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GM, lads. We are so back. All it took was a 20K week—you know, a 20K Bitcoin week—to bring an episode again. So we're here. Now we're nuking. We're trying to save it. As we speak, all of us are clicking some bids to see if we can prevent this expected washout. Whenever you get too much one-way action, at some point it's going to reverse, but we have an episode. Thiccy's in the house, an OG lad here. We've got a couple of relevant guests as well that we'll bring on. Let's kick off the episode and try to stop this bleed.

All right, guys, episode 102. It's been 4 months. We've all had a very good summer, I think, in different ways, and what a week it's been. Let's start by looking at the chart over the last few months and what's happened, because it all came at once. Maybe Justin can bring up some of these recent moves, but wow. As fast as we went down, we came back up even faster. It looks like it's all happened in a third of the time that we went back down. So we're back to around the 80K range. The trenches are back. Apparently, we're going to talk about FOMO in a little bit and understand what the kids are doing over there.

A lot of the coins that should have done well, like the expected ones—HYPE, Zcash—I think these were the promised ones, and they did indeed deliver. Although I have to say, a lot of other stuff has done well, too. So it's one of those “everyone feels like a genius” weeks, I think.

1. Is The Bottom In?

Came out of nowhere. I think we've always—yeah, we've always said that stocks need to slow down in order for crypto to catch a bid, because as soon as that stops working is when people will look for another get-rich-quick answer.

Maybe Thiccy, you have an explanation for this.

I haven't been keeping too much track of it.

You're just looking at Pokémon all day. Is that what's going on?

2. Pasta of the Week

I thought crypto was going to die by the wayside, so this rally has been surprising for me. I think many others as well. I talked to DeFi Squared, and obviously we've seen some other people leave. Pigeon and a bunch of other people have not been bullish. I had a talk with a bunch of TradFi guys this last weekend. I was at a big event, and when I told them I was doing crypto, they were like, “Oh, isn't everyone quitting?” I talked to a bunch of people recently and said, “Not anymore. Check the last 2 days. We're back.”

What do you guys think? Do you think we bottomed? Obviously, we're really dumping right now, but we did have a sense of euphoria. I'm not a fear-and-greed type of guy, but I think fear and greed hit around 70 earlier this week, when it was at 10 a month ago. That was the fastest change in sentiment in the history of crypto. I know there are narratives around debasement and whatnot, so, Jordi, for example, do you have an idea on whether the debasement narrative is real? Do you think Bitcoin actually bottomed? Do you have thoughts on that?

I'm 97% confident that we must have bottomed, because of the amount of volume that traded at 60K, the amount of time we spent there, and the amount of things that were going wrong. Literally everything was thrown at it. If we go back to 60K, who's selling again? It just feels like that's going to be a hard sell or something.

You need something crazy to happen.

Something really bad has to happen.

That's podcast.

First test of a true bull rally.

Yeah. This is the one. That's true, though. Holy.

But we are in a great macro setup here, because once the bond vigilantes had enough of an effect that the Fed started interfering, you just start talking about the dollar. When you start talking about the dollar all day, gold and Bitcoin are the 2 things—I think there's nothing else except for those 2 that are the immediate responses to dollar debasement talk. It's gotten far and wide.

Even Trump, if you look at this tweet here, he's not very happy with the bond vigilantes, and he's willing to bring in the military to stop them. So we give it a listen.

My question to you, Jordi, is that I tried PvPing Trump and Bessent earlier this year in the oil trade, and I got wrecked. They're powerful enemies.

They're powerful enemies. That's why, if you're shorting bonds, you have to be scared. If you're shorting the 30-year, it's going to be a big battle. I think it's going to go back and forth. At the end of the day, I think the only thing that will keep it up is trashing the dollar, and they're going to be willing to trash the dollar. I don't think there's any way around it.

We had a debate some time ago about whether $10 million was enough to retire. Today, I saw this tweet from some guy saying you need $30 million now to retire. That's the new number, and it's gone up 3x in less than a year. Clearly, there's some amount of dollar debasement going on.

Someone's saying, “Taiki, you're going to be the bear. Are you going to be the bear?”

I'm always skeptical. I've always been skeptical—never not skeptical.

Yeah.

Taiki's going to come back to crypto. He's looking for new shorts now.

I'll probably come back. Don't worry. Shorting is shorting.

The most interesting thing, I would say, is that over the last 3 months, if you look at the volumes, everything has been on RWAs. Frequently, the top-trading stock is not Ethereum or Solana. It's been SpaceX, Nvidia, or whatever the stock of the day has been. SanDisk, obviously, and we had a lot of the Korean stocks.

The last few days, the top 4 on Hyperliquid have been Bitcoin, ETH, SOL, and HYPE. I don't know if that's going to last or not, but at least for now, the speculative traders have returned to crypto as a source of volatility. Volatility has been super high and probably will continue to be for the next few weeks. That's what these traders like. But Dim, what's your feeling? Are these mid-caps going to be traded for a long time, or what?

3. Is Anyone New Actually Coming Into Crypto?

I agree with what you previously said: Everyone who's still here trading this market probably feels like a genius right now, or at least as of 2 hours ago. I've talked to so many people, and there are 2 categories. One category is the true believers—the autistic believers, I would call them—that include us. We've been glued to the screen 24/7, willing to click green as soon as we see this decent intervention.

Then there's the, I guess, more normal individuals who just went around looking for another market that was performing a little bit better. These guys are completely sidelined, and this also includes a lot of the institutional players in the space.

I think the first move that we got, which was a negative-convexity-type move, is obviously done. Now we're in the process of getting these people back who changed focus, and maybe they're coming back. That's a different kind of buying activity that will happen.

I think this probably means that you should have no FOMO chasing any of these coins. You should be buying dips, because the casino is back in action. We can all feel it. It is a turning point, so I think you can start chasing narratives again. The Ethena trade was great for whoever caught it. These are all really good signs that show people are looking at this market and liquidity is coming back in some way.

One thing I'll say, though, which I think that take is missing a little bit, is that it seems pretty clear to me that there aren't new entrants or new money coming into the crypto-specific space. Obviously, things like RWA perps have new demand, it seems like, but it doesn't seem like we have a new cohort of people interested in crypto.

I wondered about this as we were coming out of the last bear market, and I'm wondering even more so now if that's going to limit the upside potential, because I don't think any new people are joining crypto right now. It's just people who were interested in trading AI, memory, et cetera. Once that trade washed out, they're now looking back and returning to crypto.

Those guys have a lot of money. They made a lot of money on AI and memory and stuff. If it's just them, that's enough. I'll be happy.

But our cohort has solved the game, right, for a lot of these assets. I don't know. I'm just continuously wondering how hard this on-chain meta can run. I was talking to Kyle Soska, who's partners with Flood.

Obviously, they're big HYPE people, like maxis. But one thing he mentioned at the dinner is that as long as the debasement narrative is back and that trade is back, I think gold and Bitcoin have an all-time-high correlation at this point. There can be outside money coming into Bitcoin, specifically, if people view Bitcoin as a safety trade. I know that kind of sounds ridiculous, but I think Bitcoin is starting to become part of the conversation around being a defensive position that's part of gold beta. As long as that continues to be the case, I think Bitcoin will be supported.

No, and it hasn't really panned out.

But I feel like as long as Bitcoin's not nuking, I think these good alts, like Hyperledger, Zcash, and PUMP, can continue to go, and that's kind of where I think our focus should be. Most alts are just dead, right? They should not be touched, but—

It's just hard to imagine that BTC can run back the digital-gold narrative for the 3rd time running without doing the opposite of what a digital gold would do. During COVID, Bitcoin nuked and then rallied. In the last hiking cycle, Bitcoin nuked. This time, when inflation has come down, Bitcoin nuked. Now it's doing well with inflation back a little.

It just seems like it's not really respecting that. So I don't know. It just seems hard to me that we can run that same narrative again and people will buy into it yet again after being burned by it so many times.

I disagree, sir. The correlation between gold and Bitcoin is at an all-time high. You can see this here. Will Clemente posted this chart. The correlation is at an all-time high, and Bloomberg is reporting that investors are now buying both together. They're not choosing one or the other. So let's bring these tweets up, because I've got to bull people up again. Buy this dip right now.

But that's what we're saying, right? We have been saying this for years, and I largely agree with it in some regard, but I don't know. It's hard to say it's panned out, right? I mean, gold has been down. For you, Justin, what's really changed for you? The fact that it hasn't performed exactly as you had expected over the past 12 months?

Nothing's really changed for me. I still believe in the thesis. I just think it's a little early for the bear market to be ending. Maybe I'm following the Q4 bottom prophecy a little too hard, but that's what got me to sell at the end of last year, which I'm fortunate for, so I'm kind of just sticking to that.

I would love to own Bitcoin again in size, but I just don't at the moment. I think it's too early, and I think the upside is unclear.

You're saying the 4-year cycle has to play according to the month-to-month plan?

It's the 4-year cycle, but it's also that if the bottom is in and $60K-ish was the bottom, what more upside is here? From last cycle, we went from $68K to $125K, which is a pretty small return. If we've had diminishing returns again, which we've always had in this space, what's the upside from $125K? Is it $185K? And then is it really worth entering here at $82K for maybe a 2x when I could look at tech, AI—

I'd be so happy if we went to $180K. You wouldn't believe it.

$180K—we're going to be in utopia.

4. Se From FOMO Joins The Lads

I will say that most of the bullish thesis in crypto over the past, let's say, 4 years is usually based in some financial narrative. Either VCs have entered, VC money's entered the space, or it's been the ETF, or it's been DATs, or it's been some financial-rails reason. I don't know if there's anything left on that front in terms of a catalyst.

The real show-me-the-money moment is: are people actually moving their money into Bitcoin so they can escape their country, their capital, or their currency? Until then, I guess that's the catalyst, right? That's what we need to see.

The answer is no, right? But everyone's been perpetually trying to front-run that for a long time now, right?

I agree with you, but that's the open question. Are people going to do that? Is people's money going to move that way?

Yeah, but speaking of outside capital coming in, I think we have a guest coming up who can help answer that question. I think Se from FOMO is—there you go. What's up? What's up, Se?

How are we doing?

I'm good. How are you?

I'm all right.

We're kind of sad about the dump, but—

How are you doing? I actually just noticed that it was dumping as you guys were talking about it.

By the end of the episode, we'll be back up, so don't even worry about it. Se, good to see you, brother. You guys have been crushing it, I have to say. When you started this out, I didn't know this was going to get so big, and we had a chart we were looking at backstage. Maybe you could tell us if this is real. Are these volumes and things happening in real time? Maybe we can bring this up. But what is going on here? What is this?

Yeah, the charts are real. In fact, I was telling Se that they're a little understated. I think they're probably all anywhere from 20% to 40% lower. That's not Adam's fault. He does a good job of creating dashboards, and we work with him on that, but I think a lot of it is just that it's hard to collect all that on-chain data across 6 or 7 chains.

We have perps now as well, so it's very real, and we're in the thick of it. We're super excited about it.

We were talking a second ago about whether there are new entrants into the space or whether this is all existing players signing up for FOMO and moving over from Phantom, Pump.fun, and so on to use FOMO. Do you think these are net-new people coming into the space? Is that what you're seeing, or is it all just the same folks playing the same game again?

We 100% think it's net-new people. There's a lot of empirical data that we use to try to understand what users are coming in, whether this is their first experience, and how we can guide their process and user journey here.

A lot of this is from CSAT survey scores when people submit customer-support tickets. If you take a look at, let's say, we get 1,500 tickets a day, 1,400—maybe 1,450 to 1,500—are usually people who just don't understand what's going on. A lot of that is a perp, and a lot of it is maybe a bug, but essentially our goal is to create an application where you can trade things on-chain without realizing you're on-chain.

The only reason FOMO feels like crypto when you open it is because of the asset names and the assets that you're trading. Our goal is to expand the pie, and I would say we're adding about 40,000 new users a day from the App Store. I don't really think there are 40,000 new people every day who are discovering FOMO in the crypto space.

How are you sourcing these people? Is this TikTok? Is it Instagram? Where are these people coming from?

Their media-content machine is insane.

Really?

It's like piercing the normie sphere with this whole Machi thing. It was very well done.

What was that? Can we find that?

I think Kimchi is a trader who went viral because he posted a collage of his Rolex, this Maybach, and these cool pictures, and ended up getting a few million views. People have been clipping it everywhere on the internet. He apparently made $40 million on Trump. I don't know if that's true or not, but he's just everywhere, and he was seen with Gunna a couple of times.

He's reinforcing the idea that traders are the new celebrities. We don't actually work with him directly. I know he's a hot commodity these days, but it's the lifestyle stuff that I think people have always looked at to some extent, and now it's coming from traders instead of course sellers, vloggers, or whatever.

And so these are being posted on—give me a little more detail. Where exactly are people finding this, and how are they ending up on FOMO, which is so highly rated on the App Store?

We started marketing to non-crypto people generally around July of last year. We started experimenting with UGC and trying to understand how to get small creators to tell the story of FOMO, educate people about what you can do, and give them a sense of what's going on in the crypto markets generally.

We started that at a very small scale, and over the course of the next 9 months, it really blew up. We were probably able to do 50 million impressions a month across 100 creators. We manage this all in-house, study the algorithm, and understand what people are looking for.

Now that's become a very small piece of our user growth. At the time, about 50% of users were referred from UGC creators. Nowadays, that number is probably closer to 15%, and maybe only 30% of lifetime users who are joining are actually attributed. So there's a lot more organic growth.

There's actually a crazy or funny story. We were looking at Instagram, and one of the people on our team gets this paid ad about FOMO, and we're like, “Oh wow, this is such a great ad. Who did this? We should replicate it.” We look into it, and it's not even our guy. This guy is just shilling his own referral link in his own paid ads on Instagram, and he's crushing it. He has about 3 million impressions, and there are a lot of referrals coming in. We're just like, “Wow, he's—”

So you're not spending too much money on the marketing campaigns and the UGC, right? Do you have a big cost associated with that, or is it very cheap in terms of the numbers we're seeing?

I would say the bottleneck is not money. It's actually talent and identifying talent. So it's the creators, but then also the content managers, and we probably spend roughly $100,000–$150,000 a month on this now. That's like—

A little?

Yes, it's not a lot. It's not a lot at all. You can go sign 1 big name and pay that, right? So it's something that has worked really well and converts very well.

You're spending way more than $150,000. You're spending way more than $150,000. But that's 1 element. There's the KOLs, and there's paid ads. Are you doing paid ads?

We just started. To be completely candid, in July we did about $150,000 in total growth spend. In August, this will ramp up. We're starting paid ads and doing more creator-influencer partnerships, but pretty much anything that you see out today has been in this $150,000-ish category of budget.

That's my part. I'm spending $150,000 a month.

You guys—

[laughter]

Marketing. There's no way.

Where do you think FOMO's headed? Are you going to keep leaning into meme-coin trading, or do you think there's some ceiling there? I know you guys have perps as well, but what do you think the future of this onboarding funnel is going to look like for non-crypto natives joining an app that uses crypto as underlying rails but isn't a crypto app?

Yeah, we want to essentially be the place where everybody can speculate on opinion publicly, right? Whether that's crypto, stocks, perps, prediction markets, yield—anything that you can name where people can have a category where they can speculate and then build an audience. That's our goal.

I think one of the things that we've been thinking about a lot is, okay, so you have $100 billion companies, which are Robinhood and Coinbase. These are trading apps, brokerages, and so on. Then you have your, let's say, trillion-dollar companies, which are the J.P. Morgans of the world. It's the AUM game; all of it runs on them. Then you have your multitrillion-dollar companies, which are the Metas and the Googles, and there's a social network, analytics, advertising, and all these things.

I think that last category is what we're interested in turning into. We want to be the canonical social graph for finance. Nobody's really done that, nobody's really tried, and I think as AI commoditizes more and more content, it's going to be this paradigm shift where more people are looking for something real, which is risk. Risk is going to be the only atomic unit that is actually going to be able to stand the test of AI commoditization.

I think that leads to a social graph where everything is real. You can't just fake content, you can't just go viral, and you have to go do the thing and do it publicly. That's where we want to be, and I think it'll be the highest-intent user base of any social graph that exists in the world.

Yeah, because I'm wondering: The existing user base must be kind of eating itself, right? We know from the Pump.fun stats that over 90% of people lose money trading Pump.fun assets. It's a negative-sum game. How do you think about getting people to stay and not just getting blown out on these random long-tail coins?

Yeah, I think there are a number of things. One is transparency. I think a big issue with the number you referenced is that most of those coins are completely bundled. They're the same deployers over and over again, just dumping at certain market-cap levels, and it's gotten to the point where it's obfuscated so well that you can't even tell.

I think somebody ran a report of all the numbers here, and it was like Polymarket is at 20%, FOMO is at 20%, and Hyperliquid is slightly higher. I think that's about what you expect to see from a trading app in general in terms of profitability. I imagine maybe Coinbase and Robinhood are higher because they have long-term holder types, but we want people to graduate in their user journey, right?

You might come in to trade meme coins, but hopefully you discover Bitcoin. Hopefully you discover Nvidia. Hopefully you discover XYZ markets, and that market might just be, “I can earn 5% easily, where my bank can't offer that.” You can do that via decentralized pools, and we want to educate the user and grow alongside them.

The important distinction here between us and most other parties is that we're not the house. We don't actually benefit if you lose money, so it's in our best interest that you're able to have more money, be more sustainable, and grow your wealth over time.

And I have a question. I'm getting tens of DMs at the moment from people asking me: In the future, does it make sense for you guys to have a coin? How are you thinking about tokenizing this social-graph idea?

I think our plan is to become a publicly traded company. We actually want to IPO. We want to be in the face of the public market. I think with that comes a lot of trust, and it's going to be really hard for you to be this social graph that's closed-in and private, that doesn't actually allow people to meaningfully partake in the upside and discover the journey.

We look at a lot of companies that we really respect, like Robinhood and Meta, and so on and so forth. I think there's very much a big value-add in being in the public markets, where any consumer who uses the app can actually benefit from it as well.

Wow, that's a big vision. That's a big vision. Man, since we were having underground ramen 4 years ago in Tokyo, you guys have been growing up. It's good to see. I love to hear it.

Right now, I saw the chart with the different chains. It seems quite distributed. I thought it was just going to be Solana and Robinhood, but it's broken out. What's actually happening in the trenches? You guys have the numbers. Is it because Solana was the only one last cycle that was having this activity, but obviously Robinhood's coming hot, and then I see BSC—or what exactly is going on out there?

Yeah, I think what we've done is create this idea that you trade on a certain chain during certain periods of time, right? There's Base season, Solana season, and BNB season, and those are all completely segregated experiences where most people don't overlap into each of these things.

Do you guys remember the meme where it was Pepe on Ethereum going to Solana with a crying face, like, “Now I have to go trade on Solana”? I think that was a very real thing where people just don't like to uproot their trading infrastructure and go find another place—find a new wallet, export their keys, and do all these things.

I think what FOMO has done is effectively created 1 platform where you can trade any asset on any given day. Yesterday, we had 110,000 traders on the application. 90,000 of those traded on Robinhood, 100,000 traded on Solana, maybe 60,000 traded on Base, and 80,000 on BNB.

You're seeing the same users trade across different coins because it's 1 experience. If you actually stare at the app, you can see what chains these coins are on, but to you it's just 1 coin. It's just a coin that you can buy. There are holders, there's a community, there's a social feed, and it's very seamless as 1 experience.

It's actually crazy because Robinhood Chain was a fumble on day 1 for us. We didn't integrate because we wanted to see if there was a reason to do so. We missed out on day 1. For the next 48 hours, we just got spam messages from all of our traders: “Where's Robinhood? Where's Robinhood? Where's Robinhood?”

By day 3, we were 3 times larger than every other trading wallet combined. Today, 90,000 of the 115,000 wallets trading on Robinhood Chain are on our platform. You can actually see the powerful stickiness, whereas most of these terminals have dropped off as they moved on. They've gone back to Solana, back to Base, or back to BNB.

On FOMO, you have this experience where you don't need to pick. You can do it all at the same time.

Mhm. Yeah, I saw that Pump.fun is starting to try to copy you guys and get into all the chains, and they're looking at it similarly, I guess.

I want to ask you: I feel like one of the main advantages—why you guys are sort of winning versus Pump.fun—is that you've cracked the mobile side much better. Just from what I'm experiencing on my side, whoever wins the mobile side wins the marginal Web2 user.

People don't want to—it's kind of like a mobile game, right? This type of meme-coin trading game is a mobile game. I've seen that on my side too.

It’s just that whoever does the mobile side better typically tends to win the consumer side. I’m curious if you have any thoughts on that.

Yeah, I think that’s right. Mobile is where the world is headed, right? We look at the data on web users, mobile users, and people who do both. There are actually more people who do both web and mobile than there are web-only users, which is an interesting stat.

Maybe you can say our web product is not where it needs to be yet, but we are definitely seeing that, of the 40,000 new people a day, 39,000 of them are coming through mobile. It’s just where the world is headed. Robinhood didn’t even have a desktop app until a year or two ago. If you want to target mass audiences, chances are most of them don’t sit at a computer all day, but most of them do have phones. I do think that’s a key thing you need to get right: you need to reach the long tail of the audience, which is mostly on mobile.

And your app is absolutely phenomenal, by the way. I was talking about it before the show. I use it, and it’s so smooth. I don’t even look at the fees because it’s so buttery smooth and it just works.

Don’t look at the fees. [laughter]

I really couldn’t even tell you what they are.

Let’s increase the fees. Increase those fees. [laughter]

No, that’s great to hear. We actually do have the lowest fees in the market. We’re half a percent, versus most similar apps, which charge 1%. Coinbase is an anomaly; if you’re trading Bitcoin on Coinbase, you’re paying 2.5%. So it is lower than most.

What do you think about meme coin trading as a mobile game? Do you agree with that categorization, or would you view it as something bigger or different?

I think that’s one way to look at it. If you zoom out, almost everything in life is a game. That’s the mindset a lot of traders take. I don’t know how you view your trading journey—if it’s a game, or if it’s just numbers on a screen and there’s a leaderboard—but I think it can be helpful.

If you treat it too seriously, where every dollar matters and you can’t detach yourself from the money, the P&L, and the outcomes, then it can become dangerous pretty quickly. In a lot of ways, it’s not just meme coin trading. I think all trading, to some extent, is a game of some sort, and you’re keeping score by P&L, win-loss, and such and such.

Let’s go back to that image with the live app. I’m curious because I haven’t used it. Do people choose what they want to buy based on what’s trending, or what are they usually seeing at the top of the screen that makes them decide? Do they look at what the top guy is doing?

If you go to the Feed tab, which I think you were just on, this is pretty noisy for most people. It’s just activity that’s happening—people buying and selling coins. You can filter this to see certain things, whether it’s certain people, certain sizes, or even just theses.

You can imagine you click “Thesis,” for example. Most of this is going to be very noisy, but you can read why people are buying these things and what their thoughts are. There really hasn’t been a place where you’ve been able to do this.

There’s a good reason. He said the duck army is growing, you know.

If I knew that, then of course it makes sense to buy the Micro Duck at a $14,000 market cap.

Yeah.

Or whatever. [laughter]

The BitMEX trollbox of 2026.

Except there’s a position attached. If somebody has a million-dollar position, you care about their thoughts a little more than you do about somebody who has a $4 position, which I think a lot of people have been scared to be opinionated by. You can filter by different sizes, just your friends, and so on. It’s your world and you can filter it however you want.

To be fair, on BitMEX you could always do “/size” or something, and it would give you your—keep it optional—but this makes sense.

Yeah, variation. This is something we’re thinking about too: how do we craft a new and unique experience specifically for mobile? It does feel like desktop is more of a pro experience, but I think you guys really nailed it here by showing what your friends, the people you’re following, or your followers are trading, with the proof attached to the positions.

I’ve seen a lot of interesting takes on Twitter about how you’re washing out the low-tier influencers who are just shilling garbage, not really buying it, or buying it and losing money. It’s getting the cream to rise to the top a bit more, so I think that’s pretty cool.

100%. We want to create transparency. Crypto itself has a pretty bad reputation, especially with everybody trying to sell their own courses, scams, and paid groups. We want to be able to show you the results if you’re a new user trying to navigate the space.

Amazing stuff. Let’s give you props. You guys have got that dog in you. I saw some posts by Tensor, and Tensor had a similar app idea. They launched it and it did okay, but it’s sort of the same thing as Morpho, where there were a lot of lending markets trying to do similar things. It just requires a team to be fully dedicated and go all in, actually see the outcome, and then you get a big winning outcome. I hope you guys can keep crushing it like this. It’s amazing to watch the growth.

Yeah, I feel like whenever the monthly user count starts going parabolic, that’s also when Pump.fun starts pumping, too. I guess it’s beneficial in a way.

Is this a symbiotic relationship?

Is this Coke and Pepsi? What’s the situation?

Coke and Pepsi, bro.

Oh, Pump.fun and FOMO?

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean—

Is this a symbiotic relationship? What do you think? Is it a symbiotic relationship, or do you think—

I think Pump is trying to build—

The same app, man. They’re trying to build the same app. [laughter]

FOMO just figured it out better, I think.

Can you both be successful? That’s the question. Can you guys both be successful?

I think it depends on what you mean by success. Competition is generally good, and we actually love it. We think it’s a great place to be when other people are trying to enter the same space, because it means there’s meaningful product-market fit and there’s more to innovate on and accelerate.

It remains to be seen. I think they built a really good launchpad, and I think that’s a core business of theirs. We’ll see how things go, but we’re focused on the things right in front of us.

Incredible answer. Bullish.

Yes, PR-trained. PR-trained.

So PR-trained. Let’s go, Se. Cool. Thanks for coming on, bro. Good to see you again.

For sure. Anytime. Thanks for having me.

Bye-bye.

Yeah. Peace.

Wow, very well spoken.

That was insightful. Great guy.

It’s the same trend going on in every industry, I’ve realized after this.

What can you double-click on that, Thiccy?

Okay, so I launched this Pokémon gacha 2 months ago. It was very much a whim decision. I built it in maybe a month and a half. I just wanted to see what I could do with AI tools. Anyway, I saw these crypto gachas making money, and when I started launching, it was kind of the top of the market.

Chill, chill, go.

No, yeah, go, go, go. Come on.

Okay, so I launched it, and then I realized that the crypto gachas are making a tenth of what the mobile app gachas are making. They’re just printing money hand over fist, like a billion dollars a year. They don’t even have a web product. All the new customers are bringing what you’ve built financially on the crypto side and packaging it in a mobile app for the rest of the world.

That is the trend I’ve seen in this industry, and now I’m seeing it validated in the meme coin industry: Pump failing versus FOMO because Pump is focusing more on the web strategy, while FOMO is going straight for mobile. That’s another example of that. The new cohort of users, to double-click on your point, Justin, is coming from mobile. It’s coming from the App Store.

Yeah, and I heard FOMO users don’t even know which chain the coins are on and whatnot, so—

No, and people—

Yeah, go ahead.

You’re competing with those guys who are playing Candy Crush, right? Candy Crush is making a billion dollars a year. When you think about crypto, you can actually make money on it. It’s a really fun game if you think about it.

The social element of trading—you just strip it. There actually is no price discovery being made on technological assets. That’s too high IQ for mobile users. They need meme coins: the dumbed-down version packaged into a mobile app, and it’s a funner game than Candy Crush. They’re happy to put in billions of dollars a year, and that’s the thesis.

The duck army is growing. Thank you.

So, we have Qiao here as well joining us. I don’t know if we can get him on.

Yo, long time no see, Qiao.

Yeah, what’s up?

Recurring guest.

Wow.

Yeah. Qiao, I feel like you went into a sort of pseudo-hiding for the crypto bear market. I know your accelerator has been doing really well, but you haven’t posted about crypto much in the past couple of weeks. It looks like you’re back on board for a new bull market, potentially. Is that right?

Actually, I was on a sabbatical for a couple of months, and it was summer, so I was playing with my kids every day. It just so turns out that school is starting and the bull market is back. It’s perfect timing.

Do you think it’s back for real? Is it not just a bear-market high?

It doesn’t feel like a dead-cat bounce. It feels to me like the start of a bull market.

Yeah, same. It’s good. It’s good. If people are 50/50, there’s a source of the marginal buyer.

Yeah.

What have you guys been working on from the project side? Is it a bunch of AI-related stuff, or what’s being built these days?

I’m not back to work yet, but we’re doing some AI stuff, some stablecoin stuff, and social trading, of course.

Okay. Everyone’s getting into social trading.

Yeah.

What are you most excited about from these cohorts? Do you have something where you’re like, “Okay, when I get back to work, this is the first thing I’m going to start focusing on”?

To be honest, I haven’t really thought about crypto very much, except for Zcash. I can’t really tell you what I’m excited about.

All right, let’s talk Zcash. Let’s go straight to that—nothing else.

I think Zcash is the simplest, clearest, cleanest thesis compared to everything else I see in crypto. The thesis is privacy and quantum resistance, but more importantly, it has never really changed over the last 10 years. I’ve been following Zcash since the beginning, around 2016, but I never went big because the charts just looked like— Now, if you look at the chart, the long-term chart has really dramatically changed.

You really want the price action to confirm your fundamental thesis. I think that’s what’s happening right now.

Let’s bring up a chart. If we’re talking charts, we should look at it.

No, no, no. Justin, did you make it log? That makes it—yeah. Wait, what? Okay, okay.

5. Qiao Wang Joins / The Zcash Thesis

The chart is basically 3 cup-and-handles inside one another. It’s 1 giant cup-and-handle within another cup-and-handle, within another cup-and-handle. I think the future is cup-and-handles. It’s the perfect chart.

My chart originally didn’t go far back enough. I had to switch charts for Taiki.

No, that’s the same chart, but I feel like you don’t want to fade a 10-year distribution and then an all-time-high breakout, right? Especially when the narrative is around privacy, there’s the ETF now, and quantum resistance.

I think the biggest thing that might have happened in the last 5 years is—I don’t know this for a fact—but I think the early investors and the team distributed. They sold what they wanted to sell. At the same time, the mining rewards also decreased quite a bit. Now, finally, the buying pressure outweighs the distribution and the supply.

Even at this juncture, around 800, this really big whale—I think it was a couple of days ago—just bridged $50 million worth of Zcash and sold it via Hyperliquid spot, and it really didn’t do too much to the price. That’s a really constructive sign for me that there’s probably continuation. Even today, it’s behaving quite well.

Yeah.

Yeah, Justin, if you can share my screen, Qiao had this tweet around, I guess, the venture-slash-liquid-investing heuristic: “When the smartest people you know are polarized on an asset—some bullish, others convinced it won’t work—you just don’t overthink it and smash the buy button.” So, Qiao, can you extrapolate?

Yeah, this basically is Zcash coded. I was actually talking about Zcash without saying Zcash.

Oh, I know. That’s why I want you to talk about it.

I’m long Zcash. I think it’s going to do really well. Taiki convinced me of this, so I’m kind of pilled up on it. But it does strike me as us doing the crypto thing again, where we project onto the world what we think the world is going to want and front-run that buying.

We were talking before you joined about how the industry did that with Bitcoin. It seems like, again, this is probably going to play out for Zcash on the positive side, but it seems like we’re projecting this privacy narrative onto Zcash—that it will be useful to other people in the future. Today, people aren’t using it or have a need for it for its intended purpose. Do you think there’s any truth to that, or do you think it’s different this time?

I think that’s absolutely right, but that’s also the case with assets that don’t have cash flow, right? You have to project what the world wants into the future.

But I guess what I’m saying is that we’ve thought that with Bitcoin, and it hasn’t yet been true for Bitcoin. People realistically are not using it as a store of value, a hedge against the dollar, or their digital gold. We’re projecting that people who aren’t us will do that in the future, right?

I definitely use it as a store of value. It’s very volatile.

It’s very volatile.

Yeah, it’s very volatile, but it gives me peace of mind in the sense that if my bank account gets shut down, I have something to rely on, right?

True.

Yeah.

I’m sorry, Qiao. Finish your thought.

Zcash is a much more emergent store of value, meaning it really is not a store of value yet.

Yeah, it’s much earlier.

And if you share my screen, Justin, people are using it, right? I’m going to share the percentage of Zcash in the shielded pool. This is an actual, objective way to measure people literally buying ZEC, bringing it to the chain, and putting it in the shielded pool.

As long as this percentage or metric is going up, you can’t refute the fact that no one used this thing for 8 or 9 years, and suddenly people are using it. Whether or not you’ll use it is irrelevant. The market is telling us that it’s important, and I feel like that’s a really important signal that shouldn’t be faded.

Is there any other digital store of value apart from Bitcoin that makes sense at this point?

I think all the L1 tokens that tried to make this “ultra-sound money” argument just had too much going on. Ethereum, for example, which we’ve talked about for 100-plus episodes, just had too much going on.

This one is clean. It says, “Look, we’re not as early as Bitcoin or as distributed as Bitcoin, but we are quantum-resistant. We’re going to be a good failsafe if anything happens to Bitcoin. We have this additional privacy.” Obviously, the hack—whatever weird hack happened—was a bit of a shakeout, but Se, Dim, and I have been talking about Zcash being the first thing that would run in a kind of resurgence, and it seems like that was the case.

I do expect it to trade a lot like Bitcoin in the early days, like the 2015–2016 period. Because it doesn’t really have cash flows and is going to be based on speculation, it’s going to overshoot in both directions. You’ll be able to trade ranges. It’s going to be a good trading asset, which I think will keep interest in it, because it will be such a good asset for range traders to participate in—not just for the people who buy it and put it into the shielded pool. So, it’s definitely an interesting asset.

Yeah, I think you guys are also missing the best part about Zcash. The privacy narrative is interesting, but what’s really the tailwind for Zcash this cycle is that everyone knows you’re late to Bitcoin now, but you’re not late to Zcash. It has the exact same supply cap as Bitcoin at 1% or so of the price.

You can’t get enough of a 100x on Bitcoin anymore, but you can theoretically get it on Zcash. I think that makes it a lot more attractive for new people, people who haven’t made it yet, and people who want to speculate on privacy.

It's got a lot of things going for it.

The one thing that's missing in terms of this idea of money triad—I agree that there's Bitcoin, and there's going to be private money, which is Zcash. There has to be someone that pulls off the AI money idea well. Bittensor really has tried to do something there, but it hasn't been able to succeed.

I think it has overspent on incentives. It's become overly gamified over the past few years, and it's gotten past so many halving events that, at this point, the incentives for really good subnets just aren't enough anymore to attract good talent. I think someone that takes advantage of these principles and makes some form of AI money is going to be the third kind of horse in this race.

I really like this idea of a basket of Bitcoin, private money, AI money—whatever that is—and probably most money will be made in this AI money category at this point.

Zcash is backed by Mythos. It's AI money.

Right. That's a really strong part of the narrative, too.

One thing is, I hope people like Qiao have taken advantage of the quiet markets to get the rest of their life a bit in balance, because when things get crazy, I think we're all just living off the screen, and it's a bit of a 24/7.

I've talked about my health push since last year, and I think a lot of people have followed me. I meet a lot of people who tell me they've used the bear market for health-maxing, and it's good to hear. Justin, have you done anything, or what have you been doing?

Oh, yeah, of course. No, I've been testing out some peptides. I had my wedding this summer, which was phenomenal, followed by my honeymoon. Actually, I won't say who, but one person on this podcast right now was invited to the wedding, was going to come, and then flaked at the last minute, which stings and hurts. But, yeah, I got to try the peptides before that. I think they're incredible.

It's me.

Don't help me with this. It's a pity party.

Did you have a good reason for flaking, Taiki, or no?

Well, it was right after my honeymoon.

Okay, so Taiki was tired.

He was too relaxed at the time.

Yeah, I was too sad with crypto prices.

So everyone's been honeymooning during the bear. That's also a very good use of it.

Yeah, and chilling with the family.

Yeah, it's great. But, yeah, no, I mean, you have to be health-maxing. I don't think I was ever away, but I was trimming down fat, trying to get my abs back again, which is nice. You have to focus on your health. And Variational has obviously been consuming a ton of time.

Let's see the abs.

They're not—they haven't been out in 4 months. They'll be back.

Where are the abs?

Washboard abs.

Yeah.

Lately?

Let's hear about Taiki first.

Oh, what?

Yeah, what have you been up to during the bear, bro?

I've just been building. I've been building this thing. It feels like I'm breeding a digital 7-Eleven. I'm just catching fraud, doing support tickets, and shipping out cards, like $5 Pokémon cards.

Building.

Why did you switch to building? I'll never forget—we were at a meetup, I think with Taiki, and you were like, “I tried building before trading, and the feedback loop is really bad. You don't figure out what works; you don't get any feedback from the market until 6 months or a year later. It's slower.” You were doing really well trading. Why did you decide to start building again?

Yeah, so that's actually how I got into crypto. I was building a DeFi protocol, and that's why I learned all about crypto.

The Solana DEX, right?

Yeah, it was in 2021 and 2022. That kind of black-pilled me a little bit, because that was right when crypto went down 80%. Crypto trading was a lot more instant feedback, and to be honest with you, trading in 2023, 2024, and partly in 2025 was so much more rewarding and fun, with so much more opportunity.

6. Health Maxxing & Building In The AI Era

But now that AI tools have made building so easy, I'm able to be a professional-level developer, advertiser, animator, or whatever in just a few days. I think the feedback loop in building has almost been gamified and casinofied, which is what I think these token sellers from these AI firms really are. It's kind of like a little casino. The paid-ads thing is the same—Meta has its own little casino as well.

Let them play Candy Crush.

I feel like sometimes I'm coding and I'll randomly get my tokens refreshed, and then I'll see OpenAI researchers follow me. I'm like, “Bro, are they observing me work like a little ant in an ant colony?” Just like I am to my users, there are different layers of this sort of thing going on. But, yeah, it's been fun building in this new age.

Qiao, where do you think the alpha lies if everyone's able to spin up an app, a website, or a platform in a few days of vibe coding? Is it just going to be execution, or is it going to be ideas? If we think it through, we don't need 1,000 platforms doing the same thing. What's going to happen?

What mattered before still matters today: everything you just mentioned—execution, ideas, and go-to-market. The only thing that changes is that, right now, you can really start something new as a 1-person team, and you don't need a dedicated developer. I've been building as well since January, and I really feel the power of the latest tools.

It's kind of funny, right? On the one hand, developers have so much more ability to create stuff. They can 10x their output. But then you need fewer developers because people can just do it themselves, or they can get 1 guy to do everything instead of having a whole team.

Yeah.

So is this bullish for developers, developers, developers, or bearish? It's hard to know.

I think for big tech, it's bearish. It's bearish for engineers at Facebook, Meta, and so on, because they don't have that many good ideas and they need far fewer developers.

Yeah.

It's probably bullish for developers in specific verticals, like banks, health science, hospitals, or whatever. Now they can hire developers a lot more cheaply and more effectively.

It's bullish for people who have agency in general, and developers are really the ones that can have the power and utilize these tools the best. If you have agency wherever you are and you have the ability to build something yourself or be trusted with a project wherever you are, then you're probably going to do really well. It's bullish for them.

It's definitely bullish for people who have good ideas and a lot of agency but didn't have the technical chops before. I remember when I first moved to the Bay Area, people were talking about these 10x developers at the time. That was the thing 10 or 20 years ago.

Now it feels like you're getting some 1,000x developers who are able to get agents and create incredible stuff. It feels to me like if you went from playing basketball with 5 people on the court to 3-on-3, you don't need that many people, and the replacement-level value, if someone is not really above replacement value, drops off a lot. But if you are still a superstar, then it matters even more because there are fewer people on the pitch.

Yeah, the permanent war.

It's like it's redefined. It's not just that everyone who's in the top 1 percentile suddenly gets buffed. It almost redefines what it means to be in the top 1 percentile, because I know a lot of developers who, 5 years ago, were some of the best developers I've ever known, but they aren't really good at putting their thoughts into words, managing their time, or picking the right thing to do.

They're just really cracked at writing code, and those people aren't as buffed by AI. So now they've gone from the 1st percentile to the 10th-percentile developer.

I think there will basically be only 2 types of developers in the future. One is those who actually build products, who understand the customer really, really well and can design stuff—design products. So that's basically the app-layer developer. And then there's the super-deep infra developer who builds infra for the app developers. Everyone else in between is basically obsolete.

Well, I think he's saying the Pokémon attributes that make you an elite Pokémon now are different than they used to be. I hear a lot about words like “taste.” You didn't used to hear about taste a few years ago. Now people are saying you need taste and aesthetics, and all this other stuff seems to come out of the Bay.

Yeah, I view it as a vector, right? A vector has magnitude, and then it has a direction. Magnitude is agency, and taste is just pointing the vector in the right place.

Magnitude has been kind of nerfed. AI tools can help you scale magnitude. It's just: can you point the vector in the right direction? That matters. It gets buffed, essentially. But there are plenty of people—you look at them and think, “Okay, you're a magnitude guy, or you're a vector-pointing guy.” You know, the ideas guy or the labor sort of—

And the laborers have been nerfed.

I was just looking at the comments a bit. Someone's saying, “Jordi, tell them about the impromptu London meetup.” Yeah, I was just in London and thought, “Let me just see who's around immediately.” I just said, “Who's in Mayfair?” and I got about 10 DMs. I told everyone to come to Joe & The Juice. We had a ginger shot and—

Joe & The Juice.

Yeah.

Their sandwiches are phenomenal.

It was super cool. Obviously, I have to be safe with security and stuff, but sometimes these impromptu meetings bring the internet closer, where you're actually seeing some of the people who are out there looking at stuff. I've had a bunch of funny interactions with these IRL things.

I remember last summer I was with Jing Tao. I don't know if you guys know Jing Tao.

Oh, God.

Yes, of course.

He's known in the trenches. He's a proper DJ and hero, but I'd say a smaller profile than me. We were eating at a Mexican restaurant at the ARIA. The waiter comes up, some crypto fanboy, and he's losing his mind. He's like, “Oh my God, Jing Tao!”

I'm next to him, and Jing Tao is like, “Do you know who this is?” He's like, “Oh, Jing Tao, Jing Tao.” I thought it was pretty funny. And then now I know how he felt.

Last week, I randomly met Jack Dorsey at some event, and we're walking down the street. Some guy comes up and recognizes me. I'm literally next to Jack Dorsey, who's a very recognizable face. It's not like you don't know him. And he's like, “Oh my God.” And then he's like—I'm like, “Okay, cool. What's going on?”

That must have felt nice, Jordi. That's cool.

No, it was just very confusing. The internet's a really weird place. By the way, shout-out to Jack. I'd never met him before. He is one of the coolest people. What a beast, that guy.

You just status-mogged Jack Dorsey?

Yeah, I did. We were laughing about it afterward. He's so chill.

No, you status-mogged Jack Dorsey, and Jing Tao status-mogged you. So, by the transitive property, Jing Tao—

Yeah, yeah.

That only makes sense.

But otherwise, guys, health-wise, I do want to talk a little bit about it. I've been pushing hard. I was at 26% to 27% body fat about a year ago.

Around KBW, which was almost a year ago, my cortisol was high, my eyes were twitching, I couldn't sleep, and my nerves were shot. It wasn't like things were going badly. That was when things were still in a bull market. It was more like I was overwhelmed by the amount of things there were to do and was just trying to push hard.

I had Dim with me. I was having what felt like a cardiac arrest episode. I went to the Korean hospital. I couldn't even speak the language. I was just like, “I can't feel my arm. I don't know what the hell is going on.”

They did all these tests on me, and their English was terrible. They came back, and the guy was like, “Oh, yeah, your platelets are broken.” Dim was translating it, and he was like, “Is this internal or external? What blood is broken?” Thankfully, it was external. My blood sample had gotten messed up. It wasn't in my body.

Needless to say, that day was a bit of a wake-up call. I posted a little bit about my weight-loss bet. I had a bet with a poker player. I had to get down to 20%, which I did very quickly. I bounced around 20% for a few months, and then I did one more push. This summer, I got to 14%, which is quite a big change.

I wouldn't normally do this, but I'll share a topless photo.

Oh my God.

Let's go. He's feeling himself.

I put it in the chat.

All right.

I've done my blood work before and after. My blood work is pretty good. My inflammation—everything—is way down. I feel like I've gained 10 IQ points. I don't know if it's just that or something else going on, but we're much leaner than we were a year ago.

Do you have a before shot?

Maybe I do.

What's that?

How much are you sleeping now?

Sleep was always going to be the hardest one. I'd say it's better, but maybe I average 6 and a quarter hours. Before, it was maybe 5 and a half. I need to get to 7, so I'm halfway there.

Okay, okay.

Yeah.

You guys know what will make the biggest difference to my sleep? It is not using a sleep tracker.

Really? Why?

Really? It gives me so much stress.

Interesting. Do you have an Eight Sleep?

No. I actually tried that, but I don't know. I don't do anything special for my sleep anymore, except for having a super-dark room and not using a smartphone before going to bed.

Temperature. Temperature matters a lot. You can go cooler. I've been focusing on that, and taking glycine before bed reduces your temperature.

Yeah, that is true.

Somebody commented that not holding ETH also helps with sleep.

I can confirm.

Yeah, we can all confirm.

So nobody holds ETH now?

I don't hold any ETH.

Fiki is super long ETH, I think.

Wait, actually?

No, no. Fiki, what's your positioning right now? Someone asked in the chat, and I wanted to call back to it. Is it just S&P 500 ETFs right now, or—

It's treasury bills and Pokémon cards.

Really?

Barbell. The barbell.

How about sports memorabilia? I know Hedgehog's really into that stuff. What do you think about it?

Yeah, I think it's another expression of it.

Yeah.

So are you hedged on it? Is there any way to hedge your Pokémon card holdings, or do you just have the raw exposure?

There is a way you can hedge it. I just have the raw exposure. I mean, I have about $3 million. It's not that big of a position, but you could hedge it. What you could do is launch a token and be like, “You guys own a percentage of the cards.” That way, you don't hold any notional directional exposure to the cards.

Let's launch that right now. Let's go.

You can also wait until it goes to a premium, then sell more coins and buy more Pokémon cards.

Yeah, you can launch a little DAO.

A DAO.

Exactly. But I want the exposure to the cards, so I'm not doing that.

Do you have any PSA 10 first-edition shadowless Charizards?

I think those are about $600,000, so no. I don't.

Hmm.

What do you think of the cards token? I know there's a lot of attention on that, but I'm not sure how real the numbers are.

I don't want to speak badly about any token in particular, but I'm just bearish on tokens. I've always been bearish on all tokens. That's just my answer. I just think they're overvalued. Every token is—

All right.

Except for the ones that I have investments in, obviously.

Okay.

Until you say—

Until I vest, correct.

Tokens are bad. I will not support tokens. But if I have the token, I will defend it.

Jordi, what about your position? I think we've all shared ours, but I'm curious about yours. I know you have—obviously, Bitcoin would be one of them—but is there anything else you're looking at that we haven't talked about yet?

Yeah, the core position is certainly Bitcoin.

7. What The Lads Are Actually Holding

A lot of Bitcoin. I have bits and pieces of other stuff. I still have some HYPE. We unstaked our HYPE from the Dreamcash vault and still have most of it. I've definitely been selling some as it's ripped so hard, but I'm still long, although it feels like at this point the P/E ratio is getting a little too expanded. It's more just the DAO buying that you want to hold on for, but I don't think it's sustainable.

I saw that Hyena announced today that they're also shutting down their validator. Anyone who tried anything without a USDC stablecoin basically ran into the wall once they enshrined USDC. It does feel like I got a bit of heat from the HYPE retards for talking about how we should have some understanding of exactly what the relationship is between TradeXYZ, which is doing all the RWA stuff, and the Hyperliquid ecosystem.

Obviously, it's symbiotic in some way. They're buying HYPE and doing something that's aligned, but it just hasn't been announced what that is. Meanwhile, there was a big story about whether they were raising a round with Paradigm or not, and I think Bloomberg just reported that everyone knows they already have done one. I don't know if the second one happened. Cobie was saying that there was zero chance they were negotiating, but they've already done one, so it's not like it matters that much if they're doing more.

The point is, there are equity holders of TradeXYZ. XYZ is getting a lot of the fees, and as they're starting to reduce growth-mode fees, they're probably going to be a large part of the fees that go to Hyperliquid volume. As a HYPE holder, which I still am, do I not deserve to understand whether these fees are in any way going back into HYPE?

I understand there were legal reasons not to talk about these things, but surely, for what is an $80 billion FTV asset, it makes sense to ask a normal question: If all the growth is in RWAs, are the token holders going to be getting it, and what's the deal? I think that's a very basic investor question, but apparently that pissed off CBBFE [?] or whatever this guy is.

You're rage-baiting so hard.

Yeah, I feel like TradeXYZ is very hyper-aligned, so I think the market thinks it'll be aligned, but I'm not sure.

They're aligned, but what does that mean? Are they going to buy HYPE and burn it? Are they going to buy it and give it to their employees? It matters a lot, and it just feels like the asset is too big not to have some sort of disclosure.

Yes, they've done a good job with some of the insider trading. I saw somebody post that when the Circle announcement came out, the chart didn't look like it was being front-run. It was just announced, and they have done a good job of that. But for how big this asset is, with public companies holding a ton of it and buying it, this just seems like such fundamental information to have. I guess people don't want questions asked when they're holding a bag.

Yeah, always get the FUD your bags. What else are we holding? Let's see what else we're holding.

I'll get to that. We'll wait.

No, go ahead, Qiao. I'll look at our holdings.

This is like what's in your purse, but for men.

I have some NEAR. We have NEAR. It's a good price for NEAR.

I'd still say that's a good UGC format for TikTok.

What's in your purse?

What's in your portfolio, Thiccy?

It's not people on the street.

We have NEAR. We have GRASS. Some of these AI-related coins with decent fundamentals should do better than their current price.

If you're going to buy AI-related tokens, why don't you just buy AI stocks? Why don't you just buy the real thing? We have a growing venture portfolio of that stuff, and I've just been throwing tickets into all of the rounds of all this stuff and hoping for the best.

We have that side of exposure, but tokens are so much easier to get out and in. How am I going to get out of my Tronic [?]? I don't know how I'm getting out of that stuff. If you want some, it's in a double-layer SPV that Andrew Kang needs to transfer or something. If you want some, let me know. I'll hook you up.

I think they're trying to raise at $10, or they raised at $10. They're going for 10 in Q4. It's a 6x. Congrats. No, it's a 6x if you get out.

That's why you launch an SPV on the SPV. You sell that to the next person. You tokenize it.

All right. What about you, Qiao? What are you holding other than, I guess, Zcash and PUMP? You like PUMP, I'm assuming.

Bitcoin and Zcash. The Alliance holds a bunch of things, including PUMP, but on my personal account, it's just Bitcoin and Zcash. I'm trying to keep everything simple. On the stock side, I hold a lot of stocks, but in crypto I only hold a few assets. On the crypto side, it's only 2.

How big is your stock side versus your crypto side?

The ratio is probably 80/20, or maybe 70/30-ish.

So it's mostly stocks?

Yeah.

And then on the stock side—how could you do anything else?

Yeah.

Hey, man, we have degens watching, Justin.

This is a crypto podcast.

Yeah, I'm more of a crypto guy.

This industry can go down 50% in a day for no reason. You remember 10/10—the industry can go down 50% in a day for no reason.

This is the definition of fearmongering by Justin on this episode.

Yeah, this is the bottom signal.

I've got great exposure. I never sold my LIT airdrop, by the way. I wanted to call that out. I still hold 80% of my LIT airdrop. I sold a little bit.

That's not an incredible flex.

But if you want to, I believe in being there. When I'm there, I'm there.

He's not a dumper, okay?

He's the holder you want.

And he tax-optimized as well. You told us that.

Yes, I tax-loss harvested at the bottom at $1, and I now own quite a bit of spot Zcash because I couldn't have Taiki get all the P&L for the Steady Lads team, so I had to join him.

I mean, on a risk-adjusted basis, my Zcash holding probably outweighs all my stock holdings. On a dollar basis, I hold more stocks, but on a risk-adjusted basis, I'm probably one-to-one.

So you don't own much memory or that crazy stuff? That's pretty volatile, too.

Yeah, I never did memory, which was a big L because I saw that coming in November last year. I never pulled the trigger.

Okay.

It's more like Google and Meta.

The Nasdaq stuff. Okay.

Yeah.

All right, boys, let's do pastas. Qiao, you can hang around if you have one. Pasta of the week time. It's on you. Do you have one?

Oh, me?

Taiki is always prepared.

Taiki—

Yeah, I'll keep it light-hearted. We were talking about being underweight crypto and stuff, but it really does feel like 3 weeks ago we were all depressed. Honestly, I was kind of not feeling myself, not happy, but we're kind of like this ancient, barbaric tribe that just got rain for the first time after 80% of our population died. It really does feel that way.

Of course, Bitcoin—we're barely, not even close to all-time highs—but things like Hyperliquid, PUMP, and Zcash mean there's a select community in crypto that's winning and euphoric.

Village elders.

Elders.

The plumbers meme—the plumbers, yeah.

I mean, this is quite a lot of likes for a very simple tweet, which kind of shows how much it hit true.

Hey, hey.

No, it hit true. 4.4 thousand likes on a one-liner—that's a good one. We all felt it, right? We're in a drought, and then rain just comes, and we're euphoric. But the pumps aren't even that real, at least not yet.

Shout-out to Icebergy, a previous guest of the show. Justin, you called it weak. We have to see what you have, then.

Yeah. Obviously, the big news we've all been following is that a few weeks ago, Trump said those magic words: Hyperliquid. We all saw it here, so I won't play it again.

Some people who were watching very closely detected the face of a man who had 100x-longed HYPE 10 minutes before. Look at this smirk when he hears “Hyperliquid.” I'll just play the full video. Look at that. That's exactly the moment he says “Hyperliquid.” This man must have quite a good amount of exposure.

But in all seriousness, props to Hyperliquid. That was incredible work.

Yeah.

So generational. Yeah, let's see if we do get some kind of legalization of DEX perps and what that looks like—whether it's going to be segmented liquidity pools or joint pools. I'm kind of curious to see how they're going to deal with the legal side of things. I remember when we were first starting to do DeFi, there were always players who didn't want us to touch it because you don't know if North Korea is on the other side. You can't really mingle, but I'm curious to see how they deal with it.

Yeah.

We didn't talk about it at all, but it looks like the CLARITY Act has a very, very low chance of passing—Polymarket has it at a sub-20% chance. Obviously, if the Democrats take the House in the midterms, which seems likely, CLARITY might be off the table. It does feel like the Trump administration is rushing to get these crypto changes through the SEC and CFTC before the end of his term. We'll see how it all shakes up, but an AOC presidency is not going to be great for crypto. We'll see.

Yeah, I'm not sure we get AOC, but let's see who we do get. Dim, what do you got?

All right, let's pull that up. I was going to do a quote tweet just on Justin Sun's amazing, incredible story. I got the veto from Taiki, but whoever wants to see it can DM me, I guess. We're going to stick with some more kid-friendly content.

Obviously, everyone remembers the GOAT launch. You know, back then, I remember when GOAT launched, this was the best on-chain season ever. This is a tweet from a guy called ZeroXRacist—really, really good username—and he says, “If you ever think that a coin is so bad it can never go to $1 billion, just look at this image.” It's basically the Truth Terminal, on which the GOAT token was based, tweeting its first rumblings, I guess.

But, to be honest, I feel like that on-chain season back then represents me more than the current one, with FOMO and all these other coins coming out. I do feel like an ankh, but I guess: don't hate the player, hate the game.

Yeah, don't hate the player, hate the game. Thiccy, have you brought a pasta with you?

I couldn't find one. I was going to use Justin's one from a ThreadGuy clip earlier today, where he was like, “Man, I love Thiccy, but he really just bottomed the crypto market when he launched and topped Pokémon.”

No, no, no, that's not what he said. He said the exact quote—I think he said, “Thiccy's my GOAT, but he sold the crypto bottom to buy the top of Pokémon cards.” That was the exact quote.

He bottomed the market, Steady Lads. ThreadGuy has done really well since we had him on the show. I think we had him on when he was in that controversial period with the LA crew, and we brought him on. The guy's talented. He's a great interview host, and he's done very well. Props to him.

Qiao, any pastas with you?

I wasn't prepared, but I found a minor one I can share in the chat.

Well, if it's a minor one, Justin's going to tell you it's a weak pasta or whatever, but it's okay. Bring it on. Let's see. What does he say?

“Once you become a big crypto account, your options are to make $60,000 a month from casino and pump.fun sponsorships or lose 100% of your money investing in seed rounds.”

We've all been there.

Be a better seed investor.

And the guy says, “Can't. I lost all my money shorting HYPE.” Kyle Samani has really been crashing out on the timeline. Another former guest of the show, but this one's not doing as well as some of the other ones.

Yeah, Multicoin has been crushing it after he left. HYPE, ZK—they've been killing it.

I like Kyle Samani. He says what he thinks. He doesn't give a

Based, yeah. He's awesome.

Yeah, I like him. People just give him a hard time—the HYPE maxis, you know.

Samani, you know.

He's a Samani of crypto.

Another one of my favorites. All right, I'll finish up with my pasta. This is one for old time's sake, guys.

Oh, man, you're switching it up at the last second.

No, no, this is my pasta.

Full-screen it.

We've had these robot Olympics in China. These things are running faster than Usain Bolt. One of these robots is sprinting down the track, and the tagline is, “The Ethereum Foundation running to their ledger after the pump.”

It's too real.

I'm just waiting for the headline that they've sold another $50 million.

But they don't even have that much ETH left, right? That's kind of been the problem. I don't know.

Because they sold it all at the last peak, I guess.

Have you ever thought about whether one of the reasons crypto died is because Twitter died?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there was—

It's the other way around, right?

Yeah.

Twitter died because—

Wow.

Wait, why?

Wow.

Who are we blaming for this, Thiccy? Is it Nikita or—

I think it's Elon Musk. I think he's mismanaged Twitter, and that was the main way crypto spread to everyone. Then it died.

No, but don't you remember when Nikita came on to lead product there? He nuked a lot of the crypto influencers and a lot of the crypto-related algorithms that pushed that stuff.

That's what you're saying, though. That's a big part of the reason why we—

Yeah, but the algorithm was dead. It wasn't doing well before Nikita, either. The whole thing—I mean, all the advertising kind of died on Twitter, too. It's just hard to advertise on Twitter.

Mm-hmm.

If he had just let Twitter advertising continue—I mean, Elon Musk kind of wanted to kill Twitter. Back then, there were so many token shills on Twitter, which is what Musk and Nikita were trying to stop: people spamming tickers all the time. There were so many bots and everything.

I think that's part of the bullish mobile thesis. If you can shill on Instagram Reels and TikTok, that's where the new cohort of users is. That's where the reach is. I think it ties into Twitter dying and crypto dying.

If we can pull up the final chart by Miles, it shows something interesting. Tweet volume versus Bitcoin. I think that's Bitcoin price, right? Yeah, definitely, definitely Twitter death. Just based on this, right?

Yeah.

I see. This is the number of tweets mentioning these things, I guess.

Yeah, tweet mentions, right.

It should be impressions.

Where did Elon Musk acquire Twitter? It was 2022, right? It was definitely still a bull market—I mean, CZ put a billion into it.

I forgot about that.

Yeah. It was October 27, 2022.

Wow. Literally just before FTX. It was the week before FTX.

That's crazy.

That's why he wanted to sell FTX, huh?

Or that FTX did.

Anyway, lads, it's been good to have all our favorites back. I think everyone in here is one of the people who have done the most shows, so we've all come back. Hopefully the market lasts. I think it will.

I kind of agree with Qiao that this feels like the start of a new part of the market. It's more structural now. Let's hopefully have fun, do well, and keep health-maxing, guys.

Manifest it. And can we announce our Singapore show?

We are going to do a live show at Token2049—that's the plan. We'll have as many of the lads there as possible. That'll be October 7, I think. We'll have the number out. Hope to see you guys there as well. Take care.

All right, thanks, guys.

All right.