All right, welcome everybody. Last episode of the year, we're going to have HB with us. I'm very excited. Let's roll the intro.
All right, steady lads. We have Haseeb at Dragonfly. I think I got that right. My counterpart on the chopping block is with us, and we're going to be both recapping 2024 and also looking forward to 2025. He is one of the people that whenever I have a chance to have coffee with him, my mind is going all kinds of exploring different directions. So always enjoy it. Good to have you with us. Thank you.
Thanks for having me, man.
Absolutely. I mean, it feels like one of the most eventful years. When I look at what we did, a brief look at our predictions from one year ago when we were starting to exit the bull market, the bear market, we were sort of getting into the ETF land, the promised land. I have to say, some things we got right and some things we got wrong. I think, I'm curious, Haseeb, what was your biggest miss of the year? Well, we can get into everybody's biggest miss, but let's start there. What surprised you the most?
Yeah, probably the biggest miss in absolute terms was the run-up in Solana. I was paying attention to Solana at the end of last year, and I think most people, myself included, had assumed that Solana was just left for dead after the collapse of FTX. There was always this background NFT trading volume that kept Solana alive, and I kind of thought, okay, that doesn't really feel like it has enough legs to potentially resuscitate an ecosystem that's had one of its organs ripped out. It really was built with its dependency on FTX, and with that gone, it kind of felt like it wasn't going to be able to make it back. It just had lost so much momentum and so much brand equity from the collapse of FTX. But then seeing this meme coin thing starting to take off at the end of last year, I was like, okay, this is probably a flash in the pan. The second thing I got wrong was a meme coin bull run. It seemed like a flash in the pan, like we're getting into a new crypto cycle, ETFs are taking off, there's new retail demand, and there's this new speculative energy around meme coins. But this is obviously going to be, I don't know, I was thinking like BRC-20s, where it's like a thing for a few months and then everyone gets over it and goes on to the next thing. I was just so totally wrong. Obviously, Solana now has this foundation of meme coin trading volume, which is driving a lot of the on-chain demand for Solana, but the Solana meme and the Solana tent has just gotten so much bigger. The development velocity has increased, the amount of entrepreneurs coming into Solana has increased. Everything now, stablecoin volumes, DEX volumes, not just the meme coin stuff. Even if the meme coin stuff goes away overnight, obviously it would hurt Solana tremendously, but Solana now has enough of a foundation that it's not going anywhere anymore. That was totally unexpected to me, very much broke my mental model of how these things end up progressing.
I have to say, I think my miss of the year is going to be a combination of your miss of Solana and Justin's miss of selling ETH earlier. We both didn't sell ETH early enough, unfortunately. Justin, let's not forget, Jordy, I think at the end of 2023 you predicted that ETH/BTC would go to something like 0.1, right? New high? 0.7, wasn't it?
I think basically, I remember my prediction was that Bitcoin would triple during the year and that ETH would quadruple. So times four. And instead, I think we got like a reverse, like a times four, times three maybe. So the ratio definitely was off in the end. I did get off the train a little bit earlier than you, fortunately or unfortunately. I still have a lot of ETH, but I think instead of being a maxi on the ratio, I realized once the ETF timing kind of happened and we got that temporary pump. But I have to say, I've been a little bit surprised with the ETH ratio. I think we've obviously discussed it, that Solana has built the greatest casino on Earth, at least over the last six months. We'll see if there's a new casino now with these AI agents and where those move, or if somehow the ecosystem on Hyperliquid or Monad or one of these new chains becomes the new casino. But I think, as Haseeb said quite well, the surprise has been just the amount of levels built on the Solana ecosystem, and that's been pretty astounding to me.
Oh yeah, sure. I think as a podcast collectively, we, on the way down of ETH/BTC, were like, oh, this has to be the bottom, this has to be the bottom, this has to be... oh, damn it, why am I holding this? So that's, I think collectively, that's been our miss. I missed memes in Q1 and Q2, and I'm kind of learning from that and I'm just trying to shitcoin more and trying to embrace the crypto industry for what it is. So yeah, ETH/BTC for sure. I think we were just clinging on to our bag biases and being community members. I think the mistake everyone makes in crypto is that we just find a small community, a niche within CT, and we just join that community and we only listen to those types of people. What I've been trying to do is follow a diverse amount of people. For example, Sui, I have no idea what the hell is happening with Sui, but I'm following random Sui maxis on Twitter. I don't really agree with anything that they say, but maybe it helps to at least have some stream of consciousness. So I'm just trying to be more open-minded. I think I was way too close-minded in the first half.
Well, let me give a little bit of a counterpoint to that. I listened to the last episode where Vitalik was talking about how he doesn't engage with a lot of stuff that's happening in crypto and sometimes he misses things. It's just how it is. I think on some level, it's really easy to feel bad about yourself in crypto when you know that famous New York Times headline that I still love, which is 'Everybody else is getting hilariously rich except you.' Every cycle in crypto feels that. On some level, you kind of have to decide for yourself why you're here. Are you here to make sure that you never miss anything and you never let an opportunity to make money pass you by? Or are you here because you want to do things in a way that resonates with you, what your style is, what your skills are, what you're best at? There are some people who are going to make great meme coin traders and they can just incur the brain damage enough to predict where the waves are going to be moving to the next meme. And there are some people who are like, look, I'm never going to be good at that game, it's just not what I'm here for, and it's not what I enjoy. I'd rather spend all my time in the Solana infrastructure world or in this world or that world, or trading NFTs for that matter. There are still people trading NFTs. If that's what you love, one, you're going to have a better time doing it, and two, you're going to make it anyway if you just stick it out long enough and get good at the thing that you're doing. The number one thing that I see is that people who jump from trend to trend to trend are bad at all of them, or they just never get deep enough to be good at them. The reason why you're making money is someone else is losing money. So who's the guy who's losing money? The answer is somebody who's sort of jumping from trend to trend all the time. The thing in crypto that people really do, the thing that crypto ultimately really rewards, is discipline. So that's my counterpoint.
This was a good tweet this week from Darren Lau. He says, 'Imagine you decided AI was going to be the narrative and you bought TAO and FET and Render and AR, and everything is down or break even. Meanwhile, the vertical is going crazy, a bunch of stuff is up 100x.' So it just proves the point, it's so difficult even if you... I don't know, it's so hard to try to get the narrative. The game is so difficult, it's not as easy as it looks on Crypto Twitter, I would say.
Yeah, I mean, Crypto Twitter is kind of like people, it's like financial Instagram, right? Just like, 'Oh, I'm so smart.' But reality is... I've never heard that, that's a really good line. Yeah, I'm like, I'm like omega mid-curve. But the AI agent stuff has made me think a lot more. We were talking about this before we went live, but I feel like the past two, three years we really haven't had that many interesting metas. I mean, meme coins pumping are great, it's fun and whatnot, but no new innovation. But the AI agent stuff, I feel like there's something there. So it's the first meta where I was forced to think critically about everything that's happening. So that's why I think everyone here is looking into it. But yeah, I actually think that should be one of the main topics of today.
Let's finish this specific category. Justin, what was your biggest miss? I'm guessing it's still not selling ETH, but is there anything else?
Yes, it's definitely that, but it's a broader theme. My biggest miss has been fading what upsets me. Because one thing I've learned is if a token upsets me, there's usually something behind that emotional reaction. So I faded Solana because it upset me that it was challenging ETH and taking a different approach to how important decentralization was versus speed and executing at the technical level. I faded it because it upset me and I didn't agree with it, but really they were taking an alternate path that made sense in its own right. I faded buying Hyperliquid because I used it but didn't get the airdrop and it upset me. I faded GOAT because it was just a meme coin and it was stupid and silly and inappropriate or improper. Now I've made a big change to that. When something upsets me, I'm looking into it more deeply, maybe getting a small position to see how it performs, and trying to learn from that. If I'm getting an emotional reaction, other people are too, which is attention, and attention is all that matters in our space.
Yeah, I agree. Well said. Okay, actually, let's do all of our 2024 things before we move to the agents in 2025, because I'm sure that will come into the predictions quite heavily. We have a category here that I'm quite curious about. Everybody says founder of the year. Let me start. Let me remind people, our founder of the year from last year that everybody said... We have Justin, Brian Armstrong. I think just a very solid pick, you can't lose with that pick. I mean, I cheated basically. We have Taii also chose a founder of an exchange. We have CZ. I think he went to jail for our sins, that's why. And I think he made like 11 billion dollars while he was in jail, from what I understand, or something like that. So I think still a good pick. My pick for last year that sort of impacted the game was Pac-Man. He was launching Blast, and at that time he was the Ponzi master. Obviously, probably one of the bigger disappointments of the year, not on the caliber of Friend Tech, but that hasn't translated yet. I'm hoping, obviously for Pac-Man's sake, that a 2025 revival is in the cards. But let's go with this year. Haseeb, any founder? I mean, you work and talk with so many founders, it doesn't have to be a Dragonfly portfolio company. Who's your founder of the year?
Yeah, I was going to say Jeff from Hyperliquid, but I assumed that was going to be everyone's answer, so I thought, okay, I'll go a little bit further afield and pick Guy from Ethena. Who is a founder that... Oh, you were going to pick him? Okay, all right, I'll stick with Jeff then. From Hyperliquid is number one founder of the year. All right, at least we're going to piss somebody off no matter what. So sorry to front-run you guys, but those are my two picks, in rough order.
I think those are very safe picks. I mean, I was obviously thinking about those two. I think Guy has surprised me more. Jeff, I would say I've known him for a while, and he has the advantage of being an HFT trader in the land of people building product. All these people building DEXes, I've spoken to every single one of them that's built any meaningful DEX over the years, or even CEX. None of them come from an HFT background like he does, and he actually understands microstructure. I think the way that he's won, or at least kind of become founder of the year from Haseeb, which is already winning something, is that by understanding the microstructure, he did a few things really, really well. One was this HLP vault, which would not be possible with somebody who didn't have this background. He kind of put together something that people could, in essence, become the house, become the market maker, become part of the consistent yield. That bootstrapped activity because a lot of the early people were not traders, they were just looking for something to put money and get yield, and that built the community. Not everybody is going to be an amazing trader, right? So he used his skills to build that. He also understood microstructure in a way that... this HLP vault, I think, has some priority every block. He also implemented some block priorities for cancels, which is a traditional thing, like a last look you have sometimes in FX. By doing that in crypto, he allowed liquidity to bootstrap more, at least to look really, really good. And I have to say, the timing, I don't know if that was skilled or not, but the timing of their launch was just perfect. And Guy as well, just to get to Guy, I mean, the timing that he launched with funding rates, I think, were just completely insane at the time that they launched. I remember like 15, 20 bps a window, that kind of thing was happening. And the reason I choose Guy is because I think the idea, even though I know Dragonfly invested and a lot of friends invested, the idea of buying staked ETH and then shorting the perpetual, I thought was not fantastic because it just didn't seem scalable. Open interest over a billion, you start to skew the funding rate negative and it doesn't make sense. But to Guy's talent, the guy's just a complete beast at BD and partnerships. It's incredible what he's managed to take, like a mediocre idea in my opinion. I know it's Arthur's idea and Arthur created a foundation for him, but he just took it and ran with it. He's built the BlackRock partnerships, all this stuff. I mean, hats off, that's awesome.
Actually, the idea so... I think Arthur popularized the idea, but the idea originally came from another project called LMA Finance, which was back... we actually seeded LMA Finance back in, I think it was 2021, in the midst of DeFi summer, back when DEXes and on-chain perps were just starting to get real. Now, LMA Finance made the mistake of trying to do everything in DEXes, and there was just way too little open interest at that time. People thought that spot was blowing up, Uniswap was getting really big, so surely perps would start to get big too. They were just way too early because the DEX was just so tiny back then on a relative basis compared to what you see in CEXes. But they had this original idea. And then you might remember another protocol called UXD, which was backed by Multicoin, which was just a clone of LMA Finance on Solana. Both of them failed because both of them were kind of hung stubbornly to this idea that everything has to be decentralized. But it was actually because we had seeded LMA Finance and helped out a lot with them, helping figure out mechanically how this thing should be done. Guy knew LMA Finance very well and understood how it worked, and was like, 'Here's what went wrong with LMA Finance. I think actually the right answer is that you have to go to CEX, you have to do off-exchange custody in order to make it trustworthy, blah blah blah, all this stuff.' Mechanically, the staked ETH is like this extra little cherry on top, but the kernel of it was really, can you do this in CEX? And in 2021, you couldn't, because off-exchange custody was just not a thing pre-FTX. So actually, a lot of pieces had to come together for this perfect storm to arise. And Guy, to his credit, he identified all of that. He understood that super, super well about the 'why now,' which as a VC you're always trying to understand. Almost always when you see a project in crypto, it's not the first time someone has come up with the idea. Very, very rare is it truly zero to one. Even think of Solana, Solana was not the zero to one. EOS was the zero to one. EOS was the first person who was like, 'We're going to take a totally different VM, super high performance, we're just going to focus on going super fast.' And EOS didn't work, right? And so Solana was kind of like, 'We're going to run it back, but we're going to realize what EOS did wrong and do it better.' The same thing is true of Ethena. So as a VC, when we led Ethena's seed round, we were kind of like, 'Who knows if this is going to work? I like the founder, I like the fact that they understand this problem structure really well, but we did not know that it was going to end up being as successful as it ended up becoming.' Which I think, in general in venture, I find over and over and over again, is that you just don't know. You can see the kernel of a good idea, but there are so many things that I thought were good ideas that failed, and so many things that I thought were terrible ideas that ended up working out. So it just teaches you to stay humble.
Yeah, by the way, our audience, unfortunately, Taii has brought in a lot of left-curve farter types in the audience. They're talking, and this is one of the comments we're seeing: 'What is the CEX you keep talking about? Who's building it?' So yeah, ask your parents. I feel like it's not my place. Yeah, if you're a meme coin trader, I'm assuming that you're probably not at the age you should be hearing about this. We are deprived of sex. A lot more to go into, but I want to give you guys a chance also to hopefully give us other founders. If you can kind of go down the list.
Yeah, I'm surprised none of you guys... this wasn't on anyone's top list. Maybe it's because I'm the ETH maxi, but I think Jesse from Base has got to be founder of the year, right? I think Base TVL has about 10x. Base is basically the hub of everything happening in Ethereum, and Base has pushed the conversation ahead of 'Are L2s parasitic? Are they not parasitic? Are they helpful?' And now for the end user experience, your decision is to L2 or Base. Builders are only deciding basically between Solana, Base, maybe a little Hyperliquid now. But for me, what I've seen Jesse do without a token is extremely impressive, and I'm excited to see what happens next year. I do think Base will release a token next year. That's one of my predictions, but we'll save that part for later.
Very, very good. Very good choice. I mean, I think he checked out at some point in the middle of the year, and then you could feel it on the chain. The chain was kind of just being run over on his own, actually. And then he came back, and then it's back. So the power of his presence is clearly there. So that's a good pick.
Yeah, so I think you know, I think all of you missed one important founder. ZeroX Racer with Friend Tech. Just kidding, just kidding. But my real pick is, I wouldn't consider him like a crypto founder, but I'm just very thankful that he helped birth the AI meta. It's Andy Ayrey. He helped create Terminal of Truths with the infinite backrooms. Admittedly, Terminal of Truths is becoming less funny over time, and GOAT's price is kind of suffering as a result. But because of Terminal of Truths and GOAT, it kind of created this new meta where it really resembles the ICO era, right? Where all these tokens with real devs are launching on Pump.fun, Virtual, or just some other fork of Pump.fun, and it's allowing anyone to buy tokens, stuff million. So I think it's actually giving equal opportunity for people to identify good teams and good ideas. So I'm really bullish on the AI meta, and it wouldn't exist if it were not for Andy. So I think he played a role in creating this AI-crypto intersection.
It's a very good, very, very good left-field kind of option. I wasn't thinking about that one, but that's a good backup to Jeff. So that's good. There's one in the chat that's interesting. Lucas from Jito. John saying Lucas Bruer, founder of the year, 100%. I think if Solana has a good year next year, maybe he'll be on the cards. I mean, Jito has just been... they haven't done anything sort of like a firework, but they've just been so consistent in delivering and doing a great job. I'm not an investor, but I've taken note and I've been quite impressed with what they're doing there. So that's a very good one.
Cool. Let's do this one: CT personality of the year. Obviously, every year we have our colorful characters. Whether it's the Dope Quan or... there's always something going on. I think we've seen equally big personalities this year. Justin, you might have one of the obvious ones. You want to choose?
Yeah, for me, I would have to say it's probably going to be Murad. I think his meme coin picks specifically are less interesting than the sort of the theme he brought to our space, which I know Haseeb has talked a lot about on The Chopping Block, and I think you have a very different perspective, which is very interesting to me. But I thought it was interesting how he made me rethink how I conceptualize what these tokens are worth and what's the underlying value there. His thesis that it's literally just an attention game is really interesting to me, and that all tokens, 99% of tokens, are meme coins, and that there's no actual value, there's no DCF model you can run. And if you run the model, it's not going to look good for you. Rethinking about XRP and Cardano as meme coins, we can go down the list. 99% of these tokens have no value capture, it's just mimetic energy. That has changed my thinking a lot. Not as interested in the meme coins, but his talk at Token2049 was actually an incredible talk. Forget about the tokens, but just listen to what he has to say. For me, that was very interesting.
It's the most viewed token talk ever, I think online. So very... I knew you were going to go with that one, and it's a very solid one. Haseeb, do you have a CT personality that has stood out to you over the year?
Yeah, I would definitely have to go with Gwart. I think this was Gwart's year to really launch as a personality. I think he's also kind of the perfect Oscar Wilde character to lampoon everything that's ridiculous about this market and this cycle. So I think it's kind of close between Gwart and Big Bird, but Gwart really has kind of gone mainstream crypto-wise. The other one, what is it? The venture apologist, balloon lover, ZeroX Balloon Lover. Yeah, venture apologist, ZeroX Balloon Lover. I think that's more of a deep cut. If you want to know what all the VCs and insiders watch, they all watch Big Bird's Twitter. Yeah, venture artist. I guess he's changed his name. He constantly shits on everything. I think Gwart is a little bit more... it's a little easier to follow, and he's more classically humorous as opposed to just talking shit. But yeah, Gwart has helped me win 'Pasta of the Week' like 25 times this year or something. So he's crushing it for sure. He is crushing it. So congrats to him. He also has his own podcast, which, good for him, he's building his little media empire.
Absolutely. Taii, who do you got?
Yeah, so mine was Gwart, but I had to do a little audible here. I think I'll have to go with Bonk Guy. Do you guys know Bonk Guy? I think he levered long Bonk right before the ramp up. I think he's paid like $5 million in funding on perps. But I think he kind of just allowed, or he's a good example of what it takes to believe in something. He's still long, he's still holding his perp long on Bonk. He's up like 10 mil, paid like 5 mil in funding or something. He's still going for it. So I think I really respect that type of stuff. Of course, there's always elements of... we can all just tell Taii this was like a last-minute pick. See, you took your real pick, so you had to just think of something on the spot.
You guys know Bonk Guy, right? You guys know Bonk Guy?
Oh, Bonk Guy is like the Dogecoin millionaire of this cycle, and he's taking it a lot further. He's like Chris Money Maker but for Bonk. But I think he's much bigger than... I think Dogecoin guy got to like a million or two and then he ran it back down to 200k or whatever. This guy has been swinging some crazy P&L. So this is like Chainlink God but for Bonk. If you look at his pin post, click on his pin post, Justin. His pin post is from March, which tells you that... I don't know how well he's done since then.
Well, I think Bonk knew high. I don't know how much he paid in funding, but he also longed a bunch of other stuff. He has a pretty good hit rate for just on-chain stuff. So okay, well now that Taii is a left-curver, Bonk Guy is like the king of the left-curver, so Taii has to pay his respects to his hero.
Okay, I'm going to... nobody chose the obvious one. I know he's not exactly CT, he's kind of a CT plus CNBC. Michael Saylor. I mean, just a phenomenon of sheer willpower plus mimetic lightning locust energy. I mean, I just brought up his Twitter and random shit like this. Can you bring up this tweet, Justin? This is just like every day for Michael Saylor is a quote like this. He says, 'If you're not buying Bitcoin at the top, you're leaving money on the table.' What the hell does that mean? I don't know, but it's provocative. I mean, he has warped people's sense of reality when it comes to Bitcoin and the prices it can go to. All the predictions. I heard you guys' podcast, Taii, and you guys were talking about 150, 180, and then everything's going up. All the predictions: 250, 500. I think Michael Saylor is responsible for a lot of this, really. And I have to say that even though he keeps buying the top, how did he buy like $15.6 thousand average Bitcoin price? I don't even know how he managed to do that last week. But despite this, I think he is successfully doing what meme coin traders have done, which is, in essence, you make it so high that you get new buyers in that have to buy in because now it's a big cap. So sovereign wealth funds, they wouldn't buy Bitcoin if it was under 100k, but over 100k it becomes like a gold asset class, they buy it. And just the power of the price... he's done it. This is going to be great for our prediction section. I'm excited for this.
We have some people in the chat. We have this guy here, and like, honorable mention. Honorable mention from a Kadak who says, 'It has to be Taii.' The Lan Al gave... I don't deserve this. Not until Farcoin pumps more. I'm just a mirror, I'm just like a shadow.
Taii, you did go from being in the DeFi farming trenches and being this niche character that's just a very nice boy who's farming the yields. You went from that, but before our very eyes over this podcast year, you've gone from that to full blown, 'I am embracing the left curve and screw the mid curve and all that stuff.' So you're in the running for sure.
Yeah, I mean, the thing is, I feel like if you started following me this cycle, everyone just thinks I'm like this conservative DeFi mid-curve or whatever. But if you follow me like four years ago, three years ago, I was like a degen, right? It's just that during the bear market, I developed PTSD which made me focus more on fundamental analysis. And I think I still do that, right? But I think when we're in a bullish regime, you kind of have to adjust your strategy. And then in the next bear chop market, I'll go back to fundamentals. The true characters must transform. So shout out there. Inspiring. I give no fucks.
So we have two more awards for the year: Meme Coin of the Year and Innovation of the Year. Let's leave meme coin last. Let's do Innovation of the Year. So innovation can be a protocol, it can be a mechanism. Let's take a broad definition. All right, who's ready? Who's got the year?
All right, all right. You boys, I feel like I don't want to steal anyone's here. So my innovation of the year is the Beam Chain. I'm extremely excited about what's coming in 2029 to 2030. I think the Beam Chain is really going to scale Ethereum, and then in the next decade or so, we'll really be able to compete with the speeds of Solana.
Yeah, just making sure. Just making sure. My real innovation of the year, and Taii, I'm sorry if this is yours, but it's very topical for me seeing what's happening with Frasa AI. It's the AI agent. I'm similar to you, Taii. There's not been something that's excited me where I think this could have a kernel of what's the future, similar to what we had in DeFi. I'll never forget when we had Robert Leshner on, and Robert was like, in 2020, 'I actually believe this stuff could work too.' Where we had these Ponzi mechanics, new food tokens launching all the time. We were all so bought in and we believed. I don't think we're there yet with AI agents, but I think there's this kernel and this thread to pull on where I think there's a real narrative here for mass adoption. And I think it actually makes sense. The narrative at the start of the year, I had this hilarious tweet from Gwart. Let's see if I can find it. But Gwart basically said, 'The intersection of AI and crypto doesn't exist.' A rare Gwart miss. But actually, we've seen that it actually does make sense for AIs to be using crypto rails for settlement.
When you say the kernel of mass adoption, mass adoption of what? That is a good question.
Well, I think about that. I will highlight this quote tweet: 'What's the shadowy place over there? That is the intersection of AI and crypto. You must never go there.' At the start of the year, this was very much taboo. I remember Bankless tweeted that AI crypto is AI money, and it didn't make any sense. But now that's sort of pivoted. What I mean by this is that it actually makes sense for AI agents to be interacting on blockchains to settle value on blockchains, to transact on blockchains, because they're actually equal citizens on blockchains, whereas in the real world they're not treated as equal citizens, right? As far as mass adoption, I think it's twofold. I think there could be an application built here that's actually useful for people, but I think the lower hanging fruit is that it's actually just mass adoption in the attention game, where people can convince themselves that this is the future and that you need to get involved with crypto, similar to DeFi Summer. So I think let's leave most of this discussion for the predictions, because while this just happened in Q4, we're kind of leading into 2025. But a very solid one. Taii, you were eager to go next.
You got it. Has to be Pump.fun, right? That's literally the best. I think so. Best thing that launched this cycle, best product-market fit. I think when it first launched and started doing well, I think most of the ETH maxis were like, 'Oh, this is just such a scam.' But if you take a look back in the past 12 months, it's basically an ICO platform, right? You just make it easier to launch tokens, you standardize how to launch tokens. If you check the contract address for Pump.fun tokens, it ends in 'pump,' so I don't have to think about it. It's like, okay, it's safe. I can buy it. It might not be safe in the sense that people are cabaling it and scamming me that way, but I can't get rugged on the token itself that way. And I think Pump.fun is also a good example of building something people actually want. I think a lot of founders build crypto projects for what they want it to be, not for what the market wants or what it needs. So yeah, I think the founders are pretty sharp.
Yeah, I mean, just the... everyone's nodding. I noticed as soon as you said that. I think that's a very clear one. And I do notice something with all the best products of the cycle. We mentioned Hyperliquid, Ethena, and now Pump.fun. What they all do is the same thing: they all allow the everyday man to basically do something that professionals were doing. So Pump.fun allows you to be the dev. You have the token now, you don't need to code and do all that stuff. You can make a token. And Ethena allowed you to get the basis trade, you don't have to do all this execution and figure out how to short and long and all this stuff. And like I mentioned, HLP lets you be the market maker in essence and provide liquidity. So it's like an easy button. People love the easy button in crypto, always has been. I think the people who get to reduce the number of clicks, account abstraction in 2025... I'm waiting for whoever's going to win this game of just making crypto very, very easy to use.
That's so astute. You know, crypto is about letting you be your own XYZ. You can be your own bank. Uniswap, you can LP and swap by yourself. That's such an interesting point of view.
Yeah. I see any interesting innovations that caught your eye?
Yeah, I think the obvious number one is the Pump.fun bonding curve to LP transition. I think that's now been copied over and over again. You see the same thing with the AI agent marketplaces, they take that same concept. To pick one that's different, I would say probably concentrated yield. This is the concept of, for something like Ethena, you have everybody who holds the stable asset, but not everybody actually gets the yield. Only people who are opting into getting the yield are getting the yield, which means that the people who are getting the yield are actually getting much more yield because the yield for the entire platform is only being given to a small number of users who are opting in to take a less liquid form of the asset, but that gets this extra yield. So why does that matter? The reason why that matters is that now you can actually kind of juice the yields that people are getting. So you see the same thing happening with Usual, a bunch of these new generation stablecoins are doing this. With Usual, it's like a stablecoin with treasuries that gives you... nominally you would think, okay, this is a stablecoin that's backed by treasuries, there's 5% yield to go around, right? Because that's what the prevailing rate is on treasuries. But if only 25% of people are actually opting in to get the yield and taking the less liquid form of the currency, they're actually getting 20% yield on top of this thing, plus you get the stablecoin incentives. I don't know who pioneered this, but I know that Ethena was probably the one that made it most popular. So it's actually very, very interesting.
