Will Crypto Leave the US?

Mike Ippolito

Hey everyone wanted to give a quick shout out to the wormhole foundation. If you are a bell curve listener, you know 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. Alright guys, on with the show. Hey everyone wanted to give a quick shout out to this episode's sponsor flood 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. Flood 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 sort of 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 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.

Michael Anderson

Nothing in the episode is construed or. Relied upon as fire, financial, technical, tax. Legal, or other advice. You know the deal. Now let's jump into the episode.

All right fellas, welcome back to another round of appell curve. You have the boys back. Vance and Michael's one and two. It's been a little while. Missed you guys.

Vance Spencer

Give me a trump. Thumbs up.

Michael Anderson

Just fired right in. I mean, legend. Absolute, absolute legend. Do you guys see the. Abby Feldman was there.

Vance Spencer

I saw him ask. He was like, what would you do? What do you think about, what would you do about the hunter Biden laptop or something? He was like, I would have picked it up from the repair shop. That's what I would have done.

Michael Anderson

So what is this thing? I vaguely know that he granted an audience to crypto people that own the nfTs, but what is the deal that he's doing this week? He's launched like three or four NFT collections in the past couple of years.

Vance Spencer

We both own, I think we're some of the top holders of these nfTs, similar to the people who went to Mar a Lago. And people don't know this, but the NFT collections that he sold over the past couple years, sometimes he's done monthly calls with the holders. And it's pretty funny. It's just him talking and, you know, it's, it shows that he's engaged in the space. And he, you know, launched these to his credit when they weren't as hot.

And he also brought that up last night, which is pretty funny. Yeah, but he's like, I was there through the bear. Yeah, we're so early. But his whole point about these, I think, is, a, I think he's raised a bunch of money selling them, which, you know, obviously is a good thing, but b, just shows how pro crypto he is. And, you know, when he sold them, it was funny.

If you go to collect trump cards.com, you can, I think, buy some still. But you get this card, you get a dinner with the president, but you also get a physical card with a piece of the mugshot suit, the suit that he took the mugshot photo in, you know, like plastered on the card, kind of like a jersey card for like a baseball player or an NFL player. So they're pretty cool. But I think the bigger event was the event last night where he came out as just being explicitly pro crypto, you know, saying he wanted, wants to keep the industry in the US. And, you know, Biden doesn't get it, and he does, and he's fine with it.

And the crypto comes in many different flavors. He's not just like a bitcoin or an NFT guy. He's like, you know, for whatever we're trying to do, it wants to onshore. I think it was unironically one of the most positive moments for crypto over the past couple of years. You've never had a presidential candidate come out and say, I'm cool with it.

So just awesome. Well, and with that juxtaposition of yesterday, you had the House and 21 Democrats vote positively on the repeal. What is it? The repeal of the SAB 121. So, basically, this is a House legislation that would allow financial institutions, banks, financial intermediaries that are regulated by, you know, the SEC and other financial regulators to be able to actually custody bitcoin, custody crypto assets.

Michael Anderson

Biden yesterday or two days ago, came out and said that he would veto if this happened to pass the House. It passed the House with 21 Democrats and all Republicans voting for it. And so you have the juxtaposition of, not only is there movement in the House, movement with the legislative bodies, but then you also have Trump on the other end basically saying, this is something that we want to onshore, this is something that we want to promote within this country. And, yeah, it was just hilarious to see the two sides basically go head to head over crypto in the last 48 hours. So, yeah, SaB 121 as well, just to get a little bit more details on that.

Requires custodians to record customers digital assets as liabilities on their balance sheet. I'm quoting from a Jake Trevinsky tweet here. This has the practical effect of making it extremely prohibitive for responsible custodians to hold digital assets. Among other effects, it would result in onerous capital requirements against such assets. And this was, there was a little bit of a.

It's a small, nerdy, very victory, but there was this FASB change where you actually get to recognize crypto appropriately on balance sheets. That's why Coinbase got this sort of boost to their p and L on their income statement when they recorded earnings earlier. But I got to be honest, Celkis has been banging this drum forever. He's on the Twitter saying that there's just no future for crypto in the US if the Dems win. I gotta be honest, it's looking like he's right.

I don't really understand the logic at this point coming out of the Democrat side. Number one, Celkis did an incredible job in Mar a Lago last night. Definitely a little golf clap for the boy. He gave a speech of some sort prophesizing about what a trump administration would look like for crypto, saying nice things about the big guy in the industry. And I think that's kind of what we need here, like, when the next collect trump card series comes out, the industry needs to go hard.

Vance Spencer

Michael and I will certainly be buying them as collectors, but I think you can kind of see some of the subtext seem to be like, the wheels are turning in Donald's head. He's like, I can sell these things. There's no cost to produce them. There's a lot of people who are willing to buy them, and they'll buy them for, you know, five to $10,000 pop. That is something that doesn't really happen.

You know, he's selling bibles for $60 each. He's selling a hat for, you know, $15. Like. Like, I'm serious. It's.

It is kind of a different paradigm for selling merch, where you can't sell a hat for $5,000 will literally come for you if you try to do that. It also doesn't cost anything to create these. And that, I mean, fault him for every single thing that he's done. He is a merchandiser, and he recognizes what. Yep, he's got Trump steaks, got Trump wine.

I mean, but this is probably the highest margin item that he can possibly sell.

But it's. It's just amazing to see. It's. It's probably hard for people to imagine, after four years of max regulatory pressure, what a pro crypto administration would look like. And it looks like it's going to be absolutely lit.

You're going to see, I think, I mean, like, if you just go sector by sector. Imagine a defi sandbox where banks can interact on chain. Imagine games that can sell on chain assets that are not deemed to be gambling. Imagine all these different token projects. Get ETF's.

There is a max positive scenario here that people are not considering. That, I think is actually the most likely scenario if you consider where the presidential betting markets are. I don't know. It never made sense to Michael Rye. The shorter cycle thesis you're playing for 2024, an election year where nobody knows what's going to happen, the status quo is going to persist, but 2025 is going to be pretty incredible in my view.

Michael Anderson

I'm a lot. I agree with that. I agree with that viewpoint. And, you know, politics aside, like, honestly, I'm not a huge fan of either one of these candidates, but at a certain point, you know, the financial incentives just get too. Too crazy.

Like, if you work in this industry, it's just like, I don't know, man. This is always salk as his line. Like, I don't want to leave the US. I love the US. I don't want to go abroad.

But, you know, you guys were the ones who flag this to me, like probably like six months ago, about the amount of founders that you guys are seeding outside of the US versus inside. All you have to do is look at conferences. Like, look at the, like token 2049 ascendant because no one wants to do conferences in the, all the US conferences are getting smoked. It's like consensus. And the bitcoin conference, permissionless was tough year last year because can't get the founders of the protocols or word.

They're going to get put in jail if they stepped foot in you, in the US. That's nuts. That's nuts. So nuts. Like, people are imagining that they're going to step off the plane and be carted away by any number of three letter agencies.

But that's not even an imagination. That happened. That happened. Remember Mainnet in 2021, Do Kuan. Exactly.

Vance Spencer

This stuff isn't. You might have had it coming. You might have had it coming.

Very fine. People on both sides. Okay, dude. All right, you know what? To go down a little tangent.

Michael Anderson

So I was going down, I like to listen to old podcasts every once in a while to just get a sense of, like, what people were thinking at the time. I went back and listened to some old up only episodes. If you want to just get a sense of how differently people were thinking in 2021, just go back and listen to some up only episodes when that time period, man, what's the vibe, bro? In it, it's like these guys are laughing about no one knows what it, there was. I listened this one, they were talking about Axie, and there, everyone was laughing about how no one knows what the token does, but, like, it keeps going up forever.

And, you know, there's like, I can't even remembers, like, one subset of the token was rare. The other. And the other one is like, no, dude, the alpha's. You buy the rare token. And I remember listening to it at the time being like, fuck, that is some good alpha.

I'm like, this shit is so stupid. This shit is so stupid. But it's just, it's. And then I listened to an episode with Sam from Albedo, and he was giving his, like, dogecoin Alpha, which, you know, I listened to these as they were coming out, and I remember thinking like, man, this is really smart. Now it's just like, dude, you want.

Vance Spencer

To hear some contemporary view on that? Yeah. So meme coins, we've beat this horse to death, basically. We don't need to reflog it. But there is an argument that meme coins are like the Super Saiyan of speculation, the final form of what we're going to be trading forever.

Okay, go back and listen to NFT podcasts back then.

Look, I think Ansem has become this all powerful figure in the space. I think he's going to continue to do well. But there is a chance that the meme coin people look like the NFT people in a couple of years. Yeah, you know, maybe it's not 50%. Maybe.

Maybe it's 20 or 30%. But like, NFt Nick choose rich. Like, that arc could be coming for any number of people, you know, that are, that are the meme coin folks at the current point. So we'll see. It's just hard to tell.

These things will age. So here's one additional nuance, maybe, is that even if maybe there are a couple, like, dogecoin is actually stuck around. Dogecoin is one of these rare assets that's actually, like, outperformed bitcoin across multiple cycles. So maybe there are a couple of meme coins like Doge or, or whiff or whatever MAGA is crushing right now. But it's not going to be like these thousands of meme coins I saw on pump fun.

Michael Anderson

It was like, shoot, I want to actually get this right, but it's like thousands of new coins are being minted per, per day, and that's just not sustained. Like, this is what always collapses. This is what collapsed the NFT bubble, too. It's the cost of bringing on new supply so low. Yeah.

Vance Spencer

So we, we got asked by somebody, uh, like what, what were the, what are the most common mistakes in crypto investing? Uh, and I think one of them is the, the annualizer, you know? Yes, dude. Yes. Reach fans.

Yes. We made 2 million in revenue today, and so we are going to make a billion in revenue this year. It's like, no, no, no, no. That don't work like that. If you're selling, like, groceries, you can annualize it.

If you're selling meme coins, there could be some seasonality to that. Or if you're selling meme coins and it's a daily process, you can't extrapolate this over the week, over the month, over the year. There are some pretty hilarious extrapolations going on. But yes, the annualizer is definitely one of the things that you cannot do. You know, people bought uniswap.

Michael Anderson

People bought opensea at $13.9 billion, 14.5 was the secondary. And then it went down 99%. There are market corrections in this industry. Not to throw shots at the pumped up fun team. We like them, we think they're cool guys, but it's just worth considering with all of these things, how they will age.

Vance Spencer

Can you annualize them? What's the seasonality or repeatability of that business just bears paying attention to? Speaking of Axie, I think some of the worst takes out of the 2021 era were the annual lizoring of the Axie revenue. Do you remember people were comparing it to blizzard? Like, blizzard driven.

Michael Anderson

It's not that off. I mean, I was just, I was pretty nuts. You can also fall into a trap. I've noticed some investors who want to be metrics driven and like, hey, we're different and we invest based on income and revenue and that type of thing, and those people fall prey to the annualized oring, you know, like, look, these revenues are real. And then it's like, oh, yeah, they're.

But they're down 98% eventually. Yep. It's, I mean, it's tough. It's tough to be fundamentally metrics driven in a bull market where things are maybe not quite what they seem. So here's a question for you guys.

Speaking of, well, actually, is there any good explanation for opensea? I have yet to hear that was such a dominant, you know, whatever you think about nfTs, and honestly, I was super wrong going into this year about them coming back, but they were really dominant. There is still a bunch of NFT trading that goes on like blur ended up eating that market share. Tensor was doing really well there. Magic Eden is crushing.

What happened to open. I just haven't heard a satisfying explanation for that fall. I mean, I think that, I mean, you really do need to listen to those podcasts from back in the day to understand just how cool meme coins were to juxtapose just how cringe they are today and understand that the delta there. NfTs. Yeah.

Vance Spencer

And you had basically crypto punks and bored apes kind of powering the market. And specifically on the bored apes side, you had all these celebrities like Eminem had one, has his profile picture. Steph Curry had one. Tyrese Halliburton had one in his profile picture picture. Also shout out to Tyrese Halberdin, we've spent time with the men.

Nice guy, likes crypto. But it was just kind of like a more, you can kind of draw some parallels to meme coins where, like, they had pictures on them. You know, it was just like a little bit more retail friendly. Yep. Even if they were a lot more inefficient as a speculative mechanism, like you'd need to find one buyer for your one NFT.

You know, they persisted, but once it crested, like, it was just kind of over. And I think, like, you can kind of think about blur is one of the factors that impacted them and just brought liquidity and efficiency to a market that was retail oriented and very inefficient. And that's what I wonder about meme coins. Is there something that's going to make it ten times more efficient that's going to brick the market writ large? What could that be?

One of them is just the amount of meme coins that are issued. Like, that's one thing that we saw with NFTs was like, I never one of one of our friends we won't name was like, you know, we got the rights for Bob Dylan nfts. We're like, dude, nobody wants to buy Bob Dylan's nfts. He's like, it doesn't matter. Like we're going to send it.

It's like, okay. Once you just see the volume pick up, then you have the fragmenting of attention. The rotations get quicker and that's kind of like the beginning of the end. And the other one would be some sort of like different liquidity paradigm where maybe like the pump fund bonding curve gets transfigured some way and they put leverage in it and like, the rotations become quicker. That would be the other one, I would say.

Michael Anderson

Just to piggyback off of that, I remember very distinctly there was a flow arc as well. Remember top shots, all the top shots. And there, there was this moment where everybody was starting to, like, bid on these top shots. It was the first season that they had all come out every, like, they were trading at, you know, hundreds to thousands of dollars and everyone was like, well, wait, what if they create more? And they wouldn't do that.

They wouldn't do that. They wouldn't do that to us. But lo and behold, there were more top shots the following season, and the following season after that, and the following season after that. And so the supply effect ultimately has the same effect. If you ever seen that chart of like, the bouncing ball, it bounces and then it bounces and then bounces and just slowly dissipates in terms of energy going forward.

I think that that is one of those elements that ultimately we're going to start to see play out with the denominator effect in crypto. The other thing too, and this is something we've been talking about a lot more recently. But just like the comparison and sort of the mid curve to bring it back to bell curve perspectives of everything crypto that, that relates to another type of business, another type of company that exists outside of crypto. And I think Opensea is that perfect example of something where you have a bunch of people who don't understand this industry super well, who are just like, oh, let me put, like, my understanding of the world on this industry. This is, this opensea is ebay for NFTs.

And I know what ebay is. I know what that business is. I know how well it can do. And let me just, like, go and put this, like, plastic casing around it. And, you know, it seemed to be the ebay of the world.

And the thing that I keep coming back to is every single thing that has done well in crypto is something that is not a pleasurable in the real world. And it's not something that you can just say, oh, it's this for that. Oh, it's this for the other thing. And I think that that's something, you know, one of the big lessons that we have at framework is you have to be something that's genuine and new and different, because anything that is applicable in the real world is frankly just like, not going to succeed in this industry. And that throws people for a loop.

And it also makes people very furious and people have lost money betting the other side. But I think that that's one of the north stars that we have as well. Let me piggyback on that and say that when Coca Cola and Coachella started issuing nfts, that's kind of when it turned from based to cringe. And I think that's like a symbolic market turning point. When you see some of these big corporations issue a meme coin, I think that's when it's kind of like the hour grows late for meme corners.

Vance Spencer

But, yeah, there's a lot of time between here and then, um, I do think meme coins are a little bit more durable because they're like this, like, crypto native thing that bizarre, you know, nothing, nothing lasts forever. And the, the amount of meme coins just means, like, the attention's fracturing and it's like you're kind of trying to like, no, no, no, don't look over there. Don't look over here, like, concentrate on dog with fat. But the problem with that is that there's always a market for being early. So, you know, it's tough to scale those incentives, basically, across more and more meme coins and more and more participants.

Michael Anderson

I'm 100% in that camp. And Michael, to your point about this, is Yano and I talk about this a lot, too. Just having hired a bunch of people at blockworks over the years, people come in with whatever industry background knowledge that they have and try to jam that worldview onto crypto. And a good amount of people never make the full bridge into just accepting crypto for what it is and betting on things that are net new instead of skeuomorphic. Some people just, frankly, never bridge that gap.

And like, one example we talk about being applicable to media. It's YouTube was a new thing, and it wasn't. It's not like the Don lemons that made YouTube big, right? It's like new people. It's mrbeast and PewDiepie and, like, whoever was making it big back in the day, right?

It's net new things and net new Star wars guy. Yeah. Right? Yeah, yeah. Or that guy in the woods.

Yeah. Like, that's so I'm 100% on that page. 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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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, flood protocol, the optimal Dex aggregator.

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Michael Anderson

Moving to something that was a little bit topical that happened this last week. So friendtech did their airdrop and Fredtech for some period of time. They just grabbed an enormous amount of attention on crypto Twitter. They had, I think the things that they had going for them is one I think a lot of people in this industry believe in socialfi kind of writ large, but we're all a little bit skeptical on what the timeline is going to be for that happening. But some of the growth, the smart growth strategies I think that they leaned into was one they made it super easy to port over from Twitter, which is awesome.

And then also they leaned into the gambling thing. And you can speculate on your friends networks, which is we love doing that kind of stuff. And then they put a chat feature there, which I'm just going to go ahead and say, I'm not really sure that's particularly useful or a meaningful part of the product. I know it's ostensibly a big part of the product, but I don't think that's why anyone's using it. The mechanisms of the airdrop.

The mechanism of the airdrop I thought was pretty interesting because this just came off the back of igem. And I understand, honestly, I think they just sort of botched the communication of it a lot. But I understand why people were upset about that airdrop. And a huge part of it was the tokens weren't transferable. Only 5% was released in the first tranche out of a total of 15%.

They later bumped that up, but people were just not happy with that airdrop writ large. There's a geofencing and it seems like friendtech just counter positioned and they dropped 100% of the supply and there wasn't a big hullabaloo about it. You didn't hear about an intersubjective warp token. They were just like, here's the tokens. What do you guys think about front tech writ large and this airdrop strategy?

Well, it's funny, you know, some of the best ways of positioning yourself in this industry, in any industry actually, is just a counter position. And what that means is basically, whatever is the topic du jour of whatever the canonical example is of your watch strategy, your go to market strategy, whatever it may be, do the opposite, do the opposite by default, whatever it is that they are doing, do like literally the exact 180 degree difference. And that's sometimes mostly the best way of positioning yourself. The thing I'll say about crypto social or social fi, whatever we want to call it, is that I think that it will happen. I think we're going to have social fi or social on crypto.

The thing that people are kind of, like, missing, I think, with social fi is that there are extremely huge unlocks that happen at different infrastructure unlocks that were missing. And even when it comes to social on the Internet, there were 25 different social platforms before we had Facebook. And it wasn't just the fact that, okay, Facebook started college campuses. It wasn't just the fact that you had sort of like a mass appeal of social networks at that time, you did. But the unlock that happened with Facebook, and I think this goes kind of like underneath the surface, is that you had the ability to take photos on a digital camera and have it be a really easy upload experience.

And that's what enabled tabby, which was the viral loop that got people on social networks. It was extremely difficult back in the day to be able to put digital images on MySpace because nobody had digital cameras, nobody had the ability to upload those photos. And so I think we're still at that phase where we're waiting for that unlock on the infrastructure side to be able to enable people to actually have social experiences on the web three Internet. And I don't know what that's going to be exactly, but there's going to be some unlock where it's like, oh, I get it, boom, okay, we now have this. Maybe that's wallets, maybe that's signups, maybe that's the infrastructure capabilities of blockchain being cheaper, faster, more scalable.

But it's something that we don't have right now that's holding everything back. I mean, we're extremely biased in this perspective, but I think that it's going to be games as that conduit to bringing people into the web three ecosystem that has that ability to be social. And so it's going to be these community based social networks that ultimately become the forecasters, the broad based social networks of the world. But, yeah, I'm still waiting for that moment. Yeah, I think broadly, most of the ideas from prior cycles will actually work in the future, and that'll catch people off guard.

Vance Spencer

Like, people are like, you know, uh, web three gaming failed. It's like, no axie failed, and there weren't enough people on chain for it to even really matter. And so, like, you know, in the future, this is going to work. I would argue it is working right now or starting to work. Defi same thing.

It's like oh, you know, Defi Summer was so great, and blah, blah, blah. Is it ever going to come back? It's like, well, look, it's literally illegal for banks to touch crypto at the moment. And so, like, you know, the chances we get inflows outside of crypto natives are zero. But when that happens, DeFi will be 100 times the size.

And you can say that for each category and each use case, obviously, aside from the complete sideshow ones. And I think it's tempting for crypto natives to be like, x didn't work or y didn't work. There was friendster, there was MySpace, there was 100 social networks before Facebook came along. There was Webvan before there was Instacart. People were trying to figure out how Uber works, and then it was actually workable once there was a smartphone.

A lot of this stuff is just like, if we have 100 million people on chain, the likelihood for any application to work is probably ten times higher than it is today. And so I think you need to take the super long view and not get into this, like, jaded butthurt sentiment that I see so much on crypto Twitter, where it's like, oh, this product didn't work today. It's like, well, doesn't mean it's not going to work ever. It just means that this isn't the Mark Zuckerberg of this specific industry. The last thing I'll say is, like, how many successful social networks are there today?

Three? Maybe four. How many did it take to get there? 4000? Probably more.

You know, how many apps failed in the. Don't even want to know the answer to that. How many YC classes were there? What's the hit rate on those? Like, you're gonna see a lot of failures to get this.

Some successes. I think when you're. When you're in the venture mindset of seeing that, it makes more sense. But from the outside looking in, I get how that could be discouraging, but you gotta trust the process. I totally agree with that.

Michael Anderson

I actually, I was listening to his podcast, I'd like. It's called alfalfa pod. It's a little. Maybe a little bit of a niche reference there. I like that one.

Yeah, I think you might have. I think you put me onto it, actually, a while ago, and I've been tuning in, and they were all debating this article that Lyn Alden put out about the returns of different asset classes over the years. And there's a discussion between bitcoin and. I'm sorry, between gold versus stocks. Equities trounce everything, but it's like 2% of the equities end up generating all the returns.

It's just tricky. That's why everyone loves indexing, but we just need to take more shots on goal. But I think you also bring up a really good point around the hardware. What do you guys think about. We didn't talk about this on the show, but about a month ago, Sui came out with a handheld gaming device, and crypto company like Solana came out with Saga, their hardware device and phone.

And these have been met extremely skeptically for pretty good reason. From what I understand about the Sui gaming device, it's been entirely outsourced, which I think is really hard to do and come out with a competitive product. But I I agree with you. I do look at this as big, baby. One of the things that we're missing is the hardware component to a company, what we're doing on the software side.

What do you guys. So that, that is the prime example, like, one of the prime examples that I had in my head of, like, what's the unlock that's going to enable this industry, this category, this application? So here's my take on you. You know, generally, like Saga versus, and the company that created the Sui handheld device is called Playtron. Playtron is an operating system company.

And, you know, all of this off the shelf hardware is OEM based. You can kind of build it. You can piece it together. It's not, like, super ingenious in terms of the hardware specifically. It's more, what is required is more about enabling the hardware to have the, the software that would be web three native.

And Playtron is building that operating system that will be web three native for games specifically. And if you really think about it, it's really hard. And this is, like, one of the shots against the iPhone. Way back in 2005, 2006, before the iPhone actually came out, one of the shots against the iPhone was the phone is the hardest thing to replace. You don't have multiple phones, I mean, unless you're a registered investment advisor with the SEC, like we are, and you have to have multiple phones, but.

You. Really don't have multiple phones. And so you're playing for a market of one of one. And phones are some of the most ingrained devices in our lifestyle just because it is the connection to other people and to the rest of the world. And so you're trading off one thing and trying to replace one thing versus something like an OEM device, game based device.

That, frankly, is something that's additional and that additional factor is a huge component. And being able to sell these handheld devices, I think in terms of web three gaming, and this is just a further point as to why games is that entree into web three ownership, web three nativity. I actually think the Playtron Sui device, and there will be other devices. Sui is the first one to have this device, and there will be other platforms that have this enabled as well. But just being able to have a game based device that ends around the Google Play Store, the Apple App Store, the 30% that they're charging to be able to have a web three native game experience is actually a really ingenious way of bringing people into web three ownership.

And I think it's going to be a game based device, and it's not something that, you know, is trying to replace your iPhone, because that's a really hard task. And, and imagine basically saying, hey, here's this Solana phone. Replace your iPhone or carry both devices around. Those are the two options. No one's actually going to do that.

Whereas if you have something where you say, okay, here's a game based device, you don't need to bring this with you everywhere. It's not something that's going to replace the connection that you have with other people in the world. It's something where if you have an extra 15 minutes, 20 minutes to be able to play this game, go off and play this game. It's a better experience if you play it on a handheld device. That I think is a much better side point.

Also, just the competencies of building a phone. It's just very difficult. I agree. Extremely hard. Yeah, it's really tough.

I guess the counter to that would be, I don't have the statistics off the top of my head for, like, game Boys or Nintendo Switch or PSP, but I would guess their market share is getting it eaten into by just kids that want to carry a phone. So it's tricky on both sides, you. Know, but is that. Is that a downside or is that a potential opportunity? Could be an opportunity.

I think that that's, you know, one of the other angles, too. It's like you don't have to sell, and that's the thing. It's like one for one. You have to sell tens of millions of phones to be able to have a market share, to be able to have, you know, the distribution angle of making this phone relevant. Whereas on the, on the flip side, it can be a game that's additional.

Vance Spencer

It's a. It's a third feature in all the ecosystem applications that you own. So it's just a very different experience, I think. Yeah, I agree. I was thinking, and you know what the, this is one of the, I think this is why people get excited about social fi as well, is like this, the hardware, like why people oversubscribed to the saga phone.

Michael Anderson

Round two is, you know, bonk didn't airdrop for saga. Round one, people ended up like, people were like arbitraging the saga phone, which is hilarious. And then the next one ended up getting oversubscribed. And that's all very silly and it's very easy to look from the outside and say that's stupid and that's not a sustainable strategy. But that's what tokens get you to do at the beginning.

It helps you bootstrap that initial demand. And the idea is that hopefully you can take down these really entrenched incumbents with that initial bootstrapping. Well, and so I don't disagree with that as a strategy whatsoever. I still remember being able to take Uber pools across San Francisco for a dollar 50. This is exactly what every business does.

They want to incentivize you early on, have higher customer acquisition costs to be able to get you into the ecosystem. But this just goes back to the exact same example, which is what if you have a preloaded 20 different games on that game device as opposed to a phone instead of bonk? And instead of all the other application tokens that you have on a phone, you have game assets as something that subsidizes the entire purchase of that game device. This exact same example can work for games and for game based applications and tokens. And imagine being able to have a game based device that you get for free because you have three times it in terms of tokens that are launched preloaded on your device.

I think that there's going to be some really interesting hardware examples in this next cycle that we haven't really thought about. Yeah, completely agree. I remember those. I don't know if you guys ever bumped this guy named Scott Galloway. He was go like he created something that went semi viral this week around like young, young verse old and money transfers.

It was good. It was stuff we've talked about on the show before. It's like cost of buying a house is impossible. COVID was like a transfer of money from young to old, all this. But I remember actually he said a couple of years ago that an interesting strategy for some of the software companies out there like Spotify, would be to vertically integrate with a hardware provider like Sonos or something like that.

And it does end up being distribution in a sense, if you have a really valuable hardware product. This was the whole threat with Microsoft and antitrust back in the day. They had the computers and then they put the browser in there as the standard. I think that's the angle that the government ended up taking with them. But, yeah, I'm with you guys on the gaming front, too, by the way.

It's just the clearest. It's the. It's the clearest thing that people will want to play. And it's the easy, it's like the easiest line of sight applications to get millions of users. I think this is just.

We just need one to hit, honestly. So pixel's already. It. Like, this is already happening. People just don't notice it on CT because they are, they're not gaming people.

Vance Spencer

Like, increasingly, the crypto space, and we've talked about, this is fragmenting. There's the ETF buyers who are buying the majors. There's the gaming people who are playing the games. I guess the meme coin people are kind of the crypto people. I wouldn't say that's a different group of people.

But it's going to be hard for people to keep up with the industry progress as it continues to fragment. But Scott Galloway, to your point, he had this whole thing about, um, how it's hard to make money as a kid, as a young person. It's hard to buy a house, all this stuff. If I was broke today, you know what I would do? I would just go on crypto, Twitter and spend 16 hours a day on there, because it is the most egalitarian, alpha filled place that you can be.

And so if people are buttered or jaded about this cycle, I just don't get it. This is a. Also, in prior cycles, there was no airdrops, there was no free tokens for people. We were buying them in icos, like, so soft is my response to all of these people that are jaded at this point in the cycle. Incredibly soft.

Michael Anderson

How do you view this? I'd be curious, you guys, as veterans, having seen a bunch of these, like, do you think that this is a fundamentally different cycle? Like, is it, is this just like. A. Yeah, this is fundamentally different.

Vance Spencer

We've got ETF, we got a president saying, a former and potentially, I mean, probable future president, saying that he's cool with crypto. He likes it. We've been under attack for as long as this industry has been alive, and we've had basically no use cases either. Now we've got a bunch of use cases, we've got a bunch of developer activity. Sure, there's problems, there's scams, there's rugs, there's north korean people trying to steal money.

But look, I would take this cycle versus the others any day of the week. And sure, you're not quite as early. The easy money from being early is probably not. The 100,000 x's is no longer there. But the big money in terms of the institutions are starting to move in and do things at scale that's about to be made.

It's way different. I think one thing that we've touched on, but we haven't really, like, double clicked into is just like, the effect of what regulators are doing. And kind of the best way of analogizing it, I think, is imagine in the same way that interest rates are. Something that is just like a constant. Pressure on financial markets asset values, we have the exact same interest rate effect, which is a constant pressure that is ever present.

Michael Anderson

And you don't know where it's going to bubble up, and you don't know exactly how it's going to affect things, but it will constantly affect things in the same way for our industry. Where is this rate right now? Well, right now it's at the worst thing you could possibly imagine. Let's say it's like 15% interest rates. The Fed funds rate is 15% in crypto.

I'm just using that as an analogy. But right now, it has never been worse to be in crypto in the United States. And so any sort of relief, any sort of movement on that front is just going to have the most massive effect in terms of what's the terminal value, what's the potential of this industry, where are things going? And that, I think we kind of joke. It's like, okay, well, there are people who are pro crypto.

There are people who are anti crypto. I do actually think it's kind of an existential question for this industry in the United States, particularly as to who is in charge. And looking forward into November, I think it's very obvious as to who is pro, who is not. But that will have a major effect. And I think once people start to actually recognize that in terms of where things are moving, where the political winds are changing, that will actually be a catalyst for the entire industry.

Just, even just the recognition of it. It's not the actualization necessarily, but the recognition of it will be something that moves markets as well. Do you guys think you also hear. From, from LP's and, like, Michael was at this traditional finance conference called Medici this week, and we've been talking to a lot of LP's recently. And, like, they think about this probably more than even industry participants, where they're like, is this, like, is this, like, legal?

Vance Spencer

Is this gonna get banned? Is this, you know, is this, like, kosher? And it comes. The tone comes from the top of the US government, but if that flips, you gotta watch out. It's gonna get pretty interesting.

Michael Anderson

Yeah. Also, I do think the black rock stuff, there's the effect of the actual flows, but I mean, come on. I mean, that's just. That's. That's different.

Vance Spencer

Black Blackrock puts to bed the whole. FTX debacle and everything that happened in 2022. And that. That's a massive thing. Don't get me wrong.

Michael Anderson

I think it's becoming very obvious that we won't see any more movement on that front until there's a new administration. Yeah. It's not going to be a bunch of different ETF. It's not going to be positive movement in the tokenization front. All the different things that we hope and want for this industry are not going to happen until there's a new administration.

Yeah. Do you guys think that even if we were to. Michael, to use your analogy of lowering the crypto fed funds down from 15% to 2%, has some amount of activity been permanently pushed out of the US? Like, I don't know. Just one thing that I have been thinking about is, you know, we used to.

I know, like, we're a media company. I think a lot about conferences and audiences and where they live. We've. We've hosted conferences going back to the first one that we did in London was 20. It was 2020, because it was like a month before COVID But there was no scene there.

There was nothing. We actually. We decided at one point to stop doing it because we were like, London is dead as a crypto play. Like, Europe. There are some people here, but it's not huge now.

I think the conference spaces that, like, we're going to Das London was the biggest one we've ever done. Like, we're going to keep doing that year over year. There's ECC now. It feels like it's easier to get an audience in Europe than it is in the US at the current moment. And at a certain point, there's just, like, momentum and mass, and people have moved out there and then they don't want to move back.

Do you been pushed out? Or is it. If it were to all reverse tomorrow with Trump, then it would revert to. I think you would revert. It would revert.

Vance Spencer

Look, just like you saw London as a dead spot. And now it is not a function of that is price action. And I think sentiment follows price. And the moment you see BTC above 100k, it's going to be this global reactivation of the industry, and it'll be homogenous in some ways. And then it depends on, think about people like Hayden, think about people like us.

Think about people like Andreessen or the paradigm guys. To the extent that crypto continues to work, this is going to be a rising tide that lifts all boats. And those people are going to rep the US hard. And more founders will be interested and there will be more companies that get started and blah, blah, blah. But keep in mind that the US capital markets and the US banking system are the envy of the entire world.

And if those get connected to this industry via some sort of regulatory framework, and if the ETF's continue to be these things that are dictating which way the markets move and we get more of those, the US is going to be the center of the universe once more, just like it was in the 2021 run. So I also think there's positive benefits to having the industry be globally dispersed. There's kind of this crypto diaspora that's spread. And I think it's just like another step on the path to crypto dominating the zeitgeist in the capital markets. But it'll take a little bit.

It's not going to be like Trump gets elected and it turns back on. There's going to need to be some follow through from the regulatory perspective or no follow through. And we just say, we don't need laws for this stuff. We know they're not securities, maybe they're commodities, but we're going to kind of leave it alone. And that will be enough to kind of push the US back to the forefront.

Michael Anderson

On Monday, actually had breakfast with a congressperson who is running for Senate here in California. And one of the conversations that we had was basically about this global dominance versus what we would consider to be a national imperative to be able to have this industry exist here at the United States. And we're starting to see the ripple effects of Trump being pro as candidate. I think it's very obvious for a lot of these other candidates, they're either congressional or senatorial candidates, that this industry needs to exist here. And anyone who's willing to listen to that perspective, I think is receptive.

To the idea that if we lose out on the global competitiveness of the United States, also California, it is a potentially dangerous thing in a lot of ways. But the analogy that I did was I grew up in Palo Alto, kind of that epicenter of the tech industry and the venture capital industry, and there was this kind of famous adage from Don Valentine, who started Sequoia Capital, and he said, if I can't walk to the office of the company that we're investing in, I don't want to invest. And that was from Sandhill Road in Menlo park. And being able to say, hey, I want to be able to walk to the startup. And now it's actually pretty interesting because the conversation that we have with founders is like, basically, okay, you exist in California, you exist in the United States.

Are you ready to move? Are you ready to get out of here? And I think that narrative is something that really resonates, because in this particular instance, this candidate is potentially going to be the senator for California. And recognizing where the economy of California sits. And a lot of that, if you throw a stone 20 miles from Sand Hill Road right now, 80% of the Nasdaq exists right there.

And so that, I think, is just a recognition that if we lose this industry, it's a potentially national imperative for us as a country to be able to have that growth industry here. People are trying to recognize this, but it's something that is potentially disastrous if we lose it. I agree. I also think that the other thing I would say is, if you look at the history of technology, it's not the first or the second or the third iteration that ultimately ends up winning. And the size of the outcomes of the ones that do win are ten times, 100 times larger than the first iterations of it.

Think about MySpace. Think about friendster versus Facebook. And so a lot of the things that will succeed are going to just be so much larger than the ones that exist right now. Yeah. And on the sab 121 rule repeal, which is basically like this politicized crypto rule that we're trying to get overturned, there's 21 House Democrats that broke with their party to vote for it.

Vance Spencer

Like, the political work that's being done behind the scenes is starting to work, and it's easy to forget. But making payments on the Internet used to be illegal. Cryptography used to be classified as munitions grade weaponry, and you couldn't send it over the Internet. You need to fax cryptography to people. And so, like, you know, history doesn't rhyme or doesn't repeat.

But it does rhyme. And so I think we're in that part of the industry's j curve at the moment. Yeah, there's a cool story about. So pretty good privacy. PGP is this standard for encryption.

Michael Anderson

Who was the guy that invented. There was a guy, the PGP inventor, this guy, Philip Zimmerman. So when he invented this standard, which is literally just lines of code, and he was worried about this getting classified as munitions, great weaponry, he created a t shirt. He put his code on a t shirt and then walked across the border, got arrested, ended up going through a huge legal battle and then ended up going, now that that's a guy that's got balls and conviction is, frankly, it's just a cool piece of lore in terms of how this ended up playing out. But you probably do need some people like that to seriously push the envelope and get people to think differently about this stuff.

Vance Spencer

Oh, we've had a number of those. Some good, some bad. I do think generally we're going to need to do some work for people like Roman Storm and Tornado Cash, Ross Ulbricht and the Pirate Bay. There's a lot of people who will be looking at probable prison sentences from the industry who are, I think, at least good actors. And I hope over the long enough time frame for the industry is that we can get people like that pardoned, because they may not be the exact people that are building the consumer apps, but they made important ideological stances when it mattered and they're currently being punished for it.

So I think that's the other hope that we have is hopefully we free those people at some point. Agreed. Hard agree. So I got one more thing. I wanted to just do a brief update on Ethereum here, because something that stuck out to me.

Michael Anderson

So Coinbase released their, released their earnings like last week or a couple of weeks ago, and they break out their trading volume by asset. And the Ethereum one stuck out to me 1 second. It's like the lowest it's ever been the percentage of ETH trading. And I feel like Ethereum right now is. Vance, you used this phrase, I don't know, months ago about needing to, basically everyone needing to like, get their pitchforks out and say that super bearish for something to.

For us to finally get bullish on it again. And I'm sorry, I think I'm starting to wonder if we're getting close to that with Ethereum. So if you're following along here, you can see that trading volume, percentage of the total for Coinbase, and it's gone down over time. With bitcoin as well. But Ethereum, you know, at one point there was almost parity between Ethereum and bitcoin, 33% versus 35.

And now bitcoin's gone from Q 420 22, uh, like a year later, bitcoin went from 35 to 31, ETH went from 33% to 15%. But I don't know, I just think that that wall of worry, like the market is ready to climb that for Ethereum. And part of the reason I was calling this out today, I read Vitalik put out a blog post on multidimensional fee markets for Ethereum. So this has been something that's been talked about for a really long time. And I think there are a couple of like big tech improvements coming down the line for Ethereum.

So we've been talking a lot about Eigen layer recently, and everyone's excited about it being a way for ETH to attract more yield and secure more chains outside of ETH. But also I think there's an element that people are under appreciating, which is the native restaking apparatus, which is basically Ethereum validators being able to opt into performing more tasks for within like Ethereum validation. So that unlocks things like single slot finality, that unlocks things like stateless clock, like all this stuff that would have been very, very difficult beforehand. And I don't know, I just sometimes just need to read a little bit of Vitalik stuff to get you pumped up and be like, wow, the tech. Here is actually sick and the technology is improving.

The tech is improving. I think. I feel like we're sleeping on it a little bit. You know, I, I mean, what usually happens is that, uh, everyone gets bearish on something until they realize they're drastically underexposed, and then they have to like, pivot and do a 180 and then it reverses. Um, and, you know, the EF is starting to ship, be it the multi dimensional gas pricing, um, be it any number of initiatives we've kind of heard rumors about.

Vance Spencer

Like, that's kind of how they tend to respond to things. And I think the volume stuff specifically is probably more of a function of the ETF and the flows there. And we're believers that these ETF flows are driving the direction of the market. And it doesn't really make sense to fade the only other asset that's going to happen, ETF, in the next three years, if you believe that the ETF flows are what is driving the market. And I think that's the number one factor.

And maybe macro is a very distant number two, then it makes sense for ETH to be lagging, but also be something that's next up. And what's the timeline for an ETF? I mean, the 23 may, we'll see kind of what happens. Seems like the market is like basically zero chance for this to transpire. But that approval process, frankly, is less relevant than who wins the presidential election.

Because if Trump wins, there's not going to be this. Let's review it and let's see these lawsuits and blah, blah, blah, lawsuits get dropped. The ETF gets approved. It happens in pretty short order. Interest rates go down, interest rates go.

Down, and price drives narrative and flows drive price, and all that stuff kind of picks back up. But I think you're going to see the majors do well because they're within this, as we talked about, regulatorily approved framework. And I think things like Solana and things like, I guess like Matic are kind of like the next ones. But next means like a few years probably at a minimum. And I didn't actually mean interest rates.

Michael Anderson

I meant like the proverbial interest rates of the industry go down. But the point here is so ethereum futures markets have been live for three years now, and the futures markets are the indication of whether or not we're going to have a spot ETF. And thats basically the entire math and the entire reason why the lawsuit against the SEC from Braysdale went live. But we dont have any futures markets other than ethereum and bitcoin right now. We literally have to have the clock start whenever theres a futures market for another asset.

And right now, that timeline is two and a half to three years. I think this is the other aspect of this industry, which is there's nobody else who's coming through the door other than Ethereum for this ETF opportunity for at least the next two to three years. And right now, the math is pretty robust. It's going to be really interesting on the 23rd or the 24th to see what that reasoning is for the SEC, but expect that there will be some lawsuits that are filed probably within the next ten days after that. Last thing I'll say is basically every asset has had trouble keeping up with bitcoin, even this year.

Vance Spencer

Sol BTC is flat to down, Sol ETH is basically flat to down. And then alts have gotten cooked for negative 50% drawdowns this year. There is this perception versus reality thing. I think the reality is that, by and large, things haven't really moved a ton this year after that first couple months of price action. I think you just need to take the long view on basically all of these assets.

But we are optimizing towards a future where the things that have ETF flows are going to be the ones that perform the best. And you're not going to see this homogenous rising tide lifts all boats. I think we've been proven right on that so far. Polygon is still basically at the lows of the 2022 cycle. And you kind of see there's this invisible, maybe like $20 to $30 billion ceiling that alts kind of can't really get past in terms of FTV.

And we don't expect that to change unless those things get. Get ETF's and get approved, or you have something anomalous, like people buying the unlocks for soul. But again, a lot of those unlocks restart next March. So a lot of these things are going to struggle with these overhangs unless they have an ETF or they're perceived to have one in the near future. Yeah.

Michael Anderson

You know what else? I think ETH is the first major smart contract platform to really struggle with this. But I think it's a challenge that every smart contract platform is going to have to struggle with, which it's actually what you were describing, Vance, about the fragmentation of attention in the meme coin ecosystem. ETH has that problem a little bit because it's like, because ETH was so successful and attracted so many developers, now you've got all these l two s that you could bet on, or most of the apps are on Ethereum, and it's like, well, it's like the right curve way of exactly that same problem, right? Like, the left curve in the meme coin is like, no, focus on my Dogwiff hat instead of whatever meme coin and ETH, it's like, what?

ETH is really good instead of like, arbitrary optimism or whatever, but it's the same challenge as the fragmentation of attention and. But that, I think ethos is the first one to, like, really deal with that, because ultimately that's going to happen to Solana as well, and all these other. I think it's going to happen to every chain. Totally. You can, you can scale your chain to be free if you want it to, but you still need to deal with the incentive problem of if you're an l two, you're more highly valued than an application on an l one.

Vance Spencer

And so I think, like, when. When is it going to get really bullish? And when is the thesis going to, like, restart? It's when the blob market probably picks back up and starts to get. It's like, oh shit.

ETH has scaled, it's still generating revenue and the blobs are generating a lot of fees for the main chain. People can be like, oh shit, this works. And I think you're going to see that for probably a few different ecosystems, whether it be ETH or whether it be bitcoin or whether it be, who knows, maybe even cosmos, that will be the architectural model for the asset to accrue. And yet it scales not just from a cost perspective, but from an incentive perspective. Because one example is all the meme coins that are going on in Solana and pumped out fun as being the creator of a lot of them, do you think those meme coins are proprietary to Solana or pumped out fun?

I would say probably pumped out fun. And so this is the same thing would happen with ETH NFTs and I guess to a lesser extent, like Ethi, which hasn't really been replicated as much, but like, everyone will have to deal with this issue of like, what happens when these things start leaving our chain for a higher valuation or a different value capture mechanism. And it's probably better to front run that versus, you know, having to respond when they create their own l one.

Michael Anderson

Actually, I do want to amend my original statement to say that bitcoin had to deal with the fragmentation of attention too, to ethanol, the other chains. That's why the bitcoiners hate. That's the OG reason why they hate all this shit, which is, I guess, kind of funny. But yeah, they all wanted us to build on lightning, but there's not really an incentive compatible way to do that for many of these applications with their own token. We should do an episode at some point with Eric Wall, because lightning.

I sat next to Victor Boone, shout out Victoria on, like, my flight to ETH Denver, and he explained lightning to me. I'm not gonna. I'll be honest, I've never, like, dug really hardcore into how it works. But he was the guy who pushed forward the lightning integration at Coinbase. And the more you really discover about how lightning works, like, how did anyone ever push this as a solution?

This is insane. I. I don't know. I don't want to be a hater, but, like, maybe we should just do an obituary and just call it, this was not the right model, and then we can, you know, try to actually scale through other models that work. But yeah, lightning seems a little convoluted to maybe end in a more diplomatic way.

Vance Spencer

No bad ideas. Yeah, you're right. No bad ideas. Just bad timing. Yeah, exactly.

Michael Anderson

All right, fellas, I think this is a probably good place to end it. This was a fun one. Later. Cheers. Hey, everyone.

Mike Ippolito

Mike here. If you're a bell curve listener, you know that transferring assets across chains can be a massive pain. I certainly do. 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 get your free NFT.

Will Crypto Leave the US? | Roundup

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1: Introduction to the Crypto Landscape

2: Political Influences and Market Predictions

3: Legislative Developments and Their Impacts

4: Future of Crypto in the U.S.

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