Okay, so Meltem, I've been told a few things. One was that I have to stand up straight or sit up straight. Okay, like I seemingly all over the place, but okay. How's life with you?
Life's amazing. Yeah, what's new? Everything is new, but also nothing has changed. Same as always, just focused on building a new firm, doing what I know how to do.
I want to jump into Crucible in a minute, but first I have a few questions. Them some hey with you, is that fair? For sure, yeah. How do I pronounce your last name?
Demirors. Like the mirrors, but the mirrors. Yep, like the mirrors. The mirrors, the mirrors. Yeah.
Okay. What's the origin of your first name? I'm dying to know. Really, and what is it?
Okay, so my family is Turkish. Both my parents are Turkish, but I was born and raised in the Netherlands. When my parents knew they were going to have a girl, they were thinking of names that would sound pretty in every language. In Turkish, Meltem is not a super common girl's name, but Meltem is the breeze that comes from the Mediterranean. My parents thought it was pretty, and that's where it comes from.
I love that. I was named after Keith Richards. It's so less romantic than what yours is. My father wanted to name me Mick, my mother said no way you can't be called Mick, and so they went to Keith Richards. They negotiated to Keith Alexander Grossman. So not as romantic, but that's very metal.
Honestly, I believe in nominative determinism. I never really thought about it. Maybe a decade ago I realized having a strange name that you have to spell, that's sort of unusual, is a huge competitive advantage. Huge competitive advantage, unbelievable. People do not recognize what an amazing either flow factor or recognizability it gives you. It helps you stand out from the pack. Let's say all of the success I've had in life, let's thank my name for. Thank you, Mom and Dad. And then all of the not success is my fault. How about that? My parents will be happy. Love you.
My biggest regret is I don't have a number at the end of my name. I want like... if you go in the III, you're like wow, there's something about it. If it was like Keith Grossman III, you're like huh, that's like landed gentry status. I know literally, you're like I have books about my family. If I have a number that... no, my family, my parents don't even know what day they were born. You ask my grandparents and they're like it was sometime in the spring, we had just planted this crop. There are no letters at the end of our names. I like that their days are based on crops. They're like the crops, yes. You were... that's what happens when you're a farmer. They grew up in a farming community that had no tech, no connectivity to the outside world, fairly low formal education levels.
So, how many brothers and sisters?
I only have one sibling, sadly.
What I was excited about with this conversation was I know you through sort of the space, and I have tremendous respect for everything that you've achieved and you've built. But I was saying earlier, I don't know you that well as a person. So if it's okay, can I... they gave me your bio. This is... am I allowed? Do you mind? Will it make you... can I read your bio to everyone so when they see this they can hear how amazing you are?
If you'd like to. I don't really think it's exciting, but you'd like to. Of course I do, because this is where it was interesting. I also took notes at the end of your bio where I was like, this is written to me by someone else.
They were like, you know, now that I know Meltem Demirors is founder and general partner of at Crucible, an early stage fund investing in the intersection of crypto, computing, and commodities. Throughout her career, Meltem has earned her place as one of the most respected and distinctive investors in crypto. So this... I'm going to pause one second. I agree with that part. That part's amazing. Okay, this is where I was like wow, I didn't know this part. Before launching Crucible in May of 2024, she served as the chief strategy officer at CoinShares, which I knew, Europe's largest long-standing digital asset investment firm which oversees $7 billion assets under management. Before that, Meltem was with the founding team at Digital Currency Group. That I did not know. That's an interesting one. I'm like this is unbelievable. Meltem has lectured at MIT and Oxford and is an angel investor in over 100 startups. Now we go back. Before joining the crypto industry in 2015, Meltem began her career trading and working in operations in the oil and gas industry, and she studied math and econ at Rice and had an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management. I love this. I did not know that. Now what I was disappointed in this bio was no mention of CryptoDickButts, no mention of building Bitcoin rigs, no mention of hanging out with artists. Essentially what I see all the time with you. So all of those areas, I guess my first question to you is CryptoDickButts. I know this is about modern money, but I actually have an angle here because I'm obsessed with the CryptoDickButts as a community. And as you've done with it, what got you into CryptoDickButts and why are you so fascinated with it?
Yeah, sure. So first of all, thanks for reading the bio. Appreciate it, Keith. It's been such a fun decade. I've been in crypto professionally for 10 years now as of 2025. That's a really long time. A decade is nothing in any other industry, but in crypto, that's a lot. So CryptoDickButts for me... what was always really interesting about Bitcoin, and I got into Bitcoin personally in 2012. When I went to MIT in 2013, it was one of the only universities where there was a lot happening with Bitcoin. My classmate Dan Elitzer ran the MIT Bitcoin Club with an undergrad student Jeremy Rubin. We worked together on a bunch of stuff because I ran the fintech club. Fintech and Bitcoin were kind of... there were no other coins, it was just Bitcoin. The Ethereum paper hadn't even come out yet, that would be in 2015. That's when I first started learning about cults. I view Bitcoin as a social movement first and foremost. There's that great meme on the internet of a die stacking dominoes. The tiniest domino is like wanting to buy mushrooms on the internet, which is the Silk Road. Ross Ulbricht started selling mushrooms on the internet and that turned into a whole thing. The last domino in this meme is toppling the global financial system. I don't know if that's the ultimate outcome of Bitcoin, but what I always like to joke is we memed over the last decade, we have collectively through the work of a bunch of anonymous and pseudonymous people on the internet who very rarely see each other in physical space, we have memed a global reserve currency into existence. That is absolutely incredible. Then you fast forward to NFTs. We saw a lot of NFT communities emerging. Obviously there's a lot of overlap with the fine art side of things. I don't come from that, I don't really know anything about art other than what I like. But what was so interesting to me, the first NFT community that really caught my attention was September of 2021. It was Ether Rocks. I saw Ether Rocks and I was like, this is so funny. For those who don't know, it's a 100 piece NFT collection and it is a PNG file. Literally Google free clip art rock and hit search, it's the first result on Google Images. That's the Ether Rock. Someone took that image, colored it in browns and grays and reds and blues. I have a gray rock, his name is Grug. I learned about Ether Rocks and I bought one. At the time I texted everyone I knew, I was like, okay, shame me out, this sounds ridiculous. I'm spending 9 ETH, which at the time was like $35,000. I'm basically spending a Honda Civic on this image of a rock. And here's why: it's one of the first NFTs, it's a rock, and it's so funny, it's going to piss people off. I was like, this is going to infuriate people. I got my friend Arthur Hayes to buy one. We talked to a bunch of people about it. Justin Sun spent a million dollars on one. I just would not shut up about it. Literally two weeks later, CNBC, five up prime time Fast Money, what are they talking about? People are buying and selling clip art pictures of rocks for millions of dollars. It made people so angry. I knew that was going to be a banger because memetically it's so ridiculous. It goes back to this ridiculous spectacle. It's really commentary on the age we live in, much like the banana that you saw a year later taped on the wall by Cattelan, which by the way that banana is now owned by Justin Sun. The market appreciates ridiculousness. So that was in September. We went through this three month craziness with Ether Rock. The craziest moment, if I may recount this with Ether Rock, was we threw a party during NFT NYC at the peak. It's this NFT conference in New York. We flew in, we were like let's throw a sick party at a nightclub in New York that had not even opened yet. On top of that, we flew in Lee Burridge and Jamie Jones to do a back-to-back set. They're icons in the world of electronic music. But the party was only for people who owned an Ether Rock. At the time, Ether Rocks were not part of what the cool kids in crypto were buying. Everyone owned CryptoPunks. Literally that night at the door, someone who owned a bunch of CryptoPunks showed up to the party, were not let in, and they were like, oh, all these CryptoPunks, I'm a huge NFT collector. They ended up buying at the door that night a 2.4 million dollar Ether Rock. It just goes to show you, memes and wanting things that other people have and that you can't have, it's such an innately human thing. To me, Ether Rock is the encapsulation. There will never be 100. I'm never selling mine. Most people I know are never selling theirs. Why? Because it's just a piece of history, of crypto history. Very niche, but this is my history. So then February comes along, about 3 months later. I had rented a house in Jackson Hole and I had invited some crypto friends to come out. I was like let's just have a fun sort of ski trip. We're all at this house and we're sitting there and I'm like, okay, I've looked at these little things, CryptoDickButts. Has anyone seen these? So we all start looking at that. We all get our laptops out. CryptoDickButts are like 0.3 ETH, a couple hundred bucks. We are sitting there looking at each other and we're like, let's buy a bunch of these DickButts. They're so... they're dicks and butts. It's the first internet meme. Let's just buy a bunch. So we all start buying DickButts. We're all together. Everyone's a little bit crazy. I'm in this. I think you're in this chat too, Keith. It's called JPEG Morgan. I'm talking about CryptoDickButts. My friend Blondish, who's a DJ, she's like oh I have a CryptoDickButt. Then these other DJs are like oh I have a CryptoDickButt too. We decide to give a CryptoDickButt to Diplo because someone is friends with him. We literally all in this house together sit around and we're like let's have a Spaces about DickButts. All these people show up. Snoop, who was big in the NFT world at the time, he starts talking about DickButts. All of a sudden DickButts go on this crazy run. I was like okay, let's double down on this. We need to throw a party. So we threw an Eyes Wide Shut themed party. I was like let's just go full cult with it. I decided on my way to said party that I was going to be the High Priestess of the CryptoDickButts. To this day I remain. It's a spiritual leadership role. It's something that will forever be a part of me. I wrote in the taxi on the way to the venue a whole sermon in Latin about CryptoDickButts, which I later recorded and then remixed. You can find it on Spotify. If you look up CryptoDickButts on Spotify, you can listen to a two-minute track of me chanting in Latin. I don't speak a word of Latin by the way. What I did over the next year with CryptoDickButts was really lean into this idea of cult. The community is super active. We did a lot of in-person events. I think what's so fun is I'm a child at heart, so getting to say dick and butt all the time in a normal context. The home of DickButts is called Grug Island. It's just so preposterous that it's also so fun, so logical. For me, I've always enjoyed the absurdity, but also I wanted to experiment with some of these really interesting dynamics that were emerging around the intersection of memetic desire, cults of personality. What I like about CryptoDickButts is they're not my project. Ether Rock is not my project. I don't want to launch a project. I'm an investor. I'm not looking to make money off of other people. I've never sold my Ether Rock. I've never sold a single CryptoDickButt. I'm not here to cross from my position in a community or to try to launch something. I'm an investor and I learn by doing. For me, doing this was a really fun way to learn. I'll be very honest, Keith, maybe you feel this way about your job sometimes. My job can be really serious. These moments of levity that allow me to be a different person and to be not serious, they're fun for me. They keep me sane.
Actually, the reason I bring it up, and everyone's probably thinking like why would we start a conversation on modern money on CryptoDickButts, but the reason I bring it up is no front of time. I got my first CryptoDickButt. I remember trying to explain to people the absurdity of the NFT movement through the rationality of what I was seeing. Imagine if I went to you and I said, I want you to invest in a community that has 2,500 members, that has done $20 million in sales, is profitable, zero overhead cost, the group is rabidly obsessed, and will buy anything that has its trademark on it. You would want to be in that community in a second. You'd write me a check as a VC in a second. If I flipped that around and I said I'm going to pitch you CryptoDickButts, it's essentially a hot dog with a dick at the end of it in funny different ways, you'd look at me and be like get out. But what people forget in the absurdity is what the NFTs ultimately did was they highlighted the value of memes. I think you're seeing that now with meme coins. You're seeing it because what you're getting is an entire culture of people who feel very comfortable with social media, very comfortable with digital ownership, very comfortable with transacting online, and now for the first time ever have the currency that they feel comfortable with in terms of finding community in a world that's otherwise lonely.
Can I just augment that a bit, Keith? Here's what I think differentiates meme coins from things like Bitcoin and to a certain degree CryptoDickButts. What makes communities, communities of beliefs in particular, a handful of things. It's a shared belief system. In Bitcoin, it's the myth of Satoshi, the white paper. What really works about Bitcoin is the founder is pseudonymous. There is this air of mysticism around it. Same thing in CryptoDickButts, by the way. CryptoDickButts and Ether Rock, nobody knows who deployed the contract. It's this mysterious figure called Slow Bro, who the community nicknamed Daddy. This idea of the unknown founder coming in and laying down rules is very important. What I did with CryptoDickButts early on is I wrote the Ten Commandments of CryptoDickButts because we needed those rules, those community standards. The second thing is you have rites and rituals. In Bitcoin, the rites and rituals are things like don't trust, verify. It's all of the little procedures you go through with your private key, with your Ledger. There are all of these rituals around Bitcoin that are a really important part of being a Bitcoiner. The 21 million number is memetically very important to Bitcoin. Same thing with CryptoDickButts. I think one of the things that meme coins sometimes lack, because people have all of these perverse financial incentives and typically they have known founders or known people who launched them, and they don't have these persistent rites and rituals that people can coalesce around, what you end up having is meme coins tend to be extremely ephemeral. We saw the same thing with a lot of NFT communities. Most NFT communities today don't really persist. Bored Ape Yacht Club is a strong community, although I'd argue in spite of Yuga, not because of Yuga, the parent company that bought the IP. You have Pudgy Penguins, which the IP was bought by someone who did a great job turning it around. But there aren't really that many NFT communities or even crypto communities that I can think of that have strong culture and strong communities around them today. It's like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana. After that it gets really spotty. If you look at coins, it's very ephemeral.
Yeah, actually you make a great point and I do agree with you on this point. I do think that when Litecoin actually flipped its narrative and said we're going to become a meme, that was the first point where people were like oh let's rally around this in a very similar way, but still lack certain things. So let me ask you now, shifting forward, how do you take this lens, and this lens is so much like... I agree with you. I'm a kid at heart. I always joke I have three ages: I'm 98, I'm 45, and I'm 12. There are elements of crypto that keep you at the 12, and it's really fun. Deep regard. How do you take your understanding of this space, of mathematics, of investing, and apply it to Crucible?
Great transition. A really strange transition, probably amazing transition. I want credit for the best transition of all time. Crucible. My overarching thing is this: you have to believe in something. You have to stand for something. Aaron Burr, in the grand scheme of things, that was the whole thing with Hamilton. Aaron Burr, he's like you stand for anything, Aaron Burr. I stand for something. Jefferson stood for something. Sorry, my dorkiness in American history on that. So this has been my rallying cry. Why did I join DCG when I was leaving grad school? I took a pay cut. Bitcoin had just gone from $1,200 to $250 in my first three months at DCG. I was broke and severely in debt. Bitcoin went from $250 to... why didn't I do that? Because I believed in something. I believed that Bitcoin was going to be something. I didn't know 100% what, but I knew it was important enough for me to do that. Why did I join CoinShares? Because I knew that Bitcoin was going to become an institutional asset. Working with an asset manager that was going to help take Bitcoin and make it investable to people like my dad, people who owned traditional brokerage accounts, that was going to be important. Why am I building Crucible? Over the last year and a half I've had a realization. What I believe in and what's really important... people talk about first principles all the time. This is where my story as an investor comes in. So Crucible. We live in a world where we have been led to believe that there is infinite abundance in the digital realm. There's an infinite amount of compute, an infinite amount of connectivity. Every year our phones get faster, the connection we have, our Wi-Fi gets faster. Everything just gets faster. There's more. That's not reality. Everything that we do in the digital world requires two things to happen. It requires an electron somewhere to flow through a chip of some kind, and then it requires a packet to travel either through a physical route or a different route through Wi-Fi and other connectivity, but typically it's fiber still predominantly. You need those two things to happen. Without those two things, you have no digital anything. We live in a really critical time where our physical infrastructure has been completely underinvested in because for the last 15 years since the Great Financial Crisis, the story has been Silicon Valley tech, software eating the world. We have reached, I think, a limitation of what's possible with software. Now we're at a point where we need to invest in a step function change in the way our physical infrastructure is financed, is aggregated, is virtualized. The biggest indication of this is the insane run Nvidia has had. Nvidia is the first stop in my view in the capex receiver hypothesis of this broad-based physical infrastructure transformation. As I was thinking about what I wanted to do with the next decade plus of my life, it was okay, I want to invest at this intersection. Using everything I've done over the last decade in the world of crypto, this digitization of money and value, and I want to apply it to this emerging new physical infrastructure economy. Think about how can we use blockchains and digital money to make the world of electrons and atoms better, more efficient, and more resilient. That was really the genesis of Crucible. I've been working on Crucible for the last year. It's been a fun and interesting journey. I don't have all of the answers. If I did, I wouldn't be doing this. I'd be chilling with my crypto memes. If you knew all the answers, you wouldn't be doing this interview. You wouldn't be at this discussion. I'm probably sick. I'm really a sick person, but you know what it is? I'm having so much fun. I'm learning so much. What's really nice for me is that the last decade was fully immersed in the world of crypto. I'm now spending a lot of time still in crypto, but I'm talking to data center operators, people who own grid assets, people who operate behind the meter, off grid assets. I am getting to spend time in the world that I came from. When I was in my early 20s, I was running around the oil field in West Texas and in Horseheads, Pennsylvania, in the shale, which is all the way up in Saskatchewan. I was doing weird stuff in the physical world and learning a lot about how processes work that make it possible for us to have cars and use plastics. I was learning about how things were made. Now I feel like I'm going back to that world and really starting to understand all of these value chains that make our digital world functional. I just think there's such an amazing, incredible opportunity for us to take all of this tooling and infrastructure that's been built in the world of crypto and actually use it in a way that makes the physical world more optimized, more efficient. A really short way to summarize that is we invest in software, not hardware. What it is is number one, aggregation. There are a bunch of resources everywhere. People have excess compute capacity, people have storage, connectivity, they have access generation or power storage capacity. How do we build topologies of where these assets are in these networks? We can incentivize people to do that with stablecoins, with tokens. We've learned people will do a lot for some tokens. So how do we build and aggregate these disaggregated assets and build data topologies that people can actually build on? How do we then use those aggregated topologies to optimize and orchestrate these really complex physical networks? The last step is once we've done that, we financialize it and bring it on chain. Even just something as simple as...
I think that's a great place to pause and we'll pick up there.
making the energy grid in the US a transactive energy grid where the flow of payments follows the flow of electrons, making the grid a transactive grid where you can have the flow of data and information or the delivery of connectivity services be accompanied by real-time payments. These are things that I think are intuitively very logical and are frankly inevitable. So my job at Crucible is figuring out what order this is going to happen in and to make well-informed bets on how this future is going to evolve. But I 100% believe, just like I did with DCG that Bitcoin was inevitable, just like I did with CoinShares I believed institutionalization of crypto is inevitable, again I believe this movement is inevitable. It's going to happen. The physical world is going to become more efficient as a result of step changes in how we apply technology to it. I'll invest in that. I wish that we disagreed on something because then we could actually debate it, but I think that what we're about to see is the biggest movement towards efficiency that anyone's ever seen. All of these technologies are taking these inefficient structures that are in place and literally creating far more efficient structures, squeezing out all the inefficiencies. If you want a great book, have you read the book Grid by Gretchen Bakke on the history of the energy grid in the United States?
Of course, of course. Who would have thought the most boring topic was so interesting?
I know, it's not boring at all. I literally after I read that book I emailed her and said I love this book so much. I started to speak to her when I was at Bloomberg and I kept in touch with her through time. Today, my understanding of how energy and electricity in the country moves and is stored and is wasted is unbelievable. When I look at blockchain technologies, when I look at AI technologies, when I look at all the stuff that's emerging, I see it through the lens of efficiency. Take structures and move them towards an efficiency over way.
