This is the first real bull market that we've had.
As a macro level, you want to be long crypto. You want to be long gold as things that go up when you print a bunch of money.
I don't think you guys are bullish enough.
Bitcoin is above its 200-day moving average. Also, on August 19th, Ethereum had a golden cross.
I don't think anybody's bullish enough.
I think we're going to see a meme coin at a trillion eventually.
And it's the first time in crypto that we've had product market fit, real use cases, real customers, real revenue.
And AI agent growth. We should probably give a round of applause to Johan and his team for bringing on the bull market, because before Robinhood chain launched, it was pretty dead, and since they launched, you can know what's happened to the Bitcoin price.
Thank you. It's been a fun market to be back, and it's exciting to see the price of Bitcoin coming back up.
All right, we're back in Asia and back at Token 2049. This time at the beginning of the bull market. Let's go inside and find out what people are thinking. What do you think? Bull market? When I look around here at Token 2049 in Singapore, I'd say it is thousands of attendees. This time, five floors of activations, content, talks, stands, sponsors, and of course, Alpha. And probably for me the most exciting announcement of the conference is that they're now moving to New York in June 2027, but maybe with a version that will appeal more to the pinstripe suits crowd. And who better to usher it in than Eric Trump.
To bring this to New York, to bring this to kind of the most capitalistic city anywhere in the world, to bring it to a building that we know very well, kind of brings all of these roots together, and we can't wait to have you all there.
Here in Asia, we came to look for Alpha. We came to look for the narratives driving the new bull market. I was on stage six times. Six times with a broken collarbone and two broken ribs. But I had to spread my bull thesis. So, I promised you guys the most bullish talk of Token 2049. I interviewed some of the biggest names in blockchain. And believe it or not, I even found myself in the middle of a memecoin panel with Ansem, Murad, and Paul, the founder of FOMO.
So, I want to say that this is my fifth appearance on stage today, and it's the one that I've been the most excited and the most nervous for. I believe that in this cycle, this chart is going to go all the way up there. Here we are, another bull market, and we're talking about memecoins again. Memecoin tokens paired with stocks was an innovation. In fact, two asset classes paired together with one token was actually an innovation.
If there's one thing that you should be holding in a world where every single country is devaluing their currency and the yields are going to hell, you must have Bitcoin or gold in your portfolios.
Even with a broken collarbone, two broken ribs, and strict instructions from a doctor to stay home, no one covers this industry like Crypto Banter. Excuse my arm. I broke my collarbone trading memecoins on Robinhood. It's a memecoin trading accident. Go ahead.
I hope you're doing okay.
I'm doing okay. My shoulder's okay.
Oh, no worries. I think we can go. Boom.
Looking back, it's been 10 years since I started doing this at CNBC, and this is my 10th Token 2049 conference, so I wasn't going to miss it.
We're here in Asia looking for the five narratives driving this bull market. First, I was on stage with Robinhood asking Johann about moving real-world assets on chain. Then it was Arthur Hayes talking about AI agents and what they're going to eat. I really think that your launch was one of the most significant and one of the most successful things to happen in the crypto market. 70% of our volume is happening on weekends or after hours when the...
70 or 72. Yeah. I think it's the first time that anyone in the world, you know, you can take any place as long as they have a phone and internet connection, they can create a wallet and they can get exposure to the greatest economy in the world.
I think AI will be super productive. I think AI agents are going to take over commerce in a lot of ways. However, it's not going to happen fast enough to stop this debt implosion without printing money.
A third narrative was memecoins. They're still here, but they're different this time around.
I think your next 200 billion, 300 billion type memecoin is going to be an extremely hardcore tokenized ideology, tokenized movement.
So, it's almost like religion, so to speak, something bigger than just a cultural movement.
I think that investing and spirituality are going to merge into one. And I think that the smartest investors, that's where they're going to be finding the next thousand-x.
Then it was over to some serious business. We started talking about the post-quantum crisis. And this week, Justin Drake published a tweet warning everyone to prepare for what he called Bank Run Day. In response, enter Zcash. But only this time, they're talking about a future that's quantum-safe and private.
When you have AI being directed at every public ledger, AI being used to hack to get private information, and then putting it all together, it's very clear you need private assets and you need something like Zcash.
Looking around, the mood is bullish. With Token 2049 expanding to New York next year, headliners left and right are trumpeting our industry's progress. Ran Neuner here talking to Trump about the future of finance built in the United States.
Go back 18 months, you would have never seen the acceleration that we've seen. And frankly, it's because of all of you. It's because of this conference. It's because of the people in this room. It's because people dared to push back against major headwinds, guys. We pushed back against incredible headwinds. And honestly, I think today we can all declare victory.
Then another bunch of fighters fighting back at the bull from Bellagi and Polymarket to Tom Lee to Aave, Athena, Hype, VCs, NASDAQ, Amazon, you name it, they were all here.
You've gone from, you know, the crypto stuff to the election stuff. What does the breakdown look like? What do the markets look like today? What's markets kind of...
You know, I'm still a big believer in, call me crazy, but like financial Legos and composability and the ability to have open financial primitives.
Bitcoin is above its 200-day moving average. That happened on August 19th. Also on August 19th, Ethereum had a golden cross.
But since 2010, Bitcoin averages 80% positivity over the next 6 months, 200% gains. Ethereum averages 290%.
So the title of this panel is DeFi's institutional breakthrough, right? Like the point is that the financial system should be accessible to everyone. It should be a wealth creation opportunity.
All these companies realize just as much as we did that agentic commerce is going to be a big thing and they're ready for it.
Because I think you've seen several companies that are really driving the tokenization of markets come public earlier in the year.
It's harder to believe, but it feels like it's coming to life.
From Ilia and to Joe Lubin and ETH Men in Black with stacks on Bitcoin to investors paving 2049 in a bullish setting like no other conference.
Everything is huge here and over the top. Exchanges headline the floors with huge setups. Blofin with long lines competing in this jumping game right behind our stand. And so you may hear this like strange arcade sound coming up every now and then. Tron and the notorious Justin Sun playing for keeps. And Bitget turning on the robots. There were lots of robots.
And remember it's F1 here in Singapore. So BingX showcased their Ferrari partnership and Gate and Max Verstappen took the stage right after me and Ansem.
Exchanges kill it here from OKX to MEXC to Bybit to HTX, all the exchanges go big. There was XRP Mod selling XRP merch and believe it or not these guys were sold out. Then I saw Cardano making waves around their new Midnight privacy layer. Changenow was changing and decentralizing. And this time I saw AWS. I saw Cloudflare. Then there was Fireblocks building infrastructure in crypto and Stable.com. Well, they were doing stable funds. We even saw our partners Bitfunded giving people funded accounts. Across the hall, there was even a Dubai pavilion advertising all things Dubai, one of the big crypto hubs and Token 2049's next destination.
This is Token 2049, the destination in crypto. It's Bitcoin. It's crypto. And for some reason, there are a lot of punching bags. Maybe they're knocking out the bears and maybe they're knocking out Trump, but there's lots of bags. And there's also lots of DJs, DJs and DJing everywhere. Token 2049 is amazing. It's a conference, it's a vibe, and it's pure alpha.
However, a certain haze hangs over the horizon here, so garner Token 2049's usual outdoor activities. Fires in the region are coating Singapore in this haze, which is unfortunate, but doesn't really dampen the sentiment. And speaking of Hayes, that leads us to our first killer interview with none other than the legend Arthur Hayes himself. You see what I did there? Okay. There's a lot of people here at Token 2049. And if I were to ask anyone here who the person is that's having the most fun, they would say Arthur Hayes is having the most fun.
You look like you're having fun here, bro.
I mean, we should. This is fun. It's a bull market. Let's go.
What's going to drive it?
I think France is going to blow up soon. And that is going to be what gets all these central bankers off their ass to just start just hammering that buy button.
Talk to me about AI productivity. And the reason why I ask is because the only way that we can get ourselves out of this financial mess is if AI productivity grows so much that somehow the countries are managing to pay their debt from the increased productivity. Right? That's the theory.
That's what Kevin Warsh has come out and said. That's what Scott Bessent's come out and said.
In your mind, how realistic is that?
I think AI will be super productive. I think AI agents are going to take over commerce in a lot of ways. However, it's not going to happen fast enough to stop this debt implosion without printing money.
So, it's almost like if this doesn't happen quick enough, then we're going to get the collision. But if it does, we could narrowly avoid the collision.
You think that there's a higher probability we're going to hit, we're going to collide?
Yeah, because the collision is within 18 months.
Talk to me about what the collision looks like. And I mean I know your outcome is that they just have to print money, but what is the collision then?
The collision is that OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX signed on the dotted line and they said we will consume trillions of dollars worth of compute once your data center goes live. Right, so they don't have to spend any money now, they just get the signed paper and people are like, oh great, look, we have a customer, and they said they'll start paying us in two years when we deliver the data center. Okay, so you deliver the data center in late 2027, early 2028, and now Anthropic and all these companies are like, 'Oh, we need to find hundreds of billions of dollars to pay these people because this is what we're contractually obligated to do.' So one of two things happens. Either you don't have the money and you raise it. You don't have the money and you cannot raise it, or your product is so successful that finally unit economics are positive and you can afford to pay for it.
Well, I think you want to, as a macro level, you want to be long crypto. You want to be long gold as things that go up when you print a bunch of money. You don't want to try to short AI stocks. Difficult. Very difficult. I'd rather buy the bailout if it happens.
You say buy Bitcoin, buy gold, but is Bitcoin still a proxy for crypto when that happens? Or is it a run for Bitcoin and not really a run for crypto because crypto is seen as VC?
No, I mean obviously there's certain crypto coins that do very well other than Bitcoin. Maybe Ethereum, some decentralized applications that have proper cash flows, but Bitcoin is the OG. It is crypto and so beta to crypto will be Bitcoin. It'll go up.
All right. So, you're talking about this AI thing. I know that you're very excited about your own project. You literally spent half an hour talking about your own project. We've made a dedicated video on your project which I'll link below in the description for all you guys to see. But for those of you who are hearing about it now for the first time, tell us about FLOOP.
Right. So if we believe that there are going to be all these agents and they don't come with a payments network out of the box, they get to choose one. Then whoever creates that network will have created the most valuable network ever to be created. Why? Because you have trillions of economic agents who exist 24/7, trade at the speed of light, can form groups seamlessly. This is what an agent can do. It's much different than what we can do as humans. So, you know, Visa, Mastercard, whatever, Bitcoin, all these payment networks worth trillions of dollars for the human economy. Imagine what you can do with the agentic economy.
You're creating the currency for... you're creating the...
We are in the running to create the currency that helps coordinate AI behavior.
Tell us a little bit about how the currency works.
So essentially it's just like Bitcoin. You can contribute GPU capacity. You do useful inference. So an agent says, 'Oh, I have a model. I have this data packet. I want it done in a certain amount of time.' The miner picks up that order, processes it, and it gets rewarded with block reward in FLOOP and transaction fees in FLOOP, just like Bitcoin. And now you've basically created a link between FLOOP, the currency, and compute, the thing that agents need to survive.
Amazing. And when is it launching?
We are doing our public testnet which is an airdrop. 25% of the 10-year supply we're airdropping for miners, validators, and just for using your AI agent on the network. That happens late October till early Q1 of next year. You know, we take a break, then we launch the Genesis block in Q1 of next year.
Guys, you heard that correctly. I was talking with Arthur on a stage before this and 25% of the tokens are going to be airdropped after a 3-month testnet. 25% of the tokens are going to be airdropped. So it is actually worth farming. We'll leave a link below to anyone who wants to get details now to farm. Arthur, good to see you my friend. Have a good time. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Remember if you do want to start farming his new project, click the link below because there's a great way to start farming. Meanwhile, over here was my memecoin panel. As I mentioned, it was me, Ansem, FOMO CEO, and Murad. And he had the craziest prediction on stage. He said that he sees a day when a memecoin will hit a trillion-dollar valuation.
I think we're going to see a meme coin at a trillion eventually.
Now, let me tell you that at first it sounded absurd, but when you break it down the way that he breaks it down, maybe it's not that absurd.
I must say, when I first heard it, I thought I was like, there's no way. But you actually have a real thesis behind it.
If you think about the human body 10,000 years ago, it was your body that was the most valuable because most people were farmers or soldiers. Today, because you're either building software or developing science or orchestrating agents, it's your IQ that as of 2026 is the most valuable. It's your brain can scale much more than your body. And I think that in the future the cultural and economic bottleneck is going to be EQ, spirituality and other similar things. What people call the relational economy. So that's thing number one. Thing number two is the fact that a billion AI agents are going to come on chain and whether you like it or not, humans are not going to be able to compete against AI on anything short term. Probably anything under like two or three weeks. So ultimately people will naturally be pushed towards extreme long huddle times and essentially trading is going to start shifting more towards long-term community building and I believe that the only way to make money increasingly in the future is going to be community building and movements are communities on steroids.
So the scarcity becomes human... humanness, maybe that's the word.
They call it the humanist premium. Some people call it the social premium. Some people call it the belief theory of value.
And you're playing into... so what you're saying is the scarcity becomes humanness and the ticket to join the movement, and I'm going to use the word church, is to show that you're a member of the church, you need to hold a token so to speak.
Yeah. Essentially, one way to look at it is people are investing their money, their attention, their belief and their time and labor into certain ideas and concepts that they want to be heard loudly around the world. Think of it as a donation basket with a megaphone attached. When you're investing money, you're making it louder. And when you're taking money out, you're making it quieter. And I think people really have some things that they want to scream about. And essentially what these tokenized communities are is people banding together in order to survive being replaced by machines.
But when I look at the memecoin market now versus the memecoin market when your portfolio was at all-time highs, the market now is about launching as many coins as possible. And the metrics that we're measuring is how many coins did Pump.fun launch? How many coins did FOMO launch?
Yeah, that's a very different memecoin movement and memecoin culture. These are two different industries. Now, at the polar opposite ends of the extremes, on one extreme end, you have hyper gambling, hundreds of thousands of coins per day and holding times that are measured in seconds. On the other end of the extreme, you have holders that are prepared to hold for the next 10 years. Essentially, ultra hardcore cults that have stopped trading, started believing, and they really want to build something that's going to be 10 times bigger than Doge.
