Inside a DeFi Hedge Fund: Risk Management in a 24/7 Market ft. Evgeny Gokhberg

12 Feb 2026 · 1 h 8 min · 25 chapters

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Podcast Summary: Raoul Pal: The Journey Man - Episode with Evegny Gokhberg

Podcast Overview

  • Title: The Journey Man
  • Host: Raoul Pal
  • Guest: Evegny Gokhberg, Founder of Re7Capital
  • Episode Date: February 4, 2026
  • Description: This episode dives into the world of decentralized finance (DeFi) and hedge fund management, focusing on risk management strategies in a 24/7 market environment.

Key Themes and Discussions

Introduction to DeFi Hedge Fund Management

  • Raoul Pal introduces Evegny Gokhberg, emphasizing his experience in traditional finance (TradFi) and transition into the DeFi space.
  • Gokhberg shares his journey from working in European banks to founding a DeFi hedge fund, Re7Capital, which employs a market-neutral yield strategy.

Market-Neutral Yield Strategy

  • Definition: Gokhberg describes a market-neutral yield strategy as one that focuses on managing smart contract risk, diversifying investments across platforms and chains, while treating crypto as liquid venture capital.
  • The goal is to earn double-digit returns regardless of market volatility.

Risk Management in DeFi

  • Understanding Risks: Gokhberg elaborates on the importance of assessing software risk, as the main risk in DeFi is the potential for platform hacks rather than traditional market risks.
  • He emphasizes the need for a robust risk management framework that categorizes vectors of attacks and employs diversification.

Current Market Conditions

  • Discussion centers around whether the recent downturn in crypto is a broken cycle or a mid-cycle correction.
  • Both Pal and Gokhberg agree that fundamentals remain strong, despite the volatility and price fluctuations in the crypto market.

The State of Capital in DeFi

  • Gokhberg notes that while the number of DeFi platforms has increased, the total value locked (TVL) in DeFi has not grown significantly since 2021.
  • He argues that capital is still relatively scarce in the DeFi space, leading to favorable yields for investors willing to take on the risk.

Investment Strategies

  • Gokhberg details his approach to portfolio management, which includes holding a diversified basket of assets while maintaining a long-term investment perspective.
  • He contrasts this with the more speculative nature of investing in altcoins, emphasizing a balanced risk-return profile.

Macro Indicators and Future Outlook

  • The conversation shifts to macroeconomic indicators and their implications for the crypto market, such as U.S. liquidity and its effects on asset prices.
  • Both hosts express cautious optimism about the market's future, suggesting that despite current challenges, the overall investment thesis for crypto remains intact.

Key Takeaways

  • Market-Neutral Strategy: Focus on stable returns through diversification and risk management in the volatile DeFi landscape.
  • Risk Assessment: Understanding software risks is crucial for creating reliable investment strategies in DeFi.
  • Current Market Environment: The current crypto drawdown may represent a mid-cycle correction rather than a complete breakdown of the market.
  • Capital Scarcity: There remains a structural scarcity of capital in DeFi, which can lead to higher returns for those who enter the space strategically.
  • Long-Term Perspective: Successful investing in crypto requires patience and a long-term outlook, avoiding panic during market downturns.

Conclusion The conversation between Raoul Pal and Evegny Gokhberg provides valuable insights into the evolving landscape of decentralized finance and risk management strategies within a hedge fund framework. As the market continues to experience volatility, understanding these dynamics will be crucial for investors looking to navigate the DeFi space effectively.

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Chapters

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Introducing Evgeny Gokhberg

1:12 to 1:49

Raoul introduces Evgeny Gokhberg and sets the stage for discussion.

“The Journeyman, where we journey to that nexus of understanding between macro crypto and the exponential age of technology.”

Evgeny's Journey to DeFi Hedge Fund

3:07 to 5:59

Evgeny shares his career path and transition into DeFi.

“In The Journeyman, I talk to the smartest people in the world so we can all become smarter together.”

The Concept Behind RE7 Capital

5:59 to 9:39

Evgeny explains the meaning behind his hedge fund's name and vision.

“when making the decision to quit a pretty comfortable banking life and launch something new in the wild in DeFi as a DeFi yield investment firm five years ago.”

Market Neutral DeFi Yield Strategy

9:39 to 14:00

Understanding Evgeny's market neutral strategy and risk management.

“You're stepping in to provide liquidity into the ecosystem.”

Understanding DeFi Risk Management

14:00 to 14:59

Explore how to manage risks in DeFi while seeking high yields.

“So now it's maybe, you know, two, maybe three, maybe five, depending on the year.”

Capital Supply and Demand in DeFi

15:00 to 16:56

Learn about the supply-demand dynamics and the influx of DeFi platforms.

“We start with, in what scenario are we okay to lose money?”

Institutional Interest in DeFi

16:57 to 19:32

Discover the challenges and gradual acceptance of DeFi by institutional investors.

“You don't even need to take any DeFi risk.”

Return Profiles of DeFi Strategies

19:33 to 22:00

Analyze the cyclical returns of DeFi strategies compared to traditional investments.

“Gradually, however, we're clearly seeing a convergence of, you know, CeFi, DeFi, and ShredFi, where with a Coinbase app, you want to borrow against your coins.”

Diversification Strategies in DeFi

22:01 to 23:26

Understand the importance of diversification in DeFi investments to mitigate risks.

“And people who, you know, people are running funds, diversified funds who have big drawdowns in this space.”

Exploring New Investment Strategies

23:27 to 25:54

Learn about the introduction of a new directional fund focused on altcoins.

“And then you've built other strategies as well now.”
Show all 25 chapters

Analyzing Crypto Assets

27:42 to 28:00

Delve into the methods of evaluating crypto assets through technical and fundamental analysis.

“And I think like it also keeps changing as a function of the market regime.”

Understanding Market Dynamics in DeFi

28:00 to 29:50

Explore how market cycles and fundamentals influence investment strategies in DeFi.

“We pay a lot of attention to technicals because the space trades on technicals.”

The Importance of Patience in Trading

29:50 to 31:35

Learn why patience is crucial in the volatile crypto market and how to manage risks effectively.

“And then you've got the other side, which is more power law driven, which is like, we'll have a basket of this stuff because we like the opportunity set.”

Navigating Market Cycles and Trading Philosophy

31:35 to 33:55

Discover the philosophy behind trading in crypto and the importance of not overtrading.

“And you have to have a lot of patience because it tends to work in very concentrated periods, generally late stage cycle.”

Analyzing the Current Market Situation

33:55 to 36:50

Gain insights into the current state of the market and potential future trends in crypto assets.

“But all the smartest people I've met in this industry, they've delivered P &L without getting anxiety attacks by being very calm and very patient.”

Fundamentals vs. Price Discrepancies

36:50 to 42:00

Understand the disconnect between crypto fundamentals and their market prices and its implications.

“You can have conspiracy theories that some exchange went bust on 1010 and now they're somehow dumping the inventory, but who knows?”

Understanding the Disconnect Between Fundamentals and Price

42:00 to 43:19

Explore the disconnect between blockchain fundamentals and current prices, along with market behavior.

“And if I get more cash in and I can spare the cash, I just keep adding because over time, if you think that tomorrow is going to be more digital than today, blockchains will have more value over time.”

The Impact of U.S. Liquidity on Crypto and SaaS Markets

43:20 to 46:22

Learn about the effects of U.S. liquidity on software and cryptocurrency valuations and market dynamics.

“And I'm like, well, you know, Claude Code, Claude, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

Banking System Dynamics and Future Liquidity

46:23 to 48:56

Understand how changes in banking regulations could affect future liquidity and market conditions.

“So what you end up with is some runners and a whole bunch of stuff that doesn't ever perform.”

Market Anxiety and Seller Dynamics

48:57 to 51:44

Discuss the current market anxiety, selling pressures, and the impact on cryptocurrency values.

“That gets the ISM screaming high, the business cycle, recycles capital through the system, finances the CapEx spends that are required for all of this data center build-outs and all of that.”

Investment Strategies in Volatile Markets

51:45 to 55:52

Explore strategies for managing investments during periods of high volatility and uncertainty.

“which, well, first, I don't think they'll succeed.”

Survivorship Bias in Crypto Investing

56:00 to 57:30

Learn about the impact of survivorship bias on perceptions of success in crypto.

“But, you know, if something hasn't made a new high since 2017, you know, it's like the death, kind of the death spiral.”

Assessing Market Conditions

57:30 to 58:50

Explore how to interpret market conditions and cycles in cryptocurrency.

“to buy ethereum at the ice at the ico he's now a multi-billionaire there's 10 of them who did other ICOs and they all went to zero.”

Understanding Current Market Dynamics

58:50 to 1:02:30

Discuss the current market trends and future possibilities in crypto.

“But if you actually zoom out and you look at the relevant macro indicators and you look at the majors, it doesn't look broken.”

Mindset and Risk Tolerance in Investing

1:02:30 to 1:03:28

Examine the importance of mindset and understanding risk in investing.

“And, you know, I think it's, as you and I spent a lot of time talking about, you've got to have the right mindset and understand what risks you're taking and what your actual risk tolerance is.”
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Transcript

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0:00Today's episode is brought to you by Abra. Abra aims to provide individuals and institutions with a secure way to control, manage and grow digital asset wealth from a separately managed account. Abra helps his clients get exposure to crypto and crypto financial products like yield and lending through one full service platform. If you're looking to gain access to additional liquidity, Abra has one of the most competitive loan products in the market. You can borrow against Bitcoin, ETH and Solana at up to 50 % loan to value. Rates are in the 4 % to 6 % APY and are open term. You can continuously draw down against your collateral as the price appreciates.

0:33Abra has other strategies to add yield and their team is happy to help align your portfolio to your risk profile. Reach out today and get a complimentary consult on your portfolio. It's worth seeing if they can help you manage your allocation, reach investment goals, manage risk and add additional yield. Go to realvision.com forward slash Abra and tell them I sent you. Hey everyone, as you know, on this podcast, I bring the best guests in the world at that nexus of understanding of macro crypto and the exponential age of technology. If you're enjoying the show, a quick five-star rating goes a long way.

1:05It helps us grow and keep these conversations coming with the best guests in the world. Thanks a lot. Hi, I'm Raoul Pal, and welcome to my show, The Journeyman, where we journey to that nexus of understanding between macro crypto and the exponential age of technology. Now, most of you watching this know that crypto has been difficult in recent times. And really, we want to try and understand what's going on, what it all means, but also learn from somebody who's in the trenches as a hedge fund manager running a large portfolio in crypto. So today we're going to speak to Evgeny from RE7 Capital, and we're going to get a good idea of really what's going on right now and what it means for us.

1:48Before we go to the interview, I just want to remind you today's episode is brought to you by FIGURE. If you believe Bitcoin in long term, the worst move you can make is selling it just to access liquidity. That's why you should check out FIGURE. Right now, FIGURE offers crypto-backed loans at 8.91 % interest with a 50 % LTV, so you can unlock capital without creating a taxable event or giving up your Bitcoin exposure. FIGURE's the largest non-bank mortgage lender in the US, with over$19 billion unlocked on their lending platform. Now they're letting Bitcoin holders borrow against their Bitcoin instead of selling it.

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3:03Check out Figure using my link below. Join me, Raoul Pal, as I go on a journey of discovery through the macro, crypto, and exponential age landscapes. In The Journeyman, I talk to the smartest people in the world so we can all become smarter together.

3:25Evgeny great to see you on Real Vision Thank you for having me Ralu Yeah this should be fun I'm looking forward to this So as ever I'd love to get your story How the hell did you get here today And then we'll talk about what you're up to and then we'll talk about markets And all the things people want to hear Out of all the stories you usually get here It's probably one of the boring ones I started TradFi in London About 15 years ago in a hedge fund As an analyst And then eventually as a junior PM doing equity long short global macro which was uh very exciting and then i kind of transitioned into banking spent quite a few years in ubs and deutsche bank doing multi-asset portfolio management in the wealth management business and obviously you know the pace of working within you know european banks is uh limited by what you can do so i started searching for something more intense and dynamic, came across blockchain, which got me quite excited because when I learned about Bitcoin in the, you know, when I first heard about it was probably 2012 and I thought it was a Ponzi scheme, so I ignored it.

4:30Then I saw blockchain, I was like, oh my God, it's like, you can like rebuild the bank and make it so much better. That's interesting. And then I just started very methodically going to all the meetups and I was lucky to join an Ethereum meetup where vitalik was speaking when was this this would have been 2015 2014 2015 and uh i was okay i don't understand anything that he's saying but this is really clearly a genius so i need to learn and figure it out so spent you know about a year uh learning then start investing then uh back when enterprise blockchain was a thing and felt that was like a legitimate way to earn a living joined a startup doing supply chain traceability for diamonds and other things.

5:17That was a pretty wild and exciting experience. But eventually gravitated back towards markets. So DeFi in 2019 started playing with it personally. And then pretty quickly it became clear that there is something new that can be created, something very unusual when it comes to investment strategies. And then I launched my firm a bit less than five years ago. And fast forward to today, you know, heaven slept in like five years. by the virtue of being a 24-7 addict when it comes to on-chain activity. And yeah, now I'm here running a bunch of different strategies deploying capital on-chain. Why RE7 Capital?

5:59Why the name? That's a great question. So that's a chess reference. It stands for Rook2E7. when making the decision to quit a pretty comfortable banking life and launch something new in the wild in DeFi as a DeFi yield investment firm five years ago. It felt pretty scary, to say the least. So it was kind of a deeply personal choice. And at some point I got blocked because I needed to fill a file of paperwork and I didn't have the name of the company. And when I was a kid, I used to do chess professionally. So I started kind of drawing on that as an inspiration. and I remember that there was a story that always inspired me, whereby there has only ever been one S-Campion that has ever died undefeated.

6:49And I was like, okay, well, let's kind of dig into that. So I started looking through, you know, records of his chess games, and then I kind of thought, well, how did he become the world champion? And then I saw, you know, the record of his game, and his final move in his final game was Rook2E7, and having made that move, he has become the world champion. So I thought, okay, well, that's what I want to inspire towards in my industry, in my domain. And then I also thought that, you know, it sounds pretty cool because you can kind of play with it and you like, you know, it's like re-7, reset, re-things, like reset finance, that sort of thing.

7:27And that's how it started. Then there was an additional kind of deeply personal connection for me because when you play chess professionally, you keep a physical notebook where you record all your moves. And when I was a kid, my dad showed me a notebook that belonged to my great-grandfather who played against that guy and they scored a tie. I don't think I would even try to play against a world champion. It would be very embarrassing. But a little bit of inspiration doesn't hurt. So what strategy did you start with when you started building? market neutral defi yield and what that means in practice is it's you know think of it as a hedge fund and all it does it collects dollars converts these dollars into stable coins and parts of these stable coins somewhere in the blockchain earning yield we don't care about the direction of the price in that original product we don't care about designing a trading strategy we don't care about treasuries, macro, geopolitics, or whatever else.

8:32We care about blockchain platforms not going bust through software attacks and hacks. So my thinking was, I want to run an investment firm in the space and no one goes into the space to make 15-20 % a year. We'll come here no matter how disciplined we try to be for much more aggressive P &L, but it was very scary for me to base the business as a foundation on something that's extremely volatile. So I thought it would be great as a foundation to have something that's market neutral, that's very reliable and consistent, and then build on top of that. And in the early days of DeFi, you could have parked your stable coins in pretty simple ways and earn 30, 40 % a year.

9:18And as I was thinking about it, I was like, okay, it's pretty interesting for two reasons. One, it felt very different from arbitrage and quant strategies, whereby you're not really trying to exploit market inefficiencies. What you're really doing is the same thing that the Medici's were doing in Florence and JP Morgan has been doing in the US economy. You're stepping in to provide liquidity into the ecosystem. That's what banks do. And in this universe, the role of a bank is outsourced to anyone in the market. So anyone with a wallet can do what we're doing, maybe with less sophistication, but they have access to the same set of opportunities.

9:57So that if you can step into the ecosystem very early on, you become a structural player, like a banker to the industry in a way, which is pretty cool. And then the other element which I found very exciting was this was the first time in kind of my professional history of looking at pretty much all of the classes that have ever existed, where you can have a structurally different and unique risk return payoff cycle, sorry, profile. and I don't mean the asymmetry of returns, I mean the source of risk. Our source of risk is a random software platform on the blockchain getting hacked. Now that risk may be high or it may be low, but it's completely uncorrelated from stocks, bonds, BTC, and anything else in the world.

10:49So you get paid to take software risk and I've never seen anything else like it. And so I thought this could be an opportunity to create something very new and very different that has never existed before as a risk return payoff profile. And that was the main inspiration. And how do you then go and measure that risk? How do you know what the risk is of an exchange getting hacked? Or do you just run a diversified basket to assume some default rate? Well, diversification always sells, but it's not enough. So when I was playing with this back in the day, DeFi was wild, wild west. You're getting 30%, 40%, 60 % a year, and then every third platform is getting hacked.

11:31So great as a hobby, but maybe not very reliable as a product. So what I was thinking is, if I can figure out the risk management framework, then I have a product. If I can't figure it out, then it's basically a hobby. So then I started thinking, because I've never studied software or computer science. I'm kind of a finance person. So I can like, you know, well, now I can use cloud code, but back then I could have like typed hello world and that's pretty much it. So, okay, well, I don't understand anything at all. How do I, how do I approach it? And then I started thinking, well, what is my risk return profile?

12:08I put my stable coin in DeFi. I earn money every second. And then one day, which could be tomorrow or in five seconds or in five years, I can get wiped out with one event, i.e. a hack. and I realized it's like selling a put option, which is how credit works, right? You get paid and then one day your counterparty can go bust. So I thought, okay, to a non-financial person, you know, lending sounds like a horrible deal because, you know, I borrow from you, I pay you back with like 5 % interest to where I default. That's not great, right? Minus 100 plus five. But in reality, what you can do is you can diversify, you can run risk and you can assign a level of risk rating.

12:48so with that i've created a framework where like okay can we actually categorize all vectors of attacks that have ever existed on the blockchain when it comes to hacks can we create a a checklist in like a form which you fill in and then you say well you fill in a form and someone scores 100 out of 100 50 out of 100 0 out of 100 then you say it's you know HH will be CCC, and then you run a very diversified portfolio. So that was the hope and inspiration that the framework like that could work. We even published a paper on this a few years ago, and I'm surprised that no one actually copycatted that.

13:29And I was thinking with the same mindset as a fixed income manager would, where you have an index, investment grade bond index, for example, and the index pays you X, and it has an annual default rate of Y. So that spread is what you earn. So then if you're giving money to an active manager, that spread has to be bigger, right? So the same return, lower default, or whatever other combination of factors. When we started in DeFi, the annual quote-unquote default rate, i.e. hacks, has been double digit, 10 to 15%. It gradually came down as the industry became safer. So now it's maybe, you know, two, maybe three, maybe five, depending on the year.

14:07And, you know, we have lost about 20 basis points a year to hacks. So we've been able to push that metric down by like 20x plus while delivering double digit yields, meaning the framework works. And that's how we got to it, because we realized that audit firms who are out there, they're trying to label something as green. You're building a platform, you're paying a lot of money to auditors, and you want to communicate to the world that you've been marked as green. but world isn't binary and risk isn't binary so in our minds we do our research and we look for red if we find red it's out if it's not red it's not green it's yellow and then there are 50 shades of yellow and then you diversify accordingly and hopefully you achieve a more sustainable outcome and so you're not doing like cash and carry arbitrage yourselves you're just you're lending to DeFi overall?

15:07We start with, in what scenario are we okay to lose money? We are okay to lose money if a DeFi platform is hacked. That's kind of our starting point. Within that, we can do whatever we want as long as we only lose money in that scenario. Meaning, if there is a great platform where I can put my ETH and earn a bunch of yield, I will gladly use my stablecoins to buy ETH, I'll short the perps, I'll earn the cash and carry whilst also earning yield from the DeFi platform. Or I will make the market between a stable asset and a non-stable asset and run a trading bot that hedges out my impermanent loss and kind of the delta risk.

15:46But ultimately, it's all about picking a DeFi platform that gives us very high yield on a risk return basis. And are you finding the market still relatively starved of capital? So the yields are pretty decent or are we seeing more capital coming in or have we not seen the institutions and others coming in yet? Last year alone, there's been over a thousand new DeFi platforms that went live. I don't think there's been a thousand new DeFi yield funds that went live. So we exist, our capital is a commodity and there is a supply demand profile for that commodity. The DeFi TVL has not really grown since 2021.

16:25The number of platforms, however, has. So people are still starved of capital. And I think that's a very structural feature because cost of innovation is basically as close to zero as it gets, right? If you have a laptop and cloud code, you can fork any DeFi protocol right now. And with a little bit of venture financing, you can do a lot. But in order for someone to launch a fund, raise money and provide that liquidity, that's pretty hard and there are quite a few hurdles out there so for the foreseeable future we believe that supply demand will continue to be kind of in the favor of allocators although yields are highly cyclical so frankly what affects our pnl more than demand for demand in variance is a cyclicality because in the bull market you can you know buy eth well buy STTH, you make 2 % or 3%, and then you make additional 20 % by shorting.

17:22That's it. You don't even need to take any DeFi risk. And in the bear market, you won't make anything. So there is cyclicality to these returns, but all in all, it still feels like a favorable environment. And do you diversify across blockchains as well? Absolutely. So we take three layers of risk. We're holding an asset. Maybe it's a stable coin. maybe it's something else. So what if the stable coin we're holding is bad? So that's risk number one. The platform is the second risk and then the chain itself. And we have had cases where, as in not we, but we as an ecosystem, where chains collapsed, right?

18:00Terra, there've been some other chains which are relive on a specific bridge. There was a case with, it was a phantom back in the day where the whole chain relied on a bridge which was governed by multisig and then allegedly police raided someone's house in China and the chain collapsed. They're like, we don't want to have that risk. And so what's stopping the giant pools of capital, whether it's the banks or whether it's Apollo coming into the space and kind of crushing the returns? They just not have the sophistication or it's still too small for them. Why has that not happened yet? It's a process, right?

18:38So we have been speaking to institutional allocators for a long, long time, and they're definitely becoming more open-minded and more receptive to this. But it's just a very different world. So before Trump, is it really okay for a large U.S. institution to deploy capital on chain? Is it worth the risk? Not really. Usually when we speak to all the usual plastics in the traditional world, what they would be telling us, they would be saying, listen, we run a multi-billion dollar business. How much can we really deploy on chain? Whatever the number is. The P &L we generate from that is not worth exposing our core business to existential risk.

19:26So this is changing now and they're becoming more open. and some of them prefer to deploy through players like ourselves. Gradually, however, we're clearly seeing a convergence of, you know, CeFi, DeFi, and ShredFi, where with a Coinbase app, you want to borrow against your coins. Your request for a loan goes on chain through, you know, different vaults, for example. Morpho, you know, you source that capital. And then that capital can be provided by the market, by ourselves, or by someone who is a traditional institution. So over time, I think that convergence will definitely happen. And then the question is, you know, does DeFi growth materialize further?

20:05And given that nothing has really grown on chain beyond, you know, pump and hype, it's TBD. But they're not quite there yet. And the skill set is not transferable. Right? If you've been a brilliant trader at Citadel and you want to want to confirm market making on chain, you'll probably do very well. but if you've been analyzing Coca-Cola bonds and now you have to start analyzing hacking risk, there's probably quite a bit of adjustment. It's not an easy business for people to get into. What kind of returns does this strategy kind of do versus a traditional fixed income sort of arbitrage strategy?

20:51I mean, they use leverage, which is slightly not comparable, but where does it stack up in the return profiles of hedge funds across asset classes? Is it attractive? So non-financial and visceral, obviously. But the way to talk about it is the returns of strategy like this are, like I said, cyclical. So, you know, when I talk to traditional allocators, I tell them that, imagine that, you know, I'm running a kiosk at an airport, NFX kiosk, and tomorrow there is, you know, Olympics, and a billion people go for me. The day after tomorrow, there is COVID, and no one is going through a kiosk. And then on the third day, it's just business as usual, right?

21:33So in the bull market, you can get historically, you know, 25 to 30 % returns. That's with no leverage. Correct. Yeah. Then in a humble market, you get, you know, 15-ish. And then if it's, you know, a Lehman moment, depending on how well you do, you can get, you know, 5 to 10. So that's kind of the framework and the way to think about the yield profile of strategies like this. And people who, you know, people are running funds, diversified funds who have big drawdowns in this space. that's probably because they're running concentrated risk so they've got one large event the FTX style event and then that hits them the idea is to have enough diversification that you don't get hit by a single event that's certainly our approach if you think back to the fixed income metaphor, you could absolutely have fixed income managers who are running very concentrated books and sometimes it goes well sometimes it goes poorly.

22:39Or you can take the different philosophy. Like our philosophy has been that we accept that DeFi is what, six years old? That's frankly nothing. And we've operated for more than five years out of those six years. So from the end one, we've operated with the assumption that there are lots of unknown unknowns. Therefore, we at the very least have to diversify. But more importantly, structurally, you know, when you, you know, pour your heart and soul into building a firm, you don't want for it to disappear because, you know, one guy, God knows where, decided to like rug an exchange or something terrible happens to a specific blockchain.

23:17So our philosophy has been that no matter what blows up in the world, we want to be at least flat on the air, i.e. in the green. And that starting philosophy sets very hard caps on how we operate. Interesting. And then you've built other strategies as well now. So that was the start. The foundational start was let's have a nice kind of yield-looking product that is stable and secure, moves around a bit but not too much. What came after that? The second logical thing was us thinking that, well, we operate within the sector and we think as fixed income analysts-ish, and we kind of understand this platform.

23:57So let's launch a second strategy that thinks as a long-only small-cap equity investor, i.e. a directional fund, which goes along altcoins rather than the majors with an intention to beat the benchmark. And as a disclaimer, ExPair Myasset Management Firm is an investor here. But we're doing it as friends having this chat because Evgeny is a really interesting person. But carry on. Thank you. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, that was the intention that, at least back in the day, you know, when the market wasn't bleeding every day, that seemed like a good idea. And the thinking was Bitcoin, you know, stands alone as the story of digital gold.

24:42And everything else in our mind is basically a story of software businesses. or someone is telling you the story that we're the next app store we're the next linux but making money and we're the next robin hood and so on and so forth so without well basically you have an ecosystem of small cap uh liquid ventures is glamorously called in our space right two or three year old companies which are liquid i either still venture stage but you can hopefully get the same upside as venture funds would but in liquid fashion and we with times launch pretty well because we, you know, my firm went live in 2021 and I was very anxious to not do too much too quickly.

25:22And also the market was feeling, you know, a bit, a bit hot. And we went live pretty shortly after, after FTX, which was kind of by design and, you know, captured a pretty good run over the last few years. And then obviously last year has been, you know, very brutal for everything directionally deployed. But we remain very kind of resolute in our view that these assets are definitely not worth zero. And we believe that we're going, like, I feel that altcoins are going through a massive cleansing exercise where what percent, like we have, I don't know, a million coins right now, maybe more. 99.9 % of them should be worth exactly zero.

26:04And that's absolutely fair. And when, you know, I talk to you again, And I talked to allocators and they tell me, well, 99 % of assets should be worth zero. You know, the industry must be broken. And I asked them, imagine if every single startup in Silicon Valley would have been publicly listed on day one. Yeah, it's horrific. Just imagine the drama, the noise and everything else. And that's kind of what we're experiencing. but uh it's very clear like uh you know you ask you know you use a case study of you know a company that generates you know half a billion a year of free cash flow uses all of that money to buy back its stock and has you know two billion of cash and you ask tradify people how would you value that business you know you get pretty high numbers and you know we know that in our space you know someone something like palm trades at very distressed levels so that was our second strategy knowing it's very volatile, but we're willing to take that volatility in exchange for a symmetric upside.

27:03And that's been our second product. And so when you're in the liquid space, how are you analyzing stuff? Are you using discounted cash flow style analysis, so equity analysis, or are you using more VC style? Where's the total addressable market? Is it getting network effects? How do you think that through when you're analyzing stuff? So a quick break in your regular programming. If you're serious about your future, grab my free report called Prepare for 2030. I think you've got five years to make as much money as possible. And this guide will help you navigate what's coming. The link is in the description.

27:40Download it now. The reality is that I think it's super hard. And I think like it also keeps changing as a function of the market regime. And over there, you know, we kind of we have two buckets in our portfolio where one of them is we're thinking of something as an established business. And DC doesn't make any sense in our space because what I even your rights as a token holder, that's still a little bit questionable in some cases. And you're at the will of the market. But we look at something. We pay a lot of attention to technicals because the space trades on technicals. Where are we in the macro cycle?

28:20Where are we in the crypto cycle more broadly? Where are the majors trading? because if let's say, let's use a random example, let's say you're bullish, you know, pump.fund on the back of its fundamentals. But, you know, if Solana is crashing through the floor, there's not much you can do, right? So we kind of stuff top down and then we merge it bottom up, whereby maybe something looks like, let's say the cycle is great and there is a chart that looks amazing, but fundamentally it's like three guys, you know, shilling their coin at conferences. that's just not the game we have the energy to play.

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28:56So we try to look at fundamentals, which frankly is not very hard given that everything is on chain. Like you look at something like Aave, it's, you know, fundamental KPIs are doing this and the price is doing that. So if you see a business like that and you believe that trajectory is sustainable and you know the founder and you believe the founder is high quality, then, you know, you have these alligator jaws and at some point, you know, they have to close. and as long as you don't use any leverage, then you don't get stopped out on the way. And then there are more speculative things, right? So you look for esoteric small things where you put them in your portfolio with the expectation that they'll be worth exactly zero because these are venture-style bets.

29:39But if you're right, it's 50 or 100x and then you try to manage this in parallel. And we have had our fair share of disappointments as well as quite a big share of wins as well. So you're kind of running a barbell of... like concentrated risk where you've got something measurable that's understandable that has some network effects and is not correctly priced according to your view, taking into account the macro and the cycle and everything else. And then you've got the other side, which is more power law driven, which is like, we'll have a basket of this stuff because we like the opportunity set.

30:14We don't know which ones are going to work and let's just let it work out, play out. That's exactly right. and do you then trade around a lot or you tend to set it forget it or as a combination of the two so you know our approach has evolved quite a bit uh over the last few years we spent a lot of time trying to optimize you know let's say there is a category and there are two players in the category holding one you're seeing the other is starting to help your form so you try to be smart about it and you know in some market environments that works very well and then in a bad market that works very badly.

30:48So we have shifted to a completely different approach where as long as everything is holding structurally, i.e. on the technical level, on a fundamental level, and we have a good line of communication with the team to make sure that there's no hidden skeletons in the closet, then we'll just keep holding it. And if there is something else that's outrunning it, so be it because we came to a conclusion that in this market which is extremely unforgiving is better to be very very patient and not trade around these things because you're trading in a very p2p environment and it's just not it's not a sustainable way of delivering pnl it's really not easy to run kind of altcoin risk.

31:39It's just a very difficult thing. But when it works, it really works. And you have to have a lot of patience because it tends to work in very concentrated periods, generally late stage cycle. Yeah, you can be lucky with some things in the middle. We've had the hyperliquids. We've had the SUI did pretty well for a while. We had a bunch of those but really you need the the last part of the cycle to kick in exactly and you know when i was back in my tradfire days i remember looking at the data point if you know if you were long smp from let's say 1980 to whatever it was like 2015 at the time and if you would have missed you know top 10 days in the market what's the impact on european now and that was like very very substantial so just 10 days out of 30 years and in kripa i don't think anyone can capture that and i remember very well the days in 2020 and 2021 where you know if you're not in the market on like specific three days you miss out on half the pnl um so i think it's very important and people i think the main reason why people get stressed out in the space is the sizing issue right i think it's very important to walk into this with your eyes wide open and be very clear about your expected you know var and level of risk is because if someone comes to you and says this is a trade where you can lose 80 % of your money or 10x it okay yeah that's great you can just size it accordingly but if people think that oh my god you know I'm gonna lever up and like gamble my way into into freedom but that obviously doesn't work and do you tend to think of your portfolio in terms of the full cycle or do you move around more than that?

33:22Or is your mental framework is, we need to capture the full cycle gains of this? So we think we want to optimize for the least number of actions. So when we're putting on a name, we want to hold it till the end of the cycle. Yeah. And then we may change your view and take it off. Exactly. And then we will stop holding it if something breaks, whatever it might be. but our preference is not to overtrade because again like when i think back to my you know almost 10 years of being in the in the crypto investing game time in the market beats timing the market i mean i've said i keep trying to explain this to people endlessly but they're like why didn't you get out here and do this i said that that's not what you do the actual way to compound gains is do nothing you know at a simple you know for a retail investor i'm like hold a basket of bitcoin and ethan solana do nothing they think they need to you know every big draw down oh my god it's gone down 30 40 i'm like it's just noise what you're trying to do is where you bought it and where you sell it at the end of the the cycle and i think that's where a structure of philosophy comes into play because we think we truly think of these things as liquid venture yeah right so if you're making a venture investment you you at least should be making it with a view that you will never see your money again unless things work out yeah on the liquid side you have the temptation uh and the pressure of choice because every day you're not selling something is equivalent to you buying and under re-underwriting that every day and it's the same thing we've seen with stocks obviously uh but here it's much more extreme due to insane leverage and volatility and just the kind of the ethos of the space.

35:14But all the smartest people I've met in this industry, they've delivered P &L without getting anxiety attacks by being very calm and very patient. Yeah, I just think FOMO is one of the biggest destroyers of returns. I see it time and time and time again. And just not doing anything is generally the better way of doing things. so what the fuck is going on in the market we're recording this on february the 4th it's a it's a shit show i mean you and i caught up in dubai talking our theories through some of this which i still think is probably right but yeah it's still i mean i still think it's liquidity related but who the hell is selling and why i uh well i think if if we knew then you know the world would be a different place, but, you know, it's really hard, right?

36:11Looking back, it's easy to say, you know, that, you know, October 10th and, you know, CZ or, you know, whatever broke the market and we're paying the price. Okay, fine. Then, you know, what's happening over the last few weeks? Well, maybe it's, you know, like you mentioned in one of your, you know, posts recently that, you know, US liquidity is going down, having deviated from the global liquidity. So maybe it's that maybe it's a shutdown risk maybe it's people getting worried about quantum which i don't think is really the case and like i've spoken to some threat five people who are holding ibid and they're like oh what do you mean quantum risk like i'm sure you guys yeah exactly um it's honestly i don't understand and so the way how we're thinking about it at this point because i feel the market is beyond understanding right now.

37:06You can have conspiracy theories that some exchange went bust on 1010 and now they're somehow dumping the inventory, but who knows? And you just don't know. So we're taking a very different approach where we're just zooming out completely. We're looking at multi-year, multi-cycle kind of charts on BTC, Heath and Sol in absolute terms and relative terms. And then BTC versus NASDAQ, BTC versus gold. By the way, if you look at BTC versus gold, it's at the bottom of a multi-year channel. So we're looking at those things and everything is testing its critical levels. So over the last year, I probably said 10 times that this is the bottom.

37:51So I will not be saying that ever again. But I've been there too. It's not unreasonable to assume we're closer to the bottom than to a bottomless pit. And so therefore, as long as we keep holding these levels, then, you know, there is hope that we, you know, we can have something positive happen this year. And if we just break through these levels, then it's going to be, well, very, very bleak. But what's giving me hope is the market is behaving very differently from, let's say, a year ago. So a year ago, Bitcoin is down 1%, Sol is down 3%, and your average altcoin is down 15%. And then it's very scary to be holding alt because you're just getting destroyed every single day.

38:40It's like negative convexity. You pay to wait, which is horrible. But now, well, firstly, there are some names which are actually doing very well, and they're up, even though Bitcoin and everything else is down. But obviously, there's like two of them. So, you know, you can't do much with that. But lots of alts are actually not breaking down on a relative basis versus BTC. That's right. It looks like I use others on TradingView versus Bitcoin or Tote. And there seems to be some stability or outperformance coming below the surface. It's kind of like how I think about this as well is it took a while for the Russell 2000 to start performing.

39:23performing and it's the same thing it's small caps versus the majors it's the same process driven mainly by the same business cycle as far as i can tell and it feels like the signs of something reversing there yeah and and kind of that's the hope we have but realistically like every week we're approaching we're literally at critical levels right i mean solana you know broke down 100 and is now like at 92 as we speak which is beyond uh beyond my understanding So, yeah, I'm curious how you think about it at these levels, because, you know, do we do a stop loss at some point? Do we just keep holding?

40:00That's, I guess, the tricky question. But so far, when you look at, you know, there was a great print on ISM and, you know, we need good ISM to actually have, you know, what we need to have. I'm not a macro expert, but I don't think that we need to, you know, panic sell on the back of who's going to be the new Fed chair. If anything, it's probably the opposite. it so if everything is this cheap and this distressed why would you sell and you know this is i think where interestingly you know asset allocation comes in because if you're already fully invested you're like maybe i need to just get out before it goes even further down but then if you're not invested in the space this is when you start allocating because blood is not just on the streets it's up to your kneecaps quite literally so yeah i mean you know as you know i use my macro framework liquidity framework all of that and all of that looks great yes we need some more liquidity in the us the shutdown's just ended there's still a bit of part of it there's still a little bit left but really they've announced the funding it all looks fine we've got besant telling us he wants to hypercharge of the economy.

41:14Why the ISM is important is because that's economic activity. And that means people have more money and they invest in riskier things. And it's all there. The levels are key kind of levels. The technicals for me, I use a lot of DMARC indicators are bloody close, not on the weekly charts, but on the daily charts. But you don't necessarily need the weekly charts to stack up. We've got the potential for this Clarity Act to get through. It looks like they're really fighting to get it through because don't forget the crypto crowd were the biggest donors to the Republicans. So they owe them something.

41:46So they owe them this. So on a risk reward basis, it feels like it's a good trade. Yeah, I'm fully invested. And, you know, for me, how I play it, because I don't think this is the end of the cycle because it's not the end of the macro cycle. So that would be weird. So I just don't do anything. And if I get more cash in and I can spare the cash, I just keep adding because over time, if you think that tomorrow is going to be more digital than today, blockchains will have more value over time. And you don't have to go wildly far out the risk curve to capture any of that. And so therefore, it just doesn't worry me.

42:26But it worries everybody else so much about the ups and downs because I understand people's hopes and dreams are in this whole trade. It's a lot more than just an investment. Well, it's a lifestyle. And it's like Ethan Solana are lower than where they were five years ago. So there are people who bet their careers and lives on this, ourselves included. And it's not fun. But what really amazes me is the disconnect that we have between the fundamentals and the price. so we with with my partner uh whom we're running this fund with we uh we run a very simple exercise we looked at last year we picked what we believe to be quality defa platforms and you know like okay what's the average growth in revenue over 2025 and it was on average for that basket about 30 percent and what is the price performance for that basket is roughly minus 50 percent so that feels a bit weird and then you know every day you have uh more stable cause launching more people more banks and traditional institutions using on-chain products more integrations more more more um and yet that doesn't seem to matter so it's like fundamentals are completely disconnected from the price which then brings me back to you know maybe it was as simple as you know october 10th just structurally breaking something in the market and maybe it's taking longer than we hope to recover from that it's just very hard to explain it otherwise i had a weird thing happen to me i was writing global macro investor over the weekend and a client of mine who's a pretty well-known uh hedge fund manager sent me an email said you know should should I buy the bottom in software stock, in SaaS companies?

44:15And I'm like, well, you know, Claude Code, Claude, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The answer that the narrative, right, the market narrative, I said, I'm not sure. Let me go now. Let me go and have a think about it. And if we think the narrative in Bitcoin is 1010 broke things, blah, blah, blah. Then I overlaid the charts and they're literally identical. And I'm like, okay, this is telling me both narratives are wrong. And there's another dominant factor causing this. So, you know, I spent a bit of time with AI chatting through this and thinking through it. And the answer was U.S.

44:57liquidity. And because what had happened, and this is my understanding of this, But as US liquidity, because of the complications, everybody's heard me talking about all of that because of the TGA rebuild and no reverse repo, and then the shutdown, US liquidity shrunk. These two, SaaS or software and crypto, are the furthest out. They're the longest duration assets of all. So what happens is they get hit because the marginal liquidity is not available. There's still liquidity in the system, which is why NASDAQ's going up, blah, blah, blah. or Nasdaq stopped going up, but there's still enough momentum in the market.

45:37And then the one key variable that changed a lot was gold. So gold starts going up. It's a big asset, and it sucks in attention and capital. So the marginal assets get hit. And so nothing else makes sense if SaaS stocks and Bitcoin are identical charts. So therefore, it's not an esoteric thing, a single factor individually to those things. It has to be something bigger. So that's what I got to with that is maybe all of our narratives are wrong. It's explained by there's simply not enough money in the space right now to maintain that. It's the same if you think through the altcoin space. There's not enough money for the million altcoins for them all to run.

46:26So what you end up with is some runners and a whole bunch of stuff that doesn't ever perform. And so that's because there's not enough liquidity. If you put a trillion dollars of liquidity into Bitcoin, into crypto tomorrow, everything goes up because then there's enough liquidity. It's as simple as that, right? And what needs to happen for that U.S. liquidity to come back and become the marginal buyer? So firstly, it was this shutdown because the TGA has been – they wanted it at$850 billion, which is high anyway. It's at$900 and something billion. So there's about$100 billion too much in it already versus what they wanted.

47:01But they've had to hold it because of the shutdown that's going on that's just ended. So that should start withdrawing. So that's Fed net liquidity going up. We know the balance sheet is also growing. So then, OK, now we've got a tailwind. The next step is the issuance of bonds and bills and who absorbs them. So they've just changed the ESLR, which is the risk weighting on treasuries, reduced it, which means the banks can buy more treasuries. Today, they announced the funding schedule. It looks like because of how it's structured, i.e. they're not going far out the yield curve, they're keeping to bills.

47:41There's about$150 billion of extra liquidity coming from that. The difference is now, because they've changed the regulatory requirements, the banks can do more with those bonds. So they will recycle that capital and create money because the banking system can print money in its own right. So it has a multiplier effect. So that starts really kicking in in sort of March, April, May. But we've got the TGA beforehand. Then we've got the fiscal stimulus. We've probably got some rate cards. So it feels like it's all there, but it just needs to happen. Meanwhile, the Chinese are extending their balance sheet.

48:20They've been the driver of global liquidity. So that's good. So the conditions are in place. Are we going to get a nuclear bomb of liquidity? I don't know. But I know that the banking system will re-leverage it. The big thing is if Steve Mirren gets through what he wants to do, which is reduce all risk weighting on government bonds for banks. So that means they can create$5 trillion of leverage. And that's a big deal because, A, it goes through to Main Street because they lend money. That gets the ISM screaming high, the business cycle, recycles capital through the system, finances the CapEx spends that are required for all of this data center build-outs and all of that.

49:09But it also creates money, M2, all of that. So I think that's what they're going to try and do. And Scott Besson knows he has to have liquidity if he wants good markets. And the market's showing you right now that it doesn't have enough liquidity. NASDAQ's been sideways for two months now, three months. Everything feels a bit heavy. The gold trade is gone now for the time being. And it will never suck in as much capital again. Even if gold takes to new highs, it won't get that amount of attention again where it sucks in everybody's attention. I mean, you and I know every single crypto trader became a precious metals trader.

49:45That's exactly right. And then also there is this anxiety on AI capex, AI spend, which is, yeah, further pushing. On one hand, it's further pushing down kind of the risk appetite. On the other hand, it means that someone will look and say, well, I invest a lot in AI. I should probably go back to crypto a little bit. And maybe that helps as well. Yeah, I think so. And I think there is a, you know, we tended to see when gold peaks, gold generally is in line with financial conditions, which leads everything. So gold tends to peak and then Bitcoin really tends to perform. Now, it's not a prerequisite, but it's kind of of that.

50:24You know, what you'd like to see is the ISM going up, liquidity increasing, gold sort of topping out. And that gives you generally what the structure is. Then you want to see what you mentioned before, altcoins starting to stabilize versus the majors. You want to see Bitcoin dominance coming down, all of those signals. So it feels like they're very close to a lot of this right now. Yeah. And the only thing that's causing anxiety on my side, it feels we've been very close for a while. And then yet every day we're just getting kind of breaks. Yeah. I mean, it's surprising to get every day the market's down 6%.

51:02I mean, it's like, and I've not really figured out who the sellers are of all of this. It's fine to have no marginal liquidity, but who's the seller and why? I don't understand. I mean, there's obviously a lot of players in the market. I hear it's a lot of miners, miners who are switching to data centers. So they're switching use case, and therefore they just liquidate their Bitcoin. because there seems to be a lot of selling coming from the Middle East and Asia, China. That's what I hear, but who knows, right? Everyone's got their own theories right now. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then, I don't know, over the last 24 hours, we have this kind of coordinated push where people are hoping to cause a bank run on Binance, which, well, first, I don't think they'll succeed.

51:52But secondly, it's not like they're helping anyone. but you know maybe that is partially it as well uh it's just very unclear and as per usual we will only know in retrospect but then you know we have to everyone has to make decisions today uh you know waiting for the explanation later and what do you think for people watching this you think people should just be closer into the risk curve right now so stay in the majors uh and wait for a better signal if you're in the market i mean how should people think about it or Or should they be broadening out a bit because this is the opportunity set? It's very hard, right?

52:30Because everyone has their own, you know, as a classically trained kind of, you know, banker, it all starts with risk tolerance. That's right. And allocation. So, like. People don't understand risk tolerance until they have a 40%, 50 % drawdown. Well, until they can't sleep, basically. Yeah, exactly. like that. So, okay, if my personal approach is, okay, like, how much am I willing to lose, right? So if let's say there is an asset that I think in the worst case scenario can go down 80%, and I'm only willing to lose$80, then I should only invest$100 and no more, right? And if someone has invested that already, and obviously most people unfortunately have in our space, then it's very hard.

53:13And then the question is, you know, how do you go after or, you know, around that how do you manage that and again just thinking logically i remember in 2017 um i said no to like most icos because i thought that eth is like the nasdaq and all of those things are like small caps trying to outperform it and i missed out on a lot of winners but on average, it's been okay. And my thinking hasn't really changed where I feel we have the benchmark, which could be a basket of an EBDC soul, for example. And you can just hold it and go to sleep and know that most likely it's going to be okay in the end with a long enough time horizon.

53:58Or you can try to be more active, but then you need to realize you need to manage it more actively and you take idiosyncratic risk, right? So you may say that instead of holding you know, even Sol, you want to hold Sui, for example, for a variety of reasons. And in a specific market environment, it will do phenomenally well versus the other ones. But then you will wake up one day and, you know, it's going to be down more than the majors because it's higher beta. And then you need to be able to ask yourself, you know, why am I still holding this? That's right. Keep holding this further. And then if you can't answer why am I still holding it, you will most likely sell at the worst possible time.

54:38Well, because people also confuse why am I holding it with price action? Exactly. And, you know, you have to ask yourself, has something changed in my assessment of this? Is it acting in line with where it should be on the risk curve? You know, you look at it, if Bitcoin's down 30%, it's going to be down 45%. Solana's going to be down 55%. Sui will be down 75%, right? That's the normal risk curve. Is it doing anything different to that is the question you have to ask yourself as well. Or if not, it's just it's beta. Exactly. And then, you know, people would need to spend time thinking about it.

55:17Then they need to adjust for the fact that they'll be wrong, let's say, 50 % out of time, which means you can run a portfolio and then an end, which usually should lead to the conclusion that, you know, just take it easy unless you're highly specialized or, you know, well-trained. but that's not how people operate in in crypto naturally uh so i think it all starts with asking yourself you know what are you like if whatever you're holding goes down by x are you willing to you know to bear that and then even more importantly you know on the way up is it likely to make new highs or is it going to go down 90 and then double from there right because that's another complexity And I feel unless we get like a COVID bazooka, then it's reasonable to assume something good to happen to the majors and the quality assets.

56:09But, you know, if something hasn't made a new high since 2017, you know, it's like the death, kind of the death spiral. It will probably make lower lows and lower. But you know what they're all going to do? They're all going to look at the chart of Zcash and say it's possible. That's what happens, right? You screw your whole thinking because you're like, look at Zcash. This could do it. And that's the main challenge with the space because we've seen so many people get wildly well off on the back of taking very large, very concentrated bets. Obviously, we see the survivorship bias. right there is this uh you know twitter thing uh coin fashions where people like anonymously write their confessions oh yeah uh and you read that it's like it's pretty pretty bleak um what people are actually experiencing so there is this temptation you know it's like there is um you know there's this joke that the first the worst uh attack on education came from the zuckerberg story because now everyone thinks if i'm a dropout i'll be a billionaire great that's not really how it works and it's also the survivor bias is let's say you get a room full of people who've had a good career they've got a million bucks in investment portfolio one guy happened to buy ethereum at the ice at the ico he's now a multi-billionaire there's 10 of them who did other ICOs and they all went to zero.

57:46You don't see those stories. You just see the one person who got it right. Exactly. And that's why, you know, like any, you know, coach or, you know, psychologist will tell you it's important to look within and understand what you're willing to live with, because ultimately, you know, we'll need to acknowledge that, you know, we might all be wrong and maybe we've just been delusional for 10 years. None of this makes any sense. And like, you need to be able to survive in that scenario it's very nice to have a story where you go you know all in you know you're back to the wall and it's a dramatic story of how you know you can you make it but uh life is not as dramatic and uh you know if um i don't remember who's one of the twitter personas said that that you know if you don't manage your risk then the market will manage with for you exactly right so final question for you do you think is this the i know it's a weird question when asset you know bitcoin's down 40 or whatever but is this a bear market or is this a mid-cycle kind of weird thing what's your mental framework so that's a that's a great question so we try to think in cycle terms and then we're looking for a signal that the cycle is broken yeah tell us we're in a different regime and last well last 12 months have 13 months now have been absolutely brutal and you know an average altcoin is down 80 percent and the majors are down a lot.

59:25But if you actually zoom out and you look at the relevant macro indicators and you look at the majors, it doesn't look broken. It looks like we went through a very sharp correction within the bull market. This correction has then been extended in both duration and magnitude. But at this point, it doesn't feel right to say that the whole thing is broken and you need to get out because it's going to be two years of pain um that may change tomorrow if we go down you know more and more and more and more but as of right now it just doesn't feel like stuff has broken yeah i agree if you just look at the you know like the monthly chart of ethereum or something like that it just looks like it's a sideways consolidation since since 2021 yeah and it's like there's nothing scary on that chart yeah when you zoom in everything looks super scary but when you zoom out a lot it's like it doesn't look that bad at all yeah and then you have some other things which are either holding very well or are making, you know, higher highs, even in this environment.

1:00:42And then I think we need to take a step back. You know, I had an interesting call from one of my LPs around Christmas. And, you know, he's kind of invested on the long side. And he's kind of thinking whether he should, you know, increase. And one of his questions was, you know, do you, you know, again, do you think the industry is going to die? and I'm like why are you even asking that and he's like well you know when prices are down 80 % that's usually a signal that something is you know collapsing and I was like well actually you know stable coins banks again like blah blah blah blah and he's like oh wow because that person is not in the space at all uh and he's like oh I just looked at the market I assumed everything is dead So the question we have to ask ourselves, is ETH worth zero?

1:01:31Is ARMF worth zero? And if it's not, then we don't know what it is because we can't do a DCF. Not really. But we can have a mental model, right? Can you, if you really believe, well, the data is telling us that, you know, a trillion dollars of tokenized assets could exist on Ethereum in the near future. Could the security value of the network be lower than that? Doesn't really make much sense. You can argue both ways, definitely. But it's not unreasonable to assume that this is an opportunity rather than a sign to abandon all ships. Yeah, that's how I see it as well. All right, my friend. Fascinating conversation.

1:02:18Thank you. Hopefully people have got a lot out of this. And let's see where we go from here. I mean, I remain bullish. It was a pretty shitty year last year, but it is what it is. And, you know, I think it's, as you and I spent a lot of time talking about, you've got to have the right mindset and understand what risks you're taking and what your actual risk tolerance is. I mean, those of us, the longer we've been in this game, the more risk tolerance you have. You have the ability to take absurd risks. I mean, I've had two 87 % drawdowns in Bitcoin alone. And I'm having a decent-sized drawdown in Sui right now.

1:02:55Well, drawdown from peak, I'm still up on the trade. But yeah, I mean, this is how it goes. And it's not an easy game, which is why there are big returns when it works, because it's not bloody easy. That's exactly right. And yeah, let's see where we are tomorrow. All right, my friend. Good to see you. Thank you all. So let's see how the market develops. I think the opportunity set remains as is, and that things will continue back on the normal path. And a lot of this noise in markets will be just that noise. Anyway, I'll see you next time. Good luck out there.

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Raoul Pal welcomes Evegny Gokhberg, founder of the DeFi hedge fund Re7Capital, to discuss building a market-neutral yield strategy that earns double-digit returns by managing smart contract risk, diversifying across platforms and chains, and treating crypto as liquid venture investing. They also debate whether the current crypto drawdown is a broken cycle or a liquidity-driven, mid-cycle correction, concluding that fundamentals remain strong despite extreme price volatility. Recorded on February 4, 2026.

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