Crypto Seesaws on Weak U.S. Jobs Data | Trading Cards Bonanza | REKTVision

30:19I think that's very true. Pump is a far more loose token than hyperliquid. I think the revenue is decent. I don't think they have an incredible moat. I don't think it's like it can never be challenged in the future. But I do think that if they get this creator platform, even going 50 % to 100 % more than it is right now, I think that could really re-rate the token. So I like Pump here. I don't see it going lower. That's my point. I just think it's kind of like the risk-reward of a trade like that. If it went back to$3 billion again, I think there'd be a lot of bars. Well, I mean, so I'm actually going to agree with you on that.

31:03But I think that like, you know, I don't want what I just said to come off as like too bearish on this. It's like in a market where it is a bull market like right now, like I think there's a reason this chart looks like this, right? Like it does generate revenue. the whole structure works, right? Like it's by, you know, there's the buyback and burn. It's very substantial. Like the revenue is very meaningful. Like all I'm saying is like, the question is like, okay, if you think the market lasts 18 more months, right? I think you bid pump. Like that makes sense. Like, like I think there's a, it would not shock me if we see a 2X on this token over the next, you know, even two, three months.

31:39Like that's very reasonable to me. I just think like you should be considering to some degree, the amount of compounding volatility that will end up happening in this token because its main narrative is derived from volume-based revenue. And crypto is cyclical. And at some point, that volume will go down. And I think that this will see a larger magnitude sell-off than other altcoins in that period of time. I think that's very fair. Right. Well, the other thing that was moving this week was perhaps something a little bit closer to your heart. We did see a bit of a shift in the meta. Obviously, there's been some wins in meme coins, but not that amazing.

32:21We've seen a move back towards NFTs. And then more recently, we've seen kind of this RWA narrative come back. Now, this started obviously with stocks and there's been about 10 different headlines about tokenized stocks this week. But in the trenches, so to speak, the move was towards tokenized trading cards. And this is something which I know you are very close with. OCAP Games is involved in the TCG space, as they call it. And we saw a little bit of this back in like 2021, 2022, but the platforms never really took off. And this cycle, we've started to see it come back. There's been a couple of big platforms that have come in and done okay through it.

33:03And I thought you were kind of the perfect person to speak to about this. What's been your take on this move towards tokenized trading cards? yeah so okay i have a lot of thoughts here um so basically like here's the dealio like rwas so like tokenized trading cards especially graded trading cards are like the really obvious thing to do with rwas because they just work in terms of like you know here is a trading card it is in a slab it's verifiable that it's real i can put it in a vault and know what it is and like there's price history and all that kind of stuff for the grade, right? It works really well for that concept.

33:42And for a very long time, I think the argument was stocks will come on chain at some point. And let's build all the infrastructure with trading cards and eventually do it with move that infrastructure over to stocks, right? Interestingly, when stocks came on chain, most of these RWA platforms that were doing trading cards didn't actually make that pivot, right? And as you mentioned, there were a lot of RWA trading card platforms, but there's not actually been historically a successful token launch or really any token launches out of them, right? They tend to be pretty good revenue generators. And they also tend to all kind of go towards like some sort of loot box style casino game, essentially with trading card as the intermediary, right?

34:17So if you look at something like Courtyard, for example, like their only real product is like, you know, basically a slot machine for trading cards, right and you get a randomized graded card and then you can either like sell it back to the platform they give you a bid immediately or withdraw it and almost everyone sells it back to the platform like it's more or less like a slot machine with trading card as an intermediary right we've seen some other platforms exist that are like kind of something else but every platform basically converges towards that um the thing that really kicked off this meta uh was was the launch of ticker cards from Collector's Crypt.

34:55Collector's Crypt is someone who we work with at Orange Cap Games. They're old Magic players that founded that, so near and dear to my heart. And they did a launch with Metaplex, Metaplex's new standard, which was really interesting on Solana. Metaplex is the group that makes a lot of the standards in Solana. I think they actually are the ones that wrote the NFT standard in Solana as a fun fact about Metaplex. But what we really see is actually, this is closer to pump than you think right in terms of like it's kind of another form of like gambling it's not exactly gambling but it's more or less that um and you know we're in this revenue gambling meta like this is one of the largest versions of that um one of the things that's really interesting is like that pokemon cards you know we talk about risk assets we talk about gold having this moment i mean pokemon cards are going on a heater the likes of which we may have never seen magic cards too i mean um it's kind of for different reasons but like you know the new products for pokemon just to break down the economics right if you're a vendor for pokemon you buy at wholesale a elite trainer box for pokemon at 35 i think the msrp is like 30 35 the msrp is like 45 50 or something as soon as it hits your shelf you can put it on ebay and sell it for 120 for every release right now at infinite size this is like the craziest thing for all retailers and it sells out instantly.

36:18That just gives you a sense of like how crazy the demand for Pokemon is right now. Individual cards selling for crazy, crazy numbers. Everything is just like gig ascending. It's like, and not even just like the good stuff, like everything, right? It's like, it's like, imagine that crypto is having alt season as well as Bitcoin being at 110. Like, that's what's going on in Pokemon right now. And so what's really interesting about that is, you know, when you see new adoption and new liquidity, there is actually probably real new liquidity coming into a lot of these platforms, right? Now, one of the things that's a little bit interesting about them is unlike in crypto, trading card markets are inefficient, right?

36:58And so the difference between market price and what you could sell for or buy for is very large, right? If I am selling a card, I am expecting to get about 30 % less than what I could get, than what I need to spend to buy it. That's like the wedge between them. And so one of the ARBs I think people need to be as consumers a little bit careful of these platforms, is that a lot of them market as like plus EV slot machines, right? Because, oh, your market price, the price that someone can sell it for, like, so if you want to go out and buy it, right? Like, this is the market price that it is, like, is plus EV.

37:30But if you were to try and sell it, it's actually minus 30%, right? And so that's a really big swing. And if you don't understand that that's how trading cards work, you might be like, oh, my goodness, here's my plus EV casino, but it's not really that, right? But it is fun and interesting and it reignites a little bit of joy in all of us from our childhoods, right? I think that's a really important part of what trading cards are and what they should be. What's exciting about this is like, you know, as an investor perspective, like, you know, I have not historically invested in these kind of companies because despite them being good revenue generating businesses, like slot machines are a good revenue generating business, like what's the outcome, right?

38:07Cards, ticker cards, the token for collector's crypt, I think it's at like, we should pull, but it sent pretty hard. Like, suddenly makes all these companies way more interesting because now they have a comp and market that actually did well. Right? I think that that's something that's incredibly meaningful because it almost in the past didn't matter how good you were. There wasn't a version of this that did well. I think this makes companies like Dilley, like Beasy, like a lot more interesting because we've seen a success case in this market for this type of product, right? And so many people have attempted this, but it just hadn't really worked.

38:43And I do think that this actually correlates to the larger narrative, which is revenue meta, right? Again, the benefit of running a slot machine that does a lot of volume is revenue. And I think that one of the things that really gets people into these kinds of products is it's that nostalgia. It's also that when I buy trading cards personally, I think of it as like discretionary spend. It's cool to go up in price, but I don't mean it's kind of an investment, right? But like, if you're, if you're like sitting, you know, if you're full time trading and investing in stuff, I think a lot of people use see these platforms more as fun than as trading.

39:21Whereas like, hyper liquid is definitely like, if we're taking the fundamentals, both of these are like, if you're trading with like 10x leverage, and you're spinning like a gotcha machine on a trading card platform, I'm going to go ahead and say, in my view, these are effectively the same thing. But I think in the mental buckets for most people, they're not, right? Most people are saying, one, I'm trading and the other one, I'm just like consuming. And therefore, like they're just discretionary spending bucket, which is probably pretty high right now, given the price of all crypto assets, right?

39:48Is like what I think trading cards successfully do in this market is they capture like discretionary spend. On top of that, there's a really big trend. And this is something that I, shout out from the rooftops about, which is that Gen Z does not aspire to own a house. This is really important because historically, we see that like people save money to buy a house, right? That's one of the main drivers of savings, I think, right? For people generally. And because housing is so expensive, Gen Z just feels out of reach. They don't even want to get there, right? And because of that, they actually have more discretionary spending than you'd think.

40:18And so what I view this run across not only crypto, but traditional trading cards as is, we see this not only in trading cards, we also see this in luxury, We're like, Louboutin. Can we just touch up on that a bit? Can we just put, how big a run have you seen? Because you're obviously, maybe the audience is not really aware of this, but there is a, at the moment, there is a huge run on collectible trading cards, particularly Pokemon cards, but also Magic the Gathering cards. Do you have any numbers around that? Like what was the growth have you seen this year? Yeah, I would say the average, like expensive Pokemon card is up anywhere from five to 10X this year, which is a crazy, crazy run.

41:00and for magic magic is very interesting the magic side of this like there is old stuff is not up that much it's the new stuff that's really printing in magic and by magic he means magic the gathering by the way Spencer is a pro magic player so he would be speaking about this like a pro but yeah this is magic the gathering which has been you know a collectible trading card game for is it longer than Pokemon like was it Yes, so Magic came out in 1993. Pokemon came out in 1996 in Japanese and 1999 in English. And, you know, what's been interesting is like the Holy Grail of Magic is the Black Lotus, right?

41:40Which is the oldest card. Alpha Black Lotus is the first printing of Black Lotus. Those will run you, based on condition, anywhere from 60 to 100K. And it's been the top dog for a very long time. Now, Magic recently has shifted off of its own IP to start using other IPs. They call it Universes Beyond. the first major set was Lord of the Rings and Lord of the Rings the one ring card the one ring sold for like two million dollars but recently they did the Final Fantasy set and they had this one card in the Final Fantasy the Traveling Chocobo which is serialized there's 70 of them and the Traveling Chocobo is selling for$70 ,000 and so the very interesting thing is Black Lotus has not really experienced this run that the rest of Magic cards have experienced the rest of like trading cards of experience the early magic stuff has not the new stuff they just printed this year is on this crazy seventy thousand dollars for a card printed this year is really nuts for magic is winning in the market is cards printed recently they're actually like dominating pokemon are you are you trying to are you trying to sell all the audience on your on your bags of old magic cards because that's what it feels like right now no the opposite i mean like look like a lot of the magic dealers i know are trading their bags of old cards for like new sealed product oh really wow interesting reasons for that is because there's a funny reason for that which is that magic can't reprint any of this stuff because their license is only to do one run so they would have to go back and do a whole new licensing deal to do it right and like magic is the next one coming up the next two coming up are spider-man and avatar the last airbender right and like you've got to think that those are bigger than final fantasy right um and so but i think this is just just just to perhaps a little bit of commentary on this um i just think it's really interesting because a lot of the audience will be like, oh, this is so dumb to spend your money on.

43:24But you really did hit the nail on the head, which is that people don't want to buy a house anymore. And the luxury assets or the collectible assets that millennials spend on is actually a bit of a shift from, let's say, the baby boomers. Yeah, you should have a spending on expensive bowls of wine and whiskey, but actually this sort of stuff, trading cards, is one of the number one things in terms of luxury flexes that millennials will spend on. Well, and speaking of things that are doing poorly, right? Like coins and stamps, not doing so hot, right? That's like, you know, when I think collecting, you know, the origins of collecting, I think coins and stamps.

44:06And it's really interesting that like trading cards are having this huge moment and coins and stamps are not. Yeah, and a lot of luxury isn't, right? Like I think a lot of luxury, because China obviously has dipped off from its luxury boom. and some of the older luxury uh items like watches whiskey wine this sort of stuff it's some of it's doing okay some of it's not doing okay we're having a bit of a bounce but like it's it's down bad whereas right now these trading cards have just like you said seven to ten x on pokemon cards is wild yeah i mean like and it's not like oh if you bought the right it's like everything right and that that's the wild part and that's what makes it feel kind of like really hot right now.

44:46But yeah, it's, it's, it's really interesting to see that like, you know, Rolex is, is down a lot, right? Like at a time when you might expect it to be up a lot. And I think this is the same kind of as like altcoins, right? Like altcoins kind of feel like Rolexes right now, where like, you know, you'd expect in a market boom, everything's pumping, like, like it's, it's, it's that they would also pump, but right now it's just, it's just not the case, right? And so, um, you know, you have to think like, why is that? And again, I really think it's this shifting consumer spend, you know, you speak about luxury, Louboutin, Gucci, like I think it's over the last 10 years, the average age of consumer for them has moved down one year every year, which is a huge shift.

45:21And the average spend at their stores is also like the average purchase has gone down as well. So like, whereas Louboutin and Gucci used to be like, I am very rich, I'm gonna go in and spend$20 ,000. I'm like 60 or 70 and in retirement. And like, I did really well in my career. Like it is now I am like a drop shipper in Miami, and I'm like 25. And I have a hundred bucks because I sold something. I'm going to go buy like something, the cheapest item in the store just to feel like I made it. Right. And so I think that like, like that is a paradigmatic shift because again, like if you're not saving for anything, then you have more discretionary spending.

45:54And it's not just, I mean, there is some amount of like rich people bidding some of this stuff, but really like, like you can't have the run that Pokemon is having with just wealthy people bidding, right? The structural bid coming to Pokemon is Gen Z is millennials, like purchasing cards in the like, you know, hundreds of dollars to$1 ,000 range, right? One of the things that's always been really interesting in trading cards is there's a huge drop off above$5 ,000 of how many people in the world will buy a card at that price. Like, you see this big valley where like cards that are there's very few cards in the five to $25 ,000 range.

46:31And once you get$25 ,000, there's this big jump where then suddenly the cards you want are$70 ,000 to$100 ,000 because it's really kind of uncorrelated to... It shouldn't be a stepwise function because there's just very different buckets of people that will buy those items. Where you do see very commonly is people coming in, I just want the best. What's the number one thing? There's always this distinct market for that that moves completely uncorrelated to the rest of the market, which is interesting. And bringing it back to just crypto right now so so is your view that this could continue to be a trend that this sort of crypto community which is generally i mean a lot of it is is kind of 30 to 40 year old males but millennials also interested in this sort of stuff um do you think that this to be a a a bit of a meta for a few months here where we start to trade these sort of things on chain like you said they have this gambling aspect with like the pack openings which which lends to good content.

47:28And I think just, like I said, like this overall gambling super cycle that we're kind of seeing. Are you bullish on this as a trend? Oh, I mean, like, I could not be more bullish. Like, I think I have been pretty outspoken for quite a while that this is where the industry has to head is like, there just like must be a convergence between like collectibles and crypto because they are fundamentally the same thing and have the same audience. Like one of the things that I hear from my trading card dealer friends, not only is the correlation between the price of crypto and the price of cards, but also like increasingly the number of their buyers that are coming in and spending crypto, right?

48:02Like I get hit up basically once a day from someone I know in the trading card world asking me how they can start accepting crypto payments for their store and like the legality of it and that kind of thing. Like there is, and we already saw this happen in watches. By the way, I don't know if you know this, basically 100 % of the watch industry happens with USDT on Tron. Crazy, right? Very interesting. Like the trading card market. Oh, And by the way, this was greatly accelerated because PayPal now, if you do over$600 of transactions, does all this tax reporting requirements for you. And so suddenly, this very cash business that used to use PayPal is looking for a different digital payment method.

48:41And what's the best digital payment method where Vitalik's not going to mail your info to the IRS? It's crypto. And so I think this convergence is inevitable because it's the same people. right and so like i am very excited to see the success of ticker cards and collector script is a great company right but you you got to believe that like it's not the only good company in this space and because there is now at least one successful token associated to it right you're going to see more investment into these platforms it's always been this hard pitch of like these platforms seem like they should work and other things in collectibles and crypto seem like they should work but there's never been a good outcome now we have at least the taste of that right and And the taste of it means that we can replicate it, but turbo.

49:23And so like, you know, look, there was like Pokemon names as like meme coins on pump fund that were runners over the last week. Like that probably is a very short lived meta. Like the convergence of collectibles and crypto is not a meta in my mind. This is like a paradigmatic shift that correlates with paradigmatic shifts in the structure of how spending and consumer behavior works globally. And I think it's something that's like not a new trend, right? When you look in Asia, Sequoia China only does collectibles. Sequoia China basically only deploys into collectibles businesses. Their biggest win is Popmart.

49:59They've backed their own trading card grading platform. All of VC in China, not crypto VC, all of VC in China right now is basically just doing collectibles. And we see China's leading America in collectibles trends, which is a huge shift like labubu started in the boo was big in china a year before it was big here um probably the next one that's big i think is going to be we're gonna see this renaissance of brick products so like legos megablocks that kind of thing uh led by that lego just got the pokemon ip license and so we're gonna see which megablocks used to have or uh it wasn't megablocks it was one of the i think something like megablocks used to have it um and so like right now in china it's like like like Pop Mart actually has pop bricks.

50:43That's all the rage right now in China. If you go to the US, the blind boxes you cannot find in Pop Mart stores, but all the pop bricks are just fully stocked on the shelves because no one in the US wants them yet. And that's basically what Labubu was like 12 months ago. So like, as you said, so much of the Asia spend drove like watches and luxury, like that spend in Asia has moved to like trading cards and blind boxes. And like this level of sophistication of collector base there is starting to creep up. That's a lot of this interest in what's going on. I think this is something which is unique to cards, which again, the audience may not be aware of, is this pack opening.

51:28You can't do this with any other collectible. The idea that you can gamble on what you're going to get when you buy a luxury item and that you create content around that. And obviously this can be done on the crypto platforms as well, as well as people, you know, they fill themselves opening packs of these sort of cards, sometimes like very expensive packs that they'll open it and they'll create content around it. You can't do that with watches or wine or classic cars. It doesn't work. That's why I think also this collectible itself is kind of so well suited to the current environment of millennials, let's say, which is where, let's say, a lot of the money is kind of moving towards.

52:11In terms of you're super bullish on this, we've already spoke about collector's prep and the cards coin, which, I mean, it's now at like$400 million FDB. I mean, it's been a meteoric rise over the last week. You've clearly got your ear to the ground here. I know you've also involved in Moonbirds, which has been pretty publicly saying, we might look at all this sort of stuff. Alongside Moonbirds, what else do you think is interesting investments people should be looking at? Maybe in crypto and outside of crypto? Well, yeah. I mean, so I think my view of this is if you think collectibles will be a thing, there's a bunch of different types of collectibles that exist in in things that touch collectibles right so there's like okay cards is a big thing you could say what are the next cards and maybe the answer is you just focus on the platforms that are like most similar to collector's crypt right it's pretty obvious it's courtyard dilly bz um kind of segment like um outside of crypto you've got like box gg but in crypto it's like there's a couple there's a handful of them um which which which are very relevant, right?

53:15Those are the exact corollaries. My view, and this is kind of where we sit, is like one of the other things that's happened recently, it's very interesting. Like, you know, we make Vibes, which is the Pudgy Penguins trading card game. The first edition boxes, we just released the second edition. The first edition boxes of Vibes went from, their MSRP was like 144. I think when Pengu crashed, it went to like 120 on eBay. So now they're selling for like$350 on eBay, right? First edition booster boxes. is. I think like, you know, owning the platforms is great. But I think that you should also be looking for like, what are the grail collectibles in this format in crypto?

53:49Obviously, I'm quite biased, because I think we make a lot of the ones that are the grail collectibles. But like, my race, and this is where I think, you know, our company is pretty far ahead in this industry is like, can you create collectibles to the quality that people who are not just in crypto think of this as a good collectible, right? Are you making trading cards that are nice enough? Are you making blind boxes that are nice enough? Are you making items that are in... It will be bricks as well. It's like, who's actually making collectibles products? I think you see this in Pudgy Penguin's Eco too, right?

54:17Like the giant vinyl figures, which I think is the best collectible product that Pudgy released, are also having a pretty meaningful renaissance right now in terms of what people are trying to buy within them. Part of it is like, do you spot bid the... Do you try and find a way to get exposure to the companies or do you try and get exposure to the collectibles themselves, right? And I think like, you know there's even this further step you can take is like do you want to get exposure to the ip right we talked about like the the reason for magic's boom is its licensing of other ips drove it really really far right like the ips themselves that lend themselves collectibles end up growing itself like labubu is really interesting because labubu i mean it was an ip exterior to collectibles but like for all intents and purposes in terms of its reach like like it became a thing because of collectibles, right?

55:05So this is one of the things for us in Moonbirds is like, how do we make RIP a bigger thing through collectibles, right? When it comes to exposure to the space, if you're looking outside of crypto, right? And you want to buy things, I think my view, I think you want to look for ecosystems where you can buy the absolute best, like whatever that is, because that tends to be more resilient to market corrections the things that feel the most frothy generally are like the lower end of pokemon to me feels the most frothy because it's like i don't in a crash like when everything else is like it is like those cards are only desirable because the other cards are out of reach when everything corrects those cards just become less desirable because you can afford the cards that are slightly better right i would also like i'm a big believer in pokemon specifically you want to be really looking at the old stuff wizards of the coast era pokemon is what you want because it just like has structural demand in a different way, right?

56:06But like, you know, when it comes to like generally, how do you get exposure to collectibles? I think that you also just have to go on your own journey of like what sparks joy for you. And do you think that you're similar to other people? Like I've made a lot of, like my net worth for a very long time in my life was 90 % Magic the Gathering cards. And that returned like 20%, Sorry, 20x over like 10 years. It's just so funny talking about something like this. Obviously, you've moved into crypto, but I just don't think there is a whole generation or multiple generations that don't realize that this is what people are selling their money.

56:43My move into crypto was I looked at crypto and was like, oh, this is the same shit. I looked at NFTs and was like, oh, this is just trading cards, but in crypto. And instead of paying eBay 20 % every time I want to sell them or having to ship them, I pay, at the time, OpenSea like 5%. That was a marginal innovation in the collectible space. I think that's the other really bold case on some of these RWA platforms. And this is actually, eBay has started to move kind of towards this. Which is like, if you sell a card on eBay, you have to pay 20 % fee. That's quite a lot. But in crypto, the whole bold case of these RWA platforms is like, the cards exist in a vault, and you can just trade them.

57:23There's no shipping involved because you trade the token that represents the right to claim it. If you want the card in hand, you can ship it to you. But the reason that eBay has a 20 % fee is because it has to cover losses and claims. There's a lot of overhead it must cover because of the fraud and all this kind of stuff. Where these RWA places make a lot of sense. And eBay has a competitor to this. eBay has eBay Vault, where it's the same thing. It's kind of like gold. Globally, when you trade a lot of gold, you're not mailing people gold bars. There's a vault somewhere and you take the tag off your bar of gold and you move it you put another, and the gold doesn't physically move.

57:58And that's how like trading cards are starting to trade both on eBay and off eBay. But the thing that I would caution people against, that'd be very, very careful. I personally do not collect a lot of sealed Pokemon and especially sealed sports cards. One of the scariest things in the trading card industry today is the emergence of CT scanners that are good enough to, so cat scanners, like if you have at the airport, they're good enough to scan. So this started in sports cards because rare sports cards usually have a jersey in them or something else where they're a different shape and size. And someone was taking a sealed box, a$10 ,000 sealed booster pack of sports cards through an airport, looked at the screen and said, I can see what cards in there.

58:41And since then, they've gotten good enough where today it's expensive to do. Right. But like if you have a base set Charizard booster box, base set first edition booster box, you can scan the box and see which pack is the Charizard today. And that technology, I think, will only get cheaper and scarier. So I'm personally not a big collector of sealed product for Pokemon or sports cards for that reason. But I think that if you look at the early stuff, like Shadowless base set Charizard, that's a good buy. I personally really like Japanese Pokemon. I think especially if you get the no rarity symbol base set, stuff that hasn't had as much of a, relatively it hasn't pumped as much.

59:24I think it's a good buy right now. But, you know, look, there's a lot of good collectibles. If you want the intersection of crypto and TCG, you know, I think Vibes is the flagship product. I'm obviously very biased because we made Vibes, but like, I don't think that you see another physical collectible coming out of crypto that's as like popular and successful outside of crypto as Vibes TCG today. I just don't think you see that. yeah i i mean you're the purpose i have on this this week because this is it has just gone crazy this week and this has been kind of the number one thing that people have been focused on and all the platforms doing it are rallying and everyone's like well i don't want to i can't be bothered to trade memes anymore and i can't be bothered to trade nfts like this i have more joy doing this with with um with collectibles and collectible trading cards so i feel like this is going to be a medium-term trend i'll be very interested to see how this goes over the next two years because i agree with you that now now is it's sharp to really work there was like a brief period where it felt like it was going to happen in 2020 or sorry 2021 2022 and then it kind of fizzled out now it really feels as though we could see a bit of a an extended run there so i think it's going to be very interesting um we have we obviously spend a lot of time just speaking there about collectibles and collectible trading cards but i think that was it's very interesting i don't think many people in the in the crypto world are kind of aware that those those two are merging right now and you're starting to see very big gains and anything associated with it.

1:00:50We'll do one or two questions just to finish. Francisco on the Real Vision website says, question regarding abstract blockchain. They recently had various businesses launching Gacha game, 2 million plus revenue, PlayGigiverse,$1.5 million revenue, myriad markets. Can you discuss your thoughts on crypto entrepreneurs when choosing a blockchain to launch a product on? Can you comment on the qualities of Abstract that intrigue you? So basically, do you think Abstract is a good chain for an entrepreneur? And is there anything specific about it that you like? Yeah, I mean, I think, obviously, I'm very close to that ecosystem.

1:01:28I think that we have seen a large number of very revenue-generating products deploy onto Abstract. If you look at the Pudgy Penguins team, when it comes to marketing, there's basically no one else in the space that is as good as them, right? And so your ability to work with the abstract team, get that marketing engine behind you, like from user adoption revenue perspective, is very substantial. I think that's why you see really strong teams like the ones you just mentioned, like choosing abstract, right? And so it is very real. It is a very interesting chain also because it is very global. there's a lot of people in russia um a lot of the abstract streams are russian language um the philippines etc like there's a lot of like which which is why some of these like gotcha games like kind of more gambling-y things like really like you see a lot of them being the thing that is successful in abstract because russian is just like like to gamble right that's part of what's going on on abstract um there's also a global audience there's also an american audience and all these other things but like the thing where it seems to have really found product market fit is in these various like kind of gambling games right um there's like a sheep one that did really well, Moon Sheep or something, which was like, there's been a bunch of like kind of casino style things that have done really well on Abstract.

1:02:39And I think when it comes to like, just reach a net new inflows of people, it is a tier one chain, I think unambiguously. What I will be very interested to see, right? And what we haven't really seen happen yet, but we also haven't seen it not happen yet is a native Abstract project's token launch and pump really hard, right? Like one of the things that Abstract doesn't have as much of as some of the other chains is just TVL. And so there's often been this perception of like, can you have a$500 million coin on Abstract when there's only, you know, if you do$100 million of cash on the chain? Now, that being said, like a lot of chains out there have like really fake TVL.

1:03:24Like there's a lot of deals that get done in crypto where you provide TVL in exchange for like tokens of the native chain just to like pump all the metrics people think matter, right? Like let's be very clear that that is a very common thing in crypto that almost every chain does. It does not seem like Abduck has done that kind of deal. And so, you know, I think I commend them for just sort of not doing that just because like I think it's more transparent what's actually going on. But, you know, one of the questions is does that hurt the ability for there to be like crazy runners from major projects, right?

1:03:54So if you were looking to make a revenue-generating product and you need a lot of users, I think it's an incredible change. If you are looking to launch the highest value token, I'm not saying it's a bad option. I'm just saying it seems like we have not seen that happen yet. That being said, I do think that because of that, there is a lot more vested interest from everyone around its ecosystem in seeing that happen. So if you can be that one, then there's a huge opportunity there. And also, I should say this is true of most L2s, right? like, we don't even really see that much like crazy runners on base.

1:04:27Polygon, it's been a really long time since we've seen a runner, right? Like, you know, I think this is one of the challenges that something like a Polymarket might face is like, you know, if Polymarket launched even on Ethereum, right? But like, realistically, right now, it's like, Solana is the chain that has runners. But, you know, that's kind of the thing that really seems to be driving everything right now. Yeah, I'd agree. It's done very well with more consumer apps, less on like big token values or TVL, but it does. I think Blast had an okay job of this too. And then it just kind of fizzled out because the TVA fizzled out.

1:04:59I don't think abstract necessarily relies on it as much. So I think it's an interesting one. And then finally, we kind of already had this, is what's the best way to get exposure to these cards if you don't collect? I think we kind of touched on that already in that probably some of the older Pokemon Japanese cards. It feels like the obvious way. or you can start to look at some of these intersections between crypto and NFTs and collectibles, which is largely what Spencer's doing. So go follow him and some of the stuff he's doing in this space. Right. We went slightly over time there, but I thought it was a very interesting chat.

1:05:36Awesome to have you on again, Spencer. Thanks so much for coming. Bitcoin is doing okay. We're still holding now around$111K. I still think the bull market's intact. Stocks are a little bit lower today. So I think hopefully it will be a little bit higher next week. I think we're going to do the show with OSF next week. It's going to be the drinks with OSF and Mando. So make sure you get a Real Vision subscription. If you haven't yet, we're going to go through a bunch of different things on the market then. But until then, Spencer, thanks for coming back on. You've been a great guest. And we will hopefully see you again in the next few weeks.

1:06:06Yeah, thanks for having me, Mando. And thank you to Real Vision for hosting. You obviously enjoyed the episode because you're here with me at the end. But listen, don't forget to go to realvision.com forward slash join and grab a free membership. It's an incredible community packed with alpha, great investment ideas and the research that you need to help you unfuck your future. So get started now. Go to realvision.com forward slash join. Have you ever wanted to trade Bitcoin but haven't dared try? With Plus500 Futures, you can trade crypto without the hassle of opening a wallet. With just a few clicks, you can register and start practicing with their free and unlimited demo.

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