$ANSEM, Robinhood Chain, & Why SOL Still Beats ETH in 2026 | Mike Dudas

TRANSCRIPT
David:
[0:02] Bankless Nation, I'm joined by Mike Dudas from Six Man Ventures. Mike, welcome to the podcast.

Mike:
[0:08] Thank you. Great to be here. Appreciate it.

David:
[0:10] Mike, we've never had you on the podcast before, but we have been around each other since like the very beginning of crypto. It's good to have you on.

Mike:
[0:17] Yeah, no, I'm delighted. I've read tons of what you've written. Yeah, we interact on Twitter and real life and obviously listen to a 10-year podcast, so really appreciate it.

David:
[0:27] So I want to the current event of the day is once again, meme coins and the trenches. And that's just been a seemingly an inevitable component of the crypto industry. And it never seems to be like resolved as a topic of conversation. And you have a particular perspective, I think, that I want to get here on the episode today. Maybe we can kind of go back to the era of Bonk because that is what I remember, like your first actual involvement in like the meme coin trench era. And then we can talk about like what's going on with like Robinhood Chain and like the Ansem meme coin and like what that industry and like the debate around base and everything. But I want to kind of get your perspective around like the role that Bonk, the meme coin on Solana played for Solana back when it was launched and kind of like what your thoughts or like strategy or just overall like perspective was around, like meme coins on Solana back before meme coins were really as big as the thing as they are today.

Mike:
[1:26] Yeah, absolutely. So meme coins today, I think people look at them and think of them as this like big, you know, professional industrial complex. And to some extent, you know, that's quite true. At the same time, the meme coins that have the most significant amount of value tend to be outliers and don't really fit that mold of kind of like the cynical short term pump and eventually go down rapidly type thing. So there's different types of meme coins, just like there's different types of VC backed tokens. But anyway, the history of meme coins is either one of the earliest primitives in crypto. And, you know, Dogecoin is like, I believe, more than a decade old and Shiba Inu. And so you've had Dogecoin is its own chain. Shiba Inu is an Ethereum meme coin. And these are still today worth billions of dollars. So meme coins and this idea of, you know, call it IP, community, you know, however you want to describe these people sort of having fun around something that doesn't have really tangible value is great.

Mike:
[2:32] Something that has lasting interest to humans and clearly lasting value. So then fast forwarding to your question on Bonk, at the sort of depths of the Solana bear market. So post FTX, post all the other things that went wrong in all of crypto, end of 2022,

Mike:
[2:53] The mood, the market participants in the Solana ecosystem, so the mood was low. The number of market participants had dropped dramatically. And frankly, the number of creators, so developers, I mean, there was a meme at the time, a joke that there were something like 75 developers left in Solana. And, you know, a group of folks who cared a lot about a Solana, who had participated, who had built things, you know, not just, you know, finance people or VCs or, you know, enthusiasts or collectors, but developers and other people who were pretty deep in the Solana ecosystem said, hey, what's a really good way at a time of like low morale and activity to get people, get the chain reinvigorated, get activity back on the chain. Hey, why don't we reward, you know, the folks who have been using the chain, building on it and doing things, you know, for the past four or five years. Again, this was late 2022, I guess not four or five years, but who had been doing things for the past three years.

Mike:
[3:49] So, you know, a group of 20 folks launched a meme coin called Bonk, you know, a dog coin. Again, this is before the meme industrial complex erupted. And the idea was if we airdrop, you know, half of the supply to folks who have built on the chain, used the chain, collected NFTs and other things on the chain, one, we're going to have a bit of a stimulus activity, hopefully, you know, get some excitement, attention, and, you know, get people interested in the chain. Interested in building again. Again, this is the stone cold bottom. I think Sol was at that point like close to 10 bucks. And lo and behold, it worked. So basically airdropped 50% of supply within I think like a month or six weeks. The token was trading over 400 million. And so a couple hundred million in value had been airdropped at a time when that just wasn't a thing for meme coins out to the Solana community. And developers, some of them got like I think $10,000 plus at a time when, you know, their products were struggling and many people were grateful and it just led to a lot of goodwill. Over the next six months, Bonk sort of trended down, you know, into the summer. And then, but at a time when, you know, sentiment was really low, it was something really exciting for the community. And then, you know, it was authentic. So we, you know, a group of folks continued to work on it.

Mike:
[5:08] Turned into not a pure meme coin. So released, you know, products around it, a thing called Bonk Swap, a Bonk NFT sets, eventually a Bonk meme coin launchpad. And so, you know, the team still to this day, there's a core team of folks who are working on it, who give grants, who invest in and support Solana projects. So like to me, it still to this day, many years later, almost four years later, represents, you know, the best of memes and community. And I think shows that these things can be good, regardless of the value, which has fluctuated quite a bit over the years. In addition, it caught the attention of Solana Foundation and Solana Mobile. They ended up airdropping or loading.

Mike:
[5:48] It ended up being more than $1,000 worth of bonk onto the phone. So you bought the phone. It was essentially free if you sold your bonk. And so that was exciting. It was great marketing. I think it showed the promise of these things when done with great care. And frankly, it laid, I think, a template that others have done incredibly well. You know, not perfectly analogous, but you've seen Rekt have a brand coin. You've seen, you know, Pudgy, Penguins, Pengu have sort of a brand coin. And so folks have done that really well. So anyway, you know, these things done properly include many, many more people than, for example, NFTs, because, you know, millions of people, you can hold a tiniest, tiniest fraction, a dollar worth or less, or you can hold a tremendous amount. So, you know, like anything in crypto, The really, really, really positive ones, the bonks, you tend to be the outlier. And we have these permissionless blockchains where anyone can launch anything. And so over time, the meme coin landscape has changed over the last few years.

David:
[6:50] The reason why I ask, and I appreciate this story, and the story is like a good one. And as you say, that's like kind of an outlier in the meme coin world. Like I think the default version of a meme coin like goes up to a very low market cap, $50,000, $100,000, and then goes to zero because scalpers are just moving on. And that there's like a million of those, but no one remembers those. And like, at the end of the day, actually kind of people only remember the good ones, because the good ones are the ones that last. I kind of have like a complicated position on meme coins. And I think that's true for the industry as a whole, where like, at the end of the day, it's 2026. And I'm like, no longer interested in standing in front of the bulldozer of meme coins. Meme coins are powerful. They're big. They have had proven successes. And despite all the negative things that people can associate with meme coins, they have lasted at the end of the day. So the evidence about the.

David:
[7:47] Persistence of meme coins is like ample at the end. But my one perspective that I want to bring with you is to talk to you about is they're like building a business, a company like a Coinbase, an Apple, an NVIDIA or any or even a private company, not even a public company. It's about like building. We're trying to build like a structure, a self-sustaining, stable structure of people and inputs and outputs that generate revenue. And that structure is like stable and can be handed on to other people to pass that along. And meme coins, it's a completely new thing. And it is somewhat of a structure, but the structure feels so unstable and difficult to transcend through time. Because one of the reasons is they're memes. They are not profit generating, they're not revenue generating. Like Bonk made the transition from being a meme coin to like an actual project, But like the idea of like a social structure that we build scaffolding around and there's like stability, it doesn't, that's just not what meme coins are. And it's hard for people like me and others to like wrap their head around this new primitive that doesn't seem to be something that like you can build a foundation on. I'm talking in very like loose conceptual words, but I think you kind of get

David:
[9:11] it. What's your response to like that?

Mike:
[9:13] Yeah. I mean, I think as long as people understand them as that, that's fine. Right. I agree. I mean, these Bonk or Dogecoin are different things than Coinbase. It's a valid point. But humans are complex and have multiple interests and like to do many different things with their time. Look, I can make a lot of money, you know, holding the Aave token or holding, you know, exchange token. And that's great, but I'm not going to do a lot with it. You know, it's going to sit in my portfolio and, you know, hopefully if it does really well and the product does well, I'm going to earn money over time and fees. And, you know, but there are things that I probably want to do with the rest of my time. And I mean, coins can be a fun thing, right? They're speculative. They're enjoyable. Again, there's a community element. You know, people do things, the whole culture around it, you know, things like bag working and actually getting together in person, like Bonk sponsors a lot of in real life events. It's in that sense, they're very similar to NFTs, which I think, you know, I'm an NFT collector still. Most NFT projects, BFP projects, you know, decline massively. By the way, even the best ones like CryptoPunks, which I still hold, have declined, I think 90% or something from the peak.

Mike:
[10:28] I think folks who enjoy crypto would say that the communities that have grown up around those things and the IP and the events they hold, you know, tend to be worth it for the folks who hold them. You know, even if, I mean, you probably wouldn't value the IP of most of these collections at where they trade. So there's something about community spirit and spending time. But yeah, there's no like rational valuation framework, you know, that's going to fit into a model that I can put together to tell you what these things should be worth. So they are always going to be speculative and you better enjoy, you know, the thing that you hold and what you're doing if you're going to invest in them.

David:
[11:03] So when we watch Ansem and his meme coin, and technically it's not his, somebody else made it and gave it to him, but he's kind of like adopted it. So I'm calling it his. What's your, just a reaction or response as you're, as you're watching Ansem do his thing?

Mike:
[11:18] Yeah. So, So full disclosure, I'm an investor in Bullpen, which is Ansem's company that he's a co-founder of. He's a friend. So basically, I'm positively biased towards what he does. Like any of us, Ansem is right about many things and isn't right about many things. But what I love about him is he's like you.

Mike:
[11:42] He's courageous enough to be public about his beliefs and confident in his thought process. And by the way, willing to change his mind and share when his mind has changed. And there's very few folks like that. In addition, he's authentic. I know he gets a lot of, I mean, look, he's so public that you're going to have every opinion on earth about him. But, you know, whether you like his approach or not, he is authentic and he does believe in himself and he does believe in the people who follow him. And he does care about them. He thinks he's going to create, I've talked to him at length about this, behind this Ansem meme coin that he didn't start, but that somebody gifted him the supply. He was not a part of that at the start. And I think he saw it and he said, hey, this is a moment that's similar to that 2022 Bonk launch. He was one of the first Bonk supporters. He wasn't involved in launching it, but he got excited about it and helped drive that thing really high and you saw what it did to the price of Solana and the Solana ecosystem, the usage on the chain and the economics. And I think he believes we're at a point in the cycle where that can happen again. And I think where I and me and Ansem disagree with folks is that like meme coins are done. They're just not. They've been around, like I said, since Dogecoin in 2014, every cycle.

Mike:
[12:56] The class overall has staying power. And every cycle or every few years, one or a few of the highest quality assets and quality is, I guess, a fun, funny term. But some assets do stand out. And by the way, that's true of any subsector within crypto. There's very few good assets in crypto. And actually, meme coins have a pretty good share of the quote unquote good or highly valued assets relative to crypto.

Mike:
[13:23] L1s, L2s, Infra, you name it. So Ansem is bringing a model that he thought would exist last cycle. And I think he's admitted that he was wrong in terms of how it would come to market. And that would be these like celebrity or creator coins, right? And the fault was that, you know, non-crypto native people, people who didn't really care about market participants and folks in the trenches came in and effectively, you know, all the way up to the president of the States dumped their tokens, you know, while, you know, Trump, it was launched, you know, a single side liquidity pool and just meant to be pumped by people, you know, had a bunch of like, to my understanding, you know, influencers and folks who would just talk about it nonstop, so price went up and, you know, they were selling the Trump coin into that for cash and made a tremendous ton of money regardless of how the thing performed long-term. It's very different than what Anson did. Launched a thing, you know, it was launched at zero. He was gifted supply. I think he's bought as it's gone up. He hasn't sold anything. And he has stated, and we'll see. I mean, it's an emergent thing. It almost sounds silly to discuss it, but he's basically staking and he's got a big reputation. Guy's made a lot of money himself and for other people. He's staking his entire reputation extremely publicly on this thing succeeding.

Mike:
[14:38] And he, more than anybody else in the way that I think, for example, a Kobe understands crypto, pure crypto trading of things that people would say have definitive tangible value. I think Ansom's that for memes and fun and community. And he's got a manifesto out. I don't know that I've read it in extensive detail, but a lot of pillars around which he's going to share. And if the value of this token appreciates, share value from his other business initiatives and from the attention with the community and gift them tokens. And I think he said there will be other mechanisms to reward folks. But it's never going to be equity in Ansem Incorporated or to my understanding in bullpen. So you have to believe it's kind of similar to Pengu and even Bonk that in the future,

Mike:
[15:25] How we value assets will look different than how we historically have and that there will be some mixture of memetic community and attention value to certain assets. Now, I believe that pretty strongly. I think crypto markets have shown that to be the case, but also other class asset classes are increasingly showing that to be the case with meme stocks, with, you know, virtually everything in the AI economy now, you know, trading on sentiment and memetic value and being really hard to tie back to fundamentals. And, you know, you've got sort of the Elon meme industrial factory. Obviously he's creating incredible products for the world, very different than pure meme coins, but on any fundamental basis, it's hard to value those. So I think it's a decent bet that if you want to, it's not for everybody and it shouldn't be, but if you want to allocate a portion of your portfolio to the attention economy and interest and community and what people are talking about,

Mike:
[16:21] It's reasonable to think that this might be one of the most successful, one of the most successful assets and initiatives. And again, this is not financial advice.

Mike:
[16:31] I do. I own some personally. It's not, for example, an asset that's suitable for our fund. You know, I run a fund. I'm a registered investment advisor. So you just have to think about it in the right context. Where it gets dangerous is, you know, these are on-chain assets that anybody can hold with no KYC. There's no, you know, we say we don't want, you know, accredited investor rules to prevent people from accessing things. But then we yell and shout and scream when, you know, they invest in some of the wrong things. But I think in meme coins, like it's like pretty clear which assets are going to have strength over what period of time. There's only a few that have real signals. So I think this is a noble effort in an area where both Ansem and me think, well, you know, once again, the majority of on-chain activity is happening in the meme coin trenches. You know, we've had three years to produce other things for consumers and other things of like social value that they could spend their time on, whether it be gaming, whether it be streaming coins and, you know, none of that stuff's materialize. So I think it's like, let's try meme coins in a better form. But I understand that many, many, many people are tired of that narrative and honestly don't want to pay attention. I blame them, right? Like some people, if you don't like it, just mute the folks talking about it. Candidly, I don't try to talk about it too, too much, but it is something that people do want to interview me about because it's sort of consensus that these

Mike:
[17:57] things are useless. And I don't agree with that.

David:
[17:59] Yeah. And I think what I'm trying to wrap my head around is like The meme coin sector evolves like any other sectors. There's tech and sentiment and all of that kind of has some sort of direction of travel. And here we are in 2026, and now the meta is unique to 2026. And so I'm trying to wrap my head around it now. The thing that I still can't fully contend with is that in the fullness of time.

David:
[18:26] The difference between like meme coins and like just again using the Ansem meme coin as an example versus like an equity public company or even a private company is that like, in the future, like say we're old, dude, we're like 70, 80 years old and Coinbase, the goal of Coinbase at that point in 2080 is to be passed along from Brian, probably before now, but passed along from Brian to like some other manager who will take the reins and carry it forwards. And the whole point of like Bitcoin and Ethereum and Solana and these decentralized networks is like we pass these decentralized networks to our children and they run the network. And I haven't asked Ansem this, I haven't spoken to him about it, but like I can't imagine Ansem is like, yes, and I'm going to pass the baton of Ansem to like a new set of leadership where it will continue to perpetuate. And so like, it's a short term thing. And I think like most people see meme coins as like this pop-up shop of a casino. It's a pop-up casino game. And like, ooh, this one's a new game. Let's all play the game for a while. Maybe we can play the game for years. But ultimately the game goes away and like we move on to the next one.

David:
[19:40] And so that's, I think, what a lot of people like myself is like, why am I even playing the game in the first place if it's not about like trying to make it as perpetual and have as high growth as possible. And so that's, I think, when people think about, well, this is just nihilism. This is financial nihilism. What's the point? And really, at the end of the day, even with Bonk, for example, Bonk backed into being a project rather than being a meme coin. And so I think that's still the thing that I can't really get my head around is like, why do I even play the game at all if I know that ultimately this thing will conclude at zero in the fullness of time?

Mike:
[20:19] Yeah, that's fair. So It's not, I mean, meme coins are just not that type of, you know, life permanent assets. So like I hold a portfolio of assets and, you know, I plan to pass, you know, wealth to my kids, but, you know, I'm in my mid forties and I plan to live a long time and I want to have some fun along the way. And so I do things, I play financial games of shorter duration, you know, I, of the shortest duration at sometimes, right? Prediction markets, you know, sports gambling, like I want to have some fun. These things, if they're not enjoyable, you know, you shouldn't be doing them. And I don't think, you know, anybody would claim, yes, that, you know, Bonk has the, you know, life, the expected lifetime of Coinbase. That being said, it's actually interesting. It's noble to think that like you'll pass, like that's the goal that you'll pass these things on your kids. But like most corporations die over, you know, a number of decades. Most, you know, governments and countries die over centuries. So, I mean, we're just talking in different time horizons and there's different time horizons for different things we do. Yeah, I definitely take that point. I would just say, yeah, hold, there's some nuance and like hold a portfolio of things that are for the long term and the short term and that you enjoy, some that you enjoy for the dopamine and the fun and the speculation and living in the moment and some that you enjoy because, hey, in 10 years, I'm going to look at it and I'm going to be excited they compound it by 10% per year, 15% per year.

David:
[21:45] In favor of meme coins, what I do appreciate about meme coins is that there is some sort of implied idea about rewriting the rules of money and finance and how we value things. And you kind of talked about it. It's like this is an attention game much more than it is like a DCF analysis or an EBITDA analysis. And like, if you try and take your old world model into meme coins, like you're going to have a bad time. And that was kind of like all the premise of crypto in the first place. Like Bitcoin is like, no, no, no, we're rewriting the rules about money. Money doesn't come from the government. Money comes from the people. And that's a little bit of like rewriting the rules. And it's like what we tried to do and to some degree had success in in rewriting the rules around ETH. Like, no, don't value ETH on fees. ETH is money. Like, fuck your rules. Yeah, and Bitcoin is money.

Mike:
[22:33] And get and you know so most of the like most of the big ideas of crypto you know don't stay confined to crypto and then bleed out like into broader society and and ultimately you know then have the potential to help create for example businesses you're far far larger than anything you know that was created before and i think you see that for example and some things like stable coins like things that go like ride on public permissionless rails i think are now enabling potentially in the next five to ten years we'll have the first trillion dollar plus financial services company. We just haven't had those But yeah, it won't always be in the initial form of crypto with these like tokens that don't necessarily have intrinsic value.

David:
[23:18] Yeah, I think this is kind of like the ThreadGuy thesis. If you are a believer in like the meme coin industry sector growing bigger in the future because, you know, Gen Z comes into wealth, Gen Alpha comes into wealth. They're chronically online. They don't care about Wall Street rules. And so they value things differently. And so like the whole idea of valuing something on attention becomes bigger. I don't know if you have a directional opinion on the growth of meme coins as a category or if you're just more laissez-faire about like how big or small

David:
[23:51] the meme coin industry grows.

Mike:
[23:53] Yeah. So it's going to continue to grow as a category almost unequivocally. It's also going to grow in terms of the number of absolutely zero value, you know, extractive things as well, unfortunately. Yeah. I just think meme coins are not going away. The ethos of, again, everybody being able to participate in them, attention, community, will bleed into things of other value. I think companies with real IP will eventually, at some point, launch meme-like tokens. And you see companies like Robinhood embracing meme coins being traded on their chain because they realize that that attention then leads people to discover other assets that they can direct them to of potentially more lasting value that should represent a larger part of their portfolio.

David:
[24:37] What would you say are just the inputs into the reason why the meme coin sector will grow?

Mike:
[24:43] So I think the term will evolve. Maybe it'll always be called meme coins, but I think you'll have things like game coins. I see my kids, 8 and 12, spending considerable amounts of money on digital goods, whether it be in Roblox, whether it be in Fortnite, doing things, their digital skins, your eight-year-old, the amount of money he spends on skins and just those have effectively no tangible value, but the joy that he and his buddies have, you know, when they're playing and talking and, you know, showing the latest thing they're wearing, hey, it could be a World Cup soccer player, it could be something else that brings human joy.

Mike:
[25:25] Those today are in closed environments, but I think as those businesses struggle or sort of like top out in their addressable market, I do think you'll start to see some of those things be traded. You're seeing it, by the way, in the collectibles industry, which has some IP, a lot like has IP, but increasingly now I think there's like mimetic value in cards, you know, to what the prices are at all time highs. Some people are saying we're in a bubble, but my sort of thesis is similar to when we had NFTs or we were. sort of creating new fake IP that hadn't existed before. Like I think all the world's IP and fun is eventually going to be tokenized, move on to public blockchains, be available to anyone everywhere. And we're basically going to be importing and exporting all of these different cultures and mixing and meshing them together. So like, I don't know that it will be, again, we'll call them meme coins. We're going to have all these amazing tokenized cultural assets of all different types available to everybody. I think blockchain is going to play a huge role in that. So maybe what I'm really saying isn't that I think the meme coin economy is going to be 10 or 20 times larger, but it's the ethos of it is going to subsume so many other things, just like tokenized dollars is starting to in the financial world.

David:
[26:38] I see. You talked about Robinhood Chain leaning into meme coins and that's kind of happened at the same time as there's been some blowback against Base and Jesse and Brian Armstrong and Kobe, like maybe a month ago or something, was given the reins of the Base app because I think Base is now formally taking a step back from like creator coins and like Web3 Social. My more skeptical, cynical read on the situation is that like the meme coin trenchers are always kind of looking for the next arena of activity and they got tired of Base and so they moved on to the shiny new thing, Robin Hood. And so now Bass is evil and Robin Hood is good because Flad tweeted about a few meme coins. He said meme coins a few times. And now Robin Hood is like the good guy and Bass is the bad guy. But I kind of think it's all... Not fair. It's like the meme coin trenchers are just like moving on to the next thing. And the narrative is that base is evil. And the narrative is that Robin Hood is good. But it's really just like the chasing the shiny new object. But I'm also not in the trenches. And so I don't know to what degree the trench people feel actually slighted by base and actually supported by Robin Hood.

David:
[27:47] To me, it feels like a bunch of hot air. I don't know if you have a take.

Mike:
[27:50] It's just a timing thing. Like, yeah, base leaned into, I think what meme coins, AI coins and creator coins, like right at the market top, right? Remember, AI coins are hot late 2024, early 25. Trump basically topped the meme coin market. Things in retrospect were down only for most of 2025. And then you had 1010. The creator coins were a very, were a narrow part of this trend, but those were never going to work. That was just a really bad tone deaf idea with bad timing, but bad timing compounded by a really terrible market, right? So everything is down. Like all the majors are down. So base timing was bad. Robinhood timing was great, right? Do I think that Robinhood chain as a meme coin chain is like what's going to happen long-term? Probably not. Like there definitely will be some memes because on any chain that has users and a front door into what is a mix of an investment and a speculative asset. Robinhood's about as speculative, a mainstream financial app as anyone uses. There's definitely gonna be native meme coins there, but we've already had within just a couple of weeks, Vlad got hacked yesterday and a meme coin, his name was launched and people lost a bunch of money on it. He had to apologize. This stuff moves like really fast.

Mike:
[29:07] So my guess is the activity there sort of plateaus and peters out. That's probably a good thing, let's be honest. So they've got a lot of attention. And to my understanding, tokenized RWA ownership on Robinhood Chain is increasing pretty rapidly.

Mike:
[29:22] I'm, that's what we need to happen. Like we need better assets on chain. That's been Solana's issue for the last few years is that we just don't have enough quality assets on the chain. And that's what they, the foundation there has been focused on, you know, how do we get RWAs and it's starting to pay dividends for them, but we need more great assets on chain. Otherwise people are just going to keep churning through these things where, you know, bundlers are launching thousands of them per day.

David:
[29:47] Right. What would you say to the idea that like, this was especially true in late 2023 early 2024 we're like the whole entire crypto industry is just meme coins because it's kind of all we had and i think a lot of people would say, if we had more successful viral real use cases you know real apps real value accrual then like people wouldn't have been pushed into meme coins because the industry would be more serious more legitimate more real but because it's taken far longer than people considered, then like meme coins happened kind of as a reaction to that. And so, you know, meme coins are here because crypto hasn't succeeded as much as it was meant to. What would you react to? How would you react to that?

Mike:
[30:27] I would just say this stuff takes time. Like, yeah, the lowest friction thing was the first thing to launch. You know, you can launch a coin for a dollar. I mean, you don't have to do much around. Of course, there's going to be a flourishing of those. It's not surprising to me that it's taking a longer time to get tokenized securities on chain, Particularly given the regulatory environment in Washington, where because of the Trump family's ethic conflicts largely and banks, you know, pushing back against dollars with yield on chain, you know, the Clarity Act hasn't passed and it is now looking unlikely to. So it's given folks uncertainty around launching tokens of real legal and fee generating value on chain. But that is starting to happen anyway in permissionless manners with no KYC, maybe not available, geoblocked from U.S. folks and other countries. And we're now, I think, in a place where I wish we had been two to three years ago, but we weren't. And we had a very different administration in the U.S. That was very hostile to crypto.

Mike:
[31:28] Today, if consumers started coming back, even if they start by trading some memes and, you know, funny other, you know, tokens, there are real assets on chain that they can discover, particularly for ex-US folks, folks outside the US who can trade, you know, for example, NASBaseX and Tesla and, you know, some of the, you know, AI super cycle tokens. I think that's exciting. And what it does is, again, I think there's going to continue to be people trading the crypto native assets, including memes. But I think we have a better chance of stickiness. And over time, like less volatility in portfolios, if we have these other higher quality assets, the investment behavior should trend, you know, more towards the call it the median investment behavior, you know, in the broader markets for non crypto participants. And that would probably lead to fewer people getting wrecked by, you know, our crypto native cycles and hopefully smooth things out, which would lead to greater retention, which then gives you a base of users to continue to build and test products. And it becomes sort of the self-reinforcing thing because it's really, really difficult to build out new financial infrastructure when you're operating on these like four year boom and bust cycles. It just burns out your users, your investors, the builders, et cetera. I think we all hoped this past cycle wasn't going to quite be like that. It wasn't quite. I think we're nearing the end of it and getting ready for the next one.

Mike:
[32:55] I do think because we have many better assets on chain now, we have a really good shot here for a smoother next cycle.

David:
[33:01] All right, let's get out of the trenches and talk about next cycle. Six-man ventures, what are you guys investing in for like the rest of the decade?

David:
[33:07] Like what categories are you guys uniquely excited about?

Mike:
[33:10] Yeah, so the good thing is like most of the big ideas that crypto market participants, you know, earliest participants, including us, believed would come to fruition either have or are coming to fruition, right? So like Bitcoin is money, maybe ETH is sort of on-chain money in the Ethereum economy. Stablecoins as vehicles for better financial services. Blockchains and smart contracts, just better financial rails and better market structure. Some more accessible, more people, faster settlement, cheaper settlement. All those things are coming into fruition. There's been a lot of activity, a lot of building happening. It's not as talked about publicly because a lot of the value is accruing to, call it, equity holders or accruing to existing institutions like Stripe and PayPal and others. But, you know, what we're excited about is that many or most of the big ideas that we thought would exist, you know, are starting to exist. So, yeah, we're investing into those. So things like stablecoin finance, things like DeFi, but DeFi, I saw you tweet about vaults the other day, but DeFi with your better, not only your native crypto assets, but other assets. So your real world assets, equities, your bonds tied to, you know, could be real estate or other asset classes that have existed, bringing those things on chain together.

Mike:
[34:37] We're looking at, so we're continuing to invest in consumer. We think like trading and speculation and these markets making them available, whether it's no KYC or, you know, available to anyone, anywhere, giving dollar access to folks who are ex-US is really exciting. So those are like the primary areas.

David:
[34:55] And then, you know, I feel like out of all of those, the consumer category is probably the most contrarian because everyone is doing like the institutional, Chad five, real world to assets, tokenized, compliant securities, and like no one is talking about consumer crypto these days.

Mike:
[35:12] Exactly. So we think that that is the class that takes the longest to develop, okay?

David:
[35:18] The consumer side?

Mike:
[35:19] Yeah, it's the least, so it's institutions, you know, have been building for 10 years, like they have deep, deep business models, they know this is better infrastructure for how they want to build towards the future, they can commit to it. You know, consumers sort of wait until you show them like a lot of stuff has to build up in the background before you can get to like true consumer products of value. I think prediction markets is one of the first where you've moved like beyond. Well, I mean, obviously we had NFTs, we had your DeFi summer, but like the, on the, on the consumer side, we just haven't had the fun speculative products that

Mike:
[35:59] on-chain that had long duration. And I think that's finally starting to happen. So basically, that's happened because crypto has started to embed itself into other industries. So the biggest one that you're hearing about right now is obviously the collectibles, right? So you have companies like Collector and Courtyard, and even OpenSea is now turning into sort of the eBay of collectibles versus just NFTs. And I think, so those fun, community-driven, IP-driven asset classes, taste-driven things that maybe you can't find everywhere else because market structure on eBay and in the real world isn't very good. Those are the things that are going to start to migrate on-chain first. So that's like the first area we made an investment there in a company called Trove in Q4 of last year. That company is doing incredibly well. I mentioned Collector and Courtyard, which are the ones that people hear about.

David:
[36:48] And this is just the whole like gotcha universe, right?

Mike:
[36:51] So it's not. There's marketplaces behind these. But yes, I would say, actually, you're correct. The largest expression of it today, like is often the case in crypto is, wow, friction-free, instant trading, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, no KYC. That is absolutely the first application. Now, each of those companies has a plan to grow into something much, much bigger than that. Borrowing and lending against the assets, turning them into an asset class. I'm sure there's, I haven't seen all their decks for things like private wealth management, you name it. But I would argue that's a step change, probably a 10x better. Expression of what we were doing with like pfp nfts in 21 22 it just takes a long time so we're we're confident why

David:
[37:36] Is it better because it's actually like real higher lindy lp ip that's been around for forever.

Mike:
[37:43] Correct i mean it was like

David:
[37:44] A charizard it just has more brand.

Mike:
[37:46] Yeah many many decades of you know sort of proof point it's why you know i think there's still a far there's a larger number of folks you know who invest in gold than in bitcoin it just takes time to get the credibility so you might as well start and it wasn't until recently that you could convince people to tokenize to sell and put on chain these higher quality assets and we're finally at that point

David:
[38:11] Are pokemon cards and meme car meme coins the same thing.

Mike:
[38:13] Uh no no and it's because of what we were just talking about like society has like society has valued these. There's also, you know, TCG, there's games to be played, there's communities. I think the ethos is the same.

David:
[38:27] The ethos is the same. Yeah. And the valuation, the reasons why people value Pokemon cards in one way and then meme coins another way, I feel like that's highly overlapping.

Mike:
[38:38] It is. It is. And it's just, it's very like pop culture and fun and status oriented. And then you get into other asset classes like watches, like, you know, why does an AP or Patek like, Do they really, you know, why are they sold for $100,000? A lot of it, again, is status and scarcity. By the way, that's one way that they're different than mean coins, which don't, you know, they're divisible infinitely, right? So that's one area that we're looking for on consumer. You know, another is obviously online gaming, things of chance. You can see polymarket is mostly like sports betting. It's a, for many people, again, a better form, a better form because I can do it. You know, you can do it, no KYC, you know, you have more markets, anybody can participate providing liquidity. I consider that consumer. And I think you're going to start to see much, much more experimentation there. You're also going to see like hyperliquid and hyperliquid like platforms will, I think, become interesting to consumers as again, better assets come on chain there as we're not just trading perps on Bitcoin, Ethereum and VC coins, but, you know, as we're trading oil and, you know, compute, right? These compute markets that are tiny, tiny relative to all of the capex going into the, you know, AI build out. But over time, you know, I think, for example, crypto folks have a unique, like it's, it's, it was a new, it's a new asset class that's worth, you know, trillions of dollars that didn't exist.

Mike:
[40:07] Crypto. So like crypto, yeah, pre Bitcoin, like we created a new asset class and brought, we can argue about what level of quality market structure, but bought market, brought market infrastructure, you know, over the course of 15 plus years. So I would make a bet that crypto market participants will have a large part to play in how compute markets develop.

David:
[40:27] Yeah, I think a lot of people have attention on compute markets. And I think this is gonna be the first time where we see a brand new commodity be born. That isn't like crypto is a brand new commodity, but it's not what I'm talking about. But like a commodity that you can kind of see, like homogenized and codified into like a CME market. You can see compute, like compute traded I don't know how, but that's their job to figure out. But this is going to be the first time where a new commodity like that is born, and we have crypto rails. We have PerpDexes, we've got Hyperliquid, we've got Lighter. Do you think that's crypto as an industry, it's our fight to fight to get as much of the compute market built on our rails as opposed to CME or the TradFi rails?

Mike:
[41:06] It will be complementary, is my guess. And the way, you could do a whole podcast on this, but So compute markets will exist outside of crypto, you know, largely, right? But, you know, there will be sort of crypto primitives that have the potential, you know, to participate like in that build out. One is credit markets, right? You see with things like USDAI, there are, you know, pools of folks who are willing to lend, you know, in different models for how those pools develop and how these loans are underwritten. So on the credit side, you know, you're going to have, I think, very novel models of capital formation. I think as things are transacted, things often will start in. So like the AI markets are like extremely bespoke, sorry, compute markets, right? Like a data center over here is selling something very different than a data center, you know, across the country or in India or somewhere else. You have different machines, different capabilities. So like, it's so bespoke. It's not necessarily clear to me, you know, how crypto rails will play into that. But what I know is that crypto market participants know how to take these very wonky

David:
[42:19] Assets and do something with them? Yeah. That's not the first time we've seen a commodity that's bespoke. Like there's 17,000 different types of oil. There's like sweet crude, sour crude. We figured out how to like homogenize that.

Mike:
[42:32] Yeah, it took an incredibly long time, much longer than people expected. I think most intelligent people believe that, and again, I'm not one of these like deep, deep, deep compute market participants. Like I don't run a data center. There is a VC, Meltem does, so she's a great person to talk to about this. But the point, this will take longer than people expect.

Mike:
[42:54] I think the majority of this is going to happen off-chain, happen in sort of these OTC transactions. But again, you already have these markets starting to emerge. So in other words, like the hyperscalers are already doing things around allowing folks to hedge and offload. And what you'll find is a lot of the cap tables for a lot of these businesses come from, you know, have crypto native folks on them or, you know, folks who were mining Bitcoin and understand the inputs. And then a lot of this has to do with energy and electricity and all of those things. So, again, most of the value in AI crypto, so in compute markets and in other areas, most of the things that are happening don't involve tokens today. Like, for example, that was a noose or now's research. Most of the folks open router, like the crypto founders who started AI companies, they don't have tokens. Many of them have sort of tried to stay away from the fact that they were crypto native founders. And if you go pitch many, I mean, you saw the open claw founder, like it doesn't like crypto at all. I think somebody launched a token in his name. So when you're talking to folks in the AI industry, you don't lead with the fact that you've come from crypto markets. Even though, like I said, crypto market participants do understand a lot about emerging asset classes and novel market structure and then all the financial instruments around that.

David:
[44:13] This wasn't in my agenda, but I do want to talk about this. There was the crypto founder, Alex Otala, who founded OpenSea and then left to go found OpenRouter. But he left OpenSea in 2023, right after the ChatGPT era. There are plenty of people in my circles who have departed from the crypto industry to go into adjacent industries, AI, robotics. But they did it kind of maybe because they were forced because the crypto industry has kind of contracted, At least the middle of the market where the jobs are created has contracted pretty meaningfully over the last four years. But they are still crypto people and they're loyal to crypto. And so like my bullish angle on this is like, actually, crypto has a bunch of moles everywhere. We have moles in AI, we got moles in robotics. And, you know, one day when it's time to come home to roost, like these crypto market participants who like grew up, had their first, you know, adult job and their first adult paycheck in crypto who are now in like robotics or any adjacent industry, when it comes time, like now the knowledge of crypto and the like loyalty towards the crypto industry is like being spread out in these adjacent industries. So I'm actually kind of like marginally bullish on that actually being good for the industry because that is just like going to be a way to legitimize the crypto industry when these people actually have like influence and control over their respective industries.

Mike:
[45:37] Likewise. And I don't necessarily know, for example, though, that that means that we'll have, you know, crypto native tokens launched. And I don't necessarily know that that's, by the way, that that's important.

David:
[45:48] Yeah.

Mike:
[45:49] But what I do think is, you know, when the, you know, robots are paying one another or, you know, when my agent wants to access, you know, the website on a usage basis that your agent spun up. I think the folks who create those businesses, you know, will be sympathetic to using, you know, blockchain rails that settle faster, that allow for microtransactions, et cetera. But it'll be interesting in that, you know, much of that value may just accrue to equity in companies. And then hopefully in the future, those are tokenized equities that are issued and transferred and settled and registered on blockchains. Like DTCC, the largest securities clearinghouse, is doing all sorts of pilots on Canton and other networks. And I think it's very likely... That quote unquote crypto becomes defined much more as, you know, incredible financial infrastructure and ledgers versus the crypto native assets that trade on top of them. There will be a few, you know, very special ones like Bitcoin, probably Ethereum and Solana and, you know, a handful of others. But the rest of the tokens will look much more quote unquote equity like, you know, even if they're sitting on top of protocols. But I think things like hype and pump, you know, will be much, much more tied to business performance and look equity like.

David:
[47:06] So currently the market cap of Ethereum is $225 billion. The market cap of Sol is $43 billion.

David:
[47:14] Mike, if you had a million dollars and you had to hold it for the next five years, are you picking ETH or Sol to allocate that million dollars to?

Mike:
[47:22] So we've made that choice. I can't give financial advice to others, but we're well known as a Solana, you know, more Solana bullish fund from an asset perspective. That doesn't mean from a builder or an ecosystem perspective. We have many, many investments in the Ethereum and EVM ecosystem. But yeah, as an asset, I just believe that Sol has better properties than ETH, particularly given the value differential. So one is Solana has significantly more activity than Ethereum on virtually every metric of regular usage that it doesn't in terms of like TVL and total value issued. But I think a lot of that has to do with legacy, you know, massive value creation from many, many years ago and folks simply from inertia and wealth creation just holding their assets, you know, in Ethereum out of loyalty. If we break out, you know, 10, 20, 100x to the real world, you know, you don't have those same Ethereum loyalties in the general population. And, you know, Solana is a global state machine, you know, it has high throughput, low fees, but it also has a fee mechanism whereby, you know, priority fees, you know, people can pay for, you know, the price that they want for their transaction. And that allows Solana to capture more revenue. And, you know, you can sort of back into a situation at some really, really massive scale where Sol is actually justified. You know, you could run a model that prices a high. I don't think that's happening.

David:
[48:49] A DCF model.

Mike:
[48:50] Yeah, but this is in like your Coinbase example of very, very, very long term horizon. I think both of these, Sol and Ethereum, trade mimetically over the next five years based on, you know, how much is being built in the two ecosystems. And I just think Sol is going to continue to grow. a much higher growth rate.

David:
[49:08] Is trading mimetically the same thing as trading like money?

Mike:
[49:10] It's trading on activity. It is. Money is, yeah, money can be mimetic to your point, but different types of memes. Yeah. Like they're different narratives. So I think Sol, once again, like Sol will trade on a momentum narrative over the next 24 months would be my guess, based on more activity happening on the chain. You're going to see a much higher growth rate in stablecoin volume. You are going to see, you know, perps start to finally succeed. Like they're at like zero right now virtually on the chain and that's going to change you could just go through any use case and i'm i'm very confident that soul is going to have a much faster growth rate and it's coming from a lower base so i just would expect it to you know be a better asset over, again, a couple of years than ETH.

David:
[49:53] If you were the CEO of Ethereum and you were in charge with the driving ETH value capture and accrual and price number go up, what would you do?

Mike:
[50:01] So I would lean into, I would actually lean into ETH as money and all these L2s. I'd lead heavily into Robinhood. I do things that Solana can't do. So give more companies like Robinhood, persuade them not to launch like L1s like Tempo, persuade them to launch their own chains on Arbitrum and really be a place where, you know, you can control your, call it like semi-decentralized chain, your base. I mean, they have the two largest ones right now. So it's just getting more of the world to financial world to make not the non-stripe choice of launching Tempo and more of the Robinhood and Coinbase. And then again, you're not going to trade based on the underlying flow through economics. You're going to trade, like I said, more on narrative. Hey, all the world's largest financial institutions like a Revolut built an L2, that would be incredible for Ethereum. And I think from a narrative perspective, you'd say, oh, look, that $100 billion, $115 billion company, they're building a big part of their future on Ethereum. That's the battle that I would lean into.

David:
[50:58] So L2s, more L2s, bigger L2s.

Mike:
[51:01] I would. I just don't think the ETH L1 fee capture as fees have just dropped over the last few years, it's definitely a better L1 than it ever has been, right? And you continue to want as many assets issued on the chain. I think you want the Blackrocks of the world and the issuers to put assets there, but I think you want the companies that are building out, you know, really robust ecosystems of products, you know, the ramps, the revoluts, the next set of companies.

Mike:
[51:25] You really don't want them building on the tempos relative to building on L2s.

David:
[51:30] There's been a lot of speculation that the bottom's in, or that the bottom is at least near, soon to be in. Do you have a position on where we are in the cycle? Yeah. And also, what do you think about cycles?

Mike:
[51:41] So it just feels like they're inevitable. This one, so it's so weird that people said it felt so awful. I think it was because it didn't go as high as people expected, but I also, so far, it hasn't gone as low as people feel. So it is getting to that lower volatility type cycle environment. I don't have the data right in front of me. It's been a lower vol sort of cycle if we have hit bottom, But even if we went a little bit lower than we did, it would still be, that would be the case. We didn't go as high, not as low. I think that's going to continue. And maybe what I'll be looking for though is we finally break out of the Bitcoin four-year cycle. And maybe you do as we start to get so many halvings out and it may not have as big an impact.

Mike:
[52:27] But what's happened this cycle, again, lower vol, and you've had the ability, like people have kept building and you've seen immense equity value get created in a couple of themes we were talking about, like stablecoin finance, like real world asset issuance, so two massive, massive categories. So it would be great if that continues. I do think, you know, I couldn't tell you if we're going to go lower over the next couple of months, but I think, you know, by early next year, it's going to feel clear that we have sort of the wind in our sails, regardless, by the way, of the regulatory environment. That's been a big uncertainty, but it just feels like clarity not passing is somewhat priced in. For individual assets, it'll be interesting. You know, I don't know what Hyperliquid's regulatory status looks like in a world to where clarity does or does not pass. So I think on an individual asset basis, there's a lot of questions. But for the market as a whole, I expect that, you know, we're going to see more activity moving forward. And we have just more themes to do that behind. You know, we have perps, prediction markets, DeFi with real world assets and stable coins moving at like every, you know, breakout stable coin company we see. the chart is just wildly

Mike:
[53:33] insane over the last six months.

David:
[53:35] You said a lot of equity value has been created by these platforms and tools. And I think that kind of also taps into a lot of the frustration that a lot of the industry has where we wanted to create value in the tokens. And it's great that we are creating value as an industry, but it's a bug that, these native tokens or tokenized, not tokenized real world assets, but tokenized assets are the things where the value is expressed in. Do you see that trend changing or how do you think about that?

Mike:
[54:08] It will change, but it's going to take a long time. You're trying to create basically, I think, so the things that BlockWorks is doing with their transparency framework is a positive. I think, you know, browbeating everybody to adopt it right now and being, they're a little intense about it, but I think it's a very noble long-term goal and it is unquestionably the direction that the industry needs to and will move in. So maybe it's good that they're browbeating people and saying, hey, do this now and everything that doesn't do this now is illegitimate. Like that's too much. That's not... Because the market isn't valuing tokens that way, right? Like we're investors in MetaDAO and they have ownership coins and the market is giving, certainly is giving downside protection to MetaDAO tokens, but I don't think you've seen them sort of valued at a premium or any sort of breakout. And they're working on their model, right? It's Futaki dominated now. I think it's pretty complex and people are trying to figure that model out. But there are a ton of experiments being run, even Pump, which is known as a meme coin launchpad, has their ACE platform where you can launch a token and then you can have that token confer equity-like rights to the holder. So every company across the spectrum is experimenting with bringing better quality assets on chain. It's just time rises to take a long time. It takes a long time

Mike:
[55:31] To get folks launching ETFs or indexing. You listen to the histories of Vanguard and BlackRock. It takes many, many decades to change how people invest, especially when you're creating brand new types of assets that might have equity plus considerations to them. And especially in a world where many, many people have been burned by very low

Mike:
[55:51] quality assets like Aluna.

David:
[55:53] I think that's the thing I'm really coming to terms with lately. When I got into crypto, I was 26 years old. And in 2021, I was 29 or something, 20 and 30. And I thought we were changing the world tomorrow. And that's kind of how it feels like in the bull market, especially one as violent as that bull market. And, you know, and so we're three years, four years later from 2021, five years later from 2021. And so many people are disillusioned and myself included. And I, and to some degree, I'm like, dude, maybe these things take 20 plus years, not like six years. And that's why everyone feels so bad.

Mike:
[56:32] Yeah. I mean, obviously. Right. So like just AI as an analogy and you know, basically people were writing about the things that are happening today, you know, in the middle of the last century, you know, even

David:
[56:44] At the turn of the century. AI seems to have gone so much faster, at least from the consumer perspective, when we were exposed to it in 2023.

Mike:
[56:50] So, well, the thing is, people were exposed to it earlier than that. Like I read, you know, Ray Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines, and we laughed at it, you know, in 2000, 2001, and it took 25 years. But basically everything that he said would happen by 2030 is happening, is on the path to happening by 2030. There was a lot of disillusionment early last decade, but sort of under, you know, in the background, you had the demis of the world and so many incredible people doing things. And most of it was probably very dissatisfying to people who were deep, deep in the industry. Like, oh, we're, you know, beating people at these games. Well, that's not what our mission is. Like we're trying to change the world and, you know, you basically create a new form of intelligence and then boom, it just happens. But the time horizons were longer. And on a much, much smaller scale, I'm not comparing stablecoin innovation AI, but like an intelligence innovation over the last two years. But you can see this explosion happening after not a lot seemed to happen for many, many years to the point that like even five or six years ago, people were like, hey, Tether is like a scam company. And now it's one of the largest companies in the world.

David:
[57:58] I suppose crypto did have a very slow rate of progress Yes, up until 2020, 2021. And then that's when a ton of the investment came in. And maybe one of the reasons why AI seems to have gone so fast post-2023 is because there has been literally infinite amount of money to invest in that bubble. And that accelerates the rate of innovation. At least as a consumer. I log into Cloud and open AI every single month and the models are better and

David:
[58:26] they think better and they think faster. And that doesn't seem true about crypto. That's fair. Maybe that's because, like, AI is just...

Mike:
[58:31] They're giving people the right product now, right? Like, just having raw intelligence that's better than, for example, Google searching or... The ability, giving me the ability to code, having never been a CS major or trained programmer, it's incredible. And crypto had a chance from the 2017 era, 2021, 22 era. And I think we're both in agreement that we haven't given folks yet the right product that had long duration. And again, we've talked about a few of the areas, but like Hyperliquid giving folks a better way to hedge and speculate and get leverage on assets in a much better way than they can in traditional financial markets. So just improving upon traditional financial markets, traditional financial infrastructure is a really big step function change. Now, it doesn't have the wow factor of AI intelligence, but I do think we're finally giving folks the right products that will scale and will lead to sustained usage.

David:
[59:31] And I suppose in defense of crypto, changing finance is hard, way harder than AI because AI doesn't really have like an incumbent to compete against, but finance A has incumbents to compete against, but also your mistakes rebuilding finance are catastrophic by definition. And so progress is slower because people don't want to get hurt. And also regulation kind of also doesn't want to let you hurt people at the same time.

Mike:
[59:56] Yeah, it's easier. It definitely is easier to regulate, to penalize. And we're just getting, by the way, to that cycle in AI where it's like, hey, do we need to slow down? You know, can we release these frontier models without, you know, government or a non-government agency like FINRA reviewing them? Demis just proposed something like that. And I think a lot of people got on board with it. So you're going to see that blowback is happening over the next year or two, which likely will quote unquote slow progress. So it'll be interesting. And then to see what people's expectations are. Right now, AI is growing a lot due to non-economic activity, just to, you know, fundraising and the ability to continually fundraise and in many cases offer products below profitability. How long can that continue for? We'll see.

David:
[1:00:43] Mike, it's been great. Thanks for coming on the show.

Mike:
[1:00:45] Thanks for having me.

David:
[1:00:45] Appreciate it. You guys know the deal. Crypto is risky, but not crypto enough. The institutions are here. So we are going even more westward. This is Frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.