$ANSEM, Robinhood Chain, & Why SOL Still Beats ETH in 2026 | Mike Dudas

Memecoins were supposed to be a dead end, but Mike Dudas believes their deeper idea is only beginning to spread. The 6MV investor joins David to unpack Bonk’s role in reviving Solana, Ansem’s latest experiment, Robinhood’s push into the trenches, and how games, collectibles, prediction markets, and compute could power consumer crypto’s next chapter. Mike also answers the $1 million ETH versus SOL question, lays out Ethereum’s best strategic response, and explains why crypto’s slower progress may be setting up a more durable cycle. Subscribe for more conversations from the frontier of crypto. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔓NEAR | TRADE CONFIDENTIALLY, GET 20% BACK https://bankless.cc/near-pod 🔑BITKEY | GET 10% OFF USE CODE: BANKLESS | #bitkeypartner https://bankless.cc/bitkey ✈️COINBASE ONE CARD | EARN 5% BACK IN BITCOIN https://bankless.cc/coinbase-one-card 📊BITGET | TOKENIZED STOCKS 2.0 https://bankless.cc/bitget-stocks 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Bonk at Solana’s Bottom 7:07 What Gives Memecoins Value? 13:45 The Ansem Experiment 20:53 Are Memecoins Built to Die? 26:19 Culture Goes Onchain 29:45 Robinhood, Base, and the Trenches 32:59 Better Assets, Better Cycles 36:20 What 6MV Is Betting On 38:21 The Consumer Crypto Comeback 43:37 Compute Becomes a Market 47:57 Crypto’s AI Diaspora 50:53 SOL Versus ETH 57:02 Cycles, Equity, and Tokens 1:01:34 Why Crypto Takes Longer --- RESOURCES Mike Dudas https://x.com/mdudas --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Bankless Nation, I'm joined by Mike Dudas from Six Man Ventures. Mike, welcome to the podcast.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Thank you. Great to be here. I appreciate it.

• 0:10Speaker 00

  Mike, we've never had you on the podcast before, but we have been around each other since like the very beginning of crypto. It's good to have you on.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I'm delighted. I've read tons of what you've written. You know, we interact on Twitter and real life and obviously listen to a ton of your podcasts. So I really appreciate it.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  So I want to, the current event of the day is, once again, meme coins and the trenches. And that's just been seemingly an inevitable component of the crypto industry. And it never seems to be like resolved as a topic of conversation. And you have a particular perspective, I think, that I want to, I want to get it here on the episode today. Maybe we can kind of go back to the era of Bonk, because that is what I remember, like your first actual involvement in like the meme coin trench era. And then I, and then we can talk about like what's going on with like Robin Hood chain and like the Ansem meme coin. And like what that industry and like the debate around base and everything. But I want to, I want to kind of get your perspective around like the role that Bonk, the meme coin on Solana,

• 1:12Speaker 00

  played for Solana back when it was launched and kind of like what your thoughts or like strategy, or just overall like perspective was around like meme coins on Solana back before meme coins were really as big as this thing as they are today.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So meme coins today, I think people look at them and think of them as this like big, you know, professional industrial complex. And to some extent, you know, that's quite true. The, at the same time, you know, the meme coins that have the most significant amount of value tend to be outliers and don't really fit that mold of kind of like the cynical, short-term, you know, pump and eventually, you know, go down rapidly type thing. So, you know, there's different types of meme coins, just like there's different types of VC-backed tokens. But anyway, the history of meme coins is, you know, they're one of the earliest primitives in crypto. And Dogecoin is like, I believe more than a decade old and Shiba Inu.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  And so you've had, Dogecoin is its own chain. Shiba Inu is an Ethereum meme coin. And these are still today worth billions of dollars. So meme coins and this idea of, you call it IP, community, you know, however you want to describe these, people sort of having fun around something that doesn't have really tangible value is something that has lasting, you know, interest to humans and clearly lasting value. So then fast forwarding to your question on Bonk, you know, at the sort of depths of the Solana bear market. So post FTX, you know, post all the other things that went wrong in all of crypto.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  End of 2022, you know, the, the mood, the market participants, you know, in the Solana ecosystem. So the mood was low. The number of market participants had dropped dramatically. And frankly, the number of creators, so developers, I mean, there was a meme at the time, a joke, that there were something like 75 developers left in Solana. And, you know, a group of folks who cared a lot about a Solana, who had participated, who had built things, you know, not just, you know, finance people or VCs or, you know, enthusiasts or collectors, but developers and other people who were pretty deep in the Solana ecosystem said, hey, what's a, what's a really good way at a time of like low morale and activity to get people, get the chain reinvigorated, get activity back on the chain?

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Hey, why don't we reward, you know, the folks who have been using the chain, building on it and doing things, you know, for the past four or five years? Again, this was late 2022. I guess not four or five years, but who had been doing things for the past three years. So, you know, a group of 20 folks launched meme coin called Bonk, you know, a dog coin. Again, this is before the meme industrial complex erupted. And the idea was if we airdrop, you know, half of the supply to folks who have built on the chain, used the chain, collected NFTs and other things on the chain. One, we're going to have a bit of a stimulus activity, hopefully get some excitement, attention, and, you know, get people interested and, you know, building again.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  And this is the stone cold bottom. I think Sol was, you know, at that point like close to $10. And, you know, lo and behold, it worked. So basically airdropped, you know, 50% of supply within, I think, like a month or six weeks, the token was trading over 400 million. And so a couple hundred million in value had been airdropped at a time when that just wasn't a thing for meme coins out to the Solana community. And developers, you know, some of them got like, I think, $10,000 plus at a time when, you know, their products were struggling and many people were grateful and it just led to a lot of goodwill. Over the next six months, Bonk sort of trended down, you know, into the summer. And then, but at a time when, you know, sentiment was really low, it was something really exciting

• 5:02Speaker 01

  for the community. And then, you know, it was authentic. So we, you know, a group of folks continued to work on it. And it turned into not a pure meme coin. So released, you know, products around it, a thing called Bonk Swap, a Bonk NFT sets, eventually a Bonk meme coin launchpad. And so, you know, the team still to this day, there's a core team of folks who are working on it, who give grants, who invest in and support Solana projects. So like to me, it still to this day, many years later, almost four years later, represents, you know, the best of memes and community. And I think shows that these things can be good. Regardless of the value, which has fluctuated quite a bit over the years. In addition, it caught the attention of Solana Foundation and Solana Mobile.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  They ended up, you know, airdropping or loading, you know, it ended up being more than $1,000 worth of Bonk onto the phone. So, you know, you bought the phone. It was essentially free if you sold your Bonk. And so that was exciting. It was great marketing. I think it showed the promise of these things when done with, you know, great care. And frankly, it laid a, I think, a template that others have done incredibly well, you know, not perfectly analogous, but you've seen Rekt have a brand coin. You've seen Pudgy Penguins, Pengu have, have sort of a brand coin. And so folks have done that really well. So anyway, you know, these things done properly include many, many more people than, for example, NFTs, because, you know, millions of people,

• 6:27Speaker 01

  you can hold the tiniest, tiniest fraction, a dollar worth or less, or you can hold a tremendous amount. So, you know, like anything in crypto, the really, really, really positive ones, the Bonks, tend to be the outlier. And we have, you know, these permissionless blockchains where, you know, anyone can launch anything. And so, you know, over time, the meme coin landscape has changed over the last few years.

• 6:50Speaker 00

  The reason why I ask, and I appreciate this story, and the story is like a good one. And as you say, that's like kind of an outlier in the meme coin world, like the, I think, the default version of a meme coin like goes up to a very low market cap, $50,000, $100,000, and then goes to zero because scalpers are just moving on. And that there's like a million of those, but no one remembers those. And like, at the end of the day, actually kind of people only remember the good ones because the good ones are the ones that last. I kind of have like a complicated position on meme coins. And I think that's true for the industry as a whole, where like, at the end of the day, it's 2026. And I'm like no longer interested in standing in front of the bulldozer of meme coins.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  Like meme coins are powerful. They're big. They have had proven successes. And like despite all the negative things that people can associate with meme coins, like they have lasted at the end of the day. So the evidence about the persistence of meme coins is like ample. At the end, but my one perspective that I want to bring with you is to talk to you about is they're like, building a business, a company, like a Coinbase, an Apple, an Nvidia, or any, or even a private company, not even a public company. It's about like building, we're trying to build like a structure, a self-sustaining, stable structure of people and inputs and outputs that generate revenue.

• 8:12Speaker 00

  And that structure is like stable and can be handed on to other people to pass that along. And meme coins, it's a completely new thing. And it is somewhat of a structure, but the structure feels so unstable and difficult to transcend through time, because, because one of the reasons is they're memes. They are not profit generating. They're not revenue generating. Like Bonk made the transition from being a meme coin to like an actual project. But like the idea of like a social structure that we build scaffolding around and there's like stability, it doesn't,

• 8:52Speaker 00

  that's just not what meme coins are. And it's hard for people like me and others to like wrap their head around this new primitive that doesn't seem to be something that like you can build a foundation on. I'm talking in very like loose conceptual words, but I think, I think you kind of get it. What's your response to like that?

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think as long as people understand them as that, that's fine, right? I agree. I mean, these Bonk or Dogecoin are different things than Coinbase. It's a valid point, but you know, humans are complex and you have multiple interests and like to do many different things with their time. Look, I can make a lot of money, you know, holding the AVE token or holding, you know, exchange token. And that's great, but I'm not going to do a lot with it. You know, it's going to sit in my portfolio and you know, hopefully if it does really well and the product does well, I'm going to earn money over time and fees. And yeah, but there are things that I probably want to do with the rest of my time. And I think

• 9:55Speaker 01

  meme coins can be a fun thing, right? They're speculative, they're enjoyable. Again, there's a community element, you know, people do things, a whole culture around it, you know, things like bag working and actually getting together in person, like Bonk sponsors a lot of in real life events. It's in that sense, they're very similar to NFTs, which I think, you know, I'm an NFT collector still. Most NFT projects, BFP projects, you know, decline massively. By the way, even the best ones like CryptoPunks, which I still hold have declined, I think 90% or something from the peak. But I think folks who enjoy crypto would say that the communities that have grown up around those things and the IP and the events they hold, you know, tend to be

• 10:37Speaker 01

  worth it for the folks who hold them, you know, even if, I mean, you probably wouldn't value the IP of most of these collections at where they trade. So there's something about community spirit and spending time. But yeah, there's no like rational valuation framework, you know, that's going to fit into a model that I can put together to tell you what these things should be worth. So they are always going to be speculative and you better enjoy, you know, the thing that you hold and what you're doing if you're going to invest in them.

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• 13:14Speaker 00

  of uptime. Near.com is the best way to be on-chain and be in control. Get 20% of your trading fees back through the Banklist link. It's in the show notes, not investment advice. So when we watch Ansem and his meme coin, and technically it's not his, somebody else made it and gave it to him, but he's kind of like adopted it. So I'm calling it his. What's your, just a reaction or response as you're, as you're watching Ansem do his thing?

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. So yeah, full disclosure, I'm an investor in Bullpen, which is Ansem's company that he's a co-founder of. He's a friend, you know, so basically I'm positively biased towards what he does. Like any of us, Ansem is right about many things and isn't right about many things. But what I love about him is he's like you, he's courageous enough to be public about his beliefs and confident in his thought process. And by the way, willing to change his mind and share when his mind has changed. And yeah, there's very few folks like that. In addition, he's authentic. I know he gets a lot of, I mean, look, he's so public that you're going to have

• 14:20Speaker 01

  every opinion on earth about him. But you know, whether you like his approach or not, he is authentic and he does believe in himself and he does believe in the people who follow him. And he does care about them. He thinks he's going to create, I've talked to him at length about this, behind this Ansem meme coin that he didn't start, but that somebody gifted him the supply. He was not a part of that at the start. And I think he saw it and he said, hey, this is a moment that's similar to that 2022 Bonk launch. He was one of the first Bonk supporters. He wasn't involved in launching it, but you know, he got excited about it and helped, you know, drive that thing really high and helped. And you saw what it did to the price of Solana, the Solana ecosystem, the usage on the chain and the economics. And I think he believes we're

• 15:01Speaker 01

  at a point in the cycle where that can happen again. And I think where I, me and Ansem disagree with folks is that like meme coins are done. They're just not. They've been around, like I said, since Dogecoin, 2014, every cycle. The class overall has staying power and every, you know, cycle or every few years, one or a few of the highest quality, you know, assets and quality is I guess a fun, funny term, but you know, some assets do stand out. And by the way, that's true of any, you know, subsector within crypto. There's very few good assets in crypto. And actually meme coins have a pretty good share of the quote unquote good or highly valued

• 15:40Speaker 01

  assets relative to, you know, L1s, L2s, infra, you name it. So Ansem is bringing a model that he thought would exist last cycle. And then I think he's admitted that he was wrong in terms of how it would come to market. And you know, that would be these like celebrity or creator coins, right? And the, the fault was that, you know, non-cryptonative people, people who didn't really care about market participants and folks in the trenches came in and effectively, you know, all the way up to President of the United States dumped their tokens, you know, while, you know, Trump, it was launched, you know, a single side liquidity pool and just meant to be pumped by people, you know, had a bunch of like, to my understanding, influencers and folks who

• 16:23Speaker 01

  would just talk about it nonstop. So price went up and, you know, they were selling the Trump coin into that for cash and made a tremendous amount of money regardless of how the thing performed long-term. It's very different than what Ansem did. Launched a thing, you know, it was launched at zero. He was gifted supply. I think he's bought as it's gone up. He hasn't sold anything. And he has stated, and we'll see, I mean, it's an emergent thing. It almost sounds silly to discuss it, but he's basically staking and he's got a big reputation. Guy's made a lot of money himself and for other people. He's staking his entire reputation extremely publicly on this thing succeeding. And he, more than anybody else, in the way that I think, for example, a Kobe understands crypto, pure crypto trading of, you know, things that

• 17:05Speaker 01

  people would say have definitive tangible value. I think Ansem's that for memes and fun and community. And he's, you know, got a manifesto out. I don't know that I've like read it in extensive detail, but a lot of like pillars around which he's going to share in if the value of this token appreciates, share value from his other business initiatives and from, you know, the attention with the community and gift them tokens. And I think he said there will be other mechanisms to reward folks. But, you know, it's never going to be equity in, you know, Ansem Incorporated or to my understanding in Bullpen, you know, so you have to believe it's kind of similar to Pengu and even Bonk, that in the future, you know, how we value assets will look different than, you know, how we historically have and that there will be some

• 17:50Speaker 01

  mixture of memetic community and attention value to certain assets. And I believe that pretty strongly. I think crypto markets have shown that to be the case, but also other class, asset classes are increasingly showing that to be the case with meme stocks, with, you know, virtually everything in the AI economy now, you know, trading on sentiment and memetic value and being really hard to tie back to fundamentals. You know, you've got sort of the Elon meme industrial factory. Obviously he's creating incredible, you know, products for the world, very different than pure meme coins, but on any fundamental basis, hard to value those. So I think it's a decent bet that, you know, if you want to, not, it's not for everybody and it shouldn't be, but if you want to allocate a portion of your portfolio to the attention

• 18:34Speaker 01

  economy and interest and community and what people are talking about. And, you know, it's, it's reasonable to think that this might be one of the most successful. You know, one of the most successful assets and initiatives, and again, this is not financial advice. I do, I own some personally. It's not, for example, an asset that's suitable for our fund. You know, I run a fund and I'm a registered investment advisor. So you just have to think about it in the right context. Where it gets dangerous is, you know, these are on-chain assets that anybody can hold with no KYC. There's no, you know, we say we don't want, you know, accredited investor rules to prevent people from accessing things. But then we yell and shout and scream when, you know, they invest in some of the wrong things.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  But I think in meme coins, like it's like pretty clear which assets are going to have strength over what period of time. Like there's only a few that have real signals. So I think this is a noble effort in an area where both Ansem and me think, well, you know, once again, the majority of on-chain activity is happening in the meme coin trenches. You know, we've had three years to produce other things for consumers and other things of like social value that they could spend their time on, whether it be gaming, whether it be streaming coins, and you know, none of that stuff's materialized. So I think it's like, let's try meme coins in a better form. But I understand that many, many, many people are tired of that narrative and honestly don't want to pay attention.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  And I blame them, right? Like some people, if you don't like it, just mute the folks talking about it. Candidly, I don't try to talk about it too, too much, but it is something that people do want to interview me about because it's sort of consensus that these things are useless and I don't agree with that.

• 20:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think that what I'm trying to wrap my head around is like, the meme coin sector evolves like any other sectors. Like there's tech and sentiment and a lot of that kind of like has some sort of like a direction of travel. And like, here we are in 2026 and like now the meta is unique to 2026. And so I'm trying to wrap my head around it now. The, the thing that I still can't like totally contend with is that like in the fullness of time, the difference between like meme coins and like, just again, using the Ansem meme coin as an example versus like an equity, public company, or even a private company, is that like in the future,

• 20:57Speaker 00

  like say we're old dude, we're like 70, 80 years old and Coinbase, the goal of Coinbase at that point in 2080 is to be passed along from Brian, probably before now, but passed along from Brian to like some other manager who will take the reins and carry it forward. And the whole point of like Bitcoin and Ethereum and, you know, Solana and these centralized networks is like, we pass these decentralized networks to our children and they run the network. And I, I haven't asked Ansem this, I haven't spoken to him about it, but like, I can't imagine Ansem is like, yes, and I'm going to pass the baton of Ansem to like a new set of leadership where it will continue to perpetuate.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  And so like, it's a short-term thing. And I think like, most people see meme coins as like this pop-up shop of a casino. It's a pop-up casino game and like, ooh, this one's a new game. Let's all play the game for a while. Maybe we can play the game for years, but ultimately the game goes away and like we move on to the next one. And so that's, I think, what a lot of people like myself, it's like, why am I even playing the game in the first place? If it's not about like trying to make it as like perpetual and like as have as high growth as possible. And so that's, I think, when people like think about, well, this is just nihilism. This is financial nihilism. Like what's the point? And like really, at the end of the day, even with Bonk, for example,

• 22:23Speaker 00

  Bonk backed into being a project rather than being a meme coin. And so I think that's, that's still the thing that I can't really get my head around is like, why do I even play the game at all? If I know that ultimately this thing will conclude at zero in the fullness of time.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's fair. So it's not, I mean, meme coins are just not that type of, you know, life permanent assets. So like I hold a portfolio of assets and, you know, I plan to, you know, pass, you know, wealth to my kids. But, you know, I'm, I'm in my mid 40s and I plan to live a long time and I want to have some fun along the way. And so I do things, I play financial games of shorter duration, you know, I, of the shortest duration. It's sometimes, right? Prediction markets, you know, sports gambling, like I want to have some fun. These things, if they're not enjoyable, you know, you shouldn't be doing them.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  And I don't think, you know, anybody would claim, yes, that, you know, Bonk has the, you know, life, the expected lifetime of Coinbase. That being said, it's actually interesting. It's noble to think that like you'll pass, like that's the goal that you'll pass these things on your kids. But like, most corporations die over, you know, a number of decades. Most, you know, governments and, and countries die over centuries. So, I mean, we're just talking in different time horizons and there's different time horizons for different things we do.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I definitely take that point.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, hold, there's some nuance and like hold the portfolio of things that are for the long term and the short term and that you enjoy, some that you enjoy for, for the dopamine and the fun and the speculation, living in the moment. And some that you enjoy because hey, in 10 years, I'm going to look at it and I'm be excited. They compounded by 10% per year, 15% per year.

• 24:03Speaker 00

  In favor of meme coins, what I do appreciate about meme coins is that there is some sort of implied idea about rewriting the worlds of money and finance and how we value things. And you kind of talked about it. It's like, this is an attention game much more than it is like a, a DCF analysis or an EBITDA analysis. And like, if you try and take your old, old world model into meme coins, like you're going to have a bad time. And that was kind of like all the premise of crypto in the first place, like Bitcoin is like, no, no, no. We're rewriting the rules about money. Money doesn't come from the government. Money comes from the people. And that's a little bit of like rewriting the rules. And it's like what we tried to do and to some degree had success in, in rewriting the rules around ETH. Like no, don't value ETH on fees. ETH is money. Like fuck your rules.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  Like we are making the new rules.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  And get, and you know, so most of the, like, most of the big ideas of crypto, you know, don't stay confined to crypto and then bleed out like into broader society. And, and ultimately, you know, then have the potential to help create, for example, businesses, you know, far, far larger than anything, you know, that was created before. And I think you see that, for example, in some things like stable coins, like things that go, like ride on public permissionless rails, I think are now enabling, you know, potentially in the next five to 10 years, we'll have the first trillion dollar plus, you know, financial services company. We just haven't had those. But yeah, it won't always be in the initial form of crypto with these like tokens that don't necessarily have intrinsic value.

• 25:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think this is kind of like the thread guy thesis in, so if, if you are a believer in like the meme coin industry sector growing bigger in the future because, you know, Gen Z comes into wealth, Gen Alpha comes into wealth. They're chronically online. They don't, and they don't care about Wall Street rules. And so they value things differently. And so like the whole idea of evaluating something on attention becomes bigger. I don't know if you have a directional opinion on the growth of meme coins as a category, or if you're just more laissez faire about like how big or small the meme coin industry grows.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's going to continue to grow as a category, almost unequivocally. It's also going to grow in terms of the number of absolutely zero value, you know, extractive things as well, unfortunately. But I just think we'll, I mean, meme coins are not going away. The ethos of like, again, everybody being able to participate, them, attention, community will bleed into things of other value. I think companies with real IP will eventually, will eventually at some point, you know, launch meme-like tokens. And you see, you know, companies like Robin Hood, you know, embracing meme coins being traded on their chain because they realize that that attention then leads people to discover other assets that they can direct them to of potentially, you know, more lasting value that should represent a larger part of their portfolio.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  What would you say are just the inputs into the reason why the meme coin sector will grow?

• 27:01Speaker 01

  So I think it's, I think the term will evolve and they'll, you know, I don't, maybe it'll always be called meme coins. But the, I think you'll have things like game coins. Like I see my kids, eight and 12, you're spending considerable amounts of money on your digital goods, whether it be in Roblox, whether it be in Fortnite, doing things, their, their digital skins. Your eight-year-old, the amount of money he spends on skins and just those have effectively no tangible value. But the joy that he and his buddies have, you know, when they're playing and, and talking and, you know, showing the latest thing they're wearing. Hey, it could be a World Cup soccer player. It could be something else. That brings human joy. Those today are in your closed environments.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  But I think as those businesses struggle or sort of like top out in their addressable market, I do think you'll start to see some of those things be traded. You're seeing it, by the way, in the collectibles industry, which has some IP, a lot like has IP, but increasingly now, I think there's like memetic value in cards, you know, to what the, the prices are at all time highs. Some people are saying we're in a bubble. But my, my sort of thesis is similar to when we had NFTs or we were sort of creating new fake IP that hadn't existed before. Like I think all the world's IP and fun is, is eventually going to be tokenized, move on to public blockchains, be available to anyone everywhere. And we're basically going to be importing and exporting all of these different cultures

• 28:29Speaker 01

  and mixing and meshing them together. So I, like, I don't know that it will be, again, we'll call them meme coins. We're going to have all these amazing tokenized cultural assets of all different types available to everybody. I think blockchain is going to play a huge role in that. So maybe what I'm really saying isn't that I think the meme coin economy is going to be 10 or 20 times larger, but it's the ethos of it is going to subsume so many other things, just like tokenized dollars is starting to in the financial world.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  I see. You talked about Robin Hood chain leaning into meme coins. And that's kind of happened at the same time as there's been some blowback against Base and Jesse and Brian Armstrong. And Kobe, like maybe a month ago or something was given the reins of the Base app. Because I think Base is now formally taking a step back from like creator coins and like web three social.

• 29:16Speaker 00

  My more skeptical cynical read on the situation is that like the meme coin trenchers are always kind of looking for the next arena of activity. And they got tired of Base and so they moved on to the shiny new thing, Robin Hood. And so like now Base is evil and Robin Hood is good because Vlad tweeted about a few meme coins. I said meme coins a few times and now and now Robin Hood is like the good guy and Base is the bad guy. But I kind of think it's all not fair. It's like the meme coin trenchers are just like moving on to the next thing. And the narrative is that Base is evil and the narrative is that Robin Hood is good. But it's really just like chasing the shiny new object.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  But I'm also not in the trenches and so I don't know to what degree the trench people feel actually slighted by Base and actually supported by Robin Hood. To me, it feels like a bunch of hot air. I don't know what if you have a take.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  It's just a timing thing. Like, yeah, Base leaned into, I think, what meme coins, AI coins and creator coins, like right at the market top, right? Remember, AI coins were hot late 2024, early 25. Trump basically topped the meme coin market. Things in retrospect were down only for most of 2025 and then you had 1010. The creator coins were a very, were a narrow part of this trend, but those were never going to work. That was just a really bad tone deaf idea with bad timing. But bad timing compounded by a really terrible market, right? So everything is down, like all the majors are down. So Base timing was bad. Robin Hood timing was great, right?

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Do I think that Robin Hood chain as a meme coin chain is like what's going to happen long term? Probably not. Like, there definitely will be some memes because on any chain that has users and a front door into what is a mix of an investment and a speculative asset. Robin Hood's about as speculative a mainstream, you know, financial app as anyone uses. There's definitely going to be your native meme coins there. But we've already had within just a couple of weeks, you know, Vlad got hacked yesterday and, you know, a meme coin, his name was launched and people lost a bunch of money on it. He had to apologize. This stuff moves like really fast. So my guess is the activity there sort of plateaus and peters out and that's probably a good thing. Let's be honest.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  So they've got a lot of attention and to my understanding, you know, tokenized RWA ownership on Robin Hood chain is increasing pretty rapidly. And like, I'm, that's what we need to happen. Like, we need better assets on chain. That's been Solana's issue for the last few years is that we just don't have enough quality assets on the chain. And that's what they, the foundation there has been focused on, you know, how do we get RWAs? And it's starting to, you know, pay dividends for them. But we need more great assets on chain. Otherwise, people are just going to keep churning through these things where, you know, bundlers are launching thousands of them per day.

• 32:06Speaker 00

  Right. What would you say to the idea that like this was especially true in late 2023, early 2024? We're like, the whole entire crypto industry is just meme coins because it's kind of all we had. And I think a lot of people would say, if we had more successful viral, real use cases, you know, real apps, real value accrual, then like people wouldn't have been pushed into meme coins because the industry would be more serious, more legitimate, more real. But because it's taken far longer than people considered, then like meme coins happened kind of as a reaction to that. And so, you know, meme coins are here because crypto hasn't succeeded as much as it was meant to. What would you react? How would you react to that?

• 32:45Speaker 01

  I would just say this stuff takes time, like the, yeah, the lowest friction thing was the first thing to launch. You know, you can launch a coin for a dollar. I mean, you don't have to do much around. Of course, there's going to be a flourishing of those. It's not surprising to me that it's taking a longer time to get tokenized securities on chain, particularly given the regulatory environment in Washington where because of the Trump family's ethic conflicts largely and banks, you know, pushing back against dollars with yield on chain. You know, the Clarity Act hasn't passed and is now looking unlikely to. So it's given folks uncertainty around launching tokens of, you know, real legal and your fee generating value on chain.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  But that is starting to happen anyway in permissionless manners with no KYC, you know, maybe not available, geo blocked from US folks and other countries. And we're now, I think, in a place where I wish we had been two to three years ago, but we weren't. And we had a very different administration in the US that was very hostile to crypto. Today, if consumers started coming back, even if they start by trading some memes and, you know, funny other, you know, tokens, there are real assets on chain that they can discover, particularly for ex-US folks, folks outside the US who can trade. You know, for example, NAS SpaceX and Tesla and, you know, some of the, you know, AI super cycle tokens. I think that's exciting.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  And what it does is, again, I think there's going to continue to be people trading the crypto native assets, including memes. But I think we have a better chance of stickiness and over time, like less volatility in portfolios. If we have these other higher quality assets, the investment behavior should trend, you know, more towards the, call it the median investment behavior, you know, in the broader markets for non crypto participants. And that would probably lead to fewer people getting wrecked by, you know, our crypto native cycles and hopefully smooth things out, which would lead to greater retention, which then gives you a base of users to continue to build and test products.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  And it becomes sort of this self reinforcing thing because it's really, really difficult to build out new financial infrastructure when you're operating on these like four year boom and bust cycles. It just burns out your users, your investors, the builders, et cetera. I think we all hoped this past cycle wasn't going to quite be like that. It wasn't quite. I think we're nearing the end of it and getting ready for the next one. I do think because we have many better assets on chain now, we have a really good shot here for a smoother next cycle.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  All right, let's get out of the trenches and talk about next cycle. Six Man Ventures, what are you guys investing in for like the rest of the decade? Like what categories are you guys uniquely excited about?

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the, the good thing is like most of the, the big ideas that crypto market participants, you know, earliest participants, including us, believed would come to fruition either have or are coming to fruition, right? So like Bitcoin is money, maybe ETH is sort of on chain money in the Ethereum economy. You have stable coins as vehicles for better financial services. Blockchains and smart contracts, just better financial rails and better, you know, market structure. Some more accessible, more people, faster settlement, cheaper settlement. You know, all those things are coming into fruition. There's been a lot of activity, a lot of building happening. It's not as talked about publicly because a lot of the value is accruing to, call it equity holders

• 36:13Speaker 01

  or accruing in, you know, to existing institutions like Stripe and PayPal and others. But, you know, what we're excited about is that many or most of the big ideas that we thought would exist, you know, are starting to exist. So yeah, we're in, we're investing into those. So things like stablecoin finance, things like DeFi, but DeFi, I saw you tweet about vaults the other day. But DeFi with your better, not only your native crypto assets, but other assets. So your real world assets, equities, you know, bonds tied to, you know, could be real estate or other, other like asset classes that have existed, bringing those things on chain. You know, we're looking, so we're continuing to invest in consumer.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  We think like trading and speculation and these markets, making them available, whether it's no KYC or, you know, available to anyone, anywhere, giving dollar access to folks who are ex-US is really exciting. So those are like the primary areas and then, you know.

• 37:14Speaker 00

  I feel like out of all of those, the consumer category is probably the most contrarian because everyone is doing like the institutional, chat five, real world assets, tokenized compliance securities. And like, no one is talking about consumer crypto these days.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Exactly. So we think that that is the class that takes the longest to develop. Okay.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  The consumer side?

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the least, so it's institutions, you know, have been building for 10 years. Like they have deep, deep business models. They know this is better infrastructure for how they want to build towards the future. They can commit to it. You know, consumers sort of wait until you show them, like a lot of stuff has to build up in the background before you can get to like true consumer products of value. I think prediction markets is one of the first where you've moved to like be, well, I mean, obviously we had NFTs. We had your DeFi summer, but like the, on the consumer side, we just haven't had the fun speculative products.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  On-chain that had long duration with, and I think that's finally starting to happen. So basically that's happened because crypto has started to embed itself into other industries. So the biggest one that you're hearing about right now is, is obviously the collectibles. Right. So you have companies like Collector and Courtyard and even OpenSea is now turning into sort of the eBay of collectibles versus just NFTs. And I think so those fun, community-driven, IP-driven asset classes, taste-driven, things that maybe you can't find everywhere else because market structure on eBay and in the real world isn't very good. Those are the things that are going to start to migrate on-chain first. So that's like the first area. We made an investment there in a company called Trove in Q4 of last year. That company's doing incredibly well.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  I mentioned Collector and Courtyard, which are the ones that people hear about.

• 39:05Speaker 00

  So this is just the whole like Gacha universe, right? Which has

• 39:09Speaker 01

  So it's not, there's marketplaces behind these. And, but yes, I would say to, actually you're correct. The largest expression of it today, like is often the case in crypto is wow, friction-free, you know, instant trading, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You know, no KYC. That is absolutely the first application. Now each of those companies has a plan to grow into something much, much bigger than that, you know, borrowing and lending against the assets, turning them into an asset class. I'm sure there's, I haven't seen all their decks for things like private wealth management, you name it. But I would argue that's a step change, probably a 10x better expression of what we were doing with like PFP NFTs in 2122. It just takes a long time. So we're, we're confident.

• 39:54Speaker 00

  Why is it better? Because it's actually like real higher Lindy LP, IP that's been around for forever?

• 40:00Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 40:01Speaker 00

  I mean, it was like a Charizard, it just has more brand.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it has many, many decades of, you know, sort of proof point. It's why, you know, I think there's still a far, there's a larger number of folks, you know, who invest in gold than in Bitcoin. It just takes time to get the credibility. So you might as well start, and it wasn't until recently that you could convince people to tokenize, to sell and put on-chain these higher quality assets. And we're, we're finally at that point.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  Are Pokemon cards and meme car, meme coins the same thing?

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Uh, no, no. And it's because of what we were just talking about, like society has, like, society has valued these, there's also, you know, TCG, there, there's games to be played, there's communities, I think the ethos is the same.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  The ethos is the same. Yeah. And the valuation, the reasons why people value Pokemon cards in one way and then meme coins in another way, I feel like that's highly overlapping.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  It is, it is. And it's just, it's very like pop culture and fun and status oriented. And then you get into other asset classes like watches, like, you know, why does an AP or Patek, like, do they really, you know, why are they sold for a hundred thousand dollars? A lot of it, again, is status and scarcity. By the way, that's one way that they're different than meme coins, which don't, you know, they're in, you know, divisible infinitely, right? So, so that's one area that we're looking for on consumer. You know, another is obviously online gaming, things of chance. You can see poly market is mostly like sports betting. It's a, for many people, again, a better form, a better form because I can do it, you know, you can do it, no KYC, you know, you have more markets, anybody can participate, providing liquidity.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  I consider that consumer and I think you're going to start to see much, much more experimentation there. You're also going to see like hyper liquid and hyper liquid-like platforms will, I think, become interesting to consumers as again, better assets come on-chain there as we're not just trading perps on Bitcoin, Ethereum and VC coins, but you know, as we're trading oil and, you know, compute, right? These compute markets that are tiny, tiny relative to all of the capex going into the, you know, AI build out. But over time, uh, you know, I think, for example, crypto folks have a unique, like it's, it's, it was a new, it's a new asset class that's worth, you know, trillions of dollars that didn't exist.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  Crypto, like pre Bitcoin, like we created a new asset class and brought, we can argue about what level of quality market structure, but bought, brought market structure, you know, over the course of 15 plus years. So I would make a bet that crypto market participants will have a large part to play in how compute markets develop.

• 42:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think a lot of people have attention on compute markets. And I think this is going to be the first time where we see a brand new commodity be born outside, that isn't like crypto is a brand new commodity, but it's not what I'm talking about, but like a commodity that you can kind of see like homogenized and codified into like a CME market. You can see compute, like compute traded, I don't know how, but like that's their job to figure out. But this is going to be the first time where a new commodity like that is born and we have crypto rails, like we have perp decks, we've got hyper liquid, we've got lighter. Do you think like that's crypto as an industry? It's like our fight to fight to get as much of the compute market built on our rails as opposed to like CME or the TradFi rails?

• 43:23Speaker 01

  It will be complimentary is, is my guess, right? And the way like, and you could do a whole podcast on this, but so compute markets will exist outside of crypto, you know, largely, right? But, you know, there will be, there will be sort of crypto primitives that have the potential, you know, to participate like in that build out. One is credit markets, right? You see with things like USDAI, there are, you know, pools of folks who are willing to lend, you know, and different models for how those pools develop and how these loans are underwritten. So on the credit side, you know, you're going to have, I think, very novel, novel models of, of capital formation.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  I think as things are transacted, things often will start in, so like the AI markets are like extremely bespoke, sorry, compute markets, right? Like a data center over here is selling something very different than a data center, you know, across the country or in India or somewhere else, you know, different machines, different capabilities. So like, it's so bespoke. It's not necessarily clear to me, you know, how crypto rails will play into that. But what I know is that crypto market participants know how to take these very wonky, you know,

• 44:36Speaker 00

  assets and do something with them.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:38Speaker 00

  But we're not going to be the only First time we've seen a commodity that's bespoke, like there's 17,000 different types of oil, there's like sweet crude, sour crude, but we figured out how to like homogenize that.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, it took an incredibly long time, much longer than, than people expected. I think most intelligent people believe that, or, and again, I'm not one of these like deep, deep, deep compute market participants, like I don't run a data center. There is a VC, Meltem does, so she's, she's a great person to talk to about this. But the, the point, this will take longer than people expect. I think the majority of this is going to happen off-chain, happen, you know, in sort of these OTC transactions. But again, you already have these markets starting to emerge. So in other words, like the hyperscalers are already doing things around allowing folks to hedge and offload. And what you'll find is a lot of the cap tables for a lot of these businesses come from,

• 45:32Speaker 01

  you know, have crypto native folks on them or, you know, folks who were mining Bitcoin and understand the inputs. And then a lot of this has to do with energy and electricity and, and all of those things. So again, most of the value in AI crypto, so in compute markets and in other areas, most of the things that are happening don't involve tokens today. Like, for example, that was a new Sir Naus research, you know, most of the folks, Open Router, like the crypto founders who started AI companies, they don't have tokens. Many of them have sort of tried to stay away from the fact that they were crypto native founders. And if you go pitch many, I mean, you saw the Open Claw founder, like it doesn't like crypto at all. I think somebody launched a token in his name. So, you know, when you're talking to folks in the AI industry, you know, you don't lead

• 46:17Speaker 01

  with the fact that you've come from crypto markets, even though, like I said, you have crypto market participants do understand a lot about emerging asset classes and novel market structure and then all the financial instruments around that.

• 46:30Speaker 00

  This wasn't in my agenda, but I do want to talk about this is there, there was the crypto founder, like Alex Atala, who founded OpenSea and then, then left to go found Open Router, but he did, he left OpenSea in like 2023, like right after the ChatGPT era. There are plenty of people in my circles who have departed from the crypto industry to go into adjacent industries, AI, robotics. But they were, but they did it kind of like maybe because they were forced because the crypto industry is kind of contracted, at least the middle of the market, the, where the jobs are created, has contracted pretty meaningfully over the last four years.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  But they are still crypto people and they're loyal to crypto. And so like my, my bullish angle on this is like, actually crypto has a bunch of moles everywhere. We have moles in AI, we got moles in robotics. And, you know, one day when it's time to come home to roost, like these crypto market participants who like grew up, had their first, you know, adult job and their first adult paycheck in crypto, who are now in like robotics or any adjacent industry. When it comes time, like now the knowledge of crypto and the like loyalty towards the crypto industry is like being spread out in these adjacent industries. So I'm actually kind of like marginally bullish on that actually being good for the industry

• 47:46Speaker 00

  because that is just like going to be a way to legitimize the crypto industry when these people actually have like influence and control over their respective industries.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Likewise, and I don't necessarily know, for example, though, that that means that we'll have, you know, crypto native tokens launched. And I don't necessarily know that that's, by the way, that that's important.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  The, but what I do think is, you know, when the, you know, robots are paying one another, or, you know, when my agent wants to access, you know, the website on a usage basis that your agent spun up, I think the folks who create those businesses, you know, will be sympathetic to using, you know, blockchain rails that settle faster, that allow for microtransactions, et cetera. But it'll Be interesting in that, you know, much of that value may just accrue to equity in companies. And then hopefully, hopefully in the future, those are tokenized equities that are issued and transferred and settled and registered on blockchains. Like DTCC, the largest securities clearinghouse is doing

• 48:50Speaker 01

  all sorts of pilots on Canton and other networks. And I think it's very likely that quote unquote crypto becomes defined much more as incredible financial infrastructure and ledgers versus the crypto native assets that trade on top of them. There will be a few very special ones like Bitcoin, probably Ethereum and Solana and a handful of others. But the rest of the tokens will look much more quote unquote equity like, you know, and be even if they're on, even if they're sitting on top of protocols. But I think things like hype and pump, it will be much, much more tied to business performance and look equity like.

• 49:23Speaker 00

  So currently, the market cap of Ethereum is $225 billion. The market cap of Sol is $43 billion. Mike, if you had a million dollars and you had to hold it for the next five years, are you picking ETH or Sol to allocate that million dollars to?

• 49:40Speaker 01

  So we, we've made that choice. I can't give financial advice to others, but we're well-known as a Solana, you know, more Solana bullish fund from an asset perspective. That doesn't mean from a builder or an ecosystem perspective, we have many, many investments in the Ethereum and EVM ecosystem. But yeah, as an asset, I just believe that Sol has better properties than ETH, particularly given the value differential. So one is Solana has significantly more activity than Ethereum on virtually every metric of regular usage that it doesn't in terms of like TVL and total value issued. But I think a lot of that has to do with

• 50:20Speaker 01

  legacy, you know, massive value creation from many, many years ago and folks simply from inertia and wealth creation, just holding their assets in Ethereum out of loyalty. If we break out, you know, 10, 20, 100X to the real world, you know, you don't have those same Ethereum loyalties in the general population. And Solana is a global state machine, you know, has high throughput, low fees, but it also has a fee mechanism whereby, you know, priority fees, you know, people can pay for the price that they want for their transaction. And that allows Solana to capture more revenue. And, you know, you can sort of back into a situation at some really, really massive scale where Sol is actually justified, you know, you could run a model that prices a high.

• 51:05Speaker 00

  A DCF model?

• 51:07Speaker 01

  And this, yeah, but this is in like your Coinbase example, a very, very, very long-term horizon. I think both of these, Sol and Ethereum, trade memetically over the next five years based on, you know, how much is being built in the two ecosystems. And I just think Sol is going to continue to grow at a much higher.

• 51:25Speaker 00

  Is trading memetically the same thing as trading like money?

• 51:27Speaker 01

  It's trading on activity. It is. Money is, yeah, money can be memetic to your point, but different types of memes. Yeah, like they're different narratives. What? So I think Sol, once again, and like Sol will trade on a momentum narrative over the next 24 months would be my guess, based on more activity happening on the chain. You're going to see a much higher growth rate and stablecoin volume. You are going to see, you know, perps start to finally succeed. Like they're at like zero right now, virtually on the chain, and that's going to change. You could just go through any use case and I'm, I'm very confident that Sol is going to have a much faster growth rate and it's coming from a lower base. So I just would expect it to, you know, be a better asset over, again, a couple of years than ETH.

• 52:10Speaker 00

  If you were the CEO of Ethereum and you were in charge with the driving ETH value capture and accrual and price number go up, what would you do?

• 52:18Speaker 01

  So I would lean into, I would actually lean into ETH as money and all these L2s. I'd lead heavily into Robinhood. I do things that Solana can't do. So give more companies like Robinhood, persuade them not to launch like L1s like Tempo, persuade them to launch their own chains on Arbitrum and really be a place where, you know, you can control your, call it like semi-decentralized chain, your base. I mean, they have the two largest ones right now. So it's just getting more of the world to, financial world to make the non-stripe choice of launching Tempo and more of the Robinhood and Coinbase. And then, again, you're not going to trade based on the underlying flow through economics. You're going to trade, like I

• 52:59Speaker 01

  said, more on narrative. Hey, all the world's largest financial institutions like a Revolut built an L2, that would be incredible for Ethereum. And I think from a narrative perspective, you'd say, oh, look, that $100 billion, $115 billion company, they're building a big part of their future on Ethereum. That's the battle that I would.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  L2s, more L2s, bigger L2s.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  I would. I just don't think the ETH L1 fee capture, as fees have just dropped over the last years, it's definitely a better L1 than it ever has been, right? And you continue to want as many assets issued on the chain. I think you want the BlackRocks of the world and the issuers to put assets there. But I think you want the companies that are building out, you know, really robust ecosystems of products, you know, the ramps, the revolutes, the next set of companies. You really don't want them building on the Tempos relative to building on L2s.

• 53:47Speaker 00

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• 54:36Speaker 02

  Some exciting news. We are launching a new podcast to help people figure out the crypto cycle, how to navigate it. The best crypto cycle investor I know, his name is Michael Nato, he runs the DeFi Report. This is the guy that sent me a sell alert before the 1010 price drop happened. His cycle analysis has been absolutely on point. I've been following him for years. And this year, we started recording weekly podcast episodes. Each one, we get into his portfolio, what he's holding, the market structure, entry targets, fair market value of Bitcoin and Ether, and where we are in the cycle. There's new episodes that are released every Wednesday. They're 30 minutes, they're short, they're punchy. I think this crypto cycle is harder to navigate than most, so let's do it together. Go subscribe to this podcast, search The DeFi Report, wherever you get your podcasts, YouTube, Apple, Spotify,

• 55:20Speaker 02

  or find a link in the show notes. There's a new episode waiting for you now.

• 55:23Speaker 00

  There's been a lot of speculation that the bottom's in, or that the bottom is at least near, soon, soon to be in. Where, do you have a position on where we are in the cycle?

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:32Speaker 02

  What do you think? And also, what do you think about cycles?

• 55:34Speaker 01

  So it just feels like they're inevitable. I, this one, so it's so weird that people said it felt so awful. And I think it was because it didn't go as high as people expected, but I also, so far, it hasn't gone as low as people feel. So it is getting to that lower volatility type cycle environment. I don't have the data right in front of me, but it's been a lower vol sort of cycle, if, if we have hit bottom. But even if we went a little bit lower than we did, it would still be, that would be the case. We didn't go as high, not as low. I think that's going to continue. And maybe what I'll be looking for though, is we finally break out of the Bitcoin four-year cycle. And maybe you do, as we start to

• 56:16Speaker 01

  get so many halvings out, and it may not have as big an impact. But what's happened this, this cycle, again, lower vol, and you've had the ability, like people have kept building, and you've seen immense equity value get created in a couple of themes we were talking about, like stablecoin finance, like real world asset issuance, so two massive, massive categories. So it would be great if that continues. I do think, you know, I couldn't tell you if we're going to go lower over the next couple of months, but I think, you know, by early next year, it's going to feel clear that we have sort of the wind in our sails. Regardless, by the way, of the regulatory environment, that's been a big uncertainty, but it just feels like clarity not passing is somewhat priced in. For individual assets, it'll be interesting. You know, I don't know what hyper liquids regulatory status looks like

• 57:01Speaker 01

  in a world where clarity does or does not pass. So I think on an individual asset basis, there are a lot of questions, but. For the market as a whole, I expect that we're going to see more activity moving forward. And we have just more themes to do that behind. We have perps, prediction markets, DeFi with real world assets and stable coins moving at like every breakout stablecoin company. We see the chart is just wildly insane over the last six months.

• 57:28Speaker 00

  You said a lot of equity value has been created by these platforms and tools. And I think that kind of also taps on to taps into a lot of the frustration that a lot of the industry has where we wanted to create value in the tokens. And it's great that we are creating value as an industry, but it's a bug that these these native tokens or tokenized, not tokenized real world assets, but tokenized assets are the things where the value is expressed in. Do you, where did you see that trend changing or how do you think about that?

• 58:01Speaker 01

  It will change, but it's going to take a long time. You're trying to create basically, I think, so the things that Blockworks is doing with their transparency framework is a positive. I think, you know, brow beating everybody to adopt it right now and being, they're a little intense about it, but I think it's a very noble, long-term goal. And it is unquestionably the direction that the industry needs to and will move in. So maybe it's good that they're brow beating people and

• 58:28Speaker 00

  Got to bootstrap it somehow.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  Do this now and everything that doesn't do this now is illegitimate. Like, that's too much. That's not, because the market isn't valuing tokens that way, right? Like, we're investors in Meta Dow and they have ownership coins. And, you know, the market is giving, you know, certainly is giving downside protection to Meta Dow tokens, but I don't think you've seen them sort of valued at a premium or any sort of breakout. And they're working on their model, right? It's Futarki dominated now. I think it's pretty complex and people are trying to figure that model out. But there are a ton of experiments being run, even Pump, which is known as a meme coin launchpad, has their Ace platform where you can launch a token and then you can have that token confer equity-like rights to the holder.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  So every company across the spectrum is experimenting with bringing better quality assets on chain. It's just time horizon, it's going to take a long time. It takes a long time for, you know, to get folks launching ETFs or indexing. Like, you listen to histories of Vanguard and Blackhawk, it takes many, many decades to change how people invest, especially when you're creating, you know, brand new types of assets that might have equity plus, you know, considerations to them. And especially in a world where many, many people have been burned by very low quality assets like a Luna.

• 59:46Speaker 00

  I think that's the thing I'm really coming to terms with lately. When I, when I got into crypto, I was 26 years old and in 2021, I was 29 or something, 20 and 30. And I thought we were changing the world tomorrow. And that's kind of how it feels like in the bull market, especially one as violent as that bull market. And, you know, and so we're three years, four years later from 2021, five years later from 2021, and so many people are disillusioned and myself included. And I, and to some degree, I'm like, dude, maybe these things take 20-plus years, not like six years. And that's why everyone feels so bad.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, obviously, right? So like, just AI as an analogy, you know, basically people are writing about the things that are happening today, you know, in the middle of the last century, you know, even at the turn of the century.

• 1:00:38Speaker 00

  But nonetheless, AI seems to have gone so much faster, at least from the consumer perspective, when we were exposed to it in 2023.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  So, well, the thing is, people were exposed to it earlier than that. Like, I read, you know, Greg Hertzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines and we laughed at it, you know, in 2000, 2001, and it took 25 years. But basically, everything that he said would happen by 2030 is happening, is on the path to happening by 2030. There was a lot of disillusionment early last decade, but sort of under, you know, in the background, you had the Demises of the world and so many incredible people doing things. And most of it was probably very dissatisfying to people who were deep, deep in the industry, like, oh, we're, you know, beating people at these games. Well, that's not what our mission is. Like, we're trying to change the world and, you know, you basically create a new form of intelligence and then boom, it just happens.

• 1:01:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  But the time horizons were longer and on a much, much smaller scale. I'm not comparing stablecoin innovation AI, but like an intelligence innovation of the last two years. But you can see this explosion happening after not a lot seemed to happen for many, many years, to the point that like even five or six years ago, people were like, hey, Tether is like a scam company. And now it's one of the largest, you know, companies in the world.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  I suppose crypto did have a very slow rate of progress up until 2020, 2021. And then that's when a ton of the investment came in. And you can, it may be one of the reasons why AI seems to have gone so fast post 2023 is because there has been literally infinite amount of money to invest in that bubble. And that accelerates the rate of innovation.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:13Speaker 00

  At least as a consumer, like I log into like Claude and OpenAI like every single month and the models are better and they think better and they think faster. And that doesn't seem true about crypto.

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  That's fair.

• 1:02:23Speaker 00

  But maybe that's because like AI is

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  Giving people the right product now, right? Like, just having raw intelligence that's better than, for example, Google searching or, you know, giving me the ability to code, having never, you know, been a CS major trained programmer. It's incredible. And crypto had a chance in the, from the 2017 era, 2021, 22 era. And I think we're both in agreement that we haven't given folks yet the right product that had long duration. And again, we've talked about a few of the areas, but like hyper liquid, giving folks a better way to, you know, hedge and speculate and get, you know, leverage on assets like in a much better way than they can traditional financial markets.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  So just improving upon traditional financial markets, traditional financial infrastructure is a really big step function change. Now, it doesn't have the wow factor of AI intelligence, but I do think we're finally giving folks the right products that will scale and will lead to sustained usage.

• 1:03:24Speaker 00

  And I suppose, I suppose in defense of crypto, changing finance is hard, way harder than AI, because AI doesn't really have like an incumbent to compete against. But finance, A, has incumbents to compete against, but also your mistakes, rebuilding finance are catastrophic by definition. And so progress is slower because people don't want to get hurt. And also, regulation kind of also doesn't want to, to let you hurt people at the same time.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's easier, it definitely is easier to regulate, to penalize. And we're just getting, by the way, to that cycle in AI where it's like, hey, do we need to slow down? Can we release these frontier models without, you know, government or a non-government agency like FINRA reviewing them? Demis just proposed something like that, and I think a lot of people got on board with it. So you're going to see, yeah, that blowback is happening over the next year or two, which likely will quote unquote, slow progress. So it'll be interesting. And then to see what people's expectations are. Right now, AI is growing a lot due to non-economic activity, just to, you know, fundraising and the ability to continually fundraise and in many cases, offer products below profitability. How long can that continue for? We'll see.

• 1:04:34Speaker 00

  Right, right. Mike, it's been great. Thanks for coming on the show.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, appreciate it.

• 1:04:39Speaker 00

  Banking station, you guys know the deal, crypto is risky, but not crypto enough. The institutions are here, so we are going even more westward. This is frontier, it's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.