokens to have real ownership and all that stuff.

They're not in the spotlight right now because all the attention is on the more memecoin-type launchpad stuff, but I fully expect sentiment to change back to them at some point. They've done a really good job. The main thing for them now is that they just need to scale. They're not doing enough.

Their model has really good protections. It showed that it works, but they don't have a big breakout app yet, and they don't have enough things launching. Those are basically the 2 main focuses they need to focus on for the next year or 2.

I can't believe we didn't talk about VVV, by the way. Maybe next time we can do that.

Yeah, we ran.

We should show the chart.

I mean, it's up.

Great narrative.

I mean, it's a reaction to this OpenAI drama, right?

Like the OpenAI math drama.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think that was definitely a catalyst. I don't want to drag this on too long, but—

Yeah.

Yan, being the in-house VVV expert—and I definitely have a bag, so I'd say we're all kind of bulls on it—would you say it's more narrative-driven or fundamentally driven, in your view?

Both. I mean, fundamentals won't immediately react to something like that, so the idea is that more people are waking up to the need for private inference, and you assume fundamentals will follow.

Fundamentals on their own have been doing very well. If you look, it's continued subscriber growth. Burns have been going up, hitting new all-time highs every month on the burn front. Emissions are coming down, and that narrative certainly made it the lightning rod for expressing the private-inference bet.

Jose, would you say you're still skeptical?

I haven't followed the latest with the equity stuff. I do think this thing is obviously very bullish—the narrative of private inference. Maybe the TL;DR is that there's this 90-year-old math problem with a $1 million bounty. There was an NYU professor and an Anthropic employee working on it using Codex and a bunch of other tools. They cracked a big chunk of it in mid-August, and then some rumors started moving things.

OpenAI basically put 10,000 agents on it with its newest model and solved this 90-year-old problem in 88 hours. The professor is alleging that OpenAI had access to his prompts and chats and copied his approach. He says they had a call with him and pressured him to drop the Anthropic co-author so they could co-publish this thing together.

OpenAI says they never saw the work, and they published this thing showing that the model tried a bunch of different approaches. So, basically, it's unclear whether they actually stole anything. I think they probably didn't. I don't know.

But both sides—it just becomes a big narrative, right? OpenAI admitted they can't rule out that this guy's usage data was used to make their models better because they use anonymized usage data in training. So he basically might have been training his competitor as he was doing his work.

I think people are realizing this, but Venice would stop this, right? It would.

Yeah, you can run outside models on private inference. It absolutely would.

Yeah, but they would still have the same access, right? They're running it on the anonymized—

Anonymized doesn't mean anything, though. Anonymized just means it's separated from your name. They still have the data.

Yeah, but they still have the data here. It would just be coming from Venice.

No. If you didn't, you couldn't use frontier models. You'd use Chinese models.

Yeah, that's what I mean, but Chinese models can't solve the need in 2 months.

But at that point, the frontier models will always have solved them first.

Right, but the idea of private inference doesn't necessarily only apply to trying to solve an incredibly hard math problem. There are a million other reasons why you need it, and it just brings to light that they do, in fact, have access to the information.

I think it's less about whether I'm trying to solve the hardest math problems and more about shining a light on the privacy component of it. So, you're long—are you still long VVV? What else are you long? You didn't tell us.

Yeah. No, I'm still long VVV. I don't have much BTC or ETH. It's kind of HYPE, Zcash, Lighter, although I've been trimming HYPE and Lighter a bit. And then AERO, Grass, and Nina.

Not a bad bag at all. Good stuff, Yan. Cool, guys. We're going to do this next one. I won't tease it too much, but it might be a time when we're all together. We're going to try to get one of these in person at some point. It'll be fun.