加密代币从根本上是否已经失灵？

Is there a world where that token-and-equity model split can make sense, or does it almost always lead to misaligned incentives?

1. The Token vs Equity Debate

Yeah, no. I just think people don't want to hold tokens in things that have an equity entity that captures revenue.

They can coexist where the ambiguity that gives the token a 10× higher valuation than it deserves does not exist.

When times are good, the token can get rewarded, but once things go south, or if you're trying to get an exit, then it goes to [__].

If that's the case, we need to figure out a structure where the token can have some kind of programmatic or contractual value capture.

All right. Welcome back to the Delphi Podcast, the show about markets, crypto, AI, and unfiltered opinions. I'm your host Kevin Kelly and joined usual by the typical cast of characters. We got Jose, Yan, Satoris, and Jason.

Since a lot's been happening in the markets, we've had some trades unwind, and we've had crypto showing a little bit of green on the screen. I'd love to start off by getting each of your takes on the current state of markets. Maybe, Jason, we'll start with you.

For once, crypto's actually looking a little bit better than equities, right? When I look at equities, to your point, you mentioned the unwind. You're kind of seeing it with the memory names, right? Micron, after they had their great earnings, which was June 24 or June 25, had a super volatile day. Since then, you've seen an unwind across a lot of the names and things that have been driving a lot of the bullish price action over the last couple of months.

I'm starting to get a little bit concerned there. When I look at equity indices, I think you could look at this in one of 2 ways: it's either consolidating or distributing. It's one of the 2, and when I zoom out, I think you can make the case for both right now.

Going back to crypto, I think Bitcoin looks better than it has for the first time in weeks. A lot of that is maybe the seller overhang starting to abate—not in terms of the actual numbers, but I think he clearly realizes he messed up and is trying to raise as much cash as possible. Before, he was doing a half-and-half cash-Bitcoin type of raise, and now he's just accumulating cash, probably to buy himself some time and remove that immediate uncertainty. Maybe that's why Bitcoin is doing decently well.

Obviously, inflation prints came in cool, which is good. That pulls away rate-hike expectations, which I think we were dubious about anyway. Generally, things look okay for me on the crypto side. A lot of the names that have been doing well in crypto are continuing to do well: HYPE, Lighter, and Zcash, which is back to its pre-exploit levels almost entirely.

There is some risk appetite in the names that have proven themselves. I'm feeling decent about the 3 names that have been doing well in crypto continuing to do well, at least until midterms.

The market definitely looks a lot better than it's been in a while. You're seeing more and more things do well. Just anecdotally, I think my watch list had basically the majors and then HYPE, Zcash, and Venice 2 months ago. Now it's grown a lot. There are a lot more green shoots happening, so it's definitely an interesting market.

I think Zcash getting back to the pre-bug level is pretty bullish for it. Ironwood, which is the new pool, goes live on the 28th, I believe—13 days from now. Then you'll start to get that real-time audit as the Orchard pool, the one where the bug was found and patched, is put into withdrawal-only mode.

You'll start to see the funds move out of there. I think it'll be slower than people might think. There are around 4 million Zcash in there. You'll probably see half of it move within the first week. I don't even know if you'll see half of it move within the first week, really. I think it could be slower than people would expect.

If it's slow, that's also a bullish sign. The main risk is that you see a drawdown super fast. Then you could think, “Oh, maybe somebody is actually moving a lot to Ironwood from here who exploited it.” We'll see how that goes.

There's a lot of interesting stuff happening on-chain, too. Solana has been doing really well with all the stock stuff they've been getting on the chain. I think they've been doing a really good job.

Isn't that just a few wallets? I saw some posts.

I don't know who the people actually buying this are. I just mean from a liquidity standpoint. On Solana right now, on-chain, you can swap $100K into Zcash, HYPE, SpaceX, and all the meme stocks, and you get maybe 10 bps of slippage. On some of the newer listed stocks, you get up to 40 or 50 bps of slippage. That's cool. It's pretty good.

At the end of the day, when it comes to general-purpose blockchains and all that, it's pretty clear that the main use case people like is using them to trade and move financial assets around, borrow and lend against them, and all of that. If that's the main use case, your job as an ecosystem is to get the best assets and build products around them.

That's why, if you look at so many other chains out there, they just don't have good assets. It doesn't matter what applications you build on them if there aren't good assets to do stuff with. I think Solana has done a good job getting all that.

I feel like Robinhood is a pretty clear ecosystem that could compete in that same domain. I think they should go after the same things Solana is. We'll see how that shakes out.

2. Synapse, Options & Hyperliquid

Now that they got some good usage this past week, with Robinhood and a lot of meme-coin stuff—which some people like to talk down on—it is what it is. You didn't see meme-coin trading take off on a lot of other hype chains, right? That's always a signal. Even if I don't think any of us here really believe that the meme-coin game is going to play out the way it has in the past, and buying the first meme on Robinhood is going to go to the millions, it's still a good sign overall that people have wanted to bridge there and that there's genuine excitement for a lot of people to use the Robinhood chain.

I think it's so uninteresting as a thing, though. It's just another L2—

For sure.

—doing the same exact primitives. There's nothing new.

Actually, speaking of that, do you want to talk about Synapse? Synapse is probably one of the more interesting setups right now. I guess we'll skip the whole market chat, but just on the topic of options, we invested in something on the options front back in 2022, and the basic thesis for why options didn't really play out on-chain was because—

They've never played out, right? There have been so many attempts.

Yeah, there have been attempts throughout the years. Market makers can't provide liquidity. The setup was never enabled for market makers to provide liquidity in the same venue where they hedged.

When they sell a call, they have to long the perp to be delta-neutral. Typically, on centralized exchanges, they were able to do that all in one place. You didn't have this portfolio margin, but in on-chain land, that never really existed.

So, we invested in something, and basically, the reason it didn’t work was the difficulty around the liquidity side for the DEXs, right?

So, it’s like during the GMX heyday. It was a similar GMX-type pool, and at the time, GMX was great, but in the end, better systems were invented. So, Derive now is doing that, but they’re trying to rebuild all of their liquidity on-chain themselves. Right? They’re creating a perp DEX that’s all in one venue, but the difficulty is, as we know, you’re then competing with Hyperliquid and Lighter, and it’s very difficult to get substantial liquidity.

Synapse, the former bridge that the guys pivoted from, had a crack team from the beginning in terms of what they were able to deliver on incredibly low funding, and they delivered a quality bridge. But we all know that bridges aren’t really great businesses, and so they’ve since pivoted to building an options protocol on top of Hyperliquid. So, rather than trying to build liquidity up yourself, you can piggyback off existing Hyperliquid liquidity, which means you can offer options on everything that’s on Hyperliquid.

If you look at Robinhood, their largest revenue-generating product is options. There’s definitely retail demand for them. You could say some of that is satisfied by perps, but there are benefits to options. I think one of them is that you don’t necessarily churn through your user base in the same way, right?

Everyone eventually blows up on perps because you just keep adding collateral when it’s going down and you get liquidated. If you look at the amount of traders that get washed out on the perp side, it’s pretty high. Whereas with options, unless you’re selling stuff, it’s pretty hard to wash out, and your downside is pretty limited to your premium paid. And you have kind of a higher—

Find a way to wash out.

Yeah, but it’s harder. The percentage of your user base that you churn through is lower.

Is that true? I just feel like with Robinhood, the volume they have on zero-day options makes it feel like people are probably full-porting.

Yeah, but you’re not—I mean, if you’re full-porting, that’s a different story, but you’re not having these washouts where your user base is just gone. Right?

Yeah, you don’t have a 10/10 event.

One-time fee. And the zero-day stuff is very high-fee-generating, right? Because you’re paying a fee on notional exposure, not on premium. So, the higher volume you do, the more revenue you’re generating. That’s why they’re pushing them. But it’s path-independent leverage, which is nice.

I’m not going to sit here and shill options, but I do think, in general, there are a lot of benefits to them. Even when SpaceX was launched on Hyperliquid, they were about 5% of SpaceX volume. So, I think it’ll also drive a lot of volume to Hyperliquid themselves, and I think it’s a pretty compelling options product.

You’ll get options on weekends, which you don’t really have. You have zero-day stuff on weekends. You’ll have options on stuff that hasn’t even gone live, like Anthropic and stuff. So, I think there are a lot of compelling, novel ways to express bets via options.

This, in particular, is part of the problem solved by piggybacking off Hyperliquid liquidity. Naturally, you can’t assume that just because you build it, they will come. I think that’s kind of the risk you’re underwriting when investing in Syn: Do you think they can draw in enough taker-side liquidity and bring enough users to the platform? And they’re all competing—

I think that everything around Syn just kind of smells pretty bad, though. I feel like everything over the past month has been—I don’t know. It’s hard for me to buy SNX, given the history and everything.

What’s the issue, specifically?

All the shilling of it recently. I don’t know. It just smells wrong to me. People actually use it, and it’s trading like not that much more than—

I think it’s a couple of times higher. Drift isn’t really doing much in terms of volume either. Neither of them are doing much. Obviously, Drift is doing quite a bit more because Syn just started, but it’s more a bet on which model you think has a higher probability of success.

I don’t think you’re buying either of them for their fundamental value at the moment, but rather for the probability of them being able to deliver on something much bigger in the future. I wasn’t expecting you guys to shill SNX, to be completely—

Well, what’s the value accrual for Syn? How does it operate?

They’re going to do a bunch of buybacks. They’ll enable buybacks. I think what’s been mentioned is 80% of fees. But right now, it’s nothing because fees are nothing. They’ll basically do some kind of governance thing to enable buybacks.

Got you. And how would you know this is working? How do you know—

Volume.

Because, yeah, I bought some—you know, you shilled me into it. I bought some, but I actually sold a chunk of it. What I’m thinking is that the hype was very ahead of the fundamentals. I think it was trading higher than Derive at some point during the pump, and then Derive did pretty well.

Well, Derive had the open listing, and then—

At what point do you think it proves out the thesis that this cross-margin thing is working? As of right now, volumes are pretty trash, right?

Yeah.

On that, liquidity doesn’t seem that great either.

Yeah. There’s a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg situation, right? I think they’re onboarding market makers—

Mm-hmm.

—to help provide maker-side liquidity, and ultimately, you do need to bring users to provide taker-side liquidity. Otherwise, it’s not really interesting for market makers. But I think over time, you basically have to wait and see. If adoption doesn’t really take place, then either people don’t want options or the product doesn’t work.

I think you could probably do some sort of spread analysis. I don’t think they have much in terms of overlapping assets right now, but once you see Bitcoin options and some other things, it’ll be a much easier apples-to-apples analysis of which platform can provide better liquidity.

They’re also doing something different. Derive, and even Deribit back in the day, had a very professional-feeling front end, where you have a bunch of the Greeks, which most people don’t know how to think about. These guys are going with the Robinhood UX/UI, where it’s just this slider, a kink at the strike, and a P&L-type thing. So, it’s definitely geared more toward retail in that sense.

Yeah, I don’t really have a strong opinion on this space, to be honest. I haven’t really seen anybody succeed. I don’t know enough about what it really requires on the back end to do it either. I’m kind of sitting this one out, but if I had to, I’d probably lean Derive, to be honest.

Yeah, and broadly, the market is definitely looking better. It seems like Saylor just being a non-factor is good. It’s tough to see a world where he’s going to sell much BTC. He’ll sell some, maybe, but not an insane amount. He’s also unlikely to buy, based on his cash pile and STRC not coming back to give him new, fresh powder. So, he’s a non-factor.

You’re seeing ETH rip, which I think just scares most people, but is also a bit of a precursor for an alt rally. The thing is, I think the most recent ETH move has been heavily perp-driven. If you look at ETH UI and the jump from the high 1700s to the current price, which is 1930, it’s pretty perp-driven. Not to say that it needs to retrace immediately, but it does indicate that people are positioning for a trade more likely.

3. Grass, Revenue & Token Economics

You always wonder who’s buying ETH, but Muneeb has publicly shown that he’s got a big position. Ideally, you kind of see some alts follow. I think you have some event-driven stuff. AERO is one that I’m watching, with the migration to mainnet supposed to happen this month. But we’ll see if these things end up being a sell-the-news situation, which I’d say was the case with Grass—a combination of sell-the-news and—

Yeah, why don’t we talk about Grass a little bit? I know you had a thread here.

Yeah, I think there was a misunderstanding. The crux of it is that Grass’s revenue is seasonal and very back-half-heavy. What happened was people were comparing the back half of 2025, at 14 million, to the front half of 2026, at 17 million, and suggesting that growth is pretty weak, which, if you’re looking at those 2 numbers, makes sense.

But they’ve mentioned their seasonality before, and they mentioned it on the call. So, sure, first-half 2026 revenue is expected at 17 million, but the full year is 70 million.

And operating costs are roughly $30 million a year, so $70 million in revenue and $30 million in costs gives you $40 million in operating profit. Obviously, that gets reinvested and goes into everything else, but I wouldn't really anchor a multiple on operating profit; I'd anchor it more on revenue.

So I kind of adjust FDV. I reduce it by about 30% because a bunch is sitting in the treasury, and the foundation kind of controls it. They've shown an appetite to be more surgical and careful with how they distribute the tokens.

People were expecting an airdrop in season 2, but ultimately they just paid in cash because they don't want to give away these tokens at this price. That drew a lot of backlash, and we can chat about that as well, but I think the takeaway is that they're being measured with how they distribute the token.

My personal view is that an adjusted FDV is more appropriate, similar to what you do with HYPE. The other reason you can do that is because there is no equity component. If you're looking at revenue of $70 million and FDV of, call it, $250 million to $260 million, it's a sub-4× revenue multiple on a protocol that's growing 4× year over year.

So it seems like good value, and they have new product lines—or a new one in particular that people are excited about, myself included—launching at the end of summer. It seems like it's one of the more misunderstood tokens because you see a lot of takes about there being an equity component and all of this stuff, along with fear that they're not returning capital to the token, so that means the token is getting rugged, which is just not the case.

Yeah, I think there was also some backlash that we can touch on briefly around just the size of the rewards that are allocated, right? And I know, Yan, you've got a take on this. If you have, call it, 3 to 4 million residential IPs that are basically running their own Grass nodes and allowing Grass to use their unused bandwidth, what winds up happening is that bandwidth isn't used or distributed equally.

Certain geographic areas wind up getting more throughput, and that drives a larger share of the rewards. Maybe you can talk about that, because I think that was one of the key points of backlash, but also probably another thing that a lot of people misunderstand about how the network actually operates.

Yeah. I think we're at about 8.5 million nodes, but, like you mentioned, they're not all made equal. There's some conflation of this being DePIN: with Helium, you had to buy some equipment and set it up, and there was a decent lift, so a higher reward was required.

With this, I think most people forgot they were even running it. It's a plug-in; your computer doesn't operate any differently. It's completely unchanged—it just runs in the background and uses a little extra bandwidth when there's capacity for it. So I think people were conflating things there.

Ultimately, there's redundancy. You don't necessarily need 1 million residential IPs if you have 1 million in the same area; it's just overkill, right? There's value to be had in being one of the few available in that area and being in an area that's sought after.

What that ends up playing out to is that you don't necessarily need an insane number of nodes to make this work, particularly because they've already downloaded quite a bit. They've verticalized a bit and have their own data center, so they're storing quite a bit of data already. They don't necessarily need to rescrape for all of these.

I think what they're actually able to do that's compelling is that they're not just a data pipe. They do a lot of curation and filtering, delivering a filtered, specific product to these labs because the labs are buying data from a bunch of different sources. They don't have curation in-house most of the time, or if they do, it's a pain in the ass. So there's a premium that they pay for cleaned-up data.

All that to say, the size of their network doesn't need to be as massive now. I think they showed that with the amount that they paid. They dropped about $3 million, if I remember correctly, and they're set to make about $70 million. They'll have ongoing rewards, and those will be in USDC, in the interest of preserving the token supply.

With the amount of data they have and the distribution of nodes, it just doesn't need to be that high. Andre even mentioned that nodes dropping off is going to save them money because there were so many people botting for the airdrop who aren't really providing useful bandwidth or operating in a useful area.

As a result, they have to spend less on anti-botting on the node side. So it's kind of a win-win for them: the toxic nodes are also not incentivized to participate.

Yeah, and I think it leads to this: people just don't want to hold tokens.

Yeah, I think you're going to go to the same place I was going, Kevin, so go ahead.

Yeah, no, I was just going to say I think it leads to this bigger conversation I wanted to have with you guys, because it feels like this debate gets stirred up every 6 to 12 months at this point. More recently, with Venice's equity raise, there's this whole tokens-versus-equity value-accrual debate going on.

One question I had for you guys was: Is there a world where that token-equity model split can make sense, or does it almost always lead to misaligned incentives? Jose, maybe we'll kick off with you, because I know you're about to chime in with something.

Yeah, no, I just think people don't want to hold tokens in things that have an equity entity that captures revenue and makes some kind of effectively trust-me promise to buy back the token. I think that's the long and short of it, honestly, in my opinion.

I think we need more structures like ACE and other ones where you have at least some kind of contractual relationship between the equity and the token, or something that's very clear and delineated. Venice was a really good example, right? They came out with really bullish news that they raised a round from Dragonfly and others at a $1 billion valuation.

Then Rob Hadick made that sort of appearance on the podcast, which wasn't very bullish for the token, and I think ultimately it was bearish overall because people were like, “There's an equity entity, and we're basically relying on them honoring their commitment to buy back this token.” But they could stop at any point, right? They could, and I think people just don't want that anymore when it comes to tokens.

They can coexist, but they can coexist where the ambiguity that gives the token a 10× higher valuation than it deserves doesn't exist. The thing with Venice is that people have treated the token like Erik is a good guy and is going to make the token valuable, and that was always baked into the price of VVV.

Then Rob went on the podcast and talked about how, if you read the docs, this is what Venice is. It's like, okay, but people weren't buying it for just that mechanism, right? So I think tokens and equity can coexist if whatever the token is used for is clearly spelled out and there's no ambiguity.

The problem is that the ambiguity leads to a much higher token valuation, which people love, right?

People aren't bidding this to $1.25 billion in order to mint—

Right. Venice's VVV makes sense as a token; it just doesn't make sense as a token at the price it was at, unless you think that the equity can ever be realized someday and then all the tokens are going to come back at some point.

Tokens and equity can coexist. It's just that when they coexist, the token is a much smaller market cap, the expectations are very tempered, and it really is just this pure utility thing you're getting out of it. The equity is always going to get the bulk of the real cash profits. That's the thing: you just have to get rid of the equity.

When times are good, the token can get rewarded. But when things go south, or if you're trying to get an exit, then it goes to [__].

For the record, on Grass, there is no equity, right? There's a foundation-structured model. The foundation owns everything. They said 20% of expenses—so, call it $6 million a year—is paid to Wynd Labs out of the $70 million in revenue, but the foundation owns all the IP, the hardware, and everything in between.

So, there is no token-equity bifurcation. I think it's more a matter of the market not believing it, not understanding it, and having unrealistic expectations. Venice is slightly different, right? There's definitely a clear equity component. I'm in the camp that the token ends up being the long-term value-accrual approach, because I do think—I don't know how a business like this will play out. I don't know if they'll go public or be acquired or whatever, but that's a long time between now and then.

He's not even going public, though, right? I trust Erik—he's one of the founders I trust most in the space to actually understand this—but you shouldn't have to trust him, right? And there's still the case that, in general, founders and investors are going to own way more of the equity than they do of the token, right?

So, if you have cash flows running through this and the thing's making its own money, there's a conflict between paying out your cash flows to buy the token or just paying them out to equity holders, even assuming they don't go public.

Yeah, but for me, that's distributions, right? It's got to be an equity exit, or it's got to be an exit if you're doing venture.

Yeah, I mean, even an exit, then, right? That's what I like about the ACE thing. It just gives you this—and for those who don't know, ACE is this thing that MetaLeX built, which we're investors in, for full disclosure.

The idea is you can have a token, but you can effectively KYC and become an equity holder, right? So, it's similar to the stablecoin model in the sense that with stablecoins, anyone can hold the stablecoins on-chain, but in order to redeem them for fiat, you have to be KYC'd.

The idea is that you get the upside and liquidity of a token, but the downside protection of being able to convert to equity. This isn't the only model. I think there are a few others that are interesting.

When I got into crypto, I wrote a lot of posts about this going back 10 years ago, or 8 years ago at this point, and I thought that all value should go to the token. You shouldn't have equity entities at all. This made sense for the purely on-chain stuff, like AMMs and MakerDAO CDPs.

At that point, I think we all still thought that a lot of this stuff would be on-chain primitives. What we've found is that the vast majority of valuable crypto projects need an equity company. Their cash flows aren't generated on-chain, right? In the Venice case, they need to buy hardware, run servers, serve API requests, and collect fiat revenue.

In that case, your cash flow isn't on-chain. You need an equity entity. I just think that if that's the case, we need to figure out a structure where the token can have some kind of programmatic or contractual value capture. I think the market's asking for it at this point.

Although Venice is still incredibly valuable, so it's still a win. But I do think it would go up a lot if they had something more solid—a solid link to the equity.

Yeah, I think in Venice's defense, they airdropped half the supply. They never said this was an equity component, and they never did a raise into the token.

And then I guess

For sure.

If we had to poke holes, it's that they let the narrative run. But what were they really supposed to do on that front? People were coming up with their own narratives, and they've stated that their goal is to burn as much of the entire supply as possible.

It's just a matter of timing. If they were taking all the revenue, they would burn all of the supply a lot faster. But I do think they'll continuously increase the burn in different ways. I think they recently increased the discretionary component to $20,000 a day or something like that a few weeks ago.

Hypothetically, using ACE as a great example, what could this have looked like in a parallel universe? I do think one thing the equity raise obviously gave them, to your point, is that they're running a real business that's getting real traction, has real expenses, and whose expenses are scaling.

They're buying hardware, actually running the network itself, and hiring engineers. All of those are expenses that a fast-growing startup has, and you need capital to continue to build and scale that business. So, raising $65 million through some type of ACE-like offering—I'm curious, hypothetically, how could that have looked?

Yeah, I mean, there's the ACE structure, and there's the MetaDAO structure, too. With ACE, you just have to basically set a conversion price from the token to equity.

The idea is that you could issue tokens but raise money into the equity. The token trades freely, but at any point—and they could also commit to using most of the value to buy back tokens in the same sort of loose way they're doing now—token holders don't need to believe them.

In the case that they don't, or that the company gets acquired or something, they can convert to equity. At least someone can convert to equity and arbitrage the token-to-equity spread, if that makes sense.

The other way is just to have some kind of actual contractual agreement, which, to be fair, is what it sounds like Grass did. I'm not super up to date with their structure. Some kind of contractual agreement between a foundation or some kind of equity structure and something that represents token holders could say that all the value, or some fixed portion of the value, will accrue to token holders.

I think what people are worried about is what we've seen many times: the token gets abandoned altogether and the equity gets bought out, like with Vertex or Axelar and these kinds of examples. ACE solves for that and achieves, in my opinion, a good trade-off.

I would love for all these things to be liquid tokens that you could buy to speculate on these businesses. But right now, you're speculating both on the business and on the honesty or trustworthiness of the business's promises to actually honor the token, which really affects the expected value of these investments.

Yeah, I think Grass, to their credit, has a structure where the team members are contractors to the foundation. They don't own anything. The foundation just pays them, and everything is owned by the foundation.

I think, to Grass's credit, they started this in 2022. This was a pretty novel design for that period, when this was much less of a consideration. I think they're 90% of the way there. Obviously, there's room for improvement, but I think the improvements are more recent developments.

Yeah, and I think both, obviously, longer term, are benefiting from some pretty substantial secular tailwinds.

Yeah.

Yeah, go ahead.

Because you're right, Kevin. It's a good point. There's this narrative that companies and tokens should just buy back—they should be doing buybacks, like HYPE and stuff. Most startups should not be using all their revenue to buy their own token. They should be reinvesting in growth, and no startups really do that.

In crypto markets, that doesn't really get priced or valued, right? People want to see the buyback because HYPE has created this meme that the only way for tokens to be valuable is to put 100% into buybacks.

But I do think that if you have the premise that, once there's excess value, it will accrue to the token, people will be more patient. Because you don't know that that's the case, and it might be 10 years in the future, you have to believe this team will honor that promise 10 years from now. You want to see the cash flows now.

If we have structures that people believe in and understand better—whether it's the Grass structure, an ACE structure, or something like that—then people can start paying for and token projects can start being rewarded for reinvesting in growth and showing really awesome growth, which is, to be honest, what Grass has shown.

Yeah, they reinvest in data centers. They cut over $1 million in monthly OpEx last year. So, they're printing cash right now.

Yeah, and I'd also say that raising $65 million from 10 to 20 institutional-type funds, right—raising institutional capital versus whatever it is, 1,000 or 10,000 high-net-worth investors, but also retail—

There is a bit of a tax—and you could argue a pretty large tax—on going the token route. I think Grass went through this recently with a lot of backlash from token holders and node runners, or node operators. There is this balance as a founder: you’re almost paying a tax to have a liquid token, especially at an early stage, because you have to answer to a much wider group of people who all have their own opinions and takes on what you should be doing. Whereas, just in terms of ease and speed, I can understand why you’d try to raise an equity round instead.

Ease, speed, and you get a premium nowadays.

And the headache of dealing with the disgruntled fan base on Twitter.

It’s kind of a problem. I think it’s one of the first times in the history of the last year where there’s definitely a discount to being a token project in the same space as an equity project. You see this across the board. I think Grass is an interesting example, where I think this thing would be raising at a much higher valuation as an equity company than the $400 million valuation it has as a token project.

I view that as an opportunity, because I think it’s an awareness thing. I agree with what you’re saying in general, but I think that applies to the ones that are flirting with both structures.

You kind of need people to believe in tokens—basically, to believe that they won’t get rugged on tokens—or have some standard that people adhere to. Otherwise, these things will keep getting underpriced, especially in bear markets, and then overpriced in bull markets. You get this negative selection where, if you’re a really high-quality project, why would you go through the hassle of doing a token, dealing with angry token holders, and all this crap just to be underpriced versus equity? It has to be at least the same price and then have the bonus of liquidity, I think, for this to make sense for people.

You could argue that being slightly discounted with liquidity is okay. But trading at a third of what you should be, or whatever you want to call it, is too much. It’s a flows thing, too, right? There’s just less capital sloshing around, and the capital that is in there is less long-term-oriented.

The counter is that, in a world where there are fewer quality investments to chase, you’re okay sitting in some that are not slow cooks, but slower cooks than a black bull-type pump.

Equities are getting more liquid, too, though. Sorry, private shares and SAFEs are getting more and more liquid, too. A lot of companies now are having these secondary offerings, even for employees and stuff. It’s kind of a weird one. Tokens are occupying a weird place.

I do think that the liquidity of secondaries in the equity world is overstated. There are constant blackout periods when they’re doing a raise or an employee tender and all this stuff. Then, when you want to trade, you have to pay 5% to the broker.

Oh, you want to sell with fees? Good luck.

Hopefully that’ll get fixed. There are a few people trying to fix that.

Oh, yeah?

More to come on that soon. I don’t think they’ve really spoken about it.

4. AI Infrastructure & The Next Trade

I think, as I was saying before, Vana and Grass are both benefiting from big secular tailwinds. I want to end this with the idea that there’s always a bull market somewhere, even if it’s not necessarily in crypto. I’d love to get an update—maybe start with you, but you guys chime in, too—on the broader AI value-accrual trades and what you’re looking at right now.

The memory trade has pulled back a little bit. It’s had a hell of a run so far, so I think a lot of this is just blow-off-top-type consolidation. There’s a lot of leverage in the system, especially for some of these Korean names. Inference providers and neoclouds are starting to look interesting—or have been interesting—but maybe there are some interesting levels here. I’m curious if there’s anything else you guys are looking at.

I’m long those. I’m long basically the Mag 7, memory, and some of the neoclouds. I think it’s sort of a balanced portfolio, in a sense. They do seem to move together. Right now, the Mag 7—obviously, my Mag 7 has underperformed a lot—are going up while the riskier end of the spectrum is going down.

A lot of these people are very leveraged, especially Koreans. The Korean index market just keeps closing because people get margin-called, and it gaps down to the limit. Speaker 3

Wasn’t there a stat floating around? There was a stat: 1 in 30 adults—

got margin-called.

That’s so dope. Respect.

Retail margin is at an all-time high. They still post about this, too. Maybe I can find it or put it in the show notes.

I think these things will be volatile, but I’m still bullish. When you read the estimates by smart people, especially the stuff SemiAnalysis publishes, there’s some amazing research. Their memory update from April still says they think prices are going to go up 2–3× from here. Supply is not going to catch up to the needs of agentic workflows, so I’m still bullish. It’s a long-term position for me. I had decent entries on them, so I’m not thinking of selling.

The market reacts very strongly to things like Meta announcing that they’re selling compute, and then all the neoclouds go down. I don’t think it’s very rational. They still have tens of billions of dollars of contracts with CoreWeave and others. I think owning land and having power is still going to be incredibly valuable going forward, like with IREN and similar plays in that world.

The open-source thing is another thing that scares people a lot. If the Chinese models get so good, are all these computing investments going to go to waste? I don’t really understand the logic of the bear case there. I guess it’s that OpenAI and Anthropic don’t have pricing power anymore, and therefore they go bust on all these power and data-center arrangements that they’ve made.

If open source gets really good, it’s definitely bad for OpenAI and Anthropic, but it’s really good for the neoclouds and inference providers. All the margin moves to the inference providers because, with open-source models, you serve them yourself. There’s no margin from a model company there. Compute consumers get cheaper prices, but the neoclouds and inference providers can charge a higher margin.

It’s just better for the world in general. More people get access to cheap intelligence, and more stuff gets done. Intelligence is the ultimate Jevons paradox. I don’t think you can ever have enough intelligence.

I’m long for the next few years as this stuff percolates through society. We could be in a local top. Enterprise spending got really ahead of its skis, and there are a lot of people talking about setting limits—$200 a month or whatever it was that Grok and SpaceX were setting. But the proportion of people using AI is still incredibly small. The percentage of people using agentic and multi-agent workflows is incredibly small in the scheme of things.

There’s still a lot of work to do to percolate this stuff through society. I think this enterprise-ROI thing is a bit overstated. If your enterprise isn’t getting ROI from AI, it’s a skill issue in my mind. There’s no workflow, in my opinion, and no industry that cannot be made more efficient with this stuff. Realistically, if you don’t get ROI from AI, you’ll be replaced by someone who does, because there’s no workflow or industry that can’t be made more efficient with it.

That’ll just take time, and, yeah, I’m staying long through it.

Okay, okay.

Go ahead. No, I’d love to hear it.

I think those arguments against the ROI are also just apples to oranges. They’re saying, “We’ve improved efficiency by 5% or 10%, and our token spend has doubled.” It’s like, okay, sure, but 5% or 10% on a very large number and token spend on a very small number actually net out in the end.

I hate when they start applying percentages to 2 different-size numbers that net out in the end. It makes no sense. Brad made some good points about frontier models, and there’s an argument to be made that they increase their edge because of the revenue they’re able to generate, with that capital allowing them to continue being on the cutting edge of training.

Which I think holds true. And then there are going to be enough tasks, or enough decisions, that you have to make that are so valuable that this model can do 99% or 98% of the quality of another model.

1 minus 0.98 to whatever power for the amount of decisions, and that compounds. That's the spread. And so I think there's a big argument to be made that the cost is still cheap. It's not about the cost savings or the incremental cost difference, but about the compounding magnitude of the output and the impact that it makes.

Obviously, some decisions are binary: you can get to a yes answer with a variety of models. There's a routing component where you can route things to shittier models, but I think there are an insane amount of tasks, and everyone's kind of blown away when they switched over to Fable, right?

Granted, you're starting to see some catch-up in distillation from GLM-5.2, but each incremental one that gets released is insane. I think the demand for the frontier will still be strong.

Fable's just so good as well. I don't know if you guys have been using it, but I don't know how I could sell any AI stocks while using Kimi. It's like—and to think that in 6 months that will likely be an order of magnitude cheaper.

If we stay on the same sort of trajectory we're on, we'll have something way better at the frontier. It's just [expletive] crazy to me. Yeah.

Yeah, 100% agree. And I think it dovetails really nicely with that conversation we had with Tommy. What was it, last month, around open source versus closed source? The idea is that the pie is going to get much bigger on both ends of the spectrum, which is bullish—just mega-bullish.

Yeah. The open-source thing is also weird to me. We have AGI, supposedly, and jobs are going to be fewer, but we can't stop distillation. We can't stop the Chinese models from distilling.

Yeah.

No, I agree.

You're saying if we had it, they should be able to stop it?

Yeah, I think so.

Why?

It seems like they should. I just feel like it doesn't seem like—I don't know. I'm sure it's really complicated. But at a high level, the activity doesn't feel like it should be that hard to identify, right? These millions of pings on these questions are obviously coming from very clustered sources. They're using IP masking and everything like that, but it just seems like a problem that could be solved by an AGI, right?

I don't want these models to get distilled anymore. And when you talk to GLM, it thinks it's Claude a bunch of times. You can see all the fingerprints of Claude, and it's extremely obvious. There's an argument as to how much of it is distillation versus genuine innovation, because I think there are a lot of people—and I don't know the answer to that—who I really respect who are very complimentary of the actual innovation from the Chinese models.

But still, there's clearly a lot of distillation going on. I wonder if they'll be able to stop it. They're probably investing a lot in stopping that at this point, given how existential it is for them, at least. But open source getting really good is bullish for everyone, right? Everyone who isn't an Anthropic or OpenAI shareholder, it would seem.

Yeah, I think you can make the argument that the better open source gets and the cheaper it gets, the more demand there is for using AI more broadly across more industries. In which case, I think the demand for frontier AI to be the leader, or the orchestrator of sorts, of the new things you want to build or create also increases.

Yeah, that's why there are arguments for why China should ban its open-source models—keep its open-source models internal or domestic. It's too beneficial to allow everyone to have access to them.

I think if open source ends up mattering, though, Anthropic and OpenAI will also release some open-source models, right? OpenAI did a while ago, and it was pretty good at the time. But if you're at the frontier, you can do whatever, right? You have the best models. You can choose to open-source a slightly older version if it ends up being really important.

Being at the frontier is all that matters, I think. I don't think anyone uses Chinese closed models, honestly. If they close the models, even if they are at the frontier, they would struggle to get usage because people just really don't like—even with the open-source Chinese models, people are like, "Oh, I don't want to use Chinese models." You can just run them on your own computer.

It's kind of weird that there's still this argument going around, but I think if they were closed, there'd be very little chance that anyone uses them. So I don't think they could do that. But they could probably go open source with a more restrictive license that forces inference providers and so forth to pay them some share—some revenue share—if they're serving it at scale.

I think that could make sense, but going closed is—you basically get no advantage to being closed unless you're at the frontier, I think. It's interesting, too, because it's in everyone's interest, other than the 2 frontier labs, that open source is as close as possible to the frontier, right? Which is why you see Nvidia plow a bunch of money into open source and their Nemotron models and stuff like that. You're seeing the Mag 7 plow a bunch of money into them. If that happens, it's good for everyone.

But it's harder than—if you asked me 3 years ago, I would never have said that Meta would have failed this badly, or that Microsoft would have failed this badly at AI. They just have Copilot and Llama, or whatever the new Meta model is. They just aren't that good, and it's kind of surprising to me that it would have been that hard for them.

5. Why AI Is Still A Long-Term Bull Market

Even with frontier model providers like OpenAI and Anthropic, if they were to verticalize more quickly and get a larger, let's say, share or exposure to inference providers, or actually own their own compute, maybe that's some of these deals they've struck to get that type of exposure. There's a certain point where there's probably a tipping point where open-sourcing some of their models can actually make sense because they have a way to capture the value still, and potentially capture more value. But it's a little game-theory-esque.

I was going to say it's scary to think what markets would look like if the AI thing didn't happen.

Crypto would probably be a lot higher.

Crypto would be higher.

Because GDP would be in the [expletive], and we'd be printing. Oh, yeah.

Crypto would be the only game in town. Crypto would be a lot higher.

Yeah.

Meme coins would have FIFA ads. [Laughter]

I was thinking about this the other day. If this was 2021 or something, wouldn't FIFA just have NFTs everywhere?

It's in America. NFTs were so hot. I'm so glad NFTs died so that they didn't get stamped all over the World Cup.

Anyway, I think—yeah.

Anything else you want to cover?

No, that's a lot of great stuff. I think we got plenty. We can dive into more of this next time, because obviously these are all themes that we're going to continue to track. So I think that's a good place to end it. I really appreciate you guys jumping on and sharing your insights. Until next time.

Yep, see everyone.

See you later.