Anthropic 的 Fable 被禁、MicroStrategy 会爆仓吗，以及 2026 年如何构建投资组合

Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is forformational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

All right, everyone. Welcome back to Empire. Very excited about this one. We’ve got Santi, and I think Rob’s going to join us in a little bit. We’ve also got a friend of the pod, Jordy Alexander from Seleni. Jordy, what’s happening?

How are you guys doing? What an exciting time to be alive.

What an exciting time. Truly is, man. We’re recording this on the back of the FOMC meeting yesterday. You’re our macro guy. None of us here are macro guys, so, Jordy, what’s going on through your mind?

We’re not going to talk about the most exciting thing, which is that the Knicks won the World Cup. New York is electric right now. But I guess you guys aren’t here, so that’s all right.

Listen, I’ve been getting roasted on the timeline because I said the U.S. has a pretty big chance of winning the World Cup. We’ve talked about how crypto bros are more skeptical about crypto, while non-crypto people are excited about it. U.S. people are like, “The U.S. will never win.”

Yeah. And, man, I’m Mexican. Mexico will never win the World Cup. Structurally, they just never will. But the U.S.—I’m long U.S. If they don’t win this World Cup, they’ll get pretty far, and Polymarket has them at something like 2%. I think that’s a bit low.

I was with a guy yesterday who claims to be a big football guy. I asked him, “What are the odds of the U.S. going to the semifinal or the final?” He said, “I’ll give you 20-to-1, 10-to-1.” I said, “All right.” Then I went to Santi, and he was like, “No, no, no, no.” He chickened out of the trade.

I’m sure you can find the public odds pretty comfortably and get size if you want. I don’t know. I can’t see it. That would be a dream too far, but you never know. Even in 1994, I remember when I was a kid, they had the World Cup and did quite well comparatively, for a host nation.

Comparatively. Jordy, where are you from? Who’s your team?

Who is my team? I was a big Messi guy, but now that he’s won a championship, I’m not as emotionally invested in him getting another one.

You’re an underdog kind of guy.

Yeah. If he wins it again, I’ll be happy. He’s my favorite player, which is clichéd now that he’s clearly the GOAT. But doing what he’s doing at 39—I’m 41, and I’m also trying to extend my health span and athletic abilities into my 40s, as he is doing. So maybe I’m still cheering for Argentina. I want the old guy to show that 40 is the new 30 and that we can still get it done.

Cristiano is 41. He’s playing pretty well.

But he has an insane health regimen.

But Jordy, I know you’ve been long on the longevity track. Did you see what Midjourney announced today or yesterday?

Midjourney—I think it’s, I don’t know if you’ve been following it, but it feels like the next leg of advancement. I’m now very long Eli Lilly because my basic prediction on this stuff is that the only way to turn public sentiment on AI is to convince the public that it’s making everyone healthier.

We’re going into the midterms in the U.S., and there’s going to be so much hate toward data centers. Anthropic and OpenAI have to change that narrative. I don’t know if you guys saw it, but I think Sundar was booed, or there was a walkout, when he gave a commencement speech at Stanford. The students walked out on him.

The amount of hate toward AI right now isn’t even close to an all-time high, because that’ll be around the midterms, when politicians have to be anti-data-center. I think the only way out of this is to convince the public that AI is making everyone healthier. I actually wouldn’t be surprised if OpenAI or Anthropic brought a lab in-house, like a biotech operation, or bought a biotech company.

For all the promise of AI, I feel like the 2 categories are coding, which has been completely revolutionized—software is never going to be the same again—and health and biotech, which is slowly happening and will take years: discovering new drugs.

The amount of money people spend on GLP-1s compared to AI is significant. We all talk about AI spending, and a lot of it is circular shit, but the amount of money people are spending just trying not to be fatasses is actually bigger. That’s a bigger industry. Everyone will spend money to be healthy and look good, especially at this point, when everyone has to focus on it if they’re going to be competing in the marketplace.

I’m very bullish on that category.

Are either of you guys on peptides?

No. I don’t like needles, so for the time being I don’t want to inject anything. I’m not against the concept, and I think the concept is good. I’m taking some peptides that are bioavailable enough orally. They’re more chill peptides, not GLP-1s.

I’m on 4 or 5 peptides that have some oral bioavailability, like BPC, NAD, and SLU PP 332, the sloop. So there are a few that are working.

What have you observed? Have you seen any measurable change?

I’ve lost 12% body fat, from 26% to 14%, which is a huge change.

And that’s while you’re still exercising the same amount? You’re not really changing much other than the peptides?

No, I am changing a lot. This isn’t the peptides. This is hardcore: 15,000 to 20,000 steps a day, lifting 3 times a week, a clean diet, and doing everything.

Right.

Yeah, because I remember looking at the timeline a year ago. You started on this health train and really began optimizing your sleep hygiene and all that.

Santi was like, “I remember a year ago you weren’t looking very good.”

No, no, no, but he had a—you had a—was it a year ago, Jordy? It was a good post around—I think it was in November.

I think so. It’s been about 8 months that I’ve been pretty hardcore. Hey, Rob. How are you doing?

Rob, I don’t think you want to join this show, my friend. We’re talking longevity and peptides. We’re not talking stables today.

Maybe I could use some peptides. I feel like I’ve had one of those months. I’ve been traveling a bunch and eating too much, so I feel like I need to be here to learn something.

1. Anthropic's Fable Banned by US Government

All right. Can I shift us, Santi, or do you want to keep going?

No, no. I was just going to say, do you think public sentiment now has a greater public enemy? It’s no longer crypto. Would you go as far as saying there’s more negative sentiment toward AI than crypto? I guess crypto has just faded into irrelevance.

I think inequality in general is going to be a huge theme over the next 5 years, and it’s just going to get bigger and bigger going into elections. Elon being a trillionaire and swinging $60 billion in a day is probably not what these college students want to see.

It’s less about AI per se than about people feeling left out of what’s happening. I’m very lucky to be in the crowd that’s on the forefront of being able to look at some of these deals and see some of this stuff, and even I feel left out. I can only imagine when you go several degrees down what it feels like. I think that’s the main sentiment.

There’s a great 20VC podcast with the CEO of Perplexity that delivers a really compelling message: anything is possible now with AI. He, along with other people like the SemiAnalysis guy, has said that it’s been a disservice for Dario in particular to be so negative and focus so much on job losses. Someone even went as far as telling Dario to stop talking and have someone else take over.

It’s no wonder Fable got shut down. We should actually talk about this export ban on Fable. On June 9—I think about a week ago—they released Fable, which is like the open, public version of the hot mythos model that everyone was so scared about.

Then, 3 or 4 days later, Lutnick and the U.S. government basically said, “We don’t want you to export this to the world.” There was an export ban. Anthropic can’t limit it to just U.S. users, and so they shut everyone down.

It's good for fundraising until the US government—until that message turns on them.

I think there's an interesting question here, too, because Jordy made the point around everyone feeling like they're missing out and inequality. I totally agree with that, but I do wonder—I don't think it's just that. I do think that Dario and others going around and saying, "Hey, you're all over and over and over again going to lose your jobs," has created a lot of fodder for misperception about what we're doing.

There are some people on the timeline who are spinning positive messages, but it's always easier—it's human nature—to be negative. Even people who aren't building in the space, like a lot of investors, enjoy these doomsday scenarios. The Citrini article and a lot of these other things are examples of that.

The other side of it is, to the point around Perplexity, that entrepreneurship is rising at quicker rates than it has in decades. People are building new things with fewer people and less money, and it's more efficient than it's ever been. There's a really interesting storytelling problem that I think we have at the moment, and that definitely didn't help Dario and Anthropic with the US government.

Yeah. If you look at what all the CEOs—Dario, Sam, Dez, and obviously Elon, who's been at this game for a long time—are doing, they're spending all their marginal time on media. These guys are giving a huge number of interviews. I think they've realized that the highest ROI as a CEO of a frontier lab is trying to sway the media in your favor.

Obviously, they're not running their companies; somebody else has to be doing that. They're just going around.

Well, Dario—it came out that Dario has 1 direct report, his chief of staff, and that the whole rest of the company reports to his wife.

I didn't realize that. Is that true?

Yeah, I think so. He was on a podcast, and he was like, "This is my sister."

No, I think his chief of staff is Leopold Aschenbrenner, whatever. What's that fund?

Yeah. Situational Awareness.

I think his girlfriend or his wife is Dario's chief of staff.

Got it. Got it.

What I will say is, I saw Fable when it came out on Friday. I tried it out, and it was like waiting for the moment to happen. Then it got banned on, I think, Sunday. The conversation really needs to come back to crypto.

There's been a lot of chatter around how this further emphasizes the need to have open-source models, combined with the idea that the performance of open-source models is catching up to some degree. I think we should talk about that in particular. I don't have exposure to any of these projects, but Venice and some others—I feel like if I were to pick a narrative that is percolating and will continue to become more important, it's this idea of open-source models.

You shouldn't be using a Ferrari for everything, right? Token spend should be a little bit more discerning, and routing token spend is going to continue to be a theme. I think this is a moment for crypto to shine, if it can deliver on the performance.

I see Rob rolling his eyes.

Yeah. Well, I'm in the minority, I think. I do think there's a question here. Let's say an open-source model was the most powerful model, and let's say you believe Dario's analogy that this is like a nuclear bomb and has the power to wreak havoc, do good, or deter people. It has the power to do a lot of different things.

If you believe that an open-source model is the equivalent of a nuclear bomb, it's not clear to me that the government isn't going to want to get in the way of that as well. If that's true, they will try to find a way to limit your access.

While I believe privacy is a human right, I don't think crypto wants to be in this situation again where we're saying, "Well, actually, the main use case of this thing is to circumvent the government." I think we need to figure out a way to work together on those 2 things.

I agree that open-source models are good, that they're getting better, and that there are a lot of use cases for which these non-US models should be used. I think access and privacy are human rights, but access and privacy in this specific instance—where people see this as a potential national security issue—are going to be really hard for us to navigate as, "This is just for crypto," or, "This is just for currency."

For currency, it's a little bit easier to have that conversation. For what people believe is a nuclear bomb, I think it's going to be hard to manage that.

I think the geopolitics are super important as well, given that they've essentially said, "America first," which doesn't really work well. You immediately saw people saying, first of all, that many of the employees aren't American. You have DeepMind, which is UK-based, and then you start talking about NATO coalitions. Maybe Europe needs to let us in. Europeans haven't been innovating anything, but we're kind of aligned. Let us in.

On the other side, you have China pushing very hard on its own models. On the open-source side, I'm less interested in them ever becoming frontier models. I never believed that was going to be possible. But being 6 months behind is not a big deal when the government is essentially censoring that extra 6 months of progress and not letting it be public anyway.

To Santi's point, for normal tasks, you will probably just want a cheap, open-source model. That's something you can run locally or with crypto rails. The cutting-edge, dangerous stuff will probably be out of view.

That thing is already established now. The gauntlet has been thrown down by the US government, so it's a very interesting game theory.

Yeah, this reminds me a lot of crypto. We've had countries like China banning crypto, and there's always a way to circumvent it. You also remember the days when Bitmain would release its ASICs, and most people would say, "They've had 6 or 9 months to mine ahead of you and monetize it."

I feel like that's going to be a theme in AI: people who have access to compute and people who have access to capital. It's really hard to build a data center. It probably takes 4 years to get a new data center approved, and it's only going to take longer than that unless we figure out space with space AI.

I still think there's a place for open-source models. Even Case had a pretty good take here. For a long time, he had been saying that the gap between open-source and closed models was going to widen because of the data gap, the hardware gap, and increased restrictions. He said he was wrong. Z.ai is on another level, with incredible benchmarks on this model. He's now running his Hermes agent on GLM-5.2 via AskVenice. That's pretty interesting.

It's interesting. I'm much more bullish—not on privacy rails. I kind of agree with Rob's point that the government will always put national security concerns first and bulldoze through everything. I think tokenization is what is showing to be by far the most promising.

I think we'll have a big tokenization of AI—either compute or tokens—to raise money for the next run. There will be some tokenization happening. The rails are way too good, and I'm sure OpenAI and all these companies are looking at it. Everyone has already experimented with some amount of crypto when you look at these labs.

I think tokenizing AI is the much bigger category. We can talk about the Coinbase thing later as well. It was very exciting to see that there's so much overlap happening now. I agree with Santi's point that the gap between open-source and closed-source models is closing, or at least they're not that far behind, and I think that will probably continue to be true.

It's just that if everything is getting much better, it will still be a national security issue, right? To the point you made earlier, China banned Bitcoin mining, and there were ways to get around it. But there wasn't really a way for a lot of Chinese people in China, number one. They really got a stranglehold on the industry; it basically died there.

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People moved out of China to continue to operate in the industry. In this case, it won't be like, “Oh, well, just like China did it.” It's not going to be like that, because people see this as an arms race. If it gets to that point, there are potentially controls in the US, the EU, China, and kind of everywhere, and the free flow of AI models could theoretically come to a halt at some point. This is a little dystopian, but it doesn't seem that crazy to me.

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3. Open vs Closed Source Models

No, I think you're right, Rob. To try to make this more tangible, let's say there are 3 buckets here. There's the closed-source providers. You go long Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI. Let's call that 1 bucket.

You could go long the open-source models, like MiniMax, DeepSeek, and the Chinese models, but also Meta's models, which are open source. I think xAI might be open source. Let's call that the open-source models.

Then there's the routers. You could put OpenRouter in this bucket, and probably Venice, too. Our philosophy at Blockworks is that most people internally at Blockworks shouldn't be using the frontier model, the single greatest model. When GPT-5 came out, the natural inclination was to want to ask it your normal questions, but probably only 5% of the work we're doing at Blockworks should go through Fable 5. Most questions should actually be done on 4.6 or 4.8. How do you think about those 3 buckets, Rob?

Yeah, I don't think that's wrong. I do agree. We're seeing this a lot. Token maxing is now facing a backlash because it makes no sense. Spending more money just to spend more money is not a good thing.

For the vast majority of workflows today, you absolutely can use an older model, and you should be using an older model, especially for the things that most people are doing. That's only going to become more true as these things continue to get better. We're seeing a lot of infrastructure companies building what they call smart routing for different types of workflows.

I think that's probably the future. You'll see this infrastructure layer, especially for a lot of the agentic work that's happening, where instead of you or an engineer at Blockworks having to pick which model to use and figure it out, these things are going to have so much data. They'll have a company, or some sort of router with compute, that they're training themselves in between. That will be able to take the inference and route it to the right foundational model for that use case, the speed at which they want to do it, and so on. I think we're going to see a wave of companies in that middleware layer.

Are you guys enforcing that at the company level? Do you tell employees that they have a cap on token spend, or is that still very much uncapped?

We've basically just run it uncapped for a while. This was—you remember the podcast we did 9 months ago—because we needed to get the whole company using AI first. That was the first thing: we had to get everyone there.

We basically gave people an unlimited budget. It wasn't mandatory, but we wanted people to post in this shared Slack channel called AI Kitchen, where it was a source of inspiration. If you're a salesperson, you could share what you're doing, and an engineer could see it. Then a data analyst could see it.

Now Ramp has rolled out something where you can start to get better visibility into your AI spend. You can say, “The finance team is spending 17% of our tokens. What's the output there?” We're now just starting to clamp down on token spend. You don't want to clamp down too much, but we basically said, “Run wild for 6 months, and now let's start to figure out what the ROI actually is.” We're entering the second phase of token spend for companies, and you have to get a little tighter with it.

Yeah, and I didn't fully answer your question earlier to Yano as well, but I think that's happening. To your point earlier about AI being open source and whatnot, Meta is still a US company, and obviously most of its employees live in California. If it open-sources something that's seen as potentially outside the national security interests of the US, that thing will go away as quickly as it appeared. There will be a lot of attempts to block any future innovation there.

Yeah, this goes back to Leopold. I think he was raising the flag at OpenAI: you should not be open-sourcing stuff. It's a matter of national security. The question is, have models become so advanced, and have we reached the point where the stuff that's already open source just poses a threat to national security?

I saw on the timeline that, even during that weekend, some companies were really good at backing into the weights and all this stuff. What I'm trying to get at is the so what. You're going to clamp down, but you already released an open-source model that's pretty capable and pretty sophisticated, able to do the stuff that perhaps you thought was a threat to national security. I think we're still in the 3rd or 4th inning of this, if even that far, and I don't know what Jordy thinks.

Yeah, I think the 4th inning sounds about right. There's a lot to play out.

What? How many innings do we have, guys?

What scale are we using?

Crypto's 1st inning, baby. 1st inning for crypto.

4. Structuring A Portfolio Post 10/10

Supercycle. Jordy, do you have outside capital, or is it just your proprietary capital that you manage?

We don't have outside capital at the moment. I have a personal passion for asset management and efficient use of assets, and for ensuring that the world doesn't waste its asset allocations. At some point, we will have some sort of asset-management business.

I think proving to the world, for 5-plus years, that we're good at managing our own assets without having to ask for anyone else's—

—is a good starting point to then be able to do things properly. And we've had conversations with some sovereign funds and that kind of crowd.

“I have a passion for efficient asset allocation” is a beautiful line in a deck.

A thing to say, but yeah. So wait, let me—my actual question here is that you can invest in anything because it's your own capital, right? How do you think about allocating when the markets are so crazy right now? You can buy anything from meme stocks to Venice to SpaceX, which just continues to rip, to Hyperliquid or small-cap tokens. How are you allocating right now?

Most of what we do—because we don't have outside capital—consists of strategies that have some sort of capacity we want to fill. We can either do very high-Sharpe systematic strategies, or we can do more tactical trades.

SpaceX is something we traded very long into, and now we're getting flattish and waiting for the inevitable short that we're going to put on. This is a low-float shitcoin, as others have said. We've seen this play out before with month after month of unlocks.

The key sign I'm starting to see is that our OTC brokers, the crypto brokers, are getting locked SpaceX shares. They're getting flow for locked SpaceX shares. I'm asking what the discount is and doing the same modeling I do with locked tokens.

Crypto was made for SpaceX. You know what I mean? This is the moment for us to repurpose and just trade the shit out of this. We have to get Ansem on here and see what he's doing.

Jordy, you're a great person to talk about this because, if you have a mandate with LPs to invest only in crypto, you can try to get a waiver, but you have to stay true to your track record.

And that's not a dig. You just have to stay disciplined and invest. Because it's mostly prop, how have you changed your portfolio since 10/10? Why even play?

It's been pretty abysmal and difficult, other than Hyperliquid and maybe some market-making stuff.

What percentage of your book is long/short? What percentage of your book is market-neutral, and have you made pretty drastic changes to the book over the last 6–9 months?

The venture book, since 10/10, I think we've done 3 crypto deals total. We did Canton, we did Catalyst with SEOA, and we did one more. We've done maybe 15 to 20 frontier deals between AI and biotech.

The other stuff we're bullish on is, of course, defense, precious metals—no, not precious metals—rare earth stuff. We're trying to get these—

Like copper, or, like, deeper than that?

Then whatever is going to be the bottleneck, whatever China is controlling, you have to play out the possibility that we're going to have some kind of escalation between geopolitical rivals.

I think it doesn't make sense to try to back prediction market number 18 at this point. We do see some people trying to get into those categories, but I just tell the founders, “We'll happily invest at the next stage, once you prove traction.” Pre-traction, there are just too many people with a pitch deck, and I'm not playing this game again. I just want to see some proof in the pudding before doing it. We're happy to get later; we'll join the more expensive round.

Is crypto in the too-hard bucket right now, given the opportunity cost of doing stuff that the market likes and is clearly in favor of?

Crypto—I think there are things in crypto that can do well. Bitcoin has been very disappointing with Saylor's blunder, with the $2 billion buyback he did. But I'm still bullish on Bitcoin.

I think the L1s—it's hard to see a catalyst there for the ETH/SOL trades right now. I'm not sure what those would even be. Hyperliquid is interesting. We are still long, but we've been scaling some out at this level.

The revenue hasn't changed since ever; it's never changed. It's always just under $1 billion a year, sort of in that range. They can potentially turn off this growth fee switch. Right now, they're really reducing the fees for the trading products, but it's not clear how that would affect volumes.

It's kind of like Uniswap. You always said, “Oh, yeah, Uniswap can just turn the fee switch on whenever they want,” but it's not that simple. LPs want their share, and people won't trade above a certain slippage, so it's not that simple. I think Hyperliquid can't just triple the RWA fees overnight and have that go smoothly.

Still, the multiple now feels a little bit driven by the DATs buying more than by the expansion of their trading.

Yeah, the podcast was a month ago, when it hit $63 or whatever. We were literally on the podcast while it was at $62–$63 for the first time. We said on that podcast—or at least I said on that podcast—that I thought it was fully valued at that point.

Clearly, there's momentum and flows, and there are the DATs and the ETFs, and there's excitement about what this could be in the future. But I think, to your point, Santiago, from a multiple perspective and from a fundamental perspective, that argument has gone away now. The idea that it's undervalued on a relative basis has gone away.

Now, I think you have to underwrite whether or not you think this is just going to take market share from centralized entities, CME, and all that kind of stuff. Maybe we should talk about the CME, Terry Duffy stepping down, but also them filing suit against the CFTC today.

I think it's hard to underwrite—and I said this before—DeFi really taking market share from CME and ICE any more than it has today in the near term. Maybe in the long term.

On the podcast I did with Mike Selig, chair of the CFTC, he stopped talking about DeFi and started talking about on-chain finance. I think the reason he made that distinction was very clearly around on-chain finance, where the exchange can operate within our ruleset that includes KYC/AML, appropriate reporting, and so on.

We see a real need for that, but we don't necessarily see the need for—or want to perpetuate—DeFi as we talk about it, which is, call it, non-KYC and permissionless. So I think that does feel to me like where the hype is right now, and that's been the story recently.

So I guess the question maybe to you, Santiago—and it is interesting to hear you talk about some of those rounds that you just did, because you talked a little bit about the fundamentals of crypto, and at least one of those rounds that you did, we looked at and were like, “There's zero revenue, and this is getting done at hundreds of millions of dollars in valuation,” and we're not really sure how you underwrite this thing.

But I think maybe the excitement for what the world can be has shifted to other types of verticals and other types of industries.

On Hyperliquid, you always need something to initiate the next bull run. Solana did that, I think, last cycle, very cleanly, from $8 to $60. Then the FTX sales and bankruptcy cleared the air, and it went all the way to $240. I think there were spillover effects from that.

Interestingly, this cycle, prediction markets have been private, and a few growth investors in the public market—to your point, the public market didn't participate in that. Hyperliquid, I guess, has created some wealth, but it's interesting hearing you say that there's a cap in revenue. It has sort of stayed flat.

This is on the back of very interesting volume for RWAs and oil, given the Iran escalation, and then Cerebras' IPO and SpaceX. If that's the cap, and if Hyperliquid has that ceiling at $60–$70, what does that mean for the rest of the year? What does that mean for the rest of the cycle? What are you excited about?

This is why I was mentioning open-source models. Maybe this is where there's some sort of renaissance for crypto and open source, with some AI kinds of things running.

Yeah. No, it's a very valid framing. First, on the Solana thing, I was always maybe the only person really warning that the Solana thing was not going to last. At the end of the day, it's not money. They're not trying to make it a monetary instrument, and it's not a good monetary instrument because it has unlocks for years. It doesn't have the things that you want in a monetary instrument.

When you take that out of the way, is it worth $250 billion based on a multiple of fees burned? It doesn't really make sense. I think people have started capitulating on the idea of it being an on-chain Nasdaq.

It already seems like it's doing okay. It's fine. People want to trade perpetuals, and they want decentralized in their funds, but they want a centralized platform. People love a centralized thing that just works. Even Hyperliquid, in many ways, is more like a centralized exchange; it has that central control. It's not trying to fill blocks in a certain way.

So that's played out. The HYPE thing is similar. It has this cult following, and people have done really well. The fact that people got in early and are natives is great, but revenue-wise, the only way that it goes up is through the RWA stuff, because altcoins haven't really grown and aren't a growing segment.

They have Trade.xyz, which is a private company. Again, to your point, people aren't participating in Trade.xyz. They've tried to farm it, but there's no token on the horizon. They've tried to participate in discussions on HIP-3 because we tried to help with the Dreamcash deployer. We tried to do a Tether one, but it's been very difficult to do UST on Hyperliquid now that they've enshrined USDC.

If you participate in what's arguably the No. 2 deployer, you see that Trade.xyz is in a really unfortunate spot. They're sort of trusted as the core team because they've had that close partnership, but the revenue from it—I think they're raising a new round in the billions—isn't going to anyone. No one's getting Trade.xyz revenue, and that's the thing that's really growing.

So there will potentially be some conflict between all the stakeholders in that ecosystem. Right now, it's kumbaya because it's going up and the DATs are buying. But as we saw last year, when the DATs stop buying, things change really quickly between the XYZ shareholders, the Hyperliquid stakeholders, and the people actually paying the fees.

They're only willing to pay a certain amount of fees. That potentially clouds the horizon, even though Jeff is clearly an amazing executor for what they've built.

5. Will Microstrategy Blow Up?

So, Jordy, if you don't own HYPE, you don't own SOL, and Bitcoin's a little scary because of the Saylor blowup, are you long any crypto tokens right now?

We are buying more and more Bitcoin on this dip. You either bet that this thing is going to zero somehow, or you wait out the storm. I'm not saying the storm is going to be fine right away. I'm surprised STRC is at 85 as we speak, or something like that. Is there a point at which Saylor just starts buying that back up?

Yeah. You know, that would be the Justin Sun playbook. He's always deep-pegged his stablecoins just to get them to $0.80 and then buy them back. [Laughter]

Yeah, while we're recording, it said 85. It was earlier in the pod, I think.

He's also got less than 8 months of dividend coverage right now. I think he's—

Go ahead. I want to go there, Rob. What does that mean? When someone hears you say it's at 85, can you unpack that for a regular user? What are the implications of what the market thinks MicroStrategy can or can't do, or whether it's going to be a forced seller?

Well, maybe Jordy should talk about it. He's the trader.

I mean, look, there's definitely a panic that this thing is going to be like Luna, where it just spirals down. I think it's way overblown. He's still raising $200 million a week, and he's keeping half of it in cash. Half of it—he's still buying Bitcoin because I think he wants to show, "Okay, let's show that we're not stopping buying Bitcoin."

I don't think he's going to sell Bitcoin anytime soon. Obviously, if you're a shareholder of MSTR, there might be reasons not to be very happy right now because that's the thing that's getting thrown out first. But the fact that Elon is wealthier than all of Bitcoin, and he's one guy, makes me think this asset is still very undervalued as the primary monetary digital instrument.

We are buying Zcash. I know there's a lot of discussion about Zcash, the bugs, and what's going on. I think at this price, it's a good hedge as a potential monetary instrument, and I do like some things about it quite a lot. So we are buying more Zcash in the $400s. We have a few more tactical plays.

I'm waiting for your venture book to launch or derisk.

I think there's also a point that the market is flashing. I do think it's overblown, but STRC at $85 does flash. By the way, I think MSTR has some convertible senior notes that sit at the top of the capital structure, and then they have Strike, Strife, Stretch, Stride, and common. I think that's how the waterfall works.

STRC is near the top, so if that's at 85, to Jordy's point, the price is suggesting that there's a potential they could have to unwind this whole thing. I think it's around $8 billion of convertible notes, and then there's some stuff underneath it. It's suggesting that the actual net asset value of the company, if they had to sell right now, would be half of its market cap today. I have to do the actual math—I don't know what that looks like—but that's scary right now. It's probably overblown, to Jordy's point, and we're probably looking at a point-in-time flows thing, but the market is flashing very serious red warning signs at you.

Steady lads. This reminds me: I got roasted on the timeline because I said there's a scenario where Bitcoin just goes down to $50,000 or $40,000. At that point, what's stopping it from—

I think the difference with Luna is that when Do Kwon asked for a buyout from Jane Street or Jump, they looked at it and said, "Okay, we could put another billion in. We could put more billions in. But do we want to? No, we just want to keep our money."

If you look at Bitcoin in the $40,000s, there's too much money awash in the world. I just can't believe that you won't get one of these guys, like Jane Street or someone, to step in and say, "Yeah, this is it."

But why would they? If you're nibbling at this shit, you mean—you didn't say, "We're loading the truck with Bitcoin at $66,000." You're doing other stuff. You're buying rare shit, as you should, because you're probably investing in really overpriced AI rounds like the rest of us.

That doesn't matter. I'm sprinkling it in. You know what I'm saying? There's a disconnect there. I'm not buying this stuff right now because I shouldn't be. I just don't think I'm getting paid enough to be long crypto—none of crypto—right now. Maybe Backpack. I'm an investor, and we like it because they did some interesting stuff. I'm not long anything in crypto except for this one thing where I'm a big—

That was the most random thing to—

No, no, but I'm already long venture stuff that I think is working. I'm not compelled to get out of my seat and move capital away from public equities, fixed income, or whatever venture—not crypto—into something like Bitcoin because it's in the too-hard bucket. I'm not going to buy Bitcoin right now as this thing unfolds, looking at STRC at 85. You know what I mean?

I think the game theory of that is, to your point, who steps in? I get it—this is not Luna. There are whales out there. There's a Larry out there. You have ETFs, and at some point this becomes compelling for someone who saw Bitcoin at $120,000, didn't catch it then, and is now thinking, "Oh, this is at a discount. I should have it in my portfolio."

I think there are a lot of those people—not just the Paul Tudors, the macro guys, but a lot of tech guys who see it and say, "Yeah, this thing's going to go back up. Now I have so much money from SpaceX, or whatever thing I did, and it's at $40,000." You could buy 5% of the thing.

I actually want to sit on a point Jordy made here, which is that I think there's more optimism about crypto among the non-crypto Bay Area guys today than there is among the crypto entrepreneurs. If you actually go and talk to Elon—and not even just him; he brought up Breyer, Druckenmiller, and Wences Casares, who's obviously been in this forever—Elon and Sam Altman are more bullish on crypto today than we seem to be on this podcast, the people who make all of our money from the space.

That doesn't mean that you could be out of the hundred SpaceX employees who made over, say, $100 million or $400 million. How many of them have a wealth advisor saying, "Listen, you've got to put 5% of your newly minted wealth, diversify away from SpaceX, and put it into Bitcoin"? Do you believe those conversations are happening?

I only need one Elon. I don't need any of these other guys.

Yeah, exactly. You meet one guy, and do these guys have wealth advisors? Do you think they have some old financial advisor in a suit?

Most of the flows, I think, have come from RIAs. When we went up to $120,000, we talked a lot about where the flows were coming from, and I think RIAs still play a huge gatekeeping role in the wealth of America. I see Rob agreeing with me.

I have a point I want to make after you're done here, too.

Okay, I will be quick. If that's true, then I think you have to go into the psychology of the wealth managers and the RIAs. Are they going to put their neck out and say, "Hey, you should probably get exposure to Bitcoin right now"?

Dude, I think they are, because what are they going to say? "Go buy SpaceX at $3 trillion," or "Go buy Google, which is up 100%"?

But my point is that a lot of them did that over the last year, and now they're in a very uncomfortable position with their clients where they're saying, "You should have just told me to go long everything else except this shit."

Yeah.

I don't believe we're fully penetrated at all, by the way. There's only a very small subset of RIAs that probably did that. From a TAM analysis, you could probably get super bullish, but it's difficult.

Well, I was going to say that, and this agrees with your point: the amount of alternatives that are now making their way through the RIA platforms and the wealth-management channel has exploded. There's insatiable demand. You probably see it with your bankers—the amount of opportunities you're seeing on the alternatives side or the fund side is so much higher than it used to be.

I think Bitcoin is part of that story for a lot of these wealth managers. We've seen a little bit more of that. Some of the big wirehouses specifically are starting to say, "Do a little bit of IBIT," or whatever, because we've seen alternatives explode in interest: private markets, private equity, some of the funds, IPOs, and so on.

It's fairly concentrated. Private equity as a whole has not been that broad. A lot of people are saying, "Hey, look, we haven't gotten DPI." They really want to get into single-asset SPVs of the next SpaceX, and crypto doesn't fit into that conversation.

I've seen single SPVs from wealth managers say, “Hey, look, we have neoclouds, we have robotics, we have the next frontier model,” or whatever. I think that's getting a lot of traction. I am not seeing much interest in traditional strategies because there's been such immense wealth creation in the SpaceX IPO. Everyone was like, “If you missed it, you're really having a hard conversation with your committee. You cannot miss the next SpaceX. Go figure it out.”

We are definitely in the FOMO phase, and I agree that you're right. Nothing of what I'm talking about is really going to play out until we're a little cooled off, and we're not going to cool off until people start losing money. The first money will be the dumbest money. Poker taught me that if you give it enough iterations, enough hands, the money will always flow from the dumb hands to the smarter sharks. It always happens.

Right now, what we're seeing for the first time is that passive flows and 401(k)s are being targeted in a way that has never happened before. When I tell my family and friends what to do, I just say, “Buy the S&P. Just buy the index. It's fine. It'll always go up.” This is the first time where it feels like there's financial terrorism about to take place. This thing is going to buy SpaceX at $200. Obviously, it's not in the S&P, thankfully, but it is in the Nasdaq, it is in the Russell, and it will inevitably bleed.

I'm 100% sure that this is going to bleed once unlocks start happening. The dumbest money is being targeted in a way where it just has to buy. We've seen this in crypto before. The reason crypto has dried up is that the memecoin buyers and all the less sophisticated people have just gotten extracted by people who figured out how to get them. Now people are figuring out how to launch this massive IPO with a low float, get it bought, and then it is what it is. The game is over.

I agree with Santiago. We're at the phase where the family offices that we talk to—these SPV-maximalist family offices—are all smart, capable investors who have never done an SPV in their lives. Not only are they participating, they're saying, “I should make an SPV.” To be honest, even sometimes I'm like, “Oh, we got more allocation. Maybe we should make an SPV.” Everyone is seeing that there's so much FOMO from family offices.

The velocity of money, when you talk about inflation, isn't just the monetary supply. It's the velocity of money. There's a lot of money that has been sitting in safe instruments that is moving. The velocity is high. We're in this stage right now.

But, J, if that's the case, I've always felt that we're just in a new paradigm since Silicon Valley Bank went under. To me, the Robinhood phenomenon is that the velocity of money has gone up by multiples. What are the implications of that? Crypto continues to be extremely volatile. This is why I'm extremely bearish on anything that touches financial engineering. I just can't understand some of MicroStrategy's decisions as it looks today.

Two years ago, it was very different from what it looks like today. He just went too far out and too close to the sun. If you play this hand over and over again, you eventually blow up. If you run a Monte Carlo simulation of what happens to MicroStrategy, I think eventually that thing blows up. Who's going to blow up? Is it the shareholders? Are they going to have to liquidate all the Bitcoin? There would still be a clearing price for all the Bitcoin, even if he sells all of it. There would be some funds.

You have to optimize for the question: Do you optimize for STRC, Strategy stock, or Bitcoin? Because it's still trading above mNAV—the mNAV is like 1.1, I think, or 1.15—he can actually keep selling small amounts of Strategy until the stock gets to, I don't know, 0.7 mNAV. This would save STRC, and the Bitcoin would be fine, but MicroStrategy would get hammered.

The stock, yeah. The stock would be hammered.

Or he could kill the dividend, and the preferred would fall to, I don't know, 40 or 50 cents on the dollar. At some point, a vulture fund steps in and buys that because they think that the Bitcoin in the warehouse eventually goes to your point, J. So maybe I'll peel back.

Or he could sell $5 billion of Bitcoin, and Strategy stock and STRC would both do well. You have to think about which of those 3 he's trying to save. I think he's trying to save Saylor.

It just—I think he's trying to. He realizes that right now he's too important for Bitcoin to start dumping the Bitcoin, and that would just ruin his balance sheet. So he's going to leave that for last, and I think that's the right play. That will keep things going.

But again, my point is that right now we're in an environment where there's just too much money awash. Someone will pick up distressed opportunities, whether it's coins, Strategy, or whatever it is. There's too much capital for where it is, and we've already dipped.

I just have to realize that the amount of dollars we're talking about stepping in—even buying all of MicroStrategy's Bitcoin—is not what it used to be. $50 billion is not what it used to be. Jane Street can just come in and use its Q1 earnings. It's not the same.

Or Tether could just step in in a meaningful way.

Yeah.

So what do you think we see Bitcoin at? Back to, I don't know, $100,000? What comes first: Bitcoin at $100,000 or Bitcoin at $40,000?

I think it's hard to answer that question, but what's clear to me is that the current path is going to be choppy. I'm not that bearish. I don't think we get that low. I don't think we see $40,000. Maybe we see $50,000, but I don't think we see $40,000. It's very unlikely. Maybe we get a one-day wick, but I really can't see that happening.

I think Bitcoin does extremely well when people start worrying about the dollar again. You guys remember 2021: There was a period after 9% inflation when gold got hot, Bitcoin got hot, and people were looking for some kind of neutral asset. Gold, in my opinion, just kind of sucks. There's a lot of friction with gold, and you just can't move it. Dubai is getting bombed. You want to move your gold—how are you going to do that? It's not great.

I still like the asset. I don't know. The quantum thing was the main thing that hurt Bitcoin 6 months ago. You had Chamath going on CNBC talking about quantum, and at this point nothing's going to happen in that domain for a few years. The only thing that can happen is something positive, like they announce that they've agreed on how to hard-fork it or whatever.

If I were Michael Saylor, I would try not to go on CNBC or talk so much, because some of the interviews he's done recently have been pretty weak. I think he should privately fly to meet Paul Tudor Jones and some of the large players who really can move the market. If there's a possibility that Bitcoin continues to drip down to $50,000, you need someone like that.

I heard on, I think, Invest Like the Best or Founders—I think it was Paul Tudor Jones—he mentioned in that interview that he still likes Bitcoin. We need 2 or 3 guys like that, or even an Elon Musk, to come out and say, “Bitcoin deserves a place in the world and in the portfolio.” If that's the case, I think you have renewed interest.

You need an anchor figure like that because Saylor's lost that, for better or for worse. I actually think that's probably positive. Bitcoin should never have someone like Saylor. You definitely need a drip of good PR. You talk about a lot of these CEOs doing a lot of PR. We need more Paul Tudor Jones. We need a Ken Griffin, or a Ray Dalio, to come out and say, “I'm putting money into this.” There's a Mexican billionaire, Ricardo Salinas, whose net worth is about 90% Bitcoin, but he doesn't carry as much weight as Paul Tudor Jones.

When is Santi going to rotate out of some memory stocks and buy more Bitcoin?

I've been thinking a lot about what that price is, to be honest, and I think it's below $50,000. If I get a chance to buy Bitcoin below $50,000, I feel that it deserves a place.

There's your savior, Jordy.

Lord Jesus Christ. There you go, ladies and gentlemen.

6. Coinbase's Product Announcement

Guys, what else? Let's rotate the chat. What else happened this week? What else do you guys want to cover?

Coinbase announcement. Wow, a lot of stuff. Yeah, Coinbase rolled out—I don't know if any of you guys have a list of everything they rolled out, but a bunch of stuff. Agentic stuff. I can try to find a list right now, but bullish or bearish?

I'm glad they're trying it.

Historically, they've done NFT marketplaces and a bunch of stuff that didn't really do much, but I'm glad they're doing this and trying to create a super app where you have an advisor help you build a portfolio. I love this category. I've always said that if I'm going to be a founder of another company, it'll be something that helps people have an app to manage their money. I'm very bullish that this is something that should use crypto rails, and I'm glad they're doing this. Let's see how well they do it.

I think there were really four categories that they talked about. I was at the event—I don't know if you were there, Jano, or anybody else—but they put it into the everything-exchange side of it. It started with, “Okay, we're offering pre-IPO perps, prediction markets, and combos,” which I guess they couldn't come up with a different name than the one Polymarket was already using. They were also offering a bunch of other trading products.

Then they were unifying Coinbase International with Deribit, or at least allowing Coinbase International and Deribit to be used by US investors. That all felt like part of the course, like what I would have expected. It's kind of what everybody's doing: everyone's saying, “We're going to offer you a one-stop shop to trade everything that you want to trade.” Robinhood's doing it, and so on. Robinhood, right? Is there another one? Who else is doing this apart from Robinhood?

All the international exchanges are doing the same thing, right? Kraken's trying to do the same thing, and Bybit, Bitget, Binance, and all these guys. Obviously, it's a different customer base because it's US customers, but to me, that's almost less interesting because US customers have better access to most of these things than international customers do. Obviously, pre-IPO perps—nobody offers those other than, you know, Hyperliquid—but there are a lot of prediction-market options in the US that don't exist internationally.

But, yeah, fine, great. I think they have to do it, and it looked nice and smooth. I'm on board with that. Then there was the developer-platform stuff, which I didn't really understand how it was that different, to be honest. It felt like maybe they weren't necessarily offering a new product, but they took a bunch of features and made them more productizable for the people who wanted to step in and use the developer platform.

That's great. Maybe I just didn't understand the nuance there well enough, but that seemed positive. I thought the consumer-finance stuff was actually super interesting. I've said this to a few people, but that seemed to me like the most innovative or outside-of-the-box piece.

It's sort of like their brand, right? You don't think of Coinbase and think, “I'm going to get rich quick.” You think of Robinhood and think, “Maybe I'm going to hit my zero-day option and get rich.” You have that association with the brand. Coinbase's brand is less exciting but maybe more trusted, so you don't lose your core crowd, but maybe you get a more serious crowd. I don't know which one it is.

I said they did launch options on equities, so maybe you'll get the zero-day options there, too.

It's not about the product. It's just about—

I got it.

Are people going to Coinbase with that goofy, very clean logo and the whole thing, or are they going to Robinhood because they want to make it? I'm not saying it's a good thing, actually.

You get the confetti when you make a trade, and you get the noise and the sound effects.

7. Content of The Week

Guys, I have to jump, sadly. I'm sorry. Content of the week—I'm going to accelerate the content of the week. This was a good chat, Jordy. We have to have you back on. Jordy, we do content of the week. I'm sure you're a diehard listener and make it to the end of every episode already, so you knew that.

This is one of the few podcasts I still tune in to. Maybe this is the one I tune in to the most.

Mission accomplished. [laughter] You heard it here, ladies and gentlemen. Rob, content of the week. Kick us off, my friend.

There has been no content for me this last week, whether it's Knicks content or World Cup content. I'm telling you, that is 100% of all the content that matters. I have the parade on in the corner over here.

I started by saying New York is electric right now. I feel bad for Santi and Jordy, just in this failing state of Europe over there. What are they doing?

Yeah, and listen, you see all this stuff on social media now. The World Cup is here in the US, and all the Europeans are like, “We were lied to. In-N-Out is the best thing ever.”

Roberto, the World Cup is in the US, Mexico, and Canada.

That's true. I know. There's been some really interesting stuff coming out of Mexico, like South Korea playing.

Roberto, Roberto, I'm telling you. [laughter]

Okay, Roberto. I'm going to tell Rob Roberto this until the World Cup finishes. The percentage probability of the US winning the World Cup is 2% on Polymarket—4% on Polymarket right now. I'm going to tell you right now—

On Polymarket, I put down money that they would win the World Cup when it was at 1%, and that they were going to beat Paraguay by more than 2.5. Look what happened. By the way—

Forget about meme stocks. Forget about crypto. Just trade.

You know what I'm doing after this podcast? I'm getting on a flight to Seattle to see them tomorrow against Australia.

I'm going to paint my chest. I'm going to be on TV. I'm going to be right there: USA.

I love that.

That's the content.

Jordy, follow that up, my friend. Content of the week.

Yeah. The only time I have for content is 30-second Instagram Reels, and my obsession right now is healthy ice cream. This has changed my life.

Oh, yeah. I know. Ninja Creami. Yes, go. Sorry.

There are all these people making Ninja Creami recipes.

The Ninja Creami changed my life.

Changed my life. I saw Ninja Creamis on sale at Costco.

Yeah, Ninja Creami.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

So that's my—

Jordy, we have to share recipes, my friend. This is good.

Exactly.

You know what they say? You've reached adulthood when you have not one but two Dysons, and now, of course, you're thinking about homemade ice cream recipes.

The Ninja Creami is the new Dyson. Yeah, yeah. Ninja. [laughter]

We have to get them to sponsor the show. Santi, what do you have?

20VC's Harry Stebbings interviews the CEO of Perplexity.

20VC—Harry Stebbings interviews the CEO of Perplexity. Really interesting. I listened to it late at night; I couldn't go to bed. It was electric. Go listen to that.

Makes you want to go long more memory stocks, I will say that.

I'm long markets. Markets are up today, so I'm happy.

I know. I know.

All right, I'll bring it down a notch. I got the Nadal documentary on Netflix. It's incredible. It is one of the best sports documentaries.

Oh, yeah. I mean, they talk about that—you know, he's got the—

The wedgie. This won't ruin it. That dude was loaded up on painkillers for the second half of his career, and the public had no idea—or maybe they did. I was a fan of Nadal, Andy Murray, and Federer and the rivalry, but at the time I was younger and had no idea that he was in so much pain. It's a documentary that shows you how far the human body can be pushed. It's really, really good.

I think tennis might be one of the more grueling sports. If you look at a tennis player, he looks like he's 20. He looks like he's 40. It's crazy. I don't know what—

Well, and you're in the sun every day.

All right, folks.

Jordy, good to see you, my friend. Roberto, enjoy the game. Santi—

Jordy, you've got to come back.

I'd like to play a little Wimbledon here, you know.

I play tennis. I'm picking back up. You guys should come. One of my favorite clay courts. I'll invite you guys next year. There's a tournament out here. Really, really good. Saw what happened when you invited Rob and me to Monaco. We don't want to—

We'll make ice cream.

We didn't play tennis. Santi was worried about what would happen.

No, no. He took over the gym and was taking creatine.

We're all out at this beautiful beach club, and we're like, “Where's the creatine? Where's the creatine?”

He brought his dumbbells to the club.

All right, folks. Ladies and gentlemen, a good time to end it. Enjoy the World Cup. Go, U.S. Cheers, folks.