E92: Steady Lads - How to Spot the Next Big Crypto Opportunity (Before Everyone Else)

28:34Why is it so hard to not buy the dip or to sell when something is crashing? I'll give my own example. Luna two years ago, where I watched$7 million melt into$5 in two days. so the chance i had was i mean i say i was doing this uh be luna luna arbitrage so i couldn't sell right but and people always say oh but you didn't sell you didn't sell why and say oh yeah but i was doing this uh be luna luna arbitrage i was locked in for 21 days the actual truth is i probably would not have been able to sell and i know some guys were buying like 500k or a million dollars at five dollars buying the dip right and they had already like one of these would have the $250 million in Luna and he was still buying the dip, right?

29:24Why? Why are we like that? I think people get religiously attached to an asset. An asset's like a football team for them. It's like their culture. It's, you know, something that we're seeing over and over again especially the ones that have a leader that's kind of cult-like. You can follow them. They're very charismatic or they're very good on Twitter. They create an emotional connection with that token. This is like, you know the drug of crypto and i think you could you wouldn't have sold anyway because you would be like oh i'm not gonna sell at one million dollars i was at seven and then i'm not gonna sell 100k you know you still hold it down to zero don't worry of course don't worry of course that's what i feel i think yeah i would still have i would i would not have been able to sell yeah you were just kind of going through the educational uh cycle for you but crypto is a little bit different in that like we like assets like luna can actually go down so massively like that right these like longer tail more niche tokens even though luna was it was like a top 10 token it was a top five so i was thinking it's too big to fail 40 to 60 billion but it's it was it was a fundamentally unsound system that could theoretically go to zero whereas like something like ethereum it's easy to yeah but even it's because when you feel like you i knew it was theoretically be able to do zero but it's too big to fail you always find excuses jump's gonna come in and save us yeah or yeah exactly yeah study lads very steady lads but it's because people get conditioned that okay i buy the dip i make money right you get conditioned to believe that a certain action makes money and then it keeps happening until it doesn't um it's like a thousand and one days of thanksgiving turkey it just keeps going up until it goes to zero the next day uh so i think you just have to have the mindset that all this shit can go to zero.

31:12You have to have some form of a stop loss and understand that. For me, though, it's actually quite easier to buy assets when they're nuking. So I very much believe in the Warren Buffett buy when there's blood in the streets mentality. And for me, I really do believe this industry is going to grow in 10 years. So in some ways, yes, of course, it's sad if ETH crashes 50 % tomorrow, Bitcoin does. But it's also an amazing opportunity to now like reallocate to something you think is going to be strong in the next decade. What's the classic educational cycle? And what do people learn kind of first cycle?

31:46And then second cycle, what do they do differently? And what's the right way to approach crypto investing? I don't want you to avoid that because it has to happen. I had Joe McCann the other day. He said you have to blow up twice, right? I don't agree that you have to blow up twice. I think once is enough. Yeah. Do you have to blow up once? If it's twice, it's going to happen to you more than twice. It means there's like a blind spot. Look, it's not just for investing. I think for entrepreneurs as well, I talked to a lot of founders and the ones that have, you know, hit it big at 20, 25 years old, like super young, and they've, you know, like the pump fund founders, you know, 21 years old, hundreds of millions.

32:30Their view of the world, you need to understand, is that they've not seen the bad thing happen. Everything sort of like goes well. And there are cases like Mark Zuckerberg where it just continues to go well. And so they don't know if they're Mark Zuckerberg or not. They have to go through some turbulence and test themselves. As an investor, you're coming into crypto, you're investing in S &P 500, let's say since like 2009. the chart is up only and you know when COVID happened I think people saw a drawdown um even though it you know it veed that they were not used to dealing with and like you said some people make emotional decisions they they panic um you went through that extreme case because your asset literally went to zero not just like a little bit 20 30 40 percent I think the craziest thing was actually it never goes to zero there is always an additional zero after the coma i didn't realize that right i was like so it's not like you're killed and it's zero it's like 0.1 0.01 0.00 and then at some point you're like like you're like it's actually like it's never ending right yeah they kept like ftx kept adding uh more decimal points that day and then at some point they ended uh they filled up and that's when it bounced i remember going to bed when luna was crashing and it was down like 99.999 and it was at 0.000025 because that was the tick size at the end they didn't have ones it was 25 and i put some limit orders at 25 but it bounced off of 0.000050 i think like a thousand x from there um so i missed it i missed the thousand x by one tick

34:24you say i missed it just in the other day we were talking about sui right and you said i feel like i missed it there is this psychology in crypto we say the thing pumped i feel like i missed it and then we end up not buying when sometimes that's when you should kind of double down right had the real one on the podcast he was saying he was explaining with the sole example when even after two or three x they were actually saying now we need to double down and bet bigger. Why do we have this, I feel like I missed it, psychology? That has probably cost me the most money in this space, honestly. I've learned this lesson that's so hard to internalize, but I've learned when I hear about something from a trusted person, the first time I hear about it, even if the asset has done really well in the past week, two weeks, and I feel like I've missed it, when I hear about it, because we live and breathe the space, it's still early, but it's still so hard to actually take action just because you look at the past two weeks and this thing could be up 30, 40, 50%.

35:28Who wants to buy then? But I'm trying to internalize that when I see something, it usually is early. I don't know. Do you guys have that experience too? I feel like one thing you can do is if you hear something, you can just buy like a hundred bucks of an asset. And once you own a little bit, you'll just pay more attention. And you know, it's like a negligible amount, right? Like a hundred bucks for most of us. so just buy it right see how it feels it's not so bad right you look into the fundamentals okay it's decent you buy more see how it feels um and i feel like the only way to learn is to have skin in the game but i think you can't really outsource your conviction right you have to have your own conviction because if you buy something that someone's showing you then you know if it goes down 20 it's like oh fuck this this is going to zero anyways so jordi do you believe in this drunkenmiller thesis of like just the first time you hear about it ate a small amount and then you don't miss it and then you do your research and you add more no I don't understand what you guys are talking about um if I have a small amount and it's it's going up then I still feel like I missed it yeah it's never enough I always think about my sizing a lot I think more more than most people I really optimize my sizing on my bets and having a small amount just it doesn't fit my function my function is risk reward uh and like time horizon so um i'll either do it or or not do it what's your minimum position sizing like 10 percent 5 percent what of my portfolio yeah 10 percent minimum what do you thought no no i mean i mean it can be like one or two percent but that's yeah that's gonna be like meaningful um i remember i think it was about a year ago you were on this podcast almost the same place right yeah you were saying i was asking you a question about solana because i knew we could clip that because i knew we're kind of like not really we're saying it's kind of a meme coin etc and i knew we could clip that and make people angry right i said it will never hit an all-time high again like it won't surpass its all-time high do you still believe the same i mean yeah basically what people understand one is there's dilution um so the market cap can be higher than it was the price you know validators are kind of being paid i think it's eight five eight percent i think that's solana can't remember somewhere in that region um so you're kind of fighting against that uphill battle and you know unfortunately a lot of people don't stake or don't optimize their assets like they should.

38:10Obviously, Bitcoin doesn't have any staking, so that's a little bit of a different story. We had a little cope the other day. We did our ETH cope, ETH BTC cope. And I was saying, like, actually, if you've been staking your ETH for last year and restaking it and getting, like, all the extra stuff, the Bitcoin chart is not so bad. How have you co-opted this cope? This was, Taiki was telling me this on the podcast months ago, and you, I think, shunned that idea. Now we're all, you're talking about it. Trust me, I'm like a hardcore AirDrop farmer, and I'm in pain holding ETH. I mean, fortunately, I hold other assets and whatnot, but.

38:48No, but it's simply, I mean, simple math, right? Like, you can easily get 10 % yield if you're farming with your ETH, right? So if year to date, you know, this is an extreme year. I think Bitcoin-Eth divergence is 50%. Yeah. Helps a little bit, some part of it. It's not going to keep going 50 % every year. I think you'll have years where it's flat, flat, and then you make 10 % back. So listen, I strongly believe that having diversity in your portfolio is the real alpha. and having assets that each have a bit of a different distribution is really good. So Ethereum, Bitcoin have just different return profiles.

39:39Obviously, this year it's been Bitcoin, but it could play out differently in the future. But like you said earlier, now you've front-loaded all the hard work and now you're more comfortable. But I guess for people like me, I still want to get to some level like you. So for me, I have to concentrate. And it's hard for me to expect outsized returns in the majors. Maybe Solana can be a part of the basket and whatnot. So I feel like it kind of depends where you are in life as well, whether or not in a diversity. I front load the work when it comes to building a business. When it comes to building your net worth, like your portfolio value, you can't front load that.

40:21that is a long like you have to just keep accumulating year after year and just not blow up or blow up once max you know because every time you blow up you you kind of like you learn the lessons but um you're compounding resets completely brutal yeah do you think blowing up is necessary though i mean i've never blow up but you have to have um you have to test your limits that's what i was trying to say like people need to test their limits and see that they fail somewhere something fails like your intuition misleads you then you can't trust it always and that's kind of like where you you see where the universe's uh limits lie and you stay you stay in your lane kind of right um you just don't want it to be fatal i mean we've had people in the industry that um might not recover right um yeah and blowing up build self-awareness and i if you think about compounding I feel like if we're doing a podcast our reputation and our credibility and our audience compounds but when it comes to money right you can't blow up so I feel like oh you can do it with uh your reputation can be disintegrated you can build it for 10 years do podcasts every week do a thousand episodes and then you know you have one mistake of judgment and it's gone.

41:45So I think you can blow up. That's fair. I feel like we have more control over our reputation. Given people's attention span that's so short, right? When they are, maybe you made the mistake, you're an asshole or whatever, but the day after, everybody's already on to the next story. I feel that's kind of the... I mean, as long as the mistake is not too huge in terms of branding, but... That's like an excuse, right? It's like, oh, people are going to forget anyway, so people don't give a fuck. It's a scam. I feel like that's a really wrong mentality to have. I feel like you need to have core values that you stick to.

42:17I do agree with your sentiment. Like, I don't think you should give into cancellation if that were to happen to you. I think you can keep building through that. Andrew Huberman, the big podcaster, you know, almost went through a cancellation, but he just kept building, kept working. This is what you don't understand, though. like Huberman's cancellation was not related to his core product, which was like, you know, educating people on health topics. It was like, oh, he like, you know, dating scandals, some girls or whatever. His audience is not going to care about that. However, let's say you're Arthur Hayes and you're, you know, your audience relies on you for predictions about macro or the market.

42:56And, you know, you're like very, very convicted and you go out there and you're very strongly convicted and you're wrong and then wrong, wrong, wrong, at that point, it's core to your brand. So you have to be a little bit careful about what you're getting wrong, let's say. But I do think people and audiences are forgiving. I mean, no one's perfect. I mean, we've all, I mean, I'm the ETH bag holder. We all have our takes in Solana or like some other longer tail DeFi assets. And everyone expects like you can't get everything right, right? And so I think if you operate in good faith, That's like 99 % of the battle.

43:30Yeah. Yeah. I get so many things wrong, but I think people understand I have good intentions and I'm not well, like I'm not ill intentioned. Yeah. So people are forgiving. This is like why having Taiki on our podcast is such a good, you know, cornerstone. Let's say out of the four people usually we have on a show, you have someone that has turned down all these like seed rounds and all these things because he, like, you know, I know now maybe you're doing an echo group and changing that a little bit, but he has given up real dollars and real crazy opportunity in order to keep himself pure, aligned with his community and not biased by opportunities that he's seeing.

44:22We want to have someone that has that perspective because people listen to the show and are like, okay what's his take okay because he's like the clean guy maybe a little bit mid-curve sometimes but like he's not trying to like swindle you you can like let your guard down you talk to me you know hopefully i've built a reputation for like very kind of first principles thinking so i'm looking at it and i might say you know look you like solana like i like solana but i i hate the fact that it's a vc coin and it's gonna have unlocks i like everything else about it i might be early to this and people next year might we might do a podcast next year and you're like you know guys why why is solana like not going anywhere and it's like well there's these unlocks that started in march that are killing it and the community is very reflective as we're seeing with ethereum um but i i kind of think of it from that perspective and i think justin has like a huge strength he's very inquisitive he's very curious he likes trying a lot of stuff and that brings a lot of like knowledge and information because he asks questions that people want to ask we always see in the comments like justin is the gcr of asking questions like he he's asking the things that might be like basic or might people might be shy to ask you know what someone told me at our meetup a few days ago they said justin you were put on this planet to extract as much alpha as possible from Jordi.

45:46I was like, thank you. That's great.

45:52Just one thing on, you said, I think there is alpha in diversification, right? Had Rao Pal in your seat and he's basically thinking the exact opposite. He's pretty much all in our soul, right? Rao Pal has had a lot of bad calls and I like him. I like Raul. He's incredibly well-spoken. He talks with this charisma, and he's seen a lot of things, and he's very worldly. I would diversify my people that I listen to, not just Raul, on this stuff. Yeah. I mean, he's made it, right? So I guess we shouldn't really, like no one should just listen to one person. Everyone should just listen to like 10 people and form your own ideas.

46:53I mean, the way to think about it is, okay, you have high conviction in Solana, let's say, or some bet. That can be okay if you have some unique insight that nobody else has. Like you have some private kind of way to look at it that nobody else is understanding and the market is so inefficient and mispriced that you should be all in on this thing, then okay, that's totally fine. You're talking about a very large asset with millions of holders already. All the funds are already in. People understand what the roadmap is, what's going on. It's hard to be so concentrated on something that has consensus already, right?

47:34Yeah. One thing I realized on the single port trip is I've been talking to a lot of fund managers and we talked about this in the live study last episode too, but everyone is just bearish ETH and Celestia because of the unlock and bullish Solana and like Aave because I mean, it's going up. Do you think going to these conferences, talking to people, talking into maybe a few funds, seeing what is quote unquote consensus, do you think it is consensus or do you think it's just that a subset of group or subset of individuals and you're kind of extrapolating what consensus means for the entire market.

48:15Yeah, let's refill the wine. Yeah, yeah. Thank you, sir. I mean, when it comes to like alpha from conferences, you're right that a lot of it is not what people say, but just looking at how much money is being spent on parties, you know, which projects are trying to push what out there. I don't know if you were having a hot take that you think conferences are a waste of time. I think that's a great way to continue, actually. The next section is like, lads' thoughts discussed. And one of them is that. What's the business of conferences? Do they make sense for crypto people, crypto native people?

48:55And who are the people who are even there? Who are all these 30 ,000 people? Yeah. The hot take you're referring to, I tweeted out, these conferences are vacation as a service, where teams have, I guess, an excuse to spend their treasury dollars or sell their tokens to buy people's hotel rooms and plane tickets and whatnot. I was more referring to token 2049, like these sponsors. I angered the actual builders, which I guess I should have considered. But for example, we were on the Zibu stage, right? We've never heard of Zibu before. Apparently, it's a$23 billion FDB token. I was more talking about those types of projects.

49:33nothing against zebu of course thank you for sponsoring our 20 to 30 billion dollar it's 27 billion seventh largest project by ftb zebu coin it's a telecom infrastructure token i mean it's it's not real i mean it's a real token but it's not in market cap right have you done your research yeah you can type it in zebu and it's there yeah they just don't list it they don't rank it it's not seafood it's zebu i see like uh 4983 oh that's the number there's another one z e e b yeah okay so i was more right to those projects zbu yeah look at the ftb 23 billion i mean i can launch a you know a kevin token tomorrow and like i'll only give out a few tokens and then I can make the market cap, you know, a trillion dollars by just having a thousand dollar per coin price.

50:28And you only have a couple of coins. Nobody has any coins. So I don't know who the holders are or what these things are. Look, vacation is a service. I don't feel like I'm on vacation when I'm at these things. I feel like I'm grinding. Like the amount of people that you have to talk to in one day. I'm extrovert, introvert, and I need to recharge. I don't, yeah. Do you feel like it's efficient or effective to get something out of all these conversations? And what do you get out of it if yes? All these people that you talk to on Telegram, even the ones that you occasionally can have video calls with and then talk to them in video, being around them, getting their aura, having a chance to see if they're, you know, like the Eclipse founder obviously was going out to these events and people could see him doing all kinds of various behaviors.

51:23It's information. It's useful. It's valuable. It can make you more bearish or more bullish. You talk to someone in person, sometimes they're really impressive. I talked to a founder just this morning, sit down with him for a coffee. If I did it over a video call, I wouldn't get as convicted. that like you can tell from micro expressions just from seeing him that this guy's legit. He's building a wearables thing. So hopefully we'll have a new step in next year and a new successful kind of hybrid product. We'll see. You said, Justin, 95 % of the project at the booth of the conference make no sense.

52:09yeah it's i i had this eye-opening experience more so at token i've usually gone to like ethereum conferences or like devcon ethereum eath denver etc something about this conference i think first of all token 2049 is the best organized conference i've been at it's so professional they do an amazing job but i do think the sponsorships and booths there's less curation and i think it's probably more there's no curation it's just spend money right it's a business but Because that's different. Some other conferences don't operate like that. Some actually you have to apply. What's your project doing?

52:41How is it being built? Do you have a token, et cetera, et cetera? I think here it is truly a business that allows them to create a world-class experience. I mean, it's at the Marina Bay Sands. They rent out the whole Expo Center. They have all the F1 drivers. As speakers, they've organized this beautifully for us. There was no confusion about where to go. I've talked at other places and it's just like you meet in a back room and then they throw you up there. They do a great job organizing, I think in part because it's so financialized and they allow to journey's point anyone to sponsor if they're willing to pay up but that's not how I would run a conference so like I would not allow a zebu I mean the main question is like who is giving them money to buy the booth because we're talking about that's what I'm going to say just like it looks like they just took the the key buzzwords and they say okay this is a dog coin on the l2 with the rehypothecation let's go where Where is the money coming from?

53:31Who is funding this stuff? We live and breathe this space. And we walk around the convention center and we see all these booths and like nine out of ten projects I've never heard about, which really shouldn't be the case. Like we talk about every single project all the time. And so I'm wondering, like, who are these people? Where are they coming from? And who's paying for the projects? It's absolutely bonkers. Who are these people?

53:56I think that there must be VCs who can't get deal flow in like the stuff that, you know, the monads and this stuff. And then they invest in competitors who might not have as established presence. And I don't even know if it's effective spend because who is going to the token 2049 and then buying the random token that they're seeing maybe some people. But so I did a little, I agree to that point. I did a little research on Zibu. So I went to the landing page. I watched their like marketing videos. I went to their YouTube channel. No one's really watching these videos. They all have like 40 views, 50 views.

54:41But all of the videos for Zibu were like, Zibu is a top tier sponsor at Token Dubai, Token 2049 Dubai. And then there was footage of like the Zibu booth. And I do think you can sort of attach yourself to the credibility of a conference. And I think that's probably the strategy. But the counterpoint is, like, Taiki mentioned this to me, is like, if you've already heard about the project, what's the point of the booth? Like, the booths are there for projects you've never heard about for you to learn and discover them, which, you know, there's merit to that, too. No? I think definitely for an Ethereum conference, let's say, every major Ethereum project should have a booth, go around, maybe even have one of the co-founders just hanging out and not just random kind of representatives.

55:27We walked past some of the projects that we're investors in, and it was nice to see some of the actual builders there and having conversations you can get, feedback on the ground. Yeah, and it's not always going to be like this. It's actually really amazing how easy it is to have access to founders and projects. Like if you guys have read the Steve Jobs biography, he talks about how he called up, I think the Hewlett Packard CEO just looked him up in the phone in like the yellow pages, called him up and got an internship. Our space is actually still very much like that. It's still early enough that any old person can come to these conferences and meet the founders of amazing projects.

56:02Like Monad is a great example. Like they're just such an accessible team. And there's definitely alpha if you're trying to build your career of coming here and meeting teams and meeting founders there's a few things that are kind of weird happening in this space right we just discussed one another one i wanted to introduce with a this dog here on this table and it happened this week right i received this dog from the nero team this week and for me it's cute for me it's a good way to introduce this binance weird shit that happened this week that honestly I can't comprehend maybe I'm just too naive maybe Jordi you have more understanding of the whole situation but how is it possible maybe you explain what happened and also explain how it's possible that we have CZ that is about to get out of jail right but there is still weird if not shady shit happening in Binance feels like things are not changing um these exchanges are a combination of like very effective operators.

57:14And also there needs to be, you know, commercial people, because if you're going to win as an exchange, you're going to be very slow and just, you know, wait for Coinbase, let's say, you know, just they're eventually going to win a bunch of stuff, a bunch of categories, just like they've won the US retail market. but for Binance or Bybit or OKX, the big exchanges, they've had a commercial element to them that's let them grow. And there's people that are just trying to do deals and all these things. Sometimes there's a clash between just being commercial and sometimes you have these strange moments.

57:56I think they're very large exchanges very large companies they have a lot of people and you know people might be motivated with very different objective functions different KPIs all have KPIs I don't know if you're familiar with Chinese companies let's say but they're very KPI focused and sometimes you see this in all kinds of things in life, but one part of the body might be, you know, trying to optimize something and that's their KPI. And it ends up not being good for the whole body, right? So I think this is one of those examples.

58:40That was a very PG answer. Yeah. The reality, I mean, here's something I do want to obviously say out loud, which is there are entities in the space that you can't directly criticize if you're a participant. So Binance is one of those other large exchanges in that category. If you start poisoning relationships and then none of your, you know, I've heard of situations where someone pissed the wrong person off and then anything they invested in, they were on any cap table, any of their portfolio companies, you know, now they can't get listings. That's crazy. I hear that about the Luna case, actually, that there were many more people than were kind of talking out loud about Luna that didn't, that wanted to say something.

59:31Yes. But they could not because of this reason. I talked to major VCs that were in private telling me like this thing like looks like a scam. Like I can't say anything out loud, but this thing is going to go to zero. and the reason they can't say out loud is one, they have connections to the other investors because they co-invest all the time and then you don't want to FUD. It's like a respect of the trade. You don't FUD somebody else's bags that's your friend, right? So then they end up not saying anything and if it's a really large thing like Luna, FTX, like this kind of stuff, everyone's going to have friends in that and then no one's going to speak out loud.

1:00:14Why were you able to? You were the biggest voice saying Luna was unsustainable. Why were you able to do that? Probably because, you know, it wasn't as big. At the time, you know, it was more of an individual thought. So when I was doing it with Olympus DAO, all this stuff, you remember. Yeah, yeah. I joined my channel. I mean, some of those people, I would say, kept grudges for a long time. But a lot of them, thankfully, you know, even though they hated me, They messaged me two years later and they're like, oh, man. I had blinders on. Same with Luna, obviously. I had a debate with Jose from Delphi who was one of their biggest backers.

1:00:57And there's no ill will. I think I've learned how to do it respectfully now as well. So, I mean, with Solana, for example, I love the community. I'm invested in so many of the apps. I'm a very active participant. just because I don't like VC unlocks doesn't make me kind of an enemy of the community I feel like that's also the study lads maybe that's something that we can do that other podcasts can't do is to speak up on things and be honest about what's happening in this space maybe other podcasts like VC podcasts they're incentivized to just say nice things and say vanilla things to just maintain their deal flow and relationships but I feel like that's one thing that we've done a good job I mean, every single one of us, if you ask us our opinion, we'll give you our honest opinion.

1:01:46I don't think any of us will ever sugarcoat something or fluff it up. Like we're very straightforward people. Yeah, even like DeFi founders. Like I'm like really bullish DeFi right now, but I'm like funding 95 % of DeFi tokens. And some founders are like upset at me, but it's like, I don't really care. You know, I'm just being honest. I'm just mid curving my in my own lane. A lot of props for that. I mean, there's a huge cost to doing that, right? Like it hurts deal flow. it hurts connections speaking opportunities all of these things but so it takes courage I mean yeah but ultimately when you do that you're gonna earn the respect of the real people in the space because they are able to recognize it yeah so we mentioned Luna and FTX right one thing that you said the other day Justin was a question that is very fair did we really wash out the bad people after FTX hmm yeah You mean the bad people in the entire space or just the bad people that are running like exchanges or?

1:02:46So what I think I meant by that was, of course, we had a bear market. But the thing is, the projects that flourished out of the bear market were more, let's say, money games, as they would be called in Asia or gambling apps, as we'd say in the US. I feel like since the bottom, the projects that are actually innovative, adding value, potentially could be changing our world or just something that you'd be excited about. and excited to tell people about are not the ones flourishing. But what's flourished out of the bottom are these nihilistic gambling apps. And for me, that's been really tough as someone that's trying to build in this space that's not frankly had success, that wants to have success.

1:03:26Seeing all of these projects that I don't think are actually doing anything new and exciting, they're just changing how money trades hands. I'm actually going to agree with him for once. For once. And I'm usually like, he's absolutely right. This is not about crypto, though. This is just, you know, what markets are counter cyclical? Alcohol, gambling, you know, it's like depression, bear markets. People are going for the quick scams, the kind of dopamine hits as cope. And it's so hard because my co-founder and I see that and we're like, we raised$8 million in 2022. and we say, imagine if we put all of that$8 million into like coming up with a meme coin or a pure gambling app like we've seen.

1:04:12If we just kept running that playbook back as opposed to like actually doing the work and building like complicated smart contracts, making sure the security is there, like we would have probably won. I mean, you never know. But it's just so hard seeing the things that I think are not the right things that should be succeeding succeed. I mean, even the fact that you managed to raise$8 million, was that pre-FTX? yes yeah right before it um it's not so bad i mean a lot of projects look i can't complain i uh but it's still hard right the money can't solve your problems of finding product market fit right we have more time to explore and i'm grateful for that but it's it's hard how much you how much do get the temptation to say hey i'm gonna i mean why am i doing all this thing where when i could just invest this money even without buying meme coins right and have decent returns obviously that's not what you raise the money for but there is a bunch of projects out there that raise money and that have an amazing treasury but are not delivering anything and there is like actually a few huge ones.

1:05:22I've never had that temptation because our investors trusted us to use the money to build products and try to build something successful. They didn't give us the money to invest or to spend on other things. So for me, it was never really a thought. But what do you feel, concretely? I have no regrets. I mean, sure, it would have been great if we bought ETH when ETH was at$880, but that wasn't what we were given the money to do. You mentioned meme coins before. I had a meow from Jupiter on this podcast and he says, and he really firmly believes that every coin is a meme coin. Every coin is a meme coin.

1:06:12Do you agree with that? No. No. um we have narratives right every every me every coin has a percentage of meme nest to it of course it could be 100 it could be 1 um i agree that in crypto like everything is at least 20 but there's a right the range matters right well we get we got to pull up the chart of like 20 of the project is fundamentals and the rest 80 is like vibes or something it's the DJ spark Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I do think like, I really, really, really try my best not to believe that like all these tokens are meme coins because I don't want to be in a space where that's the case. I think that's like, would be a poor use of, honestly, the four of us's time if we're just, you know, all these coins, they don't have any intrinsic value.

1:07:03We're not building towards the future. We don't want to drive value to these tokens. Like, I just don't want to live in that world. What is the future that you're trying to drive to? I want these tokens to all be securities. as we see them. But what do you want them to be securities of? So like if you buy the Uni token, I want it to be. No, okay. But like Uni is already like something into DEX. We have a Uni. Okay. What's all the other ones? Well, let me use the Uni example. I think the Uni token should be synonymous with Uni equity. It's not just controlling a fee switch. I don't care so much about the fee switch.

1:07:35I think when you buy the Uni token in my dream world, my utopia world, you're investing in Uniswap Labs. You're investing in what Hayden's building in the future. you're investing in the future of the company, not just the on-chain fee switch. That's really the world I want. Yeah, but there's 10 ,000 coins or more, let's say, but I'm sure you have 20 that we can say, like, you know, money market, Dex, whatever, this, this, this. Okay, those make sense. But you're saying you don't want the other ones to even exist? You only feel the bet on them? Oh, that's a great question. No, I think they should, look, everything should exist that people build.

1:08:08And that's totally within people's rights. But I don't want our space to be captured by this nihilism or this like this meme culture where the vast majority of our value and attention is going towards meme coins that is super fun i've had fun doing it too we've bought the trump coin or the kamala coin it's fun like there's a place for gambling i love speculating it's fun but that should not be the focus of our industry our conversation it should be like a very small subset in my opinion yeah and when i you know hung out with vitalik and other founders i think i asked a question to vitalik like do you not get jaded by the space and yeah you know he he does get jaded and he wants maybe this kind of ties into you but he wants to see applications that he can you know show people's grandmas and have like 90 year old people be like oh yeah like that is kind of cool you know keep building young ones yeah I feel like there's not that much of those that exist in crypto um there's a lot of a lot of complicated financial engineering and infrastructure yeah but it's not there's not that many things that we see millions of normies using I don't know if it's going to work, but my co-founder and I have sort of been internalizing this thing of like, we probably have 10 to 20 ,000 DAUs in crypto.

1:09:20It's so hard to scale in our space. The mindshare is so competitive. So right now the app we're working on, the goal is that your grandmother or your mom could download it and use it. And the crypto happens behind the scenes, but you don't have to worry about it. You don't have to manage it. And I think that there's merit to that process of onboarding more people into our space. yeah i mean ultimately just like we talked about previously but also with products you have broccoli and you have cheeseburger from mcdonald's so when you're making a podcast we talked about like the two types the you know the bit boy and the the good kind of uh informative ones our goal and your goal and a builder's goal should be to be a three-star miscellane chef absolutely that is It's creating something very healthy, ideally, but also very tasty, right?

1:10:12That's what we try to do with SteadyLads. That's what you're trying to do. And I think as a builder, trying to build a product, the most successful ones never forget that if you lose attention and you don't make it a good experience, you're going to lose your customer. And sometimes you just have one opportunity to build a brand. if you have people try to use your brand, they come to your DAX, they come to your product, and it's just terrible, you might fix it and then try to say, hey, I fixed it. It's too late. It's too late. You might as well just start over at that point. Because there's only that many users in crypto right now.

1:10:57Because you've tainted your brand. You can grind through it, and then people say, like, oh, you know, like, you know, drift was like really kind of clunky, but if you try it now, it's going to be really good, right? You can try to grind through and recover out of, but ultimately it's easier to do it the first time, right? Yeah. Yeah. I really like the cheeseburger broccoli analogy, right? It's like, if you, if you have like a regular crypto guy and you offer a broccoli, it's like, no, like, fuck you. Like, get that away from me. But you give them a taste of the cheeseburger. It's like, oh, that's pretty good.

1:11:31And then you give them the broccoli. You get their attention. Then you give them the good thing. You give them the broccoli in the cheeseburger. Yeah. And then when you say bye, you hand them the cheeseburger. It's like, oh, yeah, I had a pretty good experience. So I'm very bullish on the very few founders that have been able to do both. And some of the chains that are hyped, they have a chance because they've built a community without a product. Monad, Hyperliquid, even Better Chain. Very interesting. ability to create the tastiness. You know, there's like cartoons, things that people like. They all have their cat or their dogs or I think more it has some hedgehogs and mullet ducks and different things.

1:12:16Great. Now give them the broccoli, you know, combine it in with like a very good performing technology. And let's see if you can make some magic happen. I think as a kind of closing thoughts, have something that you said just in the other day, which is something that I think everybody should hear and kind of accept. No one knows what the fuck is going to happen in the future. No one knows. And even the people you think know, act as if they know, they don't know. Yeah. You just have to focus on what you have control over, right? That's like the only thing you can do. Yeah. Yeah, the inspiration for that came from Hasib had a blog post from 2017.

1:13:01Hasib is, I think, the managing partner of Dragonfly, one of the most successful and largest crypto funds in our space. And in 2017, he said, if you're thinking about building an L2, don't. Everyone's already been working on that for years. The problem is well known. Everyone's trying to solve that already. You're going to be late. And don't try to build another L1. And it really just goes to show like even the most prolific minds in our space, and this is not to knock him at all. We're all guilty of it, but no one can predict the future. Obviously, 2017 would have been the perfect time to start an L2.

1:13:312018 as well, 2019, probably even 2020. A lot of the most popular L2s, you know, just came about in recent years. So, yeah. I guess, yeah, having humility, right? Just not having an ego. I could be wrong. We could all be wrong. It is what it is. I think you, again, that's the broccoli talk, man. These guys are broccoli boys. Broccoli boys? You got to have your hot takes. You got to give people hot takes. Aggressively, like, you know, say something that you predict. And then say that it's, you know, it's 95. It's not, you can never be 100%. So what's the hot take now? ETH going up, SOUL going down?

1:14:14That's the last question. What's your biggest prediction for the next 12 months? For me? Everyone. One after the other. The broccoli boys first. Let's start with DeFi boys. Broccoli boys, DeFi boys? I mean, I'm, I'm Omega long DeFi coins. I mean, I'm super long off in uni. I feel like, I mean, like, I have no idea if it's going to happen, but I feel like the pendulum has swung too far towards financial nihilism that I think the next logical step, I feel like people want to believe in something. People want to see a world where... Are you people or do you think the majority of the people or do you think, I mean, on the other side of the pendulum, meme coins, right?

1:14:52If market pick up again, I mean, 50 % rate, rate cut what does the little guy do does the little guy do i mean i i feel like one problem that or one mistake that people have in the industry is that they just assume retail is just like 50 iq meme coin gamblers but i feel like the majority of retail like actually want to make fundamental investments right even if you look at regular regular retail in the stock world you They do their research, they buy a stock because they think that it's going to go to 10x because of fundamental reasons. I feel like we don't really target those people. Or maybe crypto generally attracts people that only go for the 100xs.

1:15:37And we see the pump funds of the world benefit because of those types of psychographics. But what even was the original question? What's your biggest prediction for the next 12 months? Biggest prediction? uh no the return of defi defi coins hit all-time highs like all the og defi coins ave uni actually it's just those two yeah others are kind of trash most defi coins are trash but the good ones will hit all-time highs second broccoli boy all right i think for me it's pretty clear if you're at this conference as we've talked about everyone is excited about Solana. I think if you're holding Solana and you're massively long Solana, that should scare you.

1:16:24I think if you actually look at what users are doing and where they're spending their time, the L2s are growing massively on Ethereum. I think there is a big debate on if L2s extract value or add value, but I think in some ways that maybe might be the mid-curve view. The point is more people are using Ethereum products, more people are holding Ethereum. Most of the innovation is still on Ethereum to this day. Most of the apps are still on Ethereum. I think you want to be longer Ethereum than Solana over the next year. I know I've been saying that for a while. Of course, a broken clock is right twice a day.

1:16:57But I do think we're going to be, Ethereum's going to do well. I think the caveat to that and the caveat to the altcoin thesis is I do think Kamala Harris probably wins. And I do think if she wins, that effectively means we'll have Operation Chokepoint 3.0, likely. and I think that means that we're going to see less progress around how applications are built in the US and how value is delivered to tokens. And so I think that's sort of like the thorn in this thesis, but I think you want to be long ETH over SOL. Don't always follow consensus. Don't always follow the herd. I think that's really dangerous.

1:17:32That's how you get burned. That's the burger boy. Burger boy. The burger locally boy. Your 12 months puts me in a tough spot because I'm very good at predicting next weeks because I really see the flows and I see what's happening. I really know what's going to happen in the very, very short term. And I've been proven over time, over the years, that I'm quite perceptive from first principles of predicting five years or three years quite long term and eventually those things happen. I'm often early. So when I say a 12-month prediction, it could happen in three years and we'll see. Um, so I can't really say too much about 12 months.

1:18:15My main takes are, um, the difference between a meme coin and not meme coin will start differentiating. And, um, you know, I like meow, but I think that the putting it all together and it's just like, it's all the same thing, like this stuff. Um, I don't know if it's 12 months, something that I spend a lot of my time on is differentiating these different assets. I think the space is learning through all the super intelligent people I meet that we're collectively trying to figure out what are these assets that we've all created and these dogs and how many NAROs and how do we determine the real value, the role of exchanges, the role of individual countries that are not part of the English-speaking crypto Twitter.

1:19:10You have massive countries like Turkey, Japan, Korea, Brazil. They have their own echo chambers. What's their impact on specific parts of the market? It's taken me many years, but I've started to understand the influence of all these factors that you don't see day to day if you're just in one part of the world and one part of media. Yeah. So I believe that we're figuring things out. The role of tokenomics. I mean, my hottest take is like tokenomics are complete trash right now. We'll be looking back in 10 years at the dumb shit that people were designing their projects around. And it'll just look like barbaric.

1:20:00It's a very difficult topic. And you need to understand that founders of a product don't usually have expertise in this kind of tokenomics or in the sort of more token as a service, as a product. They're building their chain. They're not building a token.

1:20:23We'll eventually get a lot of better things right. Right now we're in the crisis mode. It's just like, oh no, high FDB, low float. We're all losing money. Yeah, the home economics are complete trash. But in 12 months, we will start to have better models around that. And it might become an investable asset class for these normal people who just want to put 20 % of their savings into something that will give them good returns over time and be sustainable. But you're bullish for the next year, it sounds like?

1:21:08Look, I've been very public that if you're short anything against the dollar, you're long the dollar and you don't want to be long the dollar. So the bears have not convinced me because I always know that money printing keeps coming. Liquidity will not stop. We are nowhere near the end of the political desire to print money. I've seen in Europe when they've had periods like Germany 10 years ago around this time, they created this like huge austerity and they convinced their population that this is for the best. Inflation went to like negative in the euro. They have negative interest rates. We are so far away from that with the US dollar.

1:21:50There is so much from both sides desire to just make people happy and just print money that you have to be long, sound money and sound, or even speculative stuff, because that will also do very well. You cannot be long the dollar. That's it. Amazing, guys. I really want to thank you for making it today, first of all, but even more for making my week every week and probably the week of many other people, right? Thank you. like this I think this mix of alpha and fun and not taking yourself seriously is so needed and I am a very normal person so I guess if I love it there's probably many other people who love it and appreciate it so thank you so much thank you and I also want to take a moment at the meetup event that we had I had a few people thank me for the content that we've been providing and it meant a lot to me so I also want to thank you Jordy, you Justin and you also Kevin for, you know, just, I guess like building study labs with me and also, you know, you, you helped me like inspire myself and, you know, seeing you grind also like makes me think that I need to grind harder.

1:23:05So thank you everyone here. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers guys. Crypto wouldn't be the same without you guys. So thank you, sir.

1:23:23All right. Follow me. All right. All right. So I'm my star two three. I'll talk to you later.