《Solana 的牛市逻辑》——Helius CEO | Market Bubble #8

Welcome to Market Bubble, a show all about investing in yourself. Where we feel an overwhelming majority of young men today are in a losing position. How are we positioned? Find out today and every Thursday at 1:00 p.m. PST everywhere. Twitch, Twitter, I think Z is on X, Zion.

You’re here with me, right? You hear me?

Yes, sir. What’s good, brother? How are we doing?

Chilling, bro. You see me? You see how the fuck we’re living, baby?

I know. You’re on a fucking boat-type shit right now.

Give me full screen. Give me full screen real quick. You see how the fuck we’re living, baby?

Where are you at right now?

Saint Barth’s with TJR.

It sounds like a fucking TikTok. It doesn’t even sound real.

Nightmare blunt rotation.

Insane.

No facts. Me, Alyssa Violet, Rasber, and TJR.

Nightmare blunt rotation in Saint Barth’s. That’s fucking funny.

That’s so good. I am burnt, and the markets are also burnt. How are you feeling, brother? Lots going on. You’ve been tweeting like a fucking madman. A lot has happened. You have some strong opinions in crypto. It seems like you’re the last man standing as far as positive sentiment.

Yeah.

I think we need you to flip bearish, bro. I think we need you to start doom-posting. I think that’s really the bottom.

Maybe. Maybe if there’s nobody else left to be bullish, then we’ll see. But, yeah, I think it’s been a very interesting spot for markets in general. There’s been a ton of volatility in stocks and a ton of volatility in crypto. Micron recently smashed earnings and was up about 20% after hours, so a lot of people have been trading that. Hyperliquid has been the best venue for people to trade leverage and perps on that, as you know.

The stock market closes at 4:00. That’s when they announce earnings, and Hyperliquid allowed Bull Penn to let people go 10x long, 10x short after the market closed. Great marketing for Hyperliquid in general, and it kind of proves out crypto’s thesis of being able to trade anything and everything.

But, yeah, crypto has looked pretty bad. I think we’re at a really, really, really important spot right now. The Saylor stuff has been happening. MicroStrategy has been selling off super hard and breaking yearly lows. Stretch, the preferred shares product, has done really poorly. It’s trading around 76, and it’s supposed to trade at 100. So, yeah, there’s tons of stuff happening and a lot going on. I can go deeper into all of it and my takes and thesis on it.

1. Is the SOL bottom in? ($600 target)

So, let me just ask you straight up.

Yep.

Is the Solana bottom in?

The Solana bottom is in. I’m going to say the Solana bottom is in. I think in Q3, you may see slightly lower than where the current lows are. I think it’s around 60. In Q3, you may see slightly beneath that, but I would say if you’re buying Solana here with an extended time frame of 6 months to a year or more, I think it’ll be a good trade, and it’s in a really good spot.

It’s interesting because everybody’s always super bearish on Solana after it’s down a lot, and nobody really thinks it’s going to come back. They said the same thing in 2023 when it traded at 8 and was trading between 15 and 20 for a long time. Nobody thought Solana was going to come back then.

It’s in a similar spot now, where Solana is at around 66 and hit 60. It’s been outperformed by Hyperliquid and a lot of other stocks and assets. People are essentially saying that it’s just a chain for meme coins, that it won’t be able to have other consumer applications on the chain, and that it won’t do well in DeFi or with perps.

I just don’t think that’s true. I think the issues with monetary policy and inflation can have a lot of tailwinds over the next year or so. Solana is one of the best crypto assets to benefit from a ton of different things.

2. Can SOL beat Hyperliquid on perps?

How high do you think Solana can get? I saw you tweeting out your buy targets for Bitcoin, Solana, and Hyperliquid. Bitcoin was 55K, Solana was 55, and Hyperliquid was 55. It was 55, 55, 55—something like that, right? Or I might be off by a little bit.

Yeah, I said 58K, 58, and then 55. But, yeah.

And then you said 3 to 5x by the end of 2027.

Yep. So, the targets for how high I think it can go: I think we’re nearing a cycle low for crypto, the cycle bottom, which is what I think is the macro bottom. Ideally, you buy or average in somewhere close to the bottom and average out somewhere close to the top. It’s very hard to pick the exact bottom and the exact top. Nobody really does that.

I believe Solana is going to break its all-time high from this past cycle, which was around 297. Last cycle, it went from 20—well, technically, it went from 8, but the main trading range was from 20 to 297 on Trump day. Let me get that; let me not fuck that up. Yeah, so it went from 20 to 297 this cycle. I think it can go from 60 to around 600. That’s my—

What?

—target for SOL.

Bro said 600. Solana to 600?

Yeah.

Really? Why?

Well, I think last cycle, if you look at what Solana did, it was primarily just a meme coin chain. A lot of retail activity on-chain was really just memes. They didn’t have a ton of breakout applications in other areas.

But if you’re betting that they’re going to have a breakout application in perps that’s competing with Hyperliquid, that they’re going to continue to have retail interest in memes and on-chain coins, and that they’re going to continue to have other breakout consumer applications—stuff like Collector [__] and Cards, which focuses on TCG trading—then you’re betting on all these consumer applications continuing to do well.

3. Are memes dead?

I think that really just proves the concept of how performant Solana is as an L1 and how cheap it is to transact on-chain. You’re going to see a ton of other products and protocols do well this upcoming cycle. I think the reason it’s hard to have that thesis is that we haven’t seen those products come out yet. I’d say Cards is probably the best example right now. It’s a really good example of something doing well. But people don’t have a frame of reference for Solana enabling those breakout products, and that’s why it’s hard for people to have that thesis right now. But I do think—

Are memes, in your mind, a very, very small sliver? That was going to be my next question: Are memes back? I see you tweeting, and I know the whole fucking timeline is seeing this massive rally to try to bring memes back and stuff.

I’ll be completely honest: Hot take, I can’t ever see it. Genuinely, from my normie POV, I just feel like Solana memes are the new Ethereum NFTs. I don’t know if that’s a crazy thing to say, but that’s how I feel. A lot of people share that perspective as well.

I’m here with TJR and Flipping Profits. He’s not doxxed or anything, but he’s a fucking super-successful trader, a sharp kid. They both live in Puerto Rico together and took a quick flight over here to hang out. They both share that sentiment and those thoughts around it.

I just can’t see memes really rallying back and saving Solana. I don’t think Solana is running to 600 based on fucking memes. I don’t see how it could ever get back any higher than TRUMP. How does it get bigger than that?

I think it’s a fair take, and a lot of people have the same take, comparing Solana memes to Ethereum NFTs and thinking that they’re never going to come back as hard or do as well. They’re kind of a dead area. I think it’s a valid take.

I would say that I disagree because every cycle, you have memes doing well in crypto. In 2020 and 2021, it was Doge. Last cycle, you had TRUMP, BONK, and PEPE. There were a few other ones.

I’ll clarify, by the way. I mean the trenching meme coin culture, the daily runners. I can’t ever see that happening again. I don’t think that means a lot of meme coins are going to become the meta, what most people are trading and what most people are getting rich on in crypto.

Because that’s what we need, right? For crypto to really run again, we need the average person—the fucking mailman and the Uber driver—to hear about somebody they know getting rich in crypto, believe that they have a chance to get rich in crypto, and actually have a real chance to get rich in crypto. Would you agree?

Yeah, I think it’s one of the biggest tailwinds for crypto doing well, for sure. I would say that it doesn’t necessarily need to be memes. I’m not saying that memes need to drive all that activity.

It’s twofold. You have protocols like Pump.fun, which enable meme coins and other coins to launch at very low market caps. Then you have products like MetaDAO, which is focusing on aligning real businesses, equity, and token alignment one-to-one. People are incentivized in the exact same way.

They have teams like Avici and a few other teams on MetaDAO building in that way. You’re going to have productive assets in crypto, and you’re going to have meme coin assets in crypto.

But retail is going to show you both of these things. It's the same way that you have casinos in Vegas that do really well and continue to have customers, but they bring revenue to the city of Vegas. In the same way, you have Pump.fun on Solana, which brings revenue to the chain and brings attention and retail traders trying to gamble on these 1,000x and 10,000x plays.

But you also have productive assets and perps on the chain, and you have apps like Collector Crypt and Cards. You have a ton of different things on-chain outside of just memes, but memes are a gateway into those other things, I would say.

4. Pump.fun's biggest fumble

You mentioned Pump.fun, and obviously that would be the crypto equivalent to the big casino in town.

For sure.

How do you feel about Pump.fun? I've seen you make some tweets trying to instigate them into doing some sort of airdrop, talking about how healthy that would be.

[Laughter.] Let's hope it works. Let's hope it works.

Yeah, so Pump.fun has been the dominant app in crypto for maintaining attention over a multiyear span. That usually does not happen in crypto. OpenSea was really big for a short period of time, and then it fell off. Nobody was really talking about OpenSea for a long time. Pump.fun has been able to maintain attention for a long period of time, which is rare.

What they promised at the beginning, when they launched a token, was an airdrop of around 24% of the token to people. I think it was to the community, and they never did the airdrop. People are mad as fuck at Pump.fun for a ton of different reasons, but one of them is that they never airdropped to their core users.

People are trading billions of dollars on Pump.fun. They've made $1 billion in revenue. They also raised $1 billion in their ICO. So they have a fucking ton of cash that they're sitting on, and they haven't given that back to the community at all. That's one of the reasons people are mad at them.

Let me just ask you straight up. If you ran Pump.fun today and you had the keys—Alon said, “Here you go. Take it. It's yours”—what's the first thing you're doing?

First thing I'm doing, if I ran Pump.fun—this is a great question—I would say that they need to align much closer with the community. First, I would start with a plan for the airdrop: how you're going to distribute this airdrop to people. I think you should focus on the people trading on the Pump.fun web app, people trading on the Pump.fun mobile app, creators who are launching coins, and traders who are doing a ton of volume.

You want to incentivize those people to have long-term alignment with Pump.fun. Maybe you align it so that not all of the airdrop is immediately unlocked. You have different tiers unlocked based on your activity going forward. That's the first thing. I'll figure out how to do the airdrop, how to distribute it to people, and what to do around that.

The second thing I would say is that you want to incentivize deeper liquidity on the coins they launch on the platform. One of the reasons coins are able to have higher market caps long-term is that people can blast a lot into the chart without having to worry about getting slipped super hard. But if there's not a lot of liquidity on these coins, then people are obviously not incentivized to bid large size into them.

That's not just memes, either. Whether it's the AI protocols that launch on Pump.fun, other consumer products that launch on Pump.fun, or all these different things, that liquidity needs to be there so people can trade in and out of these coins. That's another big thing.

Then they need to find a way to discourage new launches of copycats of products that have already launched on Pump.fun. This is also a user-behavior type of thing. If you're a user trading these low-market-cap coins, nothing is ever going to reach really high market caps if somebody launches a duplicate of the coin and then you're buying that one instead of the one that's already up a lot.

I think it's also a user-behavior thing. What Pump.fun currently has is multiple different ways of launching a coin, and you're not able to choose overlapping ways of launching a coin. It's rewards to creators, or pairing with USDC instead of Solana—just different things. There's not really a good way to combine all of them together right now.

That results in people launching copycats of coins over and over and over, and then they're all competing with each other for attention, which is bad. It's good for Pump.fun—volume on low-market-cap coins, which they make money on—but it's not good for traders and people who want to actually use the product.

Those are a few things I would say. There are also really cool ways that they can incentivize higher market caps on coins. One of the things that's interesting with Pump.fun is that a typical casino in Vegas is the best comparison. A typical casino in Vegas doesn't have great ways of improving the RNG for whatever it is that people are gambling on. People are gambling on slots; it's just slots. It's random.

But for coins, the ones that are trending and getting attention, Pump.fun is already doing this: they will inject liquidity and invest in products in their ecosystem, giving money to products in their ecosystem at a venture-stage type of level. What they can also do is say they made $100 million over a couple of months. They could take a portion of that money and inject it into the charts that are trending and doing well, so that they're aligned with the coins and protocols that are doing well on their platform.

Then people are incentivized to get their products to a higher market cap because they'll know they'll get buybacks from the actual protocol, Pump.fun, over the long term. I think that's another interesting thing they can do.

So, Alon, tap in, man.

Yeah, I have a lot of ideas, and people always hit me up with ideas on how to improve Pump, too. People want them to be more community-oriented. Also, the fees are super high. I think if they lowered the fees—how much rake they're taking from people—I think that's also something they could do, even if they lowered the fees for people staking Pump. They really haven't used the token at all or utilized it in any way.

Because people love Hyperliquid and people hate Pump.fun. Why? I mean, you're articulating the why very well, but people love Hyperliquid. They love everything about it. All I hear about is how great the team and the founder are, and how amazing the product is. Then you get Pump.fun just... It's kind of the exact opposite.

People love Hyperliquid and people hate Pump.fun because Hyperliquid has been 100% community-aligned from the very beginning. Like I said, they did an airdrop. Nobody had insider information about when the airdrop was going to happen, but they did an airdrop to their core users—the people who did the most trading volume on the exchange over an extended period of time. They got around 30% of the supply.

People didn't have to worry about it being locked up or anything like that. Immediately after the airdrop happened, they did the TWAP, where they're buying back 99% of their revenue directly into the coin. Nobody ever had to question the alignment between equity, token, or anything else.

They're also very transparent about what they're going to do in their plans moving forward, and they're very good with communication. When they communicate updates around HIP-3, the Assistance Fund, or HIP-4, they also ship at a very fast pace, and it's all aligned around the same product. They have a very clear vision.

5. Solana as the global Silicon Valley

I think their founder, Jeff, has done a great job of continuously showing what his vision is, how the HYPE token is centered around that, and how the community can contribute to that vision. I think what Pump has to do is that they tried a little bit with the buybacks at the beginning, but they didn't do the airdrop. Then they lowered the buybacks from 100%—or whatever it was, 90%—to 50%.

They didn't really give clear future plans about what they were planning to do with the token, what went well, what didn't go well, or what their views are on expanding their ecosystem. I do think one of the things they have done well is focusing on protocols that aren't just memes. They're focusing on protocols outside of just meme coins that they want to support and want to do well. They want to be the number-one platform for tokenization on Solana.

We just saw Rubble Strategy get listed on Hyperliquid, right? We just had Andrew Kang on. It's a publicly traded company.

Yeah. Rubble Strategy on Hyperliquid.

SpaceX pre-IPO.

Yeah, but what was I saying about Pump? I think that's the reason people don't like Pump as much as Hyperliquid: they're way more transparent, way more communicative, and way more token-aligned than Pump. But I think those are all things that can change. Those are changeable things.

I do think there’s no way they don’t want this token to do well long term. They are still buying back the token, so technically, the lower it goes, the higher percentage of the token they’re going to own. I think at some point they’re going to want to be receptive and responsive to what the community is asking them to do. I’m just not sure when that’s going to happen.

How big do you think the airdrop has to be, or will be?

I think it should be exactly what they said. They said 24% to the community. I think it should be that.

And how much would that be?

Right now, that would be around $240 million.

From Pump?

That’d be pretty good for Solana, for sure.

Yeah, bro, think about it. Where is that going to go? It’s all going to go straight to the trenches. There are going to be people buying stuff on Solana—people buying SOL, people buying a whole bunch of things.

I think one of the things that drove a lot of the adoption and liquidity last cycle was the Jito airdrop. Jito, if you guys don’t know, is one of the core infrastructure protocols on Solana. They’re also a liquid-staking provider through JitoSOL, so you can stake your SOL and still use it while it’s being staked.

They gave an airdrop to their core users right as Solana was breaking out above $30. I think it was in December 2023—I don’t know, somewhere around there. That stimmy was great for people. People were like, “Oh, now I have $10,000 to go trade on-chain with.” That was right as everything started popping off on-chain for Solana.

I think we could be in a similar spot right now if Pump decides to do one.

We’ve got TJ R here.

What’s good, bro?

He can hear you. He can hear you. We’re going to share a camera and share a mic, so hopefully you guys can hear.

He’s just going to sit in because we’ve got Merc coming on at 5:15. That should be good. I mean, you and Merc are sitting here talking about Solana. He thinks the SOL bottom’s in. He was just going off on that—why people love Hyperliquid versus why people hate Pump.fun. I figured it’d be cool to have you sit in.

Oh, bro. I think Pump.fun was probably the biggest fumble of all time. It was great when it started and what it was doing, but they could have been one of the best projects of all time.

Yeah, they had everybody’s attention. They still have everybody’s attention.

They still have it.

I know. That’s fair. Yeah.

They could come back, as we were just talking about. I think so. I think what they tried to do around streaming was interesting. It’s a very difficult thing to break into, but that was a big swing that they took and they missed. They’re definitely thinking long term.

Listen, as somebody from media who thinks about things in terms of attention, I feel like the culture over there and how they build and think about their product—with the streaming and, obviously, the shit you know, deploying meme coins and making that very, very easy with one press, whatever—and then what they just did with, what is the new feature they have?

Like bounties. The bounties. Bounty work is what I was thinking about. Adding this social layer, this social element, to trading is really, really smart. There’s definitely a market for it. I don’t know. $240 million? They own the trenches.

They own the trenches, bro. Big time. Think about it: They made $1 billion in fees. Then they raised another $1 billion in the ICO. They’re sitting on $2 billion, bro. They haven’t given anything back to people, and they still rake in fees to this day. They’re making a shit ton still.

Z thinks the SOL bottom’s in. He thinks it can run to $600.

$600? That’s absurd.

By the way, everybody in the chat—everybody who sees that clip—that was exactly my reaction.

Yo, that’s going to get clipped, and I know it. If that shit goes to $600, I’m going to be permanently memed on CT.

No, by the way, the way he and Mert are talking about SOL today—if this does mark the bottom, this is legendary. This is going to go down in history.

I think we might be due for maybe one more liquidation event, but as it seems right now, I think crypto—at least from the last time I was on this stream—it was looking ugly as shit. But now, you would have assumed that when Bitcoin dumped down, it would have gone way lower than $60,000, and it didn’t. That makes me a little bit more bullish.

6. Saylor & the Bitcoin reserve theory

I feel like something has to happen to flip him bearish. I don’t know—something that makes you say, “Oh, yeah, it might just be over. I don’t know when crypto is coming back.” I feel like that has to happen before it’s really over.

He’s got a level head, though. [Laughter] I know he does. He’s very level-headed.

Yeah, but my reasoning on Bitcoin is that I was also bearish on Bitcoin when it was testing $60,000 for the first time in June. I didn’t think $60,000 was going to hold, either. I thought it was going to break through and go to around $40,000.

Right now, I think it’s a high-risk spot, for sure. I’ve been telling people, if you’re trying to buy here and you’re wrong, you basically get clipped out for minus 20% pretty quickly. So, if you’re not somebody who’s trading actively, you can wait for a safer entry, probably above $70,000—around $72,000.

If you wanted to wait for a better entry, you can wait until the market settles in Q3 and buy higher. I think that’s a good spot for people. The reason I think the bottom could be in now is that Bitcoin’s weakness is largely attributed to Saylor and MicroStrategy’s weakness. MicroStrategy has been getting crushed, and STRC and his other products have been getting crushed.

People are expecting him to sell his Bitcoin, which is why a lot of people are selling now. I think that’s getting pulled forward, so a lot of people are expecting the worst-case scenario, but it’s actually not going to happen in the immediate term. In the worst-case scenario, he wouldn’t need to sell Bitcoin for another 6 or 7 months, I think.

I’ve heard a theory that he’s just trying to kill Stretch and not sell Bitcoin, so he can keep MicroStrategy and his entire operation without having to be the bad guy and sell any Bitcoin. If he were to kill one of them—his entire Bitcoin bag, MicroStrategy, or STRC—STRC would be the one he’d have to kill.

Exactly. The way he structured it, he has the ability to delay the payments, so he technically doesn’t have to pay them every month. He can delay the payments. He does have to pay them eventually, and there’s $10 billion in Stretch right now.

There are a ton of different financial things he can do to get himself out of the current situation he’s in. The real problem he’s going to face is when the convertible debt that he sold to people actually converts. If his stock isn’t at a certain strike price, then he does have to buy that debt back.

It kind of blows that Bitcoin is 24/7. It blows that Bitcoin’s market is at the mercy of Michael Saylor.

It’s shit, bro.

It defeats the whole purpose. Have you heard the theory that he’s been trying to collect a significant amount of Bitcoin so that his Bitcoin reserve can just get acquired by the U.S. government?

Is that really a thing? I literally tweeted that today. I didn’t know if that was a thing.

Oh, really? I heard that a month ago from one of my super, super-connected crypto friends.

Puerto Rico?

Yeah, yeah. Fully undoxxed. He’s not even online. But that’s what the rumors are.

Bro, I literally tweeted this today. I’m actually going to pull up the tweet.

Pull up the tweet.

Yeah, I’ve been thinking about it. I didn’t even say that—I haven’t been on Twitter in the past couple of days. That’s crazy.

Here it is. I hate when I reply to so many shit tweets. This is the original tweet. This guy, who’s a super-smart guy, said—unfortunately, and not that I care about another grown man’s financial situation, but it does seem like eventually Saylor has to financially die or be sacrificed for the cause.

Bitcoin will go to $1 million per coin, but it’s going to happen without him on the board of MicroStrategy. The thing is, there’s a clear flaw in Saylor’s mental model, and at the end of the day, markets are known to never let anyone too dumb get too rich.

I said, “Best-case scenario is MicroStrategy’s premium collapses.”

They’re no longer able to sell MicroStrategy shares for cash, which is what they’ve been doing. They run out of runway in 6 months to pay the preferreds back. They’re forced to sell Bitcoin to someone else at a discount to pay off existing debts. Long-term Bitcoin bulls get discounted BTC, and then MicroStrategy is out of the picture. The triple-dream bonus is if they sell it to the U.S. Treasury and then it funds the national Bitcoin reserve.

Wow. I think that’s what he has in the back of his head, bro.

Oh, because I said that because Trump has been putting out bullish crypto posts recently. He said, “I’m going to support crypto—”

Not bullish-posted crypto, though, right? It’s like—

Yeah, he has, but he said, “I’m going to support crypto in the U.S.” They’re trying to get the CLARITY Act and other acts passed, and there have been rumblings of a national Bitcoin reserve happening. That’s been a thing that’s been talked about. It hasn’t been put into practice yet.

I think it would make a ton of sense if, instead of him selling the $55 billion in Bitcoin that he has, the U.S. Treasury could buy that off him at a discount. He’s already made infinite money from selling MicroStrategy shares for cash. He’s already printed. He’s already a billionaire.

That bar from Wrong User: “The markets don’t allow anybody too dumb to get too rich.”

It’s hard. Okay. What’s he saying? Bring Forensic in, isn’t it?

Yeah, he’s saying, “Bring the—” They’re going to bring the soccer on. But, yeah, I think that—does that make sense, though? That’ll be the best outcome by far. Nobody’s—

Yeah, I really think we will.

That would be crazy. Then the U.S. government owns a ton more BTC. They already hold BTC.

All right, bring Forensic in. Bring this shit in. We’re going to celebrate. We’ll pop bottles of this shit.

Football quant?

They’re going to get crazy with it.

Football quant. Who’s football quant?

7. Forensic's World Cup bets + $100K on Portugal

Guys, ladies and gentlemen, Forensic came on last week and gave us some picks. We said, “Listen, gun to your fucking head.” He said, “My dream is to go to a World Cup.” I’m fluffing it up a little bit, but he said, “Yeah, my dying wish, my dream is to go to a World Cup game.”

We said, “What the fuck? You’re the quant and you’ve never gone to a game? You haven’t gone to a game yet?” He said, “Nope.” We said, “All right, gun to your head, pick a fucking spot, and if you win, we’ll send you to a game.”

We put three bands on—what was it?

Germany and Côte d’Ivoire.

Teams to score.

Germany and Côte d’Ivoire. And it hit.

And it fucking hit. You’re going to the fucking World Cup. Forensic, how do you feel, brother?

Dude, first of all, I appreciate you guys giving me the opportunity to do it. I was sweating, and I don’t know if you guys followed or tracked it, but my nightmare scenario happened, where Côte d’Ivoire was up 1–0 at halftime. I was like, “Well, here we go now. I’ve got to wait for Germany to score.”

Did you hedge it? Did you hedge it?

No.

Sicko for not doing that.

No, I didn’t. That was one of the times—

What was the market? You probably could have cashed out crazy as they scored.

Oh, yeah. As soon as they scored, Germany not to score was around +550. I thought about even getting in on that. It was massive. But, no, I can’t ever hedge.

Okay, wait. Gun to your head again, because I’m going to the Portugal–Colombia game.

Okay.

Is it tomorrow? Tomorrow?

Yeah, I fly there tomorrow.

So, gun to your head right now. I think it’s—sorry, not Colombia, Portugal. Yeah?

Yeah. I actually had a short list of things that I wanted to talk about. That’s actually on there. It’s not so much about that game, but the future market.

The futures market that I had—and it’s the same thing, really—is whichever is the better price: Portugal to win that game or Portugal to win the group. What I was going to pitch was Portugal to win the group at 1.9x. That’s Group K.

Portugal to win the group at 1.9x.

What’s it trading at?

Is it? Group what?

Group K.

Futures. Group—man, there are a lot of groups, bro. You said who to win this group?

Portugal to win the group. But I think whichever is better between that price and the price for them to win the game is what I would say. It’s the same idea. It’s basically trading on Portugal just winning that match, so whichever price is better is what I would take.

The thing is, Portugal have been kind of a joke after the first game. But in the second game against Uzbekistan, they came to play. Colombia have been sending it. They’ve been playing late at night, so I don’t think a lot of people get to watch them, but they’ve been sending it. If Portugal get to play them—

Low-key, Miami is a home game for them, too. There are a ton of Colombians in Miami, bro.

That’s a good point, actually. That might affect how much you want to go in on it.

Listen, that’s the FaZe Banks view. I’m telling you.

No, dude, that’s literally what it is. Yeah. I’m telling you, bro, that shit’s going to light up for Colombia.

Yeah.

They’re going to have Ronaldo chants happening and going through. They’re going to go crazy, I’m telling you.

They will, and I think that might be either super beneficial from what you’re saying, but I’m also thinking that if Colombia send it, Portugal haven’t faced a team yet that’s been attacking them. If Portugal are facing a team that’s attacking them, we’ll see the midfielders play a little bit better. We’ll see that the guys on the outside have more space.

That’s kind of what I’m expecting, but the draw is always there because Colombia just need a draw and they win the group.

Right.

So, that’s the idea: Portugal to win that match or just win the group.

Let’s say Portugal to win. I’ve got faith in Portugal. Who’s the best player on Portugal?

Some would say Ronaldo, but—

Ronaldo?

It’s probably Bruno Fernandes.

Come on, bro.

It’s not Ronaldo?

Ronaldo?

It’s not—well, it’s probably Bruno Fernandes. He’s probably the best.

Who is that? I don’t even know who that is, bro.

Bruno plays for United. Also, this guy Vitinha plays for PSG. They just won the Champions League final. Those two are probably their best players.

By the way, listen, listen. That’s why we have Forensic on the stream. That’s why we have our quant on the stream.

What game are you going to go to?

That’s what I was just—viewers have been asking me. People have been asking which game I want to go to. The issue right now is that we’re at the end of the group stages, so all we have left is the round of 32 forming.

I was trying to figure out the logistics, basically. The idea would be that if you guys—I'm not saying anything has to happen—but if you send me the money, I’d probably evaluate it differently. If you set it up completely, I’d probably evaluate it differently on both ideas, because I haven’t decided if I want to travel or go on a plane to a U.S. game, or just find a game near me in Pennsylvania or New—

Bro, go to the game you want to fucking go to, bro. You live and breathe this shit.

You smashed it.

Yeah, bro. We’ll help you figure it out. You fucking—

We’ll figure it out, bro. We’ll make it work. We’ll round it out.

Yeah.

Especially—you dropped some fucking gems this week, brother.

Yeah.

I’ll send you to another game if you’re right about this.

[laughter]

I swear to God. I swear to God. I’ll send you to another game. I’m putting $100,000 on what you just said, because gun to your head. So, $100,000 on this, and then if you win, you’re going to fucking hit it, bro. I’ll send you to the finals. I don’t care.

No, shut the fuck up.

I’m serious, bro. No, I’m actually dead serious. I’m dead serious.

I know he’s dead serious. By the way, this kid’s a fucking sicko. This is what I’ve seen him do. We’re in St. Barts right now—I don’t know if you can tell. We’re on an island. We’re on Starlink on a fucking boat right now. It’s fucking—

[laughter]

It’s sick. But, no, he’s being dead serious. You’re a fucking psycho, TJR.

Bro, I—

You’re going to the finals, bro. Wait till I win.

You have to hit. So, if you win, yeah.

What are you going to win?

Okay, okay, to solidify this: I’m copy-trading you right now. I need a signal. Is it win the group or win the game?

Dude, let me do some extra research now. Hold on. Lock the fuck in.

You got my heart racing. Production, give us some—give us some—give us some.

Hold on here. I just want to make sure that there's no difference in the markets, right? It's got to be the same thing. I just wanted to come prepared.

Make fucking sure, brother. Forensic is on here.

It's 53% to win the game and 54% to win the group.

Okay, it's got to be the same. Yeah, because they're on 4 points. If they win, there's no—yeah. It's Portugal to win.

Which market's bigger? Which market's bigger? So, Portugal to win the game.

Essentially, yeah.

No, I said it is that. Both would definitely have enough volume to be able to sustain.

Portugal to win the game is only at 50/50?

Yeah.

Colombia is good.

Oh, they're going to win, bro.

Damn, what are you going to win?

That's actually crazy. I thought they would have higher odds.

Higher odds, too. Yeah, that's what I thought, too.

I guess they traded. That's the trade, then: Portugal to win. That's what you wanted anyway.

Yeah, yeah. I want to go watch Ronaldo win a fucking World Cup game. Well, listen, you guys heard it: the sick fucking TJR is putting $100,000 on Portugal to win. If he hits, Forensic, you're going to the finals. You're going to the fucking World Cup finals, bro.

I have to watch this game now. I'm going to watch the opportunity. I thought I only had one gun to my head. I didn't know I was going to get two guns to my head.

I might get on the fucking plane and go to the game with you.

Yo, to make it even better—

To what? The Portugal–Colombia game?

It's in Miami.

Yeah, it's in Miami. I'm literally flying out tomorrow.

That's what I'm saying, bro. Colombia is like a home game, bro. I'm telling you.

Yo, to make it even better, if you're right about this, I'll go to the finals with you so that I can put a gun to your head again. Then you can predict it again for me.

Wow. Triple down.

Forensic, Forensic, Forensic, you have the opportunity here to go on such a fucking sick run.

Please, bro. Please.

Bro, we're going to send mad people to your fucking channel, dude.

Yeah, I'm speechless right now. I thought I was just going to be streaming the World Cup from my little room the whole time. I had no idea the World Cup was a possibility.

Nah, bro, you deserve it. So, what's your other picks? What else do you like? What are some locks in your head? What are you looking at this week?

Yes, so—

Feed us. Feed us.

The other ideas that I had outside of that one, because that was on my little thing here, were the Senegal–Iraq match. That was another idea. I just want to know what's available because I had 2 ideas for it, but it depends on what markets are up right now.

I like Senegal winning this match and scoring goals, too. I have 2 ideas here: Senegal to score in the first half, which was, I think, 1.4x, or Senegal to win the first half at 1.7x. I kind of like the— I mean, scoring is way safer, not as fun of a price, but I feel like they're a team that has no points. They have to win this match to even have a chance to get to the third spot.

When you said scoring in the first half, 1 or 2 goals?

1 goal. 1 goal in the first half. 2 goals is always tough in the first half, yeah.

And then the Belgium–New Zealand game is almost the same idea. This one's a little tricky because Belgium's been pretty ass so far. It really depends if they start this one guy, Doku. He had to miss the second game because of a child's birth. We're in the weeds on these players, bro. It's just the World Cup, so that's how we have to analyze these things.

Yeah, we're like, “He's a sick—I'm a sick fucking—”

It's his fucking job to know that, bro. It's the same reason why I know that Vitalik has an 8-inch dick. We need to know the fine-line details.

So, there's a safe idea and a more risky idea, depending on how you're approaching it. Belgium to score in the first half was 1.4 last time I checked, or Belgium to score 3 in the match total at 1.9. It's either the Belgium team total for the game or just Belgium to score in the first half. Obviously, Belgium scoring in the first half is, quote-unquote, safer, but you get the whole 90 minutes for them to score 3.

Let's see. To win by 3 or to score 3 total?

To score 3 total in the match was the idea.

Bro, there's no way you're putting this on the screen right now. There's no way. You're not for real. Production, what the fuck are you guys doing? Oh my God.

I think Jordi, you're muted, bro. You're muted.

Me?

I think Jordi from Last No Thanks—

Dude, that is so fucking stupid. Production, did you guys hear me?

Last week might have been right, bro. I don't—

Bro, production just fucking smoked me, bro. I was trying to show Tyler—they absolutely smoked me. Dude, you guys are fucking stupid. Bro, no, he's packing this. So stupid. It's so dumb.

Stop doing that, bro. Yo, stop. Stop, bro. Stop. You guys are so fucking dumb.

I'm doing it to show you, bro. Look. It's insane. They're still on it. Yo, seriously, stop. Stop doing that. Forensic, I'm so sorry.

No, you're good. You're good.

So dumb. See, the only reason why—by the way, that's the only reason why ETH is still fucking above $1,000.

That's crazy.

First half over 1.5? No. First half over 1—I don't see total goals on here.

Yeah, so I was going to say it's more dependent on whether you're feeling more safe or more risky. Riskier would probably be them scoring 3 goals in the entire match, but Belgium has to come out strong against New Zealand. New Zealand hasn't been great at defending the tournament. If you can just find Belgium to score in the first half, that's good.

Bless you. I think I got it. I think I got it. Mert's coming on in about 1 minute.

Forensic, listen, dude, you're the goat. You heard TJR. He's putting $100,000 on Portugal. If he fucking hits that, he's sending you to the finals. He's just sending you to the finals. And you're already going to a game because you gave us a fucking Jenny pick last week.

Thanks for sharing your trades with us this week. You're awesome. We're going to keep having you on the show throughout the World Cup. This has been a beautiful fucking friendship that has formed. We love you, man.

Yeah, we love you.

I'm so excited for you, bro. Seriously.

Thank you so much again for the opportunity.

Amazing. Thank you so much, bro.

Thank you, guys. I appreciate it.

He's the best, man.

He's cool. He's a genuine dude, I can tell.

I bet you he has a piece, too.

You better not lose me that $100,000.

Bro, he wanted to say it.

That kid knows what he's talking about. He wanted to say it.

You heard what I said. That shit's a lock. That's who I was going to put—I was going to make that bet regardless, and I knew he was going to say that. So I was like, “Bet.” You know?

That's awesome.

Yeah, you're right. You're right.

Okay, guys, ladies and gentlemen, listen. I just want to take the reins real quick. We are going to be bringing Mert in here in a second, and TJR is bouncing off the stream. We're going to bring Mert in. I'm going to stick around for 30 to 45 minutes. I have to hard out at 6:00 p.m. EST, which is in 45 minutes, because we've got to bring this boat back.

It's been a great stream. Z and Mert are going to talk for as long as they want to talk. I think that everybody here right now should lock the fuck in, grab a notepad and a pen, and listen. This is going to be a generational conversation. Honestly, I'm worried that I'm going to get in the way of it, to be real.

I'll be here for 30, 40 minutes-ish, and then we'll pass it off to these guys. Hopefully this conversation marks the bottom, Z. If it does, by the way—

Legendary if it does.

8. Helius CEO joins

If this stream takes SOL bottom, it's absolutely legendary all time. So, yeah, without further ado, let's bring this fucking beautiful, handsome Solana legend in here, Mert. And change my name tag from TJR to Banks. He's off.

Yo. Can he see us? Is he on yet, or can he hear us?

Yo, I can hear you. I just can't see—well, I see myself, which is fine.

I see him now. Production says open the other link, and you'll be able to see us.

All right, one sec.

It'll be better if you can see us. You're looking extremely bald today—super bald.

(Laughter.) Thanks, Ryan.

The beard is full, though. The beard is insane.

(Laughter.) Sick. Oh, there we go. Finally, I can see it. Yeah, I do look pretty bald. Jesus Christ.

It's shining, bro. I don't know. It might be the lighting. Damn, man. Sick, though.

Oh, well. Thanks, Ryan.

I think you look handsome, bro, and we appreciate you coming on. As you can tell, I'm on a boat, so I'm going to stick around for 30 or 40 minutes. We'll have a more normie-coded conversation with me, and then I'll pass it off to you and Z to wrap it up and talk for as long as you guys want. I'll probably be tuned in after I hop off, but happy to have you on.

I feel like this is the perfect time to have this conversation, and I've been seeing you guys tweet a lot.

We're like the king tweeters of CT, bro.

It feels like you guys are the only 2 left.

Yeah.

Feels like you guys are the only 2 left.

Yeah. It's tough bull-posting these days, man. People start completely fear-porn-ing in the replies.

They call you a paid shill, like somebody's paying you to shill Solana.

Like Solana is going to do that.

Trust me, bro. I wish.

You're right. I wish. I wish. I wish.

What are your current thoughts on where SOL is from a technological perspective, where it's at from a sentiment perspective, and how that's changed from cycle to cycle? You've obviously been a long-term Solana bull and been involved with the ecosystem for a really long time.

I think what people miss with Solana is how effective and consistent they are at pushing upgrades through and responding to the market—responding to what they need to change. I think people miss what's going on behind the scenes. That's typically what happens when the sentiment gets the worst: They don't actually know how things are improving. So, what are your views on that, cycle to cycle?

Yeah, I think the dichotomy you put there is correct: There's a tech side and a sentiment side. Last cycle—or really the last 2 cycles—there was a huge disconnect between what the chain was technologically capable of doing and what people thought of the chain, which is kind of weird because fundamentally, these are technologies. When you press the button, it better fucking work, right?

He's going to that.

Okay.

No, you're good.

All right. Yeah, you're good.

Okay.

Like, it's really weird to me. This was when I was really early on Twitter, in late 2020, 2021, whatever. It really boggles my mind that everyone kept talking about price action, sentiment, and narrative, but nobody talked about the technology, when in fact that's the thing that needs to work for everything else to work. You can only sell complete nonsense for so long, but the tech fundamentally has to work.

In 2021, it was very easy. When FTX completely crashed, I was pretty bullish because I was like, “Oh, great, because now they don't have the SBF card they can pull to blur the story, right? Now they can't say that. Now it's Solana—the thing that actually works, scales, and is the most usable thing without SBF.”

9. SOL's monetary glow-up (SIMDs)

Obviously, that's not what happened. They said, “Oh, because that guy was involved, it's now dead forever.” What they didn't realize, of course, is that when the cycle came back, it was the only chain that could handle the mass amount of activity in the past cycle, right? It's not like the meme coins were being hand-onboarded by Anatoly, or that the Solana Foundation certainly was. It just gave the best possible experience with the least friction for anybody to do anything on a blockchain. That was really the reason. Once you get a few of those, then it's a network effect.

I think we're in a very similar situation today, where the sentiment is completely blurred by a few things. One is obviously macro: the crazy amount of wars, stocks potentially being a bubble, capital rotation, Saylor, and all these different things. But if you look at the tech—and I was looking at this a few days ago—there are so many little problems that would have bitten us in the ass even in the last cycle, even 8 months ago, that have not completely gone away. The chain actually works insanely well.

You combine that with things like a new focus on the monetary properties of SOL. Helius, my company, is pushing a proposal to double this inflation rate, which is 100% going to pass. That means we'll get less issuance for SOL much quicker. That's going to be combined with a new burn mechanism for SOL that is proportional to the activity happening on-chain. Then that's maybe combined with another thing that gives priority fees from validators back to stakers. Holding SOL all of a sudden looks much different.

Then you combine this with all the other catalysts. Tokenized stocks are an obvious one that we've been seeing. There's also more niche stuff, like prop-AMM microstructure on Solana, enabling literally better fills than Binance on spot. That would have been unheard of in 2022, when everybody just thought of blockchains as shitty databases that couldn't possibly compete with centralized things. But Solana is a few thousand nodes and can give you better prices globally than Binance for certain pairs.

That's insane.

That's fucking crazy.

Yeah. It's taken for granted. But Solana is permissionless. It's not like it's a thing that Coinbase or Arbitrum controls. It's a completely decentralized system where you can have all sorts of these parallel experiments and long-tail assets, like meme coins, obviously, but collectibles, too. You're seeing this collectible crypto stuff. Really, anything that can be traded on-chain will be traded on-chain on Solana. That's the thesis.

I think people are completely unaware of the SIMDs that are currently getting ready to be passed. Let me see if I can pull this up. I think this is it. These are the 3 you were mentioning, correct? Are these the 3 SIMDs?

Could you go a little more in detail about what this means and how it changes the demand-versus-supply side for SOL? One of the biggest bull cases for HYPE this cycle—why it's done so well—is that people say 99% of the revenue goes back to buying HYPE, while Solana is super inflationary and no portion of that goes directly to buying SOL. That's not necessarily true. I don't think people are aware that some of that activity does benefit SOL, the asset. Could you talk a little more about how these 3 things change that substantially?

Sure. There are a few things here. Back in the day, when the SOL price would go up or down, people would show you the market-cap chart and say, “SOL actually hit an all-time high in market cap because of the inflation.” Now, there are a few things people conflate here.

One is that the inflation wasn't necessarily money printing; it was the unlocking of all tokens from older rounds. While there are still a tiny amount of unlocks left, the vast majority of the unlocks that people were worried about had already hit the market. I don't know if you remember, but in 2024, there were all these ETH maxi accounts saying, “This big unlock is coming, and after that it just goes to complete zero.” Obviously, it actually went up instead. Those unlocks were already one of the main causes of the market cap getting inflated.

After that, there's the inflation curve of SOL. Solana's inflation curve goes down and to the bottom right, so it keeps decreasing over time. I forget the number of epochs, but let's say every year. With this proposal that we put out with Helius, that now happens twice as fast. To reach a terminal inflation rate of about 1.5%, previously it would have taken 6 years, but now it will take half that. The new supply of SOL is decreasing in velocity.

On Solana, this is especially important. We used to talk about REV on-chain with Solana, and you've pointed this out with Jito and MEV monetization. Basically, if you're a SOL staker—if you hold SOL, for example—not only are you completely protected from inflation, you also get 2 additional sources of yield. One is the MEV yield through Jito tips, and the other is priority fees on Solana. So you can get real, productive yield that's completely inflation-free on top of staking rewards.

That’s about 3% in a good market. So, in reality, you can get up to 9% yield on SOL just by staking it. That gives you additional productive yield on top of the inflation protection. With that in mind, I think that SOL is a good—

Is that why you like Solana as opposed to—because I would assume, because all I see you tweet about is fucking Solana and Zcash? I would assume you like Solana to outperform Hyperliquid over the next, we’ll say, year. Am I right in assuming that?

[Laughter.]

With pairs—thinking in pairs—I’m not a trader. So it’s hard for me to make too much sense of. I look at it more as a venture person, where I think Solana will do well, but I don’t know how well Hyperliquid will do. Will it do 2x? Will it do 10x? For me to have a good sense of that, I need to be deeply involved in that system, and I’m just not. So I’d just be talking out of my ass.

Whereas you’re deeply involved in Solana. That makes sense. Okay.

Exactly. So, I think that’s all you need to know.

Yeah, go ahead. You’ve been talking a lot about SOL. What do you think I didn’t ask you in the show before he jumped off? What do you think? Is it one or the other? Do you think both?

I think you should hold both. I don’t think it’s one or the other. I don’t think it makes sense to pigeonhole yourself into one versus the other.

I think Hyperliquid has kind of proven itself and done a great job with its 1 singular application, but I think HyperEVM has underperformed. That’s what people haven’t talked about as much with Hyperliquid. What Solana is much better at than Hyperliquid is being an L1 where there can be a ton of applications building on top, rather than just one.

So, if you think about the upside for SOL, there could be a perps exchange that does really well and competes with Hyperliquid, but there can also be a ton of other applications, like Pump.fun, like Collector Crypt, and other consumer apps that are doing well at the same time. I don’t think that Hyperliquid currently has the necessary infrastructure to support all that.

I’ll see if I’m wrong on that, but I think right now the sentiment on Hyperliquid is super high and the sentiment on Solana is super low. That’s where the divergence currently lies. They’re both great assets, and both are going to do well longer term.

I always get confused by how people get super bearish on SOL. They always forget that it outperformed everything not even a couple of years ago. It’s been pretty consistent that in the 2020–2021 cycle, Solana outperformed nearly everything. At the beginning of the 2023 cycle, Solana outperformed everything.

10. Top crypto bags + the Zcash thesis

So it’s been the best-performing asset in crypto, cycle to cycle, for the past 2 cycles, until Hyperliquid came along. Hyperliquid is obviously still a lower market cap, but I think you should hold both. I’m not necessarily saying you should hold one or the other.

Mert, I ask everybody this question, so I’m going to ask you. I have to ask you: gun to your head, 3 assets in crypto you have to hold. You have to go into a fucking hyperbolic time chamber for the next—

He’s going to say—

—5 years. Gun to your head, what are the 3 assets you like in crypto to hold?

Wait, wait. Ansem, you said you know what I’m going to say. You obviously know the first 2, but what are you going to say for the third?

I know the first 2. I think the guy driving the fucking boat right now knows the first 2.

I’m going to guess. I’m going to guess SOL, obviously, for the first one. The second one, I’m going to guess Zcash. The third, I’m going to guess NEAR. Am I right or no?

Oh, yeah, okay. So that’s what I was asking you, because for the third, I’m stuck. I don’t know if I would say HYPE or NEAR. I’m kind of leaning toward NEAR, but that’s a much riskier bet, I think, and it has more upside.

Okay.

What do you think it’s going to take for Zcash to go mainstream the same way Bitcoin did?

I think these things, like memes, take time to propagate, right? These are memetic assets in that, if you don’t have a productive asset where you’re getting the core team buying the token or some revenue is being driven to it, the only thing that really matters is shared belief, right? For that to happen, you need, 1, the meme to be simple enough, but it also needs to be relevant enough.

With Zcash, there are a few things coming up. We already had one of the formal verifications done on the current pool, but they’re also doing 2 others in parallel for Zcash. Obviously, the new upgrade needs to go live to prove that there was no minting and/or theft. And third, the new pool will be quantum-recoverable.

There are a few other upgrades, right? There’s one that fully quantum-proofs it within the year. There’s going to be one that increases the performance—it’s hard to say, because it’s demand-based, but you can assume a few hundred TPS, which is pretty crazy for a PoW chain that’s a store of value.

Mhm.

And then it’s just a matter of, how do we keep building the integrations around this? How do we make the miners more decentralized? How do we get VPNs to start accepting it as payment?

Zcash is an asset where you don’t need a bunch of little money holding it. What you need is people who actually really need it to be passionate about it. The best example is the Swiss offshore banking folks, right?

Most people don’t know this, but the Swiss banking people got much less neutral during the Russia–Ukraine conflict, to the point where they started de-banking people. That really shifted the mental model of a few folks—or the set of people—who really need that type of banking system.

It’s not an accident that you’ve seen some of the big Silicon Valley people and some of the big libertarian people talk about it more as well. What you really need is to explain, hand to hand, how this works. This is literally private internet money that cannot be taken from you, and it is quantum-proof. You don’t have to worry about surprises.

The boring answer to your question is just time and more results being delivered consistently to show people that this team is serious. They’ve been shipping continuously since this thing started. It’s not just a fluke.

Why did I see so many people, like a month ago, bear-posting Zcash and talking about how it was fucking whatever, whatever security breach? Why did I see all that? What were your thoughts on that, and what are your thoughts on that now?

Well, there are a few things at play here. The first is—and Ansem kind of tweeted this today, I think—when a coin goes up 3% or goes down 3%, people just fucking hate it.

People pile on hard. It’s insane. It’s crazy.

It’s insane.

I’ve never seen CT like this before. I’ve literally never—

It’s so bad.

You don’t even get a couple of days of—maybe you’re off by a couple of days. If it’s down 3% and you tweeted that you were bullish on it, it’s like, “Fuck this guy.” It’s crazy.

Yeah, dude, it’s fucking—Bitcoin went down, like—it was a few months ago. Bitcoin went down like 10%, and then Zcash went down like 4%, and people were tagging me: “Oh, I told you Zcash was a scam.” I was like, “What the fuck do you mean, man?” It’s literally outperforming Bitcoin. It’s up like 600%—

[Laughter.]

—year to date.

I know.

Anyway, there’s this weird incel-like thing. You know how incels just fucking hate women on the internet? It’s kind of the same thing.

Yeah.

They just hate on the good coins that are actually performing—

Yeah.

—to convince themselves it’s actually a bad coin. But that particular one you’re mentioning is like—

By the way, what you just said is 100% facts.

It’s when they’re not positioned, bro. I think the more haters a coin has, the more people are going to buy later. That’s 100% facts.

Yeah, it’s whatever. I mean, look, there’s some validity to the criticisms, and that’s fine. But, for example, that security thing started because 5 or 6 news outlets started tweeting that Zcash was down, like it just had an outage. But it was never down.

What happened was that the block explorers were using an old, unpatched node. So the block explorer showed the wrong information, and everybody just started jumping on it. I was like, “You guys are fucking stupid. I can just go on Solana’s block explorer and say it hasn’t produced a block. That doesn’t mean Solana’s down.”

And so that entire environment—and people just don’t know how Zcash works. To be fair, Zcash technology is not super easy to understand.

Mhm.

They were saying things like, “Well, you can mint an infinite amount of Zcash,” which you obviously can’t, because there are these things called turnstiles that would trigger, and it would never actually exceed that amount. They think Monero is better or something while not knowing that Monero is susceptible to the exact same counterfeiting bugs because it’s also a privacy protocol. There are all sorts of technical shortcomings.

I was muted, sorry. That’s what I was seeing on the timeline. I was seeing people talking about how there was somebody out there who was just printing this stuff over the last several years—an infinite supply, like a money glitch. Is that just [expletive]?

That is completely [expletive].

Okay. [laughter]

First of all, let’s think about this, right? Somebody was saying, “Well, somebody’s paying off KOLs with an infinite supply.” Okay, so number 1, how is the price going up if there’s infinite selling pressure? Is there infinite buying pressure as well?

Number 2, how is the shielded pool increasing in size if people are taking money that is infinitely minted and then pulling it out? That would literally be impossible. Number 3, if it was exceeding the supply, it would trigger the turnstile, which would never allow the total supply to exceed what’s set in the code, which at that time is going to be around 16 million Zcash, not even 21 million.

The security wasn’t just some guy backdooring a [expletive] security bug. It was a top-3 Zcash researcher, and this was deliberate. Behind the scenes, we and all the core teams have been ramping up resources to say, “Look, Mithos is going to come out. We need to get ahead of this and ramp up auditing and formal verification and try to find as many bugs as humanly possible before some of this [expletive] is available to the public.”

Then they find the bugs, right? Mithos also did an audit and didn’t find anything. The newest GPC did an audit and didn’t find anything, right? All protocols are susceptible to this. Zcash just did the relatively unpopular thing of saying, “Okay, let’s just [expletive] do this right now in public and get out of it before anybody can actually expose anything, such that we’re bulletproof and become more lenient over time.”

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I think what happened was that a lot of people missed the Zcash trade and have been bear-posting it the entire time. Then that security thing they found happened, and they patched it, or tried to patch it, and people were like, “Well, it’s going to zero. It’s worthless.”

11. Crypto is a video game

It happens a lot with coins, bro. Solana in 2020 and 2021—nobody held any Solana. It went from literally around $1 to [expletive] $200, and everybody was like, “It’s a scam,” the entire way up. Literally the entire way up and the entire way down, and they missed it the second time. It was pretty crazy.

People still call Bitcoin a scam, right? So it’s like—

Peter Schiff.

Oh, yeah, [expletive] Peter, man.

Yeah, I mean—

It’s just—look, man, it’s an adversarial environment, right? People think it’s PvP, and some of the coins are obviously PvP. A good chunk of memecoins are literally—I call it Web3 gaming, right? People think online gaming would be Counter-Strike skins or some [expletive] like that, but really, what else looks like an MMORPG? You have these social games where people are buying and selling against each other, then having fun and creating memes while doing it, right?

There’s a direct correlation between professional Fortnite pros and people who perform well in the trenches. It’s one-to-one. It’s a very real thing. What you just said very much is a game, and it’s very reminiscent of gaming.

That’s my background. That’s where I come from. I founded FaZe Clan. It’s a huge esports brand. We own professional teams in Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, and so on. We’ve been doing that for 15 years.

I lived with Frank DeGods, Threadguy, and a couple of other crypto natives last year in LA, and we lived in this big 10-bedroom house. I would walk into Frank’s room, which was the big room where they would all trade. The way it sounded was literally like how it sounds when you walk into a room where a professional gaming team is practicing.

There are comms. This is pairing, this is happening. It’s insane. It’s crazy. It’s interesting what you just said because I’ve always been passionate about that and thought it could be a pretty good way to onboard retail into crypto and Solana—just gamifying it and reskinning it.

Like you said, CS:GO skins—there’s a reason why people like to engage with that type of stuff. Then people look at something more niche and a little thicker and denser, like memecoins and financial [expletive].

Yeah, that’s correct. It’s not an accident that most of the big fund managers are ex-poker pros, by the way. There are a lot of PvP-type games that happen, and that’s just what they are.

There are some challenges. We need to make them actually zero-sum instead of negative-sum and deal with MEV leakage and stuff. I don’t want to get too nerdy, but the point here is that those types of games exist, and there are also PvE games. It’s not all PvP or whatever.

For example, when Zcash goes up and more people hear about Zcash, look what happens. When I first started talking about Zcash, it was at $18, and privacy was literally deemed dead in crypto. If you look at the Kaiko charts and the social dynamics, it just wasn’t mentioned anywhere.

Now look. There are privacy protocols from all ecosystems getting VC funding or whatever MetaDAO funding. People are adding more private features. NEAR is adding confidential transfers, Base just added private transactions, and I’m adding private transactions to Solana.

Privacy fundamentally is a positive-sum thing for the individual. It gives you more freedom and choice and more dignity on-chain rather than getting [expletive] surveilled for the rest of your life. It’s not all completely zero-sum games here.

That’s a really good point. I think that’s one of the things people miss in crypto a lot of the time. They focus on all the PvP games and not the PvE games.

Bitcoin created a massive amount of wealth for people who didn’t want to store their wealth in dollars because they kept getting devalued. I think that thesis and crypto in general have been very PvE in general. The past few years haven’t been seen that way.

I’m curious—can you talk a little bit about your company, Helius? What do you think is—well, first, what is Helius, and what do you guys do? Then the second question: what do you think is most important for Solana to focus on moving forward?

In the last cycle, as we talked about, memes did really well. But obviously, if you want to be an L1 that can support a ton of applications, you want to support other market sectors as well. What do you think they should be focusing on the most, and how do they do that?

Sure. Helius is a Solana-exclusive infrastructure provider, and our imperative is to help Solana win. We help you build better, cheaper, faster, more scalable applications on Solana. No matter what app you use on Solana, you probably use us to some extent.

We’ve onboarded people from other ecosystems. We’ve helped Pump.fun, Axiom, and all those guys. When you’re using it during those traffic times, we’re behind the scenes making sure your [expletive] actually works, which is a very [expletive] stressful job. Somebody’s got to do it.

It’s like the offensive lineman in football, I would say. You get none of the glory, but if something goes wrong, you get all the [expletive] blame if the quarterback gets sacked. It has to be done like that. Somebody has to block.

What I think is most important for Solana—people have many different takes on this, right? Some people will say, “You must win perps, otherwise Hyperliquid will win.” Or some people will say, “Hyperliquid already won, so you must win the other verticals.” There are many different schools of thought on this.

Mine has been very consistent since day one. What I think Solana needs to really be the best at is becoming a global Silicon Valley for entrepreneurs. No matter who you are in the world or where you are—if you’re a kid from Bangladesh or Estonia and you just have an idea, you want to take your creativity and knowledge to build the next big thing, whether that’s a trading app, a collectibles thing, neobanking, a better inflation hedge, whatever it might be—we want you to come to Solana and help bring it to the entire world, such that it benefits everybody.

We want to set up this environment where it’s full of founders like this: me, Toly, Lucas from Jito, Armani from Backpack, whatever.

We're all here as a big network of founders trying to help you build better things, scale entrepreneurship, and bring building businesses on-chain to the rest of the world. That's why it's super important that Solana is extremely scalable, because that only functionally works if you can design the blockchain such that you don't get these weird L2 games with their own incentives, where they're like, “No, no, no, I want all the activity on my L2, not yours.” So that kind of thing breaks a lot of things.

But with Solana, what I want is for this to be where you go for capital formation, for building businesses, for having that idea in your head and then bringing it to reality. All you have to focus on is the business, getting PMF, and giving users a best-in-class product experience. Then we take care of the rest. We take care of the physics. We do the scaling.

That makes a ton of sense. At a high level, that makes a ton of sense.

Go ahead.

I would say that is a very hard thing to price. It's very hard to be like, “Look, that's great, but how do I price what Solana is?” It doesn't have a very simple thing of, “Well, some people trade perps and then buy back the token.” I think that's a bad criticism.

Yeah, go ahead.

Personally, I hold, send, transfer, and trade stables on Solana. I don't know why I do that, but it's just naturally how things have fallen for me. I'll send people USDC on Solana. Why do you think that is? It's just the easiest. It's the cheapest, fastest, and easiest.

Yeah, exactly. So it makes sense.

If you look, for example, at the big companies that have come out of crypto, a disproportionately high number of them have started on Solana. Phantom started on Solana; it's a billion-dollar company. Magic Eden started on Solana back in the day and was a billion-dollar company. Axiom, Phantom, Jupiter, Public—all these guys started on Solana because that's the environment we set up here. If you're a great founder and you just want to focus on the product without worrying about all this weird shit—funding crises for core developers, the physics of it all, and all this shit—you just come to Solana.

If you have enough teams like that building products, they find their way to onboard you, and then you just use it without even really thinking about it. That's why you send USDC.

Yep.

For example, I was buying flowers for my girlfriend. A very common thing in Web3 entrepreneurship is that you'll ask them to pay in crypto, and then they'll give you a fucking Tron address. It's always a Tron address. I don't know; maybe it's a Dubai thing.

Yeah.

It's so weird.

Yeah, that is very weird.

This was especially the case 2 years ago. But now, more and more, I'm recognizing that people actually give USDC addresses on Solana. That's very hard—again, it's practically impossible—to price.

But if you think of blockchains as economies, fundamentally, the economy that has the most usage, the most GDP, and the most production is the one that's going to have the most optionality going forward to build new things and get exposed to. I'm not going to tell you it's going to go up 10x, but I can tell you it will be the most used. I also think it'll go up 10x, of course, but my lawyer won't let me tell you that.

I said it was going to go 10x about 2 weeks ago.

Yeah, bro said it's going to $600.

I did. I literally—

That's the clip. That clip's going to go fucking nuts.

I think it—

Do you think the best comp is something like Apple? Apple obviously has its ecosystem of applications in the App Store, where people build and then get immediate distribution through everybody who has an iPhone. Solana is an L1 that everybody globally can get access to. Anybody can build on-chain on Solana, and then they get immediate distribution to everybody who has a Solana address.

Yeah, I think that's a good comp. It's also very similar in philosophy, in that Apple is vertically integrated. They try to do everything in one place. The reason that's important is because if you don't do that—

I have a very basic thesis in how I invest in things. One second. Can you still hear me, or is my thing frozen?

Yeah, we can hear you. Yeah, we can hear you.

Sorry, I'm on several layers of VPNs here.

The way I invest is very consistent, and I only look at 2 things. One is the physics of the thing I'm investing in. Are there fundamentally unsolvable problems here that will fuck me in a year, such as scaling or funding mechanisms that I literally cannot solve as an investor or as an activist investor?

And then, 2 is incentives. Is it structured in such a way that people are incentivized to work together to add value to the chain, or is it going to be fragmented across L2s such that it ends up as a giant shitshow?

Those are the only 2 things I look at, because if you have those 2 things, then what I can do is—in the traditional Web2 world, you would call this a hostile takeover, like a corporate raider, where you build up a position in distressed companies, take over management, and then add value to shareholders.

The great thing about crypto is that you don't need to be hostile about it, because there is no central team. You can be one of the many teams pushing the ecosystem forward. That's what I did with Solana at $8. That's what I did with eCash at $16. The physics, the facts, the literal fundamentals of the reality work; the incentives work. Now it's a matter of solving these entirely solvable problems.

What Solana has going for it is that it has both the physics and the incentives going for it. When you're building an app on Solana, it's not just you who's looking for you to succeed. It's also the core team, folks like Helius, folks like Jito, and folks like Jupiter that route users to you. It's this entire ecosystem flywheel—

Yep.

—that you fundamentally cannot reproduce any other way.

Yeah, it's all interconnected and builds on top of each other. I think people always discount L1s at the beginning when they launch, but you don't realize how short of a time frame Solana has been live. Think about how long it took Apple and Microsoft to build their ecosystems and do really well. Solana's only been live for, what, like 6 years now, I would say? 6? Something like that.

I mean, it's really only scaled for about 2 years, right? It used to go down and all this stuff. Base is down right now, I believe, or at least it was for the last few hours. This is hard shit.

People say, “Oh, well, crypto's not early, whatever, because Bitcoin was in 2000-whatever.” Okay, sure, but programmable chains that actually work and scale—

[laughter]

—have been around since a few months before Trump launched, which is really not that long ago. So this is actually quite new.

One other thing that most people won't understand about Solana in terms of the investment thesis is that Solana hosts a lot of HFT firms and a lot of trading activity, obviously. You saw it in memecoins. But those people are price-sensitive because they're trying to get an edge and capture bips off trading volumes.

The way you can do that on Solana—or what you must have—is that you need to hold SOL to get an edge in these markets, whether that's stake-weighted quality of service, storage fees for creating accounts, running your own block-building algorithm, or getting better transaction landing.

If HFT in TradFi is dominated by people competing literally via microwave towers and shortening their cables by 1 centimeter to get an edge—they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on that per year, billions of dollars—on Solana, it's the same. You're going to need to hold SOL in order to be able to get an edge as more and more of these things trade on-chain.

That is a buying profile for a customer that's entirely price-insensitive that nobody really thinks of.

I've never thought about it like that. That's actually true. That makes sense.

Yeah, we see them all the time. We service all the HFTs, and these guys are willing to pay a lot of money just to get a 1-millisecond edge. As you can see, as the market comes back and there's more activity on-chain, Citadel is coming on-chain now, by the way. They already have job postings and all these things.

The Jane Streets of the world, all these global hedge funds and trading quant firms, as they look to come on-chain, they're going to need to be exposed—not from a pure buyback perspective, obviously, but simply out of necessity. They'll need to do it to make their businesses win.

Right. How do you think SOL can compete with apps like Hyperliquid, which has done really well with perps? I know there are teams like Phoenix and other teams like Bulk Trade.

There are a few others as well that are new. But do you think it's possible for SOL to compete with Hyperliquid in that area? And if so, how long do you think it would take for something like that to happen?

So, I'll back that up as well, I should say.

Sorry.

Yeah, I have a somewhat unpopular opinion here. People nerd out on this and think, “Hyperliquid is good because they have closed-source binaries in Tokyo and it's colocated.” I don't think that's at all the reason why they're so good at perps. I don't think it's actually a technical thing.

Right.

I think they're extremely good at executing on product as a team. But they also obviously did a colossal airdrop and did extremely good customer acquisition for a very loyal set of users that are now going to bat for them.

Yeah, right.

People on Solana might think, “All we need to do is add a speed bump for makers such that they can quote better.” Look, that's an entirely solvable problem. Eugene and Jerry from Phoenix can solve that problem well. That's not the issue.

The issue is that this requires somebody who's like Jeff, who's a fundamental product thinker, who really cares about the user—

Yeah.

—and is relentlessly focused on that. It's not going to be some L1 change that enables it, right? And so then the question becomes not, “Can SOL compete with it?” The question is, “Can SOL enable an environment where apps on top of SOL can compete with it?”

I think the answer to that is yes. It wasn't yes last year, by the way. It is yes now. The chain is deterministic enough to enable this.

So now it's the question of what I said earlier, which is how you get the Silicon Valley mantra of all these founders choosing SOL deliberately to build their products. Because if you do that, then it's a matter of time before enough apps come to actually compete on products—not the weird L1-specific nuances, but actually on products.

Hm.

So that thing, again, I think remains to be seen. I think if you look at the history of SOL and how many unicorns have come out of the chain, I think it'll for sure happen, given that all the best wallets and trading apps have started on SOL.

I think prediction markets will be the next thing. This will be a good case study as well because Hyperliquid's new binary-outcome markets, which are prediction markets on-chain from Hyperliquid, are coming at a time when SOL is also enabling the same thing on the L1. So this will be a good case study to see which approach actually bears better on this.

I feel like everyone's building the same thing.

Everybody's competing with perps and prediction markets.

You said that Solana would not have been able to support a Hyperliquid competitor at this time last year, and that something—or a lot of things—have changed with the chain's underlying infrastructure. Would you say that is a combination of Alpenglow, Firedancer, and Jito's BAM, the Block Assembly Marketplace? Or why would you say it's better now than it was before? It couldn't have supported something like that before.

Yeah, there is no one thing here. Imagine you're building a car, right? Assume you built the most powerful fucking engine known to man. It's a Ferrari F1 engine, whatever. That's great, but now your tires can't handle all that power, so you have to change your tires. Now you did that, but your cooling system doesn't work.

Engineering is fundamentally about considering the holistic system and then incrementally adding new pieces to find the bottlenecks. That's the thing with Solana: We changed a few core things that help transaction landing, and then we need to make sure that when people retransmit those blocks across the network, that also scales.

You put together all these different updates, and then the end result you get after a while is, “Okay, now we have a V2. Now we have a much better engine that actually functions.” It wasn't one thing. I would say it's a mix of Firedancer, Jito, and Anza especially.

There's a guy, Alessandro. We might have seen him on Twitter, this yoked-out Italian dude who's a world-class performance engineer, one of the best on the planet. He alone has helped increase the performance of Solana. Block times used to go up to 500 milliseconds. Now they're like 394, and now they're going to go down to 200 milliseconds.

Wow.

All that shit, you kind of just add it up, and then all of a sudden you have a system where now the tech does enable apps to become the next Hyperliquid. But the framing can't be, “Can SOL compete with Hyperliquid?” SOL is not a trading team. Exactly.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Guys, I have to hop off because we just parked this boat and they're kicking us off the boat. Mert, I really appreciate you coming on. I'm going to leave it to you guys.

Sorry that I took a vacation on the fucking episode that you decided to come on, Mert, because we were trying to get you on since episode 1. Hopefully this can be a recurring thing and we can keep up and keep tabs with you. This has been awesome. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you and to be able to listen.

I'll pass it off to you guys from here—you and Z. Keep the conversation flowing. Sorry about that, but I have to go. Z, I'm going to pass it to you.

12. AI x crypto & the "space age"

All right. Yeah, we can. What's good, Mert? I feel like we've been at this spot before where SOL is down, a bunch of people's sentiment is really bad, and then a ton of performance stuff happens. Out of nowhere, sentiment flips and momentum shifts. It seems very familiar to me.

Yeah, I mean, the thing is, I made this meme yesterday, which is, “The entire crypto market loses $2 trillion in value,” and then gold is down like 10% or something, which is unheard of. There's a stock sell-off, Bitcoin's going down, and people are like, “How could Solana do this?”

What the fuck do you mean? What did Solana do, bro?

Yeah.

It's interesting. Do you have a take on the AI side of things? I know AI has taken a lot of wind out of the sails of crypto and taken a lot of attention away because people are creating AI-generated videos and all these other things.

I've been developing a thesis that if open-source AI is going to become a lot more popular, and you're going to see a lot more startups building in that area, with decentralized inference as a narrative as well, Solana will be the best L1 for enabling those types of protocols.

I know you have the huge AI startups, like OpenAI, Anthropic, and the other ones, which are never going to be tokenized or anything like that. But I'm curious if you have any thoughts on that and how the crypto-AI overlap happens.

Sure. I have a left-curve answer here that is not very exciting. The way I think of it is twofold.

One is that AI just makes building things easier for people who were fundamentally barred from it before. One thing is Solana—we used to call it “chewing glass” because it's just hard to build on. Now, with things like Helius and AI, you can build.

You did coding before, so you're aware of this, but there's this fundamental trade-off between ease of development and performance. For example, if you code in Ruby, you can write basically English code, but it's just going to perform like ass. Versus if you write in low-level C++, it'll perform really well, but it's very hard to do right without exposing yourself to security risk.

However, that has now changed. With AI, you can write extremely performant code in English. So now the set of developers who would have been barred from Solana before, given their expertise, can come to Solana.

The way Solana works is that it doesn't require you to write new smart contracts; you can just compose with existing ones that have already been battle-tested. This is the program model versus the Ethereum, or EVM, contract model. While that sounds pretty boring on the surface, it does enable a new wave of developers to enter Solana.

And then, two, on a crypto-wide basis, I wrote a piece about how crypto is about to enter the space age. The theme of that post was about how the smart contracts we write in crypto today have been developed with Web2 consumer SaaS standards.

If you wrote bad code on Facebook, the worst that's going to happen is your page won't load or something like that.

But if you write bad code on a smart contract, you just lost $100 million, right? So, there are certain things you cannot get wrong with crypto, and you need to apply serious spaceflight- and biomedical-type standards to writing smart-contract code because it's irreversible and catastrophic if something goes wrong.

With AI and these formal-verification methods that are now automated, you can genuinely trust smart contracts much more than you would before, provided they're written correctly, right? What will happen is AI will expose the ones that have been written in a really poor way or without much risk management. For example, there are no rate limits on any DeFi protocol right now, which is kind of crazy. If there's a hack, you can just pull out $1 billion, and it's like, that shouldn't exist, probably. It's ridiculous. You're not going to do that. Yeah, exactly. I don't think this will happen in the next 4 months, but in the next 1.5 to 2 years, you'll see that AI really fundamentally helps improve people's trust in smart contracts and also increases the number of builders in crypto, such that you're not always stuck with the same types of games and product types.

I agree with that. The TAM should be a lot larger, and it should be a lot easier for people to build in crypto who couldn't build before.

On the different market sectors, I know you've talked a lot about privacy and you're enabling private transactions at Helius. I know you're super big on Zcash, but also privacy natively on Solana. What are your thoughts on that and how it will work? I think R3 recently did its IPO. I think they've been enabling a lot of confidential transactions.

The way I think of privacy is twofold. In the case of a store-of-value asset like Zcash, privacy isn't the main feature; it's just the thing that enables a better store of value. A store of value must have fundamental properties like fungibility, being hard to seize, censorship resistance, and no surprises. In the case of Zcash, privacy isn't the entire feature; it's just the one thing that enables confidence in the asset itself.

Right.

Right. The second model is in finance. Privacy is, first of all, nonnegotiable in Web2, but in crypto, I actually view it as a scaling technology. You might have seen chains like Canto closing some big BD deals. Canto is fundamentally a Web2 database—there's really nothing crypto about it, in my view. One of the reasons they're able to do this is because they enable privacy, albeit Web2 privacy, not Web3 privacy, for institutions to actually scale their operations on-chain.

Right.

In the case of Solana, you're never going to get people doing payroll on-chain, neobanks actually offering non-marginal services to their customers, or dark pools for confidential trading. You're never going to get that on-chain unless you have what they're looking for, and one of the last things they're looking for is privacy. So, it's an enabling technology for people to come on-chain.

Squads, for example, who you might know, have a business-banking section called Altitude Now. They can't just do payroll in a completely transparent way, right? That makes no sense. You don't want to see how much everybody's being paid, who's getting what, and all these different things.

Right.

I don't want, when I use my credit card at Crypto Thai, my barista to see that I'm getting hair-transplant treatments in Istanbul. It's like, what the fuck?

[Laughter]

Right? And so it just must exist for finance to actually scale on-chain. That's what we're going after with Helius. There are a lot of issues with it; I'm not going to lie. I've been looking at the Tornado Cash cases and, man, they got charged with some crazy shit. They're under trial for conspiracy to commit money laundering, sanctions evasion, and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business, which they actually did get charged for.

Yeah.

And that's purely for writing open-source code that breaks the link between somebody sending money and somebody receiving money.

Yeah.

It's a very unsexy problem, which is why we're taking a shot at it. We're very good at solving the unsexy problems.

Got you. That's a good explainer. I guess it hasn't been great to be building in privacy in general because of how governments crack down on it. Do you have any opinions on how that landscape might change in the upcoming future? We currently have a good administration in the U.S. that's at least slightly bullish on crypto and willing to push through the necessary regulatory things. Do you think that will also affect how people look at privacy and open-source tech?

Yeah, so there are 2 things coming here. One is that the attorney general wrote a memo saying they're going to deprioritize looking at folks like Tornado Cash in the future. The problem with that is that it's just a memo, which means when AOC is president, she can roll that back in 1 second. So that's kind of a risk.

The actual good thing that might happen is that the CLARITY Act in August might get some provisions that really make this clear for users and developers to actually get clarity. The big problem right now is that you talk to any lawyer about a privacy protocol and they'll just say, “I don't know.” They'll literally just say, “I can't tell you because we don't know.” They might just make shit up. So, it's still the Gensler era in privacy, where people can just come after you and you don't necessarily have great guidance. In August, at the end of August, we'll know for sure if they'll prioritize it or not prioritize it.

Until then, it's really unclear. This is also why, when people say, “Well, you can just add privacy to your chain, so what was the need for Zcash?” Zcash is entirely structured in a way such that it cannot just be turned off by regulators, right? It has different miners, different software clients, and different wallets. They're all different entities, so you can't have the charge of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business because there's no single person you can go after.

13. Startup advice

Right. You can point the fingers very directly at some singular entities. Yeah, you spoke earlier about how you want Solana to be the Silicon Valley of blockchains to enable people to build on them. You yourself are a developer and built a very successful business. What advice would you give somebody who's maybe just coming out of college, or who's a software developer starting to use all the different AI tools, for how they would go about building a startup on Solana? What should they focus on or look at? Do you have any advice for developers in that area?

One piece of advice I'd have is that a lot of folks make the mistake of trying to come up with startup ideas. They think of it as pumping out code: all you have to do is sit down and say, “Okay, how do I just come up with a startup?” That way almost never works. It leads to all the same startups that you always see, like, “Oh, well, we're going to build the 1,000th launchpad, but this one will beat Pump.fun because it does fee shares in a different way.” That's not going to work, right? That's not why they were successful to begin with.

Back in the day, there would always be apps about dating and pet dating. It's always the same types of ideas that come out of those. What you instead want to do is be an observer. There must be things that naturally interest you within the fields. Maybe that's trading within crypto, maybe that's payments within crypto, or maybe it's not crypto in any way. But there must be things that you're interested in such that they don't necessarily feel like work; they feel like interesting things you want to explore.

What you want to do is focus on that, and then just observe businesses, products, and inventions as you go throughout your day-to-day life. Maybe you're at the airport and you see somebody taking a QR-code payment instead of a tap-to-pay payment. Maybe you ask yourself why they're doing that. Maybe the reason is because the merchant wants to avoid an extra fee imposed by some other payment method.

As you walk through life and are in this mode of observing, you start noticing all these gaps, workarounds that people use, and things that really should be different but still aren't. Then you take an MVP, use AI, and build a quick prototype after you talk to customers and observe those things. Once you do that, you put it out into the market and see if there's any demand for it. By the way, you don't need mass demand.

All you need is demand from 10 serious people. Then you see how they use it. Do they actually use this app to do something else that we're not aware of? Right? Once you keep doing that, you keep amassing knowledge. Fundamentally, entrepreneurship is about knowledge asymmetries: things that society should expect but aren't expecting because they don't know how to get them. And so you bring them to people.

That would be my advice: in short, don't try to come up with ideas. Instead, try to become the person who notices problems, opportunities, and gaps. Once you do that, the ideas are literally everywhere. And you can't fake entrepreneurship. You can fake a lot of things in crypto. You can fake P&Ls, emotion, volumes, and all these different things, but you cannot fake product-market fit. Once you release something, people either use it or they don't. That's it.

The market just decides, right? The only way you can get to a place where you're not faking it is by gaining domain knowledge in that field. You want to build a trading app? You better have talked to many traders or be a trader yourself. And I don't mean a trader in the sense that you just watched Ansem on Twitter. I mean you actually put your own capital at risk, so you felt the pain and the emotions that those people experienced.

That's a great answer. I hope the developers out there are listening. Do you have any opinion on tokenization of new startup ideas? I know it's a contentious topic around tokenizing. But you have protocols like MetaDAO that support aligning the equity with the token. Obviously, Pump.fun, one of the biggest consumer protocols on Solana, focuses a lot on tokenization. Do you think it's best to avoid that early on, or can it benefit people who do it early? Where do you think those trends are going over the next few years?

Let me actually ask you that question. I think you have a better answer than me. You're much more competent when it comes to tokens than I am.

Yeah, to be honest, bro, I think it makes sense in some cases and doesn't make sense in others. If you tokenize too early, it's going to be a negative drag because you're going to get attached to the token price rather than what you're actually building and what you're focused on building toward. But in some situations where it does make sense to have a token, having the alignment of your users who are constantly using your protocol makes a lot of sense.

For the human-coordination problems that different protocols are trying to solve, tokenization makes a lot of sense. Your input toward giving back to the protocol can earn you tokens, and then you're incentivized to continue doing so. That would be my short answer, but in general, I think tokens are much cleaner than equity in how you can distribute and align the community of your company and your protocol.

Hyperliquid is obviously the best example. It's not easy to replicate, obviously, but I think there's going to be a huge shift. Currently, there's a huge stigma around tokenization because 99.9% of all tokens are scams. But in the future, I don't think there will be that stigma once the CLARITY Act is passed and the regulatory environment is much clearer for founders building in crypto. I think you'll see a lot more token-equity, one-to-one situations. There are going to be successful startups and successful businesses. That's my short take on it, but I think it's going to get a lot more interesting.

Yeah, that makes sense. I'm completely fucked when it comes to this, I'm not going to lie. When people say developers shouldn't talk about price, that's kind of how I feel.

Yeah.

My take on this used to be: why would you release a token if you haven't completely figured out the product yet? It's going to dilute the product-market-fit signal, right? You have thousands of people on Twitter saying a product is so good just to get an airdrop. But then the entrepreneur thinks they've built a great product because people were saying this, when in fact it had nothing to do with the product. Then TGE happens, and activity is completely zero.

HYPE did really do it well. You don't see that often, but HYPE proved that it can work pretty well. Hopefully, people can take that as inspiration. I think that was pretty cool in terms of what it enables as well. I'm all for experimentation.

This goes back to the overall theme we've been talking about here. There's this new persona on Crypto Twitter who's a guy that only speaks in parables and completely shits on anything that's new. They'll be like, “This is a fucking scam.” And I'm like, “Man, I just don't understand it. Why are you here, then? What are you spending your entire life force talking shit about?” That's crazy.

I don't understand it, bro. I don't understand where these people come from, to be honest. I really think what it is—no, what I actually think it is—I think a lot of people have lost money trading crypto, trading whatever tokens, and now they don't have any tokens, so everything is a scam. That's their consensus.

But they've already spent so much time on Crypto Twitter, and they're also anonymous accounts. They probably have jobs elsewhere where they spend time, too, but the anonymous account already exists. So it's like, “I'm tokenless now, so I'm just going to put my negative input into CT.”

Do you think that's why? But yeah.

Yeah.

I know you do a lot of angel investing as well, outside of just the developer stuff. How has it been angel investing in crypto specifically? Do you invest in areas outside of crypto, and what have been some of the most interesting investments you've made?

I do invest occasionally outside of crypto. I actually invested in Lucy Nicotine. Do you know Lucy? It's like a Zyn competitor. I did that back in the day, and that one actually turned out pretty well. It's by the guys who host TBPN, like John.

Yeah.

Yeah, he's a former co-founder of Soylent.

Yeah. Solana's official drink.

In terms of interesting investments, I've seen a big uptick in people building on Solana over the past 2 months. The only other time I saw this was when a big Solana run ensued following it. It's not just the same ideas of, “We need a better tool for the trenches,” or something. It's fundamentally new things, like confidential, private auctions for tokenized-equity price discovery, and it's actually legitimate. It's redeemable on a brokerage, and it's not just some obscure SPV thing.

Wow.

There's a bunch of ZK stuff. There's also a bunch of prediction-market, synthetic-hedging stuff, like options, which I haven't seen too much of before. You might have seen this with FOMO just raising a big round. Audius just raised a big round. There are a few others that are going to announce soon, so it is coming back up.

In terms of interesting investments I've made, I've invested in so many that it's hard to pick. I'll mention one that I actually haven't invested in, just to be neutral. There's a protocol on Solana called Hylo. They have a decentralized stablecoin on Solana that's backed by staked SOL collateral. It's not algorithmic; it's overcollateralized.

I think it's pretty important because fundamentally, you don't want all your stablecoins to be completely centralized. Otherwise, you start defeating some of the purpose of crypto. It's spelled H-Y-L-O.

Yeah, exactly. That one.

It's also a unique structure. For example, there's an xSOL token, I believe, that gives you 3× leverage to SOL just by holding it. You obviously can't get liquidated because of the way it works. I think experiments like that are pretty interesting. That's one I would take a look at on Solana that I haven't invested in, but I wish I had.

Yeah.

I don't know, man. There's so much cool shit happening. I would say Banks' point that everybody's building a trading app now is a pretty good one. I think everybody pretty much is doing it. But I don't know. I think there are a bunch of problems to solve in self-custody, even, right?

Everybody takes it for granted that if you're rich, you'll probably just use Coinbase Custody or Coinbase Prime, whatever, and then you don't have to worry about it. But that kind of defeats the purpose of why you're here.

But then you also can't use a Chrome extension to secure all your funds, right? So there's kind of a Swiss-vault equivalent necessary for crypto for people who are high six to eight figures, to be able to store their assets on-chain without using a custodian that just takes an insane amount of fees. That's something I would want, for example.

Mhm. If you weren't currently building Helios, what would you be building? What would that idea be?

Probably, yeah. I think a Swiss vault for the internet—a Swiss vault on the cloud—has a cool flair to it.

Mhm.

And then, people have asked me—people have tried to make acquisition offers all the time on Helios—and I kind of just think to myself, "Okay, if I weren't doing this, what would I do?" Pretty much, I would be able to build a privacy protocol, right? I think that is the last piece remaining, where it's a very risky problem to solve because people can come after you in a criminal manner.

Yeah.

But it's like, if the thesis is such that without this thing, the vision of crypto won't work regardless, right? I don't want to be 50 years old and be like, "Yeah, I built the best surveillance infrastructure known to man, and now everybody's going to have to live with it forever." That just feels wrong. There must be ways we can change that.

Yeah, we had a good conversation with Erik Voorhees a few weeks ago, and he's super big on the core crypto ideals—very, very anti-government. He's the same way. What are we actually building any of this stuff for if we still have to have all this oversight and people who can determine what we can and cannot do?

Yeah, it's a great irony that cryptographic money doesn't actually use cryptography. It just doesn't actually use encryption. People say, "We're going to break Bitcoin's encryption," or something, and it's like, surprise, it doesn't have any encryption to begin with.

I just think fundamentally it's such a fucked-up place we've ended up in, where crypto was started by the cypherpunks, and the cypherpunks' entire operating principle is to use cryptography to enable privacy and freedom for the individual. Instead, what we now have is that you don't use cryptography for any of that, and then you have something resembling a perfect surveillance rail for real-world assets.

14. Surveillance state & the case for privacy

People will say, "Crypto can be used for money laundering," and it's like, you have to be completely stupid to use crypto to do crime because it is infinitely less private than cash, and it's there on the record forever to be used against you, right? I like saying, "Whatever you do on-chain can and will be used against you," as a riff on the cops' Fifth Amendment stuff, and it's totally true.

You especially see this in the UK, where now you're going to have to do device-level verification and hold your IDs and give your IDs.

You have to do device-level verification in the UK right now?

Yeah. Let me lay this out.

What the fuck?

Starmer, who will resign at this point, is trying to combat child pornography, which is obviously a valuable problem to solve. But the way they're going about it is they're saying, if Google and Apple don't take action to mandate scanning all the contents on a device, that is, first of all, illegal, and you will face jail time.

The way to get around it and unlock different sorts of features is to do KYC on a device level, right? So you're going to have to hand over your passport, your ID, or your credit card to prove that you're over a certain age and use the device freely as you would before.

Then, of course, the apps themselves also require it. So now you're in a position where you're going to have to do cascading KYC in a world where all the bad guys have access to Mythos and AI, such that now there's this giant golden pot of personally identifiable information that people can go after, steal, and completely fuck you with, right?

And then they're like, "Well, people might also get around this with VPNs, so perhaps we should also require age verification for VPNs." It's moving toward this completely dystopian future where, when you hear this, you're like, "There's no way that's true." But then you look, and the government website itself, gov.uk, says it, and it's just completely fucked.

Bro, what the fuck? How did I not know that this was currently happening in the UK, bro? Every time I hear news out of the UK, it's something completely dystopian and terrible. If I could be short on one country, I think it would be short on the UK. They've been doing so many things wrong. It's awful. Wow, that literally sounds like a Black Mirror episode. That's fucking nuts.

Yeah, man. Canada's the same too. Again, this is not why Zcash is pumping, so to speak, but it does help frame the picture for why privacy is necessary in this new era we're entering.

Yeah, definitely. It seems like the core ideals of crypto—nobody cares about them until some real shit starts happening, and you're like, "Wait, that shit actually makes a ton of sense. They might not actually know what they're talking about."

Yeah, and it's also happening in Canada, by the way. I don't know if you remember, but—

Yeah, I do remember.

The truckers were doing COVID protests, and the Canadian government went door-to-door to take their Bitcoin ledgers, then freeze their banks, and then freeze the banks of their relatives, which is completely against the law, by the way. But that's okay because if you're a little handsome and your name is Trudeau, you can invoke something called the Emergency Act and just get any power you want. This actually literally happened.

Yeah, I do remember that happening. I feel like the pendulum has swung so far in that direction, heading toward some kind of social event happening. I don't know what's going to happen when it actually happens, but it seems like that's what we're trending toward. I don't know what the blow-off top on that shit is going to be, but I hope it's not too crazy.

Yeah, and look, this is why I'm fundamentally bullish on crypto. This is the one piece of technology that is fundamentally the Second Amendment of the internet, right? Blockchains let you own your assets and your information without permission from others, across borders and jurisdictions, and that scales to the entire planet.

You can trade SpaceX with just an internet connection and a cheap phone. You don't need to do KYC on your broker. You can have private money without going to Switzerland to set up a new bank account. You can have stables instead of getting absolutely raped by banking fees. You can do all sorts of things. You can take positions, express your opinions, and create businesses in this world where the state keeps thinking they're your big father or something, or your mother.

We have actually built the thing that gives you a defense, that allows people to opt into capitalism, free markets, and individualism. What we're concerned about is when the price goes down 2%, rather than thinking through, "Okay, what if it did work? What if we did scale this?"

Yeah, that's a great answer. "Second Amendment for the entire internet" is a bar, by the way. That's a bar. I'm fully aligned with you. I agree with you on why crypto is important. How would you say your personal life has changed since you got into crypto and became a founder? I never really asked what your background was before doing Helium on the dot, so just to give some background on that.

I was a developer at Coinbase before this. Before that, I worked at a bunch of fintechs, and then I worked for 3 of the 5 largest banks in Canada. Before that, I actually worked at BlackBerry.

For real?

Yeah, I was doing the cloud for BBM, if you followed along with BBM. Then I did a double major in math and satellite communications engineering, which is actually where my co-founder at Helios is from.

Mhm.

And, yeah, I moved from Turkey to Canada to some places I won't disclose at this point, but I'm a global citizen at this point, let's say.

It's fundamentally changed my life in the sense that I met a lot of like-minded people who believe in entrepreneurship and financial freedom, and very cool cryptography and math stuff that's actually being applied in the real world. They're just optimists, right? That's fundamentally what I care about: how do I get myself into a place where I can be definitely optimistic?

Peter Thiel has a frame for this where there's indefinite optimism and there's definite optimism. Indefinite optimism is just like a, quote-unquote, white girl, let's say, in California.

Like, “Oh, you know, things will get better tomorrow just because why not, right? It’s sunny and all this stuff.” But definite optimism says, “Things can get better, but we have to work toward enabling that by looking for secrets, by building the machinery of freedom, by opting into capitalism, by starting companies, by taking risk.” Right? To overcome this weird doomerism that has started to dominate even the West to some extent, where people are like, “Oh, the data centers—turn off the AI so that we’re not forced to invent better sources of energy or energy production.” Right? And so, that’s fundamentally what I think crypto’s about.

Mhm. Definite optimism—I like that. I like that a lot. As far as—I know you said you use AI a lot in your day-to-day, and it’s going to be an important tool for everybody, especially for developers. For somebody who has never touched AI or never used it, and doesn’t think it has a use, what would you say to them as far as why you think it’s important they should be using AI? And then how are you guys using AI at Helios?

Well, depending on who you are, there are all sorts of ways of thinking about it. One is that it’s like hiring a junior assistant to some extent, where you can delegate certain tasks appropriate for them. Another is that it’s intelligence on demand, and it’s intelligence in a sense that you shouldn’t take it at face value, but you should just treat it as an opinion that you read on the internet and engage with it.

The best way to use AI if you don’t know how to use it is to open it up and ask, “How can I use you?” Just talk to it.

At Helios, we use it in all sorts of ways. Obviously, we use it for coding, but one thing you can do that’s fun is create an AI bot and invite it to your team Slack chat or your team Discord chat as another team member. It’s this superpowered team member where, depending on what tools you gave it, whatever you ask it, it just knows how to answer.

It’ll say, “This customer did such-and-such credits, and if they keep using this many credits, then they’ll run into an overage. So you should talk to them before that happens.” Or, “Here’s a gap that 10 users reported in customer interviews in the past. Here’s maybe a product you can build to help with that.” Or security audits. My favorite way is, “Here’s what Toly tweeted. What the fuck does this mean? I don’t understand what he’s saying.”

That used to be my job, where Toly would just say a bunch of obscure shit because he talks in riddles, and I’d be like, “Yeah, yeah, here’s what he actually meant.” What he actually meant is that Solana’s going to get really fast. Hopefully, it’s not in some weird Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Vladimir Lenin type of way.

I don’t like using it in the way where people are like, “Just have it trade on my behalf,” or something, because trading is about relative edge. If other people also have that edge, then you don’t have that edge. You can use it to inform yourself into making better trades or something, but if you just give it the trading, I don’t think you’re going to get too much out of it.

Yeah.

How do you use it?

15. Stock picks & final SOL/Zcash thesis

That’s good context. Honestly, I’ve been using it a lot for the show stuff, just doing research on topics. I’ve also been using it a lot for stock research because there are so many fucking stocks. It’s a lot. In crypto, I know every coin—not every coin, but most of the coins. I already know what they do and why they’re important.

Stocks are different. There are a ton of companies that I have absolutely no knowledge of—what they do or why they’re important. I’m a technical trader, so I can trade off the price action of a chart, but if I don’t know which charts to look at, then I can’t take the trade. It’s helped me a lot with doing fundamental research on stocks and looking up different companies.

What are you looking at for stocks right now?

What am I looking at for stocks right now? A lot of the AI and memory stuff, honestly. The one I’m researching the most right now is this company called Penguin Solutions. I haven’t bought it yet.

The AI trade has kind of shifted from hyperscalers to the memory players because that’s been the bottleneck for everybody right now. They require a ton of memory when you’re going back and forth with these models, and there are only a few companies producing the memory needed for this. Micron has done really well, SanDisk has done really well, and SK Hynix has done really well.

But it’s historically been cyclical, and because it’s constrained to a few companies, there are a lot of people trying to figure out how to be more efficient with how you use memory with all these different models. Penguin Solutions is one of the companies trying to do that. I wish I could go deeper on what CXL is and why it’s important for how memory is stored. But yeah, that’s what I’ve been researching the most right now.

A ton of different areas, though. I think what’s interesting now is that AI has gotten so much attention, but there are a lot of other sectors that haven’t gotten as much attention. There are obviously great companies that become popular and do well in all these different areas of life, and it’s like, how do I find those narratives that aren’t popular before they become popular? How do I benefit from those trends happening before they pop up?

Becks and I talked about Take-Two a lot back in ’05 or whatever it was, when the 2K franchise switched over from NBA Live to NBA 2K. Take-Two was the publisher of that game, and they had a few other things they did really well on. There are a lot of events happening socially that you know are happening as a kid or an adult or whatever. You see these social trends occurring, and there’s always a company that’s benefiting from those trends. It’s like, how do I figure out which companies are attached to these trends, and how do I make money on that?

Mhm.

Yeah. I should be using AI more for coding, though. I haven’t done a lot of coding in the past few years; I’ve done a lot more trading. I feel like I should be doing more with coding and just playing around with stuff, but yeah.

Yeah, it’s pretty fucking crazy. I vibe-coded a complete prediction market on Solana over Christmas, and it started doing real volume. I was like, “This is crazy.” I didn’t even write any code.

But yeah, I know the stock stuff. I’m not too far behind on it. When I figured out that AI was going to be a problem for security a year and a half ago, I loaded up on Palo Alto Networks, which has the things that I look for: one, an Indian CEO; two, it’s super security-focused; and three, it’s really good at M&A.

They’ve been up an insane amount, so that was a lucky bet, so to speak.

Mhm.

But I don’t know. I just look at super-obscure shit, like local Abu Dhabi real estate or energy stocks, because I know that people are overselling based on Iran war fears. But once it comes back, they have a trillion-dollar sovereign fund that they’ll use to prop up the economy anyway.

Yeah. Or Ukrainian and Russian real estate, because once Trump is done with Iran, he needs to figure out a peace deal for that part of the region. That shit’s super distressed. Definitely not financial advice, because that’s super fucking risky shit. That’s the sort of stuff I’m into.

That’s fucking fire, bro. That’s interesting. I feel like the global macro situation has been fucking crazy recently. There’s all this shit happening—so much going on. It provides for a very tradable, very volatile market, I think.

I don’t know if you track the new Fed chair, Warsh, but he’s basically said that they aren’t going to do forward guidance anymore. They’re going to respond to things as they’re happening in the market instead of guiding people on what they’re going to do going forward. He said he thinks that the market is the best arbiter of truth.

I think that’s going to add even more volatility. You’re going to have Trump going back and forth on these deals, Trump talking about the companies he’s investing in and what he’s looking at, and then you’re going to have the Fed responding in real time to all this shit as it’s happening and the data coming in. I honestly think right now is the best time in history to be a trader, to be honest.

I really do believe that. I think it is.

Oh, actually, I have a question. I'm not a trader, but one thing that I think would be fun is forex perps trading. In the World Cup, you're taking a team, and there's this social element of, “My country's better than your country.” As macro becomes more and more volatile, there's the same dynamic for currencies. For example, I hate Canada, so if I could just ape into the USD/CAD pair as a trade, I would.

With forex, the price movements aren't very big, so you need to lever up. I was curious why people don't do more highly leveraged forex trading in this environment. Is that a thing? Do people actually do that and I'm just not aware of it?

No, people definitely do. Forex trading has the highest leverage out of any of the markets, honestly. I'm pretty sure they have 1,000× on a lot of the main traditional brokers because, as you said, the moves are so tiny that you literally need leverage to bet on these things. Forex trading is super popular.

One of the guys—I forget his name—has an account on Twitter. I think his name is Global Flows. Let me see if I can find the post, actually. He's been super bullish on Hyperliquid and on the stock entity that's been buying Hyperliquid. His thesis around Hyperliquid was that if they're able to get enough liquidity, then it's not just perps on crypto and perps on stocks, but also forex, which does a shit ton of volume.

I thought that was interesting. That was his tailwind bull case, and now a lot of people have been talking about it. Forex pairs are definitely a thing. USD/CAD has actually been pretty sideways, bro. It's at around 1.42, which is the same price it was at in 2016. It's been back and forth between 1.3 and 1.42.

You definitely can trade forex pairs. People trade them all the time. That's what all the gurus who sell trading courses say: “We trade forex. We make X amount. Pay me $1,000 a month and I'll teach you how to trade forex.”

The moves are so small that it's really easy to sell courses. “I can teach you how to trade X number of pips, and you're going to make this much.” They take in the trading fees for a month, and it's like, you can say, “You win half, you lose half.” You make money from your course fees. You get enough distribution, and that's the game. People definitely trade forex, for sure.

Yeah, okay, that's fair. All right, I gotta go, student. Anything else you want to hit?

I think we hit pretty much everything I wanted to talk about. I think I was solid.

Mert—why did he follow you?

Yo, that's a great question. Shout-out to him. He followed me around Breakpoint in Singapore, which was the last Breakpoint, when Solana was going up. Then he sent me a fucking selfie, and I was like, “Holy crap, what is happening right now, bro?”

He sent you a selfie? What the fuck?

No, he didn't send it. He replied to my post because I was like, “Bro, what the fuck? Why is this guy following me?”

Yeah, yeah.

Then he just took a selfie with a fucking forehead. I was like, “Oh, Jesus.”

But it's unclear, man. Anyway, to close it off, I guess, give me your bull SOL and Zcash thesis.

My thesis on Solana is that Solana is the most performant and cheapest blockchain to do anything on, which means that it's the best place for builders and the best place for retail to trade on. I think that you can enable not just applications like Hyperliquid, which is a perp-based decentralized perps exchange, but also applications in all the other consumer areas.

That was my thesis on Solana in 2023, when there was very little on-chain trading activity. I was like, “Yes, but it's still the most performant, cheapest chain, and it enables all these things that haven't happened yet, but they can happen in the future.” Then memecoin popped off, and a few other applications popped off.

If you believe that stablecoin payments are going to become a lot more popular, AI is going to become a lot more popular, and AI agents are going to become a lot more popular, then the amount of value transmitted on open blockchains is only going to go up and to the right. If Solana is the best L1 blockchain that can enable all these things, then obviously SOL should benefit from all that activity.

We're at the very beginnings of seeing breakout applications on-chain. We've really only seen a few do well. You can name some of the startups that have done well, like Phantom. What other ones? I think you mentioned Magic Eden and a few others. Jito and Jupiter. There have been a few breakout apps on Solana and in crypto, but I think the total addressable market is so much larger, and there's so much that can grow there. It's only going to increase interest.

What people are underindexing on is that crypto does a great job of proving human verification. In a world where there are all these AI agents and all this data being put online, it's going to be really important to prove what data and information are being put out through humans. Crypto should be one of the places that benefits from that very directly.

That's the general thesis on SOL. I have the same thesis on Zcash. Bitcoin is a memetic asset, like you said. The reason it did so well is because there were a ton of people who were early believers in it and believed in digital gold as a thesis. They believed in being able to store your value online and transfer it globally easily.

I think Zcash has some of the same features as Bitcoin, but it's quantum-resistant and private. A lot of the core believers who believed in Bitcoin in its early days were also the core believers in Zcash. There has been a lot of clear discussion that the people who were early to Bitcoin were like, “If there was a way to make this private, then we definitely would want to explore that,” but it's a really, really hard technological problem to solve.

When there's a ton of smart people working on hard technological problems and they end up solving them, with the only thing missing being attention toward that solution, those typically are the best trades. I think Zcash is going to benefit from Bitcoin doing well, and it should be at a much higher ratio to Bitcoin than it currently is. I think it's around 0.01 or something like that. What is it?

Lower than 0.02. So, not financial advice, but come on.

Yeah, lower than 0.02. I think 0.1 ZEC/BTC makes a ton more sense than where it's currently at. So, yeah.

Well said. Better than me. Appreciate you, brother. Thanks for coming on, man. We appreciate you. This is great.

Man, thanks for having me. Have a good one.

Later, bro.

Bye-bye.