加密市场元叙事——2026年Q4

Thank you for joining us today.

Thanks for having me back on.

A quick disclosure before we begin. Credible Commitments is an independent podcast covering Ethereum and the adjacent ecosystem. Recently, I joined Faction as an investor. Faction is a crypto-native pre-seed fund supporting builders in decentralized infrastructure, AI, middleware, and consumer apps. This show and the opinions expressed here are independent of my work at Faction.

The opinions expressed are mine and my guests' alone, and nothing here is financial, legal, or tax advice. The guest and I may hold positions in the assets we discuss today.

The reason I had you back on is that I wanted to pick your brain and understand what's going on in the markets. We have a lot of movement and things going on on-chain with Robinhood Chain. We have the FOMO craze, Zcash popping, and things happening in Ethereum. In addition to this, we have some things going on in AI, whether it's infrastructure buildout, agents escaping a box, or various new model releases and launches.

I'd love to get your take on a lot of these different topics, depending on whether we have time. Let's just start: What do you think is the current state of the market?

1. The Market Finds New Leadership

The overall market—stock market and everything—has obviously been quite strong, and it's not just AI; it's basically everything. The MAG7 has actually underperformed the rest of the index this year, and so you've been seeing way more breadth within the S&P. My thesis with AI was always that I could try to pick individual AI companies, but if I think AI is just going to be a boon to margins everywhere, then basically you can't really go wrong owning a lot of good companies in various sectors.

Obviously, in AI specifically, you saw memory stocks have a really good year. The neoclouds have had a pretty good year. And then crypto's been quite bad this year. Ever since 10/10, it was bad. There was a little pop to begin the year, and everything was bad again after that, right? It's clear that most of the speculative money was in these AI stocks. That's where the hot ball of capital was.

In the crypto market specifically, if we think about this year—if you talk about after the little beginning-of-the-year pop and how the year went—it was mostly just hype for a bit, right? And then you had that period where Hyperliquid, Venice, and Zcash were all doing well. You started to see 3 coins really separate from the pack, and they were the only things that people were really bidding. Then you had Zcash's bug announcement, which kind of topped those 3 simultaneously. It was clear that they were traded as a unit, even though they're completely different. It was just a way to express a bullish view on crypto at that time.

Since that happened, you did start to see more and more green shoots over the next few months. In July, anecdotally, my watch list was literally Hyperliquid, Zcash, and Venice for a bit, and then I started adding these things to it. Lighter started doing well, along with a bunch of other stuff, and so you started to get these pockets going. You started to see the FOMO downloads start going up in July, and people were like, "What is this? The trenches can be resurrected? Who are these people? CT is dead."

Then Flaunch came along, which got people a bit excited with some on-chain stuff. There was all this stuff bubbling. MetaDAO had some good momentum for a couple of months there, too. So you had seen some things start to happen on-chain, with more participation and more tokens. It kind of seemed like a bottom in certain respects.

Then you had the debt thing a couple of weeks ago, where they were going to start buying back long-term bonds and issuing short-term ones, which is essentially like yield-curve control. So this whole debasement narrative kicked off and everything exploded. The thing is, it's not like you can say that was random and bulls got bailed out on that, I guess, but it just showed that anything could change the narrative.

You also had all the Saylor stuff, too. I forgot about that. Saylor had to delever a lot in July and August, and so he started selling Bitcoin, sold a lot of Strategy stock, and built up a $5 billion or $6 billion reserve. He bought back a lot of the STRC. He's way less levered than he was. Him issuing a bunch of STRC in April to buy Bitcoin obviously was not the best strategy, but he's kind of corrected a lot of that now.

The Saylor impact on the market is also a lot healthier. He's not getting liquidated anytime soon, and he has a lot of cash now to manage the debt for a while. You have the Saylor overhang mostly gone for now. He didn't participate at all in that rally from $62K up to $80K. He did buy the top at $80K, for good measure, like he always does, last week, but that was kind of the end of that rally. He wasn't responsible for the move up, which again is a good sign, right? Because he was really the only Bitcoin buyer in April.

If you think about the market in April, it was a purely Bitcoin market, and then there were those other 3 I talked about, right? But it was all just Saylor issuing STRC, buying Bitcoin, and that was the only thing happening. You had this flow happening, and nothing else was really happening.

Now, to see people talk about the debasement trade and everything, it just set up a really interesting spot for Bitcoin. My markets guys at Delphi just talked about how liquidity was against the crypto market for the whole year, basically, and usually in September you can see a bit of a turnaround there. Obviously, with them doing all the yield-curve control and everything, that was the catalyst to kick things off again. Yeah, things have gotten really crazy.

2. Social Trading Finds Its Audience

Since then, Robinhood Chain has definitely taken over the majority of the speculative activity right now. There is still some stuff on Solana, but Robinhood has really got most of the attention. It definitely reminds you more of those DeFi games from years ago, right?

Yes. If you think about Solana last cycle, it was just pure memecoins with nothing else really going on. Now you're getting, obviously, the social-trading aspect of it. And then they're doing a lot of these things on Robinhood, which I think most people know are not going to end well for most people, but it's bringing a lot of capital onto Robinhood. It's getting a lot of stock issuance.

For those unaware, a big meta on Robinhood right now is that people pair a memecoin with a real stock, and then it pays—the pool takes a high fee, like 4% or something—and it pays out the stock as dividends to holders of the memecoin. So you hold shitcoin, you get real coin. That's the thing.

What is the value of the memecoin? It's that you get this yield from the stock, but the yield from the stock only works if people are trading these pairs back and forth, right? It's obviously not something that's going to survive long term, but it's taking memecoins and adding this new component to them. It's had all this stock issuance on Robinhood because of it.

Now, who are the people really winning from this? Obviously, some of the people who have made money—there's this guy, Crayon Eater, on FOMO. He's got close to a $10 million position in AI Artificial Inu, which he bought at some ridiculous price and has just held this whole time.

But then also the arbitrageurs, because the stocks on these pairs—there's so much demand for speculation and playing this game—that the stocks on Robinhood Chain, especially over the weekend, are trading 3 or 4 times higher than the actual stock price. What happens is the arbitrageurs can just come in and dump stocks into those and close that gap.

Those are the other people who are winning here. It's just free money for them: "I have the ability to mint these stocks, not everybody else does, and they're trading at such a high premium. I'm just going to come in and smash it down."

We'll see where Robinhood goes in the long term with this. I think people like to talk down on this stuff, but let's face it: this is crypto. Crypto at its core is this financial-engineering, financial-alchemy-type stuff where people can make a lot of money in a short period of time. I still just believe the odds are much higher than with any other form of gambling or lottery or anything.

People might say no, but I've seen a lot of things over the last week, like coins I didn't buy. I could have easily bought that at $10 million. In hindsight, why didn't I buy that? There are a lot of these things, right? Obviously, it's not easy, but it does get people excited and brings more capital into crypto.

A lot of people thought that people just got burned so hard on memecoins that they'd never come back, but this FOMO surge has been pretty shocking to a lot of people. I saw this tweet from Tulip King, who works for ThreadGuy, and he was saying that there's this whole subculture out there of these trenchers and traders—the young Gen Zs who aren't on CT or anything—and this is huge for them, right? I totally buy that.

If I was in high school or university, I could 100% see it. Especially in high school, all your buddies have your mobile phone, and you're just trying to make money, climb the leaderboard, and care about the clout that gives you some sort of aura and makes you cool and all that.

Personally, I'm not interested in social trading, but I can totally see why social trading is a big thing. I can totally see this being a massive thing that only increases from here. There are obviously a lot of drawbacks to social trading, like your position sizes, your entry and exit. FOMO is a mobile app, and some people have 10 million on the leaderboard. That's not something I would ever want to have.

I think for the average person, I can just see it getting big. Again, with FOMO, they do all their advertising through Instagram Reels, and that's why most people on CT were kind of blindsided by this. There was a really good post from the Tensor guy. Tensor was this NFT trading platform on Solana, and they made an app called Vector. Vector was FOMO; it was a social trading app, and it never really took off.

The founder said, "I think our problem was that we didn't go after the normal person. We went after power users on Crypto Twitter. We went after the whales on Crypto Twitter, and we thought, 'If we get these people, we'll get everything else.'" Whereas FOMO just went after every average person through Instagram. It's a very interesting strategy.

I also think that FOMO has been really good for Pump, too. Pump.fun, I think people were definitely writing off as a one-hit wonder and assuming it was dead. I think people did not trust their daily revenue. It's the peak of a bear market—how is their daily revenue so consistent? This has to be money laundering because everything is dead. Why are people still doing all this?

Then you see FOMO come out of nowhere, and a lot of the FOMO coins are traded on Pump, right? That's been really good for Pump. I know that Pump is doing its own mobile app now, which might make it tough to overtake FOMO. It'll be interesting to see what FOMO does if they start doing a launchpad and stuff like that.

Robinhood also announced that they're launching a social app, and a lot of people on FOMO are trading Robinhood coins, right? The 3 chains traded most on FOMO are Robinhood, Solana, and BSC, right? BSC, for whatever reason, is just able to stick around forever.

They got some distribution.

Yeah. So it'll be interesting to see how Robinhood's social app adds to the mix.

The big overall meta for crypto, I would say, is debasement. Is the money going to flow into more of these debasement-style trades? The last cycle—I'm talking about 2020 and 2021—was very much a tech trade, where people dreamt about network effects, Fat Protocols, DeFi, all of this, and L1 tokens. AVAX traded at $100 billion and stuff like that, right?

Versus now, that kind of stuff just seems very unlikely to happen. And so...

And then the on-chain stuff seems like social is really what's crushing on-chain right now. I want to give you a lot of credit here. I know you didn't necessarily predict the rise of FOMO specifically, but the last time we talked on the podcast, when we were closing out, you talked about something with social on-chain. You didn't know exactly what the form factor was going to be, but there was something there. Clearly, the social aspect of FOMO is what's driving it.

The other thing that's interesting to me is that they seem to have internalized a lot of the discourse that has been had on the timeline over the last 2 years about product and focusing on getting users outside of CT. That's a really good callout that you made with the Instagram Reels as well.

The last point I'll make on that is that, to your point, Threadguy even said people aren't necessarily discovering tickers on CT anymore. They're discovering them in their own group chats, which was kind of the meta last year with Telegram, but now on Instagram, maybe on TikTok, in different places where they might congregate—maybe even in the high school chat that they have going on, as you mentioned. It's very interesting to see this shift.

3. Quantum Fears Lift Zcash

I want to go back to Bitcoin. One thing I was trying to figure out was that there's been quite a bit of FUD around Q-day coming very soon and Bitcoin being slow to act. You have a lot of coins that have an exposed public key. A number of those coins can obviously migrate, but there are also the Satoshi coins and the lost coins.

I was wondering how much of that was baked into the price—not just some seller selling, but also some FUD. Then you saw Zcash outperform Bitcoin. I'd be curious about your take there: Do you think that's had any impact at all directionally, and has that helped Zcash get a bid beyond this privacy narrative?

I think the quantum fears definitely had some impact. I think it was around the end of last year or the beginning of this year when people were talking about that a lot. AI was also really strong then, and now too, right? Bitcoin had run up so much.

If you're an allocator, you have a lot of Bitcoin, and you start hearing all this quantum stuff, you're not really smart enough to tell how big of a threat it is. It's kind of something you can sell, and you can rationalize it, especially if you're managing money for other people. All I can do is read people who are really smart on the topic and try to understand how realistic this is and on what timeline.

For Zcash specifically, I think there are a lot of factors at play. I think the privacy thing is a good meme. I'm not sure how much privacy is going into the performance of Zcash, though, to be completely honest. It's definitely a part of it. The quantum thing also probably helped Zcash a bit.

I do think that the market is looking at Zcash as a bit of a hedge on Bitcoin. If we're doing this whole debasement trade thing, what the August rally showed is that there's a lot of money that wants to buy crypto, but there's still not a ton of assets that you love buying. Zcash, as this store-of-value thing, is an asset that can just suck up a lot of liquidity that's looking to speculate on crypto flows, debasement, and everything.

If Zcash has been chosen as the true beta to BTC, then you can imagine it continuing to do well. I don't want to make it seem like that's the only reason. The team is very smart—the Zcash developers over the Bitcoin developers. I know you take the Zcash developers over the Bitcoin developers from a technical perspective any day. They're doing a lot of work with scaling, Tachyon coming, and all of that. They've done the formal verification.

You can make the case that it is the most hardened protocol. That doesn't mean there's zero risk. Even with formal verification and everything, you can't say there's a 0.00% risk that there could be an inflation bug at some point. That's something you have to accept when owning a privacy asset. But you can look at all these things as reinforcing and hardening the protocol.

I think it's also a very polarizing asset. I'm not one of these people who's going to tell you that Zcash is going to reach 10% of Bitcoin's market cap, but I'm also not one of these people telling you that the Zcash pump is just a cabal, manipulation, a meme, and everything else.

When it started pumping in October of last year, I had a tweet that said, "I'm not buying Zcash."

Yes.

Then I really thought about it over the next few weeks. I talked about it on the podcast last time, too. I was like, "Okay, it actually does kind of make sense that Zcash could do very well over the next 5 years." There are a lot of good things that used to be headwinds that are turning into tailwinds for them.

It had a crazy year this year. It started at $500, went down to $200, went up to $680, and then the bug nuked it by 70% in 24 hours. Then it went back up to around $880. Right now, it's at $810. That's a crazy year.

To hold through that, right? There's definitely 1 trader who just killed it in every direction, but there are also tons of people who just got chopped every which way on this. It's one of those where I kind of just let it sit there. It goes up a lot, maybe I sell a little, but I still want exposure to it.

Yes.

It's just asymmetric upside, where you can't say that other assets have the same kind of potential. If I had to take 1 asset over the next 5 years and put all my money into it, and it was between Hyperliquid and Zcash, I would take Hyperliquid.

But if you're telling me what asset has a chance to 10x over the next 5 years, I think the case for Zcash is way stronger because it's an alt store of value. There are no real caps on those, right? Whereas you have to imagine that Hyperliquid, at certain valuations, is just very rich.

Yes.

They're just 2 different types of assets, right? My opinion of Zcash has always been like that. That's also why you've seen it be so violent this year: nobody knows. It's this collective-belief thing. Even now, it's at $810.

It could definitely drop back down to $500, and that's going to shake out a ton of people, too. Maybe it keeps going down after that. Maybe that was it, right? But maybe it just rockets back to $2,500, right?

I think that there's a big group of people who are super-convicted on it, and I think that's good for it. I think the fact that it's so polarizing is also good for it because it means that there's a lot of capital that hasn't entered. That was what was really good for Hyperliquid.

4. Hyperliquid Becomes An Exchange

Even I was on the other side of Hyperliquid. I was like, "This thing is kind of—it's like three validators in Tokyo." I was definitely in that camp. It's closed-source. They say it's transparent, but it's not really. A lot of people felt that way, and that was just fuel. If you were somebody who was convicted on Hyperliquid at the bottom, you crushed it. Kudos to those people, and kudos to the Hyperliquid team.

All that stuff that I used to care about was like, yeah, it doesn't make sense for Hyperliquid to have to make some of these trade-offs. What it's been able to do with the pre-IPO markets and everything is a really cool product. I think my problem with Hyperliquid maybe was thinking about it through the crypto lens. I should have just thought of it as this really interesting exchange.

You get big enough, and you kind of get past the regulatory stuff. You're seeing that now. Instead of the U.S. just trying to ban Hyperliquid or something, they're looking for a way to bring them in. There was that rumor about Kraken being the Hyperliquid front end. I guess you would trade on Hyperliquid through Kraken, so you were KYC'd, right?

There was a period of time when, if Hyperliquid had to add KYC, it would be really bearish. But—

Yes.

We had passed that period. I talked about this on the Hivemind pod a few times, but we had passed that probably at the beginning of the year, where being forced to add KYC could actually be bullish in a sense because it would bring on regulated, big U.S. money that can't trade on it.

I think it seems pretty clear that Hyperliquid is going to have 2 books. They're going to have the regulated KYC book, and maybe you trade on that through a front end, like a regulated front end such as Kraken. Then it'll have what it has now, and they'll live in 2 different silos. They can serve both groups.

People used to think that Lighter had a unique advantage over Hyperliquid in the U.S., but I'm not even totally sure that's true at this point. How do you think about Trade.xyz, and how do you think about Hyperliquid continuing to monetize HIP-3 going forward? Do you think we'll see more?

It seems like you're alluding to that with the Kraken deal. They're basically using HyperCore as this back end of liquidity, so you can trade size whether it's RWAs or a crypto-native asset. With perps, the spectrum is almost unlimited, right, with respect to what you can list as long as you've got an oracle. I'm curious how you're thinking about that.

I think these HIP markets are mostly winner-takes-most, so I think Trade.xyz will be the biggest play there. I think their new HIP-4s, like outcome prediction markets and stuff, will probably be winner-takes-most as well.

Do you think they're going to start taking share from Kalshi?

Yeah, I could see that. I go back and forth on prediction markets a lot still. I know we talked about it last time, and the whole sports-gambling thing—I feel like that take has aged pretty well. I think sports gambling has become even more hated since then.

There are definitely a lot of interesting use cases for prediction markets in the long run. Every time I see a prediction market, I'm like, "Oh, that's it." Like the Zcash exploit: you can buy Yes, it was exploited, and buy Zcash, and that's a great trade, right? That's a great hedge.

But then you go on, and there's never any liquidity for anything that you would actually want to do. There's only liquidity on sports betting and the elections. The elections have good liquidity, so I think there's still a lot of work to be done there.

By no means do I think that Kalshi or Polymarket couldn't have won. Kalshi seems like it's winning right now. We'll see. I think Hyperliquid's prediction markets are disrupting Polymarket a lot because it's the on-chain version. Speaker 1

What's harder to build: a perps exchange or prediction markets?

Definitely perps.

You have so many more things to build: the margining system, the ADL, all this stuff. Prediction markets are super easy. You can make them complicated, for sure, especially once you start adding leverage to them, which definitely will happen if it hasn't already.

Kalshi is also really trying to grow its perps business, right?

Do you think that we'll start to see this consolidation into these super apps that are basically offering everything? We're kind of seeing that already. If you log on to Coinbase today, you have a super app. If you log on to the Robinhood app, it's the same kind of thing.

They're good at what they're really good at, but the extra stuff they're not so good at offering yet. I'm curious if you think we'll continue to see consolidation there, and whether owning the user and the distribution is going to continue to really matter.

What I like about Hyperliquid, just to add this point, is that they've basically said, yes, we still care about trading on HyperCore directly, with our front end perhaps, but at the same time, it's open for anybody to build on. With HIP-4, you're going to have more of that type of activity.

I just think that's an interesting thesis, which is different from what Polymarket and Kalshi are doing in particular. It's also different from any of the centralized exchanges today that are trying to integrate this stuff.

I guess Robinhood is the unique one, right? Robinhood is building its own chain experience from scratch. It has its own distribution and its own users that it can also bring. As you noted already with the FOMO thing, it can access retail that maybe purely crypto-native Polymarket users or sports bettors on Polymarket aren't necessarily. That's not that customer per se.

It's just interesting. Anyway, I'm curious about your take on the super app—whether you think that's going to be a network effect as well, and whether there's a convergence there.

5. Super Apps Capture The User

I can definitely still see the super-app thing working. It would probably be more through mergers and acquisitions than one team building all of them. It seems highly unlikely that one team would build everything.

There's no reason to me why one thing can't just kind of dominate most sectors. I would say Coinbase definitely had a disappointing year. Base went really hard on the—

Content coins.

Content coins, yeah. They really tried to make sure they weren't meme coins. They were like, "These aren't meme coins," even though they still go to zero.

Robinhood seems like it's really crushed them. It seems like they get it. Maybe it was WallStreetBets originally, right? They were the first loud Robinhood traders, so to say. But they seem to get that degen spirit in a way that some of these other companies don't understand.

Even the way that they talk about their products, they're not trying to be holier than thou. They're just trying to provide a great experience to their users. It seems like they have a good understanding.

For whatever reason, a lot of OG DeFi people didn't really want to use Solana or Base. I understand the Solana thing, but they're pretty down to use Robinhood. I think Gabe at MetaLeX has said that Robinhood is what MegaETH should have been, in a sense.

There's really just not a lot of room for a lot of chains. Sometimes people will be like, "How can you launch a new chain?" It's true that we have way too many chains, but that doesn't mean the right operator can't make one that does very well. You're seeing that with Robinhood.

I wasn't expecting the Robinhood Chain to be a flop or anything. I expected it to do decently well, but I wasn't expecting it to explode this quickly or with the kind of stuff that's on it, right? When it started, it was like that Cash Cat token. The thesis was basically: we'll buy the tokens on Robinhood Chain, then they'll list them on the Robinhood app, and we'll use retail as exit liquidity.

Yes, it's cynical, but that's what people were doing. That's what they were using it for. Now it's really turned into this completely insane on-chain thing. You have some of the NFT stuff. It's really taken a lot of speculative capital from everywhere else.

I've been kind of interested in and bullish on that real-world-assets protocol, but all the speculative capital is just on Robinhood, and that's been very detrimental to it being on Ethereum mainnet, right?

We'll see how it goes because these kinds of games can last a long time, but eventually they end. What will Robinhood do for the second leg of its chain? What will the second era, I guess, of the Robinhood Chain be after this period is over?

I don't know how long this period is going to last. It could honestly last a week. It could last 6 more months. It's going to have some violent sell-off at some point, but I'd be pretty confident that it would come back after that.

Do you think that Robinhood has an edge because it can either issue its own tokenized RWA or basically choose the winning tickers and start to build deeper liquidity on some of these tickers? If RWA trading is a thing and you actually have more liquidity, then you could maybe start the flywheel in things like lending markets or vault strategies, where you take your RWA, put it in a vault strategy, and now you're getting yield on top of your stock price while it's appreciating.

Traditionally, for most retail users, that's been kind of difficult to do in a brokerage-account setting.

Just curious about your thoughts there.

Tokenized stocks are the same thing. Even on Solana, it seems like Backpack is doing the best job there. I had this tweet a few months ago, and it's basically what other chains need to do. It was directed at Robinhood: You need to look at what Solana is doing with tokenized stocks, because for any chain, you need assets people want to trade and own, and everything else is downstream of that.

People can say, “Solana is just meme coins.” Well, yeah, those were the assets people wanted to trade, right? I still think that buying stocks on Solana—I don't know off the top of my head—I still think it's better, but they don't have all these games with the meme coins, and stocks took off on Robinhood. You have the one stock ticker; it's much cleaner.

I don't see the point of owning stocks on something like Ethereum, right? It definitely makes sense on Solana, on Robinhood, and on Base. This is another area where Base kind of dropped the ball. They're just starting to try to push tokenized stocks, but they could have been doing that a while back. It's a very obvious evolution to go down, right?

Do you think Robinhood will also do some kind of cross-margining system where you can use your on-chain assets to cross-margin into your brokerage account and vice versa?

Maybe Coinbase kind of does that. Coinbase is like—you can take a loan against Bitcoin, but it's done through Morpho in the backend; you're just using Coinbase's frontend. I could see Robinhood doing stuff like that.

I don't know if it would be the other way, where your on-chain assets let you use the Robinhood app, but maybe. It makes sense. There's a lot of stuff they can do, being who they are. The thesis that you want to own the most successful infrastructure projects on Robinhood Chain makes a lot of sense, because you can be pretty confident that there's going to be a lot of effort and money put into keeping it relevant versus a lot of other L2s.

Let's pick on MegaETH. MegaETH sank. Scroll obviously is already dead. There's a set window where they need to do well, or else it's kind of just over, right? Whereas Robinhood will have a million shots on goal.

Yeah.

And their first shot on goal went the best it could possibly go. It's super underrated that a lot of finance revolves around understanding the law, and Robinhood has all this legal infrastructure already set up. This is something that a crypto-native team like Hyperliquid has obviously improved on: They hired Jake Chervinsky, and they're talking with regulators and whatnot.

So clearly, they're making strides there. But that's always been something that crypto-native teams have struggled with to a certain degree. Robinhood is now leveraging that asset to help improve the strategies they use to develop products.

You bring up a good point, though, about Coinbase dropping the ball, and I'd be curious. You gave a 5-year prediction, a good one, on Zcash versus HYPE. If you had to go all in—I think I know the answer—but if you had to go all in on COIN or HOOD, which one would you do over the next 5 years?

I mean, yeah, HOOD. That's also a super-consensus take. I don't know anybody that would take COIN over HOOD for the next 5 years right now.

They have a good business for their high-net-worth clients, right? And they have a good custodial business that drives—

I'm just saying, me saying HOOD isn't really an interesting perspective. It would be interesting to get somebody on who would take COIN and hear why, because that could be interesting. The HOOD one is kind of obvious; it's just—

How about this: HOOD versus HYPE?

I mean, the thing is, Coinbase just isn't cool. Coinbase was never cool; it was always cringe, I feel like. I'm sorry for saying that, but that's just kind of the perspective I've always had of it. Kraken has been cool. But Robinhood is cool, right? That honestly matters a lot. What were you saying—HOOD versus HYPE?

Yeah.

No, I would take HOOD for that. Definitely a 5-year thing. Robinhood is a company that's been around for a while. They kind of have the whole U.S. retail trading market, and they're very heavily regulated. I have no concerns that they're going to be around in 5 years.

Whereas with Hyperliquid, the risk is obviously higher that something catastrophic would happen. When you're doing this exercise, it's not what you think will perform best; it's putting all your money into something for 5 years and not touching it. I have to take the thing that's more likely to still be there. It's not upside-maximizing; it's more downside-minimizing.

Totally fair.

But I don't know, man. In 5 years, Hyperliquid could have a whole centralized, regulated product, too. There's no reason why they can't. You have the Hyperliquid app that you download on the App Store, and you're trading perps on it, and then you're trading options on it—not right now; their team is way too small. You could see them eventually going in that direction.

That's interesting. If we had Jeff on the show right now, I'm sure he would say that he's coming for Binance and Coinbase.

The guy's just crushed it. And yeah, I do think that he wants to come for everybody. Their whole thing has been “House of All Finance,” right?

What I like—what's good—about Hyperliquid is that they don't tease stuff. They don't do marketing tweets hyping stuff up. They don't really listen to other people's opinions. They kind of ignore what people say on Crypto Twitter and stuff like that. They honestly just keep shipping and making their product what they want it to be.

The execution by that team is world-class. They've done such a good job of not being distracted, and they're still shipping updates every day. They could easily have—so many teams in crypto at this point would have just vested and rested.

The one thing I really like about what they did in terms of HIP-3 is requiring 500,000 HYPE bonds, I think for 183 days minimum, staked in order to participate in that program. I just think that, number one, it attracts people who were early to HYPE to build, because that's probably the only way you were getting that sizable amount of HYPE, at least liquid. Or it makes people go and buy HYPE on the market or accumulate it over time.

It creates some kind of sink, at least, for the token, even if with the growth program they're capturing slightly fewer fees. I know they're going to change that soon, but the point is that they have this token sink and this incentive alignment. If you look at Ethereum with L2s, they don't have that incentive alignment. The blob fee that L2s are paying is minimal. The on-chain settlement fee that they're paying is minimal.

Robinhood is generating millions in volume, and Ethereum is capturing around $2,000 from that. I think it was really good incentive alignment, the way this program was designed. In hindsight, the foresight they had gives them an edge that none of these other players really have.

6. Ethereum Finds Its Moneyness

Yeah, the rent paid to Ethereum—I've honestly been kind of neutral, agnostic about ETH. I was really bearish on it a few years ago, and I thought Solana was what you wanted to own over ETH. But at the end of 2024, I was kind of like, I actually have this tweet from the end of 2024: I think the SOL/ETH ratio will go up, but I also think that it's kind of a waste of time at this point to predict—

Compare that to—

SOL versus ETH, and your time is better spent elsewhere. Obviously, the elsewhere is Hyperliquid, which I did not do. I unfortunately bought other terrible bags, but it is true that this whole ETH versus SOL thing has been in no man's land for 2 years now. I'm sometimes surprised when people still have these arguments. It's 2026, and you're arguing ETH versus SOL on these 2021 talking points.

It seems pretty clear to me that Solana as a chain will make a lot more revenue than ETH over the long run. ETH has more of this moneyness, store-of-value factor than Solana, and it's just a really hard thing to predict. It's very hard for me to predict what's going to happen with the ETH price.

People still bring up the low rent that people pay to Ethereum, and it's like, yeah, this is just what it is now. This isn't a new insight. L2s don't pay Ethereum much in ETH. But this is the debasement trade thing, and people are seeing ETH as a real store of value again, right? It's possible it could definitely do well. I'm not going to tell you it won't, but I also don't know—

BlackRock, right? You've got BitMine, you've got SharpLink. The ETF flows from BlackRock were great in the last couple of weeks. Tom Lee owns 5% now. Lubin is probably going to continue to increase his ownership.

I really like your point, though, about the moneyness and the store-of-value factor, because that is a distinct narrative that SOL has never had and probably never will have.

Yeah. I think for ETH, it's not clear which way it works out, but it's very simple what it is: It's just money.

That's what's going to give it a big valuation or a low valuation. That's really it. It's never going to justify any fundamentals. And so that's always been the thing with me: I don't know, man. My opinion on whether ETH is money or not is irrelevant. I'm one person.

Are people going to trade it like that, or are they not?

And if they do, it'll go well if they do that. But nothing else matters. And it's not worth beating home the point about the fees. I've seen some tweets recently about how Robinhood paid about $200 in fees for the last transaction. It's like, yeah, we know that at this point, so we'll see.

Solana's never really had the true moneyness, but it definitely has moneyness baked into its valuation. Otherwise, it'd be crazy overvalued, right? Why does Solana still trade at a much higher market cap than all the other L1s? It is the most used one, right? It also gets a lot of the net-new products on it. People like to write off Solana all the time, but it's still doing well from my perspective.

Do you think that they have to win in perps? I know there's been a lot of obsession around there, and I know a lot of the leadership talking points on the timeline have been around perps and getting there, but can they just win on stocks? Does it have to be perps?

Yeah, maybe. I think they're just a good place for a lot of developers to go build whatever on. So, you've seen the trading-card stuff too, right? I don't think they're going to win on perps, and I don't think they need to, because you also can't win on perps and then win on all these other things too. This was the whole—I don't know if you saw the recent voting in Solana governance.

Yes. You want to break that down?

One of them was just to increase the disinflation rate, so basically get to the terminal rate. Solana has a terminal inflation rate of 1.5%, basically just to get there in half the time. And so that one passed. That one almost didn't pass until Mert.

It was also super funny because Mert is the biggest privacy advocate. And then all the public onchain voting that was going to cause this proposal to fail—he went and shamed everybody publicly, and then it passed. And so it was super ironic because it's like—

We need private voting on Solana. We need private voting so Mert can't bully you.

But no, he was right. The voters were just kind of misinformed, right? But then the other proposal, which is more interesting, was done by the guys at Temporal, and it was going to change what apps pay in fees. This was essentially going to lower perp AMM fees, but it was going to increase fees for Jupiter, aggregators, and money markets.

And if you do that, you're no longer a true general-purpose chain, right? Because now you're directly incentivizing certain kinds of apps and hurting others. Even this app called Melee—they were like, "This proposal would cost us so much more on our product," right? And so that proposal failed, and Solana stays general-purpose.

But if Solana does eventually change its fee markets to incentivize different apps, then you're really trying to win. I think there's a lot of people within Solana that are like, "We want to be general-purpose, and we want to have any app come here and be the best place for any developer, and they don't need to worry about things changing in the future," right?

And then there's another side that is like, "The main use case is onchain trading, and everything should be built around that use case. And if your application costs more money because you're not directly in this vertical, then so what? You are not the main use case."

As a developer, if you're going to commit—this is why this proposal freaked a lot of people out—because you're going to commit to building on a platform, there's that platform risk.

Yes.

And there was a chance here that Solana's entire fee structure was going to cause a lot of these apps to be uneconomical, and that is a bit of a scary proposition, right? So I am curious to see if that proposal comes up in another shape or form at some point. It would have made Solana's economics better. Hypothetically, it should have 10 times the amount of revenue Solana was making a day.

But again, how would it have changed what apps were still running after that? Then you take the historical fees, put the new fee schedule on it, and you see the outcome, but then you're not really adjusting for less activity on those apps because of that, right? So, yeah, we'll see.

I think Solana still has this global spot. It's definitely spot trading, which is their use case, and that's why getting the stocks on is good and everything. And even Phoenix, completely onchain—it's just technically a very impressive thing. It's just hard to compete with Hyperliquid from a pure product perspective when it comes to stuff like that.

Are there any other RWAs, whether it's commodity futures or corporate bonds or FX? Is there anything like this that you think is interesting for Solana?

I mean, FX is definitely the holy grail. Whoever wins that, because it's just so much volume. The FX market is the biggest spot market in the world, right?

Yeah, trillions.

The FX market alone does about $10 trillion a day, and half of that's swaps, and then there's $3 trillion of spot or something. And obviously there's the off-ramping issue that still is a thing. This is what Circle is trying to win, right? FX—and they're kind of suited to do it because they're an issuer of multiple stablecoins in different jurisdictions. Yeah, we'll see.

So we got HYPE, which is basically the bet on trading perps and this financial infrastructure that other people can build upon, competing maybe directly with Robinhood. Then you have Solana, which is very much competing on spot markets and also on memecoins still—we see with Pump, as you noted much earlier in the episode.

And then you got ETH, which you noted has more of this store-of-value, moneyness bid. And then you got Zcash, which is benefiting from a few different narratives, including maybe Bitcoin disillusionment, also the unstoppable private-money meme thesis, which is a good one, and also just another store-of-value asset to hold on to. And then you got the OG Bitcoin, of course, which everybody has their opinions on.

So, looking at the crypto landscape right now, is there any other major ecosystem or coin or something to be on the lookout for that people are sleeping on right now that you think in a year or 2 is going to look obvious in hindsight?

7. Crypto Finds Its Next Markets

Yeah. One thing on Zcash I'll say, too, is that I do think privacy is set up the best it's ever been with AI and everything. And so I do think you'll see more interest in a lot of privacy stuff, even outside Zcash.

As for next things, I definitely think onchain options eventually will have their day. I've been dying on this hill for a long time, but you are starting to see some decent momentum there, with Drift leading that right now. They're all pretty small, all-day onchain options protocols, and I'm sure Lighter will bring options. And I guess with the new HIP-4, you have options on those too, right?

Yes. So, yeah, I'd expect those to eventually have their moment. I definitely think social and debasement are the 2 main themes of the cycle. I think there's going to be a lot of temptation, and I've already had it, where I've started buying all these random, fun little games and eating into my good-bag money, which—you've got to be careful, right? Playing the onchain games and everything.

I think those are 2 main themes. I'm still really excited about MetaDAO and the onchain capital formation and making the real tokens. I think one thing we didn't even talk about is this new SEC guidance about bringing ICOs back. I think that'll be a pretty big thing too.

In the long run, for crypto, it is just the best place for capital formation, and especially if you're getting this new regulation that could make it more enticing to come onchain. And as much as I hate the token-equity thing, Gabe Shapiro has said that this new regulation is going to make it so enticing for normal companies to launch a token. In 5 years from now, I see tons of robotics and longevity, and maybe even straight-up tokenized equity onchain. That is an interesting thing to track as well.

If I think about the markets, the SPV market is one that could be kind of interesting to disrupt, because there's so much fraud in that. I don't know what the onchain solution to it is, but the whole private market seems like something crypto can potentially help out with.

A lot of the problem with SPV fraud is that you give them money, but then you never actually get the shares, or then they sell your position after it goes up 20%. There's lots of horror stories around this kind of stuff.

I saw one the other day where someone was like, they did Anthropic or OpenAI at about $80 billion or something, and then their position was sold without them knowing at a 20% gain, but they didn't find out. SpaceX—that's happened too. I don't know if you read Matt Levine, but there are these people that did the SpaceX SPV 5 years ago, and this guy thought that he was sitting on about $300,000, but it was, "Oh, no, we actually sold your position 4 years ago."

We just hadn't told you. So these are things that need to be fixed somehow. So, yeah, I think getting more and more of these interesting asset classes on crypto rails just makes so much sense. FX, those kinds of private assets, those new venture asset classes, and options are probably 3 of the more interesting things that we don't have yet that I think will come.

And then I definitely think the social thing is real. I'm sure we'll see lots and lots more social experimentation. I don't think it's just going to be FOMO and that's it. I do think, though, that the market—even though the market's been doing well—one of the reasons I think Zcash is doing well is because there is a lot of money now that wants to get back into crypto, but it's like, where do you put it?

You go and buy some of these DeFi protocols, and after the first 30% pump, it's like, “This is looking rich again already,” right? So maybe I just need to put in a bunch of liquidity, and that's why something like ETH could do well, right? If people just want something very liquid, tradable, and a lot cheaper than Bitcoin. Ethereum does have a big ecosystem. It's going to continue to have a really big ecosystem if you consider the Robinhood chains and stuff as part of Ethereum, right?

It's still a token picker's market, right? That's the main takeaway. The market looks good. Social trading is bringing a lot of people back to speculating. One thing that Jason at Delphi, who's head of markets, mentioned on the last Tidemind is that Bitcoin, ETH, and Solana are just breaking out of these bottoms, and you already have coins at all-time highs.

That has never happened. Bitcoin just broke out from $62K to like $80K, and Hyperliquid is at an all-time high. Zcash is at a realistic all-time high. Who cares about its early $3K, whatever price it traded at, right? Venice is lower market cap, but again, it's at an all-time high, right?

You're getting things that are already at all-time highs. If this is the beginning of the bull, it's like we're at the beginning of it, which is just not how these markets have ever worked in the past. So I also think that maybe what you're seeing on Robinhood is that a lot of your 2020–2021 experience could help you there.

But I think for a lot of stuff, the past of what happened in crypto is probably not useful because the market just doesn't go in those clean patterns anymore, where Bitcoin goes, then ETH goes, and then it's even kind of reversed, where memes go first. So, yeah, we'll see. I'm hoping that we get some more new, cool stuff, right?

Not just some of the—I mean, yeah, some of the stuff on Robinhood is pretty brain-rotty. I think we'll see some cool things with options, also. Options are a natural place for Robinhood to do well, just because of the brand. It could honestly be a shitty options product, but if it's on-chain Robinhood options, people will try it out, right?

I'm cautiously optimistic here that we have some good momentum. My macro guys tell me it's not as scary as it was in the past, obviously. But there is a lot of circularity in the AI bubble, and we'll see how that goes. I'm not one to call the top on it.

I think what would be the best case for Bitcoin—and just crypto—is not that the AI trade is over or anything, but that the speculative capital playing the AI trade has transferred to more long-term capital that wants lower returns because these things have been repriced so aggressively.

It's kind of like when a stock grows from a growth stock to a value stock: It changes the investor clientele that owns that stock, right? It's not that AI stocks are value stocks. I'm not saying that. I just mean that the most speculative capital may be taking its profits on memory, the neocloud, and the hyperscalers that did well in the past.

It's funny; you kind of saw old crypto cycles in AI. The hyperscalers started, and they were just crushing everything. They've actually very much underperformed this year, but then you've seen the smaller and smaller things do well now, right?

Yeah, we'll see. Obviously, there's the whole open-source AI thing, and what that's going to do to the revenue story of the labs and everything. Very interesting times.

It was great catching up with you on markets today. I appreciate all the candid opinions, and I think you added a lot of value for anybody who wound up listening to this. Let's close the show on a positive note. If you had to say, Ceteris, above or below $1,000 by the end of the year, what do you say?

$1,000? I'll say above. I'd be pretty disappointed if it wasn't. It would probably mean that this rally was kind of just short-lived, and then we went back to the old ways.

At $1,000, I'll take it. It's not a big move from here. Once you start getting to those bigger numbers that other people are throwing out, I'm less convinced, but I can see it, right? So that's the thing.

Fair enough. It was a privilege to have you on the show today, Ceteris. Follow him on Twitter. Great takes as always, whether it's shitposts or analysis. Excellent follow.

Thank you, sir. And, yeah, thanks for having me back on.

Cheers. Maybe we'll do this again in 6 months.