REKT Vision: Crypto Pumps Ahead of the Trump Inauguration
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Hi everyone, I'm Raoul Pal, the CEO and co-founder of Real Vision. Here at Real Vision, we're committed to give you the best knowledge, tools, and network to help you succeed in your financial future. If you're enjoying this podcast, please take a moment to give it a five-star rating. It truly helps us continue to bring top-tier content. Thank you so much. Hello again, everyone. We're here for another episode of RecVision.

A good episode, it feels like. Bitcoin back on its way, close to all-time highs as we go live. Feels like our luck has turned for these shows, right? We've had a few pumps, little Friday pumps, it feels like. Obviously, Monday is the Trump inauguration. There's a lot of expectations suddenly now going into that. How are you feeling about the market here, RSF? Yeah, look, I think a lot of what we spoke about last year in terms of timings and risks were...

um a big rally through christmas and beginning of january perhaps inauguration causing some form of local top and it taking a long time to for trump to actually action any of the stuff he said about crypto um it literally the exact opposite of what we said has happened all throughout december and first week of january we traded pretty poorly um

It feels like the inauguration has now turned into more like a by-the-news event or something that people are excited about because Trump is now out there, or there's a lot of headlines out there saying this is going to be, you know, crypto is going to be a primary focus for the White House. So with that and with the mega rally we've seen in Ripple in the last few weeks, I think it's fair to say we have no idea what the fuck we're talking about and you better off not listening to us. So that's my main conclusion there. Hi, Raoul here.

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Yeah, that seems I'm back. My internet might be a bit shaky today, guys. I'm going to apologize in advance for that. But it does feel as though we are looking set for a bit of a Trump pump. Before we get started, let's just again flag we've got this

crypto gathering happening in Miami. I'm still unsure if I'm going to be there, but OSF is definitely going to be there playing some golf. All the VIP tickets are gone. You've only got general admission tickets to go. You can come meet OSF, Raoul, a bunch of other people at the Real Vision event in Miami. Yeah, so it does feel like that's changed. I think the main thing that's changed that we've seen is this talk about the Bitcoin Reserve being on day one. So I saw today on PolyMarket,

that the odds that happening have gone in the first 100 days have gone from about 20% at the start of the year, maybe slightly less, to now being about 45%, nearly 50%. So going into Monday, there's kind of 50-50 odds that he could do a very near-term executive order here on Bitcoin. And Bitcoin hadn't really been, I mean, literally on Monday, Bitcoin was at

And Anson was tweeting out its 75% chance of the market topped for the whole cycle. And very suddenly, it's turned around. And there's a lot of focus that this could be a day one or at least first 100-day Bitcoin strategic reserve. Huge, huge reversal there from what felt terrible on Friday with what was going on in macro. Do you think that's...

that the price action is telling you that's true now? I look at this and think like somebody knows something. This is a pretty nice Bitcoin chart. It's pretty aggressive price action. And there's no smoke without fire. I mean, there's been a few different reports. And then you have Bloomberg reporting stuff yesterday. So it is sort of like at a reasonably high level of journalism that we're getting these rumors. So there's enough excitement going into it, I think, such that we probably keep rallying

you know, through the weekend on Sunday. And we then maybe see like a little bit of a sell off as the speech, as his inauguration speech starts or whatever it is. Kind of like how we saw with his Bitcoin speech like earlier, earlier, a few months ago. So the main thing really is like, yeah, how, I mean, I don't really have a concept of

how long it will take before the US potentially starts buying Bitcoin. But theoretically speaking, he could put in an executive order to say, okay, we're not selling our Bitcoin. And I think the market does take that positively because it's still a bit of an uncertainty, even though maybe it's an expectation now, it is still a bit of an uncertainty. And you do see a lot of FUD and market selling off every time you hear news about the Silk Road stuff and moving wallets and

getting flagged as okay to sell it and all that kind of stuff. So I think that will cause a relief to the market and it will then make people start to think about the next thing, which is can the US actually start buying Bitcoin to add to its reserve? The headlines on

the SEC dropping many of its current cases and deregulation is the wrong word but maybe like sustainable and appropriate regulation of stuff that's just been left you know unbothered for years now basically so I think I think there's a lot to look forward to and it does feel like given the headlines we've seen crypto as a whole is going to be a priority and not just something that's left behind and I think you know the bear case or what

anti-Trump people would tell you last year would be like, oh, he's just saying all this stuff to get win votes and forget about it when he comes in. And it doesn't seem like that's going to be the case now, which, and that was my, we always spoke about that as our risk for this year. We were like, if Trump follows through, we can have an extended bull cycle and things can go pretty crazy. If he doesn't and he just drops it, that would be the risk. And that's what would cause, you know, perhaps a premature ending. So it feels like we may be in for the more favorable outcome

scenario here the more favorable outcome and that for me has been the for me personally that's been the biggest thing away from charts and all the macro stuff etc and four-year cycle etc this for me has been the biggest thing because it's huge structural changes that are very positive for the industry as a whole and yeah it's got me pretty it's got me feeling pretty bullish much more bullish than i was feeling maybe just even a week ago i think

Yeah, I think that's, you raise a good point. Like, I think a lot of people were bullish on the expectation and thought it would be a kind of by the rumor, sell the news event. What's seemingly had, we had that sell-off, obviously, well, a little bit of a sell-off in December and even earlier this week, just because macro has been going through a little bit more of a tussle with high bond yields and high dollar. And normally that's not normally a great environment for crypto, but Trump's really kept up the momentum.

with crypto, which I think people didn't think, you know, maybe he used it to get elected and that the policies might be

kind of even like a year two or year three thing, or at least not day one. But now it's seemingly like these are some of the main executive orders we're hearing about that can come from Trump around crypto. It does seem to be kind of a very key bit of policy and interest for him. There's a lot of focus that he's very, very focused on the Bitcoin price. He's going to be, like you said, there's the report saying that he's going to make

of strategic national interest, and that could potentially involve a Bitcoin strategic reserve. Obviously, there is Bitcoin related to the Silk Road confiscation at the moment, which is

they safeguard. There's some other small pockets of it that they could also look to safeguard. So maybe it's just keeping hold of that. Maybe it's buying it, but it does feel like he's definitely kept up the momentum. And this is going to be

There are reports that he's going to be looking at this like the stock market. In his first term, he was very, very focused on how well the stock market had done. He's also seemingly, I think, going to be focused on the price of Bitcoin. So that's probably a good thing for crypto if the president of the United States is very much focused that the price of Bitcoin shouldn't go lower over his term. So...

We're in a good state there. Maybe we should talk a little bit about what happened earlier in the week, because like I said, Bitcoin did hit 89K. There was bearishness everywhere, right? We came on here with Raoul last week, and we spoke about the various different macro worries that were kind of rearing their head. Obviously, Raoul still was pointing to the continued bullishness, but...

We had bond yields hit a kind of a two-year high, the dollar hit a two-year high, or no, bond yields hit like a yearly high, but back up towards like 5%. And then we had better CPI than expected, or at least lower CPI than expected, better PPI than expected. And that was on the back of a decent jobs report week four. Do you think the market just got ahead of itself there a bit, OSF? Like suddenly now we're back to rate cuts expected this year. I think some of the Fed shares came out this week and

and pointed to the idea that they could still have multiple rate cuts this year. Do you think the market just got it wrong there in assuming that inflation was going to stay high? And do you think we've got a little bit more space now to continue to rally for crypto? Yeah, look, it's what I said last week. I think people had too much PTSD from what happened in 2022. And we're just like, oh my God, what if...

We start getting rate hikes again. What if inflation goes through the roof? Like that was, I think I still feel that's fresh in people's minds. And I felt like given the big run that we've had and people have this PTSD from round tripping and et cetera, the knee jerk reaction was like, okay, now it's time to take profits because what if this stuff starts going the other way now? And I don't want to say it was an overreaction of the markets because look like

Yes, stocks didn't move that much. How much did stocks pull back? Like 5% or something like that? 5% to 10%? It wasn't a huge pullback in stocks. Crypto is volatile. Crypto moves around. Bitcoin pulled back about 15%, 16%. And altcoins were maybe pulled back about 20%, 30%, 40%. These are normal, normal pullbacks that you have in crypto as well from already very high levels, at least on Bitcoin. So...

I don't think it was even really an overreaction. It just felt like, hey, this is a profit-taking point for lots of people. Maybe long-term capital gains is a factor for retail as we turn the year and the US tax year and all that kind of stuff. So it seems like those were really the factors. And yeah, we had PPI come in below expectations. You had CPI come in line but below expectations on PPI.

core and just once again goes to show like inflation numbers are not really that bad and it will take a lot in my opinion for them to get to anywhere near the levels we saw in 2022 because we're sitting here right now with the Fed base rate at I think four and a half to four and three quarters and when this stuff kicked off two years ago the base rate was like 0.25 to 0.5% and inflation was already up like 5% so just you have two very different environments and

the Fed doesn't have to hike rates. Maybe they keep rates this level for longer and that will mitigate inflation. Maybe we have more rate cuts. That's not what people were expecting a week ago. So I just think it was, you know, the fear in the market was maybe overblown, but price action was actually kind of like more normal to what you'd see, I think, in any rallying market. That's hot.

Yeah, you make a good point. Like the market, I think people obviously have recency bias. So they think about 2022, like, oh, we're about to have it in 2024. Like there are a special set of circumstances there, like off the back of COVID with a number of different supply side issues. And then a huge amount of demand came back. And then obviously you come off a huge period of money printing as well. Like that was a real perfect storm for inflation in

In the last two years, we haven't... I mean, you've had money supply coming out of money printing out of China, but the US has been in quantitative tightening. I mean, you could argue there's been money supplied by different methods, but it hasn't nowhere been near as accommodative than the period before that. And then you had...

Obviously, a lot of the supply side issues are not really there anymore. Oil has gone up over the last week or so, mainly because of sanctions potentially for Russia. But it's not like where it was, where, you know, oil was...

nearly $130 or around about that. Things feel very, very different now. So I agree with you. It would be a huge departure. And I do think the bond market probably got ahead of itself there in terms of inflation expectations and the lack of need for rate cuts.

So macro seemingly, I think is probably going to still be a bit data dependent. We've obviously got, but we've had the CPI, the PPI, we've had NFPs already this month. So we're kind of waiting until after the Trump inauguration next month. I do think each one of those data points is actually much more important now than it was

last year. Last year, it felt like that was very secondary. And this year, I feel like it's, those ones are going to be very, very important for crypto just because macro is going to be moving a lot more with it. So if you're just looking at crypto, it probably makes sense to have a little bit more of a macro head on, I think, at least for Q1, Q2 this year, because I think they're going to be pretty important. But it does feel like for now, everyone's,

straight back to assuming we're going to the moon, um, on the back of this Trump trade. I guess the only other thing to mention here was, was kind of the AI stuff that we had spoken about last week with Raoul that had actually kind of been decimated by, by Monday. Um, that figure that would have hit around 15 billion went all the way down to around 10 and then completely V shaped up to around 18, 19 billion on AI agents this week. Um,

What have you been looking at a little bit? Like, I guess maybe I'll frame it for the audience in that at the moment we have the memes we have, which is the truth terminals, first kind of coins when they came in, that's GOAT and Fartcoin. Then you have the marketplaces, which is things like virtuals and let's say infra, things like AIXBT, ARK, which are both big open source repos. Yeah, 16C, yeah.

Yeah, AI16Z, sorry. And then you have some of the agents themselves. AIXPT has been one of the most successful ones there. And then recently you've had like more applications, which I think can relate to the agents themselves. But you've seen things like DeFi meets AI, AIFi or DeFi, I think they're calling it, plus some other like smaller applications and things like the metaverse and gaming and all this sort of stuff.

What's caught your eye this week on that dip? And then what do you think looks strongest right now? Yeah, look, I think just to reiterate, I think I'm really, really bullish on this entire like AI infrastructure and agent space for this year. A lot of last year,

when we talked about stuff, I was like, I'm only in memes. Like I'm only in meme coins and nothing else. Maybe like a little bit of majors. Didn't touch any altcoins and I didn't touch like the AI stuff from last year because I didn't feel like they had a tangible product narrative. And that's changed. Like all this stuff have

has real tangible products that people are now seeing on the timeline with regard to the agents so top down like with this space just being at like a total market cap of 18 billion billion dollars like that will there's no doubt in my mind that will 10x this year and much quicker than people i think realize because i think you have to get your head out the meme coin world get it into the altcoin world and just realize 10x is this year

I think that's 10x of this year. Yeah. Whether it's like existing coins or whether it's new coins, whatever it is, like it will 10x this year. I mean, there's new tokens that are coming that haven't even been released yet that will probably be at like multi-billion dollar market caps that will fit into that, um, that market cap. So I think we'll get to, you know, 150 to 200 billion dollars this year on that number. Um,

I think a lot of... So you have the infrastructure slash launchpad slash marketplaces. I'll bucket that all as infrastructure. Then you sort of have like the products, so agents, apps, and that kind of stuff. In my opinion, I see a world where you sort of have like a pump fund-like thing, but with AI agents. So you'll have with...

how easy it is to launch an agent on virtuals and how easy it will become to launch agents on Solana. You already have something called Top Hat, which is pretty easy to use, which is built on AI16Z. Like, you're just going to see, in my opinion, hundreds of thousands of agents, possibly even millions of agents, like you have with meme coins, all doing random stuff. And so to me, my initial thought there is like, it makes...

buying agents feel risky because I think there's always going to be the hot new thing and you'll have to keep rotating and chopping and changing. It will be an attention game for the agents unless something has particularly groundbreaking tech. But it does mean the rails on which they're built on

and housed on and launched on the infrastructure and launch pads, that stuff is going to crush it in terms of fees earned. And that's the stuff that can go really parabolic. So for me, it's like, I'd rather buy virtuals at like a $2 billion market cap or AI 16C at a $1.5 billion market cap. I'd rather buy those than going and buying like agents or apps at like some $100 million. Because I think that's, I think it's more likely that will 10x than some of the agent stuff. And I really do believe

virtuals and AI6, I think these things can be like 30 to $50 billion in FTV. I think it will get there. And you have to remember like with this whole stuff, right now you have the same crowd that was in DeFi in 2020. That was a meme coin. That was an NFT in 2021, the meme coins last year. And now you have that same crowd like gambling and this stuff. But this is a much more investable sector than meme coins ever was. Like actually just before this had a call with

a mutual like, you know, former TradFi guys that now like have a crypto fund who are like involved in the stuff and looking at this stuff and comparing it to altcoin and FTVs and thinking that, you know, that's where, that's the ceiling of this stuff. That's where I can get like, I've never had any conversation with any of those people on meme coins and you never really will because they ultimately, they have investors and they can't really pitch their investors. Let me go and gamble on a bunch of stuff, right? So the meme coin stuff is like just a retail thing. I think this is a retail thing plus like,

institutional plus a tradify thing. So I think it can get to like altcoin FTVs in the bull market of 2021, which is like tens of billions of dollars of market cap. And these guys are just spoke to even compared to, you know, the L1 narrative as well. And like, you know, which is kind of interesting. Can you see like the AICCC infrastructure being compared to an L1 narrative

as being infrastructure where all the AI stuff is housed on, yeah, possibly. I'm starting to smoke crack a little bit here maybe, but potentially it can be. So I think that's where you want to be in my opinion. And I still think

I think you have to get your head out of the mindset where it's like, oh, I could have bought this stuff two months ago and I would have made a thousand decks or whatever. I think you have to get your head out of that mindset and understand why it moved that aggressively in the first place and why it can move a lot higher. And obviously I'm saying this as someone who didn't touch anything outside of meme coins really for all of last year. And after your perseverance just had a sort of awakening on the 1st of January and kind of just like went balls deep basically. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know if they are... The L1 comparison is an interesting one because I think it's an imperfect comparison in that I think these, you know, the way that you talk about applications and infra, I think these are essentially the applications for Solana, right? Like how Solana would look at these is like AI16Z is the application, essentially, right?

These are the apps on top of the L1. And I think how they will work will be slightly different to how we would maybe predict, how we would traditionally see an L1. And I think they'll probably work by selling services over the top, or there'll be a marketplace, like you said, like a pump fund. Maybe there'll be some trading related to the token itself, like virtuals in terms of the liquidity pools set up.

So I don't think they're quite L1s, but they're close. They're close. They're like mini platforms in and of themselves. And that's how I generally see that. I think that can work. I was actually looking at the history of open source tech. I was looking at Linux, the operating system the other day. And the creative Linux...

didn't necessarily make that much money. He didn't monetize it, obviously, I suppose, open source, but he monetized it in different ways. But there's been companies which have made a lot of money off Linux and been sold for tens of billions. I think Red Hat was a famous one.

which sold for like 70 billion. And that was basically a services company built on top, like a SaaS-style company built on top. And I think that's generally how these people will be set up. So they'll have revenue, but it will really be about still being a core contributor to these open-source frameworks like AI16Z, but selling services on top of that with special plugins or...

Um, maybe they'll, they'll get into certain product lines. AI 16 C came out with humanoid robots this week. They might, they might move into. So I think there's just a lot of, there's a lot of possible, a promise and possibility, although it is very early days. Um,

And I do think it's going to be very big. I do think it's going to be very big. I think we'll find out if the Emperor has any clothes in probably about 12 months. So I think from now until then, there's going to be a lot of cool stuff that can potentially come out of this space. And I think the macro Perwins are behind it too, just with AI. I think Raoul's criticism last week is still very valid. At the moment, most of these are chatbots, but

you're starting to see the foothills of that change. You're starting to see bots which can trade for themselves, which can potentially make investment decisions for themselves. Graphene, for example, came out with one where you can buy anything on Shopify this week using one of their agents. So you're going to see integrations into retail, broader retail, which I think will be interesting. So I...

I am in agreement with Rao's take that we are building upon other people's tech. We're building upon the LLMs built by OpenAI, by Anthropic, for example, and then we are applying them to crypto. My honest view is that we will see an incredible amount of innovation here at that point where

AI meets finance. I don't think that these, we're going to, like crypto is going to be revolutionized or creating AGI or anything like that. But in that specific application of where AI can meet finance, I actually think crypto is going to see a lot of the innovation.

I don't think you're going to see these other major AI firms even touch crypto or they'll be slower to touch finance, you know, the ability to trade and stuff like that. So I actually think you're going to see innovation in that space where AI meets finance, maybe even more in crypto than you do in crypto.

from the Magnificent Seven or some of the bigger AI firms. That's my prediction. That might be a bit rogue, but I just think that we're going to experiment more with that. And that's kind of what we do day in, day out. So yes, we might be wrapping at least the foundational LLMs in different ways, but they're not going to do it for us. Microsoft and Google are not going to be building

or like, sorry, agents that can trade crypto. We're going to have to do that ourselves. And I generally think that we're going to innovate a lot in that process. So I think you're going to see a lot of innovation in this space. It's going to be an interesting one to see. So that did rebound 18 billion. I think the biggest winner this week was AIXPT, which is kind of the... How would you describe AIXPT? It's become like this. It's one of the most followed accounts on X.

and you can basically add it and it gives you a bit of a summary about anything in crypto. So you can tweet out like, hey, what do you think about Solana? And it will give you a little summary and tell you what it thinks. You like this one. Maybe you can talk about it a little bit. Yeah, I think there's two ways to look at AIXBT. The first way is looking at it as like, hey, this is a really good

source of information on crypto. Like, they have, you can tag it on CryptoTips. And it will give you a short reply. But there's also a terminal that you can access if you have 600,000 tokens. And it has a, it gives you, you're guaranteed a response basically in short time. And it gives you like much fuller length answers basically. So,

I've seen a couple of theories and research analysis from there out there that comparing the terminal to a Bloomberg terminal and saying this can be a really powerful source of information because of how well trained it is on CT. I tested it. It's obviously nowhere near as powerful as a Bloomberg terminal. I think everyone is probably aware of that. But it's pretty good at like, if you're trying to figure out, oh, when does the vesting period of this token start? Or...

you know, what happened in this coin or whatever it is, whatever you're trying to find out, you can literally type it into this terminal and it will give you an answer from scraping that information. So, that I think there is some decent value to it and I can see people wanting to have that. But, I don't, for me, that's not really like the main reason why I own it and I don't think that's the thing that would like send it into billions of dollars of market cap. I think for me, it's the mind share engagement and like memetic side of it to be honest with you. Like it's,

of all the AI agents out there, it has something like a 50 or 60% mindshare. So it's really dominating that timeline. And I feel like it's built a pretty strong moat around it. Like it's hard for anyone to build something else that's going to really compete with that. Um, you can build the same thing and maybe have better results based on your trades, but you know, that is, I think it's going to be tough to, to, to really beat that from just the engagement side of it. And, um,

It is kind of like a meme. People will tag it and say funny stuff and ask it about random tokens and it will give you sarcastic and satirical answers. It has become a bit of a meme. So for me, I know you have obviously Fartcoin and Goat, which came from the Truth Terminal. Maybe a couple of other AI-style meme coins. Obviously there's Rekt, which has an AI agent as well. But for me, this feels more like, and it's not like a full meme, but it feels more like it could be

the mascot or the champion of this entire AI movement. I mean, the ticker is literally AIXBT. And it has a really good... It's like a purple Pepe. It has a very good... It has very, very strong branding, in my opinion. And if you come in as a new person and you're like, shit, I need to buy some crypto...

And AI, what do I buy? Your initial thought isn't necessarily like, if I go or fart coin, you know, those are probably different trades now. It's probably like, okay, like, I see this AIXBT thing, like, that's the thing everyone's talking about. That's the thing I see all over my timeline. It's called AIXBT. It feels like I should buy that. And that for me is like, I feel like that's a better left curve trade within the mid curve trade of AI than some of this other stuff like fart coin and go, which obviously...

It's apparently a majorly controversial thing of me to say, given the entire world is long fartcoin right now. But I actually think AIXBT will become more of a mascot for AI, and I think it will outperform fartcoin, I think, in the next few weeks and months. Yeah, it's an interesting take. I think...

If people don't know, Farcoin has been also a huge mover this week. Obviously, a very different sort of trade. People who own that, I don't even know if they think it's an AI coin. But I think what you're saying there is very true. AIXPT has been interesting for a while just because it's quick to becoming the number one crypto thought leader. It's got nearly 400,000 followers. It tops all the Mindshare stats for followers.

It's really become something quite big. And even if it's doing a Bloomberg tunnel, which originally you had to pay $600,000 to get, but then now you're going to do tiered access, it feels like. Even if that doesn't quite work out, if you have that sort of position, and you're known to being in AI, I think you can actually...

vertically integrate into a lot of different things, right? They could go into framework. They could go into specific like DeFi style agents that can work with you, like swarms, which we've seen. So I actually think their positioning is interesting in that they can fail at a lot of stuff. And because they've got so much

they could actually go and do anything in AI right now and probably be able to release a ton of different products. So it's a very interesting way to, which in crypto is a huge thing. If people like don't know about marketing and having Mindshare and,

It's just so, so important. Just as much as cash flow to your project, right? So their ability to have grabbed everyone's attention so much, and they've done this now for months, I think it's going to be a big benefit for them. So I definitely want to look at this week. I think the slightly changing tone again, and maybe going back to the majors, the two big winners this week have been US crypto. So we've seen...

Solana, and XRP. XRP has been one of the most crazy trades of this cycle. It is now becoming kind of a US darling for crypto. Everyone's saying it's going to get a lot of institutional adoption under Trump. It's nearly flipping ETH. As we speak right now, XRP's market cap is around 320 billion. ETH is around 400 billion. So

kind of a 10% move up in XRP, a 10% move down in ETH would lead to a flippening here. Solana also got a bit of a bounce this week on the expectation that it would also get an ETF, that it was going to get some sort of strategic national boost from Trump, given it's seen as being US-based. What do you think here about those majors of ETH, Bitcoin, XRP, and Solana?

And I honestly thought XRP was a dead coin. And I know lots of our viewers own XRP. So definitely, I hope you didn't take our advice to sell your XRP. It's the trade of the cycle. And I think a whole of every single crypto, you know, talking head missed it. Yeah, the vast majority of them did. Yeah, so I think that's definitely caught me off guard. And

I don't know. I just thought it was like a dinosaur coin that wasn't really doing anything. And now suddenly, you know, the tech gets better as the price goes higher, I guess. Uh...

It's pretty tough for ETH. The only thing I'll say on XRP is, I know there's these headlines of Trump potentially pushing American-made coins. There were then some headlines of Trump saying that the XRP people were supporting Kamala Harris, and so he didn't want to do anything for XRP, and then it sold back off again. So I think there's going to be a lot of... I mean, Trump is very vocal about this kind of stuff, and I remember trading markets back at Barclays

When Trump was in presidency, everything was basically around Trump tweets. Every time he tweeted, the market would move up or down and you could never really predict it. So it feels like we may start to get a bit of that with crypto. So I don't know. Until this stuff is finalized, I think you just have to take it all with a pinch of salt. But XRP and Solana feel like they now have the wind beneath their sails with the ETF stuff. One thing to note is ETH did have an ETF last year. It didn't perform very well. So...

can you argue that Solana and XRP would perform any better than ETH? Well, it does feel like they have a much stronger retail backing than ETH does given the price action in crypto. So, and there are probably more powerful narratives they can push out. So I don't know. Once again,

it just feels very challenged for ETH where it's like not really looking forward to any major catalysts and the big catalyst it had last year, it underperformed on and now that catalyst has been transferred to its biggest rival. So I don't know. Like I don't know what the bull case is for ETH right now and maybe that's the reason you should buy it because everyone's once again looking the other way. But I think it will take a long time to play out unless, you know, obviously the Liberty Fire stuff has been buying a lot of ETH.

than investing in ETH. But I don't know. I don't think that's a good question for me. Yeah, I think... I agree. 85% chance, apparently, on Polymarket of a Solana ETF this year. 70% chance of an XRP ETF. There was talk today of a Doge ETF. One of the big ETF providers came out and said they are expecting a Doge ETF in 2025. ETFs, I think, are going to come for all the major assets. Oh, it's down to...

Is that right? That's only by half, mid-year. Yeah, for the whole of the year, it's slightly higher. But it does feel as though we're going to get ETFs for the other coins right now. That's going to be a tailwind for the whole of the space. Solana has these unlocks this month, next month, and March. I...

I said last week that I think it looks unbelievably cheap to me. I think Solana could gigasend in this environment. I really, really do. Yeah, I think we're sort of in that unlock period now where maybe that was the reason why it underperformed for the last few weeks. And we're kind of over that hump now. Just like how it rallied a lot aggressively on the...

meme coin stuff last year, it could possibly rally on the big AI stuff this year as well. And there's obviously, you know, it feels like AI is like a battle between base and Solana right now. And there's some good stuff on base, but you know, there's obviously going to be a shitload of Solana. And yeah, I think Solana flipping ETH in the next 12 months feels like a very real possibility to me.

Yeah, it's interesting that you said that as well. Like, it's base. It's not happening on Ethel 1. It's happening on base. And there's a lot of talk even that base might even spin out as its own chain completely, right? I think I was more constructive on it in Q4 going, which wasn't a bad trade, right? Like, it was, but I wouldn't own it for the first half of this year. That's for certain. I think...

it pains me to want to look at XRP because I think part of XRP's rally is just, it is memetic, right? Like it's people texting me on that. They've seen a Tik TOK that says the XRP is going to $10,000 and like, should they buy some? Um, and yeah,

I still don't, it's still a show me story to me. There's not actually that much going on on XRP yet. Like they've only just got a stable coin in there. So it's really just like, will Trump lead to massive institutional adoption? Plus, will you get, plus the memetics of it right now, where Solana just feels undervalued. I think you've probably got another month or so potentially to get it because of these unlocks.

But once those are seen as partially done, I think that one could re-rate pretty quickly. Yeah, I think so. I think it's going to be pretty...

It's going to happen very fast, I think. And I think it's, you know, it's the 17th of January, right? Like people have started to put money into stuff. But I think a lot of people are like, okay, where should we invest? Should we be going into AI? Should we be growing Solana? All that kind of stuff. And that will figure itself out in the next two or three weeks. But I think the narratives have already been set. So...

I guess what I'm saying is right now you're seeing like the front running of the big trade, but we haven't seen the big trade be put on by the big boys yet. And when that happens, I think the stuff will move. I was actually watching an interview with Raoul yesterday. He interviewed a fund manager yesterday.

Richard Galvin. Richard Galvin. It's a very good interview based out of Australia he is. But he was talking about how they've put the majority of their investments away from the L1s and into the apps themselves. So, which has been like a bit of a grave trade in recent years because the apps are often undervalued in terms of like a cash flow rate

versus what you would see in tech stocks, for example. And the L1s have generally held up okay during the bear cycles. But I do think there's something to be said about that. Like he pointed out Radium on Solana. Radium is making billions of dollars of revenue at the moment. In fact, I think its burn each year is something like 300 to 400 million annualized Radium. Wow.

And it trades at $5 billion or $5.5 billion. And I did think about that and go like, maybe with this move to crypto being a bit more accepted by institutional funds, the trade may be out of the L1s and into some of these applications. So part of me did think like, maybe Solana is the trade.

but maybe radium is the trade, you know, radium is easily the number one fee creating platform on salon in, in crypto even, um, uh, away from like tether. Uh, and obviously it has the integration for Solana DeFi. It has integration with pump fun. Um, and has made the jump into doing buyback and burns of its token. You know, like it's,

It's fully doing the dream for crypto, which is that you actually get to share in the upside of the token making the revenue. It's not just like some DAO governance thing. And I think I'm going to be on the lookout for that a little bit more, I think, this year. Maybe this is the year to invest in the application layer over the L1s.

Maybe block space is slightly too overvalued with things like ETH. I don't think it is with Solana, but if more broader tech investors start to look at, let's say, we start to get ETS for a whole range of assets, and now suddenly this space is investable to ETH,

tons of different other investors, broader in TradFi, they might look at some of these protocols on a cash flow multiple and go like, wow. Which traditionally, no one has really done. Everyone's just bought memes because the only real people buying this stuff has been retail. But maybe this is the year that we start to see some of those things really re-rate. And maybe Radium could go to like 20 to 50, you know?

yeah that was maybe something we're going to have to do a slightly shorter show unfortunately today we're not going to do questions questions are going to have to come next week if you come we're going to do these special drinks with Osef and Mando obviously we're also going to be in Miami so you get to ask us a bunch of questions there but I thought I'd kind of end on that I don't know if you have anything you wanted to add there Osef nothing further to add I think it looks like you just remembered you had to leave in a minute but yeah

But watch this video. You should watch it too, OSF. Yeah, definitely watch it. It's very, very good. It looks like he has a good life in Australia and kind of travel background. But maybe this is the year to invest in applications. That's where I came out from. How long is the video?

maybe it's like an hour so you can watch it on 2x speed and then get through it 20x speed yeah yeah

Right. Well, with that, we'll wrap up for today. Exciting times in crypto, I think, and hope everyone is doing well out there. So yeah, that was RekVision. Before we head out, quick question for you guys. Let us know in the comments, how bullish do you think Trump will be for crypto? Let's hear some targets for Bitcoin, ETH, Solana, Ripple, you name it. Where do you think those coins can get to this year?

Head over to realvision.com forward slash CG 2025 to get your tickets to the crypto gathering in Miami. I will be there. I'll try and strong arm Mando into coming as well. And with that, we will see you guys next week. Same time as usual, 11.30am Eastern Time, 4.30pm Greenwich Mean Time. I hope everyone has a great weekend. Take care, everyone.

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