《我们完了》：与 Armani Ferrante、NEAR 和 General Kimmitt 对谈

Welcome back to Market Bubble, a show all about investing in yourself, where we feel an overwhelming majority of young men today are in a losing position. How are we positioned? Find out today and every Thursday live on twitch.tv/fazebanks as well as kick/ansom and on both of our Twitters. Uh 1 p.m. PST. Uh yeah, where are we at, brother? $2.5 trillion evaporated—erase that, $3 trillion gone. I just want you to pop your shit off. I have to do something on my phone for 30 or 40 seconds. Talk to him, bro. What the fuck is going on?

1. AI Fears Deepen the Selloff

Yo, what’s good, everybody? How are we doing? I think this is the reddest day of the year for the Qs, the Nasdaq, and the S&P. It was a pretty nasty sell-off across the board, and it came right after we pumped back into a prior support-turned-resistance level. A lot of people got bullish into that pump, and everything basically rugged pretty aggressively today.

The Democrats won the House and Senate for the midterms. We sold off a little bit right after the news happened, then pumped really hard yesterday. I said on the show the week before last that I thought equities were topping out and pulling back, and I kind of expected crypto to be weak in tandem with that. They’ve broken down from their trends, too, and that’s kind of what’s happening right now.

Nvidia is actually negative on the year now, which is pretty crazy, but I think there’s a lot of profit-taking happening in markets. People are uncertain about what the AI outlook is going to look like for the next year, and a ton of people are de-risking amid uncertainty about what Congress is going to do moving forward. Not great, bro. Not great, to be honest. The charts are pretty nasty. I still think Bitcoin, ETH, and SOL are going to pull back deeper, even HYPE, to be honest. HYPE kind of retraced most of its move from the HIP-3 announcement with Trade.xyz.

The Nasdaq is at a crazy spot. I think this bounces soon, though. This is a pretty aggressive sell-off, so I think you’re going to get a relief bounce soon, and it’ll probably chop around in here. Crypto hasn’t really sold off that hard yet. This has mostly been chop, and this is the breakdown, but we haven’t seen a sell-off as aggressive as we’ve seen in some of the equity names. Where’s my shit? This one. I’m expecting this to continue down, to be honest. We might get some relief into the weekend, and then next week I think it’ll probably sell off more.

Bro, you’re not telling me anything by showing me a graph. Everything is in the charts, brother. Everything is in the charts. If I were positioning now, if you bought the lows from the summer, you’re still up a decent bit, depending on what you bought. If you bought Zcash, HYPE, or PUMP, you’re still up a good bit. Even majors are up a decent amount.

I still think I’d be de-risking here if you don’t have a decent cash balance. I just think it’s going to be tough to buy these range lows again if we get a retest, and it’s a lot easier to buy back into strength. If you get a weekly close on Bitcoin and ETH around $82K and $2,400, I think you’re going to have a decent amount of strength there, and that’s a good spot to buy back in. But I think we’re going to have continued downside, to be honest.

I’m back. Sorry, I had to handle some shit.

Yeah, man. This is brutal.

Pretty nasty, I’m not going to lie.

It’s brutal.

I mean, nastiest day of the year.

Of all time, isn’t it? I feel like I’ve seen this headline and this tweet 30 times.

Ever.

Yeah. I see the big red charts and “this much money has been erased from the market.” I feel like I’ve seen it a million times.

Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the largest ever by notional amount, just because everything is so much higher than it was in previous years. Maybe.

Percentage-wise, obviously not.

Yeah, but in terms of—

Makes sense. It’s a bit gross.

Does the AI bubble burst? What does that even mean? How do you determine whether the AI bubble has burst? How do you come to a conclusion on that? What are the criteria?

Nvidia drops 50% from its all-time high.

Nvidia drops 50% from its all-time high?

That’s the criteria for that.

Drops 40% from its all-time high.

AI shares? What do you mean?

Or OpenAI declares bankruptcy.

Oh, it’s a multi-layered thing.

Yeah, yeah. Four.

Oh, okay.

Yo, production’s switching me real quick to some shit. Just stay solo.

I think you’re okay. Cool. Okay.

2. Zcash’s Privacy Thesis Strengthens

Zcash has been pretty strong. It’s been the strongest asset by far in crypto. This is what I want to buy when we get the deeper pullback, for sure. HYPE and PUMP are trickier because they depend on a lot of trading activity in the market, and I think Zcash is less dependent on that. That’s one way it’s differentiated.

With the Democrats winning the House and Senate, people are going to be more concerned about having the private-money thesis. It makes a ton more sense with them in office than it does with Republicans dominating both sides. They’re a lot more anti-crypto. They’re definitely going to go after Trump for all his crypto stuff, and I think they’re going to go after a lot of different things that have happened. They’re definitely going to go after a lot of the insider-trading stuff, so I think the thesis around Zcash is going to get stronger next year.

It’s up a decent amount, but compared with Bitcoin, it still has its quantum-resistant property and its privacy properties. I still think it’s going to continue to gain against BTC. I’ve been thinking about running the ZEC/BTC pair. I don’t have it on right now, but this might be a decent pair to keep running. It’s been pretty much up only since Zcash broke out, and there are a lot of people hiding out in it right now.

As you can see, it hasn’t really broken the lows yet. I think these longs are going to get tested—everybody’s longed in here—so I think sub-$1,040 is definitely going to happen. Personally, I’m thinking somewhere down in here. I wouldn’t want to see it go to $750, to be honest. I’m looking between $750 and $850, but that would require the majors to drop.

Bitcoin is at its last key support level right now, around $75K to $76K. It technically hasn’t broken this lower-time-frame range area. If it does break this area, you’re going to see it retest these range lows in the mid-$60Ks. But I could see buying here making sense. If you buy at $75.9K, you can play with a pretty tight stop. You’re not risking that much, so it’s a good risk-reward trade.

If we see the selling slow down in equities, even if it’s just a temporary bounce, you could see these recover, too. I could reason through buying BTC here. The chart looks better than a lot of the other things, to be honest. I think you just wait. SOL is gross.

SOL is pretty gross.

That was insane. I’m not going to lie. Ali was pretty crazy, bro.

Can we watch the clip? We have to watch the clip one-handed.

I think Mert posted it.

Find it.

Yeah, pretty sick. It was a sick event, bro. The FOMO 3-on-3 was fire.

I had FOMO unironically.

Yeah, this is insane. Somebody told me to look at George earlier. How do—

I do this? Banks laptop.

Click full screen.

There we go.

Bro, this is insane. At a fucking CT crypto charity basketball event, 3-on-3. This is actually fucked up, bro.

That's bad, dude. That is fucking bad.

Oh, bro. Everybody was like, “What the fuck, bro?” Out of nowhere, bro.

I'd have been popping my shit the fuck off.

Going crazy. That was insane.

That was tough. I'm not going to lie. That was tough.

Aura meter at max for the rest of the year, minimum, at least off that.

Shout out Bill. Shout out Bill.

Insane, bro.

Bro, that's a—

Oh, man. Look at the freeze-frame. Look where I was at.

Oh, fuck.

But literally, dick in mouth. Ming—

Your dick's literally in this kid's mouth.

Gay as fuck. This clip's gay as hell. This is crazy. That's brutal, bro. I'm not going to lie. That was pretty—

Bro, Ming, you literally kissed Ansem's dick. That's crazy. On camera. There's a clip of this on Twitter. Now M's the boy. That's fucked up, though.

M is my boy.

One more time for good measure.

Oh, fuck.

Bro, he immediately too. Yo, he threw his hands on his hips. He said, “Fuck, man. That's bad. That's so bad. That's crazy.”

It's bad because there's so many people watching this shit. There's—

I just saw ThreadGuy drop some sort of trailer. While we're already watching videos in a good mood, we should watch this.

Oh, no.

Did you get—

No.

It's—

Why? I don't know.

Just don't.

Why?

Do you have a good reason for it?

I don't know. I have no idea.

Okay. Okay. Binance got hacked for $6.3 billion while we were live last week. Is any exchange safe? I think $6 billion left after that as well, so $12 billion out of the market now, essentially. How are we feeling? Are exchanges safe? Is crypto safe? What are we thinking?

Yeah, I mean, one of the biggest rules in crypto when you're operating as a user is never to keep all your money on one exchange. That's one of the cardinal sins in crypto. One of the best attributes of crypto is the self-custody aspect and being able to manage your own keys, your own money. If you keep it on an exchange, you don't have access to it. It's not your money that you fully have access to.

There's always the risk of hacks in crypto. I think the concern is less the actual hack, because a lot of the funds got frozen pretty quickly. I think Tether and USDC were able to freeze a lot of them. The more concerning thing is the optics around crypto and people seeing it as a scam, or as something where your money can get stolen and hacked. We already kind of have a bad reputation there.

If Binance, which is obviously the biggest exchange in crypto, can get hacked, people are going to think similarly about other exchanges, regardless of whether that's true or they have better security practices. The main thing is the liquidity that left after the hack. $6 billion left Binance after it happened—not the hacked money, but $6 billion was withdrawn because people don't want to keep their funds there. That's less liquidity that's likely to be bidding coins. Not great, to be honest. Not great for the outlook in the short and medium term. It's crazy because it came right on the heels of the Hyperliquid HIP-3 announcement, which I thought was pretty crazy.

Where do you keep your crypto? Where's the safest place to keep crypto? What's your OPSEC look like for people watching at home?

I want to get my full OPSEC setup. I think having offline wallets is the safest way to keep your cold-storage crypto. Hardware wallets are good, but really, you want devices specifically for keeping your cold-storage crypto and not for doing anything else. It doesn't necessarily have to be a hardware wallet; however you do that.

And then your seed phrase and private key should be in places that aren't easily accessible to people. You should have wallets that are easy to find and wallets that are not easy to find: your hot and active wallets versus your cold-storage wallets.

Got it.

An iPhone that's offline, yeah.

Air-gapped, offline, fresh new emails, things that have not been tainted or touched. Full quarantine. The CFTC app—somebody said, “How fucked are we?” I think we're pretty fucked, bro. I'm not gonna lie.

Yeah. To be clear, you are still bearish?

3. Risk Off and Wealth Preservation

I think we're pretty fucked. I am still bearish. I got stopped out of some shorts on the morning of that pump. I got trailed out, and then I re-shorted earlier today. I still have a pretty decent cash position.

I just know that crypto has been in a downtrend for a while compared to other risk assets. This most recent Q3, we had a really good pump across the board on a lot of different things: on-chain, Hyperliquid, Zcash, and even the majors did pretty well. But like I said last week, if equities are entering a prolonged consolidation period or a prolonged downtrend, it's going to be tough for a riskier asset class to do well.

Obviously, there are going to be outliers. I think Zcash probably has the strongest chance of being the outlier because it's not determined by trading activity, revenues, or anything else. It's really just the hardest form of money, and also private, so it has qualities no other asset has. I actually bought gold and silver recently, too. I think those could be good hedges.

If equities are starting a prolonged downturn, I think it's going to be tough for risk assets. And if this pump in Q3, the past 2 or 3 months or whatever it was, was countertrend to the ongoing downtrend, that's obviously not great. We could continue to make a lower low across the board for coins. So I'm going to be bidding the most recent range lows, the summer lows, on stuff I want to bid with the cash I have now. If those give out, I'm probably going to be chilling for a while.

Yeah. So, nothing really to be excited about on that note. I mean, the Dems sweep the midterms. What does this mean for market sentiment? Is it already priced in? How do you feel about this?

I don't think it changes too much, to be honest. I think it could be really good or really bad. It could be really good if the Dems control the House and the Senate and they're still able to get legislation passed. That obviously shows that, even with that split happening, the government, the country as a whole, is on the same page, which I think would be great.

I think the core issue right now is the Iran situation and the AI investment situation—the AI capex situation—because AI capex has been driving a lot of returns for stocks. Right now, I think investors are uncertain about whether that spending is worth how much it's contributing to these larger tech companies' revenues. Revenues are already up a ton, so people are looking for reasons to sell right now.

People have said that Democrats may be more opposed to the buildout of all these data centers, which is required for this investment to keep going. I think the largest tech companies—Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google—are in the strongest position, more so than the memory names and semis, because they own the entire stack rather than just one piece of it. I think they're more defensible.

What I also think is interesting is where capital is going to go. AI has driven so much of the returns for stocks over the past few years, but what other value areas and value plays are people going to look to invest in if that's not the dominant trend? That's what I'm looking at right now, what I want to get involved with. It's definitely not immediately bullish, winning or sweeping, because it creates a lot more uncertainty right now. People don't know what's going to happen with the few different things I just mentioned.

Right. Some fun news: SpaceX just officially partnered with Qualcomm, and I guess Elon Musk is buying Boost Mobile. We're going to see a Starlink mobile here in the future. How do we feel about that? Are we switching? iPhone to Starlink Mobile? We're in the future, baby.

It's a crazy combo. iPhone, Starlink Mobile. I want to try it out. I want to see how it compares. I feel like all the cell carriers suck, bro.

They're trash.

I feel like it's 2026. You should be able to have service on the moon. You should have service on a plane, in an elevator, all that shit.

Thanks, brother. Got my best.

Wow, what is that? Chick-fil-A?

Mm-hmm.

Cheers, brother.

I need a Chick-fil-A sponsorship. This is the real sponsorship I want.

Let’s get you the gold card.

Yeah, I’m down to try out Starlink. Do they say the nationwide 5G is supposed to be way better service than everything else?

I mean, it has to be. Anytime I’ve been on a plane with Starlink, or had any experience with Starlink in general, it’s been 10 out of 10.

Yeah.

I’ve been on a jet with Starlink. You can literally FaceTime people and stream. Plane Wi-Fi is ass.

Shitty, bro.

Yeah, you obviously can’t FaceTime on regular plane Wi-Fi. It’s very slow, and you can’t really stream video half the time. It’s ass; it drops and shit.

Starlink, shout out Elon.

The GOAT. Let’s face it, the GOAT. Do you think collectibles are good investments? Do you collect anything physical? We’re talking about where our money is safe. It’s not safe in money; it deflates. It’s not safe in crypto, obviously; it gets hacked. It’s not safe in stocks; the shit’s falling off a cliff, like memory stocks. Where the fuck are we buying?

I think you just extend your time frame. Obviously, stocks and crypto are pulling back right now, but if you’re investing in good companies over an extended time frame, you’re more resistant to short-term market volatility. It’s never bad to have cash or to have your money in dollars. You don’t want to sit in dollars for 10 years, but if you’re up a lot on gold, silver, SpaceX, Amazon, or other quality assets, realizing those profits back into cash is how you actually beat inflation.

Just constantly keep it flowing, constantly keep it moving. Rotate in and out of positions, buy anything and everything.

Well, people are always going to need cash for stuff. When people say, “I can’t be in cash because inflation is too high,” and then they just sit in assets that go down 70%, your cash isn’t going to go down 70% in a year. You’re weighing your downside risk that way. I think taking profit is a key part of beating inflation.

So you’re saying the idea that having money in cash is dumb is a little overblown? Obviously, cash is inflationary, but it’s not that bad. What is it year over year?

I don’t know what it is.

I mean, it is pretty aggressive, but you always want to have a cash position. 4.5% is fucking crazy.

In markets, you can size that up or down depending on how bearish or bullish you are, but you always want to have some cash.

Of course. Pokémon cards. I know you own—

I don’t have any Pokémon cards. I have one Gyarados that my boy gifted me, so I have one. Actually, maybe two.

You flashed it on the call yesterday. It was grainy and pixelated, and I knew exactly what it was. I’m a fucking freak.

Yeah. I bought a large position in Pokémon cards in 2017. I can’t believe this sentence is about to come out of my mouth. I’d just made my first real big bag on YouTube, a six-figure bag—around $100,000—and I spent about half of it on Pokémon cards.

Brutal, bro. How much is it?

Like $600,000.

It’s worth just about that today. Yeah.

SMPratte. Shout out SMPratte. I sourced my entire collection from him. It obviously soured me on it. I didn’t buy the cards to make money; I didn’t look at it as an investment at all. It just would have happened to be a really good investment. It obviously spoiled it for me. This was way before the Logan Paul stuff.

Damn, that’s crazy, bro. The whole thing got yanked.

Yeah, brutal. Brutal.

I know what I had back in the day. I had a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh cards.

Yu-Gi-Oh, as far as the aesthetics and everything, there’s not much that tops it. The whole ethos of that world and brand, the characters, the monsters, and the game—can we talk about this for a second? The game was way better. Who the fuck plays Pokémon TCG?

Nobody.

Yeah, Yu-Gi-Oh was way better.

I used to go to the tournaments on Saturdays, get the little promo card, spend five bucks, and try to win.

Exodia, bro. Exodia and Blue-Eyes White Dragon.

Legendary. Legendary. Your Eagles, bro, they look like dogshit, coming off another loss.

Are you just calling it quits? Is it GG? Is it over?

Oh, so sick. You know, bro, I’m not going to quit. I never call it quits on the Eagles, to be honest. The NFC sucks, and our division is awful, so we’re always in it in some way because we can win the division and sneak in. I’m not calling it quits, but I wouldn’t be mad if we got a good draft pick this year. We also have the Patriots’ first-round pick, and if we also get a high first-round pick with our own pick, I think we could do some damage in the draft. We’ve been drafting out of our minds the past few years. We’ve never had good picks because we’ve been so good. If we had some good picks, I think we’d dominate this draft, which should be a good sign for next year when Jalen’s back.

Bro, the Giants are 63% to beat us. That’s nuts. It’s crazy.

The Giants in Philly, by the way. They’re at home.

I mean, it looks pretty good.

Wow.

From where I’m standing. Yeah, we have Joe Milton, I think, starting this week. Rookie quarterback, I think, from Tennessee.

Honestly, triple down, bro. Let’s fire on the Eagles. Fuck it.

We haven’t won one trade on the Eagles, bro.

What’s the Giants’ record?

Four and two.

Yeah, they’re probably going to wax Philly. Let’s be real. But they can’t cover 3.5 points. They might win by three, but cover 3.5 at home? There’s just no way, bro.

Yeah, but that’s basically 50/50.

It’s a line.

All right, do it. Fuck it.

This is emotional, by the way.

Never. I just never bet against the Eagles. Genuinely, never. What else is cool this week? I haven’t really watched much football this year. It’s been a weird year for me.

Isn’t Lamar hurt, too? Lamar Jackson’s out for the season.

Yeah, Lamar’s hurt. The Chiefs have been crushing it. Who else do I like? I think the Texans are going to smoke the Chargers, to be honest. They’re 0–7. No, Herbert’s 0–7. That’s nasty. What about the NBA? The Sixers play—well, let’s take the Sixers to beat the Cavs. What are your thoughts on SanDisk and memory overall?

I think—

Tip-top or terrible trade? Let me guess.

I think it was a great trade. As far as buying right now, I think you can buy it pretty soon for a relief bounce, because this week was pretty aggressive selling across the board on memory. But I think it’s a top for a while. You’re going to have to see some consolidation in the memory names: SanDisk, Micron, and a lot of them. That’s what happens when you have these parabolic blow-off tops. It’s not really avoidable; too many people are up a lot of money. I think it’s the tail end of the market cycle for those names, but we’ll see. Next year will probably be clearer, depending on whether inference ramps up, what the models look like, and what the next set of models looks like. It’s heavily dependent on how much the larger tech companies are going to invest and spend, and that impacts a lot of the memory trade. We’ll see. A lot of people are saying it might slow down a bit next year.

You’re buying gold and silver. I saw you tweet.

I bought gold and I bought silver.

How much of your portfolio is in gold and silver? I’m just curious. Where do you go to buy gold and silver? I’m assuming you’re not going out and buying gold and silver bars.

I thought about it. I thought about it—

Well, that’s where we’re at, huh? That’s dark as fuck. If you’re thinking about buying physical gold bars—

Are we investing in a fucking bunker as well?

Yeah.

Nuke-proof bunkers and shit.

All of it. The whole thing.

MREs, ready to eat. You saw Threads, the movie.

Bro, we’re doing all of it.

I don’t know, Nick. I think it’s bullish. I think it’s bullish.

Let me know if you physically go buy gold, because I think we’re back.

That’s insane. No.

Yeah, it is pretty crazy.

It is pretty crazy. Well, I think the reason is that commodities like gold and silver are more defensive investments. If you think risk is going to pull back, gold and silver could do well. They also do well when rates are lower, and rates are finally starting to come down because people are buying bonds again and are less concerned with future growth compared to all the AI stuff. A lot of the big AI companies were offering bonds at really high rates, so people were like, “Well, if they’re offering bonds at these high rates, we want to get a higher rate on U.S. Treasuries.” But no, I think they’re a defensive investment.

4. Pearl and Hyperliquid’s Next Bets

Got it. I heard you before the show, in prep, talking about accumulating and maybe starting to buy some Pearl in Q4, given that Pearl’s now available to trade easily on-chain. Do you see it catching a bid short term, or how are you thinking about it?

Yeah, Pearl is a longer-term play. Pearl’s high risk, for sure. What they’re trying to do is be a form of hard money, in the same way that Zcash is trying to be a form of hard money. But their entire thesis is that, instead of just doing proof of work where the work you’re doing isn’t worth anything—it’s just an electricity cost, a compute cost—the compute you use to mine Pearl can also be used for all the inference matrix multiplications you need when you’re doing inference.

They call it “useful work.” When you’re mining Pearl, you can also make money by serving that inference to people. That thesis makes sense. If you think the amount of compute we’re going to use over time will keep going up, Pearl could hit escape velocity as a hard form of money—basically, an AI Bitcoin, as they call it.

But I think you’re going to have time to buy it. I don’t think it’s going to rip really hard, especially if conditions aren’t great in Q4. That’s why I said I think you have time. It’s starting to get some attention now, probably more than it had earlier in the year.

It’s available on NEAR now. You can buy it through NEAR Intents cross-chain. I think they’re also getting listed on Coinbase soon. Before, it was really hard to buy: you had to buy on SafeTrade or OTC. It recently got Hyperliquid perps, and now it’s possible to buy spot. I do think it’s one you can buy in small amounts and tuck away, because it has a lot of upside if it does well. You can just write it off if it doesn’t.

Bet. Say less. I’m not going to say it, and I’m not going to bring up chat, but do you see what the chat’s spamming right now? They’re spamming a ticker. The last time this happened, I’m also not going to say what it was. What the fuck is that? What are they talking about? Is something ripping right now? I’d be really surprised.

If it was.

Uh, no, I don’t think it’s ripping right now. They’re talking about—

Yeah, they’re talking about this coin paired to this stock, AMD, which did well. They beat earnings. There’s this meme on Pump. That’s what they’re talking about.

They’re just raiding the chat, trying to get some quick, cheap pumps in, or what?

Yeah, trying to get attention.

Got it, got it. We were talking about Hyperliquid and, kind of, explain to me what we were talking about before. You were talking about Hyperliquid running the Robinhood Chain playbook. Let’s dive into that, because that’s interesting. Explain what you were talking about pre-show, because I don’t have anything here on—

I’m not prepped in any way on this, but you were talking about it. It sounded really exciting.

Yeah, Elysium is launching soon. Kinetiq is the largest liquid staking provider on Hyperliquid, and they do a few other things as well. They’re launching an L2 on top of Hyperliquid. Right now, you have HyperCore, where the decentralized perp platform lives, and you have the HyperEVM, which is their EVM-compatible L1. But it’s extremely slow, like all EVM L1s are, and it hasn’t gotten a lot of traction with applications in the same way that HyperCore has dominated with its purpose-built perp platform.

Kinetiq is building Elysium, a rollup on top of Hyperliquid, and it will be a lot more performant. You should be able to do a lot more on-chain there. I think what separates it from a lot of the L2s currently is that, although it has a much lower market cap right now, they’re directing a portion of the revenues to buying back and burning Kinetiq, which a lot of the L2s don’t do. I think most L2s don’t do that. They’re also coordinating with a lot of the applications on-chain to do the same thing, buying and burning Kinetiq, which I think is interesting.

I think the way for L2s to win and be differentiated from existing L2s is to have an application ecosystem that benefits a native token. That’s what it seems like the Kinetiq guys are focused on doing, so I’ve been paying attention to it. I think it launches on November 9, but the pre-mainnet is open now. The same way that, if you were early to Robinhood Chain, there was a way to get there and figure out how to bridge over before they announced it and made it public, Elysium is in a similar spot before it launches on the 9th.

I think on the 9th it’ll be available on Pump and FOMO and all the social apps and everything else. It’s an interesting spot on-chain. As we know, Hyperliquid has been dominating.

It’s goated and in contention in the debate for the greatest product of all time in crypto. The greatest team of all time in crypto. It’s a pretty whack time, though, man. The timing on this is brutal.

But, you know, shit changes quick.

Yeah, facts.

Shit changes fast, bro. I was super bearish in the early summer, and then in late June, early July, I flipped bullish, and everything ripped pretty hard after that. Stuff does change.

Let me ask you for some pretend scenarios. In a perfect world, what needs to happen for things to start trending the other way? Give us some scenarios where we could wake up tomorrow and see some sharp moves up. What do you need to wake up and see? What’s the tweet say? What is the market doing?

What do we need to happen? I think it’s a few different things for crypto to do really well. The main thing would be relative strength in crypto compared to stocks. We’ve seen a little bit of that, but not aggressively. For example, if, after that Hyperliquid announcement, it rips to $100-plus while stocks are nuking extremely hard, Zcash is at $1,500, and Bitcoin and the majors are still holding well, then obviously that’s a situation where I’d want to be investing in crypto, because it’s the only thing going up while everything else is going down. That would be crazy.

Coins ripping through all-time highs while stocks are in a downtrend and not doing well would obviously be great. The second thing is what we saw a little bit this summer with Pump and FOMO’s user numbers on their social apps. If you have a breakout application that gets net new users and traction, new people speculating and spending money, that’s another reason I think crypto could do really well.

Some of the stuff that’s underlooked right now is the neobank stuff in crypto. Crypto cards have actually been doing pretty decently. I think Ether.fi is one that’s been doing well on the user-traction side, too. The same way that, in 2023, before things really ripped, we had Friend.tech, which did really well at getting attention from a larger group of people. It broke out of CT a little bit, but not that much. It was enough that people were playing this new game.

When you have a new minigame or game that people think they can make money on in crypto, it’s obviously good for the market and for bringing new money into the market. A breakout application like that, or a coin being relatively strong against stocks, would be the two main things, for sure.

Yeah, well, we can hope. We can pray.

Maybe we can manifest it. I feel like if we focus really hard, we might manifest it.

Let’s open up the Phantom app and give somebody in the Phantom chat a Raki[?] before we get into the guests.

Let’s do that while I take my— You already know what time it is. It’s piss time.

Do we have the Phantom join?

All right.

We’ll be all right.

Yeah. Damn, what question should I ask them? Z, what should I ask him?

How much are you up to?

I don’t even know how much I’m up today on my short, bro. I’ve got to check. I’m going to look at the screen right now. Ms. Kobe, in some kind of way, you’re tailing my SOL short. Shout out, bro. I timed that shit so well today. I literally top-ticked everything right before it all nuked.

Jordan, QQQ up 20% on the portfolio. Nice, congrats, bro.

Are you guys up on any altcoins? Shout out Andy Altcoin. We can send him a bag. I like him. Are you guys up today? Did anybody play downside with options or shorts? If you’re up a lot on shorts, I think it’d be a good time to take profit, to be honest. Can we send something to Andy Altcoin? I like him.

Andy Altcoin. “I’m down forever.” Bro, you’re private.

Andy, you’ve got to unlock your profile, bro. What are you hiding in your Phantom? Do you have like $100 million there? It’s okay, bro. I won’t leak it. I gave you $9.

Thanks, man. I need that. I need that. You’re my GOAT. My GOAT. What are you guys in right now? What are you guys holding right now? “Fries in the back. Fries in the back. And some oil me down.” What? I’m not doing that, bro. We’re not that close. I don’t love y’all that much. I love y’all a little bit, but not that much. That’s a lot of love.

“Holding my nuts.” Me too. I am too. Sending people a ten is so funny.

Zebix, you know, I’m not even wearing socks right now.

That’s not a promise. I’m not.

Do we have the first guest in the green room?

What the fuck is this edit?

What the fuck is this edit, bro?

Did you give away the bread already?

What is that?

Did you give away the money?

What is that? Yeah, I gave it away.

Bet. What do we have? We have $1,000 left, I think.

So—

We’ll wait till after the post before I pass it off to you for the post-TA. Micron is down 17% today, dog. One day.

Stocks are meme coins. That’s insane.

What was the market cap before and after? Was it a trillion at the top, or close to a trillion at the top?

Jesus Christ. It’s $170 billion.

Something like that. Crypto being down less than stocks is so funny. It kind of makes sense, though. Crypto just feels so bottomed.

It’s apathy. That’s the word I keep using: apathy.

Explain.

Apathy. People don’t even care anymore. They don’t even give a fuck. “I’m already down 80%. Who the fuck cares if it goes down 90%?”

Yeah, that’s fair. It’s just slow. That’s a good way to describe the sentiment and how it feels.

It really is. Especially ETH, bro. When’s the last time you saw somebody bull-post ETH?

I just did. As a matter of fact, I just saw it, and I’m like, “Who the fuck is this guy?”

Really?

Yeah. It was some guy I met at ETH Denver, funny enough, years ago. Maybe 4 years ago at this point. Nobody bull-posts ETH. Even SOL, to be honest.

Well, what Tulip said to us on that show has really stuck in my head.

Elo is on. I’m not going to lie, dude. The “Is it money, or does it make money?” thing is such a good rule and principle to trade by, especially in crypto.

Yeah, I’m not going to lie. He’s low-key good.

Huh? Oil?

Oil, yeah.

But is oil dumping, too?

No, oil’s ripping.

The price of oil?

Not ripping, but it’s up. I think oil has to be long. They’re just really—

I think oil might be long. This low from October, this prior high, ripped double, and now it’s retesting the same area again. But it sold off on pure headlines. People are like, “Iranian officials want to discuss a possible ceasefire,” and it sells off, but nothing actually gets done. Just the idea of this war maybe ending sells this thing off. Then it keeps creeping back up once people realize it’s not actually over yet. If this war isn’t over and the Strait is still a fucking issue, this thing is going to rip back up. Nobody ever wants to be long oil because everybody wants this shit to go down. Nobody in the world wants oil high, so it’s a tricky trade. But if you think the Iran situation is going to continue into next year, this seems like a great spot to be long. I think the invalidation is pretty tight, too. Where would I put my stop? I’d probably try to bid—this is just so thin.

Somebody in chat said, “I know Banks is big on GTA.”

I am big on GTA, but none of the coins, man. I can’t do these low-cap, super-volatile coins in the trenches on-chain. I feel like it’s all completely smoked for a while. It’s tough.

I’d probably just buy some here and then buy some down here, to be honest, because having a stop here doesn’t really make sense. I’ll buy some here, and then if you get the pullback down in here, I’ll probably buy more. Maybe I actually will. I feel like long oil is just so low-T, though.

Low-T.

It is, bro. It’s like, I’m long oil. Who gives a fuck about being long oil? I’d rather just send cash.

That’s fair.

It’s really just a— Yeah, I don’t like it.

Our first guest is in the green room. You want to introduce him?

Yeah, if he’s ready.

I think we’re waiting on Illia, too.

Yeah, Illia. Both of them.

Got it. The market is so ass right now, bro. This shit is ass. I’m trying to figure out what I’m—

This is why there are no ETH bulls, by the way. What the fuck is this, bro? What is bro doing?

The problem with any kind of security is basically: who do you trust, right? And the solution is openness and verifiability, right? If you want a path for us to be able to survive and prosper in this new environment, a path that does not depend on—

He’s lucky he has a fucking hammer, bro. That’s all I’m going to say.

Jack links this. He goes, “This is why there are no ETH bulls.” So funny.

Sorry, chat. We’re just waiting for—we have 2 guests coming on at once: Illia and Alex, the co-founders of NEAR.

Two geniuses.

I’m excited for this conversation.

I have 2 geniuses on.

They’re here. Z, you want to introduce them?

Yes. We have the co-founders of NEAR on today. NEAR is one of the most successful L1s in crypto, and recently it’s picked up traction for NEAR Intents, its cross-chain interoperability protocol. NEAR has also been popularized for private transactions across chains, similar to how Zcash has been popularized as private money. That’s been their main area of interest this year. They’re very smart guys.

Yeah. Without further ado, how are you guys?

Hello, hello. Good. How are you?

Amazing. How are we doing?

Just keep building, not looking at the markets. The usual.

I know, bro. You’ve just got to build through the red candles. Building through the red candles is how you get the strongest green ones afterward. This is the truth.

That’s a good way to start. How do you guys stay focused in times like this, when things are grim, the timeline and sentiment are terrible, and the vibes are horrible? How do you stay focused, keep your eye on the prize, and stay on track?

Super great, just because the systems and the intents are earning money not when markets are high or low, but when everything is volatile. When there’s a storm happening in the industry, it means there’s even more work for us. For example, with all of the hacks, we need to protect against and counteract money laundering. There’s just a lot of work.

I mean, let’s start there, right? Let’s start with the elephant in the room: over $1.5 billion gone, evaporated, see you later, and we’re all led to believe the explanation is one employee’s laptop. What are your thoughts on this, first and foremost? And second, how does this change the way people trade? How does it change the way people run swaps? Give us your candid feedback and thoughts on this whole thing, this whole Bybit hack.

Yeah, I mean, I’m pretty sure the explanation is what it is. The systems are pretty complex, and usually at the end there are some weak points. I think this is a lesson that we need to continue improving cybersecurity across the board, and we can talk about that as a whole. But I think what Alex mentioned is that now we have effectively the biggest prize in finance floating around, right? I mean, $3 billion of that was frozen by stablecoin issuers and, I guess, Arbitrum on their side, and the rest is being laundered.

And so, effectively, how do we make sure that as the money moves around, it’s marked and all the right actors are informed, while at the same time not touching the money of good users or getting it mixed in? I think that’s a job that we—and Alex and his team especially—have been looking after. You guys probably have a lot more work to do when the market gets heated up like this, to be honest. Have you seen more volatility, with people doing more swaps, I guess cross-chain, in addition to the hack stuff?

Yeah. Usually when there are violent price moves, volume increases everywhere. And maybe to add, when Binance was locked, right, people needed to use other venues to trade, and so—

Having unstoppable liquidity that exists across all chains is extremely useful for that. I think we’ve seen this trend continue over the past few years in crypto: a lack of trust, it seems, in a lot of centralized institutions and more faith in decentralized protocols. I think that’s probably going to continue, to be honest, but it rings true to the core ethos of crypto, so I think it’s definitely a good thing.

Do you guys see yourselves as the interface for making tokens more accessible to retail? In previous cycles, everybody was waiting for an exchange listing. If you got on one of the major exchanges, that was a big deal for tokens. But now, with much easier access to everything on-chain, it seems like that’s not really the case. Do you see yourselves as the last frontier for making tokens accessible?

I would say centralized venues and decentralized protocols have different sets of risks. When somebody is custodying your funds, it means you don’t need to think about how to custody them properly. Many institutions use professional custody providers, for example, so they don’t have these risks in their heads and in their hands. Decentralized protocols require more knowledge about self-custody, but they give you more guarantees. They’re just different sets of risks.

The way I see NEAR Intents and the technologies we’re building is as an alternative to what centralized systems and centralized actors have built. It’s not that one thing is better than the other; it’s about different sets of risks and giving everybody the option to manage those risks and choose what they would like. That’s the end goal. We’re building all the pieces of infrastructure for unstoppable liquidity, so these markets aren’t dependent on any single party, regardless of where people live, whether in North Korea or in the US.

But I think maybe, to your question about retail access, it’s already started to happen. Centralized exchanges are limiting more and more who they can serve, for a variety of reasons, and from my perspective, those restrictions are going to keep increasing. If you compare Binance now with Binance in 2017, it’s a very different experience. To bring back the retail experience, where everybody can participate and use it, you need something non-custodial, but also something chain-abstracted. You don’t need to choose a chain or figure out gas fees. You need an experience that feels like a centralized exchange but delivers on non-custodiality and, importantly, privacy, as people trade more and use it for payments and other things. From that perspective, that’s what NEAR Intents and NEAR.com are offering. We see new assets wanting to launch directly to that experience because it gets them the distribution they’re looking for.

Yeah, because that’s an interesting aspect. A listing on Binance gives you distribution to Binance users; a listing on NEAR Intents gives you distribution into every single wallet and every single front end that has integrated NEAR Intents. These include all of the biggest crypto wallets in the industry, including Binance Wallet.

Including Binance Wallet. So there’s no need—imagine if anyone were able to integrate Binance’s order books straight into their front end. That’s the type of experience NEAR Intents is providing and delivering to everybody building applications.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I think the most interesting piece is the new assets that will want to go direct here, the ones that don’t exist in other traditional systems. We’ve seen a lot of issues with hacks and cybersecurity over the past few weeks. I think we’re going to continue to see that as AI models get better and better and people try to use them in nefarious ways. How do you guard against similar hacks happening against your systems? We’ve seen a ton of bridge hacks and exchange hacks in crypto. How does NEAR specifically guard against those going forward?

Yeah. I have this joke about the NEAR ecosystem: there are 2 CTOs, myself and Illia. I’m the chief today officer, and Illia is the chief tomorrow officer. I’ll tell you what we’re doing right now to protect the system, and then Illia is probably going to continue with additional measures we’re developing.

I’m always saying that security is a multilayer cake, and the more layers you have, the better. It all starts with the secure software development life cycle: how systems are patched, how updates are delivered and deployed, security audits, and AI tools with generative models that can red-team your code. All of these things are in place, but this still isn’t enough. We have a security council inside the ecosystem that provides guidance on how to take care of security for everybody. Sometimes they do the actual red-teaming, trying to extract secrets and hack our own systems.

Besides that, you definitely need bug bounty programs. Many hackers are willing to take the bounty and walk away with clean money, and that’s very good. This is everything the industry gives us, and we’re using all of these approaches to protect the system and add more layers. But there are more interesting things in development, including formal proofs, which is what Illia’s team is working on.

Yeah. If we look more to the medium and long term, something we actually launched last week was uncensored models. This includes DeepSeek Uncensored, and a few others are coming, to allow anyone doing red-teaming or security analysis to do it properly. For people trying to use Claude or Codex, I get hit with, “Hey, this is security-related, so I’m not going to answer you,” even if you’re asking questions about your own code or code the system just wrote. Security specialists, people doing security analysis, and developers need access to uncensored models. NEAR AI is offering that, and we see a ton of demand. We’re launching more products around it, including code review with uncensored models.

We’re also starting to run our agents with uncensored models that try to penetrate our system—red-teaming from the outside as an outside actor—to find out whether any newly reported vulnerabilities are still open at any entry point. In the medium to long term, all of this is a cat-and-mouse game. You have a new model, and you’re trying to defend faster than the new model finds things. Whoever gets access, prompts it better, or fine-tunes it has an advantage, so you’re constantly in this loop.

The only way out of it is to have a formal mathematical proof that something is indeed working as expected. That isn’t possible for everything, at least not right now, but it is possible for smart contracts, for consensus, for parts of the runtime, and for some other components of a system. We’ve been working on making that process cheaper in general. We’ve effectively made the proving process about 200 times cheaper than if you run frontier models, and made writing the specification—declaring what you actually want—simpler, so people can understand and verify it. Together, this allows us to verify that smart contracts are working correctly and that the consensus, runtime, or blockchain is doing what it should.

You combine that with the other piece, a shield we’re already using to detect blockchain failures, money laundering, and security issues on other chains, and to have a proactive system.

You want mathematical proof, your own red-teaming with uncensored models and code review, and proactive analysis of what’s happening in production that can pause and cut off things that seem to be outside the norm. You really need to combine all those things into a singular system working together. Everybody needs it. Every single company in the world is under attack now and needs a system.

It seems like you guys are definitely on the frontier of best practices with these things, whether it’s crypto or AI and tech in general. For the formal proofs piece, if they’re so important for verifying smart contract functionality and all these different functionalities, why doesn’t everybody use them that way? Is it difficult to formally prove all these different things, or why isn’t it the baseline standard?

Until about 2 months ago, this was so expensive. Usually, you’d hire a firm to do formal verification, and they’d ask for about $1 million for a small smart contract.

The price has gone down dramatically because of AI. The other important problem is that you prove that your model of the code works. Depending on how you model it and how you mathematically specify your smart contract, you can prove something that doesn’t actually match what the code does. That’s a pretty big problem. In many cases, even if there’s a formal proof, the code could still contain bugs.

You need to do a lot of deeper analysis. Outside of crypto, Anthropic recently posted that they formally verified a piece of code, and then a few weeks later somebody posted that they’d found 5 bugs in the code they had formally verified. The reality is that there’s a modeling exercise. What we do is make the blockchain itself the mathematical model, so smart contracts can run on that model of the blockchain and you can verify that exactly the same thing is running.

It’s a very complicated process to make sure everything is correct, but this would give smart contract developers the tools to verify that.

Gotcha. That makes sense. It’s a great explanation, and I think that’s helpful for the chat. I know you guys focus a lot on privacy. Does that make these security practices more difficult, or does it make them easier?

It’s a double-edged sword. On one hand, if your assets are private, it’s harder to target you. It’s like walking down the street with a gigantic gold chain versus storing your gold in a secure vault that nobody can access and wearing ordinary clothes. Nobody knows you have a lot of money, so it’s very hard to target you. Privacy helps here.

On the other hand, when systems are private, they’re very hard to analyze. For example, if somebody is laundering money, how do you understand what’s happening? What’s entering, and what’s exiting? The entropy within these systems increases, and because of that, trust in the systems’ boundaries decreases as more and more black liquidity goes through them.

It’s super important to introduce guardrails at these boundaries and make sure that only white liquidity, or acceptable money, comes into the systems. That’s very hard, specifically because of the aspects we’ve been talking about. So this is indeed a cat-and-mouse game.

Got it. I just noticed Pearl was listed on NEAR.com. Can you explain what Pearl is and why it needs NEAR Intents?

Pearl is a new protocol focused on GPU mining. It’s a proof-of-work blockchain, but the work is serving AI models with your GPUs. A simple analogy is that you do some hashing for Bitcoin and then receive bitcoins. If you have GPUs and serve models, and people use those models for inference, you get Pearl. That’s a simplified version of the product.

This is a new type of blockchain; it’s not yet another EVM thing. They have very specific consensus and very specific rules for how the tokens are distributed, so it’s very hard for people to integrate. But for NEAR Intents, given all the technologies we’ve developed, integrating blockchains with arbitrary cryptography is pretty simple. It was a natural decision to integrate Pearl, and the team did it extremely quickly. Now the deepest and largest market for the Pearl token is right on NEAR.com.

I think the exciting part is that it’s a new alternative store of value that converts energy into AI inference, with that as the outcome.

Yeah, instead of just wasted work—effectively lots of zeros—it creates a store of value. It follows Bitcoin’s 21-million total supply and issuance curve. A lot of people are excited about this, and a lot of people are mining it. Creating a market where they can meet is something NEAR Intents is really great for.

To your earlier question, Armani, where’s the place for retail to access this? Where’s the place for miners, or even investors, to come in? NEAR.com is becoming a place where all those people can meet and trade on a single platform.

You guys have been extremely early to seeing trends before they happen, Illia. Do you have any thoughts or bets you’d make right now about the next 5 to 10 years that people aren’t thinking about? What do you think things are going to look like in the future—in tech, AI, crypto? It can be anything, even socially or politically.

Yeah, I mean, hopefully we’re not going to die.

I hope so too, bro. I hope so too, man.

Yeah. Well, I don’t think we’re going to die. I think society is pretty resilient, but we’ll have plenty of work cut out for us to make sure things are moving in the right direction. How much time do we have? I have a whole host of predictions.

Hey, we’ve got time. Give us your best one, and then give us your second best one.

I think the biggest opportunity related to what we’re doing—agentic commerce and NEAR Intents, and what we’re doing with AI and blockchain—is in more traditional commerce, like business-to-business interactions. We usually talk about retail trading and examples of accessing assets. It’s a huge market, and we’re going after it. Alex is super focused on that. But if you think about broader business transactions, they’re processing $20 trillion easily in volume a year.

It’s a lot, and it’s a very slow, manual process. It involves emailing for quotes, figuring out legal contracts, making sure you KYB your counterparties, and figuring out how to transfer money across borders. It’s a very slow process, and it ends up in the prices of the products we consume. Everything from the electronics we use right now to food supplies is affected by that.

I think AI and blockchain together will really streamline that, reduce the cost, and speed everything up. I use the example: “Hey, I want some fidget spinners with the NEAR logo on them.” That’s my intent right now. I’d need to email some producers, figure out who can print them, then figure out how to get them delivered, and then figure out if the producer is actually a real company or just a fake website on the internet.

How do I send the money if they’re in China? Are they going to take RMB when I have dollars? How does it work? All of that is going to be massively streamlined. I think that’s where blockchain, as a machine-to-machine backend and agent communication and coordination protocol, will really affect the economy as a whole. That’s my broader thesis for how AI and blockchain, and what we’re working on, come together.

Completely orthogonal to this, I think medicine—the drugs themselves—will become fully personalized. Your AI will design personalized medicine, then literally call an API to make it for you, and it will arrive. There are a lot of things that need to work for this to function, but it has such a flywheel effect when it works that it’s going to affect everything throughout our lives. Importantly, I don’t think big pharma companies will be able to adapt to it because—

We need the anti-aging serum, brother, because we’re pushing 40 on this show.

Exactly. Well, same.

Hurry the fuck up. Yeah, we need to hurry the fuck up.

There are 2 options. Either we are the generation that is going to be the last to die or the first to—

Live forever. So hurry the fuck up.

That’s like, you can’t make it up.

The chances are 50/50 that we meet our demise or not.

Oh my God, bro. What companies do you think are going to capture that market? Do you have any thoughts on who would win? That sounds like it makes a ton of sense to me.

Yeah. I think traditional pharma just cannot adapt to it. It’s such a different model from what they do. They’re designed for this process of review, going through FDA approvals, getting into pharma, getting into doctors’ offices. There’s so much more overhead, so I think it’ll be new companies and startups.

Okay.

And on the other side, it’ll be your personalized agent doing a lot of this. That’s why you want privacy and verifiability for your agents, to make sure they don’t do stupid stuff.

You know this company, JLCPCB?

JLCPCB? No. Is it public or private?

I don’t even know, but they sponsor YouTube videos by makers. The whole premise of the company is that they have tons of machines for milling, 3D printing, metal printing, and stuff like that. You can go to their website, upload an object you want produced, and they send it back to you. This is the perfect company for producing drugs.

So maybe it won’t be JLCPCB, but JLC Drugs.

It’ll be mRNA, peptides as an API.

As an API?

Then you give it to your agent, and your agent says, “Cool, let me get your blood analysis and your workout routine, and I’ll give you some specific stuff.” Yeah, that’s crazy.

Do you think there are going to be specialized labs? Right now, I feel like all the dominant labs are general-purpose, like Anthropic and OpenAI. Do you think there will be labs specialized in one specific area of research?

There are a lot of labs trying to do that and build that thesis. The challenge is that the network effects of the labs right now are so huge. Obviously, Anthropic has a bio department and a finance department. It doesn’t need to be a big team, but there’s a team working on it and getting biological data. They just acquired the first billion-dollar, single-person bio company as well, so they’re working in all those directions.

Given that you now have such massive leverage with AI on every individual person, it’s really hard to see how another closed lab can compete. Obviously, coming from the blockchain space, I think the only other alternative is to be open and do this collaboratively. Everybody works together. I actually launched something yesterday based on an idea that came out on Monday: people can edit model weights with their agents.

Wow.

It came out as a blog post, and a lot of people started arguing about whether it’s a general technique, whether it’s RSI, or whether it’s very specific and doesn’t work for anything else. I just launched a competition where anyone can edit the weights and submit them for evaluation on a hidden test set. I’m talking about it because I keep getting notifications about new high scores coming in. People are actually able to improve the model just by editing the weights.

So now you don’t need a huge lab to train a model on thousands of GPUs?

People can tune the weights here and there a little bit and keep improving. We don’t know yet how far this can stretch, but you can imagine evaluation sets for medicine, science, and programming. You could see models starting to improve as everybody collaborates to build a better model. I think that’s probably the only alternative to competing with the oligopoly of labs that have hundreds of billions of dollars of compute.

Right. I guess that’s kind of the crypto, decentralized-ethos version of—

Exactly. I got it.

Not surprising.

Yeah. It’s like open research where everybody contributes. The fundamental idea of Bitcoin is to have self-interested parties working together to create a common good. At the fundamental level, miners are all self-interested, but they’re all pushing for a common good: a public blockchain for everyone. I think we need the same version for AI. We’ve been experimenting at NEAR with different versions. This is one aspect. Compute and inference is the other one.

Cool.

Well, production’s yelling at us to wrap for the next guest. We appreciate you coming on again, and we hope to have you on again at some point. Great, insightful conversation. Stay on track. It’s rough out there right now, right?

You guys are crushing it. You guys are crushing it. Keep up the pace.

Thank you, guys. Thanks for having us.

Thank you guys so much.

Thanks. Peace. Thank you, chat.

Z, thanks for the conversation earlier about the markets. I wish you had better news.

I wish I was bullish, bro. I love being bullish. Being bearish is so fucking awful. I hate it.

Low T, like you said.

It’s low T, bro. It is. It’s just low T.

I feel like my T is low right now, to be honest. I feel like my T’s pretty high, to be honest, but—

I mean, yeah, we all saw the dump, brother. Man, rest in peace. Love.

How are you doing, sir?

I’m doing fine. How are you guys doing tonight?

You know, I’m doing all right. The markets are pretty crazy, but it’s exciting times. I put out a tweet the other day saying I think it’s one of the most exciting times to be a trader, because there’s so much information you have to process and react to in real time. So, yeah, I’m hyped. It’s crazy times, but I’m hyped.

5. Iraq Lessons for Iran

You’ve obviously worked with the U.S. Army, and I wanted to get your thoughts on a lot of the geopolitical stuff that’s going on right now. You were involved with Iraq under Bush. If you were active now, what are some experiences or lessons we should learn from those events that apply to what’s going on right now in Iran?

Yeah. First of all, it’s not just my Army background that brought me on. I also went and worked for Secretary Rumsfeld after Iraq to run the whole Middle East portfolio, including the war inside Iraq. I then went over to the State Department and ran the worldwide program for political-military affairs. Since then, I’ve been working in the Middle East.

I think I’ve got a little bit more to offer than just that. You can’t swing a dead cat in Washington, D.C., without hitting 15 officers. If the question is what we learned from Iraq and how it applies to Iran, the easiest lesson is that we shouldn’t believe the people who speak English the best. We made a lot of mistakes with the people we picked to run Iraq originally. We did the same thing when we started talking about bringing back the Shah, and that turned out to be a disaster.

The biggest lesson is that unless you’re native-born and grew up in a particular country, you really can’t understand what motivates people there. I think we’re seeing that significantly in Iran right now. We don’t even understand the way they fight, much less the way they think. I think that’s where we’re running into a lot of trouble in Iran right now.

Completely understand that. Could you give a little more background on yourself? I guess I should have asked you that first—your background, your history, and your viewpoints.

Yeah. Not only have I done strategy for a considerable amount of time, I also have a pretty profound background in what I call 20th-century finance.

I taught at West Point. I did one of the first mathematical excursions into how to price derivatives. I’m a chartered financial analyst, and I’ve averaged about 10 trades a week for the last 40 years.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. The summation of all that equals I have no idea what you guys are doing. All of my 20th-century finance doesn’t give me the slightest bit of edge in terms of how you guys think, how you guys trade, why you guys trade, and what you guys trade.

That’s funny. We’re pretty degen, I would say. We respond to stuff extremely quickly.

Yeah, for sure. Well, you don’t respond as quickly as Virtu does, do you?

Virtu? What do you mean, Virtu? The Flash Boys?

The flash traders.

Who?

High-frequency traders.

Oh, no. No, we’re not. I’m not that. I’m on perps.

Yeah. Vinnie Viola is a friend of mine, so that’s what I meant.

I guess, yeah. Do you think this is going to continue into next year? I keep seeing a lot of headline back-and-forth, a lot of whipsaws over the past several months. They’ve said over and over, “We’re close to coming to an agreement; we’re close to confirming negotiations,” but then we also see the strikes going on, and obviously oil prices have continued to be high. Do you think we’re close to a period of more escalation, or are we close to this ending? What are your thoughts on how long you think it’s going to go on for?

Kalshi says there’s a 17% chance that we’re going to have a signed agreement by the end of the year. 17%, or something to that effect.

Yeah.

I would be pushing every cent I had into that bet right now, because there’s no way that’s going to happen. So, let’s talk about this. The fact remains that ever since the discovery of the illegal Iranian nuclear program, every president has said, “We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

Right?

We tried economic sanctions; that didn’t work. We tried diplomacy; that partially worked, but not enough. I would note that the JCPOA everyone talks about would have expired this year, so they would have been headlong back into development. If economics isn’t working and diplomacy isn’t working, the only other tool the president has—if he is sincere about the longstanding, bipartisan U.S. policy of the last 4 presidents—is military force. We obviously haven’t achieved the objectives. If you give me a couple of minutes to talk about that, if you’re interested, I can tell you why we haven’t met our objectives.

Definitely.

Yeah. I’ve written about this considerably. The fact remains that we’re trying to treat the war in Iran like the war in Ukraine. You’ve got 2 big conventional forces fighting each other, and that’s why in Ukraine right now it’s really kind of like a World War I battlefield. It’s just mud in trenches.

Yeah.

The problem is, we want to fight that way with the Iranians: the more stuff of theirs that we break, the closer we get to victory. In Vietnam, we called it the body count problem. Somehow, we thought the summation of the number of bodies we killed would make the North Vietnamese say, “Okay, you killed too many of us. We’re going to quit.”

Yeah.

We’re making that same mistake in the Middle East, particularly in Iran. We fight a conventional war; they’re fighting a resistance war. A resistance war has 2 components: one is resilience—I don’t remember the Farsi name for it—and the other is patience, sabr. If anybody’s seen the movie Rocky, that’s how it’s fought. We are Apollo Creed, trying to knock Rocky out. Rocky knows he’s never going to win. He just wants to be standing at the end of 15 rounds, because for him, he wins by not losing. And that’s where the Iranians are. They believe they win by not losing—not that they win by winning—but they believe if they can be like Rocky and stay 15 rounds, the Americans will get tired and go away, and then they can declare victory.

I mean, haven’t we seen that before? We saw that in Afghanistan. We saw that in Vietnam. Hell, I think what people don’t recognize is that we were one of the first countries formed under that principle. That’s how we fought the British.

We knew we could never beat the British army. We knew if we could stay up for 15 rounds, they would get tired and leave.

So my point is, as long as we continue to focus on trying to beat them with conventional tools—what’s the president saying now? Let’s go take out Pickaxe Mountain—they’ll just realize that the regime will stay in place as long as it says it will, and the Americans will eventually leave. So what does that mean? I don’t think the war is over anytime soon, unless Trump says, “I’m going to hit Pickaxe Mountain and declare victory and go home.” That’s what they’re counting on. They’ve got their seat belts on, and they’re saying, “Just keep punching us, Apollo, because as soon as you get tired, I’m going to be standing. I’m Rocky. I won by not losing.”

That’s a great analogy. Great context, I think, to understand exactly what’s going on. So you don’t think we’re going to win by conventional means. That would mean you think we would need to win by unconventional means, but the negotiating isn’t working. I guess I have 2 questions. First—

Well, first of all, let me answer that question. Look, I think we’ve got to understand that Clausewitz used a term called the center of gravity. The center of gravity inside Iran is the regime.

Yeah.

So the question is, how do you get the regime to bust apart?

Yeah.

You either get the people to do it, and that didn’t happen because as soon as they stood up, they got gunned down. If you take a look at how it was done in Lebanon, the Israelis did it with some pretty unconventional means, basically taking out subsequent layers of leadership until they finally got some guy who was fairly passive.

Yeah.

I mean, hell, we don’t even know if the Ayatollah is even alive. But we do know that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps—excuse me, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—is still in charge.

Yeah.

I think what we’re hoping for now is that, after a period of time when the regime is unable to pay its workers, its military, and its Basij, at that point it will have gone bankrupt, and the regime will either change or come to the table. But right now, that’s just not happening.

That assumes it’s going to take a long time for that to happen. That’s our goal there.

Yeah. You want to know what I tell everybody when they ask, “How long is that going to take?” I tell them, “We’ve been doing this to Iran since 1979”—which, by the way—no, no, let me finish—which is 18 years shorter than we’ve been doing it to Cuba.

You know, again, these regimes, dictatorships, can hang in forever. What’s that old expression about bankruptcy happening slowly until it happens all at once? It’s the same thing with regimes. They fall apart very quickly, but that point is not hit. That inflection point is not hit. You can’t predict when that’ll happen.

Right. Do you think there’s any credibility to what Tucker Carlson said? I don’t know if you’ve seen his post.

I have not. I can only imagine what Tucker’s up to now.

Yeah. He put out an extremely long, pretty insane post the other day. He essentially said that Trump was considering nuclear war against Iran, targeting Pickaxe Mountain, because they were going back and forth on it and thought that was the only way to end this in a short amount of time. He was urging Trump not to do that. He said that was the seventh or eighth option they were deciding on, or something. How low of a percentage do you think it is that this is true, or that it’s even a possibility?

Certainly, the probability is greater than zero.

Wow.

How old are you?

31.

31. So 1995 is when you were born. Is my math good?

Okay.

In 1989, 6 years before you were born, I was in a nuclear-armed artillery unit. At that time, we still had what we called backpack nukes that our Special Forces could literally strap on their backs and parachute behind enemy lines. They’d be used for knocking down bridges.

We had thousands and thousands of what we called tactical nuclear weapons, which were battlefield nukes. The Russians at that time—the Soviet Union—had a doctrine, which hasn’t changed, that says if anybody attacks into Mother Russia, the use of battlefield nukes is perfectly acceptable. There was no firebreak between conventional war and nuclear war. So which side of the argument do you want me to make? Do you want me to make the argument that Tucker is right? Because I can tell you how that would happen.

Yeah.

All right. So, you’re the president. Listen, Mr. President, we’ve got to understand that Iran, number 1, is the leading proponent of terrorism in the world. Number 2, they’re about to develop a nuclear weapon.

Number three, with that nuclear weapon, it could reach Israel tomorrow. They’ve got the ballistic missiles, so it could reach London. It’s only a matter of time before we’re going to get hit. These guys wake up every morning and say, “Death to America.” They say, “Death to Israel.” As Golda once said, if somebody says something enough times, you better start believing them.

We have different conditions, and even more pressing conditions, than we had in 1945, when we used 2 nuclear weapons against the Japanese. The Japanese weren’t going to blow our country up. The Japanese didn’t have any capability to completely wipe out millions of people, but the Iranians do, and they say they’re going to use it. They say that if they have it—I mean, first of all, they said they’d never do it, and we found out that they are developing one. Now they say they will use it defensively.

So, Mr. President, I think the toughest decision you’ve got to make is whether we want to use the only capability we have to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon. That’s to put a battlefield nuclear weapon—use it at Pickaxe Mountain. It will not trigger the end of the world. There is no force escalation, atomic escalation that’s going to end up with us getting nuked by Russia. That’s something that we’ve believed for years and years.

Nobody can link for me how using a limited battlefield nuclear weapon—no different from what we shot out of our artillery tubes in 1993—is going to lead to atomic war. If not now, we may never have the opportunity. We missed that opportunity with the North Koreans. One day, after all the six-party talks and all the other bullshit, and all the money and humanitarian assistance we gave, those bastards woke up one morning and showed us that they had a nuclear weapon.

We cannot allow that to happen in Iran. What happened in North Korea? They’re the Hermit Kingdom. They just don’t want people to come into their country, so they’re using it clearly for defensive purposes only. You can’t say that about Iran. Mr. President, it’s your duty. You will save American lives by doing this.

Well, he just sold me on that, to be honest. That sounds pretty—

And there are a hell of a lot smarter guys inside the administration than me. The president wants to leave a legacy.

Yeah, that’s very true. Right now, do we know how close they are to having nuclear weapons that would be able to target Israel or nearby nations? Are they at that point right now, or are they not there yet? You said we have more advanced tactical or battlefield nukes now than the worst-case kind of nukes we’ve used before. Is there a lot more weaponry that the military has that we don’t even know about, that they’d be able to use?

Oh, really? Not really. You can pick up a magazine; there are no secret weapons out there. Do we have nuclear weapons that can be delivered by aircraft? Sure.

Yeah. And what about Iran and how far they are in their nuclear program?

Well, that’s the huge argument. The fact that we’ve been talking about 60%, 600 kilograms of enriched uranium means they’ve made the significant technological step from enriched to highly enriched. That was a significant technical step that very few countries have been able to do. Once you’ve got it—I think it’s at 85% enrichment—getting it up to weapons grade is a very, very simple, relatively simple task.

The thing that people often forget is you could stick 5 pounds of that stuff into a canister surrounded by lead, take it to Los Angeles Harbor, and just explode it. It doesn’t have to be a nuclear weapon. Can you imagine what would happen to Los Angeles if a dirty bomb went off, spitting out radiation? Yeah. Not good.

Not good. So, if we were to do something like that, who would be emboldened to take similar actions against whatever you’re—

You’re asking 2 different questions. Does the world officially and publicly support what Trump did? The world is completely up in arms about it. Behind the scenes, they’re loving it. They’re glad that somebody’s taken on the Iranians.

I spent all my time in the Middle East, and I just got back. I’m heading back tomorrow night. These guys are all going to say, “Ah, this is terrible, what the Americans are doing,” and so on and so forth. Then you sit down, grab some lamb, and start chewing, and they say, “Trump, he’s got a set of balls,” because that’s sort of how they operate, too. They all want the strong man. They want the benevolent strong man, but they want the strong man, and they admire strength.

To answer your question directly, no. Iran doesn’t have a lot of friends in this world. It’s the only theocratic regime in the Islamic world. That’s a danger for them, and it’s a danger for non-Muslims as well.

Why do you think there’s such a difference between public and private opinion?

Oh, come on. Everybody hates Americans. It’s fashionable to decry what the Americans are doing: “We weren’t consulted. Nobody asked us. Look what’s happening to our poor country. Our gas is $9 a gallon because of you damn Americans.” As I always tell these podcasters and television shows from Europe, “Come on, they’re not going to hit us. They’re going to hit you first.” All you have to do is look at the streets of Paris to understand that they’re closer than they think.

Yeah, I meant more in the States, in the U.S., not outside the States. It seems to me that—

Would be against it?

Everybody, everybody—

I can’t say that. With the exception of a couple of real hard realists—not neocons, because neocons are a completely separate conversation. It’s the foreign policy realists; they call it realpolitik. This is where everything is stripped of emotion and it’s all logical.

I can show you that the best option for Pickaxe Mountain is to use a nuclear weapon. If we didn’t have values and did this mathematically, I would tell you that. You guys are all rocket scientists and all that, but optimization theory would tell you that you should use it.

Before AI uses it anyway. That’s a different story.

Yeah. If you’re looking at this from a speculator’s perspective, I’m currently short a lot of different things in the markets. I actually just bought gold and silver the other day as well. Are there any trades you’d be looking at?

I would be on the side of it. It comes down to prediction markets on when this thing is going to end. If there’s any prediction market that says we will have a signed agreement with Iran by the end of the year—

Yeah.

Knowing the politics of it, knowing how the Iranians think, knowing how we think, there’s no way we’re going to get to one. First of all, you’ve got to dig into what is agreed upon.

Yeah.

Is it opening the Strait of Hormuz?

Yeah.

Possibly. The Omanis may already have that agreement with the Iranians in any case. But if you’re talking about a bet on a signed nuclear agreement between the United States and Iran this year, I’d say the probability is certainly close to zero.

Okay.

Let’s put it this way: you send me descriptions of Kalshi bets and the percentages, and I’ll tell you which ones I’d jump into and which ones I wouldn’t.

Yeah. We have Polymarket up right now. “U.S.-Iran final nuclear deal by December 31st” is at about 8%. It’s a bit lower than the 17% you said, but it looks like it’s been going down. Something has likely happened over the past week that people think makes it less likely. So that’s definitely—

Yeah, and that’s counterintuitive because, again, the Democrats want us to have an agreement. The fact is, we can’t even agree on what to negotiate or how to get to the negotiating table. They’ve given us preconditions that say unless you meet these conditions, we won’t even sit down and negotiate with you. So they’re negotiating on the points to get us to negotiating. That’s absurd. But you can still make money off 8%, can’t you?

Yeah, you can. What percent chance would you put on us using some kind of tactical nuke?

15% at the most.

15%. Wow, that’s high. That’s high.

I’d roll the dice on 15% many times. I’ll only lose, what, 1 out of 7 times.

Yeah, that’s good. That is good math.

If you consider that high, then what—

We’ve got to consider it from my point of view: using a nuke at all is generally, in my head, completely off the table.

The way you described it does make a lot of sense. From my point of view, I understand why it was.

Again, you guys, I grew up in an era where we had battlefield nuclear weapons, from one a guy could carry in a backpack to these things. The problem is when you say “nukes,” it scares everybody. You know, we have nuclear weapons that are actually one-tenth the explosive power of the Mother of All Bombs.

Of course.

Yeah.

It’s just the notion of nuclear weapons that somehow scares everybody away. They all get visions of Hiroshima.

Yeah. And that’s one of the reasons I think you’d see—Is there a Polymarket bet out there on the use of nuclear weapons?

Yeah, there is. I think it’s at about 2.5%. That’s actually why I was asking. You said 15%, so that would be about a 7x if you took that trade. Right now, it’s around 2.5%. Would you say—do you think it’s also—

If that were an options trade, I’d hedge it. I’d work both sides of that.

Yeah. On the timing, this has obviously been dragged on. I know I’ve asked about timing a lot, but do you think there’s an optimal time to do something like that? Is there anything you think they’re waiting for or looking for? It seems to me negotiations aren’t going anywhere, and they’re not coming to a resolution anytime soon. That’s what I can see from my perspective.

Watch oil prices.

Yeah. Everybody talks about how Trump thinks his report card is the stock market, right?

Yep.

And oil prices obviously affect the markets.

Yeah, of course.

So if oil prices start ballooning, the president is going to say, “Hey, we’ve got to do something,” right?

I think that’s the trigger. The probability of him starting a war is very high now, but it’ll only get higher if oil prices rise. Oil prices will cause him to speed this up. Although he could attack tomorrow, people joke about Trump when he talks about being a stable genius. There’s something laughable there, but he has the world in general, and the Iranians in particular, in fits. He says, “I’m going to attack right after the midterms, and I’m going to attack Pickaxe Mountain.” Well, he’s not necessarily going to do any of that. Trump has always known, and really learned in his first administration, the expression about four-year-olds chasing a soccer ball.

Yeah, that’s what he does with the media. He has those guys chasing the ball, and he’s doing that with Iran now.

He does. How would you like to be one of those young soldiers manning an air defense missile site in Iran? “God, he told us he was going to attack tonight, then the next day he doesn’t attack, and then he says he’s never going to attack. Well, that means he’s going to attack.” You can see the madman theory going on there. He has these guys chasing the situation like four-year-olds chasing a soccer ball.

Yeah.

It’s actually intuitively brilliant. There’s nothing you want to do more on the battlefield than confuse your enemy.

Yeah, it seems that way to me, too. He did the same thing with the tariffs. A lot of the tariff stuff was him messing with the media, saying one thing, going way over the top, and then walking it back. That definitely makes sense. He’s definitely been doing that. I’ll give you one more question, then I’ve got to hop to the next one. In your military career, what’s something you’ve experienced or seen that you still can’t explain?

I can’t explain—

Like your best story from your career—something off the wall that you’ve seen, that you can share.

I have so many off-the-wall stories. Which one would you like?

The best one for the chat.

Getting shot at and all that—that’s the easiest thing in the world. Winston Churchill said there’s no better thrill in the world than having somebody shoot at you and miss. No, it would be a long story. It had to do with Abu Ghraib.

We’ve got some time. You guys, it’s so long ago—do you even know what I mean when I say Abu Ghraib?

Yeah, don’t worry about it. That’s the problem. It’s typically the case that the biggest bullshitters are the ones who didn’t do anything, and the people who did something just want to keep their mouths shut.

Definitely true. Have you ever seen any aliens?

Have I ever seen an alien?

Yeah.

No.

I mean, I’ve seen some ugly women in bars, but no.

What’s your favorite city that you’ve traveled to in the U.S.?

In the U.S.?

In the U.S. And I’ll ask you twice: your favorite city in the U.S. and your favorite city outside the U.S.?

Unfortunately, they’ve ruined it, but Seattle is my favorite city. I’ve got a house out there, but it’s gone crazy. There’s no doubt in my mind about my favorite city outside the U.S., and that’s Istanbul.

What?

I love Istanbul, too. I’ve been there about four times.

I’m based out of Istanbul.

It’s really nice. I’ve been there for a few Solana conferences. I’ve been out there to speak.

What conferences?

Solana. Do you know what Solana is? It’s the third- or fourth-biggest crypto. It’s like Ethereum.

Yeah, I know Ethereum.

Solana is like a faster Ethereum, but they host conferences. One of them, Solana Crossroads, invited me out there to speak, so I’ve been out there a few times for that.

Next time you’re there and I’m there, we’ll go to my favorite haunt together.

I’m down. Let’s do it. Next time, I want to hear the Abu Ghraib story. You’ve got to tell me the long version.

You’ve got to read up on Abu Ghraib. I thought it was a really sad story, but it had a generally good ending. Anything else I can help you guys with?

I definitely want to have you back on because I feel like you’re very knowledgeable about this topic, and it will inform a lot of the chat and our thoughts. I’m curious what’s going to happen the rest of the year, so I definitely want to have you back on. Is there anything you want to say to wrap up, or any advice you want to give the chat—career-wise, personal-wise, anything you want to leave us with?

You mean in terms of investing?

No, not in terms of investing. Anything.

I’ll put it in terms of investing because, again, I do a lot of trading myself. I don’t do trading; I just work the options market pretty hard, mathematically. But what’s rule number one of investing or trading?

Rule number one? I don’t know. What’s rule number one of investing?

Bears make money, bulls make money, pigs get slaughtered.

That’s true. That’s very true. Don’t be greedy.

That’s the wisdom of the night.

Thank you, brother. I appreciate you. This is great. I’m looking forward to speaking to you again.

Looking forward to it. And I’m not your brother. See you later.

Sir. Oh my God. Yo, he’s a G, bro. He’s a G.

He’s a G.

Oh my God, bro. Damn. He’s not my bro. He’s not my bro. He’s not my brother. That’s not fucked up, bro. That’s fucked up. I didn’t like that. That’s fucked up. That’s fucked up, bro. Oh, man. No, it was cool. He’s fucking hilarious, bro. I know. He has so many stories. How do you go from aliens to women in Boston? What did he say?

He just referred to ugly women as—

—as aliens. How did his brain go there that fast? That’s crazy, bro. Buddy’s losing it.

Bro, it’s nuts.

Yeah. Let’s bring Armani on. Founder of Backpack. What’s good, bro?

Hey, what’s up, man?

I’m good, bro.

It was amazing. I could be your brother if you need a brother. I can be your brother.

Yeah.

Brother, brother, brother. Great to have you on the show, man.

Oh, that was funny. Wow. That was funny. Do you want to give us a quick overview of who you are, what you’re working on, and your background in crypto? Start us off.

Yeah, sure thing. Most people in the crypto world know me for a lot of the work I did in the early days of the Solana network, from the first decentralized exchange on the network to one of the first wallets. A bunch of things didn’t exist when we came into the network in 2020, including Anchor, the smart contract developer framework.

Off the back of that work, Solana became very successful. Today, I’d describe it as the preeminent smart contract network. We created the company that became Backpack. Fast-forward to today, there’s a bunch going on with the business. You can think of us as a modern crypto exchange, a modern financial institution built around the world. We’ve got offices, teams, and licensing efforts everywhere you can imagine: the UAE, Cyprus, Latvia, Japan, Australia, and the US.

We’re building this global trading platform, and most recently, we’ve been spearheading the frontier of modern tokenization. There’s a bunch we can talk about there, but it’s this whole RWA meta: stocks on-chain and rebuilding the entire financial system from the ground up. That’s us in a nutshell.

Awesome, man. You have a lot of history in crypto. I feel like you’ve seen so many things happen over the years. The core thesis of Solana—that everything can happen on one blockchain, all at the same time—has been the through line over the past 5 years or so. I know that contributes a lot to what you’re working on now. How much closer to that vision would you say we are now than we were in 2020?

I’d say we’ve never been closer. Every year, every meta, it’s a set of building blocks that builds on top of each other. Going back to 2020, the question was, “How do we make these things go fast?” DeFi summer hits, gas fees go through the roof, and that was the first really big problem.

Right?

Then it was, “Okay, if the thing goes fast, what can you build?” Everybody started getting into DeFi. We had order books on-chain, but it was still a bit early. The network wasn’t fully ready for it, and the capital wasn’t there.

Then you had this winding road through all these different metas. You had the first wave of altcoins, the NFT meta, and most recently, the explosion of meme coins. Each one of these things was a toy. There were speculative bubbles, and some of it was obviously pretty far out there. But there was a nexus of something very real being built, and the technology was being proven.

Now, if you look at what’s actually happening, every day new stocks are coming onto Solana. We see it with every listing. We only have 88 symbols on Solana right now, but every day, whether it’s Power USA, Apple, Nvidia, Grindr, or whatever it might be, you see all this crazy innovation happening on top of it.

I’d say we’re in the midst of probably the most important change in the industry. It’s no longer this circular snake eating its tail, with all these tokens being built. There’s a focus on realness, whether it’s Hyperliquid and the revenues that have been setting the standard for all the new tokens, or the largest revenue-generating businesses on the planet: public equities. This is the moment we’re living in right now. It’s definitely the meta, but it’s also going to usher in the next generation of the entire industry.

As soon as you get to equities, you look back on the past and say, “That was a fundamentally different time.” I’d say we’re just on the cusp of it right now.

Yeah, it’s been cool to see stuff mature so fast. It’s really wild. You guys have been dominating. You’ve been doing great. I think on Monday you guys were 90% of all the tokenized stock volume on Solana, which is crazy. Can you speak a little bit about that period? Why do you think you guys were so high during that period? And how are you outcompeting your competitors in tokenizing stocks? The race for tokenized stocks and equity perps is very competitive, and a lot of people are trying to win it because the TAM is in the trillions.

Yeah. Firstly, we shouldn’t exist.

Backpack should not exist?

Right.

Tell chat a little bit about Backpack’s early days and the trials you went through. It’s a crazy story. You guys came back from the literal trenches.

I wasn’t even referring to that, but if we’re going to go all the way back, long story short, Backpack did a round from FTX and others back in 2022. FTX collapses, and we lose all our money. It was 90% of our capital. The company was dead for all intents and purposes, but we didn’t shut it down. We went into cockroach mode. We had basically zero money and just hard-pivoted.

We viewed the collapse of FTX as this really important inflection point where we said, “Okay, forget all of this stuff. Let’s rebuild everything from the ground up.” We literally sat in an office in Chicago, took a map of the world, color-coded it, and figured out a 4-year game plan: How do we get the money? How do we build the product? How do we get the teams together?

We’ve literally been setting up teams and offices around the world for 4 years. There are different ways to view Backpack, but the short and simple way to think about it is as the duality of Hyperliquid. If Hyperliquid is this next-generation DEX that solves a lot of the problems of previous generations of DEXs, Backpack is this next-generation centralized exchange that’s trying to solve the previous issues with exchanges.

We’ve been doing this for 4 years: building the product, compounding capital, trying to make money as a business, and opening up new markets. The thing we’ve done differently relative to basically every new exchange post-FTX is that we want a regulated path. Today, we only serve about 48% of the world. Hopefully, by the end of the year—knock on wood; my job is to be optimistic—we’ll open that up to the rest of the world.

We’re on the frontier of not just building a great product, but going deep into the financial plumbing so we can build things like tokenized stocks and bring perps to the US. We think a lot about our own product, but also about how we facilitate products for other companies, whether they’re DeFi products, wallets, or whatever it might be.

Fast-forward to today: We’re focused on bringing the entire US stock market onto Solana. We’re at 88 symbols right now, and that’s quickly going to jump to thousands of symbols. We’re going to do it for the Japanese stock market and the Hong Kong stock market, too. Most recently, you probably saw our announcement.

We just signed a partnership with SK Securities to bring the Korean market on-chain. It’s a story of not just being on the DeFi side of things, but also thinking about how we reinvent traditional finance, because that’s going to define a big part of the growth story for the whole industry. Especially with the convergence of AI, crypto, tokenization, and all these things coming together, it’s going to be a boom of retail trading coming to life. That’s what we’re on the frontier of.

Awesome, man. You’re doing a lot of very important stuff. I feel like the LEGO piece of it you spoke to a little bit—how you also want to integrate with other protocols—is hugely important, too, because of the compounding effects of everybody winning together, I guess. What would you say are the most important pieces of infrastructure that you guys specifically want to own yourselves? And who are you collaborating with the most right now on the retail side, in terms of getting new users? It seems like the most difficult part for tokenized stocks is going to be getting large-size traders and retail traders to trade these things on new venues versus their existing venues.

Yeah. First, let me create a framework for thinking about this, because I think it’s important. FOMO is a really good example of the type of company that can get built when you free yourself from the constraints of building all this stuff from scratch—

Right?

Like, look at FOMO. What did they do? They didn’t build any of the stuff that Phantom had to build with a wallet. They didn’t build a custodian. They didn’t get any licenses. They didn’t build an exchange, a bridge, or fiat ramps. They didn’t build any of that stuff.

Yeah.

Right. What they did was focus on the thing that mattered: What is the net-new mechanism I’m going to create to create a viral growth loop? They’ve absolutely crushed it on that front. They’ve crushed it by building a beautiful product, a killer content machine, a killer marketing engine, and a killer go-to-market.

I think it’s one of many examples you’re going to see when you have all of Wall Street behind an API. It sounds nebulous, but imagine you’re 5 guys sitting in a garage or a dorm room. How do you build Robinhood? You can’t. You need millions of dollars. You need to spend years building all this brokerage infrastructure. Now you can do it by hitting a simple API on a blockchain. That’s the type of phenomenon you’re going to see over and over again, whether it’s with FOMO or Pump.fun.

It’s this story of building blocks being created that’s going to continue to create an explosion of startups and trading activity. The whole financial system went from pen and paper, and then in the late ’70s you had digital trading, the rise of DTCC, and the whole financial system as we know it. The next big stage is blockchains. That’s the historical evolution you’re seeing with finance, and the building blocks I think are coming to life right now are as follows.

The first thing is asset issuance. The hard part there was stablecoins, and stablecoins are basically at escape velocity at this point. You have the stablecoin economy taking over the entire world. You have Samsung building a stablecoin-embedded wallet on Solana in every single Samsung phone all around the world.

But now it’s about issuance: getting assets on-chain, because finance doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You have memecoins that have gone crazy, and you’ve had altcoins, L1s, governance tokens, and whatever else go crazy. Now it’s about bringing all of the world’s assets on-chain. You can imagine stablecoins are really hard and stocks are super hard, but if you go to bed, wake up 5 years from now, and ask yourself, “Are stocks trading 24/7?” the answer is, “Yeah, kind of, duh.”

Once you concede stocks, it’s a very small step to get to the rest of the economy. You have obvious stuff like fixed income and options, but less obvious stuff like housing and real estate. That’s going to happen. The entire economy is going to be tokenized and run on crypto rails in this modern, next evolution of the world’s financial system.

I think that’s the first really big thing that needs to be solved, and that’s the big thing we’re doing in Backpack Securities: get assets on-chain, do that as fast as possible, do it with great liquidity, and turn Solana—not just into a blockchain or an exchange, but into global access to every piece of value all around the world, whether it’s Pokémon, stocks, or whatever.

The next really big piece that I think is important, and that’s fairly obvious to people deep into it but maybe not so obvious to the broader industry, is the regulatory piece. My favorite example is the Hyperliquid–Payward announcement. Hyperliquid is an exchange; Kraken, i.e., Payward, is an exchange. What does this mean? What are they actually doing together? How does this even work?

What they’re doing is Kraken is taking its regulated infrastructure, following all the rules set forth by the CFTC and the respective agencies, and overlaying it onto Hyperliquid’s technology. That might not seem super sexy or interesting, but what this unlocks is all of the institutional capital and, importantly, the mainstream economy being able to plug into these systems.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the work the agencies are doing, both in the U.S. and everywhere around the world, because that’s how you go from this niche thing—which, let’s be real, is what crypto is right now. Crypto is a niche thing. It needs to grow 100x, 1,000x from here, and that’s a really important piece of the puzzle.

Right now, crypto is dominated offshore. Price discovery is determined by offshore exchanges, and you’re basically at their behest. As you bring things onshore, it’s going to unlock a huge growth lever that very few people in the industry, other than maybe Coinbase, have actually been able to attack. I think that’s the next really important building block that’s going to be figured out over the next couple of years.

You’re seeing it on the CFTC side already. You have the president talking about Hyperliquid. Prediction markets have had their wave. If you think about what’s happening onshore, you had Robinhood train all the millennials to trade options. You had Kalshi and Polymarket train all the Gen Zs to trade prediction markets. You had FOMO, Pump, Axiom, whatever, training all the Gen Alphas to trade memecoins. The next big wave is very clearly going to be perps.

That’s going to shake out over the next couple of years, but it’s a huge part of the story. It’s the largest generational change in derivative structure onshore in the U.S. in our lifetime. I think that’s of paramount importance.

You’re seeing it on the SEC side as well. You have the innovation exemption for TSVs, these tokenized securities venues. There are mixed reactions happening onshore right now. But I think the way this always works out is things just get huge offshore, become way too big to ignore, and then come into the regulatory perimeter onshore.

Once these pieces come into place, you’re going to wake up one day and everything’s going to be crypto, and it’ll be, “Oh, wow, that was pretty fast.” But you’re already seeing it happen today.

Yeah, it’s a great overview of the 3 different parts: actual issuance, the regulatory piece, and then perps. I think those are a very clear North Star we’re heading toward. It’s wild because when I started in crypto in 2017, I was on BitMEX. All the people trading crypto back then were trading perps, and it’s taken 9 or 10 years to get to a point where we’re like, “Oh no, these need to exist in the U.S.” It’s definitely a huge step on the regulatory piece. It seems like we’re making some good progress now. Do you think the Dem sweep that just happened is going to be a headwind for any of that, or do you think it doesn’t really matter at this point?

I mean, yes and no. It’s really hard to ignore it. Politics are a war zone, right? They’re going to go after—

I’m speculating here, but they’re going to go after Trump.

Trump was pro-crypto. I wouldn’t say it’s even just that. I would say the Bybit hack is another good example: everybody’s sitting in their boardrooms right now. The CEOs who might have been pro-crypto are now being asked, “What’s going on here? How should we be thinking about this?”

So I do think there are headwinds coming into it right now. That’s just the nature of these things, right? There are headwinds with AI; everybody’s talking about that in D.C. Everybody’s talking about it everywhere, right? Data centers are taking over the states. Things ebb and flow, and I think all this is more or less inevitable. But it certainly is going to create some hard conversations. I don’t know the answer to any of it, but it’s definitely something to watch.

Do you think there’s anything users or active founders in crypto could do to help the perception? I don’t even know if it’s retail, but it seems to me that Jeff and Hyperliquid have done a great job of being on the forefront and actually going and talking to all these people head-on. But we’ve also had bad actors in crypto, like SBF, who did the opposite, obviously. I don’t think it’s a lost cause, but I’m curious if you have thoughts on how best to navigate that and do damage control going forward. It seems like it can swing pretty aggressively in both directions.

You have to think of it really simply: What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Is this good for the world? What does it actually contribute to the economy? That’s the simple analysis.

You could look at something like the Binance hack—or any hack; it’s not just Bybit. Security is of paramount importance. If you’re building something less secure, whether it’s a self-custodial wallet or a centralized exchange, it’s easy to attack. Founders need to think about security first and foremost. Everybody’s thinking about growth: How do I make money? How do I do the next fundraise? How do I have a business? But you can’t grow if you get hacked.

We stopped and told the entire team, “We’re doing nothing but focusing on security this week.” Security is an ongoing thing, but it’s not just about security. It’s also about the products themselves.

When you take a look at tokens, there’s a token complex I love to talk about. It’s something that’s very obvious to everybody who’s been in crypto for the past decade, but people don’t talk about it. There’s a huge amount of incentives and an apparatus to literally pump and dump tokens.

I’m not referring to memecoins. Memecoins are a separate thing—an understood game that people are opting into. But there’s this whole game where I’m going to raise a bunch of money on this big story, do a token with all these promises, put all my effort into TGE day, get a party and sponsorship at Korea Blockchain Week, pump the token price to a billion dollars, and then fight like hell to keep it up. Then I take my token supply in this contrived tokenomics and dump it onto retail. That’s objectively bad.

If you go to the conferences, especially in Asia, and talk to people, they’re openly pumping and dumping tokens. You have traders making tens of millions of dollars a month, buying up supply, going to foundations and buying up their supply, painting the chart, getting people excited, putting attention on the price, and then dumping it and cashing out, leaving retail with a bag. All of this is terrible. You cannot have a real industry with these games being played.

I think people have woken up to that this cycle. It still happens, but it needs to be killed with fire. I think that’s certainly a big part of it.

The last piece is that you really need legislation in place to set the rules of the road. Whether it’s the GENIUS Act, the CLARITY Act, rulemaking, or comment letters coming out from the agencies, operating within that system is going to be an inevitable part of growth.

You’re in the States, in New York or something, right?

Yeah, I’m sitting in New York right now.

You can’t just walk across the street and steal something from a 7-Eleven. There are going to be a bunch of hard conversations around that. Things like block building, MEV, sandwiching, and front-running—this whole dark force that’s been built into the market structure—is another huge issue.

I say this as a Solana maxi, but block building is objectively bad. You need to minimize that. People have solutions, like MCP, creating competition and bringing a lot of this stuff to life. You have to point out the hard problems and actually go out and solve them. That’s part of maturing as an industry.

A lot of the things we take for granted—MEV is a good example—people from the outside are looking at them like a joke. They’re saying, “This is unacceptable. We cannot be doing this.” I think it’s a lot of that type of stuff.

Got you. That’s good insight. I know you guys have thought a lot about the token stuff on your side, as far as the Backpack token. I know you have some milestones and structure in place, so the token is closely tied to the success of the business and the protocol and product. Do you want to talk a little bit about that, and the exchange token and how it’s connected to Backpack?

The way we thought about the token was really simple. Take this whole token complex we discussed: centralized exchanges charging people up to 10% of their token supply; industrial farmers whose entire business is just to farm tokens and dump them on the market; VCs whose job is to make money for their LPs. That’s neither good nor bad; it’s just their job, and VCs play an important role. You have teams that build something in 6 months and then cash out.

You have the whole prediction-market complex. Polymarket is a good example: You never see an FDV market for 6 months out or a year out. You only see an FDV market for TGE day. We took this whole idea, this whole complex, and rejected the premise that you have to run a token this way.

For us, it’s simple: Founders, team members, executives, board members, and investors shouldn’t get rich unless they build a pillar of the world economy. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. Go big or go home. If you fail, that’s fine, but you shouldn’t have this easy liquidity-exit mechanism. You should actually have to build a business over a long period of time. It sounds so simple, but nobody does it.

The way our tokenomics work is really simple: You use the product, you get the token. We have 25% that went out on TGE day. Another 37.5% is going to go out to users for growth, go-to-market, and different milestones that we hit. There’s a big rabbit hole we can go down there.

Importantly, we have the team allocation: 37.5% of the token supply literally just sits on our balance sheet. It’s not unlocked until a year past IPO. So not only do we have to get to an IPO, but we have to get a year past the IPO. There’s no foundation side channel. There’s no way for me to go get tokens.

It’s kind of hilarious, because whenever the token pumps, people message me and say, “Armani, you should sell the token to fortify your balance sheet.” I’m like, “That’s cute, but I can’t do that because it’s literally in the tokenomics. We constructed the whole thing so I can’t do it.” It shows how normalized this behavior is.

I cannot promise anything about the token. The only thing I can promise is that the insiders—the team—are not dumping on your heads. The only people who have this token are people who used the product and got the airdrop, or people who bought it on the open market. It’s as simple as that.

Yeah. I think that’s the way everybody should be operating with tokens and in their business. It’s great to see you guys coming at it from first principles.

What are some of the things you’re most excited about with the asset issuance piece? That’s super interesting to me. I know right now you’re focused on tokenized equities, but after that, what are some of the things you’re most excited about? I’ll let you guys take it from here.

Yeah. The first step is getting the entire U.S. stock market on-chain, then doing it regionally, right? I mentioned Japan, Hong Kong, and Korea. Once you’ve done that, it’s a question of what people are doing. You have Kamino coming out with borrowing and lending on Backpack stocks, and Jupiter with its lending book. Then it’s about getting the liquidity apparatus going.

Once you have these primitives in place, I think people are just going to take a bunch of crazy shots on Sol. You have the whole memecoin meta, where Stonk.fun and Pump are doing meme trades against the underlying stocks. It’s absolutely nuts. Who would have thought that would drive hundreds of millions in volume?

Although it sounds really silly—

—it’s a really good example of the net-new things people are going to try when they have stocks running on-chain. People are trying a bunch of crazy stuff. I think a ton of people are taking shots on themes and baskets. Somebody’s going to take your podcast, decode it, come up with a bunch of symbols, and create an Armani or a Market Bubble ETF. They’ll take all the stock callouts from here, create an ETF, and make a token out of it. People are going to trade it.

I don’t know what’s going to hit and what’s not, but one of those things is going to hit a billion in TVL without a doubt. There’s a bunch of cool stuff like this. People are taking stocks and decomposing revenue streams. I saw one project that took the idea of SpaceX stock and decomposed it: this is the Starlink revenue stream; this is my exposure to Starlink only; this is orbital data centers, and I only want exposure to orbital data centers.

People are doing a bunch of crazy stuff like this. I’m very excited to see what happens, because although 99% of these things will fail, 1% will be something like a stablecoin, a perp, or a prediction market. That’s kind of always the way it goes. It’s impossible to know what those things are, but you have to be playing in the arena to discover them. I think that’s going to be a big one.

Really, once you have all these things in place, we’re going to be transforming every single DeFi project—really, every app—into a brokerage. You see this with Jito, for example, with JTX: they now have stocks. Backpack Securities just announced today. You have all the wallets—Phantom, Solflare, whatever—introducing stocks into their platforms. X now has all the cashtags and brokerage connections. Every app is going to be a brokerage.

Going back to Samsung and bringing stablecoins into their phones, the moment all of this is just an internet connection away, everybody’s going to want money in their app. I think the whole money industry, which is really what crypto is, is going to seep into anything with an internet connection. That’s what I’m pretty excited about.

I’m with you, man. I’m super excited about the Legos I think are going to get built around it. I’ve been calling it “meme-fi.” I feel like I’m claiming this meme-fi term, but the stuff that gets built around all these new assets coming on-chain is going to be really interesting. The closest comparison is the DeFi Summer days, when a ton of new DeFi protocols popped up that didn’t exist before. Now we’re going to have a similar thing.

The timing in the market is interesting, though. I feel like sentiment is pretty low, and we’re kind of coming out of that. But I’m excited for what’s around the corner. What else? What would you say is most important for Solana to focus on right now? Generally, Solana as an entity, as an organization, as a chain?

Yeah. The way I would think about Solana is getting the max. The KPI I’d look at is simply—I mean, AUM is probably the wrong term, but roughly AUM.

Yeah.

You want capital on the network, whether it’s stablecoins, stocks, memes, alternative investment vehicles, ETFs, whatever. That’s the thing to win, because liquidity is a moat. Apps want to build where all the money is and where all the users are.

I’d say this whole story around asset issuance is probably the most important thing. I think that’s taking care of itself on the retail side. The big piece that’s going to take a long time is the institutional side. You have a couple of companies at the frontier of this right now. Bullish is a good example with Equiniti. I think they’re probably the largest, or one of the largest, transfer agents in the U.S. Some huge percentage of the stock market—like 20% of publicly traded companies, or something—uses Equiniti. You also have DTC with its whole tokenization model.

Those primitives are going to be a very important piece on the institutional and B2B sides to really lock in that kind of Wall Street apparatus, whether it’s the brokers, exchanges, banks, or prime brokerages. I think Canton is a good example of a team doing that very well. But you need both sides. It’s not just the retail side; you also need the institutional piece.

Because I think that’s very sticky and obviously very big.

And once you get that piece, then you can really start issuing native, net-new products on-chain, whether they’re ETFs, new funds, or the like, instead of just importing existing ones. The listing game—not just from the perspective of an exchange, but from the perspective of a network—is very important. You need to have products that nobody else has, and that comes from native issuance.

Solana has dominated native token issuance, whether it’s startups on Solana like Pyth or, you know, pick your favorite on-chain token. It’s doing a very good job importing existing markets, but I think native issuance of net-new things, specifically from institutions, is going to be a very important piece. I’d just focus on getting the money. That’s the thing: get the money. Once you get that, you get everything else.

Right. That’s great. Makes a lot of sense. I don’t think I have any more questions. I don’t know if you have anything for me or anything else you wanted to hit on before we wrap.

No, I’ve got nothing for you. I appreciate the time.

Thanks, man. This was great. I learned a lot, and I hope the chat learned a lot, too. I’m looking forward to you guys crushing it with the asset issuance, bro. It’s a large, large, large market and very important for the next stage of crypto’s growth. Thanks for coming on, man.

Cool. Thanks, man.

Cool. What’s up, chat? I’m sleepy. We hit everything, chat. Appreciate it, brother. You didn’t spill lemonade today. No, no, I don’t need that. I don’t need that. I don’t need it.

Thanks, bro. Okay, production. I have chicken. Oh my God, bro. This is genuinely the market right now, bro. Damn, this is [expletive]. How much would OpenAI and Anthropic be down today if they were liquid instruments?

They’d be down like 30%, bro. If Micron is down like 17%, maybe like 20%.

Wait, what? This is not a good day. Was this after the nuke or before? It’s the only other time in history the Nasdaq fell more than 5% and Bitcoin fell less than the Nasdaq.

March 16, 2020. November 5, 2020.

Let’s see. When was that?

Lockdown.

Was it? Yeah. But was it before the lockdown, or was it the day it was announced?

The day it was announced.

Yeah. Bitcoin had already sold off really hard, though. March—that was the day I’m thinking of. March 12, 2020. Bro, this day I thought this shit was going to zero. I’m not even going to hold you. This day right here—

It says March 16, 2020. That was right here. Yeah, March 12 was the real day, bro. This shit—I thought we were going to zero. I’m not even going to lie. Right here, $3,800 was going straight down, bro. There were zero bids for this, and then BitMEX cut out, and the price dislocated. Spot dislocated from perps, and you could long on perps way beneath where the spot price was, or something crazy. That shit was nuts, bro.

I really disagree with this. They basically got smoked, and they fired everybody. Their long-short is weak. It’s weak. What’s wrong with bass, bro? It’s just nasty, bro. The candles are just not good candles. They’re really nasty dailies—some of the nastiest. Look at this, bro: one, two, three, four, five, six days of price action erased in 1 candle. It closed beneath all of them, even the wick, and it’s beneath this level.

I guess you could argue we’re still at this support right here. This is the last spot. I personally think this is the actual level right here, and that this was just a deviation below. We’re definitely hanging on by a thread. I kind of want to long just because I’m so bearish. I’m so bearish that I just want to long with a really tight stop here.

Oh, Zcash is moving. Oh, nice. Zcash looks good. I don’t know what’s really going to pull it down all that much, to be honest. It would take more major nuking. I need to move to my other screen, man.

It’s like trying to catch a falling knife.

Rasvid saying he’s tingling for Zcash. Yeah, it’s the strongest coin by far. By a lot, for sure. It really has not gone down that much at all.

Somebody asked my thoughts on PUMP. What I really want to look at is the PUMP market cap. Is this it? Yeah, this is the actual chart, though it’s a bit scuffed. PUMP basically hit its market-cap all-time high, barely tapping it because of the unlocks. On USD pairs, it’s a little bit below, but on this, it hit it. So it tapped it.

On USD pairs, I think $0.0035 to $0.0038 is a really big area. You don’t want to see it lose that. If you see it lose $0.0034 on any high time frame, it’s probably going to go back down here, which would be another 30% drop, I think. I’m watching PUMP right now. I want to see it hold in here. I can definitely see a world where it chops around in here.

I still think it’s really undervalued based on how much money they’re making and how much they’re shipping on the mobile app side. They have perps, they have gacha stuff, and they sold the memes cross-chain, basically on all the chains they have now. I still like the trade. I don’t like it any less, really. Price-wise, I’ll probably cut the rest beneath $0.0034 and just wait. Right now, I’m just letting it chop around.

Zcash is super strong. It’s really choppy in here, but I do think that coming out of this downtrend, out of this pullback, this is something you want to own. There are 2 ways you can trade: you can try to catch it all at once, or you can just be DCAing into spot. I do think next year this is going to be one of the top-performing coins. I’m pretty confident in that.

I think the thesis around it, and how much it’s going to gain on Bitcoin, is going to continue to proliferate with people. So you could just be DCAing into spot. As far as support levels, I think $1,000 is the main support level right now. The main resistance is the $1,370 to $1,440 area. As far as long setups, you’re looking for something like this, where it gets back above the Q4 open, or something into here.

Those are the 2 setups in this range right now. I already said earlier, the one I’m really looking at is a retest of this. This is what I really want. I may be too greedy, but this is the area I really want to buy right here. I guess those are the 3 setups I’m looking at right now.

It’s super choppy in here, and you’re not missing much. The reason you shouldn’t care that much about this price action if you don’t already have a position is that you can pay attention to either a breakout to the upside or a pullback into here or into here. As long as you have a plan for what happens in either direction, you’re fine. You’re not missing that much by not being in a position while this is happening, so I wouldn’t stress too much about it.

I may be too greedy thinking I’m going to get down here. I might not. Nebius’s chart is nasty, bro. This thing got crushed.

It’s like trying to catch a falling knife.

Um—

Got some news. What?

A U.S. futures broker has Hyperliquid Strategies holding $3.5 billion in HYPE. That’s a lot of HYPE. Damn. It officially files to become a U.S. futures broker. This Nasdaq-listed firm says a subsidiary has applied to become a futures commission merchant, a broker regulated by the CFTC. If approved, U.S. customers could trade perpetual futures on Hyperliquid’s permissioned markets through it.

This is just the filing, though, right? This isn’t an actual approval. I think the reason the Kraken partnership happened was because Kraken already has these licenses.

Yeah, Nebius. For stuff like this that’s selling off super aggressively, I’m kind of waiting for it to bounce. Then, from wherever it bounces, I’ll mark that level out as support. I’m not currently betting on these V-bottoming to all-time highs. I think you’re going to see them consolidate for a bit after they’ve done so well. That’s kind of my opinion on a lot of the individual AI names right now.

I wouldn’t try to short this from here. It’s down a lot. Trying to short it down here is crazy, in my opinion. Zcash is moving, bro. I really might have to chase this thing.

HYPE is kind of similar to Bitcoin in that it’s close to its last key level. Here, the low 70s—it’s at about 75. It’s pretty much the same type of area as Bitcoin. In here is the last place you want to bid before a pretty deep pullback. I think it’s similar on BTC, around $75K to $77K, and in the low 70s here on HYPE.

You can bid in here with a pretty tight invalidation, but if it loses these levels, you’re probably going to get it 20% to 25% cheaper. I still like HYPE a lot. I said before what you need to see with HYPE: you need to see them getting more growth in their volumes and customers. Right now, most of their growth is coming through TradeXYZ, and the crypto numbers have been pretty much down. I think the trader cohort they have right now has been pretty capped.

You want to see them have growth similar to what Robinhood had a few years back, where they added millions and millions of net new customers. You want to see the same thing happen with HYPE. That’s kind of what we’re waiting on with all the regulatory stuff, like the partnerships with Kraken and other permissioned front ends. But the thesis of them being the AWS of finance, the liquidity layer for a ton of other exchanges, is still in its super early days.

Investing in HYPE, I think you’ve got to have a much longer-term outlook than just what their current revenues are. If you’re just looking at the current revenues, I think it’s priced pretty well. But you’ve got to look at the growth scenarios, right?

Yeah, Micron too. Micron is at a pretty important level. It’s definitely going to bounce from here. I would say this is probably a low at this level. It reclaimed this, and then it went straight down from—was this last week, last Wednesday? It’s down 34% in a week.

I do think you’re going to see a relief bounce on this and a lot of the other stuff that sold off pretty hard today. Maybe you see red Friday, and then next week you’ll get the bounce. I’d probably expect next week to be green. But after that, that’s your chance to get out.

If you’ve been holding this all the way through here and never sold any, I think if you get a green week next week, into all of this—this was the prior support for months and months and months of price action—this is your chance to exit into it. Then you’ll get the consolidation afterward, wherever it’s at, wherever it bottoms. That’s my thought. It’s pretty similar to my thoughts on a lot of the AI stuff. I think they’re going to bounce pretty soon, but that’s your chance to de-risk. Then you’re going to have the low-volatility bottom, is what I’m thinking.

Nvidia’s at a pretty important spot, too. It should bounce soon. I guess it’s already bouncing after hours. Zcash, talked about Pump, talked about HYPE, talked about Micron, talked about Nasdaq, talked about BTC.

Should I punt this here? I kind of want to punt long BTC. I don’t know why. I kind of want to just be super tight. If it gets back above Monday’s low, maybe I’ll try to get back above here.

Maybe I’ll try if we get a wick into 75. If we get something sharp into here, I’ll probably try something on a really short time frame with a really tight stop. If we get this, or something like this, then I’ll try something.

Right now, I’m expecting my base case. Here’s my base case: you get this, lose this, reject it, and then go down to the mid-60s, low-to-mid-60s. That’s my base case. But I do think I’m going to try to punt long if we spike this quickly. I’ll probably try to punt because if we get back under there, it gets pretty ugly pretty quickly.

But I like being short. I think SOL and ETH are better shorts than BTC. I think they’re going to be weaker. INJ is like 9.6 right now. Take a little bit of it off and then roll the rest. Yeah, similar to BTC. I think it’s just going to get rejected from this low. That’s what I’m thinking. I don’t think it’s going to get back above here.

Crypto actually didn’t even do that badly today, considering how poorly memory and a lot of the AI stuff did. What would change my outlook? What would change my outlook on crypto specifically, or on stocks and shit? What’s the paper-and-dice method? I don’t even know what that is.

Did I trade on Axiom yet? Yeah, actually, I was on Axiom today, fucking around. I don’t know how y’all trade that shit, bro. Shit’s crazy. I watched TGR and Incent streaming, and I watched DB earlier. TGR and Incent are doing a 1K-to-10K challenge. They chained themselves together.

Oh, it does look decent. Wow, this looks pretty good. Yeah, this looks good. I’m not mad at this at all, actually. I don’t own this right now. That Lighter looks good. It’s a pretty clear, clean retest of this prior high—prior resistance, now support. This is your support area right here. It’s still in an uptrend, and it looks like it’s bouncing pretty well.

A real confirmation of a structure shift would be something like this: you have this low into a lower low, and then a reclaim. The real indicator that this is back in an uptrend would be something like this: if it makes a higher high, then you want to bid into a lower low in here. That’ll be your daily structure. If it does something like this and then comes back down, and it rejects in here, you can kind of say it’s another lower high. You might want to bid deeper into here.

Yeah, I don’t have any Lighter right now. Maybe I should look to bid some Lighter around three. It looks good. That looks good. You guys use Lighter? You be on there? I forgot I’ve got shit tomorrow. Damn. Huh? Who is, bro? Who is trading Injective right now? What are you guys doing on Injective? What are you guys doing on Injective right now?

I got what from Callout Rewards on what? The perp? I’m not going to lie, I top-ticked that short this morning. I got back from the airport, got to the crib, sat down at the desk, and was looking at that shit. I was like, “Bro, this shit’s going to bart back down, bro.” And I shorted across the board. One of them was on Pump, but it snapped immediately after I shorted and posted the thesis on it. It nuked immediately, so I wonder if it was from that. I would guess so. Snap. Snap. Nuke.

I don’t have it on with me. I’ve got to check on my other computer. Maybe I’ll hop on my other computer after this because I hate doing it from here, to be honest. It’s a much smaller screen, and I navigate it slower. But yeah, INJ looks decent. I don’t know what’s going on with this. Why? That was an evil short, bro. What? It’s not my fault, bro. It’s just the charts, bro. You guys think it’s me being malicious. It’s really not. I’m just trying to protect my capital. I’ve got to eat, bro. I’ve got people to feed.

Yeah, the weekly on Injective looks good. You have this level, break down through it, consolidate, consolidate, consolidate, higher high, higher low, higher high. Now it’s retesting the same weekly level. It looks good to me. I don’t know why, though. I don’t know why this looks good. This is interesting.

I don’t really understand. This is obviously consolidation; it could be distribution. It could be something like this, where you have this range, and then it’s right here. This is either accumulation into higher, right, or it’s distribution back into this range, right? I don’t really know. My general feeling on the market is bearish right now, so I’m betting on a rejection from this high. But this does look good. If there’s a reason it looks good, I’d be more interested in it.

If I were going to trade it, like I said, the 2 ways you trade looking for longs are: I’m looking for some entry at support. Here you have this established level, this prior high-time-frame level, this lower-time-frame range. You’re looking to bid somewhere in here, with invalidation back into the previous range, right? Or you’re looking to buy the breakout. I don’t like buying breakouts. I don’t like buying breakdowns. I hate doing both. I already said this. Or you’re looking to get in as it’s expanding to the upside.

But yeah, I don’t know why Injective looks good. I don’t really understand. Are y’all doing shit on Injective? I hope all your theses get invalidated and we see insane upside. You guys are staying green. I do too, to be honest. I’m much, much, much, much more excited when we’re green. I love when things are green, bro. I don’t want things to be red.

This is the Korea index. Korea is also nuking, bro. This is just gross, bro. They retraced the entire year’s gains. The entire year, bro. This was the yearly open. This is a disgusting Christmas tree if it goes all the way back into here, bro. Just nasty. Look at the wick on the yearly of the KOSPI, bro. Look at this. Oh my God, bro. This is disgusting. It is. It’s genuinely disgusting.

2026. Shoutout 2026. We had Korean grandmas buying memory stocks on 5x leverage, bro. Their whole life savings. They need to be put in jail. Whoever set up SOXL needs to be put in a cell. A 3x leveraged ETF on one of the most volatile groups of stocks, bro. Oh my God. Brutal chart. AMC stock. Okay, fuck the Koreans. Yeah, fuck Korea. Fuck Korea, bro. We’re watching movies. That’s what we’re doing. Fuck Korea. Fuck Korea, bro. We’re not doing that shit.

Look at this daily. Did you do this, Lchef? You did this, Lchef, didn’t you? You did. You did this, bro. I did not bear-post the bottom. We bought the bottom live on this show. What are you talking about? A few months ago, I did flip a little bit late, but I don’t think it was that late. Bitcoin was still like 82. SOL was like 100-plus. Shit was definitely higher than it is now, especially equities.

Lchef, why the fuck do you want me to look at this chart? Are you buying this for real? What is this? Look at it when I zoom out. What the fuck is this, dog? What do you got me looking at right now, bro? Bro, can you stop spamming? Please, please, please, bro. Okay.

I don’t know. I think the thesis for AMC fundamentally makes sense. I have been going to the movies a good amount, and I do think people are going to continue to keep doing so. But I haven’t done a lot of research into the actual stock and how they’re doing. I know the CEO’s history of dumping on people’s heads. Anom, they suspended my Twitter account. Damn, Nate. How’d that happen, bro? How’d that happen?

Chart MATIC. Bro, I killed MATIC. MATIC is actually one of my greatest live shorts on Twitter. I caught long SOL, short MATIC at the bottom in 2023. Absolutely merked that in both directions. I don’t even need to pull up the MATIC chart, bro. There’s not even—what is there to look at with MATIC? You’re buying this? You’re not. Stop fucking with me, bro.

Actually, I’m going to give you guys some alpha right now because I meant to say this the other day. When you have dead tokens—there are dead tokens, right? Litecoin obviously is a dead token. Nobody—Litecoin is never going to leave the market. When you have dead tokens that pump and start doing really well, whenever you see the TA guys start posting these dead tokens, like, “Oh, I’m long Litecoin,” or long whatever really old dino shit that’s not going to pump, that’s when the market’s going to top.

Look at when this thing pumped. It went to 74, straight up 72, at the end of September, and that’s literally the market top. We did a little bit of consolidation across the board on some other shit, but I guarantee you, if you look at this time period on the on-chain majors, it’s right then that markets top. When you have laggards pump like this, that’s when you’re at the tail end of all the risk shit pumping. When the worst shit starts pumping, that’s when markets top.

Yeah, see, like the end of September, the SOL top. I’ve never met Luke Belmar. Am I going to continue buying coins? What kind of coins? Like my coin, or what kind of coins? Handsome, the chart is pretty ugly right now.

What’s my main market? Have you bought meme coins? Do I think the bear market will affect Anom? The good thing about onchain tokens and protocols is that they can do well regardless of what the majors are doing. I’ve said this before: there are fewer things people are paying attention to, so when attention gets concentrated on one thing, that thing can do really well.

We saw GMX do well in the bear market. We saw Friend.tech do well in 2023, when things weren’t really moving. There are opportunities there, so I’m definitely going to take advantage of that. I want to see you buying more low-market-cap tokens paired with Anom.

Yeah, I can do that. I actually do like the custom pair. Will I continue doing the 30-minute morning videos? Yes. You guys should bully me every day if I don’t do them, because I’m up looking at my screen. I just talk to myself instead of to the camera.

I’ve never met Luke Belmar. Serious question: what’s my timeline for the bull to resume? I don’t really have one, to be honest. The way I’m thinking about it right now is that I’m fairly confident Q4 is going to continue to be bad for risk. I do think we’re going to see a relief bounce in equities soon, but I think most of Q4 is going to be bad for risk assets in general, and I think that’s going to carry over to crypto.

Thinking that way, I think we’re going to retest the lows from this summer on most of the coins that have been dominating. I don’t think we’re currently at the bottom of this Q4 pullback. Past that, I’m not really sure. I plan on bidding into what I think is the low in Q4. If it holds around the same levels we hit before, then I can get behind the thesis that the bull is starting in Q2, probably Q2 of next year.

However, if I’m wrong about the summer lows holding and we leg down again and make new lows, then I think it’s going to take a bit longer. I guess that’s kind of a cop-out answer. Q2 is where I’m at right now, but if we don’t hold the summer lows, then it’ll be longer. I don’t know if that’s a fair answer, but yeah.

Morning videos are great. Thank you, bro. Thank you. Shout-out Shills. Shills has been giving out Anon rewards. Shout-out Wizard. Who wants to see Ethereum Classic? Are you for real? I actually make good money on ETC. It’s an interesting token, but what? You’re really trading this? You’re not. You’re fucking with me. You’re not trading ETC. There’s no way you’re trading Ethereum Classic.

Elysium season. Yeah, I like Elysium. I talked about it at the beginning of the show. I think it’s one of the interesting spots onchain right now—not on stream, sorry. But seriously, who asked me to look at Ethereum Classic? Why? What do you mean, bro? This is one of those dead tokens. It topped at the same time Litecoin topped. Look at it: it’s the same wick at the end of September. This shit should not be pumping, bro. If you see shit like Ethereum Classic and Litecoin pumping, you need to sell everything. Sell everything you have.

Somebody just asked me something I was about to respond to. Yeah, I think I agree with this. Forge is not looking great, man. It’s not. If it were up to me, I’d want to watch you slam $4K market-cap tokens. It would be hilarious. People would get upset for no reason. That would be pretty funny, bro. If I was just trenching, would you guys watch that? If I was trenching all day, I feel like that would be pretty hilarious.

Oh, trench streaming. You would like it to—you would like it to be—but anyone that tells you they’re—

This is like Inception. Anyone who tells you they can long and short intraday every day is just lying to you. Come on, chat. We can talk luxury spec custom homes if you want. I’ve got to get back to the hustle now. We’re in a full recession. It’s my guy.

What? What? Bro, what the fuck? Oh my God, bro. See, this is why this shit is so fucked, bro. It’s still up 120% year to date. It’s still up 120% year to date, bro. The chart is insane. It’s down more than 50%, and it’s still up 120% year to date. It’s even crazier—it’s still up 10x from the bottom of 2025, bro.

That’s why this shit is so aggressive. People don’t realize how much this shit is up. It’s up so much, bro. Oh, man. Oh no. WallStreetBets. No. No. Bro, Cosmos is down another 7%. What’s happening, dog? This is out of control.

So I don’t plan on it at all. Never mind. What the fuck? Yeah, I think we need to start playing wild. Bro, am I going to get in the trenches later? Is that what you want me to do, for real? You want me to trade on an Anon wallet? You’re going to watch me lose money, dog. I’m not making money trenching. I’ll tell you that shit right now.

I do have the Axiom filters and shit from DV, though. I’ve got all the filters, all the trackers, and all that shit. Not on my main. Bro, why do you want me to trench on the—why? Why do you want that, bro? Why? For what purpose? That’s what you want me to do? You want me to fuck around? I could. I can do whatever I want, to be honest. I don’t know if that’s what you really want, though.

Ah, fuck. I hate betting against Mr. Pike. I hate betting against Mr. Pike. He might be right on this one, bro. He might be. It’s unfortunate, but he might be right. I think we need to just start playing wild. I really do. I think that’s the play. Have fun with it. Blast it.

Yeah, hold on. It’s not down that much. It’s not down that much. Unless you were levered long on pretty high leverage, you’re not that liquidated. I’ve seen worse. Yo, Smack’s funny. Smack is funny, bro. Smack is fucking hilarious. Is that what would be fun, Bubbles? You’re saying what would be fun: trenching or World of Warcraft? Sorry, I keep forgetting to look at the chat. You’re so funny, bro.

Let’s run a League game. I’m down to run a League game. What’s my honest take on Kinetiq? I think Kinetiq’s good. I think Kinetiq focusing on, one, buying and burning the token with a portion of the revenue they’re making from other stuff, and, two, focusing on applications that also direct value back to the main token is good.

I think that’s the key differentiator you need as a rollup to be different from the other ones that already exist. Obviously, Hyperliquid has maximum mind share. It’s reasonably difficult to get over there right now, so you kind of have an advantage in being early, before it’s live on Pump.fun, FOMO, and these other apps, and before they announce it on the 9th. You kind of have a slight advantage right now.

Yeah, I like Kinetiq. I like Elysium. I think it’s cool. I didn’t even know there was a Return to Memes launchpad, bro. Is it all Anon pairs? This is actually pretty true, though. Scared to trench, bro? I’m not scared to do anything. Trying to bully me into doing shit isn’t how my brain works.

You would add so much volume to the trenches. Maybe I might. That Leroy shit was lit yesterday, bro. I don’t know if you guys were on the DV stream, but we basically got other people to turn an idea into a coin instantly because so many people were watching his chat. I thought that was pretty funny. It actually ran decently hard, to be honest.

“You’re already doing it. Don’t stop now.” You’re funny, bro. I’m not going to lie, I did buy some absolute nonsense today. Absolute nonsense, bro. Financial advice needed. Can you give us hints on what you plan to blast? I have been. What do you mean? I do like Ant. Ant’s good. I like Ant. I like Ant.

What the fuck is a frunk store, my—what does that mean, “frunk store”? Pick today to buy a coin. What coin? What coin should I buy? I’m giving you the lane to show me right now. Chat is funny, bro. Someone said Monad, bro. Monad? That’s what you want me to buy? Monad? I have Monad and some coin. I’ve been buying that.

Okay, I have some choices now. Is DV on right now? Let’s see. Maybe I’ll hop in there for a second and see what they’re talking about later. I’m about to hop on my other desktop, though. He is on right now. Yeah, maybe I’ll hop over there for a second. I’m about to get off here and go to my other desktop. Fellas, I appreciate you.

What do you mean? Okay, let me read this real quick. I’ve got to stop interacting with the streamers. I just make it worse for the other trenchers. What do you mean? Why? Explain. Explain. The problem is, you apes up, but the volume dies as soon as the average person gets in. What do you mean? Check Zcat. Yeah, Zcat looks good. I like Zcat.

Meeting who, though? What if I’m the first, or one of the earlier buyers in? They’re predatory, but they can learn from you and look up to you.

So we need to bring it back to how it was. What do you mean? Bring what? In what way? Bring it back to how it was. In what way? Okay. Where are you? DM me, bro. DM me, chef.

How do you not feed the streamers? Explain what you mean by feed the streamers versus trenching. What do you mean? Did I play ball in high school? Yeah, I played basketball, football, and track. Be the answer holders. Of course, bro.

Bro, make DV hold for 24 hours at least. You’re crazy, bro. They’re never gonna do that shit. They’d be out of shit in like 10 seconds. I don’t know. You guys think if certain people hold, then other people will hold. That’s not how it works, bro. It’s very rare to get people to be able to hold things. It’s a very rare ability.

Go on a date with my mom? I’m good, bro. No, I’m good. I’m good, G. All right, I’m gonna get out of here. I appreciate you guys. Enjoy your Thursday evening.

Maybe I’ll do some trench shit on an undox, just so y’all can watch. Maybe I’ll record it and post it afterward so you guys can watch how much money I lost. Yo, peace. Later. Hey, hey, hey.