Crypto Markets Forever Stuck? Onchain Data Explained | Michael Nadeau’s Defi Report #2

Crypto prices seem stuck. Is that about to change? Michael Nadeau of the DeFi Report returns to unpack what onchain data says about Bitcoin, ETH, and altcoins. We dive into why the market may be coiling beneath the surface, whether altcoins are due for a “hate rally,” and how valuation metrics reveal surprising accumulation trends. Michael also shares his current portfolio moves, including high-beta bets like Pepe and ENA, and lays out the macro triggers that could spark the next leg up. Michael Nadeau & The DeFi Report: https://x.com/JustDeauIt https://thedefireport.io --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🟠 BINANCE | THE WORLDS #1 CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/binance --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 2:19 The HODLer's Fallacy: Rethinking Conviction in a Naturally Extractive Market https://mirror.xyz/sreevanth.eth/6unQ_oX9sQFkvjPi3yehVi6M7Ak2t1V5hzyWYs9yUi4 7:03 BTC Onchain Data & Price Explanation 15:23 Altcoin Season Index 23:24 ETH & Solana Onchain Data 32:30 Beta Assets Bull Case 38:46 Ethena Memo https://thedefireport.io/research/ethena-memo 51:14 Crypto Equities 55:45 Liquity & The Macro Setup 1:00:53 Michael’s Portfolio Today 1:02:31 How to Value an L1 https://thedefireport.io/research/how-do-you-value-an-l1 1:02:53 Quarterly Reports 1:04:40 Closing & Disclaimers --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

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

• 0:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, welcome to our monthly Crypto Fundamentals podcast. We've got a few topics to discuss today. Are we forever stuck at like 107k Bitcoin, 2,500 ETH and 150 Solana? It feels like we've been in this zone forever. We're going to talk about that. Also, are alts the most hated asset right now? And if that's the case, are we actually going to get an alt rally? Maybe a hate rally? And where approximately are we in the cycle? It feels like some summertime blues, maybe. And when the bull market comes, we'll actually come to our crypto native assets? Or is it all going to stocks that none of us own? We've got Michael Nato here. Mike, how you doing? Are you feeling bullish or you feeling bearish?

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Hey Ryan, great to be here. I am feeling bullish. I think we're in an interesting spot in the markets right now. You know, Bitcoin, it sort of feels to me like Bitcoin is like a beach ball. That's trying to be held under the water right now. And I think, you know, we've been trading in this range now for going on seven months, you know, seven, eight months. So that is like a very interesting setup in terms of just like we've chopped up the markets a little bit. It feels like Bitcoin is somewhat of a coiled spring, but it's still not breaking out at the same time. We are in this sort of summer months where there's, there tends to be a little bit less volume, a little bit less interest. People are taking vacations.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  We have holidays next or this week. So like really near term is, I think, like kind of up in the air. But the setup to me looks very good and looking forward to getting into that in this episode.

• 1:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  So guys, these episodes, Mike and I get into the on-chain data. So the analytics, this is a Crypto Fundamentals podcast and we're doing this monthly, usually the first Tuesday of every month. This is coming out on Wednesday because we had some special Robin Hood things to cover that's in your podcast feed. The idea is we're trying to figure all of these things out in about 45 minutes. We're going to get you a few major investment ideas backed by this on-chain data. And at the end of the episode, Mike is going to make some calls on some assets. Okay? So we're going to peek into Mike's portfolio. I'm gonna ask him what he's buying, what he's selling, how his positions have moved between this episode and last episode. So all of that we're going to cover today.

• 2:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Mike, I just want to tee up with this. This was an article I actually like read prior to this episode. I read earlier this morning. And here's kind of the title, "The Hodler's Fallacy: Rethinking Conviction in a Naturally Extractive Market." Okay, that's the title of the article. And basically, the thesis is none of this crypto asset stuff is investable. You can't really hold it long term. The exception may be of Bitcoin, but the author says that the Hodler's Fallacy is the belief that in time, the market leads to long-term upside. But this article unpacks why crypto rewards execution, not conviction. Crypto is pure arbitrage masquerading as an investment market.

• 2:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  I feel like this sets the tone for how a lot of people are feeling right now, which is basically there's nothing investable in on-chain assets aside from maybe Bitcoin. It makes no sense to hold things for long-term horizon. You're Fundamentals Guy, and I know part of your thesis is based on, no, there are investable assets in crypto that you can hold for years and hold for decades. What's your reaction to this kind of sentiment?

• 3:26Speaker 01

  My reaction to this kind of sentiment is that we still are in a period in crypto where these markets are still largely unregulated. And I think as we sort of move through regulation, what I expect to happen is sort of this bottoms-up sort of movement amongst people like the DeFi Report, others that are in the market that are trying to deeply understand how value accrues to tokens, how it accrues through the tech stack. And through that process, like we are going to, I believe, force these projects to return value to tokens. And then that's where this narrative starts to shift a little bit. But I would say it's sort of fair to look at it right now and say, like, how could you

• 4:11Speaker 01

  hold an altcoin? Like, how could you have a long-term thesis on a lot of these things? When we still aren't at a place where you can hold the uni-token? Which, and we know Uniswap has a fantastic protocol and it does a lot of economic activity. But can you hold that token? Do you have confidence that the value is going to go to you as a token holder and not to the equity holders? And I think this is something that, you know, regulation will suss out and these tokens will certainly, I think, be valuable in the future. And we will be able to have these more long-term thesis for how value is going to accrue to the token holder itself.

• 4:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  So you feel like some of this commentary is captures where we are in the market. But this is the process. This is how we figure it out. We're in this purgatory period now and we've got to figure out what the actual aim of these assets are on productive cash flows and other fundamentals, right? That's the work we're doing here essentially on this episode.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  That's why we're here.

• 5:08David Hoffman?

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• 5:50David Hoffman?

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• 7:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, well, let's talk about the the main question that's in my mind at least, which is like, are we stuck, Mike? Is Bitcoin stuck? It feels like it's been ranging, I don't know for how long, but it feels like we've been here for a while between 100K Bitcoin and 110K range. What are you seeing when you look at some of these charts? I know the first one you asked me to pull up was was this, which is a Bitcoin holder accumulation ratio. What are we looking at here?

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, some some Glassnode data here. And, you know, I'm looking at the a lot of on-chain data and trying to pair up, like, why is Bitcoin just kind of not moving? It's there's all these treasury companies out there, starting to buy up Bitcoin. Michael Saylor and Strategy have purchased, I think, 4,000 BTC over the last few months. The the macro setup looks pretty good, like, there's enough of like a hint of like that that liquidity is going to be coming back. Trump won't stop talking about reducing the, you know, cutting the Fed funds rate so that we can, you know, refinance our debts. So you can kind of see that there's a, you know, a pretty interesting

• 8:12Speaker 01

  setup out there. And I'm trying to pair that up with what I'm seeing on chain. And what we're seeing right here is just the BTC holder accumulation ratio. And it's telling us that people that already hold Bitcoin, there's more people selling their Bitcoin of the current holder base than are accumulating right now. That's that you look at the right side of the chart, the blue line there, that's the like 43% or so that are accumulating Bitcoin right now. So we need to see like Holders actually start to accumulate. I think a lot of people are sort of holding, expecting like another thrust here, maybe into Q4. This is showing you like the existing holders,

• 8:52Speaker 01

  right? So if existing holders are not going to step into the market, we need new money to come in. And that's, that's sort of like what that's telling me right now. It's important to remember that this on-chain data from Glassnode does not pick up the ETFs, which ETFs are holding roughly, you know, 6% or so of the supply. It's also not picking up what's on exchanges. And I think when you add those two up, it's about 18%. You know, so we factor that into this when we look at this data. But it's just telling us that like existing holders were actually like most bullish, like in the beginning of last year, actually. And so I think this explains a little bit of why price is just kind of ranging a little bit right now.

• 9:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so this is telling the story because this is, this has been down since what you said was the beginning of last year. And what do you want to see from this, this blue line here that is the creeping down towards 40%? Do you want to start seeing it kind of like ebb up? What would make you bullish in this indicator?

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would expect that, you know, let's say, you know, Powell comes out and we start to see like a little bit of a shift from like a more hawkish stance towards like it's becoming more clear that we're going to see rate cuts, maybe July could, it could take until September. But I think if the market starts to sniff that out, I think existing holders will get back into the market and also, you know, new money will come back in and you'll see that line shoot up a little bit. But like I said at the beginning, where we're in like the kind of summer months where there's not, people are enjoying their lives a little bit more and less like glued to their, glued to their screens, you know, buying crypto right now. So.

• 10:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  So you want to see this holders start to accumulate more. Here's another indicator, which I think shows a holder metric. So this is the number of addresses with a balance above 10,000 Bitcoin. That's quite a hefty balance. So is this kind of some, some sort of a whale indicator here? And we're seeing this, this purple line here, which seems to oscillate around the number 100. What are we looking at here?

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, and yeah, exactly. Mass, these are the, the largest whales in terms of the cohorts of like holders of Bitcoin. And this just also sort of explains why price is just having a tough time breaking out. I think because this cohort is, has been selling really over the last, you know, few years or so. So, you know, they're scaling out. This is not like a massive, there's only 100. And when we started this cycle, there were 120, you know, holders of greater than 10,000 Bitcoins.

• 11:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, it's like 120 addresses that have over 10,000 Bitcoin. You're tracking all these big whale addresses that-

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. And that's down, you know, it's under 100 now. So, so we've lost some of the, you know, largest holders are now under that threshold. So it just tells you like, okay, like, you know, we know the conditions look pretty bullish out there, but there are people that have been, if you own 10,000 BTC, you're probably in very early. And so you still have some of that sort of sell pressure. People that are up, you know, tens of thousands of percentage on their Bitcoin are happy to sell, you know, 100, 100K Bitcoin, so.

• 12:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is another indicator of, that you're looking at kind of long-term holders. So this is Bitcoin long-term holder supply. And you've got Bitcoin price in orange. And then you have the long-term holder supply in purple here. So what are we looking at? What does this tell you?

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is on, sort of on the other side of this. So the first two charts are kind of telling me, okay, this makes a little sense of, you know, why we're seeing price just kind of range bound. This is a positive indicator to me. So that, that long-term holder supply is now back to all-time highs. We saw a dip in that. So long-term holders were taking some profits earlier, earlier this year. And we've seen basically that them step back into the market as buyers. In some cases, that line will come up just if people came into the market, even if they came into the market at the all-time highs and they just didn't sell. They become long-term holders over a period. So it's, it's, it's sort of the reaction of that time. And it's also-

• 12:59Speaker 01

  You know, long-term holders adding to their wallets. But that to me is this is very positive. This is like 74% of the supply is now held by long-term holders. And that's usually a pretty good base for like, if we see speculation come back into the market, then you get the new money coming in, the short-term holders. So that's what I'm looking for, you know, as we move through the summer months here.

• 13:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. And then how about this one to round out the Bitcoin story here? The liquid supply, what's this?

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Same idea, long-term holders. This is bullish to me. So illiquid supply is at an all-time high as well. And what this is doing, Glassnode, is just basically looking at all the wallets that have held Bitcoin and determining based on how much they're buying and selling, like, are these illiquid wallets? And so it's kind of like looking at all the on-chain data to tell us that, hey, like, most of the supply looks like it's in strong, you know, diamond hands right now. And so again, that's another, that's another bullish indicator. And like, when we see like big moves in Bitcoin, you do see that that line kind of oscillate down

• 14:11Speaker 01

  a little bit because people are moving their coins to exchanges to cash out. So it feels like we were setting a very like strong base is kind of, I think, the key takeaway for some of this data.

• 14:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. So when you add all this together, you're seeing a strong base, maybe a pause in terms of long-term holder accumulation, but it's still pretty high and the long-term holders are still holding. And after all, that's what seems to drive Bitcoin price, right? It's just like more people holding it as a store of value asset over time and not selling. And then when you, when you have that effect, you see Bitcoin price rise so long as you have net new sources of demand.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Exactly. That's it. And I think the market is. Uh, waiting to see what, what, what Mr. Powell is gonna do. Uh, and who's gonna win this, this fight between, you know, Trump and Powell. And I think that's, that's the final domino, I think, to go. Everything else looks pretty well set up to me.

• 15:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  I know we'll get your insights in macro towards the end of this, but it does, does seem like pressure is mounting on, on Powell or whoever his successor is.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right. Which could be like a real fact in this situation here. But let's turn to some of our other bags. So if Bitcoin's in kind of a hold place, but you're expecting, you know, like further increase, further accumulation, price appreciation, what about altcoins? So I think last time we had this discussion of like, when is alt season? What are you seeing in the metrics here? I know Bitcoin dominance is like creeping to all time highs. Maybe like 20, was it 2020 where it was really an all time high into like the 70% type range? Something like that. Um, now we're, we're in the 60s, mid 60%. I feel like with, with Bitcoin dominance, something in that range.

• 16:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  But you are showing a chart here, which is the altcoin season index. Uh, and this oscillates between a band that says, you know, like it's more Bitcoin season versus, oh, in orange, it's Bitcoin season, I suppose. And then in kind of this blue hue, we're moving to altcoin season. We are squarely in orange in June, uh, like in July of 2025. Earlier in this year, it actually dipped into altcoin territory, at least according to this index. So what do you see when you look at this chart? And like, what even is this chart?

• 16:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. The reason I like this one is it's, it's giving you a relative performance in terms of like the prices of altcoins versus Bitcoin. It's factoring in the market caps. It's factoring in trading volume of the, the large cap versus the altcoins. Uh, and it also looks at social indicators as well. And so it's kind of giving you a broad view of sentiment on altcoins. And yeah, we're in Bitcoin zone right now. And what, what I like to just, I try to observe the market, like, so look at the data and then observe what you see on like crypto Twitter and like most of the, when you get into this, this type of market structure, like the people start to think that like,

• 17:17Speaker 01

  The alt are never coming back and this is just a Bitcoin cycle and the Bitcoiners were right. And so to me, like that always, there's always going to be like another rotation after that. And so my view is that all coins are pretty hated right now, sentiment very low on all coins. I think there's a few things we could sort of look at to say like, why that's the case. And some interesting, an interesting data point came out with the Robinhood partnership with Arbitrum. Just seeing Robinhood, you know, move like

• 17:55Speaker 01

  15% a day on that news, but not seeing the same reaction on ETH or, you know, some of the other like animal spirits that you might look for on chain. We haven't seen that, but we're seeing it almost, you know, from TradFi and Wall Street. We saw it with Circle as well. So I think there's something going on here where alt season is looking like it may be inspired by Wall Street this cycle. We got a glimpse of that with Circle. We got a glimpse of it again yesterday with Robinhood. Coinbase has been doing very well as well of late. And so, you know, this is something, this is something to factor

• 18:36Speaker 01

  in. We have like, I think nine altcoin ETFs coming this, this summer. And so, you know, that could be the thing that sort of helps to kick off the actual sort of longer tail of crypto assets outside of the equities itself. But, but yeah, for me, like, you know, I always want to be zigging when everyone else is zagging. And I think that's, this is one of those opportunities for, for, for select altcoins right now.

• 19:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  So you think there will be an altcoin season?

• 19:05Speaker 01

  I do. You know, not, not the same way what we saw like in 21, but I definitely think that quality assets will outperform Bitcoin. And I, and I expect ETH to outperform Bitcoin, you know, for a period as well. So.

• 19:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's interesting because in 21, right? Some of that altcoin energy, let's say, went into the NFT market. And some of those NFTs, guys, like, they're just not coming back. All right. So, but this brings like the whole question of when you say alts, what alts are you talking about? And I think I mentioned last episode, I'm still haunted by Arthur Hayes. Like, like I did an episode with him and talking about, yeah, there'll be an alt season, but it may not be your alts. So it's kind of like, choose your alts carefully. When you talk about alts, are you basically talking about everything south of Bitcoin? Is that an alt? Because I know you've got some bellwether assets, let's call them, that we're about to take a look at Ether and Solana.

• 20:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  I would imagine like to you, these are in the kind of alt non Bitcoin territory, but there's a whole lot of other assets, even in the crypto top 20, even in the crypto top 10. And so this still happens to me, Mike. I still get texts from retail investors who are not plugged into crypto. I'll call them normies, but I don't want to be derogatory to like, you know, like normal people. All right. And they're like, hey, what do you think about XRP? I know you're into crypto. Like, what do you think about, you know, like Ripple and XRP? And I just don't have much commentary on that. Right? Like, it's not, it doesn't hit my rubric for like fundamentals. It's not on my radar very much. Is XRP an alt? Is Cardano an alt? Is BNB an alt? Is Litecoin an alt?

• 20:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, what's an alt to you?

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Great. Yeah, it's a great question. It's a good, I think a good lead in here. Like, the way I think of it is, yeah, basically anything outside of Bitcoin, I would consider like an alt. And for me, like, what I, what I've historically done well with in my portfolio is having an allocation, most of my allocation to the top three, like, you know, crypto, crypto networks, BTC, ETH and Sol. And then looking for high beta on, on the other side of that to sort of like, I like to think of it as like, you're capturing. It's almost like a little hot sauce on the portfolio where if you do it in a percentage, like a smaller percentage, it tends to not like add too much to the volatility of the portfolio.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  And so like sharp ratios and things are pretty interesting when you look at the relationship and the beta of like a meme coin to like ETH or like to Sol. So that's how I think of all coins, like, you know, XRP is not something I've ever held. I think you have to respect the Ripple Army and just like what's happening there. And the reason I've never held it is I've never been able to get like, everything that I do is informed by data. And so I've never been able to get any data on the Ripple chain.

• 22:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  On-chain data specifically for you.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  On-chain data, yeah. And they don't, you know, I don't, maybe there is some data out there that I'm not aware of. But as far as I know, none of the data providers have data on them. I think it's essentially a meme coin to me. But like I said, you got to respect what they're doing. And there's, there's a lot of people that believe in that. So, you know, but yeah, I think for us, it's mostly like things that are longer, farther down the risk curve that we can develop a thesis for is essentially, and that we can look at data that tells us something interesting, like there's high beta to the L1. And that's, that's how we do the analysis.

• 22:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I guess this gets us into, into your head a little bit and your kind of investment style, which is basically like for, like for you and the DeFi report, in order to capture the alt season upside, you don't have to own every alt. But like, so what you do is you own alts that you see fundamentals in, strong fundamentals, on-chain data in. But then you're, you kind of lever up a little bit and you capture the beta on those alts through other tokens. That's essentially the, the Mike NATO strategy here.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  That's the Magneto strategy right there. Yep.

• 23:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. Well, let's talk about some of those maybe bellwether alts with good on-chain data. And you've got a few charts here. We're talking about like, what is fair value for something like Ether right now and Solana? And again, recognizing this is a chaotic market, we're all trying to figure out what Layer Ones are actually worth. And that's an ongoing discussion. But tell me about this metric. So this is market value to realized value. And you've got both ETH, MVRV, and Solana MVRV, one of them in purple, one of them in this pink color, ETH in purple, Solana in this pink. What are we looking at here? What does this chart tell you?

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. So this is looking at, so market value to realized value. Realized value is a proxy for the cost basis of the network. And, you know, when I'm in the market, when I'm in the market looking to buy tokens, I'm trying to figure out if these, is it at fair value? And like, one way to think of this, it's almost like if you're going to analyze a stock or an equity, and you saw that it was trading near its book value, right? Sort of like the actual stock price is where it's trading at, the sum of all the assets. You know, you're kind of getting fair value at that point. And so trying to find ways to think about fair value, we don't have book value for these, these are software. But we have ways to think about it.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  And so one way to think about fair value is to look at the cost basis of all the tokens in circulation, and then where are you trading, you know, relative to that? So both of these are, you know, just over one, right? Which is telling you that, on average, the average ETH holder, or Sol holder, on average, again, is sort of like, just above water on their holdings.

• 25:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Break even on their cost basis?

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  So they bought ETH, they bought Sol at whatever price they bought it, and they're basically flat. They're not down, they're not up on average. They're just kind of flat.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  That's right. And when you see that line, so when you see the pink line, sort of in the middle of the chart there, that was the last bear market. When you see that go under one, those are typically like, back the truck up moments.

• 25:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  And we're close to one right now. We're not under one, but we're close to one for both ETH and Sol.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  And ETH was under one, you know, during the sort of tariff, tariff wars around April. And so

• 25:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  When it dipped at like 1500, right?

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Yep. Yeah. So that was a really good opportunity to buy ETH. We might not see that again, you know, possibly ever, you know, we'll see. But I think, you know, this is one way that we sort of get, develop conviction around, okay, we have conviction about like the macro setup. And then we start to look at these types of metrics to say, okay, this is a, this is a good time to buy.

• 26:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  I like that. I'm a fan of this metric. And other, other times when ETH and Sol have been below one, I was like, Sol fell way below one back in the post FTX, like 2022, 2023 bear, of course, you could see. And ETH less so, but also a little bit. And then you can also see these times when market value, realized value was just like well above 2, 3, 4 for both these assets. And that's when you start to see like frothy assets. Basically, the holders are way up. You know, they're, they're 2X up, they're 3X up, they're 5X up on average. And that's where you start to see the froth. But right now, it is not looking frothy for ETH and,

• 26:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  and Sol. It's looking like, kind of like accumulation territory historically. I'm wondering, like, this metric kind of reminds me of, you remember that episode we did with Jonah on Bankless, which was like MSOV, or sorry, RSOV, Realized Store of Value, right? This kind of reminds me of Realized Store of Value. Is it, is it, is it the same kind of metric? Or in the family of Realized Store of Value metrics?

• 27:19Speaker 01

  It is. Yeah. The way he's using this with like, with ETH and Sol to get to the RSOV, is he's looking at the realized value of the ETH that is actually staked. And so what that's doing is it's like, it's taking the value of ETH when the asset is actually moved into a staking contract. And it's taking the sum of all that to say like,

• 27:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Staked and also in DeFi, right? So he's taking the cost basis.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  DeFi, exactly. Yep. Yep. Those two, which, you know, and I think for, since Bitcoin doesn't have the DeFi elements, he's just using the Bitcoins realized value to kind of get to there. So this, the other thing I'll add to this is, We also look at the Z score of these metrics. So the Z score is telling you how many standard deviations you are from the average, the historical average price. Both, it's fascinating that both ETH and SOL are actually like, you know, sort of mirroring each other here, but they're both around like 0.3 above their standard deviation, which again is like pretty, pretty fair, pretty fair zone.

• 28:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  I actually really like this metric. I'm a, I'm a big fan of this metric for like buying opportunities. So let's look at another one, which is FD market cap. So I guess that's fully diluted market cap versus TVL. And this is for, for Ether, the asset. And let's see, what we're looking at is the Ethereum ecosystem total value locked in purple here. So I'd imagine this is the value of all assets, including ETH on-chain in just Ethereum mainnet? Or does this include layer twos, Mike?

• 28:55Speaker 01

  It's including just ETH mainnet.

• 28:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just ETH mainnet. Okay. And then that's, so that's in, in purple. And then pink is just the fully diluted market cap. And so what we're seeing, like, tell us what we're seeing here.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is again, just, just searching for signals of when we think like there's, it's fair value. And what's interesting about this chart is like, you can see that the, the market value of ETH like has bottomed when it's sort of touched the TVL, the ecosystem TVL. So, and we just had one, you know, we had that in April as well. So you can see those two arrows there pointing to like these bottoms. I think this is just a fascinating thing. Maybe TV, maybe ecosystem TVL is book value. Right? Like it's, that's kind of how I'm thinking about it.

• 29:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  I've, I've seen reports like this and I've seen investors and analysts and like even kind of like quant style. Look, look investors, like, look at this metric, right? And there's definitely some correlation here. And so what this means is, I suppose if TVL grows and let's say Ethereum TVL is kind of a bottom floor for the value of the network, as this maybe chart seems to indicate, there's some correlation here. Like, you know, at least, then you Start to get some proxies of well, if stablecoin growth exceeds 300 billion, 500 billion, goes like up towards a trillion, right? And a lot of that's on Ethereum, then that starts to set the floor for what the value of the network should be. Is that how you think about it?

• 30:27Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. And I think it's important to hone in on the stablecoin piece there because, you know, the assets that are in DeFi, like TVL that's in DeFi, like, the TV, it's reflexive to the price, right? There's a lot of ETH involved in there. So all the assets, if ETH goes down in price, you know, TVL is going to drop as well. So they sort of move together, but stablecoins are sort of holding more of a base there. And so maybe stablecoins actually become the sort of book value at some point. And because we know that that's not moving as much. But yeah, just another metric where if we know we're getting close to that line, then it's, it kind of tells you it's a decent buying opportunity, I think.

• 31:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. And with Ethereum, you have six years of data on this, right? So that's kind of nice. And let's talk about this one. The 200 week moving average. So this is kind of a long-term TA type of chart. What's this showing you?

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, long-term. So this is like almost a four-year moving average and similar, this works for Bitcoin as well. When, when you drop below that four-year moving average tends to be a really good buying opportunity. We dropped significantly below it in April. So that looks, that just again, looks like a really good buying opportunity back then. Still, we're, we're just below it right now. So, you know, still looks like we were in a pretty good buying zone, to be honest. That's, that's what that's telling me right there. And it, it just historically worked pretty well. So.

• 31:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's interesting about this is the numbers, the on-chain numbers that you're highlighting are indicating that it's a good buying zone, right? It's certainly not a bad buying zone. It doesn't feel like it's a good buying zone, like from a sentiment perspective. And maybe that's the exact reason you need to be looking at buying, right? Because you blood in the streets, most hated assets. This is, of course, if it was doing. If these assets were doing very well, we would be on the other side of these charts and it wouldn't be a buying opportunity. So the fact that it feels like it's a bad, like a bad time to buy is maybe the reason you should consider it. Once you look at this on-chain data, which brings us maybe to the sauce, right?

• 32:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  If you want to kind of lever up on some of these alt plays, the beta type assets. So we talked about ETH and Sol as alt Bitcoin assets. But on top of that, you can capture some additional beta. I guess, give me the take for like, why you even want beta style assets? And like, why can't we just like, why not just, why do you not just capture the full value of kind of like your takes here? And your investment in these alternative assets directly? Why even go down the stack to these beta assets?

• 33:09Speaker 01

  So I guess this is a personal question. And if people are not as involved and like they don't, they're not spending as much time studying the markets and really involved. I probably recommend just buying the majors. But this is really more for if you want to take a little bit more risk, right? So these are high beta assets, meaning they will go up significantly more than their sort of L1 pair. But they will also go down significantly more if the L1 pair does not, does not, you know, does not do well. And so for me, the way that I've constructed our portfolio in the past is, and what I'm doing right now is if I have conviction that ETH is going to do well, that Sol is going to do well.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  I then try to find a high beta pairing with that so that I can sort of, I describe it as like a little hot sauce, you know, on the, on the portfolio. And, you know, we're, we're in crypto, like we should be, if you're in crypto, you are probably more of a risk taker than the average sort of market participant. And so we like risk, right? We like to take some risks, we like to have some fun. And so that's kind of the, the thinking behind these high beta assets. And, and, you know, we've put out reports on this as well. We go through like how we actually do these, do this analysis. And as long as I can look at data that can give me some sort of conviction, then it's something I can participate in. And so that's, that's sort of the.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  Sort of the view on these memes. Pepe, like I've said in the past, if you think if the ETH is going to do well, Pepe is probably going to do well as well and probably potentially go up multiples on ETH.

• 34:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  So that's some of the hot sauce. We'll talk about some of that. But one of them is just like, and this might surprise people, is Pepe. You think that's hot sauce to ETH, basically. And the reason you derive that view is from these two charts here. So Pepe, market value to realized value ratio, nice thing, of course. It's a meme, but it's all unchained. So Mike can peek into the data. Like, what about these charts is indicating that this is beta for ETH?

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we were just looking at this for Sol and ETH. And we were saying that when you get under 1, that's typically a really good buying opportunity. With Pepe, you get a little bit further below 1 because of the volatility of this. And you can see we went down to, we've been down to 0.5 a few times in the full history of Pepe as a tradable asset. We are close to that same level right now. So again, this is telling you that the average Pepe holder is underwater right now. So if you're wondering why the sentiment is so bad on crypto Twitter, it's because people are losing money. And that's, as a contra signal, that's, to me, that's a signal to buy Pepe, potentially.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  You know, I'm not going all in, but I think it's okay to be nibbling on these things, sort of at these levels.

• 36:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let me ask you about something like this versus a strategy to just do some kind of, look, I do not advocate for leverage, right? Just like in general, margin in crypto is just, I'm, that's like, you know, strapping a bomb to your chest and then going skydiving. It's like, generally a really bad idea, but that can add some hot sauce to a portfolio. So why do something like Pepe rather than kind of like a 2X, 3X levered bet, some sort of perp trade on Ether or Sol?

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Because I don't want to get liquidated. That's really it. That's really it. You just want to survive. Yeah, I don't do leverage. So, and that's a personal choice as well. But I think if you are somebody who's comfortable doing that, you sort of get the same. You get the same output. For me, I'm more comfortable just buying the meme coin than putting leverage on to Ether Soul. And so that's how I play it. I just think it's a little safer than than risking a liquidation. And I always want to be long the crypto asset class. I don't want to risk. I just don't want to risk that. So that's, again, another personal decision.

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• 37:56David Hoffman?

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• 38:41David Hoffman?

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• 38:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about some other flavors of hot sauce here because we got, maybe this is our Tabasco. We got some Sriracha sauce over here, which is some of these other crypto assets that aren't meme-stocked. They do have some different style on-chain fundamentals, maybe access to some future cash flow. One of which is Athena and ENA, which is the asset of Athena. You wrote this memo. I thought it was fantastic. It was back in June. It's all on the DeFi Report, guys. So you can check here, but this is an asset I believe that you are bullish on, Mike. Can you tell us why?

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you know, this is, there's a little bit of a stablecoin like meta, I think, that you can capture.

• 39:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  I've noticed. I've noticed with the Circle price.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Yes, Circle is doing really well.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  We just really like the team behind this project. What's fascinating about this is it's essentially a hedge fund. And this is going to be interesting to see how regulation, we can get into regulation with this. But it's essentially a hedge fund. And the way that I think of this is they're democratizing access to that hedge fund. And anybody can participate in this. And it has this reflexive nature to it where the yields that is being paid to holders of a stablecoin, you can capture yield. This is a yield-bearing stablecoin. I think there may be an issue with them calling it a stablecoin potentially with regulation. But for now, it's a yield-bearing stablecoin.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  And the way that it pays that yield is when you are in a risk-on environment.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Funding rates, so if Ethereum sees a move towards $3,000, $4,000, what we will see is open interest rise, right? Traders will get into the market. They will want to put on leverage. And so what Athena is doing is essentially shorting ETH when that happens. And the longs are paying Athena to have that position open. And then they're sharing that, the yield of that with the stablecoin holders. So it's a very reflexive play on ETH itself, which also means there's risks there. If ETH goes in the wrong direction and, you know, open interest comes down, there could be an issue there, which we highlighted as one of the major risks.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  We cover a lot of the risks with this project in particular. But to me, this is a bull market. Play, it's probably not a long-term hold through the bear market, but it's a reflexive play on ETH and it's not a meme coin. It actually has fundamentals, it has yield that goes to those stablecoin holders.

• 41:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  So let's talk about this a little bit more because I think the mechanism itself is a little difficult to understand and maybe we could talk about that. Let's park the mechanism aside. My understanding, Mike, is this is Athena now, the stablecoin itself. So not the kind of the, you know, the token that's the recipient of future cash flows, the ENA token, but the Athena stablecoin token itself, is it what? Is it the third largest stablecoin?

• 41:53Speaker 01

  It is. Yeah, it is the largest, the largest yield-bearing stablecoin. It has about 50% of the yield-bearing stablecoin market.

• 42:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow. Okay, so stablecoins, number one is of course like Tether, and we'll call this a stablecoin for now. So number one is Tether, number two is Circle USDC. And we've seen what Circle, like is doing, and we know the profit margins on Tether. We just talked to Paulo, Mike, I don't know if you caught up with that episode, but do you know they're throwing off, I don't know, 13 billion or so in profit every year? In profit and he expects to do more this year? Anyway, massively profitable, also have some narrative, like tailwinds, say with the Genius Act, and this is the number three stablecoin. Okay, it's still not huge in comparison, but this is respectable.

• 42:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  What are we at, 6 billion or so in terms of the, like the total amount of these stable, these stablecoins that have been issued? Okay.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, massive and they were the, I think the second fastest protocol to over $100 million in protocol revenue as well.

• 42:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so we have that, we have the kind of the narrative. Now, what's interesting too, is I don't know if this is good or bad, but the Genius Act doesn't contemplate something like Athena, right? So it doesn't, it doesn't, from my understanding, it doesn't rule one way or another on Athena, right? But in the Genius Act, there is like no contemplation of a yield-bearing stablecoin. USDC does not have a path to do that, neither does Tether. So the fact that this is a Stablecoin with yield that goes back to kind of the holder of USDE. That's kind of a something different than the other top two stablecoins. Something else that's that's different, I suppose, is it doesn't have the blessing from this regulation. So it kind of exists in this regulatory gray area. Am I right about this?

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Yes, that is that is correct. And that is, you know, that's how they've been performing over the last few years. And the Genius Act sort of says, hey, like, we realize there's these other stablecoins out there. We want to study them for a year or so, and then we will come up with a framework for those. But for now, they are outside of the Genius Act. I think what people can get maybe a little comfort around is the fact that this is not a SEC regime that is necessarily probably going to go after them for being outside of that framework. It's more just that like you're you just have to operate offshore. You don't get to be blessed by the US capital markets.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  You're just going to have to operate offshore and they have to like sort of geofence the actual app to US users. You know, people use VPNs and things like that, but that's sort of where they sit. And, you know, they've been able to achieve the amount of success they've had. You know, in this current state of being in this gray area, and I think it'll just sort of continue for a little while.

• 44:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  How scalable is the stablecoin itself? And by scalable, I mean, how big could it grow? So we're at $6 billion now, but to get to Tether's like level, you're $150 billion. It's somewhat easy for Tether to scale. If there's a dollar of demand for Tether, they just buy more treasuries and they just scale it that way. Same thing with USDC. So it's infinitely scalable with demand. Some of these other stablecoin projects that are based on collateral, this type of thing, like something like Make or Die, for instance. It's just harder to scale because you have to have collateral that kind of backs it. You have to have demand for for leverage is essentially that backs those types of stablecoins. This uses a different mechanism, I believe, but it does have some scale limitations, right?

• 45:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is it the the amount of perps in circulation? What are the scale limitations of Athena?

• 45:35Speaker 01

  It does. Yeah, it's a great question. So the limitations in scaling this is really the amount of open interest on Ethereum and these other crypto assets.

• 45:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  They essentially short to pay the yield and they can't, based on sort of the risk parameters of the protocol, they can't have more than like 20% of the open interest. It just gets too, it just gets too risky.

• 46:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  I see.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  And so they are, they are constrained by this. I would say that in a bull market, what I think that constraint, just sort of the ceiling of that constraint sort of rises as open interest comes in. But, but there is a constraint there. I would say that they are diversifying their reserves as well. So they, they do have the BlackRock Biddle money market fund that is also backing. So they have some interesting TradFi integrations and they work with, they're building an L3 with Securitize and BlackRock's and that's a real world asset, real world asset platform for issuing assets. They're building that with Securitize. They're using the BlackRock Biddle, which is treasury

• 46:44Speaker 01

  bonds to sort of diversify some of the risk in some of the reserves there as well. So that constraint, you know, the way that I think of it is like, based on where I think open interest can, can go in this cycle, I think it can get to 20 trillion, or sorry, 20 billion.

• 47:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, that's bullish. 20, 20 billion in open interest. And so Athena could get, capture all of that potentially?

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I think they could get to 20 billion of stablecoin supply. They're about six right now. And if that were to happen, I would expect the token to rally as well. And we can get into fair value on the token. It's, it looks similar to me, like as these, these memes that we were just talking about. It's, I think it's down almost 80% from its all time high right now.

• 47:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, wow.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  And the financial look great, so.

• 47:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, okay, one question before we get to maybe the fair value is you mentioned risk a couple of times, okay? And I'm just like, you don't have to explain all of kind of the risk here, but I want to get your sense of the spectrum, right? So if on the one hand, on the like not risky side, we have something like Circle and Tether, which is backed by a treasury, not risky. On the other side of the spectrum, people remember 2022, and they remember Terra Luna, algo stablecoin backed by endogenous collateral of the asset itself, kind of this recursive, like pyramid scheme-y thing that like can unwind in a hurry. Where are we? Are we somewhere in between those two like ends of the spectrum?

• 48:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's fair. This is not a pyramid scheme type thing, but it also has not been tested in a bear market. And what that would look like is funding rates actually going negative for a period of time, and they make their money by shorting ETH when funding rates are positive. And so I do think there's risks here that we just haven't seen how it's going to perform. They also have custody risk, right? They work with exchanges, and they've done a lot of stuff to try to get some of the reserves and stuff off exchange so that they are not, that they don't have this counterparty risk. They did have $30 million with Bybit when Bybit

• 49:01Speaker 01

  was hacked earlier this year. They did fine through that. But there's sort of like the counterparty custody risk, there's the protocol risk itself in terms of just the smart contracts functioning properly. And then you have this peg risk in terms of the market conditions and funding rates, I think are like the three primary risks. These things won't show up most likely in a bull market, but they will show up in a bear market.

• 49:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  This feels to me like it's slightly, definitely not Luna Terra territory, but slightly maybe more risky than something like DAI, which has sustained through multiple bear markets in the past.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, agreed.

• 49:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, fair market value of this thing, what do you think? So right now it's what 25 cents for E and A.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  So it's down, it's similar to what we were looking at before. When you look at the MBRV of this, it's, it's, it's down. Uh, I can't remember where it was when I shared that report, but it's close to one, below one. And I might've had it in the closing. Yeah, there it is, MBRV. Yeah. So we're under, we're, we're negative on the MBRV Z score. That's the, that's telling you that the, um, where it's trading in relation to its, um, historical norms. So it's trading, I think almost 0.5 standard deviations below its average, uh, you know, price. So that's telling you it's, it's, it's oversold, uh, basically right now.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  It does have, you know, token, it has unlocks, right? So this is like part of the analysis we share in this report. And that's another one of the risks is, uh, team unlocks. And, and so that, I think that's putting pressure on it during like this sort of risk off phase of the market that, that we're kind of in right now.

• 50:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  And is there a fee switch on or not yet?

• 50:52Speaker 01

  So not yet.

• 50:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Cash flow situation.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, they have hinted at this. There's a few, and we cover this in the report. There's a few thresholds that they want to reach, uh, in terms of, uh, risk parameters, in terms of total protocol fees and things like this, um, before they actually turn on this, the fee switch to the E and A token, um, but it's on, it's on the roadmap.

• 51:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. All right. So that's Athena, guys. I know you also, Mike, have a position in WorldCoin. Uh, we, we talked a little bit about that last time. There's a full report on the DeFi report that people can go get Mike's take on WorldCoin. I, I want to zoom out and ask more of a meta question on sort of alt season. You were, you were talking about it a little bit earlier of like, what if alt season happens, but it's with crypto equities and stocks rather than on-chain assets? So what we've seen this week is a Robin Hood rollout of, uh, tokenized securities on top of Arbitrum. Arbitrum got like the arb token, got a little bit of a bump on that. Robin Hood. Also got an 11% bump on that. What happened to ETH?

• 51:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Nothing. Purgatory. 20. It's like it's operating like a stablecoin this summer. 2500. That's all. I wake up, I see 2500. I go to bed, I see 2500. Rinse, watch, repeat, the full cycle. So that is not filtering into some of our crypto native assets. We've seen Circle. People sideways on Circle, crypto natives at least, because they own on-chain assets. Where do you buy Circle on-chain? It's not in Uniswap. Well, at least not now. Maybe it will be someday soon. But and that's seen it like at 8x from IPO at some point in the time. So now, if you're considering fundamental crypto assets, do investors need to look outside of on-chain assets and look at actual traditional crypto equities

• 52:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  that benefit from the crypto, like things like Hood, things like Coin, things like Circle? I mean, let's ignore the treasury companies right now because those are levered bets on crypto native assets. But like the crypto equities, do we need to start looking in the public markets for these things?

• 52:55Speaker 01

  I think so. I think you have to pay attention to what we're seeing here. Like the Circle IPO was was was pretty eye-opening for me to observe just the amount of demand for that. And we're seeing Coin sort of catch up a little bit now. Robinhood has done extremely well. Like you really have to pay attention when when when Robinhood goes up 11% on announcing news that they're building on Ethereum, but Ethereum doesn't move. Arbitrum moved a little bit. You gotta pay attention, I think, to that. It doesn't tell me anything like long-term or what, you know, where this is all going. But I recommend, we've been holding Coin and Hood since like the last bear market, and we will continue to do that.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  That's basically, there's like eight assets in our portfolio. That's two of them. So a quarter of the portfolio is in these like equities. What I'm looking at is these ETFs. We do have like nine altcoin ETFs coming.

• 53:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  To me, that's that's bullish for altcoins, right? And the fact that this is happening and then this becomes the narrative, like I sort of want to fade that a little bit. It's like sort of telling me like maybe this is getting a little too, people are getting a little too caught up in this. And like you're still, you always have to come back to like. You know, people love to gamble. We are, we are, there's a lot of D gens in crypto and like, I just think people will chase. But we need to, you need to see sort of a, a change in, I think, the liquidity conditions and we can maybe get into a little bit of that at the end here. But all coins, you know, ETH BTC chart, all of these things really depend on Fed liquidity. And so like, that's, that's like the key thing.

• 54:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I, one thing I, I, I appreciate about that perspective, and I do think people need to be looking at crypto equity assets, is it resolves some of the challenges that we've had with our tokens in the past, which is like, some of our tokens have been, and people have called them lemon market tokens, but like, almost like pseudo equity, where like, do you have a right to cash flow? Do you have a right to governance? Is the team incentivized behind this like singular asset, or they have multiple assets? Could they just like abandon the project? All of those protections have already been worked out over the last, what, like 80 years? In Gary Gensler style, I'm going to invoke his name, but like, the SEC and crypto and, and, sorry, US equities markets have worked out all of

• 55:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  these kinks. And when you own, when you own stock in Robinhood and Coinbase, the teams around those have a fiduciary responsibility to return value to shareholders and to maximize that value. And that's like, in the legal code of the US. So it's kind of nice to be dabbling in those crypto assets too, because they don't have the problem that many of our tokens have. But let's, let's, let's end this episode with liquidity and the macro setup. So you've got a chart here with global, weekly global liquidity. And tell, tell us about this. And what do you see in liquidity? Why is that a driver for you of like the macro conditions?

• 56:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is from Cross, Cross Border Capital, where we source this from. What we're seeing here is like, it's just turned over a little bit in June. And this is, to me, this is just the Fed sitting on its hands. And so we know that there is quite a bit of, you know, fiscal spend going on. We'll see what happens with the, the big beautiful bill. Like, it looks like it might have hit a little snag recently here. So that's a big deal in terms of what's going to happen there. And then what is Powell going to do? I mean, Powell, he was, he spoke, I think, in Europe yesterday. And I thought maybe we would see him hint at like a sort of shift, but still hawkish.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  Still saying that they're going to be data dependent, concerned about inflation. The, if you look at the CME futures in terms of where the market is pricing rate cuts, it's at like, I think it was less than 20% for, for July. I think it was 18% the last time I looked. Looks better for September. So it looks like it might be a 75% chance of cuts in September.

• 57:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Really?

• 57:10Speaker 01

  And actually, what was interesting was like, it looked like a 20% chance of a 50 basis point cut in September. You can see like, it's, this is telling you that the Fed is, what I think is going to happen is they're just going to be behind the, they're going to be behind this. If you're data dependent, you're basically saying we're going to be late. So this is a risk in the market right now. Like it's, it's easy to look at a lot of things and be bullish. But the longer they go, the, the higher the chances are that you have something, some snag in the repo markets or some scare in the markets. You know, last August, we had the Japanese carry trade unwind in early August. So like,

• 57:55Speaker 01

  kind of just be on the, be aware that liquidity conditions are not like really good right now. At the same time, we have Trump, you know, out there talking about, we need to get interest rates down to 2% to be able to, you know, refinance the debt. And so, you know, you just have this push-pull between what Trump wants. I think Trump's going to get what he wants. It's just a matter of when, when, when that happens.

• 58:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  It is the big, bright crypto macro indicator, the, the weekly global liquidity supply. So basically if this number goes up, crypto goes up. And the higher this number goes, the higher presumably altcoins go as well. And so if this number, right now, global liquidity has like, you know, recently locally dipped down. But the things to look for are what? Like rate cuts from the Fed, big beautiful bill which adds to deficits. All of these things mean money printing means global liquidity number go up, means the crypto bull market continues. And those are the things to watch right now.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  That's it. I think so. You know, this chart here is factoring in not just Fed liquidity, but all the major central banks. So, you know, the PBOC in China is, is actually a little bit more, has a little bit of a more loose policy right now. But we are also seeing like tightening in Europe and in the UK. So it's not just the US. They're, they're involved as well. And I, I think that's it. Like, once this turns, I think you will see a move for, for, for crypto in the longer tail. I think I may have put another chart. And there is the last chart showing Fed, the Fed funds rate and ETH. Yeah. So, you know,

• 59:46Speaker 01

  along those lines, we've got ETH versus Fed funds rate right here. And we can see that when that purple line, the Fed funds rate starts to come down.

• 59:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  ETH goes up.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  That's when the pink line goes up. Right? And so even, you can even see last year when the Fed, the Fed cut, I think it was 100 basis points, they did a full percentage point from September through December. You can see that and ETH went up, right? And then when they stopped cutting, ETH has gone down. And so if you see that purple line come down, most likely the pink line is going to go up and we're sort of in a, a holding pattern. And we'll see how long we can hold on without a major sell off, right? If liquidity conditions sort of really dry up.

• 1:00:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look, man, I, I feel like with Trump's rhetoric with kind of the election cycle, actually, it's like, I mean, we're creeping on a year away. Politicians need to get reelected. I feel like it's a pretty fair bet that the purple line is coming down sometime soon. I mean, inflation's not running too hot from a CPI perspective. You know, all of these things, you're blending together, it feels like a pretty good macro setup. So let me, let me ask you the question I end these episodes with, which is, okay, what's in the portfolio now? What have you changed around? I think last time you were talking about long-term positions of Bitcoin and Ether. You also had some recent additions. You mentioned, you know, some of the blue chip memes like Pepe, WorldCoin, you have a position there. I assume

• 1:01:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  you've got a position on Athena right now. What's in the, what's in the portfolio?

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so not a ton of changes. So 60% Bitcoin tend to be, that's like on the lower side for me. So I've been sort of allocating more into ETH, more into ETH-related assets. So that's WorldCoin, that's Athena. We've been nibbling on these meme coins. So Pepe and Bonk are also in the portfolio. And I think we talked about last time, we have a position in Celestia that we started buying under $3.00. That has been selling. So we're like underweight on that position right now. But I think that that is still like that. So we actually bought more of it at like a buck 30 recently. So sort of like, I would

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  say more of a, more of a risk-on posture, but still not like fully all in the markets. Like definitely keeping some cash on the sideline to, because I think there's a chance that, you know, liquidity conditions continue to sort of dry up and you get like another, another opportunity to buy even lower than we are now. So we'll see. I want to be in the market in case, in case that doesn't happen, but also have some cash on the sideline in case there are more buying opportunities.

• 1:02:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's great. And guys, we didn't get a chance to look at it. It's an exhaustive, you know, memo report in and of itself. But Mike also authored this, this great report. How do you value an L1 on the DeFi Report, which you guys should absolutely read? If there's demand for an episode, we could do an episode on this, just this topic alone, because I think it's fascinating from a fundamentals perspective. And also, Mike, we've got something coming up, which is, we're going to start doing quarterly reports together. And the DeFi Report, you're planning to publish quarterly reports for, I believe, Ether and Sol starting in June, or starting in July, right? So give us, give us a feel for what's going to happen.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we're going to roll these out. These will be the Q2 reports for this quarter. July 15th, we plan to publish these, starting with ETH and Solana. And the plan here is... We want to produce a report that is sort of free of our opinion. It's just really the pure data and from the token holder perspective. And so that is what we're going to roll out later this, this mid-July. And then we're also going to pair this with our Dune dashboards. So we have all of the data that supports that, that report. And then we're going to do an earnings call where we sort of invite up leadership, right? From some of these communities and like, we haven't seen this in crypto. And I think this will be interesting.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  I'm sure there'll be a mixed reaction to this on CT. But the idea is that like, the token holders need a voice and they need to be able to sort of ask questions or understand things about how value accrues these tokens. What's the right way to be thinking about them in terms of, in terms of valuation? And so we want analysts to have a place that they can come to sort of ask these types of questions. And we want the report to be free from our bias, our potential biases and just data driven. And to let the market then interpret that on their own. We will do a separate podcast where I share my opinions about what the data is saying. But we want the market to be able to just take that and then, you know, build their own, their own thesis, their own analysis on top of it.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  So super excited to work with you guys on that.

• 1:04:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  I love it. Love the work you're doing. So you heard it here first, earnings calls coming to crypto starting in July. Got to end with this, of course, you know, none of this has been financial advice. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the crypto fundamentals journey.