一轮「不受待见的上涨」能否推动加密市场走出下一程？中期选举与 Binance 遭黑客攻击意味着什么

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The whole time I’ve been in crypto, people have said, “Oh man, if Binance ever gets hacked, it’s game over. We’re screwed. Pack it up, go home. Absolutely screwed.” Then we get the biggest heist in financial history, and it was the absolute opposite result of what I thought would happen when Binance got hacked.

I think the bottom’s in. I think the next leg is on. I think we’re ending the disbelief rally right now, and I think stocks will stay relevant, to answer your question. But we just shook off a $6 billion hack. I mean, that’s insane. That’s just high-level bull propaganda, but that’s how I’m thinking about it.

Welcome to The Edge Podcast. I’m DeFi Dad, here with Nomatic. Today’s show features the co-founders and co-hosts of The Rollup, Andy and Robbie. Guys, thank you for joining us. How are you doing?

Let’s go, man.

I’m good.

It’s exciting times. Thanks for having us. It feels like it’s been a long time coming.

Yeah, dudes. Love the energy. I feel like we don’t get enough time to just hang. We don’t go to as many conferences as you guys, so we don’t bump into each other as much and get a beer. But today, this will be great. This will be like getting our beer and just shooting the shit, having a little investor chat, and keying in on some of these crazy moments that have been occurring over the last 72 hours.

1. The Midterm Market Reaction

Why don’t we just get right into it? I want to start literally with last night. We’re the day after the midterm blue tsunami sweep. I want to get your guys’ opinions on what you think this means for crypto. We’ve seen a wild 12-hour reaction, with prices up incredibly. More specifically, what do you think about the short, medium, and long term? Either one of you, whoever’s the most fired up, go.

I’m excited because I think each of these are negative catalysts that we’re just climbing. This is really similar to what we saw in Q2 over the summer, where Saylor was selling Bitcoin. People thought it would never happen. Stretch was at 70 cents on the dollar, and it was pure “we’re going to zero” vibes. Then we just held the line. We didn’t go up in the face of that, but we held the line long enough to absorb it into the market. Lo and behold, you get this Bessent buyback bullish catalyst, and then we re-rate so much higher.

I think that’s very similar to what’s happening right now, both in the traditional markets and in the crypto markets. You had Apple earnings, the most valuable company. We climbed that and absorbed it. Apple dropped a little bit on the news, but it wasn’t a huge deal. You had the midterms, and we got over that.

The next things I’m watching: the Anthropic IPO is going to come out sometime in the next two weeks. People are saying that’s going to steal a ton of liquidity from the market. I think it’s going to be very similar to Q2: we’re going to hold the line. We’re going to get Nvidia earnings the day after. Now that we’ve gotten over Apple and the midterms, we’re going to get over Anthropic and Nvidia earnings.

As long as we hold the line, we’re going to do just fine. I actually think crypto is going to react before the equities markets. The equities markets are kind of wobbling, and that is creating this conversation that we’re going to rotate out of equities into crypto. I’m watching exactly that, and I think crypto is going to tell us first whether or not that’s going to happen.

You see some signs that returns aren’t as easy or as concentrated in the equities market. I’m very excited about investors starting to look for alternatives on the periphery of the equities market and moving into alternative asset classes like digital assets. If you look at the on-chain businesses—the revenue businesses in crypto—versus the store-of-value assets, I think the store-of-value assets are going to outperform.

You’re going to have a couple that are real money printers—Hyperliquid, Lighter, and Pump.fun—that are going to do well and be in that boat as well. But I tend to think the store-of-value assets—Zcash, Bitcoin, and maybe even ETH—are going to do particularly well.

I like it. I echo that. Most of our audience is from the States, and I think yours is too. For Texas to flip blue is nuts. Every office, right? Has that ever happened before? Were any of you guys expecting Texas to flip blue?

I’m not sure when the last time that happened was. I was actually trying to look it up on Claude as you said that.

Yeah, because Elon obviously moved SpaceX there, right? And he’s doing all this AI private-sector buildout there, and then, boom, it flips blue. I see some analysts saying this might lead to a 10% or 20% reduction in the pace of the buildout.

Either way, one thing Rob didn’t mention—I think he mentioned it holistically—is that AI stole the show from digital assets for the last 18 months. It stole the show big time. This blue wave is a major detriment to the AI buildout, versus a detriment to the digital asset regulatory body. The digital asset regulatory body is moving in the right direction. I think this is going to put a bit of a pause, or a bit of a scare jolt, into the AI market, which is going to lead some investors to come into digital assets.

Broadly, the year ahead is all just lining up. Rob gave so many great examples. The 4-year cycle—we’re there. It’s happening, right? Q4 of a midterm year: the S&P is always green after a midterm year. So is Bitcoin. It’s all lining up. The bottom’s in. I have no reason to be bearish. I’m fully allocated into the market.

Honestly, the reaction from yesterday felt like certainty is now being priced in. I think we’re seeing the market react positively to certainty. But at a high level, guys, I kind of miss the era of, “Who gives a damn about who won the midterms? We’re in crypto, you know what I mean? We’re supposed to be libertarian. Who cares?” That’s my high-level view: very bullish. I think AI has some headwinds to deal with. I think crypto is going to have fewer headwinds, and I also don’t really care.

I think there are a couple of ways to look at this. Saylor put out something that said, “Look, Florida elected a Republican governor who backs a U.S. Bitcoin reserve. But at the same time, Texas elected a Democratic senator who voted to create a Bitcoin reserve in his state.” Crypto is no longer a partisan issue. At least Bitcoin isn’t.

Crypto has become this catch-all term for Bitcoin, DeFi, stablecoins, blockchain, and all these things. At the same time, you’ve got pretty bipartisan support for a Bitcoin reserve at the highest levels of government. You also have news saying the Democrats plan to investigate the crypto industry’s financial ties to President Trump and his family. Elizabeth Warren is still in office. She’s going to be heading the banking committee for the Democrats, and you already know she’s going to put her name on going after Trump and his family.

You could look at this and say, “Oh, Democrats are in power. They’re going to go after Trump and his family, and ethics and all that. Super bearish.” No. I think this is going to lead to a hate rally, in which Trump goes on an absolute brigade of pumping the market for a variety of reasons. All of the financial deep state goes along with it. The regulatory agencies are in power for the next two years anyway. It doesn’t even matter what happens in 2028.

I think there will be a re-rating higher at the same time that public sentiment is super against crypto. I think this is going to catch retail by surprise. They’re going to see all the mainstream media going super negative against crypto and attacking Trump. At the same time, they’re going to see prices going higher, and it’s going to be this weird psychological juxtaposition for them. Once they see prices high enough—maybe once Bitcoin is above $100K or $125K—that’s when they buy back higher, and that’s what extends the gains, once they realize the mainstream media is just spinning the narrative their way because now they’ve got control of the Senate and the House. I’m predicting a hate rally.

We’ve been asking people this on the podcast: “What do you think a new administration would mean for crypto?” The answer that resonated most with me was, “You’ve got to build something useful. You’ve got to make people want to use it.”

We have this 2-year gap, as you mentioned, where I think the CFTC is probably going to go into overdrive, and the SEC is probably going to go into overdrive, getting some of these regulations through so this stuff can happen quickly. Everybody on this podcast knows that once this stuff is unleashed more broadly, especially things like perps and tokenization, we’ve seen enough product-market fit internally to know what’s going to happen when that escapes the lab more broadly and gets into everybody’s hands.

I’m pretty bullish as well, but you have to make this stuff useful. One other thing I want to ask you guys: we talked about the juxtaposition between equities and crypto. Do you see a world where equities could be completely in the dumps and crypto could flourish? It sounds like you do—where crypto could thrive when everything else is very pessimistic in the usual blue-chip equity names.

No. I don’t think that’s going to happen, and I don’t think it’s possible, unfortunately. I think Bitcoin is still going to trade as a risk asset, but I think that’s fine. Zooming out, Bitcoin bottomed here at $58,000. It bottomed, and we had that big rally off the lows.

2. Binance Shakes Off The Market

We just had the biggest hack in the history of the entire world—the whole financial world, right? And that brought us down 3% to 4%. The whole timeline has been bearish here at $76,000 to $77,000. I think the bottom is in now for sure. We’re trading at $80,000 at the time of this recording. I think new all-time highs are very likely in Q1 or Q2 next year.

I think we’re in a very, very bullish market. I think equities could stall out a little bit. I don’t think they tumble necessarily, and I don’t think they really rip that hard. They might, but I don’t think there’s going to be this big tumble. Here’s why: I do think that if equities tumble hard, the activist Fed is going to step in and do some sort of AI backstop.

We’ve seen this happen before during COVID and during stock market dumps. In the good old days, they had bear markets in the stock market. It seems like right now we’re just not allowing dumps of any size to happen. I think it’s going to end poorly, but I think that can is getting kicked down the road.

The core message here is—and I’m curious if you guys agree—the bull market is on. We just went through the first multi-week, complex bull-market exuberance washout, the early stage of exuberance. You saw Wormhole rip face, and StarkNet and Celestia, and people were levered up on all sorts of tokens and pumping memes. People were using leverage they shouldn’t have been. We had a 4-week washout, from $87,000 to $75,000 for Bitcoin. People are a bit worried.

I think the bottom is in. I think the next leg is on. I think we’re ending the disbelief rally right now, and I think stocks will stay relevant, to answer your question. But we just shook off a $1.5 billion hack. I mean, that’s insane. That’s just high-level bull propaganda, but that’s how I’m thinking about it.

Yeah. So the Binance exploit—

As it was happening, Nomatic and I were just having a catch-up, and we were looking at a notification and asking, “Is Binance really hacked, or is this just one of those on-chain analysts misinterpreting what’s going on? Is it just money being moved from one hot wallet to another?”

I think what was most shocking to us is just how quickly the market shook it off. To your point, Bitcoin dropped—I want to say the drop below $80,000 was when it was confirmed: “Okay, now we’re definitely below $80,000.” But we’re still well above that 50-week moving average, which seems to be viewed now as the bull-market support band. Credit to Ben Cowen for pushing that idea. It seems everyone’s adopted it. But this always happens at the bottom of bear markets—

Yes.

—or right after—

Yeah.

—we’ve bottomed.

Yes.

There are folks calling for much lower price levels, and what happens is we eventually get some sort of major news event, and then everyone tries to connect the two. In truth, it looks like folks sold off into the midterms, and that was the end of the “sell the news” type of event. Then folks started to buy back in.

This is why I’m wearing a Hawaiian shirt today. Crypto winter is over, so I’ve put my Hawaiian shirt back on. There was an incredible risk-reward setup to selling last October, when the Binance 10/10 event happened. I’m not going to pretend like I sold and was able to short the market until it bottomed there. But now, to me, it’s the polar opposite. We’re a year into what was a pretty sustained downtrend. It looks like we’ve bottomed.

At this point, you just have to pay attention to which of these tokens with a monetary premium are mispriced and can hopefully go up a lot in the next 12 to 24 months. Beyond the store-of-value-type tokens like Bitcoin, ETH, and maybe Zcash, I’m looking at the on-chain businesses. The difference between now and what we’ve all lived through over the last few years is that the market seems to have finally come around to valuing good teams building valuable products that generate revenues and fees.

Fundamentals.

Yeah, fundamentals.

Yeah. A return to fundamentals, all right?

Yeah.

Real quick, I don’t want to take us off this track, because I want to go there, but I’ve got to say: the whole time I’ve been in crypto, people have said, “Oh man, if Binance ever gets hacked, it’s game over. We’re screwed. Pack it up, go home. Absolutely screwed.”

We get the biggest heist in financial history, and it’s Binance. To DeFi Dad’s story, while we were talking through it, I actually felt oddly calm through the Binance hack, from start to finish, and I don’t know why exactly. I can’t pinpoint it. I don’t want to say it’s a nothing burger. I’m sure some people—well, maybe nobody—lost money other than Bybit.

That was the calmest hack, and then it was the absolute opposite result of what I thought would happen when Binance got hacked. Isn’t that just so crypto? We think something’s going to happen one way for sure, and it does the exact opposite. This is like me trading the market, too. Just wild. Andy, you interviewed CZ, like—

On Monday last week.

—what, 48 hours before the hack went down?

Didn’t he already ring the Nasdaq bell? It’s such a weird coincidence. But I agree, though.

What’d you plant on him? Did you plant a little tracker?

Yeah, I think I cursed him a little bit, huh?

Dude, he—

He was a nice guy, though. He was humble.

Did he give you that same calming feeling, like everything was going to be okay?

Dude, you talk to the guy, and your heart’s beating out of your chest. You just get off the plane after an overnight flight. You’re literally sweating bullets in your suit, running into this brunch. I mean, there wasn’t a whole lot going on in my mind other than, “I’ve got to get this done, man.”

So, DeFi Dad, to your point on the fundamentals and the businesses, and to your point, Nomatic, about the market broadly shaking it off, I feel like we believe in the market’s bullishness, and I believe in my holdings. But, Nomatic, I think there’s still a belief issue. There are too many perps traders, too many meme traders, and just a collective lack of belief in what we’re doing here.

I’m well aware you’ve invested in lots of teams over the years. I also recognize you’re betting on liquid tokens, not just venture bets. What are your updated thoughts there? What do you think of the state of venture markets in our space? And what do you think of the opportunity now to bet on liquid tokens?

Well, I think building on that, and also what you were explaining around these contradictory forces—there’s a return to fundamentals, while at the same time there’s this collective disbelief in the system—I tend to think there’s a counterweight to these forces. The simplistic way I can explain it is that the tech is starting to matter again. You mentioned prediction markets and how they have real product-market fit in elections, wars, and some of these other sociological dynamics that exist in the world. We can take positions on that, use it to hedge our portfolios, or gamble and bet on these things.

I’m really excited about the prediction-market element. We had the senior vice president of Cboe on The Rollup last week. Cboe is the Chicago Board Options Exchange, and it does a lot of derivatives—trillions of dollars of volume in the derivatives markets. He’s explaining prediction markets as a fundamental new primitive for financial markets, and how you can take very narrow positions within a company.

Amazon is a great example. You don’t have to just buy Amazon stock; you can bet on AWS and what its numbers are going to be, how much revenue it’s going to generate. The oracle comes from Amazon’s earnings statement. Then you can unbundle these companies. Google is another great example. Its search revenue is abysmal. It shattered a business model that had been working for the last 10 years, and its ad strategy is totally out of whack. That’s bolstering its earnings, but it’s very short-sighted. Google stock crashed 20% after its earnings call.

Its AI business is thriving; it’s just now getting off the ground. It’s very early, but its search revenue business is bringing the entire company down. You can make very narrow predictions, betting against Google Search and betting for Google’s AI. I’m very excited about the technology as it’s implemented and injected into traditional financial markets. Maybe the Chicago Board Options Exchange is a great example.

This is bidirectional. We’re also getting equities tokenized and injected into the DeFi primitives that we know and love. This direction is what we call the tokenization supercycle, something Andy and I talk about on the show very often. There’s a deluge of tokenized assets. We had someone on the show again last week who said, “I saw the hockey-stick growth in tokenized assets, and then I looked closer, and it was in a log-scale graph.” You know, hockey-stick growth is one thing, but hockey-stick growth on a log graph is exponential on exponential.

There’s an incredible amount of tokenized assets coming on-chain, and we’re not on a tokenization path to nowhere. People want to do something with these tokenized assets. They want to make them productive, unlock idle capital, and get greater utility from them. How do you get greater utility from assets? You put them into DeFi. You put them to work and make them programmable. You loan them out, collateralize them, exchange them, stake them, vault them, and do all these fun things with them.

Those tokenized assets—the trillions of dollars of tokenized assets—are high-quality assets. There are equities, commodities, fixed income, and all these income products coming on-chain. They’re going to end up flowing into the DeFi protocols that we know and love. That’s going to unlock greater utility and ultimately unlock tons more value.

How are we investing? This is your question. I’m investing in the protocols that have proven product-market fit, utility, and activity, and that are going to benefit from this deluge of tokenized assets. If RWAs, tokenized equities, and all these things are going to flow into your protocol, I want to invest in you—especially if you have a value-accrual mechanism that will flow the value you get from tokenized assets into a token, rather than to an equity holder, which would benefit some other VC who got in 4 or 5 years ago. If they can check all those boxes, they’re going to benefit from this deluge and accrue that value. They’re going to pass that value to me as a token holder. I want to own those assets.

Yeah, I think prediction markets are one part. Tokenization, stablecoins, and perps are the big 3 on the on-chain business side. Then you’ve got the store-of-value side: Bitcoin and Zcash, which have been doing very well. I bought those at the lows. I got my freaking parents into Bitcoin at, like, $65,000. I’ve been holding for a long, long time.

For Zcash, I bought anywhere between $300 and $400, up to $500. I have spot positions in a significant amount of the portfolio, as well as low-leverage perps, holding that for $10,000 or higher. I think it’s going to do a 2015-esque run, similar to Bitcoin. It’s in its earliest adoption era. I’m looking for a 20-to-40x on size. That’s the make-it play. That’s the “we’re doing all right” to the “we’re doing really well” play.

On the on-chain business side, Hyperliquid and Lighter are going to dominate perps. The CFTC is bringing equity perps into the U.S. as of yesterday. Hyperliquid’s deal with ICE is a perfect expression of perps and tokenization in one. HIP-3 volumes are flying. Lighter’s volumes are flying on RWAs. Pre-IPO for Anthropic is doing well. OpenAI is going to do well. In my opinion, those two names are the best bet on tokenization and perps.

I’m also interested in Variational and want to be a part of that. I’ve been trading on there and have points. Then you look at this broad swath, and I can name names that are going to be in the way of this train—or, I guess, on the train: Ethena, Aerodrome, Uniswap, Aave, Morpho. It’s so funny to think about all the original DeFi names that Degen Spartan put us through a, however long—what was it, like a 3-year bear market? Well, that bear market is coming to an end, and it’s going to be the biggest TAM increase.

Just to put Robbie’s succinct phrasing of what’s happening: the TAM for Aave, Aerodrome, and Uniswap was $160 billion of DeFi TVL. The TAM it’s going to be is the entirety of on-chain finance, swallowing global capital markets and all the assets off-chain—$200 trillion, $300 trillion, $400 trillion of assets in financial markets that I think are tradable and investable. That’s a rough number. If we just get 1%, or half a percent, over the next couple of years, we’re talking about an exponential step-function increase in volumes, TVLs, and revenues that, as Rob says, come back to token holders.

To me, it’s that simple. I think the world of investable assets has shrunk dramatically, which actually makes our jobs a lot easier. It makes our jobs easier to pick and hold assets. I’m not as interested in the L1s, L2s, or infrastructure stuff. I’m interested in ETH, Bitcoin, and Solana. A little bit on Solana, but pretty much no other new tokens, L1s, L2s, or infrastructure. I’m looking at this thing called Pearl, an AI token. It’s kind of interesting.

Anyway, I just wanted to give you guys a bit more tangible detail. You’ve got these revenue-generating companies, and you’ve got the store-of-value companies. That’s how we’re thinking about it. We’re broadly bullish. I’m curious how you guys are managing your portfolios. I have far fewer assets than I’ve ever had and far more concentration, and I think this is how I’m trying to approach it going forward.

3. Building A Clean Slate Portfolio

Andy, it’s hard not to have a lot of overlap in tokens these days. A lot has turned out to be garbage, and crypto has concentrated on winners. It’s pretty obvious. But before we get into what we’re doing, I want to throw one more thing back at you guys, because this is something I’ve been thinking through as an investor. The question is: Say I didn’t have a really good entry on something today. What are the tokens I’d be most into buying today?

A lot of this stuff, I’m sure we’ve all been holding from good entries. I know a bit of your HYPE story. I know your Zcash story. But, clean slate: say everything got wiped off the map and you had to build your portfolio back. What are the first—

Oh, that’s tough.

—two to three tokens you’d be eyeing up?

That’s such a good question, man, because on the one hand, you want to say, as you were saying, these good tokens are overly consensus, right? They’ve got a lot of people in them. It seems overly consensus. But at the same time, it’s kind of just the survivors left, and the smart people who have money left are still in this market.

So is it really consensus, or are we early? I don’t know. And then you also have the whole question of whether, if they’re outperforming, they’re just going to continue to outperform. Do you want to bet on a laggard, or do you want to bet on something that’s already outperformed? Those are the questions I would run through my mind, and I would probably allocate to both.

I would look at the winners so far. I’d look at what’s performed the best year to date. What you’re going to find is ZK, HYPE, LIGHTER, and PUMP. What other names are going to be on there? There are a couple others, right? I would probably put a good amount into those under the thesis that the trend is your friend until the end. I’m saying that the bull market is just starting, and these names have a lot of upside left.

Then with the rest of my capital—if you want to be very safe, split it in half—I would look at the perps, tokenization, stablecoin, AI, and potential privacy theses. I’d look at the things I think are going to do well but haven’t quite done well yet. You can put NEAR and DePIN into that other category as well. They’ve outperformed a ton.

You start looking at names like Ethena, which got beat up hard and is just making its first move off the lows. You look at names like Ether.fi on the stablecoin and tokenization side. You look at names like Zama or even Chainlink, or even AERO—it’s tough, but that’s how I’d think about it. I’d put some of the portfolio into the winners, then address my big three categories: stablecoins, tokenization, and perps. Fortunately, most of the perps tokens are winners, so I’d look at stablecoins and tokenization and the winning basket there. I’d consider who I think is going to make a roaring comeback, who’s been beaten up, and who has a chance to be an agentic tokenized-finance player with that kind of narrative, and I’d allocate there.

That is such a good question, right? We tend to get somewhat absorbed in the things we’re already in. But every day that we’re in them, we should make the case that they’re the best things to own. It’s tough because I think all of us here got good entries on these things, so we just want to continue holding them.

Broadly, we put these things into 2 categories: the store-of-value category and the on-chain business category. I agree that the store-of-value category is going to do particularly well, especially in light of the election results last night. Zcash tells a fantastic story.

Rob, what’s your best idea right now? What’s your best idea? What’s your number-one guaranteed best idea right now?

Probably Zcash. It just—

I’m telling you, it’s full-on Zcash.

It has so much strength. But you could say it’s up so much already, so how much more return are you looking to get? I feel very cozy in Zcash, but the tendency, if you missed out on the early entry, is to go down the risk curve. I want to have a thesis behind the things that I own. I don’t want to just own them for a short-term trade.

If you’re looking at the rest of that category, I think the Democrats are going to go after Trump and his broad business interests, and that is going to take on-chain businesses and potentially slow down regulation, right? It could slow down this tokenization supercycle, although I still broadly expect it’s going to do incredibly well. But in the short term, especially as this rhetoric is front and center, I’d expect the privacy category to do well, because we know the Democrats are very tax-focused and have a surveillance-state narrative. Even if that’s not really the case, it’s kind of the narrative.

Zcash is an alternative to all of this, right? Protect your money, protect your assets, have privacy. I think broadly the privacy category is going to do well, too. So far, in digital assets, the privacy story and the AI story have been very intertwined. NEAR is a great example: high privacy, high AI. I think NEAR’s going to continue to do well because it has privacy.

But if you look at something like Venice, I’m a little more skeptical. I tend to think focusing on some of the privacy and store-of-value assets is going to do well. There are only about 5 or maybe 10 revenue plays and P2Es that are justifiable. That’s why I’m pretty bullish on store-of-value assets like Zcash and Bitcoin.

I do think the narrative of attacking these things might slow down the ones that are doing things the “right way,” doing regulated business. That’s why I think Bitcoin is going to have a hate rally. I think Zcash is going to have an even bigger hate rally. People are going to see these things going up in light of the negative rhetoric coming from mainstream media, and they’re going to realize they’re caught offsides. These things go up even with all the bad news. They’ll climb the wall of worry that’s front and center in people’s minds, and they’ll end up buying that much higher.

The only thing I’d add to this—and this guiding principle has served me well over the long term, but it absolutely has prevented me from getting into some great opportunities in the short term—is that I really love to bet on category winners. I like to bet on teams, protocols, and tokens that are the clear winner-takes-all in what they do. That’s why I truthfully have almost never sold any Bitcoin. I think I’ve just continued to DCA into it.

This is another reason I’ve continued to stay long ETH. I feel like ETH has absolutely dominated the stablecoin, RWA, and DeFi markets. That being said, the entry I got in 2021 is still there for folks who want to get into ETH in 2026, so that’s been a little painful.

That’s why it’s difficult to endorse going down the risk curve, right? The category leaders are the ones that tend to compound their success and own most of the market.

I think there’s huge edge in taking that risk and identifying opportunities that aren’t consensus trades. The newest, most popular trade I got into was Derive. We did multiple interviews with Derive—

Yes.

—and we had been paying attention to Lyra before that. I didn’t get into Derive until this summer. If you look at why I ultimately decided to make a bet on Derive, it’s because I saw them as such a clear category winner in options. I’m looking at the on-chain options total addressable market and thinking about how much bigger it can get.

There’s also a little bit of overlap. I think they can eat into some market share from HYPE and Lighter without even having to compete ultimately. What they do with options is very unique, and the binary options offered through Hyperliquid and Lighter are very different.

All I mean to say is that, over the long term, part of the reason I’ve survived so many years in this space and maybe haven’t been burned as epically on certain trades is that I’ve probably played it safe from that standpoint. But I’ve watched multiple cycles where I’ve said, “Man, I missed the fastest horse in this race.” A good example was last cycle. I bought some SOL because I realized I was spending so much time trying to come up with reasons why I shouldn’t. I was literally using different DeFi apps, and that was one of the best things I could have done.

The mistake this cycle was that I had enough information to get long Zcash, but by the time it had reached around $600, I thought, “Wow, there’s been an incredible return there already.” I’ve been burned in prior cycles buying these local tops.

Funny enough, around the time I almost bought into Zcash, there was the bug in the Orchard pool. I felt smart for a few days there. Anyway, that would’ve been a great entry.

Yeah, the hack. We completely missed a ride on our side. We saw it at $12, were talking about it on the stream, showing the chart, and saying, “This is so obvious.” Then, boom, four to five X in a matter of days, it felt like.

If I may offer one thing on the category-leader point: there’s immense alpha in being right about betting on the company that’s going to usurp the category leader. But categorically, probabilistically, it’s very difficult to do. My view on the store-of-value market is that Bitcoin’s going to be number one. That’s why I didn’t have a problem buying more Zcash here at about $1,100 or $1,200, less than 2 weeks after buying a good bit in the $400 to $500 range.

Right now, Zcash has 1.5% of Bitcoin’s market cap. Like the precious metals market, you’ve got gold, silver, palladium, and maybe copper a little bit. I believe the digital store-of-value market will play out quite similarly. I don’t think Zcash will ever flip Bitcoin, but I think the bet isn’t necessarily on eclipsing it. It’s on the market going from a monopoly to eventually a duopoly, and then potentially to a couple of these assets.

The reason Zcash wasn’t that interesting to us over the last 10 years is that Bitcoin’s market cap oscillated anywhere between a couple hundred billion and about $2 trillion. But if we think Bitcoin is going to reach a $10 trillion market cap on its own, then what is 5% or 10% of that worth? You’re looking at a $500 billion to $1 trillion market cap for the second leader. Then you start running those numbers and think, “Well, maybe we’re still early.” That would be my only take on the store-of-value market. But I think you’re right about everything else: in any market with a business, revenue, and a business model involved, number one takes the cake nine and a half times out of 10.

Right now, Bitcoin relative to Zcash is almost exactly the same ratio as gold to silver. I think this is pretty much at equilibrium right now, if we expect the power law to play out similarly.

Interesting.

But with the momentum Zcash has, I do think it can have a higher relative market share in the store-of-value category.

Also, the Bitcoin run, though, right? Bitcoin’s going to go to $250K or whatever.

And Bitcoin’s going to go up, but then it’s like, just buy Bitcoin, right? If you think Zcash is going to outperform, then there’s certainly an argument there. I think it could, to a certain extent, with the momentum it has.

4. Crypto Equities And DATs

I wanted to ask you guys: Jeremy Allaire is on CNBC right now, and Circle has earnings coming out today. Are you paying attention to crypto equities? We’re talking about on-chain businesses. Circle is a business whose entire business is pretty much on-chain dollars, but they don’t have a token; they have public equity. Circle, Coinbase, Galaxy Digital, and Bullish are on public markets. You can get them through your brokerage account. Equities are moving like crypto tokens. How are you thinking about exposure to digital assets through crypto equities?

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Yeah, I’ll take that one. It’s a good question, and I’ll weave in some of how I manage my portfolio, because I think that flows into this as well. Just real quick, I want to go back to this: I think it’s interesting that the names we’ve drilled down to for both of you are Zcash, fair to say. It’s one of the few tokens where you can’t apply fundamental analysis, which is also—I find this stuff so hard to quantify upside.

The feature, not a bug.

Yeah, I know, but I find this stuff so hard to quantify upside. I like the way you guys walked through it by relating it to Bitcoin. That’s one thing we can grab onto and point to, and I think it’s built such a strong narrative: “Oh, this is private Bitcoin, dude. Come on. It’s the next iteration of Bitcoin. It’s Bitcoin 2.0. How do you not own this?” But I want to walk through a couple more things about how I invest and manage my portfolio, which I’ve come back to and think are quite important to me.

I’m always betting on people now, and that’s almost first and foremost. If there’s anything awry with the ethics, I’m out. There are some tokens where I think that matters less, like fully decentralized stuff. But with businesses, how do they do business? Are they good people? This stuff really matters to me. After investing in our fund and then investing as an angel, I’ve probably sat through 60 investments from start to finish. It always comes back to whether I bet on the right person rather than the idea, because they’re going to pivot 6 to 10 times along the way. Ultimately, that matters so much.

If anybody out there can talk to a founder before they buy even a liquid token, or listen to a few podcasts, I think that’s so important. Personally, I would never buy a token again without speaking to the founder or at least trying to talk to more of the team. I get that may be special access we have, but if you’re going to conferences and can get some access or listen to podcasts, I think that’s huge.

The last thing is the sector I think has a ton of growth and upside: neobanks, ETHFi, and Ethena, which you guys mentioned. I think the upside is hard to quantify, so I’m actually pretty bullish because I think there’s asymmetric upside there. Regulations could hinder that upside, but I think their business models are so smart. The way they use yield for cash back and the amount of incentives you can glom onto these things are really impressive. I think they’re delivering a product that’s a 10× improvement over your standard Visa or Mastercard.

Getting back to Robbie’s question about equities: I own some crypto equities. I have Galaxy, but it’s not a huge position. I got really into the DAT wave, and I can’t quit DATs. I still love DATs. Good DATs. I shouldn’t even pluralize it: there are maybe 3 I think are interesting. It’s BMNR, it’s PER, and then, honestly, it’s Cipher Mining.

Yeah, yeah.

I was like, “I need an entry into Zcash,” and my mind went to that. Then I thought, “No, don’t do that. Just buy Zcash.” But that business is really—

I own both. I like it a lot.

It’s interesting because I think they have the biggest mining fleet. They’ve got some really interesting revenue lines beyond just having Zcash on their balance sheet.

Nomatic, you had a really good win with USDe as well, the Ethena DAT.

There’s another example. I’m continuing to buy that because it’s still sitting well below NAV, and I do think that’s going to correct. That’s another DAT I called out at the time, too. It was pretty crappy for a long period of time, but I’m still very interested in that DAT. That’s another extension of a bet on Guy and a return to betting on people. How can you not want to bet on Guy Young?

Yep. I think they’re a great example of where we’re at in the industry. They just let their unlocks hit. They were like, “All at once, get out. We’ll buy you out. Get out of here. That’s done. Here’s our revenue line. Here’s how we’re giving value back to tokens. Let’s play ball.” They took the reality check a lot better than a lot of these other teams have.

If you’d told me in 2025 that there would be DATs doing well in 2026, I would never have believed you. I’m a master at buying local tops on DATs. I won’t even tell you what I had bought into, but I bought into very obvious names, and I’ve been very good at losing money on them. Whereas Nomatic has bought them at the local bottoms, I’ve waited months or weeks before I bought into them.

People ask us the same questions: “What should I buy?” No financial advice. Have you guys considered your own index?

Yeah, the Edge Fund.

Nomatic is buying local bottoms on DATs. I want to buy local bottoms on DATs too. Have you guys thought about whether it could be FOMO, or some way to copy-trade?

Inverse DeFi Dad would be mine. That’s what I would name it.

You’re too humble, man. You’re too humble.

You’re too hard on yourself. Way too humble.

Too humble.

Trust me, guys. He’s doing okay.

He’s doing all right.

Yeah.

He’s doing all right.

Okay, I saw you guys do that a while back. What was it, an NFT or what did you call it?

Yeah, we just did a Dune dashboard.

Yeah.

It was—

I love that idea.

It was just reading. We put it together, and people still would’ve had to go buy it themselves—

Right.

—on their own venues.

Yeah, it wasn’t tokenized.

But, yeah.

Bear market-based.

Right, right.

I haven’t thought about tokenizing it or doing it in that regard, but I think just being more public about what I’m bullish on and what I hold is wise. But again, that’s why I asked you guys the entry question, because I’m always cognizant of whether this was something I invested in and got special access to, and now I’m parading around being bullish about it. Did I actually do something impressive, like some analysis, find a token, and buy it in the open market? Or was it just by virtue of knowing the founder, and he got me into the round, and now I’m acting like I’m God’s gift to investing?

Dude, that’s why it feels—

You know? So it’s like—

Yeah, I totally feel you. It feels so clean—

Yeah.

—to shill Zcash and Hyperliquid.

Yeah. Those are liquid wins for you.

Everyone knows—

Yeah.

—that it was a fair game. You know what I mean?

Another simple principle I try to follow is: Would I buy a token I’m holding at this price point, or am I simply holding it because I got a good entry? Someone posted or tweeted about this sometime in the last year, and I thought it was such a great way to frame what you’re doing if you’re holding a token you’d never buy at this price point.

To your point, Andy, I’ve grown much more vocal about the liquid bets I’ve made. I’m less interested in angel investing, even though most of the bets I’ve been making are liquid bets now. We’ve written angel checks here and there, but it’s been less frequent.

Yeah, we’ve given up on that. That’s been a disaster. We need to write the taxes off.

The fact that regulation has gotten friendlier means it’s now more possible for anyone to hopefully get access to these early rounds through a platform like Echo, even though Echo doesn’t exist anymore. I love that idea because that was the whole point of crypto: to give everyone equal access. There have been really perverse incentives at times, where the insiders get the best bets. I think everyone revolted against that last cycle with meme coins.

We’ve learned a lot of lessons, and we’ve lived through a lot. We’re in the best place in the history of the digital asset space for continued growth. The numbers are still very small compared with where they’re headed: stablecoins to tens of trillions, and I think DeFi TVL grows to tens of trillions. I think we all believe that. I think you mentioned Bitcoin at $10 trillion. I’m also still looking at ETH and asking, “How does this token do if it’s even just a fraction of Bitcoin and maintains pace with it, or eventually accelerates?” Just a fraction of that means we’re talking about a 10x, 20x, or 30x return in the next few years.

I’m very, very confident that we’re in the most de-risked era of crypto we’ve ever been in. The only thing still hanging over our heads is that we have to get to post-quantum blockchains. The FUD around that, which was very well warranted, has died down a bit. I’ve paid close attention to it. Ethereum was very ahead of this, and Zcash has been pushing on it. Bitcoin is in an uneasy place.

And I think the quantum stuff is going to be like herpes. You’re just going to get these flare-ups, and then it’s going to go away for a long time. Then it’ll flare up again, and go away for a long time.

5. The Next Bull Market Leg

Two points to end here. First, to your point about equal access, ICOs opening access, and the regulatory headwinds turning into tailwinds, it’s made things easier for us as investors. Why? There’s a cohort of companies now, post-Hyperliquid, that have come out and said, “We’re making money. We’re going to allocate that capital to our token holders. It may look like a dividend. It may look like a buyback. It may look like a distribution. Doesn’t matter. We’re going to do it. You can’t stop me, and if you can’t stop me, then try to compete with me. And wait, you can’t compete with me.”

There’s a basket of 10 or 20 assets right now that are making a significant amount of money or have a really good revenue growth story. The absolute wipeout and downfall of our angel portfolios, to be humble, has been a result of the regulatory arbitrage opportunity being eradicated in favor of really high-quality founders with really good product-market fit and real businesses on-chain. Those are going to keep rising to the top, and the bottom is going to be left out. It’s going to be an extreme power law over the next 1 to 2 years. It’s very tough to be a bad founder. In the past, it wasn’t that hard in crypto to be a bad founder and do very well for yourself.

On the contrary, it’s a great time to be a great founder. It’s a great time to have a unique value proposition and a great business. The regulatory environment is behind you. Institutions are coming to deposit trillions of dollars into the blockchain ecosystem. If you have a win, a good product, a good team, know your skill set, and have some sort of core unfair advantage, it is the golden heyday of digital assets.

Second, we’re in the beginning stages of the exit from the disbelief phase in the market. I believe this next leg is going to be the most aggressive leg of this bull market. This is when we really see the world wake up to what’s happening. Once Bitcoin breaks out to all-time highs, you get this crazy, aggressive rally across the board. But the gains are made from positioning right now and over the last couple of months before that breakout happens, and then thinking about changing your psychology post-Bitcoin all-time high.

Third cycle, I’m not trying to do the first 2 cycles all over again here, guys. This is how I’m thinking about it. I think the next leg is going to be very aggressive. I think there’s no reason to be bearish. We talked a lot about outperformance and picking the right names. I honestly think that if you look at the store-of-value assets and the set of 10 or 20 on-chain businesses, you’re going to do well with a diversified strategy. I think that’s where we’re at. I don’t think spray and pray works.

Thank you guys for having us. I think we’re at the cusp of the world reawakening to digital assets and an institutional bull run, with capital coming in like we’ve never seen. Tokenized assets will flood the entire blockchain ecosystem. The AI world is waking up to the realities of privacy, which a lot of the technology has been built on-chain to support. Stablecoins are going to absolutely explode, with billions of stablecoins being minted in a matter of days next year by large banks, once GENIUS is fully implemented. I’m talking trillions of dollars in total stablecoin supply by the end of the year or early 2028.

Perps are going to continue to eat the global derivatives markets. We’re less than 1%. If we get to 1%, 2%, or 3%, we’re talking about multiples in volume and fees for Hyperliquid, Lighter, and Variational. The world of store-of-value assets is only going to continue in this post-blue tsunami. The fiat debasement trade is going to be back. It’s going to really benefit Bitcoin, Ethereum, probably Zcash, gold, and maybe a couple of other hard assets.

I think these forces are coming together. We’re on the precipice of the biggest bull run we’ve seen since 2017. I firmly believe that 2024 was not a real bull run. I believe 2021 was just a COVID-induced stimulus with no real fundamentals backing it.

We have real fundamentals, and we have real catalysts outside, with regulatory backing, to really make this the one over the next five years. Really, I think even shorter—two or three years—and we’ll get this really big explosion. So the time is now, guys. Thank you for having us. And that’s my bullish, over-the-top rant to end us out.

Well said.

So bullish.

You guys rock. Thanks so much.

We’re recording this just the day after the election, so we’re hopeful to have this out in the next 24 hours. Hopefully this is timely analysis for folks to consider all that’s ahead. We’d love to have you back in the future. Thank you again.

Thank you. Look forward to having you guys on The Rollup soon.

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