#1478 Will Clemente | Is The Bitcoin Bull Run Over?

Will Clemente is the co-founder of Reflexivity Research. In this conversation we talk about bitcoin, on-chain data, ETF’s, MicroStrategy, AI coins, meme coins, and some of the lessons Will has learned over the years. ======================= Ledger has been trusted for 10 years to secure 20% of the world’s digital assets. Their latest devices, Ledger Stax and Ledger Flex, feature secure touchscreens for safer, easier crypto management. Go to ledgerpomp.com to take control of your digital future ======================= Meanwhile is the world’s first licensed and regulated life insurance company built for the Bitcoin economy. Protect your loved ones with sound money built to manage life’s uncertainty and a broken financial system. Their BTC-denominated Whole Life Insurance policies allow HODLers to pass more BTC on to their loved ones and a tax-advantaged way to access BTC for liquidity during their lifetime. Visit their website at https://meanwhile.bm/ to join the waitlist for a policy and to learn more. ======================= This episode is brought to you by Bitdeer (NASDAQ: BTDR), a global leader in Bitcoin mining and high-performance computing for AI. Led by a seasoned management team, Bitdeer is driving innovation with its proprietary SEALMINER ASICs for Bitcoin mining and has a massive 2.5 GW power portfolio across three continents. Learn more about Bitdeer at www.bitdeer.com ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's going on guys? Today, we've got a great episode with Will Clemente, the co-founder of Reflexivity Research. In this conversation, we talk about what's going on with Bitcoin, why he isn't such a big believer in on-chain data for trading anymore, and what's going on with the ETFs and micro strategy. Then we get into things like AI coins and meme coins. What is their place in the market? Are they sustainable and resilient?

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Or are they simply passing fads that people are just gambling on? And then we also get into some of the best ideas that Will has right now and some of the mistakes he thinks he's made over the last couple of years in crypto. This conversation is incredibly interesting, and it's got lots of unique insights. So listen to the whole thing and let us know what you think. Here's my latest conversation with Will Clemente.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Ledger. They're celebrating 10 years as the most trusted name in crypto security. With over 7 million users and 20% of the world's digital assets secured, Ledger continues to lead the way in protecting your crypto and digital ownership. Their latest devices, Ledger Stacks and Ledger Flex, feature the world's first secure touchscreens, making managing your assets easier and safer than ever. Plus, the new Ledger Security Key App offers a secure alternative to traditional passwords, enhancing your digital security. Go to ledgerpomp.com to take control of your digital future. That's ledgerpomp.com. L-E-D-G-E-R-pomp.com.

• 2:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Meanwhile. Meanwhile is the world's first licensed and regulated life insurance company built for the Bitcoin economy. Operating on the Bitcoin standard, they do everything in Bitcoin. You pay in Bitcoin, they pay claims to your family in Bitcoin, you take out policy loans entirely in Bitcoin when you need liquidity. Meanwhile, Bitcoin life insurance has redefined what it means to hodl. Protect your family from life's uncertainty and a broken financial system. Build intergenerational Bitcoin wealth while the cost of living skyrockets in dollar terms. Get all the tax and legal benefits of life insurance now in Bitcoin. They are actively binding policies today. Whether you are a long-term Bitcoiner or are just considering it for the first time, a Bitcoin whole life policy could make sense for your wealth plan.

• 2:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Visit their website, meanwhile.bm, to join the waitlist and to learn more about the world's first Bitcoin life insurer. Again, that's meanwhile.bm. Go check them out today. Today's episode is brought to you by NASDAQ-listed Bitdeer. They trade under the stock ticker BTDR. They're led by a seasoned management team. Bitdeer is a global leader in Bitcoin mining and high-performance computing for artificial intelligence, and they are backed by technological innovation and a massive 2.5 gigawatt global power portfolio. Recently, Bitdeer launched its own Bitcoin mining ASIC named the Seal Miner to target what Wall Street analysts project to be a multi-billion dollar annual market. Their proprietary Seal Miner ASICs are redefining efficiency and performance, and they are

• 3:35Anthony Pompliano?

  backed by the industry's most advanced chip roadmap, with two more groundbreaking models set to launch in 2025. To learn more about Bitdeer's cutting-edge technology and business, visit their website at bitdeer.com. That's B-I-T-D-E-E-R dot com. Go check out Bitdeer today. All right, well, I thought a great place to start the conversation is you are the wizard of on-chain data. Huge part of your contribution, I think, to the Bitcoin space was all this on-chain data. But things like the ETF, things like MicroStrategy, there's a lot of Bitcoin that's being bought, not necessarily showing up on-chain. How do you think that on-chain data has evolved over the last couple of years? And how do you look at these kind of net new buyers of MicroStrategy, the ETFs, playing

• 4:19Anthony Pompliano?

  into their effect on Bitcoin's price?

• 4:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, what's going on, Anthony? Nice to be back on the pod like the old days. Um, yeah, I definitely think people initially knew me for some of this on-chain data stuff where, you know, it kind of look at the blockchain and analyze, you know, different flows based on different variables. Um, I think at this point, the flows kind of to your point are so obstructed, it's hard to really find any signal on that stuff. Um, I don't want to say I like disavowed on-chain, but like I very much stepped back from using it, uh, you know, during the last bear market,

• 4:59Speaker 02

  um, especially towards the back end of 2022 into the beginning of 2023. Um, the ETFs just amplified a lot of the reasoning behind why, um, you know, I think some of the stuff is still useful just to understand, you know, is the Bitcoin blockchain still working, right? So we can look at like hash rate or active addresses, um, you know, things like this, just to block height, just to give you sanity that Bitcoin is still working. Um, I think there's a couple of things around, like the cost basis of the network, which is kind of useful, but you know, tracking like

• 5:39Speaker 02

  quote unquote whale flows or, um, just looking at a lot of the stuff profitability metrics. Um, obviously the market's bigger than just, uh, you know, the ETFs. Um, but you know, even, you know, things like CME, there's, you know, just as much open interest on CME as Binance and just in general, I'd say a lot of the tooling for data and following flows that used to be super, super transparent. Uh, you know, you could even, even as, you know, recently as two and a half years ago, I mean, you could literally just see all of the derivatives positioning completely transparently in real time.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  As well as on-chain, like all the spot flows, now all that stuff is, is, you know, very much obscured away with, with the entrance of TradFi and, you know, as that gets more integrated into, you know, some of these kind of traditional venues that we're seeing. So I don't even have an on-chain data subscription. I haven't for, I think, like over a year now. I just, I just don't find that stuff extremely useful, to be completely candid anymore.

• 6:43Anthony Pompliano?

  What, what is your kind of takeaway? Or a year after the ETFs got approved, obviously, they had a major impact in the market, but a year later, how do you look at, you know, what they were able to accomplish and then also what their role will be moving forward?

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the ETFs unlocked a new wave of, of market participants that can trade and invest in Bitcoin for the first time. You know, I don't know if we've seen sizable allocation yet from, you know, some of these very large buyers that, you know, are going to be needed to move Bitcoin to, you know, 150, 200 K plus, like sovereign wealth funds and, and large pension funds, et cetera. But I think, you know, for some of the boomers that maybe liked Bitcoin, but, you know, didn't feel comfortable holding it on some crypto native exchange after FTX, or they didn't want to hold their own private keys, or they can't for fiduciary reasons,

• 7:38Speaker 02

  the ETFs, you know, kind of unlock the ability for them to allocate. I also think the ETFs, from like a qualitative point of view, kind of derisk Bitcoin from like a career risk perspective. So, you know, when Larry Fink's going on TV and shilling Bitcoin, you know, you're probably not going to get fired if, you know, you hold Bitcoin as, you know, a three to 5% allocation and it goes down 25% like maybe you would have in the past. So I, I think those are kind of two underlying factors that have, have, you know, been a net positive for Bitcoin coming from the ETF. Recently,

• 8:19Speaker 02

  I believe Grayscale or BlackRock filed, maybe both of them filed for the in-kind redemptions on the ETF, which is, which is good. So it basically allows people to redeem the underlying Bitcoin, whereas before it was cash. So, you know, if you wanted to redeem Bitcoin and then move it, you know, wherever you wanted to, for whatever reason, you know, you'd basically have to redeem in cash and then like rebuy. And then obviously you have, you know, some, some taxable events there. So, you know, now, once we'll have the, which I think that was like really stupid that they had it that way from the beginning. It was just kind of a Gary Gensler thing. But I think now that you have the in-kind redemptions, that's also going to be a net positive as well.

• 8:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's talk about MicroStrategy, which I think is the second big development over the last, you know, four or five years. They obviously have been buying very aggressively in the market. They now hold over 470,000 Bitcoin. But we've also seen a number of kind of copycat strategies. You know, you've got Meta Planet, Summer Scientific, a number of other businesses. How do you look at this kind of net new buyer of corporate publicly traded companies being introduced to the market?

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. I think the expert on this for anybody listening is go, go check out all the stuff that our friend Dylan has put out. He's the head of Bitcoin strategy at Meta Planet. So obviously he's been super deep in the weeds. You know, I don't understand the stuff remotely, or I've kind of looked into it remotely as much detail as he has. But at a very high level, you know, MicroStrategy is basically putting on a speculative attack on the dollar. Excuse me. You know, so basically they're able to kind of leverage the ability to tap into, you know, the debt market. And, you know, they're basically able to, you know, take out, you know, relatively healthy leverage to purchase BTC.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  And kind of harness the volatility within within micro strategy stock and some of the options pricing stuff that gets baked into that and ultimately kind of generates this Bitcoin native yield, which Saylor has done a great job of memeing for micro strategy, which basically just means that although you're getting diluted in, you know, outright value, you know, traditional sense in terms of looking at just, you know, the number of shares outstanding, the Bitcoin per share is going up over time. And, you know, I would say the majority of people that are holding micro strategy, you know, on a directional stock picking basis are bullish on Bitcoin.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Of course, now integrated into the NASDAQ, so should benefit from passive flows. But that's kind of the the super high level of, you know, why micro strategy has been interesting. You saw it blew out tremendously relative to the NAV. You had some of the micro strategy people basically saying, you know, this is justified because you shouldn't just look at micro strategy relative to the NAV. You know, it's this kind of underlying, you know, financial engineering and that's the business is it's a, you know, generates, you know, more Bitcoin per share and it's a Bitcoin treasury company. You know, the reality is always somewhere in the middle. But we have, we have seen micro strategy, obviously, you know, cracked a bit

• 11:35Speaker 02

  over the last month and a half after that that crazy rally that it had. You know, I think the way that we at Reflexivity Research, Anthony and I is previously owned owned company that got acquired last year. At the end of 2022, for the listeners, we put out a report on basically the breakdown of micro strategy in collaboration with Blockworks and basically said that Saylor was unlikely to get liquidated. The only stuff he could technically get liquidated on was the Silvergate loan, just because of the way that the debt was structured. And Saylor actually made out like abandoned on that because all the Silvergate stuff happened.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  And I believe they ended up getting back more, more BTC than than they would have otherwise. So, you know, I don't think that you have any immediate concerns in terms of micro strategy, even if Bitcoin went down, you know, 50% from here. So it's a very interesting, I think, you know, play in the in the public market and You know, especially now that it's included into the into the NASDAQ and getting passive flows. You know, that's interesting for MicroStrategy as well as for Bitcoin, because you know, then in theory, you know, you you start to have these kind of, you know, at a very, very small scale, passive flows that come into Bitcoin over, you know, a multi-year period that can that can be interesting.

• 12:57Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the things that I see people talking about, obviously the public market, we've seen a lot of corrections there. Whenever Bitcoin goes down, those public market companies go down. But what we have also seen in kind of more crypto land is a ton of people pointing to the market caps of these coins. So they'll say, hey, it's a $2 billion market cap. But then the fully diluted value may be like $8 billion. And there's this really, really big overhang of kind of unissued tokens or tokens that are going through a vesting process but haven't yet hit the market. It seems like throughout 2025 and into 2026, a lot of those tokens will become unencumbered

• 13:40Anthony Pompliano?

  and people will be able to hold them or sell them, do whatever they want. How do you look at those dynamics of the market and are there certain frameworks you use to evaluate kind of different projects or coins?

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is like a really important thing for people to understand that are looking to trade this stuff. You know, first of all, you know, I'm a very much like there's Bitcoin and crypto guy and crypto stuff is for speculating.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  Listen, there's too many tokens. Like, we've got millions of tokens now. In 2021, there weren't nearly as many tokens. In 2017, there were like a few thousand. So, you know, you just, I mean, we've talked about this in podcasts that we did at like the beginning of 2023, like there even back then, but this is even more so the case now, especially with PumpFon and all the meme coin stuff and the barrier to launching a token now. There were just way too many tokens coming online, you know, even again in 23, I mean, you were looking at hundreds of hundreds of millions of dollars of tokens that had to unlock. And, you know, you got to ask yourself, where is this money going to come from? Even if even if half or even if 25% of that supply is, is, you know, sold shortly after

• 14:51Speaker 02

  the unlocks, there's just not enough money coming into this space to absorb all that. And so, you know, now at this point, it's billions of dollars of unlocks. And then meanwhile, you know, you've got meme coins that have such a low barrier to launching. You know, you can spin one up in 30 to 45 seconds, you know, so you just go and pump fun. And, um, you know, you can just toss in an image and you toss in the symbol for the token that you want to do and you're off to the races. So, you know, what what we've seen is just this hyper rotational, uh, kind of PvP market experience over the last two years, where you, you know, seen these really, really aggressive

• 15:34Speaker 02

  rotations from sector to sector and, you know, these very short kind of flash in the pan moments, um, you know, specifically for the memes, but also from from a sectoral perspective or thematic perspective within some of these on-chain games that are being played. Um, so in general, you know, I, I, I feel like, what does all that mean, right? What does all that rambling mean? It means that there's going to be more dispersion in the market because you just can't have all these things go up like in in 2017 for sure, even though I was in background around back then, um, you can just look at the price history of tokens back then.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  Um, and in 2021, I mean, everything went up, you know, you had stuff going to 10, 20 billion dollars with no usage at all. Um, and that was just because people wanted to buy crypto and people just came in and just bought whatever, you know? And that that just is not going to get rewarded by the market anymore. You know, the the market participants are too sophisticated now. Um, and again, there's just too much token supply. So I think, you know, kind of, uh, you know, you can't just spray and pray with with these all coins anymore. You've got to pick, you know, a sector or, you know, something.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  You know, that actually makes money or, you know, something that's got a path to getting some significant adoption or, you know, has a strong narrative and these types of things. So, you know, you've got all these, all these tokens that are competing for this very scarce pool of capital and attention. And so that just again leads to more dispersion. And so, you know, I think you've got to, you've got to think very deeply if you're going to play, you know, kind of the all coin games of, you know, what, what, you know, what's going to be the next hot narrative in the next month and trying to think about, you know, second, third order effects of things or, you know, what's, what's profitable. Um, you know, one, I don't want to start, you know, showing individual tickers and I don't have a position in this, but, you know, one, one thing that

• 17:40Speaker 02

  uh, has held up, I would say pretty well over the last couple of weeks, especially as, um, you know, a lot of these on-chain coins got whacked was hyper liquid because, um, you know, they're basically an on-chain DEX that's also been kind of, um, positioning themselves as an L1 as well, but they're very profitable. Um, you know, it's very simple. You kind of are owning the casino and so, um, you know, things that are actually making money. It seems like you're, you're seeing kind of a, uh, um, a rotation capital, you know, back to kind of those things. Um, I think it's the, the memes and the on, the on-chain stuff is in a very tough spot.

• 18:20Speaker 02

  Um, because I think the Trump coin pulled forward a lot of, uh, a lot of the demand for these things. You know, Trump went from nothing to 70 to 80 billion dollar market cap in 14 to 16 hours, which was the craziest thing I've ever seen in, in crypto, hands down. Um, and, you know, for anybody that was paying attention the night that the token launched, I mean, it was just immediately everything nuked.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  25 to 30% on-chain and then continued to bleed out and has still been bleeding out. Uh, and the reason is again, there's only so much liquidity on-chain and there's only so much attention. And so Trump just kinda came in and just basically just like mobbed the whole market. Like he just kinda dropped his nuts on the table and everybody was like, I have to buy Trump coin. You know, this is like the greatest, you know, the greatest KOL that you could possibly have for a coin in the history of mankind. There's no bigger name than Trump. So you just saw people sell everything that they could that night and put it into Trump. Um, and it kinda pulled the veil back, I think, on how liquid a lot

• 19:34Speaker 02

  of this stuff is, especially across the board. Um, and I think it also pulled forward a lot of demand. I mean, you could have put millions of dollars into this thing. You could have put 10, 20 million dollars into Trump coin below 10 billion, um, and you know, hit a, hit a five to seven X, you know, almost, almost overnight. Um, so I think that, you know, pulled forward a lot of the demand for, for memes. Um, and, you know, kinda showed that maybe normies aren't gonna come in and buy, you know, all of these crypto native memes and they're just gonna buy, you know, things that, that resonate with them. And, and, you know, Trump obviously is, is the hottest name that there possibly could be. And you saw it just completely sucked the liquidity out of everything. And

• 20:18Speaker 02

  then shortly after, you know, obviously Bitcoins kind of rolled over and then, you know, you had, you have the deep seek stuff, which maybe we can touch on. Uh, and obviously the NASDAQ's had a pretty brutal day. We're recording this on, on Monday, the, the 27th, you know, down almost three and a half percent. So you kinda had this like one-two punch for a lot of these on-chain coins where Trump kinda sucked the liquidity out of everything. You know, made everything very weak. Um, the books were super thin and then, you know, Bitcoin rolled over, was super weak. Um, you know, you saw like poor reaction to a lot of the news headlines recently. And, you know, I kinda called that stuff out on Twitter of like, you know, this is a little concerning. Like you had-

• 21:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm not saying that I called the top. I was saying there's been some concerns, you know, recently for sure, like, you know, you have the Doge ETF, you know, filing from Bitwise. It went up, you know, a couple percent, instantly got whacked back down. You had the Solana and XRP futures filings, you know, they popped a little bit, immediately came back down. The market was kind of propped up, waiting for kind of this, you know, Bitcoin Strategic Reserve headline coming from Trump. You know, then we kind of got left with this like committee that's planning to put together a stockpile of different assets and it's not very clear.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  And so, you know, we saw a short pop on that, you know, Bitcoin traded above like 100, 600, 7K or something and then immediately got whacked back down. So, you know, usually when, usually when, you know, you see the market reacting poorly to good news, that's, that's a signal. And the same way the market reacting positively to bad news is a signal. So again, I'm not saying that I like shorted the top and sold everything like within a day of the top, but there's definitely, you know, I've been vocal about this on Twitter. There's been a lot of signals of concern and froth. You know, I have no idea. I mean, this is probably the worst read I felt like I've had on the market and, you know, my four or five years in the space at the moment.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  But, you know, if we go down to much lower prices from here, like 80, 85K, which again would be like a normal Bitcoin full market correction, like the signs are, the signs would definitely be there in retrospect. So, you know, I don't think now is like the time to pile on risk, especially into some of these like far tail assets at the moment.

• 22:44Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you look at the meme coins in terms of their place in the market? You know, obviously there's brands, but is this kind of, hey, these things are all going to be interesting. People are going to speculate and gamble on them and then after this cycle we'll be done with them? Or is there something more happening here other than kind of gambling?

• 23:02Speaker 02

  We recorded a podcast last year. This might've been the last podcast that we did together.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  But basically we broke down the meme stuff and kind of talked through everything. I think the reason why memes did very well, well, there's a couple of reasons to like distill it down into a few short ones. I think, you know, from a super high level and not to like over-intellectualize it, but you've got this massive wealth inequality in the US. A lot of that is driven by kind of the moral hazard that was introduced after 2008. Rich people that own assets, and that's especially become the case after, you know, asset performance has got super concentrated within indices. Rich people that own a select pool of assets have outperformed everybody that doesn't own assets.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  And, you know, at the same time, those assets are becoming obviously less attainable as they're going up in price, the people that don't own assets. So you've got increasing wealth inequality, and there's other reasons, you know, around monetary debasement, why that's also the case. And then, you know, meanwhile, you've got, you know, the trend of, you know, everybody uses the internet now. That's not like a, obviously a non-consensus thing to say, everybody on the planet uses the internet in like a developed country. And meanwhile, you've got kind of this trend as a, you know, extension of that. I think people across the world are just addicted to dopamine. I'll throw myself in there too, you know, I'm a victim to it.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  Every, you know, between social media, the ease of access to everything you could think of on the internet. And part of that is obviously gambling. Sports gambling is incredibly popular. I'm 22, I mean, almost everybody that I know that's not in crypto my age does some amount of betting on sports. You know, obviously, a lot of these major, you know, sports organizations have been working to actively integrate sports betting into kind of the broadcasting experience and watching games. So, I mean, it's just, you're hype, you know, hyper-gamifying all these things and, you know, encouraging people to speculate on them. So, you know, when people discover crypto, excuse me, specifically meme coins, I think

• 25:17Speaker 02

  that satisfies the demand for people to want to speculate, they want to gamble, they want the dopamine hit. And, you know, I think if you go back to last year, Murad, you know, eventually put together this really, really, you know, well, well put together thesis on meme coins at Token 2049, which there's like 10,000 likes, I think most people in crypto have seen it. There's all these tech altcoins, which to go back to the original point that we were talking about to the first question, like in 21, all these people got hurt investing in altcoins because there were these hidden unlocks, but then that became very widely, that information became widely known. And you know, now that's not really edge anymore of like GCR very famously

• 26:02Speaker 02

  shorted the end of 2021 because he knew all these altcoins were gonna unlock and there's gonna be a ton of supply. Nobody was there to buy it, but like that wasn't like super widely known information. Over the last two years, everybody, I mean, you could just, there's like literal data providers that specifically are showing all the token unlocks. So I think, you know, the meme coins were kind of a pushback against that as well as there was kind of just this general idea that like, there's no value accrual to any of these tokens, which largely is true for being completely candid, right? A lot of these things are just straight up speculative vehicles with maybe a promise of generating some amount of, you know, profit in the future, or some amount of, you know, real cash flow in the future. And so meme coins kind of filled

• 26:46Speaker 02

  the gap of there being a lack of any type of technology that people could actually get excited about. Like the space was, and still is, but was extremely jaded last year. And, you know, there's basically this idea that, okay, well, like, none of this is worth anything. None of this is generating any value. There's Bitcoin and all this other stuff, which is straight speculation. Why not take that all the way to the extreme and just buy memes? Which I think was a very rational thought process, but I would say now it's a little different because obviously now you have this pro crypto administration that's come in with, with Trump and David Sacks

• 27:26Speaker 02

  now heading, you know, the AI and crypto stuff. You know, obviously Gary Gensler's out. You know, we already saw a change around the SAB rule, which allows banks to custody Bitcoin and unlocks a ton of products for people to use Bitcoin. And I also think, you know, there's a 80 to 90% chance in my eyes that we're going to see some type of new, we'll see how, you know, bullish it is for the space, but we're going to see some type of new regulatory framework for this stuff come in, in the next, you know, couple of years, if not the next year or so.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  And so now I, I think that kind of changes the argument a little bit. Um, because you know, some of these tokens, especially DeFi, which had gotten beat down so badly at the end of 2022, things like Aave and Lido. Uh, Aave's been one of the best performers over the last month and a half. Um, not only because Trump partnered with Aave and his DeFi protocol that he's launching, but um, you know, now you've got somewhat of a clear path to saying these things might be able to return revenue to the token holders, you know, stuff like Aave or, or Uniswap are making money. Um, you know, Aave is the leading borrowing lending protocol on ETH. Uh, held up through all the credit contagion of 22.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Uniswap is, you know, very widely used for, for token swaps. Um, they make money, but they haven't been able to return it to the token holder. So all this to say, um, I think because of the pro crypto administration that's coming in, the argument that none of these things accrue any value, that's no longer true. And so the, the kind of void that meme coins were filling, it's now a little more nuanced than that. So I think some of the leading meme coins that have somewhat of like a Lindy effect, I think, could continue to do okay. Um, you know, especially because if you're coming in looking to buy memes with five or $10 million, there's a very select number of assets that you would feel comfortable coming in and buying.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  These are things that probably have a long history of, you know, longer price history, at least, you know, six or, six or 12 months of price history, have some amount of Lindy, maybe have gone through at least one or two significant drawdowns to kind of test the holder base, that type of thing. I think it's going to be very difficult for like brand new meme coins to come in and have any staying power. Um, you know, a lot of them will probably do these like short runups and kind of Burj Khalifa back down, as we like to call it. You know, look at like Mudang or Chill Guy or any of these, uh, recent memes that kind of were flash in the pan of like some, you know, social online trend that got really hot. You know, these things run for a week or two and then.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  You know, the narrative's dead and that's it. So that's kind of my thoughts on memes is like the big established ones for a couple of reasons that we just laid out. Those can probably do okay. Like, I don't think, I'm not saying that I don't think memes will do well. But I don't, you know, I don't think we're going to have as wide of a casted just general meme coin frenzy like we did at the end of 23 or throughout the beginning, you know, first half of last year. And I think now because of the regulatory framework shift, you know, some of these DeFi assets that were some of the least attractive assets last year are now, you know, some of the, some of the most attractive assets to think about. I guess

• 30:55Speaker 02

  I'll pause there, but I'll say like, the only thing that's tough is they have, as silly as this sounds, they have kind of downs of valuation that they are tied to. So, you know, part of why a meme coin can run so hard or an L1 can run so hard is there's no valuation that these things are tied to, right? I mean, you can't really say, you could look at like fees and things like that, but you know, it's very straightforward with the DeFi protocol. You say, okay, well, like, how much revenue is it generating? You know, how much money are they making from that revenue? You know, what's the rate in which that's growing? And then you can put some type of, you know, traditional like cash flow model on that and value it. And so, you know,

• 31:41Speaker 02

  maybe it can trade at a pretty absurd, you know, multiple because it's crypto, like 50 or 70 X, like some of these things are trading at, but like it's, you know, they're not going to trade at 300 times, right? So I think to some extent, these things are capped a little bit from like a speculative, like premium perspective, whereas something like a something like a meme coin or, you know, Bitcoin are not capped by anything like that because they don't, they don't have cash flows.

• 32:08Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you think about these AI coins? You know, it seems like some of them are meme coins in disguise and then it seems like some of them are tied to whether it's open source projects or, you know, kind of more concrete things. So how are you evaluating that space?

• 32:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I I've been pretty publicly like interested in these AI coins over the last two or three months. They've gotten whacked with the rest of the market over the last week and a half for sure. I mean, partially because of the, you know, Trump liquidity stuff and then Bitcoin, kind of that one-two punch that I talked about for a lot of these on-chain coins. And then now on top of that, you know, the NASDAQ rolling over. So like these, these things are obviously not immune like anything else. Yeah, I think they've been holding up better than some of the memes. But my, my kind of thought process with the AI coins is I think they're the market, they're going to be the market's kind of desired sector for risk-taking.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  And again, when Bitcoin goes down, I mean, these things are going to get destroyed. But, you know, I, I think they're interesting because, you know, there, there's like kind of the bell curve, I mean, but I'd say like to, to simplify the whole thing, it's like the left side of the bell curve is you've had this enormous amount of gains being made on the private market in OpenAI, perplexity, et cetera. And then in the public market, it's just been Nvidia and retail and individual investors, you know, I am retail, you know, have, have missed out on all that price appreciation, but they're excited about AI.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  So, you know, kind of my thought process is, you know, speculating on some of these, you know, AI assets, whether it's the current, you know, ones that exist today or we get like a new wave of them, you know, eventually I, I think that's a, you know, from, from the perspective of the, you know, speculating on alts, I think that's the most interesting sector to me, followed by, you know, things that generate revenue, like the DeFi protocols that now benefit from the change in the, in the regulatory landscape. We could mention some tickers, but in general, you know, I think some of the large frameworks that have actual contributors and, and usage are kind of interesting.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  We had this big run-up at the end of, you know, December. You know, I gave back a good amount of gains candidly on some of these things and I'm now nearing breakeven on some of the assets that I've been holding through the last two months. But, you know, I think the deep-seak stuff is interesting to me because.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  You've you've had, obviously, you know, OpenAI be closed source. DeepSeek is open source. You know, I think that can spin up this narrative of, well, you know, is open source kind of the way for AI development moving forward? If that's the case, then, you know, what are the what are the second order, you know, implications of that? I think basically the the base compute layer gets commodified if that's true. And then the value accrual goes to the agents specifically or applications. If you don't want to use the agent buzzword, just applications built on top of these things.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  That's where the the value accrual will will head towards. And so, you know, for some of these open source crypto projects or any other open, you know, open source, you know, AI application or agent stuff crypto aside, you know, they can just plug right into, they can just plug right into DeepSeek pretty seamlessly. So, for example, again, I don't want to like shill tickers, but the largest framework in crypto is Eliza. And, you know, they've just seamlessly integrated DeepSeek two weeks ago. So, you know, basically, the whatever's being built on top of these things benefits because, you know, regardless of it's DeepSeek or OpenAI, it doesn't really make a difference for the the things being things being built on top.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  So, yeah, I think I think they're interesting. I think they're kind of the far tail asset that I'm most interested in. If, you know, Bitcoin is in a strong uptrend at the moment, it's not. And so, you know, these things aren't going to be immune on the way down. They're gonna they're gonna get hurt like every other risk asset. But I I think they're interesting to to pay attention to if if, you know, you like to speculate on some of the more far tail stuff in crypto.

• 36:44Anthony Pompliano?

  What else are you excited right now about? I had a position in Coinbase for a while. You had the public miners, the AI coins. You've done a very good job of navigating, I think, the last 18 months or so in the market. So what are you excited about now?

• 36:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, I think it's, I think it's really just those two things at the moment.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  The AI stuff for sure. And then, like I said, the, the stuff that's, that's generating revenue or things that are benefiting from, you know, a shift in, in kind of the regulatory environment and may get uplisted.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  You know, disclosure, obviously, Anthony and I's company got acquired by, you know, a company that's, that's based out of Canada and traded on Canada. So I'm kind of, you know, talking positively about something we, we have a position in. But, um, you know, things like, uh, like Galaxy, for example, or other companies that are traded in Canada that, you know, didn't get uplisted basically because of this harsh regulatory regime in the US, um, you know, that seems like a pretty, pretty good debt. Uh, I think a lot of that's probably got priced in now, you know, and that probably got almost immediately priced in after Trump got elected. But, you know, those things can probably keep doing well if the US, you know, continues

• 38:06Speaker 02

  to trend in this direction. Um, the other thing that I'm bullish on, but like it's tough to speculate on or, or invest in is, uh, stable coins. You know, I think it's pretty clear, especially after, um, you know, the US has come out with some stuff over the last few days, um, that stable coins will probably keep, uh, doing well, um, and will probably see further, um, adoption of stable coins. Um, you know, stable coins benefit the United States because they're buying treasuries, um, you know, T-bills widely and, and, and, uh, treasuries, um, and, you know, basically backing the, the stable coin with that. And then they're able to, to pocket the, the difference between, you know, the dollar backing and whatever yield they're generating from the T-bill.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Um, and, you know, that's in the United States' interest as well because it's, you know, subsidizing demand basically for, for our debt. So, yeah, I don't know what this updated uh, metric is, but, you know, Nick Carter did a presentation like a year ago and showed that stable coins were like the 15th or 16th largest, uh, sovereign holder of treasuries if you basket, you know, tether USDC together. Um, you know, I suspect that stable coin usage will probably grow. Uh, maybe if Circle IPOs, that could be interesting. Um, got to obviously see the valuation in which they launch at. I think there's probably a pretty good chance that um, that Circle IPO is given the regulatory shift in the US.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  So that's something that I'd keep an eye on. Um, but yeah, I would say that's, that's, that's probably it.

• 39:41Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think of public companies, you know, I think most people know that I own um, DeFi Technologies, I own Soul Strategies, I own Huddy. Um, I have a little bit of Reddit stock uh, from a prior like uh, private market investment. But what are some of the things that you're excited about uh, in the public markets?

• 40:02Speaker 02

  Hmm, um, yeah, again, I think it's like companies that might get up listed to the US seem interesting from a crypto perspective. Um, again, Circle seems interesting to me. I was really bullish on Coinbase for a while. Um, I bought um, I bought leaps on Coinbase at 70 bucks and maybe after this, we can get into like some of the mistakes that I've made over the last two years because I think that could be an interesting kind of string to pull down if we have time. Um, but my, my bullishness on Coinbase has faded a bit because to me, I mean, there's been a couple of issues that Coinbase has had, generally a good company, obviously good people that, that work there. Um, but it seems like they've

• 40:47Speaker 02

  got some pretty tough competition on the retail side with Robinhood. Um, you know, Robinhood's crypto volumes have been steadily growing. Um, you know, I think Robinhood's probably got the, the, you know, highest likelihood of kind of becoming like the everything finance super app for people um, looking to trade, you know, crypto stocks, bonds, whatever. Um, you know, they launched this uh, I don't know if it was, it was a, I think your uh, IRA you could put in or, or something, or just some type of retirement account, right? That they weren't, they're matching. So, you know, it seems like they've got pretty tough competition coming out um, from, from Robinhood. So I'm not as excited, still generally

• 41:30Speaker 02

  think Coinbase will be worth more in the future. Um, yeah, uh, I, I think obviously interesting stuff outside of crypto. That's not really my, my realm of, of expertise. Hopefully we get some more AI companies that, that IPO and uh, that'll maybe add to the kind of AI frenzy. But in terms of crypto, it's really just, I think. Companies that benefit from regulatory stuff, you know, circle if they IPO. And then I guess the other small category, which maybe you can make an argument against now with deep sea is these like these Bitcoin miners that are transitioning into AI. So I no longer have this position on, but I had a position on for a bit. I had a calls on Wolf

• 42:15Speaker 02

  from like 450, didn't didn't solve the top, but took them off and like, I think the upper sevens or something. And kind of the thought process there, which I think it's still true for Wolf, Core Scientific, Cod8. If if we have this continued build out of, you know, AI in the United States, we're going to have to start to get creative with, you know, the data centers that we're using for the stuff. And so those companies that are looking to shift into allocating the resources to AI compute, I think those companies can also be interesting. I haven't, I haven't looked deeply at any of them since I took my Wolf position off like a month and a half ago or so.

• 43:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What um, what do you think the biggest mistakes are that you made over the last couple of years?

• 43:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, I'm still obviously super young and you know, I'm, I'm trying to figure the stuff out mostly like in my apartment by myself. I've got a couple of smart friends that have more IQ points than me that I try to bounce ideas off of and try to, you know, kind of help, help shape my thinking. But yeah, a lot of the mistakes for better for worse, I've kind of learned through doing and losing money myself. I think, I think the biggest, the biggest two are sizing, we can go one by one. The first is, the first is sizing. So, you know, when, when you have a position that you feel strongly of, it's

• 43:47Speaker 02

  What you should do is bet big early on in the trend and take risk off as the trend progresses. But the natural human tendency is to be nervous about putting risk on at the beginning because it's not so clear because the market hasn't validated your thesis. And then you start to add as the trend progresses. So that's definitely been one thing that, you know, I've tried to improve. Coinbase was a great example. I think candidly, you know, I kind of nailed Coinbase. I've missed on a lot of things, been wrong about a lot of things, but I was pretty right about Coinbase. But I didn't size up nearly enough. And there really wasn't a real strong reason outside of, you know, kind of just doubting like, oh, well, you know,

• 44:32Speaker 02

  am I so smart? Like, why is it the market pricing this stuff in? And it's kind of thinking for yourself and being willing to bet early on in a big way.

• 44:44Speaker 02

  The other one I think is probably the most important in crypto arguably is like thinking for yourself.

• 44:52Speaker 02

  You know, I think there's a lot of borrowed conviction in crypto and, you know, a lot of these like influencers that you follow, you know, including myself, if you, I don't really like using that word, but, you know, these people aren't like gurus and they don't have, most of the time, they don't have your best interests in mind. So, you know, you really need to think for yourself. If you're borrowing conviction from even like your friend who tells you to buy something or whatever, and you have no reason why you're holding the thing, well, you know, the information can change and that person's opinion can change 30 minutes later.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  You know, or the thing just has a typical crypto 60, 70% drawdown, you know, before going up over the coming months and then you get shaken out because you have no conviction on the thing at all and you don't really know why you're holding it outside of like your buddy told you to ape into it. So I think thinking for yourself is incredibly important. And also, you know, the more that you can trust yourself, it kind of goes back to the first point. You know, then you're able to really develop the conviction to size things up accordingly and,

• 46:01Speaker 02

  you know, avoid some of the, you know, issues there.

• 46:06Speaker 02

  Um, I think, I think those are probably the, the biggest two. We can, we can keep it relatively short.

• 46:13Anthony Pompliano?

  I think you're doing a great job. Everyone makes mistakes, but uh, I think you got not that much, uh, not that much to worry about. And I think most people in the audience are pretty thankful to you for uh, all the knowledge and information over the years.

• 46:26Speaker 02

  Thank you, man. Yeah, it's definitely, um, you know, I will say in general, like, um, the market's gotten a lot more difficult over the last even, you know, six to 12 months. It's just, uh, a lot, a lot of these crypto native, kind of idiosyncratic things that I think you could trade are gone, you know, not that I was ever really, you know, executing on some of these strategies, but, you know, like being able to short alts, like I mentioned earlier into unlocks, like that information is all there. And then you get all these weird games now, where like, you know, the foundation and the investors of the project know that the public knows about this stuff. And so then there's this like,

• 47:08Speaker 02

  weird psyop 3D chess stuff going on where they try to like, get the token to pump into the unlock, or they move the schedule so that it squeezes out people shorting it. Um, you know, and also there's all this like obfuscated stuff, like the team selling OTC before the tokens unlock, the tokens even unlock, or they hedge it out and all these things. So, um, you, there's, there's, there's, you know, the derivatives data, like I said, it just is, it's harder to track this stuff. You used to be able to just look at, um, you know, open interest on perpetual futures and funding rates and almost instantly know how the market was positioned going into something.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  You know, it was, it was like 80, 90% hit rate, like Bitcoins, Bitcoins trading down, open interest is going up, funding rates are going up. People are buying the dip on leverage. We're probably due for another leg down, or the inverse was also true. A lot of this stuff is just, uh, it's, it's not so simple anymore because there's a lot more sophisticated market participants. So the odds are like, you know, if you're, If you're an everyday retail investor like me, you know, you're, you're not gonna, if you, if you know these certain dynamics and they exist, the ads are the people that are like, you know, really, really sharp, you know, at some like HFT firm or something, trading low timeframes,

• 48:31Speaker 02

  or, you know, just sophisticated like hedge funds in general, like they've probably known about this stuff long before you. Um, and you know, that a lot of that stuff's probably already priced in. So, um, yeah, I mean, it's been, I would say it's been a really tough market. If you're, if you're trading this stuff over the last two years, candidly, there's been a ton of dispersion. Um, the rotations have been, have been really aggressive. I think, you know, we're caught at the point where there's two or three big, big assets that have, that have done well. Um, and you know, if you miss those, you're, you're in rough shape. Like I think last year it was like Solana, um, Coinbase, Hyperliquid, um, and you know, a select basket of memes, but you couldn't, you know,

• 49:14Speaker 02

  if you're trading with 10, 15 million dollars, you couldn't get size into that stuff. So, it's, it's been a, it's been a tricky market, man. And I think, uh, we're probably going to see a lot of, uh, you know, people candidly looking to just hold Bitcoin at this point because, you know, I think, I think, um, you know, it's been, it's been interesting.

• 49:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Where, uh, where can we send people to find you on Twitter?

• 49:34Speaker 02

  Sure. Um, my Twitter is W Lamenti I I I. Uh, I still am sharing some of my thoughts and such. Obviously, I've been back on doing the podcast, but Anthony, uh, Anthony asked me if I wanted to jam today and I couldn't say no. So here we are and maybe we'll do another one like every couple of months or something, but, um, yeah, man, it's,

• 49:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Follow Will on Twitter.

• 49:59Speaker 02

  It's been an interesting year.

• 50:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Follow Will on Twitter, everyone. If you don't follow him, highly, highly suggest. Will, thank you so much for your time. You always got great insights. I learn something from you every day. Hopefully other people find this just as valuable and, uh, excited to do this again in a couple of weeks.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  Thank you, sir.