Latest / CRYPTO 101 / Ep. 675 Bull Market Portfolio Construction, Market Signals, and Emerging Narratives in Crypto

Transcript

Ep. 675 Bull Market Portfolio Construction, Market Signals, and Emerging Narratives in Crypto · CRYPTO 101

0:09
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, everybody, welcome back.
0:10
[SPEAKER_00]: I am Bryce.
0:12
[SPEAKER_00]: It's really, really been an exciting, exciting summit and we've got another great guest.
0:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Austin Baroque founder of Relayer Capital, which is an incredible crypto hedge fund.
0:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Austin, how are you doing?
0:26
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm doing well.
0:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for having me here, Bryce.
0:29
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the last time we chatted was one of the most fun conversations that I've had in these sorts of settings.
0:34
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm excited to kind of dig into some of the interesting things happening in the market today.
0:40
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, doing well.
0:41
[SPEAKER_01]: It's markets are creating lots of opportunities.
0:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no doubt.
0:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And I appreciate that.
0:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And as a full disclosure, everybody watching, I'm an investor or sorry, our hedge fund tower eighteen is invested in relay or capital.
0:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And Austin's one of our favorite managers that we have backed and it's just been incredible to see, you know,
1:02
[SPEAKER_00]: your growth.
1:02
[SPEAKER_00]: We were talking kind of before we got on here just catching up and all the different learnings that again, even as a professional, we're still continuing to refine our trading strategies and refine, you know, our risk management, all that kind of stuff.
1:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I want this conversation to be wide ranging.
1:17
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to talk a little bit about, you know, your background, your history, kind of
1:22
[SPEAKER_00]: becoming such a, you know, a force, a titan in the crypto industry.
1:26
[SPEAKER_00]: A little bit about your learnings, but I really do want to focus a lot of the conversation on what's hot now.
1:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Where's the market going?
1:32
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, narratives, metas, that whole thing, and we'll just kind of go back and forth.
1:38
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, Austin, tell the good citizens here, a crypto nation who are tuning in, meeting you for the first time, a little bit about who you are, just high level.
1:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, absolutely.
1:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And thank you, obviously, for the really nice compliment on the investor side and also for calling me a Titan.
1:53
[SPEAKER_01]: That's very generous.
1:55
[SPEAKER_01]: I aspire to be that sort of, you know, Titan in the head spun world and in crypto broadly.
2:04
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, to tell you a little bit about myself,
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[SPEAKER_01]: Started relaying our capital about a year and a half ago prior to that, I was a partner at Coinfund, where I invested across early stage liquid and ventures strategies.
2:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Was at Coinfund for four years, really from the early days, helping them scale up under Jake and Alex and Seth.
2:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Prior to that, I led strategy at twenty one shares, the crypto ETF issuer, which has some really interesting crossovers now that we're seeing so many ETFs come to market, having that perspective, and then before that started a borrowland protocol in the early days of defy, and then was an early employee at a cross border payments company called Pay and Year that, you know, it's fortunate enough to be a part of and
2:53
[SPEAKER_01]: kind of leads certain divisions there as it's scaled from a small start up to a NASDAQ public who has to accompany.
3:00
[SPEAKER_00]: epic.
3:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you've been every different spectrum of crypto investor from the liquid side to the illiquid side to working in the industry.
3:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Why did you even decide to come into crypto originally?
3:14
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you crypto was born in two thousand eight.
3:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Many people didn't even see it as an industry.
3:21
[SPEAKER_00]: What kind of wind did you get in and what was the pull factor?
3:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so it's kind of like there's a lot of pieces that pulled me in at different times.
3:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Just as a background for all of this, how do you unique upbringing?
3:36
[SPEAKER_01]: I started trading when I was ten years old and started investing.
3:42
[SPEAKER_01]: literally would get like the Wall Street Journal and there's a little not to age myself, but it was a little while ago.
3:47
[SPEAKER_01]: So you could get the Wall Street Journal delivered and read that in the morning before the markets opened and then look through ten cues and cays and then began trading options when I was sixteen.
4:00
[SPEAKER_01]: So really, really was fascinating by the idea that you can find these unique opportunities and
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[SPEAKER_01]: kind of scenario our situations where you can see something that the rest of the market does it and there's an opportunity to kind of be ahead of that and get in the weeds on interesting growth technology companies.
4:24
[SPEAKER_01]: I was an investing in like Exxon Mobile or Utilities, I was investing in solar energy and bio tech in emerging tech.
4:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, I ended up going to college to study finance, it's a banking and trading internships realized that that was kind of not what I wanted to really pursue, it found it not super interesting.
4:45
[SPEAKER_01]: So I went to work in cross-border payments because I was really more attracted to the technology side of things.
4:52
[SPEAKER_01]: So when I came across crypto, it was this
4:56
[SPEAKER_01]: This awesome combination of early stage tech and just fascinating things that we're being built with the ability to express views and invest in a public permissionless setting.
5:08
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's kind of what drew me in over time.
5:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I first came across Bitcoin actually in twenty thirteen.
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[SPEAKER_01]: My brother was invited to a poker game where the buyer was with Bitcoin.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And at that point, Bitcoin was forty dollars.
5:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow.
5:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I would like to win that pot.
5:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so he ended up winning that game.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then he calls me afterwards and it's like, so how do I receive this?
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[SPEAKER_01]: How do I set it up?
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[SPEAKER_01]: So we kind of dug into the weeds together.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I was just starting my job at the payments company.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, I followed Bitcoin tangentially, but it came across Ethereum in twenty sixteen and that's what really captured my imagination.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This
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[SPEAKER_01]: platform and protocol for programmable money on the internet and a new form of kind of trustless communication.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So got really in the weeds in sixteen and seventeen and then in twenty eighteen early twenty eighteen and like
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[SPEAKER_01]: true first cycle fashion decided to leave my job to go full time just as the markets were peaking yeah that's classic but yeah it's it's been a lot of different things pulling me into the industry over time but I couldn't imagine doing anything else
6:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and there's so many interesting cool aspects of it, and you mentioned Ethereum was really the thing that got you hooked, got you in, you realize the programmability of this.
6:30
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, I think what's so interesting, and when people ask me, what do you think is going to be the biggest sector, the biggest narrative, or whatever, I'm still hooked on DeFi.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I still think, because finance touches every industry.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so no matter what industry you're in, you're going to need financing or you're going to need money.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so to me, DeFi is still the end all be all, but I know a lot of people are still saying, or starting to say, AI is going to, you know, crypto and AI.
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[SPEAKER_00]: How do you kind of pair the two?
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[SPEAKER_00]: And even if you just, like, from a portfolio's management standpoint, like, do you think, okay, I want half the fund and DeFi, a quarter of the fund and AI?
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[SPEAKER_00]: How do you kind of pair all that in your portfolio management, too?
7:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so it's an interesting question.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I take a very fundamental thesis driven approach in investing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I invest heavily across DeFi, decentralized physical infrastructure, so deep in crypto meets AI crossover, broadly scalable infrastructure.
7:26
[SPEAKER_01]: But things evolve really quickly.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So you kind of have to be nimble and that's one of the benefits of liquid investing work.
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[SPEAKER_01]: you have the opportunity and I invest in venture as well and take that even longer view, but in liquid, you can buy in cell assets, you can be nimble.
7:41
[SPEAKER_01]: So it really depends on where the opportunities I see in the market are.
7:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Right now, I think the biggest opportunities are in DeFi.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We've had a little bit of a run-up recently where, you know, with a lot of these digital asset treasury deals, there's kind of like shiny objects in every single direction.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And DeFi had done really well in
8:01
[SPEAKER_01]: April may some of June as the market was recovering, but as we got into that next stage of market excitement, there was
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[SPEAKER_01]: what I like to call shiny object chasing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But the fundamentals on defy have only continued to improve.
8:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that next leg up is going to be driven there.
8:21
[SPEAKER_01]: And the really nice thing about defies, as you were saying, it's like at the end of the day, these were just a better accounting letter is what blockchains are.
8:29
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's a better way to make and, you know, receive and send payments.
8:33
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a better way to
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[SPEAKER_01]: kind of disintermediate and expand or upon the products that you would get from traditional entities like banks.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm a really big fan of borrowed ad protocols, you know, maple and particular oil or fluid, AAVA, Camino and others because they just have a really incredible amount of
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[SPEAKER_01]: user and activity stickiness where and that's one of the things that like you often like here people say that like well the reason that TVL is so high on the theory on versus Solana even though Decks volume is so much higher is because TVL is a lagging indicator
9:15
[SPEAKER_01]: because it's stickier, but like if it's stickier, let's really think about that and is that a huge opportunity for these sorts of protocols, these that's not as easy to unwind positions where you collateralize the NASA to borrow against it and you kind of built up your position from there or you're doing a leverage loop on another particular asset.
9:37
[SPEAKER_01]: So what I'm looking at right now are these protocols that have
9:41
[SPEAKER_01]: real stickiness from their customers, but are also generating lots of revenue and finding product market fed.
9:46
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, right now, borrowlands have found the most, you know, the highest take rate and the best revenue capture, you know, syrup, for example, this is maple finances token.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They were doing four million dollars of annualized revenue in
10:05
[SPEAKER_01]: March and now they're doing twenty million dollars of annualized revenue a couple months later they had
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[SPEAKER_01]: about five hundred million dollars of assets under management.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now there's three point two billion.
10:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Like we can get more into the mechanical rocket ship ride.
10:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's a rocket ship.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And we can get more into the mechanics of why they've done really well and why some of the others have done well.
10:26
[SPEAKER_01]: But that's one component that I'm really excited about.
10:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Also, I think Dex is beyond Uniswap because Uniswap has been like the grill in the room for a long time.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of interesting things that are happening there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: in emerging ecosystems.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Those are all great names that you need.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think every single coin that you listed off, I think I have exposure to in our fund as well.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I realized by the way, actually, only answered like half of your question.
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[SPEAKER_01]: One of the other things, these do are saying like, how do I think about portfolio construction?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I definitely want to be nimble, but I also think about it very much in what's the maximum exposure that I feel comfortable having for a particular
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[SPEAKER_01]: sector of the market.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And for certain sectors, they're more mature than others in a little bit further along the adoption arc.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I think you can feel comfortable with a higher concentration.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Because D-Fi, for example, because there's really cash flows that are backing it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, exactly.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So when you look at different verticals, I typically
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm comfortable having it go up to fifty percent of the portfolio, but not above there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: D five, I'm comfortable seeing it go as high as seventy five percent, but then I also have individual position limits and the reason this is.
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[SPEAKER_01]: as much as you try and be a long-term investor.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I mean, that's the lens through which I look at everything.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Often in market euphoria prices move way further than fundamentals.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And because you're a liquid investor, you have the opportunity to rebalance your portfolio and be prudent and take profits.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I think there's a whole bunch of different rules that I've put in place.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But I think this sort of structure
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[SPEAKER_01]: allows you to both continue to have exposure in the areas that you're most excited about but also be prudent around where you take profits and make sure that you don't have too much exposure to one name where it goes all the way up and then you know you can you know see it round trip
12:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah and I think you know one of one of my big lessons learned is exactly that like take profits when the market allows it especially in crypto because you need to understand like trading crypto especially when you're far out the risk curve trading some of these smaller cap assets like on an annualized basis they have like two hundred percent volatility or three hundred percent volatility meaning it could go up
12:47
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, expected, you know, a hundred times or it could go down ninety nine percent or whatever.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's like it's such a wide range of outcomes whereas like S&P five hundred is like a fifteen percent annualized volatility.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So it's like the range of expected outcomes are really small.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So it's like that's much more fit.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Like S&P like long-term investing don't trade around those positions.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Like you kind of have a greater understanding of clarity of like the path.
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[SPEAKER_00]: for that asset where is like with crypto that wide range basically just means there's so many unknowns and so when you do have the opportunity to sell when the prices you know two hundred or three hundred percent above it's two hundred day moving average is like that is like a key point
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[SPEAKER_00]: to take profits or whatever, or any sort of metric.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But I love what you say is like, that's the exorbitant privilege of being a liquid crypto investor.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You could actually capitalize on the markets, whereas a lot of these folks who are doing long venture lockups and stuff, they could see the market go up and they're still locked up for three years or whatever it is and can't capitalize.
13:51
[SPEAKER_00]: What other lessons from the bear market and the bull market of the past that you've kind of had?
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[SPEAKER_00]: What other lessons are super applicable to today's market environment?
14:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so, and by the way, I should have said this at the beginning, but caveat to everything I've said, and we'll say not financial advice.
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[SPEAKER_01]: My personal views, not the views of my fund.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, so there's a lot of learning lessons.
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[SPEAKER_01]: One, you know, thinking about like these discrete buckets and these discrete sizing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Another, and I think this is an edge that you can have when you're small.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And when you're like an emerging manager versus if you're like already a billion plus an AUM is the alpha in the market is
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[SPEAKER_01]: to be early and to take advantage of global liquidity.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Like, you need to understand where the real opportunities are.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I think, and also, of course, have a differentiated view that the market doesn't yet get and get really in the weeds and kind of getting to that thesis.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But I think that's a unique part of crypto markets versus public equity markets where smaller investors actually have an advantage to larger investors where if you're
15:02
[SPEAKER_01]: you know let's say putting in a five thousand dollar order you're not going to move the price much but say you want to say you're a five hundred million dollar fund and you want to buy five percent of the asset that's twenty five million dollars and if the asset itself is fifty million dollars like the numbers don't work you would just move the price too much so i think having these high conviction views but also
15:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Not really worrying if all right well now the liquidity is in super high doesn't have a lot of exchange listings like that's the opportunity to get in ahead of one the liquidity comes so really leaning into that and then another one is on on at least the the risk side of things there's a lot of signals that
15:47
[SPEAKER_01]: are the same across cycles.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then there's a lot of signals that rhyme.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And there's going to always be a reason to say, like, this time is different.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So you can't try to have everything match because you're going to say, like, oh, well, Coinbase needs to be the number one app in the app rankings.
16:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And that didn't happen.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But then we still had a big pullback after the
16:09
[SPEAKER_01]: the inauguration in January.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I think like there's a couple indicators that I found to be really high signal.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So one is just like longer timeframe fear and greed index.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This is pretty basic, but literally every time it gets into extreme greed, which is above eighty, and then false below there, it's always been a good time to sell.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And it goes below twenty.
16:35
[SPEAKER_01]: It's always been a good time to buy.
16:37
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm not saying it's like on a one hour, one day or one week time frame, but on a medium term, and often a short term time horizon, there's a lot of signal in that.
16:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you can look at how elevated our borrow rates on chain for the demand for capital, whereas open interest, so how much leverage is there in the system?
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[SPEAKER_01]: What are funding rates, or a reflection of derivatives activity?
17:02
[SPEAKER_01]: What's the
17:05
[SPEAKER_01]: relative market cap changes of different assets over time.
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[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of other things like this, and I have a laundry list.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Another one, and you can actually think about it across different cycles, not even just crypto.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The pace of asset creation.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So how many new tokens
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[SPEAKER_01]: are being created in a given period of time.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's something we saw with AI.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's like in December, January of December of last year in January of early this year.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was just an insane pace of new asset creation.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And kind of conversely, if you see really emerging signs, but you don't quite see the fundamentals there yet.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, are you early or is there not product market yet?
17:51
[SPEAKER_01]: So I know I'm kind of like touching on a bunch of different topics.
17:54
[SPEAKER_00]: It gives a lot of people, it gives people a lot of ammo to kind of go, you know, pause, you know, maybe watch the recording or whatever rewind it and kind of get a couple ideas in their mind like the fear and greed index.
18:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I love what you said about it is like
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[SPEAKER_00]: You know, to me, it's almost like an RSI or like some kind of momentum indicator.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's like when you hit the top sort of the top of that upper bound, people think, oh, it's overbought.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's good time to sell.
18:19
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's often time when the most momentum is there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's about when it exits that overbought, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's like when it just enters there, it could be there for a while.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And you see the craziest part of the run.
18:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Bingo yeah and people always just you know start shorting right when something gets over bottom like that's when momentum of the strongest you want to see that strong momentum start to wane and go back down so that's a really good sort of call out with with what a lot of people kind of miss you know have missed conceptions about with yeah one other thing that that I've learned that's pretty interesting is like
18:51
[SPEAKER_01]: the different role that Bitcoin has in the ecosystem that it's had traditionally, where in the past when they were large kind of market pullbacks, you'd see Bitcoin go down seventy eighty percent and not quite as much as all, but it would still go down a lot now because there's so many broader based forms of inflows, whether it's from like a microstrategy or ETF or sovereigns or otherwise,
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of decoupled from the rest of crypto.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And we saw that earlier this year where it didn't have the drawdown.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It went down like thirty percent when everything went down a lot more and actually held up well and was up before you knew it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I think it kind of creates this different paradigm where now it's a lot easier to think about.
19:36
[SPEAKER_01]: And this could always change tomorrow and of course, decouples and kind of sees that sort of downside.
19:43
[SPEAKER_01]: There's an opportunity, like, as you reach, like, as you're moving out of the extreme grid area, just, like, as an example with one indicator, you don't necessarily need to think about it in a discrete binary way where it's like, all right, I should move half of my portfolio from Alt's into cash.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You can actually feel pretty comfortable directing into Bitcoin, where it's like, all right, well, maybe I'm not going to have the same magnitude of upside from that point on.
20:11
[SPEAKER_01]: but the volatility might portfolio will be dampened and you'll still be able to participate in some upside because you've just swapped the alt exposure for Bitcoin exposure that has like different more persistent capital flows.
20:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, it's, it's really, you know, a good point.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There's like, you know, I was just looking at the, this big breakout and Ethereum ETF inflows just before we hopped on.
20:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, on, you know, Bitcoin has this, you know, sort of big, huge inflow, whether it's micro strategy and all these corporates and these massive ETFs, the most successful ETF ever has been the Bitcoin ETF.
20:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And just this morning, the Ethereum ETF has been now,
20:53
[SPEAKER_00]: has eclipsed ten billion dollars or something in assets under management for the black rock one.
20:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Was it was that it and it was like the fastest to ten billion ever.
21:02
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if there's a fastest to ten billion.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I think that was still the Bitcoin one.
21:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's hard for me to see those.
21:08
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's because the first time.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Ethereum right now has price and sensitive buyers where they were previously buyers on fundamental.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We're now you have these digital asset treasury vehicle like Tom Lee's one like Bitmine and Joe Lubins one sharp
21:26
[SPEAKER_01]: the aspect where now they're just trying to accumulate as much ethereum as possible regardless of price.
21:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's a new dynamic and something that I think before long we'll see with Solana as well as the next candidate for that price and sensitive buying.
21:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and once we get staking yield, basically, into the ETFs, which I know a lot of these different, I think BlackRock actually just recently refiled their Ethereum ETF to include that native staking yield.
21:56
[SPEAKER_00]: That'll just blow the doors open off of it.
21:58
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just a completely new product.
22:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And hopefully Salana gets an ETF with staking spot.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Any insights there?
22:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you think the ball is going to be breaking one way or another over the course of this year?
22:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, it seems likely that it will get, you know, full ETF and sticking ETF approval at some point this year.
22:17
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't have like any insight beyond just like the chatter that you hear and whatever's published by the, you know, the ETF experts, you know, there's the, the two guys that, that everyone follows and that's the source of information.
22:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Bloomberg guys.
22:35
[SPEAKER_01]: It's exactly.
22:38
[SPEAKER_01]: But that's actually an area that I'm really excited about Solana liquid-staking and staking protocols.
22:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Gito, of course, is the, you know, eight hundred pound gorilla in liquid-staking, but in particular, I'm a big fan of St.
22:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Tom, which as a both,
22:57
[SPEAKER_01]: has it's own liquid-saking product called infinity, but also has another product that it allows any validator to create their own liquid-staking token.
23:08
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, buy-dance and buy-bit, for example, created ones like that using Sanktems infrastructure, moonpages to announce one today,
23:17
[SPEAKER_01]: DFDV, the Treasury company as an creative way to bring value to their shareholders.
23:23
[SPEAKER_01]: They actually spun up a validator and created a liquid-staking token on St.
23:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Stach called DFDV Soul.
23:32
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, you know, Marinade being another one that is doing a really great job on
23:39
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not even just the liquid-staking, although that's growing, but on the native direct-staking with integrations with Bitcoin, others.
23:46
[SPEAKER_01]: But they have these really nice token tailwind where forty percent of the revenue from the token is actually going back to buying back the token.
23:56
[SPEAKER_01]: That's marinade.
23:58
[SPEAKER_01]: That's marinade.
23:59
[SPEAKER_01]: And right now,
24:00
[SPEAKER_01]: The value of buybacks versus the market cap of the token is essentially fifteen percent of the token would be bought back every year.
24:08
[SPEAKER_01]: How is it going to buybacks versus the market cap?
24:11
[SPEAKER_01]: So like really, really nice tailwind in terms of just the amount of revenue they're generating and where that's going.
24:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and full disclosure, I've got positions for the funds in Gido and Marinade.
24:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Marinade's a much smaller position.
24:27
[SPEAKER_00]: That number might be going up actually now.
24:31
[SPEAKER_01]: So, Marinade, by the way, is very cool as well.
24:32
[SPEAKER_01]: And they just makes a new protocol called BAM to improve how you order transactions in Sloan.
24:39
[SPEAKER_01]: So, very much a fan of them as well.
24:41
[SPEAKER_01]: But I like to lean into these smaller cap opportunities that are a little more
24:46
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, under the radar and I mean, sometimes they take longer to play out.
24:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, they're they're high beta, right?
24:53
[SPEAKER_00]: So in the market when the markets going up, they're going to go up stronger and faster and harder when the markets going down, you know, they end up losing value quicker.
25:01
[SPEAKER_00]: We're, you know,
25:02
[SPEAKER_00]: I think a lot of people who are watching, like, man, like, if I could just spend a day with Austin over his shoulder, you know, seeing how he's finding his opportunities would be invaluable.
25:10
[SPEAKER_00]: So can you give us kind of the, a little bit of the speel of, you know, how do you find these opportunities?
25:15
[SPEAKER_00]: What tools are you using?
25:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, are there sites that you're frequenting?
25:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Are there forums that people could kind of join and, you know, learn more?
25:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, what's your, like, overall sort of research process look like?
25:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so it's a series is how I describe mine, by the way.
25:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I really like that term.
25:37
[SPEAKER_01]: I may talk about that.
25:39
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, it's kind of like data from a fire hose.
25:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's a lot of different sources.
25:46
[SPEAKER_01]: So one just constantly tracking all of the different like major
25:52
[SPEAKER_01]: data platforms.
25:53
[SPEAKER_01]: So DefiLama is one, do nanobidics is another, block works, Artemis, token terminal.
26:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure I'm forgetting a couple.
26:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, exactly.
26:09
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm looking through all of those and I do a combination of things.
26:12
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a universe of assets that I find interesting for XYZ reason and I'm tracking their fundamentals on a regular basis.
26:21
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I have like
26:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I call it like kind of surfing the web.
26:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Where are you just scrolling through that and see like what pops out and what interesting trend is is like where where's their revenue growth or where's their TV out and then going down that rabbit hole and it's like all right well why is this Dex volume up ten apps and it's like all right well they took away or like purse platforms like all right well they took away fees or they're doing a points campaign so maybe you can discount that but then you start to filter through and it's like all right well maybe there's
26:54
[SPEAKER_01]: new product market fit and that's why something's happening.
26:57
[SPEAKER_01]: It's been a lot of time on Twitter just reading
27:03
[SPEAKER_01]: tweets, articles, blog posts from people that I respect and you know, also kind of there's a lot of really smart analysts, truths on Twitter and trying to consume all that.
27:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And they're just doing free research for all those research.
27:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
27:20
[SPEAKER_01]: And I do put together a list though because I follow four thousand accounts.
27:26
[SPEAKER_00]: a lot of garbage.
27:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, there's a lot.
27:28
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think I've distilled it to about like a hundred and fifty accounts that I found to be most useful.
27:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've been broken out into different categories.
27:39
[SPEAKER_01]: What else?
27:40
[SPEAKER_01]: There's some, you know, on-chain tools, so mobile screener I think is an incredible one.
27:46
[SPEAKER_01]: They've released a ton of really interesting products.
27:48
[SPEAKER_01]: So
27:50
[SPEAKER_01]: being able to determine whether an asset is trending in the criteria that they use is really advanced wallet tracking.
27:58
[SPEAKER_01]: So if they say like well token holders of a particular token are often early investors and successful in this vertical of the market or if there's a particular investor and wallet holder that generally has a high win rate.
28:15
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is not a novel concept, but I think they're algorithm around tracking
28:20
[SPEAKER_01]: which are the right wallets and which where they provide the right signal gives very, very early trend indicators and you can look at it across timeframes.
28:29
[SPEAKER_01]: They recently rolled out a feature.
28:32
[SPEAKER_01]: That just lets you look at who's doing the large DCA, something that's kind of over cost average like entry or exit from the market.
28:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, exactly.
28:42
[SPEAKER_01]: So who's trying to put in a big order on chain, which is visible, say, over like a day, and someone's trying to buy a million dollars of a token.
28:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's going up, but it's not clear why that takes a lot of technical work to set that up on your own.
28:55
[SPEAKER_01]: but they just provide that for you.
28:56
[SPEAKER_01]: So you can get like a real time sense of where flows are going.
28:59
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's one that I like as well.
29:03
[SPEAKER_01]: And then another is just having a trusted group of fellow investors to yeah brainstorm and share ideas and
29:14
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, being really open and honest and feeling comfortable saying like, all right, well, maybe you see all the positives about this, but what about the negative XYZ and kind of people to keep you honest and your research piece, you know, as a long biased investor, it's easier to get excited about positive catalyst than potential negative catalysts, but they're all important.
29:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
29:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the big ones actually, can I just pull that mobile screen or just, it's something that I've heard about and looked at once or twice, but I'm gonna dive into it a little bit more and check out.
29:48
[SPEAKER_00]: But I see here at the top of their list is pump and full disclosure, you know, our fund has some pump.
29:54
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you think, that was the one of the biggest ICOs, I think they sold out like, seven hundred million or five hundred million or something like that in twelve minutes.
30:01
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you think of the whole pump?
30:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Pump.fun, ICO, and what that might mean to the future of crypto.
30:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think it's really interesting in a couple ways.
30:12
[SPEAKER_01]: One, so they raised a ton of money and there was a lot of demand.
30:15
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think the number was, from remembering right, five or seven hundred million on chain, but there was another couple hundred million on exchanges and otherwise.
30:24
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, believe it was one point three billion total, which is an enormous amount of money to raise.
30:31
[SPEAKER_01]: And now they have this huge war chest of capital to iterate on the product.
30:37
[SPEAKER_01]: They, however, they went to market with their token at a unique time where they went from having ninety percent market share to actually no longer being the market leader in the bank capturing a lot of volume.
30:51
[SPEAKER_01]: We're now a bank has about two thirds to one third that pump still has.
30:57
[SPEAKER_01]: So what it showed
30:58
[SPEAKER_01]: was, all right, maybe this segment of the market that pump capture, it wasn't, they didn't have necessarily like the stickiness that it seemed like they had this incredible mode that couldn't be surpassed.
31:11
[SPEAKER_01]: However, I definitely wouldn't discount mode to, sorry, wouldn't discount pump to capture back that volume.
31:20
[SPEAKER_01]: They've been doing
31:21
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, they've been an incredible executor and really catalyzed this category for memecoin token launches and such a seamless way.
31:31
[SPEAKER_01]: regardless though, I don't think meme coin and speculative activity on chain is going anywhere.
31:35
[SPEAKER_01]: So depending on where the market share lies, I think this category as a whole is only growing.
31:41
[SPEAKER_01]: And for now, it looks like pump and bonker are the two leaders, but we can definitely, and for a little period, there was launch coin, the belief app that had gained some share.
31:54
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think it'll be really interesting to see it evolve and pump right now
31:58
[SPEAKER_01]: They started to direct some of their revenue to token buybacks, like we've seen with other assets, like I mentioned, Marinade.
32:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Hyperlick would have been really famous for this.
32:08
[SPEAKER_01]: But that's only just one tool, and they haven't delivered their air drop to early participants yet.
32:14
[SPEAKER_01]: They haven't rolled out any other sorts of incentives.
32:17
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a streaming product that's coming soon.
32:19
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think they definitely have a lot of cards up their sleeve.
32:23
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, bonkis is a much
32:27
[SPEAKER_01]: More formidable competitor than people were expecting, but there's definitely a lot of room for both of them.
32:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I think bonk, you know, I love watching competition unfold in the free markets because they unveiled that product about a week before, you know, pump went live and like it just had a big groundswell of support and money.
32:44
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it was perfectly timed.
32:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It was like, you know, shooting an arrow right at the perfect piece of armor to kind of go right through and it really did kind of kneecap pump, pumps momentum.
32:56
[SPEAKER_00]: So hopefully we'll see, you know, things shake out positively, you know, for both, but you know, it's it's a
33:03
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a PVP market still, so we'll see if it's winter take all or enough to share.
33:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's one of the nice things about crypto and things being on chain where like I was saying before about tracking data, block works as an incredible dashboard where you can see the number of tokens launched, the number of tokens that graduate from bonding curves, the amount of volume, the amount of revenue so you can literally watch
33:25
[SPEAKER_01]: market share gains and losses in real time.
33:28
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not like waiting for a quarterly report.
33:30
[SPEAKER_01]: So you can be first to market on seeing a trend change just by being on top of the data and following things closely.
33:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no crypto investing really is the most like democratized and like low barrier to entry opportunity for anybody to kind of become like a millionaire with a very small amount of money like not even saying that like
33:50
[SPEAKER_00]: what does it call like, you know, hyperbolicly.
33:53
[SPEAKER_00]: But like, I know a lot of people who've become millionaires off, like very, very small, like initial investments.
33:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Because like the data's there, you just have to kind of roll up your sleeves and just dig in and like have some street smarts.
34:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't click on random links.
34:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't, you know, buy if it's too good to be true.
34:09
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you know, good operational security measures and all that stuff because, you know, keeping your crypto safe is just as important if not more important than like earning more crypto because
34:18
[SPEAKER_00]: I've just heard so many stories of people getting wiped out.
34:22
[SPEAKER_00]: But I want to tap you about a little bit in regards to the AI agent stuff, because I know you were really, really big into virtuals, back in October, November, and like completely crushed this trend.
34:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And then in Q-One, the whole trend kind of fell flat on its face.
34:39
[SPEAKER_00]: What happened there with that trend and will we see a resurgence in AI agents?
34:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so one hundred percent will see a resurgence in AI agents.
34:48
[SPEAKER_01]: That's just the direction that every industry is going like.
34:51
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure everyone sees these sales force commercials with Matthew McConaughey.
34:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, something bad happened and what do you hear all since like, well, you should have had the sales force AI agent.
35:01
[SPEAKER_01]: So AI agents are just useful tools period.
35:05
[SPEAKER_01]: I think one of the benefits of AI agents living on chain is the ability to interact with each other and have this permissionless environment for micro payments.
35:15
[SPEAKER_01]: So just like deep in is really well suited to crypto rails because you have this payments infrastructure and also this like incentives rails.
35:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Same thing applies for AI agents.
35:26
[SPEAKER_01]: What happened in Q four and Q one of this year is there was just too much market euphoria.
35:32
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like the example of like how many tens of thousands of agents were being created at one point in time where there were some that are actually really useful like AIAX BT but most of them didn't have a ton of functionality.
35:45
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think ultimately when the rest of the market pulled back it was just a higher beta more correlated move down.
35:54
[SPEAKER_01]: However, I think we're continuing to see some really nice development in that category.
36:00
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's really just like what are the protocols that have continued to build and are emerging from it.
36:06
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the ones that I think is pretty interesting and it's, there was a really great
36:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Right up, I think it was like two days ago on it, but it's called Ray Network, R-E-I.
36:22
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, you can think about it as like a token driven AI research lab like anthropic or some of these others that
36:35
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just public and there's a token and like, you know, it's not available in any other format and what they've done and it's fundamentally different than an LOM.
36:45
[SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of structured a little bit more like a human brain that they protocol that they're building.
36:51
[SPEAKER_01]: But it has a couple key differences versus an LLLM.
36:55
[SPEAKER_01]: So like one is persistent memory and durable memory.
36:59
[SPEAKER_01]: So as you interact with an agent, the ability to learn from the experience that it's had with you and kind of build that over time versus every interaction being almost kind of insular to itself.
37:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Another really interesting component is how
37:20
[SPEAKER_01]: inference, fine tuning, and training work in models.
37:22
[SPEAKER_01]: So in traditional LLMs, they don't really learn, and this ties in with memory a little bit, but they don't necessarily learn from every interaction.
37:33
[SPEAKER_01]: They only learn in these discrete batches when you take these, uh, these the model weights are fixed, right?
37:39
[SPEAKER_01]: So then you have to retrain the model and find to the model separately.
37:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And then they improve over time, whereas this can be done kind of more like a human brain and how a human brain learns in a constantly adaptive way, where it's like the fine tuning happens at the same time as the inference.
38:00
[SPEAKER_01]: And then another piece is just this is all happening on crypto rails in the open.
38:05
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of other pieces to this, they call the new memory type behavioral memory.
38:11
[SPEAKER_01]: would definitely recommend looking at it.
38:13
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm still like, to be fair, like, completely honest, somewhat early in my research journey on this one.
38:21
[SPEAKER_01]: But this is one of the, like, more unique protocols that I've come across recently.
38:27
[SPEAKER_01]: That's doing cool stuff.
38:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And so this is, I was just pulling it up.
38:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it REI network, I think it's like a sixteen million dollar market cap, or is it the REI, like, reassertch?
38:39
[SPEAKER_00]: REI search dot box.
38:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that the one hundred sixty.
38:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
38:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
38:44
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's the one.
38:45
[SPEAKER_01]: It's about a hundred and seventy million.
38:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
38:48
[SPEAKER_01]: The their Twitter handle is Ray network is at Ray network zero X. Wow.
38:53
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's Ray search.
38:55
[SPEAKER_01]: So like research with an eye dot box.
38:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Love it.
38:59
[SPEAKER_00]: That's it.
38:59
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a hot tip.
39:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I don't have any yet.
39:01
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm going to do some research.
39:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Check it out.
39:04
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the AI ones that I've gotten kind of readpilled on was Tao.
39:09
[SPEAKER_00]: People have been, you know, talking about the bit tensor network.
39:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that could be an interesting one for people to look into, but we don't have enough time on today's call to go too deep into it.
39:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Got enough time to do it for the next one.
39:19
[SPEAKER_00]: the next one exactly we got plenty plenty in the backlog, but but kind of the last thing I wanted to ask you you just always got a knack to be like really early on trends like you called deep in well before it was even a category you know with d five before it was even defined as d five like
39:35
[SPEAKER_00]: you're already in it with AI agents like what's kind of that next next one out there that maybe the market's not really appreciating right now that you think maybe deserves like a small portion of speculative capital that could grow into a larger portion.
39:52
[SPEAKER_01]: I guess I'll just double down on two things that I've kind of already said, but explain why it's purely.
39:58
[SPEAKER_01]: So one within DeFi, kind of the C. DeFi crossover, where you marry off-chain demand for capital with on-chain capital lending and capital sources to be able to
40:14
[SPEAKER_01]: lower the cost of capital and expand into more traditional markets to expand that opportunity.
40:19
[SPEAKER_01]: So let me give a concrete example.
40:23
[SPEAKER_01]: At its peak in twenty twenty two, the centralized lending in crypto was a thirty five billion dollar market.
40:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Now it's about fifteen.
40:31
[SPEAKER_01]: It's growing quickly.
40:33
[SPEAKER_01]: But the problem with that market back then is with Genesis and Celsius.
40:38
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of fraud and block five.
40:40
[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't.
40:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of it was fraud, but it was mostly poor risk management because what they did is they lent out money.
40:49
[SPEAKER_01]: with no collateral.
40:50
[SPEAKER_01]: And I said, OK, if you'll pay us fifteen percent interest, you don't need to give collateral.
40:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And then what is happening is three AC blew up and you know, loona blew up and all these things blew up and they're and then the counterpart is like
41:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Sorry, we can't pay you back.
41:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And they lost all these money.
41:06
[SPEAKER_01]: So like in that context, at least, under collateralized lending did not work.
41:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, as it's coming back, and obviously the fraud stuff is bad.
41:16
[SPEAKER_01]: But putting that aside, that's one of the major reasons why it blew up.
41:21
[SPEAKER_01]: But now we've had this shift to collateralized lending.
41:24
[SPEAKER_01]: But there's even more demand than there was last cycle, even though the size of the market right now is half.
41:30
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's not just funds over the counter trading desks, market makers that are demanding this kind of have this borrowed demand.
41:40
[SPEAKER_01]: But also now, it's these digital asset treasury vehicles that are looking to borrow against the Bitcoin that they've already purchased or the ETH that they've already purchased to accelerate the pace at which they can buy.
41:53
[SPEAKER_01]: And then a lot of other kind of interesting use cases, so like paying out to miners, kind of helping fund capital costs of businesses.
42:01
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think this intersection and what, you know, this ties in with maple specifically business is what they're going after.
42:07
[SPEAKER_01]: They've created a dollar denominated
42:13
[SPEAKER_01]: a dollar kind of stable coin that yields and is generating like six and a half percent APY, that then feeds the capital demand off chain.
42:23
[SPEAKER_01]: But the interesting thing about the Composibility of DFI is you can take that asset, put it in Pendle and split into a principal token and a yield token.
42:33
[SPEAKER_01]: you can loop it, so put leverage on it, and you can get thirty to fifty percent APY on stablecoins.
42:39
[SPEAKER_01]: So now you're meeting the demand off-chain with this really, really low cost of capital source, but also can earn a lot of money for the participants.
42:49
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think that markets could expand enormously.
42:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Another example of CD-Fi is, so like, off-chain demands and on-chain
43:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Executioner like on chain rails is aerodrome, you know, I'm really bullish on the growth that we'll see from base and what they're doing is they're shifting their users to be able to do more and more activity directly from their app on chain without even thinking about it.
43:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Coinbase, instead of having to list a new token, you can trade through their app directly on a decks where tokens listed immediately.
43:24
[SPEAKER_01]: And it doesn't need to go through coin funds, you know, more RGOS processes, or so you want to borrow against your Bitcoin on Coinbase.
43:31
[SPEAKER_01]: You can source that borrow for Morpho on chain.
43:35
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's going to just drive an explosion of activity for those sorts of applications, air-join being one that, you know, I'm particularly excited about.
43:44
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's one category and then the other.
43:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I just want to pause there just real quick because those are three names that I've got exposure to more foe, aero-drome and syrup.
43:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are some great picks and I love that like,
43:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Even though those are, you know, in our world right now, I mean, those are still, so hot, some hot things, but you're saying like, we're early on those still because the road map is still so big.
44:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like Stuart, for example, it's doing twenty million of ARRs trading about a fifty million dollar, sorry, five hundred and fifty million dollar market cap.
44:17
[SPEAKER_01]: That's twenty seven X multiple.
44:18
[SPEAKER_01]: That's like more or less the average S&P multiple for a company for a protocol that's done four X growth in the last quarter.
44:25
[SPEAKER_00]: That's crazy.
44:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and then the other side of thing is we've seen a lot of innovation in kind of advanced trading apps and infrastructure.
44:34
[SPEAKER_01]: So things like axiom, trojan, bolx, photon, deck screener.
44:39
[SPEAKER_01]: None of these have tokens.
44:41
[SPEAKER_01]: None of these monetize and give value back, or they monetize, but they don't give value back to the community.
44:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Mobile is an example of a project that's doing that.
44:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I think we'll see more of that.
44:52
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's one of the reasons that I'm bullish on them in that category.
44:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Also, of course, almost all of the things that I've mentioned are assets that the fund owns because, you know, if I'm excited about it, the function on it, otherwise, you know, I wouldn't be excited or vice versa.
45:11
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, caveat on kind of the things that I've said today, but those are two categories, bringing token level and centipization and
45:21
[SPEAKER_01]: value return to trading infrastructure and then this C. D. Phi combination.
45:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Beautiful.
45:28
[SPEAKER_00]: I got one last question on syrup in just kind of like I'm not really sure how to pair it, but the whole genius act saying that you can't have yield bearing stable coins.
45:38
[SPEAKER_00]: How does that kind of come to bear on maple and like the syrup token?
45:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think I think how
45:46
[SPEAKER_01]: I at least interpret the genius actors like their stable coins for payments and their stable coins for like yield bearing investments.
45:55
[SPEAKER_01]: So like think about like a treasury is not a stable coin, but it's how you look to save money or
46:03
[SPEAKER_01]: or, you know, you don't really think about saving money in your Venmo account, or maybe you do.
46:09
[SPEAKER_00]: You're getting no yield in your Venmo account.
46:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but that's essentially how I think about it.
46:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, these are two discrete categories.
46:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, that makes sense.
46:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe these get different names over time, but the way I look at it is syrup is on the lending side, the syrup USDC product.
46:28
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a dollar-denominated savings account, essentially, not an account, but a dollar-denominated savings asset.
46:36
[SPEAKER_01]: So whether you think of it as a stable coin by that exact term in an algebra or not,
46:40
[SPEAKER_01]: It serves a different purpose than I think what the genius act is going after.
46:44
[SPEAKER_01]: However, with more clarity around stable coin regulation overall, I think that brings a ton more capital on chain.
46:51
[SPEAKER_01]: And when that capital is on chain, and it's not being used for payments, it's going to want to earn yield.
46:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's a really big opportunity.
46:59
[SPEAKER_00]: love it.
46:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Austin, we could talk all day, man.
47:01
[SPEAKER_00]: We are at the top of the hour.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I want to ask you where people can kind of follow along with your journey, or you big on X, sub-stack, and any websites.
47:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so post most of my thoughts on X, so it's just at Austin Baroque.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's my name there.
47:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you have any questions or want to jam on anything, I
47:24
[SPEAKER_01]: I try and read through as many of my DMs as I can.
47:28
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, feel free to shoot me a message and, you know, always happy to kind of get a new perspective and, you know, learn something new.
47:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Amazing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Awesome.
47:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for being so generous with your time today and everybody at home watching.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I hope you enjoyed stay tuned.