This VC Bought Bitcoin at $200, Saw TikTok's Rise, and Now Says THIS is the Next Big Trade

31:38So for us, we are also interested in, because we are doing the trading platforms, we also often look at like AI tools to help traders or investors to do better investment. And there's many applications to that as well. I'm not sure if you read the story. Actually, DeepSeek, the founder, initially invented the model just to help them to do stock tradings. basically. So they made lots of money to stock trading. Then they decided to make this model publicly available with open source because they see there's lots of applications you can use with the open source, make it more wildly adapted. It's helped more people rather than just keeping them closed.

32:31Yeah. Yeah.

32:32Ryan Hanley:I think the acquisition of Manus by Meta was really interesting. So I've been using Manus almost since day one, since like its first day that it was available in the States. I've been using it. And watching how quickly that team has deployed like level two and level three functionality has been, in my mind, incredible. I mean, personally, I use it. So for let's just say for the production of this podcast, 90 % of the post-production that happens with this podcast is the result of Manus. So I've created a series of prompts. I take the transcript. I take a few screenshots. I take a few headshots.

33:11Ryan Hanley:I pop it into Manus, and then I have a set of prompts that I work through, and essentially everything that I then need, everything from podcast, YouTube, show notes page, what I'm sharing on social, the graphics that come out, and it gives me all these different options, and it's all incredibly high quality. and they actually added a feature before. This was to me, and this is why I think these AI agents. So for guys, for those of you listening at home who may not know the difference, Manus is not necessarily working off its own model per se. It does have its own model, but what it does that is so particular and where in my mind they've stepped ahead and I think shown the everyday user market, something they haven't seen in the other models, is this ability to create on-the-fly agents that then go out and execute off other models.

33:59Ryan Hanley:So it's pulling in Nano Banana Pro 2 graphics, and then it's pulling in, you know, maybe it's pulling in a video from Sora, and it's pulling in, you know, it's using these different resources, and then it also has the ability to go out and hit the web, which it could do that before OpenAI could. So Manus, because it used different models, actually had the ability to go out and do deep research and deep analysis of websites inside a flow before OpenAI could do that. And it's this idea of AI agents, I think, which is really going to be the next level. And we'll look back on these, you know, single chat flow, you know, the kind of early days.

34:41Ryan Hanley:We'll look back and laugh at how remedial, you know, that stuff was when we see these agents and, you know, how quickly voice is coming and visual recognition and all this kind of stuff. It's really wild. Yeah. but the what what man is what the acquisition of man has showed me and i was i was i wish it wasn't meta that bought them because i think meta's ai is kind of whack compared to the other ones personally but um but was how important this idea of multi-agent functionality is to high production like if you really want to get high output you need to be able to run multiple agents they need to be able to talk to each other and they need to know how to layer and I honestly, I don't think there's a better retail user product on the market than man is when it comes to that.

35:31Ryan Hanley:And that was a really interesting acquisition, particularly born out of China, moved to the U.S. or at least, you know, had a U.S. headquarters and now being bought by a U.S. company. It just shows how global this stuff is and how, you know, I often, you know, it's funny, like I love watching politics because it's like watching like Real Housewives of, you know, Washington DC kind of, cause it's all just so it's all performance art, you know? And like, there's, you see these problems, um, you know, ah, the Chinese are doing this, the U S is doing this and everyone's, and you see all these and underneath, it's just all the business people and regular people just working with each other, do it, do it, getting business done.

36:07Ryan Hanley:Like, it's just funny how, you know, you can, you can get caught up in headlines, but you know, I always tell my buddies in particular, and I'm blessed to have this show and be able to talk to people like yourself. I'm like, the people that are actually getting shit done, like it, I don't know you don't even think twice about this crap you're like we're doing business or not you know what i mean obviously there's always a little bit of something you gotta work through but um i want to move over to blockchain and particularly um uh what you're doing there because obviously if you were in early on btc i have made the mistake twice as you did of buying feeling amazing about myself when it go up selling and then watching it go down a little and then go way up again i've played that game multiple times now and i'm now just in a i'm I'm just going to hold this shit until, you know, for a decade or so before I sell any of it.

36:54Ryan Hanley:Big believer, big believer in the tech. What we've seen maybe over the last three to four years in particular is this of altcoins and meme coins and all this kind of stuff. And, you know, there was for a while there were all these core networks that still exist, Solana, et cetera. But it feels like Bitcoin is really one, at least for now, as the gold standard cryptocurrency. Today, if you walk into your local bar or your card game or your golf match or whatever, and you say, hey, I bought some Bitcoin today. People are like, oh, okay. Three years ago, people would laugh at you and say you're playing with video game money or whatever.

37:41Ryan Hanley:um what do you like when you're you know being having a trading platform seeing all this stuff having people being able to trade bitcoin as much as you know wolf coin 133 or whatever right um what has been maybe some of your high level takeaways of this maturation and where do you see the market continuing to mature as we go yeah i think uh like like you mentioned i i bought it early i sold it early too but i i think uh there's a reason why i wasn't really a true believer at the time uh because uh there is no institutional adoption at the time it was too early right so the people didn't really like there's value definitely there's values in bitcoin and but at the time there's not many people actually understand it or can realize or can agree on the value of Bitcoin.

38:39So at that time, there was higher risk than now, right? I'm not sure if you do lots of investment, you always hear about like a reward over risk. There's a ratio, right? So the higher, the reward with higher risk. But right now, Bitcoin might already have a higher price. You won't get that kind of tremendous growth if you bought like$300. But right now, the risk is way lower. The reason why is because I think over the years, especially in 2023, 2024, because of the institutional adoption, because of the spot ETFs, the Wall Street adoption, all the big institutions coming in and realize there's value.

39:40Also, Cassie Wood from ARK and Tesla, Elon, and they all bought Bitcoin, right? So this is when there is common recognition on the value of Bitcoin. And it's obviously they bring up the price, but I think at the same time, it has reduced the risk tremendously. So the volatility on Bitcoin price has been down even like over the last year or two, people are talking about this four-year cycles, right? So we're supposedly, people are arguing if there is still another four-year cycle for Bitcoin. And right now, even if there is still four-year cycles and the volatility will be way less, right? Because all this institutional money and spot ETFs, traditional finance institutions has access to Bitcoin as a storage of value, right?

40:43So because Bitcoin is treated as digital gold because it's a scarcity. It has limited the quantity of 21 million. And even a big chunk of that belongs to Satoshi, but Satoshi's Bitcoin is no longer moving. So it's not in the supply. So the supply is limited. And there is definitely application of Bitcoin on payment or the other things we can use as Bitcoin, as a blockchain even. And I think it definitely, there is a value for Bitcoin itself. On the other side, I think it's Ethereum. It's no need to be mentioned is that Ethereum has a different utility, I would say. I think Tom Lee has been the biggest bullish follower for Ethereum because he's seeing Ethereum as one of the only layer one blockchain that has never been done since gone online.

42:01And it's one of the basics for Wall Street to access blockchain. Basically, I think in the near future, we're going to see real world assets like bonds and stocks. They're all going to be going on chain. And Ethereum is going to be one of the most viable chains they're going to adapt. So I think the 2024, when the spot ETF for Bitcoin came out, that's the Wall Street adoption for Bitcoin. And 2025 this year, because of Tom Lee and Bitmain, he's one of the biggest ETH holders for a listed company right now. So he's holding, I think, over almost 5 % of the float of Ethereum. And I think he is one actually, that's actually a bookmark for Ethereum getting a Wall Street adoption, like the institutional money actually supporting that.

43:12And also on top of that, this cycle, the bullish cycle is way different than the last one in 2017. Because like you mentioned, there's millions of meme coins, altcoins out there. And I would say most of them has no value. and that's also the reason why even the major coins Solana and Ethereum they're not going up as much percentage-wise as last cycle because there's so many coins to select, especially for the retails. They follow for KOLs. they are often very excited and pushing for a couple of meme coins, and then eventually this came down and crashed, and it has no value, and people just lose money on that.

44:11It's distracted all this potential money can invest in the major coins, the Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, where they do have values. So that's why I think this bull market is more like institutional driven rather than like we have like a retail really making lots of money on the last cycle. And also, there's another side note is that during last cycle, the Chinese market, the Chinese retail can still have easily access to cryptos. But right now, because the Chinese government has very strict rules on trading cryptos in the mainland China, it's not easily accessible to any trading platforms. So that's potentially has reduced the money flowing to the market as well.

45:07So, but it could be a potential opportunity. Maybe I think in one day there's going to be an open policy and for the Chinese can get access to crypto trading. And that will be like potentially boost the market a little bit more higher, I think.

45:27Ryan Hanley:Yeah, that's a really good insight. And so I have a couple of things I'd like to clear up for the audience. because you talked a little bit about this. And let's just stick with Bitcoin and Ethereum for now for this part of the conversation, right? We have Bitcoin, which I think it's maybe more naive detractors. You know, it's not worth, it doesn't do anything. You know, it's really that idea of a store of value, right? It's not, no one's running applications on the Bitcoin network to a certain, you know, for the most part. Like it's basically just, I buy this because it has value. And I also have some gold and I also have some mutual funds and I'm diversifying and whatever.

46:04Ryan Hanley:OK. And then you have networks like Ethereum, which have incredible utility. Right. My industry that I grew up in was the insurance industry here in the States. And there has been talk for a long time. And while the insurance industry in the States seemingly believes it's 20 years in the past technology wise from anything that's actually happening today, They tend to just be massive laggards. The conversation around insurance policies are an incredible use case for using blockchain technology, a coin or otherwise. And the conversations around that have been if the industry were to start to make a move, Ethereum would be the network in which an insurance policy blockchain would be built on.

46:53Ryan Hanley:Okay, so if I'm sitting here and I'm just a retail investor, I got 5%, 10 % of my portfolio I like to play around with. I like to put it in some different things. How do people start to gauge like a Bitcoin investment, which as you said, and I've seen it as well as just a retail investor, volatility is down. And even though you saw a move recently, you know, if you pull out a little bit, you can just see the dips and the highs are not as big. And you're kind of seeing a natural kind of up and down progression with up and to the right being the overall course. Where Ethereum seemingly is going up but has been much flatter.

47:39Ryan Hanley:It's kind of been around that$2 ,800 to$4 ,000 mark for a long time. And as you said, if I'm just a YOLO Reddit investor who looks for the next hype cycle on some Reddit board deep down in Reddit and I put a bunch of money in whatever coin, that could be going to an Ethereum. It could be going to one of these other chains. So should I be thinking more Ethereum, Solana, et cetera, like one of these that haven't moved in a long time but have a tremendous amount of utility, have thousands if not in some case hundreds of thousands or even millions of applications being built on them, like seemingly are going to be around for a long time because of the tech?

48:23Ryan Hanley:or should I be thinking more, hey, let me just put my money in Bitcoin and ride the wave or do I YOLO and chase the Reddit boards? Like how do I start to think through where I should play? Because I have so many friends, so many, who when you get a couple whiskeys in them, will tell you about all the ridiculous coins that they put money in that they felt amazing about for about 20 minutes and then all of a sudden their account was at zero when everyone crashed out. So how do you start to think through this as a, we'll call it a unsophisticated crypto retail investor? Yeah, I think if you are a beginner, I think it's always to start to get, for example, if you're new to the crypto trading, I think you always get to start with the spot trading.

49:18and so if you know your trading platforms, for example, Binance, OKEx or even NAS, LevX, and you can get in there and you can open your account and deposit your USDT or your coins and do spot trading to start with. Just get familiar with the features and get familiar spot trading, Bitcoin, Ethereum, the major ones, not the smaller ones, right? So you just go on Core Market Cap. It's one of the website you use. You just go down to the list. On the top, I would say top five. Aside, like top five is like first one is Bitcoin. Second, Ethereum. After that is Binance, Solana, XRP. I think until that point, XRP is the, I think is the most riskiest ones you want to invest in.

50:16So just start there and then maybe start slowly as well. And then one strategy you can use is called the dollar cost average. You can do DCA. And over the times you can build, for example, let's say today is 92K for Bitcoin. You buy 10 % on your portfolio. and tomorrow it came down or next week, the same day, next Monday it came down and then you buy another 10%. It doesn't matter the price and you just, in 10 batches right now, like you can just slowly go down, right? Maybe in 10 weeks it came down to 80K and you started at 90K so your average is like 85, right? So then when they start to go back up, maybe in the next month or so, and you can always make money, right?

51:16So you don't have to worry about liquidation and everything. And that's one strategy for the beginners. They just get used to how the market moves and they get a sense how it's trading, right? Then once you start making some money and you can use your profit, you can take some of the profit out and sell them, and you can start looking to some of these more aggressive ones, right? So if you started with Bitcoin, you can move into Ethereum or even Solana or XRP. And you can do the same strategy, right? So you can just buy a spot and start making your regular buys and eventually you can make some profit.

52:04Just make sure the money you put aside is like the investment money, not the money you need to pay the everyday cost, right? So once you have made some successful trade and you can go to the next level and you can start looking at perpetual trading. What's the perpetual is the futures contract. Basically, you can have leverage. but you're going to do leverage very smart because I think in the long run, people lose money because they over leveraged. And leverage, in a certain sense, I would say my business school professor always tells me leverage will, if you use it the right way, it's the only way to make you like a richer, make you to the next class, right?

52:59So like even retail, the same. Like if you're buying a house using mortgage, that's a leverage. You start a company and you raise money, that's a leverage. And trading stocks using margin, that's a leverage. So trading crypto and using perpetual contracts, that's a leverage as well. So you understand the leverage and then you use it only partially of the capital you have. I think the best case is you made money trading spot and use that profit and you do leverage trading when the market is actually very clear, not when the market is in the range bonding. Right now, I think the market is still in range bonding.

53:47It's not a great time to use leverage to trade, but we can still building the spot at this moment, just doing DCAs. I do see in the first half of the year, we might see some downside. Personally, I'm waiting for Bitcoin because I sold my spots and I'm waiting to buy back my spot, maybe under 80K, even though I think currently there's a bounce. I think there's still a little bit more downside and wait until the water is cleared and the trend is clear, I will buy some spots and then I will do some leverage, very low, like 3 to 5x. And that's normally my play.

54:32Ryan Hanley:Basically, we need to wait till CNN and Fox News are saying that Bitcoin's dead and it's going to zero. And the minute they say that, that's when we probably should start. That's when you start buying. Or you see the headline news is that there's like over the last 24 hours, It's like a hundred million, a hundred billion, uh, like a market value lost in the crypto market and things like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Those, but I basically, um, cause I'm not smart enough, nor do I have the, uh, self discipline to trade I've tried. And I just like my ADD goes off the rails and I, I just want more, you know, I want action.

55:11Ryan Hanley:I just set up, um, I just invest. I just DCA every week. I literally have it just set up auto by a certain amount every week, and I don't even think about it. And that's when I see, oh, it was at 127, and now it's at 92. And I'm like, meh. I'm not – who cares? I'm not investing today for a quick lift for the type of investor I am for Bitcoin in particular. It's just I think there will come a day where it could be five years from now. It could be a decade from now, 300, 200, 500 ,000 if you're just DCAing or if you're doing it in chunks. There's going to be a time in the future when you're very happy that you just – you didn't try to time it.

55:58Ryan Hanley:You didn't try to get out at certain times. Exactly. I think if you're very smart and you know what you're doing, I think there's an incredible amount of money to be made trading. I think for a lot of the people listening, especially if you're a business owner and you don't have the time, right? This is where you get caught, I think, in futures trading, at least my friends who've really lost decent chunks, has been they don't have the time to invest. They think it's like this side hustle where I can show up for 20 minutes and open up my app and do some – and you just can't be successful long term that way.

56:30Ryan Hanley:It's a job. Trading is a job. This is what people do all day long. It's harder than the daily job. And you have to compete against people, like, for example, the financial firms or professional traders, they have invested maybe 10 millions in developing a software trading against you. And how do you think you can successful beating them, right? So you can only beat them with luck or you beat them with time. Like you can use, you can like broaden your time frame and then you slowly put your money in and you get an average, your cost down and then play the long game. So because the professional traders, they're looking for a short run, right?

57:15Or you wait until maybe the AI tools came out and they can help you to trade. And we, like as a trading platform, we actually look into those features as well. we're in the middle of developing those so so we hope this can help the traders improve their trading uh success rate yeah so with your platform right um i can buy and hold right it's not is it

57:42Ryan Hanley:only trading or i can just go like let's say today i'm listening to this you're like you know i like this guy i've been wanting to buy some bitcoin i've been wanting to get in i've been saying i'm going to do it for a while i can just go download the app you know put my information in i can buy and hold but then if i do want to start playing around and maybe like you said take take some profits here and there and and actually make put some bets in do a little futures trading on the side i want to learn that game i can your platform will allow me to do that as well so i kind of the full spectrum of opportunities to play in the game definitely definitely we have uh well we have a spot trading we have futures trading you can even do using the spot as a collateral to do some kind of leverage to trade as well.

58:25And also we have definitely like across all this sales marketing, we have this welcome bonus and everything. You can maybe just come sometime. We have promotions going out. You can come and deposit some money, get some trading credits, and you can trade with the trading credits. It's not costing your own money. And it's a good way to get used to some of the trading features as well. Yeah.

58:51Ryan Hanley:So I want to finish with like, you've had this dynamic entrepreneurial journey, not just in China, across the world. You've been in multiple different places, interacted with a ton of different people. You're sitting in Dubai today while we're talking, which just makes this so incredible to begin with. Doesn't have to be crypto. It can be whatever you want. When you can kind of sit in your spot and you look out over the ecosystem, maybe you put your VC hat back on for a second. Like what's the one tech sector, et cetera, where you're like maybe the market doesn't understand how much further this has to go, right?

59:30Ryan Hanley:Like we keep hearing like AI is a bubble. It's going to pop and it's going to become – or crypto or is it energy? Is it nuclear? Is it space tech? Like if you were sitting there today and we're, you know, something that really got you excited, what's that thing that you're like, man, this is going to move. Like I don't know, maybe know when, maybe not sure which company, but this sector's got legs and it's going to hit here in the next few years. Well, I think AI is already, everybody is already talking about. I think AI agents like Amedes, I think definitely there's more. I think AI agent is like the application on top of AI models.

1:00:17There's going to be lots of use for AI agents as well. But I think one thing I'm currently looking at, I think I still have lots of hope in Ethereum. Because like we talk about, well, I think Tom Lee sometimes overstated some points. But I do agree with him on certain degrees because Ethereum is the utility-wise, like it is the gateway for the whole Wall Street or traditional finance to access blockchain. And that's something going to be really huge. Like you mentioned, the insurance, even real estates, right? So in Dubai, they already put some of the buildings, real estates, got tokenized and put it on a blockchain.

1:01:14And people can buy shares of it or buy the coins. So basically owning a partial share ownership of that building. I think also there's many, many applications you can use. Also Polymarket, right? So Polymarket, you can do all this betting and forecasting on blockchain. I think there's whole many things you can do.

1:01:42Ryan Hanley:Polymarket's on Ethereum, built off Ethereum? I think they definitely utilize the Ethereum blockchain network. I think you're right. I just wasn't 100 % sure. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we can double check. Well, I love that. I mean, to be honest with you, Ethereum had definitely fallen off my radar a little bit, mostly just because I don't think about crypto every day. But I think you're right. I mean, Bitcoin is essentially paving the path, I think, culturally for people to accept, doing air quotes for those that are listening, kind of crypto in general. It's kind of that beachhead. Crypto is kind of establishing the beachhead.

1:02:21Ryan Hanley:But I'm listening to you and I can't find a hole in the idea that the next wave is going to be these actual utilitarian chains that where people are building. I mean, and guys, just so you know, like it's not like there's a few applications on Ethereum. Like we're talking some major, major applications, major platforms. I mean, entire business models, companies, you know, regulatory, I know regulated industries that are starting to either, that are currently using or dipping their toes in. And I think once you start to see, like you said, finance, insurance, these highly regulated industries start to grab onto these, I think that's where the dominoes really start to fall because once the regulated industries are in, there's not really an excuse for anyone else to not start to invest and go down the rabbit hole.

1:03:13Ryan Hanley:Harvey, man, I could talk to you about this stuff all day. I know it is late where you are. I appreciate the heck out of you guys. It's probably close to 1 a.m. now in Dubai where Harvey is. So I appreciate you taking this time. It's been a wonderful conversation. where could people learn more about your company? And then if they want to follow along with you personally, do you create, do you share thoughts anywhere? Is there any platform that you'd like to push people to? Yeah, actually we have our official website is www.levex.com. And also I'm on Twitter as well. My account is at Harvey Levex.

1:03:51And our official Twitter handle is at LevX. That's our official account. So if you want to learn more information about us, just hop on to one of the platforms and look for us. And also, I will be on Spaces every Tuesday. There is a quantum economic Spaces. I will talk there, talking about the market every Tuesday. I think it's 10 10 a.m. Eastern time I'll be there so if you guys want to listen you can always find me there as well and also thank you Ryan for inviting me and having this interview today and really love to talk to you maybe we can set up another show later on for AI or the other stuff we would love to talk about.

1:04:39Ryan Hanley:I would love that I'd love that we spent a lot of time on And we'll call them higher level psychology leadership type topics the last year. Coming into 2026, we're going to focus more on finance, on technology, on, you know, AI, et cetera. And I think it's a tough game, you know, when you're in a leadership position managing kind of the humans, right? You got the humans, which are really hard. And then you have the actual business that you're trying to build and the technology related to it. and we're trying to capture the full spectrum here and give people a place to have these conversations and learn.

1:05:20Ryan Hanley:So I just appreciate you. I know it's late. This has been a wonderful conversation and look, man, open invitation. We will definitely have you back. Anything comes up, you dropped that, some of the AI features you're talking about into Levex, come right back on, man. I'd love to have that conversation. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Ryan. Yeah. Yeah. It's very nice. yes, that puck thing, yeah.