The Chopping Block: Polymarket CEO raided by FBI, Ethereum’s Beam Chain, and Trump’s Pro-Crypto Agenda feat. Vance Spencer - Ep. 738
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And so I just wish Ethereum could move at a faster velocity because I think if they deliver that in the timeframe that they expect, Ethereum will be obsolete. I mean, I liked it for kind of different reasons in terms of let's say you're, you know, Vitalik or Justin Drake, you know, you're a steward of a $400 billion asset or, you know, 350 or whatever it is. Let's say you come out, we're raising the gas limit. We're going to raise the rent on L2s. We're going to

you know we think we're you know we need to change things immediately you hit the panic button you come out just absolutely firing you can't do that when you're stewarding that large of an asset like bitcoin doesn't have that problem not a dividend it's a tale of two quans now your losses are on someone else's balance sheet generally speaking airdrops are kind of pointless anyways um unnamed trading firms who are very involved i like that eat the ultimate defy protocols are the antidote to this problem

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Chopping Block. Every couple of weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insiders perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intro, first we got Robert, the crypto connoisseur and czar of Superstain. Good morning, everybody. Next, we got Tarun, the gigabrain and Grand Poobah at Gauntlet. Yo. Joining us today, we have special guest Vance, visionary VC at Framework Ventures.

Visionary. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, absolutely. The time is right to call you out as the visionary. I'm Asif, the head hype man at Dragonfly. We are early stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see choppingblock.xyz for more disclosures. So Vance, you must be feeling pretty good. You were one of the loudest

You were one of the loudest VCs proclaiming that you were absolutely confident that Trump was going to win. I gotta say, I hope you are still basking in the glow of the Trump call. How are you feeling about it? And what do you feel like other people got wrong that you saw? - I feel like that was pretty easy money, honestly. I mean, he's the best to ever do it. I think we will live another 50 years with no one even close to the type of campaign he ran.

I don't know, like from the polls to the sentiment to like just the virality and people forget. But like, you know, Michael Bloomberg raised over a billion and got 4% of a primary vote. It's not about money anymore. It's about just culture. And I think that's probably what people missed. And so what do you think the polls got so wrong and the media got so wrong that you felt so obvious? I mean, the polls were off by the exact same amount they were off last time. I think people expecting that that would change were...

just betting on you know basically the polling apparatus would change and i think that's like one of the least susceptible to you know dynamism industries that you could possibly imagine and i don't think it's surprising that like ann seltzer has retired post-election like they kind of need to clean house and restart and i think it's a huge vindication for polymarket um and the fact that they called it on election night is pretty incredible um

And obviously, you know, Shane got raided and seems like he's fine. I talked to him. He's in good spirits, but never great to have your door, you know, kicked down. Not kicked down, but like, you know, someone banging your door at 6am. That's not fun. Yeah. So, okay. Since you mentioned it, let's jump into one of the stories this week.

In our last episode, we took a week off, but in the last episode, we talked a little bit about the success of Polymarket on election night. Now, one of the seemingly codas to that story was that Shane Copland, the founder of Polymarket, got raided just basically about a week after the election closed.

So it was reported that around 6 a.m., the FBI raided his apartment and seized his phone and his electronics. There was no arrest. So this was a search warrant, but there was no charges actually against Shane himself.

Um, there, there's not a lot of information right now about exactly what happened, but Shane came out on Twitter, uh, soon after he, I guess, got a new phone and regained access to his accounts, uh, tweeting only new phone who dis, which garnered a huge amount of, of, uh, applause and praise from the crypto world that just loved the kind of Promethean spirit behind it. He later went on to post a much longer post calling out the current administration as basically being, um,

driving some kind of partisan slash political prosecution of him on the basis of the fact that Polymarket was calling out Trump as being the front runner for the election. So right now it's still relatively unclear exactly what motivated this raid. And I think we don't know, and it's not necessarily clear that actually Shane himself knows,

you know, typically in these kinds of situations, the FBI is not necessarily going to divulge exactly what they're looking for. So they may have just been looking to see if there is something with which they can put together a case and bring it against him. There's also been reporting supposedly that Trump was aware of the raid and not aware in advance of the raid, but aware of the story and that it's been brought to his attention that he's not pleased about it and considered it to be part of this overall political prosecution of the whole kind of pro-Trump

universe. And of course, you know, it is backed by Peter Thiel and Elon Musk was one of the people who came out saying that, hey, this is really terrible that this thing happened and that this raid was committed against Shane. So any reactions you guys against seeing this raid? Do you think it's likely to result in charges or is this, you know, the last gasps of an outgoing administration?

Well, I'll just add on to what you said about, you know, not having a clear understanding of what was the purpose of the raid or what they were looking for, what the, you know, potential crimes they're trying to investigate are. They might not be related to Shane himself, even. He might just be a witness to something.

You know, the speculation I've heard on the Internet for the most part comes down to the idea that it's either related to U.S.

traders active on Polymarket in violation of a settlement that Polymarket had previously with the CFTC. And the second hypothesis I've heard was that it was related to market manipulation. And one of the, I think, baseless ideas that was floating around for the weeks leading up to the election was that Polymarket was somehow either A, being manipulated,

Or, you know, be, you know, being used as a tool to influence the election in a improper way. And so, you know, I think we're all going to have to wait to see if anything comes out of this and what it is. But I agree that we don't really know what it's even related to. I think the only thing I'll say is, you know, if it would probably have been if it really was market manipulation,

Then arguably, I feel like someone from the other prediction market should have also had a similar knock on the door because like they started tracking each other within like

the last two weeks of the election. So it's like, if you're really going to go after one, you should go after the other. So I feel like it's really hard. I mean, they would be arbitraged in line with each other, right? Sure, but I just kind of am like, it's just weird to me that if it's really just a manipulation case, why wouldn't you go for both? And also, why would you do the kind of raid type of thing? Exactly. The raid is single-minded.

Yeah, I kind of agree. It does feel politically motivated. It's something was weird about it. It's like, okay, if you're going to subpoena someone and be like, oh, I want your hard drive or phone or whatever, that's different than like kind of the raid aspect in a way that makes it feel not kind of like, like either there's some crazy case we don't know about, like, I don't know, Polymarket facilitated some OFAC violation or something like that, or, you

Or, you know, it's like hard. The null hypothesis of politically motivated seems to have quite high likelihood. Yeah. I mean, I think it's important for people to understand. Normally, like, so...

Polymarket already had a settlement with the CFTC. The fact that the CFTC settled with them means that, okay, we consider you to be fairly straightforward, rational actors that are able to enter into legal agreements with the government. It means you cooperated on some level. Otherwise, there wouldn't be a settlement. They would go and they would sue you. So the fact that there was already an outstanding settlement with the CFTC means that

The base case assumption is that, okay, Polymarket, you know, it's an organization with a general counsel and with legal counsel. And, you know, I think Sullivan Cromwell represents Polymarket, right? These are people that law enforcement know very, very well. These are not, you know, some ragtag weirdos. You know, these are not like Russians. These are not, you know, foreign agents. So...

Normally the way that this is done is that okay if the government wants to know something that's that's relevant to a case They send a subpoena, which is a nice little letter in the mail that says hey We would like these documents Please send them to us in such as a period of time this stuff is extremely normal happens all the time that is how law enforcement and Investigative agencies are supposed to be doing their work of figuring out information um the only time that you would do a execute a search warrant without an arrest is

without a subpoena would be if you have strong reason to believe, two reasons. One, you have strong reason to believe that this person will not willingly give over this information or they're going to destroy or hide this information, right? Which given the fact that Polymarket so far, I mean, they entered into a settlement with the CFTC, meaning that they agreed to do stuff in agreement with the government, knowing that the government was monitoring them. Like, you know, Polymarket, again, they're not offshore, they're in New York. They're like right in the, you know,

So either one, they had strong reason to believe that Shane was going to destroy evidence or something like that. Or two, they wanted to scare him.

And very, very often that is the answer. When you see that, you know, there's something like this, is that they want you to be scared. They want to put pressure on you to get you to fold into some kind of agreement that you might not otherwise do. In this case, I mean, again, we don't know what we don't know, but strongly feels to me like, you know, when we say that it's political, again, we don't know exactly what it means, but it does mean that, okay, this is the kind of

that doesn't necessarily rise to criminality, but for whatever reason, there is increased desire to get him to be scared and agree to something that he doesn't necessarily need to agree to. So I have to imagine that his legal team is pissed

And they are trying to figure out what exactly was going on here from the perspective of the prosecutors or whoever that they believe there wasn't good reason to think that Shane was going to be able to cooperate. And then also they didn't go after the company. They didn't raid the corporate offices. They didn't raid the company. They raided Shane personally. So again, to your point, Robert, it's possible that he was a witness to some other crime.

And but again, the normal way that you get at that is a subpoena. So it does feel to me like there's something extra punitive that's going on here that they're trying to do. Well, of course. And to add option C, you know, as opposed to trying to terrorize Shane, I think the third path is that they're trying to send a signal to the broader industry at large. They're trying to send a signal to betters on poly market. They're trying to send a signal to, you know,

everybody at large that this is an entity that they don't like. And I think in a lot of ways that was already made clear. I mean, Kalshi and the CFTC battled in the courts over whether prediction markets on elections would even be allowed to exist. And the US government lost just weeks ago. And this is a sector that broad swaths of the government just don't like.

have tried to fight through the courts and now could be fighting extrajudicially. But I think...

FBI is quite different than CFTC in this case, right? The raid was FBS. So, so like I, I huge difference in terms of. Yeah. And the reality is that also the line between, you know, what is a civil violation of some kind of agreement with the CFTC and what's a criminal violation. There are some things that are hard lines like OFAC violations. There's some things that are softer lines like, okay, what's the state of mind? You know, what, to what degree is this like normal negligence versus criminal negligence? So there's, there's, there's very blurry lines.

And the reality is that when the government wants something to happen, very often they just enlist the FBI to just kind of help them. It's kind of like bringing in the heavy guns if you want to politically intimidate somebody. So-

Again, we don't know what we don't know. So, you know, we always hesitate to speculate too aggressively. But right now, there's not enough information to know other than that. Look, the administration is going to turn over in January. That's when Trump is going to get inaugurated, presumably. And I would guess that when that happens, we're probably going to get a lot more clarity about what exactly this was about. And we may just find that, OK, this thing just, you know, given that it's federal, we're

this thing just basically gets waved away once Trump comes into office. Seems pretty plausible to me, if in fact it is politically motivated. Now, all that being said, you know, so despite all of that, much focus right now is on Trump and how he's going to assemble his cabinet as he comes into putting together the coalition for January when he takes over the government. So there's been a lot of excitement around a few elements of how he's going to be assembling his cabinet. First and foremost, of course, is Doge.

the Department of Government Efficiency. I'm sure at this point, everybody's heard of it, but Trump, sorry, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are going to be heading this department that is going to be executing massive amounts of stripping government programs and

uh, lowering total government spending, supposedly about to $2 trillion, which I think most people doubt that number was actually reachable, but maybe some, some significant fraction of that can be cut from the federal government. Um, the most important thing for crypto purposes is that, uh, department of government efficiency stands for Doge. And as a result, Doge coin has been pumping like absolute madness. Um,

And it seems, again, like this is all part and parcel of this picture that crypto is somehow going to be in the center stage for the next four years, or at least the next two years. I mean, we'll see if this energy continues for four. But supposedly, Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, has two years to prove its mandate. And at least for two years, we're going to keep seeing Doge

In the limelight. I was listening to a podcast where people are very...

you know, let's say anti-crypto and anti-Trump, you know, just so that to understand the precise language they would use around Doge. You listen to stuff by people that are anti-crypto? I like to know, a little bit like Vance, I like to make sure I know all sorts of weird sides to make, you know, like I want to do the deep research.

And it's actually very funny because like I want to hear the criticisms, right? Because like all these people were like dancing on crypto's grave, right? All of 2023 and like

whatever so i wanted to see what they're saying now and they like they refuse to even say doge on their thing they're like department of government efficiency we won't say the acronym which rolls off the tongue i just kept i just kept laughing listening to it because they were like they were like really trying hard not to say doge because like we don't want to encourage the cryptocurrency enthusiasm did they actually say that yeah

Wow. I just thought it was funny because I feel like all they're doing is making it more of a meme, but they're not even cognizant of that. It was amazing. It's like saying the F word instead of just actually saying fuck. Yeah, exactly. It almost draws more attention to it if you refuse to say it. Do you think Doge has actual legs? I'm just looking at the 2021 chart. The day that he was on SNL, it peaked. It's like May 10th or whatever. I think...

Each time he does this, it kind of gets less and less powerful in some ways. And I think like the laws of gravity for crypto coins are like one basic one is it's just really hard to get over 100 billion FTV and stay there. Luna topped there. AVAX topped there. Solana topped there last cycle. Like you're at 60, 70 billion with Doge. Like,

I don't know. Is this thing going up? Maybe. Vance is not a believer in $1 doge. That's what we've learned. I've heard that people are a believer in $100 doge. That's what the kids on Twitter are talking about. Who is saying $100 doge? Nobody is saying $100 doge. I've seen it. People who don't understand. Robert, I have a bunch of doges. I think those are Europeans. Those are Europeans and you're mistakenly comma for a period. No, no, no. If you think that's crazy, you should see the people talking about the ripple price targets they have.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That is crazy. I mean, both both camps of points. I want I want to understand. I want some tick tock of this guy who's like, I quit my job because I bought XRP at 30 cents and it's going to be $30. 300 is a very common one. If you look on the Internet.

I'll say like 300 or 489 for some reason. Amateur mistake. Don't look on the internet. Amateur mistake. Actually, I told Vance this a few weeks ago. But TikTok crypto is a very interesting world to just... You need to spend an hour a week searching. Dude, it's so bad. It's so... Room temp IQ at best. It's also pretty small still. But you learn a lot about...

newcomers to the market from that, more than anything else. Instagram crypto is a bit more lit than TikTok crypto at the moment. I'll let you... Got it. Okay. So I want to know, what is the class of 24 about? What is their... I mean, I have to imagine that's a lot of the TikTok content. Animal coins. Is it just pure meme coin trading? There's nothing else? Mudang AI coins.

Third-rate dogs. Are AI coins class of 24? Is that like people who came in this year, are they into AI coins? That's already over. No, no, no. I mean like the trading bots, like Aliza and whatever. AI16Z. I was on Twitter and someone was like, AI agents have died, yes, but you just got to pick the right ones and stay bullish. The metas are moving so quickly.

Like, did you see the AI16Z one? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were aping A16Z and then some other person launched like the same token they were going to launch and then like had the same thing happen to them. It's...

It's getting wild out there. The founder has already gone through this cycle of life in one week. It's actually pretty amazing to read their Twitter. We met with a pitch this week and we were like, when did you guys start building this? They're like eight days ago. Oh, great. Yeah, that's the class of 24. Yeah, that is very true. Hasib, you're going to need to start adding months to the classes. You can't just stay the year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. That's right. Yeah, I think...

Yeah, I guess like the age in crypto is logarithmic, right? Where it's like, if you've been around for one week, okay, you launched a meme coin. Three weeks, okay, meme coin launchpad. And a little bit longer, maybe now it's like an AI meme coin. I did make this point with somebody earlier that I think the AI meme coin cycle, you know, we talked a little bit about GOAT last time, I think. Obviously, there's been many more in the interim since then. So you heard about AI16Z and there's a few others now. I think the...

The analogy I give, so some people were debating of like, okay, is there going to be this AI meme coin super cycle? Is this the new meta that more and more AIs or LLMs are going to be on chain and creating their own meme coins? And the point I was making is that I don't think it's very likely because watching an AI make a meme coin or an LLM become like this sort of fake KOL thing, it's a little bit like seeing an elephant paint.

Where it's like, when you see an elephant paint, it's like, holy shit, that elephant is painting. Now in reality, most of the paintings are terrible, right? So if you see, if you go look at one of these AI meme coin Twitter feeds, most of the tweets are crap, right? They don't have a lot of engagement. They have like 5,000 views. But then one out of every 10 tweets is just like a banger and it's got all this, everyone's retweeting it. They're like, oh my God, look at this tweet. It's so smart. Like, oh my God, I love this AI token.

But once you get over the shock factor of like, oh, the elephant is painting, after like seeing 10 or 20 of them, it's just kind of like, okay, whatever. I mean, I've seen it before, elephants. They're actually, they're not good painters though. Most of their paintings are pretty shitty. And so I think as one, as the LLMs get better,

at chilling meme coins. And two, as we see more and more of them, I think the shock factor will subside and we'll go back to like, okay, what's the next thing that's going to shock you that's going to captivate your attention? And yeah, the novelty factor I think is already starting to wear off, which is why you see the cycle starting to ebb in terms of the centrality of attention. But with Doge, I think it's quite different. With Doge, I do think, my mental model of meme coins, it's all about the spotlight effect.

And the spotlight on Doge is only going to increase and is going to become very, very broad and wide across the US, which is that

Like every time they cut something, they're going to cause a lot of drama and that's going to cause even more attention, even more clicks, and even more people, you know, say the ticker and the ticker is Doge. And they will just, you know, already I see, you know, when people cover it in the news, they call it Doge. They don't call it the Department of Government Efficiency. So like this sort of earned media, quote unquote, for Doge is just going to be absolutely massive for the next few years.

Is that a long thesis for Doge? No, not trading advice. I thought there was no financial advice. I'm not giving financial advice, but I am saying I think the attention on Doge will be very sustained for the next two years.

That's good financial advice. All right, Vince. Why don't you tell us how to trade on that as the input into the financial portfolio? Sending channels, some bull wedges. Really, you know, you got to be in and out of things like those. Really get in there. Watch for an iron condor and then make sure, I don't know. Switch to the one minute order book candle. And then I think you're good.

Yeah, crank the leverage to 100. Yeah, I think the only thing I can say for sure is class of 2024, other than meme coin rotation, is the search for the next Solana. I feel like that is like, you look at the valuations, that is clearly the thing that persists the whole year.

Everyone is trying to make a narrative of anything that could potentially be the next Solana. Apparently Hashgraph is now the next Solana. I saw that. I forgot they existed. I hope not. Oh, it's coming. It's coming.

Anyway, all right. Sorry, let's get back on politics, everyone's favorite. So there's a few other things that are captivating a lot of people's attentions in the industry. A few of the picks that we already know that are likely from Trump. So first, Howard Lutnick, who was originally campaigning to try to become Treasury Secretary, has been appointed to Commerce Secretary. So it's still an important role. It's...

It plays a big role in business and trade, especially domestically. But he, of course, is the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, which is, they're very strongly behind Tether. So another pro-crypto name that's going to be fairly central in the Trump administration.

Treasury Secretary right now, there's a few people who are playing for it. Obviously, Howard Letnick has been passed over. Apparently, the CEO of Apollo, Kevin Warsh, who's ex-Federal Reserve, who's very pro-crypto. I think he's an advisor to Electric Capital. There are people debating whether he's pro-Stablecoin or pro-CBDC on Twitter. So I haven't read enough to be educated, but I will say. Trump is so anti-CBDC. I feel like that's a non-starter, no?

Yeah, yeah. But there is this like, there are a couple articles from him about very pro-CBDC. Although views evolve with the times, right? Like four years ago,

everybody was like, ooh, like CBDCs could be cool. What if they were built on the Ethereum blockchain? Then the VUX were cool, you know? And like, since then, I think- I mean, Trump was anti-crypto four years ago, so. Yes, so- Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I'm just pointing out that there's some, you know, there's some fighting about this. Totally, but views evolve, right? Right. People change. Well, right now, PolyMarket is attacking Treasury Secretary to be 68% likely to be Kevin Warsh.

19% Scott Besant, 12% Mark Rowan. Mark Rowan is the Apollo CEO. So it looks like Kevin Warsh is the front runner, but still TBD. And there may be more to chew there. For SEC pick, apparently Teresa Goody-Guyen?

is supposedly right now the front runner for SEC, although other people have advocated for Hester Peirce, of course, who's known as Crypto Mom and is one of the most friendly SEC commissioners to potentially become the SEC head, but still a bit early. Supposedly, the SEC chair will get picked before Thanksgiving. So probably by this time next week, we're going to have an idea who the next SEC chair is suspected to be. Supposedly, Gary Gensler has also

intimated that he's going to be stepping down, which is very customary for an SEC head when an administration turns over to not end up serving out their full term. And then lastly, other piece of news, apparently Trump has met with Brian Armstrong,

to discuss staff picks. Oh, is it a phone call? Okay. So is getting some input from Brian Armstrong directly on how to position the administration as being pro-crypto, as well as, of course, at the Bitcoin National Conference, Trump claimed that he was going to make a Bitcoin and Crypto Advisory Council. And supposedly, Charles Hoskinson,

speculated to become one of the advisors on this council, Charles Luskinson, of course, being the founder of Cardano. So we've got a lot of names floating around, but it does seem so far that the overall picture is that this administration is going to be very pro-crypto, almost

almost uniformly pro-crypto names that we see being floated for these campaign positions. And so to the extent that people were worried of, oh, is this kind of a Trump campaign promise? Is he not really going to fulfill these things? So far, it looks like crypto is actually going to have a seat at the table in this administration. So I've heard a lot of speculation. I'm curious to get your guys' response that maybe the market is being over-exuberant and is kind of pricing in

a little too much that Trump is actually going to deliver on everything that he has claimed on the campaign trail. Vance, I know you've been very, very pro-Trump. How do you feel about that question? Do you feel like markets are not fully pricing in the extent that Trump is going to be super pro-crypto? Or do you think that, hey, it's correct to be cautious right now? I mean, I guess I'm like a Trump guy, just versus the alternative, of course.

I do think he's going to honor his promises to the industry. And I think the names that are being thrown around for Treasury Secretary and SEC are great. I think Mark Rohn is probably a notable departure from that. Like he's a big, I just saw a quote from him where he's pretty KYC pilled and wants to, you know, have all the wallets be brokers and all that stuff. And that would be kind of more simpatico with his views. Maybe he would be great, but like he's probably my least favorite of the options. Yeah.

The Hoskinson stuff, I'm not as big a fan of. I think the only thing that can kind of take down the Republican movement at this point is just like too much cronyism. You know, if he brings the wrong people, if he's doing for favors for people that were like, you know, if he's going to be the party of common sense, he should just go with the best option, logically. And I think that's kind of what I hope will be the defining feature of his presidency. But there's a chance that it isn't.

Um, in terms of like pricing level, like you live as a populist, you die as a populist, right? Like, you know, if you're, if you're going to go full doge, like on what grounds can you be like, well, no, but not Charles Hoskinson. He's not invited. That's fair. I mean, you know, we, we got to send our best, I think is the, uh, the first, first order of business. And I, I'm not sure Charles is that.

You're telling me that Charles Hoskinson, co-founder of Ethereum, is not the best of them? I'm so excited for the comments. I'm so excited for the comments. Look, I agree with you. I just wanted to say the co-founder of Ethereum thing, just because you know he always does. I think basically what we're hoping for is a light touch. We're not hoping for space age regulations for this industry.

we will get legislation. I hope that is also a light touch. But I think at least my optimism for crypto has never been higher in the sense that inflows are coming, people are receptive. People know that the crypto bro is not going away. He's going to be a mainstay of society for a long, long time. And I think that's a permission structure that allows all these entrepreneurs to come in and build things. And we've seen probably the best pitches we've seen over the past couple of years in the past three months. So I'm very, very bullish

The ask is that they just don't do much of anything. Obviously, arrest the criminals and people who are fucking around. And I'm interested to see how that pans out with the meme coin frenzy. Because Shaq just had that $11 million NFT sale or settlement today.

That will probably need to kind of come and manifest itself at some point to get a lot of the scams out. But the ask is a lighter touch, and I think he can deliver on that. Okay. So then to the extent that you are bullish on crypto, so obviously right now, I imagine most people are aware Bitcoin has hit all-time highs. We're now sitting at 94,000. Actually, my press time is about 92,000. Yeah, 92,000. It hit 94 just a little bit earlier.

all-time highs on many, many metrics in terms of the extent to which people are all basically uniformly bullish that crypto is going to do very, very well. And there are many expectations that crypto is going to hit 100K before the end of the year. So even relative to where we were at the election last episode that we did, at that time, we were like around 75. So Bitcoin has increased $20,000 in just a couple of weeks, which is one of the most massive on an absolute basis

uh periods of price appreciation for bitcoin in its history um now all that being said many people are now you know the the age-old game of making price calls for where bitcoin is going to go so uh novogratz has called for 500k bitcoin uh kathy wood says 1 million by 2030. um that obviously would be good for all of us um vance being that you are uh

You are Trump-pilled. You believe that Trump is going to fulfill his campaign promises to the crypto industry. What's your price call for where you think Bitcoin is going to go under a Trump presidency? I mean, look, we hold a lot of Bitcoin. We hold a lot of all the majors across the funds. So, you know, disclaimer of some sort. But I mean, I'm probably higher than Cathie Wood by 2030. You know, no matter how you slice it, Bitcoin probably shouldn't be 10% of gold's market cap. That doesn't make a ton of sense to me.

Should it be 50%? Should it be 100%? I think that's dictated by the flows that come into the hands of millennials and Gen Z. And that's slated to happen over the next 40 years. And that's going to be the largest wealth transfer in the history of the country. So if OrangeCoin, you know, gets there, and I think it's getting there from a culture perspective, and then you have central banks bidding, like basically, you can think about the bid as like a

a hierarchy of needs where retail's at the bottom and central banks are at the top. There's basically no assets that can access the top of that pyramid other than Bitcoin. And if it gets there, I think like 500K is pretty bearish. So, okay, that's 2030. What about 2026? Like 2026 is full Republican control of government, right? Most likely in the midterms,

I mean, I don't know, you tell me, but I think the base case right now is that probably at least one of the chambers of the house gets lost, or sorry, chambers of Congress gets lost to Democrats, which means that no longer we have unified government. So basically we have two years for Republicans to pass any legislation they want and enact the full scale pro-crypto legislative package. So let's say by end of 2026, where do you expect Bitcoin to be?

I don't know if I can give you an actual price, but I think it's worth considering like, okay, let's say it goes to, you know, 250K by the middle of next year. Oh my God, you know, it made so much money, whatever. Like, do you sell it? I don't know. I don't think you necessarily do if you've got a multi-year perspective on it. Maybe it goes from 250 back to, you know, 100 and that's the bear market. I know people are saying no more bear markets. I personally just have been in crypto too long.

to really believe that anymore. That's class of 24. Class of 24 is no more bear markets. Who is saying super cycle again? This is crazy. I didn't expect to hear it so soon. You see things on Twitter. Wow. TikTok. You mean TikTok. You got to spend more time on TikTok. But I don't know. I think the stock market is basically perfectly priced. Nvidia is at $150 to $200. Feels like that's pretty fair.

Gold is, you know, at $28 trillion, something like that. That's probably pretty fair there too. And so now you have people moving at the risk curve. And like what's taking off? Space, crypto, nuclear,

But at some point, like and I think like with, you know, space and nuclear, those will be priced as well. But crypto and specifically Bitcoin doesn't have a ceiling. You know, the money use case does not have a ceiling. So infinite. I heard infinite. No ceiling equals infinite price. In the fullness of time, Bitcoin is probably a few million dollars per. That's my guess. Tarun, what is your 2026 Bitcoin call?

I think all of our listeners are eagerly awaiting for you to make your annual Bitcoin call. I don't know if I have a good one, but I will say I thought it was interesting. There was almost $2 billion of options traded today on ETF, which is record high. So I actually, I think I'm just kind of watching the vol products to see if there is way more outsized usage of

um those as a way of like getting leveraged exposure and if that's true then i actually think like the you're not going to see the same kind of like crazy price spikes we've seen before people will like try to get used like the tradfi people won't have to buy spot only so i do think that will be like a will slow things down a little bit so that's why the 2026 and 2030 i i

I probably think like 200, 2026, 250. Yeah, 200 to 250. I don't know exactly. Like, again, the derivatives market is the thing I'm most curious about because when I think about, you know,

Everyone talking about central banks buying, central banks for like Eurodollar and dollars, generally buy in futures market, generally don't buy spot when they don't have to. Can you explain the intuition of why it is that if you're getting levered through options as opposed to buying spot, why that would reduce the overall volatility for the industry?

Or I just don't think the price, like, so basically people will buy more out of the money options or somewhat out of the money options.

Brokers probably won't fully delta hedge. So they won't buy exactly the amount of spot as the options they're selling. They'll have some margin for that, which generally means you don't have as much spot buying pressure. The way everyone stares at the ETF inflows and are like, this means there's this much demand to buy spot. I actually think if that goes to the other products, it will not be as tangibly clear as this much in inflow means this much in price impact over a month.

And I'm not saying that won't, it won't eventually lead to that, right? Because like around the expiries, you'll see these huge jumps.

I just think it will look different than it does now where it's like everyone sees- The shape of it will be different. The shape of it will be different and that might stretch out the spot price increase. That's all. It might look more like an S curve than a walk up. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's sort of... I don't know if that's not some crazy insight or anything. It's just something where it's like, I do think that's a different microstructure thing than we've seen with ETFs so far.

Right. I do think like the micro strategy dynamic is just absolutely wild. The fact that it's trading at three exits now is pretty remarkable. I went to this idea dinner in New York, I think probably like six months ago. And one of the it was like this, like Wall Street hedge fund. And one of the guys, everyone had to bring an idea. And one of the guys brought a long Bitcoin short micro strategy to one X NAV.

And he was explaining this and I was just like, yeah, that makes sense. But like, you are just going to get blown out. Yeah, that's how you get blown out. That is a classic mistake in crypto is that makes sense. It's like, yeah. I don't know how he's doing, but I think there's like, the bear case for Bitcoin is basically, Saylor has bought so much, it's a bad look. Like what if, you know, Saylor gets caught with like some crazy crime or, you know,

some bad visual or PR and the central banks of the world just don't want to be involved with that. Maybe the ATM runs out early versus later. But I also think to your point about the S-curve, you're going to see diminishing marginal returns to this bid. Maybe it's at $150K, maybe it's at $200K, but I think that lays the groundwork for alt season.

you know, the, the, the, the fate of the alt season. I was going to, I was going to say like one interesting thing about like, you know, you're asking about like, Hey, do the administration, do you predict that like the policies will work? I feel like,

the reason you're not seeing any alt season type of behavior is because like that's that's what people are waiting they're a waiting for yeah like people stop buying bitcoin who are just like that's their exposure but b i i feel like people are still a little like oh well what could happen between now and inauguration that might be anti-alt season i mean yeah i think uh

Except for Solana competitors, which seem to just have no, there's no unbounded upside. Same thing as last run, right? It was like basically four years ago today. Taylor emerged onto the scene. S&P 500 companies were going to buy only Bitcoin. The run was only going to be Bitcoin. And then in Q1, kind of everything re-rated. It just needs to get high enough where people are like, are you going to buy Bitcoin at 125K? Yeah.

It's a lot different decision than just like holding it. And you have to give Swan a lot of credit. It is bucking all season. It's the only thing that's like, like it's growing. Yeah. Yeah. And I think you're starting to see more dispersion like Sui, you know, doing well.

I think the new L1s will do very, very well, you know, Monad and kind of things like that. But, you know, the L1s of this cycle haven't launched yet. It's time for the Vance prediction, though, because you are the Barra chain...

You're a baddie. Yeah, exactly. So what is your price and timing prediction? Bro, you know I cannot say that. I can still... It's not advice. It's not advice. I can still ask. It doesn't mean you have to answer. Higher. Okay. But

Higher than the currently non-existent price. Yes. Yeah. So I think you're right. I think though it's not the inauguration that the market is waiting for. I think it's the end of the good news.

And right now, the reality is that Trump has been very, very clear that most of his specific policy proposals are not about crypto. They're about Bitcoin, right? So there's, oh, okay, I'm going to fire the SEC guy. And yeah, we're going to make it friendly for crypto here. But the main thing is that like, okay, we're going to buy Bitcoin. We're going to have all the Bitcoin be made in the US. The US government is going to own a shitload of Bitcoin. And that, you know, I think it would be, if it were to be that it becomes a crypto thing,

a strategic crypto reserve as well as a strategic Bitcoin reserve, that would be incredibly bullish for alts. But right now, I think until that gets delivered,

That, I think, is the main kind of shining good news that, okay, what happens when there is a strategic Bitcoin reserve? And what is the knock-on effect of other central banks and or other sovereigns that decide, hey, I want to get in on this? And now the US has shifted the Overton window and Bitcoin is now investable to a degree that it wasn't before. I think that probably means that Bitcoin is going to remain in the driver's seat for quite a while.

I actually think it's unlikely that we go into full-on alt season by next year because the market is still going to have this big spotlight on Bitcoin. But we'll see. I think it also may just be the cutting cycle. The cutting cycle may decide the ratio of energy between alt and Bitcoin more so than the actual underlying market mechanics. I could see it going both ways.

Okay, so let's shift gears a little bit. So, of course, DevCon was last week, the flagship Ethereum conference. And at DevCon, there was very big news about what was termed by many people to be Ethereum 3.0. So Justin Drake teased that there was going to be a new version of Ethereum that he was going to announce on stage at DevCon and announced that he did. The new chain is called the Beam Chain.

The Beam Chain is going to be a redesign of Ethereum's consensus layer, meaning it doesn't affect execution, doesn't affect the EVM or smart contracts, but it's a new base layer that everything is going to be settling to. The Beam Chain is going to be quantum resistant. It's going to have four second block times instead of the 12 seconds that currently exist. There will be single slot finality. So you'll get finality in four seconds as opposed to the current, what is it like a minute or two minutes or something for Ethereum currently. And they will be using snarks

meaning they'll be using ZK proofs

to eliminate reorg and MEV opportunities. So they'll be trying to eliminate reorg and MEV opportunities with the new consensus mechanism and reduce the staking requirements from where they are currently at 32 ETH in order to be a staker all the way down to one ETH, allowing many more users to be able to stake. This is going to lead to faster layer one transactions, a brand new rewrite of the base layer, quantum resistance, improved home staking, and

you know, kind of this future-proof decentralization. That's the story anyway. So now all that being said, most of the attention and most of the response to the announcement of the Beam Chain was on the timeline. And what the timeline said was that this will be coming soon in 2029.

So basically five years for them to go all the way from speccing, building, testing, and then finally launching this quote unquote Ethereum 3.0. So this was widely panned as being like, oh my God, this is precisely the problem. Supposedly, to be clear, this is not a full commitment from Ethereum. Justin Drake is basically making a proposal to the Ethereum community.

of something in which he believes is a good direction. But the Ethereum overall development plan has not bought in necessarily into the Beam Chain concept. But of course, Justin Drake is very influential. So some people said, "Hey, this is ridiculous. This is so bullshit. Like this is not even that exciting of an end state. And it's going to take us five years. Like that's just absolute craziness." Other people said, "Hey, look,

you know, trying to turn around a super tanker with hundreds of billions of dollars at stake. It's supposed to take time. It's supposed to be slow. This is not a startup. This is what you expect when you have so much money at stake is that you have to do a very safe, very graduated rollout. So curious to get your guys' responses. Vance, were you at, were you at DevCon? Tarun, I know you were. I was not at DevCon. Okay. Tarun, were you in the room? What was your reaction? What was the vibe at DevCon after seeing this presentation?

I wasn't in the room, but I was in the building. And I think the... By the way, which was an amazing venue. I think this might have been the best organized crypto event I've ever gone to. Everything was flawless. Actually, Thailand in general had very good event management. But I think most people who were very pure Ethereum believers were not really...

I wouldn't say not shocked by the timeline. I think they all just kind of ignored the timeline, if I were to be honest, because they're like, well, it's already a kind of sketch of what could be done. I think the thing people were more interested in was definitely the enshrined ZKVM and stuff like that. That seemed to be the thing that people were most interested in because it kind of gets around some of these weird principal agent problems that seem to be

hitting Ethereum a lot where like the L2s are sort of taking revenue and not returning it. And this is sort of a way to like actually get something that brings value. I would say that

For everyone who's talking about the five-year thing, it was like all people who are like not at the building in DevCon, but were in, you know, outside. Which I thought was interesting. It's like there was like the bubble in the building and then there was the like everyone else outside, which was a very huge distinction. I think it was the Bankless guys who were in the room who first tweeted out. Well, they tweeted out, but they didn't ridicule the five years. I think that once they tweeted it out, then it was... Okay, got it.

I think another thing, I think there was a really great tweet by Kobe, sort of famous Twitter and crypto personality, which was in response to one of David Hoffman's tweets that was like, you know, one who tries to catch two rabbits at the same time catches none, which I thought, you know, it does reflect sort of the exterior, you

uh thing because it was like there was so many things that were all kind of portrayed at once versus like here's step one step two step three dot dot i think i think the criticism that it seemed to i seem to see stick a lot was you know you're bundling all of these things and then giving a timeline versus like incrementally like do this first do the second do this third and then like have separate timelines and i think you know especially amongst the like

more, say, centralized development teams like the Solana side, everyone was just like, this is like saying nothing, right? Because you didn't give any kind of... So that being said, I don't think people at DevCon's vibes were negative about that. I think Twitter and... But what was your personal response? What was your personal vibe? Yeah, what do you think, Teran? I think the ZKVM is a good idea. At least it brings some revenue back to the main chain. I think the post-quantum stuff is...

too speculative anyway. It's not like anyone cares about the implementations and true type of stuff right now. And then the five years does seem a little crazy. Like you're not even doing the hard work. Like people have already built all those EKVMs. Like the hard work is testing deployment. It's not like we have to write this thing from scratch and make sure it works because like there've been so many teams done. The hard part is migrating, you know, what exists today onto a beam chain, you know?

But all, if you watch the presentation, it's like, oh, we're going to use all the existing ZKVFs. Great. That's the hard part. That's what five years of R&D. Oh, they are. They're not going to build it in-house. Oh, I see. Well, they're like, oh, we're going to use some combination of the existing open source code. But my point is you already have this huge, this has been funded since 2018, 2017. A huge number of projects of, you know, like I would say that if you told me that's going to take five years,

Sure. But this part actually does feel a little like, well, the hard part is actually done for you. And like, this is like, now it's going to be more like a smaller fork. So I just kind of think the timeline thing was also a little crazy. Also, I will say, over time, the longer I'm around, the more that there you see these bubble charts with 500 bubbles that

the EF loves making, the more you're like, why would you do that? That's so confusing to someone to look at this 500 bubble chart. And I really think communication style is somehow lacking. But again, everyone in that room was not like... No one at that building was like, oh, this is crazy. So...

I frankly love the idea of BeamChain. I think it should exist. I actually want it to exist. I actually think the roadmap pretty much in the aggregate is great. I mean, to run to your point about quantum resistance, yeah, like it doesn't matter yet. So it's like, why spend time building something that's not immediately relevant, but in five years it might be relevant. So, you know, maybe that actually, you know, does fit correctly, but I think it's awesome. I think the five-year timeframe is ridiculous. I think, yeah.

you know, frankly, what's going to happen is someone's just going to launch a similar chain, like in 18 months, like potentially built from scratch. If you want to do that, you know, please contact Robot Ventures, Dragonfly and Framework. It's a great idea and it's going to exist. And so I just wish Ethereum could move at a faster velocity because I think if they deliver that in the timeframe that they expect, Ethereum will be obsolete. I mean, I liked it for kind of different reasons in terms of, let's say you're,

you know, Vitalik or Justin Drake, you know, you're a steward of a $400 billion asset or, you know, 350 or whatever it is. Let's say you come out, we're raising the gas limit. We're going to raise the rent on L2s. We're going to, you know, we think we're, you know, we need to change things immediately. You hit the panic button, you come out just absolutely firing. You can't do that when you're stewarding that large of an asset. Like Bitcoin doesn't have that problem because just like they're done.

And I think that's going to be something that most chains have to articulate, which is like, okay, cool. Yeah, you're doing well, but like, what's the long-term vision for this chain or are we done? And so you kind of do need to put markers way out there on the horizon that basically give your chain a future that exists beyond its current state. So I think that's just like on the calm stuff on the communication stuff. I think like, you know, they could have done better, but,

in sharing what are the near-term changes to the L1 that are going to impact cost, throughput, whatever adoptability by retail. But I thought it was generally positive. And price follows narrative to some extent. ETHBTC is going to be under pressure until the sailor buys start hitting that point of diminishing marginal price impact to some extent.

But I mean, I was looking at the chain last week, you know, it's like 100 Gui at some points, 25 Gui at others, it's like 100 and, you know, 150 bucks to do a transaction. They're doing like 5000 ETH a day, you know, 3000 per in fees, that's $15 million a day, you know, they're at like a billion, 2 billion, and it heats up and it goes higher from there. So like, I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong there.

with the state of the chain of the communication. I just think you do need to be very careful when you're a steward of that large of an asset. You can't come out guns blazing with like, "We're going to throw everything at the wall and just fix it today." I think while that's true, the other thing though that was a bit incongruous with that was if you go into some of the other events like the Ethereum Interop Summit,

Vitalik was just kind of like, that was the first time I ever heard, really heard anyone really mention Solana as a UX benchmark. So I think about DevCon 2022, no other L1 name was ever mentioned, let alone Solana. This time, I think every conversation about Interop

and UX and like fixing roll up stuff for new users inevitably brought up Solana from everyone from the top down. So like, I think there was that aspect was communicated. It just wasn't communicated in the like this roadmap thing. It was, but you could see that percolate everywhere, right? You would really hear people compare the 100%. I mean, I do think in the last cycle it was Polygon. That was like the UX benchmark that most people had in their mind. But they're Ethereum.

Yeah, exactly. I do think you're absolutely right, Tarun, to say the obvious thing was that the specter hanging over that presentation was Solana with a very, very long scythe just standing in the background. I think in a way, the details of the BeamChain proposal

are a kind of concession that we cannot just rely on the roll-up-centric roadmap. The roll-up-centric roadmap is not enough. What the roll-up-centric roadmap implied is that, to your point, Vance, Ethereum is done.

We just install blobs and we scale the blobs and we allow more and more rollups to come on chain. And Ethereum itself is not going to be the place where people are actually going to do execution. We don't need to worry so much about block times. We don't need to worry so much. That's what the rollup-centric roadmap implied. It was that the sharding approach of actually scaling the L1, we're too slow. We're not going to make it in time. The rollups are going to get there faster. So let's just let the rollups do the dirty work. And I think what

What Ethereum is realizing is that that is not going to work. And it feels a little bit to me like, okay, the best analogy I can give is that for a long time, Ethereum felt like it was not responsive to token holders.

right? And Ethereum almost explicitly has said multiple times that token holders are not the only constituents that matter to us, right? Who else matters? There's token holders. There's devs, of course. Devs are very politically powerful. There's the validators themselves, the home stakers. They're very powerful. People who are archivists of Ethereum who may be none of those categories, as well as users, right? All of those people and those users, they may be at odds very often with the

with token holders because users are like, well, I want really low fees, whereas token holders are like, well, I kind of want high fees because I want to actually capture value, capture rents from owning the block space and owning state. And so Ethereum has made very clear we are not going to just make decisions for price.

And on some level, it's a little bit like the difference between governments when they start getting very fiscally irresponsible and really start pushing the edge quite a lot. And then all of a sudden you wake up and the bondholders...

are like, you know what? Fuck these bonds. Fuck this government. I no longer believe you're going to pay back your debts. And all of a sudden, somebody gets fired. Everyone wakes up. It's like, oh no, there's been turnover in the administration. We now hear you, Mr. Bondholders. We are going to make sure that we play things right. And it feels like that may have just happened in Ethereum land. I don't know if it's a- Is that the bondholders woke up?

I don't know if it's exactly that, but I will say, A, the sheer focus on Interop by Vitalik, and I got to give Vitalik credit for a bunch of events he was on, and that man was on. I heard he was doing 11 events a day. He did 11 or 12 events in one day. But there are a bunch, a couple of them that I was at were,

he literally would be on stage with all the L2 founders and would just yell at them effectively. Not yell, but kind of admonish them. Admonish them for not having interrupt standards, for boxing each other out. I thought that was the quiet flogging of L2s by Vitalik was actually, to me, the most bullish thing that I saw.

I agree. I agree. But that's what I'm saying is it really feels like Ethereum is pushing to a new mode. That was sort of what resembled what you were describing. I thought he really did take a kind of a bit of a stick versus a carrot approach, it felt like. Right. And I think Ethereum being – like Ethereum leadership being above price.

Almost like it's a church. And the church never deigns to talk about how many people attended church today. Mega churches do talk about that stuff. Mega churches are like, no, no, we got to get people in the door. We got to get the television programming, get our commercials down. And they're measuring ROI of all their stuff. Whereas the Catholic church is like, oh my God, that's an affront to the beauty of our religion and so on. And that kind of feels like that's been Ethereum's stance.

on marketing, on narrative building, on getting the L2s to cooperate, getting the UX to be good. It's like, no, no, no, that's not what makes us the Catholic Church. We're the Catholic Church because we're above all of that. And...

I feel like Ethereum now is realizing like, oh shit, we're starting to lose a bit of our congregation and they see the tide potentially turning against them. And like, okay, now we got to wake up and remember what made us the Catholic church to begin with, which was that we actually have the ability to build stuff, to ship stuff and to have muscular compelling visions about where the future of technology is supposed to be. Now, all that being said, going back to the point of the five-year thing,

Five years is obviously embarrassingly long. Yes, okay, Ethereum is stewarding, you know, super tanker, it's got a lot of money in there. But five years, five years, like Ethereum, like how long did Ethereum take to develop itself, right? Ethereum has been around for what, seven years?

Right, so literally it'll be- - More, more. Ethereum is now like almost 10 years. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Oh, I'm sorry, you're right, 2015. 2015 is at launch, 2015 at launch, yeah. So it's nine years. - But I think the point is like the five years to me would have made more sense if that like included all the ZK development, but that's already done. - Yeah, exactly. If it was from scratch, right? What they're describing is like any new Alt L1 that's launching,

meets their requirements, right? Like it seems, well, not any, we're in bull market season. There's a lot of scandal. Okay. Sorry, sorry, sorry. There are multiple places that you could pull this architecture from off the shelf. And basically like, imagine, imagine that Ethereum were just to say like, look, obviously we were, we built the first smart contract blockchain, right?

That we had to build. There was no option. The beacon chain, we had to build that. That was homegrown. We had very different requirements than anybody else. But imagine if they just said, look, there are a lot of other blockchains out there. We will offer a bounty of 1% of the ETH supply for somebody who can build, who just give us an open source repo that conforms to these standards and these APIs so we can plug it into the new Ethereum. Get it done within a year. A ton of people would show up and get that done.

It just feels insane to me, this build rather than buy instinct that Ethereum has, which made sense in 2015, made sense in 2020, does not make sense in 2025. To be fair, though, Ethereum did a lot of things that

were focused on network stability versus end user behavior, like making sure multiple clients work. So take two years to ensure network stability. Yes. I'm just trying to say I think the priorities are slightly different. But my point is I think the people working on the L1 have finally admitted that the L2

operators, creators are sort of like not fulfilling the promise they were supposed to, right? Like, and I think that's where I saw the tension that was probably positive, to be honest, because like, yeah, I just feel like the L2s have spent more time just fighting with each other than kind of like... Which is exactly what you would expect, right? I mean, essentially what... No, no, I'm not just, I'm just telling you that's like kind of the vibe was like, now it's like corral the L2s.

I agree with that story. I agree with that story. But I mean, it says right now it's a routing around the L2s, right? Like the whole idea of the beam chain is that, yeah, the L2s are not going to get us there. We have to improve the base chain itself to a significant degree because just outsourcing all the stuff to L2s is insufficient, right? To get us to the UX that we eventually wanted. To me, it's a little bit like a government that decides to privatize

some of the most important industries and realizing, huh, now that I privatized all these industries, the industries are all competing with each other and there's a big efficiency loss in just competition. And they're not working together and they're not colluding to create this wonderful unified UX. Huh, I wonder why that happened. Maybe I should

either renationalize them, which is not really possible with L2s, or just like create a new national Manhattan project to just like create the thing that I privatized in the first place. That kind of feels like what happened here. You know, if I can draw a very, very rough shot over all of them. That's not to say that if they launch the beam chain, that's going to obviate L2s. You just wanted to use Manhattan project because Trump used it this week and you're like, I want to say something. Did he? I was in Asia all week. I was not following US news for the last week. I didn't know that. Um,

All that is to say, I do think if they pull this off, which I don't know that they will, the Ethereum foundation has had a terrible, terrible track record of delivering on software projects. On time. They actually do sort of deliver, just not very quickly. I would dispute. Where is sharding, dude? Where is sharding?

Well, they purposely dropped that. Yeah, it's not necessary for a roadmap. Where are execution environments? Where's like half the things they said? What happened to EWASM? Dude, you cannot tell me that they eventually ship things. I think you're allowed to drop things off the roadmap that don't work. Yeah. You know, welcome to South. But then you cannot claim the reputation for shipping.

I mean, if we looked at all the L1s roadmaps and what they've thrown off, there'd be a lot of that. I don't know. The chain is doing a lot of revenue between $2 and $5 billion. The L2s are onboarding people. WorldCoin, I think they did 2 million verifications last week. The EVM ecosystem is healthy. I think the narrative needs some work, obviously. But I also think this is pretty standard bull market fare.

Bitcoin runs hard. Then people look at what's next. And ETH is the second asset that people are introduced to in crypto. Maybe that changes with meme coins or whatever, but I don't know. We're bullish on ETH as a computing platform over a five-year time horizon. And that kind of fits with the roadmap. Okay. Let me ask you this, Vance, because you've been a big defender of ETH. And look, I obviously have been...

One of the first to say that I think the EVM, the EVM ecosystem has been a huge beneficiary and is going to do really, really well. But I'm more skeptical about ETH as an asset, as a representative of the health of that overall ecosystem. I think that may diminish over time. Do you think that ETH is going to outperform Sol over the next five years? I mean, the things I think about with that are what are the unlocks for Sol? You know, a lot of those will come in Q1. That'll be kind of decision time.

And what's the durability of meme coining? Solana and meme coins are intricately tied at this point. And I think to be bullish on Sol, you need to be bullish on meme coins. I think that is very, very possible. I think it's equally likely that a bunch of other new use cases come up on these L2s. And ETH is still the largest asset in DeFi. It is the one that most people use in lending markets. It has the most stablecoins on its chain. It has a lot of natural advantages. I'm actually the opposite of you.

I'm probably more bullish on ETH, the asset, than ETH, like, you know, the L1 or, you know, like, whatever. I think at some point, you know, it's just like the money use case is what dominates and ETH is there for now. And I think that probably persists, but like, we're bullish on all of these chains and frankly, we hold all of them. So the goal is not to full port into, you know, the number one asset. Like, it's like kind of like the Billy Beane thing.

We can't replace them, but we can rebuild them and that's kind of what we're doing with the portfolio. One thing I'll leave you with, which is I think something I was on some panel and someone was like, what's the most bullish thing you can say about ETH? Which is

Solana exists as collateral in a lot... Sorry, Solana doesn't really exist as collateral in EVM land. But ETH does exist in collateral almost everywhere in Solana. And if there's one form of moneyness, it's like, are people willing to borrow a derivative version of your asset somewhere else? And I think that to me is like, you've proven that other networks have to import you when they're bootstrapping their collateral markets, which is like,

very hard to get to, which maybe is, again, to like Vance's point. That is very true. That being said, you know, account abstraction and economic abstraction on the L2s, I think is one of these things that people are talking about as a UX improvement.

which I worry is going to, like right now, I agree with you, the L2s are all kind of proxies for ETH. They are expanding the reach of ETH, the asset. But I don't know that Ethereum can count on that forever. I think on some sense, the roll-up centric roadmap was a little bit naive

that all of these new kind of mini nation states that it was launching were going to extend the reach of the dollar, so to speak. But once you become big enough, once you become successful enough as your own little dominion, your incentive is to not necessarily kick the value upstairs and say, "Well, thank you Ethereum for giving me this great home and I will pay taxes forever even though you're not asking me for them." I think the answer is that they're rational actors.

And they're going to say like, hey, what's going to increase my funnel? What's going to increase my retention? Maybe it's, you know, I'm base. Maybe it's allowing people to pay in, you know, if base ever has a coin in base coin or just in USDC. Like, look, I mean, I make money doubling by having more demand for USDC on base. So that all being said.

I want to caveat all of that with saying, you know, I'm very long ETH. We own a lot of ETH. I really hope that ETH does well. But I think for it to get there, it does feel like there needs to be

As I, as I analogize this sort of bondholder moment. And in a sense, like we're the bondholders, you know, like us, not just us, but you know, all the other millions of people who own ether and are frustrated that there hasn't been a more come to Jesus moment among the leadership. That's something fundamental needs to change. And all the resounding negativity toward the five-year timeline. It feels like it did register.

It feels like people are like, oh, okay, I guess we can't just like sit and chill and, you know, take our EF salaries and just like, you know, take our time building out this thing, testing it as much as we want until finally the thing rolls around. The patience for that feels like it's wearing thin. We'll see where it goes. Vance, we appreciate you coming on and making your very dramatic price calls as well as financial advice.

Everybody, if you're looking for any financial advice, go to Vance's Twitter. It's just nonstop financial advice for anybody who chooses to trade on them. Vance, always a pleasure, my man. Thank you. Appreciate it, guys. All right. Until next week. Take care, everyone.