crypto is exactly where it needs to be right now
very much not dead, very much alive, washing out the excesses, very much building things people want to use
coiled spring on a path to hypergrowth
the first/last time I ever talked to
@SBF_FTX
was saturday night
apparently he'd grown so mad I was going after his corruption and lies in DC, calling out
@MarkWetjen
, he got my # and gave me a call
ftx had been trying to set a call up for a while but i had rejected it
certain forms of speculation are normalized
you can take out an 90% loan-to-value mortgage and no one bats an eye
you can gamble high six figs on a liberal arts degree - on credit as a minor - and everyone says congratulations
but god forbid u buy a few internet coins
I think the next 12-24 months will be life changing for many people, but it will be an emotional journey with ~5-10 20-40% dips
Rule
#1
is stay in the game - spot long and chill if you are new here
Makes me very sad to see people get blown out
I could tell you all the war stories from '18-'20 bear
Playing Tronbet to make money to pay rent, moving into Michael's parents basement for a summer, selling the 401k at the depth of the bear to buy more ETH and make tax payments, bank overdrafts
But none of that matters
looking back through the fog of war, the data points that are revealed today uncover pieces of the puzzle from last year
if FTX was selling client BTC/ETH to buy SOL/FTT/SRM - this has large implications about what organic ETH/BTC price action looks like going forward
GM, it is good to be back. Here is where we are by my estimation.
We are 280 days out from the BTC halvening and a spot bitcoin ETF looks to be coming by the end of the year, if not sooner. No doubt this will lead to other ETF opportunities for other cryptoassets.
Ethereum has…
uniswap doing $2bn in volume per day through autonomous smart contracts built by a handful of employees and you are worried about inflation
my dudes
deflation is the real problem
coinbase is a great company but needs to stop dicking around with this trash
if you spent 5 minutes on CT you know POND isn't legit
stop the retail meat grinder
ship staking, ship basic features like USD->USDC on prime, improve custody, get better analytics, launch futures
Our POND-USDT trading pair will now enter limit-only mode on
@CoinbaseExch
, Coinbase Pro and Advanced Trading. Limit orders can be placed and canceled, and matches may occur. Market orders cannot be submitted.
Every bear market I re-underwrite why I am in crypto
1. Large untapped market (money, culture, games)
2. Lack of competition (very few trad people in crypto, still extremely early)
3. Large, liquid outcomes (already at $1Tn aggregate market cap, likely goes to $10-$20tn)
4.…
coinbase in 5 years
probably no orderbook, trades routed to open source liquidity where they LP, focus on frontend/regulatory/staking/custody, earn most of income from LP/staking native tokens of KYC'd DEX's, serve primarily as a wallet for users
asset light
we were once pinged by an international non crypto whale looking to acquire a size position of ropsten eth
someone had told this person that ropsten eth was the best way to play the merge, and he was intent on getting a fill
never forget this is who we are playing against
i had heard so much about SBF - bill gates, warren buffet, etc - i expected to be blown away on the call
what i got instead was a bumbling 🤡 who tried to gaslight me on DCCPA, again, and when that didn't work, threatened regulatory consequences for framework if I didn't support
When no milllenials/zoomers can afford a house and job prospects are limited don't be surprised when P/Es for zeitgeisty tech stocks/crypto going vertical even with higher rates
Interest rates don't matter to millenials/zoomers; they have no savings and little prospect to ever…
2021 narrative = Alt-L1s have solved blockchain scaling, ETH 2.0 is too little, too late
2022 narrative = Alt-L1s haven't been able to scale, most/all have structural issues, ETH 2.0 + rollups are the most viable to scale blockchains in the near term
funny how things change
watching GBTC liquidity and lenders exposure to said product for contagion risk
seems someone is selling a lot of GBTC
discount is now >40% and widening, implied BTC price is $9K, and a lot of GBTC is sitting in toxic places atm
Going to be hard to compete with the Ethereum onboarding funnel
- Gaming L2s (IMX, Ronin)
- Corporate L2s (Base, Worldcoin)
- Social L2s (Lens, Farcaster)
- All of the other (hundreds?) of L2s spitting out tokens to acquire users
They will all use ETH as their base currency
legal/good ponzis: medicare, medicaid, social security, government bonds, the food pyramid, being 30 trillion in debt
illegal/bad ponzis: generally our stuff, new things, crypto, optimism, new ideas, unprofitable startups, gen Z, avocado toast
thank you
There were many times when crypto would not have been strong enough to survive without BTC as the dominant narrative
I no longer believe this is the case
Regime change is coming
I think we break the collective hallucination that L1s are valuable because reasons this cycle
ICP is trading at a 37,210x multiple to earnings, ATOM is at 231,000x, Aptos is infinity, DOT same
Not sustainable. At some point trash goes to 0 under the weight of VC unlocks
A founding team in crypto is three people
CEO, CTO, Community Manager/Cheerleader
Getting someone to shape community early is paramount - you literally can't hire this person later on
How much market cap do you think
@ChainLinkGod
has added to Chainlink?
Few/Soon
Always surprised there are people who actually short crypto. Look at the SOL chart, clearly someone just got carted out.
IMO most crypto shorts are ppl trying to run a tradfi-esque L/S book. They think we are playing in the NBA. Sir we are playing slamball in a bounce castle.
would love to see
@elonmusk
turn the twitter API back on to 3rd party developers
twitter intentionally killed a lot of startups back in the day by shutting this off, mostly out misplaced fear
this is not the way
let the devs do something!
I don’t really see a way for Gen Y/Z to survive the Baby Boomer/Silent Generation looting spree other than to take long shots on alternative assets that explicitly give the middle finger to both corporate equity and the traditional financial system
So yes, I am optimistic, and am looking forward to a continuation of the cycle shortly
This shakeout was needed. Teams getting paper rich and distracted. Incentives misaligned. Dog coins pumping. Focus lacking.
Now we separate the few from the many so we may prosper once more
Can you imagine the pride of a boomer seeing their IBIT BTC go up 3.21% today right out of their 401K, telling their friends, the envy of the neighborhood
crypto is too focused on the on-chain super complex crypto native crypto games
most of the best crypto games will be fast casual games that incorporate minimal aspects of crypto to boost monetization and retention
CT will hate this
but it will bring in so many new users
Crypto has not yet spent meaningful money on marketing, both relative to adoption or the addressable market
For example, Coinbase spent $56M on marketing in 2020, Netflix spent $2.5Bn
With minimally dilutive financing available to companies via going public, this will change
have a theory that crypto twitter is actually the product and the coins/mcap are just the backend to keep score
but I don't think we are ready to have that conversation yet
this is the first positive public hearing on crypto that I can remember
congress seems to have done their homework, industry seems prepared and synchronized
still not sure what stellar is doing there
very bullish - could be the start of a trend
launching a token in a bear market is a far better long term plan for getting distribution and community alignment than launching it into peak euphoria bull market
Someone asked me whats next today
A few things
- Halvening, ETH ETF, increasing instutional adoption
- DeFi earnings and revenues scare superlinearly with price. At least two will have $1bn in revenue in next 24 months
- Games bring 100M people into crypto in 2024/2025
- An…
No one is optimistic enough on these ETF flows. We've had $4.5Bn of inflows in the first week, albeit bricked by -$3.5Bn of GBTC outflows that will fade in time.
To put it in context, its like 30-40 Michael Saylors worth of yearly buying
if you ever see the CTO wearing a suit and the CEO wearing a henley T just know the CTO wants to be the CEO and he will eventually rug to do so
tale as old as time. send it to zero
List of current/future narratives:
- On Chain Fixed Income / RWA / Stablecoins
- ETFs / Institutional Adoption
- On Chain Social / On Chain Casino
- DeFi Incumbents Scaling Earnings / DeFi FAANG
- Gaming / Asia
- BTC Halvening / ETH Staking
Thats honestly a lot of meat
I saw things you wouldn't believe
steth depegging sub .90 as we became backstop bidder
curve pools emptying despite jump firing in every clip it had
chinese whales trying to buy 9 figs of goerli eth off of us
all these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain
milady
web3 music startups doing 1 of 3 things imo
1. packaging up royalties - catalogs as a new asset class
2. artist nfts + token communities - web3 fan clubs, expanding price elasticity of fan continuum
3. reinventing labels via a DAO structure - crowd sourcing the next big thing
it is clear now that crypto won't just be fintech
it will be everything
just like you don't understand how facebook runs on databases/graphql
every major tech category will have elements of blockchain in it
have already gone 0-1
now 1-n
Some food for thought. Most VCs in crypto have not even raised new funds yet, but looks like most will get a capital reload in the next 12-18 months
Hard to imagine we are anywhere else than the beginning of the cycle as a result
the 2 most exciting products released by coinbase probably ever came out this week (coinbase pay, coinbase on-chain access)
this style of progressive product development aimed at bringing users on chain gives me a lot of hope for the future of coinbase
volunteered for ron paul's presidential campaign in 08 in high school after reading about it on reddit
the main policy planks were to audit fort knox to see where the gold was at, lower taxes, and abolish the fed
in retrospect the man was truly based
Money is great, but participating in the birth of an industry is a once-in-every-other-generation opportunity
Make the most of it - your ancestors were shoveling shit for some land baron
Crypto is a technological wave that will touch almost every aspect of people's lives in the coming decades
Blessed to be chasing the dream of a more inclusive and innovative financial system with my best friend, an incredible team, and incredible backers
1/ As the largest $ILV holders outside the team we've gotten some questions on what we plan to do with our tokens when unlock happens
We're not selling, we've agreed to extend our lockup voluntarily, and the tokens are held within a 10 year lockup fund
ETH network state vs. USD/US state system
- ETH has no debt - doesn't owe boomers trillions for medicare, social security, etc
- ETH has no inflationary problems - supply/demand balanced
- ETH is growth oriented in a digital context
- ETH has shared values closer to GenX/Y/Z
we really only need 1 crypto game to work and show the rest the way
once we know the path the consensus will rapidly converge and you get the virtuous flywheel of vcs funding and an order of magnitude more games building
same thing happened with defi - “compound moment”
after a true capitulation event you have ~months to buy the bottom
when i've bought post-capitulation i've felt physically sick, and the bet is usually smaller than i would've liked as a result
central tenets of crypto are questioned and there is career risk to even buying
We've made 16 investments, ~6 have launched
The other 10 are teams that are trying legitimately new things, net new code, no forked bs, pushing the space forward
I'm sick of the food coins and the ponzis and the never ending games of musical chairs with 0 innovation
Hedging alts that are locked up on perps is incredibly dumb. This was popularized by SBF to get VCs to put cash on FTX, squeeze them, demand more collateral, squeeze again
The real flywheel is blowing out the hedgooors on the way up, keeping the cash, starting a polycule
days like today are painful but we will be back, my conviction in crypto has never been stronger
no government bailouts, we sort this out amongst ourselves