Why Hyperliquid Is the "Gold Standard" with Blocmates' Grant | REKT Vision

28:14This isn't 2016, 2017 where people are just having a go anymore. They've got the likes of Tempo, which is backed by Stripe and they've been poaching some of the lead Ethereum researchers and it's got all the distribution of Stripe and it's got$500 million behind it and Paradigm are involved and you've got Solana, which is hyper, hyper, hyper organized and hyper competitive and that likes a hyper liquid. So the industry's like, well, it's good, but it's not pragmatic for the use cases that there is actually demand for. So it creates a situation where it's all well and good having a roadmap to 2030, but are you going to be relevant enough into that time where people actually give a shit?

28:53And if I'm being really critical, if you've got a roadmap to 2030 and if you keep selling your treasury at the rate you're going to go, you're going to run out of funds by 2027. So how does that work? I know there's a lot more people that contribute to the enablement and the financing to maintain the network. But I don't know, you're sending mixed signals to the market there. So you can't expect to be able to keep people interested for a long enough time to see your ideological pursuit actually become a reality. And I also don't like the fact that they've basically done everything they can not to promote what happened in the DeFi sector, which basically put them on the map.

29:32There's been a lot of kind of... Anything that hasn't been financed is relatively being pursued. But if we're talking about it correctly, I don't think people give a shit. What are these networks good for? They're good for financial primitives. They're good for new opportunities on chain. and they're good for giving the average person on the street, no matter where they're from, permissionless access to financial instruments that they've never, ever, ever in their wildest dreams thought they could get access to. That is the bread and butter of the industry. Everything else can be built from that as a base.

30:05That's fine. But get that shit sorted first and lean into that and use that as your distribution mechanism and then go and do all the artistic pursuits and the social and everything else. That can be like, that's downstream of that. But I think you need to get the house in order with finance and DeFi first and then build from there. But it just annoys me because I wanted to see, I wanted to do well more than anything really in the industry. It's kind of what got me really, really interested in DeFi. It's what made me kind of leave what I was supposed to do from a regular career perspective to go and pursue what's happened in DeFi.

30:40And then just seeing how they've kind of like dropped the ball and lack of leadership is, yeah, just frustrating more than anything else, I think. do you think the decentralized decentralized nature of eath is actually hurting it in that aspect because you did mention like solana and how they're like very organized i feel like that's a product of solana being like you know centralized right they have a they have a clear board they have a clear leadership hierarchy and that's driving the ship whereas eath yeah like vitalik there but like how much is like that really impacting it so i'm just curious on your thoughts on that Yeah, that's a really good point.

31:17Because when people say it's a distributed system and there's nothing like Ethereum, right, when it comes to the bare metal hardware and people running Ethereum globally, right? I think the pushback on Solana being insufficiently decentralized from a hardware perspective is a bit poor, to be honest. But then when you come down to who's steering the ship, who has the grand vision, what is the North Star, and who's actually making sure that it gets executed against. If you put them side by side, it's night and day. It really is night and day. And not to say that some of the Ethereum researchers aren't doing great work.

31:56They're probably some of the smartest people on the planet working on some of the most technical concepts known to man. But putting that to use is also equally as important and getting that to market is also equally as important and making sure people give a shit or making sure it actually falls on people's radar that is also equally important. So it feels like a battle of a team from yesteryear where the vast majority of people's mantra and attention, the reason why they were in the industry was brought around from an ideological pursuit where we're now in this, oh, the tech actually works. What can it be useful?

32:32So you've got this like ideology versus pragmatism battle going on and the market's showing you which one it prefers to melt the ideological pursuit. unfortunately yeah i think a lot of us you know kind of wanted want e to do well i think there's a lot of us especially those people that got in in 2017 or even like you're right around the time i think a lot of people were buying eath over bitcoin because they saw the the the roi on eath over bitcoin so a lot of us hold it near and dear so yeah i'm with you on that So I want to pivot to little AI talk, right? Because this is obviously like all the narrative.

33:12I feel like every time on my timeline, I see like some post about Claude just made this job obsolete. Claude in YouTube, this, you know, this and that, right? There's so many posts just going on. So it's obviously everywhere. But before we do that, I just want to get your quick take on Near Protocol. call because Janie Coutts, Real Vision, chief crypto analyst has been talking about Nia a lot. They had a really big pump up. And I feel like it might be, I don't really know what they do, to be completely honest with you. But I feel like they might be like the L1 that is, I guess, closely, most closely related to the AI space.

33:49But I wanted to hear your thoughts on it. Yeah. I mean, Nia's been around for a while and I'm just pulling up Coingecko I just check what I'm about to say is correct so I think what's interesting about Nia is they've got they've got two products that are probably the most two underrated products in the full industry and one of them is Nia Intents so being able to basically be anywhere and tap into any asset and the user experience is absolutely fantastic and there's very very trust minimized security assumptions and it's just a fantastic product for like quite a big problem in the industry, which is crypto UX and moving around on chain.

34:29That goes unnoticed. And the revenue on that thing is absolutely nuts. That's the thing that gets you going. Then the confidential transactions, which have just basically rolled out, that just went under the radar. I don't know what happened that day, but you know where there's like a quite a heavy news day and someone's went with an announcement and it just gets washed. And then I didn't see anything else from that, but I was just like, that is huge. Like that's massive. But maybe at the same time, it's like, well, the market's not really paying attention. it's probably opportunity. But I think that's why you're seeing this price appreciation in it.

34:59One other thing, and I'd have to like 100 % check this, but from what I'm seeing on the Block Explorer, it looks like it's fully vested. So no kind of, got this big of a lot coming. It's like, where's it going? Who's going to get hold of it? So yeah, there's a few things there. There's obviously the strong continuation of the AI. they do a shit ton of work in that space and they're like really, really, really, really, really strong team. So yeah, I think it's, again, it's one of those things where it's capturing a lot of different tailwinds at the same time. And anytime where you've got probably one tailwind, it's just like a little bit more difficult to purchase and you kind of think, well, if that invalidation happens and it's like, it's kind of dead in the water, but it's got a lot of good things going for it at the same time.

35:48And I think in a time where people are just sick of this supply overhang as well, it's, you know, it looks quite appealing for a lot of people. And I think any liquid funds, very, very easily justifiable if you want to go and purchase some near-end market, I think. Yeah. So, yeah, let's move on to AI, right? AI agents. Let's talk about... First of all, are you using any agents in what you do? Or like, how are you thinking about that? Yeah, I keep flipping between cords. I'm basically running everything out of my terminal. And then it keeps getting... noticeably rubbish from time to time. And then they've obviously just pushed 4.8.

36:30Codex, I've been playing around with from OpenAI, which is really, really good. We joke internally that whenever Cloud goes down, people might as well have a day off. So no one knows how to send an email anymore. But yeah, very much in the weeds. We've got a few products coming out over the coming weeks where 12 months ago, they would have been just way too costly to actually build or getting your idea across to someone who could actually build them would have just been like pulling teeth and you never get your actual vision down onto the page when it's kind of getting lost in translation to certain people.

37:02So I think it's one of the most exciting times to, even just if you can think it, you can build it now. I think it's, you know, it's just an amazing time for, you know, you've just got a load of ideas and you want to get them out to the world. Yeah, absolutely. Raoul also jokes about like he knows when Claude is about to push out a new model because absolutely nuke his, the old father, like mess up the memory and everything. So Anthropic also, like they just, I mean, it feels like every day is like their valuation is increasing. They're going to, obviously they're going to break a trillion. It's just a matter of like when, which is probably very soon.

37:38Open AI, same thing. SpaceX, like same thing. They're probably going to, there's talks about them, you know, combining with Tesla and everything. So just a lot going on. what do you think because i have this theory and i don't know like how how valid it is but i have this theory that retail is going to get wrecked on these ipos but like i just wanted to hear like how you think about like all of these like insane valuations that are that are coming to market yeah i i kind of agree unfortunately um it's so why are these valuations happening and why are teams staying private for much longer and not having to go for the headache of having to go public.

38:19So there's more and more access to private capital than ever. Like Stripe, Stripe have got it good, right? Stripe basically invites private investors in and they say to their employees and people on the board, do you want to sell any secondaries? Do you want to sell any of your options and shares? There's people lining up around the block to just buy that off them and get exposure. So they don't necessarily need to go public because they've got infinite access to private cash. Now, anyone in the right mind who's got a mandate or a fund to actually allocate to Anthropic, I've seen a house listing in SF the other day that was willing to take exposure to Anthropic instead of cash.

38:54Like, this is the state we're in. I think it was like 8 million or some shit. And same for OpenAI. They've got infinite access to private cash. And I think Elon's just got an infinite money printer and could raise money in any situation. It doesn't really matter what's happening. So that's just driving private market valuations as high as swiftly possible until it becomes untenable for that private cash to actually picture it actually getting a return on investment. You've got to remember NVIDIA is set at level$5 trillion. So there is still some upside if people think it's going to play out. But the question is then is, where are we in the cycle?

39:27So do you really want to be going to allocate? Because you've got to be putting min-full size in that trillion dollar valuation if you want a decent return compared to, I don't know, going a little bit higher up the stack and looking at some consumer stuff. and maybe defense tech or robotics. And there's a couple of other shiny narratives that come in, quantum, photonics, all this other stuff. I think, and I don't want to be a doomer about this, I think they're running out of people that are willing to give them money in the private markets. And once that does run dry, retail is stupid, is the thought.

40:08and like who wouldn't want to get access to OpenAI when all they do is create like dog pictures of themselves or like using JGPT Image Gen or they've created their first application on Cloud and Elon's got a kind of like cult-like like religious like following behind him so he can take anything public and people want exposure to it. So I think it might be quite scary when and a huge liquidity suck when these things start going live. I don't know, and I don't know if you have any thoughts on this. Does it, with OpenAI and Anthropic, does it benefit you to go first or second? Like who's going to jump first?

40:51Because SpaceX are obviously going to go first and God knows what Elon's up to. But out of those two, I don't really know. Like, do you go first? And if it turns shit, then you've kind of put your competitor off going public. I don't really know. There's a lot of game theory behind it. I see the pros and cons to it, right? Because like, what if open AI goes second, for example, and they don't match what Anthropic did, then they're going to look pretty bad and vice versa. So I don't know, honestly, but I do have another theory that I think Elon, Elon's a crazy guy, right? He is, he's wild, he's unhinged, you cannot predict him at all.

41:26But I have a feeling, and again, it's just a theory, just, you know, crazy tinfoil theory. My theory is that he's going to do whatever he can to spoil open AI's IPO, whether that's like time is SpaceX IPO around them might have spies like figuring out when they're going. I just have a feeling he's going to do that. So open AI, I don't know. But if I were anthropic, I just think like I've got I'm clear, like I'm doing my own thing. I think they are leading the space. So I think for them to go first or second, I don't think they really care. yeah but it's gonna be wild it's gonna be uh it'd be worth doing a live stream as these things go live because it's uh it's it's it's literally it's literally history isn't it so it's truly like we are literally at the precipice like we're at the beginning of history being created rao often says like he just said something on his episode yesterday that kind of blew my mind he just said ai is the greatest technology that humanity will ever create and it's the last technology that humanity will ever create.

42:25I'm just like, dude, that's so crazy. Equal parts excited and equal parts terrified. Yeah. Yeah. Cause this whole thesis is like, you know, on the agentic economy, which I think is like, it's very valid. Right. And I think it's, I can absolutely see happen, you know, just myself playing around with agents. I'm DCAing Solana with my, through my open claw right now. I gave it a phantom wallet and it's doing its thing. how do you view like the agentic economy do you think like do you think it's actually going to happen do you think there's this other argument i'm sorry to go off on a tangent here but i was just in a heated debate in our discord earlier but there's this argument that the ai agents are essentially going to just create their own chain so that the existing chains right now don't matter but like my thing is like that's literally not what they do like it's it's the human operator that's controlling it uh they're going to go the path of least resistance and with infrastructure already built.

43:19But anyway, I digress. What's your take on the overall agentic economy? Yeah, I think payments in the early stages of being completely disrupted. And I think we're going to look back in maybe five to 10 years and think about whenever you used to pay for something online and you have to blow your card, even if it's saved in Apple Pay or Google Pay, and then you have to put a number in and what you want me to sign up for a year or a month. well, I just want to use, I just want to pay as a go for any subscription service. And I think everything's going to be completely headless. So everyone's going to be operating out of the chat interface of choice, whether that's Telegram, WhatsApp, ChatGPT interface, Cloud interface.

44:01Everything will be done via chat and it's going to be pinging APIs. It's going to be pinging webhooks. And I think the idea of paying for something per month or annually is going to be gone. I think it's going to be paper use. It's going to be microtransactions. I think what you're seeing with X402 and MPP from Tempo and things like that, that's only going to continue to explode. And businesses that do enable that and allow for that, the earlier the better. And I think it's just an impact on point where everyone has to continue to cave. Maybe like the mom and pop shop on the street, never get there.

44:33But for things where it's a SaaS product, where you can affect it. Like how many subscriptions are you paying for now where it's just like, I can't remember the last time I opened that up. That is not a great business model while you're relying on people for getting that subscription. You should have actual demand. And I think agents just pinging APIs and then getting a microtransaction and that's how you pay for certain things. I think that's probably what the future looks like. I think you're spot on, right? Sam Altman even just said as much himself, actually, kind of recently. He was saying he envisions a world where AI or intelligence is like electricity, where you just pay for it on a meter based on what you're using.

45:11that's absolutely going to happen because well first of all you like i use open claw right so i can't connect it through my anthropic uh or my clawed account they they just they remove that but i use the api like all the time so and i'm paying for it it racks up at cost but like that is absolutely the world we're going to and hopefully they can get those costs down yeah i hope it's not just being i know it's been subsidized but i hope it's like not to the point where it's just completely unaffordable to access them. So, because that would be, you know, I'd be devastating until the cost of inference actually comes down and, you know, the GPU bottleneck is actually solved.

45:52And, you know, the electricity bottleneck is also solved. Like, where are you getting the power for these things? It's not just Nvidia, you know, priced out till 2028 to get that GPUs into people's hands. It's also a way getting the electricity to actually, you know, fund these giga centers and stuff like that. yeah no it's kind of going going back to your your little joke about you know when it's down you could just take a day off i give that they don't solve that people have been taking days off left and right so you're right so our last question on this uh this is a selfish question uh what do you think i should should i switch to hermes or should i stick with open claw you are you like involved in that like what's your like have you have you dove into those much if at all?

46:36Or are you more focused on the Claude and how those within Anthropics Claude, how those agents are being used? Yeah. So I played around for the longest time with OpenClaude. And quite amazing, really, what got built and people collaborating on this open source product to actually get it to market. I think Hermes is fantastic. and I think the Noose team are some of the smartest people I've ever met and I think what they're doing is like utterly brilliant and I'd love to find somewhere to get exposure to what they're actually doing. I don't necessarily have a preference. I think they're probably different horses for different courses.

47:21What I prefer, just having a little bit more configurability by just being able to run everything from my terminal, from my command line and tapping into anything that I need to from there. with the way that even the mobile interface for Claude is actually going now and for Codex, anything that I was kind of wanting to use with OpenClaude or anything that I was kind of wanting to use, like scheduled updates, like basically cron drops and basically being able to have stuff run while I wasn't at the desk and anything that I was really using OpenClaude for, I was finding and I was spending way more time trying to debug it.

48:01And then, as I say, OpenAI and Anthropic can just turn on features overnight. And basically, that was the core principles of why I was actually using it. So it became kind of redundant to the point of, am I spending more time trying to fix this? And what am I actually getting out of using it in this setup? And then, again, I've just defaulted back to using kind of like code from my phone, connected into code code or code work. I'm not that way, really. Yeah, I think that's a great way. That's actually a great way to go about it because I haven't updated my OpenClaw from three updates ago because every time I update it, they release an update every day.

48:41Every time I update it, it breaks. And then, like you said, I'm spending 30 minutes debugging it and troubleshooting things before I actually get to my task. And at that point, I'm like, I'm tired. I don't want to do this. You just wasted half a day. Yeah, exactly. So let's pivot, you know, because AI, right, is obviously it can help with a lot of things, not just like your finances. And you made you made a statement that I've also made in the past. And I want to talk to you about it because I want to see how like how like how much do you actually believe this is going to happen? Because I'm firmly of the opinion that this is going to happen in our lifetime.

49:18So for anyone that doesn't know what we're talking about, it's that basically humans are going to live to 150 years old. um brent how seriously how serious do you think that is and how soon do you think we could see that um i think anyone under 40 should be taking their health and fitness as seriously as physically possible and that's not to say um but full brian johnson because i think there's i think there is also some merit to being able to unwind and have really good social experiences and maybe some certain things that he tells you basically not to do. I still think there's some probably un-empirical evidence that would counteract basically what he's saying.

50:07So I was supposed to actually go into cancer research and do a PhD and got drawn into blockmates and built that from an academic standpoint. So everything that we were looking at back then was pushing towards personalized medicine. So CAR-T therapy is a pretty interesting personalized cancer therapy where you're basically taking out the cancerous cells that are in your body and then engineering antibodies that are specific to that type of cancer because it's completely different in each individual case, not just each individual cancer subset. Expanding that up in a lab so you've got an infinite amount of antibodies against that specific cancer, then re-injecting it back in.

50:55So, we're going to probably look back in five, 10 years time and think, why are we doing one size fits all treatment? Because that's not the case. And I know you can use different combinations of certain drugs to target certain diseases and increases the, brings down the mortality ratio and stuff like that. But it's stupid. It's obviously something that needs to be solved at scale. There's a lot of bottleneck and manufacturing and safety issues. I know this is going to sound ridiculous, but I think regulation in the next 5-10 years is going to cause more deaths than it's actually going to save people.

51:28The way that we're moving with these models, and it's all linear information. DNA and RNA are very well mapped. It's very easy. It's very predictable. You've got protein models and mapping out basically any form of protein. It's basically a collection of four different nucleotides. right so anthropic claude mythos all all these new insane models that are coming online very very very capable of figuring that shit out um so being hampered by regulation and over bureaucracy when there's personalized medicines that are getting performed probably without jurisdiction of certain governments and it's working um you're seeing the guy who he's out in australia his dog had this really, really strong milligrant cancer and he sequenced the DNA for cancer then grew up the antibodies in the lab and then reinjected and the dog went into remission after being like just full remission, you know, it's available.

52:30It just needs pursuing and there's a lot of money funding that for it. But so if you can kind of bring down all cause mortality by implementing personalized medicines and people just generally understand and have to look after themselves on a personal level, these kind of like blanket statements of you should do this you shouldn't do this is totally stupid it's like everyone's body and everyone's genetic code is completely different and the way that it's been exposed to the environment over the course of their lifetime is also just completely throws everything off from an epigenetic standpoint so i think people understanding what's going on inside their body from like a genetic level also not giving too much of your information away to the likes of an open AI and anthropic maybe some local models are probably probably a better use case for that um so yeah i think i generally think we'll get there it's just entropy at the end of the day it's it's a disease it's just it's an inevitable disease but it can be slowed you know um so yeah i genuinely think like just pay a lot of closer attention to your body and like look after yourself from a health and fitness standpoint and you never know what's gonna like what the unlocks are around the corner i think yeah oh my god that's like that is like so fascinating to think about and like i love your dna point too because um listen if they were able to bring back the direwolf and like those are instantly mammoth with like very limited dna like they they can figure this out i think that's that's that's my that's one of my case cases you're literally bringing uh the direwolves and woolly mammoth back i'm pretty sure we can sequence some pet people's like invasive diseases and figure out like uh the right engineered antibodies against them you know absolutely we can add it yeah we can add an extra 50 years to our lifespan or you know 75 like we've just brought back thousands of years old extinct animals so it doesn't it doesn't stop uh um bungee cord accidents or jumping out of an airplane like those those are risk factors that it's probably never going to be able to outcompete right yeah yeah craziness can't uh can't be controlled uh so so grand before i let you go here uh just want to just you know kind of get your your thoughts on where like kind of your future your future vision for the crypto market ai just like all this intersection that we're within because like crypto ai has so much crossover uh it seems like a natural fit um Want to throw in and bake in another question here because like some people are of the opinion that maybe AI and crypto isn't a natural adoption and that AI can just like, you know, use a PayPal or something like that.

55:15But anyway, I want to get your take on just where we're going in this world. I think it's one of the most synergistic technologies and running in parallel that has ever been invented. And it kind of feels weird to say that probably the next 100 million users that are operating, particularly on chain, are definitely going to be agents as opposed to the new cohort of humans. I think you're relatively close to the last ceiling, particularly from a speculator's perspective. Maybe payments changes that, but I think the next wave of people is not actually people. And I think it's agents. And I think programmable money, particularly at the stablecoin level, is very, very, very, very, very interesting.

55:56I think with what we were saying about X402 and MPP and H &M payments, I think that's very, very, very interesting. It goes hand in glove, in my opinion. I don't get the opposite opinion from what I have seen them. I just don't subscribe to it. Yeah, I'm with you. So for those of you that were arguing within the Discord, Grant, you guys are wrong. So Grant, where can we check out what you guys are doing next? I know you guys have a bunch of things coming. We mentioned like a new website's coming as well. Like what's, where can we find out more and follow along with some of the cool stuff you guys will be coming out with?

56:36Yeah, I'd really just, if you want to see what's going on at the forefront of the industry, like the earliest access to teams. I mean, the Hyperliquid one has obviously been, is obviously a gold standard of covering a team three years ago and then they blow up. But there's a lot more where that came from. Like we've got a previous upcoming some really, really early teams and they wouldn't be on there, we didn't like truly think they were legit, you know. So we're fully boot shop. So we have all editorial control of what goes out. So there's no pressure from external investors to cover this, cover that.

57:06It's like, if we don't think it's good, it's not going on now. So yeah, I'd put notifications on the Blockmates account just for now until then, and you'll see when the new site goes live. And that's going to be a little bit more all singing all dancing because the current one's horrible, if I'm completely honest. But yeah, that's probably the best place to actually find everything that's going on because everything gets distributed for them. Absolutely. Well, thank you, Grant. Well, the Blockmates PFP, we have it right here on the screen. The Blockmates PFP is clean, though. So we guys are doing something good there on the design standpoint.

57:38Grant, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us on RectVision. Hope to have you back again soon. You've been awesome. Anytime. Anytime. Thanks very much. Thanks, everyone, for joining us. This has been another episode of RectVision. And actually, before we go, we've been talking about AI. check out the RV website. We just released some new AI features, including RV Cypher, which is the former Ask AI co-pilot. And we released Pulse, which does an AI summary of everything that's going on on the website. And also RowBot and AndreasBot coming. Well, RowBot's already out. AndreasBot coming soon.

58:16Thanks again, everyone, for tuning in. We will catch you next week. 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.