Tulip King——为什么 Meme 币不再容易赚钱
Tulip King 认为,这是一个选股重于广泛配置的交易员市场。 资金正从 HYPE、PUMP 这类能在链上盈利的资产,流向“一堆垃圾”——既不赚钱,也不向持有者返还价值。他的周期信号毫不留情:“光是我赢还不够,我还要我的敌人输”(“It’s not enough for me to win, I need my enemies to lose.”)。
Solana 的活跃度不会自动沉淀为 SOL 的价值,因此 SOL 是押注其生态成功的弱表达。 Pump 赚取的收入高得多,Phantom 可以在不同链之间重新分配订单流,而 Hyperliquid 和 Lighter 已经在挑战“去中心化 NASDAQ”这一论点。除非 Solana 再造一个 Pump 级应用,否则 Tulip King 的交易逻辑很简单:“他们真的会卖掉 Solana 去买 Pump。”
Hyperliquid 改变了加密资产组合的构建方式,因为它真正赚钱,而不只是声称自己具备货币溢价。 Tulip King 偏好的杠铃组合,是把 BTC 和 Zcash 作为“现金”,另一端配置 HYPE 和 PUMP 这类能产生利润的资产,取代过去由 BTC、ETH、SOL 这 3 种都存在争议的货币形态组成的篮子。他称之为加密市场中“最蓝筹的资产敞口”。
Meme 币已经成熟为一种永久存在但具有周期性的资产类别,即便交易它依然极其困难。 Tulip King 认为,无许可资本市场必然会产生 Meme——“如果 NASDAQ 允许任何人上市任何东西,NASDAQ 也会有 Meme 币”——但他本人付出巨大努力,最终只赚了约4美元。投资者可以专注于单个 Meme,也可以持有 PUMP 这样的基础设施,或 Robinhood 这样的股票。
PUMP 的优势不只是 launchpad,而是一条不断扩张的业务栈,能够将发行、交易、订单流以及潜在的社交活动逐层变现。 即使 Meme 币交易量下滑,PumpSwap 仍让收入没有同步崩塌;Pump 应用则可以不收交易费,因为业务能在其他环节赚钱。因此,Tulip King 认为 PAWNS 与其说是生死威胁,不如说是一个仍处于早期、且扩张期权不 comparable 的竞争者。
Tulip King 不愿追逐 AI 股票,尽管他也拒绝做空它们。 他对 2000 年前后的类比是:基础设施支出已经先于足够多的生产性业务到来,而债务、股票发行、中国的规模化扩张,以及政治层面对数据中心的反对,都可能压缩经济回报。他的仓位刻意保持不对称:“我不押注 AI 下跌,因为我不想结束自己的人生,但我也不押注 AI 上涨。”
1. 只有坏代币交出资本,周期才会奖励好生意
Tulip King 开场的判断是,这是一个“交易员市场”:无论股票还是加密资产,都不存在轻松的全面上涨交易。AI 和制药都需要精选标的;Thread Guy 将同一套框架延伸到链上、DeFi 和 Meme 币。机会与毁灭之间的距离异常接近。
他的资金轮动检验比单纯跑赢市场更严苛:“光是我赢还不够,我还要我的敌人输”(“It’s not enough for me to win, I need my enemies to lose.”)。如果 Avalanche、Litecoin、Optimism、Arbitrum 以及其他不产生收入的代币继续跑输,它们的“死资本”就能在没有外部资金流入的情况下,为盈利代币提供资金,并让本轮周期走得比共识预期更远。
对 Zcash,他的方向判断只有一句:“往上。我是说,非常、非常强的上行。”他最初因为 Ironwood 升级买入了一些,随后随着价格上涨继续加仓;在此之前,他已经花了 12–18 个月学习如何读懂 Zcash 的图表。
2. Solana 有活跃度,但其代币未必能捕获价值
Tulip King 从概率和估值两个维度攻击“去中心化 NASDAQ”论点。Hyperliquid “明显领先”,Lighter 可能排第二,Solana 未必排得上第三;而 Solana 面临的竞争者更多,交易量却远小于 NASDAQ。Thread Guy 认为 SOL 的价值高于运营 NASDAQ 的那家公司,但 Tulip King 没有直接确认这一比较。
Thread Guy 的反驳值得保留:如果 Meme 币之外再出现一个 Pump 级应用,就可能验证“区块链是城市”这一论点。Tulip King 承认这确实重要,但当下只有 Pump 独占这一位置;他的 Solana 手机“基本就是一块镇纸”,而 Phantom 把用户与底层链抽象开来,也可以把用户导向其他网络。
价值捕获问题让 PUMP 成为更干净的交易:Pump 能从活动中赚钱,而 Solana 无法自由提高费用,否则用户就会转向竞争网络。Tulip King 仍然接受自己可能判断错误——Solana 是大牌项目,技术也不错——但他拒绝仅仅因为 Meme 币在 Solana 上交易就买入它:“好币会增长。买它们。”
3. HYPE 完成新的加密资产杠铃,BTC 仍是抵押品
Tulip King 过去的长期篮子——BTC、ETH 和 SOL——本质上是对货币溢价的 3 种押注。Hyperliquid 则提供了结构上不同的资产:它的规模足以容纳耐心的机构资本,而且“它不是货币,而是在赚钱”,由此形成 BTC/Zcash 现金端对 HYPE/PUMP 盈利端的组合。
Thread Guy 提醒他,自己曾经持有相当于资本“200%”的 Bitcoin 仓位。Tulip King 确认了那段纪律:只留出房租和伙食费后,其他每一美元都投入杠杆 BTC,所有交易利润也继续投入其中;如今 Bitcoin 可能已经是他最小的配置,但“所有东西都在加密资产里”。
这种表面上的矛盾是有意为之。生产性资产通常会跑赢货币——这是 Buffett 的观点——但不断贬值的货币会创造转向更优货币的制度切换交易;与此同时,盈利的链上项目在思想上已经摆脱了 Bitcoin 的引力。即使在他坚持称为“没有 Bitcoin 的周期”中,BTC 仍可能大涨,因为它是加密市场的基础抵押品,并能释放杠杆。
从战术上看,只要 Bitcoin 站在大约 72–74 以上,走势就偏建设性;跌破 70,他会担心“他们真的用这个牛市陷阱把我套住了”。如果只跌 4%,交易员不该急着翻看 ApeCoin 的盈亏截图,因为资本更偏好的去处已经清晰可见。
4. Meme 币将长期存在;老牌 DeFi 必须靠赚钱证明生存
Tulip King 的个人结果是一个有用的警示:在投入“无法计算的数量”进行 Meme 交易后,他赚了约4美元,却付出了远超回报合理程度的努力。但他仍然尊重专业交易者,因为 Meme 是无许可市场的涌现结果,行业会经历持久的周期,而不是到了某个终点就彻底消失。
他的可投资框架将交易 Meme 与持有 Meme 基础设施区分开来。Meme 币已经证明自己是长期资产类别,但这个生态仍未找到公平估值,因此投资者可以通过 PUMP、Robinhood、创作者和社交交易产品获得敞口,而不必持续挑选代币。
新一代链上企业也在抛弃加密行业过去的仪式:它们进行回购,避免无休止的 DAO 流程,有时围绕一位值得信任的创始人组织。Anom 的模式表明,信任可能应该存在于“链下、社交层面”,把真实团队和真实业务与链上实验结合起来,而不是假装代码可以消除信任。
他的愤怒留给老牌 DeFi。他说,Anom 的代币通过首日销毁返还给持有者的价值,比 Compound 在整个存续期内返还的还多;而 Compound 随后又从其 DAO 中抽走了5200万美元。Aave 和 Uniswap 也受到类似批评。这些代币要么改变行为,要么跌到足以释放机构资本的程度,让资金流向那些“尊重你”的项目。
5. Pump 的纵向整合比最新的 launchpad 威胁更重要
Thread Guy 将 PAWNS 描述为潜在的生死威胁:当非 Solana 代币的份额升至历史最高水平时,Pump 仍然只忠于 Solana;Robinhood 的链、Vlad Tenev 的进攻性,以及 PAWNS 不断增长的收入,都可能打击 PUMP 的估值。
Tulip King 的反驳是,Pump 已经完成了一次“大师级示范”。击败第一代 launchpad 后,它加入了 PumpSwap,从单纯将发行变现,扩展到同时将发行和交易变现;因此,在熊市期间,Pump 的收入跌幅小于 Meme 币市场的市值和交易量跌幅。
FOMO 和 Pump 可能更多是互补关系,而非敌对关系:FOMO 依赖 Pump 发行的代币,而任何由 FOMO 驱动的 PumpSwap 交易量最终都会为 Pump 带来收入。下一步的纵向整合是社交交易:Pump 应用可以不收交易费,因为 Pump 能将底层活动变现;只要这一品类足够大,它甚至只需成为第二、第三或第四大的社交应用即可。
Streaming 的效果并不好,Tulip King 也称赏金事件“在道德上令人不齿”,但他把失败的非对称押注视为大规模运营的一部分,并以 Google+ 和 Google 更广泛的业务组合作类比。PAWNS 最终可能搭建出类似的业务层;但 Tulip King 认为,Pump 未来的市值也可能来自借贷、质押、奖金以及更广泛的生态扩张,而 PAWNS 尚未证明自己具备这些能力。
6. AI 支出已经跑在全经济生产率证据之前
Tulip King 接受 2000 年前后的类比:互联网确实催生了全新的业务,但 Cisco 的基础设施估值跑在盈利应用之前,可能花了 10年、15年甚至20年才恢复。如今,“唯一真正赚钱的企业,就是那些在建设 AI 基础设施的企业”。
他的证据是宏观回报仍然缺席:尽管技术已经从“Chat GPT 3 走到 Fable 5”,GDP 增长依然低于平均水平。融资先是来自过剩的企业现金流,随后转向债务,再转向股票发行;而当债务和股票市场都开始枯竭时,Nvidia 据称5000亿美元规模的支出联盟,在他看来像一个难以成立的支撑故事:最终这些钱买到的是 Nvidia 芯片,而不是明确的终端需求证明。
中国通过持续规模化扩张增加了供给侧压力。即便中国本土 DUV 光刻机的效率比西方联盟的 EUV 系统低25%,但“如果他们的数量是对方的100倍,那就无所谓了”;他还提到 Apple 正在投资 CXMT 的存储供应,中国也在建设自己的光刻设备。
政治风险可能在技术之前击穿数据中心商业模式。他认为,离网供电无法阻止地方政府就电力补贴进行投票,而 Oracle、Galaxy Digital、IN 和 CoreWeave 都没有建模“在政治上输掉意味着什么”。Thread Guy 听到了一个做空逻辑;Tulip King 则拒绝押注任何一个方向——他既不押注 AI 上涨,也不愿拿自己的人生押注 AI 崩溃。
完整逐字稿
Yo. How are you, dude? What's new? Nice to see you again, friend. How are you?
It seems like you haven't officially been on stream for a while.
Always happy to be on the air. I'm fine, man.
Yes, a lot of time has passed.
Every time I connect, you guys are bigger. It's nice.
Yes, that's true. You little brat. I wanted to call you a scoundrel, but I won't.
Tell me, what is your intuition telling you right now? How are you feeling? Maybe we'll discuss crypto and then stocks. What do you want to talk about?
Dude, we can talk about anything. I feel pretty good.
I think it's a market for traders. In stocks and crypto, it's not so simple: everything doesn't just go up or everything go down. You have to choose the categories you want to be in, and frankly, you need to choose the right names in those categories.
For example, AI is quite tough for trading right now. Pharmaceuticals have always been crazy, but now it's just trash.
Same thing in crypto, right? For example, on-chain versus DeFi versus memecoins, and so on.
I feel really good. I think there are a lot of opportunities, but there are also a lot of ways to lose money right now. This really looks like a traders' market.
Well, I don't know. It could be different. This is the most exciting period in trading in a long time, honestly. You can trade, or you can just sit in the hype for the last 6 months and do nothing.
Yeah, hype is good if you have a lot of money, right? If you're like, "Okay, I have a lot of money," I can't just throw it away. Do you know what a real project is that you can invest in?
But I think I'm kind of a turbo-hype. It seems we're doomed to go above 100, but there are better returns elsewhere.
Another thing you like right now is Zack, and I like the guys from Zack, man.
I don't have any right now. I can't believe it—as soon as it started gaining momentum again, I'm like, "Oh, yeah. I like this coin. I'm buying."
I bought some for the Ironwood upgrade, which was a pretty prophetic purchase, and then just kept accumulating more as it grew.
You had one of the craziest short-sale trades, man.
I'll be frank: I figured out this chart over the last 12–18 months. It wasn't like I could close my eyes and tell you where Zcash was going at any given time. It was a real masterpiece for me.
What do you think of our small group of good coins now? What about the hype around Zcash and the pump? What do you have? What do you like?
I don't know. How do you think this group will play? Besides, they want to know where it's going, bro.
Of course. Where is it going?
Above. I mean, very, very up.
For a group of good coins, I like the saying that it's not enough for me to win; I need my enemies to lose. It seems to me that it's not enough to simply win with good coins. I think bad coins should continue to lose.
This is your signal that a real redistribution of capital is taking place. If you believe that redistribution is happening, then there's so much "dead" money in all this garbage, right?
Just scroll through the top, okay? I'm not bearish on Ethereum, but I'm not bullish either. You pass by Avalanche. Litecoin still seems to be in the top 100 coins. It's a bunch of junk, right?
I think this is probably one of the most controversial opinions, but let's say Arbitrum, Optimism, Avalanche, maybe Solana. All these coins also aren't money and don't bring any profit, so you're just fooling yourself by holding on to them.
But that's great if you want to know where the money for the pump comes from. It would be people selling Solana to buy Pump, right?
Just like Pump. They sell Solana to buy Pump.
I think as long as we see a divergence between good and bad coins, the cycle could last much longer than people expect and could reach much higher levels even without an influx of external capital.
It seems like people are finally ready to reconsider their assumptions about crypto and start investing wisely.
The only coin that stands out from the rest, and that causes a lot of hate on streams, is Solana. I also often hate it.
Here's Ansem. I don't know if Anom likes the hate on SOL, but give me the same capital rotation that will turn Solana around.
Why is that? What needs to happen so that SOL doesn't give up its position and start falling behind?
If you support the thesis of Solana as a decentralized NASDAQ—a networked NASDAQ—then the first problem you'll face is a lot of competition, right? Hyperliquid is clearly ahead, and in second place is Lighter.
I thought it was Celestia.
Oh, man. Sorry, sorry, sorry. It's just decentralized. Sorry.
But if you support this thesis, the first problem you'll face is a lot of competition, right? I don't know if Solana even ranks third in this game. Maybe, maybe not. I'm not 100% sure.
NASDAQ is a public company, right? You can look at its market capitalization—not the NASDAQ index, but the company that runs the exchange. Why does no one ever talk about this? Because they don't earn anything, right?
There are tens of billions of dollars or something, but all the companies traded on NASDAQ make more than NASDAQ itself.
Wait, Solana is worth more than NASDAQ right now, right?
Solana has more competitors than NASDAQ. At the same time, trading volumes on Solana are much smaller than on NASDAQ, right?
So I look at it and think, "Dude, it's overrated, right?"
Let's say you implemented the plan. The first problem is that there's a good chance they won't become a second NASDAQ at all. That's the first pessimistic scenario.
The second one—let's imagine that they did become a networked NASDAQ. Is it really worth the money everyone is talking about?
Got it. I definitely think that's a little problematic.
This is not the right coin. You don't need to make a hero out of yourself here, right?
Pump makes significantly more money than Solana. The tokenomics are great because they literally dump Solana to buy Pump, right? Just look at the trade. I don't think there's much more to be said here.
You don't have to try to catch a falling knife, right? Good coins grow. Buy them.
Hmm, okay. Another thought: Ansem said in the group that the problem with Solana is that it competes with Robinhood and Pump on both sides.
I completely agree. I think you know what else is a valid idea? If Solana had another Pump—a successful application at roughly the same level as Pump, but which wasn't a launchpad for memecoins.
Then I suddenly think, "Damn, Solana Network. Maybe this idea that blockchains are cities is totally true."
If they had another powerful application that makes 6 figures a day, then they would have to admit, "Okay, the network on this chain is crazy, and it's really valuable."
But when it's just Pump, it's hard to say anything other than, "Drain the SOL. What's the difference?"
And maybe it's the cards. I don't know.
There's a big problem with that too, right? Here's Phantom—a top-tier product. I've seen great working relationships between Solana and other social-trading apps, but they abstract the user from the chain itself. There's no "Solana app," right?
Now look at how many Solana phones were sold. I don't know the numbers, but I'm sure they're meager.
Have you discovered it? There's more than one of them, brother. Did you turn that thing on? Did you turn it on?
Okay. Well, here's the problem: you didn't even turn it on.
Yes. I use mine. I love mine. I bought it and made a profit on the Doge airdrop or whatever it was. But it's essentially a paperweight.
So the problem is that Solana doesn't have a price advantage, right? Because if they start raising fees, FOMO will just redirect people to other networks. Phantom will redirect people to other networks.
They're kind of in an existential crisis. If they can't get users, then the way they make money is by exploiting the users of all the other apps that have the order flow, right? They can direct it anywhere they want.
Most people don't make money ignoring Phantom, so I could very well be wrong. Solana is a big name, and it's good technology on which to build a real business, but they're in an extremely difficult position.
I don't want to bet just because everyone is trading memecoins on Solana. If there is no accumulation of value, it's better to bet on something that actually gains value from this activity, not on Solana.
Yes, I think this will take one application away from Phantom. Solana is crazy again. I really believe in this.
What do you think about Hyperliquid? You're a big Hyperliquid fan too, right? Do you think there's still potential for hype?
I like the trio of ZK, Hype, Pump.fun. It's like Solana, AVAX, and Luna.
I mean, Hyperliquid is easy to hold, right? You could just hold Bitcoin before, then Bitcoin and Ethereum, then Bitcoin, Ethereum, and SOL.
But the problem is that you inadvertently created a very skewed barbell strategy. The theses were: Bitcoin is money, Ethereum has a premium because it's money, and Solana has a premium because perhaps it's money.
My long-term crypto portfolio is 3 types of money, but for the other 2, as we've found out, it's debatable how much monetary premium they deserve, especially compared with Bitcoin, which is simply king.
But Hyperliquid comes along and becomes big enough for the institutional level, which means patient capital—meaning it can be held as an institutional asset—and instead of being money, it earns money, right?
So you can actually create the perfect barbell strategy between some Bitcoin-to-Zcash ratio as the cash aspect of your portfolio and some Hyperliquid-to-Pump ratio as the profit-making component of your barbell.
At this point, you think, “Okay, maybe it will happen today, maybe in a year. It doesn’t matter, but all this could double or triple.” I have exposure to crypto, and now I can do whatever I want—trade everything else and allocate funds into these barbell ratios as I see fit. So I think this is the most blue-chip exposure you can have in crypto, and within the supercycle, it’s pretty obvious.
Okay, so I think that’s a good idea. Listen, man, when we hired you, wasn’t the biggest reason you told me you had 200% of your capital in Bitcoin? I’ve never heard anyone say anything remotely like that in my life. I didn’t even know that was possible. I think you’ve started changing your tune. You didn’t change your tune, but you started talking about things that aren’t Bitcoin.
When I knew you, you only wanted to talk about Bitcoin. Now we’re at this very interesting point where we’re knocking on the door of what could be another manic Bitcoin breakout. I also ran around shouting that this was the first cycle in which Bitcoin would not participate. I really mean that altcoin pairs are going crazy against BTC, whereas in the last cycle they didn’t, except for a few legendary ones like the hype around SOL.
What are your thoughts on BTC, given where we are now? What about the macro environment? Where is Bitcoin headed, or is that all?
I’m still at the stage where Bitcoin is probably the smallest percentage of my portfolio. I’ve been trading, and I’ve been taking profits in HYPE. I’ve been taking profits in Zcash.
You used to only take profits in BTC, right?
Yes, I used to do this all the time, like a religion. I think I mentioned this in the first interview: there were times when I only had enough money left in my bank account for next month’s rent and groceries, and every other dollar was in leveraged Bitcoin. I immediately invested the profit from each trade back into that position.
Actually, I still don’t have any free money. Everything is invested. Everything is in cryptocurrency. I love this shit. You’ll have to pull me out of here by force, with screams and resistance.
Now I’m allocating funds to HYPE. I distribute them to Zcash. I insist that this is not a Bitcoin cycle because you have to keep two opposing points of view in your head.
The first is Buffett’s view, which is correct. Gold is a bad investment, Treasury bonds are a bad investment, and money is a bad investment because they’re not productive. It’s better to just buy and hold a business. There’s a reason Buffett made more than all of us.
But the problem is that this is true almost always, except when money is worthless. When money depreciates and it’s time for a regime change, it creates an investment opportunity to move from bad money to good money.
The current crypto cycle is dominated by the ideas of the Buffett school: let’s buy good projects that generate profits. There’s a lot of discussion about how to value revenue, buybacks, tokens, and equity. There’s much debate about how to build this and what the value of this tokenomic model is.
But people are starting to do it right. On-chain projects have become intellectually as far removed from Bitcoin as ever before. It’s like we broke these shackles.
It just so happens that 30-year bonds are flying into the abyss. We’re effectively losing the war in Iran. China’s technological dominance continues. Artificial intelligence is sucking all the money out of the market, and this is putting a lot of pressure on the dollar system.
So Bitcoin is skyrocketing. Bitcoin is going crazy because it’s essentially the base, the basic collateral of the crypto economy. It allows you to use a bunch of leverage, and that triggers a bull market.
Therefore, I stand by my intellectual opinion that this is a cycle without Bitcoin. It just so happens that Bitcoin is doing very well right now.
The thing is, and we talked about this before, I keep mentioning AVAX. They’ll send me a pretrial demand, but I think we’re safe until Kleo genuinely posts a fractal targeting an all-time high.
Then I get a little stressed. Even during this last little drop, Bitcoin is down 4%.
I know, but everyone was in the chats posting ApeCoin’s P&L. I’m like, “Guys, what the hell are you doing? ApeCoin’s P&L? What are you doing?”
I think it’s good that it’s pretty clear what to position yourself in, where the money is going to go if it consolidates, and what could skyrocket. As we know from every cycle, there are always a couple of new things that come out and take all the attention.
How do you position yourself with new things—Robinhood, on-chain experiments, AI coins, and things like that?
I respect memes. I love memes, and I’ll throw some money into memes when I have a good idea or find something funny, but that’s not my game. I probably did an incalculable amount of meme trading and made $4. I worked infinitely harder trying to make money on memes than I did actually making money on them.
But with a primitive like on-chain stocks, and with memes having proven themselves as a long-term asset class, I think it’s fair to say that memecoins are an emergent property of completely permissionless capital markets. If NASDAQ allowed anyone to list anything, NASDAQ would have memecoins.
If that’s a key property of the technology we’ve built here, then memecoins aren’t going anywhere. I respect memecoin traders. You can just be a memecoin trader. That’s cool. They’re not going anywhere. They’re going to go up and they’re going to go down.
There are going to be market cycles here, just like in any other sector, but memecoins are always going to be around. Of course, it’s easier to make money when the market is going up than when it’s going down, but that’s true of any asset in the world.
You can become a memecoin trader. I really like all these creators. I like the whole social movement that’s happening there. It’s really interesting to watch, and it’s going to be good for our industry as a whole.
You can buy into the infrastructure of memecoins, like Pump.fun, or maybe buy into stocks like Robinhood. Sector A is the idea that memecoins have become a stable asset class, even though they weren’t considered that a year ago. The whole asset class is undervalued right now, and we’ve yet to find a fair price for the memecoin ecosystem.
Then there are the on-chain projects that I think are different from memecoins. These are things like FWAs, brokers. They’re financial experiments. I’m glad that people are having fun and trying new things.
I’m glad that we’ve learned from the past because these projects are doing buybacks. These projects aren’t spending time on DAOs. They’re just saying, “This is how it is. Here’s a buyback.”
I think we still need to work on the structure of these projects. Maybe we should go the Metadow way. Maybe that’s the right way to launch an on-chain business, or maybe there’s some other way.
What Anom is doing with his coin is building social interaction around it, combining off-chain social capital with a team and a real business. He can bring in a team to work with market bubbles like a real business. He can do on-chain experiments with his index.
Maybe you don’t need a DAO or a launchpad. Maybe you just need a trusted founder whom you trust. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe we were wrong to try to put trust on the on-chain level. Maybe it should just be at the market level, and maybe trust should actually exist off-chain, on the social level.
It’s so exciting to see all of this happening. While I feel the anger at all this, it’s not enough that good coins go up. Bad coins have to go down. I would like to see Compound or Aave go to zero, or Uniswap really suffer.
I think these overvalued tokens have a kind of toxic capital allocation from labs. They’ve done nothing but squeeze the most out of the DAO.
I think this, by the way, seems like a trio.
Yeah, hold on.
But just for the record, Anom’s coin made more money on its first day and gave it back to token holders through the first-day burn than Compound has in its entire existence in terms of revenue to token holders.
Compound just pulled another $52 million out of the DAO. This is a token that should go to zero. The same goes for Aave. They’re doing buybacks and stuff, but I want these on-chain kids to get the hell out of here and sell this shit. Don’t short it. Just sell all of this and buy tokens that treat you with respect.
Maybe you don’t like memes or something, but Anom has done more for its token holders than it took Hayden Adams and all of these guys years to do. So I think we should think about that.
The other great thing is, again, it’s not enough for good coins to go up. Bad coins have to go down. The institutional crypto venture class is so heavily allocated to all of these projects.
They’re allocated based on the principle that we have lab capital. We can sell a token to get liquidity, and then we’re profitable and essentially have a free position in the labs.
When these tokens start to go down, and you realize they didn’t really get any value out of them, you think, “Oh my God, the labs don’t make that much money either.” They’re basically job-placement programs, paying a couple of people to hang out in Williamsburg and drink bubble tea all day.
When they go down and on-chain coins like PAWNS go up, and on-chain coins like FWA go up as well, VCs find themselves sidelined by Pump, so they’re forced to buy. At some point, their LPs look at them and say, “How come you didn’t buy the most profitable app in the world because it was in meme coins?”
They’ll say, “Why would I invest? At some point, they’re going to say, ‘Hey, you invested in Compound, but they didn’t make anything.’” Or, “The team took all the money and is having these token parties, and you invested in a team that was just enriching itself.” What do you do? What about this Paws thing? It went up to 100 million and bought out 30% of the supply or something.
I’m really looking forward to either these projects getting hurt enough that they have to change their behavior and can actually grow because they’re creating value, thank God, or getting hurt enough that all that capital can flow into these good projects. For the last time—I’ve said this a million times—if these bad coins can go down, these good ones can go up so high. They’re so undervalued.
I think, overall—not really, but I’m making up numbers here—I’d bet you three-quarters of the institutional capital in crypto, the professional capital, is just completely exposed. They put themselves out there as absolute junk. It’s true if you look at the top 100 cryptocurrencies. It just sucks.
So it’s time. I’ve never been more optimistic and excited about the state of on-chain than I am right now. Liquid Fund has been holding onto DeFi bags for years. Anom said it right. It’s time for them to refocus. It’s time for them to sell and buy our assets instead.
Although I like Robert Leshner. He’s my guy. I adore him. He started Compound back in the day. Things were different back then, and I’m willing to forgive everyone a little bit for what they did in early DeFi. The DAOs were cool. Were you going to get sued or not?
But there are no more excuses. Robert left before the sins of Compound happened. He was forgiven, but the others—I don’t know. Big Lash, the legend, friend of the stream.
How big of an existential threat is Pon to Pump.fun? I’m starting to think about it. They’re only on Solana, which is historically similar to Bitcoin’s problem.
Hear me out: Bitcoin remains resilient—Lindy—because it does nothing in the face of any threat. And then there’s the quantum fear, perhaps the most significant one we’ve had. Bitcoin owners say, “There you go. We didn’t do anything. We did a million Xs, and Bitcoin survived because we didn’t do anything. Why should we stop doing nothing?”
In many ways, Pump does the same thing. They only use Solana. They never added mainnet. They never added Base. They added Blast at one point, and it was a disaster. They never added Monad. With every new hyped ETH chain, Pump says, “No, no, no. Sol, Sol, Sol, Sol.” That’s Lindy.
Here comes this Robinhood Chain. I totally understand why they didn’t add it on day 1, but Vlad Tenev is being aggressive. The share of non-Solana coins is at an all-time high, Pown is going straight up, and their revenue is going straight up. If it gets too crazy, Pump’s valuation could get a little shaky.
What do you think about Pump having to take the hit and add Robinhood Chain, and their failure to do that?
Yeah, I think people underestimate the kind of masterclass Pump is doing. First of all, they’re making more money than anyone else with this launchpad, and they beat out all the competition, like BonkBot and other launchpads. In the first wave, they beat out all that competition.
Then the bear market comes, and of course, meme coins die and volumes drop. But why didn’t Pump’s revenue go to zero? Revenue dropped less than the market cap and volume of meme coins, and that’s because they launched PumpSwap.
Before that, they were basically just making money from issuing meme coins. Then they started making money from issuing and trading meme coins. They started verticalizing, and that protected their revenue during the bear market.
Then FOMO came along, and now you have social trading. That’s the interesting thing: if FOMO drives any volume to PumpSwap, Pump makes money. I don't know if they realize it because there's a little war going on there, but Pump probably makes a lot of money on FOMO. They’re actually probably better friends than they might realize.
FOMO relies on Pump coins. Pump likes FOMO traders. I’d bet they benefit each other to some extent.
Exactly.
To continue verticalizing, Pump is starting to change course—the Pump app—toward social trading. You see everyone saying that Pump.fun only hit the mark with the launchpad because they botched streaming, which was a good idea, by the way.
When you had it, it was a good try. I’ll stand by that.
Yeah, it was decent. It didn’t work great. But this is a business. You have to be like Google. Look at Google’s investment portfolio: SpaceX, Anthropic, and Waymo. There are also a lot of failed projects.
When you’re as big as Pump.fun, you have to invest in these asymmetric opportunities, and because they’re asymmetric, most of them fail. I think the talent at Pump.fun gets a lot of hate because streaming was so obvious, and the bounty story—the bounties were a little morally repugnant. I don’t think anyone should defend that, but it was another attempt to achieve a goal.
It’s not just that. They launched PumpSwap and an app. I don’t have any information, but the future of Pump is obvious. It’s a continuation of verticalizing. Maybe they develop lending, come up with bonuses, and figure out what kind of ecosystem they can build around these projects.
If you have an app, should they just hold your money in Pump, or should they do some staking? There are so many paths to development, and they’ve already proven that they’ve done verticalization once. They’re in the process of the next stage of verticalization.
They don’t even have to win. They could be the second-, third-, or fourth-most popular social app if the whole category is that big. Remember, I think the Pump app has no trading fees because they make money from trading the Pump tokens and Pump itself.
They have a competitive advantage because they make money from order flow. They don’t even have to charge a fee in the app, so they’re in a pretty good position.
Would I be worried about Pawns? No. I just think Pump is at that advanced stage. Pawns has to reach a point where people realize that Pump’s growth is coming from all these other opportunities, once it’s priced fairly relative to its current revenue.
Then people will realize that the new market cap is coming from these expansion opportunities. If you don’t see Pawns doing that as well—and maybe they will, but they’re a long way from that today—then Pump’s future cap has nothing to do with what Pawns is doing. I’m not really worried about that.
By the way, JPMorgan just announced that they were launching a stablecoin, and Circle went down 5%.
Wait. Yeah, I don’t—I mean, it’s such a fragile business. It’s such a weird business. It’s quite complicated.
What’s Google+? Google Social. What’s Google Social?
They were basically trying to do something like Twitter or Instagram—a social network where you used your Google account—and it was a complete failure. But it was another thing that looked like, “Okay, Threads for Google.”
If I was sitting in a Google boardroom and they said, “Hey, let’s try to make a social app,” I’d probably say, “Yeah, let’s try. Good idea.” It’s another one of those things that failed, but it was a good bet.
You didn’t have Google+? What the hell is Google+? I’ve never heard of it.
Maybe I have. It could have been before you, man. It launched in June of 2011.
Yeah, you might be too young. Dino, let’s do a story on that tomorrow. Hell. Ann was in high school when this [ __ ] came out.
Mr. King, anything else you think happened in high school? Are there any final thoughts that inspire you? What do you think we should know? What if Bitcoin goes to 75,000 right now?
I think Bitcoin looks—it’s just a graphical mess at this point—but it looks good above 72, or 72–74, wherever you draw your fancy lines. I don’t know. I think the coin looks good.
If we go below 70, I’m going to start getting worried and be like, “Oh, shit. They really got me on this bull trap.” But for now, I feel pretty good.
I also think AI is starting to get a little bit bigger, which is definitely good for our profits today.
Maybe. We’ll see. Yeah, I mean, gosh, I just don’t think there’s a number they can call that’s enough. They can’t let Leila Harpin [?] be right about this liquidity fundraiser, right?
Oh, no, no, no. She says, “No hate.” No hate. No hate.
By the way, I didn’t mean to say your name wrong. I really didn’t mean to.
She says she was short. Nvidia is a tulip. Also, Flood [?] really is short. I don’t understand why people don’t like the analogy to the 2000s, when it was basically: okay, the internet gave us the opportunity to build fundamentally new businesses with a new economy.
So let's all get wildly bullish and bet everything on that opportunity. Cisco, which provides networks and connectivity, goes sky-high, but the profitable businesses built on the internet don't show up at that moment, so everything collapses. Cisco takes 10, 15, 20, whatever years to get back up again, right?
Dude, I don't know. I think we're at this point with AI where we're putting all of our GDP into AI, and the only businesses that are making money are the ones that are building it. But if you and I have an internet connection that doesn't do anything, it only matters if we're trading over that connection.
Yeah. That's right.
So building AI for your religious project of creating a machine god is cool, I guess, but it doesn't create any real economic activity. Then you listen to Doresh's podcast that he just did with Dell, and they're like, "Oh, you know, I see a 10% increase in GDP. This will require so much capital that it will start taking it away from the government. Anthropic will be the only private company in the world."
And I'm like, "Dude, GDP growth has been below average since ChatGPT launched." What are these guys smoking? I understand that GDP is a deeply imperfect indicator, but damn, shouldn't we? By that I mean, we went from Chat GPT 3 to Fable 5, and we still have below-average GDP growth.
Every company wasn't in a bubble, because these were profitable businesses that were using excess cash flow to build AI. So even if everything went down, these companies still had profits left, right? But then they started raising debt in the markets, and the debt markets dried up. Then they started raising equity, and that's drying up too.
Now Nvidia is in a position where they say, "Oh, here's a magic coalition for half a trillion dollars of support, and everyone's going to use that half a trillion dollars to buy Nvidia chips." Dude, that's just impossible. There's no fucking number that they can say that makes me think, "Oh, we're there."
At the same time, China—what's the history of China other than taking something and scaling it to infinity? We take electric cars and scale them to infinity. We take steel and scale it to infinity. We take fabrics and scale them to infinity. The Chinese models keep catching up, right?
They're building these DUV machines, these deep-ultraviolet lithography machines. They've already taken DUV lithography to a level that I just didn't think was possible 5 years ago. The way they've advanced this technology is incredible. Maybe their machines are 25% less efficient at making chips than the EUV machines of the Western alliance, but if they have 100 times more of them, it doesn't matter anymore, right?
Apple is going to China to invest in CXMT to ramp up memory supply. China is building all of its own lithography machines. I don't think you have to be very smart to figure out what this is all about.
The final summary is basically boring, right? The tweet exchange between Dario and Gavin Baker—I read 3 sentences of that. I did an angry retweet, and then I deleted it a minute later because I hadn't even read this. I don't care.
I'm like, okay, we get it. You're building a god, you think, blah blah blah, and all this coin crap—crypto, yeah, yeah, Bitcoin. It's just, yeah, yeah, so you can confuse everyone with your $30 trillion total market cap. It only works when the story is interesting, but I'm so tired of listening to these guys.
This is worse than when they're mad at you or happy for you. Data center hate—I promise you, I could be wrong, but not a single data center investor I've talked to has factored data center hate into their funding, right? They all go online and read, "Everyone hates that these data centers use a lot of energy, so we're going to build these data centers on off-grid power so they don't impact the local community."
This is cool. But techies are so ignorant about politics that they don't realize it won't change anything. I guarantee you can build your data center on off-grid power and your local government will still vote for you to subsidize their electricity bills.
I promise you, Oracle didn't calculate this. Galaxy Digital did not model this. IN did not model this. CoreWeave did not model this. None of these companies have modeled what it means to lose in politics.
And they don't understand that when they lose in politics, it will simply result in attacks on them. So as the cost of capital increases and costs arise that were not factored into the models, there will soon be purely economic reasons to slow down this construction.
If development slows down, and Nvidia was counting on its half-trillion-dollar cyclical funding, I'm not betting on AI going down because I don't want to end my life, but I'm not betting on AI going up either, man. I really don't play for promotion. Nvidia reports today, dude.
An important day. This is a fucking important day. Hope for the best, dude. This is long overdue.
Yes, this is long overdue. This sounds like a sell position.
"It sounded like a short thesis to me," he says. No, don't do that, Anom. Don't—just don't look.
Some things shouldn't be sold on principle.
This is scary.
Yes. Yes. The consequences of this.
TH, you're the best. You're the fucking best. I love it when you come. I love it when you're optimistic. I love it when you're optimistic about my coins. And you did all 3 things today. You came, you were optimistic, and you were optimistic about my coins.
Do you have any final thoughts you would like to share?
No. Good luck. Good luck to everyone in the trenches. I hope we all make money.
You're the fucking best. Thank you for coming again. See you in a quarter. Peace.
My fucking best, man. This guy has a special brain, man. I'll tell you this: I think he sometimes beats his head against the wall. He has to talk to me for hours every day. I think he bangs his head against the wall for a couple of hours every day when he has to talk to me. Shad [?] is a tulip.