What's your take on that? How does that look like to you for someone who's been in the industry for such a long time, who's seen these meme coin manias come and go? What are your thoughts when you look at Robinhood chain?

So I think that with anything in crypto or markets in general, specifically crypto, you see this first hype bubble.

in any thing, right? We had the DeFi summer for those who remember when literally DeFi at that point wasn't talking about yield and loans and, you know, institutions finding 4% yield for the customers.

We were talking about farming yams to trade them for tacos, to trade them for potatoes, for whatever other nonsense, right? And that was sort of the first iteration of DeFi and it had its hype cycle and it collapsed.

We saw it with NFTs.

We saw it when...

Facebook rebranded to Meta and all of a sudden anything in crypto that had a Metaverse attachment went absolutely nuts.

How do you look at that Layer 1 landscape also from your perspective as a Bitcoiner? How will all of this play out? Will we even have Layer 1s in the future or will it just merge into, well, Bitcoin?

There was a lot

of bankruptcies as well.

I mean, BitMEX closed, AscendX closed, BitMart now is arguably insolvent, Movement Labs, Storage, bankruptcies.

I mean, really bad.

Movement Labs.

And I don't know.

You'd probably like to check your portfolio.

i mean for bullish bullish for bitcoin so let's talk about

So it almost seems like counter, uh, counter forces, but I just wanted to get your take on the overall financialization of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin.Uh, once again, I think that that's the inevitable process and the messy path that, that Jeff described.

So it's funny because when Jeff was speaking, I looked up one of my old tweets because I remember that I once made the unfortunate mistake of using the word co-opted in a tweet about Bitcoin, and I had to look it up to see because every Bitcoiner jumped down my throat.

This was in July of 2025.

I said, "Bitcoin's amazing, but it's obviously been co-opted to some degree by the very people that it was created as a hedge against.

Many of the most ardent early whales have seen their faith shaken and have been selling at these prices." So this was below...

It was a sub-tweet to me saying that we were seeing massive selling from early whales that said that they would never sell, which factually we can see on chain and was true.

To me, it looks bubbly and frothy, but maybe I'm wrong.

Can you give a few of them?

Yeah.

So first of all, like, I, I have high conviction in price, right? So, um, I, I think it's a superior way to store wealth.

When you know what you know about the central banks and the United States government and the way money is created, which I don't think most people do, uh, all of a sudden that volatility doesn't feel spe- like a, like a problem.

You don't feel like you're speculating.

Um, but I think there's also an element of it that is somewhat apolitical.

Um, it's a statement of your belief system.

Mm.

Scott, I did something from a conversation he'd had with Saylor himself, and it was striking.

He basically said to me, STRD, STRK, STR, all the other STRs.

He's like, I wish I had never created those or I had gotten to STRC first.

And I think that's actually part of the reason that we saw this flight from STRC initially and Sato was holding its value at par was because I think a lot of people went, well, Strive has the same product without any of the debt, without any of the convertible notes, with nothing encumbered, no leverage basically on it, and a day-to-day dividend being paid and a higher yield.

So if I'm going to take the risk, why don't I buy that one?

Scott agreed and put it in historical context.

We survived, you know, Mt. Cox, China Bands, FTX, Luna, Voyager, BlockFi, Celsius, you name it, Trump coin.

And countless leverage blow-ups.

Why, why do you think it's happening? And, I mean, I know we can't predict the future, but when you think about where we go from here, where is that?

So, uh, once again, I kind of remove Bitcoin from this, right? Because I think it's flown the coop, uh, to some degree as far as mainstream adoption, and I don't think you can talk about it the same way that you talk about crypto.

But I think a lot of people in crypto have been very depressed about altcoin performance, right? 'Cause even if you view this as part of the four-year cycle or even that we've had a Bitcoin cycle that made new all-time highs, we all know that 99.9% of the altcoin market didn't follow, right? They've effectively been in a sustained bear market, grinding down for five years now.

Absolutely brutal.

So, you know, for a while, we just believed it would happen, and maybe it still does.

There are tokens that do exceptionally well, but I think that it's for certain reasons.

But I think that what really happened is that, uh, maybe we can put it in terms of if we thought about Vegas, right? The early days of Vegas, uh, somebody put one casino in the middle of the desert.

How are you gonna talk to your kids about where we are financially?

Why, why do you think it's happening? And, I mean, I know we can't predict the future, but when you think about where we go from here, where is that?

So, uh, once again, I kind of remove Bitcoin from this, right? Because I think it's flown the coop, uh, to some degree as far as mainstream adoption, and I don't think you can talk about it the same way that you talk about crypto.

But I think a lot of people in crypto have been very depressed about altcoin performance, right? 'Cause even if you view this as part of the four-year cycle or even that we've had a Bitcoin cycle that made new all-time highs, we all know that 99.9% of the altcoin market didn't follow, right? They've effectively been in a sustained bear market, grinding down for five years now.

Absolutely brutal.

So, you know, for a while, we just believed it would happen, and maybe it still does.

There are tokens that do exceptionally well, but I think that it's for certain reasons.

But I think that what really happened is that, uh, maybe we can put it in terms of if we thought about Vegas, right? The early days of Vegas, uh, somebody put one casino in the middle of the desert.

Mm

What is your theory on altcoin season never coming?

I, I think, uh, altcoin season comes, but in a totally different iteration, uh, of what we've seen in the past.

So I think now you have sort of a have-and-have-not situation for the crypto market.

Have is anyone with an institutional element, so an ETF, treasury companies, uh, you know, a narrative around stable coins, whatever.

So let's call that Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, and maybe you can throw in an XRP or some others in there, depending on, on where you stand.

And then there's the everything else that's relying on crypto liquidity, uh, to catch a bid, and I think that we've seen that liquidity really dry up.

I think I have a lot of theories on why that's happened.

Of course.

How would they value crypto holdings and what protections would lenders have against price swings? Because, I mean, certainly just in Bitcoin, we've seen some massive price swings of late.

have seen some massive price swings in bitcoin of late but as i said it's actually been less volatile than most tech it trades 24 7 365 it's the most pristine collateral on the planet actually and you even see jp morgan making an announcement that they're going to count bitcoin and ethereum as collateral in your portfolio and start to take it this is the way that the puck is moving and obviously the housing market is just skating in that direction i think they're just going to give it the same haircut that they do to volatile stocks you know every stock is not created equal when it's considered a part of your portfolio when they consider a retirement account they don't consider it in the same way because obviously it has to be liquidated at a penalty volatility is something that underwriters eat for breakfast they know exactly how to do this it's just a matter of literally counting the asset so maybe the value of your bitcoin will be discounted 50 when they add it to the number that's a part of your net worth

Does that risk making affordability worse than it already is?

I don't think so.

I would love to believe that it will be that impactful on the market, but this isn't going to affect enough people, I think, to affect the entire housing market writ large.

What this does do, if you want an equivalent, imagine if you were holding Apple stock in 2005 and you didn't qualify for a mortgage but you would if that apple stock was cash and you were forced to sell it and take a taxable event to sell that and then show the cash that's what people have had to do so far so imagine selling your bitcoin at a price that you didn't want to just to show the cash in your account three months ahead of the approval taking the huge tax get hit just to eventually buy the bitcoin back after you qualify it's just clunky it's nonsense but no i don't think this will affect the housing market in general i think it just makes buying a house much easier for a huge part of the population and a lot of that remember is the younger people who have been largely locked out of the housing market in general now this gives them a chance to own a home as well because they're so passionate about these assets

But since we have a guest speaker fresh from Dubai at the airport, Mr. Scott Melker, I'd be curious to get your quick wrap on all the festivities at Token out in Dubai and what the vibe was like.

It gave me extreme FOMO that I was missing the show every day and couldn't discuss it.

After a 15 and a half hour flight, I decided to jump right on getting into a car from the airport.

It was very interesting this year, to be honest.

We've talked about the conference circuit in the past and how I use it generally as a gauge for the vibe of the market.

You'll all remember from listening to the show for the past years, every time we'd have a conference in the United States, obviously in the past administration, it was almost like going to a funeral.

You know, I remember consensus last year, maybe it was two years ago, and most of the booths were lawyers and accountants.

Yeah.