Bitcoin's Renaissance: Inside Runes, Ordinals, and Transaction Revenue

Vance Spencer

I think there's an ending point to each protocol where you just call it a day and then you have the l two s or whatever, just build whatever they want and continue building the network effects. There is nothing to reinvest into if it's a true protocol. The things I like about crypto are like ETH is, look, there's a base burn, there's a fee that I get, I stake my yield, I earn three, three and a half percent, whatever it is. That's a very streamlined form of capitalism versus most companies in the S and P, which don't pay out a dividend. Hey, everyone, wanted to give a quick shout out to the wormhole foundation.

Mike Ippolito

If you are a bell curve listener, that transferring across chains can be a massive pain. I certainly do. I complain about it on this program all the time. That's why we are super pumped to have partnered with the wormhole foundation, the stewards of the wormhole protocol. The wormhole protocol connects over 30 blockchains and six different runtimes, including Solana, Sui, ethereum, layer twos, and more.

And the coolest part about this particular partnership is that they have made custom Bell curve nfts, which you can get and mint for free. You can claim that by just going down into the show notes and clicking on the link. All right, guys. Hey everyone wanted to give a quick shout out to this episode's sponsor, Fludd protocol, the optimal Dex aggregator. Now, if you are a listener of Bell Curve, you know that Mev is a massive problem, which is why we are so pumped to partner up with Fludd on this season.

Fludd is the only gasless and Mev free aggregator that not only gets you the best execution, but also gives you back all the extra surplus that you create every single time you swap. Now this is relevant for both swappers and developers, but you're going to be hearing all about them later in the program. So for now, thank you flood, and back to the show. Hey everyone, this episode is brought to you by uniswap, delivering the best on chain trading experience in crypto, period, bar none. One thing I want to call out is the Uniswap extension, so say goodbye.

These days are these annoying as our pop up wallet extensions? You lose your place trading. You have to open it back up. Uniswap now has a nice, sleek Sidebar that persists no matter where you are on the web. It's more much easier to use if you click the link at the bottom of this episode.

You can join the waiting list and I'll see what I can do to get you moved up that waiting list. But definitely go click the link, check it out. All right, everyone, welcome back to another episode of Bell Curve. Before we jump in, quick disclaimer, the views expressed by my co host today are their personal views, and they do not represent the views of any organization with which the co hosts are associated with. Nothing in the episode is construed or relied upon as financial, technical, tax, legal, or other advice.

Michael Anderson

You know the deal. Now let's jump into the episode.

All right, everyone, welcome back to another Bell curve roundup. You got me and Vance this week. Me and Vance holding down the fort. What's up, buddy? How are you?

Vance Spencer

What's going on? How we doing? We're doing good. We're doing good, man. We just did a, I was just telling you off the air, but we just did a little blockworks analytics on site New York.

Michael Anderson

So our small but mighty analytics team feeling fired up here. We got big plans for 2024. 2025. And you're in. You're in Miami this week.

Vance Spencer

I'm Miami. Miami. Timmy little birthday thing for a friend. And, yeah, Michael's about to join me, so let's get it going. Oh, boy.

Michael Anderson

You guys got to come back next week with some stories for expecting big. No. We've got. We've gotten tamers. We've gotten older.

Yeah. Well, there's a rumor that you guys have a boat. Did I ever tell you my boat story? With Yano's bachelor party in?

Honestly, this was the worst money I've ever spent on anything in my life. It was the third day of his bachelor party down in, I think it was Cabo, and they rented this crazy boat, and this was originally when there were 15 guys. We were gonna spread the cost around, all of them, but eight people bailed on the last day, so immediately goes down. All right. And then there were hurricanes before, so there were.

It was safe, but there were a bunch of waves, and within going on there immediately, Yano and I got seasick and just tried not to puke for, like, 4 hours. It was like two grand. Two grand worth money ever spent. So I'm wishing you better vibe for this week. Last time I was here, I caught a shark fishing.

So let's see, like, bare hands, you just dove in and wrapped around. I was reeling it in. It was a big fighting fish, you know? Nice, nice. Very good.

Well, speaking of reeling in, before we get into the actual stories of the week, we got to pour one out for our friends that are in Dubai right now. Who are also potentially wrangling sharks, except it's in the streets. So I didn't realize that you could actually. This is sort of a cool thing about Dubai and just desert countries in general, but they actually create fake rain so they inject something up into the clouds and it actually creates rain. But I guess it's not a super exact science.

It looks like they just flooded the entire city and they've got token 2049 going out there right now. So yeah, hearts out for the folks who made it out to Dubai and like waiting around the show floor. But tough. Look, this is, this is a crypto conference classic 2020 KBW. It was like torrential street flooding rate as well.

Vance Spencer

So, you know, all part of the process, I guess. But yeah, good luck out there, dude. It's also, it's just an event organizer's nightmare. Like, my heart goes out. I don't even know what the reaction on our team would be if that was us too.

Michael Anderson

So yeah. Token 29 2049 organizers I'm sorry, man. That is, it's just a rough go, but tough one. Tough bid, tough bid, tough bid. But moving on to actual, like real stories this week.

So I feel like the last couple of weeks we've seen a pretty, I mean, I'll use the word standard, but I'd love to get your take correction in markets. So as we're recording this, I think bitcoin is trading right around 60k. Maybe it's back, oh, it's back up to 64. All right. That's a nice little rebound.

But we kissed. We kissed 60k down from 74. And this retracement has now been going on for the last month or so. And bitcoin is fine, but alts have definitely taken a bath. And some of the frothier sections of the AI coin sort of bags, like dpin bags, some of the all l one s, theyve just gotten absolutely smoked.

I think Solana went down to 130 or something like that from over 200. So whats your prognosis for why correction and where do we go from here, do you think so? It's the first thing I would say. It's not just a crypto correction, it's general markets. The S P is catching a bounce today, but I think it's been down for the past four days, which is pretty rare.

Vance Spencer

And so I think there's two narratives that are happening right now globally. One, which is interest rate cuts are not coming, which like I personally think is a fade. Michael disagrees with that. He thinks there's no cuts on the horizon. But I think the economy is probably weaker than expected, and you probably still get one.

And no matter what you get, it's kind of like an acknowledgement of the process. Starting versus the market tends to price in all the rate cuts at once, just like it does on the rate hikes. Also, it immediately prices whatever the terminal rate they think it should be. At least I think that's going on, definitely. And inflation is higher than people expect.

The other thing that I pay honestly closer attention to because I think it's bigger than interest rates. It's just politics and the polls and the narrative. There has been basically that the race was tightening. I think there's probably some truth to that. But if you look at the battleground states, Trump's winning six out of seven.

He's up by like three in Michigan and Wisconsin. And it's hard to understand the election in the abstract, especially when you look at things like the popular vote. But if you look at the battleground states and the way the battleground states work is basically like, Trump needs to pick up one of either Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania or Minnesota, frankly. And so if he's leading in three out of four of those, I think the case for him not to win is pretty weak and the market will start repricing his winning odds higher, which will kind of drive everything higher in election year. That's kind of what I think is going on.

I think there's definitely some aspect of Ethan bitcoin taking a breather, which is healthy. There's 1120 percent corrections in the last run. But then I think the alts have just really gotten crushed most of all, like you were saying, like the AI coins and things like that. And I think that just because. People.

Who start meme coins or VC's who fund coins, like they're very good at replicating things that are working in the market and meetings demand with that supply. And I think on that front, this is kind of like the first leveling that will take us to a different probably paradigm for alts, where fundamentals aren't easily replicable, new categories and platforms aren't either. And so just more of a move to even if it's meme coins, we get one or we get two meme coins, we don't get like 1000. And same with Defi and same with games and same with infrastructure. And some of these things just reach such crazy ftvs.

Like world coin was 114 billion at the top. The emissions of that, just to put it in perspective, are the size of maker over the next year. So, like, if you really think about it like that, I think you kind of know where the market is going to go. But also, you know, there's a pretty good case for. This is probably just a garden variety correction.

Michael Anderson

Yeah, the. This is one of these classic charts that just gets trotted out every now and again. But Chris Berninski tweeted this with the caption, in case the lettuce hands need a reminder. This is the class just looking at the 20 11, 20, 15, 20, 18, 20 20 cycle and then charting where we are today. And this is, I guess, trough to peak, basically.

And yeah, I mean, if you look, there's obviously no guarantee that the current trend is going to play out like it has in the past, but past performance is not indicative of future results, et cetera. But this is pretty typical price action. And I do feel like we ran up really, really hot leading into the bitcoin ETF's, which ended up being a massive catalyst, as many thought they would be. I think maybe a bit of this story is also on bitcoin ETF flows. So we've seen relatively consistent outflows for the last week or so.

Nothing crazy, but something in the realm of about $100 million per day, something like that. Look, to your point about it being a broader macro correction, the s and P has been on a tear so far this year. Nothing goes up forever in a straight line. And it's actually pretty healthy for there to be shakeouts like this. And it's nothing that shouldn't be expected.

The more you shake this kind of stuff out, maybe the more legs there are long term in the, in the rally. Yep. Yeah. I mean, I think that's basically the chart. And I went to a dinner where people were talking about what you described, what happens when the ETF's work in reverse, where there's outflows and that's kind of like this existential fear that I think a lot of people have and rarely do.

Vance Spencer

Markets let you get away with not addressing whatever the existential fear is. And I think there's going to be probably a couple of weeks of outflows. But at the same time, the fact that binance sold a billion dollars of PTC, I think over the past 24 hours, along with the outflows, and we still didn't really meaningfully breach 60k or whatever it is, it just shows you how resilient the market is.

I think of it also in the converse way. Do you think the bitcoin ETH story is over? Probably not. There's just a lot more to play out. The ecosystems are developing, the ETF's are getting improved, there's really use cases.

Honestly, we're not really too concerned. I think this is a pretty garden variety correction. But I do really think a general rule of thumb is it's hard for alts to breach 100 billion if you're an l one, an all l one. A bunch of them got roughly there last cycle. And if you're kind of like middleware, it's hard for you to reach 20 billion.

Just like the financial gravity of what the market is willing to price is like, is tough at that level. And so I think this is just like a more meta point of like, if you're thinking about doing a TGE and like, you know, the float is such that the coin will spike to 20,000,000,006 months after launch. Like, you're not doing yourself any favors over the long term because that just is, frankly, selling pressure before the project is really ready for primetime.

Michael Anderson

So here's another thing that's coming up, is we've talked a little bit about this, but we're also just a couple of days out, actually, from the having. And having is traditionally this sort of fulcrum point that these four year cycles have swung around. And I know coindesk put out something recently just looking at what the price action looked like around the before and after the first, second and third having. So that was in 2012, 2016 and 2020. So just the having, I'm sure folks listening would be familiar, but that's just when the block reward for bitcoin gets cut in half.

And I think it's at 6.125 or something like that right now, and it's going to get cut to three something. And you can see that it's not. I mean, mostly the price appreciation actually tends to, to happen post having around six to nine months or something like that. And honestly, I think the story of this entire cycle so far is maybe it feels a little bit like an abnormal cycle in a couple of ways, but it's really just, it actually is exactly how past cycles have played out, just with a couple of changes. So I think, again, one of the things that just really stumped people is Solana just outperforming pretty aggressively very early in the cycle.

Usually what happens is bitcoin runs first, then ETH runs second, and then kind of like blue chips and then meme coins. And what happened this cycle is Solana ran really hard, really fast, and that was just because I think there was a crazy dislocation post the FTX blow up. And so it made everyone say, hey, is something weird happening here? Is ETH, like, lagging? And I just think it was idiosyncratic Solana thing.

And then the other thing that was different this time was that we got the bitcoin ETF's and maybe that pulled forward some of the growth, um, or some of the price appreciation a little bit sooner relative to the having than it would typically happen. But overall, I think this is, you know, pretty standard cycle stuff here. There there is a debate that's currently happening about how impactful the having really is. Is it more psychological than mechanical? Like, we have the.

Vance Spencer

We have this debate every single time. I know. It's. I know empirically. Just even if you look at, like, you know, these charts, it's not priced in.

Michael Anderson

Yeah. Even if it is the placebo, it doesn't matter. Like, you know, the placebo effects the psychology, affects the bidding behavior. Except, like, you know, it's all tied together. It's never, you know, one for one.

Vance Spencer

You can't really measure it at all. So that's my thoughts, at least. Vance, where do you sit on this argument that one of the things that also might be different this time, and people have argued this in the past as well, is that, well, these flows that are coming in via bitcoin are coming into an ETF now. They're not, you know, typically what happens is people buy bitcoin first. The price appreciates.

Michael Anderson

You take some of your chips and you roll it into ETH and alts and whatever, and now it's going to be a little bit different, because while people are buying it in these vehicles that exist in tradfi, in your brokerage account, it's not as easy to just take that and roll it into, you know, Shitcoin XYZ, are you a subscriber to that thought, or do you think that's not a super meaningful distinction? Ultimately, there's probably some truth to that. I mean, where's bitcoin dominance right now? I could pull it up.

Vance Spencer

Yeah. I mean, it's. It's, uh.

Yeah, I mean, you kind of have this, like, cliff at the end of the last bear market into this trough. Then it goes back up, usually tops at like, 71%. We're at 55% right now. Here, I'll just throw this chart up. Cool.

Or if you could throw it up, we're at 55.7% right now. The last cycle top was 71%, so it's more a function of, I wouldn't think of it as one person in their brokerage account buying bitcoin and going up and then bidding these other coins. I don't think that's going to happen. Maybe it'll be east when it has an ETF, but it's more so the aggregate wealth effect of the ecosystem, because we're still at a point in crypto's history where we hold, we, the proverbial, we eat the, the crypto natives hold most of these coins, and so we all get wealthy, and then it also becomes a function of pricing.

I guess bitcoin was a little bit higher, like sixty nine k at the top of last cycle. You're looking at ETH at that point, and you're like, can this triple from here if bitcoin goes off one and a half x or goes to 100k? So it's also about relative value and kind of how the crypto natives participate in that and also front run whatever the ETF situation is going forward, which I think all of us are believers that if not in May, it's happening probably in the next year, maybe sooner, maybe at the end of that year, but the market can look through that. I agree with you. That's.

Michael Anderson

I think even if you look at what's happening right now, you've seen this talked about the bitcoin meme coin barbell, where bitcoin is doing well, meme coins and everything in the middle is kind of struggling a little bit. And I think the reason for that is because, not because there's a bunch of crypto natives that are holding bitcoin and then rotating those gains into meme coins. I think it's because they, crypto natives know how this, they've seen this movie before, and they know how the sequence plays out, and they're just trying to skip to the end so they know it goes bitcoin ETH, blue chip, defi whatever, alt l one s meme coin that ends on meme coins, and they're just like, yep, I've seen this. I know when bitcoin goes up, eventually it's going to go to meme coins. So I'm just going to skip right to the end and go into meme coins.

So, again, I think it's the maybe less about mechanically, about wealth creation and more just pattern recognition, in the same way that, yeah, the halving could be a little bit of a placebo, but at the end of the day, that's still a really important effect. Right. It's still going to have a huge impact on the price. So, yep, it's also, it's also about, like total size. Like, at what's, what's bitcoin at right now at 1.25 trillion, that's a big asset.

Vance Spencer

Like, like, your scale becomes obviously, like, as your price goes up, your market cap expands, it gets harder to move the price. Like, you're probably even at a price right now where you need probably like $20 to $50 million of inflows per day to maintain it on the ETF side. To maintain it at this price, you're going to need to see those ETF inflows get back to the hundreds of millions per day or maybe even billions when it's super frothy and bullish. But I think these things are going to be taking a breather for, until the narrative on interest rates or the narrative on the presidential race tightening goes away. But that could be a month, that could be a few months.

But I think the longer term is what's more important to play for, and both interested in democratic politics and republican politics. But I think one side, if that administration changes, and I think that the betting odds are certainly favoring Trump at the moment, that expands the industry, like 100 x. And so I think it's even worth the temporary economic malaise if you see that play out to potentially get to that endpoint.

Michael Anderson

So the other thing that I've always thought is that the price actually leads the narrative, not the other way around. If price ends up moving up, people look for reasons for why the price is up, and now the price is down a little bit, and people are looking for reasons why, and they're, oh, it's the election fears, or, oh, it's the interest rate stuff. And honestly, it could just. It's not a great podcast sounding explanation, but maybe it's just that crypto and equities have ripped so far this year. There's naturally going to be, everyone got long, and then that's how these sort of countertrends happen.

This was what was always going to happen here. And now we're all looking for some explanation. But I feel like most of the stuff that we've been talking about so far this year hasn't really ultimately changed. Like, it's still a super bullish environment for crypto. I don't, you know, I'm not even sure the interest rates really matter that much right now.

I'm not sure that's what's moving markets on the. On the macro side, it really feels like market, the deficit is much more important, and the election is much more important this year. I think interest rates, they're always super important, obviously, but it's kind of last year's story, and I'm just not sure. Three cuts versus six cuts. And is it July versus August is really what's moving the needle at the current moment.

Vance Spencer

Yeah, I think for the most part, when we were buying in 2022, it was like, you know, east, probably one to two k this year, maybe two to three k the next year, maybe. You know, like, you kind of, like, that was like, my simplistic framework and, you know, use that to keep myself honest in terms of, you know, if it's looking like a bearish day or are we still kind of within the long term plan? I think so.

But I mean, the macro and the politics, I think those are kind of like the ex post facto rationale for whatever happens with price. But, you know, sentiment can flip on a dime. People don't even remember when they're bullish or when they were last bullish. Like, people can't even tell you what they were buying or what they were thinking about. And so, like, the market literally has the shortest memory of any person that, you know, and it's kind of like, that's like, where mister market comes from.

It's just like your irrational friend who's kind of bipolar and, you know, stampedes either direction, and it's just not worth really worrying about the near term. And if you're not playing the long term, like, you're probably playing the wrong game. Hey, everyone wanted to give a quick shout out to the title sponsor of this season of Bell Curve, the wormhole foundation. Now, if you are an on chain user, which I bet you are, if you're listening to Bell Curve, you know that the cross chain experience in crypto still sucks. Let's just call it spade a spade.

Mike Ippolito

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First of all, this is a fun team. They did something really cool with us. You can actually go and click the link at the bottom of the screen, which is going to send you to a landing page where you can claim your own unique wormhole. NFT. So we're doing this with me and we're doing this with Jason, my co founder.

So help a brother out. It's a super cool NFT, I promise. Go click the link at the bottom of this episode and fill out your po app. Get your free NFT. And if you're a dev, head over to wormhole and check out to see what cool cross chain stuff you can build.

Hey, everyone wanted to give a quick shout out to this episode's sponsor, Flub protocol, the optimal Dex aggregator. Now, Fludd is the perfect partner for this episode on the multi chain future because Fludd is solving so many of the issues that we're gonna be talking about this season, and this is relevant for both traders and debs. So if you are a trader, you should definitely head over to fludswap and start trading because they solve three massive problems. One, gasless trading, no more pesky trading fees. Two, you don't have to worry about.

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Or if you're a wallet builder or something like that, you can actually build your own order flow auction in and start recapturing a bunch of that Meb. If you want to reach out to them, go to devslood bid or just jump right in the discord. All right, guys, thanks very much. Appreciate you, Flood. Hey everyone, this episode is brought to you by Uniswap delivering the best on chain trading experience, period, bar none in all crypto.

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Click the link at the bottom. Uniswap extension is in alpha right now and we'll see what you can do about getting you moved up that list. Thank you very much. Uniswap changing tack a little bit here to talk about something else that's happening on bitcoin. The we are going to see the launch of runes this week.

Michael Anderson

So this is all, this is another Casey Rotomore who is the, the creator of ordinals. This is another one of his projects, but it's, he's launching runes on the day of the having, which it looks like it's going to be in a couple of days. So basically what runes allow you to do is to create some sort of token standard equivalent to sort of like a competitor to BRC twenties, which is kind of a poorer form of ERC 20s that exist on ethereum, on bitcoin. And it's not exactly inscriptions, but it's close enough to inscriptions that's good enough for you to really understand. Bitcoin has a different model than Ethereum does, which has a bitcoin is just Utxos and you can't use smart contracts on it.

So it's extremely limited in terms of what you can actually do. So huge credit to Casey here for what he's done with ordinals and runes are just kind of the latest version of that. But it's just basically a very crude way to get around the limitations of the bitcoin blockchain and do Ethereum like things. And people are really excited about runes, frankly, is driving an enormous amount of activity on the bitcoin blockchain today. So bitcoin inscription NFTs are even generally within the global world of NFTs are now 55% of NFT trades.

And you got to give credit to magic Eden, who they started on Solana and they sort of pivoted over to bitcoin and they really capitalize on the ordinals fad on and im sure theyre going to do extremely well on bruins, et cetera. And its actually led to a resurgence in their market share on Solana also. So yeah, I'm not really sure what your thoughts are. Our data guy over here, Dan Hitsmith, absolutely hates the idea of inscriptions. Basically just use it as spam and completely silly.

Pretty meritless. But what are your general thoughts on this? I'm not sure how deep you've got into runes. I would say this is another example of price driving, narrative driving use case.

Vance Spencer

It's great that bitcoin's going up. This incentivizes all this new developer activity.

I mean, some people on my team are super optimistic on what these could be. I kind of like. I don't know, it's like, is this more like an NFT, or is it more like a meme coin? Which side of that framework are we on? Are we digging for artifacts that are lost in the chain?

Or is it like, pure financial nihilism? Or is this in the middle of the curve?

Like, that's kind of where I go. Yeah, I don't know. How would you, like, how would you define the difference between NFTs and meme coins in general? Is the whole Kobe thing, is it just all. Just the liquidity?

The liquidity, yeah. NFTs are such an inefficient form of speculating because you got to find one guy to buy your whole, like, you know, if. Even if it's a, you know, one of many, like, you got to find a very specific buyer for that. You can't price it on an amm. You can't sell it or buy it indiscriminately.

So I think that's the difference, honestly.

Maybe I'm just a boomer, but the runes are cool. I think it's an interesting experiment, but what's the long term longevity? Are these crypto punks or is this like an ephemeral financial nihilism meme coin that goes up and down? I don't know. I don't know either, honestly.

Michael Anderson

I think probably the dynamic is the same dynamic that drives an enormous amount of speculation on crypto, which is wealth gets created in l one coin or token. So BTC, ethan soul, and people look to speculate on that, and they look to turn those gains into other things and get more exposure. And there's just an extremely limited universe of assets out there. I mean, this is probably the rabbit hole that many crypto natives end up going down where, remember when you were getting into the space and it felt like bitcoin and ETH were super risky, but then once you've been in the ecosystem for a couple of years, you're like, I need to be taking some more risk than this. This stuff's obviously going up.

This feels too safe. And so the universe of stuff is just pretty limited when you're looking at it through that lens, when bitcoin or ETH are your safety bags. And so that's how you end up going into the stuff that sort of kind of might work and maybe there's a future there. And I mean, there have also been tons of stuff like that that ended up working over the years. Like, you guys were super early, Chainlink and Aave and how crazy did that seem at the time?

I remember looking at that stuff and being like, it feels a little too risky for me. You gotta be in that headspace to get that type of return where you're going on these rabbit hole adventures like that. That's what makes a market. You know, people who are early and, you know, then they bring in people and then it becomes popular. So I'm glad people are doing this.

Vance Spencer

It's cool to see the bitcoin ecosystem developing. I've said this on a couple of.

Sorry, just checking my mic was working. I've said this on a couple of different tweets, but it's pretty notable that the ETH and bitcoin ecosystems are converging on the same model. It's like, I mean, one is proof of work, one is proof of stake, obviously, but it's like the l one is for the sticky defi, the nfts, the grails, the high value transactions. And then the l two s are for, you know, speculating, meme, coins, runes, inscriptions, like, you know, whatever. And I think as they become closer and, like, people recognize that they're going to compare them on more dimensions, specifically like moneyness, fees, revenue.

Like, I think that this is where a lot of crypto goes. It's like, if you think about the end game of different protocols, I think this web of l two s is one endgame in a different way. Restaking is a different endgame. I see that as both on bitcoin and ETH. Restaking to me is m and a in crypto.

You're basically saying, come under my wing, give tokens away to my community. We'll develop primitives. You're aggregating all these services. And I think maker is another good form of endgame. And their roadmap is literally entitled Endgame, but they're becoming this superstructure with all these subdaos, and they're allocating dai to the basis trade into crypto loans and to rwas.

And that's an end game of defi. I think generally a lot of these end games are starting to play out. There's obviously still huge incentives like multi billion dollar market cap to be around standalone project. But I think kind of what we're seeing is like an aggregation of the ecosystems into this kind of like universal, either like restaking or l two model. I agree with that.

Michael Anderson

I agree with that. And another ecosystem that I would point to that actually looks very similar in terms of the architecture is going the same way. It is kind of a neat mix in between bitcoin and different versions of bitcoin and ETH is Celestia. I'd put in that exact same camp because Celestia also has this. Actually, Celestia is in a lot of ways what the big block vision for bitcoin could have been if some of the tech had existed at the time and they were able to obviate some of the negative trade offs.

So they have super big blocks. They've got a few chunky validators or like a hundred or something like that, you know, chunky validators. But then they have this thing called data availability sampling and light nodes, which basically negates all of the negative transactions that the, the small blocker camp used to levy at the big blocker camp. And what youre left with is this chain with very dumb sort of non functional but extremely large blocks. And thats kind of similar to bitcoin, which is pretty, its utxo model.

You cant do things like smart contracts on it, but its small blocks. And each one of those things theres an incentive to create roll ups on top of that. In Celestia, its more for smart contract functionality. And for bitcoin, its more like, well, it's kind of like block space and functionality. And then Ethereum, it's just block space.

So, yeah, like if I think over time, the, especially the Celestia, bitcoin and ethereum, it's all converging on the same stuff. Probably even over time, Solana ends up looking like that too. So. And I think what that means totally on a long time horizon is I think these things, these things are, what that really means on a long time horizon is that these things end up getting commoditized. And right now there are these religious communities around bitcoin versus Solana versus Ethan.

It's so different. But I think at the end of. The day, it's, I think that's the only non commoditizable piece of it. Yeah, like the network. The network effects like, like figure out tether.

Vance Spencer

Like I would argue tether is dominant because it's dominant. It's like, it's kind of circular, but like, there's, like, when you have money, like, there's huge network effects to that. And so, like, I kind of think about it. Architecturally is one way, but the other way is like, how do the network effects accrue? What are they powered by?

For ETH, I would say it's the asset for bitcoin. I would say it's the same for Dot, for Maker. And I would say it's the DAi stablecoin. It's like, yeah, you know, if you, if you. We've done some analysis, it looks like Dai captures around 35, 40% of all defi profits.

Just because if you think about Athena, too, it's like, okay, this means maker can now get into trading without taking any risk because it's delta neutral. Obviously, there's the exchange risk, all that stuff. But that's a superstructure. It's a superstructure. Bitcoin's a superstructure.

My question with DA layers is, are your network effects ten times more powerful? If there's a community of people using your Da layer? What's their relationship to that? To me, it has to be about the underlying asset in some way. And that applies to restaking as well.

Michael Anderson

I think that too. But I guess then the question would be if it's really about the network effects and the liquidity of the asset, that it doesn't even really matter so much what the underlying protocol is doing. I'm not sure, because the bitcoin protocol is a really interesting example of this, where, dude, the prior to ordinals transaction count had just been going down. There've been very few legitimate upgrades since Taproot, and even by the standards of an EIP, like, taproots wasn't a crazy change or anything like that, but the asset price still kept going up, and I sort of view that's what TIA is as well. They have.

One of the challenges of celestial architecture is that you can't, because you don't have smart contract functionality, and TIa isn't a settlement layer. You can't do the types of roll ups like settlement contract, very trustless, bridging up from main chain ETH to roll ups that you can do for Celestia. They have a solution to this, which is just a ZK account that basically, instead of a valid signature, there's a proof, and you submit proof or a valid proof, and then you can bridge Tia up to their sovereign roll ups and stuff like that. It's on the roadmap, but I view it as being all birds of a feather, pretty similar. And I've always looked at Tia as an asset in its own right.

And then there's the DA sort of business model. But I think the protocol has less to do with which assets are successful than just the liquidity and adoption and narrative that form around the assets themselves. Well, so what you do have to have an underlying cash flow driver, like, you know, like ETH and bitcoin. I think this approach has a lot of credibility. Like, ETH did, like, 400 million in profits in Q one or whatever it was.

Vance Spencer

Bitcoin, I think, frankly, has work to do with PoW. And, like, it's so expensive and there's so much incentives and the fees seem to be growing. Celestia. And, like, we have Celestia bags, but, you know, just like the revenue of the underlying DA, I don't think it has to be super high necessarily. But, like, you need something that gives you credibility when people are like, I'm using this as money because, like, you know, there's a lot of different factors which impacts people using this money.

I would say the reason why we're optimistic on the Solana ecosystem is because we spend a lot of time with the Jito people, and you can see the uses money of soul. Like, you look at their TVL chart, I'm just gonna throw it up. You look at this TVL chart, it's a hockey stick. It's gone from 48k in December, 22 to 10 million sold today. Yeah.

So. I agree with you. There needs to be some kind of lock in. This is the whole not to go all macro and talking about money on this podcast. But, yeah, this is the, I mean, the way that sovereigns have historically done this is you have to pay taxes in this currency, and that's the lock in.

Michael Anderson

And that creates the network effect. And it's kind of the same thing in blockchains. Right. In order to get access to this block space, you have to pay in our unit of currency. And that's actually why when the burn was originally theorized as a mechanism, they were trying to get around this thing that they called economic abstraction at the time, which was people basically off chain contracts between a validator and someone who is trying to pay fees.

Right. And it's like, well, I'll just. I don't want to actually pay you. You know how, you know, 100 ETH or whatever it is. Like, I want to pay you 50.

I'm just going to pay you $50 off chain. You can just waive my fee. So by then, you're essentially circumventing the tax lock in. So that's why the burn initially got created. But, yeah, the dude.

The Gito chart is. I love the Jito. Lucas was just on the pod a couple weeks ago. He and he and Eugene are standing. Solana Mev guys.

But. But, like, I think, you know, I didn't even know we were talking about it first. This good conversation. But I think, like, generally this is how people should think about the long term. Like, what does this look like in ten years?

Vance Spencer

It is. There's money based ecosystems that have network effects via their native assets. And then I think the maker. But thesis is that maybe that native asset should be a stable coin that can internalize all the profits on all these DeFi and frankly, CFI now activities and redirect it to holders of a stable coin. And that is a very different vision.

And maybe there are other visions you could think about if Uniswap releases its own chain. It started with the Amm primitive, generated a ton of profits, maybe gotten people to use uni as much. I don't really see people using uni as money, though. Yeah. You know, like, I don't know if that's a thing, but, like, they'll watch.

Michael Anderson

A shame. Maybe. Maybe you back into it same way the maker did, where it's like you start with a stable coin, then you launch a blockchain. So, yeah, you should think about the use cases from the ground up in terms of, like, their initial profit generating enterprise. And then what they do after that is like, they're either creating their own form of money via allowing people to use it, or it's frankly more like a SaaS business, where they're just a protocol that sits on top of every other chain and tries to externalize whatever they do.

Yeah. Let me ask you this. This is something I've been thinking about recently, too. Part of the lock in that these ecosystems that are built around a base unit of currency as a money have, is the social layer, a really clear narrative. And this is what I've thought bitcoin has kind of nailed from.

From day one, is. Well, not since day one. They had the block size war, but they're like, we are a store of value, digital gold type thing. Really clear at, you know, 21 million hard cap, super easy. That's changed, though.

Vance Spencer

The narratives have changed over time. True. But recently that's. But recently that's what it's been. And there's a.

Michael Anderson

There's an accompanying vibe to that. It's kind of like a macro austrian, economic, gold loving, keep the government out of my property. Sort of vibe. And that works with their whole thing. So now that they have most of the transactions on the base chain coming from, well, like, now the fact that there is a base chain and they're going to be l two s and there are runes and there are nfts, suddenly you've got people that are coming back and saying, hey, bitcoin should be innovating, we should be pushing the envelope.

And this is the tech people versus money people tension that has always existed in crypto a little bit. And do you think it's disrupting this kind of neat narrative and shelling points? Build the community around? Do you think it's a positive thing? What do you think about that?

Because I think there's a lot of pretty spirited conversation that's happening right now in the bitcoin community. I mean, I don't even know the extent to which they're still infighting around, like, expansion of bitcoin being bad, but it will change the narrative because narratives are usually set by people on the margins. And at first it's a whisper and then it's like them shouting with a megaphone at you, and then it's everyone saying it. And so where this all naturally leads is, do we have enough fees for the 21 million supply cap to be real? And so at some point they'll have that fight, but it's going to be like 100 years until that really matters.

Vance Spencer

But I think at a certain point that will stare you in the face. Maybe they'll talk about premium stake, who knows? It's kind of unclear who the core devs are to me or what their values are other than stopping more progress on these apps, but it will look more like ETH, and I think ETH will also look more like bitcoin as it moves towards this. Fees are or whatever. I think Nick Schleck from Rivet did a presentation on east.

They said the fees were like, revenue is like 6 billion a year or something like that. There's just enough deflation where it's not too deflationary but it's not rising in supply. I feel like everyone is just going to go, this is the end game. Endgame for all this stuff is that the branding and network effects of the assets are all that really matter. I think if you read like, makers Endgame plan with this in mind, it feels very clear headed in terms of, like, really nailing where this is all going.

And, you know, 99% of protocols will probably die. We've also launched a shit ton of protocols meme coins and all this stuff. But like, the point is you get to those ten, you know, there's the Mag seven is seven stocks. It's not 50, it's not 100, it's seven. And they crew probably 80% of the profits of tech.

So you think about the stuff over the long term, what do you want to invest in? Whatever the Fang or Mag seven or what QQQ is going to be of this industry, because a lot of it, especially when you look at Worldcoin and all the emissions and all the other tokens are going to have emissions, you need to have something that's strong enough to basically stand against those emissions, but also well placed enough to really navigate the strategic landscape of crypto, which is merging. I would say maybe not collapsing, but I feel like we're going like this. It's merging. There's a lot of protocols launching, but we're going like this.

Michael Anderson

So it is merging. And here's an example that I would give you. So we're doing the third permission list that we've done, and I don't think we've talked about bitcoin at all in any of the previous conferences, because really it's kind of. It's a conference for people that are building on the frontier for the most part. But this year, one of the big themes we're like, yeah, honestly, where a lot of the innovation is happening, or where a lot of the mind share is right now in the builder crypto native community is bitcoin.

And so we have a whole theme like bitcoin renaissance, and Casey Rotomore is going to be there. And munib from stacks like a bunch of the Bitcoin L two s. That's never been a thing before. And yeah, we've never even been like, yeah, this maybe makes sense. It's always been kind of Das is bitcoin and permissionless is kind of e Solana Cosmos.

And yeah, it's starting to merge. And I do think it's an interesting. I think Ethereum is kind of going through a transition from the other side, which is Ethereum counter positioned against bitcoin really nicely back in the day, where if you didn't want to be like a doomer and just sit there and stack sats and not do anything or take risks or innovate, then there was this void and Ethereum was like, hey, we're a general smart contracting platform, come build apps. We're very optimistic. And that was the Ethereum vibe.

And now that Ethereum is kind of growing up and being like, well, now that we're a $300 billion protocol and we really see ourselves as a money, then you don't really want the people that are managing your money to be like, oh, optimistic dreamer, you need to be a little bit more serious. If you have that much wealth that's being held or secured by these developers, then you want to make sure that they're serious, conservative people. Ethereum is almost coming the other way a little bit, being like, okay, we're grown up now. We care about things like yields, and this is a money. And so I almost see bitcoin and ethereum kind of coming closer together than they've been in a long point.

So to your point on convergence, I. Think the long term question, which we'll have to answer in the short term, because you can't have these things, have no fundamentals forever, is like, we talked about this before, but how do you create the best Internet money? What should it be based off of? What's the best economic architecture versus the most scalable? Is it better to have high value users doing enough transactions on your main chain where you can burn enough of the supply for it to be stable?

Vance Spencer

Or is it better to charge everyone nothing and basically drive fees to zero and make a play for the most users? I think this l one l two architecture is admitting, basically, that you need the l one transactions at a relatively high cost with a relatively small amount of users who do relatively few transactions per year. But then you want to make a play for everyone using your asset and being native to these chains with these l two s. Yeah. And, like, you know, I mean.

I mean, one way to think about it is, do you think you can be a trillion dollar protocol as a monolithic chain? I would argue you need, like, a lot of different incentive camps rowing in your direction. Like, you know, how much did the op retroactive grants do for the ETH community? A ton. Like, you know, Arb, same deal.

Like, all these airdrops. Like, those only happen if you have, like, this plurality of l two's approach. So, yeah, you know, maybe. Maybe the ceiling for all tail ones is like 100 billion. That wouldn't surprise me.

But maybe to get to a trillion plus, you either need to be, like, the first mover, or you need to have this, like, l two based ecosystem where everyone's burning a little bit and you still got your l one fees and the economics flow upwards. Yeah, I think. Well, maybe it's relevant, then, that Solana's been struggling. The UX of Solana has been extremely challenged in the last, I don't know, a couple year, weeks, at least a month since meme coin started to take off. And to your point, to your point, Solana is the chain that has the most transactions right now.

Michael Anderson

It's something like 35 million transactions per day, which is a pretty mind blowing statistic. Now, how many of those people are, is it just repeated kind of gamblers, like, clicking like this on whatever, but still, usage is usage. And I do think it's, on the one hand, it's bullish to have so much demand on your chain that you break down, but on the other hand, this is a huge problem for Solana. And I think they need a little something more than just, I know they're working on a patch right now, 1.18, and hopefully that's going to be live and they're going to fix some of these problems. But I still haven't really seen, at least from my perspective, a long term roadmap or strategy towards solving this.

Because even if they implement this successful patch, then they're just going to, there's just, you know, what if, okay, they fix that and then it goes up to 60 million transactions per day. Right. And at some point, you kind of have to either start charging more. And I heard Keone from Monad make the statement that he thought Solana transactions were just too high based on compute, because eventually you have to price those compute resources appropriately. Or.

Yeah, maybe you end up doing something like a layered approach, like l two s. I don't know. I don't know what the solution is, but I think, I think it's still a, it's, it's an open question. Yeah. So if I were to make the argument for Solana, I would say that basically the.

Vance Spencer

So if you think about bitcoin and ETH, the people who own bitcoin and ETH and use bitcoin and ETH on the l one s, like they're going to use it there forever. Like, you know, maybe we'll grow that pie by, you know, ten x over the next four years or whatever, but, like, you know, those are sticky l one transactions that are not moving. It'll bootstrap the chain. What the market hasn't figured out or explored is like, who's going to have the most users? Who's going to have the most users?

And what is that sweet spot of fees versus throughput versus use case? And if you could make the chain free and charge everyone nothing, would you? You probably wouldn't. That's not the optimal economic model. So there is a sweet spot.

But I think that's where the market is going to be most subject to disruption, where it's like, okay, cool, you launch an all l one. Let's say you have 100,000 users. Let's say immutable X or Ronin has 10 million, but they're all basically very low paying users. They are monetized on the Dex versus the actual base underlying fees. Is there a different economic model that has less to do with gas cost abstraction of a blockchain and maybe more with like the Defi underlying primitives or like, you know, gameplay or things like that for, you know, the blockchains that have like 10 million users?

Because that economic model is going to be different. And honestly, probably so is the underlying asset. It probably doesn't have that same call option to become money. And so like, you'll need to find kind of like a different type of valuation framework or, you know, what have you. So like, I think there is broom for these high throughput blockchains that charge people very little.

But you need to have that sweet spot. Here's another thing that I've thought about that I haven't really seen discussed that much, but one thing that might end up having a big impact here is on how performant the l one is in terms of how good the l two ecosystem is. To give you an example of that, a huge issue on the ETH L two.

Jesus. Roll up roadmap has been the interrupt and the solution to this that Justin Drake has been talking about a shared sequence or based sequencing where the Ethereum. Ethereum still does the sequencing and basically just route all the transactions down there. The reason why none of the roll ups were seriously considering that until you had something like pre conformations, was it was still a twelve second block time and basically the whole point of moving to a layer two. So you could have much shorter confirmations for users.

Michael Anderson

So you just surrender basically all the utility. But on Solana, base sequencing would be super easy because you have 400 millisecond block times. So all of a sudden you could do something like base sequencing on Solana tomorrow with a whole bunch of different roll ups. You wouldn't have like, you basically solve 90% of the interop challenge overnight because you wouldn't have to wait three years for restaking to get built out and pre confirmations to get adopted and all that stuff. So I do think the functionality of the l one actually has a huge advantage.

And if Solana were to go down the l two route, which I'm not sure if they even are going to. I think it would have some. Some legs up over for some of the, like, bitcoin. Like, just think about the bitcoin l two functionality. I know nothing about it, but I just have to imagine it's so limited compared to ETH, you know?

So maybe the l one performance ends up being a big deal. I think it does. And I think at the end of the day, the apps have the power, right? They do. They do, dude, absolutely.

Vance Spencer

You know, the apps and the assets, frankly. Yeah. Your assets are floating around on l one or l two, and they're burning ETH. Like, that's not leaving your ecosystem. But, like, the apps are the key thing here.

And, I mean, I'm pretty encouraged by what I see in gaming right now. Like pixels is 200,000 people in their vip, basically group. And those people have paid to be there and they're real users and they think they've got a million monthly actives at this point. And what does that look like when it has 10 million users? Probably got a lot of leverage over whatever chain they're built on.

And if those block space fees are valuable enough, that's a conversation that probably has to happen. So I think crypto is going to look a lot different in three or four years, in a good way. I think the majors are the majors, but I think all of this other stuff is subject to. To a lot of change. And things are just like, there's so much dispersion in pricing that I think that's going to drive a lot of just interesting behavior over the next couple of years.

Michael Anderson

Yeah. All right, here's one final question for you, because it came up during this analytics on site. It always does. But how do you think about the concept of profits or fees for an L one, because here's something that I am struggling to wrap my head around, which is, when you think about profits from the perspective of a company, why it's attractive. It's attractive for two reasons.

So, one, it can get returned to you, or two, you can compound your capital gains by reinvesting those profits into more employees, more R and D. That's going to lead to even more profits in the future. And in the case of these L one s, I know we talk about base fees as being profits, and in some way it is getting returned to you. It's getting burned, so it's getting returned to you as a holder, but you don't have that compounding effect that you do in a company. There's no organized body which is directing those profits towards compounding the advantage of Ethereum.

It's almost like if it was a company, you're just immediately dividending that out, which is good. But I think the reason why equities outperform every asset, and it's not even close over a long period of time, is that compounding effect. So do you think that's a meaningful distinction? Do you think it's not? This is kind of why I view the L one s as more commodity like than equity, like at least, at least on a long time frame.

Vance Spencer

To me, I view them as more commodity like as well. Like, you know, there's, I think there's an ending point to each protocol where you just call it a day and then you have the l two s or whatever, just build whatever they want and continue building the network effects. There is nothing to reinvest into if it's a true protocol. We're not going to improve x times y equals k. Uniswap labs might release subsequent versions of that, but that will come from a different economic arrangement.

I think that's how it's intended to be. The things I like about crypto are ETH is, look, there's a base burn, there's a fee that I get, I stake my yield, I earn three, three and a half percent, whatever it is. Thats a very streamlined form of capitalism versus most companies in the S and P, which dont pay out a dividend. They just tell you, trust me bro, and they invest into their own companies. Its the government taxing you, its like whats your level of confidence in them as a capital allocator?

I would say most companies pretty low. Thats what I like about generally maker as well. And smart contract based capitalism, whatever you want to call it. I have programmatic guarantees about if you make a dollar of revenue, I can see the cost, so I can net out what earnings are, and if I want, I can get a chunk of it by staking SDI or maker. So like it's, it's um.

Yeah, I think this is the way God intended it to be. You know, very streamlined, no middle. What are we looking, what are we looking at in terms of. I'm pulling up DeFi Llama right now, but what are we looking at in terms of maker profitability or revenue these days? Maker is at around 200 million earnings per year, and those are all used for the buyback.

At the moment. That's like net of SDI payments. I mean the big thing with maker is that they've just opened this billion dollar vault on Morpho or they can lend against USD. So they put in Dai, people put in Usde. And there's kind of this positive carry trade where like USDe yields like, I think it's like 15%.

They lend it out at 14% and there's this 1% yield that you can loop. And assuming that DAi and USDe stay on stable coin, which they do, that's like a free basis trade. But as that yield spikes, it's like the revenue of maker will go up as well. So I mean, personally, internally, we think maker is going to get to probably ten to 15 billion of die supply at like 13% to 16% interest rates on average. Maybe if 15 is like crazy high forever, it'll be 20%.

But that's between a one and $2 billion earnings protocol at the end of the day. And I think that speaks to, if you look at it on chart next to ETH and Tron, you would be generating more fees than Tron and it would be second only to ETH and bitcoin. So like, like profitable. This stuff is it. And that's why I think it could be the end game of a lot of crypto.

Is this like weird stable coin thing that like we're in traded.

Michael Anderson

The. Have you seen the maker or the Tron chart recently? Adam actually, Adam actually sent me this this week because we were talking about the Justin son, Hans Zimmer, asking. But look at, look at this little chart that Tron's got going on here. I mean, this is a not a ta guy at all, but this is a very.

It's a good looking chart. This is a cup and handle type chart if I've ever seen one. So who knows? Maybe his Excellency has. All right, I don't want at risk of asking a crude question here.

I would love to know the extent of Justin Sons resources, because that man, I have heard. I've heard some rumors about the amount of money that he chucks into some of these, like restaking or bitcoin. L two things. And yeah, I think his Excellency is doing pretty well on the, on the Tron. On the Tron dividends or backend or whatever.

But yeah, I guess this is what. This is what makes me a little bit more skeptical of bitcoin. L two s is like the tv eldest version is like three or four people. It is. It is.

Vance Spencer

And like talking to the maker core team, like, whenever they see justin deposit into SDI. So like, oh, we got. We gotta figure out a way to like get him out. Like, I don't think he's this farmer that's, like, particularly friendly to the underlying protocol or the tokens that it issues. So, you know.

Yeah, one man's treasure. So do you think that. So I've sort of heard this as well. It's not even for the bitcoin l two s, but ETH l two s. Some of the restaking platforms, they do this kind of roadshow abroad.

Michael Anderson

And I think the reality is there are. There's, like, 50 to 100 whales that kind of live out east, and they end up being the TVL that goes into a ton of these protocols. And I don't know if this is early chinese miners. That's what I get the sense. That's where I get the sense a lot of the money comes from.

But I do think it's a smaller number of whale like individuals, because sometimes you see a protocol launch, you're like, I've never heard of this thing. And it's got a billion in TVL. Like, who is putting a billion in TVL, in billion dollars worth of capital into one of these protocols? But maybe that's it. The dev.

The devs. Yeah, the dev. I mean, yeah, it's true. It's dangerous out there. Well, it's.

You know what? It's a. It's an early stage industry. It's still very much wild west. People were saying it was Wild west six years ago, at least, when I got in, and it's still pretty wild westy.

And, I mean, even in the. Even in the restaking ecosystem, there's a ton of money getting thrown around. There's a ton of lrts. Now, a lot of them are great projects, but, yeah, that also feels like a space that's really heated up recently. And you were saying before about AVss, that's kind of the new l two, right?

If you want a narrative and you want to buy into be a part of this ecosystem that's growing, there's a ton of attention around it. The Abs. AbS feels like a good way to do that. Not that there's not really legitimate reasons to be an abs that there are, but I know it's a bit of a competition to be, like, you're kind. Of, like, selling part of your project to, like, eigen layer.

Vance Spencer

You know, it's like that, to me, is, like, as close to token m and a as we might get is just like, this natural aggregation of a lot of these abs's, or, like, lower level primitives that, like, if you think about a stable coin, or like a dex, those can stay on their own as business and be the foundation for something more. Yeah. What else is there?

Michael Anderson

Yeah, you know, borrow lend, borrow end. Kind of borrow ends maybe, you know, perps maybe. But like when one of those structures, a stable coin can subsume all others assume that on a long enough timeframe it will. Yeah. And kind of same with like the ETH asset as like the stapling layer for all these Abs's.

Vance Spencer

It's just like you are basically, you're getting aggregated by the ABS or by the retaking platform and ETH the asset. Also, I've got a question for you on the subject of standalone businesses. How would you look at these kind of like a dexcreener or a pump function type business that's kind of sprung up? They are, they're selling picks and shovels to meme coin traders and to be honest, they're probably raking it. They're very different business models.

Michael Anderson

But a dexcreener, I think they pay, they charge something like $300 for a meme coin to link socials or something like that, and pump fund this more traditional sort of exchange model. But I mean, how would you like, look at one of those businesses, the long term legs on it? You know what I mean? I got, I'm, I'm not really sure. For me too, too early to tell.

Vance Spencer

I would say that like, you know, a good test for, if something is a superstructure is like, can this happen somewhere else? You know, can like Uniswap get in this game? Can maker get in this game? You know, there's a version of this where it's like maker can provide, you know, the base capital for the liquidity, for meme coins, whatever. There's a version of this where it's like uniswap is doing this stuff instead of pump fun.

Maybe the cultural lock in is strong enough where they can go off and spend money and acquire users and build real moat, but at the end of the day, it's like, does pumped up fund launch its own chain? Because that's a real superstructure at the end of the day and they can build more of a moat. I could see that very much happening. Like we're definitely, I think Haseep said this on some podcast where it's like we're not in the Kumbaya era anymore. Kind of a cynical take.

I kind of agree with that in some ways. But like, over the long, long term, like aggregation theory is going to play out here and it'll be the people who have like for instance, I used to work in Netflix, and when I worked in Netflix, the DVD business was the cash cow. I know, sounds crazy. This was a good. I was an early Netflix user.

Michael Anderson

I did that. I was a customer. And I was there when, you know, streaming was. Was kind of getting going, and we started launching our own originals and it was like, you know, the DVD business paid for all the originals, it paid for all the streaming, it paid for the international expansion, and it allowed it to leapfrog to like a real superstructure where it was like, you know, Netflix was buying movies to put on DVD's. And then it was the entire industry, and now it dictates term to the rest of Hollywood.

Vance Spencer

And I think you're going to see some of that play out here. But the key is, what are the businesses that can stay on their own? A stable point is one money like assets that are digital is another ETH in bitcoin, is it Dexs? Is it Pfoff? Is it lending?

Is it new meme coin paradigm? I don't know, but that's what I think about. We have ten year funds. That's the time scale we're on. I think that's good.

Michael Anderson

That's a good mental model. All right, buddy. I think, unless maybe we can. We can ask our editors here to send listeners off with the Tron. Justin.

Justin Sun, Hans Zimmer, please send you gently off into the night. You can look, honestly, it kind of slaps. So credit, credit Justin sun, credit Hans Zimmerman. Yeah, we can end there, but Mansell's. Shout out, everybody, later.

See you next week. Hey, everyone. Mike here. If you're a bell curve listener, you know that transferring assets across chains can be a massive pain. I certainly do.

Mike Ippolito

I complain about it on this program all the time. That is why we are incredibly excited to have teamed up with the Wormhole foundation, the stewards of the wormhole protocol. And the coolest part about this particular partnership is that they have made custom bell curve nfts, which you can get and mint for free. Click the link at the bottom of this episode, take you to your free nft.

Bitcoin's Renaissance: Inside Runes, Ordinals, and Transaction Revenue | Roundup

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1: Introduction to Bitcoin's New Features

2: Market Trends and Economic Impact

3: Long-term Implications for Bitcoin

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