REKT Vision: Bybit Hacked for $1.4B | Are Meme Coins Dead?
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It was actually gearing up to be a pretty good show until about an hour before we went live. It looks like Bybit's been hacked. Just a few days after FTX repays everyone $800 million. We have our latest crypto exchange calamity. Bybit has been hacked for over $1.4 million. This...

This is slightly surprising that you think of yourself like to see this is probably the second biggest exchange in the world, arguably, like in terms of volume. We can go into how it happened, but like this is definitely had a bit of an impact. We've seen stuff dip around three to five percent kind of across Bitcoin and some of the majors. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, the magnitude of this hack is about.

$1.4 billion worth of ETH. So it's a crazy, crazy number. It sounds like it was through like a spoofed multi-sig transaction for people to sign, which is really crazy because I think if you're at that level where you're signing things for, you know, that much under management, you should obviously like check and read everything that you're doing. I don't really quite understand the nature of the hack, but it sounds like people...

didn't realize what they were signing um i can give you i can give a little bit of detail so please do ben ben's ben zau who is the founder of bybit it's gone on um gone online and said firstly that we're one for one um we will this isn't going to take down bybit although this is a crazy amount of money like all withdrawals will be fine everyone's money is fine hi raul here

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I mean, trust, but verify. You can always take your money off Bybit if you've got a large amount of funds on there, but

He is basically saying that this is not going to be like an FTX style hole, let's say. He is saying that it was a Musk attack, he's saying. And I look up what a Musk attack is. A Musk attack refers to a phishing technique where attackers create a perfect visual replica or legitimate interface, in this case, Safe's multi-sig wallet interface, but the actual transaction data being signed is different from what's displayed. It's similar to a fake ATM interface.

The screen shows you're withdrawing $100, but the machine is actually programmed to take your whole balance. So I think they've created almost like a fake balance

um, site safe site and, and a fake transaction. I don't know how that's happened, but this is clearly a very, very sophisticated hack. They had pre-warned everyone that they were going to move some of these funds from their hot wallet to their cold wallet. And then clearly a hack has been given the heads up to, to create a very, very detailed scam here. Um, but yeah,

It says this is a particularly dangerous attack vector because even experienced users with hardware wallets can fall for it if they don't verify the raw transaction data. The safe wallet interface was specifically targeted here since it's widely used by major institutions for secure storage. Makes you think, right? Like we're going to see some very sophisticated like safe like websites. You need to be checking on your, yeah, you need to be checking everything, even on safe, which is like used by everyone.

It's crazy because, you know, safe is deemed to be the thing that is like, this is the safest way to manage large amounts of money. You're going through, there's no single points of failure, like multiple people have to sign. You would think if there's an issue like this, it would get caught somewhere along the lines. I don't know how many people had a signatory on this particular safe, but I would imagine it's at least three or four, if not more than that. So yeah, I don't really know. I mean...

I don't even really know how you're to blame as a signatory if the UI you're looking at just looks normal or is completely replicated to be spoofed and the URL is normal and fine as well. So yeah, that's kind of insane. It must be something that's happened internally, right? Because someone must have received the... Like I presume when they have something to sign...

They have some sort of internal communication beforehand, which is, oh, hey, by the way, sign this. I don't think they just logged into the safe and saw, oh, here's something to sign. Let me just sign it without verifying it first. So it must be something that's happened internally, I'd imagine. Yeah.

Yeah, I honestly don't know. Like, I think we'll find out a lot more data about this. Obviously, a hack this big, 1.4 billion, you have to assume it's someone very sophisticated. North Koreans are generally behind a lot of these. Interestingly, they've recently, like, in...

I mean, they hack all different sorts of ways, but the worst ones we've seen in the past has been when people have got hold of private keys. There's a Ronin Bridge hack, for example. To get 1.4 billion off-chain might be a little bit difficult. This is obscene amounts of money. So to even get that through a centralized exchange or into a bank...

I don't know how they actually do that. Well, Tornado Dash is now almost allowed. They will be able to do that. But I would imagine this is such a big figure. This is such a big figure that it probably just makes sense to do some form of bartering to get the money back. I'll keep 10, 20%. You get the rest of it back. I'm sure over the next two days we'll

we will hear some sort of message being passed from the hacker back to Bybit because I just feel like that's just an obscene amount of money to be able to get away with hacking. I don't know. If they get away with it, it's kind of bearish for the whole space because I think that is... Like that, you can just steal $1.4 billion. Everyone's going to be trying it. Yeah, there's just no...

I'm trying to think how you get it out. Even Tornado Cash, presumably the Tornado Cash guys realize something like that is coming and maybe they have some way to block it. I don't really know. I mean, they'd have to do it through thousands upon thousands of addresses. And then all of those would have to basically take it out through a centralized exchange because that's where the majority of the on and off ramps are. Or, I don't know, maybe there's some other ways that they can do it in some way. You're going to have to find some black market OTC companies

buyer who does that some crazy discount i guess well yeah no and it's that i guess you're right like it's it's such a large amount of money it's basically impossible to really get it all out yeah but even you can't really negotiate with them can you you can't just say okay you guys take back one bill i'll take 500 mil then like how are you gonna get that out you can um i mean often they'll say we won't prosecute you know if if we get their funds back that sort of stuff um

I've seen it happen for smaller amounts, but like... Smaller amounts, yeah. You know, you keep 140 mil. That's pretty nice. Yeah. So...

Yeah, I was trying to think that, like, what the hacker must be thinking at this stage. Like, imagine getting hold of that and being like, it works. I've got $1.4 billion. Crazy. And the other side of that is the people who signed the transaction. Like, can you just imagine the moment where it shows it's being moved out of the account and you're just like, what has happened here? Not good to think about, for sure. So is this like...

good or bad for the market. I mean, obviously the knee-jerk reaction is things should sell off, but I see a lot of people talking about the fact that Vibrate may potentially have to buy back the 1.5 billion worth of ETH. They're not able to recover it to replenish what they lost, I guess. Well, this is selling the ETH. It sold about $300 million. So the initial move was lower, but I agree like the next move might have to be that Vibrate have to buy it back. Um,

I think the obvious moves here would be people might take more money off centralized exchanges. I saw like literally two minutes ago that Binance came out with an even higher yield on their stable coin. So they're clearly scared that people might just like move tons of funds off centralized exchanges off the back of this. That's the general knee jerk reaction when one of these exchange things happens. Yeah.

similarly like some of the DEXs might gain market share so like a bunch of people who are

Because Bybit is known for spot, but it's really known for perps, right? It's really known for perps. So Hyperliquid, for example, it's actually up on the back of this because people are expecting even more volume to kind of move to them, which I think is... which makes a lot of sense, to be honest. Although I wouldn't say Hyperliquid is squeaky clean in terms of its security process either. Lots of different vulnerabilities potentially there. So I...

I don't know. I just think people will probably just take a pause. You know, there's normally like a 24 hours, like, Oh God, how is my own personal security doing here? Like maybe I shouldn't be doing that. Or yeah, it's kind of a crazy amount. Um, I think with AI as well, this stuff is only going to become more and more sophisticated, isn't it? Like we're only starting to scratch the surface of, of how crazy AI is going to be at hacking, um, the stuff that we do. Uh, so, um,

And crypto is like fair game for just a crazy amount of this sort of hack. But I don't know. Let me have a look. Total number amount hacked in 24. This has got to be hacked in crypto. This has got to be. Yeah. So $2.2 billion was stolen in 2024. So this is almost, this is about 75% of what was stolen in all of 2024. Wow.

has been stolen just now. So pretty, pretty big figure. Yeah. I'm curious to see how this, yeah, how this plays out because it's, I mean, we've gone into it a little bit because the market was feeling pretty good until then, if I'm honest. Heath, Heath was actually outperforming, you know, on the week. We bring up the weekly moves like,

ETH had had one of its best weeks in a long, long time. And normally when ETH rallies, the rest of the market pukes. But ETH had been up about 4% on the week. Bitcoin had been up about 2%, 3%. And Solana actually had been down about 10%. And post this, Bitcoin's again higher than ETH on the week. So...

I think people were calling for like altcoin season. You know, ETH is suddenly now breaking out versus Bitcoin after just being downtrodden for so long. And interestingly, it was starting to beat Solana by a decent amount. And I think this is probably short term. I don't think this is like, this really isn't going to take down ETH. But it is annoying to be an ETH holder and feel like, you know, stuff's starting to move. Things are starting to look good. Now you've got a guy who's selling, you know, at least a billion dollars worth

potentially um more to go it's it's not like i remember we kind of had that with ftx the ftx hacker do you remember um when whenever like they used to swap eth eth used to get smashed lower um that was just after the ftx collapsed do you remember that yeah yeah and like everyone was like watching when they sold and all this sort of stuff and it was it wasn't it wasn't good so

Maybe this is a little bit of a overhang for ETH, which I don't think people will be that happy about. But nevertheless, it did feel like that was the general trend. It did feel like the market was feeling pretty good. Bitcoin was heading back to 100K. And we were starting to see, it felt terrible middle of the week. But by the end of the week,

you know, it felt a little bit better. What's your views? I know you're, you're a Bitcoin maxi these days, but you have been dancing around a little bit in some other stuff. Um, what's your take on like how the market is dynamic is shifting a little bit here. I think you're starting to see, obviously I've been very like Bitcoin maxi-ish for a while. I think you're starting to see pockets of altcoin performance, L1 performance out there. Um,

Things that aren't just Bitcoin have been rallying this week and doing well. Interestingly, it's not really memes. And I think after the, I mean, we haven't even spoke about the whole Libra stuff. And I guess we'll cover it, but it's crazy that was still like less than a week ago. But I think after that and a lot of these extraction type

meme coins. It's funny because we on the show would talk about and the whole narrative was like, oh, old coins are bad because VC is getting really low and they just dump on you as the resting schedules unlock and you're the one left holding the bag. And meme coins were like the fight against that. Whereas now with like the last 90% of meme coins, it's just insiders who are

you know club together on the stuff and then end up dumping on you as a retail investor so it feels like it's now as if it's once again switched back and indeed there are some altcoins that are doing pretty well in the last week or so um story protocol spoke about sonic today which is phantom um bear chain aptos um there's been a there's been a few of them so i just wonder now whether

I don't think it's like a carte blanche for all old coins, but I just wonder now whether like some serious, you know, more serious, even AI coins are up a decent amount in the last few days. I just wonder if there's now more return to some of these coins and perhaps in situations where something like Hyperliquid, where it was, I think they didn't even raise capital, right? There's no real VC involvement. Yeah. But there's also no,

They're not being extractive, if that makes sense, like many coins are these days. So I think a coin with a good story like that can do really well. Like actually a good use case, good utility. So back away to mid curving or ideally right curving some of this stuff, but also a good narrative where it's not just like, oh, here's all the VCs again, I think. Should we maybe go into that a little bit? Because...

This time last week, Libra hadn't happened, right? Yeah.

Which has kind of been seen as a bit of the final nail in the coffin for, well, not nail in the coffin, but it's definitely put a break on the Solana Casino. This was, we've been speaking before that about the hyper rotation, you know, new coin each week and that Trump, after Trump, you had Melania and then you had a bunch of other celebrities come in and do kind of pump and dump style coins and no one wanted to hold anything because there was just a new coin each day and you needed to buy the daily runner.

This time last week, LibraCoin came out, which is from the Argentinian president, Mille. And he did it. One of the more crazy, crazy stories in crypto, right? Seems to have done it alongside a LA-based token launching group led by... Head Ransoms.

So, a young guy who is just a bit gormless, right? Completely gormless. Who seemingly was behind Melania and a few other coins. This coin initially went up to around $4.5 billion after it launched. Everyone was going crazy. Now, this is the new Trump. I can't believe Argentina launched a coin. And it quite quickly became apparent that 95% of the tokens were owned by insiders, which wouldn't

completely. They could sell at any time. And that a bunch of people had been given kind of the heads up on this and that then it quickly started to fall. And then I think around a billion dollars, just under a billion dollars, Mille deleted his tweets and said he wasn't part of it. And it went all the way down to $300 million. Since then, there's been a bit of back and forth about whether he was involved or how much he was involved, but his

in the political side, he's definitely under pressure from this. But I think the main takeaway was that what you just said is that it suddenly just felt like there'd actually been this

this, uh, the casino had been rigged for, for a little bit here and it actually engulfed some of the major Solana protocols. Um, the main one being Meteora that's been behind the Trump launch, the millennia launch and this launch and, and, um, seemingly had been using this, uh, this group, um, to launch a few of these different coins and, and potentially profited from it as well. There's a lot of debate about whether these, um,

These big protocols were involved in something like the insider trading around it. A bunch of influencers, KOLs, were revealed to kind of know about this and perhaps have gotten free allocation. Dave Portnoy said he was given free allocation, but like sent it back, but then was disqualified.

given $5 million because of his trading losses. It all kind of stunk on many different levels, and there was a bit of a witch hunt afterwards because it kind of felt like it had been revealed the sort of scamminess of what had been going on. And since then, Solana DeFi volumes are down about 50% to 60%. Solana dropped from trading at around 205%

all the way down to 160 pretty soon after this happened. And a lot of the protocols on there also fell just because meme coin trading, this sort of casino spirit had been such a big part of Solana's activity. Maybe not 100% its culture, but that was driving so much of its activity.

What do you make of all that? Like, do you think, firstly, yeah, what are your thoughts about the coin? What happened? And what do you think of the implications? It's just, this is not the first time the same people have done this trick where you get someone who is really big or famous or important to sort of like bless the coin. And I think what they tell Javier Mille maybe is something like, hey, you can make some money out of this.

this isn't your coin but as long as you tweet about it people will assume that it's your coin it's all about it all seems to be about like can we get them to tweet about it um so uh once you have that then you know the rest of the market is like oh wow this is going to be like crazy high fdv coin and everyone just throws into it so what these guys have done is they've just been using these meteor pools where they just put in like a bunch of the tokens that they have as you

It effectively becomes one-sided liquidity because they put in two-sided liquidity. It all rallies because everyone foams into it and they pull the bid-sided liquidity to monetize basically. And then they've just extracted money for everyone. So it's pretty bad because I think in this situation, there was a stat that I read, which was $286 million of realized losses

on this coin. And if you looked at the top 10 or even top 20, they were all like mid to low seven figure losses realized, not just like paper losses, but realized losses. So I just think it got, the market got to a point where people were maybe high off the Trump trade or feeling cope from the Trump trade. And the amount of posts I saw in the timeline where people were just full porting this thing, like,

you know putting oh here's my whole three million dollar portfolio put it all into this relay coin um and then just subsequently losing 50 60 70 80 90 depending on where you got out it's crazy but it's sort of like a perfect storm right like all of every time

not just crypto, but every time any market sells off is because there's been too much risk taken within the system. And that happens because of greed. People get too greedy and want to make as much money as possible. And here you have two sides of the fence. You have a bad actor being greedy and trying to extract this money from...

from the retail market. And then you have like the entire retail market itself diving headfirst into it being greedy. And it's not even like, like, I think people realize maybe it's a scam. I'm not really sure. I don't really believe it's going to have longevity, but everyone just gambles to try and make that quick, like two, three, four, five, 10 X. Right. So,

It's kind of what happened. Everyone lost their money. I don't know how this guy is going to get out of the $100 million right now that they have in his wallets. $110 million, yeah. He's talked about putting it back into the chart. The levels of illegality of what's going on here is kind of insane. I just think he obviously hasn't spoken to a lawyer or has no idea what's going on. But it's a big liquidity suck out of what I would say is the trenches, which kind of is the...

pool of capital that invests in meme coins and so a lot of people sold their meme coins to buy this lost their money on this and that capital hasn't really flowed back into those meme coins and like i said this has happened this is happening over and over again i mean this scale of the losses of this one was probably the largest but the same thing has happened with you know people trump did well but it's still off it's still what like down 60 or 70 percent from the highs like people have lost money on that people have lost money in milania people lost money on enron

Jelly Jelly, like all these random coins that came out. It's just probably the same group of two or three people coming in, extracting the capital away out of retail. Retail takes the hit, tries to make it back on something else. And, you know, it's like that meme where you have the big wheel and the slightly smaller one, the slightly smaller one. Like retail is slowly being drained of its capital. And I think it's going to take a while for the market to recover. And I don't know, maybe that's why you're also seeing like

some bigger pools of capital feeling more confident to invest in alts or other things that aren't memes because now it's like oh well memes are actually dead so I don't have to make that decision and buy some of this other stuff now I think it's all related really I agree with that analysis almost completely like I think um

I think this one was interesting because I think a lot of people did a huge amounts because there was, and often it was like influencers and KOLs, right? Because I think they'd been given a tip off, um, that this was going to come and they'd done the Trump playbook. And then often those are the people that lost the most. Like a lot of people, um, lost quite a lot who were like, um, KOLs or kind of semi insiders, let's say, um, which is kind of, kind of interesting around this one. Um, but

But I do think people just feel as though, like you said, it's come to light that this was almost like it

a tried and tested method of taking money away from, from retail. Um, I hadn't been making any money on, on the left curve stuff since Trump. Um, I, I'd like, that's when I kind of reduced it, um, into, into more defensive plays because I just felt like I wasn't going to make money, but a lot of people were still trying to play that hyper rotation, you know, don't own anything. Like I'll buy the daily runoff, sell it at the top and I'll try and move on to the next one.

I think that people were losing a lot of money. And then to see then that this came out, that that was actually a rigged game, despite a lot of, a lot of key voices in the space telling you to like, you know, you need to buy the daily runner. I think, I think that was,

that was painful for a lot of people. And that's caused this massive backlash. Like it felt worse or around the same as FTX on, on Monday or Tuesday in like the core CT community. I think you kind of agree with that just because it also felt like all, all the old sort of in the back of this, everyone just felt like, cause Solana has been such a huge, huge trade from, from, from many angles of alts as well, that people got very, very frustrated and,

you kind of look at the market, stables gone up to still going higher. We've got $250 billion nearly of stables on chain right now. That wasn't really changing. It didn't look like we're heading to a bear market. It just felt like people were just done. They were done with the casino. And, well, they were done with that room of the casino, let's say. We've now moved on to the new room, which appears to be altcoins and DGEN DeFi, which is kind of what we said at the start of the show. But what I've been seeing is

is a lot more of the 2021 DeFi crew being a bit more emboldened. A lot of older faces starting to pop up. A lot of the newer faces from this cycle being a lot quieter. And a trend towards L1s with active ecosystems. This kind of started with some of the newer launches. So around this time last year, I don't know if you remember,

Everyone used to want to buy the new launch, like the new Binance coin, right? And we had some big runners in gaming and a few other different things. But it's kind of gone back there a little bit. Things like Story Protocol is up 150% this week. There was a new coin, Kito, which was a social platform coin. Pretty interesting one, actually, there. That's up to like 1.5, 2 billion. Payne did well, which was that other new coin, at least in the meme coin space.

It suddenly just felt like, okay, now people are looking at new launches. That's where we're going to degen. And then some of the more established degen DeFi chains is where I see a lot of money moving. And those two are really bear a chain, which again is also a new chain. And Sonic, which is the one that I guess me and you have been looking at a little bit more over the last 24, 48 hours.

And I think it makes sense. You know, on these chains, there's often crazy casino-like DeFi yields. Like, you can put it into LPs where you get thousands of percents and there's a huge rewards program, for example, going on in Sonic right now. And...

You can see that people are, there's flow, there's funds moving from things like Solana and activity moving things like Solana into these chains. And you can see that in DEX volume, PERT volume and TVL changes. I think Sonics TVL has gone from under a million dollars to $700 million in a month.

And you're starting to see price increases in these R1 coins about 50 to 60%. But it's really the activity on the chain, which is like the D-gen stuff, which people are being drawn to. I'm not saying I think this is like the next meta yet.

But I don't think, I think that this could be the thing that people now start to get more involved in. And I think it could be a slightly different crowd. I think people have had enough of some of the, the influences from the last six months. And I think some of the more crazy stuff from the DeFi influences might, might suddenly become more, more attractive.

What do you think, Osef? Do you think this trend of altcoins and new coins and then DJ and DeFi might be the thing that lasts with us for a month, two months? Yeah, I think a month or two months it could definitely happen. I don't feel like it's strong enough to be a main cycle narrative. Like,

you know dgen defy is not that easy to understand for the average person um number one number two if you're based somewhere like the uk or the us the tax implications of it are quite complicated as well so i think um for me it's um it's not the it's not something that will be like a main cycle narrative but i do think um it can dominate the timeline and people for about a month or so yeah

Maybe we'll talk a little bit about Sonic because that's the one I think interests me the most. This was, Sonic is Phantom. If anyone remembers Phantom from last cycle, they did an upgrade to the chain. They rebranded. It's now doing 10K TPS. So that's,

That's at Solana or faster levels, obviously pre-Fire Dancer, but it's the fastest EVM chain. It's an L1, it's not an L2, and it was created by André Cronier, who is a pretty well-known kind of DeFi OG. And Phantom was like the home of D-Gen DeFi in 2021. And

I think they're giving $300 million worth of rewards roughly over the next six months to people who are doing stuff on the chain. So it feels like a lot of money has moved there. And I don't know, I quite like some of these stories. Like that maybe there's going to be... I love Solana. I think it's more a culture thing that has been shaken out here. But I do think that people want to...

move away from it. Like they, they want to go and do something else. And it's just the right time, right place for someone like this, like, um, like bear a chain or, or, or like Sonic, the FTVs of these sort of check these chains is much lower. You know, um, the ones that we've mentioned today, Sonic's at 3 billion, I think bear a change around four and a half. And, um,

Story Protocol, which is very, very different, to be clear, I think is around four. But you compare it to like Sui at 30. You compare that to Solana at, what is it, 80 or 90 now? 90 maybe? 85. There is some room to run there. You know, like if the TVL of these chains continues to go up and you continue to see like a building out of a community there,

Those aren't the worst altcoin longs. And there was a lot of talk of like, you know, this could be another... Bitcoin dominance is still at 61%. So to say it's an altcoin season, I think it's kind of crazy. But it could be this pocket of altcoins could have a bit of a run here, which is the alt L1s, not Solana. And that may include ETH too, you know, barring today's disaster. But...

It feels as though there could be a movement away from some of the L1s that have done well so far, maybe Sui and Solana, into some of these newer, lower-cap ones with, like, established, relatively established communities. Yeah, like, I think it doesn't take much to...

You told me about Sonic this morning and I kind of just decided that to get involved. It's not a difficult pitch to understand. And I think it's something people can get on board with quite quickly. Whether it's, I'm a bit skeptical as to how long it lasts for. Like I'm definitely skeptical of metrics such as TVL.

even volumes I'm skeptical of. I think fees generated is probably the best metric and provided that it shows some consistency and staying high. I think it's interesting. But other than that, I think, um,

I think it's something that can do well for a few weeks or something like that. But I don't know if it's enough to dethrone the likes of Solana, et cetera. I mean, even with like finance smart chain, right? Like you had the whole CZ push a couple of weeks ago and then activity just dropped off again pretty quickly. I don't know. I don't think there's enough meat on the bone to say that, oh, this is going to be the next big thing for the rest of this year. It could be, but it's too early to, I think, to judge that.

Yeah, it's definitely early. I think this is a show that maybe in two weeks we'll be like, okay, did that continue or did it not? But what I noticed today in these bounces is that meme coins haven't been the thing that really bounced. AI coins have actually done okay.

So I think AI, as I've said before, I really like that narrative throughout the year. I think we know our favorite coins there really at this stage. And they've been beaten up a lot, but I think they still could provide many multiple sort of returns. Maybe you talk about your AI thoughts as well, because I know you're like very, we're getting increasingly bigger in AI16Z and ARK, which I think are the two probably the strongest alongside AI16Z.

Well, I would have said Fartcoin, but it still feels like it has that meme aspect to it right now, which I think could hold it back in this market. But yeah, what do you think about those two? I know they've got some developments coming up where, you know, they could be moving more towards like an L1 narrative as well. Yeah, exactly. Look, I think, no, I don't have any Fartcoin and I don't think I ever will. I think it's become...

It's become mid-curve to left-curve, if that makes sense. And I think everyone is so trapped in like, oh, memes, left-curve, blah, blah, blah. But that's just not where any institutional capital can invest in any meaningful size. Like if you're a crypto fund,

And you have investors and you have to explain to them, oh, I bought this fart coin thing and now it's down 80%. You're going to lose that capital, right? Whereas with AI, everyone understands it because all your investors are probably invested in trad-fi, AI and AI, private equity and everywhere else, basically. So they'll understand it.

as a concept as an industry and if you can demonstrate hey there are actual real products within crypto that use ai and this could be the next big thing that's a really easy sale in my opinion so just from a top-down standpoint i think ai and crypto can be really massive just because that is a big narrative that is spoken about every single day in all of our lives not even

you know even outside of trading and markets and all that kind of stuff as well so um ai agents i think is the first tan it feels to me like the first tangible use case of ai within crypto like

um you can actually see these agents operate you can see what they're doing you can explain what an agent does to a normal person who doesn't really understand crypto or ai it all makes sense so in the past you had you know coins like fett and tau and i think they were just more difficult to grasp to a very simple person whereas this stuff is really easy to understand and grasp and then finally and the reason why why i like

ai 16z and r because i think there is potentially going to be this l1 narrative within the ai space at some point like hey this is the ai l1 where all the agents get launched and operate on and you know the more stuff that's um that's yet to come and then you think about you know where do you help most l1s trade they trade in like the multiple billions of dollars of ftv um and you could maybe even assign like a premium to this because it's ai so i just think you know something like ai 16z uh

400 million dollar market cap arc at 250 or whatever it is like all this stuff could be very easily in the billions um in my opinion and i like again ai 16z is the one i had most of just because um a lot so they're they're gonna rename it it's rebranded to eliza um and eliza os is like

one of the most followed and highest rated GitHub's out there. Like there's tons of people working on this. It's, there's tons of stuff that's been created on top of this. Like Eliza is not just going away tomorrow. It's not, you really look at some of these coins and think, oh wow, this is, don't know this will work. Maybe the dev team rugs it and they walk away tomorrow. Like for Eliza, that's not 100% not the case. Like this has been ongoing for years and you have a real, real team behind it. So,

that's the one that I like the most. And I sort of have arcs like a beta page of that really. Um, virtuals, virtuals came out with something this week, which I thought was interesting. This autonomous businesses are here. They have their now create autonomous agents. Basically they can talk to each other. Um, so it's the idea that you could create a swarm of agents all talking to each other on chain, performing actions on chain, um,

They continue to be kind of also at the forefront of pushing new tech in this space. And that's like $1.3 billion FTV. But I agree with you.

100% that this is where we're going to see explosive growth in crypto users. And I still have a very, very strong view that, like you just said, doing DGN DeFi is difficult, but giving it to an AI agent to do it might be much, much easier than what people are used to. So I think that it will reduce the complexities on onboarding, particularly in some of the more

difficult things, difficult technical things. And I think they'll be used extensively by the end of this year for various different things in crypto. They'll be one of the major things that kind of come out of this next year. So that's why I agree with you. I think these launch pads or maybe even moving into chains can capture a huge amount of it. Maybe we'll change gears just slightly and go back to majors here. If we talk about

Bitcoin, ETH, Solana, XRP now. You still Bitcoin, Maxi? Or do you feel as though this could be a moment for ETH to kind of take up the mantle a little bit? ETH, Bitcoin just continues to head lower. It's the low now. Why is it the BTC now?

uh seven so it's back back down to the the recent lows um well no actually it got all the way yeah not far from the from the recent lows after a period where it felt like it was it was starting to break out versus um bitcoin or at least reverse you tempted at all to move some of that bitcoin bag back into eath not not really you're not thinking about it at all like um

I mean, I still have a lot of ETH and ETH exposure just through various things. Like if ETH rallies a lot, I'll be very happy. Just through various things like I can't really sell and whatnot. So if ETH rallies, I'll be very happy. So I don't feel like I need to get extra exposure to it. If I had zero exposure to ETH, would I earn some here? Yes, I think so. I think that's the way I feel. The reason why I haven't just been like banging the drum or piling into it just because I'm

Many people are in this industry that are just naturally very exposed to ETH anyway. I've even been questioning my JLP a little bit in this market, which has been my favorite for a whole year. That's a big one for you, questioning the JLP. Well, it's performed relatively well. Despite Solana being down 40%, it's down roughly 15% from where I bought it.

maybe slightly higher, no, about 15% from that high. Obviously, I bought it much, much lower. But the, it's still been like, that's kind of similar to Bitcoin's move from its high, you know, Bitcoin's down, what, 12%. So it's not underperformed that much as being pure Bitcoin, but

One thing that JLP is, is it's also a bet on Solana volumes, particularly their PERP volumes through Jupiter. And Jupiter is slightly caught up in the FUD from Libra, like directly. Like Meow has said there's going to be an internal investigation on who knew what, because he is also one of the co-founders of Meteora that was like at the center of this. And...

All I keep on seeing is that like, is DEX volumes continue to fall and PERT volumes continue to fall on Solana. Like if you bring up PERT volumes for the last week, I think G-Posits is down like over 50%, over 60%. So that does worry me slightly. But I don't know what to move into. I don't know if I should consider a different LP sort of token, if I should...

moving to ETH, Bitcoin, maybe like I've been looking at lots of different angles. But I am starting to question if JLP should be as big a bit of my portfolio now, just because it has such a large Solana exposure. And the reason why it's been outperforming for so long is that Solana volumes have been so high, but they've definitely taken a dip over the last week. And I feel like at this level, it's basically been the same as owning Bitcoin. And I don't know if that will continue.

But yes, that's my general thoughts on it. It just seems good. For me, JLP is always like a defensive trade. Like it outperforms the market when it trends lower or even when it's, even sometimes when it's flat because you obviously, you're making money on the perp side of things. So like as the market sells off and many altcoins are sold off, it does make sense to reduce exposure to that and just long coins. It reminds me of like,

I think we both had this JLP trade on in the summer of last year. And at the end of the summer, I swapped all my JLP into meme coins just to express like a bullish view as everything had dropped. And that ended up working pretty well. And I wonder if you're meant to do the same here, except instead of meme coins, it should be, you know, I say ETH or some of this other L1 stuff. Yeah, that's what I've been thinking. Maybe doing a basket of like different ones, like doing a bit of, you know,

bit of ETH, bit of Bitcoin, and then, and probably doing it in LPs or, or creating some form of a, of a, um, of a basket there, which, which can only yield at the same time. So basically kind of replicate JLP, but, but, um, in a slightly different way. Okay. Do we maybe want to go to questions? Yeah, let's, um, let's do some questions. Um,

Before we do the questions, we want to showcase some more pro crypto content on Real Vision. Earlier this week, we had Sebastian Purcell holding a roundtable of institutional crypto fund managers and analysts.

Um, one of the guests, well, interesting. One of the guests they had said they expect a shift from mean coins to utility coins in the short term, but that mean coins aren't truly dead. That's an interesting take. Um, definitely one worth checking out. If you guys go over to realvision.com and, uh, sign in with your pro crypto subscription, you'll be able to watch that in detail. Um, definitely one that I think I will check out given the discussion we've had today. Um,

All right, questions. First one from JP on the Real Vision website. Why the hell are people, especially those that are more crypto native, keeping their spot coins on sex? I mean, at this point in time, if you've been crypto for at least one cycle, you should know to keep your coins in a cold storage wallet. Why is this an issue? It's a really good point.

I think it's been going a little bit back and forth, to be honest. Like, I think there's obviously been some massive DeFi hacks. Sometimes people just don't feel comfortable, like, with self-custody. Like, they feel as though they might lose their wallets. They might, you know, they might sign something on their Phantom or their MetaMask and then it's all gone. So they quite like the one layer of security, which, like, a centralized exchange brings.

But then whenever there's a centralized exchange hack, it's like catastrophic like this. I don't know. I would agree with you, but because I hold the vast majority of our funds in like multisigs. But then to be fair, Bybit got hacked via a multisig. They didn't get hacked on the advisor exchange. So this is kind of one of those weird things where...

it was kind of one of the cornerstones of holding your own assets has been hacked here, which has then taken down a centralized exchange. So I think don't just assume if you have your own keys that you're fine. You know, I'm definitely checking everything that I do with safe from now on, no such safe. Yeah, I think obviously from a safety standpoint, if you keep all your funds on a ledger or even, you know,

on a hot wallet on a computer that you never use or something like that um you strip out the third party risk i think if you're an active trader um and you're trading a lot of perps or other things um you it's obviously a lot easier to just keep all your money on an exchange right like the act of oh hey i just bought soul then i switched it to ethan i bought bitcoin and transferring it out to a wallet and back on every single time for an active trader it's very

painful to do that. So I think that's one reason why people keep their funds on exchanges. You know, the guys that lost the most money on FTX were all very active traders. So I think that's one of the main reasons. I think also sometimes people feel it's weird, but like psychologically people feel safer with a

with funds on a sex. It's like, oh, I can't do anything to mess this up by boosting my C phrase or clicking something, you know, clicking a bad link or something like that. Don't forget, like, people get hacked a lot from phishing links and signing malicious transactions and all that kind of stuff. So there's a lot...

There's a lot of reasons why. I think you probably just, the main thing is just to not have all your money in one place. Like you should split it up across different wallets, across some sexes, some self-custody. So you don't have a single point of failure. I think that's the biggest thing. I mean, I've never really been hacked, but a year, a couple of years ago, I

I can't remember what it's called, but not BananaBot. One of the bots on Unibot, I think it was, had money on Unibot and Unibot got hacked basically. And I lost some money on that, which I actually got back in the end, but I didn't have all my money on it. It was just like a small amount, which I'd used for trading. So the main thing, the main thing I think is just don't have all your money in one place and be aware of the risks as well. Yep.

The market is beginning to sell off on the back of this. It looks as though we might rebound and everyone was okay. The Bybit CEO is actually doing a live stream right now. If you are affected, he's doing a live stream on X trying to quell worries. But after FTX, I think people are right to be a little bit worried. Bitcoin's holding up okay. Still kind of 90%

just, just under right now. But, um, yeah, it's back down to 2,700. Solana's kind of one 70 area. It does feel like people are, um, not, not letting him out of, not, uh, we don't feel like we're out of the woods just yet on this. Um, okay, cool. Next question. Um,

Have you guys heard of Opulus and Lyra, the AI agents in music helping other artists and AI agents produce and distribute music? Just curious if you have explored this as you're both in AI. I personally haven't heard of these of you. I've only heard about Lyra, but I have not been involved in them from a...

from looking at it past that. I think Lyra was spoken about when originally people were talking about AI agents a couple months ago, but I just can't. I think I might be wrong on this, but is it like it was one of the original virtual things, I think, Lyra? I don't know. I haven't looked at it, but I do think this is what's going to happen. I think you're going to see a ton of different things

industry specific agents spun up with their own training data and are useful for different things. I think the music stuff for me and you have music NFTs and et cetera, I just don't feel like there's a big enough time for me to invest in that kind of stuff. I think if you're interested in music, sure, it makes sense, but it's never really felt scalable to me. Now, granted, I don't know

the details of Oculus and Lyra and I'll have a look but just as an industry it's not something that I've felt like I've wanted to invest in from a return standpoint yeah I feel like it's more like a for me at least it would be more like a hobby investment I guess well Zero Bro had those two albums didn't it that kind of went semi mainstream yeah

we're going to see this. AI films, AI music, in various different creative forms, we're going to see AI versions of it in AI books, all this sort of stuff. But I, and maybe they do interact with the blockchain. You know, maybe they do. But my guess is they may also need to, like, so we'll kind of see if blockchain is the best way to monetize that.

All right, cool. This is from Vano on the Real Vision website. Hey, Vano. Do you guys think Hyperliquid's spot volume has a chance to pick up? It's clear they lack spot traders, so their volume is low and most of it is just R. But is it just a lack of relevant integrations to move token in and out of Hyperliquid, or is there more to it? What are your thoughts on spot volumes on Hyperliquid?

Hyperliquid volumes are high. The number of the traders is not. We're talking in the... Part volumes are high, right? But are spot volumes actually that high? I'm actually talking about the number of users of hyperliquid is actually not even that high. But we're talking in the thousands, not in the hundreds of thousands, which is like, first of all, centralized exchanges.

So there is this general thought that Hyperliquid has really just been a bunch of OG perp traders that made money on it and made a big deal, even though the platform is very, very good. It's not gone mainstream by any means, really, although the volumes are particularly high. It kind of reminds me of Blur, where Blur dominated the NFT trading, but it didn't necessarily have all the users. It just had the most active users. Yeah.

I think Hyperliquid is as right now, remember it launched its EVM this week, which is like a digital chain. And Hyperliquid up until now has been valued like a chain. You know, like the Perp Dex would be the first thing. And then they're going to expand to various different things, build out a whole DeFi ecosystem with spot trading, with the Perp Dex, but then have lending, have options maybe, have a ton of different things.

And it did sell off when, when, when it launched the EVM, because I think that's kind of like they're shipping it, you know, now it's got a, everyone was like the hype of it's going to be a chain. And now the change here, let's see what actually does. Interestingly, it's held up. Okay. Like this, this sort of thing today with by bit, I think it's going to make it feel slightly better. Um,

I think at $25 billion, it's pretty fairly valued. If I'm honest, I don't think that's going to 50 to a hundred, but I do think it can go up to like 30 to 40. But there are some unlocks that start later this year. So I think you have to be aware about that. And a bunch of,

those core contributors, I think, are getting unlocked as well. People have been talking about it a lot. So I'll be more wary on Hyperliquid later in the year. For now, I think this is the sort of coin that can go to 30+. I don't think it can go to like 50 to 100. That's my gut. Yeah, I think...

It's just really a perp trading platform. As you said, there's not that many users, but some of the biggest perp traders are on it. It hasn't really attracted like the on-chain crowd or... I think spot traders are mostly the on-chain crowd because anyone else trading spot, if you're trading majors in spot, you're really just holding it. You're not really trading that frequently. So I think that's one of the reasons why the perp volumes for the spot volumes, but also just like

Unless you have like all these random on-chain meme coins where a lot of the spot volume happens now. And I think they're obviously not on Hyperliquid. It's hard for anyone to like go in and meet if you do that. I think, you know, you can actually buy spot Bitcoin now on Hyperliquid. One of the easiest places to do it actually. Like if you have an EVM and you find people to like...

or you don't want to buy on a centralized exchange, it's one of the easiest ways to do it. You can buy on Hyperliquid. So I would agree. It's a great platform. There's nothing against that.

If you're interested in hype versus the platform, though, I think you've got to be cognizant of the things I said. You know, hype is hyper liquid, I think can do can still do quite well. I think hype is is at this level is is fairly valued or at least can go up. But I don't think it's like a 10x trade for me. OK, last question. Which of the top 10 do you both think has the highest risk reward ratio this year?

That's a good question, actually. I like the top 10. I like framing it as the top 10. So top 10, Bitcoin, XRP, BNB, Solana, Doge, ADA, Tron. And we can kind of go down a chain link. Sui, Avalanche, Stellar, Litecoin, Tron. Best risk reward out of these. That is difficult, isn't it? Solana's down a lot. So I do think Solana can go down to like one...

I think Solana needs a change in slight change in culture here. And this might just take a couple of months, you know, I just, but Solana is the best UI UX experience that I've had in crypto. There's no way anything's beaten that, but it has the unlocks this month and it has now it's had this whole, the casino is closed narrative and volumes moving out. I think it can maybe underperform. I'm guessing here for, for a small bit. I don't, I don't know, but,

over the next year it's tough to argue this arm is not going to be a great trade in my opinion um but if not then in terms of risk reward bitcoin like i like i agree with you i like so i would pick solana out of that list it's down a lot it's down a lot off of its off as high as this year um does soul go back down to 100 so you know setra's parabola i doubt it like

I don't think it, if it goes back down to 100, I don't think it significantly underperforms any other coins. Yeah, I think several really have gotten new. So I really, I think with this fall you've had in the last week, I think, and I think, yes, there's unlocks, but we've been talking about them for a while. And I think they're now priced in. You tend to sort of value after the unlocks happen.

I would pick Sol here after this sermon. I can't believe Doge is still in the top 10. I mean, like, it's just crazy, isn't it? Well, Doge has lots of stuff going for it at the same time. It's still 37 billion. The other weird ones I've looked at, Tron, like, from a risk-reward standpoint, Tron I don't think is going lower. It makes too much money. Yeah.

and it trades at 20 billion. I think that's, that's a trade that's been a good one over the last year, for example, and no one really owns it. And it is difficult to own if you're in the U S um, and then I would maybe say outside of that, like, and there's a lot of ones who kind of already rallied. Uh, I quite like some of the, um, once we mentioned that, yeah, like I like the, the, the Sonic story more than I like some of these other L ones that are kind of here. It makes sense. Right. Well, we're at time now. So, uh,

We can call it a day there. I think that was Wrecked Vision. Before we go, we have a question for you guys. Are you planning to move your funds off centralized exchanges given what happened with Bybit today? Please let us know in the comments. Next week, we'll have the exclusive AMA and drink session on the Real Vision website. So sign up to realvisioncrypto at realvision.com forward slash RVC to gain access to that. And we will see you guys next week on Friday at 11.30 a.m.

Eastern Standard Time and 4.30pm Greenwich Meantime. I hope everyone has a great weekend. Thanks, guys.

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