中国刚刚“干掉”Claude AI……——GoodAlexander & David Choi
GoodAlexander 认为,中国开源模型已经击穿了支撑 Claude 及其他闭源模型龙头的经济学基础。 他最初认为这些模型只是通过基准测试作弊的 Opus 蒸馏版,但在亲自测试后发现,借助一张约1万美元的 GPU、甚至 3090,就能跑出接近 Opus 或 Sonnet 的表现。受保护的 Opus API 使用成本约为每终端小时80美元,而 Qwen 3.6 级别的算力成本约为2美元,这一“40到80倍差距”让本地推理和由加密货币融资的算力首次变得可信。
David Choi 认为,AI 资本开支热潮之下存在巨大的融资缺口:Nvidia 未来5个季度预计将实现约5000亿美元销售额,其中“99%由融资支持”,但约2亿美元以下的贷款几乎不存在。 他表示,其中20%-30%的销售额来自规模较小的新兴客户,而这些客户无法高效获得证券化债务。USD.AI 未来12个月的目标是发放10亿美元 GPU 贷款;他希望这足以建立一套衡量 AI 扩张成本的全球参考利率。
USD.AI 的核心主张是,GPU 应像房屋、汽车和飞机一样获得融资,但 GPU 的产品周期过快,传统证券化跟不上。 打包1万笔贷款、分层、路演并出售相关产品可能需要2年;在这段时间里,抵押品可能已经从 Hopper 迭代到 B200、Vera Rubin,并接近尚未发布的 Feynman 世代。DeFi 则会将每笔新发放的贷款立即计入 sUSDai 的 NAV,形成 David 所说的“债务永续合约”。
USD.AI 提出的飞轮,是利用稳定币经济学降低 AI 的融资成本,而不只是把现有债务搬到链上。 如果 AI 公司使用 USD.AI 结算,协议就能利用每铸造1美元所赚取的3%-4%收益补贴借款人,同时保留发起费和净息差。CHIP 被定位为协议类似 GP 的治理层,负责费用分配、协助设定不同交易类型的利率,并可能决定赎回优先级;但它还不是一套完全披露的效用方案。
算力稀缺既是 Claude 体验变差的原因,也是新一轮主权竞争的基础。 David 表示,服务商正在对用户限流,因为需求增速已经超过安装速度;因此,OpenAI 激进投入算力的方向是正确的。他提出的“AI 美元”论点是,各国将成为生成 token 的净进口国或净出口国,而缺乏足够 AI 产能的国家,会像石油贫乏国在石油美元时代那样落后。
GoodAlexander 的加密货币看多逻辑横跨3个时间尺度:1年看 Saylor 驱动的资金流入,3年看资本外逃,5年看原生加密金融轨道。 STRC 可以将退休人群的资本引入 Bitcoin,而压制隐私币的失败尝试说明,隐私技术可能在敌对政策环境下继续存活。更长期看,税收、印钞、CBDC 和资本管制可能让加密资产对富裕人群更具吸引力,因为他们无法“拎着一袋黄金登上飞机”。
他的股票观点几乎完全相反:在 AI IPO 盛宴中继续看多,但随后准备迎接历史性反转。 他预计 SpaceX、OpenAI 和 Anthropic 合计约4万亿美元的股权将进入市场,其中估值1.5万亿-1.7万亿美元的 SpaceX IPO 是“主秀”。如果银行推动有利的 AI 可比公司估值,且被动指数快速吸收 SpaceX,他认为这一事件会成为“Solana 300美元时刻”——一轮世代级顶部的开始,而不是永久性的新平台。
1. 算力,而非模型智能,正在成为 AI 的硬约束
David 开场的判断是,Claude“每次使用都会被砍掉一截”,原因是服务商缺算力,而不是模型研发停滞。从长期看,他认为真正决定胜负的问题只有一个:“你能获得多少 Blackwell?”
两位嘉宾用了一个实体规模的类比:建造30座拉斯维加斯 Sphere,据他们估算,“这才相当于一个数据中心”。他们认为1 GW 算力约需500亿美元,并描述了全球数十个规划项目中达到2 GW或3 GW的站点。
David 表示,AI 资本开支如今已经大到如果没有这部分支出,美国 GDP 增速将为负3%-4%。他进一步称,1年的 AI 基础设施投入,可能超过石油、公路及其他传统基础设施10年的支出。
USD.AI 同时押注他所说的两大趋势:稳定币——全球购买国债速度最快的买家之一——以及数万亿美元规模的 AI 资本开支。其核心逻辑是,资本形成中“跑得最快的马”,应该为经济中增长最快的资本需求提供融资。
2. 中国开源模型击穿了闭源模型共识
GoodAlexander 表示,过去的共识是,中国发布的模型都是偷来的 Opus 蒸馏版,Anthropic 最终会将其关停。他当时也持怀疑态度:中国实验室可能会“过度宣传”产品并操纵基准测试,但在亲自测试最新模型后改变了看法。
真正的变化在于硬件可及性。他表示,过去需要顶级闭源 API 才能完成的工作,如今在一张1万美元的显卡上就能达到接近 Opus 或 Sonnet 的效果,有时甚至用 3090 就够了:“两周前,在普通消费级硬件上做到这一点还不现实。”
他的受保护 Opus 配置成本约为每终端小时80美元,同时运行两个终端则约160美元;相比之下,Qwen 3.6 级别的替代方案每小时约2美元。这一“40到80倍差距”让他从“OpenAI 已经赢了”转向相信,开源模型仍被严重低估。
在讨论更新的模型时,GoodAlexander 提到了 GLM 5.1 和 Knowledge Atlas Technology(股票代码2513)。David 表示,在他看来,GLM 是比 Opus 更好的聊天模型;两人都批评 Claude/Opus 过于冗长,也批评 Anthropic 矫枉过正地纠正此前的迎合问题。
GoodAlexander 将这一变化直接与加密 AI 联系起来:OpenAI 和 Anthropic 等闭源模型受到权限限制,不太可能让有意义的算力支出流经加密货币;而开源模型则让分布式、由加密货币融资的推理成为可能。他预计 Hermes Agent 及其他开源 harness 会爆发式增长。
3. GPU 信贷像现代抵押贷款出现之前的住房金融
GoodAlexander 将 David 的优势追溯到他早期为 NFT 提供贷款的经历——借款人为互联网头像融资,堪称“世界上最糟糕的信用”。他认为 GPU 是仓储融资资产,同时带有资产支持证券属性,这种处理方式优于当前私募信贷对 GPU 的做法。
David 的抵押贷款类比从流动性开始。银行可以提供90%的房屋融资,是因为数千笔原本缺乏流动性的抵押贷款被打包成可交易证券;单个 GPU 没有对应的二级市场,而“如果单个 GPU 都拿不到贷款,就不可能针对一个大型集群获得贷款”。
传统发行速度跟不上硬件周期。等到贷款累计、分层、营销并在约2年后出售时,抵押品可能已经从 Hopper 迭代到 B200、Vera Rubin,并接近 Feynman——“那些甚至还没发布的产品”。
David 表示,低于约2亿美元的机构级 GPU 融资实际上已经消失。一家新兴数据中心运营商曾收到 Guggenheim 或 Jefferies 长达5页的解释,说明为什么其2亿美元采购无法融资;私募信贷正在撤退,而 Oracle 则被描述为已经“杠杆拉满”。
4. 昂贵的股权融资填补了资产支持债务本应占据的缺口
缺乏专门的 GPU 信贷后,借款人只能转向可能最终转化为股权的可转债。David 举的例子是,早期 CoreWeave 或 Crusoe 的持有人可能遭遇约90%的稀释,因为发行股权成为设备融资唯一可行的方式。
GoodAlexander 将其称为“Bitcoin 买披萨效应”。如果一家公司以10亿美元估值出售股权,用于购买1亿美元 GPU,随后以600亿美元被收购,那么它实际上为了这些硬件让渡了约60亿美元的预期价值。
他的 Finance 101 结论是:如果创始人看好公司,就应该保留股权,直接为资产融资。GPU 还具有很高的税务价值,因为它们属于可折旧的资本开支;David 提到,Meta 约200亿美元的收入与约200亿美元的资本开支几乎形成了刻意配对。
David 指出,加速折旧及其他税收优惠是收益率经济学的重要组成部分。两人的更广泛论点是,更便宜的 GPU 融资能够避免稀释,同时保留底层建设所带来的折旧收益。
5. DeFi 将缓慢的证券化变成持续定价的“债务永续合约”
对于“为什么是加密货币?”这一问题,David 的答案是资本形成速度:DeFi 可以“凭空生成市场”。一笔约15亿美元的 CoreWeave 债券自8月以来只交易了约5000万美元,而 USD.AI 规模小得多的系统据称在6到8个月内产生了约150亿美元的二级交易量。
乘数来自可组合性。USD.AI 和 sUSDai 出现后,用户可以交易它们,通过 Pendle 拆分收益,通过 Fluid 循环仓位,并创造远超原始贷款规模的隐含名义敞口。
每笔新贷款都可以立即进入债务工具或 sUSDai 的 NAV,而不必等待数千项资产积累完毕并完成路演。David 将其与 Hyperliquid 的期货永续合约对比:“我们本质上就像一个债务永续合约”,持续为新发起的信贷定价并进行复利。
这一结构旨在将准入范围扩大到传统白领债券交易台之外。David 的主张不仅是区块链能让旧证券更广泛地分销,而是即时定价和结算让此前不存在的小额 GPU 市场成为可能。
6. USD.AI 想发现、并最终补贴 AI 的利率
第一章的目标很明确:在12个月内发放约10亿美元贷款,成为 GPU 信贷的参考利率。对 David 而言,这一利率就是“你能以多快速度发展 AI”——也就是资本成本,以及人们愿意为回报投入多少钱。
他预计 GPU 的所有权将沿产业链向下扩散。租赁服务商正在购买芯片;能够放大单张 GPU 产出的 token 工厂希望拥有芯片;LLM 公司已经在买;应用公司也会跟进,因为无限期租用最大成本并不可持续。
David 认为,算力约占 OpenAI 成本的80%。他说,5000亿美元的 Nvidia 设备加上利息后会变成6000亿-7000亿美元,这意味着华尔街实际上已经成为仅次于 Nvidia、领先于 OpenAI 的 AI 第二大生意。
如果客户使用 USD.AI 结算,协议从铸造美元中获得的3%-4%收入就能补贴债务利率。收入仍来自发起费和净息差。GoodAlexander 将 CHIP 定位为负责费用分配、按交易规模和承购质量决定利率、以及可能确定赎回优先级的治理层;更完整的效用细节仍待公布。
7. 真实客户被融资,而不是意识形态,拉到链上
David 表示,目前约有70个潜在客户正在进入,其中包括大型新云服务商,需求还在逐日增加。眼下的约束是协议必须拥有足够流动性来服务这些客户,因此 CHIP 上线后,团队正在推动扩大 sUSDe 和 USDe 市场。
许多客户此前从未使用过钱包。团队会带他们接入 Coinbase Prime;在欧洲访问受阻时,甚至免费寄送 Ledger。最初的困惑很快变成惊讶:他们可以用 GPU 抵押借款,购买更多 GPU,再通过智能合约重复这一过程。
David 在挖 Bittensor 时产生了最初的洞见。他表示,每小时支付约3美元租用一张芯片,年化成本超过2.5万美元,而 GPU 本身大约也只要2.5万美元:“想象一下,你花100万美元买了一套房,但每月房租是10万美元。”
主持人披露,他此前持有并交易过 CHIP,赚过钱,但讨论期间没有持仓;他对加密货币山寨币仍保持谨慎。David 自己强调的是运营工作:“我只是继续发放更多贷款”,大部分费用预计来自 AI 公司,而不是加密货币用户。
8. AI 产能正在成为主权资源和潜在货币锚
David 预计,各个司法辖区将成为 AI token 的净进口国或净出口国,这里的 token 指生成的推理结果,而不是加密货币 token。一个国家的 token 生产能力,将越来越决定其公民生产力、经济产出和战略自主性。
他的石油美元类比始于1970年代:石油驱动汽车、供暖、工厂和国家增长,因此控制石油结算就能获得货币和地缘政治杠杆。如今 AI 发挥着类似作用,因为拥有 AI 的公民,其能力可能是没有 AI 的人的“10倍”。
David 得出了一个绝对化结论:“如果你没有 AI,你就不是一个国家。”因此,规模惊人的数据中心建设不仅是企业资本开支,也是围绕这一底层资源展开的军备竞赛,目的是在大规模和小规模场景下持续保障其可用性。
9. 加密货币看多逻辑建立在资金流入、抗审查和资本外逃之上
GoodAlexander 从嘲笑 Michael Saylor 的推广,转向接受 Taiki 关于 STRC 的逻辑。他认为 Saylor 已经“做成了这台资金流入机器”:一种收益率约11%、面向退休人群的工具,能将老年储户的资本转化为机械性 Bitcoin 购买,并扩大 MicroStrategy 的 mNAV 飞轮。
他用亚洲散户行为支持这一人口结构判断。他表示,加密 Twitter 约93%为男性,而日本和韩国的参与者接近各占50%;韩国老年女性是重要的投机者,因为多年来本地股市疲软,加上外汇交易流行,塑造了不同的投资文化。
尽管交易所正在针对 Monero,隐私项目也承受压力,GoodAlexander 表示 Monero 和 Zcash 仍然运行良好;Zcash 出现在 Robinhood 上进一步强化了他的看法:“你试图杀死这些隐私币,但你做不到。”
他的时间表很简洁:1年看 Saylor 支持的资金流入,3年看资本外逃,5年看未来建立在加密金融轨道之上。印钞、财富税、CBDC 和资本管制会推动财富外流;不同于黄金或石油,加密资产可以跨越国境而无需拎着实体行李。
他的长期宏观框架更为阴暗:他认为美国治理和产权执行已经恶化,这意味着最终盈利终值倍数可能从约29倍下降到11-13倍。他表示,居住在波多黎各并将财富保存在体系之外,是在这一转型中保持韧性的方式。
10. AI IPO 超级周期可能以被动股权转化为高 FDV 加密资产而告终
主持人将当前市场与 Solana 的“每日跑者”时代相比较:一个投机热点在 Car、Hims、Texas Instruments 等标的之间反复弹跳,而标普持续不断的被动资金流入使其区别于加密市场。GoodAlexander 的回答是,狂热可以持续到最大的流动性事件到来。
David 估计,估值可能达到1.5万亿-1.7万亿美元的 SpaceX 是“主秀”,OpenAI 和 Anthropic 将随后登场。相比 Dario Amodei,他更看好 Sam Altman 操纵叙事和股价的能力,并预计顺序将是 SpaceX 第一、OpenAI 第二、Anthropic 最后。
David 表示,银行和企业都有动力抬高 AI 股票估值,并设计出令人印象深刻的企业交易,因为糟糕的可比公司会威胁到规模巨大的 IPO 费用。他举的可能例子包括 JPMorgan 与 Cursor 达成企业交易,或 Cognition 出售“无数”席位。
危险出现在 SpaceX 被快速纳入标普500或 Nasdaq 之时,这将迫使退休账户在没有进行公司层面尽调的情况下买入。David 称之为“想象一下 EOS 被纳入标普500”:一个高 FDV 的加密货币发行被嵌入被动金融体系,随后可能迎来“世代级顶部”和“史上最大规模的做空”。
完整逐字稿
Alex, this is an incredible view, man. I’m getting view-mogged, dude. I have this new lighting setup, and I’m getting view-mogged right now. This is insane.
I feel like that would be your basement in this apartment. It’s just a different setting in the same location.
Yeah, there we go. It’s good to see both of you here. First and foremost, David, you were on what—maybe in October or November? You first came on, and I first met you. I thought what you were doing was really interesting. The whole USD.AI concept was pretty wild.
After that, a lot of smart people—Taiki, Alex Good, a lot of people—were telling me about it. Then you just had your TGE. You just launched CHIP, which is exciting because it’s the first hyped crypto TGE since, I don’t know, Aster that hasn’t gone down in a straight red line yet. It’s only been a day or two, but not going down in a straight red line is pretty exciting.
There were some pretty cool crypto names who were excited about it, GoodAlexander being one of them, so congratulations on the launch. Do you want to start with a high-level overview of what you’re working on and what you just launched? Most people have some context, and then we can get into the fun stuff.
For sure. For those who weren’t listening last time, we’re effectively trying to solve a capital issue that AI has. You see Claude getting kneecapped every time you try to use it because there isn’t enough compute. OpenAI seems to have caught up in terms of quality, and even though they have this Microsoft’s hosting in the back, they knew from the very beginning that, of course, you can have better and better models, but at the end of the day, it’s going to come down to access to how much compute you have.
You’ll never have enough compute. People might say it’s a power issue, or the quality of the LLM, but really it’s going to be how many Blackwells you have access to. That’s why you’re seeing this flip literally this week.
The problem is that we’re trying to figure out how to enable this abundance by making chips easily accessible—not necessarily just to OpenAI, but to anyone who wants to buy a chip. It’s kind of like a mortgage for GPUs. We solve this by using stablecoins to finance this wave of capex build-out.
A lot of people overlook the fact that T-bills are the world’s fastest buyers. Stablecoins are the fastest buyers of T-bills in the world. Right now, one of the biggest sources of spending in the U.S. economy is AI capex. If we weren’t spending this money on AI capex, our GDP growth would be negative 3% or negative 4%. It has that big an effect on the U.S. economy.
That should be financed with the fastest horse, which I believe is stablecoins. That’s why we built USD.AI. You have two megatrends: the capital formation of stablecoins, and the AI capex spend in the U.S., which is going to be trillions and trillions of dollars.
If you sum up the last 10 years of infrastructure spending—oil, highways, and everything else—one year of AI capex is more than all of that. The amount of money we’re spending is just infeasible. I used this metaphor last time on this call: if you were to visualize the Las Vegas Sphere, the most expensive stadium ever, 30 of those would be one data center. That’s just so much money being put into it.
Yeah, one gigawatt is like $50 billion, and then that build-out is two or three gigawatts. You have these being built around the world—50, hundreds of these. It’s like Project Hail Mary is literally being done. Have you seen the movie? But instead of trying to save humanity, you’re trying to have the best model. It’s an insane amount of spending.
It’s the most we’ve ever spent since the build-out of China. It’s hard to see because people keep talking about data centers, but I don’t think people realize the hyperobject of this.
Thirty Sphere build-outs for one data center is nuts. Alex, by the way, why are you mogging me right now? You looked fresh last time. What’s going on here?
People kept commenting on my background. They were like, “You’ve got to leave your room,” and I’m like, “I don’t want to leave my room because you don’t want to see what’s behind me in real life, because you’ll feel bad about your location.”
Now that we’re in the mogging era, I thought it was appropriate to reveal the state.
It’s got to be the double jaw. I haven’t pinpointed it yet, but I’m talking to Razmig Bacarian [?], and we’ll figure out what it is.
Give me a primer before we get into some of the details. You’re definitely one of my high-signal proxies for AI stuff. If you say something about AI, I generally pay attention to what you’re talking about—maybe except for Baba Long—but in general, I do.
You were, and have been, pretty excited about USD.AI, CHIP, and the whole ecosystem. Explain why you’re here and why you’re excited about it.
David and I have lived next door to each other—we’ve been neighbors since 2021.
I’ve been super into this ever since David originally had a financing platform, a blockchain-based financing platform for NFTs. He built this really elaborate credit mechanism for the worst credit in the world, which is basically guys borrowing other people’s profile pictures on the internet. It’s the exact dude you don’t want to lend to, so he built a really good system for that.
When NVIDIA started talking about this whole sovereign AI thing, what you might realize at a very high level is that the holders of Tether—the UAE, Malaysia, and these international jurisdictions that are mostly the stablecoin holders—are also extreme investors in data centers. They’re extreme investors in NVIDIA graphics chips specifically.
This is the perfect crypto financing use case because there’s weird credit, warehousing issues, and a completely new category that you can invent. For example, Canton Network is a very hot coin.
Yeah.
That’s the old economy. That’s trading Coca-Cola fixed income on a blockchain. There are a lot of people who trade Coca-Cola fixed income without a blockchain, and you’re like, “Well, anon, check out this cool new private network.” They’re like, “How much can I farm?”
With USD.AI, it’s more like, “Nobody really knows how to finance graphics cards right now.” Before David showed up on the scene, a lot of this was done through private credit and unsecured lending.
What got me excited was that these are warehouses. Previously, when I worked at Palantir, I used to work in trade financing. I studied Standard Chartered, receivables, credit, and trade financing, which is one of the biggest forms of financing in the world.
GPUs are firmly warehouse-space credit products, so I thought, “This checks all the boxes.” It’s a new category, it has an asset-backed security element that’s superior to the market’s current treatment of the asset through private credit, and the existing holders align with the Tether holder base.
I counseled David back when we were in a sauna. He said, “I’m thinking of pivoting into AI,” and I said, “You should absolutely do that.”
Obviously, I was younger and happier, and things were very optimistic. But as we’ve evolved in the market, shit’s real. Everything is no longer a meme. All these things are actually happening, and that’s how I got into CHIP and USD.AI.
Right now, it’s exciting because even a couple of weeks ago, the consensus in the market would have been that Opus, Mythos [?], and OpenAI were the god-tier models. Random people buying GPUs, and a lot of the things people in crypto were saying, were misguided.
You’d ask, “Do you really need to buy your own GPU if OpenAI is the best thing in the world and you can just access it through an API?” Probably not. But in the last 2 weeks, there’s been this nonstop barrage.
What caused the shift?
For a while, people were saying that China was just distilling Opus. The narrative was that these Chinese models were just Opus distills, that they were stealing our shit, and therefore they weren’t worth paying attention to. What was going to happen was that Mythos [?] was going to be a thing, and they were going to shut down the distills.
So Anthropic put out these releases saying, “With no more distills, we’re shutting this down.” And then there are all these releases coming out that are better than Opus in a lot of different ways—in terms of efficiency, in terms of utilization. The fact that you can run one of these models with Opus-like or Sonnet-like performance on a $10,000 graphics chip is a complete game-changer. There are guys doing this on 3090s now, right?
Damn.
A nicer card than that.
Yeah, and so it’s like—the local models. These are real. I didn’t even believe it because, with Chinese stuff, they do have a tendency to over-promote these releases and game benchmarks. But I tested this stuff out because I didn’t believe it, and these models are amazing.
I actually think the market still largely hasn’t realized what this means because people are still very much in this mindset that we literally aren’t going to be able to afford Opus. My Opus bill, I was saying, is $80 per hour per terminal if you’re actually using Claude with proper zero-data-retention protection—ZDR—so your IP doesn’t get transferred to Anthropic and you have strong protections. If you’re using that via an API without the Claude Max plan, or whatever, and you’re just paying per token, it’s $80 per hour per terminal. A lot of guys run two terminals, so that’s $160 an hour.
Jeez.
Right? That’s extremely expensive. To put that in perspective, this machine—the new models on Qwen 3.6—is $2 an hour. You’re looking at something like a 40–80x delta, and a lot of these models are state-of-the-art, SOTA.
I’m like, “Oh, shit.” And no, I haven’t really used GPT-5.5 a lot yet.
Yeah.
But I think that’s what’s new in the market. I think everyone—SoftBank and a lot of the Anthropic secondary market—all of this stuff has already had this crazy run. I just don’t think the open-source stuff is really priced in or appreciated by a lot of people in the market.
It’s really good for crypto AI because we aren’t structurally capable of serving closed-source models. Especially with the Mythos launch, where they’re gating it—imagine trying to buy Mythos on Venice AI, for example. It just doesn’t make sense, right? You have bio-authenticated, closed-source models. Crypto AI would really be in a bad spot if that were the future.
So, yeah, I think this is great news. I’m super excited for the first time in a while because I actually thought OpenAI had just won. And, yeah, that would suck.
That would suck.
David, go ahead.
Yeah, I just want to add that it’s kind of why I thought having both of us on would be nice. We both come from Puerto Rico and seem to share something just like Jeff from Hyperliquid. It’s a very miserable place, but I love it at the same time, to some degree. It’s terrible, but it’s lovable.
This is kind of like the new wave that we want to push. It’s like the exciting times of early DeFi. I think there’s such a rut in the ecosystem right now. People are surprised that our project did decently well in the market, and I’m like, it’s because there’s kind of been a cesspool of horrible projects, obviously, and the post-memecoin era, with all this venture-backed vaporware whose goal is just to extract money from public launches and hedge it on perps.
But there is still a future. I think a lot of people have lost that glimmer of hope. You’ve seen so many OGs leave the space. Crypto AI is definitely where we’re seeing interesting use cases. You see them with Venice, people are starting to see them with us, and soon with Post Fiat. There are actual users coming about and organizing around this new wave of hope.
What can we do to show the world that the things we’re doing actually have an impact—not necessarily just in the sector we’re in, but out toward the frontier, toward what we actually see in AI?
How big is the market to finance GPUs?
I’ll give you an example. NVIDIA has $500 billion of sales in the next 5 quarters. Ninety-nine percent of that is financed.
Next 5 quarters. Okay.
Yeah, and about 20–30% of that is from emerging clients—that is, smaller participants. They aren’t the hyperscalers like Amazon. We were small at one point. One of their loans was around $50 million.
It’s basically all these participants. You really can’t finance anything under $200 million. We were chatting with this pretty emerging data center, and they had a 5-page pitch from Guggenheim and Jefferies explaining why they couldn’t get financing for a $200 million GPU purchase. They had a call with us.
And why can’t they get financing for it?
This is best explained through a metaphor. When you get a loan for your house, the bank you get the loan from isn’t the one holding the loan. When you get a mortgage, it’s crazy, right? You put 10% down and get a 90% loan on your house because they batch it up, package it with 10,000 other loans, and make it tradeable.
It’s much like wrapped stETH with ETH staking. You’re staking your ETH and it’s stuck, but if you have a derivative, then—
Let’s stick with the mortgage market, David. Maybe that’s not the one you want to go with.
Yeah, but I mean, The Big Short—that’s all interesting combinations. The main idea is that you can make something really liquid for an illiquid asset. Houses are not liquid, right? How many house sales are there versus the value of the houses? It’s very, very low.
That exists for airplanes, houses, and cars. You can get a loan against a Honda Civic, right? But you can’t get a loan for a single GPU. And that’s a problem. If you can’t get a loan for a single GPU, you can’t get a loan against a large cluster.
Why is this? It’s because you don’t have the thing I just described: a mortgage-backed security, something that batches up all the loans and makes them tradeable. Why do you have this for airplanes, cars, and houses, but not for the most important commodity in the world today—the basis of national sovereignty, AI?
Why don’t you have this? It takes about 2 years to issue that instrument. You have to get 10,000 loans, cut them up, tranche them, go on a roadshow, and then trade and sell them. I explained the whole thing. That just takes too long.
If it takes 2 years, you’re past the Hoppers, the Blackwells, and the B200s. You’re past the Rubins, the Vera Rubins. You’re now at Feynman, which they haven’t even announced yet, because of how fast technology can improve.
Because you don’t have the secondary debt market, which is the basis of how you get that easy, simple mortgage, this is like U.S. housing in the 1910s. You didn’t have mortgages. You did a 5-year loan, and the banker could call that loan at any time. That’s how it worked. You put 50% down, as opposed to 5%.
This, too, is like the Bitcoin pizza dynamic, right? Imagine if you’re Cursor and you’re raising a billion-dollar valuation to buy some GPUs. You buy $100 million of GPUs, sell it at a billion-dollar value, and get acquired for $60 billion. You just paid $6 billion of expected value for $100 million of GPUs.
If you’re actually bullish on your company and selling at a high valuation—right now the venture market is very hot, but the reality is there’s a reason it’s hot, and all of these companies are going up a lot. A lot of these Korean stocks are up massively. These equities are crazy. People are saying SK Hynix, Samsung, and some of these other companies are going to earn their entire market cap in the next 3–5 years.
The earnings of a lot of these companies, unlike in the 1999 tech bubble, are quite high. So, do you really want to sell equity? At least you want to have the option to finance the GPUs, right? You don’t necessarily want to sell equity or other types of credit when you have this alternative financing mechanism.
It’s unfortunate because, for the most part, people actually do have to sell equity to do these deals. It’s a weird category because a lot of the companies that would be going into the traditional debt market have underwriters saying, “Who are you? What is Cursor?”
Yeah.
You know? I think it’s kind of a cost-of-capital thing, right? Very basic Finance 101.
You're bullish on your own company. You don't want to issue unsecured credit. You know that you have to make an asset purchase. Why wouldn't you do asset-backed financing like every other industry? This is common.
I used to work in the e-commerce space, and a lot of really basic things, like lawn mowing or garage work, where you know there's going to be a return—all of that is asset financed, not only because it's efficient, but because of taxes. This is something that people, I think, also don't understand: these are fully depreciable assets with huge tax implications.
Because of the new tax acts, David, I don't know if you want to talk about this, but it's a material part of the yield component of this credit instrument—some of the recent tax bill changes.
Yeah, that's kind of why you see Meta have almost a perfect pairing of, say, $20 billion of revenue and $20 billion of capex. It's kind of on purpose, by the way, because they can offset all of that.
I said it completely.
Yeah, because of bonus depreciation. These are capex assets. We're really trying to encourage the development of stuff, and I think us both being in PR kind of already enforces that: you can definitely change human behavior with that kind of incentive structure.
But for those that don't understand, when you buy—I mean, a G-Wagon also qualifies, by the way, because it's a weight class where it qualifies as a credit—
But then only—
Yeah.
Can you—sorry, finish, finish.
Yeah, I would just say, too, that we're pushing whatever we can to encourage the development of AI capex because it is such a massive black hole of money. There's so much money being put into it, and we should definitely put ourselves in the center of this.
Can you explain, David, why crypto is necessary to solve this? And why is crypto uniquely positioned here?
Crypto is unique because DeFi, specifically, is the sector that I tackle. It is the fastest horse. It forms capital in a way that is hard to recreate even in TradFi. You can just spawn markets out of nothing, which is difficult to do—you need to have a lot of infrastructure and a lot of participants.
I'll give you a good example: a CoreWeave bond that traded $50 million since August. It's a $1.5 billion tranche. It's a tradable debt instrument. We ourselves were much smaller, but in the last 6 to 8 months we traded about $15 billion in secondary-market volume.
Because the moment you create USDai or sUSDai, you can put it on Pendle to strip out the yield, and then you can trade in the implied notional value. You're doing looping on Fluid or these other platforms, and you end up creating this massive volume.
What the tech really develops is, one, perpetuality. Of course, you have HYPE, which is the futures perps. We're really like a debt perp. We can instantly price and compound things, which is why whenever there's a new loan, it gets added the moment it's originated.
You don't have to wait for 10,000 loans to be batched up. The moment a loan is created, it's immediately priced on NAV and given to our debt instrument, or to sUSDai. So it's just a really, really good financial-tech product, which is the way finance should be run, because it makes things extremely fluid and tradeable.
You don't need to have just white-collar guys trading it; anybody can do it.
Is TradFi struggling with GPU funding, or is that one of the hardest? It is. TradFi is struggling with it, especially on the lower end, with the smaller contracts, like you said.
It doesn't even exist on the lower end. It doesn't exist. You can't get financing. If it's under $200 million, you might get it if you work with a private credit fund.
By the way, every private credit fund is in retreat. Oracle is fully tapped out. They're max-levered out. They've maxed out their credit card and their term loans, because you have revenue and you can borrow 6× against it.
So you're literally seeing the very edges of pretty much every financial vehicle to raise money to build out AI capex reaching its limits. It's like you're playing hot potato, where you're trying to make sure your hand doesn't get burned, but people are playing solo, right? They're literally just holding the hot potato—
So, do you just get stuck with suboptimal financing because you're the only one that will underwrite these GPUs?
Oftentimes you have to do a convertible, meaning that you get a loan, but then they can turn it into equity and you get diluted. A good example is if you were a seed investor in CoreWeave or Crusoe, you were diluted almost 90%—10 times more equity had to be issued because that's the only way to finance it, because you don't have any other option.
So having non-dilutive financing is pretty interesting, but generally the solution doesn't even exist. It's why we exist as a company. It doesn't even exist as an offering in traditional ecosystems.
People have described us as a monopoly because nobody else even comes close to offering this stuff, which is smaller than Apple. I'm not going to say who, but it was definitely not—
I'll ask you in a minute, David, but I'll go back really quick: what is the win condition for the company at large, and what is the purpose of the chip? How do you 10× or 100×—not price, but overall size—from here? How does it get massive? This is to you, David.
Well, there are 2 angles for us. There's chapter 1, which is the next 12 months, where we do $1 billion of loans. That's our ultimate goal. We want to do enough loans that people start referring to us as the reference rate for what the interest rate should be.
That's what we're trying to do: if you do enough loans globally, you discover this interest rate. When I say interest rate, I mean the cost of capital—how fast you can grow AI. That is what you're trying to discover.
It's really hard to know what the interest rate of artificial intelligence is. It is literally the cost at which things can grow: how much money you're willing to spend for a return. Once you discover the interest rate—which is us doing $1 billion of loans—how do you then weaponize this to penetrate into the rest of AI?
I'll say this, too. We're starting to see that every AI company we talk to will eventually own GPUs. We started talking with these rental companies a year ago, and the GPU rental platforms are starting to want to buy chips.
They want to rent them out to token factories, these guys who can really amplify, like the Base10s of the world. They amplify how many tokens you can generate per GPU. Now they want to buy chips, and LLMs are already buying chips. The apps are going to buy chips because it's really expensive to rent them.
What we're trying to do next, after we discover this interest rate and offer financing for smaller participants, like applications or LLMs, is figure out how to subsidize it—how to lower that interest rate more than the market, like a central bank in a sense. Lower rates, things grow, and people spend more money.
The number-one expense in all of AI is compute. Just to clarify that: 80% of OpenAI's cost is compute. Salaries are very high, but compute is way more expensive than the salary part.
This is expensive because Nvidia chips are expensive, but also because all of it is financed. The $500 billion of sales, like I said—it's actually $600 to $700 billion because of interest rates, because it's expensive.
Much like a house, you're paying $3 million for a $1 million house across 30 years. In this case, it's just really high interest rates, and everything is debt financed.
So if you can lower this expense, which is very simple because you're just paying Wall Street—Wall Street's getting the second-largest business in AI, call it: Nvidia, Wall Street, and, I'm sorry, Nvidia, Wall Street, then OpenAI. That's $20 billion of revenue versus $500 billion, and then you have $150 billion right in between.
How do you lower this second-largest expense in the AI sector? We think it's by settling in a stablecoin. I described a debt instrument as USDai. We're giving out loans against chips.
But what if people started paying in a stablecoin that I created? This is what USDai is—not the staked version. If you can start paying in my currency, I can subsidize the interest rate, because I earn 4% or 3% on every dollar that's minted.
Much like Circle and Tether, they just pocket that, right? They just keep that money.
I'm saying, why don't you have the entire AI sector settle in a stablecoin by subsidizing their number one cost that they can control, which is debt?
How do you make money?
Make money? I mean, we still earn an origination fee on the debt. We also make a net interest margin. But eventually, in the longer run, we're not giving 100% subsidies. It's much like the growth pains of any stablecoin beginning. You're always cutting deals, but eventually you just earn the yield.
But if you can subsidize the interest rate of AI, which again is how fast AI can grow—the cost of capital—I think this is a second line item in AI, but it's also the second-largest business.
And what is the purpose of the chip token? You talked about it real quick.
That is kind of like the GP position, in a sense. This is the best metaphor I can give. We haven't really detailed it; we will over the next few weeks. But it controls the fees that are related to the protocol and how they're routed.
It also determines what the interest rate should be, which I think is very powerful. You want to know what the rates are for small deals, large deals, better off-takes, and worse off-takes. There will be some prioritization structure as well around redemptions. That's usually where the best token utilities are, when it relates to prioritization.
Transaction fees—there are a number of use cases that it governs, of course, but it also has decision-making power in how the fees are routed. But that's up to the users, not necessarily just us.
Cool.
On the crypto topic, Alex, I feel like, broadly, you are one of the more optimistic, forward-looking, crypto-specific people on my timeline recently. I don't know if that's surprising.
Yeah, actually, I think Taiki got me into the thesis early on. I kept seeing these Michael Saylor yoga-instructor videos, and I'm like, this is just late-stage Madoff. It's so bad. I think I pinged Taiki and said, “This is just late-stage Madoff. It's so incredibly bad.”
He's like, “No, you don't understand.”
And I'm like, “What do you mean?”
He's like, “STRC can't go bankrupt because it's a really smart convertible preferred stack, which is based on the mNAV.”
And I'm like, “Okay.” So I looked into it, and Saylor has cooked up this inflow machine with STRC.
I know everyone is wrecked. Everyone has given up hope. But Saylor can't give up hope. Maybe it's because he owns too much Bitcoin, or he's an older man without a wife. Who knows what the reason exactly is? But he has developed a very, very effective yield-inflow mechanism.
There's a funny Economist chart showing that the Silent Generation is substantially wealthier than millennials. It's pretty bleak. Millennials and Gen Z are pretty poor relative to older people. If you really want to get inflows into an asset class, you need retirees to bid.
To be honest, not to derail on CHIP, Upbit volumes are very high. This is something I've kept track of with XRP. A lot of the buyers are older. Older Korean women specifically.
Women?
Yeah, it's a big retail market: the hajumma.
It's very different from U.S. retail. Japan and Korea both have a more gender-neutral composition. If you look at crypto Twitter demographics, it's 93% male. If you look at Japan and Korea in terms of the retail composition, it's closer to 50/50.
On a capital basis, on a trading basis, you might be seeing an even higher female skew because of cultural dynamics. Japan, for the longest time, and Korea have had very poorly performing stock markets over very long periods. That led to forex trading becoming popular.
Both of them have famously bad work-life balances, and it's led to women adopting financial speculation in a way that hasn't been true in the United States.
These demographic points are important because, with Michael Saylor, the question was always: who's the incremental buyer? All the memecoin guys are cooked. None of the crypto AI protocols, at least as of Bittensor, have excited me. I was like, “Okay, the AI buyers are not here.”
The Koreans are bidding AI stocks in Korea. So the question was always: who's going to buy this thing?
The STRC catalyst was big enough that you're like, “All right, this is getting multiple billions of dollars of inflows.” If you were to put a billion dollars into the current tape, it's going to move the market. Furthermore, if you've seen MicroStrategy's mNAV expand, that creates a flywheel.
This is just mechanical. A lot of the recent bounce has been ETH/BTC near the lows. This is a mechanical BTC-driven pump.
The other element is that there was a head-fake conceptually, where everyone bet on the institutions. They bet on Trump, they bet on the banks.
Yeah.
And it was just a rug, right? World Liberty Financial kind of was a rug.
The good news is that all of the reasons why crypto existed prior to that are still there. Historically, if you study the crypto asset class and ask, “What is the driver of the price of Bitcoin or crypto market cap over time?” it's mostly people moving money out of the system.
It's Chinese whales mining Bitcoin. Over the last year, you've seen basically every exchange come after Monero. The Europeans came after Monero. Spagni's done prison time, and Zcash has worked. Monero has worked despite everyone coming after them.
Zcash is on Robinhood today.
Exactly. You try to kill these privacy coins and you can't, which is exactly what you want to see for the forward outlook of the asset class. If you try to kill these things and then fail, you have a picture that this is going to last and be able to work in a regime that is not friendly to capital.
What does that mean? It means the Democrats winning, it means CBDCs, capital controls, wealth taxation, and unfriendly policies toward capitalists.
From here, what is going to cause us to go incrementally higher? Right now, everyone is convinced the S&P is a moon machine and that you don't need crypto because you have equities. In the near term, that's great because it means Saylor is going to keep issuing STRC, selling 11% yields to 75-year-olds, and getting billions of dollars to max-bid BTC.
In the near term, we're going to be fine because Saylor is literally an ATM that props up the market. In the long term, I also think it's going to be fine because we have the privacy technology, and we have the outlook of the G10 turning into China.
You're going to have extreme fiscal pressure because the fiscal situation isn't getting better anywhere in the world, and Iran is making it substantially worse. Across Europe and Japan, with energy subsidies, the global fiscal situation was quite bad before, and it's gone from bad to much worse.
The way that's going to be paid for is ultimately through taxation and money printing. Those are things that drive capital out of systems.
I'm like, “Okay, where's the money going to go?” It's going to go into gold. It's been going into oil. But ultimately, you can't easily leave a country with gold or oil. You can't get on a plane with a bag of gold. We saw this in Dubai.
Saw this in Dubai, yes.
And there's going to be a bid, in my opinion, from the ultra-rich to move money out of the system, and that bid is going to go into crypto assets.
That's sort of my thesis. It's not necessarily optimism about CHIP. I think the stuff like CHIP is gravy on top of it. We are in an internet economy. There are open-source technologies and transactions that can be built on top of blockchains, and it doesn't make sense to build a new credit market without a blockchain.
Why would you construct a new credit system in this legacy technology stack when you know that you probably need to move to the UAE in 3 years or move to Latin America? We know that the future is going to be built on crypto rails, which is maybe a 5-year story.
In a 1-year story, we have Saylor. In a 3-year story, we have capital flight. So on a 1-, 3-, and 5-year time frame, I feel very, very good. Right now, it's quite contrarian, and you should be there pounding the table when other people are depressed, because that's when you make money.
How do you not drive yourself crazy with this bold thesis sort of cemented in, where everything is pretty fucked? They're going to hyper-print, it's late-stage capitalism, but crypto—and risk assets in the interim—are going to pump really, really hard. How do you think through that? How do you not drive yourself nuts thinking through that?
I mean, I think a lot of the really exciting areas to speculate in such an environment are—you know, I think the answer is you keep yourself busy.
Like things like Avis rental, right? This recent 850% increase—like a lot of the retail feeding frenzies that you're seeing—are exactly what you would expect in a late-stage capitalist economy, right? It's kind of like all financial meaning has been reduced to meme stocks and meme-like asset price movements.
I think SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic—you've got like $4 trillion of equity coming onto the market. And so it's going to be the biggest period of speculative IPO excess in financial history by an order of magnitude. None of this is in the S&P 500 right now, right? So if you think about it, the S&P and the passive-investing markets need to absorb $4 trillion of bids, right? And you're like, okay, I don't know if that's even possible.
The bleak thing is that you can predict there are going to be a lot of people pushing assets really hard. There are going to be a lot of fundamental investors who get short-squeezed on things like Avis. And you're going to have a lot of dislocations where people are screaming, “This shouldn't happen,” and all kinds of GameStop-like events.
By the time it ends—when it does end—it's going to be the mother of all shorts, right? It's going to be just like 2021. We know that equities have turned into crypto, and as crypto people, we're super jaded. We see these AI conferences and kind of know, “Yeah, this is 2021. I know what happens next, and trust me, it's not great.”
Most people don't know that, right? So I think what's exciting to someone like me is, okay, you're going to monetize a lot of the insanity until the SpaceX IPO and the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs. But after these events, you're probably looking at a generational top in equities, where you're going to make so much money shorting this thing into the [__] ground, right?
Ultimately, my simple frame is that governance in the United States has declined substantially. I think the government is not trustworthy and doesn't enforce property rights effectively. Even things like the supply-chain risk classification toward Anthropic shows a government that is capricious and random. In the long run, we know what that model looks like in China and other countries that are not property-rights-friendly.
It's an 11-, 12-, or 13-times earnings terminal multiple, not a 29-times multiple. The long-term playbook for me is to assume that. That's why we live in Puerto Rico, right? We don't believe that the system in the long run is sustainable. And the reason I'm in crypto is because I don't want to have money in the system after it blows up.
Yeah, yeah.
And so that's how I think about it. I'm just building a life that's robust to the system going through a major transition to something that isn't that awesome.
Let me ask you one more on this, and then I'm going to go to David. You're kind of rolling. How does this play out in the interim? One thing that's been fascinating to me is that I've never really paid much attention to geopolitics, and I've spent the last 2 months trying to figure out how to monitor the situation and these headlines.
You see fake news everywhere. You see a market whipsawing on Trump tweets, most of which are fake. And you see a market that's basically completely shrugged off a war and just a generational bid on the S&P. What happened today was nuts. The bid is so insane, it makes you start believing in a higher power almost.
At the same time, you see this—I almost compare it to the daily-runner era of Solana—where there's a hot ball of speculative money that whipsaws from Car to Hims to Texas Instruments to thing to thing to thing. And now we all know how this ended on Solana.
But there's a difference where our majors are BTC and ETH versus the S&P, which has, like you said, this passive, forever, nonstop, aggressive flow. They're printing and they're buying, and they're printing. It is nonstop up-only. So how does this manifest in positioning and price action over the short term here? How long can a hot ball of money whipsaw around?
Well, I think the very near-term catalyst—I think SpaceX is going to suck a lot of liquidity out of the market in the U.S. My crypto proxy is that SpaceX is the TRUMP coin.
It is. It's like, yeah.
It's obviously the TRUMP coin.
The face, right?
It's like the xAI thing—manufacturing the financials to be ridiculous. The reason Elon acquired cursor is either to manufacture $10 billion of revenue or capacity utilization for SpaceX, or to juice it and allow him to point to an enterprise billing curve similar to Palantir that he can hype up.
He's going to announce all these things. He's trying to front-run Sam Altman and say that they have a $600 billion AI research lab. So when you're buying Starlink, you're buying the future in-space data centers. You never want to fade Elon.
I actually think Trump is probably amateur hour in terms of Elon. But to be fair, this is a $1.5 trillion to $1.7 trillion IPO. In my opinion, this is the main show, and everything leading up to it is basically a dance before the main DJ comes on the set. We're still on the pre-set. The main Tiësto is coming, and that will be the main set.
My drugs haven't even hit fully yet.
After that, it's over. I think he's going first, and you're going to have this series. Then you have 2 more catalysts: the OpenAI IPO and the Anthropic IPO. They're going to be systematically pumped.
I'm more bullish on Sam Altman's ability to engineer narrative and manufacture stock price than I am on Dario. I think Dario is kind of a weird guy who crashes out and sends weird emails. The Anthropic thing has had a lot of self-owns.
So basically, Elon's going to go out first. Sam is going to go out second. And then Anthropic will be the last one, like, “Oh, that's it.” And I think after that—the answer to your question is that after the SpaceX IPO, you start getting very bearish on equities, right?
That's sort of similar to Solana. Basically, the SpaceX IPO is going to be the Solana $300 moment, right? That's where we are right now. We're in this max-bid environment where anything's possible. Everyone is incentivized—every investment bank is incentivized—to come out and upgrade every single AI stock.
Insane.
Because they're going to get so many [__] fees when SpaceX IPOs and OpenAI IPOs. They don't want any of these comps to look bad, right? So JPMorgan will do some insane enterprise deal with Cursor, or Cognition will sell a kajillion seats to financially engineer these IPOs. Everyone's in on it, and everyone is incentivized to make these numbers look good.
Everyone's in on it.
And when it ends, nobody has any reason to play anymore. So that's my mental model: it's bullish until you get $4 trillion of liquidity dumped.
The wake-up—the realization that people are going to have—is that Elon is basically working with the S&P and the Nasdaq to fast-track inclusion of SpaceX into these passive vehicles. This is the really big moment where we finally see what we see in crypto.
We know what a high-FDV scam is in crypto, right? But the S&P has historically been immune to the high-FDV scam because there's a committee, and they're like, “I can't list this. It's too spicy.”
But in this case, it's such a big deal and there's so much money on the line that they're going to jam SpaceX into the S&P way faster than they should. And basically, the entire retirement—
—is [__] SpaceX.
Oh, yeah. And then everyone will max-bid SpaceX. They'll own a ton of it, and they won't even know it. They won't have done any of the due diligence.
It's like an EOS ICO. Imagine if EOS got added to the S&P 500. That's the crypto equivalent. After that, everyone's going to be like, “So it's going to be like us in crypto, but with equities, right?”
After TRUMP coin went down from around $20 to around $7, they're going to be like, “Oh, man. This is all a scam. I can't believe Goldman Sachs did this to me. Why did they put a buy—” It's like, “Well, I mean, you're a passive investor.”
You trusted the market cap of the stock, and that's what you did. So, yeah, I think that's my thought process: we're in bull mode until SpaceX. SpaceX is the Trump ICO, and then after that, it's the beginning of the downfall. That's sort of my equity view.
For crypto, I'm like, it's obviously kind of the opposite because after this kicks off, there are going to be a lot of people trying to get the hell out of Dodge. There are going to be a lot of people moving to Latin America. There are going to be a lot of people in Argentina and Uruguay, and you're going to start seeing very rich people, very soon, starting to look for exits.
Jesus, man. How could Goldman Sachs do this to me? Yeah, everyone's going to hold fucking SpaceX in the S&P?
Yes.
Damn. I was telling the chat before you came on, by the way, that you came on Twitter 24, and I was reading them my one-shotted tweets that I had 30 minutes after you got off. I was debating whether I should tell my waiter about Truth Terminal and fucking—everyone was fucking clowning me, and now they're like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah."
David, can you explain to me why my Claude feels like the models are getting worse, by the way? Do you have a take on this? You mentioned it briefly at the beginning. Why is my Claude so horrific now? What's happening to these models? It's seemingly getting worse.
I mean, they even say it to you: they're rate-limiting you. They rate-limit you, and then they add in all these excuses for why it's getting worse. It's kind of like a Big Mac over the years. They're slowly adding in all these excuses when they're just trying to survive the fact that there's too much demand and not enough compute.
It's entirely—if you know, there's a constrained resource, and this is access to how many tokens they can generate and how much compute they have access to. They saw the users growing like this, but their compute is only growing like this. You see this with the pricing of GPUs as well. Installations are getting slower. There was the Helium thing with Lizard to Hermes [?]. You have a bunch of supply shocks.
What happens is that installations are stale, they're slow, and demand is higher. So the equilibrium is fucked. You just don't have enough compute. We're in a compute-constrained environment. The scarcity is real. If we had infinite compute, everyone would have a very good model, but they're growing too fast.
Technically, as much hate as OpenAI got, investing in compute was the right move. They knew very well that it was going to be the constraint in the future.
It feels like there's an OpenAI vibe shift happening, aggressively.
Yeah. Even for a lot of Chinese models, there are a lot of GPUs being built in Asia, too, so they're getting a little better. But we are in a compute-constrained environment.
Speaking of sovereignty, Alex is saying that eventually people will just be net importers and net exporters of tokens—tokens meaning obviously related to AI and not crypto.
Yeah.
They're literally developing infrastructure to import or export how many tokens they can generate for each jurisdiction. It's become a sovereignty thing.
I guess, more toward what the purpose of AI is in the future: obviously, we have the petrodollar. This was extremely evident in what I think is a manufactured crisis that we made in the Strait of Hormuz. We just take out our military and see what happens. Of course, they'll go to the U.S.
But just to reinforce it, the petro is still the world's top concern, whether it's [peripheral Asia?], because they don't have access to oil. In the future, having proper AI for your citizens is going to determine the efficiency and national well-being of your nation. If you don't have AI versus a country that does have AI, you're going to fall so far behind. You're like a backwater country if you don't have it.
Can you explain the petrodollar, but the token-dollar thesis?
Yeah, I guess it's more the AI dollar, the compute dollar.
Yeah.
This is what happened in the 1970s. Obviously, we moved off the gold standard. They wanted to ease credit. I'll try to explain this as high-level as possible, because once you ease credit, you can start enabling ownership of different things, whether it's houses, credit cards, and other things, because you can have some elastic control over how credit expands in your country and your currency.
But the most important thing that makes a reserve dollar globally is whether you control the most important resource that determines your ability to grow as a nation. That was oil. This is why it was kind of a technological feature of a nation in the '70s: you had to control oil.
Yeah.
Just compare a citizen in China who didn't have oil versus a guy who has a car, heating, factories, and everything like that. Oil was literally the determinant of what made a nation survive at that current moment in time, and what made a citizen fall behind for the next 20 or 30 years. It was a commodity that was effectively the mortality of a nation.
The same thing is true today. If you have a citizen in a different country that doesn't have AI versus you, who do have AI, and all things work, your capacity is 10x. It's the same thing as somebody with oil in the '70s.
The entire purpose of the petrodollar is that you had to control oil in order to have sovereignty. If you didn't have oil, you were not a country. If you don't have AI, you're not a country. You are significantly behind. Your citizens are fucked. If you don't have AI, the outputs, GDP growth, and everything else—the well-being of the nation—is dependent on compute, how many tokens you're able to generate per unit of compute, and the infrastructure you built to enable that.
If you don't have enough, you just fall behind. Your sovereignty, as a result, is subsidizing the AI wave. Every dollar that we're spending in the U.S.—yes, maybe it's a little petro, but at the same time, it's also making sure that we win this AI war, this AI arms race in a sense. That's why we're spending so much money building out these massive data centers.
It really is kind of like Project Chimera. It's an arms race. It's the petrodollar all over again. It's a national resource, and we have to make sure that it's continuously being built, both at a massive scale and at a smaller scale.
It was a good explanation. Thank you.
I guess, as a follow-up, one of the last things I'll ask you, Alex—I'll let you guys go soon and go back to David afterward—you posted an article today about how these Chinese labs are white-pilled. Can you give us a high-level view of your take and your thesis? I was going to read it on stream, but instead of making you guys wait, I'll just bring you on.
Yeah. Essentially, before the last 2 or 3 weeks, using these models on your local machine or on a cheap GPU—and when I say cheap, I don't mean an H200; I mean a $10,000 GPU—wouldn't generate something acceptable for what people are using most of these models for, which is AI coding.
Specifically, everyone is using Claude Code and everyone is using Codex, and Elon has acquired Cursor for $60 billion. So we know the product-market fit in the market. The reason why the software index is getting smoked is because everyone is writing code with AI.
Prior to 2 weeks ago, doing that on commodity consumer hardware was not really viable.
The big shift, of course, is that this has become viable because of these efficiently distilled—or whether they're distilled or not—versions of Opus. These Chinese models are a new thing.
It's relevant to the crypto space because if there were ever going to be widely distributed AI spend through crypto rails, it would almost certainly be open-source models. The likelihood of OpenAI or Anthropic agreeing, given some of their comments around national security, to deliver spend through their platforms just doesn't make sense.
A lot of the Tether arguments, or even these stablecoin arguments, are like, "Oh, we'll have these bio-authenticated, KYC'd users." It's like, "Okay, you're going to have zero fee capture with that."
The chunky spend—the stuff that's leading big financing deals with USD.AI—if there were a world where we only had Anthropic and OpenAI, and they were the only buyers of compute, they would be doing debt-financing deals with Goldman Sachs, and you would never hear of chips. You would never be talking about Bittensor or any sort of distributed compute protocol whatsoever.
And so, basically, the market is totally off-sides because no one thought this was possible. The result is going to be explosive growth in Hermes Agent and all these open-source harnesses. I'm so used to using Codex that I was testing this on Codex, which is—
Long Alibaba right now?
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think I'm also long all of the Chinese names. Baba is the worst-performing. Alibaba came out with Qwen, and it's just—the stock is a piece of shit. So I was like, okay, this—
The worst stock ever?
It's generally part of—I mean, if you look at Qwen in the Chinese internet index, it's down-only tech, because of a lot of governance issues with the CCP. It's all the same shit as usual.
Yeah.
But I think the thing is, if a company is doing models like this, and they show that level of expertise, the likelihood that they have something closed-source that they can deal to enterprise clients is really high. You're already seeing random devs popping up on Twitter being like, “Oh, I quantized Qwen, and now I can run it on an even smaller thing at 100 tokens per second.” The likelihood that Alibaba hasn't figured that out internally, if they haven't developed a model, is very low.
Suddenly, people used to buy Meta because they had Llama, right? So I'm like, okay, this thing is the most consequential AI release since Llama. Alibaba stock is hated. Everyone is balls-long OpenAI and closed-source tech because that was the current meta. I was long SoftBank—I was shilling it to everybody who would listen. Now I've had the catalyst. We've had the big blow-off top, and I actually think the next big narrative is going to be—obviously, GLM 5.1. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it.
Okay.
Knowledge Atlas technology company, ticker 2513. A lot of these are Hong Kong stocks, which are weird. But—
You know, it's just an amazing model. I think it's a better chat model than Opus. With our own cryptocurrency, we have a community of people interacting with these models, so we run our own benchmarks with real user data. It's like, “Okay, which of these models are good, and which ones are generating—”
What you might have noticed on Opus is that it's just so fucking verbose. It has a tendency to say—like, it'll send you four pages. I'm like, “Bro, just please tell me. Just tell me the answer.”
It's like one of those women that sends you a 20-page document, and you're like—
“What is this?”
You know, it's funny—the Claude thing worked backwards. At first it was very much, “Wow, it's so personalized, and it's very nuanced, and it's hitting all these details.” But then the personality hits this pendulum too far out, and all of a sudden it's a very fine line. Then all of a sudden it's like, “What the fuck am I supposed to do with this?” Every answer is, “What is this?”
They also hired a woman from OpenAI who, originally, people got too upset about what you call sycophancy, which is them kind of glazing you.
Yes.
OpenAI overcorrected, and they made a model that's like, “Well, you might not be thinking of these seven nitpicky points.” And you're like, “Dude, okay, I'm just talking to you. I'm trying to get answers. Don't give me these fucking nuances.” They hired that woman at Anthropic.
Okay, this is my biggest pushback with Claude, by the way. I don't know how important the instructions are. I should maybe update mine, but it used to be way too glazy, right? Claude is not so much, but it's very frustrating. Now every time I ask it anything, it's like, “Sure, but what you're obviously not considering—” and I'm like, bro.
I asked it about USDai, and it gives me an answer. I'm like, “What do you think of this question?” It gives me an answer, and it's like, “But what you're obviously not considering is that it's a crypto—” I'm like, bro, just answer. Is it a good question or is it not? I don't need your life story here.
It actually hates crypto.
I'm like, what? Just answer. Is it a good question or is it not? I don't need all your life story here.
Yeah, I mean, that's the—have you—you're a psychologist, you know, based on our earlier conversation. Have you seen Boris Cherny?
Yeah, I have, actually. What are you saying exactly?
He's the guy. If you look at him and understand that the system prompts are written by this man, you should understand exactly what's happening. At an organizational level, they're getting a bunch of dudes who are making this product. It's weird. It's SBF-backed Anthropic because they're a bunch of fucking weirdos who got along with him and his effective altruist friends.
SBF is victory-lapping that all the time, but it's also like, dude, it's because they're weird people. These guys are weird. They're in polycules. They're just a group of—they're odd.
They're in the Bahamas, ripping the freak-offs and stuff.
Yeah, I mean, it's sort of like, if those are the people generating your chat models, it's going to get weird. Actually, I think Opus 4.7, as a base model, what you'll see about their corrections when they're putting out releases—I think they leaked Claude Code.
You look at Claude Code and the stuff that got leaked, and it's like there are 20 script files about generating different animal shapes for different users. You're just like, what is this tool? What were you doing when you made this, and why?
You can tell it's all vibe-coded, too. They keep shipping all these products that are clearly vibe-coded, and they clearly think they're sick, but then there are all these guys who post viral threads saying, “Yeah, the UX doesn't work in 15 different places.” I think what's actually happening is that they're a world-class model company trying to be a consumer company, and it's turning out really strange.
Strange, right? Strange is a very good word for it. I think we over-indexed on the Sam hate, really. He's coming out of this looking kind of based. Elon can't build a model that works. Claude's gotten fucking weird. The only thing was that OpenAI was too fucking nice—GPT was too fucking nice. And all of a sudden—
Well, everyone crashed out because he worked with Trump. I think there's a nuance that people maybe miss: you kind of don't want an effective altruist designing your work product. You kind of want the guy who says yes to the military building your coding tool, because he'll actually do what you ask it to do.
If Hegseth is like, “Blow up that building,” Anthropic will be like, “I don't know. Are you sure? That building is very ancient and has a lot—”
This was always the thing with the war, by the way. If you looked at it from the Anthropic angle, the Department of War thing made sense. All right, fine, Dario says, “I don't want my AI models to be used in automated killing weapons.” But then at a certain point it's like, all right, are we going to call Dario to get approval?
If you're the guy in the jet over Iran, are you calling Dario? It's a very fine-line, weird spot on this war stuff.
Yeah, I think Sam Altman is a very opportunistic guy. I don't frankly trust either Sam Altman or Dario. I think that's another really good thing for crypto AI: you shouldn't trust the CCP, either.
Your three options with the closed-source versions are: you can trust Sam Altman, who's Sam Altman. People who knew or are close to him have New York Times articles saying he's a pathological liar. He's a killer. Then you've got Amodei, who's an SBF-type character. And then you've got fucking Xi Jinping.
I don't want any of my data going to all three of these guys, because I just don't trust them at all.
Give me Eric Voorhees.
Well, the crypto advantage is that Eric Voorhees can serve Chinese models without you sending data to the CCP. That's the whole point. It's not that I trust Eric Voorhees. It's that people like Eric Voorhees can make crypto protocols where you can actually say, “Okay, did my data go to the MiniMax server that has an agreement with the Chinese military?” No, it didn't.
It’s like maybe I don’t love the Eric Voorhees. I tried looking into Venice, and all their terms of service and how they’re doing onion routing—it’s not very transparent to me. I don’t have a strong view about that, but on the surface, crypto is likely going to be the rails for Chinese open-source models.
Yeah, that was honestly a sick discussion. I don’t know if you froze, but I was going to ask David a question anyway. David, as a sign-off, now that you guys are live, the token is live, and you have a bunch of contracts, what is your number-one focus going forward? What are you most focused on?
I’m just doing more loans. That’s pretty much it. We’re very much a product-driven company, which might sound odd. We really are trying to build something that TradFi hasn’t been able to solve. I think that really comes down to how you deliver a service to the market that’s unique—something that traditional finance or other offerings haven’t been able to capture.
It’s kind of like Hyperliquid, right? Hyperliquid really is an instrument or product that’s hard to replicate on traditional rails. That’s why it becomes a very unique offering. People come from outside the space and specifically use that product.
For us, we have about 70 customers coming in right now—large neoclouds—and that number is increasing every day. We’re just making sure that we can actually service them by having the capital. That’s why we launched the token, but we also want to start building out more liquidity for sUSDe and USDe. That’s also why we’re launching a salon event.
Sweet.
Once you start serving these customers, then, to Alex’s point, people will just use crypto protocols out of need. Much like our customers, they’ve never used wallets before. Our 50 to 70 customers literally don’t even know what a wallet is.
We introduced them to Coinbase Prime, but it doesn’t work in Europe, so for one of them we had to send free Ledgers. They were like, “What the fuck is it?” It’s his fault. Then once they do it, they’re addicted. They’re like, “You can literally just borrow against your GPUs through a smart contract, get money, buy more GPUs, and get more money.”
It just blows your mind that you can do this—just like leveraged looping in DeFi, but using GPUs as your lever loop, because it actually generates money. I don’t think people realize how much money GPUs make.
This is actually how we found this sector. I was mining Bittensor with GPUs, and I realized I was paying $3 an hour for this chip. You do the basic math: there are 700 hours a year or something somewhere around there, and you’re spending $3 an hour. It ends up being more than $25,000 a year, but the chip itself costs $25,000.
I thought, “I’m paying this much a year to mine this, and this makes no fucking sense. I should just buy the GPU.” So I bought the GPU. I actually just bought the GPU. You’re paying 100% of the value of the chip. Imagine that for real estate: if you bought a house for $1 million, but your rent was $100,000 a month, you should just buy the house.
Yeah, but you can’t unless you have debt. It’s too expensive.
Got it. That’s kind of our aha moment. We thought, “Yeah, we’ve got to just buy the chip, and then get debt against it to lever it up and actually scale it.” We’re just getting more AI participants to borrow against us. Most of our fees come from AI companies; they don’t come from crypto customers.
It’s also why Alex and I are on the same pod: to illustrate that there is a use case out there. There aren’t a lot of good use cases, but Venice is one of them. Obviously, what Alex and I are building is part of a new wave of going past the jaded world of meme coins and unproductive things and actually starting to build real stuff.
I do think it comes from where the growth sectors are, which is probably not RWAs or whatever they call them. You’re just taking dinosaur assets and bringing them on-chain. That’s fucking sick. You should really be pushing this research at the frontier, which really is just AI today. But yeah.
Sick. Well, look, thank you so much for coming on. Alex was awesome. You were incredible. Congratulations on the launch and on a successful launch, at least up to this point. I’m looking forward to what you guys do.
It’s about time we have some fucking talent, some sauce, and some excitement in the crypto hierarchy, if you will. Maybe until part 3. Mr. David, it’s an absolute pleasure, man. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for your time.
Thanks for having me on. Good stuff.
All right, brother. Have a good one. Peace.
I thought a lot of that was Jenny. Did you? That was kind of Jenny, bro. Alex is a lunatic, and the USDai thing is really cool. Alex is Jenny, bro. He just has—I mean, it’s hard to refute. Honestly, tomorrow we should sit down and do some math and really figure out what we’re going to do into this SpaceX IPO. I don’t feel like we’re taking it seriously enough. Genius is generational. I don’t feel like we’re giving it enough credit. I’m not going to lie.
I like David a lot. Smart guy. Really smart guy. And Good Alex is one of the best. If you want, we could do a solo with GoodAlex in the future. By the way, I don’t hold any CHIP. I did hold it, traded it, made some money, and got out. I’m not the most confident in crypto alts, but I do like it.
If you want, I will do a solo with Alex, and we could talk more in depth about Luton Rob and a lot of this stuff, because I think he has some really good takes—good takes on privacy. Alex by himself is too intense. Maybe we’ll throw D-Nap in the corner or something. He is very intense.
Do you understand why I got one shot now? I would imagine it’s now making sense to you why that happened. Okay? I got fucking—I lost it. I lost my mind because he was talking about how AI is going to ruin—we’re going to—yeah. You get it.